One thing at a time

There is now slightly less than a month to go before we start our summer season of excavations. Many vehicles, most of our equipment and what seemed like hundreds of students went south this morning to the other big project UCLan is running this summer, the excavations at Oakington Anglo-Saxon cemetery just outside Cambridge. This has focussed my mind on making sure that we are ready to start at Whitewell on the 8th July. Hopefully it isn’t raining as hard in Cambridgeshire as it was here this dinnertime otherwise they are all going to get very wet putting up their tents. Once they start digging up Saxons, probably around dinnertime tomorrow, there will be regular updates from this project on their Twitter feed.

I have been carefully working out where the best place to put our trenches will be and how many I think we can realistically complete in four weeks. I have gone for four, which may or may not be over-optimistic. Two of these, trenches H and J, will hopefully give us a lot more detail on the New Laund Enclosure. Trench H should cover both one edge and the centre of the timber circle. I’m hoping for lots more evidence for Early Bronze Age ritual and burial at the centre of the enclosure here.

Trench J is based on Simon’s work tracing the line of the outer bank and ditch of the enclosure using GPS and resistivity survey (this is what the Technicolor overlay is on that part of the hill). I have set out a long trench covering all of his suggested locations for the line of this feature, all we have to do now is find it.

The other two trenches are away from the enclosure and are there to look at the wider landscape in prehistory. While we were working at Fairy Holes in April, Alex Whitlock from Pendle Heritage Centre Archaeology group found some Mesolithic stone tools and waste in the field above Fairy Holes wood. We are going to use trench K to look for more of this earlier prehistoric activity. Alex has also reminded me of a serious omission in my list of children’s historical fiction last week – Noggin the Nog. Apparently based on the Lewis chessmen, after illustrator Peter Firmin saw them on display in the British Museum, and boasting, in the Terry-Thomas-alike form of Nogbad the Bad, one of the all time great villains, how could I have forgotten the books and TV series? However, I digress…

On the other side of the hill, trench L is going to be an exploration of this doline (a vertical sinkhole in the limestone). Dolines are the one kind of natural limestone feature that we haven’t explored yet on the farm. Being vertical holes in the ground they are very good traps for any archaeological material (or careless people and animals). There is also a well-documented Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age tradition of using them as burial sites. They are also good places for preserving fossil pollen so we should get some more environmental data from this site too.

Of course, before we start all of this, we should really have finished off the stuff we started at Easter. At the very least we should make sure that the interim report is finished for the Fairy Holes cave before we dig any new holes. With this in mind I have also been working on that report today. I didn’t get that many words written but I do have a lovely overall plan of the three Fairy Holes caves and the location of our trenches to show for my efforts.

Rick

How to make archaeologists

I was looking at a post on Spencer Carter’s Microburin blog about fieldwork at Seamer Carr in 1985 which got me remembering my first excavation experience, also in 1985 but a bit further north, in Hartlepool. This got me thinking more generally about how people get into archaeology. I started digging in the summer after my A-levels because Cleveland County Archaeology Unit were finishing the excavation of the Norton-on-Tees Saxon cemetery. This was just over the road from my house, so, in a break from the important business of watching every ball of the Ashes series†, I wandered up to site and asked if I could have a go. They were nearly finished, and the last thing anyone wants on site in the final few days of a cemetery rescue excavation is untrained volunteer labour, but they pointed me in the direction of another project the unit was just starting on the Anglo-Saxon monastic site on Hartlepool Headland.

I’ve talked to many archaeologists over the years about what led them to their first excavation and a few constant themes come up. One is an affinity for soil. Nearly everyone was the sort of child whose favourite outside game was making mud pies in the garden (my brother and I used to anoint my Grandad’s pigs with (mostly) mud – they loved it, we used to play in the muckspreader too, make what you will of that).

Archaeologist (and also Financial Journalist admittedly) in training

The other key influence that lots of people have in common is children’s historical fiction. My understanding of Iron Age social systems is supposed to be based on a whole range of academic papers but actually depends at least as much on Rosemary Sutcliffe’s Warrior Scarlet and The Eagle of the Ninth. Archaeologists all seem to have absorbed this sort of stuff by the bucket load as children: Henry Treece’s Viking Saga books, Geoffrey Trease’s ones set in ancient Greece, Leon Garfield, John Grant’s Littlenose books and, ones which I inexplicably missed as a boy but have just discovered, C. Walter Hodges The Namesake and The Marsh King, both about King Alfred.

The Late Bronze Age/Iron Age transition explained

All these authors seemed to be a staple of Jackanory during the 70s. There was a parallel genre, known in our house by the catch-all title of Around the Corner and Into the Olden Days, which was equally popular for television dramatisation around the same time. Here past and present intertwine for children who find themselves working through versions of ancient myths or caught up in past titantic struggles. Penelope Lively, Alan Garner, Diana Wynne-Jones and William Mayne all wrote very powerful children’s fiction that required and expected you to understand the importance of the past to the present.

Once you have a child who knows who Grendel and Athelstan were and is comfortable around industrial quantities of mud then the damage is done. There is no hope for the little one but a future in archaeology.

Rick

†Overshadowed, even at the time, by the Botham/Willis heroics of ’81, this was a fantastic series in its own right. Australia were strong, but not the remorseless humiliating force of the 90s, Border was captain and they still had Geoff Thompson, although he was older and slower, McDermott was their main strike bowler. David Gower couldn’t buy a run going into the series but suddenly clicked about half way through and made his highest ever score. England won, then Australia won, then there were many nervy draws before England won the last two to take the series. In my memory the series turned on one dismissal in the second last test. Wayne Phillips pulled a ball down onto Alan Lamb’s foot, it bounced straight up into the air and Gower ran around to catch it. Phillips was given out to a great chorus of moustachioed shouting and finger-pointing.

Never off duty

It’s half term in Lancashire this week so I took the end of the week off work and we’ve come to Scarborough to eat ice cream and dig in the sand. The weather has taken a sudden turn towards summer and South Bay was filling up nicely when we got there this afternoon, although it wasn’t full up to the August Bank Holiday ‘can’t see the beach for towels’ level. We dug a very large hole in the sand, which turned out to be just the right size for burying me in. I stood and watched some games of beach cricket getting very serious indeed (Come on, you’re costing me runs! backing up guys!) while the backfilling went on around me. Despite the knotted hanky and rolled up trouser legs I was obviously keeping at least half an eye on what was in the sand. (I have been in trouble for this before, especially when I am supposed to be gardening and I keep stopping to see if we have found any nice pottery).

In amongst the mussel shells was this very waterworn bit of worked flint. I think it is part of a largish flake, although the edges have got a bit rolled with it being in the sea. I imagine it has washed out of the cliffs to the north of here. There are a lot of prehistoric flint scatters on the North York Moors and for about 40 miles north of Scarborough the moors end in very unstable sandstone cliffs, big chunks of which wash away every winter.

Rick

What have we learnt this week?

As it says in the weekly newsletter from my son’s school. Lots of different stuff as it happens because, now the exams are finished, we are getting on with sorting out the finds from last month’s dig at Fairy Holes Cave. We had everything properly cleaned by the end of Wednesday. Since then we have been photographing each find and creating a full catalogue of what was found where.

With all the mud washed off the bones we found that there was another piece of cremated bone from the entrance of the main cave. It is the central fragment in the bottom row on this photograph. This was found in the same grid square as the three bits we identified on site, clearly part of the same disturbed cremation burial. This is also the same square we found the big sherd of Early Bronze Age collared urn pottery in.

Now the pottery was clean it is obvious that we have found parts of two different prehistoric pots. The big sherd we still think is part of the urn that Musson and his team found in 1946. The rest of this is on display in Clitheroe Castle Museum. I will be taking our sherd to Clitheroe shortly to confirm the match but I’m sure this what it is. This fits with the cremated bone from the same square to show that there was a cremation burial in the urn close to the cave entrance in the Early Bronze Age, probably around 1800 BC.

The smaller sherd we found first is clearly something different. It is finer, uses a different mixture of raw materials and is decorated with parallel lines. These seem to have been incised into the surface of the clay. It is clearly prehistoric but I am still dithering about what I think it is. I have had the big pottery books open on my desk all week and been poring over the possible parallels. I’m supposed to know about pottery so I can’t help regarding this as a bit of a challenge.

The general shape of the sherd, and therefore the bit of pot that it came from, makes me think it is part of a beaker. This was also my initial identification on site when it was first found. This would mean it ought to date from between 2200 and 2000 BC. However, the colour of the pot and the incised line decoration looks more like Grooved Ware, which would be slightly earlier, somewhere between 2900 and 2200 BC. Either way it is earlier than the Early Bronze Age evidence from Musson’s dig and from our excavations on top of the hill last summer.

Of course not everything we found is quite this old. One of my favourite photos from this week is this one of the finds from the area of burning at the top of the main cave sequence. As well as lots of bottle glass and candle ends you can see all the non-plastic parts of a mobile phone. The consensus among the team is that it was a Nokia. I assume that it was destroyed in the fire for all the plastic to have vanished so thoroughly.

Thanks to Megan, Barry, Dan, Emily, Kelly, Nikki and Rob for all their hard work with the records and finds this week.

Rick

Crazy mixed-up people

I was trying to revise a paper about Neolithic cave burial this week and after about two days of fruitless tinkering with the words I gave up and decided to spend the day drawing diagrams instead. When I was in primary school they used to tell us to draw a picture and then write a story about it. It is surprising how often this is a successful tactic in adult life too.

I took all the unwieldy mass of vaguely related facts about all 43 Neolithic burial caves from the first part of my paper and tried to encapsulate they key points in one graphic. The draft paper is very much too long, so I very quickly realised that more than one picture was going to be needed. This is my first go at one of them. One of my themes has been to try to look at what was going on in different regions over the Neolithic. So, in this diagram I have tried to show what cave burials were like in each region. Here we are looking at evidence to do with where people chose to bury the dead. What was special about particular caves? Which parts of caves were chosen for burial? What was already in the cave when the burial took place?

I’m quite pleased with this as a tool for getting my thoughts straight. To me, it looks as if it is best to think of Neolithic cave burial as a range of related traditions. So, there was not a single ‘cave burial rite’ in Neolithic Britain, but there were a lot of recurring themes which would get combined together in slightly different rites in different regions and at different times. For example, the geographical location of the cave chosen often seems to have been important, but it wasn’t always the same choice being made for the same reasons. In Scotland, West Wales and Devon coastal caves were popular, while around the Severn Estuary nearly all the caves chosen faced north. Over in North Yorkshire, the group of caves around Settle mostly face towards the south. Here you can get some inkling of the reason for this choice by looking at all the available caves in the region. This bit of the Yorkshire Dales is full of caves and lots of them have human remains in of various dates but all the Neolithic burials are clustered along the south-western edge of the limestone uplands. For Neolithic burials, only those caves with that particular kind of view would do.

Similarly, at different times and places we can see people making various choices about whether it was important to bury deep inside a cave or out in the open entrance. One interesting trend, which seems to cover most of the country, is that burials in vertical shafts in the limestone (these are technically known as dolines) are late. Burials in these sites are usually either very Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age. This is one reason why I am keen to dig some of them at New Laund Farm, where there are both lots of dolines and lots of Early Bronze Age finds.

I’ve also had a go at making more specific diagrams about just one aspect of burial. This is my summation of the regional evidence for the different ways people treated the body after death. One of the defining characteristics of British Neolithic burials, from all kinds of sites, is that the bodies are usually in bits when they are found. When you have more than one body they are all mixed up together.

There has been an awful lot of ink spilt on precisely why Neolithic people were so keen on death as a communal experience. There has been almost as much debate about how these mingled, mixed up burial assemblages were created. When someone died in the Neolithic what did they do to break them into bits?

People who study Neolithic chambered tombs have suggested a whole range of different possible techniques and different explanations have been fashionable at different times. When I was an undergraduate there was a lot of discussion of excarnation – the practice of leaving a body somewhere do be picked clean by animals and the elements – before the bones were carried into the tombs. More recently, bone specialists have suggested that the most common and plausible method was the bodies were placed into tombs intact and left to decay there. They then only became mingled with earlier bodies after decay because people were repeatedly coming into the tomb and moving bones around. Sometimes this was to deliberately create the mixed burials and sometimes it may just have been a product of trying to make room for the next one to come in. The technical term for this practice is ‘successive inhumation’

As you can see from the chart, there is lots of evidence from caves for successive inhumation, it seems to be the main method used over the whole country. But there were other things going on too. In Yorkshire and Derbyshire there is good evidence that the only bit that went into some caves was the skull. This should be clear evidence for excarnation, at least in the Early Neolithic. Also in Yorkshire there seem to be some people who were not having anything to do with this communal burial nonsense. One body (or sometimes an adult and infant together) was placed in one grave.

There is also one burial from West Wales which seems to have been re-assembled from bits of three different people. This is why it says ‘mummifcation?’ on the chart. This is not definitive proof of mummification in the way that, say, preserved skin or a powerful curse is. But it is highly suggestive of a body that has been preserved, kept as some sort of talisman and repaired over a long period of time. Precisely this kind of mummification was demonstrated through a detailed dating programme from the Late Bronze Age site of Cladh Hallan in the Hebrides.

Most Neolithic cave burial shared the overall Neolithic obsession with breaking people down into bits and mixing them up together but it seems to have gone about it, especially in the Early Neolithic, in a whole range of different ways.

Rick

 

Look at me on the radio

This week we have mostly been working on impact. Research funding councils are very big on ‘impact’. By impact they mean the influence that a piece of research has in the wider world, beyond the results of the original study. Impact in archaeology is a bit difficult to measure. In science and medicine it is easy to see when a piece of research has a tangible benefit to society. In archaeology we just hope that knowing more new stuff about the past makes some people happy.

Ultimately this is the best justification for doing archaeology, people enjoy it and enjoy learning about it. Of course, to spread the joy, this means you should talk to as many people as possible about your research whenever you get the chance. Apart from the small matter of a few exams, I don’t seem to have been doing anything this week except explain the research project.

On Saturday last week I was part of the Lancashire Archaeology Day, which we host on campus at UCLan. This is a yearly event which is jointly organised between UCLan Archaeology and Lancashire County Council where local archaeologists get the chance to explain to the public and to each other what they have been up to. I talked about the New Laund enclosure and the outline results from the Fairy Holes cave dig. Steve Rowland from Oxford Archaeology North gave an update on the excavations on the site of the Franciscan Friary in Preston (this is the site which was underneath what is now the Preston Legacy hotel on Marsh Lane). This is a particularly cool site, not least because I used to be able to watch them digging it from my old office window.

Then we had two papers on two fantastic industrial period projects. Brian Jeffrey talked about the amazing excavation and reconstruction work that has been going on at the ‘Constant Mary’ site. Here there is a mass of 18th century  wagon roads associated with a massive water-powered winding mechanism for drawing coal wagons out of the drift mine. Ian Miller, also from Oxford Archaeology North, talked about the textile mill survey they have been carrying out, recording and hopefully helping to preserve some of these highly significant sites. I was pleased to see the second slide was the vast Tulketh Mill in Ashton (now used by Carphone Warehouse as a training centre) which I walk past every day on my way to work. Peter Isles, the County Archaeologist, also pointed out to me on another occasion that it is the distinctive chimney and tower of Tulketh Mill you can see in the backdrop townscapes during the Wallace and Gromit film Curse of the Were Rabbit.

Nigel Neil talked about the ‘Loos trenches’ of Blackpool. These are first world war replica training trenches dug by soldiers billeted in the town which then became fund-raising tourist attractions during the rest of the war. John Hudson, an extremely accomplished  craft potter with longstanding expertise in the archaeology of all kinds of ceramics was on last, talking about medieval tile production. Sadly I had to leave before he started. Ceramics is one of the many things I find completely absorbing. I’ve also heard John speak before and he is a brilliant speaker. If you want a flavour of his work have a look at his website here.

Today I have been explaining what a henge is to the listeners of BBC Radio Lancashire. I got an invitation to be a guest on Sally Naden’s daily lunchtime chat-show. Given the importance of impact, as explained at the top of the post, it was obviously my duty to accept this. It was just a co-incidence that it involved being one of three people been given licence to talk about ourselves for two hours to the wireless audience of the county. I got a bit lost in Blackburn trying to find the studio but otherwise had a great time. After all, no one becomes a University lecturer unless they like the sound of their own voice. We even had to choose a Desert Island Discs style ‘track of my life’. I chose Yazz and the Plastic Population’s version of ‘The Only Way is Up’ but if you want to know why you’ll have to go and do listen again here.

Rick

The archaeology of archaeology

Fieldwork finished nearly a week ago but we haven’t made a great deal of progress on the post-excavation work yet. Partly this is because when Sam and I got back into the University last Friday it was both late and pouring with rain. As always happens in these situations, rather than carefully putting everything away we piled everything up around my desk and left it for the weekend. This means that I have to excavate my office before I can get stuff done.

I also realised that between the dig and a bit of leave over Easter that I only spent six days of April actually in the office. This is not the best way to keep on top of your email. Still, while I have been catching up, other people have been making progress.

Sam has been looking at all the cremated bone, both from last summer’s excavations on the New Laund Enclosure and the pieces from Fairy Holes cave we found the week before last. She has written a short osteological report (it’s all very fragmented stuff). The bone from the enclosure site was all cremated at a very high temperature. It all seems to be adult remains and because the cremation technique is the same for all the bone Sam thinks that this is a single burial that has been disturbed. It was found over quite a wide area of the timber circle in the middle of the enclosure. This is probably because the  burial was originally at the base of one of the posts and was disturbed when that post was pulled out.

The Fairy Holes bone wasn’t cremated to quite such a high temperature. This bone includes both adult and juvenile bones, showing that there was more than one person buried in the cave. As both excavations have only found a single collared urn it is quite likely that this urn originally contained a double burial of an adult and a child.

I have managed, in amongst tidying up, to download the survey data from the total station. I haven’t processed it all yet, but one interesting result is the outline of the main Fairy Holes cave. The red spots are the cave wall positions measured during my long surveying trip into the cave (see the Tunnel of Mud post). The shape revealed is surprisingly straight. It felt a lot more twisty than that when we were working in it. I’ve pasted it over Musson’s sketch plan for comparison. As you can see they exaggerated the angles of the bends too.

Tomorrow, I will be going over all this in a lot more detail at the Lancashire Archaeology Day jointly run by UCLan and Lancashire County Council. I am just the first speaker on what looks like a fascinating day. Full details are listed on the web link under events.

Rick