Outlandish Knight

Archaeology and psychogeography

2011-12-15T15:32:00.000-08:00

I’m not going to be able to reach this year’s TAG in Birmingham this year, which is a shame as I’d really like to have gone to the session Psychoarchaeology being organised by Kenneth Brophy and Vicky Cumming.

I have always been surprised how little archaeologists have engaged with the notion of psychogeography. Like many movements, this is a rather protean notion, but it can be seen as a set of techniques that attempt to integrate subjective and objective engagement with the landscape with a particular emphasis on engaging emotionally and politically with what is perceived as capitalist space. With its emphasis on performance and the subversion of conventional historical and social narratives, it is not surprise that psychogeography grew out of the Situationist International of the 1960s.

Archaeology has over the last two decades seen a massive rise in interest in trying to understand the subjective experience of space, heavily influenced by Chris Tilley’s Phenomenology of Landscape one of the ur-texts in the phenomenological movement in archaeology. This perspective on human interaction with the environment, whether ‘natural’ or ‘designed’ has been one of the paradigms that have dominated archaeology in the 1990s and 2000s. One key sub-theme that has been particularly important is that of exploring how past societies interpreted and re-worked earlier monuments, or to put it another way, how they dealt with the past in their present. Initially, these approaches were developed by archaeologists working on prehistoric landscapes, particularly those of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Northern Europe. These were periods when landscapes were seen as being particularly ritualised and symbolically dense, with earlier monuments being continually reworked and re-appropriated for later purposes. This emphasis on the inter-relationship of monuments in the landscape and their subjective experience was something that had been presaged by those working outside mainstream archaeology in what might be called ‘earth mysteries’, a broadly New Age movement, which integrated the personal and spiritual points of view with an interest in folklore and mythology to produce densely allusive and textured readings of prehistoric monuments. Whilst operating in very different spheres, both communities were exploring similar themes.

Despite this close interest in the subjective experience of space, the world of phenomenological archaeology and earth mysteries have generally shown little engagement with psychogeography and vice versa (this is something highlighted in Bob Trubshaw’s recent review of Merlin Coverley’s book Psychogeography)in Time and Mind.

I suspect that one of the reasons for the lack of engagement has been the tendency for psychogeography to have been conceived as an essentially urban phenomenon – whether looking at Flaubert and Guy Debord in Paris or Peter Ackroyd in London, the key figures in the psychogeographic movement have been firmly cosmopolitan (although for individuals moving within world cities their landscapes are often strangely lacking in engagement with ethnicity). Even those who have ventured beyond the confines of the city centre, such as Iain Sinclair or fictionally at least, JG Ballard their milieu has been (sub-)urban; very few have obviously headed into the countryside. In his recent overview of psychogeography, Merlin Coverley claims that one of the key underlying definitions of psychogeography is that it is, in essence, urban. Perhaps underpinning this notion is that the market and capitalism are somehow at heart more urban than rural, an idea clearly at odds with modern perspectives on globalisation that highlight the capillary aspect of free-market capitalism.

What is exciting about the TAG session is that it sees archaeologist attempting to engage explicitly with the notion of psychogeography from an explicitly archaeological perspective (although given the fundamentally cross-disciplinary approach of psychogeography I’m not keen on the neologism ‘psychoarchaeology’). One key way in which archaeology can engage with this approach is through an emphasis on time depth, particularly through the idea of the ‘archaeological imagination’, the creative engagement with the material residue of past societies within the present world. A fundamental aspect of the ‘archaeological imagination’ is the juxtaposition of features from different periods within contemporary spaces, whether on the shelves of a museum or written in the landscape. However, whilst archaeologists have been good at looking at the past in other presents, we’ve not been so good at looking at the past in our own present. This may be because this sphere of action is seen, at heart, as not really ‘archaeology’, but ‘heritage’ or ‘cultural resource management’.

Nonetheless, at heart, what psychogeography and cognate approaches can offer us, is an alternative way to write about the past that moves beyond the traditional period or area survey (not that there is anything wrong with these). One new approach which is being increasingly explored is the notion of chorography – which entails thick description of place, drawing on a range of sources with an explicit engagement with the way in which people have experienced locations physically and emotionally – see Michael Shanks exploration of the idea of ‘deep mapping’.

A recent paper by Darrel Rohl, a graduate student here at Durham, flagged up a number of basic observations about chorographic writing: a focus on space/place, a multi-media approach, an engagement with the spatio-historical, the connection of past and present, an emphasis on the interdependence of human and environment, a de- and re-centering perspective, a present and recognizable authorial voice, a focus on experience, memory and meaning, a degree of native knowledge, requiring real emplaced experiences, a transdisciplinary perspective and it should be qualitatively and quantitatively empirical and critical. It is easy to see how many of these perspectives chime with the aims and objectives of many engaged in study and interpretation of the historic environment, and indeed how many of these approaches have a long genealogy within archaeology.

What surprises me, is the fact that there are so few works by archaeologists in the UK that actively engage in this approach to writing about the past. One reason may be that this kind of discursive work is not seen as sufficiently academic rigorous to past muster with the Research Exercise Framework – a fine example of the stifling impact of the academic audit culture on innovative ways of writing about the past. Whilst there are one or two recent works that very explicitly draw on both chorography and psychogeography, such as Mike Pearson’s wonderfully evocative In Comes I , they are often nonetheless undeniably dense and demanding reads. One of the positives about chorography and pyschogeography is that they provide exciting ways of engaging with the wider public, rather than just exchanging ideas within the academy.

Ironically, in recent years in Britain, there has been an upsurge of popular writing that can be clearly situated in the chorographic tradition. The increasing popularity of writers such as Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey and Roger Deakin show a popular appetite for writing about the intersection between people and place. However, these writers have all been labelled as ‘nature writers’ rather than ‘history writers’, despite the fact that all three write about the relationship between the natural and the human environment and regularly engage with archaeological topics. They are part of a wider resurgence in writing about place, such as Madeline Bunting’s meditation on her childhood in North Yorkshire seen through the perspective of one small area of land (The Plot) is important. Alexandra Harris in a recent article for the New Statesman has drawn parallels between this and the rise of ‘localism’ as a political mantra within the UK political establishment, although she has emphasised the historical rather than ecological dimension to this movement. Despite the recent popularity in this literature, we can perhaps place the origins of the revival back in the mid-1990s with WG Sebald’s Suffolk journey in Rings of Saturn (1995) and Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (1995). The latter, a wonderful example of alternative ways of movement within a landscape, including explicit collisions between the desire to move through natural landscapes and the overriding tendency to control access to natural resources even rivers.

The challenge thus remains for archaeologist to try and engage with these alternate perspectives to writing about the past and the present – the TAG session is a start, but the real challenge is to move them from the confines of the lecture theatre and onto the shelves of the nearest bookshop.

Review: Way of the Morris

2011-11-13T14:19:00.000-08:00

I’ve finally had a chance to see Tim Plester’s excellent documentary The Way of the Morris on DVD having missed it when it was briefly on general release.

The morris is one of England’s traditional dance traditions. It is also one that is very easy to mock – it is hard to take too seriously men garlanded in flowers and bells frolicking in country lanes. Indeed, morris dancing’s last significant cinematic outing Morris: A Life With Bells On went down the tongue-in-cheek road. However, this new film takes a far more thoughtful look at the dance. It is not a straight historical overview of the dance or a search for its origins. Instead, at its heart is the director’s changing personal relationship with the tradition in his home village. A native of Adderbury in North Oxfordshire, his father and uncle were closely involved in the revival of the dance in the village in the 1970s. Despite this, he himself had never been taken part and had seen his connection with Morris as a skeleton in his closet. Over the course of this film, he speaks to those involved in the resurrection of the dance during the folk rock revival of the early 70s (Fairport Convention; Morris On). He follows the village side to the war graves and cemeteries of the Eastern France, where all but one of those who danced before WWI were killed. Only one, Charlie Coleman, returned, and he could not face dancing again. Touchingly, he was still alive in the village when the dance was revived and able to see the new side dance outside his cottage. It is perhaps inevitable that Plester ends up taking his father’s bells, hanky and baldric and taking his place in the morris team.
It is easy to describe films such as this as ‘elegaic’, and it certainly does look back to the end of the old agrarian way of life finished off by the Great War. However, it is also optimistic and forward looking underlining the continued enthusiasm for the morris in the village reflecting a wider national renewed engagement with local dance traditions. One of the strongest aspects of the film is that it explores the over-simplistic distinction between the old unbroken traditions and the 20th century revivals - initially promoted by Sharpe, Neal, Karpeles, Butterworth et al in the Edwardian period but with later upsurges in popularity. In many cases, such as at Adderbury, where although the tradition was broken, the new revivals looked backwards to these sides building on personal, often familial connections and making use of the records and transcriptions made by Sharpe and in this case of Adderbury in particular, Janet Heatley Blunt [http://library.efdss.org/archives/aboutblunt.html]
Apart from a slightly mystical introductory sequence that sits a little ill at ease with the rest of the film, this film manages to tread the tricky balance of treating morris dancing seriously without being po-faced about it and acknowledging the slightly silly side of it all. It shows the dancers to be thoughtful and introspective about the dance and the reasons for its survival and the importance of preventing it becoming a slightly middle-class re-invention of an essentially working class tradition.

North-East Heritage and the Coalfields: Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival talk

2011-11-08T11:42:00.000-08:00

This is the text of a talk I gave this week at the Radio 3 Freethinking Festival at The Sage in Gateshead. It was broadcast on Friday 11th November in The Essay slot on Radio 3 - you should temporarily be able to find a link to the Listen Again facility here

"Arriving in the northeast of England for the first time a decade ago I thought I knew what to expect. There may have been pit closures, the decline of heavy industry and the miners’ strike, but this was County Durham, heart of what was once the biggest coalfield in the world. There would be pitheads and spoil heaps, there would be mines. I wasn’t expecting to see cloth-capped miners trudging back from work begrimed from a days work at the coalface, but I did expect to see mines. I’d spent time in some of the big industrial cities of the north. They were often dominated by former mill buildings, old foundries and warehouses. The workers may have gone, but the works themselves remained. When the tide of industry that had swept through the North receded, it had left the factories and mills stranded high and dry. But at least they were there. There was something fundamentally different about the North-East. The pitheads, mine shops, spoil heaps and store sheds had been completely erased. In 1914 there were over 300 coalmines in County Durham; today only one winding wheel survives in situ. It is a testament to the extent that the colliery landscape has disappeared that standing mine buildings are now outnumbered by memorials to the disasters that claimed the lives of many miners during the industry’s heyday. In Durham City, both the site of County Hall and much of the University are built on the sites of former coalmines. During recent construction work at the university, the remains of the mineshaft of Elvet Colliery were briefly uncovered. I watched groups of hard-hatted engineers and construction workers staring down onto this brief emergence of the region’s past before it was covered over and construction began anew.

I want today to look at the extent to which the collieries have been erased from the landscape of North-eastern England and make a plea for the preservation and protection of what little survives of this globally important industry.

It is hard to under-estimate the sheer scale of this disappearance of the coal industry. Even the spoil heaps had been landscaped out of existence, and spoil heaps are big… very big. The spoil heap at Ashington was, at its greatest extent, the biggest spoil heap in Europe. It’s now been almost entirely landscaped away and a country park lies in its place. Some geologists have suggested that we should characterise the current geological period as the anthropocene, an age where the human impact on the earth came to define the world’s environmental trajectory. When one comes to comprehend the extent to which the north-east coal fields has seen its mineral resources extracted from the ground, redistributed either as coal or spoil and then the subsequent scars and spoil further eroded and removed, it is hard not to agree.

But this was not just an extractive industry; it produced communities as well as coal. On a landscape scale, the rise of the mines saw a re-organisation of the settlement pattern, with new pit villages springing up in undeveloped countryside or enveloping existing settlements. An entire culture grew up that was centred on, and grew out of, the coal industry. The north-east coalfields had their own rich dialect ‘pitmatic’. It even had its own dance traditions, rapper dancing; the dancers commonly wore hoggers, the long shorts worn by miners in the late19th and early 20th century. Whilst many of these traditions and practices remain, the organic and living link between them and the communities of labour that they grew out of is becoming increasingly tenuous. Durham Miner’s Gala, originally the big meet of the unionised labour force, although once in decline is becoming increasingly popular again. But whilst the morning starts with the procession of brass bands and union banners, they no longer have a close and immediate link with the coal industry. They may parade into Durham from the surrounding villages, but they march past industrial estates, new housing developments and wasteland where the pits used to stand.

However, the coal industry was not Durham’s only extractive industry – up in the hills of the North Pennines another industry thrived – lead mining. Here the situation is very different. This industry went to the wall half a century before the coal industry was destroyed, but it has left a far more visible trace on the landscape. The industrial buildings and installations associated with extracting the lead from these bleak upland moor sides can still be seen. As with the coal industry, there was a distinct set of specialised terms to refer to these features. The hushes, adits, jigger houses, buddles and bouse teams can still be seen along roadsides and side valleys. They survived because of cheapness of land up in the hills and the lack of pressure to redevelop it – there was plenty of it and it had limited alternative uses. The communities who had moved into the area to work the lead veins simply drifted away- the non-conformist chapels lost their congregations and survived by being converted into holiday homes.

The contrast between the lead mines and the coalfields are clear – the lead valleys have kept their landscape, as the people went. However, the pit villages were different- the industries went but the people stayed. Notoriously, in the 1950s, Durham County Council classified some of these villages as not worthy of investment and aimed to demolish them and re-locate the populations. Whilst a small number of villages were entirely destroyed and their people moved, for the majority of the 120 or so villages it simply meant a lack of investment. Nonetheless since the end of this bitterly resented policy in the mid-1970s, the collieries were slowly destroyed and the spoil heaps removed.

It is a lasting tragedy that so little effort was spared in recording the physical infrastructure. There was little realisation that although the process was a piecemeal one, the demolition of individual collieries was removing an entire distinctive regional landscape. This is not to suggest that archaeologists have not been interested in our industrial past; the study of industrial remains grew massively in the post-war period. However, for a long time it was the preserve of the enthusiastic amateur, often themselves with a background in engineering or industry. Within the confines of professional archaeology there was sadly often less commitment, less will and crucially, less resources to engage in recording the remains of such a recent period. It has to be said also that within the colliery communities themselves there may have been a reluctance to see the heritage sector start to treat the places that had until recently been their place of employment as the focus of research by academics. Understandably, in the rawness of unemployment people were not always happy to see the mines packaged and sold as a ‘heritage attraction’, worried perhaps about a dewy eyed glorification of the coalfields. Others simply wanted to turn their backs away and seek new work hoping that the rapid redevelopment of the old colliery sites would see an economic upturn.

However, today, as we move further away from the great days of Durham coalfield, we are increasingly aware of what we have lost. There is also an increased appreciation amongst people living in the region of the importance of coal mining. For many, it helped to form a sense of what it means to come from the North-East. There is also a wider understanding of the central importance it had, not just for the history of the local area, but on a national, indeed international stage. For example, the need of the early coal mines to get their coal quickly and easily to local ports to allow it to be exported led to the creation of network of horse-drawn wagon ways. In the early 19th century it did not take long for the newly developed technology of steam locomotion to be introduced, giving the North-East a pivotal position in the development of steam railways. It is salutary to note that in a recent survey 68% of those in the North-East agreed that the industrial revolution is the most important period of British history and significantly 71% of those in the region believed that industrial heritage sites made them feel proud of their local area. Despite this clear local enthusiasm for the North-East’s industrial heritage there are still more Roman forts open to visitors between the Tweed and the Tees than sites connected to the industrial past. More worryingly, despite its relative lack of antiquity, this industrial heritage is at greater risk than older remains. Recent research by English Heritage has shown that 1 in 10 Grade I and II* industrial Listed Buildings are threatened. This is more than three times the national average for Listed Buildings. This is a problem that is particularly acute within this region, with the North-East having nationally the highest proportion of industrial sites at risk. Why is this? Is the recent industrial past less valued here than elsewhere? I believe not, instead there are good practical reasons. It is not easy to convert a coalmine! The best way for industrial remains to be preserved is not by turning them into heritage attractions, but by finding effective and economic ways for them to be used for modern purposes, as offices, homes or factories. But by their nature, the remains of coalmines are designed to house heavy machinery or had very specific technical functions, which make it hard to find alternative purposes for them. In general, sites connected to extractive industries are not easily re-appropriated for modern use – and in the North-East sites linked to coal, lead and iron mining form over 50% of the sites at risk. There is also a wider aesthetic challenge; historic sites such as castles, monasteries and stately homes are seen as beautiful in their own right and often thought to actively contribute to a landscape vista. Whilst many people may feel that industrial remains have a certain utilitarian elegance, this is a much harder notion to sell to the wider public. All too often, the remains of industry are seen as something inflicted on a region rather than organic elements of a historic landscape.
It is not just a question of protecting upstanding industrial buildings.

Another key aspect of the region’s industrial past can be found beneath the ground, surviving as archaeological remains. Many mines saw investment and technological development when the coal industry was at its height. They were constantly being rebuilt and expanded. This meant that the colliery buildings that were removed when the industry declined were just the latest version of a sequence of structures on the site that may go back 150 or even 200 years. These early collieries could be very different in appearance to their later iterations. Watercolours of 19th century coal mines by the Victorian artist Thomas Harrison Hair show industrial landscapes subtly different to the ones we associated today with the coal industry. His landscape view of ‘A’ pit at Hebburn is dominated by what at first appear to be carousels, but on closer inspection are wooden gin-gangs, horse-driven engines for providing motive power to the colliery. Behind them looms an impressive pithead, which unlike later 19th century examples is an entirely timber structure. The screening shed at Phoenix Pit, High Etherley he depicted in a watercolour probably done in the 1830s could easily be mistaken for a medieval half-timbered building. The dominance of wood as a construction material over stone, brick and metal is a reminder of how much our mental images of colliery landscapes are influenced by the photographic and film images of early 20th century mines. It is this kind of prehistory of the coal industry that can only be accessed through archaeological investigation.

Yet, whilst today the public and heritage professionals are increasingly open, indeed positively enthusiastic about preserving our industrial landscapes, the recession presents new challenges. Even when the physical arrangement of industrial structures are suitable for redevelopment, the higher additional costs associated with taking on an historic building is often a disincentive to developers, particularly in straightened economic times. With current planning controls that ought to help conserve these kinds of sites under threat from the new Draft Planning Framework, it is likely that we will see more industrial sites destroyed rather than re-developed as investors would rather see a cheap and uncomplicated new build than take on a potentially problematic historical structure. The kinds of grants and advice that should be in place to encourage sympathetic engagement with these sites are vanishing in the crackdown on public spending.

Where planning permission has been granted to demolish or substantially alter these sites, current legislation stipulates that, where appropriate, archaeological investigation should be carried out on the ‘polluter pay’s principal. This, though, requires local government to have access to specialist in-house conservation and archaeological advice. Instead we see local authorities massively cutting these key services. Even within the North-East we are faced with the possibility that large areas of Teesside will be without any archaeological support, a serious and urgent threat to the industrial heritage of that area.

This is not a call for the end to development or even for the end to destruction of buildings and landscapes connected to our industrial past. A refusal to sanction change would lead to a sclerotic landscape imprisoned by the physical legacy of dead industries. Whilst it is possible, indeed essential, to critique the notion of ‘sustainable development’ as presented in the new governmental framework for planning, we need to strike a balance between preservation and renewal. But to do this, we need to have an awareness of the extent to which we have already lost elements of the industrial landscape and be able to evaluate both the social and economic value of these sites. This involves not just a detailed consideration of each individual case; individually, a terrace of miner’s housing or an isolated fitters workshop may not have much significance. Nonetheless, a sense of the place that these specific cases play in the wider landscape is essential if we are to avoid our industrial landscapes dying a death of a thousand cuts. In addition to this basic challenge, one that is in essence curatorial, there is a second barrier to overcome, and this is an interpretative and representational one. One does not need to be a hardcore Marxist theoretician to recognise that in the later 18th and 19th centuries the massive expansion in British industrial production was not simply predicated on rapid technological advances. There was also a profound alteration in labour relations, with the development of a new industrial working class. Neither is it a particularly radical proposition to suggest that the relations between the proprietors and workers were marked by inequality and exploitation. On a wider scale Britain’s precocious industrialisation was also closely connected to its imperial expansion. When we come to presenting and interpreting our industrial heritage we need to bring this on board. All too often the story of our industrial past is presented as a teleological story of scientific and engineering know-how and entrepreneurial nous. Whilst this is certainly one aspect of our industrial past, we need to be alive to the conditions and constraints within which the all-important workers were situated. We need to emphasise their contributions to industrialisation, the price they paid and where appropriate their acts of resistance. If we don’t do this we run the risk of providing what the French museologist Philippe Hoyeau has called a simple ‘restaging of dead labour’.

Despite these challenges, we should be positive. The immediate trauma of the rapid de-industrialisation of the coalfields, if not forgotten, is at least blunted. There are new generations in the North East who have never directly known the coalfield, but who have parents and grandparents for whom such landscapes were integral parts of their personal histories. We are at the point where “current affairs” is beginning to tip into history, where personal experience is replaced by second-hand testimony and where living memories are replaced by historic cartographies. We can’t stop this inevitable progress of change, nor should we want to, but we can take the chance to save what can be saved, record what can be recorded and continue to tell the story of an industry that defined a region."

NB: The picture is of Murton Colliery (Co. Durham) from English Heritage's excellent Viewfinder website.

Muddy trenches and ivory towers

2011-09-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

I’ve been looking at the recently published Southport Group report, a document resulting from a working group drawn from a cross-section of the English archaeological sector which aims to address the implications of PPG16 with the new PPS5. PPG16 was the planning policy guidance document which in 1990 established the current system integrating archaeology into the planning system. In practice, this has led to a massive rise in archaeological fieldwork and an associated expansion in the commercial archaeology sector. It was predicated on the notion that when a development threatened to impact on archaeology it should either be mitigated against (by, for example, a change in the plan of the site) or ‘preserved by record’ through excavation. The advent of the new PPS5 changes some key underlying assumptions. One major change is the assumption that ‘preservation by record’ is possible and that an objective recording and archiving of a site is an unproblematic process. Equally, there is an increased realisation that simply mitigating damage to the site is laden with inherent challenges; it does not stop the inherent decay processes faced by all archaeology and some mitigation strategies, such as needle piling, may even speed up these processes. Instead PPS5 moves towards the notion of ‘offsetting’ with a realisation that there is always going to be a trade-off between mitigation and recording, and throwing into the mix an increased emphasis on involvement by the wider community (yes, the word ‘localism’ rears its head) and an increased focus on capitalising on the research data generated by more partnership working (including local groups, local government curators, commercial contractors and academia). I want to touch on the proposals linked to increased community involvement in another post, but in the meantime I want to explore some of the suggestions put forward about the role of academia in commercial archaeology.
It calls for an increased involvement by British universities in the commercial archaeological process. This is undoubtedly an exciting prospect; the huge increase in archaeological information from the sixfold increase in excavations over the last 20 years is enough to whet the appetite of any archaeologist working on British material. However, it would foolish to pretend that there has long been a certain level of tension between academia and the commercial world. There is a tendency for field archaeologist to stereotype academics as out-of-touch, unrealistic, ivory tower scholars, with no understanding of the reality of life in the trenches, whilst academics can often characterise the commercial sector as under-theorised, technicians happy to compromise their academic integrity for a fast buck.
The Southport report suggests that there has been a reluctance for academia to engage in commercial archaeology for a number of reasons, including the perception that the demands of the Research Assessment Exercise (Research Excellence Framework as it is now) have encouraged many universities to disengage from British archaeology. I must confess, I’m not entirely convinced about this; it is certainly easy to think of a series of senior archaeologists with impeccable research profiles who focus partly or wholly on UK archaeology.
One factor that is not mentioned, however, is the increased separation between the commercial world/local government archaeology and academia for a range of professional reasons. In the past it was not uncommon for individuals to be able to make the transition between the commercial sector and universities. There are plenty of famous university archaeologists who had an extensive track record in commercial work (or its pre-1990 equivalent). For example, people like Philip Rahtz, Martin Carver, Graham Webster and Philip Barker who had significant pre-academia careers before making the transition into the university world. It is hard to envisage happening to any extent now. This is because of changes in the way in which academic careers are constructed. The first change is the demand that all lecturers have a PhD – a laudable idea in theory, but in practice this immediately precludes senior field archaeologist, who may have extensive track records in major excavation, but no doctorate, becoming academics. A second issue is the need for an academic to have a strong portfolio of REF-submittable publications is paramount. However, even if a field archaeologist has a strong record of bringing field projects to publication they are unlikely to be seen as comprising a strong REF submission. Instead, the main career path for those entering academia is PhD – post-doctoral research posts – lecturer; increasingly few academic archaeologists, particularly of the younger generation have ever experienced employment outside universities, beyond perhaps a couple of months working as site technicians during the summer vacation. This means that the current cohort of academics is increasingly detached from the form of archaeology that produces the overwhelming bulk of data for those working on British archaeology today.

This is undoubtedly something I’ll come back to…

Bunny Huggers and Red Tape

2011-07-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve just done a broadcast on Radio 3’s Night Waves about the commercialisation of British archaeology. It’s only a short piece, and broadly speaking positive about the unexpected surprises that have arisen out of archaeological excavation that has been carried out as part of the planning system. It was not intended to be an in-depth overview and is hopefully a short prolegomena to a more considered exploration of this issue.
In a time when heritage is under increased threats from many directions, my piece could certainly be accused of being soft on these problems. Frustratingly for me, I wrote and recorded it before the ‘Bunnygate’ saga blew up, so I was unable to bring this into my discussion, so I want to use this blog post to explore some of the current challenges faced by archaeology in Britain today.

I’ll begin with ‘Bunnygate’; for those not in the know, this is connected to a speech given by Cllr Alan Melton, leader of Fenland District Council on June 21st at the 4th Annual Cambridgeshire Times/ Wisbech Standard/ Fenland Council Building and Design Awards. In it he launched an attack on the role of heritage and archaeology in current planning legislation, demonising it as hindering growth. It is worth repeating a key part of this diatribe

I can announce tonight, that from the 1st July. A requirement for an Archaeological dig/survey will not be required. The requirement will no longer feature at pre-app. Or form part of the committee agenda. With one exception, in local known historical areas, such as next to a 1000 year old church. Common sense will prevail! (Neale Wade springs to mind) The bunny huggers won’t like this, but if they wish to inspect a site, they can do it when the footings are being dug out.

Not surprisingly (except perhaps to Alan Melton himself) this piece of sub-Daily Mail oratory resulted in a massive backlash from the archaeological community. The most rapid response was a grass-roots campaign organised via Facebook with the other more formal and august archaeological bodies being slower to respond; some of these ‘official’ responses (such as that from the CBA including a fine performance by Mike Heyworth on Radio 4’s PM programme) were considered and to the point, others, such as that of the IFA were astoundingly anodyne suggesting a somewhat sclerotic organisational structure incapable of acting rapidly to address such incidents.

Now, it was rapidly pretty clear that Alan Melton’s threats was nothing more than a piece of blow-hard after dinner rambling aimed at golf-club cronies rather than a thought-through policy decision. Doubtlessly, local government officials has to hold back their anger and frustration as they patiently explained to Cllr Melton that he had no power to rewrite English planning legislation and that perhaps he should have a milky drink and have an early night. However, as a number of bloggers have pointed out, despite the ham-fisted way in which it was done, Alan Melton appeared to be following the sub-text of the CONDEM localism policy to its logical conclusion, i.e. local authorities should be able to tailor their planning guidelines to meet local requirements (which in his opinion appears to be to turn the Fenland into a housing-estate) and that in the current ‘difficult climate’ priority has to be given to economic growth (Discuss this amongst yourselves). It is unlikely that Melton was the official vanguard of the triumphant march of the Pickle-istas, but he clearly thought he was doing his dark master’s bidding.

Nonetheless, this sorry saga does emphasise the clear subtext of the localism agenda, which is that any kind of framework that might act to protect the environment (built or natural) is the malign expression of the Big State stifling the green shoots of growth. This can be seen in a series of recent proposals, such Grant Shapp’s Community Right to Build which would allow, in certain circumstances, the construction of rural housing without a specific application for planning permission,

At the other end of the scale the government also plan to ‘fast track’ planning enquiries linked to major infrastructure developments, such as road and rail schemes and have already abolished the Infrastructure Planning Commission. It is hard to see how ‘fast track’ can be translated as anything but ‘half-arsed’. Once again, the important systems of regulations that protect our environment are threatened.

This kind of chipping away of the planning system is dangerous because it is so insidious. There is no open broadside on PPS5, but instead a death by a thousand cuts, as the remit and power of these measures are slowly chipped away by the increase in ‘special circumstances’ in which existing legislation can be side-stepped or ignored. This makes it harder to fight against, as there is no single target on which those opposed to this process can train their guns. There is also the important related danger presented by the wholesale reduction of local government curatorial staff whose role it is to enact and monitor the existing planning sytem. Whilst the County Mounties have sometimes been criticised for failing to be rigorous enough in their policing of commercial archaeological excavation, it is not hard to see that reducing their numbers is unlikely to improve the situation.

In the face of this kind of ideological approach to the reform of local planning it is essential to keep a very close eye on forthcoming initiatives. It is easy enough to see the threat (no matter how half-arsed) in the ill-informed ramblings of the Alan Meltons of this world. It is harder to pick up on the small print of seemingly harmless governmental policies and mobilise and focus opposition to them. The government’s embarrassingly populist ‘Red Tape Challenge’ will be turning its jaundiced eye onto the Environment in September; this could prove very interesting…

The North Pennines

2011-06-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

Last week I got the rare chance to head up into the North Pennines as I had to go to Westgate to look at a dig my university has been involved with. I’m not naturally drawn to moorland landscapes. I have a fairly low tolerance for Gore-tex and Kendal Mint Cake and normally prefer my countryside on the more pastoral side. It may be heresy, but I must admit I can take or leave the Lake District or Snowdonia. However, I do have a soft spot for that stretch of the Pennine ridge between Stainmore and Hadrian’s Wall. Unlike the Yorkshire Dales to the south it has managed to avoid the excessive tidying up and gentrification which has turned some parts into a lumpier version of the Cotswolds.

My drive took me up to Weardale with a diversion to Rookhope then up over to Alston and down Teesdale. The weather was beautiful, the hay meadows were in full flower and the dales were saturated with birdsong. Bizarrely, this is an area where oyster-catchers and curlews nest in the summer- close your eyes and you could be by an estuary rather than in some of the highest moors in England. This was also a landscape loved by WH Auden:

From scars where kestrels hover
The leader looking over
Into the happy valley,
Orchard and curving river,
May turn away to see
The slow fastidious line
That disciplines the fell
Hear curlew’s creaking call
From angles unforeseen...

(Missing, 1929)

Many of Auden’s poems keyed into the thing that keeps me coming back to the North Pennines; it is a post-industrial landscape.

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to a wood,
An industry already comatose,
Yet sparsely living...

(1927)

From the Roman period until the early-20th century this was an area dominated by lead mining. In the 19th century, the mines of the London Lead Company and the Blackett-Beaumont Company produced more lead than anywhere else in the world. This industry had a direct impact on the land in terms of the scars of mining and the construction of pithead and processing facilities. It also brought people into the Dales and created a distinct human landscape – non-conformity was strong and the lead companies had a strong ethic of public benefaction and investment in supporting their workforce. Methodist chapels multiplied and many areas of miners housing ('mine shops') still survive. At exactly the same time, further east, the great north-east coal field was also reaching is zenith; through much of the 1800s County Durham was dominated by these two great extractive industries. The lead mining declined in the earlier 20th century whilst in the County Durham the coal industry did not collapse until the 1960s and finally dying in the 1990s. However, today, virtually nothing survives of the collieries– if you did not know it, it would be hard to tell that you were in the heart of a once-thriving coalfield. The pitheads are long dismantled and many mines are built over (my last two jobs in Durham have seen me working in offices on the sites of former coal mines). Even the spoil-heaps that once dominated much of east Durham have been sculpted and shifted out of existence. This is in contrast to the lead mining area. Here land is cheap and there is little pressure for development- the mine buildings stand derelict as in places do the miner’s houses. The scars caused by hushing and processing have never been erased. It’s a landscape where the evidence for the industry is still apparent. The mines always operated alongside farming and the moors were owned by the great estates and used for game shooting. The moors are still home to sheep and grouse, but the miners are long gone.

The Great God Pan

2011-06-14T13:41:00.001-07:00

Most people think of Wind in the Willows (1908) as a rather jolly and ever-so English story of meadows, moles and mucking about in boats. However, within it is a haunting, mystical passage, which see the animals hearing mysterious piping and then encountering the god Pan:

"he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward"

Interestingly, I've come across a number of other depictions of Pan in late 19th and early 20th century English literature. Probably the best known is Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan (1890), a book which was a great influence on writers such as HP Lovecraft. Its depiction of Pan is a diabolic one and a world away from the awe-inspiring yet ultimately benign Pan in Wind of the Willows. More recently, I've come across another appearance of Pan. This is in a short story by EF Benson (of Mapp and Lucia fame) entitled 'The Man Who Went Too Far' (written I think in the 1920s). In it, Frank Halton, a young artist retreats to he New Forest and opens his soul to Nature. At first, this results in him regaining a youthful vigour as he begins to hear the 'strange, unending melody' of Pan's pipes. He anticipates 'a final revelation..a complete and blinding stroke, which will throw open... once and for all, the full knowledge, the full realisation and comprehension that I am one...with life'. Inevitably, no good can come of this, and he is found by a friend with his face fixed in terror and marks on his chest 'as if caused by the hoofs of some monstrous goat that had leaped and stamped on him'. I am intrigued by the localisation of Pan in particularly English landscapes. Although he comes across differently in each case, there is a strong sense of both attraction and terror inherent in him and his links to untamed nature. Intriguingly, there is also a passing reference in Puck of Pook's Hill by the Roman soldier Parnesius to a 'the little altar I built to the Sylvan Pan by the pine-forest beyond the brook?' - pleasingly, Wind in the Willows also harks back to a Roman past with Badger's description of an ancient city that preceded the Wild Wood: 'People come—they stay for a while, they flourish, they build—and they go. It is their way. But we remain.' - it looks like Pan may have remained too.

Canal Ghosts

2011-05-25T14:03:00.001-07:00

Following on from my last entry, the two key figures in founding the Inland Waterwazys Association were Tom Rolt and Robert Aikman. However, I've stumbled across another interesting connection between these two men; they also both wrote ghost stories. Indeed, both have stories anthologised in the excellent Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Rolt's 'Bosworth Summit Pound' is, as the name suggests set on a canal. Aikman's story The Cicerones also appears in the same volume. It has long been one of my favourite supernatural short stories and even if it doesn't keep you awake it should certainly put you off Belgian cathedrals for a while (although I always mentally visualise it being set in Boulogne Cathedral)

Canal Vision

2011-05-17T08:23:00.000-07:00

On Monday night I caught The Golden Age of Canals, one of those wonderful documentaries that BBC4 insists on sneaking out without telling anyone. Although it’s not clear from it title, it was primarily about the movement to prevent British canals falling into dereliction following a final later flowering during World War II, rather than an in depth exploration of their initial creation. One of the key figures in the establishment of the key lobbying conservation movement the Inland Waterways Association was Tom Rolt. He is someone I’ve been becoming increasingly interested in. He was along with figures like Kenneth Hudson at the vanguard of the creation of the practice of Industrial Archaeology, and was not only involved in protecting canals, but was an early pioneer of preserving railways. Pleasingly, he partly owes the success of his first book, Narrow Boat to H.J. Massingham, who is someone I’ve blogged about before. The rise of an interest in the industrial past is something that has been largely neglected in the huge literature generated on the relationship between landscape and environment and the creation of particular narratives about what it means to be ‘English’. Generally speaking, the meta-narratives have been about the anti-modernist and predominantly pastoralist visions of the Neo-Romantic movement (though to be fair David Matless’s excellent Landscape and Englishness is far more subtly argued and contains a number of pages on Rolt). However, in the 1940s and 50s we can begin to see an alternative vision of a distinctively English landscape constructed around the industrial past – interestingly this appears at first to involve particularly steam trains and canals. These are elements of technology that we clearly receding in importance, and significantly I think were physically able to escape the confines of urban landscapes and strike out into rural landscapes. For the first time, it appears people were distinguishing between an interest in technology and modernist agendas. Of course, as Alexandra Harris’s recent Romantic Moderns makes clear the Neo-Romantics were as much Neo- as Romantic and artists such as Eric Ravilious and John Piper were interested in depicting relics of older industry. However, people like Rolt were perhaps the first to flag up the importance of industrial technology, providing it with some sense of time depth, and importantly, flagging it up as something worth saving.

Cecil Sharpe: Photographer!

2011-03-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

I've just come across the on-line image gallery of the photographs taken by Cecil Sharpe of the singers and musicians from who he collected his music. These are an absolute revelation. Despite the massive expansion of photography in the later 19th and early 20th century it is incredibly rare to see portraits (and this is what they are) of the working-class, particularly rural workers. The only parallels I can think of are the 19th century 'mugshots' of criminals taken from police records.

Two things impress me particularly about Sharpe's images. First is the gaze of the subjects- straight on at the camera confronting the photographer and the viewer. Many are very relaxed and not at all nervous about having their photographs taken. Also, many of these individuals are elderly, they aren't wearing late Victorian or Edwardian clothes, instead they are dressed in the costume of mid-19th century labourers. With their chin-strap beards and wide-brimmed felt hats they belong to the world of the Tolpuddle Martyrs not Lark Rise...

‘People who don’t like to hear an old song, I don’t know what they do want to hear'

2011-03-26T10:07:00.000-07:00

Cecil Sharpe is one of the founding figures in the English folk revival. He was in the forefront of collecting traditional songs and tunes in both England and the Appalachians in the early 20th century. Like most such pivotal individuals he has been the subject of much revisionism, and there is a tension between celebrating him as a valuable collector of a vanishing tradition and condemning him for exploiting those who provided his songs and bowdlerising and editing his material to provide an orthodox canon of ‘authentic’ material. However, I think it’s easy to forget the incredibly important work done by collectors from the 1930s onwards, by which time recording equipment was more transportable allowing a fantastic corpus of songs to be recorded as performances, not simply transcribed straight to paper. It gives us a great chance to hear the performers and singers themselves without an intermediary. I’ve been recently exploring some of this material through the Voice of the People series issued by Topic Records (available on Spotify). One of the revelations for me has been that some of this field recording was Alan Lomax, who is best known for his recordings for the Library of Congress in the US. I must confess I never knew he strayed this side of the pond.

Current favourites include the singing of Fred Jordan [Spotify link to We Shepherds are the Best of Men],
Harry Cox (pictured and from who the title quote was taken) [Spotify link to Just as the Tide was flowing] and
Walter Pardon [Spotify link to an unusual version of Raggle Taggle Gypsies]

Disappeared noises

2011-03-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

An item on PM on Radio 4 about the power of sounds to evoke emotions got me thinking. The article discussed the impact of the sound of the Merlin engine [] of a Spitfire. Much as I hate to admit it, I am no longer in the first flush of my youth, and I’ve noticed that certain sounds that were part of my childhood no longer exist.

Telephone bells; you get ringtones, trimphones, bleeps and tunes, but analogue phones bells have gone (as have phones with dials – in a brief informal survey of my students none of them had ever used a dial phone)

Foghorns- I remember lying in bed at my great-aunts house in Deal listening to the foghorns. I think they’ve all been taken out of service now (as have the lightships on the Goodwin Sands we could see when we were night swimming).

The Broadmoor siren – this is a slight cheat as its still operational, I’ve simply moved away. I grew up close the high security hospital at Broadmoor (home of Peter Sutcliffe and others of that ilk). Because of the high risks posed if a prisoner escaped, the surrounding area was provided with a network of sirens to warn the population. Every Monday morning at 10 o’clock, it was tested, first with the wail of the alert then the monotone of the ‘all clear’. I must have heard this nearly everyday for the first ten years of my life. Looking back it’s a strange thing to have grown up with, but at the time it seemed utterly normal. I can also remember wanting people to escape as it meant we got kept off school!

Copse and robbers

2011-02-04T15:16:00.000-08:00

More ramblings about the Forestry Commission sell-off I'm afraid. What has intrigued me about this new policy (one incidentally not in either the Lib Dem or Tory manifesto) is the absolutely half-arsed way the government have gone about trying to defend it. Any attempt to paint it as a fiscally driven initiative ceased rapidly- the sell-off will make little money. It has become rapidly clear that it’s an ideologically driven policy, a classical liberal/libertarian abhorrence of any involvement of the state in an area where the ‘market’ could apparently make a better job. Caroline Spelman has flagged up the tension between the FCs role as regulator of the British forestry industry, as well as a major commercial contractor, yet never satisfactorily explains why this should require the selling off the forestry estates rather than simply setting up an independent regulator (Off Plank?)

This issue is important, for several reasons. First, of course, our forests are important cultural and natural resources and not simply financial seams to be mined. However, it is also a lens through which we can better understand the problems with the condem ‘big society’ agenda and its promotion of free market alternatives to all forms of state activity. In theory, the ‘big society’ is a wonderful notion, right up there with motherhood and apple pie, but it’s stymied by the friction of reality. Of course, people should get involved with their communities and take responsibility for things. However, just because people get involved in making decisions, does not mean that there are the resources to make these decisions actually happen. If the government really wants to see the ‘big society’ happening, we would be seeing them investing in funding schemes aimed directly at the voluntary sector, we would be seeing initiatives to provide community groups with training in employment law, health and safety, and writing business plans. If they were serious, we would see them ring fencing local government funding for voluntary groups. If they really wanted this to work, we should see increased funding to bodies like English Heritage and the Citizens Advice Bureaux. We would see them working with insurance companies to provide subsidised insurance for community events. Instead, it is precisely these kind of funding streams that are being cut at every turn – it is not surprising that Liverpool has withdrawn from being one of the pilot areas in the ‘big society’ project, citing lack of funding as one of the key obstacles. Support the ‘big society’ by all means, but don’t expect it to also save money. Let Cameron support choice, but let’s see him stump up the cash to pay for the decision-making process and to fund the choices once they have been made.

We also see with the woodlands sell-off the weakness of the market. Whilst for the Tory’s the freeing of the market is the ultimate panacea to all our woes, by saying that they will embed safeguards regarding conservation and public access in the long-term forestry leases, they are explicitly acknowledging that a completely free market won’t meet these needs without an element of compulsion. If the free market is so perfect why do we need child labour laws and health and safety legislation? Why do we need OFWAT, OFCOM and the Office of Free Trade? Commission, the Office of Fair Trade, OFWAT and OFCOM? Why do banks need bailing out? Because, simply, the results of a truly free market leads inevitably to a lot of sheer bloody misery for a lot of people and huge financial rewards for a minority. One only has to look at the periods in British history when the market was probably at its freest, the mid-19th century, to also see a period where child labour was at its highest, pollution was at its worst and the most industrial deaths and injuries occurred. We could equally turn to areas of the developing world today, where existing legislation over sweatshops are often not enforced, to see the incredibly poor conditions endured by workers. The free market may be the best way of making money, but, banally obvious as it may seem, there is more to life than money. The frustrating thing is that the government clearly realise this themselves. If they really wanted to follow the small state theory to its obvious conclusions, then they should seek to remove all immigration control and abolish the army and replace it with contracts with commercial security firms such as Blackwater. Of course, they won’t, because they too recognise that there are limits to the efficacy of the market,and by following its inexorable logic leads to socially unacceptable conclusions . However, rather then entering into a real debate about where the limits of the state are and how to recognise them, they blithely assert that the state is bad thing and the market a good thing without ever exploring why.

postscript

If ever I feel a need to get really angry and shout at things, there is nothing like a brief listen to Radio 4’s Any Questions to get me suitably splenetic. Only caught a couple of minutes this evening, but that was enough to leave me in a foul mood. Its worth listening to the odious (and looking at his blog, deeply self-pitying) James Delingpole purely for the opportunity to throw heavy objects at your radio.

The Woods and the Trees

2011-01-28T08:47:00.000-08:00

The CONDEM proposals for selling of forests owned by the Forest Commissions have attracted, quite rightly, a lot of opprobrium, with particularly concern expressed about the potential threats to both the natural and cultural heritage connected to British woodland. The latest versions of the proposals appear to show some governmental concessions to these widely expressed worries. However, it is still clear that they don’t seem to ‘get it’ and here is why:

First of all, forests are dynamic things. This is an obvious and banal statement; of course they are living ecosystems. The crucial issue, though, is the fact that the vast majority of British forests are actively managed. They haven’t achieved their current state through being left to ‘get on with it’; they are the result of a long period of monitoring, management and control by humans. Like the majority of the British landscape, woodlands and forests are not simple natural landscapes, they are cultural products. It is incredibly important not lose site of this for two reasons. First, it has direct implications on how forests are looked after; they can’t simply be left to grow, they require continual investment in time, money and expertise for them to flourish. Secondly, a clear acknowledgement of this is important to avoid any accusations that those of us who have concern about the current policy are dewy-eyed mystic tree huggers with an obsession with a quasi-mythical wildwood (populated no doubt by Robin Hood, Herne the Hunter and possibly Bambi).

This is where the government’s proposals about forests hit their first snag. Whilst saying that many forests will be sold off to commercial companies, they are keen to promote their inchoate ‘Big Society’ agenda, with the proposals that a significant number of forests should be sold off to local community groups (under the Community Right to Buy provisions in the planned Localism Bill). We can take as read the implicit assumption that despite the recession there are lots of community groups out there with the initial capital to invest in the purchase of a wood (the consultation document is clear that any sale would be at the commercial market price and that the local groups simply have the option of first refusal- woodland costs c £3,500 and £7,000/hectare, so an average side wood could cost c £300,000). We can also pass over the assumption that there is an endless stream of volunteers and enthusiasts who are ready to get involved in running the forests (if not a zero-sum game, the size of the volunteer community is far from elastic). The biggest worry is the assumption that a small group of enthusiasts can easily run a wood. It takes more than committee meetings to actively run and maintain even a moderate sized wood. They need to be worked on and looked after. This includes felling dead wood, planting new trees and maintaining the infrastructure (drainage, fences, gates etc). Add to this, the need also to research, understand and curate any elements of the ecosystem (protected plants, animals etc) or the historic environment. This is going to involve money, time and expertise. There is no indication where this money is going to come from, nor the expertise. The planned massive expansion of the ‘big society’ is clearly going to put immense amount of pressure on existing funding sources (e.g. the Historic Lottery Fund and charitable bodies) who are unlikely to see a massive expansion in their own resources to meet this challenge. Equally, at the very time as all these new community groups are going to need professional advice, the bodies that provide them, including local government (e.g. rights of way officers, county archaeologists etc), quangos (e.g. English Heritage) and charities are facing massive cuts themselves. These forests are living organisms. They are going to require management and investment on an on-going basis year after year after year after year, long after the relatively short-term financial gains made by flogging them off are made. Are those community groups who purchased the woods in the first place even going to be around in ten years time? One only has to look at the number of local community initiatives funded by the HLF that have withered and died to realise that such groups often have a relatively life-span, usually relying on the drive and enthusiasm of often a very small group of individuals. The consultation documents states states that if the local group was wound up, the forest would return to the control of the State, presumably then to be sold to the commercial sector and leaving the community. This lack of appreciation of how forests work is disturbing and is symptomatic of a resounding short-termism.

Overall, according to the consultation document, the forests which might be available for management by local groups total about 13,000-26,000 hectares (c. 5-10% of the Forestry Commissions holdings). Another chunk of forests are what they call ‘forests of national historical, biodiversity or cultural significance’ (e.g. the Forest of Dean, New Forest) these might potentially be managed by charities (rather than smaller community groups) on a trust or lease-hold basis – forests potentially to be treated this way comprises a total of 50-80,000 hectares (c.20-30% of the FC holdings). Again, the same problems apply (funding etc), as well as some potentially interesting issues of governance (e.g. what would the relationship be between, for example, the New Forest National Park authority and a charity running the related woods, although, to be fair, the NPA could presumably bid to run the woods). These charity-run woods would have greater obligations to maintain the woods for public access etc. As with the smaller woods, they could apply for Forestry Grants, but there is an explicit assumption they should move away from reliance on state aid (how?). There are finally ‘commercial forests’ which would be leased to the private sector. These would have far less restrictions about public benefit (although there would be some) – key example given of this is Kielder Forest, and over all commercial forests make up a total of c35-50% of the FC holdings.

Whilst it is clear that some forest areas, particularly larger areas of ‘ancient woodland’ have some particular public importance, I am a little worried about the notion that it is possible to separate out some important forests in this way. Some elements within a landscape may not be of particular antiquity, but nonetheless contribute significantly to the character of a particular area. With this in mind, I was more than a little surprised to see that Kielder Forest in Northumberland is classified simply has a ‘commercial forest’/ Whilst in terms simply of antiquity it does not compare to the Forest of Dean, nonetheless, it defines its surrounding landscape, and although very much a working forest, it is of far greater significance to that part of the country than simply an economic one. It dates back to at least the 1920s and there will be increasingly fewer people who remember that area as anything but wooded. Kielder Forest is as essential to local distinctiveness in central Northumberland as the New Forest is to south-west Hampshire.

So, all in all, there are still real problems with the proposals. Let’s be clear, forests need to be managed and a major element of this management is best carried out in a commercial context. Also, there is nothing inherently wrong in the selling off of some elements of the Forestry Commission portfolio on a periodic basis in order to rationalize the estate, if balanced by a more or less equal level of purchasing more threatened forests to protect them. However, the current proposals, seemingly driven by an ideological move towards ‘localism’ and a short-termist demand for immediate capital, fail to address some very real problems. Currently, by operating a mixed portfolio of woodland the Forest Commission can use profits from commercially dominated woodlands to fund and manage forests with greater public / environmental benefits. By splitting up the estates the government are simply offloading the costs of running the woods with a greater public benefit onto a community with a limited capacity and a no secure source of financial support.

Folkwaves

2010-12-16T05:31:00.001-08:00

I've just found out that Radio Derby are axing their excellent Folkwaves programme. This is a copy of the email of complaint I've sent

I’ve just found out about the plans to scrap Folkwaves on Radio Derby, and I’m deeply saddened. It seems perverse to end one of the UKs most popular folk music programmes at a moment when British (and particularly English) folk music has never been more popular. Indeed, I found out about Folkwaves ‘ fate on the same day that BBC4 broadcast an excellent documentary about English folkdance introduced by Mercury Prize nominated Rachel Unthank- and then followed it up with a programme about clog dancing presented by Charles Hazlewood who regularly broadcasts on Radio 2. Both programmes I note were selected as weekly tv highlights by the national press. To turn your back on a burgeoning local and national folk scene seems frankly bizarre. Folkwaves has been highly successful in building a loyal local audience, but also thanks to Listen Again/I-Player an expanding national (indeed international) audience. Whilst I understand that the radio station has an initial loyalty to local audiences, it is a shame that it is failing to capitalise on this wider listener base and see it as a chance to spread knowledge and interest in the region to a wider listenership. It is a regrettably parochial decision. Even in local terms it is sad. We have seen in recent government policy an increasing emphasis on localism and locality (something echoed in many initiatives of recent years, such as the Heritage Lottery Fund). We are also seeing increasing cuts to arts funding, which has been a great financial support to the folk music scene. So in this time of increasing calls for the ‘big society’ coupled with critical attacks on national support for the arts, it is frankly rather odd that this is the moment that Radio Derby decides to end a programme that has done more than anything to nurture and encourage local and regional traditions. I would urge you to reconsider your decision; the end of the Folkwaves is a sad indictment of Radio Derby

British archaeology on the ropes?

2010-11-29T06:06:00.000-08:00

An important article from Nature highlights the threats to British archaeology from the results of the recession.

Archaeology is being hit by a three-way whammy: the economic recession is causing a collapsed in commercial archaeology, the withdrawal of state funding from a wide range of areas as part of the CONDEM cuts agenda, and a threat to universities due to the changes in direct government funding for Higher Education and a reduction of funding available via the Research Councils; Dr Mike Heyworth, Director of the Council for British Archaeology has characterised this as a ‘perfect storm’.

There are a lot of issues worth exploring here, particularly the wider impact of changes to Higher Education (I’ll try and talk about these later). However, I think most significant threat is from the underlying rhetoric about the state withdrawing from funding services, with Cameron’s nebulous notion of the ‘Big Society’ (aka ‘the tooth fairy’) co-ordinating itself to replace, through voluntary service, the state-shaped hole in provision of support for the historic environment.

I am profoundly uneasy about this recourse to the 'Big Society' to cure all ills.

First of all, whilst the belief in the unending stream of volunteers is very touching, one has to question where all these individuals are going to come from. If we are all being asked to give up time to support core services (education; health; welfare etc) there will be a greater pressure on the limited corps of 'willing enthusiasts'. Anybody who already has something to do with local community groups or societies already knows that there is not an endless source of volunteers. There are undoubtedly many keen and enthusiastic members of the community who engage in a wide range of dedicated and committed ways with archaeology and heritage. However, their numbers and time are limited. There is an even greater shortage of people who are willing and able to take up the organising and administrative roles. It is these often boring and unexciting admin jobs (chairman; secretary; treasurer) that keep local volunteer groups going. It is ironic that one of the first things to be axed by EH is their outreach team.

Secondly, again, whilst there is a huge amount of experience, knowledge and specialist skills out there in the amateur community, there is always going to be a need for them to be supported by professional specialists. For example, whilst many local societies have keen field walkers, excavators and documentary researchers, they may lack access to conservation skills (and equipment), geophysical kit (and experience) etc etc; there are also many 'soft' skills which aren't widely available in the amateur sector (e.g. understanding the manifold delights of writing MORPHE compliant project designers, detailed knowledge of planning law). For a vibrant amateur community to work, it has to work in partnership with an enthusiastic professional sector. However, the three main arms of professional archaeology (Local Government; Academic; Commercial) face real challenges - particularly Local Government, where much of the co-ordination and involvement with local groups occurs. As looks likely, if the function of Local Government Archaeology is being reduced right down to simply providing planning advice, the first thing to go in terms of service provision will be precisely the time/resources to facilitate this kind of much-needed partnership working with local groups.

I agree with Mike Heyworth that its great that the HER network has been expanded over the last 10 years, but these are living databases, they need to be updated constantly (many HERs already have significant backlogs) and time is needed to deal with enquiries. Currently, these incredibly important research resources are open to the public and researchers (of all levels) and are not simply treated as planning tools. However, how long will this stay the case when Local Government administrators pressure County Archaeologists to maximise income and limit unnecessary work? Even the increasing move to on-line HERs is not the answer- huge amounts of data is held in parish files/'grey literature' - and they still require curation and updating.

It is encouraging that funding for the Heritage Lottery Fund will increase in future years; however, given the 'cuts' agenda, there is also likely to be a massive increase in applications - potentially to fund services that had previously been funded through core budgets. HLF funding also has limitations- it is primarily project based, it won't pay for the year on year provision of basic services or facilities. It is great for initiating work, but not so good at keeping things going when times are tight.

There are many other challenges - I am broadly keen on the move towards localism, but how will Housing Minister Grant Shap's proposals to get rid of planning law when it comes to local housing developments in rural villages affect archaeology, for example? What will be the implications of the proposals to privatise the Forestry Commission on our ancient woodland? What will be the impact of the huge cuts to DEFRA in conserving and maintaining historic landscapes? If we want to support a 'local' agenda, we need to ensure that those in administrative jobs have the detailed and intimate knowledge of local heritage to allow local needs to be effectively developed within an environment that takes on board the idiosyncratic nature of local landscapes and needs- however, it is precisely this kind of knowledge held by people who have spent year's working in their local area that will disappear following the threatened staff cuts. Once that knowledge is gone, it is not easy to get back. Of course, some will continue to work in an amateur capacity out of their love for the subject, but it's a harsh lesson to be told that you are expected to do for free, what you were once paid to do...

I would agree with Reuben that much of this cut agenda is ideologically driven; although I know that many would argue against that perspective. However, whether one sees this slash and burn policy as a necessary evil or politically motivated carnage, what worries me profoundly is the sheer short-termism of the way it is being handled, with a lack of communication, lack of any visible succession planning or real sense of the long-term impact.

The Imagined Village

2010-08-23T01:59:00.000-07:00

Pleased to see that Georgina Boyes' seminal book The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival has been re-issued. Very interesting stuff (if still showing the scars of being based on a PhD thesis...). This book developes some of the earlier ideas put forward by Dave Harker's book Fakesong: The Manufacture of British Folk Song, 1700 to the Present Day, which critiqued the Sharpian folk-song revival of the early 20th century, arguing that it was essentially that the notion of a 'folk tradition' was a creation of a bourgeois group of middle class collectors. To quote from the blurb from The Imagined Village "Alongside this, however, runs the analysis that The Folk” themselves were a convenient fiction. They and their culture were created and used in the cause of conflicting ideologies – including the Women’s Suffrage movement and British Fascism. Issues of Englishness, class and creativity are all dealt with in this fascinating and controversial history of the Folk, who existed only to sing and dance in an Imagined Village." Ut is worth pointing out that this critique has itself been subjected to a more recent critique- a good review of the debate can be found here

Folky stuff on the web

2010-08-21T13:58:00.000-07:00

A couple of folky discoveries on the internet. First, the British Library has a fantastic collection of ethnographic field recordings of world music- much of which is on-line. In general, there is more Africa and Asian material than European music. However, its great to see a good collection of traditional music and song from England – for example, there are some good field recordings of Oxfordshire morris, particularly from Bampton. Its not all just English material; for example, there is good stuff from the Irish immigrant communities, particularly from London, such as this version of Matt Molloy’s Reel and other tunes, recorded in The Favourite in Holloway. Nor is it very ‘trad’ stuff- I like the recording of ex-POWs singing ‘Abdul Abubbul Amir’

I’ve also been meaning to mention Jon Boden’s new project A Folk Song A Day, which as the name suggests is a blog providing a new recording of a traditional song every day for a year- its only been running since the end of July and there is already some cracking stuff on it, such as good version of Polly Vaughan (though I do like Jim Moray’s recent version) and a nice video of Bold Sir Rylas and Canadee-I-o (which most people will know best through the music of Nic Jones)

Museums and the CONDEMS

2010-08-20T02:31:00.001-07:00

Last week David Cameron gave a lovely heart-felt speech all about how the UK has been not promoting its touristic charms effectively. He argues that the significance of England’s heritage had been underplayed by the previous administration: “"The last government underplayed our tourist industry. There were eight different ministers with responsibility for tourism in just 13 years. They just didn't get our heritage. They raided the national lottery, taking money from heritage because it didn't go with their image of 'cool Britannia'," (which is quite a fair point). Certainly museums and galleries boosted the UK's economy by £1bn last year. However, the irony is that not that long before making this speech Cameron’s “bonfire of the Quango’s” saw the abolition of the Museum, Libraries and Archive council by 2012; with the Culture Minister considering a review of the role and remit of English Heritage, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund.. The DCMS is also heading for major redundancies () - and more recently we’ve seen potential plans for the hiving off of nature reserves to private management. There have also been increased calls by the government for museum funding to be funded through philanthropy – along with Cameron’s wider call for a volunteering ethos as part of his “Big Society” idea (if we can call it an ‘idea’).

In many ways there is relatively little which is particularly controversial- if there are going to be spending cuts (and I’ll skip the whole cuts v tax rise debate) then I have no problem with the arts and heritage taking some of the pain; equally, I have no problem with people giving up their time to help museums (let’s face it, outside the nationals and major regional museums, most museums rely on huge amounts of volunteer support already). I’m equally relaxed with wealthy people giving museums huge bags of filthy lucre.

I don’t particularly want to get drawn into some of the wider discussions about the importance of museum and heritage in general – not surprisingly, as a professional archaeologist, I am of the opinion that these things are generally a ‘good thing’ and should be encouraged and promoted. I have very little sympathy for the more instrumentalist view of heritage (i.e it's not the intrinsic value of heritage itself that counts but the wider impact it can have on society - such as engagement with the National Curriculum, promotion of literacy/numeracy, as well as ‘softer’ functions, such as promoting social cohesion; and most importantly heritage as a creator of wealth) – although I’ve not been above seizing the instrumentalist agenda when it comes to writing proposals for grants and funding for my own work. What currently gets my goat is that in a fairly typical case of doublethink, the new government is busy promoting British heritage as a source of income and prosperity through its intimate links with the tourism industry, whilst simultaneously hacking at the roots of the sector in other ways.

If the queues outside the National Railway Museum, just round the corner from me, are anything to go by, then the national museums aren’t going to have too much problem surviving. They have the internationally important collections and high profiles which will make it relatively easy for them to attract personal and commercial sponsorship, and have the high visitor numbers that will make it possible for then to weather minor drops in footfall. However, it’s the smaller, local museums that are more likely to suffer from attacks on the support infrastructure. As I noted above, they already rely heavily on volunteers to support them. Whilst there is undoubtedly much to criticise about the MLA, they do provide some of the professional expertise (security, collections management, conservation, interpretation) that smaller museums don’t have on tap. On a purely personal level, it is visiting local museums as a child that triggered by interest in the past (a brief roll of honour would have to include Reading Museum; the Museum of English Rural Life; Deal Maritime and Local History Museum amongst many others). If the government are really committed to an instrumental heritage agenda and promoting tourism, it would be good to see more commitment to supporting these kind of local institutions, as these, as much as the nationals, have potential for feeding the tourism industry. It's worrying,although not surprising, to see a complete lack of the 'joined-up thinking' that governments of all political stripes are so keen on connected to this issue. Sadly, its going to be the local and small museums that have less capacity and less ability to weather financial storms that are going to suffer (and don't even get me started on the way the HLF has been raided to support the Olympics.....)

Folk and Industry

2010-08-07T14:40:00.000-07:00

I’ m looking forward to reading Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music. As the review in today’s Guardian notes, the historiography of the British folk revival has been relatively limited (although in addition to the few examples noted in the review, there is also Georgina Boyes’ Imagined Village and the BBC 4 series from a few years ago Folk Britannia. It’s clear that Young’s project is to draw out the pastoral neo-Romantic aspect to the folk revival- with its origins in the folk collectors (Vaughan-Williams, Cecil Sharpe etc) of the late 19th and early 20th century through to the 1960s trad folk and ‘hippy’ revivals through into the pastoral noodlings of Kate Bush and potentially even Goldfrapps’ relatively recent excursion into LSD folk. This is clearly a strong line of inheritance, with the rural idyll closely tied into a British radical anti-industrial political tradition which can be traced from William Morris to the modern Green movement. British (particularly English) folk music is often unfairly decried for its rose-tinted view of a rural past (have a listen to Show of Hands’s Country Life or Imagined Village’s Hard Times of Old England as an impassioned rejoinder to this).

What I suspect Young’s book will not bring out (and as ever, it might have been a good idea if I’d actually read it before writing this), is the strong tradition of folk music derived from urban and industrial contexts. Traditional music was obviously most heavily embedded in the working culture of maritime world (shanties etc), but also other industries gave birth to rich traditions of song and dance. For example, the coalfields of the North-East developed and refined an existing tradition of long-sword dancing and saw an outpouring of vernacular songwriting and poetry. These alternative threads have also long been closely entwined in the folk revival. Figures such as Ewan McColl early identified the close link between folk song and the industrial working class, and collected and popularized many traditional songs about working life. He, along with Charles Parker, was also responsible for the creation of the Radio Ballads, a series of radio documentaries about industrial and other communities that integrated interviews and oral history with new music written in a traditional idiom. This industrial dimension to the current folk tradition is an important one. In recent years there’s been a new set of Radio Ballads written, and bands, such as Chumbawamba, who have come from very different musical backgrounds have embraced this aspect of the tradition.

Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

2010-06-17T15:22:00.000-07:00

It's one hundred years since the first performance of Vaughan William's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. This has become part of the canon of British (or should that be English) popular classics (voted number 3 in its Hall of Fame by Classic FM listeners). An interesting article in last weekends Guardian contextualises the piece. What I think the article brings out is the role classical music played in the Neo-Romantic project. For me, the movement really flowers in the post-WWI period, as a direct reaction to the slaughter in Flanders and the twin perceived threats of fascism and communism. One of its key characteristics is the engagement in a metaphorical archaeology, digging into the past for powerful images and juxtaposing them, often anachronistically, with a more modern symbolic repertoire or stylistic techniques. A good example of this is Eric Ravilious' series of pictures of chalk hill figures seen from or next to railways. The Guardian article shows how in the first decade of the 20th century a series of British composers were carrying out musical antiquarianism. They were not only rescuing the rich tradition of Tudor church music (Byrd, Tallis, Gibbons, Taverner, Dowland), but also refashioning and using it, along side folk song, in new compositions. I find it interesting that most of the traditional narratives about the rise of Neo-Romanticism tend to sideline music focusing mainly on visual arts and to a lesser extent literature.

The Making of the British Landscape

2010-06-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

I'm now going to do that most difficult and irresponsible of things, comment on a book I haven't read. Once can't help but think of home-county vicars getting outraged by alleged smut on BBC drama series they haven't actually seen, but what the hell, you only live once. Francis Pryor's Making of the British Landscape was reviewed in The Guardian last week. As the review notes, the title is a riff on Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape; I'd be interested to find out how much it really is truely British in scope (don't worry I promise I'll read it to find out). Raeding between the lines it clearly takes a much longer perspective than Hoskins. The latter's work barely grazed prehistory, whereas Pryor made his name as a prehistorian work on the important site at Flag Fen. Pryor's previous popular archaeological publications have always been far stronger in his home territory of the pre-Roman world and noticeably weeker once he hits the first millennium AD. This is by the by however; what has piqued by need to comment on this blog is the fact that according to the reviewer

He worries that landscape history is on the cusp of retreating entirely into academia, taking its findings and its insights with it. As a result, ordinary people – the kind who tramp the footpaths of Britain at the weekend for no other reason than they love to – will be thrown back on to a fuzzy subjectivism untethered to real knowledge.

Certainly, Hoskin's book was one of the few academic volumes that was both accessible and made a break through into the wider public perception and indeed made a television series based on his book. However, the high point of its popularity was probably the 1960s and 1970s and Hoskin's is no longer any kind of household name, and inevitably the tide of new research and discoveries made in the half-century since its initial publication have rendered its modern importance primarily historiographical. Nonetheless, I'm not sure I see landscape history 'retreating into academia', if anything its hard to go to National Park Visitor's centre, National Trust shop or Tourist Information Centre without being able to pick up dozens of pamphlets and leaflets about walks packed with information about the landscape through which they pass.

I wonder if Pryor is instead worried about the decrease in university extra-mural teaching. The popularising of Hoskin's work coincide with a highpoint in extra-mural/workers eduational/evening classes; he himself I believe was very involved in this kind of outreach. Much local research (parochial in the best sense)was carried out by groups which had their origin in such groups. Undoubtedly there has been a massive retreat in this kind of non-vocational adult education, due to recent government's heavily instrumental approach to adult learning, i.e. if it won't help you get a job its not worth funding. This has seen over the last ten years far fewer universities offering extra-mural learning, whilst the rise of educational bureaucracy (such as the joys of Aims, Objectives and Learning Outcomes) has meant that there are far fewer individuals willing to tackle all the paperwork required to offer this kind of learning experience. This has been a real tragedy.

However, I think, that limiting our views of the relationship between academic and popular archaeology to the world of evening classes is wrong. At the same time that there has been a decline in evening classes we've seen a massive rise in 'community' heritage projects mainly funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund; just taking my own area as an example, the Northumberlan National Park has its Coquetdale Community Archaeology project, the North Pennines AONB has just launched a new community archaeology initiative called Altogether Archaeology and there was a major joint project on recording prehistoric rock art run out of Durham and Northumberland county councils. All these projects have been fundamentally based on a large-scale community involvement, and have resulted in a large number of enthusiastic individuals in the region with a commitment to and good understanding of, archaeology in the landscape. Maybe things aren't quite as gloomy as Pryor suggests

Blackbeard's Tea Party

2010-03-20T08:41:00.000-07:00

I had the rare opportunity of an evening out last night and headed down to Fibbers (one of York’s most palatial and salubrious night spots) to see Blackbeard’s Tea Party. Anyone who lives in York will probably have seen them busking in town; but this was one of the first chances to see them headlining– also to see them wired up rather than entirely acoustic. After a couple of support act (some drumming gubbins and a bloke and a guitar) they hit the ground running with British Man of War. One of the great things was that this was a proper gig with a proper atmosphere. Much as I like folk music, occasionally the atmosphere can be a bit ‘Sunday school teaparty’ – I remember once being told off for talking during a Dhol Foundation gig at the Beverley Folk Festival- apparently I should have been sitting down quietly. Anyhoo, it was their usual mix of songs and tunes (often with a nautical theme) with electric guitar and bass adding a bit of oomph (as did the sousaphone). Highlights for me were Rolling Down the River and I Can Hew. All in all, a good night out – looking at their MySpace page they appear to be putting in an appearance at the Beverley Folk Festival this year and they’ve already been played on the BBC2 Folk programme with Mike Harding. Now if Fibbers can only do something about the price of their beer….
(In the interests of full disclosure I should say that Laura from BBTP is my fiddle teacher )

London 2012 Opening Ceremony

2010-03-06T00:46:00.001-08:00

I watched the Winter Olympics opening ceremony a few weeks ago. A typically brash and overblown celebration of the culture of the host nation. Obviously my thoughts now turn to what delights the London Olympics opening ceremony will deliver, and what aspects of British culture will be involved (cardigans? pot noodles? mild disappointment? out-of-town shopping centres?). Personally, I am fully supporting the campaign to see Morris Dancing included. I kind of like the idea of 14,000 choreographed morris dancers performing in perfect unison, in some kind of bastard mix of the Archers and totalitarian mass callisthenics.

I’d also like to suggest a new Olympic event. As most people know, the marathon is traditionally believed to have been based on the run made by Pheidippides from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to report the Greek victory over the Persian in 490BC. If we can base sporting events on Greek historical events, then I think we should be able to use British history as a source for unique races for the London Olympics. In 1600, Will Kemp, an actor and jester known for taking comic roles in some of Shakespeare’s plays, took 23 days to morris dance from London to Norwich. He later published a description of this event called the Nine Days Wonder. Thus, I’d like to suggest the 186km prance as a new event for London 2012 - the winner to be awarded a gilded pigs bladder.

Nick Griffin - folk music fan!

2010-01-21T12:42:00.000-08:00

Last weekend’s Guardian had a fun piece about the music favoured by dictators and political villains (Robert Mugabe is apparently a fan of Cliff Richard whilst Mahmoud Ahmadinejad favours Chris de Burgh). However, there was little bit of the article that mildly pissed me off. Amongst the pantheon of bad hats and loonies was Nick Griffin,who apparently is a fan of (and I quote) “that most arthritically white of genres”, English folk music including ‘nu-folk poster girls Eliza Carthy and Kate Rusby’. According to his blog Griffin finds it ‘"an alternative to the multi-cult junk played incessantly on Radio 1"

First of all, a slap for the journalist for that lazy bit of stereotyping and secondly a slap for Griffin (I don’t think I need a reason for that). I’m sure they’ll both be pleased to hear that Eliza Carthy is currently touring in the band Imagined Village, whose members include a sitar player, one of the country’s leading dhol drummers and an overall line-up which is about 50% ‘non-indegenous English’. I saw them live in Leeds at the Irish Club on Tuesday (I’ll post a review soon). Pleasingly the band had also picked up on the article and videoed the entire audience flicking the Vs at Griffin and shouting “bollocks”; they are doing this at each venue on the tour and will be editing it all together and putting it on there website as a suitable rejoinder to the BNPs attempt to get into folk music.

Does this matter in the big picture of things? Well, lets face it, I don’t think that all Nick Griffin needs to do to make the elusive electoral break-through is to profess an appreciation of Steeleye Span and The Wurzels; nor, I suspect, will the SSuporters of the BNP be particularly dismayed that a bunch of weirdy beardy folk fans don’t like them. I still think its important though to try and attempt to resist Griffins/BNP attempts to annexe English folk music, history, archaeology and other things close to my heart in his rather half-arsed attempt to create a volkish image of an indigenous national culture which he is trying to use to contest his (mis)-understanding of the multi-cultural society we actually live in. So, if shouting “bollocks” to Nick Griffin and his nasty little party are what we have to do, then so be it!

(Image whipped from David Owen's Ink Corporation website; an excellent site well worth looking at).

Woolworths and Leylines

2010-01-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Guardian's always excellent Ben Goldacre strays into the world of archaeology with a nice piece on the latest claims about the sacred geometery of the prehistoric world - also worth reading for the comments below. The work in question claimed that prehistoric monuments were so arranged as to form a network of triangulated points that were used by past societies to navigate around the country. It also reports a counter analysis that showed that similar patterns could be found in the spatial distribution of Woolworths
The key point, of course, is not whether prehistoric societies ritualised their landscapes through monument construction (something accepted by all mainstream and 'alternative' archaeologists), but how data is used and analysed. Like any study which involving recognising patterns in huge amounts of data, it never really confronts the fact that if we have enough points of data (whether these are inscriptios, Bronze Age mounds etc etc) and subject them to enough analyses seemingly meaningful patterns will be found. However, the trick is proving whether these apparent patterns are a function of meaningful action by a past society or just a freak of statistics. Another example of this is the work by Charles Thomas drawing on the approach developed by David Howlett on Biblical Latin Style on the early medieval inscriptions of Wales and Western Britain. Thomas's analyses of these inscriptions seem to show messages (and even images) hidden within these simple inscriptions (this is best laid out in his his book Celts: Messages and Images. Stroud: Tempus, 1998). He argues that these messages can be made visible by certain mechanisms such as letter counting and the ascription of numeric values to letters. However, his critics point out that it is possible to identify hidden messages using such techniques in almost any text if you analyse it in enough different ways - is it a case of the 'wisdom of ancients' or simply infinite monkeys producing, if not Shakespeare, then at least Biblical Latin?

Imagined Village

2010-01-08T05:40:00.001-08:00

Very excited about the new Imagined Village album- the first album was one of my picks of 2007. Of course, although there is a tour, they are not playing anywhere I can get to...

Setumaa

2010-01-05T07:20:00.000-08:00

Whilst searching something for entirely different I've just come across this old picture report from the BBC news website about the Seto people who live in the south-east border of Estonia and the neighbouring area of Russia . We went to Estonia in 2004 and spent some time in Setumaa (the land of the Setos) whilst we stayed nearby. The Seto are an Orthodox minority within Estonia where the main religion is technically Lutheran. They still maintain their traditional culture very strongly, particularly their folk song and their polyphonic choral tradition has recently been inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage.

It was when we were exploring this forgotten corner at the edge of Europe that I really fell for Estonia and its history- this has led to the accumulation of far too many books on Estonian archaeology. I'm desperate to some fieldwork there at some point...

Mumming Plays

2010-01-02T12:51:00.000-08:00

It's the time of year for mumming plays. I got to see one performed in Wantage on Boxing Day this year- the text of the play is actually recorded from my parent's village of Steventon (which is just down the road). Fortuitously, whilst I was working on archives at the Museum of English Rural Life research H.J.Massingham I came across the text of a mumming play which I think has not previously been published - it was in a box along with the manuscript for an projected book written by Massingham on Cotswold folk-tales and humour. It is very similar to one from Snowshill (Gloucestershire) so I presume its from somewhere in the neighbourhood. The copy of the text is not written in Massingham's hand, so I presume it was passed to him by someone else; presumably at some point in the 1930s.

Armistice Day

2009-11-11T01:10:00.000-08:00

Today is the first time Armistice Day has been remembered without any World War I veterans attending the ceremony at the Cenotaph. The last two British veterans of the war, Harry Patch and Henry Allingham, died earlier this year.

As a child I remember watching the Remembrance Parade on television, and enjoying the march past of the former soldiers from both World Wars; the lack of WWI veterans this year is a stark reminder of how both of these momentous events are slipping away from living memory. Even the numbers of World War II combatants is increasingly tiny and physically frail.

For anyone growing up in England over the last thirty years, both wars will loom large in their cultural memory. Many people study the war poets at school: Wilfrid Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and others. There were also the direct personal links with those who’d lived through them and experienced loss. My grandmother lost four male relatives, including her father in World War I. My great-grandfather got a medal for shooting down the first Zeppelin over London (even though he was stuck on a train at the time). One of my grandfathers served in India, whilst the other repaired tanks in Egypt: my great uncle came in on the beaches at D-Day. I have a photograph of a family wedding from during the war; it was a large family and every single male was in military uniform. It’s difficult from our modern perspective, when the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem impossibly remote to imagine the extent to which these wars permeated all aspects of life and how they impacted on life and society after the war; my great grandmother struggled to bring up two children single-handed in London in the 1920s. Even though all these things are slipping away from immediate personal experience and memory, its worth pausing for a moment or two to remember them

Family Roll of Honour

Private James Patrick McManus DCM, 2nd Bn, Kings Own Scottish Borderers, 6th May 1915

Private Patrick Canavan, 1st Bn, Royal Irish Fusiliers, 10th May 1915

Private Albert Hollowell, 24th Bn, London Regiment, 28th October 1915

Sapper William Hollowell, Inland Water Transport, Royal Engineers, 24th January 1919

Archaeology and the BNP

2009-10-27T07:00:00.001-07:00

Interesting piece of comment arising out of last week's Question Time in today's Guardian

Having been poking around some of the seemier (politically) ends of the internet over the weekend, it's interesting to see what use the BNP/Far Right is using of archaeology. Particularly, they appear to have picked up on the work of Stephen Oppenheimer who has used genetics to suggest that the British population has its origins with pre-Celtic populations and was not profoundly influenced by later migrations. (NB: that is a very broad characterisation of his more subtle argument; its also important to note the Oppenheimer has publically disavowed the racist/political spin put on his work by the BNP. It is of course possible to make a critique of Oppenheimer on technical grounds (though I'm not particularly well-placed to do this); however whether accurate or not I am interested in the way in which his work is being used.

Essentially, the BNP are arguing that this means we can clearly distinguish an 'indigenous' British (which they often gloss as 'English') population which they see as countering the argument put forward by many of those who are anti-BNP that Britain has always been a melting pot, with great genetic diversity (thanks to 'Celtic', Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman etc interbreeding).

The problem with the BNP use of Oppenheimer's work is that they elide the notion of race as defined by genetics/descent and the notion of a people/ethnic group, as defined by cultural practices. So, if we accept that Oppenheimer is right, then the BNP have the problem that although there is a broadly genetically homogenous indigenous population in the UK, its cultural practices have continually been reworked by incoming cultural groups. Whatever the current debates about the size of Anglo-Saxon migrations, it is pretty clear that the 5th-8th centuries saw a profound 'germanicisation' of much of lowland England. The far right then have to accept the fact that Anglo-Saxon society (in its archaeological sense and in its modern politicised sense) is something that has been imposed on an indigenous population. Thus, it makes it hard for them to criticise on an a priori basis the notion that externally derived cultural change is a 'bad thing'. On the other hand, if they reject Oppenheimer's work (or it becomes discredited), they have to accept that actually, our 'pure'/'indigenous' population is nothing of the sort.

However, I suspect that detailed exegesis of the current work on population genetics and archaeological culture theory is not at the top of their minds. However, this is an excellent example of how archaeology (in its broadest sense) is being used to fuel pressing current political debates.

More on Norman churches...

2009-10-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

The first blast of the beginning of term is now over, so I’ve finally found time to have a bit of a think about the results of my initial fieldwork in Western Normandy which I’ve blogged about previously.

Essentially, I’m interested in exploring the development of early Christianity in the Cotentin peninsula in West Normandy; this is a border region between Normandy and Brittany. The received wisdom (primarily based on fairly limited documentary evidence) suggests that in the pre-Viking period (ie pre-10th century) there were only a small number of ecclesiastical sites in the region incuding Portbail, Orval, Coutances, St Marcouf and Le Ham (near Valognes). These are assumed to have fallen into abeyance following Viking raiding, with church organisation only reviving in the 11th century. Although little has been written about the rise of the parochial system there is a general assumption that this only falls into place in the 11th/12th century, although this has never really been tested.

My current working hypothesis is that there are two problems with this existing story. First, I am suspicious of the fact that in the pre-Viking period there were only around six ecclesiastical centres. For example, in England, County Durham (an area of comparable size) has around fifteen known pre-9th century monastic/church sites. I believe that there is enough reported archaeological evidence (primarily in the form of Merovingian burials) from later church sites to argue that they had pre-Viking origins. Of course, I am making some key assumptions here, particularly that this reported evidence is indeed of pre-Viking date. One of my key tasks now is to go back to the original (mainly antiquarian) publication of the evidence for early activity on later church sites to assess its reliability – luckily thanks to the Society for Church Archaeology I have a small grant which will allow be to visit the British Library and the Bodleian Library to consult the relevant publications.

My second suspicion about the current narrative is that there was a large-scale disruption of Christianity in the region following Viking settlement. I have no problem with some sites being raided and temporarily falling out of use, but I’m not convinced there was a complete abandonment of the churches until the 11th century. Again, based on the presence of pre-Viking activity on later church sites I would argue that there is continuity straight through. Otherwise we’d have to argue that the memory of the location of church sites was preserved for at least a century and then when Christianity was re-established the churches were revived on the original locations rather than new sites.

I am also interested in the spread of parishes. I am happier that the 11th/12th century date posited is correct. However, I think there is a still a need to provide more hard evidence. One way of exploring this is through looking at the provision of churches in this period. This can be done using the limited documentary evidence and the architectural evidence. The charters issues by the Dukes of Normandy are of some help; a number of churches are mentioned in the grants they made, particularly to abbeys, in the 10th and 11th centuries; although it is noticeable that there are geographical variations in the evidence for these churches. For example, quite a few are recorded in the central Cotentin (Barneville-Carteret; Valognes; Briquebec areas), but far fewer in the north. How does this correspond with the evidence from the churches themselves. Well, again, there is a traditional narrative here. Most overviews of early Romanesque architecture in the region (broadly speaking 11th-12th century AD) limits themselves to a fairly limited number of sites; primarily those which contain large quantities of Romanesque sculpture or extensive areas of fabric (for example, Tollevast, Martinvast; Octeville; Brucheville). However, my gut feeling, based on previous visits to the area, was that, in fact, there were many more churches than that which preserved at least some early Romanesque fabric (based on the presence of various diagnostic features, such as the use of herring-bone masonry and monolithic stone windowheads. Thanks to a grant from the Society of Medieval Archaeology I was able to spend some time out in the region in September doing a rapid but systematic survey of churches in a number of sample areas across the Cotentin. I looked at around 140 churches and recognised a far higher level of existing fabric of this period than had previously been suspected (you can see lots of images here. It was interesting to note how poor the local understanding of church architecture could be; for example, at la Haye D’Ectot. , the information board firmly stated that the building was built in the 18th century, despite the clear presence of 12th century fabric in it! .

Although there is still much of the area to survey, it is clear that the documentary evidence significantly under-represents the provision of churches in the area in the 11th/12th century. There are a number of areas, such as that around the Sienne estuary, where there are entire blocks of parishes which have churches with 11th/12th century fabric, suggesting that the parish network was established by this point.

So, still lots of work to do pulling together all the documentary and antiquarian evidence together. I'd also like to explore the landscape context of the churches in a little more detail at some point: many of them are in hilltop locations and in some areas they are often located well away from the modern villages.

Early Christianity in Western Normandy

2009-08-27T07:26:00.000-07:00

I've not really written much about my archaeological research on this blog so far. However, I'm getting ready to head of to Normandy in a few weeks to do a small-scale pilot project on early Christianity in the area (thanks to a grant from the Society for Medieval Archaeology), so I thought I'd include a little bit about my current plans (ie I've basically cut and paste a chunk from the grant proposal)

Mapping the early medieval church in Western Normandy: AD400-1200

This project aims to begin mapping the evidence for Christianity in Western Normandy using archaeological and architectural evidence to supplement the sparse documentary material, with a view to developing a better understanding of the evolution of the Church in this understudied region. The Cotentin peninsula (forming the bulk of the modern Département of Manche- roughly coterminous with the diocese of Coutances) was a border region throughout the early medieval period. Whilst the initial evangelisation of the area was carried out in the late period by the bishops of Coutances (the Roman town of Cosidia) it is clear that the early church in the area was strongly influenced by missionary activity from Brittany and Ireland; for example, the monastery at Orval may have been founded by Columbanus. From the 9th century the area saw considerable political disruption following extensive Viking raiding and then settlement along its northern and western coast. The political and social unrest this caused saw it fall under the first the political control of the Kingdom of Brittany and then the Duchy of Normandy, though it was physically and politically peripheral to both polities. The ecclesiastical structure saw extensive disruption in the later first millennium; the see of Coutances fell into abeyance in 866 following Viking attacks and was not re-established fully until 1049. The politically peripheral nature of this area and the impact of Vikings mean that documentary evidence for the region before the 12th century is sparse and consists mainly of sources from outside the area. Any attempt to reconstruct the nature and development of the early church thus has to be able to fully integrate the archaeological and architectural evidence (cf Jarry 1998). Pre-Romanesque religious structures are known Querqueville and Portbail (Duval 1995), and a series of Christian Merovingian cemeteries are recorded in the antiquarian literature (Pilet-Lemière & Levalet 1989). However, existing scholarship on the 11th and 12th century churches in Normandy has generally focused on high-status and archaeologically elaborate structures (e.g. Mussett 1967: Grant 2005), particularly within the Norman heartland, east of the River Orne. There has been virtually no research into the survival of early fabric in the parish churches (though see Baylé 1999). However, recent field visits by the PI to the region have made it clear that early fabric does survive in many parish churches. Distinctive features include the use of herringbone masonry, petit appareil and round headed monolithic windows. A number of grave slabs of probable early date have also been identified.Research objectives. The aim of this project is through a combination of desk-based research and fieldwork to map the evidence for the early church in the Cotentin, allowing the study of the development of the religious life in the region to move beyond the limitations of the documentary evidence. The work will address the following questions:
i) How much evidence is there for Merovingian religious activity on later church sites?
ii) How was this activity structured? Was it centralised and limited to a small number of monastic sites or is ecclesiastical provision more decentralised?
iii) Can this be used to assess the extent to which Viking settlements really disrupted ecclesiastical activity in the region?
iv) To what extent does Romanesque and pre-Romanesque fabric survive in existing church structures?
v) How can this evidence be used to understand the development of the ecclesiastical organisation in the region following its integration into the Duchy of Normandy in the 11th century?
vi) To what extent can archaeology be used to explore the development of the church in an area with limited contemporary documentary evidence?

Methodology
The limited historical resources will be used to build up a corpus of contemporary references to churches in the region, which will be complimented by collating the archaeological evidence, mainly from 19th and early 20th century French journals (available in the UK at the British Library and Bodleian Library, Oxford). The fieldwork element of the project aims to map the extent of surviving Romanesque and pre-Romanesque fabric in the existing churches in the area. This will involve two phases of fieldwork. Phase I will comprise field visits by the PI to all churches within two sample areas: an area to the west of Coutances and an area in the far north-west of the peninsula (La Hague). The study areas have been selected to provide contrasting social, political and economic backgrounds in the study period, and to avoid areas of the region, which saw a high level of destruction of churches during the 1944 Normandy landings. Key features will be recorded by digital camera. No permissions are required at this stage.

Phase II consists of more detailed investigation and analysis of a smaller number of structures, selected on the basis of the results of Phase I. This will involve creating a more detailed drawn written and photographic record by the PI and a Research Assistant using a digital SLR camera, hand survey and some photo rectification. Analysis will define key phases of work and seek to identify and interpret early fabric. Once the physical evidence and textual evidence for the early church has been mapped, it will be used as a basis for an attempt to write an overview of the growth and structure of religious activity in the region. Permissions maybe needed depending on sites chosen; will be sought if necessary on completion of Phase I.

Folk Against Facism

2009-08-09T12:13:00.001-07:00

A rather depressing but perhaps inevitable story about attempts by the BNP to co-opt folk music to the fascist cause. Traditionally, the sound track of the far right has been heavy rock/punk e.g. Skrewdriver). However, as the article points out this is not compatible with the new smooth image the BNP are trying to put across now. This has been reported a number of time previously- see here and here. However, there is now the formation of a new body Folk Against Fascism to try and counter the attempt by the BNP to 'claim' folk music as its own (interestingly on its on-line shop the BNP labels it 'British' rather than 'English' folk music). Now of course, I doubt this is exactly going to leave Nick Griffin quaking in his hush-puppies; but its an extremely useful development, if only to remind the Neanderthals in the BNP that the English (and indeed Irish and Scottish) folk tradition is primarily an anti-establishment one, pitted against landed and industrial wealth and imperialism. Its not surprising that ideologically bankrupt and historically and culturally ignorant parties such as BNP should in its typically half-arsed and lazy way try and annexe folk music, and its pleasing to see that those involved in the current folk scene are busy telling them precisely where to stick it.

From dots to downloads

2009-07-21T13:21:00.001-07:00

By pure chance I caught a fantastic programme on the Radio this morning called From Dots to Downloads about the rediscovery of tunebooks of 17th to 19th century date. These were private notebooks containing a range of music including traditional folk music compiled by local musicians for their own private use. It was presented by Tim van Eyken. The programme particularly talked about the wonderful Village Music Project. Its worth adding that this is not the only excellent resource on-line which brings folk music resources to the wider public. Its definitely worth checking out the excellent FARNE (Folk Archive Resource in the North-East). I was also pleased that it mentioned the importance of folk music to the work of the poet John Clare, a favourite poet of mine (not to mention potentially an ancestor...)

Mining heritage

2009-07-18T12:47:00.000-07:00

Last week Durham saw the annual Durham Miner's Gala: this year it attracted over 100 000 people to the city to remember the grant tradition of mining in Durham. This year numbers were doubtlessly swelled by the fact that it was 25 years since the miner's strike of 1984. The narrow streets were crowded with brass bands from the surrounding mining villages marching along the banners from the local National Union of Miner's lodges. Its an awe-inspiring and moving occasion. However, the elephant in the room (or at least in the streets) is the sad fact that there are now no working coal mines in Durham or indeed the entire north-eastern coal field.

When I was doing A levels, it was common knowledge that the north-east (County Durham and Northumberland) was dominated by coal mining. Even then (in the late 1980s) it was notable that we covered this more in History than in Geography. The process of de-industrialisation may have reached a bloody climax in 1984, but mines had been shutting long before this. So when I started working in Durham and Northumberand a little under a decade ago it was no surprise to me that there was little active mining in the area. What was a shock though was the way the entire industry had been wiped from the landscape. Today, the only pitheads still standing are heritage attractions (at Beamish, Washington F Pit and Woodhorn). I was used to the former industrialised areas of Yorkshire such as Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield, where although many factories and mills were no longer working, the buildings themselves still stood. However, in the north-east the entire infrastructure of a globally significant industry that more or less underpinned entire sections of the regional culture has been entirely erased. It was not only the removal of all the mine buildings that is staggering, but the shifting of the spoil heaps. The spoil pit for the pit at Ashington was once the biggest manmade mound in Europe; its now entirely disappeared. Once in the course of work I came across some photographs of the Durham landscape in the 1950s. There many pictures of many mining villages I knew quite well, but they looked almost entirely unfamiliar because in the background were the spoilheaps standing high above the buildings. The end of the mining industry did not just mean the destruction of the mines themselves but an entire reworking of the landscape itself. I was told recently about the notion of the Anthropocene used to describe the period of earth's geological history when for the first time human's rather than natural processes began to influence the earth's geology and geomorphology. The mining history of Durham is surely a case study in this. Now, though, there is clearly a growing interest in reminding people of the role mining played in County Durham. I think people are realising that babies born during the strike are now in their mid-20s, but have never known the county has a centre for coal production. The Gala, which nearly died in the late 1980s, is now bigger than ever (it's still the biggest regular political rally in the world). Almost all former pit villages have now erected memorials to their collieries. There is a burgeoning interest in oral history and local history; new banner's for the Gala are even being created. Despite all this enthusiasm, there is still a strange and silent gap where the mine's themselves used to be.

There is also a political element to this. I've been told that following the '84 strike, English Heritage wanted to record the historic buildings and installations linked to the mines that were to close. Apparently, however, Michael Heseltine (President of the Board of Trade at the time) actively forbade this; it is hard not to see this as a vindictive act against the miners. The feeling that the mining industry should not be turned into a heritage resource was not, hoewever, simply promoted by the government. Many miners at the time felt strongly that what they saw as a living industry should not be turned into a heritage or tourist attraction. For them the wounds were fresh and the bitterness too raw. Consequently, it is not surprising at the time there was little appetite for protecting or preserving the pit heads.

Return to Doggerland

2009-07-18T12:45:00.001-07:00

After my blog earlier about drowned lands, I though the following was quite nicely timed.

BBC Radio 4 Open Country programme explores Doggerland.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lmpkb

On the first day of this year's Festival of British Archaeology, BBC
Radio 4 will be airing a special programme exploring Europe's lost world
- Doggerland - a land lost beneath the waves of the North Sea, which is
the focus of a recent book published by the CBA.

Besides speaking to archaeologists who are investigating Doggerland,
Helen Mark will be joined by the storyteller Hugh Lupton who imagines
the myths of those long-lost hunter-gatherers.

The programme will be aired as follows:

* BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 18th July at 6.00am
* repeated on Thursday 23rd at 3.00pm
* will be on the BBC iPlayer for quite some time after that date.

For more information about Doggerland or to purchase a copy, see the CBA
news release about Europe's Lost World; the rediscovery of Doggerland:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/news/090327-doggerland

I'm particularly pleased as I'm a fan of Hugh Lupton, not least because of the wonderful work he's done with Chris Wood.

Binchester landscapes

2009-06-29T13:36:00.001-07:00

I went exploring the environs of Binchester last week. Primarily I was interested in getting a feeling for the extent that there might be surviving Romano-British field archaeology in the area that surrounded the fort. Whilst I did find some interesting features, it was also a fascinating exercise in the exploring a post-medieval and modern landscape. Most of the fields appear to be a product of 18th or 19th century parliamentary enclosure, although there are areas of ridge and furrow in many of the fields. I’m intrigued by possible areas of what appear to be ridge and furrow in the low-lying area around the Bell Burn, but these can’t be medieval ploughing can they? More likely they are linked to the management of water meadows. The woods along the Bell Burn are probably ancient woodland and are rich in birch and sycamore, although there are clearly many features within them. There are a series of leats and small stone bridges linked along the course of the stream. These are probably post-medieval and perhaps connected with a lot of investment put into the lands owned by the Bishops of Durham in this area in the late 18th century.

Walking through the woods I also stumbled across a recent ‘shrine’ clearly to someone who had died and been remembered by his family at a place he’d loved. It was rather an eerie experience to discover it tucked away in a thick wood. Strangely enough, I came across another similar example a little further on by a bench on the old railway track (now a footpath). Is this a Bishop Auckland tradition?

The railway track was a reminder that this part of Durham was a heavily industrialised area, with many collieries; Lodge Farm just to the south of the wood was once where all the pit ponies in Durham were bred- according to a visitor to site whose grandfather had worked there, there were sometimes thousands of ponies there; I wonder if some of the features along the burn were connected to the need to water them?

Drowned Lands

2009-06-19T13:14:00.000-07:00

Last week we took the nipper down to Hull to visit The Deep (an excellent afternoon out for all those who love combining looking at fish with colossal sensory overload). Afterwards we headed out east into Holderness, the slice of land that lies in between the Humber estuary, the Wolds and the North Sea. This part of Yorkshire feels very like East Anglia, with its low-lying wetlands, shallow coastlines and insistent presence of the North Sea. One of my favourite parts is Spurn Head which juts out into the mouth of the Humber, and has a vaguely post-Apocalyptic feel, and reminds me of places like Dungeness, combining raw nature, ruins and traces of industry. At Spurn you can watch waders feed on the mud flats whilst in the background the lights from the petrochemical factories at Immingham twinkle on the other side of the estuary.

Like much of the east coast, Holderness has been in a constant struggle with the sea. Estimates vary, but its reckoned that between 3 and 4 miles of land have been lost to the North Sea since the Roman period. Villages with evocative names such as Frismersk, Orwith Fleet, Ravenser Odd, Dimlington, Hoton and Turmarr amongst others have all disappeared since the Middle Ages. South of the Humber many other villages have slipped beneath the waves, perhaps the best known being Dunwich in Suffolk, once a thriving coastal trading town, but now largely consigned to the sea (not to be mistaken of course with the Dunwich which appears in the works of HP Lovecraft…). I like the idea of these missing villages and towns lying beneath the waves of the German Sea These are the last traces of the land bridge that once linked Britain the Continent. Along the west coast of Britain, there are myths of other drowned lands, such as Lyonesse (off Cornwall) and Cantre'r Gwaelod (in Cardigan Bay), but, as far as I know, the lost villages of the East coast have never stimulated similar legends. Although there have been fantastic archaeological and geomorphological projects to map these drowned lands, of the North Sea, I like the idea of mapping the lost histories of these drowned villages. It would have to be an entirely speculative and creative exercise, certainly not something rigorous or methodological; perhaps more like a collaborative work of fiction. Something else for the ‘to do’ list.

Road to ruin

2009-06-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

One of my first professional archaeology jobs after I completed my undergraduate degree was as a site assistant on an English Heritage fieldwork project along the edge of the A1 (‘The Great North Road’) around Catterick. This involved fieldwalking and excavation on the site of the Roman town of Cataractonium, in advance of a scheme for widening the road to three lanes. My abiding memories of this job are the joys of fieldwalking in light snow cover and digging in shin deep mud.

Little did I know that I would later come to know this stretch of road extremely well. Having variously worked in Northumberland and Durham for the last eight years, I must have now driven up and down this section of the A1 hundreds of times. As it happens the road widening scheme is only now just beginning (a mere 16 years after I was working on the site). What has surprised me is how attached I’ve become to the landscape along the road, including not just the farmhouse, copses and fields, but also the garages and service stations. They’ve all become embedded in my own personal landscape of the commute to work; as such its rather strange to see these private landmarks and distance markers being bulldozed away Its also a shame to see some important aspects of the modern (post-medieval landscape) disappearing. The Great North Road was the main road north from London to Edinburgh since the medieval period, and became particularly important as the route that the mail coaches ran in the 18th and 19th century. It is only with the advent of the railways and more recently the construction of the M1 in the late 1950s and early 1960s that its key role has been circumvented. Even now, it is still the main road north from York to Edinburgh (and once north of Newcastle, is still single carriage way in places).

Its history has meant that it has created its own distinct landscape. Although it now by-passes the centres of most villages and towns, many of which still contain historic coaching inns, many farms still lie close to the road (and at a microtopgrapic level are clearly aligned on it). It’s still crossed by B roads and farm tracks, and in several places former bridges can be seen just beyond the edge of the road. On top of this more ‘historic’ landscape, there is also the post-war infrastructure of a main road, including petrol stations, cafés and service stations. Much of these features are now being sacrificed to the need for a few additional lanes of road. Whilst I would not argue that the Little Chef at Dishforth is of the same historic value as the Roman town at Catterick, it is sad to see the erosion of these elements of an historic landscape. I suspect that there has been little recording of these structures (though I might be wrong).

These ‘modern’ road landscapes aren’t entirely overlooked; Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital explores the M250- the kind of inbetween landscape so loved of the late JG Ballard; there’s also Edward Platt’s Leadville: A Biography of the A40 (a road I spent a lot of time staring at blankly at the Oxford Tube ferried me into London in the mid-1990s. This kind of writing is not even a particularly modern phenomenon: the artist John Piper wrote a long description of the modern and ancient sites along the old Bath Road (A4) as long ago as 1939 (Architectural Review (May 1939), 229-46).

Postscript: a link to the wonderful website Pathetic Motorways

Call for Papers: Archaeology and Englishness

2009-05-28T01:38:00.000-07:00

"Field archaeology is an essentially English form of sport" O.G.S Crawford

Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference Durham 2009

As Gordon Brown wrestles with how to promote a sense of ‘Britishness’, there are increased signs of revival of a sense of English identity, whether expressed through the resurgence in popularity of the English flag or increased call to celebrate St George’s Day as a national holiday. There is also an increasing popular literature exploring the notion of the ‘English’ and ‘Englishness’ often creating essentialised models of the concept (e.g. Ackroyd 2002; Gill 2007; Paxman 1999).

However, whilst other discipline, such as art history, literary studies and geography have long treated the notion of ‘Englishness’ as concept worthy of analysis and deconstruction, this has not been true for archaeology (cf. : Burden and Kohl 2006; Corbett , Holt and Russell 2002; Matless 1998; Pevsner 1956). Whether exploring the development of national traditions of scholarship or considering the way in which material culture is used to develop and maintain a sense of national identity, there has been a tendency for England to be subsumed within a wider British or imperial discourse (though there are some exceptions e.g. Johnson 2007). This session aims to restore this balance and consider the extent to which it is possible to recognise the notion of ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ within archaeology.

It is hoped to explore a number of facets of the problematic relationship between archaeology and English identity including: 1/ Materiality and Englishness: the way in which material culture, structures and landscapes were used to create and maintain a distinct sense of English identity in past societies; 2/ The development of English traditions of archaeological scholarship and a consideration of the consequences of the development of ‘England’ as a distinct unit of analysis. Is there a distinct English tradition of archaeology or heritage management?; 3/ The use of archaeology to create discourses of ‘Englishness’ in popular culture.

Ackroyd, P. 2002. Albion – The origins of the English imagination London
Burden R and S. Kohl 2006. Landscape and Englishness, Amsterdam
Corbett, D., Holt, Y. and Russell, F. 2002. The geographies of Englishness : landscape and the national past 1880-1940 London
Gill, A.A. 2007. The Angry Island: Hunting the English London
Johnson, M. 2007. Ideas of landscape Blackwell
Matless, D. 1998. Landscape and Englishness London
Paxman, J. 1999. The English: A portrait of a people London
Pevsner, N. 1956. The Englishness of English Art London

Scouring the horse

2009-05-25T13:55:00.000-07:00

Nice little article about the 'scouring' of the White Horse at Uffington. It's a wonderful site. Although the Wiltshire Downs are better known, I have a soft spot for the Berkshire Downs, particularly the area from the White Horse along the Ridgeway to Wayland's Smithy and down to Ashdown House (which has also recently appeared in the news). I spent several weeks working for Oxford Archaeology on a very exposed hillside nearby excavating the area where a Bronze Age hoard had been found. I can still remember the way in which the curtains of rain would sweep across the landscape. I would watch the front of the shower of rain move over the field towards me allowing me to time my retreat to the site hut to perfection.

View over Atlantis

2009-05-15T13:23:00.000-07:00

Sad to see that John Michell, New Age mystic, counter-culture guru and author of the View over Atlantis has died; particularly as only last night I was reading the large retrospective of his life and thought in the latest issue of the Fortean Times- you can see the FT obituary here. Although as a hard-nosed academic archaeologist I obviously have no truck with ley lines and earth magic, it's hard not to be seduced by the love of landscape which stimulated and pushed Michell’s work.

My own research is on the early medieval period and I have very little interest in prehistoric archaeology from an academic standpoint. However, I do have a profound Romantic attachment to prehistoric landscapes, particularly the Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments of the Wessex chalk downland. I think this stems partly from having grown up in Berkshire and in the course of my childhood been regularly taken to look at hillforts, barrows and megalithic monuments. My experience of this landscape was also stimulated by a number of books and television programmes. I remember particularly a BBC children’s drama called The Moon Stallion, which was full of typical 1970s children’s telly, cod mysticism and general New-Age jiggery pokery, and was, I seem to remember centered around the White Horse at Uffington, the Ridgeway and Wayland’s Smithy. I was also intrigued by the images in Kit William’s book Masquerade, which also had a Wessex- New Age vibe going on in it; I never had my own copy, but coveted those of my friends. As a consequence of this, I still have a close personal and emotional connection to these prehistoric ritual landscapes; always seen at their best I think in the depths of a winter. I don’t want to know about the archaeology, I just want to enjoy them.

ps: When I was writing this just now, I was absolutely convinced that the BBC series was called Sun Horse Moon Horse; which it turns out is actually the name of a Rosemary Sutcliffe book, about the White Horse, which I am absolutely convinced I've never read or even knew about before.

Common Wealth

2009-05-13T03:38:00.000-07:00

Those who scour the obituary columns may have noticed that Wing Commander Ernest Millington DSC, the last MP who sat in the Commons during WWII has just died. It’s not only this that makes him important; he was one of the few members of the short-lived Common Wealth party to become an MP. The Common Wealth party was founded by members of the Labour party and other radicals who disapproved of the Conservative-Labour electoral truce put in place during the War. The parties three key platforms were Common Ownership, Vital Democracy and Morality in Politics (which have rather a fine contemporary resonance).

Common Wealth was founded by Richard Acland, JB Priestly and Tom Winteringham. Tom Winteringham (the balding figure in the photograph)has long been a bit of a hero of mine; he commanded the British Battalion of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War before being wounded at Jarama. He broke with the Communist Party in 1938 and went on to take a leading role in running and training the Home Guard in Britain during World War II using techniques he’d acquired in Spain. Coincidentally, I’ve just started reading Hugh Purcell’s The Last English Revolutionary: A Biography of Tom Wintringham 1898-1949. All I need to do now is find an archaeological connection... (though Priestly was married to the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes).

Massingham and Archaeology

2009-05-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

I’m currently reading a lot about the way in which archaeology was used in popular writing between 1918 and 1945. Whilst not surprisingly, the most high profile aspect of archaeology in the inter-war period was exploration in Egypt and the Near East, there was also a great interest in the British archaeology. The prehistoric monuments of Wessex loom large in much topographical writing at this time, such as the various series put out by publishers like Batsford. This was partly linked to a rise of rural tourism, as access to motorcars and the increased popularity of hiking and rambling meant that increasing numbers of people were exploring the countryside in a way not possible before. The cover art of many of the Ordnance Survey maps of the 1920s and 1930 reflect this increased interest in exploring the British landscape. Archaeology was also used by a number of writers of this vintage as a source of evidence for explaining and understanding the many problems seen as facing society, particularly the rise of industrialism and the changing face of rural life. Crucially much of this output was also focused on prescribing changes to society allowing it to meet these perceived challenges.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am particularly interested in the work of John Massingham, one of the leading ruralist writers of the mid-20th century. He regularly used archaeology in his works, both as a source for metaphor and analogy, and also to shape his agenda for a revived agrarian society that was opposed to the mechanisation and depersonalisation of social relationships which he so hated in industrial society. One of his early books, Downland Man (Published I think in 1925), is almost entirely archaeological in content. In this odd volume, primarily focused on the prehistoric monuments of Wessex, he puts forward an entirely new chronology for prehistoric society, and crucially argues that a golden age of peace and prosperity was destroyed by the introduction of metalworking. He also promotes the notion, which was outmoded even at the time, of diffusionism; essentially that all the key changes in society were diffused out from a single point of origin, usually Egypt. Taking this diffusionist point of view he regularly attacked social Darwinism throughout this book (and much of his other writing), which he saw as a model for social progress predicated on conflict.

Massingham is particularly interesting, as unlike a lot of the ruralist and agrarian writers of this period, he actually had some archaeological training. After spending some time as a journalist (his father was the radical journalist Henry Massingham) he joined the staff of Grafton Elliot Smith, who was based at UCL and held hyper-diffusionist views (and indeed wrote the forward to Downland Man). It is clear from reading his books that Massingham was up to date with contemporary archaeological writing, such as the works of Vere Gordon Childe, and by the 1940s was in correspondence with W.G Hoskins, one of the key figures in English landscape archaeology after WWII. I’m hoping to do some more serious work on the archaeological dimension of Massingham’s work, which will form a paper in a session I’m trying to put together for TAG on Englishness and Archaeology. Pleasingly, I’ve found out that Massingham’s archives, including his archaeological notes, are held in the Museum of English Rural Life, in Reading, which was one of my favourite museum’s as a child.

Landscape Distinctiveness

2009-05-04T03:57:00.000-07:00

As a lover of landscape (and cider) I was pleased to read about new initiative by the National Trust to halt the decline in English orchards and attempt to revive them as part of the landscape. Over 60% of orchards have been lost since 1950, partly due to the impact of successive EU agricultural policies which rewarded over-production and encouraged farmers to put down as much land as possible to cash crops, and also due gradual erosion of orchard land around villages due to building and property development.
This project is something to be welcomed, as it is part of a larger move in current rural policy to maintain landscape distinctiveness. In the past, local landscapes showed a high-level of idiosyncracy. There were (and still are) broad regional patterns in the English landscape, such as the distinction between the broad zone of ‘enclosed’ landscapes running in a swathe across the country from the North-East through the midland plane to Dorset and the so-called ‘ancient’ landscapes found in the south-east and much of the west and south-west. Laid over these high-level landscape ‘provinces’ are distinct regional styles of hedge-laying, wall-making and gate building, as well as climatic and geological micro-topographies. This meant that England was a country of many distinct local landscapes.

It is some aspects of this landscape distinctiveness that is being recorded by English Heritage’s important Historic Landscape Characterisation initiative. This is an important project which will allow a base-line assessment of patterns of landscape to be assessed. This will allow the on-going survival of landscape types to be evaluated and allow archaelogists and landscape historians to begin to explore in detail the range of factors that make a particular local landscape distinct. It has its limitations though; its methodology is resolutely cartographical focused on recording the shapes of property parcels and ascribing broad functions to them. This is fine as far as it goes, but it is less useful in recording the many other factors that make a local landscape distinct, such as vernacular architectural traditions and field boundary types.

The Long 1970s

2009-04-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

I can't help noticing a recent resurgance of interest in the 1970s at the moment. The '70s have long had a fun popular cultural resonance, with fond memories (for some)of flares, the Bay City Rollers, the Brotherhood of Man, the drought of 1976 and the Silver Jubilee. There is also the memory of the counter-cultural response to this bubblegum stuff with the rise of punk (crystalised in the popular imagination in the Sex Pistols).

However, over the last year or so, a different aspect of the 1970s is emerging in popular culture. Damned United, the new film about Brian Clough and Red Riding, Frost/Nixon (a film about the Frost/Nixon interviews of 1977) and the recent TV adaption of David Pace's novels both, in their own ways,both reflect a very view of the '70s, with a reminder of the shabbiness (physically and socially) of the 1970s and the political complexities of the period. The 'long 1970s' from Paris '68 until the Miner's Strike of 1984 saw a period of social and political discontent that arose out of the failure of the 1960s hippies to effect change (and the re-politicisation and radicalisation of the left in the events of Paris 68) and was dealt a death blow (in the UK at least) on the picket lines of Orgreave, Ollerton and Ferrybridge. Although the Tory's came to power in 1979, it was only following the Falkland's War and the Miner's Strike that they were secure enough to push through many of their most distructive and radical policies. The local and global problems, Cambodia, Vietnam and Beirut and the rise of Republican violence in Northern Ireland and the appearance of left-wing terrorism (Angry Brigade in Britain; RAF; Action Direct and the Red Brigades in Europe; the Weather Underground and the SLA in the States), as well as considerable labour unrest and the rise of the unions, were ignored as much by punk as by the Bay City Rollers (with the honourable exception of the anarcho-punk movement including such bands as Crass), who as early a 1978 sang 'I see the velvet zippies in their bondage gear, The social elite with safety-pins in their ear,I watch and understand that it don't mean a thing,The scorpions might attack, but the systems stole the sting.. '

I'm not sure why this interest in the seemier, or at least more mundane side of the 1970s is reviving. Possibly because its now far enough away to be looked at slightly more dispassionately, rather than through the ironic lens of Abba tribute acts (is Mamma Mia a crime against humanity? Discuss). We've just had the 25th anniversary of the 84 strike, and whilst the wounds are still deep, it was noticeable in recent coverage, that those involved on the right from tory ministers to police on the front line were much more conciliatory and at least openly acknowledging the social damage done, whilst those on the left are willing to admit that whilst the struggle may have been a just one, the timing of the strike and the decision to proceed without a ballot were badly mishandled by Scargill. An interesting take on the memory of the strike is Jeremy Deller's 2001 re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave, one of the key turning points in the strike.

South Downs

2009-04-01T07:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I know its been ages since I posted, but the joys of essay marking and English Heritage paperwork have been calling.

Anyway, I found this nice little article about the landscape of the South Downs, which has just become the latest National Park. It particularly drew my attention as the article mentioned the Copper Family, who are important as performers of Sussex folk songs, and part of an unbroken family tradition of singing going back to the 19th century. You can see them in action here.

On a vaguely connected tack- I had a rare trip out on Monday when I got to the Spiers and Boden gig at the NCEM in York - a good night out indeed- they also lead the excellent Bellowhead, who I am still trying to catch live (you can see them on Youtube here and with a drubk looking Jon Boden here)

Never mind the pancakes

2009-02-25T01:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Shroves Tuesday, the day before the beginning of Lent. For us in England, it generally means PANCAKE DAY!, whilst for many other countries its Carneval (literally- 'goodbye to meat'); both traditions emphasise the giving up of good food in advance of a time of fasting in the run-up to Easter. However, even within England there are many other traditions connected to the Shrove Tuesday, for example, the playing of Shrove Tuesday football matches was once common. These aren't 'soccer' matches, with equal numbers on each team and pitch. These are full-on, crowd-participation melees played over a large area, sometimes an entire parish. Many of these football traditions declined when the 1835 Highways Act forbade the playing of ball games on the road. However, they still exist in some towns, including Ashbourne Derbyshire. Here are some pictures of yesterday's match from BBC Radio Derby

Steam dreams

2009-02-16T02:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pondering stream trains recently. Driving home a few weeks ago we were surprised to see a large crowd of people standing on the railway bridge near us, which goes over the main east coast line. It turned out that they there to watch Tornado, the first new steam train to have been built in Britain for fifty years. Apparently the station was packed, as was the station up at Darlington where it was heading. Then yesterday morning I took Isobel to the National Railway Museum, which is handily just down the road from us. Although we were there at 10.30, within an hour the museum (which is big) was absolutely heaving with families and children. Isobel loved it, which as she comes from a railway family on her mum’s side is presumably genetic.

It got me thinking about the popularity of steam trains in the UK though. As well as the excellent railway museum in York, it now has an outpost in Shildon (Co. Durham), and in the last couple of years a major new museum has opened up in the railway town of Swindon. If anything, stream trains are becoming more popular than ever, which I find fascinating. In the past, the stereotypical steam fan was a weighty fifty-year-old man (almost always a man) who remembered the last days of steam himself and still hankered to be an engine driver. Now the core audience appears to be children; neither they nor their parents are able to remember the glory days of steam, yet we’re still obsessed with it. Obviously, for many of us adults, there is an element of faux-nostalgia for a time and society we don’t remember and probably never existed anyway. It’s no surprise that one of the biggest themes running through the merchandising in the railway museum shop is that of old railway posters, with their imagery of seaside holidays and bucolic countryside. Steam trains evoke a world of Brief Encounter, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Night Mail, the Railway Children and Ivor the Engine, a pre-lapsarian England before Dr Beeching wielded his axe. However, whilst for adults the thought of steam engines might set off this nostalgic riffing, it can’t be true for the children, who presumably just love the steam engines for being big, noisy, smelly and steamy (what’s not to like?).

However, when I’ve travelled abroad I’ve not come across much evidence for the cult of the steam engine in the same way it exists over here. Why is it such a British phenomenon?

More on morris...

2009-02-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in Saturday's Guardian about Mary Neal who is one of the unsung heroines of the folklore revival in the early 20th century, but who made the mistake of getting on the wrong side of Cecil Sharp. Mary Neal was an socialist, suffragette and social worker who used dance as way of encouraging and helping factory girls in London. Her approach to dancing emphasised the fact that dance was a developing tradition and that forms and performance styles could change and evolve over time. This contrasted with Sharp's highly formalised approach to folk dance which focused on developing a fixed canon of repertoire and was dogmatic about performance style. They fell out and the subsequent hagiography of Sharp more or less wrote Neal out of the story. This is now being remedied though and the EFSDS held their first Mary Neal day on Saturday.

Neal is also interesting for her involvement in the Kibbo Kift, an early version of the Woodcraft Folk (kind of lefty version of the Scout movement), which also involved individuals like Rolf Gardiner (who I've blogged about before) whose subsequent career had a distinct right-wing trajectory. The Kibbo Kift also utilised a range of interesting imagery including Anglo-Saxon / Viking ideas and concepts drawn from a 1930s concetpion of Native American life. I hope to come back to this at some point.

NB: the photo is of morris dancing at Stonehenge in the 1950s taken by RJC Atkinson (the photo is from the excellent English Heritage Viewfinder website)

Romans in Durham

2009-01-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

I've tended not to blog about my research much. However, I thought would write a little about a major new project I'm closely involved with which looks like it might be playing a big part in my life for the next five years.

I am part of a team from the Department of Archaeology at Durham University and the Department of Classics, Stanford University, planning a major campaign of excavation on the Roman fort at Binchester (Co. Durham). We are going to be carryig out six weeks of fieldwork at the site each year between 2009 and 2014. We are also going to be putting in place a wide range of more non-intrusive strategies (field walking; shovel pitting; geophysical survey; LIDAR etc) which hopes to locate the fort in its landscape context.

Those of you who know me will be aware that I am not particularly a Romanist (though I have published on Roman material); my heart is really in the early medieval period with a focus on the spread of Christianity. Luckily, Binchester, as well as being a key Roman military installation on the main road between York and Hadrian's Wall, has also produced significant evidence for the continuation of activity well into the fifth and probably even the sixth century, and went to become a centre of one of the estates owned by the Community of St Cuthbert at Durham.

The project will have its own blog at some point, and I'll probably put updates on here as well. It's only just dawning on me what a major undertaking this is going to be!

And now...here's the gallery

2009-01-26T23:45:00.000-08:00

After the death of Oliver Postgate just before Christmas, its sad to see that Tony Hart has died. Its rather disconcerting to see the landmarks of one's childhood starting to die off.

Clogging it

2009-01-26T05:56:00.000-08:00

After the previous post and my reference to clog dancing, I was watching Folk America at the Barbican: Hollerers, Stompers and Old-Time Ramblers, which features a bit of Appalachian clog dancing (about 8 minutes in), a reminder that this British tradition went to the States early (pre-1800) and became a key element in the Appalachian and Ozarks musical tradition.

Morris dancers: a protected species.

2009-01-21T13:34:00.000-08:00

Back to the blog after the festive season (and two weeks nose to the grindstone working on the book). Anyway, something popped up in the news in the New Year which caught my eye/ear/eyes (delete as applicable). Apparently, morris dancing is under threat. This is something that seems to come up fairly regularly (and it would help the case a little if The Morris Ring who were behind this piece of publicity allowed women to dance!). However, morris still appears to be in fairly rude health, both in terms of numbers and dare I say it artistically. Few would deny that the morris tradition was heavily resuscitated by the folk song movement in the early 20th century (Cecil Sharpe and others of that ilk), but it is a genuine living tradition, and there are dance sides, such as Bampton and Headington (see picture above) which have an unbroken history back into the mid 19th century and probably earlier. The numbers of dancers is at a good level, and crucially young (and I mean younger than me) dancers are still taking it up. Sides like the more arty/performance based Morris Offspring and the more traditional but still ballsy Dogrose Morris show that morris needn't mean accountants flouncing with hankies (you can see Dogrose Morris on Jools Holland later here).

Its also important to remember there is a lot more to English traditional dance than the traditional morris dancing (the Cotswold/Oxfordshire tradition); there is also border morris found along the Welsh borders, which has its own distinct dances and costumes (including painted faces) and rapper/sword dancing from Yorkshire and the North East - the latter with a traditional costume based on the work clothes of 19th century miners. Not all traditional dancing was based round team dances; there is also a tradition of solo clog dancing (I think this is mentioned in Ronald Blyth's wonderful book Aikenfield)

Christmas Champions

2008-12-23T11:19:00.000-08:00

Once again, I've missed the opportunity of going to see a performance of English Acoustic's Collective exploration of the British mumming tradition Christmas Champions, though its still possible to catch the original broadcast for Late Junction on which it was based. There is also an interesting article from Folk World about its genesis.

Sadly, this year I won't be able to catch the Mummer's Play in Wantage on Boxing Day, which has become a bit of a family tradition in recent years. Its not such a tradition up North, where the plough stotts are more common. I'd like to think I'll catch the Goathland plough stots, but suspect we won't make it... (I am now wishing I'd brought the original 1913 pamphlet on the sword dances of Northern England by Cecil Sharp, which I saw in Fossgate Books today..doh!)

Collecting England

2008-12-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

Jane recently came across the website for the brilliant Pitt Rivers Museum Inside England project. It won’t come as a surprise given my recent posts how interesting I’ve found this. Partly for the highly entertaining object biographies (Tylor's bewitched onion anyone?) and partly because its got me thinking about the history of collecting English folk/vernacular objects. As the name of the museum suggests, it was founded by General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, one of the founding fathers of British archaeology. His influence was greatest in the development of field techniques, but he was also important as one of the earliest field archaeologists to beging to place his practical archaeology in a broader theoretical framework. Not surprisingly for someone of his dates he seized upon Darwinism and evolutionary approaches. He was also dedicated to promoting and popularising archaeology and education more generally. He opened his private estate as a kind of educational pleasure ground and also built up collections of a wide range of objects and artefacts, often arranged typologically to illustrate the process of evolution through the change in form of objects. His early collections certainly included contemporary (ie 19th century) objects, and much of his early thoughts about material culture and evolution were worked through in his collection of firearms.

However, his collections of English material appear to have primarily use to illustrate and develop his theories and not particularly because he saw the wider value of treating England as a subject of ethnographic study, comparable to the fields of enquiry being developed abroad (particularly within a British imperial context) by British anthropologists.

I’ve not been particularly succesful in finding out more about the growth of the collecting British material in a broadly ethnographic context. I’d presumed that it must have had its roots in the early 20th century ‘folk’ revival, though I’ve not come across any details. I suspect that the early collections were largely put together by private individuals and did not reach museum collections for some time. For example, Hugh Massingham had a collection of various rural tools and equipment, which he put together in the between the 1920s and early 1950s when he died. However, the museum which they are now in The Museum of English Rural Life was not founded until the year he died. Beamish, the museum near Chester-le-Street dedicated to the local way of life was not founded until 1970, the same year as the Weald and Downland Museum. Many other major private collections of this kind of material is still finding its way into museums (such as the Harrison Collection) which has just been acquired by the Ryedale Folk Museum. I am sure there are also many small collections of ‘social life’ material in minor local museums, which are not presented or extensively promoted. Noticeably it was not until the post-war period that entire museum’s were dedicated to this kind of material. There is still no national museum dedicated to English folk life and culture, unlike Wales, where the St Fagan’s National History Museum is part of the National Museum of Wales. From my limited knowledge, this makes England relatively late to start taking the collection of indigenous objects seriously; for example in Sweden, the celebrated open air museum at Skansen was founded in 1891.

English Folk Culture (and a bit about Napoleon)

2008-12-12T11:43:00.000-08:00

After my recent post on defining Englishness I've just come across the work of Sarah Barber who is developing research on defining English Folk Culture addressing some of the methodological issues in defining what we mean by 'folk culture'. I am not sure I entirely agree with some of the working definitions she is using, but its useful to see someone attempting to define 'folk' as cultural category of analysis(as opposed to what has now become an aesthetic genre). I think her attempt to define 'folk' as a relationship between the individual and the collective is a useful approach and avoids sterile arguements about what is inside or outside the folk tradition.

Its important to distinguish the search for a working definition of 'folk' as different from a working definition of Englishness (if such a slippery subject can be defined). There is no direct or easy equation of English folk culture with 'Englishness', which is often defined using exampla drawn from a range of sources from Imperial History, the Anglican church (bells and smells or happy clappy) and other criteria derived from middle class culture. Indeed the search for Englishness might be defined as a particuarly middle class neurosis. Folk culture, however, makes an overt reference to national identity and in many cases, particularly in the musical tradition, drawns on radical and republican discourses that are inherently anti-Nationalistic. For example, there is a fascinating tension in the depiction of Napoleon and the French Revolution in English folk song; compare the words of The Liberty Tree

It was the year of '93
The French did plant an olive tree
The symbol of great liberty
And the people danced around it
O was not I telling you
The French declared courageously
That Equality, Freedom and Fraternity
Would be the cry of every nation

with

Come listen every lord and lady, squire, knight and stateman,
I've got to sing a little song about a very great man;
And if the name of Bonapart should mingle in my story,
It's with all due submission to his honour's worship glory.
He fell in love with Egypt once because it was the high road
To India for himself and friend to travel by a nigh road,
And after making mighty fuss and fighting night and day there,
'Twas monstrous ungenteel of us who wouldn't let him stay there

Though to be fair, I wonder how many of the pro-Boney songs are from the Irish rather than English tradition. Its also worth mentioning my favourite lyric

My uncle, Captain Flanigan,
Who lost a leg in Spain,
Tells stories of a little man
Who died at St. Helene;
But bless my heart, they can't be true,
I'm sure they're all romance;
John Bull was beat at Waterloo!
They'll swear to that in France

ANYWAY....coming back to Sarah Barber's work, on far more trivial matter, I was pleased to see that one of her interviewees was on Joseph Porter drummer, lead singer and song writer of one of the words greatest bands, Blyth Power (named after a Class 56 diesel don't you know), possibly the only band to have ever written song about Graf von Tilley, the 30 Year War and the Battle of Breitenfeld!

In the lands of the North, where the Black Rocks stand guard against the cold sea...

2008-12-09T01:29:00.000-08:00

I've just heard the sad news of the death of Oliver Postgate, creator of Bagpuss, The Clangers, Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. These programmes defined my early childhood, and that of almost anyone else who grew up in the 1970s. I've recently started seeing some of the modern children's programmes, and without wanting to come over all nostalgic, they don't hold a candle to this classic era of British television (though I do have a soft spot for In the Night Garden). Listening to excerpts from Postgate's programmes on the radio this mornign, what really struck home was their immense seriousness. They could be light hearted in places, but it was in their solemn attention to simple matters they were at their most childlike (in all the good senses of the word).

Tam Lyn

2008-11-27T06:00:00.000-08:00

With reference to the previous post- I've just found this on You Tube. Its from the Imagined Village; a version of the traditional folk ballad Tam Lyn by Benjamin Zephania. There is also a version of Cold Haily Windy Night from the same album. For those who are interested in these thing, the driving force behind the album is Simon Emerson, who is also the main man of Afro-Celt Sound System. Imagined Village also involved Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Eliza Carthy, the Dhol Foundation amongst others.

The Imagined Village

2008-11-27T05:49:00.000-08:00

I’m getting increasingly interested in concepts of England and Englishness. Obviously with my academic background I am interested in the ways in which archaeologists have used England as a frame of reference for their research and the way in which the concept of ‘Englishness’ has been expressed and created through landscape, architecture and material culture (or as I prefer to term it ‘stuff and things’). But I’m also exploring a range of wider ways in which national identity is expressed, particularly through popular ruralist and historical writing (specifically in the inter-war period) and also in what might be termed folk culture, particularly music. The whole notion of ‘folk’ is as complex an idea as ‘Englishness’, but as a working definition I’d define it as something deriving from a vernacular tradition with an emphasis on an oral and practical mode of transmission, as opposed to a formalised and defined tradition (with an associated emphasis on written records). Whilst the folk tradition is something that was, in practice, highly fluid and constantly being re-worked, in the 19th and 20th century it was increasingly tightly defined and studied by a scholars creating a formal canon, and defining the way in which it was reproduced and interpreted. Georgina Boyes’ extremely interesting (but horribly written) book The imagined village: culture, ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester 1993) is very good on this (The title of this book was also nabbed for the music project Imagined Village which gave contemporary reworkings to traditional folk music). This ‘folkloric’ tradition can today often express itself in a puritan and reactionary attitude to the TRADITION.

Anyhoo…the reason why this has come up is that I’ve come across an interesting artistic response to this over-propriatorial approach. The artist David Owen has an exhibition at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Dance and Song Society, often seen as a bastion of the tradition (you can see a review here .

In the words of his manifesto

MOST OF MY WORK IS CONCERNED WITH FOLK MUSIC AND ITS IMAGE. FOLK MUSIC IS USUALLY PORTRAYED, OR PERCEIVED, AS ANCIENT, PASTORAL, VINTAGE, FROZEN IN TIME - THE USUAL STEREOTYPES OF BEARDS, JUMPERS AND FINGERS-IN-EARS. BUT FOLK MUSIC IS AN EVOLVING, LIVING, CONTEMPORARY VEHICLE FOR TRANSMITTING STORIES AND IDEAS, LIVES, LOVES AND FEARS - THE HUMAN CONDITION. FOLK SONGS HAVE EVOLVED OVER DECADES AND ACROSS GENERATIONS, SOMETIMES OVER CENTURIES. NAMES GET CHANGED, LOCATIONS GET MOVED, MODERN EVENTS ARE INCORPORATED, THE SONGS GROW, CHANGE SHAPE, ADAPT, EVOLVE, AND MUTATE. WHEN CECIL SHARP, VAUGHAN WILLIAMS ET AL TRAVELLED THE COUNTRY TO COLLECT AND RECORD THE SONGS, THEY INADVERTANTLY 'FROZE' THEM IN THEIR RECORDINGS AND WRITINGS. THEY HAVE SUBSEQUENTLY BEEN SEEN, BY SOME, AS COMPLETE, FINISHED AND DEFINITIVE. FOLK SONGS ARE DEAD UNLESS THEY CONTINUE TO BE SUNG, TOLD, EXCHANGED, RE-WORKED, ADAPTED AND RE-INTERPRETED.

Idea of Landscape

2008-11-19T14:32:00.001-08:00

I’ve finally had time to put down my thoughts about Matthew Johnson’s Ideas of Landscape , which I’ve recently re-read. In this book Johnson explores the distinctive English tradition of (primarily medieval) landscape archaeology, which has its roots, or at least is personified in the form of W G Hoskins, author of the Making of the English Landscape. He situates Hoskins as the inheritor of a wider Romantic tradition of writing about landscape; one which he sees as both empiricist and conservative. He argues that the methodology of much landscape archaeology in this mould is undertheorised, particularly in the way in which it goes through the process of interpretation. In Johnson's eyes, for the English landscape tradition the process of understanding field archaeology is unproblematic and essentially a procedure which involves the reconstruction of landscapes using models derived from historic sources. He focuses on what he sees as the empricist inferences behind the ‘mud on the boots’ emphasis on fieldwork and the tyranny of the Cartesian gaze in the use of maps and aerial photographs.

One of my major problems with this book is that Johnson misses the chance to turn his critique on many of the post-processual approaches to landscape. I would argue it is also possible to see the influences of the (Neo-)Romantic landscape tradition running through the phenomenological tradition (e.g. Chris Tilley) and what Andrew Fleming has called the hyper-interpretive approaches (for example in the work of Mark Edmonds). These are characterized by fixing on the experience of landscape (both in the past and by the modern investigator) and an aestheticised gaze. They are as reliant on ‘gut reaction’ as part of the interpretive process as is the English landscape tradition. Andrew Fleming has explored the methodological limitations of these approaches in a couple of recent papers (Camb Arch Journal 16/3 2006; Landscapes 8/1 2007). Because Ideas of Landscape focuses on the medieval landscape tradition, rather than approaches to prehistoric archaeology, which is the main arena for much of these post-processual approaches to landscapes, he misses exploring the more complex relationship between Romanticism and archaeology. In his eagerness to place the blame for all the problems (and there are undoubtedly many problems) with landscape archaeology in England on the Romantic tradition, he fails to see the complexity of this important tradition in British thought and its pervasive influence on archaeology in the UK. He briefly acknowledges the important stream of political radicalism in the Romantic tradition (such as Blake, Crabbe and Orwell)but fails to develop this line. By drawing all his fire on the Romantic geneaology of Hoskins et al, he fails to explore the way in which the empiricist approach to archaeology derives much from the Enlightenment project, which much Romantic thought deliberately set itself against.

As is also common in archaeological critiques which explore the intellectual genealogy and context of other scholars and traditions, the book fails to contextualise itself adequately. I would have liked to see Johnson carry out an element of auto-critique to his own work. Although he mentions his experiences as a student at Wharram Percy, he fails to situate his own work in a cultural tradition. There are hints of his preferences; he prefers the 'naughtiness, travelling, whoring and sharp comment on the social iniquities' of the 18th century to the sentimentality of Romanticism. But it is hard to get a sense of his own personal academic journey, which is a pity, as his own output on post-medieval archaeology shows some interesting biases. For example, he manages to write a book on the Archaeology of Capitalism which hardly mentions industry or industrial archaeology. Is this deliberate? Is there a methodological or theoretical reason for this, or even (whisper it quietly) a degree of anti-modernism in his own scholarship…

World War I Letter

2008-11-13T04:06:00.001-08:00

This letter was written by my Great-grandfather's cousin, Private Patrick Canavan (Royal Irish Fusiliers), from the trenches in WWI. It is dated January 1915; he was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres four months later; he was just twenty-eight years old. He lived on Kashmir Road, Belfast, and left a wife, Rose, behind him. He is buried in St Sever Cemetery in Rouen.

My great great uncle, James Patrick McManus (Kings Own Scottish Borderers), was killed in the same battle four days earlier. His body was never found, but he is remembered on the Menin Gate at Ypres. He had previously won the Distinguished Service Medal.

Bletchley Park

2008-11-06T03:37:00.000-08:00

At last some good news about Bletchley Park, where Allied codebreakers worked in World War II. Its a fantastic site, but has been badly in need of investment to keep it standing. Whilst the house itself is in good nick, the huts are in pretty poor shape (somewhat inevitable as they are mostly pre-fabs which were never intended to have a long life). Its well worth a visit; many of the guides worked at Bletchley during the War. Its great that EH has finally provide some money for this site; I'm amazed that given its importance during the War and its key role in the development of computing technology that its had to struggle so hard for funds.

Rotherwas encore

2008-11-06T03:14:00.001-08:00

More news about the Rotherwas Ribbon

A Land

2008-11-05T12:58:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading Jaquetta Hawkes' wonderful book 'A Land'. Written in the late 1940s, it is a meditation on geology, archaeology and the development of Britain. Hawkes was that rare thing, an archaeologist who could write wonderful prose, in places coming close to poetry.

It is this immense antiquity that gives our land its look of confidence and peace, its power to give both rest and inspiration. When returning from hill or moor one looks down on a village, one's destination, swaddled in trees, and with only the curch tower breaking the thin layer of evening smoke, the emotion it provokes is as precious as it may be commonplace. Time has caressed this place, until it likes comfortably as a favourite cat in an armchair, also caresses even the least imaginative of beholders.

Like many of the writers I've been reading recently, Hawkes takes an unashamedly (Neo-)Romantic view of the landscape; she quotes extensively from Wordsworth and illustrates the book with a sketch by Ben Nicholson . Like W. H Hoskins she looks back to the period between the end of the Middle Ages and before the Industrial Revolution as a 'Golden Age' of English landscape, and, again like Hoskins, she revels in the immense regional variation within the British landscape (though unlike Hoskins her perspective is truely British rather than English). It is a useful counterpoint to the other book I'm reading at the moment Matthew Johnson's Idea of Landscape which emphasises the English landscape archaeology tradition in general, and (in Johnson's view) its founding father, WH Hoskins, firmly in an intellectual tradition that stems from 18th century Romanticism (and Wordsworth in particular). He clearly dislikes Romanticism in all its form seeing it as the progenitor of (in his words) 'dreary, dreadful, Victorin mawkishness', and I think his aesthetic tastes (he prefers the salty, roaring, bawdy 18th century) are perhaps clouding his judgement of later writing and scholarship on the English landscape. Though perhaps I'm letting my preference for the Romantic and particularly Neo-Romantic vision of England cloud mine.

postscript: despite my preference for Romanticism I can't stand Wordsworth (I blame A levels for this)

York lightshow

2008-10-29T13:30:00.001-07:00

Some pictures of the lightshow at St Mary's Abbey this week. Its difficult to do the event justice with these photos. It was spectacular.

Heartbreak Hill

2008-10-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

Made a visit to the site of Heartbreak Hill, an allotment scheme created for unemployed ironstone miners just outside the village of Boosbeck. It was set up in the 1930s by Rolf Gardiner (see postings below) At this time, unemployment in this area was even higher than in other areas of the norht-east such as Jarrow Land was given for the allotments by Colonel William Wharton, owner of Skelton Castle. Students were brought in to help clear the land of roots and stones. This student element and the artistic / utopian ideals of Gardiner meant that there was also a strong artistic element including operas (one of the volunteer students was the composer Sir Michael Tippett), folk music and dancing. The allotments are still there; unlike many municipal allotments, the plots are clearly marked with fences and boundaries and many are still in use. Also plenty of livestock, including chickens, pigeons and a goat. Not clear how many, if any, of the sheds and pigeonlofts are original, though I spotted at least one re-used Anderson Shelter.

Chagos reversal

2008-10-22T13:16:00.000-07:00

Shockingly the Law Lords reversed an earlier judgement that the deported population of the Chagos Islands could return to their homeland. Between 1967 and 1971 they were illegally removed by the British government so that the island of Diego Garcia could be handed over to the US as a major airbase. Most islanders went to Mauritius, but some came to the UK. Whilst some don't want to return others are keen to do so, and have been finding a long campaign to be allowed back. In 200o the then Foreign Secretary accepted the result of a court case saying they could return, but in the fallout of 9/11 US security paranoia led to pressure being placed on the UK to change their policy and contest the Chagossians right of return. The islanders continued to take their fight through the courts and the UK government has consistently opposed them, despite admitting that the way they were initially treated was wrong. The government fought their case on the basis that resettlement would be a security risk to the US airbase and the cost of resettlement would be too costly. Both these arguements are profoundly flawed. The islanders are not demanding to be allowed to reoccupy Diego Garcia (DG), just the outer islands. It is hard to see how they can form any kind of security risk; if the US are unable to contain any potential threats from 150 impoverished Chagossian thinly spread across a isolated islands some over 100 miles from DG, then one wonders how they expect to be able to fight global terrorism. They don't seem too worried about locating their Guantanamo Bay prison home to many hardened terrorists (hem hem) on Cuba, on an island controlled by a Communist administration with a history of 'difficult' relations with the US. The cost of resettlement needn't be an obstacle either. A report has shown that there this would be a feasible process. The former main crop of the island was copra, and there are many abandoned palm plantations scattered across the islands which could be used to produce palm oil, whilst there are good fisheries offshore. Combined with a carefully developed eco-tourism industry (the area is rich in wildlife) it could easily be economically viable for the small population. (see here for the Chagos Conservation Trust's critical but constructive comment on the Howell Report).

The Chagossians will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights but it is difficult to feel optimistic. What is so depressing is that even through the UK government admit that the original removal of the population was manifestly unjust they refuse to do the decent thing and let the islanders return, and instead defer ironically to the security demands of the so-called war on terror. All in all, a shameful and squalid affair back in 1967 and a shameful and squalid affair today.

Hackney Library Ban

2008-10-22T00:39:00.000-07:00

A rather depressing little story about the writer Iain Sinclair being banned from launching his new book at Hackney Library

Watkins and Crawford: Photographic perspectives

2008-10-17T03:10:00.000-07:00

More ley lines....quite literally. Kitty Hauser's book on O.G.S. Crawford touches on his tetchy interactions with Alfred Watkins, the promoter of the notion of 'ley lines'. As founder and editor of Antiquity, Crawford gave such 'crankeries' pretty short shrift. However, they both shared an interest in the importance of photography in the study of the past. Crawford, as an innovator in aerial archaeology, and Watkins as significant photographer in his own right and a member of the Royal Photographic Society. However, the cartographic nature of the vertical aerial photograph contrasts strongly with the ground level view of Watkins work, much of which he used to illustrate his published work on ley lines. This difference closely reflects the difference approaches to landscape explored by writers such as Chris Tilley (in his Phenomenology of Landscape). Not surprisingly in Tilley's work he criticises the 'objective' and 'totalising' objective and map centred approach which characterises much modern landscape archaeology, instead privileging the subjective, experiential and phenomenological perspective used by many post-structuralist archaeologists and anthropologists. It seems that that despite Watkins' approach being consigned to the dustbin by Crawford, it is in fact his approach that is more in tune with certain streams of modern archaeology. Poor old Crawford also comes in for a bit of a kicking in Matthew Johnson's Ideas of Landscapes. However, I think Tilley's book certainly over-does his arguements and his heavy use of binary oppositions in contrasting objective/subjective approaches to landscape are a little surprising in someone who is meant to be post-structuralist. I'm going to go back to Matthew Johnson's book soon, in the light of my increased interest in the uses of archaeology in the 1920s-1950s (and the fact that I read it when getting an average of four hours of sleep a night); now I'm more awake and more informed I'm looking forward to giving it another go.

Rotherwas Resurgat

2008-10-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to write that reports of the redating of the Rotherwas ribbon are much exaggerated. I've been contacted by Keith Ray, County Archaeologist for Herefordshire who has let me know that contrary to my earlier post the C14 dates and finds information are all pointing to a Late Neolithic/Early BA date for this highly interesting and unusual site. There will be more information appearing on the Herefordshire SMR website as it becomes available.

Pater Noster

2008-10-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

I was at a wedding this Saturday. During the service, the Our Father was said. It was rather disconcerting to notice that looking round the church barely anyone under 40 was joining in with it. If I was charitable I'd say it was because they were shy, but I think it was more likely to be that they simply didn't know it; something I found highly depressing. Knowledge of basic prayers and the broad shape of the liturgy and the liturgical year ought to be a fairly fundamental part of people's general knowledge.

This kind of knowledge is not something that should only belong to practicing Christians. For anyone with an interest in history, literature or popular culture, a basic understanding of the tenets of Christianity is essential. People need not believe in it, but they should at least grasp the basics as part of their basic general knowledge. How can people understand huge chunks of British, European and World history, art and literature without appreciating a key aspect of the social context in which it was created? This applies to everything from Shakespeare, Chaucer and James Joyce through Da Vinci, Millais, Chagall and Stanley Spencer to Father Ted and the video of 'Like a Prayer' by Madonna.

When teaching medieval archaeology I can no longer assume even a basic knowledge of Christianity, and have to provide crib sheets to basic concepts such as the Eucharist and the Passion. This is not a call for increased belief in (I'm a lapsed Catholic- though not so lapsed I don't feel guilty about it), but a knowledge of a key strand of the European cultural inheritance.

Literary ley lines

2008-10-10T08:31:00.001-07:00

Lots of strange convergences over the last couple of days. My friend Paul sent me a link to a blog which explores the work of Arnold Toynbee (which I’ll get back to you about Paul!). The same day, I saw Toynbee mentioned in the book I’m currently reading – Where Man Belongs by the English inter-war rural writer and social thinker H.J. Massingham. Massingham, although spending much of his working life as a writer and journalist had some archaeological training and indeed in the same book he mentions O.G.S. Crawford, pioneer aerial photographer and founder of Antiquity. On Wednesday I got the recent and excellently reviewed new biography of Crawford by Kitty Hauser (which I hope to blog about shortly). Massingham was also closely involved in a fascinating nexus of thinkers and rural writers between the 1930s and 1950, which included Adrian Bell (father of Martin Bell), with whom he formed Kinship_in_Husbandry, a kind of proto-think tank opposed to the industrialisation of agriculture and promoting organic farming. It was one of the precursors of the Soil Association. This curious organisation straddled the traditional left/right divide and many of its founders were interested in the notions of social credit, Guild Socialism and Distributism (an economic philosophy formulated by Catholic thinkers such as Belloc and Chesterton). One of the key thinkers in Kinship in Husbandry was Rolf Gardiner, who made an appearance in yesterday’s Guardian, cited as a key figure in developing youth movements in Britain. Literary ley lines in action….

Viking York

2008-10-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

Viking houses discovered on the Hungate site in York. Hungate has so far hit the headlines mainly as an excellent and rare example of the archaeological excavation of 19th century domestic area, with the streets, houses and backyards of the former slums of Hungate revealed. However, its important not to forget that this is York after all, and the fact that it was a major Viking city combined with waterlogging can lead to rather nice discoveries such as this.

Cambro-Canadian Epigraphy

2008-10-07T03:19:00.001-07:00

Rather nice find from the Heather and Hillforts project in Denbighshire. Graffiti by a Canadian soldier from WWI.

Scottish wolves

2008-10-07T03:17:00.000-07:00

The remains of a wolf trap has been discovered by archaeologists near Inverness.

Shepton Mallet chi-rho

2008-10-06T14:09:00.000-07:00

This intriguing little item has hit the press again (e.g. The Guardian). Found in 1990 during excavations on a Roman cemetery and settlement at Shepton Mallet, it caused immediate interest as it was discovered in a grave and it is one of the very very few pieces of personal jewellery from Roman Britain bearing a chi-rho symbol. It became a highly symbolic object and was reproduced in replica form and given to the the Bishop of Bath and Wells (one George Carey).

However, there were suspicions about the authenticity of the object voiced very early. Even before tests on the metal composition in the late 1990s and this year confirmed that it was made from a modern rather than ancient alloy, several archaeologists expressed their scepticism about the item. As a Christian item found in a grave it was highly peculiar; whilst it is not unknown to find grave-goods used in a probable Christian context in the Late Antique world, it was to say the least, unusual; there were certainly no parallels in Roman Britain. It had some similarity with a brooch found in Sussex in the 19th century, but the clumsy way in which the chi-rho had been created by punched holes made for a very unsatisfactory item.

So...it does turn out its a fake, but this leads on to two obvious questions: who dunnit and why? There are a number of possible reasons; as the newspaper article notes there was much opposition to the development, and it may have been placed there in an attempt to stop the building (lets not forget that Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 did not come into operation until the November of that year). It does seem a somewhat costly way of preventing the development- there would have been the cost of the silver (admittedly probably not that much), but also the time needed to design and make it. Either the culprit had reasonable jewellery making skills themselves or they had to commission someone else to make it (which would mean more than one person was involved). Whilst the design may have been clumsy copy of the Sussex brooch, it does show that some level of research had gone into the design. The decision to plant a Christian-inspired piece is also intriguing; it shows a good eye for things that would click effectively with public opinion. This wasn't just a quick prank, but a carefully conceived and thought-through project.

I've spoken to a number of people who worked on the site, they all insist it wasn't planted at the time of discovery and that it came from a secure context (ie had been excavated from the ground and not just dropped on the topsoil). So, it must either have been placed in the soil at an earlier point, though presumably at a point after the dig had commenced and the graves identified (it would be interesting to know how much time elapsed between the initial identification of the graves and the discovery of the artefact). All in all a mystery, though in my personal opinion it must have been perpetrated by someone with at least some knowledge of Roman Britain and of archaeological techniques....

Return to blogging

2008-10-06T13:48:00.000-07:00

After a very hectic year involving moving house, being repeatedly vomited on by Isobel, spending too much time on the A1 and generally piddling my life away on Facebook I am planning to make a return to the blog. I've been posting odds and sods on Facebook, but I'm going to try and start sticking them on this blog, as there is a little more room to witter. So lets get stuck in....

Fieldwork at Valle Crucis

2007-08-16T04:39:00.000-07:00

At the end of July, myself and a group of students from University of Chester (Phil C., Brandi M., Joe M and Rachel G) spend a number of days carrying out fieldwork of the site of the old fulling mill of the Cistercian abbey at Valle Crucis, near Llangollen. This is the first stage of a joint project with Llangollen Museum to explore the site. There are no standing structural remains, but a series of earthworks related to the mill can be seen in the garden at Pandy.

We carried out an earthwork survey, which involved creating a hachure plan and levelling in a series of profiles across the site. Exploring the surrounding area I think I have also identified the course of aqueduct that took water to the nearby abbey. This will require further fieldwork though.

The next stage of the project will be small-scale fieldwork on the mill site and, ideally, further geophysical survey in the surrounding area. This will hopefully link up with geophysical survey already carried out by Sarah Semple (University of Durham)and Dai Morgan Evans ((University of Chester)in the environs of the Pillar of Eliseg.

Rotherwas Ribbon

2007-08-15T00:46:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the long delay in updating the blog. The joys of fatherhood (ie sleepless nights, projectile vomiting and constant nappy changing)and the need to complete writing my new book have meant that the blog has slipped down by 'to do' list.

Thanks to Bill Sheppard for passing the following on to me:

NEWS: Green Party in England & Wales

GREENS DEFEND ROTHERWAS RIBBON

A recently discovered 4000 year old monument in rural Herefordshire
is at risk of being covered by a new road development. Archaeologists
have said the 197ft (60m) long ribbon of stones, found by road
builders, could be as important as Stonehenge and is apparently
unique in Europe.

It is made up of a series of deliberately fire-cracked stones and
appears to have been deliberately sculptured to undulate through the
whole of its length that has so far been uncovered.

Hereford Green Party has been leading the campaign to defend the
Rotherwas Ribbon, also known as the Dinedor Serpent.

Local Green Cllr Gerald Dawe, said: "What we're going to have is a
road which no-one wants, going over a part of our history which has a
lot of public support.

Green Party Principal Speaker Dr. Derek Wall said:

"The Rotherwas Ribbon is of great historical importance. It is vital
that discoveries like these are protected from more road building.

"English Heritage inspectors have said that the best thing is for the
remains to be preserved in-situ. They are currently considering
whether the site meets the criteria for 'scheduling' - this status is
given to monuments whose preservation is given priority over other
land uses. (1)

"Though this wouldn't preclude the relief road being built, it would
send a message to Hereford council of the importance of these ancient
remains.

"A petition calling for a full public inquiry to decide the future of
the Rotherwas Ribbon can be signed on the Downing St website. I urge
people who care about out archeological heritage to add their names.(2)

"There are many organisations fighting effective and vital campaigns
against road building around the UK - including Road Block and the
Group Against Motorway Expansion." (3)

ENDS

Notes for Editors

(1) More information on the Scheduling of Monuments can be found at
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.2436

(2) http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/rotherwas/#detail

(3) More info on Road Block can be found at www.roadblock.org.uk

More info on Group Against Motorway Expansion - http://
nom6e.blogspot.com/

Green Party Press Office
020 7561 0282
http://www.greenparty.org.uk

Published and promoted by Jim Killock for the Green Party, both at
1a Waterlow Road, London N19 5NJ.

The destruction of Saami forests in Finnish Lapland started again

2007-06-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

Forwarded from Taiga-Info

Here is some new information on the situation in Finnish Lapland, where the
Finnish Forest and Park Service recently resumed logging in one of the
important reindeer winter grazing areas.

Hannu Hyvönen at independent Finnish media cooperative Signs of life has
compiled this information. You can reach Hannu directly at
hannu@elonmerkki.net

The destruction of Saami forests in Finnish Lapland started again

The long lasting forestry conflict in Finnish Lappland is again in a very
urgent state. The Finnish state owned company, Metsähallitus,
has started large scale logging operations in the home area of indigenous
Saami people on the 14th of May, 2007.

These logging have been critisized for the following reasons:

-there is no solution yet for the land ownership conflict between
indigenous Saami
people and the Finnish state.
-the Finnish state has not proven to be the actual owner of the forests
that it is logging right now.
-the clear-cutting style of logging ancient forests in the extreme north
of Europe cannot be accepted from an ecological and micro-climatical point
of view.
-the loggings destroy the very basis of the culturally important Saami
free grazing reindeer herding tradition
-the loggings waste the ancient forests and its wood and leave less
possibilities for future truly sustainable continuous cover forestry
without destructive clear cutting.

Among others Union of Ecoforestry urged Finnish
parliament to stop the logging immediately and distributed for
parliament groups the documentary movie Last yoik in Saami forests
(http://elonmerkki.net). Until now there has not been any public reaction
by the Finnish government. The silence in Finnish media also continues.

The director of the movie, Hannu Hyvönen, expressed his feelings about the
on-going loggings recently: "It is quite easy for us to update this sad
turn-up in the documentary movie, but we cannot update these forests which
are now again cutted down."

The documentary movie can also be loaded here:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/last_yoik.mp4

More info and links:
http://elonmerkki.net

The short history of this conflict with video clips from the movie
==================================================================

1. Centre of Saamiland

In northern Lapland, over one thousand kilometres north of Finland’s
capital, Helsinki, lies the largest remaining wilderness in Western
Europe. These fells and forests are the homeland of Northern Europe’s only
indigenous people, the Saami. The land rights issue in the Saami homeland
is unsolved.

Look the introduction of the scenerys videoclip
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/alkumaisema.mp4

2. Pulping the Saami forests?

Traditional reindeer herding is the one essential basis of
Saami culture.

During the cold Arctic winter months, old-growth forests provide a
lifeline for grazing reindeer. On the old trees grows the arboreal hanging
lichen that is an essential wintertime food for the reindeer.

However, the Finnish state-owned forestry company, Metsähallitus is
destroying important winter grazing forests that are vital to the
reindeer. These old-growth forests are harvested for production in the
Finnish pulp and paper industry.

Look the forestry yoik of the movie Last yoik in Saamiforests:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/metsatalousjoiku.mp4

3. Who owns the land?

One big and still unsolved issue is the ownership of these forests.
Finnnish state cannot prove its ownership and still continues
logging activities. Look the comment of Heikki Hyvärinen, the lawyer of
Saami parliament
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/varas.mp4

4. Greenpeace arrive
The long-lasting conflict between Saami reindeer herding interests and
government-owned industrial forestry flared up in the spring of 2005.
Local Saami reindeer herders joined environmental organizations and
started an international campaign to save the reindeer grazing forests
from logging.

Look the interview in the camp:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/gp%20tulee.mp4

5. Cutting break and Antiterror infocenter

Greenpeace contacted the paper buyers. Forest industry giant Stora Enso
decided soon to stop buying wood from the disputed forests.
Metsähallitus had to stop the logging.

The conflict escalated towards violence when forestry workers, supported
by the Finnish government forestry company, set up their “anti-terror”
camp next to the Greenpeace Forest Rescue Station in the disputed forests.

They started attacks in the Greenpeace camp in nights
and days.

http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/logging%20break%20and%20alqaida.m
p4
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/loggersjoik.mp4

In May 2005 cutting moratorium continued and Greenpeace moved avay their
camp to cool down the atmosphere.

6. Stora Enso and Metsähallitus started loggins again in June 2005

But in July Stora Enso announced to their customers to start the
wood buying again and Metsähallitus started their cuttings in the area of
Nellim reindeer herders.

Look the clip of the scenerys from Inari lake:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/inaria.mp4

7. United Nations intervention

In November 2005 reindeer herder Kalevi Paadar with his brothers made a
complaint for UN Human Rights Committee and claimed that cuttings in their
village destroy their possibilities continue the traditional free crazing
with reindeers and so violate their Saami rights for manage own culture.

UN Human Rights Committee asked Finland to stop cuttings for further
researches.

Look the video:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/kalevi-YK.mp4

8. Illegalism in Lapland

The cuttings were stopped but the dialogue did not continue. The prime
minister did not want to join in discussion and the chair of Finnish
Secret Policy accused Greenpeace to be a violent terrorist organization:

http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/supo%20ja%20terroristit.mp4

>From the Saami side the conflict was not seen caused by Greenpeace but
Finnish companies wasting the forests and wasting the wood of them. Look
the comment by Pekka Aikio, the president of Saami Parliament in Finland:

http://video.elonmerkki.net/videoreportage/aikio.mp4

9. Cuttings continue in June 2007
The present situation is now hot againg. Metsähallitus started logging in
Saami forests in Kessi in May 2007.
Read more and look the photos on the areas:
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/forestrescue/

============================================================================
===================================

LAST YOIK IN SAAMI FORESTS - A DOCUMENTARY FOR UN

The above clips are part of the documentary movie
Last yoik in Saami forests , 54 min

You can look the version updated April 2007 on the address:
http://video.elonmerkki.net/last_yoik.mp4
The documentary movie is also available on DVD.

For commercial presentations, library use and for tv broadcastings, please
contact the director Hannu Hyvönen directly at hannu@elonmerkki.net

Contacts:

http://elonmerkki.net

info@elonmerkki.net
tel +358 40 831 7733

New arrival

2007-05-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

Isobel Kathleen Petts finally made her long-awaited appearance on Sunday May 20th at 5.36pm (just in time for Antique's Roadshow). Yay!

Pathfinder

2007-05-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

A bit of a quick winge. In 1987 the Norwegian director Nils Gaup made a rather good film called Ofelas (also known as Pathfinder). It was the first film made Saami, the native language of the native groups of northern Sweden/Finland/Norway and Russia, who are often called Lapplanders. It was a powerful retelling of a native myth. It was a simple, stark film relying heavily on the stark nature of the tundra landscape of northern Scandinavia, with relatively little dialogue. Its one of my favourite films.

However, 20 years later, Hollywood leaps in with both feet and remakes it as Pathfinder. Pointlessly resetting it in America, with a Viking boy adopted by Native Americans fighting against maruading Vikings. PLus adding loads of pointless special effects, atrocious art direction and Vikings in BLOODY HORNED HELMETS.

I've got nothing against pointless historical action films- when done well they can be great. But I don't understand the need to remake fantastic films, suck anything good and original out of them and turn them into cack hack and slay features. Maybe I'm just turning into an miserable old sod. Pah!

Archaeology News

2007-05-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Liz Dean for flaggin up some archaeology in the news.

First, there have been developments on the contraversial M3 motorway development in Ireland. This new motorway running through County Meath cuts extremely close to the internationally important archaeological landscape of Tara. This has caused massive controversy in Ireland, as many people have argued that the course of the road will destroy much archaeology and have a wider impact on the setting of this important site. Last monday the Irish Transport Minister cut the first sod to commence the motorway construction. The very next day the construction has to be stopped as a major new prehistoric ritual site was discovered.

Some of you may have seen the excellent Time Team recently which excavated a fantastic early Christian site on the Isle of Man. Amongst the discoveries were a fragment of an ogham inscription. The finds from the site have now been handed over to Manx National Heritage.

Many of you that one of my recent grumbles has been the diversion of money from the National Lottery Fund to fund the Olympic Games. However, there has been some positive news in the relationship between the Games and archaeology, as excavation has begun on the site of the games themselves in East London.

Finally, a medieval settlement is being excavated in Kinross (Scotland).

Ideas of Landscape

2007-04-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

I’ve just been reading Matthew Johnson’s excellent new book Ideas of Landscape. In this exploration of the origin of the English approach to landscape archaeology Johnson’s places particular focus on the work of W.G. Hoskins, whose book The Making of the English Landscape played such a central part in the development of landscape history in England. A key element of Hoskin’s approach was a strong criticism of industrialisation and the modern world. This comes through most profoundly in a key passage from Making, which is worth quoting in extensively:

“What else has happened in the immemorial landscape of the English countryside? Airfields have flayed it bare…Poor devastated Lincolnshire and Suffolk! And those long gentle lines of the dip-slope of the Cotswolds, those misty uplands of the sheep-grey oolite, how they have lent themselves to the villainous requirements of the new age! Over them drones, day after day, the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable’s and Gainsborough’s sky. England of the Nissen-hut, the “pre-fab” and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment; England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil, murderous with lorries; England of the bombing-range wherever there was once silence…Barbaric England of the scientists, the military men and the politician; let us turn away and contemplate the past before all is lost to the vandals” (Hoskins 1955, 231-2)

This elegiac and undeniably slightly reactionary passage strikes a chord with me. One of the first digs I worked on was the Anglo-Saxon site at West Heslerton. It was the summer of 1989 and as we revealed the remains of an rural settlement dating to the 6th century American A10 Tankbusters flew low overhead warming up for the first Gulf War. In the evenings we’d sometimes walk up to the top of the scarp slope of the Yorkshire Wolds and drink and smoke whilst looking at the landscape laid out in front of us. To our left lay Ryedale with its many early medieval monasteries, directly opposite were the southern slopes of the North York Moors, whilst in the distance to our right was the Mesolithic site of Star Carr. Occasionally, this idyll would be disturbed as warplane streaked across the sky practising night flights.

Many of my subsequent digging experiences have been juxtaposed with signs of warfare and conflict. Jet fighters screamed above us when sieving on the site of the castle of Dolforwyn in Montgomeryshire in 1992; military police stopped to investigate what we were up to when fieldwalking next to the army camp at Catterick in 1994. In 1996 I dug on the Roman fort at Pevensey in the shadow of a pillbox of 1941 vintage. In four years working in the North East I regularly sped passed convoys of army vehicles heading north to Catterick after peacekeeping duties in the Balkans or moving up to Otterburn for exercises.

Hoskin’s approach to the study of landscape was Romantic and his work is paralleled artistically in the Neo-Romantic movement. This movement has its origins in the late 19th century and early 20th century in the work of William Morris, Samuel Palmer and such under-appreciated writers as Richard Jefferies. However, it flowered particularly in the 1930s-50s in the art of John Minton and Eric Ravilious, the films of Powell and Pressburger and Humphrey Jennings and the music of Arnold Bax and Benjamin Britten. This late blooming was undoubtedly stimulated by the impending threat of industrialised warfare and the massive change in rural life that were taking place following WWI; George Orwell wrote about both these threats in his novel Coming Up for Air (1939). Whilst not normally seen as a Neo-Romantic in this little gem Orwell clearly engaged with the concerns of many other artists in the tense years of the late 1930s after Guernica and before Dunkirk.

It was the work of later artists in the Neo-Romantic tradition, including authors such as Alan Garner, Keith Roberts, and artists including Andy Goldsworthy , Clifford Harper and the Brotherhood of Ruralists, whose work I first encountered as teenager (in the case of the work of the Brotherhood of Ruralists on the cover of the Arden Edition Shakespeare’s I used at O level and A level) that stimulated and has continued to fire my own academic and creative engagement with the past and the English landscape, as much as childhood visits to castles and churches.

Estonia Pictures 4

2007-04-04T12:03:00.005-07:00

This building, now the Estonian Museum of Architecture, but was once a storage building for shed. It lies in the heart of the Roterman's district close to the port of Tallinn. It is a reminder that although Tallinn's trade was at its peak in the later medieval period, its docks remained a key factor in the 19th century prosperity of the city. Even today over 80% of Russia's trade through the Baltic goes through Tallinn.

The Orthodox Cathedral of Alexander Nevski which lies in front of the Estonian parliament house on the Toompea. It was built in 1900. Its dedication to Alexander Nevski, the Russian czar, whose remains lie in St Petersburg, was a clear political decision. Nevski defeated a Livonian army on the eastern borders of Estonia in 1242 at Lake Peipus. In Russia this has long been seen as a highly symbolic victory by Russians over military agression from Europe, and a victory over the Catholic church by Orthodox Christianity.

Tallinn Day 3

2007-04-04T12:03:00.004-07:00

It has definitely got much colder today. The temperature is around 0ºC and the water in puddles is frozen. I go back to the Department of Archaeology to do some more work and do some photocopying. I wrestle with the photocopier, but eventually manage to get it to work; I get half way through my copying and then… out of toner. There is no one I know around, and I’m not sure I know the Estonian for “photocopier toner” anyway.

I take the opportunity to investigate some of the local museums: the nearby Niguliste Kirik (St Nicholas Church) is now a museum of religious art. It contains a range of altar pieces and crucifixions from the 14th-16th century, when Tallinn (or Reval as it was known) was at its height as a Baltic trading city. The highlight is the Dance of Death by the Lübeck artist Berndt Notke, a potent reminder of the proximity of death in medieval life, as well as containing scathing criticism of both the Pope and cardinals.

I then visit the Tallinn City Museum housed in a 14th century merchant’s house. It contains an excellent display on medieval life in Tallinn, with lots information about the city’s origins and the role played by the Guilds in structuring society. There is also a sobering display about life in Estonia under Soviet control.

After a bite to eat, back to the Department for some more wrestling with the copier and then back to the hotel to catch up with further reading, sort out my emails and get ready for tomorrow’s trip out to look at some archaeological sites.

Tallinn Day 2

2007-04-04T12:03:00.003-07:00

After a breakfast I head back over to the Department of Archaeology. I take a different route and walk across the Toompea, the upper part of the Old Town, stopping to peer in the Orthodox cathedral. I spend most of the day working through loads of archaeological papers and journals building up my background knowledge of Estonian archaeology, particularly focussing on the what we would call the early medieval period, though in Estonia the Iron Age continues until the 13th century, when the country was conquered by the Danes and the Teutonic Order. Apart from a quick lunch in the departmental pub (!) I’m at my desk from about 10 till 6, when I head off. Marika Mägi, the head of the Department, for a meal, invites me round for a meal. I’m fed and watered splendidly. Chatting to her partner Tyge I realise that he spent some time in the Dept of Archaeology in Reading at the same time I was there- embarrassingly I have no memory of him- though to be fair he has no memory of me either! By the time I take the bus back into town its noticeable that the temperature is dropping. The walk back from the bus stop to the hotel is freezing. Despite yesterday’s sun, it’s clear that the cold weather is not yet gone.

Since I was last in Tallinn, three years ago, there have been some noticeable changes. Like any European city there are the usual mix of Irish pubs, Indian restaurants and Greek tavernas, as well as bars and eateries serving more traditional Estonian fare. However, the city is definitely becoming more oriented towards tourism. Twice I find that what used to be a bookshop has turned into a shop for holiday makers and gift buyers. There are also changes in the city’s attitudes to the traces of Soviet occupation. There decision by the city authorities to remove a monument to Russian soldiers who died in the Second World War has caused much controversy and has been reported in the international press.

Elsewhere, near the church of St Nicholas the foundations of buildings destroyed during the bombings of the city by the Soviets in 1944 stood as testimony to the destruction wrought by the Russians; when I was last here they were carefully fenced off and a sign explained their significance. However, they have now been covered over and the area is being turned into a small park. There is a definite sense that the city is turning away from the legacy of the Russian past and has its face firmly set on the future.

Estonia Pictures 3

2007-04-04T12:03:00.002-07:00

Someexamples of typical 15th/16th century merchants houses. The bottom example is known as the Three Sisters and is now an expensive hotel. These houses combined domestic accmodation with warehousing; similar buildings are found in many of the towns that once belonged to the Hanseatic League.

Estonia Pictures 2

2007-04-04T12:03:00.001-07:00

The sixteenth century Great Sea Gate on the northern side of the old town of Tallinn. The massive tower visible on the left is called Paks Margareeta (Fat Margaret), because it was the biggest tower on the walls. In front of the gate lies a monument to the victims of the ferry Estonia, which sank with huge loss over 800 lives in 1994.

Estonia pictures 1

2007-04-04T12:03:00.000-07:00

The Russian orthodox church of St Simeon ad Anna which is just a few minutes walk from my hotel. It has its origins in the late 18th century, but fell out of use during the period of Soviet occupation in Estonia. Its now being restored.

David's Tallin Trip Day 1

2007-04-03T22:58:00.000-07:00

After a stupidly early start (I didn’t know there was such a thing as 3.30am in the morning), I make it to the airport, which at that time in the morning was filled with tired, grumpy people. The flight takes me over Denmark and the southern coast of Sweden. We overfly a series of Baltic islands including Öland, Gotland (Swedish) and Saaremaa, Hiiumaa and Vormsi (Estonia). It’s a good reminder of the importance of island and coastal landscapes when studying the archaeology of the region; in periods when the interiors of much of the East Baltic were dominated by dense forest shipping routes were obviously a major way of moving around the area.

I get a taxi from the airport to my salubrious dockside hotel. A Russian driver who either had a death wish or a grudge against the English drove the taxi; it is not surprising that Finland and Estonia produce such good rally drivers.

Tallinn is a fascinating city; it stands at the borders of Europe and Russia and also lies on the edge of Scandinavia and Central Europe. This can be seen in the architecture. The medieval heart of the city shows clear similarities with the other important trading towns that lie around the Baltic and the North Sea. At the centre of the old town lies the main square, Raekoja Plats, dominated by the 15th century town hall. In many of the streets around this part of the town the 15th and 16th century houses of the city’s major merchants, which combine domestic space with warehousing. Other clear reminders of the city’s Hanseatic trading past include the House of the Great Guild, which was the headquarters of the German-speaking merchant guild that dominated trade. Nearby is the House of the Blackheads, an organisation for visiting foreign merchants founded in the late 14th century. Both buildings are again typical of late medieval North European architecture.

However, elsewhere there are clear reminders of Estonia’s Russian past. The country was ruled by Russia during much of the 18th and 19th century, and was occupied by the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1991. This has left a clear mark on the city. This can be heard on the street, where it is common to hear Russian spoken – Estonia still has a large Russian-speaking minority, particularly in the cities. The architecture also expresses Russian influence. This is most obviously seen in the presence of a number of Russian Orthodox churches, including the spectacular Cathedral of Alexander Nevskii built in 1900 in a typical Russian medieval revival style, with onion domes and the a cross-shaped plan (for more about the changes in Russian architecture in the later 19th century have a look at Orlando Figes’ excellent cultural history of Russia: Natasha’s Dance). However, it’s not only in the sphere of ecclesiastical architecture that the Russian influence can be seen. The relative proximity of St Petersburg can be seen in the presence of the Neo-Classical and Baroque facades on a number of important public buildings, including the castle, which houses the Estonian government.

I head into town to get my bearings and a bite to eat. The weather is great- I am able to sit outside at a street café while I have my lunch. Having digested my beer and visited a few bookshops I head over to the Institute of Archaeology which lies in an historic building behind St Nicholas’s Church, a mainly 15th century building erected by German merchants. I have a meeting with Marika Mägi, the head of the department. We go for coffee in a pub in the basement of the building – the Department even has its own back entrance into the bar. This is an innovation every archaeology department in the UK should follow! We arrange that I should come in the next day to use the Departmental library for my research. By now my early start is beginning to catch up with me so I head back to the hotel to get a bite to eat and an early night.

PICTURES TO COME!!

Archaeology and slavery

2007-03-16T14:24:00.001-07:00

As anyone who has picked up a newspaper in the last couple of months will be aware that 2007 is the 200th anniversary of Parliament’s abolition of the slave trade. As such I though it might be useful to flag up an interesting paper by Dan Hicks (University of Bristol) explores the relationship between ethnicity and slavery in post-medieval archaeology.

Olympics overspend hits HLF

2007-03-16T13:53:00.001-07:00

I’m not a great sports fan. The nearest I get to active participation is the occasional length of the pool and a beer in front of the rugby. However, when I heard that London had won the Olympics bid in 2005 I can’t deny that like many others I was pleased.

Since, then though, my feelings about the Olympics has become less and less enthusiastic in almost exact proportion to the project overspend. Certainly, the Olympics will help regenerate a deprived area of east London, and may well inspire a generation of dumpy English people (myself included) to put on an ill-fitting tracksuit and jog round the block for a bit. But at what price?

The most recent budget projection for the games is now a wopping £9.3 billion – this is FOUR TIMES the projected cost in 2005 when we won the games. This is not a slight overspend, this smack of at the very best incompetence and at the worst dishonesty when setting out the finances to the public and the IOC. Just think, if the costs have risen that much in 2 years, what will the final spending be by 2012.

Does this matter? Well, yes it does. This extra money has to be found somewhere, and one of the kittys from which the money is being directed is the Lottery Fund, which is being hit to the tune of a cool £675 million. This adds to the money from the fund which had already been promised to fund the games.

Obviously my main interest is in how this will effect the Heritage Lottery Fund. According to a press release from the HLF it's going to have £90 million less thanks to the Olympic Games debacle. £90 million is a lot of money, but what does this translate to in practical spending on our heritage. This would pay for four year’s spend on smaller community and voluntary sector grants and the funding entire stream aimed at involving young people (around 6000 projects). Alternatively it could pay for the planned HLF spend on churches and historic town centres from Gateshead to Great Yarmouth (around 1400 schemes) for four years. The HLF is currently the biggest source of funds for the historic and natural environment, and cultural heritage, far outweighing the amount spent by government. This slashing of HLF funds comes after four years of de facto spending cuts for English Heritage. There appears to be no real interest within the government about the adequate funding for heritage in the UK. The good intentions laid out in the recent White Paper will come to naught without supply of adequate resources.

Heritage in the 21st Century: White Paper

2007-03-12T10:50:00.000-07:00

The government has just published Heritage in the 21st Century, its White Paper on the future of the protection of archaeological and historic sites in England and Wales. It outlines its proposals for the way in which they hope to change the system which designates particular monuments or structures as worthy of protection. Currently, important buildings are protected by “Listing”- with Grade I Listed Buildings being the most important and Grade II being of lesser, but still significance, import. However, archaeological monuments, such as earthworks are protected by being made Scheduled Ancient Monuments (SAMS). Under the new proposals it is suggested that rather than having a separate system for buildings and monuments that they are brought together under the same system.

Other important proposals in the White Paper include the welcome suggestion that Sites & Monuments Records/ Historic Environment Records are made statutory, and that all county councils or local authorities should have access to one. It is also suggested that Class Consent (general standing consent given to carry out certain activities on SAMs) for ploughing should be removed. Until now, the subsurface areas of many protected ancient monuments have been annually damaged by continued ploughing, which often badly disturbs archaeological deposits. This would be ended under the White Paper, instead farmers would be encouraged to come to management agreements with English Heritage to protect the sites, potentially through the existing DEFRA Environmental Stewardship Schemes.

The White Paper is currently out for consultation- some bodies such as the The Archaeoligcal Forum have already responded. What do you think of these proposals?

Tomb of Christ

2007-02-28T11:29:00.000-08:00

Lots of press coverage of the claims by James Cameron (erstwhile producer of Titanic) that archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Jesus and his family. A tomb with a number of ossuaries (boxes for storing bones) were found in excavations in 1980. Six of the ossuaries were marked with the names Mary; Matthew; Jesua son of Joseph; Mary; Jofa (Joseph, Jesus' brother); and Judah son of Jesua. This, Cameron and his cohorts claim is clear evidence that this was Jesus’ tomb. Not surprisingly, the press released are being issued in advance of a forthcoming documentary on the topic directed by Cameron.

This is not the first time that a claim has been made linking an ossuary to Jesus. Several years ago a stone box bearing the name of James, brother of Jesus was found. In this case it was soon proved to be a forgery However, the press excitement at the time was just as great.

This is a potent reminder of the great popular interest in biblical archaeology (particularly in the States). There are still many people who look to archaeology to prove or disprove what is found in the bible.

In this case however most people’s critical faculties do seem to have remained intact (including in the media). Many people have pointed out how incredibly common the names found on the boxes were in 1st century AD Jerusalem.

Chimpanzee Archaeology

2007-02-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

For most of us the idea of chimps using tools tends to bring to the mind the old PG Tips adverts. However, it appears that the truth might be a little more complex. An recent article in The Guardian describes recent observations of female chimpanzees making wooden spears and using them to hunt other animals for food. (Chester students also have a look at the original article in Current Biology – available on-line via IBIS. It’s in the “articles in press” section) discovery of stone tools apparently utilised by chimpanzeesover 4000 years go raised the intriguing possibility of being able to write the archaeology of another species.

Cleopatra

2007-02-20T10:21:00.000-08:00

Cleopatra

Some of you may have recently noticed a flurry of news articles about Cleopatra being revealed as not the beauty that portrayed in legend. An image of her on a coin depicts her with a bulging eyes, a thick neck and a hooked nose. This is not a particularly new angle- a similar suggestion emerged in 2001 (thanks to Liz Dean for this reference).

The interesting thing about this is not whether or not Cleo was a beauty, but rather the way in which new discoveries or insights are publicised. In both cases, the suggestion came in advance of the opening of a new museum exhibition; one at the

VANdalism

2007-02-20T10:13:00.000-08:00

A controversial archaeological project has recently been carried out at the University of Bristol. Archaeologists from the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology “excavated” a transit van used by workers and archaeologists at the Ironbridge Museum.

This has caused some raised eyebrows- is this useful archaeology or a waste of time? Can archaeology tell us something new, useful and important about something as mundane a 1991 van?