eBay and Antiquities survey

I received a message from an undergraduate Anthropology major at the University of Rhode Island who is conducting a brief survey of people’s attitudes to the sale of antiquities and eBay, asking if I could post a link. So here’s the link

The sale of antiquities   is an incredibly important and emotive issue (in fact, last week Lord Renfrew amongst others were discussing the treasure aspects of the Coroners and Justice Bill in the House of Lords).  Readers interested in a simple overview of the subject might be interested in Siorna McFarlane’s article on Collectors and Museums on WikiArc.

Contributors wanted

Transverse section through ancient lynchets, by Matt Law after Evans 1978, 121

WikiArc is project designed to create a series of simple, accessible reference articles covering the broad range of topics that fall within the discipline of archaeology. The site works by accepting members on application, who form a community of peers able to edit and amend articles, under the guidance of a small number of specialist editors. Currently we are looking to build a collection of great articles explaining different feature types that might be encountered on an archaeological site (today I started the ball rolling with a brief article on lynchets), and would welcome article submissions or offers of membership as a referee. Please write to me on matt [at] wikiarc [dot] org or comment below if you are interested in helping, explaining a little about your background and expertise.

Sir Mortimer Wheeler on public archaeology

Cover of the Pan edition of Still Digging, from Wikimedia

I’m currently reading Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s 1955 autobiography Still Digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary’s Notebook (mine is the 1956 reprint by Readers Union, so the page numbers might be a little off), which has been an enormously interesting read for a number of the great man’s insights into the condition of archaeology in the early to mid-twentieth century.

Wheeler (1890 – 1976) had been an Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Director of the National Museum of Wales, Keeper of the London Museum, and Director-General of the Archaeological Service of India, as well as establishing the National Museum of Pakistan and the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London (my own alma mater). He also brought archaeology to a wider audience in the UK, hosting three television programmes: ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?’ (1952–60), ‘Buried Treasure’ (1954–59), and ‘Chronicle’ (1966), and was named British ‘TV Personality of the Year’ in 1954.

I thought one particular passage of Still Digging deserved sharing at it shows Wheeler’s admirable attitude to the relationship between the public and archaeology. At this stage (1937), he and his wife, Tessa, are leading excavations at the Iron Age hillfort Maiden Castle, in Dorset:

“All this was, in our view, to the good. Our more conventional archaeological friends sometimes raised their eyebrows and sniffed a little plaintively at ‘all this publicity of Wheeler’s’! But we were not deterred, and we were right; right not merely because this same public was incidentally contributing in gifts no small partof our considerable funds, but because I was, and am, convinced of the moral and academic necessity of sharing scientific work to the fullest possible extent with the man on the street and in the field.” (Wheeler 1956: 102)

Reference:

Wheeler, R.E.M., 1956: Still Digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary’s Notebook (London: Readers Union)

For the Sake of the Worms

A short article I wrote about Charles Darwin’s experimental work into the effect of earthworms on soil, and their impact on the process of stratification, has been published in the September/ October issue of British Archaeology along with a short piece by BA’s editor, Mike Pitts, about excavations this summer at Abinger Roman villa which found Darwin’s trenches. Full details about the magazine (which includes a fascinating piece about William Cunnington, and a feature on the Thames Dicovery Programme which I have blogged about before) can be found here.

Festival of British Archaeology

Festival of British Archaeology Event in Yeovil

I just wanted to post a little note to publicise the fact that the Festival of British Archaeology 2009 is now running. The Festival is a fortnight-long series of events all around the country which involves local authorities, museums, community archaeology groups, archaeological contractors, and national bodies, especially the Council for British Archaeology.

Yesterday was Yeovil’s event, consisting of displays from South Somerset District Council’s Community Heritage Team, the Yeovil Archaeological and Local History Society, South Somerset Archaeological Research Group, a number of local metal detectorists, and Somerset’s Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which was very well attended, and included a chance for children to make temporary mosaics using real Romano-British tesserae. For the rest of the fortnight, Somerset County Council have organised a community excavation on playing fields at nearby Ilchester, which was a very important Romano-British town.

Full details of the events nationwide can be found on this website Those of you who use Twitter might like to follow related posts using the hashtag #fba09

A resident alien snail from Sawston, Cambridgeshire

In this post I talked briefly about finding the mid-twentieth century introduction Hygromia cinctella Draparnaud 1801 in Yeovil in Somerset. Back in May I was digging in Cambridgeshire, when I came across these (modern) shells of another introduction, Cernuella virgata Da Costa 1778:

Cernuella virgata Da Costa 1778

C. virgata is a somewhat older resident than H. cinctella, it’s probably a Romano-British introduction (Davies 2008: 178). It is a calciphile, which means it only lives where lime is abundant, and can be found on moderately dry and open sites such as grassland, dunes, and sometimes hedgerows (Davies 2008: 13, Kerney and Cameron 1979: 178).

The impact of Roman occupation on our flora and fauna is worth a mention. As well as a number of other snails, species introduced during the Romano-British period include the brown hare (also found on the site at Sawston), peacocks, and pheasants. It’s possible that the black rat was a Roman introduction (Davis 1987: 193), and in the past some have claimed that the fallow deer was also introduced at this time, although evidence that a breeding population was established in Roman times is lacking (Sykes 2004: 79).

I noticed recently that there is a forthcoming book called ‘Introductions and Extinctions in the British Isles’, edited by Dr Naomi Sykes (who has studied fallow deer extensively) and Professor Terry O’ Connor, and which will also include a chapter on land and freshwater Mollusca by Professor Paul Davies, who wrote the textbook Snails: Archaeology and Landscape Change (Oxbow, 2008), which I reference rather a lot on this blog. I’m not entirely sure when it will be published, but I’m looking forward to reading it.

References

DAVIES, P., 2008: Snails: Archaeology and Landscape Change (Oxford: Oxbow)

DAVIS, S.J.M, 1987: The Archaeology of Animals (London: Routledge)

KERNEY, M.P., and CAMERON, R.A.D, 1979: A Field Guide to the Land Snails of Britain and North-west Europe (London: Collins)

SYKES, N., 2004: The Introduction of Fallow Deer to Britain: A Zooarchaeological Perspective. Environmental Archaeology 9 (1), 75-84

Shell Architecture Up Close

In my opinion, molluscs are quite impressive looking things, and that is no less true of the smaller snails as it is octopi and giant clams. Vertigo pygmaea Draparnaud 1801 is a holarctic land snail often found in dry calcareous grassland and on dunes, but never in wooded areas. Inside the mouth of the shell are a number of folds known as ‘teeth’. which are very useful for identifying the species. V. pygmaea can have between four and seven of these teeth, but only one on the upper (‘parietal’) margin of the mouth.

Unfortunately I didn’t include a scale with this photo, but the background is my fingertip. V. pygmaea are seldom more than 2.3 mm high.

Shell of Vertigo pygmaea

A gift from the garden

Left valve of oyster from the garden

You may recall in this post I wrote about finding animal bones and an oyster shell in my parents’ garden when I was young. I still have the bones, but alas the oyster shell is lost. Well, visiting my parents’ garden this weekend, I noticed the shell pictured above in one of their flowerbeds.

The shell is part of the left valve of an oyster (Ostrea edulis L.). Although it is somewhat broken and abraded, I can tell it is a left valve because of the way it curves, right valves are generally flat.  The hole in the shell may have been formed by another animal boring through the shell during the oyster’s lifetime, for example the aptly-named oyster drill Ocenebra erinacea L., a gastropod which preys on oysters and other shellfish.

I like these chance encounters with the past. As Grant (2002: 19) notes, although now considered a luxury commodity, oysters were once an inexpensive and common foodstuff even among relatively poor people. Oyster consumption became incredibly widespread in the UK during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially as the development of the railway network enabled fresh stock to be carried around the country quickly (Yonge 1966: 156, Stott 2004: 64), however oyster stocks declined steadily towards the end of the nineteenth century(Yonge 1966: 157-8).

It could be that this is the same oyster shell I recovered from that garden wall construction cut all those years ago, unfortunately I have no way of knowing.

References:

Grant, A., 2002, Food, Status and Social Hierarchy, in Milner, N., and Miracle, P., (Eds), Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Stott, R., 2004, Oyster. London: Reaktion

Yonge, C.M., 1966. Oysters. Second Edition. London: Collins

Open Access Archaeology Repository (or a start at least…)

Last month, I posted a call for links to open access archaeology journals, books and conference proceedings on the web for a new repository at WikiArc. Thanks to those of you who answered, we now have links to a fair number of resources, although I’m sure the list is very far from definitive so please do keep the submissions coming, either by comment on this blog or by e-mail to the address on the WikiArc links page.

In an attempt to make this resource more useful, I spent this morning playing with Google’s Custom Search Beta, and have created a small custom search widget which searches the resources linked from WikiArc. The search box is near the top of the page on WikiArc. You can also search from the link below:

WikiArc Open Access Archaeology Search

Please do let me know if you encounter any issues searching. I hope you find it in some way useful

Community engagement in California

Entering California from Oregon on I-5

I recently spent a few weeks in northern California, and while I was there encountered an example of an attempt at communicating the past that I thought deserved some note.

I’ve idly musing for a while now on how the historical activity on a development site can be communicated to the site’s future users (be they workers in an office, shoppers at a mall, or residents of an apartment block), so I was quite interested by what I saw at Bay Street, Emeryville. Bay Street is a mixed-purpose retail/ residential/ entertainment development, built close to the site of the Emeryville Shellmound, a massive midden deposit created over the course of 2,500 years, and which contained numerous inhumations. The shellmound, which was said to be up to 40 ft high,  was levelled in 1924 (information from this site). The modern Bay Street development features a number of nods to the Shellmound, from the more figurative -such as a 50ft high metal arch that is supposed to represent the shellmound , to the more literal, such as a display of replica artefacts from the excavations on the site outside the restrooms. It was nice to see an attempt to represent the past use of the site, and even better to see (from my point of view at least) the replica artefacts, which although less architecurally impressive than the other elements, at least present evidence of the past without any interpretative distortion. Outside the restroom was an inpired choice of location too, as I’m sure we’ve all spent some time waiting around outside in those usually bare corridors while somebody uses the facilities. I dream of a day when permanent exhibitions of the site history are part of the planning conditions in the UK (and the USA or anywhere else for that matter).