Post-War Recycling

I’ve been working on a site in Somerset recently, where we’ve been uncovering traces of medieval quarrying and later farm buildings. We’ve been using a barn as our tool store, and looking up at the ceiling, I noticed that a second storey has been fitted using wooden planks, and that some of these planks bear traces of their former life, as part of railway freight wagons during the Second World War. If any readers recognise any of the codes, I’d be very interested to know what they mean.

Heritage Scholars, Professionals and Volunteers on the New Year Honours List 2010

I thought it would be interesting to see how historians, archaeologists and museum professionals fare on the New Year Honours List for next year. This may not be a complete listing, as for some of the community services awards, no further details were listed at my source, The Guardian. It would be nice to see some more community archaeologists honoured, but nonetheless, congratulations to the award recipients.

Knight Bachelor

Mark Ellis Powell Jones, Director, Victoria and Albert Museum. For services to the Arts.

Professor Paul Anthony Mellars, FBA, Professor of Prehistory and Human Evolution, University of Cambridge. For services to Scholarship.

CBE

Dr Sian Eluned Rees, Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Cadw, Welsh Assembly Government.

OBE

Professor Michael Charles Prestwich, Emeritus Professor of History, Durham University. For services to Scholarship.

MBE

Peter Geoffrey Challinor, Curator and manager, Anson Engine Museum. For services to Industrial Heritage.

Arthur Graves Credland, For service to Maritime History.

Professor John William Stanley Hearle, For services to Archaeology in Mellor, Stockport, Greater Manchester.

Mrs Elizabeth Ann Heeley, For voluntary service to Somerset Rural Life Museum.

Dr Claude Doumet Serhal, Special assistant, British Museum. For services to Archaeology.

Royal Historical Society Bibliography

I’ve recently learned that the RHS Bibliography is to be replaced by the Bibliography of British and Irish History on January 1st 2010. A key part of this change is that access will no longer be free. This is a real shame as the RHS have been providing an invaluable resource to researchers, particlularly those outside of academic institutions, and of course this bucks the trend I’d like to see of increased open access to academic material. Unfortunately, the bibliography London’s Past Online will also close.

For archaeology researchers, there will still be the Council for British Archaeology’s British and Irish Archaeology Bibliography

A pot sherd in situ

The pot sherd above struck me as quite a fancy-looking piece, so I thought I’d share it here. It’s a piece of Westerwald stoneware, which is a salt-glazed stoneware produced in the Westerwald region of modern-day Germany, in particular from the late 16th Century to the 19th Century. Westerwald ware can be used to make a number of kinds of vessel, particularly tankards, mugs, jugs and chamber pots, and is more commonly white with cobalt blue decoration. The Museum of London’s very helpful web page on Westerwald stoneware states that manganese purple details such as on the sherd above appear after 1650. The sherd in the picture is from a site in Somerset in south-west England, but the pottery can be found as far afield as North America and Australia.

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