Local archaeology – continuing as usual

How are local societies flourishing ?

With the continung predominance of developer funded archaeology, and the rise of Community Archaeology, how far are the traditional local archaeological societies managing to succeed?

The 13th Congress of Independent Archaeologists looked at these questions.

The 2009 Congress for Independent Archaeologists took place at Buxton, Derbyshire on August 29th – 30th 2009, and despite the weather, was a great success. The conference was held in conjunction with the Derbyshire Archaeological Society, in the magnificent surroundings of the Dome in Buxton itself, a huge structure that for many years was the largest unsupported Dome in the world.

Setting up for the PowerPoint presentations

The Congress set out to demonstrate that independent archaeology was continuing as usual. We began with the survey of archaeology in the home territory, in Derbyshire itself – Barbara Forster who is the wife of Keith Forster our Secretary, is herself the Hon Secretary of the Derbyshire Archaeology Society and was keen to showcase the work done in the county.

The Archaeology of Derbyshire

We began with an overall talk on the archaeology of Derbyshire by Clive Hart who, having retired from his position with the Tyne and Wear Museum, has returned to Derbyshire where he is now devoting himself to a survey of the Medieval towns and villages of Derbyshire – 38 already completed but many more still to come. He reminded us of some of the wealth of archaeology in Derbyshire, starting with the Palaeolithic sites in Cresswell Crags, admittedly on the border; then the henges at Arbor Low; the great wealth of Neolithic sites up on the moors; the Roman towns of Chesterfield and Buxton and then coming through to the Medieval sites that he was himself researching.

The High Rick Lead Mine

He was followed by John Barnett who has a professional job working for the Peak District National Park, but also plays a key role as an amateur archaeologist with the Peak District Historical Mines Society, which investigates mines in the area and indeed further afield. It is the leading society on historical mining in the world. Their main work has been on the High Rick Lead Mine which set out with high hopes in 1834 to dig a deep shaft through the volcanic layers to reach a rich vein of lead ore underneath. They had two steam engines, a 70 inch double cylinder engine to work the pumps and a smaller engine to work the winding gear. However, they never found the ore and in 1852 they went bust and the equipment was sold off which meant that the engine houses were demolished. A photo taken earlier in the 20th century when the chimneys and remaining buildings were still standing helped them in their researches, and they have been able to reveal the outline of this ambitious but doomed project.

John Barnett, talking about his excavations at the High Rick lead mine

This is the sort of investigation that would probably not be undertaken by professional archaeologists. The mining enthusiasts are those who love dangling on the ends of ropes, penetrating down into lost mines. But when at the end of their project they applied to the Lottery Fund for a grant to make the site safe and to put up iron signs for the visitors, they were rejected by the Lottery Fund as not being sufficiently ‘communitarian’. Their interests are worldwide, anyone may join, but special interests are needed and therefore this does not count as being community. They eventually got their grants, but from the local councils and from the parks Authority.

The Ticknall Potteries

We then heard of two other local projects, both which had resulted in the publication of a book. The first dealt with the Ticknall Potteries. The Ticknall Pottery industry was unusual in that it flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries when the Medieval pottery traditions were ending and before the Staffordshire Potteries swept the world. The Ticknall Potteries which had operated on a small local scale in the Middle Ages, suddenly expanded producing Cistercian wares, imitation Bellarmines, Midland Purple, and lead glazed slip wares. They experimented with the Cream wares with which the Stoke-on-Trent potters eventually swept the markets and the Ticknall potteries faded away. But in the intervening period they became one of the major producers in the Midlands and they were penetrating as far as Leicester. It is a bit of a mystery as to why the pottery should suddenly come into prominence when it did, and why it should eventually fade away. But this is an important local study and copies of the book are still available from the authors via their website sales@ticknallpots.co.uk , price £24.99.

Janet Spavold talking about the Ticknall potteries

But their splendid research appears to have been done almost entirely from documentary sources. They seem to have done a certain amount of fieldwalking in the village of Ticknall itself, but basically all their work is done from documentary sources and particularly from probate inventories. Thus they have all the right chapters on markets and prices and the distribution network, but it is all done from probate inventories. What a pity that they did not use archaeological evidence, looking at some sample collections for rescue excavations. One must ask why was this not done. Is it that we as archaeologists are frightening away researchers, who therefore prefer to stick with documents?

Don Henson in full flood, explaining how archaeology can be brought into the curriculuim.

We then had a splendid diatribe on archaeology and education by Don Henson, the Education Officer of the Council for British Archaeology. Education is constantly changing these days with the government always putting down new curricula and he pointed out some of the opportunities for introducing archaeology into the teaching of history and citizenship. I must admit I was rather appalled by the way that the whole curriculum appears to have been politicised — I am sure that my views on English history and the rise of the Industrial Revolution would be completely unacceptable. But it seems that the way is wide open for teachers to promote their own agenda providing it is politically correct.

Archaeology in Scotland and Kent

Albert Daniels has been excavating a Roman building in Kent.

And then from Kent, Albert Daniels gave the latest update of his work with the Maidstone Archaeological Group who have been digging some Roman buildings at East Farleigh. Here the main discovery was of a small three-room structure with a veranda around the outside, a building too small to be a villa and probably no more than an outhouse. However, by digging under an embankment where a lot of top soil had accumulated, he was able to find traces of five different buildings on three different alignments. His methods might be condemned by some as being old fashioned as they consisted mostly of small trenches following up possible walls, but is this not how most professional archaeologists spend their days while working under PPG16 proving that some site is free from archaeology?

Geophysics and the Resistivity meter

The final section for the day was devoted to geophysics and the work of the TR/CIA resistivity meter. Although the meters are no longer being produced thanks to EU regulations, Bob Randall who designed and produced them, has not been idle and has been producing additional devices which will be incorporated in any upgraded version. The first was a set of probes for producing what he calls pseudo sections, that is sections showing the depth of any given ditch.

Two speakers have avidly taken up this work and showed what could be produced. Bob Smisson gave a fascinating talk on his work with the Berkeley Castle Project run by Bristol University which is trying to find the Saxon nunnery that is said to precede Berkeley Castle. He had been producing deep sections with the resistivity meter and everywhere that he produced something of interest, excavation proved that he was right. And then there was John Oswin on the Blacklands project. This began as the excavation of a very early Roman villa but they have now carried out resistivity surveys over 150 hectares.

Bob Randall and his new multiplexer

Finally Bob Randall himself gave the final address of the day, talking about his new multiplexer. This replaces the usual two probes by four probes, which enable one to work twice as fast or to do a precise narrow range survey combined with a broad range survey at the same time. Bob is still hoping to produce an updated version of his resistivity meter if only he can find suitable funding and this new multiplexer will be a built-in feature of the revised version. He is quite willing to do the main research work for free, this is after all his hobby. But there are considerable overheads involved, for instance there is the problem of the computerised CPU (centralised processing unit). He could continue to use the old one but this is now obsolete and cannot be upgraded. However, the latest version will need to be re-programmed and this means buying a new re-programming programme and ancillary equipment, and this story will be repeated throughout. He needs a grant of £20,000 to see him through, though an initial grant of £5,000 would certainly get him started.

Unfortunately however, this fails to tick the boxes of any of the usual funding sources. There is no 'community' involved – at least not until the work is completed and the machines are sold. And he is a private individual who needs the money to fund his own private researches, even if ultimately they will result in great public benefit. But all this shows the danger of concentrating our research funding on so narrow a basis. What archaeology desperately needs is some outside private funding that is not constrained by the usual politically correct guidelines. Is there any private research fund out there that will take a punt on this valuable research?

With that, the lectures were concluded for the day, but it was not the end of our activities for we then went on to the Congress dinner in the grandiose surroundings of the Palace Hotel, which was one of the grandest hotels in the days when Buxton was a great spa and spas were fashionable ways of becoming healthy (why is it that spas have gone so much out of fashion in Britain? They are still fashionable in Germany and one feels that all the emphasis of alternative medicines, immersion in nice warm salty water would be a very stimulating alternative to conventional medicine.) But the dinner was followed by a splendid after dinner speech by Lisa Westcott, the Editor of Current Archaeology who told us how it came about that an American was editing a British magazine, and concluding with a pitch for new articles from the independent sector which are always welcome in Current Archaeology.

Field Survey for Local History

The second day of the Congress began with a talk by Tom Welsh who was pushing his new book “Local History on the Ground” which is published by History Press (formally Tempest, price £16.99). Tom, who despite his name, is actually Scots, is by training a geologist specialising in soils and he is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at Northampton University. Tom, who is often finds himself at war with professional archaeologists, said that the book was originally called “Archaeology and Field Survey” but this was a casualty of professional archaeology because whenever it was sent to professional archaeologists to be refereed, they always recommended rejection because it was unorthodox. He therefore re-titled it “Local History on the Ground” to appeal to local historians and it has now been published under this name. But it applies to archaeologists every bit as it applies to local historians, arguing that archaeology should best be done when set in a landscape context.

He said that the current orthodoxy was that field survey should be ‘objective’. You select the area to be researched and you then do fieldwalking over the whole area, doing every bit equally thoroughly, so it is then possible to produce statistical analysis of the relative occupation at each spot, at each period.

This approach was not wrong, he said, indeed he said it was extremely valuable, but his own subjective approach was equally valuable. He preferred to begin by doing topographical and documentary research and then targeting his field work, choosing survey methods to fit the subject. He took as an example Church Mearns, near Glasgow, where a charter named a specific field and it was not possible to make sense of the landscape round Church Mearns unless this field was first identified – which he had done.

Mellor Archaeological Society

He was then followed by John Hearle from the Mellor Archaeological Society, who is the doyen of the art of getting community grants for archaeological societies. John has now retired from his original job of being professor of Textile Technology at Manchester University (a rather important professorship at Manchester University!). But in the dry summer of 1995 he and his wife Ann looked out of their window in the Old Vicarage at Mellor and saw crop marks in the field opposite. They called in the local professional archaeologist who laid on a dig, three diggers in the first year, thirty in the next year plus three supervisors from UMAU (The University of Manchester Archaeology Unit). They found that they needed £25,000 a year to operate on this scale so they applied for and received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. He then got the bit between his teeth and the next grant of £455,000 for three years enabled them to employ a full-time education officer and funded much of the work done (UMAU has recently been closed down — though this is another story. The senior staff have since migrated en mass to the University of Salford just down the road.)
But the society has recently excavated Shaw Cairn with great success, finding a necklace of sixty amber beads. But they are now turning their attention to industrial archaeology and they have got a big grant of over £700,000 to investigate a major textile factory that burnt down in the 1850s and is now concealed under woodland, though trial excavations have suggested that the remains of some of the textile machinery still survives under the trees. This is an outstanding example of how it is possible for a local group to raise considerable funds from the Lottery Fund. It took a lot of work to put in the applications, but it was worth it in the end.

Tony Rook digs Romans

Tony Rook telling snme graveyard tales of a Roman execution cemetery

He was followed by the inimitable Tony Rook from the Welwyn Archaeological Society whose jokes become ever older and even funnier. He offered us some Graveyard Tales from the very unusual Iron Age to Roman cemetery he had been excavating in Welwyn. The site of Roman Welwyn has been covered by modern housing so it is only possible to excavate in the few bits of remaining open ground. He spotted an abandoned, unused set of allotments, and in the typical fashion of a local archaeological society, he managed to find a hole in the fencing where he slipped through unnoticed and managed to dig there for ten years until he was discovered, and the area is once again allotments rather than excavations.
Here he began finding inhumations set in a chalk pit. They dated to the early Roman period but this was very unusual because in the early Roman period you didn’t bury people, you burn them. However, eventually about a dozen burials were recovered, many of them buried face down. One of them was called a ‘Mafia execution’ because he had been told to dig his own grave and he dug it too big in order to gain extra time. But he had then been executed by being knocked on the back of his head, and he had then fallen in face down with his legs projecting out at the back. There were nearly a dozen burials in all and English Heritage had done some radiocarbon dating and had shown that the dates varied from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD. They were all inserted in a chalk pit which had been kept open throughout this period: was this an execution site?

Llangynidir

Then after coffee we heard from Jan Bailey about the history of the Llangynidr History Society. Llangynidr lies on the road between Monmouth and Brecon, and the society had been set up in 1982 by the retired postmistress and the WEA and there were now 25 members.

Jan Bailey of the Llangynidir Society, now our Hon Assistant Secretary

They began by doing local history, and the postmistress recalled the work of her father who was in the habit of getting up every day, walking 3 miles to collect his pony, then going round on his pony for his rounds, coming back, delivering the pony, walking 3 miles home, having his breakfast, and then repeating it all over again for the second delivery! They then did a graveyard survey and looked at old farm buildings and wrote a book entitled Parish Past. They persuaded a hundred people to give £100 each for this book, and printed 2,000, which they sold for £10: as a result, they ended up with a £6,000 profit on the whole exercise.

Ian Clark, of the Brightwell Baldwin Archaeological society

They began off all properly by doing surveys and documentary research. Brighton Baldwin is a village 9 miles east of Oxford on the Icknield Way which would have been an invasion route for the Vikings, and there was an Anglo-Saxon charter giving some of the land to the Bishop of Worcester who would have provided a major landowner to protect them against the Viking raiders. But they soon realised that if they wanted to really involve the community in archaeology, that meant digging. So they have been involved in three digs.

The first dig was not very successful, so they moved on to Cadwell farm where there was a field named the Monastery Field, but they soon found that this had been renamed by the farmer and was originally the Holme Field. They received a grant of £10,000 to excavate this, of which £6,500 was spent on a resistivity meter, as the TR/CIA meter was no longer in production. This enabled them to do extensive resistivity survey in advance of excavation. There had been extensive humps and bumps of a mediaeval manor house in this field, but this had all been deliberately cleared by the farmer 20 years ago. They excavated and found the bottom of the moat, but nothing remained of the Manor house.

They therefore moved on to another site to find the lost Manor of Brightwell Park. Here there was an isolated dovecot which was dated to the 16th century from its unusual cruciform shape, but their resistivity survey revealed the remains of a substantial structure adjacent to it: there appeared to be a long approach road, then the house structure, and the other side an elaborate Tudor style garden. They began by digging the gatehouse and found a burnt area that would appear to correspond to a fire recorded in 1788. Following this, three people were accused of stealing wine from the wine cellar: two got off, but the third was sentenced to six months hard labour. But clearly the wine cellar was extensive, as they found over 13 kg of broken wine bottles on the site.

The Community History and Archaeology project has clearly been a great success. Ian Clarke said that the success of the society depended on a critical reappraisal of the situation in the village, then carrying out a large area geophysics, having a good project design, and then carrying out Time Team style excavations on the areas that appeared to be the most fruitful. He might have added that in order to make a local society thrive, digging is an essential component; and when you dig, you must find things. When their first excavations clearly didn't work out, they quite rightly scrapped their project design and went on to the second and then the third site. This appears to be more fruitful. The secret of being a good entrepreneur is to be a good butcher – especially of project designs.

How the Treasure act works

The final lecture was by Peter Clayton on the workings of the Treasure Act. Peter Clayton had been invited way back in 1992 to act as an expert adviser on the valuations of objects of treasure and of coins, and he was the only adviser who advised on both coins and antiquities -- all the other advisers advise on either coins or antiquities.

Then in 1996 came the Treasure Act which only came into operation in 1997. The first valuation they had to do was of the Hoxne hoard, which consisted of both coins and antiquities and was eventually valued at £1.75 million. He was the only expert to value the whole hoard but his valuation came out very close to the total valuation of the other experts.

Peter Clayton reveals the secrets of how to value treasure.

He is now a member of the Treasure Valuation Committee and they have been recently valuing the new Harrogate or Vale of York Viking hoard from Yorkshire. This consisted of both coins and other small objects, some 600 of them and the silver gilt bowl in which they contain. The coins could be valued easily enough but the silver gilt bowl, of which there are only 6 parallels, proved contentious. But eventually the whole hoard was valued at £1.1 million.

They worked closely with the FLOs, that is the Finds Liaison Officers of whom there were now at 42 posts, whose main job is to encourage finders to make voluntary declarations. Bt whereas under Treasure Trove, the Treasury had to find the money, it is now the duty of museums who acquire the objects to find the money. There was often a problem when the finders bring in outside experts to challenge the view of the panel. Sometime anonymous valuations were offered, but these were always rejected, and sometimes the experts were not experts in the objects under consideration. But it was difficult to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

He hoped the new Coroners Bill will make a big improvement in that there will be one coroner for treasure for the whole country, so there will be a certain consistency, unlike the situation at present, where there are a number of local coroners who tend to reach very different conclusions.

And with that, the Congress came to an end. It was my duty to try to summarise everything and then to thank those concerned, notably Keith and Barbara Forster who had arranged it all and made it run so smoothly. Thanks to them it was a memorable Congress.

Andrew Selkirk

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