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Dr Ron Wilcox at
http://www.archtext.co.uk/onlinetexts/britains_past/index.htm


   < Main Page

                                 Chapter 1

                        Introduction to Archaeology
                                      
   What is archaeology? The usual definition is that it is the study of
   the past of humankind using material remains.

   This is certainly true for all the earlier periods of archaeology, the
   prehistoric periods, where no other evidence survives, but in the
   historic period, although purely material remains can illuminate areas
   which the documents cannot reach such as the peasant world or times
   when historical documents are few and far between like the post-Roman
   period, it is necessary for texts to be brought into the picture by
   the archaeologist. A good example of an area where they often form the
   largest archive is that of medieval trade.

   The earliest archaeological study in the period referred to as the
   Lower Palaeolithic starts off by looking for the time and place of the
   origin of humankind and the evidence used is the remains of the human
   body itself, fossil bones, in fact. Finds of these bones in Africa in
   particular are helping to document the sequence of various types of
   early human species. So far there are a great many gaps in the
   sequence but the rough outline is pretty well known up to the
   appearance on earth of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens.

   Once this point is reached archaeology attempts to document the
   development of human societies.  To be an effective study it must
   include all aspects of human activity and necessarily the
   archaeologist must be prepared to deal with a great range of topics
   embracing all human life at a particular period. This seems a pretty
   tall order and it is clear that, above all, the archaeologist must
   possess a far-ranging and open mind. This account starts with the
   Mesolithic period which is viewed as a prelude to the appearance of
   farming in the Neolithic.

   Archaeology is a scientific study and like all sciences must, in the
   words of Newton 'enquire diligently into the properties of things' and
   'to proceed more slowly to the explanation of them'. Note the 'proceed
   more slowly'.  It involves formulating hypotheses, testing them, by
   experiment if possible, abandoning them if they are undermined by new
   data, formulating new hypotheses and in this way gradually approaching
   closer to the ultimate truth. Not that it will ever be possible in
   most cases to reach that objective.

   But hopefully each new hypothesis and each new discovery will help to
   enlarge our knowledge of the past and it is this accumulation of
   innumerable tiny bits of information which is more likely to
   illuminate our understanding than a dozen tombs of Tutankhamun or
   Sutton Hoos or other spectacular finds. This is why the contribution
   of all who are interested in the past is so important whether they be
   professional and qualified archaeologists, historians or amateur
   investigators.

   The more we know about our past, the better we shall understand our
   own species and ourselves. Thus the study of the past has relevance to
   the present and is not just an esoteric inquiry for a select few.

   During the time when it has been on earth our species has been
   presented with challenges that were just as severe as those that face
   us today and in most cases, in terms of scientific knowledge and
   understanding, it was far less fitted to face them than we are now.
   Changes in climate, disease and technology all presented (and still
   present) challenges that our species overcame and these processes
   offer us lessons that can be applied in general terms today.

   Whether these considerations inspire many students to take up the
   study of archaeology is a moot point. Most are probably driven more by
   curiosity or by the romance of entering into a dialogue with objects
   and people from a different age. But these reasons are just as valid
   and the bottom line is probably a common interest in people.

   It is wise to remember that Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most
   charismatic archaeologists of the twentieth century and certainly one
   of the most inspirational, warned us always to remember that we are
   digging up the lives of people and they should be in the forefront of
   our minds rather than the artifacts and structures that we are
   unearthing. And, of course, Alexander Pope's dictum rings in our ears
   'The proper study of Mankind is Man.'

   Every scientific study needs mechanisms for obtaining data that it
   studies. In the case of archaeology there are three of them. One is
   excavation and this is the one that is foremost in the popular mind.
   Another is the study of features that are on the surface of the ground
   and are themselves survivals of the past. The third is the use of
   documents that help to provide a chronological sequence in historic
   times.

   A common question about the use of documents is 'Why do we need
   archaeology in the historic period as well? Are they not sufficient to
   provide a picture of the past?'

   The bald answer is 'No'.  On the whole historical documents are not
   concerned with  ordinary people but governmental activities or with
   great people. There are exceptions to this statement for some
   government papers record the results of inquiries into the economic
   and financial conditions of the country and these can sometimes
   include tbe concerns of ordinary people.  But most are writs or
   letters addressed to important folk or are concerned with property.
   The Church too generated many documents and one can learn a good deal
   from them about ecclesiastical institutions like monasteries and
   cathedrals but little about ordinary people.

   And that is what is missing - details about the lives of ordinary
   people. What sort of houses did they live in, what sort of food did
   they eat, how were they dressed? These and many other questions should
   be put if we are to have a proper picture of the past and there is
   little on paper to help us. It is rare to find anything outside the
   pages of fictional works such as 'The Vision of Piers Plowman' by
   William Langland written during the fourteenth century that describes
   something of the life of ordinary people.  Another example, a little
   further up the social scale, is Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'.

   So, it is to fill in the great vacuum of the prehistoric and earlier
   post-Roman periods (the latter time the historians call the 'Dark
   Ages' because of the lack of documents) and to investigate the
   condition of ordinary folk at all times that archaeology exists.

   To give a couple of concrete examples of life without documents.  All
   that we know of the social structure of the Bronze Age period comes
   from excavations. And what would we know of life in an Iron Age
   hillfort without excavations like those at Danebury in Hampshire?

   But documents can be an invaluable aid to archaeology in later periods
   and the partnership can produce some outstanding pieces of work.  To
   take an example from a Medieval excavation: in the Brook Street
   excavation in Winchester during the 1960s Martin Biddle investigated a
   segment of the medieval city by taking down the stratigraphical
   succession a century at a time over the whole site. Available to the
   excavator were the Winchester records for the period that identified
   the householders throughout the centuries in the tenements under
   excavation and allowed the identification of the very people whose
   church, homes and possessions were being uncovered.

   Out of this study of archaeology has grown a practical science with
   methods that are more or less customary, a jargon which is sometimes
   illuminating but more often obscurantist, at least, if you take it
   literally, and a body of thought that is continually changing as old
   ideas are dropped and new ones are added.  In this way archaeology is
   no different from any other science. Like other sciences it is often a
   battleground for opposing ideas so that its practitioners, even if he
   or she is only a bystander in a particular argument, must be prepared
   to make judgements and to take up a position and be ready to justify
   it with sound archaeological arguments. Those interested in
   archaeology are often called upon to defend it against people who
   question its validity and usefulness in the modern world, an argument
   that it often raised when sites of archaeological significance are
   threatened by development.

   During the last forty years `New Archaeology' offers a different
   approach which endeavours to explain how things happened in the past
   rather than simply describe what occurred. This could clearly be more
   interesting than cataloguing events but is difficult to do with
   inadequate data which is the situation in many areas of the
   sub-systems that are studied like trade, ritual, food-supply and so
   on.  Much discussed recently has been the role of gender and the
   theory that conventions, rituals and the environments created by
   people themselves shape their expectations and views of the world.
   This study depends to a large erxtent on hypothesis aided by
   borrowings from disciplines like geography and sociology.  Processes
   of cultural change are taught in universities to third-year and
   graduate students as Processual Archaeology.

   Out of this archaeological practice have grown a number of supporting
   professions, all of which have originated and blossomed in the
   twentieth century. In fact archaeology has come of age, developing
   from a hobby for the English leisured classes during the nineteenth
   century into a major area of intellectual inquiry in all countries of
   the world today which commands in favoured nations considerable
   financial resources.

   Today, in museums, as lecturers in universities or on television,
   archaeologists are familiar figures and have been so for some time but
   they also appear in quangos like English Heritage, CADW, the Scottish
   Heritage and the National Trust and in local government where they are
   usually installed in planning departments. A newer development is the
   formation of private-sector archaeological units who bid for contracts
   to undertake archaeological investigations on behalf of developers and
   others. A good many of these contracts are for 'rescue' excavations or
   other work in advance of building developments.  As more of these
   excavations or surveys are carried out, a substantial body of
   archaeological evidence accumulates that Richard Bradley describes as
   `grey' literature - reports that rarely see the light of day in
   standard archaeological publications.

   Full-scale rescue excavations were very common in the 1970s and 1980s
   but are far less common today in this age of declining intellectual
   curiosity.  In almost every case, time and money are both limited for
   rescue excavations which turn out to be more in the nature of sampling
   exercises than properly-planned investigations.  Very often only a
   small part of a site is uncovered and that is sometimes only partly
   excavated.

   Nowadays it is usually only museum and university archaeologists who
   have the opportunity of carrying out research excavations that can be
   long term, a season of work being undertaken each year over a period
   of years. It can probably be argued that, in contrast to rescue
   excavations, research excavations alone justify the time and
   expenditure spent on them.

   All excavations should begin with a number of questions that are to be
   answered and the excavations should be directed to answering them. If
   they are not likely to do so then the excavation should not begin or
   if they can only be answered with a good deal of expense the excavator
   should think twice about the benefits the answers will contribute to
   the store of archaeological knowledge.  More time and money has been
   wasted on unnecessary and ill-directed excavations than on all other
   archaeological work put together.

   And the main problem with rescue excavations that often makes them
   little more than a gesture is that it is often very difficult to
   formulate the proper preliminary questions when the archaeologist is
   not clear about what site he is excavating or even, in some cases,
   whether there is any site worth digging there at all.  It has been
   suggested that rescue excavations should not be attempted unless the
   nature of the site is well-defined beforehand and it can be reasonably
   assumed that it will be worth the effort. Money provided by the
   developers for an investigation that is not considered worthwhile by
   professional archaeologists could go into a fund which could be used
   for research excavation elsewhere.

   Apart from these sorts of excavation jobs, archaeologists are employed
   in heritage and conservation posts where they are concerned with
   presenting monuments to the public in as good a condition and in as
   informative a manner as possible. This is not just monuments in the
   landscape but ships like the Mary Rose, mines like the Roman gold
   workings at Dolaucothi in Dyfed and simulated sites like the York
   Viking Coppergate. We are only just beginning to address the question
   of how to present places of archaeological importance to the public
   and a lot needs to be learnt in this direction.

   In the past, on the whole, archaeologists have singularly failed to
   provide this information. Perhaps a number of people who already had
   antiquarian leanings were attracted to castles and monasteries and
   wandered round them with the impenetrable blue guidebooks or,
   nowadays, their inadequate modern replacements but the bulk of the
   population only visited them when it was too wet to go down to the
   beach and came away massively unimpressed and uninformed.  Today it is
   a little better and a few monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury
   attract very large numbers of people whose feet are literally wearing
   away the very sites that they have come to see. So a new problem
   presents itself.

   New ways of displaying popular monuments need to be developed either
   by accommodating people on the actual site in a different way so that
   the damage they do is minimised and still allow them to obtain a
   proper knowledge of it or by displaying the monument in films,
   dioramas or virtual reality or by simulation of the site by full-sized
   models. This last may well be the most expensive way but is surely the
   best way. The French have done it with the Lascaux painted cave in the
   Dordogne that has been closed because of visitor degradation.

   It is an area where archaeologists need to work with graphic and
   computer program designers and structural engineers in programmes that
   literally re-create ancient monuments. This is perhaps a heretical
   idea to many traditional archaeologists but a new populist initiative
   of this sort must be taken if we are to safeguard our heritage and
   also fulfill the very important duty of explaining our ancestral and
   social lineage to ordinary people.

   As we have said above, basically, archaeological investigation aimed
   at the recovery of data is either done by excavation or by fieldwork
   or by a combination of both. Excavation is by far the most expensive
   and as a consequence a good deal of investigation today is carried out
   by fieldwork with or without the help of small evaluation trenches.

   Excavation is done on a known site in order to provide detailed
   information about the activities that had been carried out there in
   past times and also to find out about the environment that had
   prevailed on the site.  Evidence from this type of investigation can
   be concerned with the following:


   1. Building plans or layouts of settlements, industrial areas (e.g.
   pottery manufacture, metalworking or some other activity).

   2.   Artifacts - pottery sherds, metal objects, glass, coins etc.

   3.   Sequence of phases or activities on the site.

   4.   Past environment(s).

   5.   Skeletal and other burial information.

   6.   Agricultural, technological or other processes.

   7.   Detailed chronology.

   8.   Diet.

   9.   Religion and worship.

   10. Relationship with other sites either in the vicinity or further
   away.


   As can be imagined, the amount of work necessary to examine the finds,
   do the laboratory tests on soil samples and other samples collected
   from the excavation, evaluate the stratigraphical relationships and
   write up the data into a final excavation report can be very
   time-consuming and expensive and almost always takes far longer than
   the actual excavation. This is described as post-excavation work and
   nowadays is carried out with the aid of computer graphics, computer
   design programs and word processing on an archive stored on a computer
   database.

   Fieldwork involves study of historic features in the landscape and
   their relationship to each other. The relationship of crop-marks to a
   neighbouring deserted medieval village is an example of this sort of
   task.  Investigation can be pursued in various ways. Fieldwalking is
   one such. This consists of methodical searching of a ploughed field
   for artifacts, usually pieces of pottery, rarely anything more
   exciting, although on Roman sites coins are likely to be found. On
   some sites the presence of a spread of pottery could mark the location
   of a settlement or, if in vast quantities with burnt and reddened
   clay, it could identify a pottery-manufacturing site.  Similarly, iron
   slag could signal the site of a bloomery for iron-making.

   Having got a collection of material and made sure that its position is
   securely marked on a map, the various ceramic bits and pieces have to
   be washed.  Most is pottery sherds but in later periods pieces of roof
   tile and floor tile may be there also if it is the site of an
   establishment superior to a peasant village. A Romano-British villa, a
   medieval monastery, or perhaps a manor house would have had such
   durable materials used in its construction.  The pottery, too, may be
   of better quality than that found on the sites of peasant houses and
   perhaps include imported wares.

   An analysis of the pottery will give some idea of the date of the
   site.  Not a precise figure, of course, but a slot within the
   archaeological sequence. Most coarse pottery was made by its users
   during the prehistoric period or in local kilns later on so that if
   you do regular fieldwalking you will soon get to recognise the
   commonest ware which was the local product.  Perhaps the site of a
   manufacturing site is already known. If not a very useful and
   interesting project would be to try to locate it.

   Fieldwalking of this kind is a good way of locating sites but of
   course they and their positions must be recorded and this information
   passed to the County Archaeology Officer for inclusion on the County
   Sites and Monuments Register that lists all archaeological sites in
   the county with their location and information that is known about
   them.  An excellent  way to get to know the archaeology of your area
   is to consult this archive which is open to the public and make
   yourself familiar with the information marked on the relevant map of
   your area.  It is usually located in the Planning Department of County
   Hall.

   Of course for this type of fieldwalking you usually need a ploughed
   field but it is possible to obtain data from a pasture field.  Farmers
   in the past who had remains of prehistoric monuments, say, or
   Romano-British villas or Roman forts on their land would usually not
   attempt to cultivate those fields if the remains were too much of an
   obstruction for their ploughs to tackle but would use it for pasture.
   If the remains were of masonry buildings they often would not trouble
   to remove them but allow them to become overgrown and eventually be
   covered by woodland.  So today it is possible to find humps and bumps
   in permanent grassland or tumbled walls in woodland that are remains
   of ancient sites.

   These could be easier to interpret than spreads of pottery in ploughed
   fields for the humps and bumps may form patterns that are
   characteristic of particular establishments. A villa site, for
   example, the ditch that surrounded a Bronze Age barrow, the banks of a
   henge or the outline of a cursus are all features that can be
   recognised at once. And there are many examples of this sort of
   immediate recognition.

   Sites of this sort can very often be best seen from the air by aerial
   photography. At times of low light when the sun is rising or setting
   in the summer or at midday in the winter, the shadows thrown by almost
   imperceptible bumps or depressions in the ground can show up and
   outline features that would be invisible from the surface. If the
   bumps are the remains of banks and depressions or the remains of pits
   or ditches and if they are in a grain field they will make their
   presence plain by the unequal height of the crop or by the contrast of
   colour in the ripening grain above them.  Over the banks that usually
   have a stony foundation the ploughsoil is thinner and contains less
   moisture so the crop growing there will ripen sooner and be stunted
   and a lighter colour than the crop growing over the ditch or pit which
   has its roots in the deeper and moister soil of the fill and will grow
   taller and ripen later.

   Our countryside has been peopled by farmers since the beginning of the
   Neolithic period, some 6,500 years ago, and it is not surprising that
   there are hundreds of thousands of sites out there waiting to be
   discovered by one technique or another and a substantial percentage of
   these sites belong to the prehistoric and Romano-British periods.

   If you watch Time Team on Channel 4 television you will have seen
   geophysical surveying being carried out. Different machines are used
   to detect magnetic anomalies underground or employ electrical impulses
   to locate buried pits and ditches. These are fairly recent additions
   to the fieldworker's armoury and although beyond the pocket of the
   amateur fieldworker and requiring tuition in the interpretation of the
   results, they have become a relatively speedy way of locating buried
   features. Walking up and down a field with one of these machines is
   probably the most boring piece of fieldwork that can be undertaken but
   it is likely that they will become more and more common.

   All this investigation can be classified under the heading of
   Landscape Archaeology, for the results of work in a particular area
   can be marked on a map and help to build a picture of the prehistoric
   or Romano-British landscape. The foundation of the map will be the
   shape of the land, the physical features including the hills and
   valleys, rivers and streams and perhaps woodland which can be
   identified as ancient.  On this will go the second layer of the
   palimpsest, the sites of the archaeological periods, the Neolithic,
   the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Roman periods that were imprinted
   into the landscape more or less indelibly as a background to the later
   settlement.  Some of these will perhaps continue in use during later
   periods, like the Roman roads that continued to be used as routes
   later on in the medieval period.

   By doing this in your own area you will begin to get an eye for the
   archaeological landscape and become more adept at recognising sites or
   locations where sites are likely to be found and where it would be
   worthwhile looking.

   It is always important to record your researches or discoveries. A
   notebook in which you can jot down notes and rough in the odd sketch
   is an ideal way to do this and it can very usefully be supplemented
   with a camera. Carry a section of a large-scale map with you and mark
   the location of your discoveries on that too.

   Perhaps it is proper to say that the important difference between
   excavation and fieldwork is that fieldwork is non-destructive. All
   excavation is destruction - you can't go back and excavate the same
   site in the same way twice but with fieldwork the evidence is still
   there after you finish and you can have the pleasure of pointing out
   your discoveries to your colleagues.

   More attention nowadays is being paid to chronology. Archaeologists
   used to be accused of not bothering about dates and this perhaps is
   still vaguely true about the prehistoric archaeologist but the Roman
   and later-period investigator cannot take that sort of cavalier
   attitude because he or she is always conscious of the historian at
   their elbow.  Historical dates form the framework, few and far between
   still perhaps in the pre-Romano-British period but available and they
   should be used whenever relevant. Dates before the Neolithic period
   were often quoted as BP (Before Present) while later dates were given
   as BC (Before Christ) or (nowadays) BCE (Before Common Era).  In the
   Common Era (after the turn of the first millenium) the letters AD
   should be placed before the date, meaning Anno Domini (in the year of
   Our Lord) and this refers to the Gregorian calendar.

   It is sometimes difficult to fit archaeological data into the
   historical framework or associate it with an individual historical
   group. The problem is also evident if you try to work from the history
   to the archaeology. What archaeological evidence for instance is there
   on the field of a famous assembly like Runnymede where the Magna Carta
   was sealed?  Or where is the famous site on the south coast where
   Julius Caesar built his first fort?  Difficulties like these sometimes
   prompt historians to dismiss archaeology as a non-historical
   discipline and archaeologists to disregard historical information.
   But in fact in the Romano-British period and later, there is no way in
   which the two disciplines can exist independently.  They are two
   horses in the same team.

   Carbon 14 determination (radiocarbon) is the commonest archaeological
   dating technique. Determinations are given BP (before AD1950) followed
   by a plus or mInus figure, a statistical one, meaning that there is a
   two to one chance that the correct figure lies within that bracket.
   (1250+/-150BP is an example: the time bracket is between AD1100 and
   1400) This lack of definition or of precision is why it is important
   that several samples are used. In recent years the determinations have
   become increasingly accurate as different laboratories have refined
   their techniques. In the early days of Carbon 14, its inaccuracy was
   such that it was difficult to use in the post-Roman periods.  But
   nowadays it is accurate enough to use with some confidence and
   nowadays can almost routinely be depended upon to give a result to the
   nearest 25 years. This is particularly true when it is calibrated with
   the dendrochronological sequence that converts the radio-carbon years
   into calendar ones.

   For Carbon 14 determination, samples of uncontaminmated organic
   material from the particular context that needs dating must be
   provided to the laboratory.  The technique depends on measuring the
   proportion of remnant radio-activity in the sample that can only have
   imbibed radio-activity from the atmosphere if it was once alive as a
   tree, plant or other breathing creature. Since the demise of the
   organism, the amount of radio-activity in its remains has decayed at a
   known rate. Measuring the amount of radio-activity left provides an
   estimate of the time that has elapsed since its death.  However, it
   should be mentioned that some recent questions about the levels of
   radiocarbon in past atmospheres have led some to question the method.

   Timber in many circumstances can be dated by dendrochronology. This
   depends on a sequence of tree-rings garnered from many trees in a
   particular region that display the variations in climate ezperienced
   in that region during their individual lifetimes. Each tree-ring is a
   growth ring added annually to the girth of the tree and the thickness
   of the ring is an indication of how good the growing season was in
   that year. A succession of rings in excavated timber can be matched
   with part of the master seqence for the region and so can be allotted
   to its chronological position.

   Apart from those major aids to dating, the archaeologist has to depend
   on the layers of material (contexts) that he or she is digging through
   in an excavation. This stratigraphy provides a sequence with the
   latest context at the top and oldest at the bottom. If there are
   artifacts in each of these contexts then the archaeologist has a
   sequence of relative 'dates' so-called because the chronological
   sequence of these objects is quite clear. But unless he/she can assign
   an actual date to one or some of them, the chronological sequence is
   not tied down, it is 'floating.'

   That is why the modern archaeologist assigns so much time to studying
   objects and placing them in a chronological progression with
   associated dates (if any) to as many of the steps in the sequence as
   possible. This is called a type series. One datable object in an
   assemblage of objects from a particular context is invaluable because
   it can provide a date for all of them.  This is called dating by
   association.  Or perhaps it is possible to identify an object with an
   identical one from some other excavator's datable context.  If so,
   this is called cross-dating.

   Of course, during the Romano-British period and later, coinage is a
   help in dating as well as an aid to documenting the tentacles of
   internal and foreign trade. But use of coins for dating is limited
   because a coin may have been in circulation for a considerable period
   of time before it was lost so the sophisticated use of coins as dating
   tools is really a job for an expert who can assess the amount of wear
   and take other variables into account.

                                                                  o

   Most people think that the first human-like creatures appeared in
   Africa around five million years ago. Amongst these was mankind's
   earliest ancestor. About one and a half million years ago we have
   evidence of the movement of Homo erectus, one of mankind's forebears,
   out of Africa and into Asia. A relative of this species must have
   migrated into Europe. Later, the Neanderthals became the predominant
   inhabitants of the continent and they were joined by Homo sapien
   sapiens, our own species, who migrated from Africa and lived in Europe
   during the last Ice Age. To them we owe the brilliant culture that
   produced the cave paintings and the ivory figurines. During this time
   and at other times in the past, the English Channel did not exist and
   people wandered into southern Britain, following their hunter-gatherer
   way of life. We have very little evidence of these people but the
   earliest evidence of them has been discovered in river gravels at
   Pakefield near Lowestoft in Suffolk. Flint implements were found in
   sediments that date back 700,000 years at a time when the climate was
   relatively mild. Later, H.sapiens sapien seem to have come in larger
   numbers and have left traces of their life-style in caves like those
   at Cheddar in Somerset.  The latest research by Stephen Oppenheimer
   suggests that the first people into our lands (not yet islands at the
   early period between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago) came from the region
   that nowadays is south-western Europe and so we shared a common
   heritage with people on the Continent like the Basques and spoke a
   language akin to theirs. He suggests that the Celtic tongue was
   brought to the British Isles by the first farmers.


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