Drop-out

Drop-out

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there were tales of building sites where Roman mosaics and structures were routinely machined through without any effort to record them taking place. In response to this destruction, which was mainly due to urban redevelopment, new road building, and the growth of quarrying that went with them, regional committees were set up across the country. These developed into what became known as the Rescue movement from which active organisations derived. These were set up in museums, in local government offices, as independent trusts or, occasionally, in universities. Funding was precarious, mainly coming from the Department of the Environment’s Ancient Monuments Inspectorate.

These organisations created a role for people who would be willing and able to carry out archaeological fieldwork, which was another way of saying “digging”. The people who would do this work became known as archaeological “volunteers”, a title which suggests that he/she might have done it for nothing. They didn’t have to, the volunteer was paid a subsistence amount of money, and would find short contracts by writing off for a pamphlet from the Council for British Archaeology, the CBA Newsletter, which listed all the organisations looking for people to help with their excavations that season, along with lots of additional information and addresses of organisations.

The technician job that I had started at the end of my apprenticeship, was paying me £18 a week, and volunteer pay was upwards of £11 a week. It would be quite a drop in income, and difficult to justify to myself, but I didn’t smoke, drink much, or drive a car. Accommodation was also usually provided as part of the job, and travel costs reimbursed. Could I do it? I wasn’t sure.

People who applied for these excavations had a mixed bunch of skills, and didn’t necessarily have to have any archaeological experience at all. Some were from overseas, and were working to pay for travelling the world. Some would go on to be archaeologists while others just enjoyed a season and went on to do what life had otherwise intended them to do.

I could see that in choosing to work in archaeology I would be taking a cut in pay, but I sent off for a copy of the CBA newsletter anyway, and looking in that, found three excavations that I thought I would try applying for.

Replies to my letters from the directors of those excavations arrived. Two of them invited me to join excavations as a volunteer, but the third one was from a Curator at the British Museum who took one look at my qualifications and training in electronics and decided he needed somebody who understood electricity to supervise his Resistivity Survey at the excavation he was directing at the Neolithic flint mines, Grimes Graves in Norfolk.

The British Museum Curator directing the excavation was Mr G de G Sieveking. He offered me a short, 8 week contract on a very good rate of pay, £50 a week, and I accepted.

I seriously, and repeatedly, wonder if I would have had the courage to take the leap out of the electronics world into archaeology if Mr Sieveking had not offered me £50 a week to manage his resistivity survey. No matter how miserable I felt in the job I had at that time, I would have found it impossible to justify the move to myself or anybody else. 

When I called him to confirm my willingness to work on the excavation, he granted my request for a lift from Norwich Station to the site, but stated that I would need to prepare myself to camp for the duration. 

I had never camped in a tent. I wasn’t at all sure I liked the idea, but that was what was required so I set about putting together everything that I, or the rest of my family could think of to make it happen. My major first step was to buy myself a big new tent. The other things I was going to need, included a sleeping bag which I had already, and a primus stove which emerged from an attic store, along with a nesting set of cooking pots and clip-together cutlery that had been issued by the army to my grandfather in the First World War. All this and more, was put into a travelling case that was big enough that it could have carried at least one corpse, ready for my train journey to Norfolk. 

I have no idea how I got from Bournemouth Central Station to Norwich Station, across London with an enormous suitcase to manhandle. I’ve never been very big, and my weightlifting abilities involve a lot of thought, but only limited muscle. The thought of undertaking a journey of the sort now, leaves me quaking at the very idea. I’m sure that British Rail was running a better operation then, but even so...... 

Mr Sieveking met me and my enormous suitcase at Norwich Station as he had promised, and drove me to the campsite which was about a mile from Grimes Graves, and close to the village of Santon Downham. 

Mr Sieveking had received permission to park his digging team at a public picnic site beside the river there. This is a broad grassy area between the river on one side and Thetford Forest on the other, broken up by clumps of bushes, into clearings in which a couple of tents could be pitched with comfortable separation. I selected a clearing of short grass between low bushes in which to pitch my tent, and being an early arrival was available to assist with the setting up of the toilet tent that the campers would soon be needing. By the time that this job was due to be done, other arrivals had put their own tents up, and we all set to the task. Putting up the toilet tent involved, initially erecting the tall canvas tent and charging the big bucket that would go into it with Elsan fluid and water, ready for use. Following that a suitable spot was found for digging a hole, well away from likely tent pitching sites. At the chosen location a square hole was dug about a metre square and up to a metre deep. When excavated, a plank, or two, was put across this hole to prevent people and animals accidentally falling in. As the toilet was used and the bucket in the tent filled up, it would be carried here for emptying and the contents dumped in the hole to be covered with a layer of soil. 

I don’t remember a rota being set for elsan duty, but I seem to recall that people would keep filling the bucket until it was practically overflowing, and then somebody would say “Oh fuck” and carefully lift the over-filled bucket out, struggle across the grass and empty it. 

At the end of the excavation, after the last emptying the hole would be backfilled completely. The Elsan fluid we used then contained formaldehyde which preserves fecal matter - so excavating the pits we dug for our toilets should be interesting for future archaeologists. 

I am not sure that I had ever to this point in my life cooked food for myself. My mother once gave me a book of recipes that contained recipes requiring, at the minimum, a couple of hobs, an oven and a grill to cook meals like beef casserole. She hated cooking for a family, and I hadn’t acquired even the basics really, so it was clear that among all the other learning experiences I was to have, feeding myself was to be an additional priority. 

There were some fifteen to twenty people camped on the site. I don’t remember there being a public house nearby, and if there was we didn’t use it much. The tents were randomly laid out with good distancing between them, and we enjoyed swimming and wading in the river on our days off. 

After work every day we would return to our tents to make evening meals, and towards seven or eight o’clock we would start to gather at the bonfire that had been set up at a reasonably central area of the campsite surrounded by several logs to perch upon. Some people would go into the forest behind us finding suitable wood for burning and others would be lighting the fire, and coaxing it into life. 

Gradually most people would be gathered around the fire chatting and drinking tea and coffee, or very occasionally beer. Not everybody was there to excavate for the full twelve weeks, so our population fluctuated, and we enjoyed the novelty of meeting new people and sharing our bonfire with them. As Grimes Graves is a flint mine site, a lot of people were keen to try working the stuff, and the knapping floor beside the fire was our chance to practise and talk flint. Several of us would spend some of our evening, while the light held, knocking rocks together. 

About a month in from the start of the three month excavation the “Dutch Miners” arrived at the camp site. It must have been a Tuesday as people were at the campsite during the day. That was the one day off we had. These were a close knit group of men, with their families, who had been made redundant as coal miners in Holland, and had taken up the archaeological excavation and recording of mines as a specialist interest, pursued in their spare time. The combination of mining knowledge, and excavation and recording skills was a valuable commodity for the director of this excavation. There was a secluded area of clear ground at the end of the campsite, invisible to the main camp site, and it was there that the newcomers elected to camp. As we sat in and around our tents, enjoying time off that sunny afternoon, we heard them banging, crashing, and hollering in the thick forest behind us. The ricochet of timber being struck followed, twigs breaking, more hollering and then more crashing through the woods. 

Eventually the site went quiet again, and we decided it was safe to be a bit curious about our new neighbours. We sidled along, as if we weren’t being nosey, and had a furtive look at their clearing, finding that they had erected a tall pole, perhaps four metres high, and laid out their tents, on a radius around it, each tent the same type, a bit like boy scout tents, equispaced and oriented like the spokes of a wheel around the pole. It looked a bit regimental to me. 

*

The Grimes Graves Neolithic Mine is an area within the Thetford Forest in which the Forestry Commission do not plant trees for harvesting in respect of its status as an ancient monument. This clearing in the forest is pock-marked by the filled-in mouths of 433 mineshafts, pits, quarries and spoil dumps which survive as earthworks covering an area of 7.6 hectares. The pitted ground is cloaked in grass that doesn’t get cut while all around the edge of the area tall straight pine trees densely packed together mark its limits.

A sloping stratigraphic layer of geologically formed flint rises here to the surface. It would have been horizontal once but the movements of the earth’s crust made it, and the chalk that formed it, buckle. Further natural erosion cropped the chalk to make the land surface more or less horizontal and as a result this rising flint deposit was exposed. 

The flint is not a layer within the chalk, but a level at which flint has formed in large discreet lumps called nodules. At the west side of the area of mine shafts flint was to be found on the surface. As the layer at which flint developed dipped down shallowly from the surface into the chalk, small shafts were cut down to it, but as it went deeper the shafts that were required in order to reach it were necessarily wider and to a greater depth. The deeper mines are some 10 to 12 metres deep with tunnels radiating out from the shaft bases, and linking underground with enlarged cavities, called galleries, where the nodules of flint that were found by the Neolithic miners have been removed. 

There were actually two layers of nodules in the natural chalk, one above the other, with only a couple of metres separating them. The upper layer though just wasn’t of good material to work with, and was ignored in favour of the deeper one which was a black, glass-like substance having amazing tool making qualities. We were told that this quality may have been enhanced for the Neolithic craftspeople by having been freshly mined out of the natural chalk, in which it had formed. 

Mining is thought to have taken place on this site since the Palaeolithic period, but reached its height in quantity and complexity during the Neolithic period with the earliest evidence of activity from around 3000 BC. Mining took place using antler picks, and whole nodules were lifted from the flint bed. These were broken down into smaller pieces on the site, but production of finished tools appears to have taken place somewhere else, a place that Mr Sieveking, directing the excavation, would have liked to have found. 

On the first morning of working there I was given a lift to the site in a car, but after that I made my own way, on foot. I walked along the peaceful forest rides, long straight tracks that divide the plantation into blocks of trees. Out of habit my eyes were focused on the ground, looking for flint, enjoying the solitude and the sounds of birdsong and the wind in the trees. 

We worked for six days a week, our day off being a Tuesday. The reason for this being given that it was the quietest day and fewer visitors were likely to come then while the weekend was more likely to be busy. I’m not sure if being there for visitors was to invite their interest, which seems unlikely, or to discourage them from trashing our excavations in our absence. 

The first two weeks of my work at Grimes Graves were devoted to the resistivity survey which is a method of mapping features below the surface using the relative electrical resistance of soils to create a contoured impression in the form of a map. The results derived are subject to some degree of interpretation, but they can be very useful in providing preliminary data on the presence or absence of archaeological features without digging a hole. 

The equipment used is in theory, not unlike an ohmmeter, a resistance measurement device, used in testing of electrical circuits. In practise it is completely different. 

In an electrical resistance meter (ohm meter) two probes are used. These probes are attached to either end of the component whose resistance value is required. A fixed voltage is then applied across the component , and the current, which is proportional to the resistance, drives a readout of the resistance measured. 

While the resistance measuring equipment I was familiar with from my electronics work had two leads, the box of tricks I was presented with for the survey had four. These would connect to four electrodes inserted into the soil in a linear formation. The first and last (outer) terminations would deliver a current of electricity across the soils underneath the surface of the ground. The second and third (inner) electrodes would sense what electrical activity the soils were permitting. 

The reason for using the four probes was that separating the live circuit (outer pins) from the sensing (inner pins) circuit eliminates the contact resistance in the current circuit which is between metal and soil, and can be quite high, and would otherwise give a misleading result. 

This arrangement of circuitry is called the Wenner Array, and Mr Sieveking was using it in very early days when research into effective systems still had some way to go. It had its shortcomings, and at Grimes Graves was probably not as valuable in terms of results as was hoped, but our efforts would have contributed to future developments in the science which became known as geophysics. 

I was employed to supervise this resistivity survey of a large area of flat ground next to and west of the earthwork pits that were obviously the tops of abandoned mines.

The resistance of the soil would be affected by a variety of factors, and would not be an absolute value, but might change from day to day, or hour to hour as moisture levels in the ground changed. The lowest resistance values would probably be found in wet deposits, while the best insulator, and the highest resistance will be dry, air filled and stony deposits. Chemical differences may also affect measurements, and obviously structures and ditches should show some variation. 

The actual equipment we were to use, comprising the Wenner array hardware, consisted of a plastic box with a meter, a couple of switches, and four terminals on the top of it. Fragile leads of some considerable length were connected to the terminals on the box, and these in turn were terminated with metal pins, like tent pegs, that would be pushed into the ground to make a measurement. 

This box reminded me of something I might have bought as a kit, from the classified advertisements at the back of Wireless World, a high profile electronics magazine, popular among makers of home electronics, radios and amplifiers at the time. It looked as if it might have been put together in a basement of the British Museum, and in all probability, it had. 

I was presented with the equipment with which I was to lead the survey, but there was no manual or any other information that would help me to understand whether it was working properly or not. My electronic experience was of no real value, and the purpose of the role I had taken up was to organise the survey, which required almost no technical knowledge whatsoever. Furthermore I was surrounded by several people who were obviously more able than me in that area, and who might well have had a slight resentment at me having the better paid job. 

My understanding at the time was that we were surveying the level area West of the main field of deep pits, and that this was an area which might have had evidence of shallow pits as the flint layer was surfacing, or had surfaced there. 

Before we were to start surveying, the long summer growth of grass over the ground had to be cut down with scythes. A survey team then measured the ground with tapes creating a grid of wooden pegs hammered into the ground, with a nail in the top, ten metres apart, from which tape measures would be laid for guiding our survey probes. 

Starting the survey we laid out the measurement tape between the first two ten metre pegs and pushed the pins into the ground at one metre Intervals Pressing a button on the console activated the current through the soil and the needle on the meter of the box settled on a reading for the resistance, which was recorded. The first pin in the series of four was then carried along the tape to be repositioned one metre beyond the fourth pin, a rotary switch on the console clicked around so that when the current travelled through the soil it passed between the outer pair of pins again. 

The repeated rotation of wire over wire as the system moved across the field resulted in an interesting cat’s cradle of leads from time to time, which required some serious untangling. 

I tried to make sense of the readings we recorded but could not. It seemed to me as I laid out the meter readings on a scale plan of the grid we had worked that the electrical response was quite flat. It probably was, and possibly later seasons developed better systems for this type of survey. 

It was no surprise to me then, that after only a very short time I was removed from the supervisory role Mr Sieveking had initially taken me on for. It was a very kind and sensitive sacking, and in fact it was quite a relief. Also, I was very grateful that in removing me from the staff, he was willing to keep me on as a digger. 

The next week, after my demotion, I was sent off with an accomplice to collect core samples in the forest. Surveyors had been out in the forest marking points on the same ten metre grid that the resistivity survey was mapped on. They had left bamboo sticks with eye catching tassels on them at places where cores were to be extracted. These samples were intended to be analysed for substances that might indicate the presence of habitation and/or manufacturing sites. 

We were to take a coring tool and Kango (petrol-driven) hammer, find the flags that identified the grid points, and hammer the coring tool into the ground to collect the soil sample. The woods were dense and dark. Just carrying ourselves and our equipment through the deep undergrowth was both challenging and exhilarating.

I only spent the one week in the forest. The fun jobs were shared out evenly. By then an area had been opened up for excavation, and I joined the core team digging flat ground away from the pitted area of mine shafts. 

It was hard physical work under bright blue skies. Days of heavy trowelling, filling wheelbarrows, and pushing the spoils from our excavations up plank runs on mountainous heaps of soil. Some of us were used to this sort of effort, others not. The wear and tear on our hands was quite extreme, we had no gloves and most people enjoyed complaining about their honourably come by blisters while they were sitting round the camp fire in the evenings. 

The main tool that caused the damage, fairly obviously, was the trowel. Like knife and fork, digger and trowel go together. The digger without a trowel is lost. 

It is such an important part of being a digger, spending eight hours a day crouched down or kneeling, scraping back soil, that the tool becomes an extension of the hand that holds it. As time and the digging goes on, the handle of the trowel begins to darken, and any coating protecting the wood flakes off, and the blade begins to tarnish. As the months of daily digging go on the blade begins to wear, and after a while everybody can recognise their own tool by the shape of the blade that the long hours of digging have eroded. The shape of the blade says something about the digger, and the way he digs. At any one time few blades on site will have the same pattern of wear. Someone who is only or mainly right handed will have a very different shaped blade to someone working with the left hand, or those who use both hands interchangeably. 

This tool, the trowel, was never designed for excavation, but has been adopted for the job by archaeologists. It has blade edges for slicing off thin skims of soils. It also has a point for stabbing the ground, but it was an early rule of the use of the Trowel amongst those that I worked with that stabbing was unprofessional, and to be avoided. (it didn’t stop me stabbing though, just not when anybody was looking). 

This tool is properly, a bricklayers trowel, designed to mix concrete on a board and lay bricks to build walls. It has a long diamond shaped blade, about six inches long when new and is fixed to its wooden handle by a cranked extension off the blade and a tang into the wood. 

Sometime back in the fifties or sixties, (or possibly before) when archaeology was becoming slightly more common, diggers found that the trowels they were able to buy in their hardware shops were often breaking when they were using them. Gradually one manufacturer was found by trial and error to produce a tool that could withstand the punishment of archaeological digging . This was WHS, and they made the trowels that all diggers used in the seventies. 

That didn’t stop trowels breaking though. When mine cracked and fell apart it was looking terrific, a good curved edge signifying a long and active life, mostly right handed, but not always. I looked at the place across the base of the diamond where it had broken and went to a hardware shop to replace it. Instead of getting the standard shape I found a bucket trowel. It had a wider blade, which tapered at a much greater angle than the standard bricklayers trowel. It was around 3 inches square, and 5 sided. This had the advantage that the weak area at the tang end of the blade was impossible to break, and its increased general width meant that I was at less risk of shredding my knuckles with over enthusiastic digging, a problem I definitely suffered from. 

The trowel still wore down amazingly quickly though, so the next time I thought a spare trowel would be a good idea, I bought an even bigger one at six inches long. I was doing a lot of digging, but never broke one of these. 

Some people managed to retain a trowel in good order to practically a stub less than two inches in length. From my perspective it seemed to give the owner a badge of honour, as if they had been digging longer than anybody could remember. 

We seemed to be digging a quite deep area of degraded chalk soil, some sixty to eighty centimetres down. In spite of the depth there appeared to be little evidence of mining activity, at least in my recollection. 

Then, a couple of weeks after I had joined with the main excavation team, Mr Sieveking came over to where I was digging on the surface excavation and asked me to go and help the Dutch miners. 

We had been told that these men were coal miners who had been made redundant in Holland, and who had used their skills and knowledge of working safely underground to excavate Neolithic mines somewhere in Europe. 

Mr Sieveking had asked them to come over to Norfolk to excavate and record some of the underground workings here. 

The deep mine shaft they were to work on had originally been dug out some four and a half thousand years ago, and re-excavated quite recently. When the shaft of the mine was cleared of fill, a concrete cap had been built over it, and a ladder installed for access. The original re-excavation of the shaft had not explored the Neolithic tunnels that had been cut, radiating out horizontally from the base of the mine shaft, so the miners were here to excavate at least one of those.

There was a crane at the surface, above the mine shaft, with a big bucket that was loading excavated spoil on to the back of a lorry to be taken away from the site. In the concrete cap was a big square hole with hinged covers. Through this the big bucket had to be passed, to be lowered down to the bottom of the shaft and filled with excavated chalk. The bucket would just about fit through the hole in the concrete cap, but they needed someone up there handling the bucket to stop it hitting the concrete sides, as it was lifted or lowered through. That was to be my job. 

One of the days when I was directing the bucket Mr Sieveking called me over at the start of the day and said in urgent emphasis “A journalist is coming today from the local paper. Don’t talk to him. Under no circumstances are you to talk to him”. So the journalist came and he called out, and I did what was asked of me. I stoutly ignored him, but he took my photograph and it was published in the local paper, the Norfolk Times. 

Later, as the volume of waste material being removed from below in the mined tunnels reduced I went down and worked at the entrance to the galleries as the miners excavated them, pulling on a rope to draw out a sledge that they had filled, of chalk rubble from the gallery they excavated, and loading up the big bucket myself before climbing back up the ladder and guiding it out topside to be loaded onto the truck and taken away. 

The miners were a tight knit group. There were half a dozen of them and they had brought their families with them. At the campsite they kept themselves apart, behaving as if they were on holiday, which in a sense they were. Their English wasn’t that great, but we communicated well enough, and they taught me a handful of Dutch words. 

As an assistant without the safety knowledge they had I was privileged to be down the mine with them at all, and the distance they allowed me to follow them down the tunnel into the gallery was understandably restricted. 

One day though, they called me further into one of the passages with a sense of suppressed excitement and invited me to go deeper in, alone, to look at a gallery they had just reached. 

I was wearing a safety helmet as I shimmied along the tunnel which cannot have been much more than 70 or 80cm wide, and about the same high. I was sure that if I were not wearing the helmet my head wouldn’t keep banging the ceiling. I was carrying a torch as I wriggled along, and in it’s light I could see a scree slope in front of me as the roof belled out into a wide round cave perhaps two metres wide, with a domed ceiling one and a half metres high. As I scrambled up the scree slope before me the going became more difficult. Raising my head up into the gallery, and bringing the torch to direct its light across the rubble chalk floor I saw that against the far wall of the gallery a deer antler had been left propped up there, as if whoever left it there might just pop back in a moment, pick it up and start picking his way into the chalk again. 

These, the picks the Neolithic miners used were the only tools that survived. They were the antlers of red deer, and repurposed in the hands of the miner were used to break away the chalk that encased the flint. They must have had other tools that scooped up the debris of their excavating, and contained it so that it could be carried away from where they wanted to be working, but these did not survive. 

Analysis of the antlers found in mines across Europe and beyond suggest that during the excavation of an average mine roughly 140 antler picks were blunted and discarded in the completion of the work. Also, as the left and right hand antlers were used by right and left handed people respectively, the average presence of 14 right handed antlers suggest that just 10% of the workers were left handed. 

Mr Sieveking was clearly the kind of archaeologist that Michael Ridley had advised me about when I was a youth. He was a Curator at the British Museum, and spent his life immersed in research into prehistoric archaeology, and in particular the early development of flint technologies. Grimes Graves was a major excavation for him and the museum, as he directed five seasons at the site from 1972 to 1976. 

He instigated the use of the emerging technologies of the time with the support of the Scientific Laboratory of the British Museum. Embarking upon projects to trace the extent of mining at the site, obviously including resistivity surveys, but also radio carbon dating of antlers, phosphate analysis to locate potential habitation sites near the mines, and trace element analysis of the flint to define geographical contexts for the varied forms of the material, envisioning how the trade and migration of peoples with flint axes evolved. 

He asked the archaeological miners from Holland to use their experience and technical ability, to assess the comparative effectiveness of antler picks relative to more recent tools, and to collect accurate statistics for work rates in the mining context. 

Further examples of his willingness to use experimental archaeology included recording the distribution of flint flake waste on a floor around a skilled flint knapper, research that has proved invaluable for many sites since the work was done. 

Gale de Giberne Sieveking (26 August 1925 – 2 June 2007) excavated at Grimes Graves, in association with Ian Longworth between 1972 and 1976, He was aided in technical matters by, among others, Professor Rory Mortimore, an engineering geologist, and the Dutch “Felder brothers” who had excavation and recording experience in opening the Rijckholt St Geertruid Neolithic Flint Mines near Maastricht in Limburg

                                                                  

I wasn't planning to go back to Grimes Graves for the following season. I rather thought that my presence then wasnt much wanted, but in the spring i recieved a letter from Mr Sieveking saying that the Dutch miners had asked him to ask me to work with them again this season. It was nice to be wanted, especially as I had had that awkward start with Mr Sieveking last season, and it removed from me the arduous (for me) business of deciding where to dig next.

When I arrived at Grimes Graves for my second season I found that everything was a bit different. We were no longer camped by the river, but in forest rides not far from the cleared area of mine shaft pits, and a marquee had been set up with chairs, tables and cooking equipment which was to be the mess hut.

I arrived, expecting to be working with the miners but instead I found that I would be working as part of a team of young offenders from a borstal. This prospect did not appeal to me, so with apologies all round I cried off working with the miners and joined with the above ground diggers instead.

As the work at Grimes Graves came to a close that season, Mr Sieveking asked some of us if we would join him in an excavation in Acton, London.

This was to be a site in Creffield Road, at the Haberdashers Aske School.

In 1690, Robert Aske gave the Haberdashers’ Company £20,000 to set up a hospital and home for 20 elderly men and a school for 20 boys at Hoxton, just north of the City of London. Later a girls school was added, and early in the 20th century, two new sites for the school were purchased. The boys school was settled in Cricklewood, and the girls school in Creffield Road in Acton. The girls school moved away from Creffield Road in 1974 to Elstree, giving Mr Sieveking a perfect opportunity to excavate the grass lawn of the place, which was located close to the site of a major find of Middle Palaeolithic material, made by John Allen Brown in 1885 and interpreted by him as a working floor. The site has since become the home of the Japanese School in London.

We diggers were camped in a school building for the duration of our work, and the location of our excavation was to be the front lawn of the school.

As we were in the grounds of a school, and the condition of the lawn was quite immaculate, we might conclude the children had been forbidden from ever treading upon it. We were not at the time aware that the school was changing hands, which made our cutting of the ground almost underneath the windows of what might have been the head mistress‘s office seem almost sacrilegious. It was obviously out of bounds to the pupils, and each of us had been at school where there would have been an area of grounds or grass where children were not permitted to go.

Our first task was to very carefully cut and strip the grass turf, laying it equally carefully in stacks to make the relaying of the lawn as speedy and seamlessly repaired as possible.

Rather to our surprise the excavation was to be quite shallow, and very quickly beneath the turf we came down to the layer at which finds were to be expected.

This was a windblown deposit laid down during the lower Palaeolithic period, the old stone age, called Loess, a pale wind blown silty material. The word loess, is of German origin and means loose,

We came upon this material at a depth of 10 centimetres, and I don’t remember digging down much more than 30 or 40 centimetres altogether. It was supposed to be a soil, but it was really hard, rock hard, and we were all really struggling. It was hard enough to cause muscle strain and injury to anybody trying to dig it.

We were at the point where archaeology meets geology, and the finds we hoped for were like fossils in a rock stratification.

Mr Sieveking knew what he could expect to find, and he would describe what he called Levallois flakes, large triangular struck flints typical of a particular culture and technology from our earliest ancestors.

Levallois is named after a suburb of Paris, Levallois – Perret where flint tools of this distinct type were discovered in the 19th century.

Tools formed by this method are said to be knapped using the Levallois technique, and are from cultures developing during the Palaeolithic period.

The process began by creating a surface on part of a core upon which a strike would cause a large flake to break off. Then having envisaged the flake that could be formed, the maker struck the edges around that area so that when struck at the striking platform, the finished flake simply fell into his hands with sturdy sharp edges ready for use.

After three weeks of scraping through a substance not far short of concrete we were still gamely prising the ground to dust, practically crumb by crumb. People crouched to work on the ground muttering and swearing at it, suffering from the archaeological equivalent of vibration white finger. Not everyone had a pickaxe or mattock but as we worked we could hear the rhythmic thud as Phil Harding swung his into it, as if he had a personal grievance with the site.

Phil would later become the matter of fact face of diggers in the UK, when he joined Mick Aston and others in the series of televised excavations, “Time Team”. I had worked on the same excavations as him at Grimes Graves for the previous two seasons, and his enthusiasm and energy had been a feature of those excavations. It was not a great surprise to me that he took his career that way, and I hugely respect the work he did. On this site he was on form. There weren’t a lot of mattocks on site, but he had one of them. The thwack of this hitting the ground with accompanying grunts was a background theme to our work. Then one day, the thudding stopped and Phil made a different noise that made the whole site, perhaps not as many as ten of us, stand up and look towards him. He had laid aside his mattock and was scrabbling around in the soil he had managed to break off. We all walked over to see what he was doing, knowing that something was going on, guessing that he had found something from the cussing and blinding that he was filling the air with.

We stood around him as he sifted through the soil filtering out the fragments of a fine flint flake that he had just found. It had been completely encased in the Loess, but because it was as completely part of the stuff it was embedded in, and as fast and as fragile as a fossil would be, he had smashed it into three or more smaller pieces and any number of tiny sharp flint splinters.

He crouched there grimly piecing together the surviving fragments of the flake. It must have been two inches long, a little less wide, and perhaps a quarter of an inch thick, a perfect levallois flake, or most of it!

1975

Empty Barrow

I hardly dared to believe my good fortune. I was to supervise an excavation of a barrow on Canford Heath, Tony Westrap and I would share the job. He would do a lot of the practical stuff, including setting up our office-cum-mess-hut with tea making facilities, and equipping us for working on the site for a month or so. I was equipped to remain in my tent, on site as a security guard, as the place was isolated, on common land, and would otherwise have been vulnerable to damage and pilfering. We had visions of motorcyclists driving over our excavations while we were off site, so I suggested that I would be happy to camp there.

The nearest road to the barrow was called Gravel Hill. This is the main road from Poole to Wimborne, a busy road that rises from the heathland around Poole onto the plateau, on the edge of which the Barrow perches. Near the top of the hill a junction leads off to the Poole Crematorium, and it is near that junction that a track enters deep woodland, doubling back to the edge of the plateau that the hill rises onto. At the end of the track was a clearing containing a mound of soil upon which nothing grew. This was the Barrow that we were to excavate. Standing upon it we had a panoramic view of Canford Heath around and below us, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), and on the distant horizon the high rise buildings of Poole and West Bournemouth. Trees grew up the slope towards us, and a couple of steep tracks, like the gouges of motorcycle wheels marked the side of the barrow, and down into the Vale below us. All around it on the plateau was low scrubby woodland, silver birch trees and pines, brambles, and ferns. The valley perhaps ten or fifteen metres below the barrow, was more open with gravel tracks through Heather, Ling, and mossy clumps.

Bikers had been seen using the mound as a launch place for riding down the slope and onto the heath below it, and tyre marks were seen to damage the make up of the mound itself. An excavation was agreed upon as the best remedy against the loss of the barrow by accidental damage.

Tony organised the siting of a office/mess hut that was stationed beside the track to the mound while I pitched my tent across the track from it. Nobody made their way up to the barrow while I was there. I had the heath to myself and would stand on the edge of the barrow, at the top of the escarpment for a while most evenings, looking out over the countryside north of Poole, the sound of traffic on the roads nearby mostly deadened by the wind rustling the leaves of the low birches and firs growing up the slope. Night visitors would flit across the evening sky, and looking at the stars in a clean blackness of heaven gave me a crick in the neck and a vertiginous sense of falling.

The barrow which we were to excavate existed at the outset as a grey lump of soil on a small promontory off the edge of the escarpment. Nothing grew on it, there was no grass, no trees, no plants, nothing. As we scraped away the grey sandy soil we were immediately excavating Barrow make-up soils.

There were half a dozen of us working the site, although it felt like a lot more. Right at the start two young boys arrived out of nowhere, asking if they could join in the excavation. They were about thirteen, so I said OK, and put them in the line up to start work, but almost before we had begun digging they had vanished down into the valley, hollering in the sunshine, returning later with a folding chair they had stolen from a building site not far off, which they donated to the site hut, and were never seen again.

Tony and I had laid out strings that would guide our excavations cutting the barrow into four equal quadrants, and providing four good sections to record.

From the outset I wasn’t doing any digging, I was watching and Supervising, and I wasn’t sure how that worked, but I trusted that all would be revealed. I didn’t want the diggers to start on the barrow itself so I lined them up with kneeler, trowels, shovels and buckets at the plateau side of the mound and set them to scraping away the soil around the edge of the barrow

I wasn’t sure what to do then, I didn’t want to stand over them, looming, and while not wanting to be in the line, I hadn’t yet worked out what a supervisor did when they weren’t supervising.

Havering, I went away to do something else, but was called back almost immediately by the young woman, the least experienced person there, now that the boys had gone. To my shame I don’t remember her name. Sorry. I’ll call her Sian. To my eyes she was uncomfortably thin. Seeing her lifting a bucket only a third to half full of soil, with arms that showed very little muscle distressed me.

She was kneeling on her pad and holding a piece of flint up to show me, saying “Is this something? “. “This” was really close to the surface, in fact on it. I was rather expecting the thing she was holding not to be something, I could see it was flint, but the hill we were standing on was made of crushed up flint gravel, so the risk of finding flint of some sort was extremely high. When I looked at it though, I saw a struck flake, a small piece of dark translucent, glass like material, a bulb of percussion on one side, and pressure wave ripples on several faces.

I asked her to replace the flint where she had found it and to carry on digging, leaving it on a little island of soil while I went and sorted out recording the location and bagging of the find. By the end of the day she had found, in the small area she was working, perhaps as many as ten flakes, and we planned each flake, writing its coordinates on the little zip top bag it was to be stored in.

When we returned to the barrow on the second day she continued with the excavation, and by the end of that day it was clear that there was a substantial flint scatter, which was turning up all along the line-up of excavators, and I would have to work out a better way of recording and extracting what was becoming a sizeable concentration. Once it was clear that recording flints individually was not going to be either effective or efficient I set out a metre square grid sub divided locally into ten centimetre blocks. By now the scatter was visible from the top as a deep and densely packed mass of flint pieces, often gapped with air. As the blocks were carved out, the sand cleaned off, and the flint bagged, we found that the scatter had a maximum thickness of over 5 centimetres, and consisted of 2632 flints including 19 retouched flakes.

Leaving some people to gather the scatter we moved others to examine the mound of the barrow, and others to look into the ditch.

We discovered that the mound of the barrow was around 8.5 metres diameter resting on an old ground surface and surviving to a height of 60 centimetres. A one metre deep “V” shaped ditch surrounded the mound over the one third of its circumference that faced the plateau, the other two thirds edges of the mound dropping directly down into the Vale below. In between the mound and the ditch a broad curved area of ground had been left, only stripped of vegetation and onto that surface a low bank of gravel had been placed, curved around between the mound and the ditch. The flint scatter that we were finding looked as if it may have been knapped by people sitting on the side of the mound. It followed the edge of the mound, and was limited to the area between the mound and the gravel bank.

As we cut into the mound we found that it was made up of black layers of sandy soil interleaved with clean white sand. As we went further down it became clear that the mound was built up from an ancient turf that was cut from the ground above the ditch, and perhaps from further out, and that that turf layer was still present as an old ground surface below the barrow mound.

Below that old ground surface we found a layer of white sand above the natural gravel, which contained in a random distribution a small number of fine Mesolithic flints and cores. These numbered 35 struck flints which included two cores, one microlith, a scraper, and a blade.

The distance between the Canford Heath and Hengistbury Head is about 12 miles. They are both hills around which valleys have been carved by rivers probably carrying glacial melt to the south. In prehistoric times these two high plateaus may have been connected by flat open landscape, not only to each other but also to mainland Europe. On the tops of both hills Old Stone Age flint tools and debris have been found, and I found it interesting to compare the two groups of finds. The cores that were found on Hengistbury Head could be very small, less than 2 inches in any dimension, having been struck and pressed to form multiple fine long flakes. The few finds under the barrow differed in that they were generally larger. The core that was found was perhaps over 3 inches long which made a surprising difference to the size of flake produced from it, and all those flints that were underneath the old ground surface were larger and more impressive than those that were struck by people sitting on the barrow mound group.

The pre-barrow flints looked like materials that had been carried to the area as a nodule to be worked upon, they were a clear black colour opaque, with little cortex or evidence of exposure to sunlight or weathering. The post-barrow collection on the berm seemed, from my perception, to have been produced from the local gravel flint. They had evidence of many forms of weathering much of which I did not fully understand but might have been consistent with lumps being unearthed from the ditch of the barrow, later to be found and utilized, but not with as much skill as the pre-barrow group displayed. So close to the surface was the post-barrow spread, and executed with so little finesse that I found it difficult to believe that the group hadn’t been struck there at any time in the last three thousand years, right up to last year.

What did not strike me as odd then, but I now find interesting is that there was no topsoil. The mound was completely naked, and the materials that had built it had never been grown over or grown into. Also the spread of flints was only a few centimetres below the present ground surface. The general poverty of soil conditions in heathland was probably a factor in this nudity of the mound.

When we had removed the quadrants opposite each other, and parts the other quadrants, leaving one metre wide strips of barrow make-up, right down to the gravel surface of the plateau around us, we found at the centre of the barrow a small pit. It happened that the day that we were looking at that pit with a view to excavating it my friends from the South Wessex Archaeological Association visited the site, Richard and Sophie Pryor. They were standing admiring the work progress, and somehow the subject came up that we would be digging the pit quite soon. Sophie asked if she could do it, and quite liking the idea, not having anybody else on the team that minded we set it up with a section string and she dug out half of it, under my watchful eye.

The pit, as it was excavated was “U” shaped with a diameter of 0.6m and depth of 0.5m. “The fill of the feature yielded neither artefacts nor any evidence for either a cremation or inhumation. The absence of bone fragments systematic concentration of phosphates, ash or evidence of burning suggests that the pit never had a cremation. It is suggested that the pit fill is composed of redeposited topsoil but the botanical evidence indicates that this unlikely to have come from the old land surface around the pit. Charcoal from the pit yielded a C-14 date of 1110 BC +/- 110.”

It had been agreed before we started that neither Tony or I were really qualified to write the report that would be written to publish our findings. Myra Shackley and Ian Horsey were asked to do that for us. Myra visited the site on a couple of occasions to look at what we were doing, and to take samples for pollen analysis. They wrote that:-

“The barrow was one of forty known on heath land immediately north of Poole Harbour and a larger group occupying the Avon Stour heathlands North of Christchurch. Known as Poole 24, it was situated at a height of 71m OD on the edge of a south facing escarpment of a Pleistocene gravel capped spur overlooking Poole Harbour. Such a location at the end of a spur overlooking a valley is particularly common in South East Dorset. On the heath, barrows are often found in pairs or clusters or short linear alignments but this barrow was isolated within the Canford Heath group.”

Word spread around and we found ourselves to be a popular destination for other archaeologists including Geoff Wainwright, who was definitely one of the most influential archaeologists at the time. He later became the chief archaeologist at English Heritage.

After the last piece of barrow soil had been removed the excavation was complete. I stood on the ground where the barrow had been, a clearing in the woods, and I was missing it already. I had a tremendous sense of loss, partly because the whole project had been such a good experience for me, but also because I recognised that I had destroyed something that had meant something to somebody . I didn’t know what it meant but that didn’t matter, to me it felt like a desecration.

The absence of a body was a mystery to me too. The report that Ian and Myra wrote held no understanding for me about the reason for the construction of the barrow, and the lack of a body. I felt cheated.

When the excavation was complete, and the team had gone on to other work, elsewhere, Tony loaned me a set of Rotring pens from the museum and supplied me with a roll of Permatrace. The pens were professional draughtsman tools, refillable with special ink, and the Permatrace was a semi transparent plastic tracing sheet. The plan and section drawings, were to be published in the report for the site. They had been drawn in pencil at the barrow, and I would tracing them onto the film. I also selected a handful of the nicest flints from beneath the Barrow to illustrate for the publication

About five years later Myra and Ian published the report on the Excavation and Tony Westrap gave me a copy, which I put to one side, and more or less ignored.

After my recent visit, and out of curiosity, I began reading the Canford heath barrow report that Myra and Ian written, and noticed some discrepancies had occurred in the recording, and that these could have a serious impact on the conclusions reached by the authors. I also looked on the Internet for reports on other barrows and began to see the Poole 24 barrow in a very different light.

I was mildly surprised to discover that in comparison to other excavated barrows this one was in very good condition, and that although we had failed to find a burial of any sort, the condition of the site left no doubt that no inhumation of any sort was ever intended for it.

I had had a conversation with Tony while the report was being prepared in which he suggested that as the pit at the centre of the Barrow was close to the section I had drawn (maybe 40 centimetres) that attaching the small pit section drawing to the main section drawing would make sense. From my perspective then it did. Looking at it now though I see some basic flaws to that course of action, but worse, what was done was completely inaccurate in more than one sense.

The section of the pit was shown on the published drawing as cut from the old surface, and bottoming on the gravel of the hill, whereas in fact it was cut into the gravel, and the dimensions that the report gives are of the feature as it was excavated into that gravel. This means that when we were excavating down onto the old ground surface in that area I failed to recognise a disturbance in that black soil that would have been a feature of perhaps as much as a metre deep, and more likely to be a post hole than a burial pit.

Had a feature nearly a metre deep, but less than a metre wide been found in any other context it would probably have been recorded as a post hole. The way the layers of sod have been laid around the Barrow, in some places quite steeply, also suggests to me that there may have been a post against which they were laid.

I now wonder at the possibility that the Barrow had a post at its core. With a little under a metre depth of post in the old ground surface, and maybe another metre supported by the clods of the barrow, could there have been as much as three or four metres of timber projecting from the top of the mound?

After completion the monument was not entirely abandoned, and I wonder if it may have been a lookout point for a local tribe who may have been watching and waiting for wild animals to wander into an area where they could hunt them without coming into conflict with other tribes. Somebody sat on the mound long enough to knap a huge amount of flint (10kg)

I don’t know what the wild life was like then but I hope that the heath was brimming with it, including deer and boar. Some animals might avoid people, but others might not, and I can imagine if boar were present in the landscape the ditch, which on reflection looks extremely severe, might be a comforting barrier for people seated on the barrow faced with the threat from a notoriously aggressive animal.

My view in hindsight is that the presence of the barrows in this heathland of Dorset is linked to establishment of territories and demarcation between tribes of peoples. The land then, as now was heath. In a time when agriculture was starting to open up the landscape of England these places would be poor for cultivation, but good for hunting. If hunting parties from neighbouring tribes had no reference points in the landscape maintaining mutually agreed borders between hunting grounds would be difficult. Linking the inheritance of land rights to the landscape markers (barrows), by burying previous generations reinforced inherited rights. Building a barrow without any burial, to my mind, the intent to achieve the same aim of peaceful coexistence with a neighbouring tribe, but by a different political means.

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