Issue no 1, February 1995

Personality most ancient

What sort of character was Boxgrove Man, the 500,000year-old hominid whose shinbone was found in Sussex last year? What kind of society did he live in, and how did he think?

A mass of data, recovered over the past century and more, now allows us to build up some sort of picture of hominid behaviour in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic age (about one million to c 40,000 years ago). The evidence comes not only from `flagship' sites such as Boxgrove, but also from hundreds of lesser-known, less spectacular sites all over southern England - the subject of the Southern Rivers Palaeolithic Project, funded by English Heritage.

Hominids of the period pursued activities that were both routine and varied. The vast timescales, hundreds of thousands of years in some cases, in which it took basic technologies to change underlines the essentially habitual nature of life.

But the highly varied forms of, say, Acheulian hand-axes suggests that the exercise of choice nonetheless took place, with the presence of raw materials, food, water and other hominids all exerting some influence.

Evidence of the processing of carcasses for food provides similar behavioural clues. Hunting and scavenging were both practised by Lower Palaeolithic hominids in different circumstances, but each method of obtaining food was followed by its own pattern of bone breakage and cutmarking - a powerful example of the application of habitual forms of behaviour to individual needs.

Lower Palaeolithic society seems to have been highly individualistic. Handaxes, stone flakes and even wooden artefacts seem to have been made by individuals for their own assistance, not by collective labour.

Conversely, there is hardly any evidence for co-operative behaviour at this date. There are no burials, no large monuments with heavy capstones to lift into place, and no examples of collective technology such as nets and fish weirs, which would all point unambiguously to joint social action. Combined action can be inferred from the mass animal slaughter at La Cotte in Jersey, but such instances are very rare.

There is also no evidence for camps. Architectural post-holes and storage pits have never been found, even though the conditions for preservation at Lower Palaeolithic sites are often excellent. Society at this date did not require villages, permanently settled poor-season camps, or even long-term ritual areas as indicated by burials or art.

Moreover, the absence of structured campsites, with hearths and `conversation rings' of debris, is the clearest indication that people of this date did not use spoken language. Speech has its own archaeological signature, found in evidence for the arrangement of people around hearths so they could hear one another.

Instead, communication and negotiation depended upon face-to-face contact, in which hominids used their bodies to perform, rather than state, the various social bonds.

Societies in this period were also highly local, without any evidence for interregional links. Stone tools are rarely found more than 25-30km from their source, and entirely lacking are any items indicating long-distance exchange, such as shell, amber, obsidian or ivory.

We can infer from this that Lower Palaeolithic hominids did not recognise strangers, but excluded them from their social networks, constructed on a day-today basis during such activities as implement manufacture or carcass processing.

This exclusivity had long-term evolutionary consequences. The conditions of survival set limits both on the extent of land that could be occupied by hominids of this period, and on the permanence of occupation. There would have been an ebb and flow of people into and out of the settled areas, and local populations no doubt regularly became extinct.

Thus the hold of any given population on a piece of land was tenuous, because the elaboration of routine life which might have stretched social systems over large areas and time spans had not occurred.

Dr Clive Gamble is Reader in Archaeology at the University of Southampton

This is a version of a paper given at the recent `English Palaeolithic Reviewed' seminar held at the Society of Antiquaries of London

Hunting the origins of Roman London

It has never been entirely clear why the Romans founded London exactly where they did in c AD50-55. There seems to have been no pre-existing British settlement at London, and several sites along the Thames might have been equally suitable for a new Roman town.

The debate, which has simmered gently for decades, came to the boil over the past year in the pages of the London Archaeologist. Three writers examined the written accounts of the Claudian invasion of AD43, the topography of London and the archaeological evidence (especially Roman roads), and produced three conflicting theories of why and where the town began.

In January last year, Bill Sole, an amateur archaeologist, made the radical suggestion that the Romans were drawn to the site by an early Roman settlement in Mayfair, west of the City and north-west of Westminster, founded some years before c AD50-55 (the date when archaeological evidence begins to appear in the City and Southwark).

A riposte came in October from Nicholas Fuentes, a post-graduate student, agreeing that `proto-London' existed but claiming its location was in Southwark.

Both were challenged in January this year by David Bird, County Archaeologist for Surrey, who saw no reason to dispute the evidence that there was no Roman settlement in the area before c AD50-55. Others, writing to the magazine, commented that Sole's idea had been anticipated by Francis Celona in the 1950s and Graham Dawson in the 1970s.

The main positive evidence comes from six roads: Wading Street east to Canterbury; Stane Street south-west to Chichester; the route west to Silchester; Wading Street north-west to St Albans; Ermine Street north to Godmanchester; and the route east to Colchester.

Stane Street and Ermine Street are aligned on London Bridge and the City, and are therefore probably no earlier than them. But the two Wading Streets can be projected to meet at Westminster, suggesting to Sole and Fuentes a primary river crossing there.

Sole noted that this route crossed the east-west route near Marble Arch, which he therefore saw as the hub of the primary road system, with invasion routes fanning out west, north-west and east. Such routes, he argued, would have radiated from a military base, which would have become an administrative and urban centre as the invasion passed on.

Fuentes, seeing a main invasion base north of the natural barrier of the Thames as military folly, preferred to locate it to the south, in north Lambeth or Southwark. A military camp there would then have developed into a proto-town.

Against them, Bird argued that no evidence exists for a Roman crossing at Westminster, which would in any case have been as difficult to engineer as one at London Bridge. Evidence from Verulamium, he added, suggested that Watling Street north of the Thames may have been laid as late as AD55. He saw the primary route north as being up the Lea Valley to the east of London.

Much has been made of the historian Dio's account, in which the Britons, in retreat following the Roman invasion of AD43, crossed the Thames `where it empties into the Ocean and at flood-tide forms a lake'.

This point is thought to lie between Westminster and London Bridge, where the low-lying river-banks are prone to flooding. It has been assumed to be the location of the first Roman crossing, although some have suggested a location as far upstream as Staines or downstream as Greenwich.

Bird pointed out that, in military tactics, a good crossing for retreating Britons would have been a bad one for advancing Romans, and that there was in any case no need to postulate an early crossing in the London area at all.

To support his theory, however, Sole appealed to the apparent existence of an early (pre-1700) straight stretch of road at what is now Park Street, east of Park Lane, and cited topographical evidence - humps in Culross St and Blackburne's Mews - for the outline of a proposed Roman fort in this area. He dismissed Fuentes's claim that an 18th century map showed no evidence of an early feature on the line of Park St.

What can we make of this debate? The difficulties of using archaeological evidence to pin-point events only ten years apart are well known, not to mention the problems of relating written evidence to topography. The lack of excavated evidence makes Bird's view almost convincing, but leaves a nagging doubt about self-fulfilling prophecies. The debate about the origins of Roman London is, I suspect, still far from over.

Clive Orton is Editor of London Archaeologist

Finders, keepers and losers

Most people's perception of metal detecting is formed by newspaper reports of great discoveries - such as the finding of the Hoxne Treasure a few years ago.

In that case, a retired gardener who struck gold in a Suffolk field alerted local archaeologists, and subsequent excavations produced one of the most important hoards of Roman gold and silver ever found in Britain. The hoard was declared treasure trove, and the finder became a rich man.

Thus metal detecting was seen as an eccentric but harmless pursuit, which occasionally enriches everyone - the finder, historical research and the nation.

The reality, needless to say, is more complex. Archaeologists and metal detectorists have experienced an uneasy relationship for more than two decades, with some archaeologists accusing the hobby of historical vandalism on a vast scale.

At issue is the non-reporting of finds and findspots, and the removal of thousands of artefacts from the soil without adequate regard to their contexts. As a result, details of finds that might once have borne clues to the nation's past are lost to the historical record, entering private collections or turned into trinkets for the antiquities trade.

These anxieties have now been underpinned by a new report into metal detecting in England - the first ever systematic survey of the subject - conducted by the CBA and jointly published with English Heritage.

The study, Metal Detecting and Archaeology In England, found that the number of finds made by hobby detectorists is colossal running probably into hundreds of thousands a year. Although many detectorists do report finds, as at Hoxne, only a minuscule proportion of the overall total is reported.

The study also found that detecting is rife on ancient monuments protected by law, and on archaeological excavations where no permission to detect has been given. No fully effective precautions against raiding are known, and prosecutions have been rare.

The potential benefits of metal detecting to archaeology are enormous, but only if the problem of non-reporting can be tackled. This will only be achieved by a change of heart - not only by members of the hobby who presently do not report finds, but also among archaeologists.

Many in the discipline want nothing to do with detecting- even to the point of not using machines on their own excavations. But only by building friendly links with detectorists, and persuading more to co-operate, will the haemorrhage of artefacts flowing unrecorded into private collections be stopped.

Almost every month newspapers carry reports of new discoveries of ancient metal made by metal detector - a coin here, a buckle or a button there. Because of non-reporting, the overall number can never be known. But the general picture is clear: it is vast.

According to David Wood, former General Secretary of the National Council for Metal Detecting, about 30,000 detectorists operate in England. Many of today's detectorists are considered highly skilled and committed to the hobby.

In the English Heritage survey, compiled by a team led by archaeologist Dr Colin Dobinson, and written with Simon Denison, Editor of British Archaeology, detectorists were asked how many finds pre-dating AD1600 they had made in the previous year. Only 69 detectorists replied, but altogether they had made 3,556 finds, with one detectorist making 354 finds, and 11 finding nothing- giving a median point for the group of 13 finds each.

According to the study, the figure, although impressionistic, was plausible for the number of finds a skilled, keen detectorist might make in a year. If multiplied by the overall number of detectorists, it suggested that altogether they make nearly 400,000 finds of archaeological value a year.

This estimate is supported by other evidence. For instance, at the British Museum, which sees a vast amount of material through treasure trove procedures, two-thirds of all Anglo-Saxon, medieval and post-medieval metal artefacts seen since 1988 were found by detectorists, together with nearly nine out of ten hoards and about half of all coins.

Metal detecting is known to have brought a more-than-tenfold increase in the number of Icenian coins known to archaeologists, and more Icenian coin hoards have been found by metal detectors in the past ten years than were found by conventional recovery methods over the previous 300.

In addition, detecting clubs have found nearly ten times more Roman brooches per club since 1988 than archaeological units had found per unit without the use of detecting technology.

Yet of 6,601 Icenian hoard-derived coins found by detectorists in East Anglia since 1970, only 331 were declared for the purposes of treasure trove - about five per cent.

A third of the detecting clubs polled in the survey had no arrangements for finds recording by archaeologists - a statistic thought to under-represent the national proportion because the sample was self-selecting.

Moreover, the 13 regional museums able to provide precise figures saw a total of only 2,389 metal-detected finds in 1993 far fewer than the 69 detectorists made who replied to the survey. The report concluded that these and other museums must have seen only a minute fraction of the total number of finds made in their areas.

Illicit metal detecting is an altogether separate problem, no doubt practised by only a small minority of detectorists, but severely damaging because it often takes place on sites that promise rich pickings - for instance on scheduled ancient monuments, which are protected by law, and on working excavations where no permission to detect has been given.

Illegal detecting is by its nature hard to quantify. The number of criminals involved, the volume of their annual haul, the number of convictions - all of these figures are obscure. Most scheduled monuments are only monitored at intervals of months or years. Traces of detecting are thus only occasionally recognised, and criminal detectorists are rarely caught redhanded.

Even so, the report found that at least 188 scheduled monuments had been raided since 1988, some of them many times. At one Roman town, for instance, raids averaged once a week at one time. At two other Roman sites that happen to be carefully monitored, 124 raids were recorded over the period.

In addition, three-quarters of the 50 archaeological units canvassed in the survey reported raids on their excavations at some time. Some well-known sites have suffered severe losses. Moreover, security measures often involve units in heavy expenditure figures up to 20,000 a year have been reported.

No fully satisfactory solution has yet been found to the problem. Pre-emptive detecting to sterilise a ploughed site, for instance, was found to be both labour intensive and generally only of temporary benefit, as ploughing brings new material to the surface.

Saturating sites with metal scrap to fool the detector was also found to provide only slight benefit, as determined looters will not be fooled, despite permanently contaminating the topsoil.

Putting signs up at sites, which removes the defence of ignorance when intruders are caught, can also be counter-productive in drawing attention to a site, the report found. It concluded that continuing research into safety measures at sites should be conducted as a matter of urgency.

Furthermore, the law has rarely been enforced against offenders. The report found only nine `sets' of successful prosecutions since 1988 (involving more than nine culprits), all brought under the Theft Act, and eight relating to detecting on scheduled sites. The ninth was for detecting on land without permission.

Metal detecting presents archaeology with an intractable problem. Some day, perhaps, with more effective policing and new safety measures, illicit detecting may be stamped out. `Ordinary' detecting, however, conducted with the permission of the landowner, is here to stay. It can only be contained.

However, detecting also presents archaeology with an intriguing opportunity. If the skills of hobbyists could be more fully harnessed, and their finds properly recorded, the gains to archaeological knowledge could be large.

The report found that great scope for progress exists, particularly in fostering liaison between the archaeological and detecting communities. Of the 64 regional museums surveyed, those that had attempted to build up friendly relationships with local detecting clubs had invariably seen an increase in the number of finds referred.

Liaison between archaeologists themselves could also be improved. A quarter of the museums surveyed were found to have no regular communication with their local sites and monuments record (SMR); far more had no communication with other SMRs, even though two-thirds said they regularly received metal-detected finds from outside their county.

In the long run, it may even be possible to persuade detectorists to operate only on less archaeologically sensitive land. According to the report, in some soils metal seems more corroded, and its context more blurred, than in others.

However, the problem of metal detecting is not likely to be resolved, or its opportunities fully realised, for many years to come.