Issue 108

Sept / Oct 2009

Contents

news

Major slipware kiln site found near Leeds

Roman graves rescued: but cemetery doomed?

Isle of Man house is one of Britain's first

In the press

In Brief & Phase 2

features

THE BIG DIG: Fetternear
Penelope Dransart reports on the topical issue of MPs claims expenese, at Kettlethorpe Hall

London: the mud of ages
Lorna Richardson reports on the discoveries made by the Thames Discovery Programme community initiative and Nick Booth describes his Foreshore Group training

For the sake of the worms
As we celebrate Charles Darwin, Matthew Law considers one of his less well-known interests that led him to excavate at ancient sites

on the web

Recommended websites
Caroline Wickham-Jones reviews How to get active with archaeology, and John Schofield looks at Flash methods to view the evolution of graffiti

letters

your views and responses, with further Beneath the Sea coverage

book review

We review a new publication about the Vindolanda Roman Fort

CBA Correspondent

Mike Heyworth welcomes new HLF money for training, and highlights the CBA's role

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

on the web

How to get active with archaeology: Want to do archaeology, not just read about it? The opportunities are bewilderingly numerous and varied. Caroline Wickham-Jones suggests you start looking on the web.

Summer, the Festival of British Archaeology: it is time to get out. One of the best ways to get involved is to join a membership organisation. How do you find the one that matches your interests and location? Your quest begins from an armchair – where are the websites? What do they offer?

The three national bodies have friends' organisations, linking to membership from their home pages. Each provides basic (if dry) information (English Heritage, Historic Scotland, Cadw). There is not much to choose between them, and none emphasises participation beyond visiting monuments and attending lectures and events. In Northern Ireland the Environment Agency has plenty of links to events and activities. The two National Trusts offer similar sites (England, Wales, N Ireland and Scotland), local groups and volunteering hint at more physical involvement. All of these bodies devote most of their space to information about scales of membership and ways in which to pay.

The Council for British Archaeology has no monuments to entice you, but its website provides links to pull you in. Membership benefits include local meetings and activities as well as printed matter [such as this magazine – Ed]; payment pages are more discrete. There is also considerable material devoted to involvement for non-members.

The CBA is supported around the UK by various groups. Archaeology Scotland operates its own membership body. Benefits comprise publications and events, with links to organisations providing opportunities for active participation. CBA Wales/Cymru has a simpler website that seems not to have been updated since early 2006. The CBA also runs the Young Archaeologists Club, "the only UK-wide club for 8–16 year olds interested in archaeology". The enthusiastic website does not make it entirely clear what members get up to; there are local branches and most meet once a month.

The CBA provide a comprehensive list of societies, local and national (see also Current Archaeology). Many offer information and publications rather than action. The Prehistoric Society supplements plenty of publications with a wide range of study tours and conferences, but no excavation (though there are grants and awards). The Roman Society and the Society for Medieval Archaeology are very similar.

Local archaeological societies can be more adventurous, and there are many. If they have web pages, they vary greatly, most are comprehensive (eg Kent Archaeological Society). Activities include publication (Dumfriesshire & Galloway) excavation and research (Surrey Archaeological Society), lectures and courses (Chichester), trips (Glasgow) even restoration and reconstruction (Staffordshire industrial archaeology). There is one somewhere to suit your taste.

Finally there are one or two bodies that, while encouraging participation are not really clubs. Shorewatch is one, facilitating local work to monitor eroding archaeology along the coastlines of Scotland. Time Team is another and BAJR ("an independent voice for the workers in archaeology and heritage") a third.

Joining in with archaeology on the web

• Peeblesshire Archaeology Society – www.peeblesarchsoc.org.uk
  • "The past is out there". One of many excellent local society websites
• Shorewatch – www.shorewatch.co.uk
  • Clear, straightforward information from around Scotland on how your help can make an impact
• Nautical Archaeology Society – www.nasportsmouth.org.uk
  • Get your feet wet, whatever your experience or geographical area of interest
• Isle of Thanet Archaeological Society – www.iotas.org.uk
  • Simple, but effective, website with all you need to know
• Prehistoric Society – www.prehistoricsociety.org
  • Academic-looking presentation, but membership includes a wide range of people – and a new site is on its way

Caroline Wickham-Jones teaches archaeology at the University of Aberdeen.

Digging graffiti

John Schofield admires a website that, to the disagreement of some and without a trench in sight, calls itself archaeology – but it bears the hallmarks of deep archaeological insight.

People have been painting and scratching walls and other surfaces for thousands of years. Art is one of the things that define humanity and social complexity. Wall art is also one of the great mysteries of archaeology – why did people paint cave walls, for whose benefit and for what purpose?

It seems odd therefore that archaeologists might question the legitimacy of contemporary representation, either as a means to understanding expressions of the deeper past, or for what it can tell us about ourselves – through urban graffiti and tagging (graffito signatures) for example. Like their earlier equivalents, these familiar "wild-signs" are traces of human activity. They also have social relevance in representing people, often on the margins of society, who leave few other tangible clues. We can learn from these signs, characterising landscapes we struggle to comprehend, and understanding lives on the edge, played out in the interstitial places of our supposedly familiar world.

Archaeology is about people. With archaeologies of the contemporary past our concern is with the people here today, the traces they leave, and the values and attachments they form for the places around them. Where these connections have an obviously material representation, a wholly relevant and socially meaningful branch of archaeological endeavour comes into view. And what fun it can be!

Take Graffiti Archaeology. Here is a website of immense colour and beauty with fantastical examples of urban artistic endeavour; private and secretly-formed creations on public display. "Neat site – but is it archaeology?" someone wonders. In literal terms, maybe not. But some also do not consider it art (and neither is it lawful, in the UK at least).

For me, the "archaeology" is evident in the recognition of trace within urban environments, and in the stratigraphy of painted surfaces, where forms and figures overlap and the surface evolves – much as representations of bison and anthropomorphic figures overlap in the caves and rock-shelters of southern Europe. Here, on spray-painted walls, are the spatial and temporal dimensions of more conventional archaeological situations.

On the website, the "Archaeologist" (Cassidy Curtis) describes how "graffiti archaeology" captures the process of constant change and makes it visible. The website is an interactive, timelapse collage of photographs of walls, taken over months or years. The photos are precisely superimposed, so that by moving through the layers, you experience a compressed version of time passing, as old tags are submerged beneath new ones. You can see how a writer's style changes over the years, or explore the dialogue between writers as they paint over each other's work.

The project also functions as a living archive, since most of the pieces on the site no longer exist in the real world. The "Archaeologist" describes how the site has attracted the attention of both graffiti artists and photographers, and a vital online community is beginning to form around it. "This community", he says, "has become essential for weaving together disparate threads of visual information into a nuanced, structured historical record".

Finally, the "Archaeologist" hints at the merits of photographic recording as a documentation of the contemporary world, and a mechanism for understanding it.

But surely, some might say, this is a familiar world – full of things, places and social context that we already understand; it is familiar because we live with it every day. Do any of us really believe that? We are constantly questioning what we see around us, on the news, and in our daily lives. The questions archaeologists of the contemporary past might ask will be different to the questions we ask of prehistory, but there are questions nonetheless, and much remains to be done even to start to provide answers.

I firmly believe archaeology has a part to play in understanding better the world around us. The approach presented through the splendidly inventive Graffiti Archaeology website is one way of attaining this heightened sense of knowing, even if that knowing extends only to forming further questions. But as the "Archaeologist" says, "by assembling and juxtaposing these scattered fragments, we can gain new kinds of insight. What else can we reconstruct from so many points of view? What subtle dimensions will we discover?"

John Schofield works with English Heritage's characterisation team and co-author of CBA Research Report 147 War Art: Murals and graffiti – military life, power and subversion now £5.

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