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Issue no 3, April 1995

LETTERS

Air archaeology

Sir: Richard Morris makes the case for the increased funding of regional flying (Smoothing air archaeology's flight path, February). The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) is well aware of this need and is currently concluding a strategic review of its operations, which will certainly be making the case for increased funding of aerial archaeological survey.

Meanwhile, RCHME's current strategy for the distribution of resources for air photography is necessarily directed principally at the mapping of information already obtained but not yet properly analysed and systematically entered into the national database. Only when this is completed will we properly be able to emphasise the cost effectiveness of aerial survey and the case for ongoing funding.

Yours faithfully,
TOM HASSALL
Secretary
RCHME
Swindon
6 March

From Mr John Hampton

Sir: The RCHME's use of public funding for regional flying, as Richard Morris says, is `outstanding and cost effective', but the total funding available may not be adequate. The working party on air archaeology to which he refers, which I headed, subordinated the issue of strategic planning to the essential question - how to identify a level of funding that enabled air archaeology to function effectively. The need is to ensure that air reconnaissance fully exploits the potential provided by yearly weather patterns, and to map the results adequately for analysis.

It is inevitable that mapping and the processes of understanding are long-term issues, but the concern is now to establish that funding in Britain is adequate to sustain reconnaissance and mapping at optimum levels. It is today's problem because of the nature of the evidence and the time-scale required to record it - and time does not equate well with the survival of our ancient landscapes.

His proposal for an enquiry now into the place of these activities in current archaeological funding has much to commend it. An enquiry would be timely and appropriate in the last decade of the 20th century, and the CBA, in its supra-national role, is ideally placed to pursue such a venture.

Yours faithfully,
JOHN HAMPTON
Epsom
7 March

Guns and barrows

From Dr Henry Cleere, OBE

Sir: During my training as an artillery officer in the 1940s I spent a great deal of time trying to get my guns to hit the barrows on the Salisbury Plain Training Area (SPTA), like generations of gunners before me. When the fuss over damage to monuments on the SPTA started, I felt somewhat guilty. It was reassuring - and at the same time chastening - to learn recently from Roy Canham [Wiltshire's County Archaeologist] that the monuments in the impact zone of the artillery ranges were the least damaged of all.

It may be that improvements in artillery science and technology over the past half-century will put the 643 sites at Otterburn at risk, now that artillery training is being moved there (Letters, February), but I doubt it: gunners just aren't much good at hitting barrows.

However, I agree with Kate Ashbrook's proposal that there should be a campaign to press for an urgent review of the MoD's training needs: they have been hedging on this for a decade. The MoD should also be encouraged to consult its counterparts in the USA, where the Defense Department employs a large number of archaeologists and makes archaeological impact assessment obligatory for all projects.

Yours faithfully,
HENRY CLEERE
Paris
16 February

Roman London

From Mr Garrick Fincham

Sir: In your article Hunting the origins of Roman London (February), you report that Nicholas Fuentes saw `a main invasion base north of the natural barrier of the Thames as a military folly'. There is no real evidence that the Romans ever conceived of rivers as barriers, but rather as highways. Any invasion base is likely to have been built with further offensive deployment in mind, and a site on the north bank of the Thames would have secured the river as a transport route, and aided further Roman advance.

Beyond this, the choice of site for military bases is often subject to other considerations than the purely tactical. Laziness, bureaucracy and incompetence all play their part. If the site of the postulated invasion base north of the Thames was `military folly', so were many other sites. Moreover, the Romans, even those in the army, were human beings, not machines. Perhaps they just liked the spot.

Yours faithfully,
GARRICK FINCHAM
Burgess Hill
West Sussex
14 February

Boxgrove Man

Sir: The character Clive Gamble describes in his article on Boxgrove Man (Personality most ancient, February), redolent of a Pleistocene Alf Garnett, differs widely from my perception of Middle Pleistocene hominids. Gamble's view reflects his need to see anatomically modern humans as totally new and better than their antecedents, rather than an objective assessment of the evidence.

Contrary to the article, there is overwhelming evidence for speech at the time, as demonstrated by the research of Aiello and Dunbar. At Boxgrove, in the horse butchery area, there are at least five discrete knapping scatters around a complete carcass, which easily satisfy the criterion for `conversation rings' of debris. Moreover, this activity area shows, definitively, the use of co-operative behaviour.

Gamble refers to hunting and scavenging as exhibiting their own patterns of butchery-- hardly surprising as butchery will be determined by the state of the carcass. Such behaviour appears habitual but is in fact expedient. The real point to be made about these activities is that in open environments, they would require a far higher degree of co-operation and communication than Gamble is prepared to see.

The concept of hominids tenuously holding on to any given geographical area and becoming regularly extinct does not stand up. Evidence for hominids is found throughout temperate stages, and at the beginning and end of cold stages. The apparent stasis in the Lower Palaeolithic lithic industries for over 250,000 years reflects the lack of need for change among a species supremely well adapted to cope with life in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene.

Yours faithfully,
MARK ROBERTS
Director, Boxgrove Project
University College London
9 March

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