Issue 66

August 2002

Contents

news

Native village that dabbled in Roman culture

Roman mosaic found inches below ploughsoil

Egyptian seal and a ‘cave of jewels’ at Scottish mansion

The 7,700-year-old woman who ate like a wolf

Rare Iron Age temple excavated near Cambridge

In Brief

features

When Burial Begins
Paul Pettitt on why humans began burying their dead

Chemical Revolution
Tim Allen traces the origins of the Industrial Revolution

Great Sites
Helena Hamerow on the Anglo-Saxon town of Hamwic

letters

The West Midlands in prehistory and the closure of railways

issues

George Lambrick on the importance of museum collections

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

The Welsh Border by Trevor Rowley

Digging up the Past by John Collis

The Historical Archaeology of Britain c 1540–1900 by Richard Newman, David Cranstone & Christine Howard-Davies

Genetics and the Search for Modern Human Origins by John H Relethford and The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe

CBA update

favourite finds

Val Turner on a Pictish stone that spooked a gravedigger

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

Peter Ellis

Everyone except the archaeologist has given up on time. Linear narratives are a thing of the past. The simplest of films uses flashbacks, sliding door timeframes joining parallel worlds, backwards narrative, etc. In academe, post-modernism has laid waste to history's structures of time, so historians have given up on sequence - except when asked to present a series on kings and battles for television.

Alone in all this sea of temporal relativity, archaeology bravely battles on, putting things in order of occurrence, even though ours is the discipline where time offers its cruellest features.

For the great majority of our timescale we have to number things in decreasing values, with 3rd centuries weirdly followed by 2nd centuries. That BC/AD watershed occurs well on in the sequence so we have to work backwards most of the time. Only the brave launch into verbal constructions like the third quarter of the 2nd millennium BC, though we use them to annoy each other in print.

Then just look at the hand that science has dealt us. The calculators of radiocarbon dates are like the worst door-to-door salesmen, telling you that you're 90 per cent certain to be delighted with their product. In contrast, dendrochronology results offer ridiculously precise islands of absolute dates - 327 BC or even spring 327 BC. This is more information than we want. These amazing dates sit there like posts in a tidal river. You can hitch onto one for a while but then you have to let go again and dash headlong through a swirling mass of contradictory dating material till you grab the next one. One day, presumably, every year in prehistory will have a fact - 327 BC, post 1 in posthole F44 at Time Team Hollow; 326 BC, plank B from pit F39 at Meet the Ancestors in the Wold, etc etc.

Adding to the difficulties, the actual recovery of archaeological information is done in the rower's or backstroke swimmer's position, heading rapidly backwards and watching the starting flag recede. We dig down from the present to the past, effectively knocking out signposts as we go. We don't know what might have been a clue until it's gone. When we get where we think we want to be, we don't really know what the date is because there's all the junk lying around from the time before the one we're in.

Then there's the fact that no one actually experiences the past, or knows what future historians or archaeologists will say about the present. The whole thing is pretty obviously an invention after the event, and never more clearly than when - with a quick cut and paste - we shove that irritating bunch of postholes from the Period 2 we've just invented to the Period 3 we've also just invented.

Archaeology is itself undertaken through time and this hardly makes our life any easier. Look at the basic data from a Sites and Monuments Record. Here we look up a site, and see the first record in 1860 is for the Revd Bulldozer whose men dug into the site one afternoon while he was picnicking and thought it was the tomb of King Arthur. Next in 1930 we have a fieldwork interpretation of the site as a disk barrow, while 1950 saw a small scale excavation which suggested it was a windmill mound. Total rescue excavations in 1970 over a few days before a road went through suggested a Roman signal tower, though a reinterpretation of the 1970s evidence in someone's PhD thesis in the 90s rather suggests it was the tomb of Arthur after all.

It's a nightmare. But though everyone else may disappear into post-modern timelessness, our actual material is debris deposited in a time sequence, so we have to keep on keeping on. The struggles we have to go through will be recognised one day. Just give it time.

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