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Issue 71July 2003ContentsnewsNew Neolithic settlements found on Orkney Medieval double watermill found at Stafford Iron Age hilltop ‘town’ found at Margate Prehistoric landscape of settlement, ritual and magic Coins reveal how Hannibal bankrupted the Romans featuresUnderground warfare Great sites Islands in the Neolithic Tale of the limpet lettersRoman burials, medieval fields, and Saxons in Scotland issuesGeorge Lambrick on the looting of antiquities in Iraq Peter EllisOn archaeology and today's mentality of hurry, hurry, hurry booksA History of Childhood by Colin Heywood Conserving landscapes reviewed by Christopher Catling Farming in the First Millennium AD by Peter Fowler CBA updatefavourite findsPaul Pettitt on an antiquarian book found in a junkshop
ISSN 1357-4442 Editor Simon Denison |
favourite findsFrom a junk shop to a suburban gardenFavourite finds can come from the most surprising places, as Paul Pettitt discovered My two favourite finds were both made when I was living in Portsmouth in the late 1980s, during my student days and shortly beforehand. One was an important antiquarian book that I found in a Southsea junk shop and the other was an enigmatic gold object from Fishbourne Roman Palace.In my holidays I used to excavate for the Chichester and Winchester archaeological units. After a day on site, I'd get the train back to Southsea, muddy from digging, and one evening on my route home I noticed a junk shop that had just opened up. It had second-hand books in amongst all the bric-a-brac and rubbish, so I decided to have a quick peek in, and there the book was - John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times of 1865 - amongst probably about three dozen books on cookery and goodness knows what else. This book was a milestone in the history of archaeology - the book in which the word 'Palaeolithic' was first used, and which presented for the first time an essentially modern framework of prehistory. Lubbock could not have written it even ten years previously because of the way that human origins research had advanced in the 1850s with the discovery of the first Neanderthal fossils in 1856 and the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Anyway, I recognised this important book, opened it up, saw to my increasing excitement that it was a first edition and to my elation that it was on sale for just £6. So, needless to say, it was with shaking hands that I tried to maintain a cool face, pay for the book and get out of there pretty quickly. The junk shop itself was very short-lived, and disappeared soon afterwards. Before I went to university, I worked for two years as a field archaeologist for the Chichester unit, and in 1986-7 we did two seasons at Fishbourne Palace. Although I am a Palaeolithic archaeologist now, my interests were largely Roman at the time. Much of Fishbourne is under modern housing, and parts of the west wing and some of the south wing are under a major road - the Fishbourne Road into Chichester. So the Sussex Archaeological Society, who were directing the excavation, bought a house on the Fishbourne Road and we excavated the garden, before they sold it on. A lady who used to live in the house in her childhood in the 1930s saw a report of our dig and remembered that when she lived in the house she dug a hole in the garden and found a piece of Roman mosaic. Her parents got in touch with the farmer who owned the surrounding land at the time, and he said - 'Cover it up, we don't want archaeologists coming and digging the place up'. So she did, and the mosaic lay there hidden until we went back and excavated the garden 50 years later. Blue Peter, the children's tv programme, got wind of the story and did a little piece on it. It was an idyllic summer in 1987, and the garden was just to the south of the palace's audience chamber, where Barry Cunliffe carried out his famous excavations in the 1960s and 70s. And the little gold item I found that year is one of the few gold objects ever found on the site. I was happily scraping away, excavating down through a debris surface on top of the mosaic, when I uncovered what looked like copper, and I thought - 'Ah, a sestertius, that's nice.' So I took a brush to it, but I soon noticed that there were none of the inscriptions that one sees on coins, and also that it had a hole in the middle. So I carefully excavated round it and saw for the first time the glint of gold. Even today, no-one really knows what the object is, but it has been interpreted as a fitting for an elaborate piece of furniture. It was the first gold I'd ever found - and the last, no doubt, given what I am interested in now. So I called the supervisor over, and he said - 'Bloody hell, be careful with that, you'd better take it to see the director of the palace'. So I duly did, walking very reverentially through the grounds as though I was holding some religious relic. Needless to say, he was suitably impressed. And that's the last I ever saw of the object, now that I come to think of it. It was put under lock and key, and later went on to conservation. And by the time I had gone back to university, I was thinking of other things. The find was published in 1996, and I do from time to time leaf longingly through the monograph. But not for long - I'm soon back in the Palaeolithic. Paul Pettitt is a research fellow at Keble College, Oxford |
CBA web:British ArchaeologyFebruary 2000 CBA BriefingFieldwork CBA homepage |
