Digging Up the Past E-Book

John Collis

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 351

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1996

Beschreibung

This concise and fully illustrated introduction to methods of excavation describes a technique that is essential for all kinds of archaeology. It presents new ideas on excavation techniques and challenges traditional approaches to site organisation and recording. John Collis uses his 40 years of excavation experience to recommend practical solutions to problems, and considers the impact of computerisation and other technical innovations. He also describes the history and development of archaeological excavation which provides a background to the methods employed today. This practical common sense guide should find a place on the bookshelf of everyone who practices archaeology on a professional or amateur basis, and is illuminating reading for anyone who wants to understand how archaeologists can recover the past by digging in the soil.

Leseprobe

DIGGING UP THE PAST

An Introduction to Archaeological Excavation

John Collis

First published in 2001

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© John Collis, 2001, 2013

The right of John Collis to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978-0-7509-5418-1

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgements

1 Paradigms

2 Site Preparation

3 On Site

4 Finding Things

5 Contexts

6 Making the Record

7 Finds Processing

8 Stone Buildings

9 Wooden Buildings

10 Pits, Ditches and Banks

11 Burials

12 Sampling

13 Summary

Appendix

Bibliography

FOREWORD

I have now spent more than forty years of my life on archaeological excavations. On the one hand there is much that I have learnt, on the other there is much that I simply take for granted, so that it is difficult for me sometimes to communicate the obvious to people who are taking part in their first excavation. There is so much that a new volunteer or student needs to know, but so much that is totally meaningless until one actually does it. As a director of an excavation I will talk to people about what they should do on site, but inevitably I will forget to say something, or the people I am talking to can only absorb so much at one time, so that inevitably things go wrong. The eventuality that one had not expected, the exceptional find or unusual occurrence, may happen to someone who simply doesn’t have the experience to cope with the situation. This book is aimed at giving new excavators as much information as possible in a form they can absorb or go back to refer to, so that they will not only be ready to work on site, but also be confident that they are not likely to cause some disaster. It aims to tell the digger what is expected of him or her, and also tries to explain what else is (or should be) going on around on the project, and to show how often directing an excavation involves compromises or choices.

But it is also aimed at those who have to teach, and at supervisors and directors who may themselves lack the experience of teaching something that they learnt so long ago that they have forgotten what it is like to be ignorant. In the last couple of decades archaeology has become more professional, with more people earning their living from digging, whereas in the 1950s and 1960s, when I came into archaeology, the professional was the exception, and most of us were amateurs, spending our holidays and weekends on excavations. The opportunities to start while still at school, especially as I did at the age of eleven, are perhaps now less available, but it is still pleasing, when interviewing potential students, to find how many of them already have some experience of excavation from school. I do not advocate a return to the bad old days when large-scale excavation of complex urban sites was the domain of large numbers of semi-skilled or unskilled volunteers. Young professional archaeologists should be adequately paid for their work, and should also have a proper career structure. But, on the other hand, archaeology is becoming an accepted leisure activity, and if its skills are not communicated to the public at large it becomes a pointless exercise. Part of our professionalism should be in teaching and communicating. But this requires both skill on the part of the professional, and understanding of his or her limitations by the amateur, so that both will strive towards higher standards of research and results. There are certain sorts of site which should be left to the skilled – which usually, though not inevitably, means the professional; there are other sites which can only be excavated on a large scale by amateurs, and where simply by employing large numbers of people, or by taking the site slowly over a long period of time, higher standards may be achieved than would be the case if using a small professional team over a short period of time.

This book is intended for students, at all levels, and volunteers who want to gain some experience in something that will enrich their lives, or which may be of peripheral use when they go into another profession such as teaching. It is also aimed at teachers and professionals – those of us who are concerned with training in universities and evening classes, and who see archaeology as a subject that is relevant to our own society and has something to say to the world at large. Though in Britain the majority of archaeology takes place in rescue situations, with a small group of professionals carrying out the work, much of what I am writing is addressed to those who are not professionals, or have not yet achieved that hallowed status. I am assuming that they will usually be working on research projects organised by universities or other groups, and they may be working anywhere in Europe. Thus, I am not assuming that they will necessarily be faced with ‘single context recording’ which is the norm in professional circles in Britain, or indeed will encounter what I would consider the ideal of ‘open area excavation’, though I shall be emphasising these methodologies. So, it is possible to find the ‘Wheeler grid’ or the ‘Bersu Schnitt’ methods still the norm in parts of Europe; students may well encounter them and thus should be aware of how they function. At the same time I am taking the opportunity to criticise some aspects of modern practice, so that students realise that there are alternative ways of doing things, some of which may be better than what is common practice, and also to increase awareness that what they are being taught on one particular project may not be best practice. In general, by increasing awareness, I hope we can improve standards.

I was brought up on two textbooks. The first was Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s Archaeology from the Earth, a stimulating book that provided inspiration for a generation of archaeologists, telling us what archaeology was like and how high our standards should be, and was written in an entertaining and witty style. The second was Kathleen Kenyon’s Beginning in Archaeology, which was more prosaic and down-to-earth, but with many practical hints of what to do, and what not to do. It is this sort of book which I feel is now lacking, and I hope this book will go some way towards filling the gap. In recent years there has been a number of books on techniques, but either they have been aimed at the professional market, for instance Phil Barker’s influential Techniques of Archaeological Excavation; or they have become dated, like Graham Webster’s Practical Archaeology, which in many ways was the successor of Kathleen Kenyon’s book; or they have aimed at explaining archaeology to an interested public, for instance Kevin Greene’s Archaeology: an Introduction, or Phil Barker’s Understanding Archaeological Excavation. None, however, describes what it is like to participate on an excavation or how one should excavate a burial, or the almost military discipline that is necessary for a site to function properly. Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn’s Archaeology: Theory, Methods and Practice is a very useful textbook which gives a wide perspective of the aims, theory and methodology of archaeology, but of necessity it does not go into the details of excavation techniques. I can also recommend Peter Drewett’s Field Archaeology: an Introduction which covers the whole range of fieldwork. While my book was in press, Stuart Roskam’s Excavation appeared, giving another excavator’s perspective on excavation technique. I hope, thus, that this book will complement these other publications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the commentators on the earlier versions of this book, Phil Barker and the anonymous reviewer for Sutton’s, and especially Geoff Carver for his detailed criticism. Many of their thoughts have been incorporated, but I am especially thankful for their encouraging remarks at times when the project was grinding to a halt.

I would like to thank all those many excavators and students who have contributed ideas, many of which I have shamelessly adopted. For help with the illustrations I would like to thank Irene Luis de la Cruz for assistance with some of the original drawings. I acknowledge the following for the drawings and photographs: 1.1, reproduced by kind permission of the Wiltshire Natural History and Archaeological Society; 1.2a–b, after Clark 1954, by permission of the University of Cambridge; 1.3c, Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum; 1.4a, Allen Collection no. 768, reproduced by courtesy of the Visitors of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; 1.4b and 6.6a–b, after Wheeler 1943, by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London; 1.5a–b, from Wheeler 1954, by permission of the Society of Antiquaries of London; 1.6a, after Krämer 1957, by permission of the Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, Ausgrabung Manching 1955; 1.6b, after Krämer 1957; 1.7, after Grimes 1960; 1.8, John Hampton, National Monument Record; 1.9, after Barker 1969 and http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals, © and by permission of Taylor and Francis; 2.1, after Redman 1986; 2.2, Dept of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield; 2.3, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 6.4, 6.6a, 6.7, 7.1, 9.4, 10.4c, 10.8, 11.1c and 11.4b, Association pour la Recherche sur l’Age du Fer en Auvergne; 2.5a–b, 8.5, 9.7a, 9.7b, 10.1a, 10.1b and 10.2, Exeter City Museums; 2.10, Steve Marsden; 4.2, John Coles, © Somerset Levels Project; 5.3, after Harris 1989, courtesy of Edward C. Harris; 6.2a, © Museum of London Archaeological Service, from MoLAS 1994; 8.1, based on R. Parrenti in Frankovitch et al. 1983; 8.4a, reproduced by permission of Rescue, from Rescue slide-set; 6.6d and 9.2, from Bersu 1940; 9.2c and 9.3a–b from Musson 1970, by permission of C. Musson; 9.5a–b, based on Richmond 1961; 9.6a–d, based on Hope-Taylor 1977; 9.8a–b, after Beresford and Hurst 1992, courtesy of the Wharram Research Project, drawings by Chris Philo; 9.9, after B. Soudsk´y 1966; 10.4a, from Reynolds 1974; 10.6, from Dimbley 1965, by permission of the Experimental Earthworks Committee; 10.10, Graeme Guilbert; 12.1, John Warbis.

While this book was in the final stages of preparation, Phil Barker and Brian Hope-Taylor, two of the greatest excavators of the later twentieth century, died, and I would like to dedicate this book to their memory.

ONE

PARADIGMS

There are two schools of thought about the development of archaeological technique. One, the usually accepted view in Britain, sees the development and improvement of excavation techniques as something technical – we devise better methods and techniques, and so can better understand and get more information from excavations. The other viewpoint, which I wish to put forward here, is that the best archaeological excavators have always been efficient, it is merely that the aims of excavation have changed. I was once asked to play the part of Thomas Bateman, one of the best of the nineteenth-century antiquarians, and to argue in public against my students that in fact modern excavators waste a lot of time recording irrelevant information – and I won the argument, not because Bateman could excavate better, but he was clearer in his mind about what he wanted to achieve. Excavation is very much a matter of deciding what one wants to know or obtain, and setting about finding it, even though what one finds may refute the original hypothesis, and this should be as true for rescue excavations as it is for pure research projects.

This view of archaeology is akin to the general approach to science, which argues that science is based not so much on observed ‘facts’ but on the logical framework within which we place those facts. This is what scientists refer to as a ‘paradigm’, and in archaeology we can demonstrate that methods of excavation have been dominated by the prevalent paradigm in society at large. However, as I shall discuss later, this is very much the purist, academic, view of archaeology, and the reality of modern excavation is that we are driven by events as much as by research. Increasingly we recognise that archaeological sites are precious documents, and that digging a site is like a historian reading a unique document, but tearing it up as part of the process of reading, so that no one else will ever be able to read it again. For unique and special sites such as Stonehenge, this is obvious, but it is also true for more mundane sites – there may be many farms or town houses from which we may draw generalisations about architectural, social or economic history, but each site has its own unique history.

This attitude has now been enshrined in a number of international agreements, notably the Treaty of Malta (or Valetta Convention) which the British government has just signed; indeed, this lays down the legal and ethical framework for the archaeology carried out in all countries in Europe which are signatories to it. It states that the archaeological resource is limited and is rapidly being diminished; once it is destroyed, it is gone for ever, so it should be preserved as far as possible. So, although there are still excavations which are carried out for research or for social reasons (for example to display a site to the public), most excavations occur because the site is threatened by development. It is therefore up to developers to preserve the archaeology by avoiding sites or, where that is not possible, either to minimise the site destruction or to ensure its preservation ‘by record’ – that is, to pay for an excavation to take place. There is a lively debate, which I shall come back to in the last chapter, about how far such ‘rescue’ excavations are, or should be, dictated by research problems, and to what extent we are merely trying to record even when we have no research questions to ask. Should only threatened sites be excavated, or should some excavation be carried out for research reasons? Whatever, excavation is a privilege, and we need to accept that we are privileged in a way that future generations will not be; once the majority of sites have been irreparably damaged or destroyed, excavation may well be the exception.

TREASURE HUNTING

Though there are occasional records of people digging holes to obtain information in the classical and medieval periods, essentially early excavation was intended only to find treasure. In Britain until recently we were hampered by the concept of ‘Treasure Trove’ and the conflicting rights of the finder, the landowner and the state. This concept still exists in the financial rewards given to people who find valuable objects which are declared to be the property of the state; it is also reflected in the flourishing trade in antiquities which has led to conflicts between archaeologists and the art world about the display of objects known to have been dug up clandestinely and sold. Many objects such as coins come from the work of ‘treasure hunters’, some of whom work closely with archaeologists so that their finds can be given greater meaning; others do it merely for money, and disguise the true origin of their finds if they have been removed illegally.

On some excavations in Britain you will be asked to sign a disclaimer to any gold or silver objects you may find, as sometimes coroners’ inquests have found in favour of the person who actually discovered the object, including in one case a volunteer on an excavation. In other countries the right of the state to all antiquities is better established. The general view of archaeologists is that objects removed from their context lose much of their scientific value, and equally that they should be preserved somewhere where they will be available for other people to study and look at – so do not pocket anything you find on an excavation, even pot-sherds from the dump, without prior consultation with the person in charge. You may find that even (s)he does not have the right to give you that permission, as in most countries finds are the property either of the State or of the landowner.

THE ANTIQUARIANS

It was in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain that the first excavations took place, the results of which can still be used by modern archaeologists. The aim of these excavators was simply to acquire objects for their private cabinets, be they of classical or local origin, and in certain circles an interest in antiquities was an indication of a cultivated and educated person. Finds from the classical world had greater prestige, given the debt that Europeans from the Renaissance onwards ascribed to their Greek and Roman predecessors, but by the nineteenth century this value was extended to other civilisations of the Near East, as well as India and China, and it is these values which still form the foundation of the monetary worth ascribed to objects by the antiquities market. The best objects, then as now, could be obtained either by excavating in ancient tombs or by pillaging monumental buildings of inscriptions and sculptures. This activity was very much an upper-class activity, though in general those who did the actual pillaging were, and often are, local peasant farmers.

The best of the early excavators, like William Stukeley, Sir Richard Colt Hoare and William Cunnington, recorded in addition the place where these objects were found, and published illustrated descriptions of the finds and the circumstances of discovery. Items found together with an individual burial would also be noted, and sometimes the associated material and stratigraphy (a concept of a chronological sequence of deposits taken over from geologists such as William ‘Strata’ Smith) deserved comment; for example John Frere observed in 1797 that hand axes occurred with the bones of extinct animals in the gravels of Hoxne. Since complete or well-preserved objects worthy of display were required, in Britain burials were the favourite hunting ground of the early antiquarians, especially where these were observable on the surface as barrows. Burials tend to be in the centre of the mound, so the most efficient form of recovery was to dig a hole in the middle (Fig. 1.1).

RACIAL ORIGINS

In the early nineteenth century Colt Hoare was already attempting to assign greater meaning to his objects, by dating them and assigning them to different peoples in the past, though he himself remarked how difficult this was for the period before written records. One major interest in the early to mid-nineteenth century was the question of racial origins, and of the peoples who made up the nation state, as well as those who populated the less civilised parts of the world. One solution to the problem, advocated by the Danish anthropologist Daniel Friedrich Estricht, was the study of skulls, especially their dimensions and shape. By 1850 the Derbyshire antiquarian Thomas Bateman had started to collect skulls in addition to the artefacts, and this led on to the detailed publication of skulls by Joseph Davis and John Thurnam in Crania Britannica. Details of pottery styles and burial rites were linked to the supposed racial groups (long-headed people buried in long barrows, and round-headed in round barrows), and these were assigned to specific ‘peoples’, usually defined by their language – the change of head shape from ‘long’ to ‘round’ was often interpreted as the replacement of pre-Indo-Europeans with Indo-European-speaking people! These questions increased the need for recording, with plans of burials and sections appearing in published reports, but these were minimal and idealised, usually done after the excavation and for purposes of description only. Excavation of barrows began to be more systematic, like Thurnam’s clearing out of the eastern chamber and passage of the West Kennett long barrow to obtain human skeletons.

1.1. Antiquarianexcavation has often been dismissed as being a disastrous loss of information from poor excavations. In fact for what these early excavators wanted – specimens of artefacts or skulls for collections – it was on the whole very efficient. The easiest way to get complete prehistoric pots is to dig a hole in the middle of a burial mound, as William Cunnington is doing in this picture. The problem was that the questions being asked were too limited, and modern excavation can tell us much more about the context in which the objects were buried.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGM

Christian Thomsen’s concept of the Three Age System for the first time provided a chronological framework into which these antiquarian discoveries could be placed, linked with the concept of technological advancement, as first stone, then bronze and finally iron were adopted by prehistoric man. This idea of technological advance was to be a dominant theme throughout the nineteenth century, so again archaeology was merely reflecting the interests of society at large. It was another Dane, J.J.A. Worsaae, who first applied the concept to field observations, recording the different types of artefact turning up in the shell middens and the megalithic tombs, and so building a basic chronology. Sophus Müller, a later Director of the National Museum in Copenhagen, noted that Stone Age graves tended to be the deepest in barrows, with graves inserted later occurring at depths varying according to their relative age – a simple form of stratigraphy – and this chronology was later confirmed by finds from the Danish bogs where the associated plant remains could be studied.

By the time these ideas had become generally disseminated in the mid- to late nineteenth century the concept of evolution was becoming widely accepted. This could be applied to objects as well as to living creatures, and the Swedish prehistorian Oscar Montelius developed the concept of typology, by which objects such as bronze axes could be demonstrated to change over time, becoming more efficient in design, especially as better technology became available. To demonstrate his thesis Montelius used a modern analogy: the evolution of the railway carriage from the stagecoach. His use of association of objects in hoards and graves required greater precision in observation and publication, firstly to demonstrate how the typologies of different artefacts could be tied together (e.g. axes and swords), and secondly to link the chronologies of northern Europe with the historically dated sequences of the Near East by cross-dating (by studying the context of exports from one part of Europe to another, and so linking the sequences in the two areas). Though modern methods such as dendrochronology give us much greater precision, Montelius’s basic chronology for the later phases of prehistory is still right in its general outlines. It also allowed greater potential in dating archaeological sites. This in turn placed a greater emphasis on field recording, noting the associations of objects with one another in burials or in hoards, and, where possible, making stratigraphical observations in burial mounds.

CLIMATIC CHANGE

Charles Lyell’s publication in 1830–3 of the Principles of Geology opened up for archaeologists the possibility not only of using stratigraphy and type fossils for dating different strata but also of finding remains of early man in association with extinct animals, indicating climates very different from the modern. In 1859 the various observations which had been made about such associations, such as Frere’s notes at Hoxne, or Jacques Boucher de Perthes’s discoveries in the gravels of the Somme around Abbeville, were brought together by Sir John Evans and Joseph Prestwich. This triggered excavations not only in river gravels, but also in French caves and Danish bogs. In both bogs and caves stratigraphy can be complex and difficult, so considerable precision is needed if artefacts and other finds are to be correctly located – in the case of the caves with animal bones, in the bogs with macro-fossils of plants (later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was recognised that pollen also survived, and was a better indicator of climatic change). The excavation techniques which evolved laid a great emphasis on detailed stratigraphy, coupled with detailed plans of bones and artefacts in situ.

The methodology was to excavate slices of the deposits, and this was gradually systematised into excavation in one- or two-metre squares, each with a series of superimposed plans, and a series of drawn sections, which in this book I shall call the ‘squares’ method. Only rarely was a surface of more than a few metres square opened up, and each square was treated as a separate unit. It allowed the collection of the artefacts by the metre square, and so allowed density of finds to be plotted – useful in studying, for instance, camp sites of hunter gatherers; this became the standard technique in the 1930s for the excavation of Mesolithic sites in Britain. The classic example of this kind was Grahame Clark’s excavation of Star Carr in the 1950s (Fig. 1.2). However, attempts by French archaeologists to employ this technique on more complex sites, riddled by pits and ditches, such as my French colleague’s excavation at Aulnat in the 1960s, were less successful, and despite the detail of their recording it is now very difficult to assign finds to individual features, and especially to identify groups of associated finds.

SOCIAL EVOLUTION

Evolution was also applied to the development of society as a whole, with the realisation that society had become more complex as mankind had developed. Perhaps the concepts of anthropological and sociological writers such as Morgan and Engels were not immediately applied to archaeology – that was the impact of Gordon Childe a generation or more later – but the awareness that societies other than our own had lived on the same land, had used it and left traces of their activity in the soil led to a marked change in excavation technique. In Britain this change is usually associated with General Pitt Rivers, the ‘father of British archaeology’, but in fact he enjoys this reputation more because of his excavation technique than because of the conceptual framework that lay behind it. His museum at Farnham in Dorset contained not only an exhibition of the finds and excavations he had carried out on his estate on Cranborne Chase, but also a large ethnographic collection demonstrating technological evolution on a world-wide basis.

Pitt Rivers and his contemporaries were trying to demonstrate the life-style of previous inhabitants of this country. Thus the emphasis shifted from the discovery of individual objects (and thus an emphasis on burials) to settlement archaeology and a concern with the more prosaic elements of life – what sort of animals did they keep, what sort of pottery did they use, what sort of ornaments did they wear? Excavation was on a large scale, with complete excavation of settlements where possible (Fig. 1.3), and detailed descriptions of the finds. Excavation was still the domain of the rich middle and upper classes, but it was no longer simply an enjoyable way to spend a weekend; instead it became a seasonal activity, with workmen employed full-time over a period of weeks, if not months.

1.2. Star Carr. Grahame Clark’s excavations contrasted strongly with the dominant methods prevalent in Britain in the 1950s. Though he was digging in trenches to remove the overburden and get down to the archaeological deposits (Fig. 1.2a), the occupation levels, once located, were excavated in one yard squares, a methodology originally developed for French caves and for bog sites similar to Star Carr excavated in Scandinavia. It allowed finds to be tied in very closely with the environmental data, especially with the pollen sequence. However, it also allowed Clark to look at densities of finds, and so locate activity areas, and calculate the size of the site (Fig. 1.2b).

Authors such as Wheeler, who see the evolution of excavation technique as essentially technical, have often contrasted Pitt Rivers’s excavations on Cranborne Chase with those carried out at the same time at Silchester, and they express surprise that Pitt Rivers, though he visited Silchester as the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, passed no comment on the limitations of the excavation techniques employed there. At Cranborne Chase every find was measured in, its stratigraphical position recorded, and all significant finds were illustrated and published. At Silchester the aim was to discover the plans of buildings, so that walls were followed, with little concern to study finds within their stratigraphical context. However, the difference was in many ways one of scale. The quantities of finds at Silchester were huge compared to those found by Pitt Rivers, and no excavators then understood the complexities of stratigraphy or were able to identify the ephemeral traces of timber buildings. Both were trying to do the same thing – to describe the societies they were excavating, and place them within their evolutionary context. For Pitt Rivers on Cranborne Chase it was the peasant farmers of the prehistoric and Roman periods; for Fox and St John Hope at Silchester it was the inhabitants of a Roman town. What they did not realise was that they were dealing with several towns one on top of the other, and that the Roman town did not remain static through the four hundred years of Roman occupation.

Fig. 1.2b

For later periods the description of life-styles was less often attempted (that could be done to a certain extent by using written sources, or so it was believed); rather, there was an interest in artistic and architectural development. Excavations were carried out to elucidate the plans of castles and abbeys, with little concern for the chronological aspects of the site or for the stratification of the finds. Thus Sir Charles Piers’s excavations at Whitby Abbey in the 1920s have left us a legacy of tantalising finds of Saxon date, which must come from the earliest Saxon foundation recorded by Bede – but we know nothing of their context. As late as the 1960s Roman archaeologists were more concerned with understanding the architectural history of the Roman villas, as a perusal of Collingwood and Richmond’s Archaeology of Roman Britain shows, than with understanding what villas actually were and how they functioned. This concern with architecture and art history reflects upper-class interests, and there was little interest in the sites where the majority of the population lived.

1.3. General Pitt Rivers at Wor Barrow.Using the extensive finances generated by the family estate on Cranborne Chase, Pitt Rivers was able to employ workmen to carry out excavation on a large scale, including the complete stripping of the Neolithic Wor Barrow and the total clearance of several Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman settlements. The plans of settlements he produced were not to be equalled until the 1960s. However, he did not fully understand the structures he encountered, such as traces of timber buildings, and re-excavation of one of his sites has shown that he commonly missed smaller features such as post-holes. His aim was not to find spectacular objects, but to provide a description of the life-styles of earlier people. Any significant objects, including small pieces of pottery, he considered should be published, and this was done in a series of volumes, Excavations on Cranborne Chase, which remains one of the classics of British archaeology, and is a mine of useful information. The objects, with plans and models of the sites, were exhibited in his museum at Farnham, and he used to hold dances on Sundays to encourage local people to come and see the collection, and report finds to him. My grandmother was invited to one by a boyfriend, but refused to go, as it was not considered quite respectable – a problem archaeologists have always suffered from!

However, the approach also survived for a long time in the Marxist archaeology of central and eastern Europe. Large amounts of money were expended by the state on large-scale excavations of typical sites of various periods, which could then be used to illustrate the various phases of social development as laid out in the works of Engels. In Russia the most famous excavation was of the early medieval trading site of Novgorod. In Czechoslovakia such research excavations included the Palaeolithic site of Dolní Ve^stonice, the Neolithic Bandkeramik settlement of Bylany, the excavation of various Iron Age oppida such as Hrazany and Závist, and the medieval settlements of Mikulc^ice and Staré Me^sto–Velehrad, on a scale which could not be matched in western democracies. In the National Museum in Prague the results of these excavations were laid out strictly according to Marxist theories of social evolution.

THE CULTURE-HISTORICAL PARADIGM

The tradition of Pitt Rivers continued into the early part of the twentieth century with excavators such as Bushe Fox, St George Gray, Bulleid and Toms, but gradually the aim of excavation was changing from the description of ancient societies to an understanding of the dynamics of change. The stimulus for this came mainly from prehistory, with the desire to understand the changes in ceramic types, burial traditions and so forth: the history of culture-groups as conceived by the German scholar Gustav Kossinna and developed by Gordon Childe. These culture groups were then equated with ancient peoples, and were used, for instance, to document the supposed origin and spread of the Germans, a methodology which underpinned claims over territory. (This false approach is still used today in political conflicts.) The catalyst for change was essentially seen in external influence, usually in the form of invasions – what Grahame Clark was later to term the ‘invasion hypothesis’. In Roman archaeology a parallel process was especially concerned with military and political changes, such as the details of the conquest of Britain. In both cases the emphasis was on short-term changes, with a need for precise dating.

In terms of excavation technique this meant a change from horizontal to vertical recording. The section demonstrating the stratigraphical sequence became more important than the plan, and excavation strategies changed accordingly from area excavation to trenches and similar forms of excavation. However, unlike the parallel development that I have noted under ‘Climatic Change’, where excavations were small-scale and conducted by students and specialists, the culture-historical paradigm dealt with complex societies, for which a larger scale of excavation was needed, which generally involved employing unskilled workmen. The approach is nowhere more vividly demonstrable than in Wheeler’s excavations at Maiden Castle (Fig. 1.4a). Virtually all excavation was directed towards the sequence of defences, especially the gateways, and information about the interior of the Iron Age hill-fort is largely incidental, from the excavation of the Roman temple. At the same time the precise stratification of a specific find could be vital, so greater control was needed in the recording of the excavation.

The trench gave this control, but in addition Wheeler introduced on to his excavations a hierarchical organisation of trained supervisors whose responsibility it was to label finds, to label and draw sections, and to keep written records in a site note-book linking this information together with numbering and descriptions of the layers. The actual excavation was still largely the domain of the paid workman, though supervisors were expected to dig as well – indeed, this was part of their training. The use of the trench meant that diggers could be broken down into small groups and their work closely monitored.

This did not mean that interest in the plan totally disappeared, but to obtain a useful plan view meant an adaptation of the trench strategy to an area. There were two main solutions. The best known is Wheeler’s ‘grid’ (or ‘box’) method which consisted of a grid of squares divided by baulks (Fig. 1.4b), which could be used for access to any part of the area without trampling on any excavated surfaces. It gave rigid control over the individual excavators, as well as stratigraphical control, with a large number of sections crossing the area in both directions. It also had flexibility as it could be expanded in any direction as time and funds allowed, and following the areas with most significant results. After recording, the baulks could be removed, as was done at Maiden Castle to expose the ‘war cemetery’ or at Stanwick in the 1950s (Fig. 1.5). This system became Wheeler’s hallmark, and was introduced by him (or his trainees) into other countries such as India.

The other solution was to dig a series of parallel trenches, preferably alternating with blank areas where the spoil could be dumped. After recording the sections, the trenches were filled in and the blank strips excavated to give a total plan. This allowed greater efficiency in keeping the movement of soil down to a minimum, but had the disadvantage that all the sections were essentially in one direction. I have always referred to this as the ‘Schnitt’ method (Schnitt is the German word for trench), as it was primarily developed in Germany, a classic example being Werner Krämer’s excavations at the Iron Age site of Manching in the 1950s (Fig. 1.6). The main innovator was Gerhard Bersu. The leading archaeologist in Germany in the 1930s, he was forced to emigrate for political reasons; he introduced the technique to Britain, and used it on the Iron Age settlement of Little Woodbury and also on his excavations in the Isle of Man where he was interned during the war. I have found the system useful in situations where there is a small labour force but the topsoil has to be removed by hand, for example at the cemetery at Owslebury, where finds disturbed by deep ploughing were still in the topsoil, and where an overall view of the site was not essential (Fig. 2.4). In Germany, especially on the löss soils, stratigraphy might not always be clear, and stratigraphical excavation in the style employed by Wheeler and others did not appear until the 1960s, so often the ‘Schnitte’ were dug in spits, as Bersu did on the Isle of Man, a method often referred to as the ‘planum’ method. As each horizontal surface was cleaned and planned, features of soil changes would be marked, and the diggers instructed to keep the finds from them separate from the rest; thus some stratigraphy was introduced into the system.

1.4. Wheeler at Maiden Castle.Sir Mortimer Wheeler produced a number of innovations, and popularised archaeology for a wide public. However, in the realm of excavation technique, he imposed standards of organisation and control which form the basis of those in force today. Trenches were cut vertically and exactly, layers were numbered, sections labelled and drawn, and finds carefully labelled. The emphasis was on sequence, so the vertical record was important, and on the detailed stratigraphy of individual finds. This also involved cleanliness on site to prevent deposits and groups of finds becoming contaminated. Wheeler’s excavations concentrated on the sequence of the ramparts to obtain a cultural sequence, with less concern for the interior (Fig. 1.4a). Where more was needed to obtain a plan, for instance of the entrances or of the ‘war cemetery’, he developed his grid method which gave considerable control not only over the stratigraphy, but also over the work force (Fig. 1.4b).

Fig. 1.4b.

Both these techniques of excavation appear in modified form in various contexts. For instance Sir Cyril Fox applied the ‘Schnitt’ method to round barrow excavation, but more commonly used was the ‘quadrant method’, an adaptation of the grid, whereby four squares were laid out centred on the round barrow, giving sections across the mound in two different directions. In various forms this technique dominated barrow excavation in the 1950s despite the inconvenience of the baulks usually masking the central burial!

Other methods were employed. From 1953 to 1961 early urban excavation in Winchester consisted of digging a trial trench through the deposits and then opening up an area adjacent to the trench once the stratigraphy had been tested. The areas were dug piecemeal and lacked proper control, so this was not true ‘open area’ excavation (it was more akin to that described under ‘Climatic Change’). At Verulamium, Shepard Frere found the traditional 3m (10ft) square trenches too small, and opened up larger ones, specifically to deal with the extensive timber buildings.

THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC PARADIGM

The revolution, when it reached Britain in the 1950s, came from an unexpected quarter. Medieval archaeology had trailed behind other periods, being largely concerned with art and architectural history or simply with exposing sites for public display. In Britain two excavations from the 1950s stand out: those at the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy and the Saxon palace site at Yeavering. Wharram Percy was instigated by the social and economic historian Maurice Beresford, who was himself one of the catalysts for changing the paradigm in medieval archaeology, by asking questions about the causes of desertion and, later, about the origins of villages such as Wharram Percy. The early attempts at excavation were disastrous: normal trench excavation was totally unsuitable for peasants’ dwellings where often only a trace remained of the ephemeral structures, unlike the substantial remains on castle and church sites. Jack Golson and John Hurst, who had some training in the Danish methods pioneered by Gudmund Hatt of ‘open area excavation’ of occupation sites, suggested that this technique should be applied at Wharram Percy. The point to make is that the change of paradigm caused a different sort of site to be excavated, and it was the problems these sites caused which then forced a change in excavation method. Brian Hope-Taylor, who excavated the timber buildings at Yeavering, was also familiar with Scandinavian techniques and he excavated complete buildings rather than attempting to trench the features that showed up on the aerial photographs. The reason why Scandinavian archaeology was more advanced was in part due to the political and social climate of pre-war Denmark, a country dominated by small farmers who had a great interest in settlement and environmental history, in contrast to the imperial and colonial aspirations of Britain which emphasised progress and change through conquest and colonisation.

1.5. Wheeler at Stanwick.