There is something different about a Time Team dig. Excavations normally have an air of calm, with people quietly troweling, sectioning features or wrestling with drawing frames. The hustle and bustle comes at tea time, when diggers compete for the best biscuits and plot their evening’s entertainment. Not so with Time Team. Visitors are announced with a burst of walkie-talkie static, before being ushered onto a scene of intense activity. A fleet of buggies, land rovers and minibuses ferry archaeologists, crew and cameras around, while JCB drivers await the order to strip the topsoil from a new trench. Up above, cameras mounted on cranes capture arcing shots of the trenches. And yet the archaeology underway at the eye of this storm is instantly recognisable.

I first came across Time Team as an impressionable 15 year old, when the series made me realise that archaeology was not just something you read about in books. It was something you could go out and do. It also captured the excitement of a subject where success depends on research and preparation going hand in hand with good fortune. The Time Team approach to archaeology certainly struck a chord, and the programme has been going strong since 1994. Last summer I was invited to spend a day digging with them at Kenfig, in Southern Wales. This was to be the last episode recorded in season 19, and despite approaching the end of a long shoot the team were in good spirits, and still enthusing about the previous site where they had to zip-wire onto an island.

 Kings of the Castle

Kenfig is a Medieval site in the Vale of Glamorgan. In the 1140s this was border territory, and a castle was founded on a low knoll overlooking the Cynfig River. This English enclave at Kenfig proved an affront to the Welsh, who repeatedly sacked the stronghold in the 12^th, 13^th and 14^th centuries. Despite this chequered track record, a town flourished in a defended enclosure beside the castle, spilling out beyond its fortifications. Ultimately it was not the Welsh but sand that did for the Medieval settlement. The dunes gradually overran the defences, until by 1665 only a single cottage remained. A detailed project design summarised all earlier work at this site, and explained how the research aims of the Time Team excavations fit into regional research frameworks.

Arriving on site for the second of the trademark three days I was met by Tim Taylor, Series Producer and unseen mastermind of Time Team. Despite not appearing on screen he is central to the show’s success, developing the original format and guiding events on the ground. Proud of the extent to which Time Team has permeated popular culture, Tim noted that large numbers of undergraduate students credit the show as their inspiration to study archaeology. He also pointed out that the team is essentially a survey unit, backing up John Gater’s magnificent geophysical surveys (see CA 252) with trial excavation.

And then it was on to the trial excavation. I was put in a trench with Raksha Dave, where geophysics predicted a road and building frontage. Previous experience has taught me that seemingly promising deserted Medieval villages can prove disappointing. This was different. The sand lifted away cleanly to reveal a hard metalled surface and rubble wall. Once the cameras were gone ranging poles and a planning board appeared as Naomi Hall from Wessex Archaeology tackled the recording work. Meanwhile, overhead more and more spectators were silhouetted against the skyline of a dune overlooking the site. Looking like a Zulu pastiche, they were armed with rugs and picnics and determined to enjoy the spectacle, no matter what the Welsh weather threw at them.

Lunch brought an opportunity to chat with the rest of the team, and a refreshing change from the cheese sandwiches that are usually an excavator’s lot. Matt Williams and Alex Langlands engaged in good-natured rivalry about who would win their afternoon showdown, when they were competing to fire flaming arrows. Afterwards a full meeting brought everyone up to date about progress across the site. A coin that had just been discovered in Phil Harding’s trench caused particular excitement. The assembled experts were quizzed on its likely significance, and a strategy developed on the spot.

The day ended with a trip to the incident room in a replica Medieval hall over the Prince of Wales pub. Here the regulars reflected on progress before the cameras. Partly scripted and partly adlibbed the director went for five takes, and it was fascinating to watch the scene evolve. As Tony Robinson found new ways to inject humour, the landlord of the Prince of Wales kept the Time Team tankards charged. ‘The archaeology is great’, Raksha chipped in as her contribution to the end of day scene. Yes it is.

Time Team: Series 19

1. Dig by Wire – 22 Jan, Gateholm, Pembrokeshire
2. A Village Affair – 29 Jan, Bitterley,Shropshire
3. The Drowned Town – 5 Feb, Dunwich,Suffolk
4. The First King of Racing – 12 Feb,Newmarket,Suffolk
5. Chapel of Secrets – 19 Feb, Beadnell, Co.Durham
6. A Copper Bottomed Dig -26 Feb,Swansea
7. The Only Earl is Essex – 4 March, Earls Colne, Essex
8. Secrets of the Dunes – 11 March, Kenfig, Bridgend
9. Rome’s Wild West – 18 March, Caerleon,Newport
10.  How to Lose a Castle – 25 March, Crewkerne,Somerset
11. King John’s LostPalace– 1^st April, Clipstone, Nottinghamshire
12. Time Team Guide to Burial – 8^th April, compilation
13. Time Team Greatest Discoveries – 15 April, compilation

A Roman imperial jigsaw puzzle

The discovery of fragmentary remains of several Roman helmets at Hallaton, Leicestershire, set conservators quite a challenge. Now, over a decade later their work is complete. Helen Sharp and Simon James reveal what has been learnt.

It is 11 years since a mass of corroded iron was found in a pit at Hallaton. Discovered on the site of a Late Iron Age shrine, this cracked and rusted metal could well seem unremarkable alongside such rich pickings as 5296 Iron Age and Roman coins, a unique silver bowl, a bronze tankard handle, ingots, and thousands of pig bones (see CA 236). Yet the presence of a telltale silver-plated ‘ear’ identified the metal mass as a Roman cavalry helmet. And an especially fine one at that.

Too delicate to excavate on site, the helmet was lifted as a soil block and taken to the British Museum for a painstaking programme of micro-excavation and conservation work. Finally concluded in December 2011, this revealed that parts of at least four helmets were buried in the cache. Now, as the newly restored Hallaton helmet goes on public display for the first time and a monograph discussing the site is published, we investigate what this surprising find reveals about conquest-period Britain.

Shrine find

Initially discovered by members of the Hallaton Fieldwork Group in 2000, the shrine was excavated alongside archaeologists from University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). This revealed a stretch of ditch with a central, east-facing entrance, and carefully ordered pockets of activity. Coins were concentrated in 14 separate hoards inside and to the north of the entranceway, while pig carcasses – possibly the detritus of ritual feasting – were dumped on the opposite side of the ditch. Silver objects such as the bowl were placed in the southern length of ditch. This ‘structured deposition’ of high-value objects, possibly as religious or ceremonial offerings, suggests a native British shrine was active at Hallaton in the mid 1^st century AD.

The helmet pieces lay in a pit sunk in the southern stretch of ditch. Digging it disturbed an earlier pit stuffed with animal bones, mostly from pigs. Vicki Score, Site Director for ULAS, believes that this may have been deliberate, and that memory of the earlier animal bone offering was a determining factor in where the helmet was buried. Approximately 1100 Iron Age and Roman coins were buried with, or immediately alongside, the helmet, forming a single deposit. These allowed Ian Leins, Curator of Iron Age and Roman Coins at the British Museum, to date its burial to the immediate post-conquest period, c. AD 43-50.

Investigation and conservation

Once lifted, the fragile helmet remains were entrusted to theBritishMuseum’s Department of Conservation and Scientific Research. Since 2002 conservators Marilyn Hockey, Fleur Shearman and Duygu Çamurcuoglu have meticulously excavated and recorded them. This work was initially carried out as part of the Treasure valuation process, but was later funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant obtained by Leicestershire County Council after they acquired the finds for display at Harborough Museum, Market Harborough.

Conservation work revealed the remains of a helmet bowl – the part that protects the top of the head – with an attached browguard and neckguard, as well as a beautifully preserved cheekpiece (Cheekpiece 1). Five further cheekpieces were stacked on top of it. A sixth was found wedged inside the helmet bowl, while the presence of a seventh was proven by scattered fragments of corroded metal. Such cheekpieces would be fixed to a helmet bowl with a metal hinge, and were worn by soldiers to protect the sides of their faces.

The question of whether any of the cheekpieces were originally attached to the helmet bowl was finally answered in November 2011. A fragile sliver of metal on the cheekpiece found within the bowl joins with its edge. This left-sided cheekpiece features a similar, if less well preserved, equestrian figure to Cheekpiece 1. The right cheekpiece has yet to be conclusively identified.

Triumphant iconography

The Hallaton cheekpieces portray a wealth of Roman imperial propaganda. Several depict a male figure – probably a victorious emperor – on horseback, spurred on by a winged Victory. Cowering beneath the horse is a subdued barbarian, sometimes with a helmet and shield to symbolise the spoils of war. Each cheekpiece included an ear protector, indicating they were intended for horsemen—cavalry troopers or mounted officers—to whom such triumphant equestrian scenes must have been especially appealing. In total five cheekpieces display horsemen motifs. Cheekpiece 4 is more baffling and seems to show a man in profile wearing a banded headdress, hat or helmet (see CA 252).

What the landscapers had recovered was a hoard of 80 United States Gold $20 coins of the type known as the ‘Double Eagle’.  They ranged in date from 1854 to 1913, and even at the time of minting would have represented a considerable amount of wealth.   Realising the significance of what they had found, the party contacted the local representative of the Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS), Kate Sumnall.  In her work as a Finds Liaison Officer (FLO), Kate is accustomed to seeing all manner of archaeological finds reported to her, but this was a special case.  Finds from the 20^th century certainly have the potential to provide important information about their past owners or the place in which they were found, but rarely do they qualify as ‘Treasure’ in the legal sense, under the  1996 Treasure Act.

Under the old law of Treasure Trove, finders of items made substantially of gold or silver were required to report their discovery to the local coroner.  Such items, if they had no traceable owner and if they appeared to have been buried with the intention of future recovery, would be classed as Treasure Trove and become property of the Crown.  They could then be acquired by a museum at a price determined (until the 1990s) by an expert at the British Museum, with the totality of the sum payable to the finder. In the case of the Hackney Double Eagles, it seems likely that such a collection found concealed in the ground can only be a caché that its depositor had hoped to return for.

It is not uncommon for hoards of 19th and 20th century coins to be found in Britain.  As late as 1996 a hoard of silver threepence with coins dating to 1943 was uncovered in Hertfordshire and reported as Treasure. Nor is it unheard of for such finds to be made in urban areas. In the 1927 another hoard of gold coins was found in the back garden of a London property, but on this occasion it was gold sovereigns from Essex Road, in Islington.  What is unusual about the Hackney Hoard is the combination of its recent date, the historic value of the coins, and the fact that they all came from a particular foreign country.

It seems just possible that the hoard was buried within living memory.  As with any case of ‘buried treasure’, the fact that they were not retrieved by their depositor speaks to some misfortune which may have befallen him or her, even if it was something as benign as the inability to relocate the precise location of the coins within the garden.  Rarer are stories of the successful recovery of hoards, though we know that at least some were retrieved by their owners, the famous example being that of Samuel Pepys who, succumbing to the fear of an invasion of London by the Dutch in 1667, sent his father and wife to hide his gold at Pepys’ country home.  After much distress at the method of safekeeping chosen by his family – burying the fortune in the garden in broad daylight – Pepys managed to retrieve most of the coins some months later.  In the case of the Hackney Double Eagles, precise information about the find spot has been generalised in order to protect the site (as is the practise in all Treasure cases); in addition, it is expected that a legitimate claimant of the coins will be able to provide more details about the property of the coins and history of their burial.

What that history might be remains – at the moment – only speculation.  As in other areas of the Capital, the early twentieth century was a time of dramatic social change in Hackney.  Then, just as now, London was a popular destination for migrants, many of whom crammed into the terraced properties so prolific in maps and photographs from this period. Research has been undertaken by the Museum of London, the British Museum and the coroner’s office to assemble as much information as possible about the property in Hackney and any individuals who might have been responsible for the burial of the coins.  This has produced a plethora of data; we have learned for instance that the house and adjacent properties experienced a series of different owners in the decades after the First World War, and that the neighbourhood experienced extensive bomb damage during the Blitz leading to subsequent replacement of Victorian housing stock with large swathes of social housing.

The hoard could be the manifestation of years of patient collecting contemporaneous with the minting of the coins, a bulk acquisition in exchange for other goods, or a combination of both. It is tempting to look for evidence of an American expatriate or perhaps a visiting American soldier of the First or Second World Wars who may have brought his substantial savings with him, but the depositor may not necessarily have been a citizen of that country.  Playing an enigmatic role in this story is the numismatic context of the Hackney hoard. The ultimate date of 1913 on the latest Double Eagle is important because of its proximity to the start of the Great War – an event which was to see the United Kingdom come off the gold standard.  Other western countries, including the United States, clung to the gold standard after the war, pegging the value of their currency to a specified quantity of gold, which could be redeemed on demand.  Legislation in the United States required that the Federal Reserve maintain a stock of gold equal to 40% of the value of all the notes in circulation.   In the late 1920s the United States experienced what economist Milton Friedman termed the ‘Great Contraction’.  Due to a number of factors (the stock market crash, lack of confidence in banks, deflation) the level of circulating currency dropped by a third and the United States, unable to print more money, was faced with a deflationary spiral.  President Franklin Roosevelt’s new administration sought to arrest this trend in part by increasing the reserve of gold. In April 1933 it passed tan executive order which saw the enforced exchange of gold in private hands for the market rate of $20.66 per ounce.  The dollar was ‘floated’ against other currencies and after a year it was refixed to the price of gold, which by that time had risen to $33 an ounce.  Whilst it rejoined the gold standard, the United States no longer minted gold coins for circulation, and 1932 was to be the last year of significant production of the historic ‘Double Eagle’.  Although it is possible that the depositor of the Hackney hoard smuggled the coins out of the United States after 1933, it seems more likely that they were removed or collected earlier.  But why and by whom?

A large part of the significance of this case lies in the possibility that circumstantial evidence, from a living informant or documentary sources, will reveal something of the story of how these gold Double Eagles were collected and then deposited in an innocuous back garden in Hackney.  What would be of interest for archaeology would be to compare the circumstances of this deposit with others of which we have only the coins and their context to examine.

Text: Ian Richardson

 This is an extract, but you can read the full article in issue 251 of Current Archaeology

February 7th marks the 200th anniversary of novelist Charles Dickens’ birth. But how might archaeology offer a new chapter to his blockbusting London slum story, Oliver Twist? David Saxby, of Museum of London Archaeology, explains all.

Few writers conjure up images of Victorian London more readily than Charles Dickens, born two centuries ago this February. Among his most famous London-based novels is the page-turner story of Oliver Twist, published chapter by cliffhanging chapter from 1837-9.Long after the eponymous urchin asks for another portion of gruel, the story unravels into a tale of bloody murder. The killer, Bill Sykes, flees the North London scene of his crime. But where should he go? Ultimately, there was only one refuge befitting a soul so dirty, and that place was Jacob’s Island, in South London, said to be the worst slum inLondon. There, amid the stinking dilapidation, the novel reaches its climax, as (spoiler alert!) Sykes is hanged by his own noose.

In his novel, Charles Dickens offers a lengthy and graphic description of Jacob’s Island, which appears too grotesque to be anything other than pure fiction. But in fact, Jacob’s Islandreally did exist. So how true was Dickens’ description? Might archaeology provide answers? To discover more, in 1996 I led a team from Museum of London Archaeology to excavate at the site of Jacob’s Island, just east of St Saviour’s Dock, Bermondsey, South London. The story of our dig, and the insights it sheds on the lives of the real people who once lived there, has never been presented to a wide readership, but in memory of the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, the time is now right. So light the fire, settle down, and listen to the true tale of 19th-century slums and squalor in South London.

The rise and fall of Jacob’s Island

What stories can the artefacts in national museums tell us about those countries? We explore how objects both everyday and exclusive combine to tell the 230,000 year tale of the birth of Wales.

Viking finds are rare in the North West. The discovery of two hoards in 2011 provides a rare glimpse of the international reach of the Danelaw. Amongst the coin issuers is a previously unknown Viking ruler, whose reign was most likely cut short by the turbulent events of his time.

The largest excavation ever undertaken in Cambridgeshire has revealed how the landscape evolved from the Bronze Age through to the modern day. A Roman memorial garden and bizarre late monument are amongst the intriguing discoveries in the Cam valley.

Finally, January saw the last pieces slotted into a Roman jigsaw puzzle almost a decade in the solving. The Hallaton cavalry helmet is now on public display. Read all about the messages conveyed by this masterpiece of imperial propaganda.

FEATURES

DIGGING JACOB’S ISLAND

A new chapter for Oliver Twist
Uncovering the ‘Capital of Cholera’: what light can archaeology shed on Charles Dickens’ most notorious slum?

TREASURES FROM EARLY WALES

Climate change, copper mining and the birth of the Cymry
Exploring 230,000 years of human activity through the superb collections of the National Museum Cardiff.

VIKING HOARDS

Buried wealth of the Norse North West
Commerce, Christianity and an unknown king: what can two remarkable detectorist finds reveal about Viking activity in north-west England?

CLAY FARM’S EVOLVING LANDSCAPE

From first farmers to post-Roman rituals
The largest single excavation in the Cambridge area has uncovered 5000 years of prehistoric activity and some tantalising Romano-British features.

NEWS

A burial plot to rewrite Roman inhumations;London’s love token?; Cutting edge Neanderthal technology; Cash, cheque or firedog?; Unravelling the King’s Knot; Conserving Co. Durham’s POW camp; Protecting Scarborough’s Star find; European archaeology on display.

REGULARS

Conference
Exciting new details about our updated timetable of speakers.

Time Team
A sneak preview of what you can expect from Series 19.

Reviews
Dennis Jackson: a Northamptonshire Archaeologist

Sherds
Chris Catling’s irreverent take on heritage issues.

Odd Socs
The Pugin Society

1. Dig by Wire – 22 Jan, Gateholm, Pembrokeshire
2. A Village Affair – 29 Jan, Bitterley,Shropshire
3. The Drowned Town – 5 Feb, Dunwich,Suffolk
4. The First King of Racing – 12 Feb,Newmarket,Suffolk
5. Chapel of Secrets – 19 Feb, Beadnell, Co.Durham
6. A Copper Bottomed Dig -26 Feb,Swansea
7. The Only Earl is Essex – 4 March, Earls Colne, Essex
8. Secrets of the Dunes – 11 March, Kenfig, Bridgend
9. Rome’s Wild West – 18 March, Caerleon,Newport
10.  How to Lose a Castle – 25 March, Crewkerne,Somerset
11. King John’s LostPalace– 1^st April, Clipstone, Nottinghamshire
12. Time Team Guide to Burial – 8^th April, compilation
13. Time Team Greatest Discoveries – 15 April, compilation

I was down in the very splendid library of the Society for Roman Studies, looking for a book and happened by chance to notice a title Rome and China.  I thought,  ha ha!, this  is a book for me.  Since I am devoting my semi-retirement to writing my ‘big book’,  a history of the world in which I am putting the world to rights (you can read the chapters so far on www.civilization.org.uk), I am indulging in these cross comparisons, so this is just the sort of book for me.  I found it was written, or rather edited by Walter Scheidel who also contributed by far the best chapter on a comparison of Roman and Chinese money.

This led me to pick up once again another book comparing Rome and China which I had been sent for review entitled Why the West Rules – For Now by Ian Morris – Profile Books £25.  This is by far the worst book produced so far in the 21^st century.  At 750 pages it is far too long and one just itches to get out one’s red pencil and edit down, because inside this very bad book there is a very good book struggling to be let out.  So I spent the Christmas holidays pecking away at it, and learning an awful lot about the Chinese civilisation.

Walter Scheidel and Ian Morris both come from the same university: Stanford.  Stanford University is in California, and is the only private university in California, competing with the monstrous public University of California with its numerous campuses spread over the state.  Stanford however competes hard.  Not only does it house the Hoover Institution, a notorious right-wing think tank, but it also specialises in computers.  Hewlett and Packard were both doctoral students there, but more recently Google was founded there by two young students who hogged the entire university’s computing capacity until eventually they had crawled through and indexed the quarter of the entire world’s web sites, and were thrown off the university’s computers into the welcoming arms of venture capitalists.

Ian Morris, on site

What does the Department of Classics do to keep the flag flying against such competition?  The answer is to send out a raiding party to raid the universities of Europe.  They went to Vienna where they captured Walter Scheidel, the rising star of Austrian classicists, and they also carried off Ian Morris, originally from Cambridge. (They also carried off Ian Hodder of Catal Huyuk fame – but that is another story).  Having arrived in Stanford they had to demonstrate their value by showing that the classics are relevant, which meant indulging in cross-culture comparisons.

Ian Morris therefore has been indulging in the old game of East, West who is best.  Were the Chinese really better than the Romans or was it vice versa?  Well, the United Nations had set up a Human Development Index,   comparing the different countries of the world by a variety of different classifications.  So he thought he would set up the same sort of thing for the ancient world, and in particular for China and the West: specifically Greece and Rome.  He set up what he called a social development index – the details are promised ‘soon’ on his web site at www.ianmorris.org .  Here he uses four indices.  The first and the most secure is the size of largest settlements.  Then, somewhat more dicey, comes the ability to make war.  Then comes what he calls information technology, which is what we would call literacy, but they would call that ‘information’ technology in Stanford, wouldn’t they!  And finally comes energy capture (don’t ask).

Well, having set up the index, who wins? The West springs into the lead with Catal Huyuk with 1,000 inhabitants in 7,500 BC and 3,000 by 6,000 BC (when in Stanford, always support your fellow professors).  The West then remains firmly in the lead: by 1200 BC, both Babylon and Thebes have 80,000 inhabitants, while the biggest Chinese city An’Yang has only 50,000.  The West remains in the lead in the Roman period:  at the year dot, Rome had a million inhabitants and was twice as big as the biggest Chinese city, Chang’an, which only had 500,000.

Generally speaking, he argues that throughout prehistory and down to the Roman period, the West was ahead of China by between 1500 and 2000 years.  The one big exception was in pottery where the East was miles ahead with the development of what is called in Japan Jomon ware.  There is the suspicion that acorns can be made into a very rich source of food by boiling off the poisonous elements, and thus pottery was developed very early in the East.  But in most other aspects — cultivated plants, big villages, domesticated animals, the West was well ahead.

This analysis is of course a big shock to the Chinese who like to believe they were ahead in everything.  Apparently quite recently an eminent Chinese minister was on an official visit to Egypt and was told by the Egyptians that they were always ahead of the Chinese, and he didn’t believe them, and on his return to China he set up a massive investigation of the subject.  A lot of Chinese scholars were set to work and 2 million dollars later the answer came back – yes the Egyptians were ahead.  The results were not widely publicised.

The lead was kept throughout the Roman period, though the Chinese equivalent the Han Dynasty was not far behind.  However, between AD 200 and 400, both Rome and China declined and both embraced exotic religions – Christianity in the West, Buddhism in the East.  However the Dark Ages were much more prolonged in the West.  In the East,  there was a major revival around AD 700, and the succeeding Tang Dynasty became China’s ‘Golden Age’, when China went right ahead.  By AD 800, the biggest Chinese city, Chang’an  had reached a million inhabitants – the same as Rome at its height, while the biggest city in the West, Damascus, had only 175,000.

Indeed those who like to compare Islam with the West, might like to note that the biggest Islamic cities were around AD 1200 when both Bagdad and Cairo reached 250,000 inhabitants – the same size as Constantinople at the same time, though both were dwarfed by Hangzhou in China with 800,000 inhabitants.  But in the second half of the second millennium, the West began to overtake China again, and by 1800 the biggest Western town, London, had reached 900,000 inhabitants – almost as big as Rome at its peak.  But China was still ahead, for Beijing, by now its biggest city, had 1.1 million.  However by 1900 the West had gone right ahead, with London having 6.6 million as against  the biggest city in the East, Tokyo with 1.75 million.  By 2000 however, the East had leap frogged ahead once again, and   Tokyo had 26.7 m whereas New York only had 16.7 million.  Though whether the size of the city today marks success or failure is another matter.

The big question is of course is why did the Chinese retain their superiority for so long, and why did they then lose it and why did the West go ahead?  Part of the reason, I believe, is  monetary stability.  China never suffered the terrible inflation that the Roman Empire suffered in the 3^rd century.  Indeed the Kaiyaun  coinage introduced in AD 621, and the coiage system  lasted through to the early 20^th century.  It was only in the 1940s and 50s that China eventually suffered terrible inflation which destroyed nationalist China and allowed it to be replaced by the Communists who reintroduced monetary stability.

But the biggest aspect was surely their bureaucracy, and the invention of competitive examinations for entrance to that bureaucracy which ensured that although China was constantly being invaded by wild invaders from the deserts to the north and west, nevertheless the concept of a single unified Chinese Empire always survived, and there is always a steady supply of well-educated and clever bureaucrats.  Indeed one suspects that the success of China today is based on the existence of a very clever bureaucracy.

Full size stationary model (built of concrete and timber) to show just how large these 'Treasure boats' were. Photo:wikipedia

But how did the West manage to leap ahead? Partly it was through sheer bureaucratic inertia.  In the 15^th century the Chinese built a huge treasure fleet of ships very much bigger than anything seen in the West, which under the Admiral Zheng He sailed all over the Indian Ocean and down the East coast of Africa, though not — as the popular  books by Gavin Menzies  argue —  to America.  But having made these voyages, the Chinese establishment turned against the idea of foreign voyaging,  and the ships were laid up and allowed to rot away.

Meanwhile in the West,  smaller but tougher ships were sailing across the Atlantic and eventually around the world. I am attracted by the argument – not used by Ian Morris – that the reason why the West went ahead lay in the fact that there were a number of competing states, which because they were competing with each other encouraged the concept of free thought and enterprise and this was the foundation of the Industrial Revolution.  This of course makes a strong argument against the EU, that Europe has succeeded precisely because of its diversity, and if we try and forge it into a single monolithic block, it will simply stagnate as China did.

Ian Morris however, doesn’t take this argument.  He believes in geographical determinism, and argues that it was because the distance across the Pacific Ocean is more than three times the distance across the Atlantic, the Europeans with their smaller ships, were able to undertake major transoceanic voyages first. Similarly because of geographical factors, although the West rules for now, we are going to be overtaken by the East.  We shall see.

This is undoubtedly a very stimulating book, full of wonderful ideas.  Ian Morris writes well and alluringly and his learning is immense.  Much of the book is inevitably devoted to China whose history is little known in the West;  but when he turns his attention to Europe, one realises one is in the presence of a master classical historian.  If only it wasn’t quite so long:   every time a side turning appears, he wanders down it, often with fascinating anecdotes, but always in danger of losing the thread.  I have only pecked at the book so far: I may have read half of it in an entirely random order, and there is still the other half to be read.  This is in many ways the worst book on archaeology and history to be published in the 21^st century.  It is also the best.

Secret passages are the stuff of childhood adventure stories, but all too rare in real life. Now excavations inIreland’sCountyLouthare unearthing the elaborate precautions that those threatened by Viking raids took to protect their families.

Britain in the dying days of Roman control is a captivating though elusive subject. Excavations at Binchester are revealing how an industrial revolution swept through the fort, as the former garrison became ever more dependent on local produce to keep them in food and leather. Was this pocket of Empire the genesis of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom?

Finally, we travel to the remote St Kilda archipelago, to see how hardy 19^th-century islanders won a living from this windswept world, and examine tantalising traces of their prehistoric forbears.

FEATURES

WATERWORLD

Life on the Bronze Age riverfront
Going with the flow: what can Must Farm’s spectacular prehistoric remains reveal about how Bronze Age people adapted to their changing surroundings?

ESCAPING THE VIKINGS

Souterrains in Co. Louth, Ireland
Going underground: exploring the secret tunnels dug to outwit marauding Norsemen

BINCHESTER AFTER ROME

Continuity or change in the Imperial twilight?
What happened when the Roman Empire left? New investigations reveal the role of a fort in the new post-Imperial world.

SURVEYING ST KILDA

Life on the edge
A new survey uncovers 5000 years of activity at one of the most remote settlements on the British Isles.

NEWS

Stonehenge: sourcing the bluestones; Britain’s first Viking boat burial surfaces; Village of the Pictish symbol stones; Another towering Pictish find; Lakeland Neolithic rock art; Misplaced Place of Kelly; How do you date a hoard?

REGULARS

Conference
Further details to whet your appetite for Current Archaeology Live! 2012.

Sherds
Chris Catling’s irreverent take on heritage issues.

Last Word
Andrew Selkirk has been to the new Ashmolean Egyptian galleries.

Odd Socs
Regia Anglorum

The discovery of six Bronze Age boats and an intact prehistoric riverside at Must Farm, Cambridgeshire, is a stunning find. It also provides a glimpse of the human struggle with a changing environment, as David Gibson, Mark Knight and Kerry Murrell from Cambridge Archaeological Unit (CAU) told Matthew Symonds.

The boats did not sink accidentally. Five of the six craft were deliberately scuttled, their backplates removed so that the waters of the River Nene could flood in. No longer watertight the vessels would have foundered quickly, slipping from sight before settling on the riverbed silts. But this was no mass sinking as part of a ceremonial spectacular in a sacred place. The boats were sunk individually, over the course of six centuries from 1300-700 BC, amongst the traps and weirs of a well-managed watercourse. Now 150m of the channel are being excavated by CAU in Must Farm quarry. While this stretch of river was probably unremarkable to the Bronze Age inhabitants who worked it, the forces shaping their way of life were anything but.

CAU working on one of the six boats recovered from Must Farm (Photo: Dave Webb)

Around the dawn of the Bronze Age an environmental catastrophe engulfed the plains of south-eastern England. A managed landscape where cattle were herded, red deer foraged and oak trees grew was gradually inundated by rising water. Vast swathes of these plains, the Mesolithic hunting grounds of Doggerland, had been claimed by the North Sea thousands of years before. Now it was Cambridgeshire’s turn. As the ground saturated, peat began to form and the Fens were born. Dry-land species retreated as their landscape drowned. By the close of the Bronze Age the cattle, red deer and oak were gone; to be replaced by beavers, pelicans, otters and water voles in a new, wetland world. But one mammal proved more than a match for this changing environment: humans.

While the emergence of a Fenland habitat did not displace the human population, it encouraged a new way of life. Before the Middle Bronze Age, their archaeology is essentially that of any other prehistoric society in southern England. The pottery assemblages and Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age monuments would be entirely at home in the Wessex chalklands. It was only after 1500 BC that everything changed. As the peat thickened, and the area became ever less penetrable on foot, features that were uniquely Fen began to appear. The famous Flag Fen causeways and platform dug by Francis Pryor (see CA 119) typify this. It is around the southern end of the Flag Fen basin – an area of marsh that formed around 1300 BC – that Must Farm quarry lies. The ongoing CAU excavations there are providing a vivid insight into how a changing environment moulded a new world.

The clay’s the thing

The humble brick is to thank for the spectacular Must Farm discoveries. Deep deposits of Lower Oxford clay here, lying 20 or 30m below ground, rank amongst the finest in the country. Until recently this clay was especially prized by the brick industry, as it is rich in decayed Jurassic sea life. This ignites when fired, creating a particularly solid product. Renowned as the ‘London brick’, it earned its name after being used to rebuild most of the East End following the Blitz. Yet today the extra pollution the clay generates has fallen foul of environmental measures. In its heyday 20 brickyards were producing the London brick; now only one remains: the Must Farm operation run by Hanson. Still churning out millions of bricks a week, its appetite for raw materials is steadily revealing a pristine prehistoric landscape.

This is fortunate, because existing site detection techniques are blindsided by the Fens. Lying at depths of 4 to 6m, the prehistoric layers could be seen as no more than a thin veneer of human activity crowning the pre-Fenland geology. Yet it is still sufficiently far down to be invisible to aerial photography, and out of reach of field walkers and metal detectorists. Even the gravel sought by aggregate quarries does not take them so deep, while the soft Fen sediments rule out the construction of housing estates and the opportunities for excavation they bring. The brickworks provide our only window into the prehistory.

It was the way layers formed as the Fens developed that created this depth of archaeology. Every year the previous surface in the Must Farm channel was blanketed by a fine layer of silt. In places delicate lenses of fallen autumn leaves still survive, banding the sediment like tree rings. Over centuries this produced a marked difference in height. The latest boat in the channel, dating to around 700 BC, lies 1.3m higher than the earliest, which was scuttled around 1300 BC. In the 1930s Grahame Clark described the fen deposits as a ‘delicate chronological scale’, because he realised that British prehistory had been separated out there and sorted into layers. After the radiocarbon revolution and advent of hard scientific dates for prehistory its potential was all but forgotten, but the CAU archaeologists are now making full use of the chronological control it provides.

Wind in the willows

Volunteers brave the waters of Loch Tay in a reconstructed Bronze Age boat (photo: PKHT/Scottish Crannog Centre).

The archaeology reveals that from around 1300 BC those living in the area became steadily more preoccupied with access. Building the Flag Fen causeways was one natural response to the growth of swamps. Rather than connecting previously inaccessible spots, these structures maintained access by replacing lost dry-land routes. Yet in some places manmade walkways were not needed, as natural causeways known as ‘roddons’ already penetrated the marsh.

‘Roddon’ is a Fenland term. It refers to a former tidal river channel that was gradually choked by sand and marine sediments. Once silted up, these created a far firmer surface than the peaty bog that developed around them. Today, roddon courses are easy to spot in the landscape, because in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries they offered the only substrata stable enough to support farms. It was one of these, now demolished, that gave Must Farm quarry its name. Yet roddons were also valued by the Bronze Age population, as they provided a dry passage through the wetland.

Must Farm’s roddon was doubly useful, because as well as providing a natural causeway, a freshwater channel developed along it, cutting into the hard marine sediment. Running from Northamptonshire out towards March, before debouching into the sea, the result was a major navigable watercourse easily accessible on foot. Believed to be a former channel of the River Nene, prehistoric people enthusiastically exploited its potential.

This is an extract.  The full article can be found in issue 263 of Current Archaeology, on sale now.

Exposing hidden sinners in a rural Welsh church

 Deep in the Vale of Glamorgan, the interior of the 13^th-century church of St Cadoc in Llancarfan was once a riot of colour. Dramatic images of saints and allegorical scenes competed for space while vivid depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins cavorted around the arch of a south-west window. But during the reign of Edward VI these pictures offended the religious sensibilities of Protestant reformers who promptly whitewashed the church’s Catholic past out of existence. Llancarfan’s saints and sinners lay forgotten for the next 500 years, but now conservation work has brought them to light once more.

St George and the Dragon, with Death and the Gallant bottom left (photo: Ian Fell/Media for Heritage)

The first clue to the existence of the lost paintings emerged three years ago when architects noticed a thin red line of ochre on the south wall of the church. Hours of painstaking work removing over 20 layers of limewash, modern paint and bat droppings revealed the line to be part of a painted frame surrounding a spectacular mural of St George. Dressed in full armour, England’s patron saint attacks a coiled dragon from the back of his white charger. Nearby stands the grateful damsel in distress (accompanied by a lamb emphasising the Christian tone of the painting), while her royal parents look on from the safety of their castle. The princess’ clothes and George’s armour date the image to the 15th century. Only two other St George murals are known from Welsh churches, and Llancarfan’s is thought to be the largest and best preserved.

Subsequent initiatives funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Cadw have uncovered further paintings, including a sinister ‘Death and the Gallant’, a variation on the popular Medieval Danse Macabre motif, emphasising the futility of earthly vanity. In the version at St Cadoc’s, a young man – dressed in the height of 15th-century fashion with his knitted Monmouth cap – is shown being dragged to his doom by a shroud-wrapped skeleton.

The Venerable Peggy Jackson, Priest-in-Charge of Llancarfan, counts the church's sins. Clockwise from bottom left: Lust, Sloth and Pride (photo: Ian Fell/Media for Heritage)

Now the latest project, which included repairing damage around a window caused by resident bats, has discovered lively depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins hidden under 27 layers of paint. Each shows a human being tempted into wrongdoing by gloating devils. The first to emerge was Gula (Gluttony), but others soon followed. Luxuria (Lust) portrays two lovers kissing rather chastely – though a nearby devil urges them on to more amorous acts. Accedia (Sloth) has a devil encouraging a man to escape his meaningless life by falling on his sword, and the regal figure of Superbia (Pride) smiles smugly as two demons place a crown on his head. Meanwhile Avaritia (Avarice) is plied with bags of gold coins. Wrath and Envy are still lurking unseen beneath the limewash, though as the Heritage Lottery Fund granted the church’s Conservation Committee a further £541,900 only this week, it is hoped that these too will soon be exposed to view.

Conservation Committee member Ian Fell said he expected another 18 months were needed to uncover, preserve and interpret the rest of the paintings in the church.

He said: ‘The questions to be unpacked from these discoveries are legion. Not least, what is St George doing on a church wall in Wales? We will have to watch this limewashed space.’

For more information on St Cadoc’s church and its wall paintings, visit www.stcadocs.org.uk

Article by Carly Hilts