June 2020

Recently, my current employers, whose services to tourism have been massive, were invited to meet Princess Anne at a garden party in Edinburgh. Alas, the nearest I have ever come to royalty was accidentally walking on the queen’s red carpet at a public event. The Egyptian government had lent some of the treasures from Tutankhamen’s tomb to the British Museum, and the queen was going to open the exhibition. I was at that time a student at the Institute of Archaeology, now part of University College London, and the BM was my second home, so to speak. The Institute is located in Gordon Square, a few minutes’ walk away from the museum. We were always being sent round to look at the displays in the public galleries, and occasionally got to work in the stores.

The morning of the royal visit, I was working as usual on some stone age tools in the depths of the massive warren of underground passages and storage rooms below the public galleries. Those were the days before the war on terror; nowadays they wouldn’t have let any students in for a week before a VIP visit. The member of staff responsible for me had promised to come and warn me when I had to get out. However, as it approached lunchtime, there was no sign of him, and I thought I had probably better get going. The way out from my particular part of the underground maze opened onto one of the public galleries. I took my usual route and emerged from a door in the panelling of a gallery full of printed books to find myself standing on a red carpet in the middle of a roped-off area, with about a hundred people staring at me. Scandalised attendants leapt out from all sides and hustled me and my battered briefcase out of the way. As I looked back over my shoulder, someone had got out a carpet sweeper and was running it over the area my plebeian feet had polluted!

In my professional capacity I have cleaned many a floor. No, I don’t mean vacuuming the carpet. I mean excavating the floor of a prehistoric family home. One in particular stands out. The year I graduated from university, I went to work in France on an archaeological site in the Dordogne region. This area is famous for its prehistoric painted caves, but there are also many sites in the region where people lived as well. The site I was working on dated from the end of the last Ice Age, when humans, and they were modern humans like us by this time, were still hunter-gatherers. They lived, not in the deep caves where the paintings were made, but in rock shelters and overhangs. They often made them cosier by building fireplaces, and walls across the entrances, and paving the floors. The local limestone splits into handy pieces, and the shelter I worked in at the end of the summer had a floor tiled with limestone pieces carefully chosen and fitted together. It was covered with the rubbish the original occupants had left behind.

I spent about three weeks drawing and excavating that blasted floor. The words “sur le dallage”, “dans le dallage” and “sous le dallage” are still burnt into my brain like a French language exercise. First I had to draw the surface of the floor and everything that had been left lying on it – bones, flint flakes etc (sur le dallage). Then I had to take three dimensional measurements of all of these objects, and excavate each one and place it with a label in a little plastic bag. We didn’t have GPS in those days, so we used tape measures and a curious little string triangle constructed on the edge of the trench. You measured the depth of the object by sighting across to the triangle using a wooden measuring stick. Then I had to excavate the floor and take up all the limestone fragments, again carefully measuring in and labelling everything that I found in the cracks among those paving stones (dans le dallage). And finally I had to do it again when all the stones had been lifted and I got to the area underneath (sous le dallage).

This is the nitty-gritty of archaeology, which programmes like Time Team can’t really convey. It takes WEEKS to excavate a thing like that properly and a lot of it is boring, repetitive work, which nonetheless has to be done with absolute accuracy.  But the thrill is that you are uncovering the lives of humans thousands of years in the past, people who felt the cold of winter and wanted a fire and a windbreak, people whose feet got wet and wanted a floor that wasn’t a sea of mud, people who sat round the fire and gnawed on a marrow bone, and carved decorations on their possessions, whether for magic or just for pleasure. People very like us.

One of the most interesting jobs I have done so far in my new home town has been helping to digitise the museum’s accessions register. That is, the list of all the objects to which the museum has legal title as opposed to objects on loan. This involved simply copying the entries in the paper register onto a database, which sounds boring. But it wasn’t. The act of data entry introduced me to a fascinating series of objects which I had never encountered before, because the museum where I worked for much of my life was located inland, miles from the sea, and my new home is a group of islands surrounded by sea. Also it was in England, and my new home is in the far north of Scotland.

My previous museum contained no net sinkers; the people of my new home have been fishing for 9000 years and oval stones with a groove round the edge are quite common finds. When it comes to World War II, my former museum boasts a modest collection of gas masks, and a few mementoes of the munitions factory created from a local stocking factory and an intelligence centre. Scapa Flow was a major naval base: we are talking about a whole separate museum site on Hoy full of guns, portholes, binnacles and other bits of warships.

You don’t find “luggies” or peat spades in south-east England because there wasn’t any peat to be cut.

In my former museum, I quite often used trade tokens or “jetons” for dating 15^th and 16^th century pits full of pottery. In Orkney museum, these are rare, but church tokens are quite common. Metal tokens of various shapes, made of lead or other base metals, were issued to people considered by the various reformed churches to be qualified to receive Holy Communion. Most were issued by the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, although they are known in other countries, and they were especially common in the 18th and 19th centuries, although they began in the 16th century. They were later replaced by communion cards. People were visited by the church elders during the weeks before Communion was celebrated (it was not a frequent service, only two or three times a year), and could be excluded for ignorance of the tenets of their faith, or for sinful behaviour. The Church of England didn’t do this so I had never met them before.

My previous museum was based on the site of the third largest town in Roman Britain, and was stuffed full of goodies from wealthy Roman town houses and villas. The Romans never set foot on Orkney. There are only a handful of tiny pieces of Samian pottery and Roman glassware which had somehow found their way this far north of the border to the brochs where the local Iron Age elite were living while their counterparts in southern England had accepted Roman rule and built themselves Roman villas. But there are boxes and boxes of Neolithic Grooved Ware. Before I came to Orkney I had seen a couple of bits of Grooved ware in the teaching collection at my university and that was it.

19^th century farm equipment – ploughs, horse harness, churns etc. – is pretty standard all over Britain, but it has different names in the local dialect, so I have had to learn a whole new terminology. For instance, how do you platt a pig? It took me a week to find out that a pig platting tub was a tub where you put your recently-killed pig to pour boiling water over it to get the bristles off. Read “Lark Rise to Candleford” by Flora Thompson for the gory details of pig-butchery.

Three years of data entry have taught me as much as all the reading I have done since I came here.