August 2020

Most of the things I dug up or picked up during my years as an archaeologist in the field were broken pieces of things, sherds from pots, smashed roof tiles, butchered bones. If they weren’t broken when they were thrown away, they were crushed by the shifting pressures of the earth and buildings under which they were buried, or smashed by some archaeologist pulling them out of the ground in the gathering dusk as the bulldozers moved in. But I remember one find that startled me so much when I found it that I actually yelled out loud, because for once it was complete and unbroken.

I was working on the site of a Roman villa just outside my home town. This was in the late 1970s. It was a research dig, so we had all the time in the world (within reason). The trench and the diggers’ campsite were in a piece of perfect English countryside, in the tree-lined avenue of the local stately home, with fields of ripe corn and contented cows on either side. It was high summer, so the days were sunny and warm, with a breeze that sent ripples across the cornfields and rustled in the leaves of the towering horse chestnuts. The lane leading to the house was fringed with frothy white flowers of cow parsley, and birds sang in the hedgerows. In the evenings, after the usual water-fight by the horse-trough, where the more boisterous members of the team threw saucepans of water over each other, some of the staff played chamber music on their recorders in the tool shed. The others went to the pub. So English!

I was poking the point of my trowel into the earth, which I should not have been doing – I was supposed to be scraping carefully with the side – and suddenly the earth just fell away to reveal a little Roman brooch. It was a cheap bronze trinket without any decoration, of a kind made in large numbers for ordinary people to fasten their clothing with in the days before buttons. The metal was bright green from the corrosion products of the copper, but when it was worn it must have been either a reddish-bronze colour or perhaps a brassy gold-yellow. And it was complete. That one was a special thrill.