Archaeology

When I was a schoolgirl studying the history of Britain, about 50% of what I had to learn by heart was the names and dates of battles. After about 1750 it was the names and dates of Acts of Parliament. Very dry stuff. Some of the battles had a long-term effect on the development of the British political system, language and culture in general, such as the battle in 43CE which led to the lasting legacy of the Romans in Britain, or the Battle of Hastings in 1066CE which introduced a significant modification of the language and political organisation in much of Britain. But most of them were just attempts at empire-building or rearranging medieval political boundaries in ways that really didn’t matter in the long run.

And of course, when I was at school, all of them were looked at from the perspective of England, even before the date at which England became the dominant partner in the United Kingdom. Since moving to Orkney, I have found it very interesting to change perspective and look at the battles of British history from north to south rather than from south to north.

Until the late 15^th century, England, Scotland and Orkney were three different countries. Until 1468 Orkney was part of the kingdom of Norway (or Norway+Denmark+Sweden). Scotland and England were two separate kingdoms until 1707 and the Act of Union, even though after 1603 the same man was king of both of them. Unless they were fighting each other, which they often were, any battles between one of those countries and anyone else were usually of no concern to the other two, unless there was a way in which they could gain a political advantage while the enemy was distracted..

For most of the medieval period, Scotland was concerned with fighting the English and the Norwegians. England wanted to take over Scotland as it had taken over Wales, and Scotland wanted to take over the bits of modern-day Scotland which were then ruled by Norway. Orkney was part of Norway until 1468 (made official in 1471 by an Act of Annexation), and was therefore concerned with fighting the Scots. Scotland and Orkney, unlike England, were never at war with Wales or France.

The Battles of Agincourt and Crecy, for example, were nothing to do with either Scotland or Orkney. They are no more to do with the history of ‘Britain' than the Battle of Largs, which I had never heard of until I moved north.

The Wars of Independence took place between 1296 and 1328 when Edward I of England made a determined attempt to add Scotland to his kingdom. Peace and Scottish independence were restored only after a very nasty set of wars, with all the usual horrible medieval accompaniments of assassination, treachery, torture, excommunication etc. on both sides. They included plenty of battles, including the famous battle of Bannockburn. You probably have heard of that one. Most people have heard of the Scottish leader and eventual king, Robert the Bruce (something to do with spiders, wasn’t he?) and William Wallace (sanitised version in the 1995 film “Braveheart” played by Mel Gibson). The Declaration of Arbroath, an appeal to the pope for his support, does have some very good bits in it, especially the bit where they stated that they would get rid of any king who submitted to English rule, thus claiming the right to choose their king themselves rather than having to put up with the nearest male relative of the previous one. Just as good as Magna Carta, which introduced the revolutionary idea that the king should not be above the law.

Orkney had no more to do with the Scottish Wars of Independence than they had with the English Wars of the Roses. They were still part of a different kingdom. The only battles of any importance to Orkney between 1000AD and 1700 were the battles of Clontarf, Florvaug, Largs and Summerdale.

The battle of Clontarf took place in 1014 in Ireland just outside Dublin. Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, was fighting for Irish independence against the Dublin Vikings and their allies, who included the Irish king of Leinster, and Sigurd the Stout, the Norwegian earl of Orkney. Legend has it that Sigurd died after picking up a specially cursed banner prepared by his mother, a witch, which was supposed to guarantee his victory, so long as somebody else carried it. Whoever carried the banner was fated to be killed. When his men began to notice that whoever carried the banner didn't last very long they refused to pick it up and he lost his temper and picked it up himself. He got killed. The Vikings lost.

The battle of Florvaug was in 1194, when the Orkneymen and Shetlanders, rudely nicknamed the “island-beardies” from their unfashionable habit of wearing beards, joined in a rebellion against the king of Norway during a dynastic struggle for the Norwegian throne. They lost.

The battle of Largs in Ayrshire in 1263, was part of an on-going struggle between Scotland and Norway over control of the Western Isles. The Norwegian king sailed round to Largs on the Firth of Clyde and there was a battle. The Norwegians lost. The king struggled back to Kirkwall with the remains of his fleet, intending to winter there and have another try next year, but was taken ill and died in Orkney. Three years later his successor signed the Western Isles over to Scotland.

The battle of Summerdale in 1529 was part of a feud between the Caithness Sinclairs and the Orkney Sinclairs. The Orkney forces won. Comprehensively – the Caithness side had only one survivor.

As a pacifist, I am not much into the glorification of war or the celebration of battles. But as a person with an interest in history, if we must go on about battles, let’s get some proper perspective on them.

Reader, what images do the words “tea ceremony” evoke for you? A beautiful young geisha or a white-haired old tea master kneeling on a cushion whisking frothy green tea in a priceless old bowl? Or the Chinese version, seated round a low table watching the careful steeping of fragrant tea leaves in a red clay pot, before sipping the result from minute cups? I was privileged to experience the Chinese version on one occasion myself at a wonderful tea house in Singapore called Tea Chapter, but alas, when I hear the words “tea ceremony”, a very different image tends to come into my mind.

A group of people are sprawled on barrow-boards, in wheelbarrows, or cross-legged on the ground. Oh, the relief of sitting down for fifteen minutes after several hours with a pick and shovel in the blazing sun or the pouring rain! The tea is poured out of a battered tin tea pot into mugs which are sordid in the extreme. Hot water is hard to come by, sometimes even cold water comes in plastic jerry cans, and nobody really has time to spare for thorough washing up. The experienced keep a mug clearly labelled with their name, to avoid cold sores. The tea itself is the colour of dark mahogany and we often add flavour by idly lobbing lumps of mud into each other’s cups.  This is the tea ceremony as performed on almost every British-run archaeological site I ever worked on.

Mind you, it could get even worse. I went on an awful training dig in the Western Isles of Scotland during my second year at university. It took place during the Easter vacation. We spent a fortnight outside on the seashore, digging up an Iron Age wheelhouse in the freezing wind and rain. We had to wear goggles because the wind blew the sand back into the trench as fast as we could dig it out. At morning tea break, a large boiler in a hollow in the sand dunes provided us with tea and coffee. At lunch time it provided us with synthetic soup. At afternoon tea break it provided us with soup-flavoured tea. Of course there was nowhere to wash out the boiler. The tea was warm but I do not recommend it.

On the French-run sites I worked on there was no formal tea-break and no tea. Instead we were urged to take the odd break and help ourselves to iced water and fruit from a cool-box. But when I was working with a French team in the Lebanon, we were taken to visit the museum in Damascus in Syria. After we had been given a guided tour of the museum, we were served glasses of the most wonderful mint tea I have ever tasted. I have been trying without success to recreate the taste for the last fifty years.

I think I’ll go and put the kettle on…..

Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!

Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….

People have often asked me what was the most exciting object I ever found while working in archaeology. Two finds stand out in my memory and I can’t decide between them, so I will describe both. They could not have been more different. One dated from the Ice Age, the other was medieval. One I uncovered on an excavation, the other in a museum.

The excavation was in south-west France. We were working in the cool shade under the overhang of a limestone cliff. Above us towered the cliff, below us stretched a gentle wooded slope. Saplings had grown across the entrance to the shelter and filtered the sunlight. Fourteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, people had lived there, blocking the entrance with a wall and lighting a fire year after year on the same spot to make a snug home for the winter. Now some of us were uncovering the hearth, slowly peeling off the layers of earth and ash, while others were working on the area just outside the living space, where they had thrown their rubbish. Strings weighted with fishing line sinkers hung from a frame across the ceiling, marking the ground below into one metre squares so that we could make records of the horizontal distribution of the finds.  A string triangle at the edge of the working area allowed us to record the depth above sea level of finds and surfaces.

I was working on the rubbish dump. As I gently scraped the earth away, I found two tiny flakes of fine bright yellow stone, each with minute chips removed from the edges to shape it. They were the stone barb and tip of an arrowhead made of yellow jasper. The wood of the arrow had decayed, leaving them lying in the exact position they had been in when they were still attached to it, one lying flat, one on its side.  They were quite beautiful, the fine yellow stone looking like solidified butter. And mine were the first eyes that had seen them, mine the first hand that had touched them, in fourteen thousand years.

But you don’t have to be working on site to make an exciting discovery. Almost equally thrilling was a find I made when I was doing post-excavation work on the pottery from a medieval town. All the potsherds had been washed clean and marked with the code for the site and the layer it had come from. This was done in a shed on site while the excavation was going on. Then it was my job to lay all the pottery out on a huge table and see if any of the broken bits would stick together, before proceeding with the cataloguing. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with half the pieces missing, because for various reasons, we never found all the bits.

One of the medieval pits had produced a number of very large sherds of coarse grey unglazed pottery made locally in the thirteenth century. I fitted them together to produce the best part of two dripping dishes. Dripping dishes were shallow pans that were placed under the roasting spit in front of the fire to catch the fat and juices that dripped out of the meat. Mine were semi-circular in shape, with a straight edge on the side nearest the fire, and a handle on the round edge away from it. Each corner had a lip for pouring off the fat. And the best thing of all was that these two dripping dishes had actual medieval fat still sticking to them, where it had burnt onto the lip and the edge against the fire. Just like the fat burned onto your barbecue or your roasting pan, but seven hundred years old.

The thing I found exciting about both of these finds was not that they were made of gold or silver or had an enormous financial value. It was that they connected me to my fellow human beings, who had made and used them long ago: the hunter from so long ago who chose to make an arrow using a stone which was beautiful as well as functional; and the medieval housewife cooking her chicken or leg of lamb on a spit in front of the fire, basting it from time to time with the juices and fat collected in the dish below it. I could almost smell the roasting meat…