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.