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Limpets and jellyfish, cockles and mussels, oysters and snails… They have gone from being famine food or the food of the poor to expensive delicacies for recherché feasts. They may even become the staple foods of the future.

Before the comparatively recent arrival of modern industrial farming and global transport systems, famine was a constant possibility in Europe, as it still is over much of the world. Only the most privileged did/do not have to worry about starving to death. Farmers watched the sky and their fields and livestock, and prayed to a multitude of gods in an attempt to guard against bad weather and disease wiping out their crops and herds. The brutal demands of unscrupulous landlords for excessive rent and labour often made matters worse. Nowadays , we have the growing realisation that there are too many people for the planet to support in the way we are used to, and food in the future may be very different from today. Invertebrates may be the key to survival, as they have been for millennia in difficult situations. Invertebrates are animals without backbones, about 95% of all animals. This includes cockles and mussels and oysters and limpets.

It is weird to think that many of the foods scavenged in the wild by starving peasants or hunter-gatherers in marginal environments have become much-prized delicacies, or suggested as a possible source of protein for the future. In Orkney, limpets (Patella vulgata) grow on every rock. Limpets were normally used as fish bait but were eaten as ‘famine food’ in bad years. They are considered to be quite nutritious, although rather chewy. Yet in some parts of the world limpets are regarded as a delicacy. On the island of Madeira, they actually have a limpet festival, where the shellfish are served grilled in their shells and flavoured with garlic and lemon.  

I cannot imagine why anybody would want to eat snails (Helix pomatia) if they weren’t starving. I found them just like small pieces of chewing gum in a strong garlic sauce. I wouldn’t serve them at my feast. I would feed them to my pig and roast the pork. Flora Thompson in ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’, Penguin Modern Classics 1973, Chapter I page 24, mentions being sent out to collect snails to fatten the family pig. However, snails have been popular treats for millennia. One of my favourite letters by the Roman writer Pliny the Younger was to his friend Septitius Clarus, who hadn’t turned up to a dinner invitation. It mentions snails as one of the hors d’oevres he had missed. Mind you, the Romans considered sows’ udders and boiled parrot to be delicacies, so one wonders about their tastes.

When Charles Dickens was writing his novels commenting on life in 19^th century London, oysters  (Ostrea edulis) were the food of the poor, in fact, according to his character Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers, eating oysters was a clear sign of poverty. Oysters are now an expensive treat. Wild oyster stocks have been depleted and we have to farm them, as indeed the Romans did. There is also an interesting debate at the moment about whether vegans can eat oysters and mussels because they don’t have a central nervous system, or whether the concentrations of nerve tissue in various parts of their bodies count as a brain. 

And finally (for now), the most obviously invertebrate of all invertebrates is the jellyfish. When I read in a historical novel about people in 16^th century Japan eating jellyfish, I wasn’t sure whether the author was making it up. But my son was offered fried jellyfish as a special treat while on holiday in Malaysia. He said they didn’t taste of much but they looked like scrambled egg, and he clearly enjoyed them. They remind me of the description of human beings by an alien life form in a Star Trek episode: “big ugly bags of mostly water”. Somehow I don’t think that the future of human nutrition lies with jellyfish!

Heroines in Jane Austin novels are always in need of sal volatile. “Young ladies are delicate plants,” as Mr Woodhouse said in “Emma”. They react to any distressing situation with a genteel faint, so they always carry a pretty little bottle of smelling salts. I’m afraid that I am not very genteel. Sal volatile always reminds me of a disastrous experiment I carried out while I was an archaeology student.

I was working on chipped stone tools from the very earliest part of the Stone Age, around 300,000 years ago. For some reason that I can’t remember now, I wanted to take photographs of the details on the surfaces of a lot of these flakes. Flint is very shiny and I couldn’t get good photos because the camera flash reflected so badly off the surface of the flakes. One of my more scientific colleagues suggested coating the flakes with a matt film. He produced a nifty little device which allowed me to heat crystals of ammonium chloride i.e. sal volatile in a glass bulb over a Bunsen burner. This produced curls of grey vapour which could be blown gently over the flints through a rubber tube, coating them with a non-reflective grey film. I felt like a real scientist with my Bunsen and my tubes of chemicals. It’s a pity that the experiment was a complete failure. However, I probably inhaled enough smelling salts to prevent me fainting for the rest of my life.

“Diamonds are forever” goes the song. Not quite true, as I proved during an even more disastrous experiment with flint tools. Another part of the project involved trying to replicate the effect on flint flakes of being tumbled along in a river. Tumbling wears down the edges of the flakes and smooths the surfaces.

I bought a little machine used by gemstone enthusiasts, which had a drum turned by an electric motor.  You put the flint flakes into the drum and tumbled them for different periods of time with different combinations of sand and water and pebbles. However my little tumbler proved inadequate and I somehow got permission to use a bigger one at the Geological Museum in South Kensington. The staff there suggested that I should number the individual flakes and kindly lent me a diamond-tipped drill to do it with. Flint is mostly silica, which is an extremely hard substance, although in theory not as hard as diamond. In theory. I must be the only student ever to have worn all the diamonds off the end of an expensive diamond-tipped drill. I slunk from the laboratory in shame, and my days as that kind of experimental scientist ended there.

It’s August, and many people are going on holiday. Some of them will be seeking sunshine, sea and sand in the countries south of Britain. Some of them will be culture vultures, visiting interesting historical sites and taking selfies in front of the ruins. Some of them will be having a staycation in Britain, seeking to calm their psyche by spending time in wild places and getting the benefits of fresh air and solitude, as counselled by many a celebrity blogger and women’s magazine.

Well, they are all out of luck. Planet Earth is groaning under the numbers of humans. The climate has changed and it isn’t safe to go out in the sun around the Mediterranean this summer. Cruise liners now disgorge thousands of passengers at a time at famous cities. Those who go ashore don't get to meet the locals, who are all staying at home to avoid the crowds. They have to shuffle shoulder to shoulder with their fellow sightseers for an hour to get close enough to the historic object to actually see it, let alone take a picture of it. And the wild spaces of places like Scotland are now stuffed full of camper vans (so are their town car parks).

Don’t blame me. I told you so. Fifty years ago. It was clear to me half a century ago, when I was in my twenties, that the world population was rising too fast to be safe. I joined a charity known as “Population Countdown” and we tried to get people to think about it, but to no avail. In 1973 the world population was 4 billion; in 2023 it is 8 billion. Or if you prefer it, in 1973 there were 26 people per km² and now there are 54 people per km².

The result is exactly as predicted: global warming, rising sea levels, changes in weather which are wrecking harvests, flooding low-lying areas and turning marginal farmlands into deserts. Famine, plagues and war over scarce resources are historical constants, only this time we have brought it on ourselves. Like the covid pandemic, we were told it was going to happen, but we refused to listen.

And people still refuse to listen. Not just those who are only concerned with short-term profit or who are simply so woefully ignorant that they cannot understand that yes, it really is happening. There are plenty of well-intentioned folk who believe that becoming vegans and turning down the heating two degrees will do the trick by itself. When I have raised the subject I have met with reactions ranging from an embarrassed silence to quivering hostility. It just isn’t done to speak of it in many respectable middle-class circles.

Eating more plants is a very good idea. Condoms are an even better one.

PS If you want to know more about it, Population Matters have a good website.

One of my favourite places in the world is a museum store. I love being in an ice-cold warehouse surrounded by shelves and shelves of exciting cardboard boxes labelled with tempting codes which entice you to open the box and view the goodies within.  Or not labelled so you have to open the box to see what’s inside. Or even more intriguing, different labels on the two ends of the box. Or glass-fronted cupboards full of almost complete pots or a stone coffin complete with skeleton or…. But perhaps you may ask, and rightly, why is all that stuff that never goes on display and the public never sees being kept there at the taxpayers’ expense?

Most of this stuff comes from archaeological excavations. When a dig takes place, the finds will initially go to the headquarters of whichever body is carrying out the dig. When they have done the necessary studies and the site has been published, the finds will usually be deposited in the county museum and the archive, plans, sections and paperwork will also be stored somewhere suitable. So any local authority museum is faced with an ever-increasing mass of finds, very few of which will ever go on display. Only a very few finds from excavations, things like the Scar plaque, are worth putting on display. It would be impossible to display fifteen tons of squashed sherds of Grooved Ware, or half a roomful of butchered cattle bones and they wouldn’t be very interesting to look at either. But that is not what they are there for. And you can’t throw them out to make space for new ones.

The important thing in any science is that any scientist can test conclusions that have been published and see if they are valid. If you are doing this in say, chemistry, you can just get hold of some apparatus and chemicals and do the experiment all over again and see if you get the same result. But in archaeology you can’t do this. Excavation destroys the evidence as you retrieve it. You have to have the original objects and the detailed records of how they related to each other if you wish to reconsider someone’s conclusions. A few years ago an archaeologist looked again at a collection of human bones in Kirkwall museum and came to a totally different conclusion to the original bone specialist. No doubt further study will extend the argument even further. This couldn’t have happened if the bones hadn’t been kept after the excavation was published.

New techniques are being developed all the time. Recently, in this same museum, two international projects have revisited the finds from excavations carried out years ago and published at the time. They were using newly-developed techniques on this material. One was looking at the particles trapped in dental calculus on 5,000 year old human teeth, which can tell you the most amazing things, for example which spring these people got their water from, and what they had been eating. The other was collecting residues from 5,000 year-old potsherds to use for enhanced methods of C14 dating. If those shelves and shelves of boxfuls of human skeletons and smashed potsherds had been discarded on the grounds that they were already fully published, all this new information would have been lost.

I have a particular interest in the problem, as a piece of research I was once involved with at another museum came to something of a full stop because a large number of the finds I needed to look at had been thrown away. Someone had written a report on them which they considered adequate at the time and then discarded them, keeping only a few sample pieces. They were medieval glazed roof tiles, which of course are bulky (although rather pretty).

Of course it is impossible to keep indefinitely all the masses of broken brick, stone, and smashed up animal bone that come out of the ground on large excavations. Some of it has to be thrown away, preferably before it gets into the museum store. But you have to make sure that you throw away the right stuff, for example, most of the material from mixed or contaminated layers, where finds from many different periods or centuries have, by various processes, been jumbled up together. But it still means a large and ever-increasing quantity of finds in the store.

And of course there are all the social history finds which do not come from excavations but which have both their own historical value (or not) and their own problems. A faded postcard of the local artillery battalion during WWI doesn't take up much space. A small fishing boat with a hole in it does.

And somebody with the right training has to look after all that stuff. Someone has to know what is in that store and where it is, so that they can arrange access for people doing research on the objects. It’s no use having the best collection of spindle whorls in south-east England if nobody knows which of two hundred boxes they are stored in. Somebody has to make sure that the temperature and humidity of the store is suitable at all times. I once spent six months breathing in Rentokil fluid in a leaking amateur storage facility in England, repackaging pottery that had got loose when the cardboard boxes it was packed in had got damp and collapsed. Good job the sherds were individually marked (most of them). Someone has to see to the packaging of the objects, stacking them so that the ones underneath don’t get squashed by the ones on top. Someone has to prevent moths and beetles from eating the wood and the textiles. Someone has to make sure that the fire alarms and burglar alarms are working, and that PhD students who are studying material in the store don’t walk off with objects to use in their evening classes (yes, this was rumoured to have happened at a national museum when I was young). These are only a few of the things that have to be taken into account. And there are also the Health and Safety issues to consider.

It is right that the general public, whose taxes and donations keep many museums going, and the members of the local council who allocate funds, should ask why a museum needs both a bigger store and people with university degrees who earn a staggering 27K per year to look after it. We have to explain to them that many earth-shattering discoveries in archaeology are made, not outside on site, but inside an old warehouse, by someone taking another look at boxes of finds which have been carefully looked after by someone like me.

I have had to do with many human sanitary arrangements in my time, but I have never met quite such an enchanting one as the Hillswick public toilet. It started with the choice collection of 18C earthenware chamber pots I had to catalogue in a museum. At one point I collaborated with an artist to reconstruct a Roman public toilet from the excavated remains at Verulamium (see Hertfordshire Archaeology & History vol.17). Then there was the collection of plum and blackberry pips which had been tipped down a medieval cesspit in St Albans. I regularly walk past the stone outlet shaft of a medieval toilet in the Bishop’s Palace in Kirkwall. Before the reclamation of the foreshore it would have emptied onto the beach, cleaned up every high tide.

I have used an earth trench while working on an excavation in the French countryside, and taken my turn emptying the ghastly drum from a chemical toilet while working on another dig in the English countryside. The deal was that if the girls did their turn emptying the loo, they got a turn driving the dumper truck as well as the boys. During lockdown when there was a shortage of toilet paper, I investigated the ultra-modern Japanese toilet, which if correctly programmed (I understand foreigners often get it wrong) will automatically wash and dry your bottom for you. Or flood the cubicle.

But never have I met with such a charming bog-house as this community-run public toilet in Hillswick, Shetland, with its forecourt filled with lavatory pans used as planters. A flowery delight!