1 - Introduction to Archaeology
The earliest archaeological period, what is referred to as the Lower Palaeolithic period, starts off by looking for the time and place for the origin of humankind and the evidence is the remains of the human body itself, fossils, in fact. Finds of these bones in Africa in particular are helping to document the sequence of various types of early human species. So far there are a great many gaps in the sequence but the rough outline is pretty well known up to the appearance on earth of our own species, Homo sapiens sapiens.
Once this point is reached archaeology attempts to document the development of human societies. To be an effective study it must include all aspects of human activity and necessarily the archaeologist must be prepared to deal with a great range of topics embracing all human life at a particular period. This seems a pretty tall order and it is clear that above all the archaeologist must possess an far- ranging and open mind.
Archaeology is a scientific study and, like all sciences, must, in the words of Newton 'enquire dilgently into the properties of things' and 'to proceed more slowly to the explanation of them'. Note the 'proceed more slowly'. It involves formulating hypotheses, testing them, by experiment if possible, abandoning them when they are undermined by new data, formulating new hypotheses and in this way gradually approaching closer to the truth. Not that it will ever be possible in most cases to reach that objective.
But hopefully each new hypothesis and each new discovery will help to enlarge our knowledge of the past and it is this accumulation of innumerable tiny bits of information which is more likely to illuminate our understanding than a dozen tombs of Tutankhamun or Sutton Hoos or other spectacular finds. This is why the contribution of all who are interested in the past is so important whether they be professional and qualified archeologists, historians or local investigators.
The more we know about our past, the better we shall understand our own species and ourselves. Thus the study of the past has relevance to the present and is not just an esoteric hobby for a select few. During the time when we have been on earth our species has been presented with challenges which were just as severe as those that face our species today and in most cases, in terms of scientific knowledge and understanding, it was far less fitted to face them than we would be today. Changes in climate, disease, technology all presented challenges which our species overcame and these successes offer us lessons that can be applied in general terms today.
Whether these considerations inspire many students to take up the study of archaeology is a moot point. Most are probably driven more by curiosity or by the romance of entering into a dialogue with objects and people from a different age. But these reasons are just as valid and the bottom line probably is a common interest in people.
It is wise to remember that Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the most charismatic archaeologists of our century and certainly one of the most inspirational, warned us always to remember that we are digging up the lives of people and they should be in the forefront of our minds rather than the artifacts and structures that we are unearthing. And, of course, Alexander Pope's dictum rings in our ears 'The proper study of Mankind is Man.'
Every scientific study needs mechanisms for obtaining data which it studies. In the case of archaeology there are three of them. One is excavation and this is the one which is foremost in the popular mind. Another is the study of features that are on the surface of the ground and are themselves survivals of the past. The third is the use of documents which help to provide a chronological sequence in historic times.
A common question about the use of documents is 'Why do we need archaeology as well? Are they not sufficient to provide a picture of the past?'
The bald answer is 'No'. On the whole historical documents are concerned with governmental activities or with great people. There are exceptions to this statement for some government papers record the results of inquiries into the economic and financial conditions of the country and these can sometimes be concerned with ordinary people. But most are writs or letters addressed to important people and are mainly concerned with property. The Church too generated a good deal of paper and one can learn a good deal from them about ecclesiastical institutions like monasteries and cathedrals but, again, not about ordinary folk.
So what is missing from historical documents are details about the lives of ordinary people. What sort of houses did they live in, what sort of food did they eat, how were they dressed? All these and many other questions should be put if we are to have a proper picture of the past and there is little on paper to help us. It is rare to find anything outside the pages of fictional works such as 'The Vision of Piers Plowman' by William Langland written during the fourteenth century which does describe something of the life of ordinary people. Another example, a little further up the social scale, is Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales'.
So, it is to fill in the great vacuum of the prehistoric and earlier post-Roman periods (the latter time the historians call the 'Dark Ages' because of the lack of documents) and to investigate the condition of ordinary folk that archaeology exists.
To give a couple of concrete examples. All that we know of the social structure of the Bronze Age period comes from excavations. And what would we know of life in an Iron Age hillfort without excavations like those at Danebury in Hampshire?
But documents can be an invaluable aid to archaeology in later periods and the partnership can produce some outstanding pieces of work. To take an example from a Medieval excavation at the Brook Street excavation in Winchester during the 1960s, Martin Biddle investigated a segment of the medieval city by taking down the stratigraphical succession a century at a time over the whole site. Available to the excavator were the Winchester records for the period which named the householders throughout the centuries in the tenements under excavation and allowed the identification of the very people whose church, homes and possessions were being uncovered.
Out of this study of archaeology has grown a practice with methods that are more or less customary, a jargon which is sometimes illuminating but more often obscurantist, at least, if you take it literally and a body of thought which is continually changing as old ideas are dropped and new ones are added. In this way archaeology is no different from any other science . Like other sciences it is often a battleground for opposing ideas so that its practitioners, even if he or she is only a bystander in a particular argument, must be prepared to make judgments and to take up a position and be ready to justify it with sound archaeological arguments.
Apart from this justification, those interested in archaeology are often called upon to defend the study against those who question its validity and usefulness in the modern world, a point that it often raised when sites of archaeological significance are threatened by development.
Out of this archaeological practice have grown a number of professions all of which have originated and blossomed in our present century. In fact archaeology has come of age, developing from a hobby for the European leisured classes during the last century into a major area of intellectual inquiry in all countries of the world today that commands in favoured nations considerable financial resources.
Today, in museums and as lecturers in universities archaeologists are familiar figures and have been so for some time but they also appear in quangos like English Heritage, CADW, the Scottish Heritage, the National Trust and in local gevernment where they are usually installed in planning departments.
A newer development is the formation of private sector archaeological units who bid for contracts to undertake archaeological investigations on behalf of developers and others. A good many of these contracts are for 'rescue' or 'evaluation' excavations in advance of building developments.
Rescue excavations were very common in the 1970s and 1980s but are far less common today in this period of financial stringency. In almost every case, time and money are both limited and rescue excavations turn out to be more in the nature of sampling or 'evaluating' investigations than full-scale and properly-planned excavations. Very often only a small part of a site is uncovered and that is sometimes only partly excavated.
Nowadays it is usually only museum and university archaeologists who have the opportunity of carrying out research excavations that can be long term, a season of work being undertaken each summer over a period of years. It can be argued that, in contrast to rescue excavations, research excavations alone justify the time and expenditure spent on them.
All excavations should begin with a number of questions that need to be answered and the excavation should be directed to answering them. If it is not likely to do so then the excavation should not begin or if they can only be answered with a good deal of expense the excavator should think twice about starting. More time and money has been wasted on unnecessary and ill-directed excavations than on all other archaeological projects put together.
And the problem with rescue excavation is that it is often very difficult to formulate the proper preliminary questions when the archaeologist is not clear about what site he is excavating or even, in some cases, whether there is any site worth digging there at all. It has been suggested that rescue excavations should not be attempted unless the mature of the site is well-defined beforehand and it is a site worth digging. Money provided for these investigations by the developers would go into a fund which could be used for research excavation elsewhere on worthwhile sites.
Apart from these sorts of excavation jobs archaologists are employed in heritage and conservation posts where they are concerned with presenting monuments to the public in as good a condition and in as informative a manner as possible. This is not just monuments in the landscape but ships like the Mary Rose, mines like the Roman gold mines at Dolaucothi in Dyfed and simulated sites like the York Viking Coppergate.
We are only just beginning to address the question of how to present places of archaeological importance to the public. In the past, on the whole, archaeologists have singularly failed to do so in a successful manner. Perhaps a number of people who already had antiquarian leanings were attracted to castles and monasteries and wandered round them with the impenetrable blue guidebooks but the bulk of the population only visited them when it was too wet to go down to the beach and came away massively unimpressed and uninformed.
Today it is little better except that a few monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury are beginning to attract very large numbers of people whose feet are literally wearing away the very sites that they have come to see.
New ways of displaying monuments need to be developed either by accommodating people on the actual site differently so that the damage they do is minimised and still allow them to obtain a proper knowledge of it or by displaying the monument in films, dioaramas or virtual reality or by simulation of the site by full-sized models.
This last may well be the most expensive option but is surely the best way. The French have done it with the Lascaux painted cave in the Dordogne which has been closed because of visitor degradation and for the overwhelming majority of visitors this alternative is proving to be perfectly satisfactory.
It is an area where archaeologists need to work with graphic designers, computer program designers and structural engineers literally to re-create ancient monuments. This is perhaps an heretical idea to many traditional archaeologists but a new populist initiative of this sort must be taken if we are to safeguard our heritage and also fulfill the very important duty of explaining our ancestral and social lineage to the general public.
Basically, archaeological investigation aimed at the recovery of data is either done by excavation or by fieldwork or by a combination of both. Excavation is by far the most expensive and as a consequence a good deal of investigation today is carried out by fieldwork with or without the help of small evaluation trenches. This is certainly true in the case of work done in advance of development.
Excavation is done on a known site in order to provide detailed information about the activities that had been carried out there in past times and also to find out about the environment that had prevailed on the site. Evidence from this type of investigation can be concerned with the following:
1. Building plans or layouts of settlements, industrial areas (e.g. pottery manufacture, metalworking or some other activity).
2. Artifacts - pottery sherds, metal objects, glass, coins etc.
3. Sequence of phases or activities on the site.
4. Past environment(s).
5. Skeletal and other burial information.
6. Agricultural, technological or other processes.
7. Detailed chronology.
8. Diet.
9. Religion and worship.
10. Relationship with other sites either in the vicinity or further away.
As can be imagined, the amount of work necessary to examine the finds, do the laboratory tests on soil samples and other samples collected from the excavation, evaluate the stratigraphical relationships and write up the data into a final excavation report can be very time-consuming and almost always takes far longer than the actual excavation. This is described as post-excavation work and nowadays is carried out with the aid of computer graphics, computer design programs and word processing on the archive which is usually stored nowadays in a computer database.
Fieldwork involves study of historic features in the landscape and their relationship to each other. The relationship of crop-marks to a neighbouring deserted medieval village is an example of this sort of task. Investigation can be pursued in various ways. Fieldwalking is one such. This consists of methodical searching of a ploughed field for artifacts, usually pieces of pottery, rarely anything more exciting, although on Roman sites coins are likely to be found . On other sites however it is pottery and the location of a dense spread of it is likely to mark the location of a settlement or if in vast quantities with burnt and reddened clay it could identify a pottery-manufacturing site.
Having made a collection of material and made sure that its location is securely marked on a map, the various bits and pieces have to be washed. Most of it is likely to be pottery sherds but in the Middle Ages pieces of roof tile and floor tile may be there also if it is the site of an establishment superior to a village. The site of a monastery, perhaps or a manor house which would have durable materials used in its construction. The pottery, too, may be of better quality than that found on the sites of peasant houses and perhaps include imported wares. An analysis of the pottery will give some idea of the date of the site. Not a precise figure, of course, but a slot within the archaeological sequence.
Most coarse pottery was made by the users during the prehistoric period or in local kilns during the Romano-British period so that if you do regular fieldwalking you will soon get to recognise the commonest ware which will be the local product. Perhaps the location of a manufacturing site is already known. If not, a very useful and interesting project would be to try to locate it.
Fieldwalking of this kind is a very good way of locating sites but of course they and their positions must be recorded and this information passed to the County Archaeology Officer for inclusion on the County Sites and Monuments Register which lists all archaeological sites in the county with their location and the information that is known about them. An excellent way to get to know local archaeology is to consult this archive which is open to the public and you can make yourself familiar with the information marked on the relevant map of your area.
Of course for this type of fieldwalking you need a ploughed field but it is possible to obtain data from a pasture field. Farmers in the past who had remains of prehistoric monuments, say, or Romano-British villas or Roman forts on their land would usually not attempt to cultivate those fields if the remains were too much of an obstruction for their ploughs to tackle but would turn it over to pasture. If the remains were of masonry buildings they often would not trouble to remove them but allow them to become overgrown and eventually be covered by woodland. So today it is possible to find humps and bumps in permanent grassland or tumbled walls in woodland that are remains of ancient sites.
These are easier to interpret than spreads of pottery in ploughed fields for the humps and bumps form patterns that are characteristic of particular establishments. A villa site for example or the ditch that surrounded a Bronze Age barrow or the banks of a henge or the outline of a cursus are all features which can be recognised at once. And there are many more.
Sites of this sort can very often be best recognised from the air by aerial photography. At times of low light when the sun is rising or setting in the summer or at midday in the winter, the shadows thrown by almost imperceptible bumps or depressions in the ground can show up and outline features that would be invisible from the surface. If the bumps are the remains of banks and depressions or the remains of pits or ditches and if they are in a grain field they will make their presence plain by the unequal height of the crop or contrasting colouring of the ripening grain growing above them. Over banks, which usually have a stony foundation. the ploughsoil is thinner and contains less moisture so the crop growing on top of them will ripen sooner and will be stunted and a lighter colour than the crop growing over the ditch which will have its roots in the deeper and moister soil of the pit or ditch and will grow taller and ripen later.
Our countryside has been peopled by farmers since the beginning of the Neolithic period, some 6,500 years ago, and it is not surpising that there are hundreds of thousands of sites out there waiting to be discovered by one technique or another and a substantial percentage of these sites belong to the prehistoric and Romano-British periods.
If you watch Time Team on Channel 4 television you will have seen geophysical surveying being carried out. Different machines are used to detect magnetic anomalies underground or use electrical impulses to locate buried pits and ditches. These are fairly recent additions to the fieldworker's armoury and although beyond the pocket of the amateur fieldworker and requiring tuition in the interpretation of the results, they have become a relatively speedy way of locating buried features. Walking up and down a field with one of these machines is probably the most boring piece of fieldwork that can be undertaken but it is likely that they will become more and more common and perhaps cheaper.
All this investigation can be classified under the heading of Landscape Archaeology, for the results of work in a particular area can be marked on a map and help to build a picture of the prehistoric or Romano-British landscape. The foundation of the map will be the shape of the land, the physical features, including the hills and valleys, rivers and streams and perhaps woodland which can be identified as ancient.
On this will go the second layer of the palimpsest, the sites of the archaeological periods, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Roman periods which were imprinted into the landscape more or less indelibly as a background to the later settlement. Some of these will perhaps continue in use during later periods. like the Roman roads which continued to be used as routes into the medieval period. By doing this exercise in your own area you will begin to get an eye for the archaeological landscape and become more adept at recognising locations where sites are likely to be found and where it would be worthwhile looking.
It is always important to record your researches or discoveries. A notebook in which you can jot down notes and rough in the odd sketch is an ideal way to do this and it can very usefully be supplemented with a camera. Carry a map with you and mark the location of your discoveries on that too.
Perhaps it is proper to say that the important difference between excavation and fieldwork is that fieldwork is non-destructive. All excavation is destruction - you can't go back and excavate the same site twice with any degree of profit but with fieldwork the evidence is still there after you finish and you can have the pleasure of pointing out your discoveries to your friends.
More attention nowadays is being paid to chronology. Archaeologists used to be accused of not bothering about dates and this perhaps is still vaguely true of the prehistoric archaeologist but the Roman and later investigator cannot take that sort of cavalier attitude because he or she is always conscious of the historian at their elbow. Historical dates form the framework, few and far between still perhaps in the Romano-British period but available and they should be used whever relevant.
It is sometimes difficult to fit archaeological data into the historical framework or associate it with an individual historical group. The problem is also evident if you try to work from the history to the archaeology. What archaeological evidence for instance is there on the field of a famous battle? Or where is the famous site on the south coast where Julius Caesar and built his first fort? Difficulties like these sometimes prompt historians to dismiss archaeology as a non-historical discipline or archaeologists to disregard historical information. But in fact there is no way in the Romano-British period, for example, in which the two disciplines can exist independently. They are two horses in the same team.
Carbon 14 determination (radiocarbon) is the commonest archaeological dating technique. In recent years the determinations have become increasingly accurate as different laboratories have refined their techniques. In the early days of Carbon 14, its inaccuracy was such that it was difficult to use in the post-Roman periods. But nowadays it is accurate enough to use with confidence and may soon be routinely depended upon to give a result to the nearest 25 years. This is particularly true when it is calibrated with the dendrochronological time-scale which converts the radio-carbon years into calendar ones.
For Carbon 14 determination samples of organic material from the particular context that needs dating must be provided to the laboratory. This is because the technique depends on measuring the proportion of remnant radio-activity in the sample which can only have imbibed radio-activity from the atmosphere if it was once alive as a tree, plant or living creature. Since its demise the amount of radio- activity in its remains has decayed at a known rate. Measuring the amount of radio-activity left provides an estimate of the time that has elapsed since that time.
Apart from that, the archaeologist has to depend on the layers of material (contexts) that he or she is digging through in an excavation. This stratigraphy provides a sequence with the latest context at the top and oldest at the bottom. If there artifacts in each of these contexts then the archaeologist has a sequence of relative 'dates' because the chronological sequence of these objects is quite clear. But unless he/she can assign an actual date to one or some of them, the chronological sequence is not tied down, it is 'floating.'
That is why the archaeologist assigns so much time to studying objects and placing them in a chronological sequence with associated dates (if any) to as many of the steps in the sequence as possible. This is called a type series and one datable object in an assemblage of objects from a particular context (step) is invaluable because it can provide a date for all the other objects in the context. This is dating by association. Or perhaps it is possible to match an object with an identical one from some other excavator's datable context. If so, this is cross-dating.
Of course, during the Romano-British period, coinage is a help in dating as well as an aid to documenting the tentacles of internal and foreign trade. But use of coins for dating is limited because a coin may have been in circulation for a considerable period of time before it was lost so the sophisticated use of coins as dating tools is really a job for an expert who can assess the amount of wear and take other variables into account.
Where timber survives as it does on a waterlogged site, samples can be used for carbon 14 or dendrochronological dating. This latter technique involves studying the tree-rings and matching the sequence of rings with a sequence of rings on a master sequence for that particular ecological area.
| Contents |  |
| 2 - The Lower, Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic periods |  |
