The January/February 2008 issue of British Archaeology

Submitted by Andy B on Sunday, 09 December 2007 Page Views: 2561

Mike Pitts introduces the latest issue: On the Cover: Roman treasure in London. This summer archaeologists have been excavating in the City of London, as Richard Seifert’s 1963 Drapers Gardens was redeveloped (the tallest London structure to have been demolished). The site was within the Roman city, in the upper Walbrook valley where the wet ground resulted in exceptional preservation of wood, leather and metal. Though excavation has just finished, it is already clear that the quantity, quality and variety of finds is set to make this a Roman dig of international importance.

These finds include the floors and wall foundations of wooden buildings, with timber pipes emptying into the roadside drains; a bear skull, perhaps from an animal that performed in the amphitheatre; a wooden carpenter’s ruler marked in Roman inches, and a complete, extremely rare Roman door; the remains of an infant in a small wooden coffin; and a spectacular group of 19 metal vessels (mostly copper alloy), piled in the bottom of a wood-lined well and looking fresh from a car boot sale – this hoard is to be displayed at the Museum of London

* Portable Antiquities Scheme threatened
The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council says it plans to shed the PAS’s central unit, effectively ending the scheme. MLA chief executive Roy Clare told me that the PAS’s core staff in the newly-formed Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure at the British Museum, was “inefficient”, and that the taxpayer would benefit if the scheme was run in a more “corporate way” within the MLA. When challenged over the 27 marketing and advocacy staff listed on the MLA’s website (the PAS has none), Clare denied knowledge of their existence. The PAS is probably the most successful project in the world for engaging ordinary members of the public in archaeological research, leading to important discoveries almost daily (see below), at an annual cost of £1.3m

* Stonehenge tunnel scrapped
The government is soon to announce that the £510m Stonehenge roads and visitor project is to be scrapped. Arts minister Margaret Hodge told me, “The tunnel was never affordable – I’d have killed it off years and years ago”, pledging the apparently impossible by saying she was determined to find an alternative solution by 2012

* Unique prehistoric iron smelting furnaces excavated in Corby
A new metal was introduced to Britain in about 800BC, initiating the iron age.
Yet iron production sites are rare. Excavation at Priors Hall, Corby,
Northamptonshire has revealed the first substantial remains of Britain’s
prehistoric smelting furnaces

* Poem in Silbury tunnel was written by Wordsworth’s relative
A “time capsule” buried at the centre of Silbury Hill in 1849 and recovered by the BBC in 1969, but never fully published, contained a manuscript poem. We reveal that its author, Emmeline Fisher (1825–64), was closely related to William Wordsworth, who admired her work, and that it has now emerged that a second copy may survive. The 1849 capsule, a stoneware jar (now lost), contained 21 items including inscribed plaques, coins, an almanack, a newspaper, a bible meeting poster and a manuscript account of the dig.
*** A fuller text with two versions of the poem, and a description of the 1849 time capsule, will go online on the British Archaeology web pages ()

* Culture hero: Jonathan Ross or Phil Harding?
Most politicians and opinion-formers seem oblivious to the huge public support for heritage. As evidence, British Archaeology compares Jonathan Ross (headline BBC deal of £18m over three years) and Phil Harding (Channel 4 pays his archaeological employer for his time). This year Time Team has had 14 of 17 broadcasts in the weekly C4 top 30, with a peak of 3.01m viewers. Friday Night with Jonathan Ross has had three of 23 broadcasts in the weekly BBC1 top 30, with a peak of 4.48m viewers

* Is UCL in breach of the Theft Act?
University College London has refused to publish a report rumoured to say that an artefact collection, borrowed for academic study, had been illegally exported from Iraq after 1990. If this proves correct, then UCL could be in breach of section 22 of the Theft Act 1968 for handling stolen goods. UCL Institute of Archaeology (who did not have the collection) was the first UK university department to introduce an ethics code for potentially looted or illegal antiquities. I asked UCL research student James Doeser: does the department feel compromised?

* Major feature on work of the Portable Antiquities Scheme
August bank holiday 2006 saw one of the largest metal detecting rallies ever
held in the UK, attracting some 2,000 detectorists to a field in Oxfordshire. Such rallies are becoming increasingly controversial, as the sheer number of collectors threatens all attempts at a proper finds record. In this case, however, Portable Antiquities Scheme staff helped turn the event into a unique landscape study, in which possible prehistoric tracks were identified, with unexpected bronze age settlement and Roman military gear

* Important cemetery find
As indication of what responsible metal detectorists and the Portable
Antiquities Scheme are achieving, British Archaeology presents news of a
discovery near Sleaford, Lincolnshire: a completely unknown Anglo-Saxon cemetery, with well-preserved artefacts pointing to high status people – a lost community from the earliest days of English history. The finds were made in a field near the meeting of three parish boundaries, within the old kingdom of Kesteven but far from any known Anglo-Saxon villages

Contributor Bio for Andy B: Megalithic Portal Founding Editor.

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