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Martin Jones

5 April 2012

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First Encounters With Archaeology

A visit to a museum is quite different from actually digging up the past. In a museum, conserved objects are seen behind glass, neatly arranged and labelled in their controlled environment of scholarly explanations and humidity meters. An archaeological dig is something else. Here, the past is dirty, sticky, tactile, and quite often smelly. All this came as some surprise with my first taste of archaeology in the field, three decades ago. I had somehow imagined there would be a great deal of brushing, sifting and so forth, with one of those museum objects very occasionally emerging to be clutched from the dust. In reality, what our ancestors have left beneath the ground is much more varied and challenging than that.

Rather than brushing and sifting, my introduction to field archaeology involved much wielding of picks. We pushed enormous battered wheelbarrows and hurled shovel loads of earth as the sludge from a rather wet Somerset field found its way into our boots. Along with that moist sensation came surprise at the sheer quantity and variety of things emerging from the ground. As our spades penetrated the turf of a slight mound in the middle of this field, our finds trays quickly filled, but not only with the kind of objects seen behind museum glass. True, there were fragments of the elaborately decorated 'Glastonbury Ware' pottery, its dark burnished surface adorned with the kind of swirling designs we associate with 'Celtic' art forms across Europe. It was an unusual sensation to be the first to hold such an artefact for over two thousand years. But there were also large numbers of discarded animal bones, not so often seen in archaeological displays, some broken up for the soup bowl and glue pot, others elegantly fashioned into the weaving equipment of the ancient village dwellers. One day one of the diggers found another trace of their everyday lives, a broken pot spilling over with small black pellets. On closer inspection these pellets proved to be cereal grains, blackened by charring. We gathered around to peer down on the curiosity, before it was taken away to be entered into the record books of that delightful antiquarian category 'small finds', which is the archaeologist's repository for coins, beads, oddments, and anything that falls outside the most familiar categories.

As we dug down, the range of materials surviving increased. By the time the adjacent turf-line was at the level of our waists, that range broadened dramatically. The grey clays we had been removing gave way to something very different. This blackened peat below was full of all the things that had decayed from the sediments above. Our trowels teased their way through, to reveal leaves, nuts, and vast quantities of wood. As pieces of the freshly exposed peat were pulled apart, branches of birch buried for over two millennia revealed their silvery, flaky bark. Blades of grass could still be seen that still seemed to be green, as if the chlorophyll within them had remained intact. Now that they had been exposed to the air, that green colouration quickly changed to brown, just as a host of other processes of breakdown and decay set in. That exposed peat was soon peppered with insect holes, as burrowing soil animals responded with enthusiasm to the opening of the larder door. Waterlogged and sealed off from the air, the organic peats had been protected from the foraging of these creatures. We archaeologists had taken that protection away and now the limbo in which these fragments of life had been suspended would soon come to an end. In the case of the wood, this change took place before our eyes. When first exposed, the wood fragments within the peat seemed solid enough. Their surface features and patterned grain were clear to see, the main distinction from modern wood being their darkened colour. Once lifted and exposed on the grassy verge beside our trench, these pieces began to shrink as the water within them evaporated. They would twist and crack, and their surfaces would become flaky. Their solidity had been an illusion, only maintained while they remained within their enclosed and waterlogged refuge.

None of this curious decay caused great waves back in the 1960s when that Somerset dig was underway. The main business of archaeology lay beyond those flaking timber fragments on the grassy verge where another set of transformations was busily taking place. The excavated finds were being washed and marked. Toothbrushes and nailbrushes were scrubbing away in bowls of cold, murky water. The task was to remove all those things that separated the dig from the museum, the dirt, the peat, the stickiness and the smell, in order that the object we had unearthed might one day inhabit a neat museum drawer, if not a plinth within a humidity-controlled cabinet.

Since the 1960s, our perception as archaeologists of what we are digging up has changed. It has become clear that what we have left behind in those peaty sediments, on the earthy surfaces we have scrubbed from the pots, from the bones and organic objects, and even from the partially decomposed materials we can smell, may be rich in intimate clues about past lives. We would no longer reduce what lay beneath that shallow mound in a Somerset field to an assortment of cleaned pottery fragments and other durable, easily visible objects.

Bit by bit, other data was gathered and analysed as part of the archaeological routine. First came the more stable biological materials, the animal bones, and then those charred cereal grains. Then methods were refined for conserving and gleaning information out of all that waterlogged wood and the other debris within the peat. Most recently of all, it has become clear that the reason any of that organic material survives at all is because even the molecules of which they are built retain a remarkable trace of their fragile and intricate structure, for thousands, even millions, of years. Those molecules can be hunted down and analysed in their own right, and have a considerable story of their own to tell.