Editorial.
Scarre, Chris
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What lies beneath?
When archaeologists in Britain begin to excavate a greenfield site,
they regularly strip away the loose ploughsoil to get down as quickly as
possible to something solid and undisturbed. The mechanical digger is
followed by a line of people armed with hoes and trowels who clean back
the surface to reveal pits, postholes, ditches and anything else that
emerges. Typically, some or all of these will then be excavated and
ascribed to one or more periods of occupation or activity. So what we
have is a kind of palimpsest, where archaeological traces from the
Palaeolithic to the present day appear truncated in the same
stratigraphic horizon, cut into the subsoil. But are we missing
something? What might we learn from the ploughsoil itself?
That is the question posed by Chris Evans, Jonathan Tabor and Marc
Vander Linden in this issue of Antiquity. The large, open-area
excavations associated with developer-funded operations produce
complicated site plans. Typically there might be a handful of Neolithic
features, more of them from the Bronze Age and Iron Age, and large
numbers of Roman and medieval, but with breaks in the sequence that
suggest that occupation and activity may have come and gone, that for
certain periods that piece of the landscape may have fallen out of use
or been abandoned. But is that the whole story? Working on
'islands' in the Fenlands of eastern England, Evans and his
colleagues have shown how the topsoil tells a different tale. By
hand-digging large numbers of test pits, and sample excavation of
sub-soil deposits, they revealed just how much of the past we might be
missing by conventional surface stripping strategies--a barrow cemetery
where burials were laid on the ground surface, the middens associated
with a Late Bronze Age settlement, or the very slight traces of Iron Age
round houses.
This is an important lesson, and one not restricted to north-west
Europe. If we are trying to calculate the densities of prehistoric
occupation and activity, we should not rely on pits and postholes alone.
The densities of occupation may often indeed have been much greater than
the excavated record initially suggests. The same goes for more recent
periods. Recent research in Italy has moved away from major villa sites
in search of the peasantry who were the backbone of the Roman
population. On the surface there are scatters of pottery and building
debris; but excavation rarely reveals a well preserved domestic
settlement. The surviving remains of these less substantial sites are
now, after centuries of cultivation, trapped entirely within the
ploughsoil. That is not for a moment to suggest that we abandon our
mechanical diggers and excavate everything by hand; that would be
entirely unrealistic. But we do need to think carefully about the
inferences that we are drawing.
New arrangements at English Heritage?
In the Editorial to the September 2013 issue we briefly mentioned
the proposal to split English Heritage, the body primarily responsible
for protecting archaeological sites and advising the government in
England. This proposal has now taken detailed form in a Consultation
Document setting out the government's 8-year 'vision' for
the historic environment to 2023
(https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/englishheritage-new-model-consultation). One half of English Heritage will keep the existing name
and look after what has become known as the National Heritage
Collection, around 440 sites and buildings that are owned by the state
or in government guardianship, and open to the public. There will be
some government money for this in the early stages, and above all 80
million [pounds sterling] initial funding to clear the conservation
backlog and invest in new and renewed visitor exhibitions and other
projects. In addition, the consultation envisages that the new body will
somehow raise 83.4m [pounds sterling] of 'third-party funding'
over the 8-year period. By moving to charitable status the new body will
be free to raise money from sponsorship in a less restricted way than
before, 'from a wider range of companies', in addition to the
grants, donations and legacies that it already receives.
Are these proposals a good thing? The financial calculations give
some cause for concern. The 'third-party funding', for
example, makes reference to recent grants and donations for Stonehenge
(16.7m [pounds sterling]) and Kenwood House (5m [pounds sterling]), but
it might be more prudent to regard these as special cases rather than
the basis for ongoing, year-on-year projections. The average site will
not be capable of generating that kind of income and one might wonder
whether attention in future is going to focus on income generation at
the expense of other criteria. Much will depend on whether the sums
really add up. If not, the rosy future that is set out in these
proposals will prove simply a smoke screen for the removal of central
government funding. At the same time, it could be argued that the
archaeological heritage is safer removed from the vagaries of changing
government policies and priorities. But one wonders whether a better
arrangement still might have been achieved by negotiations with an
existing national heritage organisation such as the National Trust.
The remainder of English Heritage will undergo a subtle change of
name to 'Historic England'. It will continue to be responsible
for the heritage protection system and for saving heritage at risk. One
key objective is to provide a more responsive service for owners and
developers, 'reducing unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape without
reducing protection for heritage'. Efficiency is to be applauded,
but exactly how the new priorities will play out remains to be seen.
There is clearly a danger here that once the well-known sites are
transferred to the new English Heritage, the role of Historic England
will steadily contract under pressure from developers and from
government spending cuts. Furthermore, while the proposals make clear
that the National Heritage Collection will still be the guardian of last
resort for buildings or monuments that are at risk and have no other
saviour, if the NHC is entirely dependent for its income on grants,
donations, corporate sponsorship and visitor entry fees, then its
resources are going to be strictly limited. Will it be able to step in
whenever the need arises, even for sites or buildings that may have
little potential for income generation?
Once the new arrangements are confirmed, Historic England and
English Heritage in its new guise will both come into being in January
2015.
Stonehenge
England's premier prehistoric monument figures prominently in
the English Heritage Consultation Document. To much fanfare in the
press, the long-awaited Visitor Centre opened in December 2013. We will
be running a full review feature in the next issue of Antiquity, but the
new centre has already drawn fire from the Council of British Druid
Orders for its display of human skeletal material, which they would like
to see reburied. Our own attempt to visit the new Visitor Centre shortly
after it opened was foiled by the weather: we arrived mid-afternoon to
find the car park closed and a steward turning us away because of the
cold wind and rain. We'll hope for better luck next time!
Managing Angkor
The new Stonehenge Visitor Centre is the response to long-standing
dissatisfaction with the visitor arrangements. It is far from being the
only famous monument where tourists are proving both a bane and a
blessing.
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The very successful 20th Congress of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory
Association (IPPA) was held at Siem Reap in Cambodia in January this
year, hosted by the Royal Academy of Cambodia. The meeting gave
delegates the chance to learn of new discoveries, to renew academic
acquaintances, and to debate issues of common concern throughout the
region. The latter is extensive and heterogeneous, encompassing islands,
coasts and country-sides from the Indus to Easter Island and Peru. There
were over 700 participants from 40 countries, and close to 600 papers
were delivered over the six-day period. Patterns of human colonisation
in the Pleistocene and Holocene were much in discussion, along with
maritime contacts in prehistoric and historic times, and the emergence
of the great medieval empires, to name but a few of the varied themes.
For many conference delegates this was also an excellent
opportunity to visit the temples, other monuments and landscape of
Angkor. Greater Angkor, the vast medieval urban complex and capital of
the Khmer Empire from the ninth to the fifteenth century AD, is on a
scale that is hard to grasp. The walled town of twelfth-century London
could have fitted comfortably 10 times over within the vast rectangular
reservoir of the West Baray, and the latter is only one of the major
components of Angkor. It was only with the systematic use of radar in
the 1990s and then lidar in 2012 that the structure and settlement
pattern of the site began to become clear. Radar and aerial photography
revealed the full extent of Greater Angkor. Lidar revealed the detail of
the road grid, water tanks and occupation mounds of central Angkor. The
major public buildings have long been known--Angkor Wat was never
abandoned or forgotten and remains in use as a Buddhist shrine to the
present day--but the complex system of canals, roads and reservoirs, and
the fields and houses of the ordinary populace, are only now beginning
to be comprehensively understood. New discoveries continue to be made
within the major temples too: our June issue will carry an account of
painted imagery recently revealed in the galleries of Angkor Wat.
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Angkor was added to the World Heritage List in 1992 but was
immediately highlighted as under threat. It has since been taken off the
list of threatened sites but tourism numbers have rocketed during the
past few years, and like Lascaux and other World Heritage Sites, Angkor
risks becoming a victim of its own success. In 2013, more than two
million tourists visited Angkor Wat, a 20 per cent increase on 2012, and
10 times as many as those who visited in 2003. The visitors bring much
needed income, but pose the challenge of tourist management on a grand
scale. One only has to see the crowds walking the vast causeway to
Angkor Wat or filing past the spectacular low-relief friezes around the
outer enclosure of the temple to appreciate the problem. The Angkor Wat
friezes are among the longest in the world. Here you can see King
Suryavarman II mounted splendidly on his war elephant while the Khmer
army goes into battle around him. Turn the corner, and gods and demons
in an immense tug-of-war pull to and fro on a huge serpent to churn the
ocean of milk and free the elixir of immortality. Nor is it only Angkor
Wat that is under pressure. The impressive Bayon at the heart of the
city enclosure of Angkor Thom is another favourite destination, and some
of the other temples are becoming famous in their own ways: Ta Prohm,
for example, draws crowds through its managed but forested condition,
with temple structures entangled among the roots of massive silk-cotton
trees. But if all this is to be preserved, the pressure from tourism
needs to be managed. The Royal Cambodian Government has been working
with UNESCO and foreign partners to develop a Heritage Management
Framework, and IPPA itself is drawing up an Angkor Declaration calling
for multilateral cooperation for the protection and conservation of
Angkor and other vulnerable heritage sites in Cambodia.
The overwhelming impression from both the IPPA meeting and Angkor
is of the huge potential of Cambodian archaeology. It has seen difficult
times during recent decades, but the Cambodian APSARA heritage authority
and the Cambodian archaeologists we met showed great energy and
commitment. And of course the splendours of Angkor shouldn't blind
us to the wealth of Cambodian archaeology more generally, especially its
prehistory and the 'Middle Period' (fifteenth to nineteenth
centuries AD). It is certainly one to watch for the future.
Reburial and Richard III
It is not only at Stonehenge that reburial is proving a contentious
issue. The colonial era of collecting indigenous human remains has long
gone, and restitution to the descendants for appropriate and respectful
burial is something on which virtually all archaeologists now agree. The
same applies quite widely to human remains of recent centuries. In
Britain and elsewhere, recent skeletons disinterred by developer-funded
archaeologists are reburied (after scientific study) in consecrated
ground. That assumes of course that they were Christians, and would have
expected to receive a Christian burial. Local clergy sometimes hold
special ceremonies to rebury the bones dug up from medieval graves, in
respect for what we presume to have been the wishes of the dead.
Prehistoric remains, of course, raise different issues, and curation of
human material for specialist study and analysis continues to be
challenged in some quarters. Despite occasional claims to the contrary,
however, we don't know what the prehistoric dead expected in death.
We don't really understand their religious beliefs and can't
say for certain how they wished to be buried or why, and it is difficult
to know how best to proceed. In addition, the scientific value of their
remains is such that reburial is not generally desired by
archaeologists, or not at least in the immediate term.
The reburial issue has been given a slightly different twist by the
argument over the burial thought to be that of Richard III (killed in
battle in 1485), which was reported in the June 2013 issue of Antiquity.
The plan was to rebury the skeleton in a specially designed tomb in the
cathedral at Leicester, not far from the place where it was found. It is
fair to assume that a fifteenth-century English nobleman would have
expected to be buried in a major church; in that regard his wishes are
being respected. What is not known is whether he would have chosen to be
buried in Leicester, had he had a voice in the matter. The alternative,
being urged by the Plantagenet Alliance, is for reburial in York
Minster, the premier religious centre in northern England, and a place
that is known to have had connections with Richard III. The struggle
between the pro-York and pro-Leicester parties has been running for over
a year, and has received fresh impetus from an official ruling allowing
for a judicial review. The cynical may wonder why the issue of location
is so important. After all, Richard Ill's reputation may have been
unfairly blackened by Polydore Vergil and other Tudor propagandists, but
he was certainly no saint. The whole debate is a reminder of the
symbolic power of the dead and their remains, and the issues that
digging them up can provoke.
Archaeological photographs
A key product of all modern excavations is a set of photographs.
Some of these are carefully framed and posed, almost like stage sets;
and as has often been noted, excavation photographs have their own
aesthetic. Others are informal or impromptu, some of them taken not by a
professional site photographer but by other members of the team, or by
visitors. They too can be an invaluable source of information, often
revealing details that only become important with hindsight.
A new project based in the Netherlands is seeking to collect
together 'non-professional' photographs, in order to digitise
them and make them available to both scholars and the public. The
Non-Professional Archaeological Photographs Project, led by Bart
Wagemakers from Utrecht, is based on the principle that
non-professionals often photograph features or stages of an excavation
that escape official coverage. Anyone interested in helping to expand
this resource is asked to contact the project directly (see the Project
Gallery article at http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/wagemakers338/).
There is also a more general principle here. As photography migrates
from one medium to another, there is a danger that valuable older
collections of prints, negatives or slides may be damaged, discarded or
destroyed. More projects like this one are needed.
Archaeology and war
The year 2014 marks the centenary of one of the most climactic
events in European history: the First World War. Already in Britain
debate has begun over the merits of the military strategies adopted on
the Western Front; what is beyond question is the enormous human cost
with tens of thousands killed or wounded on the first day of the Somme
offensive alone. The archaeology of the War has been gaining increasing
prominence in recent years, and has featured in Antiquity (2002 (vol.
76): 101--108; 2006 (vol. 80): 161-72). As individual memories fade,
material evidence comes to light to remind us of the conditions in which
the conflict was waged. Trenches and dugouts are uncovered in advance of
development, and war graves revealed, not to mention the military
installations away from the fighting front: hospitals, practice
trenches, airfields and prison camps. They are a reminder that
archaeology is not just about the distant past, but covers the physical
traces of events that have shaped the modern world in more recent times.
Chris Scarre
Durham, 1 March 2014
