… Suffice to say that garum, a humble fishy condiment, helps us to understand and humanise these economic processes, from the lives of fishers and their boats and nets to the free and enslaved workers who processed the fish – all the way through the supply chain across water and land, to far flung borders like Hadrian’s Wall …
Read moreMusculoskeletal Disorders in Archaeologists who Dig
‘Be cheerful, enjoy life’ says the merry skeleton from Hatay, Turkey
There’s plenty of material in the literature about musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) in the archaeological record. What there is very little of however - perhaps surprisingly - is material specific to archaeologists who themselves have MSDs. This is quite some oversight, given that MSDs are not uncommon in archaeologists who have spent part of their careers digging, and that there are serious career implications for archaeologists having any kind of physical disability of illness, whether it be participation in digging, field-walking, driving, running a fieldwork camp & kitchen, and all kinds of dexterous work.
Read moreThe Falklands Yomper - Still Betwixt Barracks and Beach
We were among a few who went down to the Falklands Yomper on Armistice Day at the 11th hour to pay our respects, and who took the short walk to the memorial garden in the grounds of the former Royal Marines barracks and museum. It’s good to have it regularly confirmed in the cold light of day that the Yomper is still in place - and that the plan to relocate him from his position atop his mound overlooking the Solent remains mercifully shelved - at least for now.
Read moreThe Horrors of the Burnings of 'Witches' and Heretics - Island Stories
Sixteenth and 17th century Europe saw a huge swathe of prosecutions, tortures and executions of so-called witches and heretics, including the brutal burnings of local families by foreign elite powers on islands perceived to have weak Christianity and church and a fondness for long-lived pagan superstitions and culture. In this piece I look at the burnings of supposed ‘witches’ and heretics on Guernsey, the Isle of Man and Iceland, and some of the symbols of resistance I remember from my own Manx childhood.
Read moreInfanticidal Women: The Strange Resurgence Of Murder Trials In A Corner Of Modern England
In one 2021 case in Portsmouth, that of Lisa Blagden, where a murder charge would have been ludicrous given there wasn’t even a killing but rather a perinatal death of indeterminate cause, the bewilderingly punitive Wessex CPS went full steam ahead for a Victorian ‘concealment’ charge and prosecution. This was the prosecution of a groomed, abused, mentally unwell, poor and bereaved young woman who had been deprived in pretty much every way. When the case finally came to court, the judge quite rightfully and mercifully ordered that the accused be given an absolute discharge.
Read moreNorton Disney Roman Villa Landscape 2021 - A New Threat
Source: English Heritage, Roman Villa in Britain Reconstruction
I’m not the only person to have noted that the new planning application for Villa Farm Norton Disney does not differ in any meaningful way from the previous unsuccessful application. Given that the statutory authorities, if the system works as it should, are duty bound to reject this latest application, it begs the questions why the developers bothered to do it?
And this is the question that bugs me.
Read moreFrom Greenham Common to Clapham Common - Two Generations of Women's Vigil & Protest
I thought I should stick this piece on my Archaeology Blog, too. It’s inter-generational women’s history.
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From Greenham Common to Clapham Common
Two generations of vigil & protest
The Last Dambuster - Landmark, Landscape and Memory at Norton Disney, Lincs
George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, Pride of Britain Awards (Photo: Steve Bainbridge / Daily Mirror; reprinted by LincolnshireLive). Updated: Johnny Johnson passed away in his sleep in December 2022, aged 101.
When the last surviving Dambuster, 98 year old George ‘Johnny’ Johnson, turned over a spadeful of earth at last year’s ground breaking ceremony at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire, he inaugurated the long-awaited construction of a major landmark sculpture of a Lancaster bomber. ‘Johnny’ Johnson, who among other honours and awards has an MBE for services to Second World War remembrance and the community, including his outstanding work on mental health rehabilitation, imprinted a little of himself in that Lincolnshire landscape’s layers of memory. He was a link between past and present, and linked the landmark to the future perceptions and narratives of the Lancaster aircrews.
Read more'Our Boy' - An Act of Remembrance in a Landscape of the Fallen, East Jerusalem
Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, East Jerusalem
On teenaged George West’s tombstone, his parents - a world away from Jerusalem, grieving in Govan in Glasgow - had just two words inscribed. And with their plain, honest words, Mr and Mrs West told those generals and the state: he doesn’t belong to you any more. He’s Our Boy.
Read moreThe Prehistoric Infants of Wadi Kubbaniya – Making Young Lives Visible
I’m very pleased to have written a guest piece for the excellent website The History Girls. Please click on the link below to have a look - it’s under my name, dated 9th July. I’d also like to pay tribute to the wonderful work of the late Gordon Hillman, which inspired the article.
Read moreMuseums, Children and Violent Images - Boudicca in Colchester
Panel showing destruction of Temple of Claudius, Colchester Castle Museum
How do you present things to children like the ‘Boudiccan revolt’ and the massacres of colonists that took place at Colchester and London in AD 60 – and can it ever be got right? Given we have two written accounts (by Tacitus and, later, Cassius Dio), can we ignore them? Dio pulled no punches in recounting hideous atrocities being carried out on Roman citizen women – their breasts were cut off and sewn to their mouths, and their bodies skewered lengthways – but are these images ‘suitable’ for children?
And already - see? - the subject is fetishised. But remove those accounts, and knowledge and images of annihilation and casualties on all 'sides', and the subject becomes sanitised.
Read moreThe 'Gods of Old' at Norton Disney - and the Power of Community Archaeology
Pavement at 'Potter Hill villa', Norton Disney, excavations c 1934. Photo kindly supplied by David Barker, archivist of the Collingham & District Local History Society. An already-damaged Roman building undergoes a somewhat shoddy excavation in the 1930s.
The objections poured in thick and fast. Many objected to the poor quality of the planning application, which seems to be claiming that two huge buildings, associated traffic and commercial activities, and an enormous chimney, would have 'no adverse impact' on this ecologically beautiful, archaeologically-rich locale. Then there was the lack of an obvious map (at least whenever I looked), and the somewhat desultory list of consultees. It was, to my eyes, as an archaeologist and a former Planning Committee member, all pretty woeful. And, sadly, the archaeological desk-top survey included with the application was incomplete, based on inadequate data, and quite eyebrow-raising in its brevity.
Read moreRape - the Use and Misuse of Ideas about Sexual Violence
So, I’m currently reviewing Archaeologies of Gender and Violence (eds Uroš Matić and Bo Jensen 2017); and I came across a (happily favourable) mention of a paper I wrote a long time ago on the use – and, more importantly, the misuse – of rape narratives by evolutionary sociobiologists. The sociobiologists had theorised that rape was understandable as an adaptive mating strategy by males, and made clear that they saw this stretching back into evolutionary prehistory. I see sexual violence as, well, sexual VIOLENCE writ large - violence carried out against women of all ages, children of both sexes from infancy, and men; and as all about power. I was concerned that some of this mangled nonsense from evolutionary sociobiology might permeate some strands of prehistoric archaeology and anthropology.
Anyhow, it also reminded me that I hadn’t yet scanned and posted up this particular paper on my website, so here’s a link to it: ‘The use and misuse of rape in prehistory’, from Indecent Exposure: sexuality, society and the archaeological record (ed Lynne Bevan 2001).
Read morePolyandry in Late Iron Age and Roman Britain - Myth or Reality?
Couldn't resist this Ladybird book image of Julius Caesar's Britain ... so who's married to who?
It's been a while since anyone took much notice of Julius Caesar's writings on ancient Britain as any kind of credible social commentary. There's not only the problem that he was writing for a particular audience and in a particular style - there's also the issue that so little of what he says about Britain matches the archaeological evidence.
But that's not to say that his words aren't worth looking at. His statements about (at least some) British marriages tantalise us with their allusions not just to polygamous unions but to a rare form of this known as 'polyandry' - the marriage of a woman to more than one man - as well as to how the children of these marriages were made legitimate.
Read moreWhat is a Roman Villa?
Idyllic image of Great Witcombe Roman villa (Credit: Historic England)
What was a ‘villa’ to the Roman eye and to the Roman understanding? What do modern archaeologists need to see on the ground in order to classify a site as a ‘villa’? In what ways - if at all - are they a meaningful category of evidence, and how might they give us information about the Roman economy and the colonisation of landscapes by idealised edifices? On some sites in early Roman Britain, within just a couple of decades of the occupation and in the vicinity of new Roman towns, the traditional late Iron Age settlement type of timber roundhouses were replaced by a Roman building type of rectangular houses with stone foundations and, seemingly, increased room divisions. What does this all mean - what class of habitus are we dealing with here?
Read moreThree Burials at Norton Disney - and the End of Roman Villas in Britain
Late burial from Norton Disney Roman villa (Oswald 1937)
In the 1930s, three intriguing burials were found by Adrian Oswald and his workforce in the upper archaeological levels at Norton Disney Roman villa. Some might call these inhumations strange, lying as they did not in a burial ground but on top of or aligned with dismantled walls of once-imposing buildings from the Roman era. Why are they there? How rare are such burials? What can they tell us about life and death and the end of Roman villas in Britain - and indeed the end of Roman Britain itself?
Read moreThe Intriguing Roman Villa at Norton Disney – A Conundrum under a Threat
Norton Disney late burial - Oswald 1937 (see Refs)
I’m deliberately keeping this piece as short as possible – a lot of people involved already have too many stacks of papers on their desks and in their inboxes. This is a ‘capsule argument’ about how and why this site at Norton Disney matters, and why it deserves protection. It’s one of many villas known, but it’s one of the most intriguing. It was partly excavated a couple of years prior to World War II, so is ‘known about’; but those excavations by Adrian Oswald have themselves thrown up a whole range of puzzles. These include the archaeological narratives currently emerging of connections that stretch from prehistoric tribal Ireland through to this corner of Lincolnshire, and the story of the rise of private property and the collapse of Roman Britain - as well as suspicions of an excavator 'dining out' on fabricated stories of Saxon raiders and collisions of races and nations in the late 1930s.
Read moreWriting Roman Britain in 1,200 Words - aka, Writing for Encyclopedias
'How would you like to do a small job?' asked Martin Millett. 'It's paid,' he added helpfully. (Doesn't that say something about archaeology, when it's a bonus to be paid for one's labours.) I asked what it was, and he said it was a simple writing job for a new encyclopedia on British History. They wanted some stuff on Roman Britain and, if I had the time, it would be right up my street.
Oh that sounds great, I said. So Martin put me in touch with the editor, Professor John Cannon, and forward we went on our great word-restricted, tightly-written adventure. Fifty quid a thousand words and a free copy of the finished weighty tome, The Oxford Companion to British History. I was on my first maternity leave - what could possibly go wrong?
Read moreExcavation - Let's Talk about the Mental And Physical Challenges
Shiqmim, Negev Desert 1984. I nearly died. Which was nice.
'That same night, the screaming started, as giant cockroaches flew into the communal awning and landed on people's backs and heads'
Read moreInventing TRAC
It's so good to see the cheerful images of the band of organisers of TRAC 2017 on social media, and the delegates gathering for the planned events and sessions in Durham and on Hadrian's Wall. I'm struck now for the first time what a comparatively solitary and nerve-wracking undertaking it was to set up and organise the original TRAC in 1991. It also still amazes me a bit just how much TRAC owes its origins to a whole load of random happenings - a set of unforeseen political circumstances in the Gulf, a chance meeting in Jerusalem, and a piss-up with Charles Daniels upon my return to Newcastle.
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