it be possible to reconstruct such stories from dry bricks and mortar? Increasingly the deep foundations of modern developments devour all before them, leaving nothing in their wake for future archaeologists to puzzle over, admire and enjoy.
So those of us with an eye for such things are already looking around at our surroundings, wondering what will come under threat next. And here we are faced with the dilemma that must confront anyone whose job is to predict such things, because almost by definition people in the future will decide that we got it wrong: that it was a mistake to Schedule* multi-storey car parks when it was shopping malls that were then rapidly redeveloped and promptly vanished.
So the answer is probably to cast the net wider and protect whole areas of towns or rural landscapes, rather than individual sites or buildings, if our attempts to second-guess posterity are to have any chance of success.2 This is already being done in the so-called Conservation Areas and Historic Cores of certain historically important towns and cities; furthermore, designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty can help to protect well-known tracts of rural landscape. But inevitably such designations must favour the chocolate-box view of landscape and townscape. I can’t see anyone choosing to put forward the flat, treeless landscape where I have chosen to live, even though I personally regard it as life-enhancing and profoundly beautiful. The same could be said for many suburbs or industrial conurbations, which may well be recognised as important in two hundred years’ time. The other problem, of course, is that such protection can then put a break (it’s often termed ‘planning blight’) on commercial redevelopment and the area then starts to slip into economic decline – a process that can also be ‘assisted’ by those with vested interests.
My approach to archaeology has always been based around the landscape and by that I mean the physical setting for a particular site or monument. So it makes no sense to try to understand the mysteries of Stonehenge without thinking about why it was placed on Salisbury Plain, and why it is surrounded by hundreds of burial mounds and other sacred places, some of which are actually much earlier than the famous Stones themselves. By the same token we can soon come to understand why Manchester and the towns of north-west England became an early centre of the textile trade when we know that this area had been producing woollen fabrics since the later Middle Ages, so was able to take advantage of, or ‘add value’ to, the rapidly developing trade in cotton between Liverpool and the southern United States. So if we are to understand the context of the nineteenth-century cotton industry in the North West, its economic setting should also include Louisiana and Georgia, and latterly the effects of the American Civil War on the supply of raw materials. Similarly, it would be impossible even to think about the hugely important ceramic industry of the area around Stoke-on-Trent without also considering where these millions of plates, mugs, teapots, cups and saucers were traded.
In prehistory stone axes and bronze implements could be traded over long distances – three to four hundred miles was not uncommon – but the amounts were still small. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trade had become global and the quantities involved were huge: thus pottery exports were measured in tons and improvements in ship capacity meant that distance had almost become irrelevant. So archaeology and those who practise it have had to develop new techniques and approaches if they are to throw genuinely new light on the complexities of the historic past. There is close collaboration, for example, between American archaeologists working on colonial-era settlements in Virginia and New England, and their colleagues in the English Midlands, where many of the exported goods were manufactured. One might perhaps expect that the flow of information was entirely from east to west, but in actual fact the American sites have produced results that have caused considerable surprise in Britain. Archaeology has a wonderful ability to prove the best-based predictions wrong.
There is, of course, always a danger when considering the archaeology of the recent past to become overwhelmed with detail. As a prehistorian I routinely recover a large proportion of the surviving debris from, say, a Bronze Age settlement. That might amount to 5,000 pieces of flint, maybe 200 potsherds and 10,000 bone fragments – half of which could prove identifiable. But today the amount of rubbish being produced by even a small-sized town can rapidly fill huge landfill sites. In such instances the best one can hope to do is to sample what is being discarded and for several years a team of archaeologists in Arizona did just that: in the Garbage Project they sampled what the city of Tucson was discarding day by day.3 But, again, it’s all very well to sample, but what really matters are the problems you are trying to resolve when you come to analyse the samples. That is undoubtedly why today historical archaeologists have grown increasingly aware that the questions they are posing must be closely tied down and tightly defined. It is no longer regarded as sufficient simply to study, say, steam engines for their own sake, because such myopic attention to detail will only tell us more and more about less and less. Instead, a historical archaeologist might try to understand the social impact of steam power: why did it become so significant and what were the effects its adoption had on the lives of people, not just in the factories where the engines were built, but in the towns and villages where the new, mass-produced goods it helped to produce were sold?
It has been said many times that archaeology is a very broad church and this is particularly true for the post-medieval period.4 Some specialists have arrived in historical archaeology from their studies of the later Middle Ages; others, often excavators, have grown interested in those upper layers that in the past were given only passing attention on the way down to the supposedly more interesting ancient deposits closer to the bottom of the trench. Many have joined the ranks through more specialist research interests in, say, pottery, or churches. Some have come from outside archaeology altogether – and here I would include those many industrial archaeologists who have come to the subject through their concerns for old mines, factories, vehicles or machinery and the urgent need to protect and preserve them.
As time passes it would seem that the ‘glue’ that will bind these different strands together will be social. In other words, how did people in the past react to a particular stimulus, be it a new chapel, coal mine, crop rotation or steam engine? That, surely, is the key question. Because when all is said and done, chapels, mines, farming methods and machines are of little interest in themselves. Like, dare I say it, flint tools and Bronze Age weapons, they only come alive when they can be related to society and to people.
Earlier I mentioned the distinction between the sources of information drawn upon by archaeologists and historians, namely artefacts and documents. And here I must also admit that there has been a tendency among archaeologists to regard their information, perhaps because it is so very ‘bottom-up’ and derived from the ground, as somehow more reliable than written accounts, which we all know can be distorted in favour of a particular opinion. As a prehistorian I have the enormous luxury – actually it’s a responsibility, too – of working with data whose analysis cannot be challenged by documentary sources, simply because writing didn’t exist at the time. This makes it much harder to contest my conclusions, but that doesn’t make them more reliable. So I still think it important to emphasise that it is just as easy to be misled by a spread of coal and clinker in what might once have been an engine room, as by the letters written by an eighteenth-century ironmaster to his bankers. There is nothing in the ‘bottom-up’ nature of archaeological observations that makes them necessarily more truthful than conventional historical sources. Both are different, that’s all. It goes without saying that both, too, need to be treated with caution and care. I think one reason why historical archaeology is so exciting is the creative tension that appears at the moment, often late in the life of a project, when the written record is set against that from the ground. This is often when a new revelation suddenly becomes apparent.
One might suppose that the very abundant documentary records of the historical period mean that less attention need be paid, for example, to science. But in actual fact many written records don’t address what people thought obvious at the
