I pulled into the car park outside the museum.
Peterborough Museum is a fine stone building in Priestgate, the only street left which gives a feeling of what the old city would have been like. The rest was swept away – today we would say ‘redeveloped’, because it sounds nicer – when the main railway line arrived around 1850. The resulting prosperity carried all before it, including nearly every old building, except of course the churches. They couldn’t pull them down. As Bob Dylan once sang: ‘Money doesn’t talk, it swears.’
Inside the museum I was shown into the library, a tall, dark room lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. There was that wonderful booky, musty smell I had first encountered in the Myers Museum at school, and for a too-short moment I was transported back to my youth. The librarian showed me the shelves that held their archaeological titles. In amongst the dusty volumes I noticed a clean paperbound book with a green spine and the letters ‘RCHM’ in bold black type at top and bottom. Far from being a museum piece, this book, Peterborough New Town: A Survey of the Antiquities in the Areas of Development, had only been published the previous year. It was a survey by the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, and I had been trying to get my hands on a copy for several weeks, but every bookshop I tried had sold out. I ignored the wisdom of the ages on the shelves all around me, and opened the book eagerly. The site I was interested in lay on the eastern fringes of the city, at the point where the dryland stopped and the once-wet fen started. It was known as Fengate (from two Norse words meaning ‘road to the fen’), and I wanted to know to what extent it would be affected by the New Town.
It was immediately clear that most of Fengate would be destroyed by factories when work on the New Town started in earnest, in 1971 and 1972. Although I was sad for the people and buildings of Fengate, this threat of development meant that I stood a good chance of raising money from the British government, as well as from the ROM. Nowadays developers have to pay for any archaeological excavation their proposals might require, but in the early seventies it was up to government, local government or sometimes archaeological societies to fund such work. With dual sources of funding I might be able to carry out a large-scale open-area excavation. Maybe I’d get the chance to do a proper, wide-ranging project on a landscape which the Royal Commission report suggested would mainly be of pre-Roman date. My mind was racing. Could this be the site I had been looking for?
I knew a bit about Fengate – every archaeology student in England knows a bit about Fengate, as it’s one of the key sites of British prehistory. It was Fengate that produced those Late Neolithic Peterborough pots. The sherds of pottery that gave the Peterborough Culture its name were found in hand-dug gravel pits that had been worked in the first three decades of the century. What I had to know now was simple: was anything left? Had the gravel pits destroyed everything? I was itching to find out.
The librarian told me that the museum was about to close, and the car park would be locked up in fifteen minutes. I still hadn’t answered those key questions, and was almost exploding with frustration; but at least I now had the book safely secured in my briefcase. This time I drove across the Fens to King’s Lynn and my lodgings in North Elmham using the most direct route possible. I don’t think I have ever driven so fast, or with such abandon, before or since.
I took the stairs three at a time and leapt onto the bed, as there was nowhere else to sit. I started to read, and rapidly the truth began to dawn. What a site! It was extraordinary. I couldn’t believe it. The meticulous survey showed that the hand-dug gravel quarry pits were confined to about a quarter of the area of Fengate, and the rest of the prehistoric landscape lay out there, untouched. Intact. And what a landscape it was. I had never seen anything like it before. I was aware that I must be looking at one of the richest archaeological areas in the country. Even the Royal Commission, never noted for extravagant hyperbole, enthused: ‘This area shows massive evidence for occupation from the Neolithic period onwards …’ I lay back and stared at the ceiling. I couldn’t believe it. I had hit the jackpot.
CHAPTER THREE A Trans-Atlantic Commuter
I NOW FOUND MYSELF in a strange situation: I was an Englishman working in England for a foreign institution. I was resident – and indeed taxed – abroad, but most of my team were British. After the initial exploratory expedition of 1970 I returned to Canada for the winter, and drew up proposals for a five-year project which would examine all the land threatened by the expansion of the New Town. Although our main funding was from Canada and the British government, the local authority (in this instance the New Town Development Corporation) also provided us with essential help in kind, which included accommodation, storage facilities and the like.
From 1971 to 1978 I would work in Britain for the four or five months from spring to autumn. I had to be careful not to stay for more than six months, or I’d find myself paying both British and Canadian taxes – and my salary wasn’t big enough to take such a knock. The digging season usually started in May, when North American students became available. From June onwards we employed more British students, and the excavations would close after the first frosts and rains of autumn, which were usually in October.
Most of the digs I had worked on previously had been either small and amateur or large and professional, and to be honest I found neither very satisfactory. The small, amateur affairs were relaxed and friendly, but the pace was too slow, there was an enormous amount of talk and not much action. The big digs were less to my liking – that is, as gatherings of human beings (they even had cooks and field kitchens) – but as a way of getting large quantities of archaeology done, they were superb.
Even if I did manage to squeeze big sums of money from my sponsors, I knew that funds wouldn’t be limitless. I also knew that it would take me some time to come to grips with the local geology, and until I had mastered that, it would be impossible to find useful work for a large team. Familiarising yourself with the geology is something that every dig director has to do. Unless you know in detail how the natural subsoil formed and how it was altered after its formation, you cannot hope to identify the slight marks left on it by the hand of man.
At Fengate the subsoil was gravel that had formed during a warm period in the Ice Age, over ten thousand years ago. The gravels were laid down by rivers, and when they froze and ceased to flow during the next cold spell in the Ice Age, the gravels were torn apart by ice and glaciers. The results of this tearing apart sometimes resembled man-made features, such as ditches, which was to prove a major source of confusion during my first season of excavation.
I suppose I was looking for reasons not to have a big team, because that’s what I eventually chose to do. I decided I would organise a small group – perhaps six or eight students – with two or three experienced professional site supervisors to keep a controlling eye on things. That way, we could combine the best of the amateur and professional ways of digging. In the event it worked well; in fact I still dig with a small, select team. I made a flying visit to England over Christmas 1970 and recruited two supervisors and a field assistant, all of whom were about to start post-graduate research at Manchester University. I also found somewhere local to live the following summer. As dig houses went, it wasn’t a palace, but it would have to do. And it was free – offered as a contribution to the project by the local authority.
The contrast between mid-winter England and Canada was extraordinary. In Toronto the snow had been lying for three weeks, but in England, five hundred miles closer to the North Pole, the roses were still out. As I drove back to Heathrow in early January a few suburban lawns were being given a light trim.
I returned to England for my first full season as an excavation director in April 1971. I was twenty-six years old, and although I did my best to appear supremely confident, I was quaking in my boots. Walking out onto my own site for the first time was a strange experience. There they were: my team of three senior staff and
