to me to make the first move. I knew instinctively that to appear indecisive would be fatal. But we were alone in a field, our tools hadn’t yet arrived, nor had the site huts or the digger. We couldn’t so much as brew a cup of tea. And I certainly couldn’t ask them to scratch at the ground with their bare hands.
I had begun to experience a tide of rising panic when there was a shout from the road. It was the truck delivering the hut sections. With a huge sigh of relief I sent everyone across to help unload. I had learned the first lesson of any dig director – ensure that you have work for people to do, no matter how futile the tasks might seem. It’s always better to do something – anything – than nothing. A team’s morale is crucially important, and as soon as it starts to slip, everything else will rapidly follow.
I have always believed in leading from the front, and this is particularly important when everyone on the team is of roughly the same age. A team leader’s job is not just about co-ordination and morale; it’s also about inspiration and motivation. In time, our team began to believe that we were the best in Britain. And we may have been, for all I know. This growing sense of pride showed itself in a number of ways. We always made visitors welcome, and I was at pains to see that nobody rammed our growing reputation down other people’s throats; but I was also at pains to see that no visitor left without being seriously impressed by what we were doing. What was happening was no more than the growth of a close-knit, motivated team. Many of us have since moved elsewhere – back to Canada, to continental Europe, even to Hawaii – but we still keep in touch, nearly thirty years later.
The first few days of a dig can affect the way the entire season runs. The biggest influence is undoubtedly the weather, and there’s nothing one can do about that. A rainy start is the worst. The huts go up wet; they seldom sit square on the ground, and never seem to lose their dampness. The various delivery trucks stick in the mud, and someone always manages to fall over – but they never hit grass; invariably it’s a broken bottle or a rusty iron spike. Nowadays wooden huts have been replaced by stackable, portable cabins which come ready equipped with electricity, water and well insulated walls. These have made an enormous difference to the quality of life on site.
The arrangement of the huts would reflect the way the dig was organised, and I always made a point of agreeing the layout of the compound with my two senior supervisors well in advance. That first season I came across the pair of them, entirely by chance, in a student pub, and together we sketched something incomprehensible on the back of a beer-soaked envelope – which I promptly lost. Anyhow, the compound more or less matched what we had agreed.
The huts were arranged around a small, open-sided ‘yard’ which faced onto the areas we were digging, and was surfaced with gravel taken from the dig. The largest hut, which sat at the centre of the yard, was the domain of Anne, our finds assistant. The finds assistant is possibly the most important member of a team. His or her job is to supervise the washing, marking, cataloguing and storing of the finds. They have to be rigorously methodical, and know where anything is at any time. The numbers of finds will vary depending on the type of site one is digging, but I suppose a typical day at Fengate would have yielded perhaps two or three hundred finds; of these, about 30 per cent would be man-made artefacts of one sort or another and the remaining 70 per cent would be animal bones.
Sometimes the artefacts were complete objects – brooches, pins, needles or small pots – but more often they were fragments of pottery or sharp flint flakes, the by-products of chipping flint to make tools. Like the artefacts, the animal bones were either found whole or, more usually, broken. They had to be treated with the same care as artefacts, because they could yield just as much information – about the cuts of meat that were eaten, the type of animals kept and the way they were farmed. If, for example, we found a high proportion of bones from older beasts, that might suggest that the younger ones were regularly transported to market.
Next to the Finds Shed was a small hut for tools, and a larger Tea Hut in which wheelbarrows were kept overnight. There was a hut given over to the storage of plans and records, and another in which I did my accounts and administration work – which took me about an hour every morning. People soon learned that doing the accounts made me grumpy, and if they were wise they’d stay well clear of my hut between ten and eleven o’clock. The sanitary arrangements were primitive in the extreme, and involved the liberal application of pungent blue liquid.
This was our self-contained world for the summer. We baked in the sun, froze in the cold, and soon grew extraordinarily weather-beaten. Most of us wore heavy boots, tattered shorts made from cut-off jeans, and old T-shirts that might once have been coloured. Nowadays, when I look at photos of the team, I’m surprised by how little our appearance has dated, when compared with the images in the glossy magazines of the time, which invariably appear extreme and ridiculous. A 1970s field archaeologist could readily slip unnoticed into a twenty-first-century team.
As soon as the panels of the huts were erected, Anne took a small party to town to buy essential supplies, while the rest of the crew started to nail down roofing felt. Rain was forecast overnight, so we had to make everything waterproof by the end of the day. While this was going on, our on-site foreman Sandy and I sat in the Land-Rover with a large aerial photograph and scratched our heads as we tried to decide where to start digging. We had a lot of land and potential archaeological features to choose from.
Aerial photography has had a profound effect on archaeology, since its first widespread use during the Great War. In lowland England years and years of ploughing have removed most of the humps and bumps from the actual surface of the ground, but in aerial photographs long-vanished features such as trackways, field ditches, even house foundations, can be seen as dark marks in growing crops. In a dry year, and only in a dry year, the roots of crops such as wheat and barley need to dive deep to find moisture. Above buried and long-filled-in ditches, wells or rubbish pits, the roots find dampness and the crops grow thick, lush and luxuriant. This darker growth shows up clearly from the air.
The cropmarks on the photos that Sandy and I were examining looked like a painting by Jackson Pollock: there were lines everywhere. Some were straight, one was a perfectly circular ring, others were squiggly, and there were seemingly random dots and irregular dark splodges. The splodges and squiggly lines were caused by water freezing and thawing during the last great Ice Age, so they could safely be ignored. But the other marks were interesting. The dots might or might not be ancient wells, while the circular ring was almost certainly the quarry ditch around the outside of a Bronze Age barrow, or burial mound. Unfortunately, it was in a neighbouring field, and we were unlikely to get a chance to dig it until at least 1973, when it was scheduled by the New Town authorities to become available for commercial development.
One of the frustrating aspects of so-called rescue archaeology, undertaken ahead of specific commercial developments such as factory building or quarrying, is that you cannot carry out a logical pattern of research. Ideally, I like to work my way back in time, starting with the recent material and finishing with the most ancient. But it doesn’t work like that in rescue archaeology. You excavate the land which is under the most urgent commercial threat, whatever the age of the archaeological deposits it contains. In effect this means that the archaeologist has to maintain a number of distinct, but often interweaving, threads or themes in his head. Many times I have found myself looking at an Iron Age grave or house foundation of 300 BC, while my brain is thinking about Neolithic problems of 3000 BC.
We decided to place our first trench across two long, straight, dark marks of parallel ditches. By this time I had bought several copies of that RCHM survey which I had first seen the previous year in Peterborough Museum. The survey reckoned that the two parallel cropmarks were probably the drainage ditches on either side of a Roman trackway. Roman features in the Peterborough area were often crammed full of pottery, because from the late second century AD to the end of the Roman period (AD 410) there were highly productive potteries in the lower Nene valley, immediately west of the modern city. Large potteries like those in the Nene valley were among the first true factories, and they produced cooking and tableware
