He seemed quite impervious to my exasperation. He didn’t even look up when he spoke. He was completely wrapped up in his work.
‘Calm down, Francis. It won’t take long.’
I had been dismissed. More than a little surprised at Dave’s offhand reply, I continued on my way. I was not in the most sunny of tempers.
The following morning I was detained with the project’s accountants in town, and did not arrive back on site until the afternoon. I almost exploded when I saw that Dave was still on his hands and knees in the same spot. I stormed across to his trench.
‘For Christ’s sake, Dave!’
He smiled up at me, holding a small flint blade on the palm of his hand. It glistened in the damp sunlight against his silt-stained skin.
I was staggered at his nerve. Small flint blades and other scraps of ancient flint-working debris frequently find their way into tree-throw pits through the action of earthworms, moles or other animals, so to find a flake on its own meant absolutely nothing. After a few minutes I was again dismissed, and this time I left with ill-concealed irritation. Out of the corner of my eye I could see other members of the team beginning to take an interest in what Dave was up to. I’m not noted for a quick temper, but I knew I was approaching the end of my fuse.
Throughout the whole of the next day, Thursday, I studiously avoided Dave’s trench. By now it was quite deep, and I could only see the top of his head when he straightened up to empty a bucket of soil into his wheelbarrow.
By Friday we only had a week to finish the dig. In seven days’ time the workmen would be arriving on site to start building factories. There would be a ghastly public row if we held them up, so I assembled the crew together in the Tea Hut and suggested we should work through the weekend to get things finished. Everyone nobly agreed, although a few bad-tempered looks went Dave’s way. It was clear that I was not the only person who considered him to have taken temporary leave of his senses. That night Dave and his ‘bloody great hole’ featured prominently in our talk at the pub.
On my way to the site the next day I made up my mind that ‘Dave’s hole’ had now become a major issue. Something had to be done about it, or else I’d look stupid in the eyes of the others. As is the way of these things, I had learned in the pub the previous evening that some of the younger members of the team thought I was losing control over my Principal Supervisor. It was ridiculous to fall out with a good friend like Dave over such a minor matter, but the crunch could not be avoided. It was him or me: site morale – something my mental antennae have always been quite well attuned to – was beginning to creak.
I was about to leave my shed to have the nose-to-nose confrontation I was dreading when there was a rap at the door. It opened, and Dave stood there, grinning hugely. I knew that look: it said ‘I told you so!’ in letters a yard high.
I have always tried to discourage the team from gathering around the scene of a new discovery – but so far, I have to admit, without much success. As Dave and I walked rapidly across the site, we saw that half a dozen folk had already congregated around his pit, and that others were coming to join them.
When we got there, I was amazed at the size ‘Dave’s hole’ had grown to – he had certainly been hard at work. The bottom of the hole was flat, where Dave had been scraping off silt with his trowel. This smoothed, flat base gave the impression of still water with just the lightest of ripples – the marks left by the trowel. Towards one end of the pit, as if freed from an underwater necropolis, a human skull could be seen emerging. Parts of another, perhaps smaller, one were next to it. Several limb bones and a few vertebrae lay round about the two skulls, like grisly flotsam on the water’s surface.
I have seen many burials, but it was hard not to be moved by the sight of this one. A question immediately came into my mind: what on earth had these poor people done that had led to such an ignominious end, in an unmarked pit on the edge of the Fens? My archaeologist’s eye noted that the grave-pit was a large one, and it was soon apparent that it had been dug to contain more than just two skulls and a few loose bones. There had to be more bones or bodies.
After I had seen the skulls, Dave, with characteristic grace, tried to spare me the large slice of humble pie that was now my rightful lot; I ate it nonetheless, and in public. But how on earth had he known that that apparently unpromising patch of silt would turn out to be so exciting? When I ask him, as I still do whenever our paths cross, he simply shrugs his shoulders and smiles enigmatically. Whatever it was, something made him persist against the full force of my growing fury and the unconcealed scepticism of everyone around him. Moreover, it was not as if he had a record of eccentric behaviour. Frankly, I can’t explain it; nor, I suspect, can Dave.
We now confronted the practical problem that faced us. In theory there were just six and a bit days of excavation to go; but I knew that the discovery of what was probably a complex multiple burial had strengthened our hand enormously. Nobody, not even in those days, could simply have taken a bulldozer to human remains. I took the problem to the powers-that-be, and was eventually able to negotiate a three-week stay of execution that allowed us to excavate the contents of ‘Dave’s pit’ properly. In the event, this required extraordinary care.
The two skulls that were first revealed belonged to a young woman, aged twenty-five to thirty, and a child (hers?), aged eight to twelve, whose bones had been placed higgledy-piggledy in a pile at one end of the pit. At the centre of the pit were the small bones of a younger child, aged three to four. The only complete skeleton was that of a young man, of about the same age as the woman. He had been buried on his side, with his legs drawn up to his stomach, as if crouching.
Like many burials, it was difficult to be certain of its age. We did know that the upper filling of the pit had been cut through by a farm ditch of the much later Cat’s Water Iron Age settlement. That meant that the digging of the pit had to predate the ditch, which we knew was dug sometime around 200 BC. That was some help, but not a lot. The silt that had been thrown into the grave was a whitish pale-brown colour, and we knew that pale soils were often old. My guess was that the grave pit had been dug sometime in the Neolithic period. For all anyone knew, it could have been at the time the house we had found in 1972 was in use, around 3000 BC, or even earlier.
Our guessed date was proved triumphantly correct when Dave’s meticulous excavation revealed how the unfortunate young man had died. Between his eighth and ninth ribs Dave revealed a beautifully made leaf-shaped flint arrowhead with its tip snapped off. Similar damage had been noted in Scandinavia on arrowheads that had been fired into hunted animals, so I reckoned that ours had probably lost its tip when it struck the rib bones. There could be little doubt: the young man had been shot with an arrow.
The discovery of what was then one of the earliest deliberate killings in Britain caused enormous public interest. Breaking with tradition, we decided not to remove the bones one by one and reassemble them for a museum display. Instead, we lifted the entire burial intact in two large blocks of gravel, which we consolidated in a type of liquid plastic (Polyvinyl acetate) and then transported to Peterborough Museum, where it now forms a central part of the prehistoric display. The arrowhead is still in place, undisturbed, exactly where we found it.
That year I returned to Toronto somewhat later than normal, because I was unable to arrange for over 20,000 pieces of pottery and probably half a tonne of animal bone to be transported across the Atlantic. Instead, we made arrangements with Peterborough Museum for space to store and study the finds. I took some key maps and plans with me, and several boxes of flints – tools and chippings – which I would study during the long, cold Canadian winter.
Back in my office at the Royal Ontario Museum, I started work on the complex plans of the Cat’s Water
