seen as at best the spread of a set of ideas, rather than the wholesale movement of people or populations.
With hindsight, Glyn’s explanation could not have been otherwise. Like all European prehistorians he relied on the well-documented areas of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to provide him with the dates he needed for his far-flung monuments. This method of dating held within it the seeds of its own fallibility. By looking east for a date, it was also natural to look east for an origin. And that was the fatal flaw which led to the theory’s eventual collapse: when the first radiocarbon dates arrived for megalithic tombs in Ireland and Brittany, they were found to be thousands of years earlier than their supposed progenitors in the eastern Mediterranean. It must have been a bitter pill indeed that Glyn, and many other archaeologists, had to swallow.
I finished at Cambridge in 1967, and spent two years out of archaeology. At the time I had no intention of returning to it, but events conspired to draw me back. My time out of archaeology had been very frustrating, and in an attempt to break free from the life I was then leading, I followed the advice of an old friend of the family and made my way to Toronto, where I registered as a landed immigrant in 1969.
After a few weeks of unemployment spent among the huge population of US draft dodgers in Canada I eventually got my first ‘real’ archaeological job, as a technician in the Royal Ontario Museum. The ROM was the largest museum in Canada and has magnificent collections, particularly of Chinese antiquities. The Chief Archaeologist, Dr Doug Tushingham, was an anglophile and was proud of the museum’s collections of prehistoric European material, which included a fine assemblage of Bronze Age metalwork that had been dredged from the Thames in the early years of the century.
I worked directly for Doug Tushingham, as his technician, for about a year. At the time he was writing up a site he had excavated in Jordan, at a place called Dhiban. My job was to prepare maps and plans for publication, draw and repair pottery and glass, and work through the various sections he had drawn in the field. Sections are a vitally important part of archaeology, and can be difficult to understand. But the principles behind them are straightforward enough.
Because the Near East is so dry, people have tended to live in the same places, usually those with good access to water. Over the millennia the houses, which were usually built from unfired mud bricks, collapsed and new ones were built; rubbish accumulated; new roads were constructed; and slowly the ground surface began to rise, in some cases forming huge man-made hills, known as tells. Early in the history of modern archaeology it was realised that if one cut a deep trench into these hills it would expose all the layers that had accumulated over the years. The wall or side of the trench would tell the story. These vertical faces were known as sections.
The situation in northern Europe was completely different. Here, if tells occur, as they do in parts of Holland, they were deliberately built up to keep people clear of rising water. The damp climate and the widespread availability of water meant that people could settle down and live almost anywhere, so it’s unusual to find deep sections on excavations out in the countryside. In towns and cities, like London or York, where people have been living on the same spot for two thousand years or more, the sections can be fairly substantial – but even so, they’re shallow by Near Eastern standards.
Sections are important, even on shallow rural sites, because they show how the deposits within a particular feature accumulated. Let’s suppose that someone once dug a hole to receive a post. These postholes are the commonest of archaeological features, and are the bare bones of vanished buildings, or timber circles – or whatever. The hole is dug and a post is dropped in. Earth and stones are then back-filled and rammed home around the post to keep it firm. The post forms part of a house, which is then used for a generation. Thirty years later, the occupants die or move away, and eventually the roof falls in. The post then rots, usually at ground level first, and finally collapses. Within a few years it has entirely rotted away, above and below ground. As it rots below ground level, topsoil slowly accumulates where the wood had once been. This topsoil is darker and finer than the stones and soil that had been rammed into the hole all those years ago. Quite often the dark soil accurately preserves the shape of the original post; this is known as a post-pipe. If excavated carefully, the outline of the post-pipe can be recorded in plan view, from above, or as section cut down through the centre of the original post.
The variety of buried archaeological features reflects the variety of ancient life: as well as post-holes, there are ditches that may once have run around fields, or alongside roads; there are shallow gullies which took rain from house roofs; there are wells, hearths, kilns and rubbish pits. Above-ground features may occasionally survive, such as road surfaces, stone walls, huge standing stones like those at Stonehenge, or the humble earthen banks that once ran alongside field hedges.
The sections at Dhiban were extremely complicated. There were vast numbers of different layers: early house floors were cut through by later house walls, which were in turn cut by even later drainage ditches. And so it went on, for hundreds and hundreds of different, separate deposits. It took Doug and me weeks to work out how it all fitted together, but in the end it made sense. This was superb experience for me: a combination of detective work and jigsaw puzzle – but much better fun than either. Eventually, after almost a year, we finished the technical phase of the Dhiban writing-up, and my services were no longer required. The job had been completed, more or less on time, and Doug seemed well pleased. It was now up to him to write the main report narrative, which took another six months.
I had effectively been out of British archaeology for two years, and in that time a lot had been published, which of course I’d missed. As I read my way through this backlog of literature, I was struck by the fact that medieval archaeologists had a great deal to teach we prehistorians. There is so much medieval archaeology in Britain that it is necessary to work on a grand sale. As I read I could discern a shift away from minutiae towards a bigger picture. Many medievalists were excavating entire villages; having done that, they turned their attention to the countryside round about. To put it another way, they worked with entire landscapes, rather than on single, one-off sites. That was precisely what I wanted to do for prehistoric archaeology.
While we were completing our work on Dhiban, Doug and I had discussed what I should do next. Doug had long cherished the idea of launching an ROM expedition to Britain, alongside the museum’s existing projects in Central America, Peru, Iran, Egypt and of course in Ontario. He had set aside the then princely sum of £1,500 for me to use as ‘seed corn’ – in effect to buy my way back into British archaeology. Given my growing predilection for medieval archaeology, I made contact with Peter Wade-Martins, one of its leading exponents. Peter was directing the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon village in deepest rural Norfolk, at a place called North Elmham. I made him my offer, and just as Doug had predicted, he welcomed the money and myself with open arms.
I owe an enormous debt to Peter and his team. From them I learned the benefits of opening up huge areas, rather than small trenches. With an open area you can appreciate how everything fits together. You do not need to worry whether a ditch exposed in Trench 1 is the same as another exposed in Trench 15, a hundred metres away, because it’s there for all to see. You can even walk along it. But open-area excavation also demanded a whole battery of new skills, which I had to learn in double-quick time.
In order to open huge areas of ground, you have to use earth-moving machines. It’s important to know how to use the various diggers and dumpers to shift the topsoil quickly, but without causing damage to the archaeological layers below. The power of the machines has to be controlled and harnessed, or else they are capable of doing immense harm. Open-area excavation also requires planning (i.e. map drawing) if it is to be fast and accurate. Nowadays one would use laser technology to survey rapid plans, but in those days that hadn’t been invented. So we fell back on ingenuity.
While I worked with Peter’s team, I also had my ear closely to the ground. Back in Toronto I had read that the small English city of Peterborough, about eighty miles north of London, was going to be expanded
