Britain’s Amateur Archeologists

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Let’s take a moment to appreciate Britain’s amateur archeologists–the people who do grunt work for real archeologists, who wave metal detectors over unpromising ground to see what turns up, who follow local legends and either find something ancient or go to the pub and decide when to try again. 

Okay, I can’t tell how fully appreciative you just were, so I’ll take us through a few things amateurs have done lately and see if we can’t push the appreci-ometer upwards a bit.

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, a.k.a. rose of sharon

The Palace of Collyweston

Collyweston was home to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, but by the modern era the palace had disappeared so thoroughly that efforts to find it in the 1980s and 1990s came up with nothing. 

Enter the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society. It had three things going for it when it decided to look: a group of amateurs, ranging in age from their teens to their 80s; local legend; and ground-penetrating radar. 

Yeah, that last thing was important. Equally important, I suspect, was a fourth thing: local people, some of whom had grown up hearing about the palace. It was out there and they damn well wanted to find it.

“We had no money, no expertise, no plans, no artist impressions to go off,”  the society’s chair said, “and nothing remaining of the palace. It’s naivety and just hard work that has led us to it.”

They used “local folktales and hearsay” to narrow down their search, then they brought in the radar and got permission to dig in people’s gardens, where they found stone mouldings–the remains of the castle. Historians from the University of York will verify their findings, plan the next moves, and preserve what’s been found. 

It’s got to be exciting, seeing a castle emerge from your compost heap, your veg bed, or your kids’ sandbox. 

 

A Bronze-Age Hoard in Dorset

A retired pensions consultant paid £20 to join a group of metal detectorists working on private farmland in Dorset, but he managed to get himself lost and ended up with what he called the find of a lifetime. About 8 inches below ground, he found a sword from the middle Bronze Age, a bronze ax head, and what the paper’s calling “a decorative arm bangle.” Before I moved to Britain, I read about bangles and wondered what they were. Allow me to translate in case you’re as clueless as I was: a bangle is a “stiff usually ornamental bracelet or anklet slipped or clasped on.” So, basically a bracelet. Unless of course it’s on an ankle, but let’s not complicate things. 

You feel much wiser now, right? 

The director of collections at the Dorset Museum said, “This hoard is incredibly special. The rapier sword is unusual because of the cast bronze handle. The bracelet decoration was quite unusual as well. . . . Finds like this tell us about how people were traveling, meeting, and exchanging ideas with others on the continent in the centuries before the Roman invasion. 

“There was a farming community here and people generated enough wealth to be able to barter for or exchange objects others had made.”

And since nothing matters in our culture unless it can be measured in money, let’s give it a price: the museum raised £17,000 to buy the finds. That was divided between the finder and the landowner.

 

Deep Time

This is a project that had some thousand people looking through high-resolution satellite images and I have no idea what else to find hints of archeological sites. They covered some 200 square miles of ground in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Dorset, finding Bronze Age burial mounds, Roman roads, abandoned medieval villages, and some 13,000 other old places. 

Okay, potentially old places. The next step is to go out in the field and decide which sites to excavate. 

 

And in General . . .

. . . amateur archeologists are having a moment. A long moment. 

Back before the pandemic (remember a time when you didn’t know the word pandemic?), my partner and I joined some other volunteers at Tintagel Castle, in Cornwall. The glamorous work involves uncovering stuff, in this case the foundations of several early medieval buildings on a headland surrounded by the Atlantic on three sides. 

We joined the crew that came along to rebury what the first crew had uncovered. The idea is uncover, document, and then rebury in order to preserve. It’s less glamorous than finding, but it left us with a strong sense of connection to the site. And working in dust and a wet, salty wind, left us dirtier than I’d thought it was possible to be. Salt, it turns out, binds dirt to the human skin in ways that no one has yet explained to me.

More recently, schoolkids have unearthed what’s being called a 1,400-year-old possible temple near Sutton Hoo. (Sutton Hoo itself is an over-the-top medieval burial involving an entire ship and a shipload of treasure.)

More schoolkids helped unearth a Bronze Age hillfort in Wales. Injured ex-servicemen helped with excavations in the Salisbury Plains, and in Greenwich Park (that’s Greenwich as in Greenwich Mean Time) volunteers have uncovered Charles II’s steps, a swallow brooch, clay pipes, coins, the lens of a sextant, and a Sony mobile phone “that was buried pretty deep.” 

Earlier community excavations in Greenwich found a World War II air-raid shelter and a Saxon burial mound. 

A TV show, The Great British Dig: History in Your Back Garden has encouraged people to find out what they’re living on top of. Its presenter–an archeologist–talks about Britain as having been densely populated, which increases the odds of an amateur finding something. Put a shovel in the earth and who knows what will come up. In our very own back yard, I found a small plastic toy spawned, no doubt, by a TV show I’m not familiar with. I reburied it–uncover, document, rebury in order to preserve. It will be a golden find for some future archeologist. 

Lord Google, who’s always anxious to help, thought I’d want to know about ways a person can volunteer on a dig and led me to the Council for British Archaeology. (Please note the stray A wandering around the word archeology. It’s presence is what tells you the organization is genuinely British, not some American knock-off.) 

Yes, you can volunteer on a dig. You can be a Casework Input volunteer and help plow through applications involving historic buildings in England and Wales. You can join a local group. You can “inspire young people.”

Sorry, at that point they got too upbeat for an old cynic like me and I closed the tab. But never mind. You can sign up to help on a dig, although some digs will cost you, because volunteering ain’t necessarily free.

27 thoughts on “Britain’s Amateur Archeologists”

  1. Pingback: Britain’s Amateur Archeologists – On Being Incredibly Quiet

    • I have it on good authority (sorry, no link available) that they are. There was a time, or so fox legend tells us, when foxes held a position of respect and authority among humans. All they need to do is find the evidence…

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  3. Archaeologists of the future will find the bones of 5 cats so far in our garden, (they did belong to us) and we still have two still alive so there’ll be 7 all together. I know, it’s not treasure but they may be excited for a few minutes.

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  4. This is one of the many reasons why I love nerds. Just think of the knowledge we have gleaned because of the dedication and passion of people with niche interests.

    My in-laws live along a Roman road so they often have amateur and academic archaeologists coming to conduct digs on their property. There have been no big discoveries but they still find it exciting any time something new is uncovered.

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    • That really would be exciting. I think I’d be sure to have tea and cake available and hope they offer information and archeological gossip in return. And yes, I’m with you on nerds and people’s niche passions. I love that people are not only interested but get out there and (literally) dig in.

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    • I love the amateur-inventions and discoveries, too, many made by people from adjacent fields with a great passion for solving a real problem! There are so many fantastic examples of that, seems like that could be another worthy list in the making!

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      • An example of that is somewhere in the back of my brain, trying to find its way out, but it’s unlikely to get out of the maze before I hit Send. Which is a way of saying that I agree–people from adjacent fields, people with a passion, and people with a need often bring a new and valuable set of skills to a field of study.

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  5. This is a wonderful ! I have loved archaeology since I was a kid (it actually began with paleontology because of the dinos, of course.) and enjoy watching all the shows and reading about such finds by ordinary people.

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    • It is exciting, hearing about ordinary people finding things. And I’m impressed that they recognize that they’ve got something worth setting in front of an expert. I’m not sure I’d know.

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  7. You may enjoy a quirky little show called The Detectorists, it fits very well with your description of the wiggling of the metal detectors (and they’ll immediately correct me and say that they’re Detectorists 🙃).

    On a different note, pre-pandemic, we were also surprised by places that beg for volunteers to come help and then expect the volunteers to pay for the pleasure of volunteering. The world is filled with mysteries and contradictions?

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    • It is indeed filled with contradictions. I’ve volunteered on two digs. Both have involved nasty weather.but no fee. I do understand that nonprofit organizations need money to keep functioning, but that does seem like a counterproductive way of raising it.

      I haven’t watched The Detectorists but it sounds like something I should go in search of. Thanks.

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    • Somewhere along the line, some genius in this country created a system where people who find ancient artefacts have to involve the experts–archaeologists, museums, whoever–but get half the money when the stuff is sold, usually to a museum. The other half of the money goes to the landowner where the whatever was found. So both documentation and preservation will end up in the hands of experts. It would’ve been nice if I’d thought to mention that in the post.

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  9. We keep that spare a in archaeology on this side of the pond as well. And The Detectorists is one of the all time best Brit tv series. As a retired archaeologist & certified Anglophile, I’ve watched it several times, and it’s worth if for the theme song alone.

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    • The spare A is running around in the US as well? Damn. I’m a retired editor, and American originally, but archAelogy is, oddly, a word that never wandered into anything I worked with, so I was free to bump along in the blissful belief that we’d taken to spelling it more efficiently. Where’s Mr. Webster when we need him?

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