Author Archives: Natasha Powers

‘The ploughman feeds us all’ – January is over

By Harvey Tesseyman, Heritage Research Supervisor

January is finally over, a month with five Mondays to kick the year off. Since we’ve spent January out in the field excavating, geophys-ing, and undertaking earthwork surveys, we’ve been thinking about what people in the medieval period would have been doing out in their fields this month.

The Julius Work Calendar was a twelve page book measuring just 200mm by 130mm and produced in c.1020 in Canterbury Cathedral. It was divided into the calendar year we recognise today, each page showing a zodiac sign, the holy days of that month, and an illustration of a particular task http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Cotton_MS_Julius_A_VI. This ‘Work Calendar’ was a religious text, likely produced to help young monks with their learning (Robert and Danziger 2003). It was rescued from destruction following the Dissolution of the Monasteries by a 17th century Member of Parliament, antiquarian, and book collector, Robert Cotton, from whose shelves the calendar gets its name: each of Cotton’s bookcases in Westminster library was topped with the bust of a notable figure of the classical world; Augustus, Caligula, Claudius, Cleopatra, Domotian, Faustina, Galba, Nero, Otho, Tiberius, Vespasian, Vitellius and, of course, Julius.

The calendar suggests that January’s task was ploughing. The ploughing season began in earnest on Plough Monday, the first Monday after Twelfth Night. Plough Monday may have had associations with rites surrounding fertility, whereby local young men would wear special badges and engage in ploughing competitions (Gilchrist 2012). We decline to pass comment on this aspect.

Ridge and furrow earthworks visible during an earthwork survey in Lincolnshire

The open field systems that dominated much of the medieval landscape comprised areas of arable land up to c.50ha big, divided into furlongs which in turn comprised a number of narrow, enclosed strips. Generally between two and four of these giant fields served a single settlement, with somewhere between one third and one half of the rural population living in places given over to this system (White 2002). Medieval ploughing was difficult work. Teams of people goaded and sung to their slow-moving oxen to drive them through the fields, whilst the plough was steered to deliver the perfect furrow within which to sow seeds; not too shallow nor too deep. It was a system that worked for hundreds of years before oxen were put out to pasture in favour of smaller teams of horses. A plough team could cover an acre a day, which would have involved walking something like 17.5km (Ochota 2016). Quite a distance even on level ground (our geophysicists walk up to 25km a day and that’s with just a magnetometry rig, not a team of oxen)! Unlike modern ploughs, medieval examples had a single blade, not unlike a spearhead in shape, or an archaeological trowel held at an angle. They were designed to cut a small trench into the earth and push the dislodged soil to one side and this created a characteristic set of linear earthworks, known as ridge and furrow (or furrow and ridge, respectively). Due to the wide turning circle on a team of oxen when compared to a modern tractor, ridge and furrow ploughing has a gentle ‘S’ or reverse ‘S’ curve to it to give the animals enough time to turn around and start another furrow, in an area referred to as headland.

With time, many examples of ridge and furrow ploughing were in turn ploughed out. Where evidence for these medieval field systems survives, often soilmarks showing where the old furrows used to be are the only trace but happily for archaeologists, these soilmarks and remaining earthworks can be quite easy to spot both by eye, and using LiDAR. They’re interesting to dig, and useful to identify during a desk-based assessment or heritage statement as they often indicate further activity nearby.

January was busy, and February is already off to a good start. Luckily for us according to the Julius Work Calendar we’ll be out in February clearing vines…

Ridge and furrow visible on LiDAR near a site in Leicestershire

References:

Gilchrist, R, 2012, Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course, Suffolk: Boydell Press

Ochota, M., 2016, Hidden Histories: A Spotter’s Guide to the British Landscape, London: Frances Lincoln Ltd

Robert, L., and Danziger, D., 2003 (3rd ed), The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At The Turn of the First Millenium, London: Abacus

White, G.J., 2002, The Medieval English Landscape 1000–1540, London: Bloomsbury

Find of the Month January – medieval human bone from The Lawn, Lincoln

[Warning: contains photos of human remains]

By Natasha Powers, Senior Manager (and osteoarchaeologist)

Last year we were commissioned by Banks, Long and Co. to undertake a programme of archaeological monitoring and recording during groundworks for work on Stokes new barista training college at The Lawn, Lincoln. Previous work in the area has revealed medieval and Roman remains, but much of the area was remodelled when the gardens for the Lawn Asylum and Hospital were laid out in the 19th century. The monitoring found relatively modern features associated with the buildings, but about 12m to the north of the former location of the Joseph Banks Conservatory, was a shallow pit containing fragments of medieval and post-medieval roof tiles and a quantity of disarticulated human bone.

Spread of disarticulated, redeposited human bone

The bones originated from more than one person and were jumbled in a way that showed that they had been moved from their original position. A minimum of three adults and a child were represented. Radiocarbon dating showed that these people had died in the early 14th century. There was evidence that some had suffered from infectious disease and lots of damage consistent with the bone having been moved around in the past. Most significantly, there were peri-mortem (around the time of death) cuts and chop marks on eight separate bones, including this adult humerus (upper arm).

Adult upper arm (humerus) that has been chopped through

In 1987, excavations at The Lawn uncovered a number of burials thought to be related to the graveyard of the parish church of St. Bartholomew. St. Bartholomew’s was established in the 11th century and in the 14th century was used as the chapel of a hospital. The Cathedral canons were buried there from 1297. The graves that were uncovered during the excavation were suggested to be 14th century in date (Camidge 1987). In the part of the site closest to the location of our monitoring were multiple burials with large spaces between them. Our work has been able to confirm the date of the burials, whilst the 1980s excavation helps us determine that our finds are most likely from closely associated burials and were disturbed en masse by 19th century gardening.

Looking at the 1980s excavation and the current work together, what explanation can be provided for the injuries? The injuries include the (at least partial) removal of a right arm just above the elbow, a foot at the ankle, and a lower leg (probably above the ankle), all with a sharp, heavy blade. These injuries have characteristics that suggest an attack on a living person by another, for example during battle. Some of the other bones have injuries that indicate numerous repetitive parallel chops, as if made in quick succession. The location in the body means that they would be difficult to achieve in a living person. These injuries might be more likely to show the dismemberment of a dead person. The early 14th century was a time of unrest between the Scots and English (notably Bannockburn in 1314) and conflict spilled south. This was also a period of poor harvests culminating in the Great Famine of 1316–1322. Famine had a serious impact on social cohesion and crime rose in both urban and rural areas; or perhaps those buried on the margins of the cemetery of St Bartholomew’s died in an, as yet unidentified, battle. Something to ponder over coffee perhaps?

Camidge, K, 1987, The Lawn, in Archaeology in Lincolnshire 1986–1987, Third Annual Report of the Trust for Lincolnshire Archaeology, October 1987, 25–26

Carillion collapse: lessons to be learnt for archaeology?

By Mark Allen, Director

The 15^th January 2018 was a momentous and shocking (though not surprising) day with the announcement that Carillion, the second largest construction company in the UK had gone into liquidation. The signs had been there, with three previous profit warnings over 2017, the share price plummeting, and indeed the markets even betting against their survival since 2013! This has of course led to questions over why public sector contracts continued to be awarded to the company throughout 2017, but that is for others to discuss…

Now I am not, of course, saying our company was in any way comparable with Carillion at the time they ceased to exist: they had 43,000 staff worldwide, literally a thousand times the number of staff at Allen Archaeology! However, commercial archaeology is intrinsically linked to the construction sector; indeed its format of tendering for work is based on that of the construction industry. In addition, many archaeological contractors are likely to have been subcontractors on Carillion schemes across the UK, and, unless their financial contract was with a third party (e.g. the public sector), then they are almost certainly going to receive no reimbursement for invoices submitted or work yet to be invoiced for. There will not only be a financial impact but also a loss to archaeology as projects are shut down part way through, potentially leaving significant volumes of new data that will not be assessed or analysed or published, making it practically meaningless.

It has been written that Carillion continued with the ‘recession mind-set’ that prevailed after the financial crash of 2008, when the construction industry, and indeed archaeology, were hit particularly hard. Although many companies have moved forward over the last decade, not all have done so, and Carillion’s continual pursuit of this strategy resulted in serious ‘suicidal’ pricing shortfalls to keep the order book growing, the staff working and supply chains intact, whatever the cost. They piled on too much debt, chasing new business to make up for the shortfalls of cash caused by losses from the high risks that they continued to take.

Carillion sites across the country shut down immediately on the 15^th January, and their once competitors have been quoted as saying they would only take on many of the contracts with a 20% uplift in price, such was the artificially low price that Carillion had offered to undertake the work.

So why was Carillion given so much work, when many insiders in the industry were particularly concerned with their practices? Simply put, money. Large public sector (and indeed many of the larger private sector) schemes usually require at least a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ) to be prepared by the tenderer. A large portion of the PQQ is focussed on showing the company’s suitability and experience for undertaking the work but usually anything from 40-60% of the tender package is focused on the bottom line, i.e. the overall price the company is willing to do the work for. There has been further criticism that many of those in the public sector reviewing PQQs do not have sufficient training or experience to do this, so the bottom line cost has carried some weight with the rest of the PQQ. After all, the lower the construction budget the higher the chance the overall project will be completed, as the construction element is almost without question the largest portion of the project finances.

The high risk approach of slashing potential profit to the bone or accepting a ‘loss leader’ in the hope of further work, or even a loss just to keep staff busy, simply must stop if there is going to be a healthy construction industry moving forward.

Now to here I realise I have focussed solely on the construction sector; however all of the above relates to the commercial archaeology sector too, albeit the financial values are somewhat lower.

Far too many times in the past when a contract has been awarded to a competitor, and the client has provided the range of (anonymous) quotations for the work, it has been shocking to see how low the winning bid has been, often significantly lower than all other quotations. You may think that this is sour grapes, but far from it. We are never going to win every contract, but the alarm bells should ring when three tenders are almost identical and one is, for example, half the price. This means that the winning contractor has decided to take on a lot more risk than any of their competitors, i.e. that they hope that significantly less archaeology will be encountered than the other tenderers have predicted. This is not because they know anything different, all known information on the archaeology is provided in the tender package and the answers to any queries during the tender stage are made available to all interested companies. They may be lucky, but it is more likely that they will not be, so they either make a loss, push for compensation events to recover additional money from the client (resulting in an unhappy client), or the archaeology suffers.

Whatever the case, the practice perpetuates the race to the bottom mentality, as competitive tendering forces companies to try to match or beat their rivals. This also sustains the continuous concerns over the levels of wages within the industry, as wages can only be set at levels that the company can afford.

We are living in a time where there is serious investment in public infrastructure projects such as HS2 and the Thames Tideway Tunnel, as well as a good level of private sector work, so it should be seen as an opportunity for the industry to stay busy with a fair price for work of high standard, to be treated with respect by the construction industry and not just viewed as a hindrance, and most importantly to use this opportunity to improve our standing in the sector allowing us to provide more archaeologists jobs, job security and higher wages, in line with their qualifications and experiences.

Pineapples and Pteridomania!

By Dominika Czop, Project Archaeologist

Last week I was sent on an archaeological adventure in beautiful Shropshire. I accompanied our new Senior Project Officer, Craig. Our task was to investigate what is hidden under the ground next to the walled garden in Weston Park. We discovered foundations of a pinery-vinery!

I hope everyone likes pineapples because pinery-vinery was a greenhouse for pineapples. Pineapples were first grown in the Netherlands, and British gardeners learnt the art of growing this exotic fruit from the Dutch. Therefore it comes as no surprise that the first British grown pineapples were cultivated by a Dutch gardener, Henry Telende, who worked in Sir Matthew Decker’s Pembroke Villa in Richmond. As a fruit that is very expensive and difficult to grow in northern climates, pineapple, like other exotic plants, became a symbol of wealth and status. Unlike today when we can buy one at any time, only two hundred years ago people rented pineapples to show off to their guest or even send them to the king or queen as a royal gift!

The majestic pineapple, once available for hire

Unlike citrus fruit, which could be grown in orangeries, pineapples require constant heat as they grow all year round. Since the 17^th century heated greenhouses were used in Britain. Hot air flues inside cavity walls allowed heating of entire length of the garden wall. Furnaces that provided the heat for the walls can be seen along the southern wall of the Walled Garden in Weston Park. Unfortunately furnaces required constant attention – they had to be supplied with fuel, produced soot, which could block the hot air flues and created danger of fire. Fumes from the furnaces also damaged or killed the plants in greenhouses. Different techniques of growing pineapples and providing heat inside of the greenhouses developed during the 18^th and 19^th century. First pineapples were grown in tan pits and then moved to heated hothouses to mature. James Justice described his success in growing pineapples in 1728 at his estate in Crichton, Scotland. He combined tanners’ pits and greenhouse into one stage of growing and maturing pineapples. The pineapple pots were placed in a pit filled with layers of pebbles, manure and tanners’ bark, which provided a source of stable heat for few months.

Pinery-vinery wall

The use of pinery-vinery was proposed by Thomas Hitt in 1757. It had a dual function of growing pineapples and grapes. Pineapples were grown in a greenhouse on the south side of the heated wall and grapes grew on the north side inside of the walled garden. Unfortunately growing pineapples and grapes together required a lot of effort and was very expensive, therefore it was later abandoned. Presence of arches in the lower part of the pinery wall in Weston Park indicates that the vines were planted there and they could grow inside of the greenhouse as well as the other side of the heated wall. This early 19^th century invention also allowed greater space for the roots of the vine. Nails inserted between the bricks allowed the vines to spread across the whole surface of the wall.

Greenhouses became more popular in Britain after the invention of the Wardian case in 1829 and abolition of the glass tax in 1845.This new development led to the fern craze (Pteridomania!) in Britain. Availability of cheap glass and invention of well sealed greenhouses allowed growing of tropical plants on a larger scale, even in the fumes filled London. Despite the popularity of the heated greenhouses and success of the pineapple growing, this type of horticulture was abandoned with the arrival of imported exotic fruit.

Today anyone interested in past horticulture and pineries can visit the Lost Gardens of Heligan and Tatton Park or the Pineapple Summerhouse at Dunmore. There are also other places which still have standing structures associated with pineapple growing, and perhaps in future they will be restored to bring crops of British grown pineapples!

Find of the Month December: Clay Pipe Bowl

Decorated clay pipe bowl

By Cova Escandon, Finds Supervisor

On 27^th of July 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh brought back three unknown weeds from one of his trips to the New World. They were the plants of potato, maize and tobacco.

Although tobacco was most likely to have been known in England before this date through Spanish and Portuguese sailors, Raleigh was the first person to introduce smoking as a fashionable habit in the court of Elizabeth I. Imagine the first time these courtesans saw smoke coming out of someone’s nose and mouth! It is said that one of Raleigh’s servants threw water on him thinking he was on fire. Smoking soon became very popular, and it was even thought to be beneficial to health. It was highly recommended to heal conditions such as worms, halitosis and toothache. Even during the Great Plague (1665) it was thought to clean the air, so schoolboys at Eton College would smoke a pipe at breakfast. But at the beginning of the 17^th Century some voices started speaking against its use. One of them was King James I who wrote a famous text called ‘Counterblast to Tobacco’ where he condemned the use of the aforesaid plant. He also destroyed the crops existing in England and taxed severely the import from America. Despite this, the use of tobacco continued to grow until the 1930s. It was around this time that clay pipe use declined due to competition from cigarettes.

The pipe bowl that we bring to you today was found in Lincoln and made at the Watkinson Clay Pipe Factory in Market Rasen. This factory was founded in 1843 by George Spencer Watkinson and it was very successful until 1893 when wooden pipes started being more popular. Watkinson’s son, George Spencer Watkinson Junior, wrote a journal of his memories of the factory and drew sketches describing the process of making clay pipes. This source of information is priceless as not much is known about this type of factory.

Back in those days, each factory would produce their own designs incorporating the name of the manufacturer or place of production. Our pipe bowl is beautifully decorated with a trophy, possibly related to horse racing, and what appears to be thistles and roses in a laurel crown. On the rim of the bowl you can read MARKET RASEN. Interestingly, we know that the Watkinson Factory often used another design showing a chained slave on one side and the personification of Liberty on the other. This antislavery decoration is highly unusual in the tobacco industry, given its close relationship and dependence on the slavery system.

As you can see in the photograph, the stem of the pipe is missing. We actually often find them with short stems, or none at all, and one reason is that in the second half of the 19^th Century, pubs would provide pipes for their clients to smoke: the customer would break the end of the stem, fill the bowl with tobacco and smoke, returning it to the landlord once he had finished. The next client would break the stem and start again. This artefact not only is a beautiful piece of art, it is also a little window into our past.

Lincoln’s Medieval High Street: a new book

In 2012 we carried out excavations on Lincoln’s High Street in advance of a retail development. The site revealed the presence of a ‘lost’ medieval alley way that took people from the docks on the Brayford to the shops and workshops of the High Street. Amongst the discoveries made were a medieval paint palette made from an oyster shell, locally made pottery and cobblestones which had been worn down by the carts that passed over them. We wanted to show how this small but busy neighbourhood could tell the story of medieval Lincoln and its thriving markets, the evidence for metalworking, weaving and baking and the affect that the Black Death and later the Civil War had on the town.

The medieval street recreated by Pighill Illustration

In our new, fully illustrated book we do just that. The medieval High Street is recreated thanks to a digital reconstruction by Peter Lorimer of Pighill Illustration. Signposts through the text enable you to learn more about the archaeological evidence and a map help you to discover parts of medieval Lincoln that are still visible today.

The book is on sale at the SLHA bookshop, Jew’s Court, Steep Hill or via our website for £8.50 plus P&P

“Marion”: The Bourne Head Pot

By Feenagh Johnson, Project Supervisor

At the end of last year, Allen Archaeology (Marine division) undertook a small excavation in the Market Town of Bourne, Lincolnshire.

The site at Bourne

Now I maybe biased, having grown up a mere stone’s throw away, but I already thought the site was pretty exciting… and then this little lady turned up in the first excavated feature. She was covered in mud and in many fragments but enough of her features were visible to identify a face, and it was the unusual form of her hair that gave her the nickname “Marion” (as the frills looked like a medieval headdress).

Finding Marion

A muddy Marion

Although similar to their better known cousins, the face pot, head pots are usually made of a fine fabric with the body of the vessel moulded into the form of human head. Their exact nature is uncertain but it has been postulated that they are ritual vessels, with another notable Lincolnshire example, the “DON MERCVRIO” head pot, being dedicated to the cult of Mercury.

The fully cleaned headpot

However, the Bourne Head pot is unique; she is beautifully hand painted with a distinct hair style and facial features. It’s very possible that the vessel was “made to order” sometime in the 4th century AD, and it would be nice to think that she was modelled after an actual person before being ritually deposited… unfortunately we can only hypothesize!

illustration by C Bentley

Find of the Month November – Roman denarius

Roman coin

By Yvonne Rose, Archives Supervisor (with thanks to Adam Daubney, Lincolnshire Finds Liaison Officer, for the original identification)

This month’s featured find is a lovely silver denarius recovered from a large site in North Lincolnshire.

The coin features Mark Anthony who was a Roman politician and general under Julius Caesar. It has been dated to 42 BC and is a quite rare example of the type. The obverse depicts Mark Antony’s bare head, and to the left of his portrait is a lituus – a symbol of augury. In ancient Rome, augurs were part of a college of priests whose duty was to interpret the will of the gods by observing natural signs, particularly the behaviour of birds. The reverse of the coin shows the radiate head of Sol, the Roman god of the sun. Interestingly, Mark Antony’s son by Cleopatra was named Alexander Helios; Helios being the personification of the sun in Greek mythology.

The coin, when new, would have borne a legend around the outer edge of the reverse. Now completely worn, it would have read M ANTONIVS III VIR R P C. This is the abbreviated form of “Marcus Antonius tresviri rei publicae constituendae”, which roughly translates to “Marcus Antonius, one of the three-man commission for restoring the constitution of the republic”. This commission was known as the Second Triumvirate and was the political alliance of Octavian (Caesar’s great nephew and adopted son), Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Mark Antony. It was formed in November 43 BC, following Caesar’s assassination the previous year, with the intention of defeating his assassins, Brutus and Cassius, who had gained power in the eastern territories. It is possible this coin was minted to celebrate victory over the assassins in 42 BC.

Coins were manufactured using circular “blanks” of metal which would be warmed slightly to make them more malleable, and then placed within a metal die with the mould for one side of the coin on it. The metal die with the mould for the opposing side of the coin would be placed on top of the blank and then hit with a hammer. This is why many obverse and reverse sides of the coin don’t match up, as the die moulds weren’t necessarily lined up before hammering.

Coins were usually manufactured in static mints in towns, but this coin is likely to have been made in one of the military mints travelling with Mark Antony in Italy. As it was struck 81 years before Claudius invaded Britain, it makes it quite an intriguing find to have it made its way to North Lincolnshire!

Find of the month October – a Roman buckle

Roman buckle

By Yvonne Rose, Archives Supervisor with Mike Wood, Project Manager and Finds Specialist

Our find of the month for October is a rather nice example of a Roman buckle. This type of triangular-shaped buckle dates to the second half of the 4^th century and is found at predominantly military sites in Britain. Indeed, ours was found in Lincoln, just outside the east wall of the Roman city. In this period of history, buckles are still a relatively rare find, much less common than brooches.

The buckle was discovered together with other artefacts in the grave of an adult male. The other associated objects include a crossbow brooch, a small silver mount, a fragment of decorated copper strip which could be part of another brooch, the broken plate of a further buckle, as well as 10 iron nails which may indicate the presence of a coffin. All of these objects are typical of the burials of males from positions of authority in the late Roman Empire.

Buckles with triangular plates are known from both the late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon periods. Roman ones usually have openwork plates with D-shaped or, as with ours, kidney-shaped frames; whereas the Saxon ones tend more towards oval frames and solid plates.

The buckle is made from cast copper alloy and measures 50mm in length. The pin is present, as are three copper alloy rivets, one in each corner of the plate. From the junction with the frame, the arms of the plate extend to meet at a cleft terminal lobe with a pointed projection either side. The heart-shaped aperture of this buckle is particularly attractive.

German archaeologist H. W. Böhme studied buckles with integral triangular plates as part of his survey of late Roman artefacts in Britain, and the settlement of England by the earliest Anglo-Saxons (Böhme 1986, Liste 1, Abb. 5, Abb. 14). He dated them to the middle or second half of the 4th century and his map shows that they are found in small numbers not only in the British Isles but also along the European frontier of the Roman Empire, along the Rhine and Danube rivers.

Böhme, H W, 1986, Das Ende der Römerherrschaft in Britannien und die Angelsächische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 33 pt. 2