Harvey Tesseyman, Project Archaeologist (Heritage Research)

My job in the Heritage Research team mostly involves writing desk-based assessments (DBAs) to establish and record what might be damaged if construction or demolition was to go ahead on a particular site: I take thousands of years of archaeology and history and condense it into a report. There’s a real joy in the neatness of it (if you’re into that kind of thing). If you’ve ever stood back and looked at your newly tidied living room or desk, with everything in its place, it feels a bit like that. It’s about teasing a coherent and useful narrative out of a seemingly endless set of information to a strict deadline. Generally DBAs are made up map regression, place name analysis, and analysing HER (Historic Environment Record) data, accompanied by a visit to the site to see what is ‘on the ground’.

Harvey at work

Map regression refers to comparing a series of maps made over a period of time so you can see the changes and consistencies within a landscape. Some rural areas change very little, but as time goes on you often see huge spikes in the density of buildings. Medieval maps are often as artistic as they are utilitarian, drawn with an unusual perspective and often with hand painted illustrations. As the common land utilised by everyday folk was privatised and enclosed from the early 1600s, enclosure maps refer to prominent landowners and the winding medieval field boundaries give way to the authoritative grid-like structure that we still see today. Tithe maps keep track of what areas of land belonged to whom, and how much wealth that land was expected to render. Historic mapping is intrinsically linked to social and political history, what seem like simple changes to the borders of a field system or the establishment of a new settlement often represent huge societal changes.

Looking at place names also offers insight into the history of an area. Place names ending in “..chester”, or “..caster” often refer to Roman period occupation. Most people live near somewhere with the suffix “..ham”, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon name for a farm or settlement. The “..thorpe” or “..by” suffix in a place name derives from the Old Norse “þorp” and “bȳ”, both meaning a small village or farmstead. A derivation alone isn’t enough to confirm settlement for a particular period, but it’s a good start. You’ll find lots of names like Kiln Street, Butchers Row, Mill Row, or Gallows Lane, which suggest how a particular street may have once been used. The history of Britain is quite literally written in its place names, although in typical fashion it isn’t usually written in modern English and requires some degree of translation.

HER data is a log of every important aspect of the historic environment. Artefacts, the location of settlement cores, listed buildings and anything else historic or archaeological are included and the data arrives spread across any number of PDF files and GIS shapefiles. First it needs sorting, then it gets categorised by period in a spreadsheet and imported into a GIS to get an idea of how it looks spatially. A strong concentration of Roman finds taking on a roughly straight distribution might indicate a ladder settlement belonging to a lost road, whilst medieval and post-medieval settlement cores often remain unchanged even into the modern period. The same goes for little villages centred around medieval churches. For the prehistoric period you can often see clusters of activity in particularly fertile areas, or along waterways.

I have more than a passing interest in landscape archaeology partly due to the ephemeral nature of early finds and the lack of maps for certain periods. The prevalence of barrows, trackways, and enclosures paints a reasonable picture of how the landscape was used. You can level a building, but it’s far harder to completely obliterate its place in landscape. My favourite thing by far about working in the team is the closeness to the historic environment; I can take a privileged look into the minutiae of someone else’s life, and the work goes a long way to arguing the point that the historic environment is something that needs protecting and preserving. Archaeology is more than just “stuff” and history is more than just “things”.