Archaeology just might be The New Black. Or The
New Rock 'n Roll, what with Richard III and all that. Last week we
kicked off our new artists' residency with the archaeologists of
Cambridge Archaeological
Unit, spending 3 wintery days as volunteers on a dig. The team
are tasked with scouring the farmland in North West Cambridge that is
earmarked for a vast new University development, whilst we (Nina
and I) are tasked with saying or showing (eventually) something
meaningful about that. The finds to date here are Roman, possibly
Bronze Age and Iron Age, but more of them later, and this phase
stops when this season's crops are sown this spring, so time is of
the essence.
Until now my experience of archaeology was limited to dusty
field-trips when at the British
School of Rome in the 90's - erudite scholars took us to some
Very Important Sites which generally underwhelmed us artists.
Tangles of brambles and piles of indistinct rock reminded us of
Piranesi etchings but we failed to grasp the experts'
anticipation of what lay (possibly) beneath. We were polite though
- we always had a good lunch in a local trattoria (they seem to
like their food, archaeologists) and enjoyed these rather eccentric
pilgrimages. Stories of their wildly orgiastic research digs on
Italian islands (complete with excellent mobile catering)
occasionally filtered back to us, we were ironically incarcerated
in the rather stiff boarding school atmosphere of our corridors of
studios. Many artists and curators I know cite a teenage
archaeological experience as their creative epiphany (one also
involved - post-dig - their first experience of Class A drugs, but
that's another story) so I'm keen to find out firsthand what's so
hot about this thing called archaeology.
Anyhow, here under the milk-white sky, on the
outskirts of Cambridge, at first glance the scenario reminds me of
building sites I have (unfortunately) known: White vans, site huts,
portaloos, high vis jackets, shovels, buckets, barrows, boots,
sandwiches, lunchtime banter. And mud, my God, the mud. The sticky
Cambridge clay coats everything it makes contact with and then
everything those things make contact with. A week on I'm still
finding it everywhere, and as I write this from Scotland, I've
probably dispersed the Cambridge soil seed bank farther than it was
ever dreamt possible in the prehistoric time we were digging
up.
The similarity between this encampment and those of the
building trade does end there though. I didn't spot any
grimy calendars showing whatever the archaeological equivalent of a
brand new power tool held by a grinning topless girl, is. (If
you've never seen these bizarre promotional items, I recommend you
seek them out). There are women on site, albeit heavily disguised -
but we discuss hats, lipsalve and other girlie things. Nor does
work proceed along to a deafening soundtrack of shit local radio.
Unless some of the archaeologists at the edges of the site are
discreetly feeding that through their iPods, but I doubt it. It's
probably Wagner they're listening to, or Mumford & Sons, or
maybe Squarepusher.
The archaeologists themselves are muffled in layers upon
layers of muddy clothing, genderless and ageless from
afar, like Arctic explorers. On closer inspection they have none of
the physical characteristics of builders either: they have fine
hands and quick eyes, they must be able both to dig for long
periods of time as well as delicately unearth the sought-after
treasures. Our small volunteer group are distinguished by our brand
new high vis vests (filthy by day 2) and of course (at least in
Nina and I's case) by our evident lack of experience, though we
know well how to handle a garden trowel. Nina has brought her own,
I evidently stopped reading the email before I came to that bit and
have to borrow Hayley's - it's like a delicate half size
bricklayers trowel. One day, when the ground has frozen overnight,
we're allowed to hack in with a mattock initially, it's a cathartic
process though not without risks, as I mashed up the bone that was
the sole find in that morning's hole. Shame on me.
Dotted across the moonscape of the site,
topsoil and subsoil piled high, puddles everywhere, are very
distant single figures, occasionally a barrow and bucket by their
side - it reminds me of
a Jeff Wall photograph. At the designated teabreaks and
lunchbreaks the figures slowly migrate back to the site huts. At
one point I go into the main lunch hut when full, it's like opening
the door to a cargo hold of stowaways - a damp, warm fug of food
and bodies and gossip.
The flat fields lying between the distant
motorway and the shabbily genteel back gardens of Cambridge, show
(to the naked eye) clearly defined dark zones all around, and these
depict likely digging spots for finds. (Apparently archaeologists,
like film-makers, cherish the dusk 'magic hour' for its revealing
light quality). I'm reassured by the simplicity of this, and a
later tour of the previous excavations introduces everything from a
WW2 'practice trench' to cremated human remains and wells. A smart
visitor from the Developer's office accompanies us on this tour,
gamely traipsing around though clearly horrified by the mud, and
making the sympathetic noises people use with puppies and kittens,
when words like 'skeleton' and 'grave' come up. Grasping what's hot
about archaeology is clearly challenging without a trowel and a few
hours digging, as I am to find out.
An esoteric code of numbered sandwich bags
flapping on nails in the ground seems to make perfect sense to our
team leaders and we are set to the task of excavating post holes
which are suspected to be evidence of long-gone Roman building. I'm
amazed how quickly the time goes by, and I realise I'm easily
mesmerised by soil and stone, I could dig and move it forever even
if I never found anything, like a toddler in the back garden. Nina
- a few metres from me - raises the alarm quickly and begins
holding up large, black pottery shards, enough to establish that
they may in fact be one large pot. We fleetingly wonder if the team
planted them there to encourage us, like an Easter Egg
Hunt, but if so they certainly kept up the pretence well:
the finds are bagged up and then the tricky bit of paper recording
starts: Paper-based records are still the lingua franca on site,
the archaeologists tell us other higher-tech means have tried and
failed and that it's all quickly digitised off site anyhow. By the
very next day, Nina's pot is dated to the early Iron Age. We're
both thrilled and experience one of those rather cliched 'time
travel' epiphanies that the people on Time Team
used to go on about.
After digging for a while, Hayley encourages me to 'clean up
that hole a bit, Karen'. That seems bordering on the insane
('Hayley, it's a hole in some mud. It will never, ever be
clean' was what I was really thinking) but soon I notice the
professional finish of her and Toby's holes. Who would dream that
the walls of a professionally-wrought hole could be so admirable?
'Trench envy' is common on digs, but for me it was as much about
the walls as the finds.
One site hut contains mainly office stuff and
studious young archaeologists (in fact they are mainly young here,
are all the older ones in offices?), heads down, drawing on large
boards with real pencils. Impressive - I haven't seen this done
since art school in the early 90's. There is also a Very Important
Folder of paper and these are the find sheets, and we need to learn
to do one. Toby and Hayley are very patient with us, Nina is
quickly giggling as she reads my mind - she knows this is the kind
of thing I find very trying. I endeavour to keep up but as usual
I'm easily distracted from the numbers, I just hope to God no
future academic has to rely on my notes. The system - at first -
seems Byzantine. There is some to-ing and fro-ing of digits on
different sheets, and I'm still not sure how the 'Slot Number' is
arrived at, but you soon realise that these very brainy folk have
worked it out to minimise error and where they do occur, to enable
it at least to be found. Later I try to do a find sheet alone and
after a few minutes leafing, numbers becoming ever more confusing,
I have to interrupt one of the silent drawing people for help.
Their trance is ruined but they indulge me, probably thinking 'For
God's sake, all this for a smashed bone from some Iron Age
barbecue'. Or maybe archaeologists never think such things, after
all, wasn't Richard III just a bone in the ground once?
The walk back to base camp (the Unit office,
where the finds go nightly) takes us past a Site of Special
Scientific Interest that Toby says is full of coprolite - its
sounds like the name of a Victorian medical elexir but Wikipedia
says it's 'a fossilized feces'. I can't remember why this ancient
shit is important (now there's a title in the making!), but it
seems they are not allowed to dig there. We also pass what is to be
soon our Artists' House - a former farmhouse (though more 1970's
than 1870's) that looks rather far from being inhabitable still.
It'll be good when it's done - we can then clump 'home' muddily for
a hot bath. A blonde longhaired woman walking her matching dog
chats to us about the dig, we encourage her to the March
Open Day on site - it's been planned as a Roman Street
Party apparently, though I sense some unease amongst the team about
quite how to pull this off with conditions as they are. Sadly Nina
and I can't be there to offer any artistic diversion, and we're
quite good at that so it's a bit of a shame.
Back at the office - part storage facility -
corridors towering with finds boxes, part garden shed - another
team has cleaned and laid out some of the best site finds. The
delicacy of these objects I find very moving: I recall the acres of
gleaned earth, the huge mechanical diggers, the soil mountains, the
heavy shovels pitted against these slithers of ancient metal and
clay; the boorish builders who will soon be on site. There are
brooches, pottery, an exquisite bone needle that looks days old, a
bit of an elegant javelin found in a well (one of very few arms
found so far - they were a peaceful lot here). A fellow volunteer
lends me a magnifying glass to study the coins with, it's magical
to see their fine detail. The team are so casual with much of their
expertise - I suppose like many specialists are - that it feels
faintly embarrasing to show our enthusiasm and awe at the aura
these ancient things possess. I guess it's all in a day's work for
them. I'm also quickly aware of how much more interested I am by
these objects, found in the very soil I've been toiling in, than
had I encountered them cleaned up and labelled in a dusty museum
case. It really matters when you intimately know their origin, and
their aura perhaps (for me anyhow) derives from the liminal space
between their 'loss' thousands of years ago and their rediscovery
now by these means by these people....
PS I'm realising that this new project needs me to quickly
learn how to type the word 'archaeology' correctly - it seems to
have more 'O's in it than are strictly necessary and I've not got
it right first time once
Posted Monday 18th February, 2013 at 10:37 am by Karen
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