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Beyond Hope: Archaeology and Collaboration in Castleton with Colin Merrony -Ep 44
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Archaeology & Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. This talk in keeping with our focus on community archaeology, is given by Colin Merrony from the University of Sheffield and is entitled – Beyond Hope: Archaeology and Collaboration in Castleton. This talk took place on Monday 28th November 2022 at The Red Deer, Pitt Street, Sheffield
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 44
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 44 of Archaeology and Ale, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach programme from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology.
Guest Speaker: Colin Maroney
00:00:42
Speaker
This month our guest is Colin Maroney, who is giving a talk entitled Beyond Hope, Archaeology and Collaboration in Castleton. For our overseas listeners, Castleton is situated in the heart of the High Peak District of Darlington.
00:01:04
Speaker
Thank you very much.
Castleton Project & Community Involvement
00:01:07
Speaker
Steve's blocking the doorway, so I can't make an escape. But then neither can you, so that's good.
00:01:14
Speaker
Many of you will have heard me talk about Carsten before, but don't worry, I'm not going to go into vast detail about everything that we've done there in the past, because Steve gave me a particular theme, so this is not talking about Carsten relay. I will get to the end some of the things we did this summer, but there are about 85 slides before I get that far, so that'll be tomorrow morning, I think.
00:01:35
Speaker
But he told me they had to talk about community involvement. That's what the theme is of this set of talks, I believe. So what I'm going to do is tell you the story of Castleton, really the project as it happened, and just how valuable
00:01:51
Speaker
working with people who aren't archaeologists and aren't from the university can be, because it's taken the project in all kinds of strange directions, shall we say, and we've discovered all sorts of things which you didn't expect to start to find at the beginning.
Themes & Challenges in Community Archaeology
00:02:06
Speaker
During that process we've ended up getting lots and lots and lots of people who get all friendly and happy and work together. So we've had people right the way from school kids, lots and lots of students right the way through to people who are
00:02:17
Speaker
Even older than me, if that's possible to imagine. And people from all around the world come on the project. And it's grown into a community project. And at the end of it, I'll try and give you sort of three messages to take from a project like this and how useful having people who aren't professional archaeologists is and involved in a process. And we'll mention one or two community themes. And Kate's here to tell me off if I use the wrong words because I had different forms of community involved. There's a lot of bad community archaeology out there.
00:02:46
Speaker
Let's hope this isn't a bit of it. So anyway, we're understanding a place and having people who aren't just professional archaeologists and there isn't just a research agenda for this. It's a project that has grown and developed in
Significance of Castleton's Location
00:02:59
Speaker
various ways. So how did we get from a few members of the local history society doing a bit of geophysics to a project which in fact hundreds of people quite literally have come on over the years of all ages and all kinds of backgrounds? Well,
00:03:12
Speaker
First of all, I should sell you where Carsten is, just in case any of you don't know where it is. Chris, run over there, was trying to tell me to convince you it was in central Germany, but actually...
00:03:22
Speaker
Just before we started, we're over here somewhere, and the area we're talking about is over here. It's about 18 miles away, 30 kilometers away, just off into the Peak District. So very nice and convenient there. So many of you will know it, because it's a sort of honeypot area. Lots of tourists will go there. It's the end of a lovely glaciated valley, so we're looking down the valley here. There's Castleton in there. Hope's in the background, and we're also going to concern ourselves with
00:03:50
Speaker
little village of Bruff, which is just behind the cement works there. And the story is, how did we get from one tiny little bit in here to end up looking at the whole of the end of the valley, really, and turning it into a landscape
Expansion to a Landscape Project
00:04:02
Speaker
project? Oh, no, not turning, it turning into a landscape project. Turning it into would imply that I had some kind of control over it, which is most unlikely.
00:04:10
Speaker
A very well-known area. Lots of tourists go there, known for things like its caves. So there's Peak Cavern and lots of other caves there in Blue John, all sorts of things in there. So lots of lots of people go here, lots of archaeology. So Mantoor, there's that late Bronze Age, Iron Age hill fort that dominates the end of the valley. Looking down the valley, later stuff such as Peverill Castle. So we know there's lots of stuff there. And so it's a popular place for people to go and visit. And we're going to
00:04:37
Speaker
I'm going to try and tell you the story how we went from a place, from a project, which initially was going to just look at a tiny little area here, where the medieval hospital is, which is just in there, the top left hand corner of that H, to something that ended up looking at the villages of Castleton and Hope, which are rather different in their origins. And then that's turning into an area in the southwest end of Castleton, looking at an area we call Juilliard, which also then led on to looking at an area.
00:05:06
Speaker
Northwest of Castle and Newhall and then having a little trip all the way over here to Navio to the far end of the Hope, the parish of Hope and actually we did sneak outside the parish of Hope because we ended up being just over the road to there and eventually turning up and having a look at Pebble Castle because initially all we were going to do was have a look in and just in the area in there. So
Historical Research & Medieval Hospital
00:05:29
Speaker
What brought us here in the first place was actually work being undertaken by the Council on Historical Society. Angela will put me right if I go too wrong at any point, I'm sure. But they've done a lot of historical work looking at
00:05:46
Speaker
This supposed hospital that is supposed to exist at Castleton, there's quite a reasonable number of documentary references to it. You know, it's founded by the wife of William Pebble, so on. So the castle is built, the hospital comes on not long afterwards, as does the village of Castleton. So they're all relatively late compared to Hope. So we've got this information there and then
00:06:12
Speaker
There's the idea of wanting to follow that up. So we know where it is. So there's field names. So there's spittle field down here and the area that we're actually talking about for the hospital itself. There's various other spittle field names where Lucille Hall now is. But it's pretty clear where it should be. We've got a description of where the remains are. They're in this field bounded by the road to the north, by the road to Hope, to the south and to the west, partly by the river and to a name over Marston over here. Marston Farms over here, the road to Hope's there.
00:06:42
Speaker
The peaks are water whether it's called these days peaks arse river is running down there So we've got that so it should be pretty obvious where it is and there's a schedule monument Fantastic there's a field with some sensible earthworks in the corner lots of ridge and furrow over it So lumps and bumps and a description saying it's the hospital
Challenges in Early Exploration
00:07:01
Speaker
Can't go wrong, can you? Can't go wrong. We know where it is. There's documentary evidence telling us there. And so, quite rightly, the society thinks we should do some more about that. So, at the moment, Sheffield University is not involved here. It's nothing to do with us. I mean, it's not far away from the sort of things we're interested in because we've worked on the hospital at Bortree, for example.
00:07:23
Speaker
And so medieval hospitals and medieval monastic things are things that we're interested in and we do work on. But at this point, we need to introduce two people who are going to be critical to the appearance of this project. So first of all is Angela from the Carson Historical Society. Interest in the hospital for many reasons. So apart from the fact they've just done all this historical research, hospitals might be a sort of place where you might have herbal medicines and things. And for somebody who knows about plants,
00:07:51
Speaker
and is a plant scientist. This is all very interesting, apparently. And so anyway, the driving force of this really is Angela and she went to talk to somebody else.
00:08:00
Speaker
Stella Maguire. So not this grinning fool over here, Tim. But in the middle there, Stella. Now, Stella is one of those people really lucky in Sheffield because there are lots of people who aren't professional archaeologists, who come from all kinds of backgrounds, but get involved in archaeology heavily in Stella. It was a local government officer. I think she sort of did emergency planning for a lot of her career. And she did a lifelong learning qualification in the days when the university
00:08:24
Speaker
People could do lifelong learning qualifications at the university before they shut all that down, turn it into just foundation years. And then she retired from local government and then she became an advisor on the Peak District National Park. Something to do with looking after the heritage and all sorts of other things. Anyway, as far as I understand it, Angela went to talk to Stella. And Stella, who lives at the other end of the Hope Valley, said, oh, there's this bloke in Sheffield's a bit of a mug.
00:08:46
Speaker
I mean somebody who's really helpful and who might want to help out if you want to do a little project and have a look at your hospital. And so Stella did that and as you can see from the photo Stella then carried on supporting and supervising working on the project right the way through to her.
00:09:01
Speaker
to her death in 2017. So we started off with a bit of geophysics, a bit of resistivity with people who are, like myself, who are hugely experienced in zimmer frames and so on, so we have no problem with it. Started with a bit of resistivity on the side, section 42 license and so on.
00:09:20
Speaker
Started off all right. We also did magnetometry. I just have this gratuitous picture of how lovely it is doing magnetometry in Derbyshire and how much, quite clearly, the student there is enjoying her day out doing magnetometry with me. You can understand why Jessica Couperdon went into pub management after she graduated.
00:09:37
Speaker
She did come back to archaeology a couple of years ago to do an MA. But anyway, she's recovered from being scarred by that, but that was just a lovely place to work. So, and we get results.
Discovery of Medieval Hospital Site
00:09:47
Speaker
Well, there's the magnetometry. We've got an oil pipeline coming through, part of our major infrastructure that they're worried about terrorists getting at. We've got another
00:09:57
Speaker
pipe or cable of something going through there. A couple of manual covers for another big thing that runs through there. No medieval things leaping out. Some resistivity. Looks a bit better, but we've got the oil pipeline coming through again. We've got whatever that thing is cutting across there from the direction of Lucid Hall or the caravan part. We've got another thing coming across. These look like
00:10:20
Speaker
modern services really. We do have something that matches the earthwork a bit, a sort of semi-enclosure in there. But where are they? This is a medieval hospital, high status medieval structures. There should be lovely rectangular buildings in there in the scheduled area because the scheduled area is in here. And of course there should be dead people, all the sort of things that archaeologists love because they're easy to find.
00:10:43
Speaker
As it turns out, that little black bit there, that sort of T-shape is probably a bit of a hospital, but we didn't realise it at the time, of course, because it's not a lovely rectangular building. So that's not very helpful. It doesn't immediately jump out at you that this wonderful hospital and the schedule monument is there.
00:11:03
Speaker
Really, you've got to try doing some excavation then. Geophysics hasn't really given us a lot to work on. It did give us a few high resistance areas in here and so on, which we thought we could investigate with trenching. So we put some trenches in. And don't worry, I'm not going to take you through every year like I normally do, tell you how to think gradually. I'll just give you a few examples from here. And they're fantastic. There's absolutely nothing in them, except these really poor quality field drains. They are the most rubbish field drains I've ever seen. They were tiny, must have silted up in minutes.
00:11:33
Speaker
Nothing. It's a clean field. There's not even any modern rubbish kicking about in there. So you put some test pits in. But then I'm used to working in South Yorkshire, so not finding anything. It's not a barrier to anything at all. I'm quite happy to carry on for years. So we then don't give up. Let's dig more holes. So we put test pits across this pebble castle background. Happy students.
00:11:54
Speaker
at least one of which is now doing a PhD. So happy students there digging holes, which were just as good as the year before, with absolutely nothing. And there was a single shard of medieval pottery came out from halfway across the field. So that was something. So let's work towards the scheduled area, because by this point, English
Community Impact on Project Direction
00:12:11
Speaker
heritage as they were at the time, historic England now, we're getting a bit worried because they scheduled this and there's no, there's not even, there's no rubbish. There's nothing really supporting the idea that there's any substantial archaeology except some lumps and bumps on the surface.
00:12:23
Speaker
So you put a trench through what looks like a bank and ditch, and funnily enough, it's a bank and ditch with nothing in it, apart from fills. So that doesn't help. You've still got nothing to make this feel seem even vaguely medieval. But we don't give up. We go right into the middle of the treasured area.
00:12:39
Speaker
dig there, there's a spread of stone, there's 18th century pottery, which is not exactly what you're looking for when you're looking for a medieval hospital, but at least there's something in there. We're almost on the verge of giving up, and you allow the local school in who come in, dig a hole, and they find a wall at the end of the trench. So, never let children onto your side, I say. Except the young archaeologists, of course. Wonderful, Sheffield young archaeologists. Never had a bad word to say about any of them.
00:13:03
Speaker
And eventually we did find a wall. There is a wall. And this is possibly that little T-shaped thing that we're showing up on the geophysics. We have got a wall at first, 18th century pottery, then bits of medieval pottery, but nothing to be absolutely certain at first that this is a medieval building. But at least it's a substantial structure that we've got something to show for it. There's some building going on here and then there's another wall at the back, but that looks like probably some kind of enclosure or field wall. But this is a proper building wall, which is sort of plastered on the inside and so on.
00:13:32
Speaker
And so, therefore, let's keep looking. Looking around, bits of buildings are up. We could really do with a cemetery. That would be nice because archaeologists love dead people. And it gets everybody very excited. And yes, we do find a skull. That's good. This is all taking quite some time.
00:13:50
Speaker
taking a few years. The years are running on now, slowly and continuously. And eventually, after another couple of years, we realise we're not digging deep enough. We're not seeing the tops of grave cuts. What looks like natural isn't necessarily natural. It's just you don't see the differences, so you just need to keep taking the layers off. And eventually, we realise there are some dead people here.
00:14:11
Speaker
We'd almost given up on that front as well, beginning to think we're never going to find anything here. Just a few scraps of building and then we did strip off one area a bit deeper and there was a grave cut and that was of course the day before we finished for that year and all the students said, can we dig it now? I said, no, we'll have to come back next year and so we did. But there really are dead people in there. So we've got
00:14:34
Speaker
cemetery with various dead people. We won't bother going on about underneath each of these buckets is also an extra head. We've got a lot of extra heads, but that's another story.
00:14:43
Speaker
We've got a cemetery, we've got bits of a building, and the lowest deposits are only associated with medieval pottery. So this must be the hospital, or at least it must be something related to the hospital. And I have a strong feeling that probably what we're looking at is perhaps the chapel of the hospital and not the hospital itself, but because it's been a bit odd to have burials inside your hospital and all the way around the hospital. So it seems we'll like to be the chapel to me. But anyway, so we gradually keep looking.
00:15:10
Speaker
more cemetery and eventually some bits of building that look convincing like bits of building rather than just a few fragments of stone. What we realized was the building has been almost completely robbed out and most of the time they've just left this foundation course in and that looked like a bit of a yard surface at first when you just saw a couple of patches of it. It didn't look like the foundations of a building but it turned out it was the foundations of building and we have got a building there
00:15:35
Speaker
but it doesn't relate to the lumps and bumps on the surfaces. I'm pretty sure all the lumps and bumps on the surfaces, the platforms, and things that are described in the scheduling are all to do with the 18th century, this 18th century pottery, and that it's probably, or very possibly, a builder's yard for the construction of the Turnpike Road that actually have taken this area, there's this ruined building in it, they've nicked all the stone, used that as road stone, then brought more stone in as a builder's yard, taken that out to build the road from Hope to Castleton through the very wet, marshy bit.
00:16:05
Speaker
dump more stone and eventually left it, abandoned it. When they finished building the road, they just leave it. And there are these sort of level areas of stone and bits and pieces around. And that bank and ditch, well, that bank and ditch may be an 18th century construction as well. So it's misled us, but we've ended up in the right place. So they've showed it for all the wrong reasons, but at least they've showed it all the right area. And so we end up with a building very nearly robbed out, but we've got the corner missing there.
00:16:31
Speaker
telegraph pole put in. This end is sort of missing, although there are one or two bits that made it onto this plan. Some quite well preserved burials inside, quite a lot of less well preserved burials on the outside of it. And so there is a building there, a hospital building there, or at least I suspect the chapel of the hospital.
00:16:48
Speaker
This took quite a few years, and you might have thought that the local people would have said, God, these archaeologists are rubbish. They can't even find a scheduled 18 monument where we've given them the exact location of it. And instead, they were very kind and said, oh, this is a bit more complicated, isn't it, really? How about having a look around the villages? And let's see if we can spread out this sort of project and look more widely at the origins of other things, because you don't give up that easily.
00:17:14
Speaker
So let's look at the two villages. Castleton down here. Hope up here they should be very different. Castleton isn't really there in doomsday. There's a couple of households. Along comes the castle, Norman Castle. You build the castle, you build the planned town next to it, you build the hospital, all this sort of thing coming in.
00:17:34
Speaker
in the 1100s, presumably. Whereas Hope is well-known, well-documented. It's there in Doomsday. It's got one of these major churches that happened in Derbyshire that have these weird regional churches like Bakewell, like Hope, like Melbourne, and various other ones, which seem to be the mother churches for a large number of parishes and so on, or a larger area.
00:17:58
Speaker
So Hope is one of those.
Hope vs. Castleton Archaeological Findings
00:18:01
Speaker
As you know, you've got the mot of the Martin Bailey Castle that people claim might be early, but you've got a church there, which we know is early, even though most of what you see obviously is later medieval. Saxon Cross and the Church are all that sort of thing. So it's the Hope Valley. It's named after the village. This is the dominant settlement. This is the early medieval settlement that's there. Castle isn't there in the early medieval period, or at least that's what it's supposed to be. So let's dig some holes in it.
00:18:26
Speaker
digging test pits in people's backgrounds. It's lovely. It's great. Lots of cups of tea and biscuits and things. Lots of lawns that looked lovely when we finished, honest, as long as they've all gone on holiday for a few months and don't look too closely. So you put test pits around Hope. It's really nice activity. People can get involved, especially when the weather's so nice as it always is in Derbyshire. You can
00:18:48
Speaker
People work together, you can get the people who have the houses helping, so it's a very good way of people getting to know the project and getting interested in what's going on. And the test pits are obviously exciting, full of archaeological features and material. Pretty much all look like this. You can do the same in Carselton, lots of lovely anywhere that's got a bit of garden or a bit of green space. Let's put a test pit in it where we can. We get permissions to do it. Scatter them across.
00:19:12
Speaker
It's a really effective archaeological strategy if you happen to be in the south of England. So we've had a really good project at Whittlewood on the border between Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, I think it is, where you can do this and you'll get Roman pottery, Saxon pottery, medieval pottery, post-medieval pottery. You can see how the village is developed and all that sort of thing.
00:19:34
Speaker
in Northamptonshire, which is a good thing in many ways, but not necessarily when it comes to pottery. So lots of lovely test bits in Castleton, just as full of archaeological features as those in Hope were. All very exciting. Everybody's happy. That sort of thing. Boop, see?
00:19:52
Speaker
What more could you ask for? Complex stratigraphy, lots of features, everything else. No, most of them have nothing in them at all. If you're lucky, a bit of post-medieval posturing. When you look at the artefactual material we have, actually, you can't see the villages until the 18th century, really. And that's true of hope, which we know is an early medieval village. It's there. It's a substantial, high status, important settlement in the early medieval period.
00:20:17
Speaker
but you can't see that from the archaeology. And actually, Carston looks just the same, which is odd, because Carston has quite a different origin. And I think what's going on, there's a number of things going on, one of which is hope is a dispersed settlement, typical upland dispersed settlement. So actually, you don't have a little village round a village green, so it's very easy to work out what's going on. You have it scattered all over the place. And also, these areas in the early medieval period are probably using very little pottery.
00:20:40
Speaker
using almost no pottery in South Yorkshire, in the southern northern England, so the southern end of Yorkshire, the southern end of Lancashire, and across the north Midlands there's very little pottery being used, and we rely on pottery so much to survive and to tell us we're looking at things that are of that date. So very difficult to see the two villages, so we failed again. So
00:21:01
Speaker
But there's sort of good reasons for that, but it's an interesting outcome, how difficult, actually, villagers in the north and in the uplands are to investigate, and yet how easy they are in the lowlands of southern England. And that's why Corinza Lewis turned up in Castleton and dug a few test pits and ran away screaming because it couldn't work out what was going on. But however, we're more used to this, and so don't give up so easily. But within that,
00:21:25
Speaker
So you're talked into doing the two villages by the local history societies, because obviously Hope Historical Society has spotted something going on in Castleton, and they think, hold on a minute, something's going on in Castleton. Why is something not going on in Hope? Well, of course, something did go on in Hope. It did both villages.
00:21:42
Speaker
But then, test pits down here, we're not finding anything in most of them, except down in this corner down here, in the garden of this bungalow, actually in this a bit here. You put test pits in there, we'll come back to that field in a moment. Test pits in there, clearly everyone's enjoying it, test pitting is such fun and they find exciting things. Except in this case, they do, they find bone. They find bits of bone, which obviously
00:22:05
Speaker
At first sight I go, oh, it's just animal bone, don't worry about it. But unfortunately, there's human bone people around who go, no. And they find bits of bone. It looks like bone disturbed in with limestone rubble. So you're thinking, this is odd. You get a radiocarbon date for it. It comes out as early medieval. That's just not right. It shouldn't be here. So something very odd is going on.
Unexpected Cemetery Discovery
00:22:24
Speaker
So you put more test bits in there and also you go across to the other side of the field on the other side of the car park. And there's a little ridge in here.
00:22:31
Speaker
And as we walked through the gate across that ridge of Cyline Parker, walked across there and said, what's this lump then? And I said, well, I don't know what this lump is. We'll have a look at it later. So he walked to the other end of the field, put test bits in, absolutely nothing in them. Came back here to put test bits in this little slight ridge which runs across and then is truncated by the wall and the car park. And he did a hole in that. And it's not dumped bones in among limestone rubble. It's actually a cemetery, just really not very deep below the ground.
00:22:59
Speaker
and when you look at the issue, so we've got the end of it just inside that field and it runs out across the car park, past the bungalow and so on. Seems all a bit odd, especially when you're getting eighth, ninth, tenth century dates for it, except along come the local history society again and point out that when you look into it, there's actually for the last hundred years or so quite a few mentions of human bones in that car park when they're building the tennis courts and near the restaurant or whatever it was and various people doing things in the area. There have been all sorts of
00:23:28
Speaker
Mentions there none of which have made it to the ears of archaeologists and so people have been finding dead people there for a long time There's actually some early engravings which show things going on in the area Which I think may suggest that the dead people were being found You know back in the 17th century or whatever and people didn't understand why they were there because the churchyard is over here There shouldn't be dead people over here But there is we've got the end of the cemetery there and it's running off across this car park we think so if you were and
00:23:55
Speaker
It's completely the wrong date. They shouldn't be there. Castle isn't here at this time, supposedly, according to these documents. And yet we've got early medieval dates and quite a lot of dead early medieval people. And if the newspapers ought to everything else to go by, there was an awful lot more under the car part, which we can't get at.
00:24:12
Speaker
Many of which were visited by various cyclists from Sheffield and bones were taken back to Sheffield and the newspaper said, isn't it marvellous? Go and get some of yourselves. Things like that back in the 1930s and the 1890s or whatever. And so probably in kitchen drawers around Sheffield there could be bones. We'd love to get radiocarbon dates on, but we haven't been able to track any of them down. So, it's all very nice. Eighth, ninth, tenth century cemetery. Quite a substantial one at a place where there's no settlement except there must have been one.
00:24:37
Speaker
So we're looking at here, in front of Peak Cavern, just in this field, just in there, running across the car park like this. On a little terrace it drops down behind the bungalow to the stream that runs through here. So we've got an old medieval cemetery there, and what seems almost certain is that we've got a settlement in here.
00:24:55
Speaker
in the shelter of Peak Cavern, effectively. That settlement is fizzling out as you move towards Doomsday, so it doesn't get much of a mention in Doomsday. We take Doomsday to be gospel, really. This tells us what was there before the Normans came, and if it's not in Doomsday, it doesn't exist. Well, I think presumably it did exist, but it had peated out. On comes Peverill, builds the castle, builds the planned town next to that on the Greenfield site, next to the remnant of the village that's there.
00:25:24
Speaker
We've discovered an early medieval castle, an early medieval cemetery, which there's not a possibility we would have gone looking for it there, except for the fact that we've been drawn into this larger project through the enthusiasm and suggestions of local people, he says, a wonderful thing. So another connection, though, is of course not only are we going to look here, but thinking of the spittle field, the end of that, the last warden of that was involved in a place called Newhall. Newhall is very interesting to the
00:25:53
Speaker
to many of the people who live in Castleton and so on, and so we get talked into having a little investigation of Newhall in here. And this is, you know,
00:26:04
Speaker
We know quite a lot about Newhall, late 15th century, we know what it looks like, there's pictures of it and so on, which is where you think, oh yes, yawn yawn, post-medieval, it'll be alright, it'll be interesting, but it's not exactly a medieval monastery, is it? Apparently it's very important for the Sheffield School of Plaster Work, and at this point I'd never heard of the Sheffield School of Plaster Work in the late 16th century, apparently it's very important and very high quality.
00:26:26
Speaker
And this is a site that is mentioned because the plaster work in Lucille Hall is supposed to be a copy of it, all sorts of things. And it's one of those places, but it got knocked down in the 1890s. And so nobody's ever seen that plaster work. So can we find it? We know pretty well where it is. It could be under the car park, there's suggestions with walls and things. So we put one or two test bits in over here, and we put a little trench in here, and we've got a wall.
00:26:51
Speaker
Wall coming here, possible doorway there. Bit of stone wall, marvellous. Geophysics didn't show anything we realised because it's just very little of the building is left and it's covered in rubble, so not surprisingly really. So we'll open that trench out a bit and here we are. That's the bit we just saw in there from the year before. Open it out and that was pretty much all the wall that was there.
00:27:11
Speaker
Annoyingly, it's robbed out as soon as you get out, but we can see this. The wall runs out here, along here, and out a bit, and you can see where the wall was because you've got the edge of the floor. Similarly, the bit of wall we had in here stops almost immediately, and that's where the wall was. You just got the edge of the floor to tell you where it was. So we can look down on that, and there's our bit of wall and bit of wall and our doorway from the year before, and just around there. There's our robbed out wall. Down here is our robbed out wall going out and off up here somewhere.
00:27:40
Speaker
Very nicely we can work out where that is, because that's that doorway. So we're looking at this wall, going round the side, we've got this base here, which is the base of that staircase, pretty well. So there should be a wall running out this way, but we can't see it, it's robbed out completely. Somewhere in there there should be a wall. But very excitingly is this stuff.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yes, this is lumps of cruddy plaster, which most archaeologists normally go, let's lose that, but not here, we keep everything. And David Boswick from Lincoln gets wildly excited and looks at it, and looks at it in the lab, and after a couple of hours convinces me that actually he does know what he's talking about, and you can tell just from these scraps what the panel designs were and how they're not the same as Lucer Hall, all sorts of exciting things like that.
00:28:27
Speaker
And this is a useful contribution to our understanding of the Sheffield School of Plasterwork, which I still don't know anything about, really, except that it produces this. But it seems that very few people have heard of the Sheffield School of Plasterwork, but it's all sort of wood seats, not the people involved in it, it seems. But that's taken us into a thing that I'd never heard of before, and something we would never have investigated, except that we were drawn. There is a connection to the hospital, the last warden of the hospital.
00:28:55
Speaker
lives at Newhall and so on. So there's a connection there. We carry this on trying to find more plaster and trying to understand this building because it's almost completely robbed out. And so we extend back. So we have been digging in here. Let's have a look at it from the side and see if we can see. There's our years superimposed on each other. So we've extended back 16, 17, 2018, onto there, 2019 here. And then if we overlay, there's 2022 on here.
00:29:24
Speaker
So that's what it looks like. All done by I, don't tell Gu, and I did it like this. But anyway, no GIS involved. So we've worked our way back across the building. I suppose if we look down on it, there we are, let's look vertically down on it. So this is our first part that we were looking at with our doorway and so on. We've worked our way back. Let's add on 2022.
00:29:46
Speaker
We haven't got the back wall. It's back here, so we've got close to it, I'm pretty sure, but we haven't got it. What we have got is what I would still think of as a later added on, a later additional. That's not the point of view that everybody has. Some people believe the latest bit is down this end, and as they're a building specialist they may know what they're talking about, but we'll not give you that easily. So I think we've got the cross wing here with its fancy plaster work is added on later, and the earlier parts of the building are back here. And we've got a range at the back,
00:30:14
Speaker
and arrange here with a space in between. This is built across and these are connected. This is a yard area with a well in it. That well gets capped over and covered and drains get run into it and it's possible that this gets closed in and you're left with this yard area going out this way. But we really don't have very good evidence. I mean there's a fireplace in here but it's almost completely robbed out. There's a very weird
00:30:41
Speaker
thing there built into the wall. That's very odd. We've possibly got the beginning of a fireplace back here. But actually, I don't think we do understand this building because we're struggling. There's a wall running through here. There's a wall running through there. There's a wall running through there. There's a wall running through here, almost all of which are robbed out. So it's very difficult to say what's going on. So my suggestion is this year that we're going to go back and
00:31:03
Speaker
trying to big area here and have one last go at trying to understand whether this is the earliest part and what's going on at the front when we the wall that must be running through here somewhere.
00:31:13
Speaker
that we can't see. But we're investigating you all. It's almost completely robbed out, but it is there. And actually you can show people pretty well where it is and what there is left of it. And we certainly contributed quite a lot of the plaster work. And we'll have some idea of how the building is developed. And hopefully if we can have one last good go at it, we'll have a good idea of how the building has developed over time.
00:31:38
Speaker
But then you have the Hope Historical Society. You found some nice things in Castleton. Why haven't you found anything nice in Hope? Hmm, good question. And I, from Hope, is rather more terrifying than any of the people from Castleton. Well, maybe not any of the people from Castleton, but most of them.
00:31:55
Speaker
Anyway, so you think, what can we do? Because we've got all these test bits and we can keep putting test bits in there, and they really haven't come up with the goods. There is a mott, we could look at the ditch of the mott, but that's likely to be expensive. It's still something that's a possibility. But just inside the parish of Hope is the Roman fort of Navio.
00:32:11
Speaker
Few. And David English had just done his master's dissertation on Templebrook, Brough, Roman Road, and he was starting a PhD looking at leadworking. Navio may be involved in leadworking, although I think even already we're inclined to think it's less likely to be involved in leadworking than some people would like to think. So in the interest of balance,
00:32:32
Speaker
Not that there's any tension between the castle and the Hope Historical Society, they're the best of friends. They're the best of friends. And anyway, so, but in the interim, let's have a go within Hope Parish and have a look at... And there we go. So, we're coming over to this area here, so, which, just inside Hope Parish, actually we ended up working over here, which is actually outside Hope Parish, but let's not worry about that, because many members of the Hope Historical Society, or at least one, anyway, live in, live in Brough.
Roman Fort & Industrial Activity
00:33:01
Speaker
So we work over here, we've worked our way over here at the sort of suggestion of the hope historical site. We've done various other bits and pieces obviously, there's loads of other bits and pieces we've done along the way. So there is Roman fort.
00:33:17
Speaker
It's a fairly small one. We know that there's VICAs in here, there are various excavations of the civilian settlement running down the slope towards the stream in here. And we're going to end up working in this field over here, which is not what we expected to at first.
00:33:35
Speaker
We'll do some geophysics. You can see the road coming out the fort running down here and it runs up there past these buildings. This is magnetometry, it's not very clear, but there is a bit in there. You've got some, there's a series of enclosures it seems across there. There's some weird things going on in here, but ARS have investigated that since then. Resativity, Roman fort's a bit better. We've got the road running down through Mill Farm and it just runs along that boundary.
00:33:57
Speaker
and pass these buildings, and so on. So not enormously revealing, but during that process we reminded the fact that actually there's also some PXRF of lead levels undertaken by some
00:34:14
Speaker
rising star of British archaeology. With lead levels in the corner here, which may be related to Roman structures rather than processing of lead, but we don't know, because that's inside the rivikas and the shodud area. So we did discover that over here, when they were constructing more of this, this is the timber yard for the agricultural merchants, which you may know of in there. And there are excavations done over here.
00:34:42
Speaker
by some Sheffield people, then Chris Drage of Trenton Peak, as it was then, now rebranded York Archaeology in the last few months, which produced road, various structures, it produced some deep stratigraphy, it showed terracing, and then it showed some industrial processes going on there a little bit later. Essentially, we stood on the gateway at the side of this, thinking, you know, well, the road's here, and they equated just over there, leaning on the gate, as archaeologists do, David English is now going, this is very flat, isn't it?
00:35:08
Speaker
This field's really flat and it goes up this slope. Surely, if there's stuff here, there would be stuff there. This vicus is bigger. The activities around the vicus are bigger than you expect. So, we did geophysics in that field. We were standing on the gateway just there and all the stuff that had been excavated earlier was from up here, including
00:35:27
Speaker
two or three altar stones and things, one of which is in one or at least one of which is in Buxton Museum that the others tended to turn up on the back of a quad bike when people, when they decided anybody wanted to look at them because they actually lived behind the farmhouse over here at the moment. If we look at the geophysics here though, we've got a noisy area at the bottom end down here
00:35:46
Speaker
And that's where it's very flat and it goes up the slope. And the only thing is going up the slope is what looks to be an enclosure ditch of some kind in there, which nobody believed. Nobody believed me when I said that was there. So anyway, but it's not really conclusive. They're not clear structures. We just got magnetically noisy areas. And so you think, it looks like it could be industrial on the level area and it gets quieter up here. Let's, you know, we're going to have to dig some holes. So this is our field in there. We're sort of above the Roman fort here looking across. So the Roman road runs down.
00:36:16
Speaker
through the back of this and it runs through those trees like that. So we know the Roman road is there and we know there's things in here. There must be things in there in spite of nobody saying there would be. So we're excavating there and straight away it's Roman material, lots of
00:36:33
Speaker
burnt stuff in the bottom, particularly in this lower area, and then there's that trench up there looking at what I believed would be a ditch, even if nobody else did. And we've got lots of burnt stuff, lots of things going on, not major structures, except a trackway probably at the end here. And so we had our trenches there, so that's this one, two trenches here, then one in the distance. So that photograph is looking from over here up the hill.
00:36:58
Speaker
and there it is, so our trenches are like that, and indeed they are full of dumps of material, cuts of pits, burnt stuff, infill things, certainly in some cases going down, certainly pits cut down well, down to possibly close to two metres down, so relatively deep stratigraphy, burnt material going on all the kinds, looking like there might be some larger
00:37:21
Speaker
sort of kilns or furnaces as we move away from the towards the bottom of the slope and with some smaller features in here. So the bottom there we have this which was the most intensively sort of active area. If you look in there you've got these areas of burning all over the place, you've got weird things like this which is a small platform constructed of flat stones and big chunks of amphora going on like that, all sorts of things. So we decided that, but however I've just mentioned,
00:37:48
Speaker
Up the hill there was indeed a ditch. Look, there's the corner of that ditched enclosure. I was right. I don't know what, this later dry stone wall or something is on top of it. But there most certainly was a ditch there, even if we did put the trench in the wrong place. And instead of having a trench across the ditch like that, we've gone diagonally across the corner. Anyway, let's not worry about small, small mess up. There clearly was a ditch there. I was right all along. Look at that. So actually our trench was over here. Wasn't in the right place at all. But anyway, we've got the corner there of that. So that was nice. And it appears to be Roman, it's got Roman material in it.
00:38:16
Speaker
So this Intensive Act, we decided to go back and make it bigger, so this was May, we went back in July. So there's our original 2 metre wide trench, we've expanded it out either side to make a bigger trench. There's our original line. And this side is absolutely stuffed full of burnt things, little platforms, reused quern stones as paving slabs. This side is much quieter. And we've got features like this. So here is Strollwater Wessex Archaeology, Philip Meyer.
00:38:44
Speaker
various professional archaeologists did give up time. They come at weekends or they took a week off work to just come and join in as well sometimes. So digging one of these burnt areas and it looks like this. You've got these burnt features like these small ovens or
00:38:58
Speaker
burnt, things like that, furnaces, kilns, whatever they are. We're not quite sure yet. We've only looked at the top of them. We've only really gone down into the very latest deposits here. The suspicion is that we've got another metre or two of deposits to go. I'm really just scratching the very latest activities here. There's clearly a lot of
00:39:17
Speaker
Productive activities, whether they're going to be industrial, we don't know. There's not particularly good evidence of lead working, although there are lumps of lead around the place, but that could be just because they're passing through. It doesn't look like a big area of lead working. There's some old pottery here and there's various structures which could be producing pottery or tile or things. And maybe these are bread ovens and things like that going on on the edge of the settlement, presumably on the edge of the settlement.
00:39:41
Speaker
So, if you look at this reconstruction drawing a while ago, we're actually, we know that the VICAS continues down off the bottom of the picture now, because we're down here. And actually, Archaeological Research Service has also been looking in the quarry extension over here, ARS, and they've found quite a lot of Roman material out there. I think probably that that's to do with the fort, that it looks like military stuff. At the moment they're saying it's VICAS, but we'll be interested to see what the report is when that comes out.
00:40:09
Speaker
Another couple of years, two or three years time, we should have a much better idea of what's going on around Navier-Roman Fort through modern excavation techniques and large-scale geophysical survey as well, because prior to this
00:40:24
Speaker
the stuff that was undertaken in the 80s with little tiny trenches and little tiny areas of geophysical survey. We hadn't intended to go and look at Navier. Remember, we just went there to look at a medieval hospital, nothing else, and it sort of grew out of
Geophysics at Peverill Castle
00:40:37
Speaker
that. And then perhaps a very last thing to mention before my three things to take away from this talk is Peverill Castle. So we did have a look at Peverill Castle. Actually, what was mostly interesting was what's known as the Outer Bailey out here.
00:40:52
Speaker
On the off chance that they might let us, I put in an application for a license to do geophysics, including the English heritage area. And much to my surprise, they went, oh, yeah, all right then. And then English heritage do what you like. So that meant in the hottest time of last summer, I didn't go up the hill, of course, but there were many young fit people who were sent up the hill and nearly died on one of the days when they ran out of water. But so it's up here.
00:41:16
Speaker
We were going to have a four-wheel drive to drive the equipment up to here, but annoyingly, the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre had not paid its bill to the hire company. And so our hire was cancelled, even though the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre has more money than all of us could imagine, and yet they don't bother paying their bills on time. So it was pushed up the hill here. I would say I did it, but I didn't. I didn't do it at all. But various people happily volunteered to go up there to do
00:41:42
Speaker
Radar up here and radar up there. It was extremely dry. We were going to do a resistivity. We didn't do it. So there's a vertical view. That's the English heritage area running down the slope. The inner Bailey with the keep. This is the so-called outer Bailey in there.
00:41:58
Speaker
I need to process the data better, but it looks like it's quite slopey. So look, heroic efforts on the part of some heroic people there. I don't see a student anywhere who was supposed to be doing this for their project, but now there's Nina heroically trying to keep this thing from sliding down the hill.
00:42:15
Speaker
There may be one or two students in there helping out a little bit, I suppose. But it's slopey. That's the bank of the Outer Bailey. It's quite a slopey site, awkward site, obviously awkward site to do any kind of geophysics or anything else on.
00:42:32
Speaker
Put the radar results on it. Well, there's a range of buildings in here, not that's very surprising. Certainly a range of buildings. We can argue about what's going on here. There's very little going on in the Outer Bailey, it seems. There's more to be done with this, but there may be a single structure in there, possibly in some of the bits. But it looks
00:42:49
Speaker
I'm increasingly coming to the feeling that this isn't an Outer Bailey. The idea that this is the main entrance coming across, and then you've got an entrance across here into the inner Bailey, I think this has always been the main entrance. The problem is that this piece of land here is higher than over here. So it looks down into the castle. So you've got to secure that piece of ground. And I wonder whether this is actually an area that needs securing at the back of the castle. And so they secure it, and everybody looks at it and thinks, oh, it must be.
00:43:16
Speaker
The Outer Baily. There's the model if you go into the English Heritage Site. There's the Outer Baily full of buildings and a bridge across and then it's a bit of an odd place to have your keep. Much better to have the entrance here and the keep well away from it rather than bringing people in past that. But I don't know, we have to look at it further and there's more to be done up there. But I'm beginning to think that
00:43:35
Speaker
There's something very unusual about this and its relationship to here and it's not simply an Outer Bailey and the main entrance is here and that's how you get into the castle at all. I suspect the main entrance was always over here and it connected to the town, which is moderately logical. Anyway, so we've also
00:43:53
Speaker
I've got some nice 3D models from Structure for Motion drone survey. I'm just showing these gratuitously, because amazingly I got these off Gu's computer, which has no license for Agisoft Metashape, but I managed to just get them on the screen. And also I managed to ... I can't believe it that I actually managed to get this off. I don't know what I'm doing on a computer which has no license for this software. But anyway, we managed to see the pictures, so we've got these sorts of things. There's the outer Bailey, and in here.
00:44:19
Speaker
So we can start to look at very closely how any features that do turn up in geophysics lie in this particular circumstance. And then we've got this area of high ground here, which is full of buildings according to the little model.
00:44:34
Speaker
down by the visitor centre, but it doesn't seem like a very plausible sight for it. It's very slopey. It's much more slopey than that model gives the impression of it being, so it's much less attractive for putting your buildings on than it seems. Anyway, so we've got some useful data here. More about this will be revealed at Derbyshire Archaeology Day. Anybody going to that in January? He says, well, I hope it will.
00:44:55
Speaker
if we can ever get enough licenses to use the software and things. Anyway, so the project has developed from one where we were just looking at going to look at a hospital. That was going to be it. And then it's grown. It's grown through suggestions and interested links and, well, if you're doing this, what about this? And all sorts of things which we didn't plan at the beginning. So I think there's three things to take away from this. There are research projects. There are research projects which
00:45:22
Speaker
have a specific aim, you go and do them, the professional archaeologists do them and that's that. All projects such as this one have research outputs and this has had a whole series of research outputs which we wouldn't have imagined, we didn't imagine finding an early medieval cemetery, didn't imagine helping out to understand the Sheffield School of Plaster Work or look at a Roman fort or anything like that.
Research Outcomes & Surprises
00:45:42
Speaker
That's happened because we've been drawn into that as the project because it's gone from a project to investigate the hospital into a landscape project looking at the end of the valley and
00:45:52
Speaker
It's all important. Yes, there will be the research outputs. There's also research outputs. So you've got dead people, you've got a proper medieval cemetery, we've got an early medieval cemetery. We've got all these things going on. We've got all the extra heads, I should say, which we haven't talked about. Let's not go into those. And the Carselton Garland Festival is upset to the people of Carselton.
00:46:10
Speaker
The other thing is, of course, a project like this creates great opportunities for training and for involvement. And so there's lots of training of students gone on, school kids come along, some of those have come to be students of archaeology later, some people have gone on to be post-grads, there's been lots of people from local societies, school kids, people from other universities, other people from around the region coming along, some people from travelling from quite far away to join in. So you've got a great opportunity for people to work together,
00:46:38
Speaker
and to build their skills about archaeology and also enrich the experience. So this is better for students to be working with a variety of people. It's a much more interesting experience for them, especially people who know the local area really well. It's more interesting for other people. They meet students, they meet people from outside the area, they meet all kinds of people of different ages and backgrounds. And so it brings people together really well. And it's one of the great advantages of archaeology is that we have a fantastic vehicle for bringing people together
00:47:02
Speaker
and forgetting them to think about skills beyond just the archaeological skills that are going on. And lots and lots of people have got involved in the project over that time. So, for example, literally hundreds of people have passed through the project, many of whom have gone into archaeology, some professional archaeologists worked on it, other people just starting out who are now professional archaeologists.
00:47:21
Speaker
We've had students come in through this way. We've had students from abroad. We've had school kids, young archaeologists, when I remember to tell them when the dates are, of course, which is a very rare event, unfortunately. And school visits, people of all ages, you know, from young kids.
00:47:36
Speaker
kids, school kids who want to go to University of Archaeology right the way through up to people who are long retired and so on. So quite literally hundreds of people have come through and done that. And so community engagement, community archaeology in that sense, where we have a project which people come in and join on, is a very good thing. It's a marvelous thing and it enriches the experience for all those people, including the student training experience is enriched by that. But beyond that,
00:48:03
Speaker
If you were trying to understand a place, I would say that one of the best ways of understanding a place is working with the people who know that place, and who have ideas and thoughts and knowledge which you just can't imagine when you're working out your original research design, should you ever get round to doing it. So if you want to do a landscape project, don't just involve local people and invite them in to help out. Actually enable them to drive the project forward, because they understand the place better thus. And according to Kate, that's co-production apparently.
00:48:35
Speaker
And it's just what we do. And it's a marvelous thing, but it is different to that idea of taking something out to people and allowing them to join in or allowing them
Impact of Archaeology Department Closure
00:48:46
Speaker
to see it. It's a problem we have at the university because they have this very top-down approach where we go from the university and we provide wonderful knowledge to the rest of the world, and it's great. And that's good as far as it goes, but it's not the same thing. It's not really what I would say community archaeology is. There's community engagement, and then there's projects where
00:49:03
Speaker
people are actually involved and able to change and alter what the project does and steer it in ways that interest them. And actually, at the end of it, we think, wow, we've just found an early medieval cemetery or we've just found this, which we didn't expect to do. And it's a serious research output, so it increases research output. So that's my three message. Yes, there's research outputs and those are important. Yes, there's the training and the people meeting and getting to know each other and working together and all that sort of thing. But also, if you want to understand the place,
00:49:29
Speaker
enable people to actually move the archaeology forward themselves so that we don't, the professional archaeologists don't make, take all the decisions. I make no decision on this project just to what I'm told. And that's it. So anyway, there we are. Thank you very much. Thank you Colin. Does anybody have any questions?
00:49:53
Speaker
I've got a really stupid question for you. That might be within my limit sense. It's huge, you have to backfill everything up again. Yes, generally.
00:50:03
Speaker
Yes, even though at the hospital site, the farmers say, do you really have to backfill it? And he didn't mind. But yes, you do, because leaving it in the winter over winter would deteriorate. And so you'd have to cover it up somehow. I mean, Nessebrogge, they cover it up with plastic sheeting and loads of tires. They don't actually put the soil back in. But again, they do cover it up. I want to say the dink that was done up at Redbine is important.
00:50:25
Speaker
When there were, I forgot the exact numbers of faces that were, there were well over 40 there, and two were left very exposed. Big concrete faces. So many people interested. We've got some examples saying absolutely about that, but that was very different because it wasn't going to damage it to leave it at all.
00:50:45
Speaker
Now, Bishop's House people are very keen, the Bishop's House excavation we have, we're just looking at cottages next to Bishop's House. Lots of people came past and said, are you going to leave it visible? Because they found it interesting and thought it would go with Bishop's House Museum. The answer is no, we can't because it would deteriorate. On the other hand, you could lower the ground surface and make the walls visible and consolidate them and make it possible, but you couldn't just leave them open because they would fall apart. So that's something for Friends of Bishop's House, the local councillors, the people who run the park and things like that, where they would ever want to do that. But normally,
00:51:15
Speaker
refill it in and come back the next year and usually spend quite a long time taking it out and then people go why can't we use a machine? I go oh there's no fun in that and then eventually they get a machine it comes out as much quicker and so that sort of thing goes on so I believe there's a sort of you know
00:51:30
Speaker
It is, and you get a much closer emotional relationship with all those deposits if you have to dig them out and put them back and dig them out by hand and put them back. But no. It was a really good guilting call on a diary machine for us, so we're very grateful for that. Andrew usually pays for it, so it's not as if we're hiring a historical society pay for it, usually. Can I ask a general question for the peps of the audience in here, the wider audience, in view of the
00:52:00
Speaker
imminent sort of closure of the department, what sort of involvement will the University be able to give to community groups following next summer?
00:52:14
Speaker
It is a difficult question because my feeling is it will be much reduced if effectively disappear. We don't know that because there's still no plan from our wonderful enlightened management who are clearly controlling this process and managing it brilliantly through to a sensible conclusion. No, there's no plan, so we have nothing to work on. But what clearly is going to be the case is our capacity for this sort of thing will be dramatically reduced. And as far as I can see, really,
00:52:42
Speaker
the university's intention is to get archaeology to fizzle out and disappear. And so there'd be no capacity for doing it in the future. But that won't stop. Suddenly, I don't think it will run down over a few years. But it would be hugely reduced. And given that the university spends all its time saying that it wants to make a difference in the local area, have an impact to the region, work with local groups, everything else that archaeologists just do, not because we're necessarily very good at it, because that's what archaeology is. You can't avoid talking to people because you're on their land and everything else.
00:53:11
Speaker
That's going to reduce the capacity of the universities to do that, even though they say that's one of their priorities. But, you know, that's the beauty of shutting down an archaeology department. It does all this other things. So I think it'll fizzle out. I think it'll certainly be much reduced and probably disappear completely. So we can anticipate a summer at Newhall? Yes. A big drought at Newhall? I believe so. Is that right? Is there any intention to take Bruff? Well, the hope is to go back to Bruff either.
00:53:38
Speaker
next summer or the summer afterwards, which are the two summers we have before they finally get rid of us, or split us up between biosciences or history or whatever is going to happen. The hope is to go back there. We don't know. It depends on the heirs, the landowners and various other things, but I know Kelsey, for example, is very keen.
00:53:55
Speaker
to take that forward and think she knows of some money she might be able to apply for, that sort of thing. So the hope is to go back to Brough, because we've really just done the top of that trench, and even if we just do that sort of 10 metre square roughly, there's going to be a lot of industrial activity and other activities there which are well worth looking at. And there's already some very interesting quirky things about the pottery and things like that coming out of it, which will be good to follow up and not just leave, sort of, maybe just scratch the surface. Anybody else have any questions?
00:54:24
Speaker
Do you think there are any disadvantages to this sort of development process that you've just described of what you've really portrayed as a community-led approach?
00:54:40
Speaker
Yes, because you can't get funding for it very easily, because you can't go forward with a precise plan to somebody, not that they would give any money to us probably, but it's very difficult from an archaeological point of view, or indeed from, say, a university's point of view, where you put forward a research proposal, we're going to do this, it has this amount of money attached to it, and then you get on and do it. Whereas something like this, which
00:55:01
Speaker
has very fuzzy boundaries and is looking to take opportunities and to involve people and create opportunities by doing so, it's very, very difficult to go to anybody and explain how much money you want. So you have to run it on a shoestring and find bits of money to make it function.
00:55:18
Speaker
And that's more than compensated for by the fact that you're going to find all sorts of things that you would never have found before and you didn't expect to find, and that you can break that habit archaeologists have of just finding what other people have already found and looked for. Archaeologists tend to go back and look for the same thing other people have already found, because that's low risk. And in this sort of thing, you get led in directions which you just don't expect, and you come up with completely unexpected things like, why is there an early medieval cemetery there? Even though people have been seeing it for decades, probably hundreds of years.
00:55:48
Speaker
mentioning risk, is risk assessment any different or any harder when you've got people who might be very novices involved? No, it's pretty easy really. Most archaeological activities can be dangerous, but they don't need to be because they're not that complicated.
00:56:08
Speaker
No, I mean, if you were running certain types of activities, like having large machinery around and all sorts of other things, you'd need to be much more careful. But for most of the stuff we're doing, anybody can do it, really. For others, it's explained to people, and you keep an eye open for the really mad ones. Or whoever it might be, but those are probably archaeologists anyway.
00:56:30
Speaker
No, it's not difficult. It's not difficult to run projects like this and dig holes with people, all sorts of abilities. We've done it with people who are completely blind, with people who are adult learning disabled groups, you know, people who have much more, many more challenges to face than the average person who isn't experienced. We have generally well-adjusted and we don't know how to do it. I thought you had to mention, you know, big festival cranks wearing a hard hat.
00:56:53
Speaker
Yes, well, there are a few hard hats. Sometimes we should wear hard hats. Don't listen to this riff-raff rambling on. They just want to talk about the risk. The only thing that can get a bit complicated is if you've got unaccompanied small children, that can get very complicated. Which is why a lot of the sort of work that we've done is either with a teacher or with a school group or
00:57:21
Speaker
When kids come, they have to come with the parents. Some of the parents, yes. Generally, they have to come with the parents. And it's really sad because actually lots of little children really want to come and dig. And if they're normally your daddies or carers or whoever don't want to come with them, then sometimes that has to be on there, which is difficult. Hasn't been difficult, hasn't it?
00:57:42
Speaker
We've mostly been able to find a way around it somehow, find people who are willing to come with them or have enough cover, their parents being nearby, going to a tea shop perhaps every now and again when they get a bit bored, but that's all right, they're not far away, and things like that, so we're quite flexible with it. But yes, there are certain considerations which are...
00:57:59
Speaker
which can be difficult. And certainly, again, with disabled people, sometimes you've got to take into account accessibility of things and also where facilities are, like toilets can be much more difficult to do. But they're all solvable. They always have been solvable pretty much routinely. And this is not the first time we do this sort of thing. We've done all sorts of things at Brodsworth and other projects that the department has had in the past.
00:58:24
Speaker
So even if you think of it selfishly, if this is a training project for university, it's a much better training project for university because of the involvement of lots of other people. If you talk to students generally, they all go on about how interesting they found it because they met these sorts of people or there were people from here or they were able to work with the school kids that came or the young archaeologists or they volunteered to do this thing. When we had adult learning disabled people,
00:58:51
Speaker
at Brodsworth groups coming there. The students were queuing up because they absolutely loved spending time with them and seeing the enthusiasm and the reaction that they were getting from the archaeology there. So it really adds to the students' experience. And also they're talking to people who know about things. You know, if you're exposing a wall and digging it next to somebody who's a builder, it's surprising what they notice and tell you and other things that they're doing. They're not thinking about it. They're just, oh, look at this. It's like this. And they say things.
00:59:19
Speaker
I've never thought of that. And so all these people coming in bring with experience and skills with them, which are useful. They all have some contribution to make because they've got a different perspective to the archaeologists. And actually, that comes across to most students usually.
Podcast Closure & Contact Info
00:59:34
Speaker
So even from that sort of selfish point of view, actually, this is a better experience for student training than it would be. And actually, that is, I suppose, one way of getting a bit of money. And we do get some money that way by having it as a student training project.
00:59:47
Speaker
But yeah, so it's it's sort of better around from that point of view Thank you for listening to archaeology and ale for more information about our podcast and guest speaker Please visit our page on the archaeology podcast network
01:00:10
Speaker
You can get in touch with us at archaeology in the city on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time!
01:00:29
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.