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Ken Dash: Mud and Flared Jeans - Ep 47
945 Plays1 year ago
Local archaeologist Ken Dash talks about his time with the Museum of London and reflects on how excavation was changing in the 1970s.
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Guest Introduction: Ken Dash's 1970s Archaeology Experience
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to Episode 47 of Archaeology in Elle, 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. This month our guest speaker is local historian and archaeologist Ken Dash, who will be talking about his time with the Museum of London and how excavation was changing in the 1970s.
00:01:08
Speaker
It's seven o'clock, so we're going to get started. Because Ken's in for about three hours tonight. But then they don't know me, my name's Steve Hollings, and on behalf of Archaeology and City, I welcome you all to our latest Archaeology and Health talk, which we've made into our podcast.
00:01:28
Speaker
and should be released in the next couple of weeks. I just want to say thank you to Emily and the team here at our spiritual home, the Red Deer.
Ken Dash's Nostalgic Reflections
00:01:38
Speaker
Please drink sensibly and eat as much food as you can, and then we'll let this happen for some system, I think. As I say, Ken's going to speak for an hour, so there'll be opportunities for questions afterwards.
00:01:57
Speaker
With no further ado, I will hand over to the legend, that is Ken. Thank you very much. Thank you. You've been a lovely audience, I should say. But, yeah. I actually put this talk together, God, it was 12 years ago. I gave it to Bolson Stone, wasn't it? This is like a different version. About 12 years ago. Yeah, I think it's 2011, somewhere like that, yeah.
00:02:22
Speaker
So you were special. Yeah, nothing, none of that here. So really, this is, I'm afraid it's full of grainy black and white photos from almost 50 years ago, so don't expect anything with modern technology. They're taken with my old Nikon camera, black and white film.
00:02:39
Speaker
in the days of film. So really, it's a bit of a retrospective. I spent a year and a half working for the Department of Urban Archaeology Museum of London from the spring of 75 through the autumn of 76. I came back briefly in 77. So it's that, but it's also a bit like a personal biography. And also, when I was chatting to Steve about what we should show, I thought, let's show how archaeological
00:03:04
Speaker
excavating techniques were changing in the early 70s. Lots of things you now see as standard were being adopted then, nearly 50 years
Excavation Highlights and Techniques
00:03:14
Speaker
ago. So it's this one, right. So here we go. One or two embarrassing photographs. That's me, my first dig, age 19.
00:03:25
Speaker
I was working for the Prudential, believe it or not, as an insurance clerk, and it was boring, and I swapped a three-piece suit for that and went digging. If you know London, this is the famous
00:03:39
Speaker
Royal Naval College, now Greenwich University. And there's the Queen's House and the Royal Observatory up on the hill. I think this is made by Sir Christopher Wren, if I remember rightly. And that's the excavation, all but forgotten now, of one of Henry VIII's palaces, the Palace of Placentia. There's only one known drawing of it by a Dutch.
00:03:59
Speaker
spy called van der Weingarten. We found what he drew, we actually found here. This was the Thames foreshore in the 1500s. This is now obviously dry land and the Thames is now out here having been in bank. But I think the bit I was digging was there.
00:04:15
Speaker
So, I thought this was all archaeology is going to be like this because we're finding gold and silver and goodness says what else. In fact, the director, Phil Dixon, once came up to me with his hands like that and he said, I'm going to show you this for three seconds. He opened his hands and there were five gold quarter marks in a rotted leather purse. And they're in the Maritime Museum now. They're in there somewhere. I think they were, I saw them there.
00:04:42
Speaker
So I thought all digging was going to be like this, unknown to me, it's going to be more like Castleton, but never mind.
00:04:49
Speaker
So, yeah, this is, to illustrate a difference in technique, this is, that's me again, I'm afraid. Much thinner version of me with lots of bushy hair. Bay and Abby and Kent. To illustrate a difference in technique, really, it's the only dig I was on where we recorded the site in imperial units, because it started back in the 60s. So the plans, everyone does them now at one to 10 or one to 20. There's a scale of one to 24, one inch to two feet. So, yeah, it's sort of a search dig. It's this beautiful,
00:05:17
Speaker
I think it's a pre-monster Tency and Abbey in Kent. So what safety equipment were you wearing there, Kent?
00:05:27
Speaker
There's a trial there, that's all I think. Your colleague at the back, yes, I'm not sure we can do that nowadays. No, you'll see something even more scary in a bit. In 74, July 74, I worked at the excavation of an Iron Age farmstead, three milestone old Penn Hale in Cornwall. This is the only site I've ever been on, and I don't think any of you have ever been on something like this, where the site grid, as we record them in squares now,
00:05:54
Speaker
But the director, Joshua Schweizer, set out the site grid in equilateral triangles. There were no planning frames in those days. We literally used to get a tape measure from a peg on a grid and extend it out to whatever we're doing and do it by triangulation, which is very tedious. And he thought, if you're going to do triangulation, let's do it by literally triangulating on an equilateral triangle grid.
00:06:20
Speaker
Thanks to Colin, who gave me his email address, I contacted Joshua just a few weeks ago. And lo and behold, he had the site plans in his attic. He actually fetched them down. He's a bit shame-faced. He'd never, in 49 years, give them to the Truro Museum. So here they are. This is that there is, of course, that there. So you can just about see.
00:06:47
Speaker
peg there, peg there, peg there, peg there, peg there. It's the whole thing you set out in equilateral triangles. No one's ever used that before or since to my knowledge, unless you have any, it's a one-off. It shows you how techniques are changing.
00:07:02
Speaker
Another vision of the past, in the autumn of 1974, I was excavating up here in Dover Castle in Kent. They were doing a drainage ditch around the castle, just with a JCB, and we were recording the sections. And one day, at the bottom of the JCB's scoop broke through, and people say, oh, there's tunnels everywhere. We actually found a medieval tunnel. There's pottery in it dating to around 1300.
00:07:26
Speaker
We didn't have a sight camera because we were just a sort of washing brief so I actually had to phone the Ministry of Public Building and Works as it was then and this man from the Ministry came out from London. He took the sight photographs with this thing. I mean, this is the nearest I found on the internet. One of these bellows cameras that, you know, you put
Museum of London and GPO Site Dig
00:07:43
Speaker
a hood over yourself and it was not even film, it was a glass plate camera. Yeah, this is what I'm trying to illustrate, how much things have changed in 50 odd years. Yeah.
00:07:55
Speaker
And then I started, the following spring I started with the Museum of London. It was set up in 1973 to conduct a programme of excavation and research into various aspects of the city's origins and development. It was still then, even in the 70s, a lot of bomb damage being repaired, excavated, built on in the city of London. So I started in March 1975. They're running two major digs. I started
00:08:23
Speaker
with what's called the GPO because it was a post office, a site on Newgate Street which is quite near to St Paul's Cathedral.
00:08:31
Speaker
And I'll show you more of this later, but the excavated area is about 50 by 80 meters. These huge area excavations were very typical of the 1970s. So that's where this site was. There's St. Paul's Cathedral, of course, and there we are. That's street level there. And by the time we got down to this level, we were about the level of the 12th, 13th century, maybe. So everything before that had just been stripped out. And this strange thing here is a ventilation shaft
00:08:59
Speaker
That's early work. That's in the very first few weeks. That's the excavation director who was a beatnik. As you can see from the clothing he's wearing. Oh, excuse me. This is why you need beer. Oh, that's just four of my sort of digging buddies. I've lost touch with them. This guy, I won't name him, but he's married to an MP now in North London and got lots of children, so you better keep him quiet.
00:09:30
Speaker
That's the medieval wall being excavated. And yes, this is a rope. That's how we got down into the thing. That's health and safety here. And at tea break, you have to climb up this rope to get out of the ditch. The techniques are very, very different then. That's Debbie, one of my housemates, climbing out of a similar ditch.
00:09:52
Speaker
That's Dave. In fact, Dave's 70th birthday party soon. I'm going to his birthday bash in London. So I'm in touch with a lot of these people still. That's Barbie. She lives in Wales now with her husband. Yeah, I still know all these people. That's the nicest thing about it, because you're all young. Perhaps in many years' time you'll all know each other. Keep in touch. It's worth it.
00:10:17
Speaker
That's excavating a medieval pit. Everything was cut through and cut through and cut through by later incursions. And this is a more general view of the site. This is this enormous ventilation shaft. Again, there's street level. There's Alan, the site director.
00:10:38
Speaker
And yeah, this ventilation shaft, what most people don't know, there's actually two underground systems in London. This is the second one. It's run by the post office GPO, ran for 75 years from 1927 to 2003. It's 21 meters below the London streets. You can actually look it up on the internet now. So I guess the shaft we had was that
Social Life and Anecdotes in Archaeology
00:11:01
Speaker
one there.
00:11:03
Speaker
And it was just a tiny underground train. They actually do tourist rides on it now. You can climb into this tiny little thing. It just took all the post and the mail all the way underground through London from one end to another. And there's nothing like so much mail now, so it closed down. But it's reopened, as I said, in recent years as a touristy thing.
00:11:25
Speaker
And that's the house we rented in Sydenham in South East London. That's the flat we had. There were four flats. And people often say, was it haunted? The answer is yes.
00:11:35
Speaker
No, I should have brought them. I put them in this. When I left, there were two students. I just wrote them a letter when I got here to start my degree, just to thank them for posting on my mail. And they were terrified. They wrote me a letter, which I still got, just saying they're frightened for the ghost that was in the rooms in here. So I never saw it. There you go. They were absolutely terrified.
00:12:03
Speaker
That's Barbie, Barbara Scammell, she's an East End lass. That's the medieval pits cutting a Roman floor, and we didn't have much of the Roman layers, everything was intercutting and there wasn't much left. The medieval suffered these deep cesspits and so on, it destroyed almost everything. And what we did find though is the graveyard of St Nicholas Shambles
00:12:30
Speaker
date to the 11th and 12th centuries. Most of the bodies lay in simple graves, no sides to it, no wooden things, no coffin nails or anything. Analysis of the material showed a generally healthy population and a high incidence of similar traits suggests that many of the skeletons were of related individuals. And as you might expect, you know, they had osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, bone defects from anemia,
00:12:57
Speaker
One trauma-spinal degenerative disorder was four times more common in men than in women, maybe in lifting heavy objects. What we also found, which I copied down, doesn't say, the shambles was the meat market, and we found a lot of young skeletons of butcher's boys with finger digits missing when, presumably in training to be butchers, they chopped off their fingers.
00:13:26
Speaker
So there's one of the skeletons. We couldn't, just because of the pressure of time. We photographed them and put a marker at each end and had a general plan and we shaded in on that, what was left of each one.
00:13:43
Speaker
And that's just a general view of us excavating. We opened it to the public, and we had a lot of these business-suited city gents. Because remember, this is the city of London, where all the businessmen were. They were a bit baffled. One of them actually started shouting, it's heresy. It's heresy. You shouldn't be doing this, because we're excavating human remains. We did have to rebury them, all the ones that were lifted, in consecrated soil. It was all done properly and with respect, and so on.
00:14:11
Speaker
I think for some of the visitors, it was a bit too much in the mid-70s. And this is what I took photographs with. I began to get interested in sight photography. And there are digital versions of something looking like that now. It's a film camera, obviously, it's a Nick Ormatt, beautiful camera. And also a Rolleiflex, which is a twin lens reflex camera, which gives you a laterally inverted image.
00:14:36
Speaker
Have any of you ever seen anything like that? Shake heads? No, I didn't think you would have. That was a large format camera, a really large format black
Excavation Discoveries and Challenges
00:14:46
Speaker
and white film for photographic records really, and we used an accord mat for colour slides. So again, an example of how recording techniques have changed.
00:14:58
Speaker
Yes, and that's me on a stepladder doing site photography. The boulder hat I'd bought the year before and another excavation. And it was actually good because the rim kept the rain off you when you're taking photographs. It was actually, you know, kept the rain off my glasses. But that's a hell of a stepladder. It went down even further than this. Yeah.
00:15:19
Speaker
I don't know, would you allow that these days with health and safety? Stepple out of that big? Probably not. You wouldn't allow the person who's holding the ladder just step away to take the photo? Oh yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. Well, how tall is it? Well, you can see, I'm only five foot five, so it's... Yeah, we can't see the bottom. I know you can't. It must have been a good three or four meters high. It's enormous, yeah.
00:15:45
Speaker
So going deeper into the early medieval layers, there's a well there. We actually found three of them, all in a straight line. We heard later there's actually a well in the basement of St Paul's. We thought there's an underground stream, you know, lost between the centuries to each other, but obviously known about at the time to whoever was making it.
00:16:05
Speaker
And we had these enormous concrete stanchions. There's one there, one there from the Victorian building that was destroyed. And it was the devil's own job to get rid of them with pneumatic drills, which is good fun to use.
00:16:23
Speaker
And that's Barbie, we've seen a few photographs. That's her boyfriend, later husband, Salvatore. They're still together and they live in Wales. I tried to teach him Cockney rhyming slang. Coming from the Bronx, it didn't work. That's his parents visiting from America.
00:16:41
Speaker
As I said, it's a bit of a personal journey, so it's people I know. That's Andy Bodington, who's a liberal, the Dem Councilor in Shrewsbury at the moment, showing some students. Notice the flare genes? I said there would be, yeah. Lots of flare there. So that was my main site, but every now and again I got taken off that. And in the autumn of...
00:17:05
Speaker
1975, we started excavating 48 to 50 Cairns Street near the big railway station. The cellar, again, had taken out all the surfaces. We only got cup features, just drains, really. All we got was six Roman drains from Trajanic, Hadrianic date, about 100 to 140 AD.
00:17:25
Speaker
And we found a lot of pits containing mid to late Saxon pottery. And being that time of the year, the excavation took place in almost continual rain. And because we were so deep, they literally scooped out a building between the other buildings that you see in a minute. So the sunlight never reached the ground surface at all. So we start as early as we can and worked on.
00:17:45
Speaker
In an effort to excavate as much as possible, we worked through three evenings by arc light. That's the site. Probably a time exposure. I literally went on top of a building and photographed down through the... You can just see the foundations there. There isn't even street level. You can just see the beginnings of the drains there.
00:18:10
Speaker
That's us excavating by gas light, believe it or not. November 1975, there's a big arc lights there, and there's the gas cylinders there and there, and another one there. That's one of the drains, Timberline Roman Drains. And there it is. You can see the line of drains there, the post holes.
00:18:37
Speaker
To take that photograph, I put my inner icon and buttoned it up and had the camera on the edge of the building, which I took it from. It's about 100 feet up. I leaned over the edge and Andy Bodington held on to the...
00:18:52
Speaker
the hood of my anorak, and I leaned over the edge. It's the only way to get this view. But you can see how deep we were. This is hardly even the street. The street level was about here. There's no other way to get a view like this, but I managed it. And I tried it one other time with my eldest daughter, and I got berated for that. Leaned over a cliff, got my wife to hold on to the anorak, and I got good wildlife shots. You can do that, but not recommended. What did the risk assessment say when you picked it up? We didn't have risk assessments.
00:19:21
Speaker
There were literally none, you just got on with it. Oh, that's nice, Pierre. So that's the plan. I tried to relate this to that photograph, and it's very difficult, actually. But that's a reconstruction of the drain, just wooden drains. I think those stakes there are probably the posts over there.
00:19:50
Speaker
And during this, I went just for a weekend with my, I mention my personal life, my then girlfriend. We went to Paris, looked at all the art galleries, and while we were away, guess what, they blooming well found. Yeah, that. I know, people often say we're not really there to find buried treasure, but we did. Someone had thrown this into one of the drains. Emeralds linked by a gold chin, I presume is, made for some Roman nobleman's wife or mistress or whatever, we don't know. We found it.
00:20:20
Speaker
It was whipped into the Museum of London. I only saw it in 1992 when I went to the Museum of London. Unfortunately, that's being refurbished and everything, so it'll reopen, I think, next
Rescue Digs and Historical Insights
00:20:29
Speaker
year. Whether that'll be on display then, I don't know, but I have seen it. I think the emeralds came from North Africa, so it's an absolutely astonishing thing. Who would throw that away? Perhaps there's a lover's tiff there that we'll never know about.
00:20:46
Speaker
Oh, that's my housemate Debbie cooking at that flat in Sydenham. God. There's living conditions in the 70s. I can't remember now. We're alive.
00:21:00
Speaker
This is the winter of 1975-76 now, so it's a bit gloomy. We carry on working all through the year because it's not a student day. We're working for the Museum of London. We're on permanent work contract. Our wages then were £25 a week. £7.50 a week went in rent in London, believe it or not.
00:21:22
Speaker
What were your working hours? Nine to four, thirty, nine to five, five days a week. Yeah, it's fairly standard. Another one of winter, seventy-five, seventy-six.
00:21:39
Speaker
And then another rescue dig that was called Forum Southeast, the southeast corner of the Roman Forum, trying to locate the built between 120 and 125 AD. There wasn't much left of it because of all the, you know, later
00:21:55
Speaker
building. So we worked closely with the contractors on a tight schedule to construct what was later to be called the Natwest Tower, which later, when it was built, became then, now being superseded, of course, the tallest building in Britain. So it was really beyond the rescue excavation, it was a salvage dig. So a four piece of Roman occupation would reveal a gravel surface and a regular gully and mud brick buildings, the walls of unfired bricks.
00:22:22
Speaker
phase was destroyed by fire, probably with the burning of Londonium during the Boudiccan Revolt. Ah, I actually remember this. You recover. I remember literally shoveling in bags of carbonized grain, because almost nothing had been found of the Boudiccan Revolt, and we suddenly found lots. Yeah, we found 25 kilograms of it. Amazing.
00:22:44
Speaker
Third period comprised surfaces of gravel and grey earth over the fire debris, but there were no definite structures, very little was left. The fourth period comprised mortar, gravel and sand surfaces to the south, fragments of walling. And the medieval churches, the diocese of black churches also discovered, ran off and reused medieval foundations. So there's a photograph of part of the dig cleaned up.
00:23:09
Speaker
There's very little left, unfortunately, just odd stubs of walls here and there and layers. We weren't able to record it very well because the contractors were working at breakneck speed to build the enormous Nat West Tower. There's another. You can see the Roman brickwork there.
00:23:27
Speaker
There's one story here. If you ever go to London and see the NatWest Tower, one day I came in and they had a huge jackhammer connected to a JCB. They were destroying a piece of concrete wall that they had built and formed only a few days before. And I said, I just built this like three days ago. Why are you destroying it? And this shows a difference in technique, if you like. Now it's all done by GPS.
00:23:52
Speaker
Pointing and everything he said oh my my pen slipped in the plans and the wall ended up nine feet longer And this is it yeah 1975 Yeah, so they just they just erased it by destroying nine foot of wall And there's us digging in the forum Southeast it was a hell of a salvage dig There we are again just shoveling out this Thames gravel it was horrifying stuff to move and
00:24:22
Speaker
And then back, there's the Forum Southeast and a reconstruction there. And that's the London Bridge, of course. We, in fact, go back one.
00:24:32
Speaker
That's Louise, my girlfriend, from almost 50 years ago now. And in the following, that very hot summer which followed, she and someone else actually found the pilings for the Roman London Bridge here. And then that super hot summer ended and the level of the Thames rose. It was not rediscovered again and properly recorded until 1981. But I think she has the honour of finding it.
00:24:56
Speaker
And there it is. That's what they built once we finished digging. I just got this photo off the internet just to show you. It's now surrounded by lots of even taller buildings. And that's just to give you an idea of what the Thames was like about a thousand years ago. And that's the city of London, of course. There's lots of streams coming off. There's a river at the fleet and there's another one there, Walbrooke. I think the Tower of London, to be, was about there.
00:25:24
Speaker
And the GPO site was about, I think there, somewhere like that, yeah. So by early 1976, we'd gone down to the late Saxon there as we found the remains of a large building, 88, 50 to 950. So yeah, beautiful Saxon timber trenches.
00:25:48
Speaker
That's a suggested reconstruction of what it might have looked like from a building about the history of the City of London, which I've got at home. I just photographed it from the book. Hope they won't mind. And that's my flatmate Debbie, and she got married to Steve. I lost touch with him about 20 years ago, so I assume they're still married. I don't know. The wedding was at the University of London's church.
00:26:14
Speaker
And she was with the Institute of Archaeology at the time. He was doing a PhD on the psychology of the National Front. I don't know why, but there you go. If you don't know, the National Front is an extreme right-wing group, like a precursor of the British National Party or whatever they're called now. And that's time off from work. It's an evening playing darts at the Globe in Borough Market, which is near London Bridge Station.
00:26:43
Speaker
And that's the reconstruction of Roman London. You can see the Thames is very wide then. That's the city of London, that's Southwark. I don't know if you know London at all, but Thames is about twice as wide then as it is now. And that's all massively built over. All these rivers have disappeared. They're all in brick-lined Victorian tunnels now.
00:27:01
Speaker
And actually going back there, the river was successively narrowed and narrowed and narrowed as time went on. So in Roman times, it was very wide, but when they wanted to build, it was easier to build inwards. So you just put a piling in there and just filled it with rubble from all the buildings, and you want to do another one, you did that. And so the level of the Thames slowly got higher, the Thames flew faster, and it got narrower.
00:27:28
Speaker
which is why the Thames is such a fast flowing river now. The original Thames was a very wide, very slow flowing river. That's one we found on the internet, which is actually very good. You can see the course and the extent of the Thames now and all its bridges, and you can see how much wider it was then.
00:27:49
Speaker
a river with many small islands. And if you know London, lots of the suburbs, like Bermondsey, Chelsea, and so on, the sea ending means an island in a river. And I think they were, where's Bermondsey? Is it over there somewhere? Chelsea, that might be Chelsea, I don't know. But yeah, there was lots and lots of islands. It was nothing like what you'd expect now.
Safety and Scale in 1970s Excavations
00:28:14
Speaker
Oh, sorry, what you get now.
00:28:17
Speaker
May 76. There's one of the skeletons from the cemetery of St. Nicholas Shambles being excavated. There's my first photograph of planning frames. I've never seen them in use before. I don't know if any of you go back that far. Maybe use some irony, I don't know. So you've probably found that one. Oh, no. It's when you start using them, that's the thing.
00:28:45
Speaker
We're just down below the medieval stuff and onto the Roman layers by now. And that's May of 76 again.
00:28:55
Speaker
And this is the day that changed all our lives. Harris Matrix was introduced. That's my diary from the 6th of May, 1976. Day of site conferences on using Ed Harris recording techniques, Andy very skeptical, as so am I. We didn't like it at all. But again, this is to illustrate how things have changed. This is all standard procedure now, but that's the day it was introduced.
00:29:24
Speaker
Oh God, yeah. Yeah, that very hot summer of 76, we've just gone down to legend began. We all went a little mad. In June 76, we dressed in drag and danced to the seps of St. Paul's. I think we did a can-can. We were thrown out for being disrespectful. There's me. Yeah, I'm still in touch with him, him, him. Not her, yeah.
00:29:51
Speaker
and not him, yeah. Yeah, and her, yeah. So yeah, most of us still in touch with each other, but yes, we, that was infamous. If you want to look at all these pictures, we got them all together about seven years ago. There's a website, if you Google Hobley's Heroes, Brian Hobley was the chief urban archaeologist. A few years ago, we decided to put all our photos down. They're all there. All this 70s rubbish, but there you go. We had fun. Tea break?
00:30:21
Speaker
And this is just, I was almost ready to leave for university then, group photo of Newgate Street in August 76, just before I left for Sheffield. There's me. And we had a coach trip out to Butser, which is just being set up then. So that's one of the early Iron Age buildings at Butser, just being built. That hot summer had broken, that's why it's so misty and foggy then. It started with torrential rain in the autumn of 76.
00:30:52
Speaker
Then I left the university. But I returned to volunteer the Milk Street excavation the summer of 77. That's just a photograph showing same people with... I don't know if it's slightly more or slightly less flared jeans. I don't know. And I nearly got myself killed. I went down to this chap John Maloney there. You can see the layers.
00:31:19
Speaker
workers were building a telecommunications tunnel, you know, to put cabling in under the modern street levels. It was just far enough below the street surface that we could again find the, look at the Roman layers, which we're measuring there. Then between us and where the navvies were digging this tunnel, the whole building thing collapsed. There wasn't much shoring there. We had safety helmets on for once, and that's about it. Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker
That was the fifth time I was nearly killed on an excavation, actually. It's the only one I've got a picture of. I told my daughters they're living lucky to have me as a dad because I nearly didn't make it.
00:31:55
Speaker
There was a trench collapse when I was at Dover Castle, another one on the Ugate Street site, and it was 1972-73 when I was extricating at Baynard's Castle in London. But yeah, in fact, three people were killed in the 1970s, three young archaeologists, because no health and safety, no regard for anything. It was just good fun for us. We just went in there and did it.
00:32:22
Speaker
So that's really the end of my story of working for the Museum of London. I could have battled through this very quickly. Never mind. So I'll end by showing you some other photographs of other digs I was on, really to illustrate the sort of things we were doing then. This was the area of big area excavations. Often we never knew when we were coming back. Some of them were research, some of them were rescue. But the idea now, we excavate a small area, sampling it,
00:32:52
Speaker
We excavated big areas then, and big means you'll see. Several years, 1971, this has worked its way into the textbooks now. I worked on the excavations of an Iron Age hill fort in the Cotswolds, Crickly Hills. In any of your textbooks? No? Oh well.
00:33:12
Speaker
We excavate the whole of the hilltop exposing the Iron Age village, so this is a reconstruction of the earlier phase of the Iron Age village, and that's later phase when they convert from longhouses to roundhows. This is a bit of an innovation because these longhouses weren't known in Britain very much at the time. They were known all over Europe, the linear band ceramic.
00:33:31
Speaker
but we were one of the very first digs to find that they actually were building in this style in England. Philip Dixon, who's excavating that very first dig of mine on Greenwich, he's now retired as professor of archaeology in Nottingham, but he was the director of this. I don't know if you can see, it's not very clear, but you can see the ground surface there wasn't much below 10 or 15 centimetres down, there's not much depth.
00:33:59
Speaker
And there you can see the postholes, one of the longhouses, and a horse came onto the site somehow. I don't know how much this is in meters. I've never converted. About 880 feet up on the Cotswold Escarpment. But one tale I tell, this very old man came to the site one day in 1973. We'd never seen him. And Alice Pandrich, one of the site supervisors, I can't do her Geordie accent very well, but she said, have you had a hard time getting up here, Henny?
00:34:29
Speaker
And he said, don't you know who I am, madam? And he was blooming Mortimer Wheeler. He was so old that he died three years later in 1976. He was so old then and hadn't had a public profile. No one's seen him publicly for years. Unfortunately, he was given a guided tour, of course, but yeah, famous visitor.
00:34:48
Speaker
And there, as you can see, that's the trench from the neolithic causeway to the enclosure. And again, normally the depth of archaeology was hardly anything below. You just took off the grass and about that much of turf and you got it. It was, yeah, the whole surface was exposed.
00:35:08
Speaker
And this is what I meant when we did big area excavations. This is 1970 suit too. We had a six week dig with 120 volunteers. And each of these is a 10 meters square. You can see that big roundhouse there, the postals beautifully. And some of the longhouses there. There's one there, there's another one there. I think there's another one there, another one there.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, it was amazing. And we lived in a place called Allenwood, which is all destroyed now. I couldn't find it on Google Maps anymore. It was an ex-Polish refugee camp from World War II. And we lived in these sort of Nissenhut. It was very spartan, I think.
00:35:51
Speaker
Okay, another dig I went on. Again, it illustrates a massive scale of excavation in the 70s. Very beautiful. Some of you might have been there. It's Castle Acre Castle in Norfolk. I keep meeting people who say, oh, I've been there. So I don't know if any of you have. The castle had been involved in the Stephen and Matilda War, our first and largely forgotten civil war between 1139 and 1153.
00:36:13
Speaker
Unfortunately, lesson two, always take your camera with you. I didn't have it on the very first day of the dig. I was back at the campsite and I didn't record this thing. It's a diesel-powered conveyor belt to get all the soil out of the keep. The Royal Air Force had brought it in and put it in there with those enormous twin-bladed Chinook helicopters. I haven't got a photograph of it. Bloody annoying. I know. It's really annoying.
00:36:40
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You can see how steep the trenches were as we're going down into the keep. Somewhere in there, I have got a better picture of him, but it's, oh my God, what's his name? John? Ah, I forgot his surname. He'll come to me, never mind. He's quite famous now. But there's the conveyor again.
00:37:05
Speaker
And no health and safety. This is how we got down to the keep to excavate. And it goes down, down, down. Yeah, just enormous wooden ladder.
Technological Evolution in Archaeology
00:37:13
Speaker
I didn't get much of a tan that part of the summer, because out of the sunshine, slowly taking down that into the keep. And of course, there's no digital stitching then. So this is several black and white photos. You can see the join I put together. That's the keep there.
00:37:29
Speaker
You can actually go and see this now. I went and saw it in 91 when the children were little. I think Rosie had a tantrum then. She didn't want to see it. My oldest daughter. But it's a beautiful village. You're out that way. This end of the village is the castle.
00:37:50
Speaker
In the middle, just there, is the, I think of the Church of St James the Great, 13th, 14th century. The far end of the village is Castle Acre Priory, the best preserved Clunich Priory in England. So if you're into medieval archaeology or medieval history, that village is well worth a visit.
00:38:17
Speaker
And in the spring of 74, I spent several weeks excavating a deserted medieval village. It's, um, thrizzling to north of Stanton, as it is called then, in County Durham. The village had been occupied for 150 years, from 1100 to 1350. I think 1350 is very significant, because, of course, the Black Death, 1347.
00:38:34
Speaker
I don't know if you know, but there's something like 3,000, 3,200 deserted or lost medieval villages in England due to famine, pestilence, economic decline, whatever, and we're excavating one of them. This whole landscape is very depressing. They're just stripping the landscape for a Dolomite quarry, and there's the factory there. And that's Dave, my friends, on a very wet day.
00:39:02
Speaker
And again, I put lots of photographs together. You can see we just had to excavate everything because it would be gone within a few weeks when the quarry just encroached and stripped it all out. You can see the walls, the various buildings of the village.
00:39:18
Speaker
Yeah, the most remarkable thing wasn't anything to do with the dig. We had a violent thunderstorm. We saw a tornado. The only time I've ever seen one in England, you can get an idea of the scale. You can see the chimneys of the houses there and the trees. I have no idea how big that would be. A couple hundred meters. And just to finish off, this is what it's actually like.
00:39:39
Speaker
a few young people, once all the warm summer excavations are over and you carry on working through the winter. This is me working in the third century AD Roman site in Syrancestor, Gloucestershire, in November 1972. And not long after this photo was taken, even the plank sank into the mud. So, right, there you go, finished. Thank you very much. Finished quite early. Do we have questions for Ken?
00:40:09
Speaker
I'll start off. So what do you think now are the big differences from when you started to when we're now starting? It's got standardized soon after this. So a lot of stuff that was, you know, it's like the Harris Matrix that was coming in in 1976. Certainly by 1980 that was becoming a standard. Yeah, site photography is becoming standardized.
00:40:36
Speaker
A lot of the recording techniques that were rudimentary then were becoming standardized. I don't know about health and safety because I had a big gap raising a family. When I started again in 2010, it was all very, very different. The idea of wearing safety helmets was thought to be a bit naff. There almost was no health and safety then, and it was really quite dangerous. But we laughed at it. It was just a big joke to us. The more danger there was, the more fun it was, which is absolutely ridiculous in modern terms.
00:41:06
Speaker
We did put ourselves quite in what you would regard as peril. Working conditions weren't very good. We lived in awful living conditions. That flat I showed you is unheated. We had enough money to live on, but not enough money to heat it, which is all right in the summer. In the winter, it was freezing cold. We had one small paraffin heater for that enormous flat, the four of us.
00:41:33
Speaker
I hope your working conditions when you finish your degrees and go out to work will be a lot better. There's no central heating. In fact, one day in that flat it got so cold that all the water vapor in one of the bedrooms condensed out and there was a fog in the bedroom. I know I told my daughter this because she was complaining at a cold flat she had a few years ago and I told her she shut up at that point. But yeah, the conditions were now very, very primitive. But it was great fun. It really was.
00:42:01
Speaker
What did the general public understand and think of what you were doing? We didn't have a lot of the guided tours now. There's no internet then. Things like Time Team, lots of documentaries are on now. This, of course, didn't exist. The general public's view, when we let them in at all, there wasn't much interaction between us and the public. That site in Newgate Street
00:42:24
Speaker
We let the public, which are mainly business-suited businessmen from the city of London, have a look around. We gave them some guided tours and that was about it. It's one of the few excavations I knew where we actually interacted with the public. Guide of Community Archaeology wasn't known. Some local
00:42:41
Speaker
There were local societies which sometimes joined in, like the City of London Archaeological Service, which a great load of volunteers who lived around London came and joined us at the weekends, but not much. There was a separation between professional archaeologists and the general public and a few small private groups which joined down again.
00:42:59
Speaker
None of the community excavations didn't exist then at all. Interacting with the public, putting photographs on Facebook so the public could see what you were doing. None of that existed. That was a big, big separation. I don't know, because I took this enormous gap to raise a family when it changed. You can ask Colin that one. He knows. He knows. What about now archaeology is quite a heavily
00:43:29
Speaker
influenced by science and scientific breakthroughs. There's very little of that. Just recording the skeletons, for example, at Newgate Street is quite rudimentary. You could tell
00:43:43
Speaker
what bone deformations were visible on the scene, but there's no DNA analysis, none of the looking at teeth to see where people came from. That literally didn't exist then. None of that science was known. Human genome was only sequenced in 2002. That technology was far in the future.
00:44:05
Speaker
In fact, I was talking to someone the other day about photography. We took sight photographs with film cameras, of course. So you shot off a reel of 36 photographs. You couldn't hold up the dig till they were processed to see if they were all right or some of them blurred or too dark or too light. You carried on with the dig. By the time you got them back from the chemist, you hoped they were all right. Nowadays, you can check individually if your photographs are good, if not take another one. So if you took a bad photo, it was just too late because the dig had progressed.
00:44:35
Speaker
There wasn't much of what you'd call science. We recorded it, you know, on poetry as we do now. And our site records were as good as they can be, but probably not a passion of what you can do today. There's no... No radar, no... Oh, sorry, what's the word?
00:45:00
Speaker
Magnetometry, none of that. I don't think it's just UPR. None of it is coming in. In fact, where the site was in relation to other buildings was only known from old maps.
00:45:14
Speaker
I told you this in 2011, Tim might remember, I told this tale in 2011, so I'll tell it one more time and I'll shut up forever. No, it'll be on the podcast, alright. Before I started with the Museum of London in March of 1975, a few weeks before, my friend Andy Bodington, one of those photographs, was on a watching brief, I think it was a central line, to see what was being recorded as they were removing
00:45:45
Speaker
the stuff over to build another building. I think it was central on one of the early lines. It was just a cut and cover. They dug a trench through London with navies in the 19th century, built a brick tunnel, put the underground railway inside it and covered it over and modern buildings are over it now. But its exact position in relation to modern buildings was not that accurately recorded. You could do it, but not so well. So one day the JCB scraped
00:46:15
Speaker
This curved brick surface and broke through to it and Andy looked over and he could see the blooming the railway lines below with a pile of bricks on it
00:46:26
Speaker
And he actually ran to the nearest underground station, managed to convince the station managers to stop the underground trains or there would have been disaster. And this is not well known. Well, it's actually been suppressed because in the autumn of the year before, in the autumn of 1974, there was a famous Moorgate tube disaster when two underground trains crashed together and many were killed. So I think the London Underground, they just didn't want this to be known, they suppressed it completely. So you know, but not many people do.
00:46:56
Speaker
And when you started, was archaeology a career? Yeah, I mean, I've been working as an archaeologist since 1971. And there was a career path ahead of... There wasn't a career path. I came here to get so up the academic side of it, but most people were working as I did, going from one dig to another, basically with a rucksack on your back hitchhiking around the country. And they were forming archaeological units like the London one, there's a Norfolk one and so on. Similar to the setup now, but yeah. And what qualifications did you have?
00:47:27
Speaker
to be taken on to become an archaeologist. None. I literally started. I literally started. I just went along and they said, can I dig? And I said, yeah.
00:47:37
Speaker
I did three months working for the Guildhall Museum, excavating Baynard's Castle. I just went there to visit a friend of mine, and she said, oh, they need some diggers. And then the excavation director is just passing through. I said, oh, here, you're looking for people. And he said, yeah. He said, what have you done? And I just, as he was walking through the site, I told him what I'd done. He said, can you start Monday? That was it.
00:48:00
Speaker
And same for the Museum of London. I had a quick 10-minute interview and he said, can you start on Monday? There's no looking into qualifications. Very few of us had degrees. It was all very, very ad hoc compared to now. Are there some things that you prefer, techniques, methods, that you prefer from then compared to now? Not really, no.
00:48:27
Speaker
The only thing is, I suppose, you know, looking back on it, it was a lot of fun. It really was. We had a great time. Beer was six or seven p of pint. So you could get drunk for about 20 p. Ridiculous, yeah. Sorry, I shouldn't have known that. Sorry. Archaeology. Archaeology.
00:48:46
Speaker
I was talking about the important things. No, just recording things, plans, sections, doing site photography, theodolists, all that stuff that you do now. We didn't have GPS, we didn't have total stations. Obviously digital photography is a world away and a world better.
00:49:06
Speaker
than anything we could do then with film cameras. Film cameras often weren't adapted for the range of colours you found on the site, all the browns and reds you get in soils. We weren't very well adapted for that at all. Some of the photographs we got came out very strange looking at... We experimented with different films, different grades of films. Now you can fiddle with a digital camera and just get the picture you want.
Ken Dash's Return to Archaeology and Conclusion
00:49:29
Speaker
That wasn't available then. And you have multiple cameras though, different kinds of cameras. Just those two, yeah. That was it.
00:49:36
Speaker
Because we used to use black and whites and colours in slides and stuff, didn't we? Yeah, that was very normal, but you did have lots of discussions about which films to use, and if you'd you'd have heard that. Yeah. We'll have a greener too. Yeah, that's right, yeah. We were experimenting, because some of them gave a very green tinge to a lot of the photographs, and we didn't want that, didn't record the reds and browns and yellows you often got with soils.
00:49:59
Speaker
Is there any one particular site you worked on back at the day where, if you've got modern techniques, you think, oh, we wish we had those techniques and could have learned? I do. I'm a lot of fondness for that beautiful medieval castle, Castle Acre. We only excavated it in the keep, in the keep yard. I wish we'd gone into the Upper Bailey. You can see lots of humps and bumps there and we never dug it. I wish that could have been done. That was just such a pretty place to live and work.
00:50:26
Speaker
Of course, the other one, of course, was with Paul Mellers and Oransey, which I haven't shown at all, in the Hebrides. That was extraordinarily beautiful. Tiny little island. We went there by Land Rover when the tide was out between Oransey where the dig was and Collinsey where we were staying. Colin knows about this. That's where I corrupted him.
00:50:50
Speaker
the following year. And the tides were out. We went by boat between the two islands. It was beautiful. When did you then return to archaeology and become a legend? In 2010, when I retired, I emailed Colin. I said, what's going on? He emailed me back. And that all started up from then. So thank you, Colin. Any more questions for Ken? Excellent.
00:51:28
Speaker
I have one more question just for Colin. I'm not going to throw him under the bus this time. For the listeners of the podcast, is there any update on the state of the department?
00:51:41
Speaker
We've not very much to report for last time, I suppose. We still don't know things like what's happening to all the fixed-own contract staff, no use on that. The only thing that has changed a bit is that there have been various documents produced about collections and facilities and equipment, and they've all gone into the implementation group and there are various sort of labels about what may or may not be possible happening, but there's no substantial changes in what we know, but there has been more information supply than various documents produced on this amount. So we're still largely in doubt.
00:52:15
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology in Ale. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.
00:52:39
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.