A working life: The archaeologist
July 31, 2009 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Archaeologist Deirdre Gleeson at Harry Avery’s Castle in Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul McErlane
I am standing by a gate in the upper corner of a gently sloping field near Frome in Somerset. The scene below is quiet and grassy, recently refreshed by rain. It would be perfectly unremarkable, to be frank, had I not been brought here by an archaeologist. Instead it is alive with possibility. Records indicate field systems and medieval pottery have been unearthed nearby; there could be anything beneath that rippling sheet of green. You just need to know how to look for it. But I don’t. So after several minutes’ careful consideration, I have to own up: it just looks like a field to me.
“Well, it is a field,” Deirdre Gleeson admits with a soft Irish chuckle. “There’s no denying it’s a field … But you can predict from walking around, and from the research you’ve done, what could happen [if you excavated].” She gestures down towards the giant supermarket and the strip of mostly modern orange rooftops that lie beyond the river. “For instance, Frome is a medieval town. So you’re thinking, ‘well, we’re not that far from it’. Medieval people had to eat, so there must be outlying farmsteads and field systems in this area, from that period or earlier.
“And we’re coming up to quite high ground here, but as it slopes down towards the river Frome, it gets wet and floods, so you often get housing halfway up the hill. This means you can see all the way around in case anybody wants to attack you, but you’re still close to a water source, so you can drink and fish, though not so close that you’re going to get flooded.
“People had the same principles in the past for building a house as we do now.” Except we don’t have to worry about being attacked all the time. “Yes, well,” she laughs, “there is that.”
And these are not the only features in a landscape that might point to buried treasure.
High mounds with ditches round them, Gleeson tells me, can indicate a prehistoric site. In Ireland, raised circles of trees in the middle of a field may once have enclosed early medieval settlements. And though the grass where we are standing now is too long to tell, patterns of discolouration in other fields – often visible from trains or cars – may reveal the shape of buried buildings underneath.
“Darker or lighter, it depends,” Gleeson says, “but when you look at it from a different angle you might be able to make out a square or a circle, or something that’s not ‘natural’ … There still is huge potential out there. It varies though,” she warns sensibly, before I can get carried away. “You don’t ever really know until you take off the top. That is where the fun starts.” It is all I can do to prevent myself from running down to Asda to buy a spade.
And yet, for all her obvious enthusiasm, it is not the potential treasures of this field that have drawn Gleeson here today, but its promise as a future housing estate. This is the peculiar pact at the heart of “development-led archaeology”, in which most British archaeologists work. Modern planning law forbids anyone from building on land that might still hold undiscovered finds, so somebody must visit fields like this to assess …
Read the original article at Guardian
