Founded 1906

Archaeology Report Autumn 2019

Selected Article from the BHAS Bi-Annual magazine "Flint" Autumn 2019   What do you think to it so far? - Rubbish? (with apologies to Morecambe and Wise) The ditches at Rocky Clump continue to reveal more of their se-crets. We have continued to uncover bones, pot sherds, and coins and other artefacts from substantial lengths of the ditches, pits and postholes. We almost invariably attribute the presence of the coins to accidental loss some time in antiquity, but how do the other objects end up in the ditches? Casual comments on site indicate that we often start from the premise that the ditches served as some form of elongated rubbish dump once their useful-ness as a boundary had passed. Whilst this may often be the case, I think it is wrong to assume this as we dig these features. Boundaries are complex entities combining physical and symbolic functions. A deep ditch will form an effective barrier against aggression by others and to prevent ingress or egress of animals. It also creates a symbolic space between in-side/outside, private/communal, home/not home, farm/not farm, safety/danger and maybe even our own world/the “underworld”. Archaeologists refer to such boundaries as liminal spaces; boundaries between one state and another which is neither 'here nor there' (e.g. Chadwick, 1999). There is plenty of evidence from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age for special deposits of bone, pot etc. in the ditches of cause-wayed enclosures, barrows, henges and other ritual spaces re-flecting their liminal status. For instance, Francis Pryor (1998), excavating at Etton causewayed enclosure, Cambridgeshire,showed that objects were carefully placed at the butt end of ditches adjacent to the causeways. Of particular relevance to Rocky Clump, he observed that animal skulls and pots were often placed upside down. There is also evidence to suggest similar functions for the ditches of Iron Age and Romano-British farmsteads and enclosures particularly in respect of baby burials. Millet and Gowland (2015) investigating baby burials at Roman sites in Yorkshire suggested that ' burial of neonatal infants' (in ditches and beneath dwellings) 'followed a careful age-specific funerary rite.' Again with relevance to Rocky Clump, northern boundary ditches appeared to be a favoured site for such burials. I believe it would be wrong to imagine that people engaged in only one “realm of activity” at any one time. The mundane and everyday activities would merge with the magical and ritualistic in a way which inextricably conflate theserealms of behaviour. The material remains of these activities may then appear to us (as outsider archaeologists) to be devoid of ritualistic elements or, alternatively, overloaded with ritual meaning at the expense of the everyday. This may be the case with ditches, dug as a boundary but then used in symbolic behaviours involving items we may interpret as rubbish. For instance, it may be the case that after an important meal leftovers and parts of items used in preparing the meal (e.g. pieces of pot, fire cracked stone, charcoal) were customarily (ritualistically?) buried together. It is only with the careful recording of all deposits and the accumulation of large data sets that we can begin to unravel the evidence. We must probably accept that the everyday and the ritualistic cannot be separated in the lived environment of prehistory. Maybe, if Iron Age peoples could question us, they would find it odd that we seem to be forever trying to separate their be-haviours into such distinct dichotomies. The presence of baby burials at rocky Clump alerts us to the fact that the ditches on our site are more than filled in bound-aries reused for rubbish disposal and we should carefully rec-ord all deposits with that in mind. Then we may eventually have an answer to the question “What do you think to it so far?” which is more than “Rubbish”.     Home About Us Archaeology Events Field Unit  Lectures Gallery  Links Training FAQ Contact Us