The best we can do?

The best we can do? This is certainly a strange business: on the one hand, the thrillof discovery, the glory of gold, the flattery of the media and thepurring of officialdom; on the other, the agonised frustrations ofacademics whose job it is to make sense of everything brought to lighton this island. An editor is supposed to remain neutral, bur in thiscase there is no contest. Antiquity champions research I so while we arehappy to welcome the arrival of a mass of shiny things, we are bound tolament the loss of an opportunity to understand what they mean. Thenthere is the paradox of the English system: the treasure hunters areapplauded and rewarded, but the archaeologists are seemingly obliged tolurk in the shadows, anxious not to spoil the party. Does it have to belike this? Older Antiquity readers will be saddened to reflect that therecovery of the Staffordshire (Ogley Hay) hoard was even more rapid andperfunctory than the excavation of the Sutton Hoo Sutton Hoo(sŭt`ən h), archaeological site near Woodbridge, East Suffolk, E England, containing 11 barrows. Excavations here in 1938–39 revealed remains of a Saxon ship (c. 1 ship burial A ship burial or boat grave is a burial in which a ship or boat is used either as a container for the dead and the grave goods, or as a part of the grave goods itself. If the ship is very small, it is called a boat grave. on theeve On the Eve (Накануне in Russian) is the third novel by famous Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, best known for his short stories and the novel Fathers and Sons. of a world war, 70 years ago. While Antiquity's mood then(Volume 14, 1940) was relief at having recovered a complex burial ofhuge historical importance as the country was preparing for invasion,the mood of many scholars now is more nearly one of outrage that thescience of archaeology in England has sunk so low in professional andpublic esteem. However, the purpose of this comment is not to take anyindividual to task, or even to criticise the Portable AntiquitiesScheme, but to point out that, in this case, a combination ofstarry-eyed publicity and the low expectations of those that took partin the hoard's recovery, impaired a perfectly reasonable researchopportunity. And that there is another way. In many ways the obvious things were done. Following thedeclaration of the find, the NW angle of the field (bur only that), wasmetal-detected, in a survey undertaken by Mr Terry Herbert andcross-checked by a team from the Home Office Scientific InvestigationBranch. Each of the potential signals was plotted on the ground, and itscause sought by digging the spot: all were found to be modern rubbish(Alex Jones pers. comm.). In the first season (summer 2009), the wholeof the field was subjected to a magnetometer survey, following which'a selection of pit-type magnetometer anomalies were tested byhand-excavation' (Dean et al. 2010: 142). In the second season(spring 2010), a resistivity resistivityElectrical resistance of a conductor of unit cross-sectional area and unit length. The resistivity of a conductor depends on its composition and its temperature. survey was undertaken and its anomaliestested by trial trenching (Dean et al. 2010: 142). Then there wasdigging. In the first session, the archaeological team opened a block ofcontiguous 1 x lm test areas, proceeding outwards flora a test pit dugthrough the approximate centre point of the hoard. In the second, theteam laid out a line of 11 test pits at regular intervals in a NE-SWdirection. Recovery was by spits in metre squares in default of observedstrata. All finds were plotted, bur only in two dimensions and notincluding those found by Mr Herbert. A metal detector was on site; allsoil was sieved, although wet sieving was abandoned in the interests ofspeed. It was stated at the 2010 symposium at the British Museum British Museum,the national repository in London for treasures in science and art. Located in the Bloomsbury section of the city, it has departments of antiquities, prints and drawings, coins and medals, and ethnography. that noRoman, medieval or post-medieval pottery was found, which must make thesite almost unique in England. As is readily admitted, these measures were principally intended torecover all the pieces of a presumed hoard, as opposed to its context.As a result, we lack information about the way the material was buried,its container and the nature of the chosen spot, as well as the way itwas subsequently disturbed. However, some contextual information wassought and recovered, even if the details are not yet fully available.For example, local informants and an air photograph imply the previousexistence of an oval mound with a cropmark ditch round or near it(Jones, above, p. 00; not shown on Figure 3 or 4); resistivity is saidto have picked up (another?) circular feature around the hoard location(cf. Dean et al. 2010: fig. 3, where this feature is said to begeological). Undated un��dat��ed?adj.1. Not marked with or showing a date: an undated letter; an undated portrait.2. features tested by excavation included a ditch, agully and few postholes, and further off to the east, two palisadetrenches. Whether these sightings can be confirmed, and whatever theycan be persuaded to mean, we can at least say that negative featureswere present and definable in the subsoil subsoilLayer (stratum) of earth immediately below the surface soil, consisting predominantly of minerals and leached materials such as iron and aluminum compounds. Humus remains and clay accumulate in subsoil, but the teeming macroscopic and microscopic organisms that make at and near the findspot, evenif only small areas were actually opened. Meanwhile the general character of the formation process remainsunclear. Alex Jones (p. 00) interprets the starburst pattern as meaningthat the collection was anciently deposited in topsoil and wassubsequently dispersed by ploughing in NS and EW directions.Leahy's verdict is that the fragments must have entered theploughsoil in recent years, based on their relative lack of damage, andthat the hoard may have been first disturbed as recently as autumn of2008 (cf. Dean et al. 2010: 142). However at the symposium Stephen Dean,the county archaeologist A County Archaeologist is a local government employee in the United Kingdom with responsibility for overseeing development-led archaeological investigations required by PPG16. and thus the touchstone for local knowledge, isreported to have said that the field had been ploughed at intervals coming or happening with intervals between; now and then.See also: Interval forgrowing vegetables to a depth of 400-500mm, while the topsoil lay200-250mm thick. If this is so, and it would be normal enough, thenabout 300mm of soil has disappeared down the slope as a result ofploughing since the mid nineteenth century (Hooke, above, p. 00), if notbefore. The deduction is that the field had long been ploughed, but thatthe level of the hoard was only reached by the plough in 2008, exposingit for the first time. This would resolve the contradictions between thevarious participants, and suggest that the collection originally layabout 300mm underground. As Leslie Webster emphasises (p. 00), and Catherine Hills deplores(p. 00), the lack of context leaves the hoard in something of a vacuum;we do not actually know whether it was stashed hurriedly underground,buried in a container, placed in a grave under a mound or dropped on thesurface of a battlefield, a fairground or a holy place. We do not evenknow if it was a hoard. Of the possible ancient circumstances ofdeposition sketched by Webster et al. (above, p. 00), perhaps the mostsuggestive is the Scandinavian model cited by Catherine Hills, wherevotive vo��tive?adj.1. Given or dedicated in fulfillment of a vow or pledge: a votive offering.2. fragments are deposited on the surface near to a ritual buildingof a type that has only recently been defined (above; Larsson 2007 andsee Carver et al. 2010:11-14 for other northern European temples). Suchbuildings may or may not always have giant postholes like Uppakra, butthe sites are well spread out over the landscape, and it would be alucky strike to find any one part of them within a test pit or trench.Geophysics should be informative, but they would perhaps work betterunder the topsoil following a strip and map. Clearly excavation wasnecessary, but we can suspect that chasing an inconclusive geophysicalsignal with a test pit is likely to be inadequate if one is looking forgraves, buildings, tracks or ponds. In the second season, four trencheswere disposed at various angles, apparently to test magnetic anomalies.But we have known for 40 years that excavation using test pits ortrenches is never likely to give the definition needed for this sort ofinquiry. Indeed, what the archaeological response serves to reveal isthe level to which field investigation has been beaten down by theinflationary pressures of countless mitigation projects, in which'finding nothing' is accepted as compliance. Test pits andtrenches have become part of the Pavlovian reflex of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) An integrated information system that is used to plan, schedule and control the presales and postsales activities in an organization. industry, aplacebo applied in every case, regardless of research objective orterrain. But in an archaeologically dense country like England,'finding nothing' has a lot to do with not looking hard enough(Carver forthcoming). So, how could the excavation have found more? The subsoil was amixed boulder clay boulder clay:see drift. and sand/gravel, and in August 2009 the groundconditions were quite wet (Alex Jones pers. comm.). Even in idealconditions, West Midlands clays are especially hard to resolve intofeatures, and I have certainly noted examples that appear to exist onlyin the ploughsoil; but they are features none the less. The area of theactual findspot required excavating at a much higher recovery level thanit was, and the obvious prescription would have been a large scalestrip-and-map with plenty of water and 3D plotting, starting from themodern ground surface and followed by chemical mapping of the subsoil.This would require a large team of trowellers and a tower to observeanomalies, not resources that need present any problems, especially in aregion with strong local societies and a field unit belonging to auniversity with numerous archaeology students. Such a public operationwould provide a permanent presence on site, as well as giving a clearsignal to the world at large that archaeology takes itself seriously asan investigative science. As it was, more attention, exposure andexpertise was given to the monetary valuation of the treasure, than tothe archaeological evaluation of the findspot. It was certainly a challenging situation, but one made morechallenging by the furtive fur��tive?adj.1. Characterized by stealth; surreptitious.2. Expressive of hidden motives or purposes; shifty. See Synonyms at secret. way it was done. I for one would not acceptthe premise that the fear of nighthawks This article is about the painting by Edward Hopper. For other uses, see Nighthawks (disambiguation).Nighthawks (1942) is a painting by Edward Hopper that portrays people sitting in a downtown diner late at night. (looters) requires secrecy,speed or a total absence of consultation (especially in the six monthsseparating the two campaigns). We do not live in anarchy. On thecontrary, the month immediately following the discovery in July 2009 wasthe time to protect the field, and pool ideas about the project design.This would ensure that the funding for investigation, made speedilyavailable by English Heritage, would be deployed to its best advantage.It seems astonishing that the public presentation of the entire episodewas dominated by the reward to an individual rather than the potentialreward for this generation, and the many to come, of the new historypotentially on offer from a structured investigation. Whatever the content of a research design, it would deserve nosupport if it consisted only of test pits and trenches. It wasdemonstrated in the 1960s that open area excavation was the only way ofdetecting widely-spaced low impact features, and this has not stoppedbeing true. In addition, the enhanced mapping of opaque soils in bothsurvey and excavation has been around for several years now: well knownexamples include trace-metal plotting, as at Shapwick where a churchyardwas located from lead concentrations (Aston et al. 1998), or Sutton Hoowhere a vanished body and grave goods were mapped in an'empty' burial chamber (Carver 2005: 58-64) or at Catalhoyukwhere the use of rooms in houses was determined (Matthews 2005). In morerecent years, the archaeological exploration of difficult soils hasdeveloped apace, especially that using lipids (Hjulstro & Isaksson2009), on-site micro-magnetometry (Herries 2009) and the use of dirt DNA DNA:see nucleic acid. DNAor deoxyribonucleic acidOne of two types of nucleic acid (the other is RNA); a complex organic compound found in all living cells and many viruses. It is the chemical substance of genes. to determine the presence and quantity of humans and animal species(Hebsgaard et al. 2009). These state-of-the-art instruments ofarchaeology's 'CSI' approach should be automaticallyapplied in a case like this, even if there is no great optimism of aresult. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , whether or not they prove to work, they shouldform part of the toolbox of a modern archaeological response, in thesame way as police respond to an accident. The hoard has been cited in the same breath as Sutton Hoo,presumably pre��sum��a��ble?adj.That can be presumed or taken for granted; reasonable as a supposition: presumable causes of the disaster. because seventh-century gold was present at both sites; butthere is another, less happy, comparison. The speed of recovery and lackof precise recording at Sutton Hoo in 1939 forced the British Museum tospend four decades and a lot of money trying to fill the gaps throughfurther excavation, phosphate measurements of the encrustations on theartefacts and much else besides (Bruce-Mitford 1975). While necessaryand thoroughly done, this was still shutting the stable door long afterthe horse had bolted. We face a similar prospect now. To compensate for its lack ofcontext, the assemblage and its on-site mapping require microscopicanalysis to demonstrate the hoard's importance for the history ofearly England, something which, pace 12 months of hyperbole, is far fromcertain. We seek evidence for the construction, disassembly dis��as��sem��ble?v. dis��as��sem��bled, dis��as��sem��bling, dis��as��sem��blesv.tr.To take apart: disassemble a toaster.v.intr.1. anddispersal of the material, as well as its detailed content. In additionto the pommels, there is one third of a helmet with a cheek piece and apossible brow piece, together with quantities of silver gilt Pressblech,which suggestively feature marching warriors and kneeling figures. Thereis a possible shield-fitting carrying images of a pair of birds of preyand a fish. There are hints of harness and saddle fittings. There areother possible crosses apart from the ornamented processional cross andthat implied by the inscribed strip and its rivet rivet,headed metal pin or bolt whose shaft is passed through holes in two or more pieces of metal, wood, plastic, or other material in order to unite them by forming the plain end into a second head. holes. Tiny tracesimplying other objects will surely come to light as the material isexamined in expert hands. The epigraphy epigraphy:see inscription. (Okasha, above p. 00) and thedifferent types of ornament--filigree, cloisonne garnet and incised-givecontradictory messages about date, sometimes within the same object.This implies either that the collection as a whole was amassed over morethan a century or that the stylistic dating is in need of revision. The necessary methods need to be effective but low impact,beginning with the association of fragments from their precise positionsin the ground, followed by microscopic scanning of the surfaces with aview to assessing construction, wear and breakage; then digital imagingof all the objects with a view to refitting them virtually, in advanceof any mechanical unfolding or manipulation. In brief, the researchcommunity requires the intensive scrutiny of the fragments, in the hopeof discovering linkages within and beyond the hoard that will throwlight on which objects were chosen and what happened to them beforeburial. The agenda for the technical analysis of the objects--theprovenance of constituent materials, the form of the original objectsand the stylistic links with the rest of Britain, Ireland and thecontinent-can follow and develop the exemplary trail blazed by theBritish Museum's Sutton Hoo team (Bruce-Mitford 1975, 1978, 1983).The scholarly reconstruction of sword, cross and helmet will be anoutcome rightly desired by the museums that are to display the objects.There may also be grand historical questions to address, about thewealth and contacts of the Mercian kingdom, rank, regalia, ownership,craftsmanship, weights and measures weights and measures,units and standards for expressing the amount of some quantity, such as length, capacity, or weight; the science of measurement standards and methods is known as metrology. , units of value, the appearance ofthe army, the ways of the church and links with historical events -andthese may or may not fall within the grasp of the analysis. That is allfor a future research design to justify. No design or research programmehas been presented as yet, but we are entitled to assume that it willinclude the best conservators and researchers in the best equippedlaboratories in the land. And we must hope that, as for the latestSutton Hoo campaign, the proposed programme will be published orcirculated for comment before it is executed. The purchase of the hoardfrom its finders required 3.25 million [pounds sterling]: itsconservation and adequate study will probably need half as much again.The publication of a detailed project design supported by adequatefunding will send a clear signal to colleagues at home and abroad thatBritain still values knowledge above treasure. Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to Tania Hayd��e Tamara Bunke Bider, communist revolutionary Tania (queen) Tania was an alias of Patricia Hearst Tania Borealis and Tania Australis, stars in the constellation Ursa Major Tania Emery, actress Tania Lacy, comedian Tania Libertad, singer Dickinson for information from theBritish Museum symposium, and for her comments and suggestions on thecontributions as a whole. References ASTON, M.A, M.H. MARTIN & A.W. JACKSON. 1998. The potential forheavy soil analysis on low status archaeological sites at Shapwick,Somerser. Antiquity 72: 838-47. BRUCE-MITFORD, R.L.S. 1975, 1978, 1983. The Sutton Hoo ship burial.Volumes 1-3. London: British Museum Press. CARVER, M.O.H. 2005. 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