What's surprising is that i actually arrived in Bradford back in the 1980s as an undergraduate,
and i came through the archaeological science system, ended up doing a PHd and eventually
went off to become a commercial Archaeological Geophysicist.
I ran my own company for 18 years and were involved very heavily with things like 'Time Team' and other
TV programmes. About 7 or 8 years ago i ended up, selling up the company and job sharing
at Bradford for a little while and, well here i am now, now running the Archaeological Prospection course and also Head of Archeological Sciences.
I started off looking at Roman villas and
their landscape context and that really hooked me onto landscape, but after a brief change
of careers in museums i felt i had to go back to Archeology. I did a PHd in former Yugoslavia.
I came back to Britain. I carried out landscape research in Britain, in Italy, in Croatia, America, North and Southern Africa.
You know, it started with Vince and myself
in a field next to Stone Henge and just saying "Wouldn't it be great to do a huge area".
It's give us a really unique insight into this Stone Henge landscape, with collaborators
from around Europe we've be able to look in between the monuments, not just the places
that people usually look, in order to create a data set of a type British Archeology and
indeed world Arheology have never seen in respect of a wonderful and uniquely important
archaeological monument. - I think one of the most exciting things are
just the tiny little monuments that sometimes actually exist between the monuments we know.
There's little henges which were probably chapels that people visited on route to Stone Henge.
We've seen some sites that are within other sites, that are hidden away so we sort of
completely re-charaterised parts of the landscape which we didn't really understand.
But the larger scale? - I think the other thing that comes out of this
is Stone Henge, and to most archeologists it's somewhere that's set apart, to revered people,
perhaps didn't come close to it apart from to special people at special times.
But the new data, because we can look everywhere in the landscape, is starting to suggest there was a lot
going on in the landscape. There may have been processions, large numbers of people
may have turned up actually, but you can't see that just by digging small holes in monuments
some of which stretch for 3KM across the landscape.
What we've been doing is starting to use oil
and gas data, survey data, seismic data to provide a map of the areas underneath the North Sea.
We've been doing that for nearly 10 years now, now we're about to do something
different. From going from a map that has nothing on, essentially, apart from rivers,
hills, lakes, coastlines. We're going to take ships, we're going to core down river valleys
and we're going to extract DNA, paleoenvironmental evidence; and create huge models
of colonisation and decolonisation of this land after the Ice Age; with your sea level
rising, temperature rising, plants moving in, animals following plants, people following
the animals. And we're going to do it over an area of about 60-90,000 square kilometres.
Most of which cannot be explored by Archeology using conventional means.
I think we can be quite explicit and honest about the position of Bradford Archeology,
both in Britain and across the world; it has a very special position. It was at the forefront
of the development of geophysics and has always been an applied department. It's actively
gone out to do innovative projects across the world and without doubt that is reflected
in the standing it has within the world. People do look to Bradford to see what is happening
in these areas. - Vince and I have always worked together, sometimes
it's great, other times, you know, well, we're brothers. Fortunately we still support the
same football team, so that's one less argument that we always have.
- I think there's a number of things about us. We have worked together for a long time
and, you know, we do confuse a lot of people globally; most of which think there's only
one of us. Probably moving to the same university isn't going to help that situation.
Not at all!