Translator: Katarina Ericson Reviewer: Denise RQ
I don't want to start this lecture
by making it sound like a therapy session,
but hello, my name is Miles Russell,
and for 30 years I've been an archaeologist.
Archaeologist is a very loaded term,
in the way in which we see it in popular culture,
the way that we see it in the media.
Certainly, the media representation of what an archaeologist is,
is very often divorced, very much removed from the reality of it.
And certainly, I suppose,
if we look at what an archaeologist is in popular culture,
they are adventurers, they are explorers, they discover things,
they are fighting the forces of evil,
usually with large amounts of armament.
But they discover things with unerring accuracy,
they have a 100% accuracy rate at discovering things.
They use the sense of the tomb;
is for them the ultimate goal.
The tomb is, I suppose, a repository of treasure.
It represents a monumental 'X marks the spot', for finding loot,
finding gold, finding treasure, things of monetary value.
What I want to try and do, in the short amount of time we have today,
is to try to impress upon you the idea
that when we look at the past, we're trying to understand its worth.
Its value is something else entirely.
When archeology appears in the media, when it appears on the news,
whenever we hear it being discussed, it's often the value side of it,
it's what we call the National Lottery Syndrome.
It's that sense of Bargain Hunt and Antiques Roadshow, Cash in the Attic,
it's "What is the value of this piece?" rather than its informational worth.
So, for someone like Indiana Jones or who we see in The Mummy franchise,
the tomb is the beginning of the story.
In fact, in Raiders of the Lost Ark with Indiana Jones,
in the first ten minutes he's entered the tomb,
he's destroyed the tomb,
and got out with a nice big slab of gold under his arm.
And in that time,
he's done no photography, he's done no recording,
he hasn't taken out the pen, he hasn't done what archaeologists do.
He's not understanding the context of the find.
All the information is stored in his head,
but admittedly, he spends most of his time escaping boulders, poison arrows,
treachery among his own team, and that happens quite a lot,
but he's not doing what archaeologists do,
he's not trying to understand the worth of a find,
it is completely off, divorced from its surroundings;
he's got it under his arm,
but the civilization that it belonged to has completely gone.
Something else archaeologists are very good at, in popular culture,
is awakening the dead.
Usually, it's some curse being invoked,
and some bandage-swathed monster that's reanimated,
and destroys the excavation team,
threatens to destroy the whole of humanity.
It might be the archaeologists themselves that puts the monster back in its box,
generally, it isn't;
it's some another civilian, or it's the military ...
It's somebody else.
It's the archaeologist
who ulitmatelly is the bad guy for awakening the dead,
for letting them loose.
And I suppose it's that adventure side, it's that exploration side,
it's that desire to link with the pop culture side
of the archaeologist as explorer and adventurer,
that we see so many celebrities, actors, politicians,
in the guise of archeo-explorer.
There's Vladimir Putin in his election campaign,
holding some very large slabs of the past.
And he's linking into that, he's hoping that a bit of the excitement,
the glamor of archeology is going to rub off on him.
And as I say, we see that in the media,
I can give you an example from 2009,
but any time you see archeology on the news,
it's, "Woman walking dog finds ten million pounds' worth of Roman gold."
"Man with metal detector finds seven million pounds of Viking silver."
This is the Staffordshire Hoard, found in Staffordshire in 2009.
It is amazing,
we've got lots of pieces of gold pommels, hilts, bangles,
bits of decorative jewelry, bits of arms, bits of equipment, emerald-encrusted gold.
Fantastic.
It was on the news, there have been multiple TV programs about it,
there have been a whole number of books written about it,
there's documentaries, TV programs.
Wherever it's on display,
there have been queues around the block of people trying to get in to see it.
I would argue that's not archeology,
that's art history, that's something else entirely.
Archeology is about trying to understand ordinary people,
to understand everyday lives, what people did in the past,
what did they eat, where did they defecate,
what was their religion, what were their hopes and dreams.
We're trying to find out about people in the past,
what their lives were like.
This tells us nothing,
about 99.999 recurring percent of the population.
This tells us what a very small amount of people, the wealthy elite, did,
the kind of things that they bought and they put on themselves.
So spectacular, yes, I would argue; archeology, no.
And I get that sort of aspect in life,
whenever I say I'm an archaeologist, one of the first questions is,
"What's the best thing you've ever found?"
And I suppose there's that thought
that people expect me to be battling with Nazis in the middle of Egypt,
trying to rescue some kind of important biblical artifact from their evil hands.
And when I say something like this is the best thing I've found,
that makes people shift.
A little uncomfortably. Bodies.
I mean, what's special about a skeleton?
We've all got one. It's not necessarily an amazing find.
But of course, your life's story is embedded in your skeleton.
When someone like myself comes to dig you up, in 1,000 years' time,
your life history is there, it's recorded there,
we could try and reconstruct a part of your life.
So with these two individuals,
they were part of a Bournemouth University excavation which is ongoing.
They're both Iron Age, they both died almost 2,000 years ago, about 50 AD.
Just to point out the sense of ethics about excavating these,
these two individuals are extremely plough-damaged.
You can see the one on your left, part of his face is missing,
a plough has struck it.
He's got a pot, found on his knee, that's partially missing as well.
These are individuals destroyed by agricultural attrition,
so there's a need to excavate and remove them.
Safely take them away and analyze them, look after them, curate them.
Possibly also re-inter them,
but at the moment, we are saving them, and we are trying to understand them.
These are two individuals who saw the Romans arrive in Britain,
they saw a point when Britain was dragged kicking and screaming,
out of prehistory and into history.
When Britain became part of the Mediterranean superpower.
They saw that happen.
Now, at the moment, we haven't got the technological kit to interrogate them,
to interview them, to find out what they thought about this,
when their customs, their language, their religion, their settlement,
everything about their life was in a state of flux and changing.
They lived through that, they saw that occurring.
We can't interview them, sadly,
but there are certain things, of course, that we can do with the bodies.
We can age them, we can identify what age they were when they died.
What's life expectancy in the past?
We always assume that life in the past is short and brutish,
and people only lived for about 20 or 30 years.
So what age did they die?
Are they male or female?
What's their relative health status?
How did they get on through life?
Is there any evidence of the sort of works they were doing in life?
Does that affect the body?
Are they particularly muscular on one side?
Are they doing hard manual labor? Are they working in a field?
Have they got horse-riding injuries?
Lots of different things we can assess about their health.
Their status, of course, we can look at that.
We can gather an idea from what's buried with them.
Things they might have acquired in life.
Not every burial, contrary to what you see in the cinema,
is stuffed full of gold.
Very, very few of them are, in my own experience.
So what they're buried with, because that informs about their life,
or does that tell us more about what those who were there, at the graveside,
wanted to put in with them?
What about their religion?
Most of the burials that we're excavating, that most archaeologists excavate,
have got evidence of the religion in the grave with them.
For these people, they lived in a time before there was a written record,
we don't know what they believed in.
They certainly believed in an afterlife,
because they've got things with them for that journey into their afterlife.
They've got pots with drinks in, they've got joints of meat,
they've got things that facilitate their life,
so they might have a sword, or a spear, or an arrow,
something that they will need in the other world.
We don't understand what their afterlife was,
what their concept of it was,
but there they are, with their objects, to sustain them on that journey.
We can look at aspects of disease;
these are two bones from one of those burials.
The lesions in the ribs suggest there's some kind of respiratory disorder,
possibly tuberculosis,
and that, from our point of view,
I never get excited by tuberculosis, but that's exciting from our viewpoint
because it's one of the earliest examples of that particular disease in Britain.
So we're trying to understand the way in which disease spread,
and the way it affected ancient populations.
Trauma; we've got two individuals here showing these distinct cranial trauma,
so we can see these two people died violently,
in fact, in a very similar way.
There is something akin to a pickaxe,
I don't want to give too much detail if you've had lunch.
But it has impacted upon their head, that being the cause of death.
Is that evidence of inter-tribal warfare?
Is that evidence of sacrifice?
Have these people been executed? Have they been punished?
Is this some kind of accident that has occurred in life?
So by analyzing these, if we're looking at these types of battle injuries,
we will expect to find defensive injuries, across the arms,
there might be other sword cuts.
Anyone who's seen the story of Richard III on the news,
will have listened to discussions about how many injuries he sustained
before he finally died.
So looking at these bodies, we can see that evidence,
the pathology of cranial trauma.
There's Carbon-14 dating; I won't hit you with lots of scientific detail,
but essentially, we can measure the amount on Carbon-14 in bone.
We know how much should be there, we know the decay rate,
by measuring what is in there, we can get an estimate of when that individual died.
If there's no dating, no pottery, or flint, or coins with the body,
we could still date the bone to get a reasonable idea,
within a certain time bracket, of when that person died.
We can look at the DNA.
That's very useful if you've got a large cemetery.
Are those two people up there related?
If there are later burials, are they descendants of the original?
One thing we never know about the past is how static populations were,
whether they are migrating around the landscape, moving around the land,
or whether people stay in the same place for hundreds and thousands of years.
So we can look at the DNA.
Oxygen and Strontium isotope analysis, looking at dental enamel.
Everyone of you will have clues buried in your dental enamel
as to where you grew up.
The kind of water you were drinking
gives you the geological fingerprint of where you grew up.
So if I was excavating you,
I should have a good idea of where you came from and where you migrated to.
That's again very useful,
if we're looking at population studies and movements of people.
There are chemical signatures in bone collagen relating to what you eat,
If you're vegetarian,
your bone collagen signal is going to be very different to one who eats only meat.
If you just eat marine resources, that will be different as well.
So again, there are signatures in your bones that will tell me,
or my archaeological descendants, about your lifestyle.
Facial reconstruction, putting the muscle back onto the skeleton,
we can work out the thickness of muscles, we can put back the face,
and of course, then we could ask questions about skin color, hair color, eye color,
fashions, ethnic identity, cultural markers,
there's a whole series of things that affect the way
in which a person looked in the past.
Rather than just having a blank, naked face,
we should then try and think
if he's male, what sort of facial hair would he have,
if it's female, certainly, in the Roman period,
looking at some of the statues, they had extremely ornate hairdos.
What sort of person are we dealing with?
What sort of fashion signal would they have been sending out
to their comrades, to their fellows.
And, more ongoing, but these are a series of other burials,
which were excavated last year, which were in the news;
a series of five graves.
We've got three females and two male graves.
The male graves, we are dealing with individuals,
they are lying on their backs,
they've got their heads at the east, and their feet at the west,
so we can say straightaway they're not Christian,
because early Christian burials are the other way around,
so that if they sat up, which would be quite a disturbing sight,
they would be facing sunrise, their direction of the Day of Judgment.
They're facing the wrong way, they've got grave goods,
and early Christian communities didn't have grave goods with them
because they don't take their material wealth to their heaven.
There's another one.
They're all lying in coffins, you can't see it very clearly,
but around the body there are little iron nails,
indicating where the walls of the coffin were.
The two male burials have got evidence that they had shoes,
from the tiny little nails around their feet,
which would have been embedded in the soles of their shoes.
The three female graves have all got spindle wells just above the pelvis;
that little dark blob is a bit of weaving equipment.
So they've got graves, it's not high status graves,
but no treasure, nothing Indiana Jones would be happy to find.
There's a rather deviant burial, this is an elderly woman, aged about 80,
who's been decapitated, so cause of death is quite clear there.
Her head has been taken from her shoulders and placed at her side,
but she's still buried with care, reverence, and grave goods.
So the question is, how did she meet this rather gory end?
That's not a cooking accident, that's some kind of significant injury.
But whoever put her into the ground
was still giving her the right stuff for the afterlife
to convey her on that long journey.
And probably the best find, from my point of view, is this one.
This is another female burial, she's about 40 by the time she dies,
we can't see any evidence on the skeleton of cause of death.
She's got a spindle well by her head,
by her feet, you can see this little pottery bowl.
I's a very simple bowl,
we know by analogy with other sites that have been excavated,
in and around southern Britain, that it dates to c.380-390 AD.
But it hasn't gone into the ground fresh.
It's heavily worn, there's about 50 or 60 years' worth of wear on there,
the slip is worn, it's been broken, it's been repaired,
the base has snapped off, it's an heirloom.
We can imagine that passing down from generation to generation,
person to person, for some significant time.
That grave dates to around 450 AD.
"Why is that important?" I hear you scream.
Because that's 50 years after Roman Britain ends.
These are people who were living through economic turmoil, inflation,
mass unemployment, mass immigration, invasion, terrorism, war,
all sort of things the news tells us about today.
They lived through it, and they died in the middle of it,
but they are, essentially, Dark Age graves.
So whereas the news will tell you
something like the Staffordshire Hoard illuminates the Dark Age,
I would argue that's not the case.
Those burials, although they're not traditional archaeological finds,
are of far more worth.
Monetarily, no value at all,
but information-wise, the worth of those five graves
is more significant than anything in that treasure,
because they truly shine a light into the Dark Ages.
Thank you.
(Applause)