The Joys of Archaeology
There are two traditional pictures of the archaeologist. One is summed up in the phrase, "the spade of the archaeologist". This views the archaeologist as a sweating navvy digging deep into loamy soil to discover long-buried monumental statuary such as Layard's Assyrian bulls or Schliemann's many layers of Troy. The other picture is of someone lying on his stomach, armed with a camel-hair brush, delicately brushing dry, sandy dust away from fragile fragments of gold leaf or parchment. Both pictures are abysmally wrong, as I can show by describing the first "dig" I went on with my father.
It is always a shock to the system to be routed out of bed at an unwontedly early hour of the morning. The shock was compounded by the fact that, owing to clocks in Britain being two hours behind those in the Middle East, the 4.30 am alarm was really 2.30 am as far as my body clock was concerned. I turned with a slight shudder from the proffered breakfast and staggered out to the ancient truck that was to take us up to the tel. Ten minutes later an offensively cheerful father trotted out, wiping crumbs of bread off his lips, and jauntily swung up beside me.
At the tel I plodded sleepily up the steep slope behind my 76 year old father, who bounded along like a two-year old on his way to a birthday party.
"Come along!" he urged. "Hurry up and I'll show you where we are going to be digging before the others get in the way."
At the moment I would have been more interested in knowing where I was going to be buried, but I obediently followed him across the flat summit of the tel to a gaping, rectangular hole about twelve feet square and seeming, in the gray pre-dawn darkness, to be about twenty feet deep.
"See that white line down there?" my father enquired, pointing into the depths.
I struggled to focus my bleary eyes and finally made out a thin layer of white dust in the side of the hole just above what seemed to be bed-rock.
"That's a Bronze Age floor," my father informed me in reverent tones more suited to the discovery of Shangri-la or the Holy Grail. "All that dirt above it has accumulated in the last three and a half thousand years."
I nodded. I know what our living room looks like if my wife neglects to vacuum it for a day or two, so three and a half thousand years — yes, it figured. Admittedly the boulders protruding from the side of the pit above the floor seemed a little excessive but an explanation readily occurred to me. Doubtless the woman who had neglected to sweep her floor for three millenia had teen-agers and with teen-agers anything was possible. No doubt, like my teen-agers, they were fond of heavy rock — or should that be heavy rocks?
"Come on," my father said, "Let's go get our tools and get started."
With seventeen or eighteen feet of mess to clean up I expected a pickaxe and a couple of shovels at the very least; in fact, I would have preferred something with the word "power" or "pneumatic" prefixed. I was totally unprepared for the household brush and dustpan which were thrust into my hands.
"What do we do with these?" I asked, aghast.
"You know that floor I showed you?" my father asked. "We're going to sweep it."
Now I am not a male chauvinist. There is absolutely no truth in the rumour that I believe that women should be "bare-foot, pregnant and in the kitchen." As I always say, if my wife spent all her time in the kitchen, who would mow the lawn?
Seriously, though; I do take my turn at doing the dishes and vacuuming the living room but ask me if I enjoy it and I know the answer. "No." The thought of doing the housework for some slut of a Bronze Age housewife who had been too lazy to run a duster over the place once in the last three and a half thousand years was just about too much for me. Only my father's boyish enthusiasm, which it would have been churlish to dampen, kept me going through that awful week. I haven't done any vacuuming since!
All this is by way of introduction to the fact that, just occasionally, the stereotype comes true. Archaeologists working in a quarry at Stanway, near Colchester in Essex, have found their camel-hair brushes coming in very useful in the last couple of weeks.
Colchester, the seat of King Cunobelinus, the original of Old King Cole in the nursery rhyme and possibly of Shakespeare's Cymbelline as well, was one of the early Roman centres in Britain, for the natives were friendly towards the Romans. This friendliness with the invader was later to be brutally punished when Boadiccea revolted, for Colchester was the first city that her tribesmen destroyed, leaving not a single living thing behind them.
Shortly after the Roman reconquest under Claudius Caesar in 43 AD — and many years before Boudiccea — a native British nobleman died. Like most of his kin, he was taken out to Stanway to be buried in the ancient cemetery of the nobles. As was customary at the time, he was interred with a rich hoard of possessions and among the objects placed in his tomb with him was a shallow wooden box containing a popular board game. Probably the game was one to which he had been devoted, for before the tomb was closed up someone opened the box and set up the twenty-four glass pieces for a game — and then made the first move!
That little gesture has made this discovery exceptionally important and interesting. We know that the ancients played board games: Greek vases show pictures of warriors playing a board game, rough squares have been found scratched on convenient flat surfaces in temples, barracks and the paving stones of many an agora, but no one knew how the games were played. Here, for the first time, is a board with the pieces in position, not just for the game but for the start of the game.
The playing area of the Stanway find consisted of two maple boards about 40cm x 26cm, hinged together and edged with bronze. They may have been laid out in squares like a chessboard or, alternatively, marked with horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines. We will never know, for the boards have rotted away completely, leaving only the metal edging. This is a pity, for the markings might help historians to decide whether the game was Latrunculi (Little Soldiers) where the object was to trap your opponent's pieces between two of your own, or another game more similar to modern chequers.
As the grave was excavated the workers first found a single row of ten blue pieces made of glass, each piece 15mm across. Excitement mounted when the curious glass counters were identified as game pieces. As Phillip Crummy, of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, reported: "First we uncovered the whole row of the blue pieces and we said, 'Wouldn't it be great if the white pieces were there as well.' Then, like magic, they appeared."
Careful brushing with soft paint brushes has uncovered the bronze edging to the board, its hinges and other bits of metal which may or may not be related to the game. It has also established that one piece on each side, the pieces directly opposite each other at the end of the rows, had been moved forward. Presumably these were the opening moves in the game, to which the dead man's spirit was supposed to respond in the after-life. If ghosts are as insubstantial as we have always been led to believe, I can only presume that the kindly gesture must have proved endlessly frustrating to the dear departed, who has had two thousand years to think of every possible reply, wthout being able to make the second move!
