Dan Snow's History Hit - The Fight to Save Archaeology

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Archaeology is not just about digging, it’s about understanding the human experience of existence. In the space of a few weeks there have been many sad developments in archaeology in the UK. Sheffield University announced the closure of its world-renowned archaeology department, shortly before Liverpool’s waterfront was stripped of its UNESCO World Heritage status, which preceded the news that Stonehenge is also at risk. In this episode, Dan is joining the fight to save archaeology. He chats with TV presenter, archaeological scientist and lecturer at Newcastle University, Chloe Duckworth and Executive Director of the Council for British Archaeology, Neil Redfern, about the importance of the discipline. They discuss why archaeology matters, why it’s a good subject to study, and, in a world facing issues like a global pandemic and climate change, why put funding into digging up the past?For more information on how you can campaign to save archaeology in the UK, head to: www.dig4arch.co.uk

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm Dan Snow. How are you all doing this beautiful, beautiful week? We are hooking up with an important campaign on the podcast today. We are joining the fight to save archaeology. We've had big and sad developments here in the UK, in the world of archaeology. Liverpool, the jewel of the Northwest, has lost its UNESCO World Heritage status because of all the new building around the docks. That's kind of archaeology. Perhaps more importantly, the University of Sheffield announced it's closing its archaeology department down.

And now, amazingly, Stonehenge HQ, one of the world's greatest sites, is probably about to be listed as at risk by UNESCO because the government's cavalier attitude to drilling a few tunnels under that sacred monument. It's tough times. It's tough times for archaeology at the moment. We're being attacked on all sides. So this is a call to arms.

It's time to blow the trumpet. It's time to raise the standard like King Charles I at Nottingham. Actually, not like him. But it's time to get involved. We have got on this podcast the brilliant Chloe Duckworth. She's an archaeological scientist. She's a lecturer in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University. She's a great TV presenter. We've also got Neil Redfern. He is the Executive Director of the Council for British

Archaeology. It's the all-star cast on this podcast. And I asked Chloe, I asked Neil, why archaeology matters, why it's a good thing to study, why we should care when there's all the other problems in the world, And they make a very compelling case. So I hope you agree and I hope you add your weight, your voice to the campaign to save archaeology. If you want to listen to other podcasts about archaeology, like when we went to Stonehenge, or when we talked about the Sutton Hoo ship recovery, or the time when we dug up that Jacobite Highland lair, check if he's had a head, long story, please become a subscriber to History Hit,

where we have all of our TV shows, all of our podcasts about the ads. You just go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix and Audible just for history. I mean, it's amazing really when you think about it. So head over there for a very small subscription. You get access to all that. And you get 30 days free if you sign up today.

But in the meantime, folks, here's Chloe Duckworth and Neil Redfern. Enjoy. Chloe and Neil, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Thank you. Good morning. Right, guys, listen. Rhetorical question coming up here, OK? The world is melting down.

We've got record temperatures in North down. We've got record temperatures in North America. We've got catastrophic flooding. We have got economic inequality. We've got wars. The democracies are crumbling in front of our eyes. Why should we spend money on digging up bits and bobs out of the ground, looking at the past? Come on. Do you know, the past is so important to people. I mean, to use a very bleak example, we saw this in Syria with the war there, that people were willing, in fact, to go as far as risking their own lives to protect their heritage. So the past, archaeology, heritage, they are clearly important to people. But more than that,

if you are willing to spend money tearing through some ground to put up a new development, then a tiny proportion of that money that goes on archaeology, I think, is very well spent. Neil, what about you? You have such an important lobbying position. What do you say when people are saying, you know, COVID, hospitals, future pandemics, why on earth are we spending money on archaeology? you know, COVID, hospitals, future pandemics, why on earth are we spending money on archaeology? Okay, so for me, the most critical thing about archaeology is it doesn't actually have anything to do with the past. It's actually about who we are in the present. We as archaeologists live in the present. And what we do is we draw from the human narrative that has got us to this place. And so actually, if you look at what we do, fundamentally, we study the process of failure, societal failure, societal change. So that actually gives us a unique skill set in understanding the challenges around change

that we experience today. So actually, when you think of archaeology, it's not really about telling the story of people who lived before us. It's actually drawing through their experiences to help us cope with this completely uncertain world you've just presented. Archaeologists are unique amongst any discipline or any subject in the ways they actually look at the places and the people around them and how we interact with them. And we use incredible time depth to actually bring that story and those narratives to a relevant audience today. Obviously, I completely agree, guys. I always say to people, everyone I

know that loves history, it doesn't just have this kind of bizarre, detached obsession with things that happened a thousand years ago we love this mad journey that we're all on these human beings and actually loving history and archaeology opens up your field of rather than just being able to gossip about you and your mates and their past experience over the last few years you're able to have the biggest possible canvas you can gossip about what happened when alexander the great died or when rising sea levels threatened settlement on the east coast of england you know, in various periods throughout our history. So obviously completely agree with you guys.

Why don't you both talk about some interesting archaeological projects at the moment that you feel do speak to this moment and are of, I don't want to just tie everything to practical relevance, but you think are really interesting to think about at the moment. Okay, so for me, the most interesting and relevant and really fascinating project that I've been involved in at the moment is the work around the closing of Bootham Crescent Football Ground in York. So the football club are moving to a new stadium and Historic England, who I used to work for,

have funded Jason Wood to do, basically was to record the final year of a football ground and to understand what that meant to record the final year of a football ground and to understand what that meant to the people who were there. And it's featured in our British Archaeology magazine in the last edition. And whilst that was happening, Jason organised some excavations on the pitch to try and locate the ashes of supporters who had been interned there. And what you actually found is archaeology at its transformational best, because you got football supporters coming to this place they loved and adored, which encapsulated so many memories. That came up against archaeologists trying to recover knowledge and understanding. And on one occasion, Jason was

actually excavating next to a lady who was looking to locate the ashes of her sister, who had died 15 years previously. The sister said, I never thought I'd expect to dig up my sister. And Jason replied, I never thought to be excavating human remains next to their living relatives. And it added a completely different perspective to the archaeological process, but was also relevant around how places encapsulate memory and meaning. Lovely. Chloe, how about you? Yeah, it's such a beautiful one that Neil's mentioned, because it's about community, and it's about local place, and archaeology is all of that. From my point point of view with the work that's being done by academic archaeologists there's a lot of stuff being done lately on sustainability and also climate change and of course as Neil mentioned archaeology is this discipline that gives us this unique long-term perspective on climate change and such

issues which obviously affected well they affected humans in the past and they affect us now and they will continue to affect us and so personally I've been doing some research along with some brilliant colleagues on recycling and reuse in the past and we've been looking at the difference in attitudes to it and And today, we have a very particular way of understanding recycling. We think, well, you know, it's good to recycle, you know, you put things in the right bin and they go off and they get recycled. But there's a lot of anthropological work that shows that recycling economies can be quite damaging. If we look at the way it was done in the past, there was a lot more personal responsibility for

your waste. And so reuse was just easier than having to find a way of disposing of it. To take another example, a colleague of mine is doing some research on water management, traditional water management in North Africa. And what we're seeing is because people today are very obsessed with kind of technological innovation and novelty, people today are very obsessed with kind of technological innovation and novelty. The traditional methods have been sort of swept out of the way by these really destructive ones using diesel to ground pump. And of course, this depletes the water table. And so a place that's been providing enough water for irrigation for centuries, in some cases, even millennia, is depleted very quickly. So in terms of very contemporary questions about sustainability, about recycling, about how we interact with our environment,

archaeology is absolutely the best way to understand that human-environment interaction. I couldn't agree more. I'm so fascinated by the projects I've been lucky enough to visit around humans dealing with sea level rise, climate change, afforestation, deforestation, whether it's the Greenland Norse or other places I've been lucky enough to visit around humans dealing with sea level rise, climate change, afforestation, deforestation, whether it's the Greenland Norse or other place I've seen. And it just makes you think so profoundly about what we are about to go through because it's coming for us. The thing I'm very struck by is in Britain, this might not seem very contested.

An island, of course, is and archaeology has a very powerful political dimension there. And obviously, the projects I've visited in Israel-Palestine, archaeology really matters. And also in other areas where, for example, communities seek to lay claim to customary rights, to indigeneity. In a world where we talk a lot about identity, archaeology is very important for many of these communities in these contested places. The key thing about this is that if we don't have the ability to have a wide range of archaeological voices then it's about who owns the past isn't it? If we don't keep funding archaeology, if we don't keep prioritising archaeology then the people with a vested interest are going to be those who are going to go in and I don't mean indigenous, I mean far more nefarious interests. And the classic example is the way that the Nazi party in the 1930s and 40s used archaeology

in order to construct a racist narrative that fuelled their actions. But there are many more examples of this. What I find fascinating about this is we've almost created the concept of contested heritage in order to package it and put it in a box that in some senses we say is too difficult to deal with, but also in a sense what it does is it allows us to then think about everything else as being safe? Well, for me, all heritage is contested. There is not a single thing that is not. You, I and Chloe will all think and perceive things differently. In the fundamental thing in there, the only reason why we're together is as human

beings, we like to have conversations about those things. So what is the skill set you need to manage and understand the values and the perceptions we're talking about when everything is open to challenge and debate and discussion? And I think so often what we actually see is this real tension between what people would now talk about as authorised heritage discourse and actually what everyone else on the planet wants to actually talk about. Who creates those perceptions of heritage and who actually really lives perceptions of heritage? And I think, you know, from a Western point of view, we've got an awful lot we can learn from indigenous cultures who use oral history as their main way of telling their story and how they will take that story and adapt it for the

circumstances of the present. They don't have that history to set it in stone that can never be changed or rewritten. They actually have it there to understand the relevance of the issues they're actually facing today. And so I feel the really important thing we've got to do is understand that heritage and archaeology and history is all about multiple perspectives. And it's how do we actually improve the skill set to navigate through that sort of really dynamic world. Which is why, Neil, I'm looking out my window now at the glistening waters of the Solent. And thanks to Gary Momber and his brilliant team at the Maritime Archaeology Trust, we know that the world's oldest shipbuilding site is underwater just a mile or two west of me now,

which is why I live in the best place on earth and everyone should get on a boat and celebrate it. That's my use of archaeology today. But also, Neil, you touched on something really important there because we've seen a high-profile closure of an archaeology department in a British university, very sadly. Let's talk a little bit more about the skills, because this is something that Team History talk a lot about. Studying archaeology doesn't mean you're on your hands and knees in the mud all day,

getting sunburned and having a few beers. It's a great thing to study, whether or not you intend to pursue it as a career or not, right? Archaeology gives you the skill sets to actually hold conversations about the very meaning of human existence. We are almost about humanity. And I often find that one of the most important skills you need to be a really effective archaeologist or heritage practitioner is actually empathy, the ability to allow people to hold their own perspectives. And archaeology is not about digging. Archaeology is about understanding the human experience of existence. And, you know, so often we're pigeonholed into this idea that all our relevance is a trowel and the material culture of the past.

And I think that actually really belittles the public value and the impact that we actually have by enabling people to ask questions about themselves and about the places they exist in. Archaeology is fundamentally about questions, not necessarily answers. You're listening to Down to Notes History. We are fighting to save archaeology. More fighting after this. Imagine a millennium that laid the foundations for the modern world as we know it today, when kingdoms were forged, languages shaped, cultures created.

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we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Chloe, what do you tell the young people that come to study that flock to study with you about what they're going to get you know to be fair to them how they're going to learn and grow and enrich their lives well a degree course in archaeology of course it's not the only route in but a degree

course in archaeology whether you intend to go into archaeology or into any other field, is one of the few courses that gives you can adapt the flexibility of having done a really actually wide range of types of assessment for example you know this is not a degree course where you can just get by writing multiple essays if you are a young person recently graduated and you go to a job interview they are going to be asking you questions like, can you tell me about a time where you faced a challenge and how did you address that challenge? And you are going to have a lot more to say if you've been on a field school, if you've been working in a group as a team to resolve something in the university classroom, then you're going to be able to say from for example you know well this piece

of coursework was quite difficult but in the end I finished it so archaeology degrees are really powerful things because they teach us these skills early on that we can take forward to pretty much any workplace and it's as Neil said it's about interaction and everything we do at work is about human interaction anyway it's about interaction god i tell you the digs i've been on there's been plenty of interaction going on and asking questions dealing with complex data sets trying to work things out i mean it's axiomatic stuff isn't it and the other thing i found i'll actually as you say it's degree level course they're not the only way in it's such a democratic it is so diverse i really mean that

i was at a dig the other day in the heart of england near derby and looking for viking material and there was a retired surgeon there who decided to have a second career and started just volunteering and is working his way up the ranks of being archaeologists obviously young people from every background it was a person of limited mobility there was something about you guys you archaeologists i don't know what you've done, but you've broadened it. Maybe it's all the TV stuff. I don't know. What do you think, Chloe? Oh, it's wonderful, isn't it? This is what I love. I mean, the TV show that I work on, The Great British Dig, we work with local communities. So we go from one local community to another. And oh, the joy that we bring people is amazing it's absolutely humbling and you know

yes archaeology we've worked with breaking ground heritage that works with ex-military personnel who've had various types of trauma and I'm telling that to you as though you don't know about this but there's so much amazing stuff that links archaeology with well-being, that links archaeology with bringing the past to life, bringing things into local communities. And it is, yeah, as you said, genuinely democratic and diverse. So we've told everyone why it's so great to study. We've told everyone why it's important.

But this is the other weird thing. Within our planning system, there is something very frustrating, no doubt. If you're trying to build a nice building, we need to build more homes. Too many people are homeless in this country. It'll be hospitals and all sorts of exciting things. But we also want, before we just concrete things over forever or actually destroy it, well, digging into the ground destroys it, absolutely. We do want to investigate what's there.

We want to have a look, we want to hold things up. Why is that Neil? Why should archaeology have the power to make us delay these essential infrastructure projects and things? What is it about tipping our hat to the past before we go on to build gigantic shiny buildings that is important? In terms of planning for me archaeology is fundamentally about place making and place shaping and creating engaging places for people to live. And I'll give you one example of a project I was involved in in a town in Doncaster. The town's called Thorn. It's an ex-mining community, but it was also a brilliant medieval settlement. It's just got one of the best planned settlements you could find. And there was a medieval Motten Bailey castle there. And there was a piece of wasteland next to it.

And for years, when I worked for Historic England, we tried to prevent a supermarket being built on that site. That would have cut off this amazing monument from the town. We then got involved in a conversation with a local authority where they asked, what would we think about building an extra care facility? And our approach was to say, yeah, absolutely, so long as you make the focal point of that building the Mott & Bailey Castle. And indeed, we actually developed a project that continued out so well that we agreed that a footpath would be built through the outer defences into the Mott & Bailey Castle, so that it became the borrowed landscape and extra garden of that

care facility. With this concept that when the resident GP was there they would be able to prescribe twice around the Mott each day. So this was actually a form of social prescribing solution. So archaeology isn't there just to be mitigated for. It's not about sterilising landscapes. It's actually about making meaningful places. Now, I think we've got a lot more we can do around that and there are a lot more creative responses. The challenge with the planning system at the moment is archaeology has been boxed into this concept of mitigation. The development happens, you've got to deal with the archaeology. Well, planning reform might enable us to get more upstream, to be more creative with actually how we then use that archaeology? It's not just about getting the knowledge into an academic tome, it's about making

it relevant to the local people and the places we want to create. Yeah, I think that is such an important point. I'm half Canadian and my grandparents' farm north of Canada was rich farmland, rolling hills, red barns with silver roofs and a beautiful agricultural scenery. And it's now destroyed, like literally bulldozed. The hills have been flattened. It's in subdivisions. And the fact that no nod has been given

to its heritage and archaeology makes it a less nice place to live. We know, don't we, Chloe and Neil, that actually we're not just being kind of bohemian middle-class losers sitting around in our studies the market agrees like you get more money if you're in the wonderful Williamite dockyard development in Plymouth you know per square foot your extraordinary project you've just described Neil I'm sure that'll be far more desirable than a identikit development might have been we're on the right side debate the bait here, weirdly, intellectually, but also commercially, I think, aren't we?

Oh, absolutely. And also, you know, proper archaeological consultation saves developers money, because whatever you do, if you unexpectedly happen upon some kind of graveyard or something, you know, what are you going to do at that point? You know, you're probably going to wish that you'd talked to an archaeologist and known that it was going to be there I mean that's a ridiculously extreme example but yeah it adds huge value I mean just on a totally anecdotal personal level when I've been again working with all the local communities that we film with we say to people the first thing we say is did you know there was a Roman fort under your house? And they say, yes, it's why we bought the house. You know, we love history.

I think this nation is a nation of people who love history and the past. We really do. And so it does add value and it adds a sense of place and a sense of pride in place and pride in local community. But in some of the more deprived parts of the country I think we sorely need. And if you are looking at a world in 30 years time which is concrete, steel and Starbucks, its singularity of place, that unique history, that modern Bailey Castle, that Roman fort that's half eroded on the coast of North Kent, that's uniqueness, that's why people are travelling. I think that's what we're going to seek in the future.

And that heritage archaeology is an oil well that's never, ever going to run dry. And brackets doesn't threaten life on this earth either. So we're all in agreement here, folks. Neil and Chloe, what can we do? What's going on? How do we get involved and help? Well, we, at the moment, our big challenge

is that the government have been talking for a while now about planning reform. This is in England. So if you are in England, write a letter to your MP urging them to make sure that archaeology is specifically protected in the planning reform bill when it goes through. If you want some help to do that, we have a template on our website, dig4arch.co.uk. It's dig with a number four, A-R-C-H.co.uk. And there's a template on that that you can use, that you can personalise and tailor to where you are and write to your MP and say, we need you to bring this up. Yeah, particularly if, like me, you have a local MP who is from a party who is apparently called the Conservative Party. Amazing, isn't it?

The name's in the title, folks. Conservative. Neil, what about you? OK, so I think there are three things that we really need to focus on. And these are a bit longer term than necessarily the crisis here and now that Chloe's brilliantly articulated. So the first thing is, I think we've all got to get to a better perception of what archaeology is. OK, the fact that people still think that we're Indiana Jones and we've got a trowel in our hand

is actually not right. We are a process that's far more deeper and far more engaging. So I think listening to people and understanding a wider perception and getting that across will help us demonstrate the impact of what we do and ultimately the public value of what we do. I think we've absolutely got to empower everyone to realise that they can all join in this conversation and that there is an archaeologist effectively in every one of us. And what I mean by that is archaeology is fundamentally about asking questions. It's asking questions about humanity and who we are and how we've got to this place. And the most powerful question in archaeology is the simplest. And everyone has this question. And it's why.

It's only got three letters and it's the first question every single archaeologist has ever asked. What happens is when you become an academic or a professional you tend to forget you asked the why question when 90% of the population is still on that question. So we as archaeologists need to help empower that question because fundamentally it is what defines the rest of what we do. And then the final thing you can do is you can get involved in our Festival of Archaeology. So you can get over to the CBA's website, you can actually get online and you can find out what's going on in your local places. Well, you've inspired me. The why is why I started this podcast and why go out of bed every day. Why is this all happening? What's going on?

And where's it all going? Chloe, Neil, archaeology is lucky to have two such wonderful champions as you two. Good luck with it and come back soon. Let us know what we can do. Thank you so much. Thank you. All the traditions of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks.

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