Dan Snow's History Hit - The Great British Dig

Episode Date: January 25, 2023

We think of archaeology as an exclusionary profession, one reserved for experts in the field. But why isn't the discipline more accessible to the public? Should the past not belong to everybody, and are there some basic skills that anyone can learn to help rediscover our past? The archaeologist and television presenter Chloe Duckworth joins us to give advice on how to become archaeologists in our own back gardens.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Dr Chloe Duckworth joins me on the pod this time. She's a big star, she's one of the co-presenters on the Great British Dig, she's a lecturer in archaeology at Newcastle University. She is the archaeoduck on social media platforms. She has spent a lot of the last year uncovering a lost world of human stories, just shovelfuls beneath our feet. She talks about the Great British Dig, the hit TV show here in the UK. We talked about archaeology, its future, its past, and how we could all be archaeologists. Inspiring stuff. As I say, I met her at Short Valley and she gave us all practical advice on how to be an archaeologist in our own back garden. It was great. My kids bought trowels

straight away. And how to research your local area for clues about what might have been there centuries ago. Do you live on the site, for example, of an old abbey? Let's hope you do. This episode is a great celebration of archaeology and how we can all do it. Enjoy. Black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Let's welcome Chloe to the stage. Thank you for coming on. Thank you. Thanks.

Hello, everybody. Chloe Duckworth, legend, archaeologist. Chloe, how's it going? It's good, thanks. It's great here. I've never been before. I love it. Well, you're among friends here.

What is amazing about your latest work and about you is you're not exclusionary. You say that we can all be archaeologists, which is very exciting indeed. Yeah, I genuinely believe this. I'm not just saying it to flatter people. I think if you are interested in the things around you and you're interested in the past and how those two things come together, you know, just the objects that we use and make, then you are doing archaeology and also in my book i do have various sections throughout the book which show you how you could actually dig a trench in your own back garden but isn't that because

as someone who occasionally gets beaten up with baseball bats for calling himself a historian by other historians real historians isn't that a bit alarming that someone might go into their back garden and just dig up a trench and not do it properly? Well, you know, you have to learn. You have to learn somehow, and the only way to learn how to do something is by doing it.

And you could happily go into your garden and dig a fish pond. If you're going to do that, why not follow a few simple rules and try to dig a trench? Sell it to people, because I've spent my time in quite a few trenches finding little bits of things. And people tease you about it sometimes. Your normal friends tease you, don't they?

I'm sure you've had normal interactions with normal people. I mean, this probably doesn't need much convincing, but what do you love about it? Why does it matter? Why should we care what's underground? And even in our back gardens, not just on the great you know terracotta warriors or ankle what but even in all of our little plots in our back gardens oh my goodness because it's actually incredible so this is what doing the great british dig making the show has shown me because i was never going to be digging in someone's back garden that never occurred to me until we made the show and then what you find is even if you put in a one meter by one meter trench

there's so much in there and it might be quite mundane stuff it might be pipe stems or little fragments of pottery hold on those are the best things i've ever found mundane stuff pipe stems and pottery is like that's my nirvana yeah i think there's a line in detectorist where he wants to be an archaeologist and he says uh oh you know to get to do the good stuff like a pottery yeah so yeah maybe i'm a bit privileged maybe i'm a bit spoiled but it's there it's everywhere and it's this is ours it's all of ours you know because it's under our feet it's the people who've gone before us and it's the real ordinary people like us it's not the kings and queens and sort of movers of history it's everybody and history happens especially in this little island we live on.

History has happened everywhere and in the most remarkable places. And it's likely that if you dig in your back garden, you probably will. I mean, there's a density of human activity on this little island of ours, which means a lot of stuff underground. It really does. So the way I imagine it now, especially having done the show and working with people in their gardens, I just think always of the soil and all the things that are under it all the time,

you know, everywhere you go. And when you dig out this little metre square, you sort of think there's so much in that. How much is there in the rest of the area? There is nowhere that doesn't have some interesting archaeology. Dig it all up, that's what I say. HS2, very, very inefficient, but a good way of digging a trench right up the spine of the country.

And obviously lots of amazing things we should talk about at HS2, actually. Where were you, right across the country? We do our best to be everywhere. And we're doing our best, if we do another series, to go to some of the places that we haven't been yet. But yes, we've been multiple places in England. We've done a dig in Scotland, and hopefully we'll be moving around a bit and biggest surprises or highlights what can you show us so one of my favorite finds was one of these things that i might describe as quite mundane

it was such a simple thing but just to set the context we're working in oswestry near to the welsh border and we're working on what was a workhouse so a poor house in the 19th century so the story of that could be quite a sad story you've got men women and children going there because they can't afford to feed themselves and it's very tough life and you know the conditions are not great right Charles Dickens style thing but what we actually saw was that over time and we saw this in the archaeology over time they made a lot of improvements and they really tried to give people a good life in this place and give them an opportunity and my favorite thing that we found

there was a little slate pencil that a child would have used to write on a slate when they were taking their lessons so this kid was getting their education and they'd sharpened this pencil. You could see where they'd sharpened it so carefully. And I felt like this was just such a beautiful way of touching that person who I don't know their name. I don't know what happened to them, but they were there as a child, carefully looking after this pencil

that was maybe their key to a better life. Those moments where you find something that moving just make everything worth it. I want to hear some other highlights, but I do also just want to say, because I'm a generalist, I love flitting around very promiscuously from project to project, period to period,

ancient Egypt to Cold War. You archaeologists are a bit like that as well, aren't you? So you have to be confident when you're going to dig a hole, you have to be ready to find Victorian, Roman, Second World War. So do you have a really good general sense of history as well? I think you sort of have to. And if you don't have one, you do develop it.

I mean, what they used to do in the very early days of archaeology is they would just dig through everything until they got to the period they were interested in and chuck it. But these days, we don't do that. And so, yes, absolutely, even recent 20th century stuff is recorded and noted. But you must all have something you've trained in, you have a passion for. Yeah. What's yours? And why is it the 18th century?

It's not. When I'm not doing the TV show, I work as a lecturer. And so I do a lot of research, my own research. And that's mostly nowadays in southern Spain and looking at medieval... Well, I bet it is. Medieval archaeology. Yeah, I mean, it's a hard job, right? But someone's got to do it.

God, that's so exciting. And is that pre-Islamic Christian transition? So this covers that period. So I'm looking at the way that different people interacted, different religions, different social groups, and how they interacted and the technologies that they made as well. How close to truth can you get as an archaeologist? On one hand, they're so essential, these clues.

On the other hand, it's like looking at any of our bedrooms, the bottom two inches of the bedroom floor on any particular day, and then trying to extrapolate how we live. Maybe you can, maybe worryingly you can. How close do you think you can get? Well, it's a really good question. I think there's a line in Indiana Jones where he says archaeology is a search for facts, not truth, or something like that. I can't remember. But it's like

doing a jigsaw puzzle, but most of the pieces are missing. It's detective work, really. But again, we never really get to solve the case. All our cases are cold, and we never know if we've really solved them. But there's a sense in which the sorts of information we can get from archaeology are very different so if I were to

look at what was surviving of say somebody's bedroom or you know if we were to just literally go through your rubbish bin which is quite a rude thing to do I think but actually archaeologists have done this they've done rubbish projects as well I'd be able to tell a lot about the way we live but it might not be the things that we think would be prominent. We're avid consumers. We throw away a lot of stuff. It would tell me about diet. Might not tell me about the things that we'd expect.

Yeah. You'd learn that my family are avid Rice Krispies eaters if you went through our rubbish. Tell me some of the other highlights from the series. Oh, so many. One of the ones that I really enjoyed doing was we were working in gardens, but also in a school playing field

because there were these photographs, aerial photographs taken from a plane in the 1950s, and they showed marks in the grass that looked like what you tend to see when you have Bronze and Iron Age settlement. So we knew there was a settlement in the area, but we were digging in the playing field looking for something else. So we didn't expect to settlement in the area, but we were digging in the playing field looking for something else.

So we didn't expect to find a roundhouse under the school playing field, but that's what we found. It hadn't shown up in the photographs. The kids were learning about the Iron Age, and literally out of the school window was a roundhouse. Amazing. So it was wonderful. That is the dream. It's like Ross

killed a Viking museum finding all the Viking ships as they were building the museum. So you found a roundhouse as the kids were studying it. That's the dream. It's like Ross Kilder Viking Museum finding all the Viking ships as they were building the museum. So you found a roundhouse as the kids were studying it. That's so cool. It was so cool and they were so excited. And you don't find much

because everything was built of stuff that rots. So what we really found was a stain in the soil where it's a different colour. But it's telling us so much about what was there. And then we also found there was a pit, and at the bottom of the pit, somebody had put a little arrowhead that they'd napped from stone.

During the Bronze Age, because you think of the Bronze Age, they all go to metal, but actually in the early part of it, they're still using a lot of stone tools because the technology is good and it works. So again, we also managed to find things as well which was nice very exciting i'll just quickly say during endurance going to antarctica i've seen lots of school teachers and they plan projects kids learn about shakhtan and then at the end of the term shakhtan ship was discovered so the kids were like yeah that was a good time and the teachers were like yeah just it won't be like that every the class project won't always be

like that so you're looking won't always be like that. So you're looking at aerial photographs there. You've got the ground penetrating radar that we all know and love from watching your show and Time Team and everything. What big technical excitements are there in your field that means in 20, 30 years' time we're going to be learning unimaginable things and seeing perhaps non-invasively or learning more about skeletons? What's coming down the pipe way? Oh, there's quite a bit.

I mean, I think often when stuff stuff comes in we get kind of really excited and we get new technologies and everyone got obsessed with 3d printing a while ago and things so we do tend to kind of jump on them maybe sometimes a bit too quickly but there's just so much stuff i mean you mentioned lidar which uses laser scanning and can see below trees and see what's there which is just brilliant i work in kind of archaeological science in my research so i do analyze stuff using electrons to see things because the things that we're looking at are too small for the wavelength of light so it's kind of cool in terms of what's coming though i think just quickly though what does that allow you to see the things that you can see so um i mean i like it yeah but why do we why do

we do that? So this is kind of like reverse engineering, right? So how is something made? How did people do it? By looking at it on that tiny scale, we can get clues, and then we can compare them with stuff that we make as well. So I do a lot of stuff where I just reconstruct things to see how they were made in the past as well.

So we can get the wonderful gentleman who can make an arrowhead out of iron in their technique, and we can compare that. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So it's one of the ways in which we test this stuff. And there's stuff like, we still do this sometimes, but we used to painstakingly draw everything that we dug. And now you can use photogrammetry. So you set up some markers, you walk around the trench,

you take photos, you shove it in a computer, do some stuff to it, and you've got a 3, you walk around the trench, you take photos, you shove it in a computer, do some stuff to it. And you've got a 3D model that you can turn, that you can explore. Oh, my goodness, it's just revolutionized everything because it saves so much time. You listen to Dan Snow's history. We'll talk to Chloe Duckworth about archaeology. More coming up. To be continued... Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. you have been an advocate for saving archaeology in terms of the planning process in terms of you're fighting on all these different fronts um is archaeology under threat it's so popular your programs you ever you can see the people that go there say what is going on with archaeology what do we need to be aware of well it, I don't know if it's under threat. I think actually the main thing to know is that archaeology in the UK

is something we do really, really, really well. We've got the top four archaeology departments in the world are all in the UK. We have a system that incorporates archaeology into planning and everything that is the envy of most parts of the world. There are very few places that have such a good system. So it's just about protecting it. And as we get changes to planning and stuff, it's quite a dry topic really, isn't it, planning and development?

Even when I say the words, I just think, oh. But we actually really have to protect the archaeology because actually the archaeology is a really exciting part of that. And actually, if archaeologists are involved in this process, it often adds value because then the estate where you live, you've got a bit of a Roman wall that's been preserved there. It's a great thing and we just need to fight for it and protect it. But I also really want to promote the idea that archaeology is for everyone.

And I really want people to get involved because it's just so much fun. If you haven't done it, do it. It is so much fun. And it's not even it, do it. It is so much fun. And it's not even about finding stuff, actually, weirdly, isn't it? It's about being there on the day and the atmosphere. It's so exciting. As a great ambassador for archaeology, tell us all, help us to articulate

why life is better when you know what's under your feet, when you can read a landscape, when you can read buildings, the town. Why does that make us richer, not often in terms of money, but lead richer lives? Well, you'll never be bored. So if you sort of start learning to see the world like an archaeologist, everywhere there is some interesting clue, whether it's a street name,

whether it's the way the bumps are in a field. And also it makes you reflect on kind of our own culture and material culture, everything that's around us today. And I like to sort of sit and think, what would survive of the things around us? You know, most of them wouldn't survive after a few hundred years. And think about what that would look like. So it just enriches you.

And as I say, you can't be bored. I completely agree. So it's a great gift never to be bored in your life. Teach us how to read. I mean, we can't say anything at the moment because we're in a tent and it's full of umbrellas but um when you walk down the street give us some practical tips without even digging under the ground give us some tips about how we can all be archaeologists yeah so it's being an archaeologist is about thinking and asking questions about the things

around you whether they're modern or whether they're historical. Obviously, the country we live in is what I call a palimpsest. It's just layers and layers and layers of history all interwoven. You can also do things online. So National Library of Scotland has all the Ordnance Survey maps freely available. You can go and find out what your area looked like for the past 150 years in quite a rich amount of detail.'s just there freely available but if you're walking down the street and you notice the name of the street that's giving you a clue often often streets are named after the things they knocked down when they put the street in so there's a clue there as well look at whether uh there's been some bricking up of part of a building you can look at bricks to tell how old the house is so if all the bricks

are all long you're just seeing the long side that house was built after the 1930s because then they had cavity walls so even bricks can be exciting in terms of just giving you a clue about when things were built that's cool i didn't know that right let's get more practical here meter square in the back garden yeah how do we responsibly archaeologize that square okay the first thing you do is you have to check online that you're not digging on a protected site uh darn it if you live in hampton court don't do this and there are sites scheduled monuments and also check the treasure laws because if you do find something and you responsibly report it then it's done legally and it is yours anyway.

Treasure. So treasure, gold, silver, any of that stuff, the treasure laws are out there as well. And that's the same thing that detectorists use as well. And then you want to get it nice and neat. So we use good old Pythagoras from school maths to make sure that we can get a nice square that's completely square you had me until the treasure bit the pythagoras make me a bit sweaty here but if you're digging on grass you want to take off the turf and then once you're looking at the soil underneath the turf you can take out the smaller tools you can buy an archaeological trowel for

under 1010 online. Better to use that. Don't do what I did when I was very young on my first ever dig and buy a gardening trowel and then be incredibly embarrassed. Yeah, who would do that? I've definitely never turned up the gardening trowels. So an archaeology trowel is more like a plasterer's trowel. It's got a nice flat. I know that now, yeah.

You learn the hard way this is what i say you learn through mistakes right okay so we've got a square here we've got the grass off the square we're looking for treasure folks it's gonna be exciting all right so with the trowel you're now just going down through the layers so what you're doing is you're using the trowel to feel and to see you're looking as well looking for changes in the soil because those changes are going to tell you something so whatever you find in a particular layer you're going to be able to use things that you can date to help date the layer itself when it went down and what's the earliest or the latest it could have gone down so actually by digging like that and by looking for

changes and then you dig if you see a change in the soil you try to work out which thing happened latest so if you were to go now and dig a pit into the ground and then fill dig, if you see a change in the soil, you try to work out which thing happened latest. So if you were to go now and dig a pit into the ground and then fill it in with rubbish, over time the soil in that pit would look a different colour because it's got different stuff in it. If you see that as an archaeologist, you see the pit, the outline of the pit, you go, right, well, that's the thing that happened last was it got filled in. So you always take out the last thing first.

So it's like a reverse engineering again. And that way everything in that pit you know that it belongs together and so not only do you find things but you can understand how the things relate to each other and what's happened there and build a picture of it is it possible to say rough or is it completely different from completely different neighborhoods how far down you have to go to get to say say, the 18th century or Roman Bronze Age. Is there a rule of thumb? There is no rule of thumb

because it's completely dependent on what's happened in that area. Some places are eroding. Other places, if you've got kind of rich land that's got a lot of stuff going on, it's going to decompose. That's how the soil builds up. So when plants and animals die, it creates a new layer of soil. So one of the places

we dug out there were roman finds directly underneath a trampoline that the kids have been jumping on other sites we had to go down two meters to find something similar so it's there's no rule you just have to dig and find out do you realize when you've got to the bottom of the pit when do you stop digging well you stop either when it gets dangerous to keep going down, or we tend to stop... Sometimes you hit the bedrock, or you might hit what we call the natural, which is where you can tell, with experience at least, that there are no human finds in it.

And, you know, sometimes if you're not sure, you just dig a bit, and there's not human finds, you know know but stuff that people did is not present and so you don't worry about people like us just digging stuff up and going for it given in we might be the act of digging is also destroying isn't it it is yeah and archaeology is in a sense destruction which is why when we're looking at a big site unless something's going in and they're building something and it can't be saved we'll dig a portion of it so that we leave some spare

it's not the way they do it everywhere in the world the Germans have a habit of going and just digging up entire areas but I think it's better to do it like that I don't worry about people doing it though because as I said you could literally go and put a fish pond in your garden that would be fine so why not do a small go and put a fish pond in your garden. That would be fine.

So why not do a small trench and get a feel for it? Because this thing shouldn't be privileged. It shouldn't belong just to people like me who have the absolute luck to be paid to do it. It should be for everyone. And some of the best archaeologists there have ever been were amateurs. That's right. Let's finish up just quickly. There's so much archaeology.

It's in the news a lot at the moment. You might have seen it. There was the recent find in the Chilterns, the early medieval extraordinary Anglo-Saxon burial site. HS2 has been amazing for you and your profession, right? Because we've just dug this trench between two of the most important cities on this island, and you've been finding unbelievable things. Is that quite an exciting time in archaeology? It is exciting. It's worth saying that we don't necessarily always agree.

I know there are issues around the development. We don't blame you for chopping down the trees. Essentially, if it's going to be done anyway, then we're going to find out so much. There have been some extraordinary sites. I think it just highlights how rich we are in this stuff. It literally is everywhere.

You cannot dig in this country and not find something. It is extraordinary. Chloe, thank you. What a great ambassador for archaeology, something that we're really good at in this country and we all love. So thank you for coming and talking to us about it. Thank you. Thank you.