The Report on the excavation of a Late Roman building on Alderney which I directed in 2024 has been published in the latest Alderney Society Bulletin. The projects run by our team in Alderney have, since 2008, been written up straight away and an interim report has featured in the next Bulletin.
Reports on archaeological excvations can take years to appear. Funding delays and resource backlogs can add years to the process, meaning a ‘new’ archaeology book can be a decade old before it even hits the shelves. Excavation and research is exciting but writing up can be a slog – the mantra is that post-excavation work takes the same number of man-hours as the excavation did. Too often an excavation director has died before the project is complete, leaving colleagues to pick up the threads and complete a postumous publication.
Being a bit of a completist, I’ve always tried hard to avoid this happening, writing up my projects immediately and agitating for publication. So A Gallo Roman Trading Vessel From Guernsey was written up by Margaret Rule and myself in 1990 and came out in 1993, Roman Pottery in York which I finished writing in 1994 came out in 1997. It’s a maxim in archaeology that publication is an obligation – if it’s not published, the research may as well not have happened. There has since the late twentieth century been a move away from this by commercial archaeology units who have instead published online or created catalogues of what is known as ‘grey literature’ which can he sought out by other researchers. It’s not very useful for the general public though.
I’ve been quiet on the novel writing this year as the obligation to publish over a decade of excavations at the Nunnery, Alderney has come to the fore. An interim report has been published of each of the digs between 2008 and 2022, but these need to be brought together as a whole and research brought up to date. At last, a 65,000 word manuscript is now in draft, plus an appendix of equal size which will not be formally published but will be available online. It is planned that A Late Roman Fort on Alderney will be published in 2026 by BAR Publishing, the world’s leading archaeological publisher.
To find out more about the Nunnery excavations and ongoing projects in Alderney, you can check the Dig Alderney Facebook page or join their newsletter by emailing info@digalderney.gg. The 2024 dig was covered in an earlier blog.
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