I’m currently working on both a heavyweight archaeology textbook and a new archaeology mystery series, so it felt like an apt moment to look back at my own career. This involved some crawling around the loft looking for old photographs from the age before digital photography. The earliest dig photographs include my laying in my sleeping bag. doing the laundry or slumped with my student-digger friends, none of which were intended for public consumption. The most useable shot from the 1980 Tours dig had to be digitally cleaned up as colour photographs from that era tend to fade.
It’s easy to forget the days before we carried a smart phone and photographed everything from our breakfast onwards. using a film camera we might take one 24-shot film away for a ten-week expedition; a quarter would be barely usable and half would be scenic views, leaving just a handful of shots that remain interesting decades later. And of course, no selfies, unless using a self-timer and getting it right first time.
So I have only a handful of shots from the freezing week at Bullock Down and the long hot months at Tours; none that feature me from the gruelling summer at Ahrweiler in the Eifel. None I can find from City Dig, Oldbury Hill, Lihou Island, Port Au Malades or other little sites in Kent or Guernsey that I helped out on and none from the Elizabethan wreck project. I was taking slides during the Guernsey Roman wreck project, and the best shots came from the Press.
Indeed there are very few from the early years on the Nunnery excavations from 2006 as I was chiefly using a video camera, and smartphones were not common until after 2010. Even then I was relying on other team members or press photographers to take action shots unless I staged them.
This really is the archaeology of archaeology. I only recorded what was immediately interesting at the time, or was technically useful. I never imagined that 40 years later they would be needed for a blog written on a computer smaller than my desk and be posted on a science fiction invention called the internet. Nor that my audience would include bots based in China (yes the tracking data can see you) and a tedious parade of scam artists.
Accordingly I’ve reconfigured my website to reflect some of this story, and how it came to influence my fiction writing. It includes more pictures and links to the books that came out of the projects. You can find it here. The bibliography also lists all the short papers and articles arising from my adventures in the world of archaeology.
Cover photo – taken from ‘Meet the Archaeologist’ in York Archaeological Trust’s quarterly magazine Interim, Spring 1991.
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