Archaeology
We have a huge variety of objects in our collection and I am constantly reminded of this as they come through for cleaning, photographing and packing.
This large Amphora, c 100BC and the earliest known found in Britain, was cleaned by brushing and vacuuming and then gently scrubbing with plain water and a toothbrush.
The outside of the pot is smooth but the inside has lovely rings on it, which made me wonder whether it may have been made as a coil pot. On the outside there are some green patches where it would have been in contact with copper.
As I cleaned the Amphora I was struck by the smell of dust and soil – it was an old and earthy smell!
At the same time, in the gallery, we had this beautifully shaped 4th-1st century BC miniature flagon which was cleaned in the same way as for the Amphora and it struck me what a variety we have in the collection – this time in scale!
North Herts Museum is always happy to offer work experience placements for interested young people; many of us got our first taste of museum work in a similar way. Last week, Tom, a student from St Christopher School in Letchworth Garden City, spent some time looking at the finds from an old excavation. The finds were deposited with the Museum Service more than ten years ago but no-one had had the opportunity to look at them since then.
I was interested in looking at the finds because they were excavated from a site at the east end of Works Road in Letchworth Garden City, only a few hundred metres from the henge in Norton that I have been investigating recently. The original work was carried out between 1997 and 1999 by the Hertfordshire Archaeological Trust (now Archaeological Solutions), who discovered important Late Neolithic features, dating from about 3000 to 2000 BC. These included a hengiform monument with the crouched skeleton of a teenager at its centre, some deep shafts, a curious banana-shaped pit and an L-shaped ditch. A report on the flints found compared them with those found at Blackhorse Road, a site excavated between 1957 and 1973 by Letchworth Museum, just 200 metres away. I wanted to see for myself how similar they were to the flints from the henge and, perhaps more importantly, to see how their small quantity of pottery compared.
Smoothed slab with a groove along the centre
As expected, the types of flints were very similar, with some rather nice scrapers and denticulated blades. By the end of the week, Tom had learned how to spot the difference between scrapers, blades, débitage (waste flakes from striking the flint) and cores. He also spotted some stone objects that were rather more unusual, which had me puzzled at first. Two of these objects consisted of flat slabs of a gritty sandstone-like material, about the size of my hand. One surface on each had been polished smooth and, on one of them, a polished groove had been worn into the centre of the stone’s long axis. There was also a cube of stone with one face polished and a pebble with a pointed end that was damaged as if it had been used as a hammer, which is what I thought it was at first. Then I spotted that it was also worn along one edge and that it fitted into the groove on the slab almost perfectly.
Grinding stone, worn at the pointed end and along one side
This was the clue I needled to answer the puzzle.The slabs were hand-held palettes, used for grinding something, while the other stones were the grinders. The cube had not worn into the face of the slab, but the different shape of the pebble had gradually worn down a groove. Unlike larger querns, slabs that were used for grinding flour from grain, these were designed to be held in the hand for grinding small quantities of something. Palettes have been recorded in the Neolithic of other parts of the world – the decorated cosmetic palettes of Egypt are well known – but they are not widely reported from Britain. I suspect that the pair from Letchworth Garden City were used in a similar way to the more decorative Egyptian examples, for grinding pigment to use as cosmetics, perhaps for religious ceremonies rather than general beautification. To have two together is really quite unusual, if my identification of them is correct.
A palette and grinder from the same layer in the banana-shaped pit
The discovery of these palettes has turned the site at Works Road from one that is merely interesting to one that looks to be rather significant. With the early henge only 300 m away, flint mines closer still and a hengiform monument on the same site, this is a complex to rival many better known sites. It goes to show that important discoveries can be made away from the site, by people who, like Tom, are not trained archaeologists. Thank you, Tom!
A late sixth-century jar from Gosmore (not the pot from Gaping Lane)
Coincidences can be quite alarming. Ten days ago, I was asked by Isobel Murray, a student on work placement with the Museum, if I knew anything about a “Saxon pot” found close to Samuel Lucas School in Hitchin. I replied that I didn’t and that it sounded rather unlikely: Saxon pots are notoriously rare in Hertfordshire.
Nevertheless, I did a quick search of Heritage Gateway, a website that gives access to Historic Environment Records across England. It brought up this record, describing a “Roman or early medieval pot, Gaping Lane, Hitchin”. “Early medieval” is a term that many archaeologists and historians now prefer for the period from around 400 to 900, replacing the old term “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon” with its assumptions about the ethnic origin of people, which may not be correct. These are all better than the horrible term “Dark Ages”, which implies that everything between the collapse of Roman rule in Britain and the Norman Conquest is unknown and unknowable.
Early medieval Hitchin
Early medieval material is rare in Hertfordshire. Unusually, there is some from Baldock that shows that the old Roman town struggled on into the sixth century. Its inhabitants were descendants of Romano-Britons, not Anglo-Saxons, which is why the term “early medieval” is so much more appropriate. There are finds from a few other sites, including Blackhorse Road in Letchworth Garden City, Therfield Heath and, significantly, Hitchin.
Excavating an early medieval burial in Queen Street during 2001
Here, excavations in 2001 uncovered what were clearly Christian burials off Queen Street. There had been stories circulating for years about the discovery of skeletons in this area, which were always said to be burials from the Great Plague of 1665 (or, even less plausibly, from the fourteenth-century Black Death). The excavators thought that they were Christian Anglo-Saxons, buried between the seventh and tenth centuries. As a result, the new development on the site was named Saxon Court.
When the radiocarbon dates came back, they were surprising. They put the burials between the fourth and sixth centuries. In other words, they were contemporary with the very late (‘sub-Roman’) finds from Baldock. No Anglo-Saxons were Christian before St Augustine’s mission in 597, so these people had to be Britons (again, another reason to use the term “early medieval”!).
In a way, this ought not to have been surprising. The placename Hitchin derives from Hicce, a name found in a seventh-century document known as Tribal Hidage, which lists all the kingdoms in England south of the River Humber. At this time, many of them were small and that of the Hicce was among the smallest, with only 300 families due to pay tax. But Hicce is not an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) name: it only makes sense as a Celtic word, *sicco-, meaning ‘dry’, probably a reference to the River Hiz. In other words, the Hicce people were Britons.
Back to the Gaping Lane pot
All of this background makes it very unlikely that anyone would have found an “Anglo-Saxon” pot in Gaping Lane. To make matters worse, the Heritage Gateway record describes the vessel as “a small globular pot, a mica-dusted feeding bottle of the late 1st or early 2nd cent AD, from a garden in Gaping Lane”. It also gives an Accession Number for the vessel, Hitchin Museum 6. Turning to Idealist, Hitchin Museum’s old database, we read “Small mica-coated globular vessel. “If genuinely local could be evidence of local Roman pottery industry” Farrar, A.H. Partly blackened, handle missing.” I do not know who A H Farrar was.
I therefore assumed that we were dealing with a Roman vessel. This seemed to be confirmed by Heritage Gateway, which speculated that it was the same pot as this one, although I was worried that the size of the two vessels did not tally and the second one was also accessioned to Hitchin Museum, this time as number 7. They did not sound to me to be the same thing at all. Even so, I guessed that the pot from Gaping Lane would have been Roman.
The pot itself
The pot found in Gaping Lane, Hitchin, in 1932
Then, on Friday of last week, I was looking through boxes in the Bulk Store at the Museums Resource Centre at Burymead Road, Hitchin. This is where environmentally stable archaeological finds from across the district are stored and houses ceramics, stone and bone. In one box, I found a small hand-made pot with a number 6 prominently written in Indian Ink on one side and thought to myself that it looked odd but had forgotten the details of the Gaping Lane pot.Coming back into the office, it suddenly struck me that this was indeed the Gaping Lane pot. I got it out from the box and found that it was even stranger than I had first appreciated. It is basically a thumb pot, hand made but shaped into a round-bottomed globular cup with a vertical rim. It originally had a handle that ran from the rim almost to be base, but this had broken off before the vessel was thrown away. It isn’t mica dusted, which is a Romano-British technique for making pots sparkle as if they are made from bronze. Instead, the pot is covered in a slip that has particles of mica in it, but they are much more sparse than in true mica dusting. The lower part of the handle has a tiny hole in the middle, which shows that it was made by rolling up a thin sheet of clay to make a cylinder before applying it to the cup: this is why someone thought it might have been a feeding bottle. The hole does not go through to the inside of the cup, so it can’t have been used for feeding.
The most interesting aspect of the cup is that there are similar “Anglo-Saxon” vessels from the East Midlands and East Anglia that date from the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth centuries. But the fabric of the pot (the clay type, the mix of material added to it and the way the pot has been fired) is not Anglo-Saxon. Instead, it looks like the fifth- and sixth-century pottery found in small quantities at Baldock. In other words, we have a pot made using indigenous sub-Romano-British techniques but copying a form used by Anglo-Saxon settlers.
The implications
This pot brings us right into the transformation of Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England. Instead of the old school-book view of Anglo-Saxon invaders slaughtering most of the Britons and driving the remnants into Wales, we can see that something more subtle and a good deal more interesting was going on. During the fifth century, the Britons of North Hertfordshire were clinging on to Roman ways of doing things. Perhaps this was partly because this is what they had done for centuries but also perhaps partly because being seen as “Roman” remained a good way of showing your status. By 500, though, they had stopped doing this. As the Anglo-Saxon settlers became powerful landowners and then politically dominant, so your status depended on being seen to be English (which is the word the settlers used to describe themselves). The Gaping Lane pot shows this very transition: the Hicce, a people who kept their British name but who became English, perhaps without even noticing.
The lesson of this story is to go back to the original data every time: while there may be authorities describing objects in our collections, these authorities may be mistaken. They had less knowledge about the past than we do today, so in the words of Bernard of Chartres, “we are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than them”. Some day, people will no doubt criticise my conclusions because they have seen even more. I have Isobel to thank for bringing this pot to my attention.