Objects
This week at Burymead we found these two Medical bags in brilliant condition, one belonging to Dr. Machen, who recently retired from Regal Chambers Surgery in Hitchin.
One is an obstetrician’s bag containing cutting needle, Wrigley’s forceps, suture, cord powder and other assorted medical items.
The other was a general medical bag, containing bandages, scalpels and a syringe as well as other medical equipment (for example glass bottles).
We both thought these were both very interesting as it was fascinating to look at what actually was in a Doctor’s bag, but especially the obstetrician’s bag as some of the equipment isn’t commonly used any more. We hope you have found this as interesting as we did.
A Roman marble head, found in a shed in Radwell; it is a portrait of Germanicus, who died in AD 19, twenty-four years before the Roman conquest
This is the title of a talk I gave last night for the Hitchin Society as part of the Hitchin Festival. I have given a talk every year since 2004, when I started in my post with North Hertfordshire Museums, and each time I try to highlight a different aspect of Hitchin’s fascinating past. As the years have gone by, I have widened the scope to include the rest of North Hertfordshire, focusing on the buried sites and standing buildings that contribute to understanding our history. This year, though, I decided to do something different.
As my work is now much more focused on the objects in our collections, as we prepare for the displays in the new museum, I decided that this is what I would talk about. These are the “small things” of my title, a term inspired by the pioneering work of American historical archaeology, In Small Things Forgotten, by James Deetz, originally published in 1977. James Deetz used the often overlooked details of archaeological finds to piece together narratives to cover gaps in the story of how the Thirteen English Colonies became the United States of America.
A Dressel 1A amphora, dating to before 100 BC, found in a chieftain’s grave in Baldock: it is the oldest Roman amphora found in Britain
I wanted to look at a longer chronological sweep, from the invasion of Julius Caesar in 55 BC through to the present day. This is a period when we think we understand how and why things changed, when we slice history up into over-neat categories such as Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, Norman England and so on. Worse, from my point of view, is when we talk about these periods as if each one is populated by a different ‘people’: “the Romans”, “the Anglo-Saxons”, “the Normans”, “the Tudors”. Using labels in this way can make it seem as if there was a discrete time from 1485 to 1603 when everyone thought of themselves as “Tudor”, for instance: know that they did not.
Life doesn’t work like that. For the most part, the world changes slowly and imperceptibly. Things that can seem like dramatic events – the Roman invasion of AD 43, the Norman Conquest of 1066, the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 – because they figure so prominently in our histories rarely affect the lives of ordinary people. This is where the “small things” help to correct the picture we get if we rely on documents alone.
Looking at the objects in our collections, we can see how the changes that really do affect people take place gradually, over many years. In other words, they are processes that transform lives almost without being noticed. During the ninety-eight years between Julius Caesar and Claudius’s conquest, North Hertfordshire was in no sense part of the Roman Empire, yet people began to use Roman style objects, importing goods from places that were inside the Empire. Our kings issued coins with legends in Latin, people began to use samian ware for dining, they drank wine that they served in pottery flagons. By the time that the Roman “conquest” occurred, local people were so thoroughly “Romanised” that we can’t detect the conquest archaeologically. Our region has no forts and no military remains because there was no need to coerce people into being “Roman”: to a large extent they already were and they may even have welcomed the conquest.
A Roman cogwheel bracelet; popular in the fourth century, the type is found along the Danube and Rhine frontiers as well as in Britain
The same story can be seen at the other end of the Roman period, when trade with the Empire shifted from across the English Channel to across the North Sea, initially to the Rhineland. During the fourth century, there was increasing trade with Free Germany, outside the Empire. Mercenaries recruited from this area served in the army in Britain (the largest standing army in the Roman world by that time) and some may have brought families with them who settled permanently in Britain. By the fifth century, when Roman rule came to an end, germanic decoration was commonplace on a whole range of objects and this process continued as more settlers (whom we would call Anglo-Saxons at this period) arrived to join those already here.
The “small things” of our collections show that our neat period labels may be convenient – as human beings, we love to categorise the world around us – but they don’t reflect historical reality all that well. This is part of the challenge we face for telling the story of our District in the new museum: choosing appropriate and interesting “small things” that will engage and challenge our visitors.
While looking out some unprovenanced stone tools this morning, I was intrigued to find a rather unusual stone tool. Removing it from the box, I saw that its label said that it was from Somaliland (now Somalia) and recalled that the Accessions Register for Letchworth Museum records the donation of six stone tools from there. The most striking aspect of this tool is that although it is clearly a product of human workmanship, it is quite unlike any other stone tool I have ever handled.
Oldowan chopper 1932.6240, from Somalia
The tool is not made from flint or from any of the igneous rocks sometimes employed (especially for making polished stone tools in the Neolithic and Bronze Age) but from a highly granular quartz-rich pinkish rock. It has been very roughly shaped from a river pebble to produce one rough cutting edge. From these characteristics, I could tell that it is probably an Oldowan tool. These are the oldest stone tools we know that humans made and date from about 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago. It seems to be associated with the earliest representatives of the genus Homo (Homo habilis and Homo ergaster) and perhaps with Australopithecus garhi.
So what is it doing in the collections of North Hertfordshire Museums? The Accessions Register notes that it was donated by Heywood Walter Seton-Karr (1859-1938), a soldier, explorer and big game hunter who, as an amateur archaeologist, discovered the African Palaeolithic. In a series of publications in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, he explained that they had come from a low hill on the right bank of a sand river, the Issutugan, roughly mid-way between the port of Berbera and the town of Hargeisa to the south-west. This is arid, inhospitable country that was part of the British Protectorate of Somaliland from 1888 to 1960.
The hill where this tool was found is in the centre of the photograph
Heywood Seton-Karr seems to have collected many hundreds of flints, which have ended up in museums all over the world. Although some of his ideas now appear repugnant to us today (he left a bequest to the Eugenics Society), he was a man of his time whose discoveries in Africa convinced him that all humans shared a single origin (although he wrongly assumed it to have been in the East) and were thus a single race.
Even though it is not relevant to the archaeology of North Hertfordshire, it is exciting to have this sort of object in the collection, as it provides a tangible link to the very origins of human behaviour. It stands a good chance of being our oldest artefact.