Ever wondered what it was really like to be an archaeologist? From the ancient origins to modern day archaeologists, it's a world full of discovery and dirt. Join Miranda as she talks to Arran Johnson about the early days of archaeology, Indiana Jones, and even Arran's favourite find.
Listen and enjoy, and please consider leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!
Ever wondered what it was really like to be an archaeologist? From the ancient origins to modern day archaeologists, it's a world full of discovery and dirt. Join Miranda as she talks to Arran Johnson about the early days of archaeology, Indiana Jones, and even Arran's favourite find.
Listen and enjoy, and please consider leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!
Miranda 0:04
In Viking times, a "thing" was a gathering a place where leaders and warriors could meet and talk. In the 21st century, our "thing" is a virtual place where history academics and enthusiasts from around the world can come together to share knowledge. I'm your host, Miranda Schmeiderer. Hold on to your helmets for this episode of That JORVIK Viking Thing podcast.
Miranda 0:32
Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we're not discussing Vikings or Richard III or even a particular time period. Instead, we're starting off our three-part series for our Archaeology Live event. We'll speak with some archaeologists here at York Archaeology as they tell us about some of the excavations that we've done, the different types of archaeology that we take part in and even hear about some of the projects that we've got going on right now. In this episode, I speak with Arran Johnson, one of our project officers in our fieldwork branch at York Archaeology. I'll ask him about archaeology and pop culture, and even the early years of archaeology here in York.
Miranda 1:09
Archaeology has been around for as long as there's been a past for people to look at. In ancient Egypt, the son of Pharaoh Ramesses II recorded and restored lots of ancient buildings in Egypt. This makes him both the first buildings archaeologist and the first Egyptologist. Idn 550 BCE, the last king of the Babylonian Empire discovered and analyse to the foundations of the building from an Akkadian ruler who lived nearly 1700 years earlier. Even Constantine the Great's mother, Helena of Constantinople, searched the Holy Land for Biblical relics, especially the True Cross, well into her 80s, and is now the patron saint of archaeologists and new discoveries.
Miranda 1:50
But really, the beginnings of modern British archaeology dates back to the antiquarians of the 18th century. During that time, antiquarians were more concerned with collecting objects from the past, particularly - as Aaron calls them - the shiny things. For them, these collections were less about discovering the past and more about showing off how wealthy and well travelled they were. Today, the process of uncovering artefacts is just as important as the artefacts themselves, sometimes even more important, but to these antiquarians, only the artefact, cleaned up and restored, mattered.
Miranda 2:23
Today, archaeology is working really hard to move past these antiquated colonial roots as well as widening what it even means to be an archaeologist. When people think of archaeology, they tend to imagine people digging in fields with trolls and buckets. But there's more to archaeology than just that. Zooarchaeology is all about animal remains, while osteoarchaeology looks at human bones. Bioarchaeologists tend to stick to a lab, looking at things like dental caries, stable isotope analysis, and even ancient DNA, while a landscape archaeologist looks at the lumps and bumps in the ground to build a picture of how humans have shaped a landscape. Experimental archaeology tries to figure out how people did things in the past by recreating now lost techniques. Maritime archaeologists don't even work on the land - they dive to excavate shipwrecks and other sites now underwater. There's even space archaeology, which looks at the debris humans have left behind in outer space, though they certainly have to look at that from here on Earth.
Miranda 3:23
One last thing before we talk to Arran - we had a little bit of sound difficulty with this episode. We recorded this interview in a very busy museum during the height of summer holidays. So please excuse the sound quality.
Miranda 3:34
Can you start by introducing yourself?
Arran 3:37
Yeah, my name is Arran Johnson, project officer with the York Archaeological Trust.
Miranda 3:41
Fabulous. So we are doing a bit of an intro to archaeology. And so I guess a good place to start with what is archaeology?
Arran 3:48
What is archaeology, that is the question isn't it? It's a vast field of interweaving disciplines. So we could probably speak for a whole series on what archaeology is. I mean, I'm a field archaeologist. So my job is to go out to various sites, and through a combination of fieldwork, research, and then post excavation analysis, make sense of them and work out what happened in the past.
Miranda 4:10
Excellent. People often have a very particular image in their head when archaeology is mentioned. Most of these come from pop culture like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. How accurate are these images?
Arran 4:21
I'd like to say that the glamour and travelling the world was accurate, but it is more kneeling into mud in the rain. So not the most accurate, no, but they have been a very successful pop culture kind of phenomenon. And I'm sure a lot of people have been fascinated by archaeology as a result of seeing the excitement of discovering something that's been buried for so long.
Miranda 4:45
Would you consider either of them to be particularly good archaeologists?
Arran 4:49
You don't see them doing a lot of paperwork. And if you ask any professional archaeologist, it is 75% paperwork at the very least, you know. You never see them writing a finds label, you know, there's never any nice conservation assessments no matter how well preserved a find is. But they've got a lot of energy.
Miranda 5:07
They do - a passion for it maybe. So what about the less fantastical depictions of archaeology like Time Team? How accurate would you consider Time Team to be?
Arran 5:18
Oh, Time Team, it's a wonderful thing. And it was responsible for getting many British archaeologists, many archaeologists around the world into the discipline. I'm probably one of them. Yeah, I was. I was interested already, but just seeing seeing them on the TV really kind of turned me around. As for accuracy, there are there are things that are very good. You see there's a real methodology, they'll research a site before they go in. Archaeology is extremely interdisciplinary. So you know, they'll use various expertise from you know, looking at historic maps, aerial photographs, geophysics, as well as the traditional excavation, the fieldwork methods. I think where Time Team is different from commercial archaeology, professional archaeology is that they're always searching for something, there's always some kind of agenda to find the lost moated manor house or so-and-so, when, in fact, in the field, in certainly commercial work, we're just finding what happened. We just want to know everything. We're very nosy.
Miranda 6:17
Amazing. So a lot of these pop culture ideas have basis in kind of the sordid history of archaeology. Can you tell us a little bit about when the practice of archaeology first began?
Arran 6:28
Well, it's when you go into deep history, there's an archaeology of archaeologists. My particular area is in York. So if we use York as a case study, it's fascinating, because people have always had a fascination with the past. Lots of early Christian churches, it's not uncommon to hear about people rooting around other buildings to save any good buried building materials. If you go to All Saints Church on North street in York, just by River Ouse, there's complete rows and columns in the fabric of the mediaeval nave. So it's not necessarily archaeology as we'd see but they were digging up and finding things of value and putting them to use. I'm sure there's some level of interest in terms of what we'd call actual archaeology. Again, York as a case study, I think it's 1696 is the first kind of documented find point of someone finding some buried coins, you know, some shiny things. We're just as excited today when we find a coin. I think these were William the Conqueror period, and they were found in the associated remains within the building. So you may have a late Viking Age, early kind of Anglo Norman period structure. Of course, no record. And then you have like a lot of British cities across the 1700s, the 1800s, there's a real construction boom, people are digging out cellars, left, right and centre. Breaks your heart when you think about the amount of buildings which were being put up with no kind of archaeology as part of the process. And this was noticed, there were various people would visit York in the 19th century, they would speak to builders, they'd ask them to set aside things they found - particularly shiny things. Always shiny things, and I think they're referencing the 19th century to a basically a tug of war with the kind of precursors of what's now the York Museums Trust, they have the Yorkshire Philosophical Society and then private collectors trying to snap up the best, the best artefacts, and then thankfully, later on, some of these private collections have since come back into into public ownership. So you can see some of these treasures. I think, in 1736 in the Drake's famous tome, Eboracum, there's the first mention of Viking Age coins, again, where it's showing the first deviation from the early interest in Roman York. York's very much always been a Roman city, and you know, the Romans are building in stone. So people for generations have been digging holes, finding substantial stone walls, sometimes digging that stone up and using it in a new building. And it's fascinating watching this process develop. I think it was George Benson, to the 20th century was watching a development, literally watching - he wasn't involved, he was an architect who happened to walk by, would make some notes and see what would be exposed just near the JORVIK Viking Centre, they're kind of between High Ousegate and Coppergate, two metres, 2.2 metres underground, they have a huge wooden structure with perfectly preserved timbers and he described it as of the Danish period and some kind of tanning pits. Having personally dug and looked at a dig with similar structures, we now know this would be a Viking Age sunken feature building. So in one respect, this is long before we'd worked on the amazing conservation techniques that we could preserve those gems. However, he did make some drawings for us. They were measured, we know a depth. So the very least we can plot on a map that we know there is a Viking building roughly here. So that's the beginnings of archaeology with kind of, you know, methodology to it. And then over the course of the 20th century, that improved massively. Peter Williams' famous excavations across the city on a number of important sites. The York Minster excavations, when tower came alarmingly close to collapsing over a real wealth of Roman archaeology. And then, of course, the York Archaeological Trust formed in 1972. And the rest is history.
Miranda 10:19
Or archaeology? Yes. So, and you kind of mentioned that, especially like, when the coin hoards were found, they didn't have a lot of methodology. So was this early kind of practice of digging stuff up just for the sake of digging it up? Was that helpful to modern day archaeologists? Or was it more harmful?
Arran 10:35
It's a great question, isn't it? Because without these things being found, we wouldn't know about them. And you know, some of these collections have, as I mentioned earlier, they've come back into, you know, being a public display. So it's wonderful that we can now see these things. You do also wonder how many things disappeared into private collections, and they've never been seen. So there's probably a wealth of riches out there.
Miranda 10:57
It's really sad to think about it.
Arran 11:00
It's not all doom and gloom, I promise.
Miranda 11:02
Well, some people still have this notion of archaeology being mainly treasure hunting. So how does metal detecting fit in with archaeology?
Arran 11:10
It's extremely difficult, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't. I think we have to recognise that there's a lot of very, very good metal detectorists in Britain, I've been lucky enough to work with some myself, particularly on community archaeology projects. One gentleman on a project in Lincolnshire was working through the spoil heaps. So obviously, we were digging at a fair pace. And we were trying to investigate some medieval remains, it's very easy to have a shovel full of clay, sticky soil and not notice that small object within it. So in that respect, it's fantastic. Because he was coming back from the material I was just excavating, which meant I could figure out which archaeological context this find was from and just as we were leaving on the final day, he pulled us up to let us know that he'd found a perfect medieval silver penny, he could very easily pocketed it. And he was more interested in what this penny could tell us about the site and the feature. So that was fantastic. And it's always a pleasure to work with people like that. The opposite end of the spectrum, I'm sure you're aware of in the news, particularly recently, as well, with the the nighthawking of people breaking into sites and just excavating and taking finds away, again, then we don't get to see as people that are interested in archaeology.
Miranda 12:19
It's interesting to think that even in 2021, there's this archaeology like black market, almost, you know, it's something you definitely associate with, I guess, like the 19th 20th century, you know, but like, it's weird to think about that kind of still being a thing.
Arran 12:32
It's still around, it is a problem. I'm sure it will take some time, but now there's increasing precedents of heritage crimes actually being prosecuted. So you know, hopefully, that'll carry on. But also, it's just a matter of education, really. If the majority of people are not friendly to this idea of just stealing, you know, our shared kind of cultural heritage, then it's going to be more difficult for people to do that, I think.
Miranda 12:56
Definitely. If people have an interest in archaeology, but no formal educational background, how can they go about getting involved?
Arran 13:03
Oh, there's a wonderful world of opportunity. There's many companies that do things just like us, like we do here at York Archaeological Trust. So across the country, at any given time, there'll be countless community archaeology projects. And what's wonderful is there's a real variety of these now, we've gone beyond just coming, having a scrape at the ground with a trowel, people are getting involved in recording historic buildings and researching historic maps, and people are getting involved in much more creative ways to use archaeology, you know, in terms of art, music, theatre. We fundamentally are storytellers, you know, we find a collection of objects and deposits. And we have to kind of form those into stories and the evidence that we create. And I think it's always wonderful to then pass that on to people, see how they respond to it. And there's always opportunities, there's plenty of websites you can search where you can get involved with excavations, more creative projects. And then of course, there's a lot of formal training excavations. These are usually when you pay. For the course that we run here, we're entirely funded by the people that take part. So as well as obviously getting the training from professional archaeologists, you also get the satisfaction of actually knowing that that project wouldn't happen without your involvement. So yeah, there's a whole world of exciting, archaeological opportunities
Miranda 14:22
Is that We Dig now? Is that what it's called?
Arran 14:24
We Dig, yes. It historically has been called Archaeology Live, what we're trying to do with the York and Nottingham and Sheffield offices, get them to work more closely together. There are lots of very excitable archaeologists like myself that just love sharing what we do with people, and we are finally getting our heads together and making our offer a bit more cohesive, but also making the best use of the skills we've got in-house. There's a lot of people that are extremely knowledgeable on certain aspects of archaeology. And we can now offer that across the different courses in the different locations.
Miranda 14:53
What is one thing about archaeology that you want our listeners to walk away knowing?
Arran 14:58
That's a very, very good question. I should prepared for it. I think, certainly as a commercial archaeologist, where we're very much in the habit of getting very cold and wet and muddy and maybe having a bit of a gathering on the evening in a pub and having a good old complain. But fundamentally, I think there aren't many other jobs where every day has the potential to be life changing. You might be on the worst site in the world and lots of horrible sticky clay, might be terrible weather, but you never know what's under the next shovel, you know, and some of the discoveries that I've made over the 15 plus years of digging now have been genuinely, you know, some of them really get you, you know, because as I say, we are storytellers, and we're nosy, and we get to see things that there's such a small chance that they survived. So it can really be a privilege. I think so. I think it's if there's one thing to think about archaeology, it's extremely unpredictable, but it can really open you up into a whole world of fascinating tales.
Miranda 15:53
Can you tell me about your favourite dig and a little bit about it?
Arran 15:56
Blimey, there's been so many. Trying to avoid going through a huge Greatest Hits. Working mainly in York, I have been extremely lucky. The Hungate excavation was where I came as a young archaeologist, I'd worked for a year in West Yorkshire, mainly excavated Roman ditches with nothing in them, which was still charming, you know, it'd still feel interesting, but then I was thrown into the middle of a Victorian-era slum settlement and forced very quickly to learn the rigours of a single context archaeology. It's my personal favourite method of recording and interpreting archaeology and it can be difficult when you first begin. So the Hungate site was incredible. We began with these 19th century remains, and found countless amazing tales. We could have a whole series of podcasts about Hungate, about sort of things we found. But starting with that, the archaeology was amazing. We actually got speak some of the people that remembered it from when they were children. And there was one day, we stuck little portholes into the site so passers-by could ask us questions and see what we're doing. And a gentleman asked what house number I was in, I think it turns out stood in the building he'd been born in.
Miranda 17:04
That's amazing!
Arran 17:06
So obviously, we were very into the site, then we progressed down, we basically just kept finding these earlier and earlier stories, how people have lived on the same spot. And some things have been exactly the same. You know, it's always been wet. Getting getting rid of the sewage has always been a challenge. You know, we found that the Victorian wells, the bottom of them were almost all sat directly on a Viking cesspit. But I think it was, you know, archaeology is all about the experience of the average person. You know, history tells you the great deeds of the kings and queens, whereas, you know, we're rooting around in the ground, finding things like, you know, a Viking haircut that found on a site in the centre of York, the famous Coppergate turd, you know, it's a bad word for that. You know, these are things which are fantastic, and very direct insights into the lives people were living. And then, you know, Hungate in particular, the very earliest deposits that were found were basically the beginnings of the Roman occupation of York and the first kind of subdivision of land. And it's just incredible to be able to kind of stand on this one site where all this has happened. So that's certainly been amazing.
Miranda 18:13
And for my last question,what is your favourite artefact that you've ever found?
Arran 18:18
Well, Crikey, there's obvious things. So you always remember your first coin. The first time you deal with human remains is quite an emotive moment. If there's a complete pot, it's always lovely. The correct answer should be I was one of the team that was very lucky to find a Viking building on Hungate, which was made from a recycled timber ship, which we found were, with the tree ring dating, the dendrochronology, were dated, I think, if I remember correctly, 954 but the building was built on I think 969. So we have the remains of a ship which was probably originally from the South East of England. We're talking about a 12 metre long seafaring vessel, which is somehow ended up in York and then been hacked to pieces by some local Anglo Scandinavian person who's built a cellar out of it. That that was amazing. But you know, one of my favourite things I ever found was far less glamorous. I was in a very early 20th century garden, just working through a garden soil and found a piece of tile that I just luckily put my mattock down for a second to investigate this piece of tile and as I lifted it, I realised that someone had created a small chamber. They dug a small hole, they lined it with pieces of roof tile, and they laid the remains of tiny little bird, a small songbird, it turns out, so I thought oh, this is amazing. I found a pet burial, and who hasn't lost a pet, the loss of a pet and been devastated by it, but it was later on in the historic research we found that a pub down the road called the Bricklayers Arms had a linnet singing competition and so you bring your songbirds down and sang, the finest might have got their owner a few pints of ale perhaps so that was really heartwarming. That was a lovely one, that was kind of you know, really brought me in touch with the person whose garden I was rooting around in.
Miranda 20:08
Well exactly, it's like you were saying that the you know, archaeologists are nosy there's not many other jobs where you get to root around people's lives for a living you know,
Arran 20:17
With human remains, it's very literally as well, we get to see the ailments that people were living their life with and I think it's that it's much easier to walk a step in someone's shoes if you know what their knees were like, and the abcess there was really causing trouble so yeah, it's a fascinating discipline and can really take so much, so yeah, I love it. Keep an eye on the on the York Archaeology web pages, certainly next year. We're hoping to expand even further our portfolio of public archaeology opportunities, working with numerous charities. So again, thinking of different ways that we can involve people in archaeology, because, you know, if we just put a fence around a site, dig holes, write a report that only a few people might be interested in, we haven't really shared what we've found. We're always looking at new ways to share, share the discoveries that we make.
Miranda 21:04
Amazing. Well, thank you very much.
Arran 21:06
Sweet.
Miranda 21:07
Special thanks to Arran for being our guest today. Stay tuned for our next episode, the first of two, all about York Archaeology, how and why it was founded, what projects they have worked on, and what they're currently digging up. Want a more hands on experience? For the next few weekends at our museum DIG: an archaeological adventure, we'll be hosting some experimental archaeology sessions for the kids to have a go at. Additionally, why not book one of our triple tickets and visit the JORVIK Viking Centre, DIG, and Barley Hall, our mediaeval town house? Book your tickets now at JorvikVikingCentre.co.uk. Thanks for listening to That JORVIK Viking Thing podcast. You can find us on Spotify, Apple podcasts and anywhere you get your podcasts. Don't forget to rate and leave us a review, and if you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. It's the best way to help support your favourite Viking podcast.
Miranda 22:16
That JORVIK Viking Thing Podcast is a production of the JORVIK Group and York Archaeological Trust. Researched by Miranda Schmeiderer and Ashley Fisher. Written and produced by Ashley Fisher. Sound designed and edited by Miranda Schmeiderer.