Antiquities, archaeology and the public

For the ‘Public and Popular History’ seminar, University of Cambridge, 8th February 2011.

SLIDE 1I have two part-time jobs, one working for the Portable Antiquities Scheme (housed at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research here in Cambridge) and one working for the Channel 4 television programme Time Team. They both are essentially jobs in public archaeology, but otherwise they are very different. So after I have briefly told you how both of them work, and what they try to do, I’ll try to analyse them, and look at their strengths and weaknesses.

Having said this, I must stress that I am not a telly professional, and as you will find out I’m not a particularly electrifying speaker. I’ve also got none of the theoretical background in public archaeology that is being developed these days. So these are simply my practical observations on what I do day to day.

SLIDE 2 bullet pointsSo. Time Team and the Portable Antiquities Scheme:

Why have they both been relatively successful? What impact they have had on the way that the general public

perceive archaeology as a subject (and research into the past in general)?

What impact have they had on archaeology as a discipline?

Now I know that this is the Public and Popular History seminar, and of course history and archaeology are different disciplines; history studies the written evidence and archaeology the unwritten or physical evidence. But they both have what you might call a joint endeavour; they are both aimed at finding out more about the past. So it is important that historians have a basic understanding of archaeology, and vice versa. I think it is also true that in most people’s minds there is little distinction between history and archaeology – they just want to know what happened in the past, and how, and why. I’ll say more about the relationship between the two disciplines later on.

SLIDE 3 PAS mapI am going to start with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. This is a government-funded scheme which records archaeological finds made by members of the public, and the slide shows you where our 30 or so

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officers are based around the country. We don’t cover Scotland or Northern Ireland, only England and Wales.

Before we were set up, about ten years ago, there was no formal place to record these things. If you found a Roman coin poking out of a mole-hill in Cambridgeshire you might take it to a museum, but often they would not know what it was, and even if they did, the information generally didn’t get to the Historic Environment Record at the County Council – so generally it would be lost and no-one would ever know, which was, to put it mildly, a pity.

SLIDE 4 websiteWe now have a great big website with a huge database on which we record all the finds – and as you can see, we have a vast number of records of all dates, from palaeolithic handaxes half a million years old, to early 20th-century Russian flax seals.

SLIDE 5 detectorist and gardenerMost of our finders are metal-detectorists, for two very good reasons: one, their hobby is looking for things, and two, they have an expensive machine to help them find things. So they find more archaeological objects than other people do.

SLIDE 6 demographic of detectoristsMetal-detectorists are a slightly skewed demographic. They tend to be male, middle-aged or elderly, and of relatively low social class. But they aren’t the only ones who are interested in our portable antiquities.

SLIDE 7 Daily MailAn awful lot of people are interested in things like this – the Staffordshire Hoard – or this [SLIDE 8 Daily Telegraph] the Crosby Garrett helmet. These things give us lots of press coverage, so presumably are popular with the public at large, not just metal-detectorists or people with an interest in the past.

I think that what’s going on here is a combination of a kind of celebrity factor and lottery factor. These things were owned by the top celebrities of their day (even though we don’t know who they were) and are now famous in their own right. The lottery factor comes in when you realise that these finds netted over a million pounds each for their finders and the landowners, and we can all fantasise about how we would cope if we were suddenly a million pounds richer! It’s kind of like the Antiques Roadshow on speed.

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But having said this, there’s little connection between being amazed by these finds and being interested in the past. It’s a bit like the connection between watching the television show Embarrassing Bodies and being interested in medical research – a few people might watch because they are interested in the science, but most watch for a reason which might be called simple vicarious pleasure.

So, one of the advantages of the Portable Antiquities Scheme is that its raw materials – the archaeological finds – are sometimes of interest even to those who don’t generally value the past. We find it relatively easy to generate news stories – partly this is because we have better pictures! But we have to be relatively cautious about this – we can’t simply spin our sensational stories, and hope that the interest thus generated will have the right effect, which of course from our point of view is to encourage people to be interested in and value the past.

There’s a huge gulf between being fascinated by the celebrity and lottery aspects of finding amazing objects, and being interested in the past. Most archaeologists originally wanted to do the job not because they wanted to find things, but because they wanted to solve mysteries. For me, it was how Roman Britain turned into Anglo-Saxon England. For others, it was how humans evolved, or agriculture began, or how their village was established and grew, or why we have the political system we do.

This also appears to be true for metal-detectorists. One recent survey found that most detectorists say that they metal-detect because they are interested in the past. Not that many people got into it because they wanted to make extraordinary or valuable discoveries.

Of course, they may be saying this because the question is being asked them by an archaeologist, and they know what we want to hear. But if you are really interested in the past, metal-detecting is a relatively easy way in. It is a pretty democratic hobby that you can get involved in without having to read books and get all scholarly.

Plus finds have a kind of immediacy – they are often like stuff we have today, and they are easier to understand than something huge like a Roman villa or something most of us have no experience of like a field system.

I think because of this, a lot of effort that is spent encouraging children to get interested in archaeology also focuses on finds and on finding things.

SLIDE 9 Sutton Hoo ‘dig’

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Here is an example from Sutton Hoo, run of course by the National Trust. Their major children’s activity is ‘the dig’ – a box of sandy soil set into the ground by the Edwardian house, where the old central heating furnace was. Objects are buried in the soil and the children dig to find them, helped by their parents and perhaps a visiting celebrity or two. It is popular with the very tiny – those who simply like digging in a big sand-pit – but it doesn’t take long to get bored. The detective work that is crucial to maintaining interest is missing.

So I think that there are dangers in emphasising the lure of finding things as a way of harnessing fascination with the past.

And the Portable Antiquities Scheme has to be careful here because it is the only national archaeological organisation which has staff around the country whose job it is to liaise with the public. We are all based in separate local organisations – mostly museums and planning offices – and there is a temptation there to let the Portable Antiquities Scheme officer take over the outreach and education side of things. We have been called ‘the largest community archaeology project in the world’ – but we must be careful to ensure that we are not seen as the only community archaeology project, because archaeology is more than finds – to understand what happened in the past you obviously have to use every strand of evidence available.

SLIDE 10 PAS changing view of archaeologySo when we ask ‘how has the Portable Antiquities Scheme changed people’s view of archaeology’, we have to acknowledge both good and bad aspects.

Archaeology is all around us, not just on ‘sites’ but everywhere Archaeologists are now seen as more friendly and approachable –

we go out and meet the publicBUT There’s a risk that archaeology will be seen as finds-based, and the

more valuable the object (in monetary terms) the better

SLIDE 11 Time TeamOK now let’s move on to Time Team, which I hope you are all familiar with. It began on Channel 4 in 1994 and has gone from strength to strength. Each year there is a series of 13 programmes, normally shown between Christmas and Easter, and four hours of Time Team Specials shown throughout the year where the team follows an archaeological project being done by someone else.

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Each of the programmes follows an archaeological excavation carried out over three days to answer specific questions. There’s always an element of risk – how are they going to find that out in just three days? – as well as an interesting story to tell. There have traditionally been three parts with commercial breaks in between, corresponding to the three days, but now as Channel 4’s finances get worse and worse there are four parts, with a break at Day 1 lunchtime.

As Time Team is now such an old-established programme, it works to a well-honed routine.

SLIDE 12 Choosing the sitesWhat’s called ‘development’, or planning the shape of the series, is done early in the year by Jim Mower, a very experienced archaeologist who has been working for Time Team for ten years. He selects the sites according to these two criteria: there must be good archaeology to film, and a good story to tell. Ideally there will also be a good mix across the series, of different time periods, different places across the country, and a mix of site types – back gardens, famous places, urban sites, fields.

SLIDE 13 PDJim begins the research, gets all the relevant permissions, and writes the project design which can be very lengthy – here’s a bit of one from last year. The PD is circulated before the shoot so that we all know what we are going to do.

We all turn up the day before to have a meeting where the plan of campaign is outlined based on the PD, and everyone can add their two penn’orth. This meeting includes local archaeologists and landowners – and everyone who has a stake in the project. We all need to be happy with what’s being done.

Then we really do make each programme in three days. It begins with geophysics on the morning of day 1, and filming of the bits that have to be done before a trench is opened.

SLIDE 14 ScheduleHere is the shooting schedule with which bits will be filmed when. Crew 1 are filming Tony and Mick deciding what to do; Crew 2 are filming the geophysics. So Trench 1 can’t be opened until at least 11 am, and usually it is just before lunch. So the digging is really done in 2½ rather than 3 days.

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There are lunchtime meetings on days 2 and 3 to keep everyone informed of what is happening and what is planned, so that everyone knows what is going on. Clearly you can’t contribute to the campaign if you don’t know what’s happening – and there have been terrible mistakes made in the past through ignoring something important, that’s been discovered but not communicated properly so that one half of the team doesn’t know what the other half are doing.

The lunchtime meetings were brought in to improve the way we work as an archaeological team, and have worked very well. There are also occasional ad-hoc evening meetings, but these don’t work so well as we are not always all together in the evenings.

SLIDE 15 ScriptWe do also have a script, which always surprises people. This is because there is a basic framework as to how the programme is made. Decisions have to be filmed before being implemented. The background research has to be gradually told to the audience – not too much at once or they won’t take it in. Every so often we have to pause and think about what it all means. And the script makes sure that these building blocks are in place. It doesn’t mean that we know in advance what we are going to find – and here is the proof, some rather vague scripts from last year. [SLIDE 16 Mad scripts]

Now Time Team is very much a collaboration between the television side and the archaeological side.

SLIDE 17 Camera crewThere is a director for each programme who works with camera crew 1, and also edits all the footage together. He or she is responsible for getting all the bits filmed that need to be done, working with a second unit director who has a second crew.

Each programme has a different director. Those responsible for putting together the entire series are the series editor and the executive producer. They do the hiring and firing and are basically in charge of it all.

The important link man between the two sides, archaeological and televisual, is a unique feature to Time Team and possibly one of the secrets of its success.

SLIDE 18 TimThis is Tim Taylor, who invented Time Team in the first place. He trained as a teacher and then moved into television, but he’s a

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passionately committed archaeologist too, and because he never appears on camera he can devote himself to making sure everything happens in terms of archaeology that is necessary for the programme to work. So while Mick Aston, or whoever the site director is, is filming a decision that has been made, for the second or third time – so that different camera angles can be recorded – Tim can be getting on with sorting out the labour and so on with the other camera crew filming the actual work happening. Similarly, if Mick is up in the helicopter then there is no hiatus in what’s going on on the ground.

SLIDE 19 Tim at work with MickTim is also essential when discussing what to do next – he can immediately see how the different options push the television story on (or if something would be impossible to film or make interesting), plus he understands the archaeological reasons for doing it. I think it is fair to say that the archaeological team – Mick, Phil, Stewart, John Gater, myself and so on – do the archaeology first, and let it get filmed. This gives the programme an authenticity and integrity that other archaeological programmes, which don’t have such control given to the archaeologists, lack. But because Tim not only gives this degree of control to the archaeologists but, crucially, always has his first eye on how the finished programme will look, not only do we avoid arguments and conflict between the two sides, but we also avoid targeting an audience of archaeologists alone.

When you ask members of Time Team what makes it popular, this is what they always say. The authenticity of what’s portrayed on screen – we really are doing proper archaeology and making real important discoveries in just three days, and being filmed as we do it.

SLIDE 20 Time Team as archaeological researchWe concentrate on the process of archaeology – you can see it as it is really being done and you can watch every discovery as it happens.

We also obviously do include quite a lot of history – the documentary side of the research. This allows us to get closer to the thoughts and feelings of the individual. Archaeology isn’t very good at capturing the emotions of people in the past, and this is where people like Michael Wood and Philippa Gregory are so wonderful – they can translate dry historical record into warm, empathetic life. But history can be very seductive, and Time Team has to take care not to let it take over. For us, history is always there to illuminate and give depth to the archaeology, and not the other way round.

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OTHER TELEVISION PROGRAMMES

I think that what really appeals to professional television people, though, is less the integrity and authenticity of the archaeology and more the authenticity of the risk factor – the jeopardy, as they tend to put it. Time Team, although I’m sure Tim Taylor would be horrified at this suggestion, owes a great deal to a BBC television programme that you may or may not remember called Challenge Anneka.

SLIDE 21 Challenge AnnekaAnneka Rice used to have ‘just three days’ to take on a practical challenge, like building a children’s playground or painting a lighthouse. The series had elements that would become familiar in Time Team, such as the use of a helicopter and walkie-talkies – and of course there was in both the real uncertainty of whether the challenge set could be accomplished in just three days, and the interplay of personalities as the stress mounted. Otherwise you might think that doing a community building project might not be the most interesting thing to watch.

SLIDE 22 Other time-limited programmesAnd this ‘can they do it in just three days’ format was of course also used for later programmes such as Changing Rooms (1996-2004) and Ground Force (1997-2005), where again the personalities, and the jeopardy factor with its highs and lows was the real draw – not the gardening or decorating advice. It’s the same for Time Team.

(I don’t suppose that you ever thought you would be considering programmes such as this at a Public and Popular History seminar.)

HISTORY PROGRAMMES

So let’s move swiftly on! to consider Time Team’s place within other history and heritage programming.

Martin Davidson, the BBC’s commissioning editor of history, once said – at this seminar – that the incremental nature of history research doesn’t translate well to television, and for that reason we end up with narrative rather than tales of discovery or even explorations of debate. In other words, television doesn’t illustrate the process of thinking very well.

Archaeology programmes used to conform to this too; they would tell the narrative story of what an excavation had revealed, after it had been completed; and it would be one story, uncontested.

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But Time Team changed all that. In its own words, it ‘sets out to capture both the excitement and immediacy of the process of discovery - archaeology as it happens.’ Television does do physical discovery very well. But you need to be able to guarantee some discoveries, which is always difficult in archaeology, where you don’t know what you will find until you actually begin to dig. The crucial development within archaeology that allowed these guaranteed discoveries was mobile computer-assisted geophysics.

SLIDE 23 Hitcham geophysics and trenchOnce you can get this kind of picture in a single morning, you have got two things: a broad-brush picture of the whole site, plus you know where to dig to get a result. No more digging vast trenches over a whole summer with a hundred undergraduates to try to locate something.

Time Team is incredibly dependent on geophysics, so that’s another element which allowed it to emerge when it did; in television terms it was the development of the race against time format, and in archaeological terms it was the development of mobile geophysics. So we’ve established that Time Team concentrates on the techniques and the process by which we gather the information, and the information, or the interpretation of the evidence, is slipped in along the way. One effect of this concentration on techniques is that we also now see how conflicting interpretations can arise from the same evidence. Of course television loves conflict, so Time Team ticks other boxes here. There’s always a big tension between being nice to your colleagues and disagreeing with them, though, so we perhaps don’t have as much conflict as we ought to.

DOWNMARKET

I think one of the things we can learn from looking at the range of heritage programmes is that archaeology does - in general - tend to be seen as less intellectually demanding than history. This leads producers, who of course aren’t generally experts, to take a less socially exclusive line with archaeology programmes.

Another related aspect is that archaeology ideally tells the stories of people who aren’t recorded in history – the ordinary people, the C2s, Ds and Es of the past.

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In fact, I think that the secret of success, not only for Time Team but also for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, is to be to a certain extent downmarket.

Now this may surprise some of you who think that history/archaeology is an aspirational subject, and that to make it downmarket is to ‘dumb down’ to the masses in a horribly elitist way.

SLIDE 24 Vicky Pollard

But in fact both the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Time Team do not make concessions in terms of the quality of their output (for example, Time Team always get the best experts) or the scholarly nature of the enquiry – they just make it accessible and friendly too.

It’s a mistake to think that the audience that could be defined as ‘downmarket’ – that’s the C2s, Ds and Es in social grading terms [SLIDE 25] is necessarily any less intelligent, or less well educated, or less well off. In terms of television programmes on history or archaeology, what all social groups want is their kind of thing, which is a slightly intangible aim. I think that the ABC1 audience may feel that a downmarket TV show trivialises its subject, whereas the C2DE audience may find a more highbrow approach unfriendly and boring. Everyone needs to be intuitively comfortable with the presenters and the style – it’s their kind of programme.

I think that what both the Portable Antiquities Scheme and Time Team manage to do, and the secret of their success, is that they are both downmarket – in terms of being accessible, inclusive and friendly – but they also communicate good authentic research. The work that the PAS and Time Team do should be done anyway – the public front is a bonus. And the public can work this out from the feel of the programme, or in the case of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, the website and the staff.

SLIDE 26 public face of PASThe public, when watching the television or talking to someone about their finds, they are participating in something real, a real detective story.

DEMOGRAPHIC

I don’t want to exaggerate the downmarket appeal of Time Team. All of Channel 4’s output has moved slightly downmarket with the rise of things like BBC4 and the obvious appeal of the large audiences pulled in by programmes such as like Big Brother. Channel 4 needs to keep its market

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share up, and going a little downmarket is a way of doing this, because more C2DE people watch television than ABC1 [SLIDE 27] (nb in 2009, 55.8% of UK population could be classified as ABC1s and 44.2% as C2DEs.)

Keeping an eye on what kind of audience is watching – or participating – is essential. Time Team is going well – SLIDE 28 viewer figures

it is thought of as being one of Channel 4’s most successful programmes. Although its viewers are old – it ‘skews old’ in the jargon – it doesn’t skew quite as old as other traditional history programmes.

SLIDE 29 - agesHere you can see Time Team, this time in grey I’m afraid, next to the orange of a David Starkey programme on Henry VIII. Time Team has more children – we have a loyal family audience – and far fewer in the 65-plus age group. Having said this, our audience is apparently steadily ageing, perhaps in line with the age of the presenters, I don’t know.

The Channel 4 share of the television audience in general has gone down from 10% of the television audience in the 1990s to 5% now. The problem is that the channel needs to be mainstream, not what you might call ‘niche’, to maintain audience share and audience numbers – because these are what you need to attract advertisers. (Of course this isn’t the same for the BBC, whose income has not dropped so sharply, so it may not really be a level playing field.)

Ironically though the big spenders, the people who advertisers most want to attract, are the ABC1s, and those with small children, and so on, who are in fact niche people! And now there is BBC4 and CBBC, so they may be watching that instead of Time Team. So Time Team needs to keep attracting new viewers to justify its place in the schedule.

SLIDE 30 - questionsSo, to return to what I began with, my questions. Why have they both been relatively successful? I’d argue that both have been innovative, both have historically been well funded – and that’s something we haven’t even considered yet, but neither have had to scrimp and save until the past year or two – and both have kept a careful balance between scholarly integrity and friendly approachability.

What impact have they had on the way that the general public perceive archaeology as a subject (and research into the past in general)? This is a complex question. On the one hand, you could argue that all publicity is

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good publicity, and the more that the public understand archaeology the more that they will appreciate it and be prepared to pay for it. That’s true, but you have to remember that Time Team and the Portable Antiquities Scheme both present a biased picture of what archaeology is.

SLIDE 31 – knivesOn the one hand, the remit of the PAS is confined to archaeological objects, and as I said before finds are a relatively easy thing to intuitively understand, they are relatively accessible.

SLIDE 32 – digging at TottifordOn the other hand, Time Team always concentrates on an excavation (this is last Sunday’s very muddy site). It covers other aspects of archaeology as well, but always centred around the dig as the heart of discovery.

Again this is concentrating on what might be seen as most exciting, most accessible, but it is not at all a reflection of what makes up most archaeological work – especially most amateur, do-it-yourself archaeological work.

The third question is what impact have they had on archaeology as a discipline. In some ways Time Team has had a fantastic effect, with increased numbers of prospective undergraduates, and better educated ones at that. When I was at university the big draw was the Indiana Jones films, SLIDE 33, so we all had a slightly unreal idea of what the job might actually be like. These days not only university applicants but also people like major developers and civil engineers, SLIDE 34, who will actually be having to work with archaeology, understand what it is.

Both Time Team and more particularly the PAS have also been very careful to keep politicians aware and involved with what they have been doing. Politicians also like a slightly downmarket approach – they probably think of it as extra democratic and appealing to everyone – and the PAS in particular has really benefited from inviting MPs to events and giving them photo-opportunities. We’ve only had a 15% cut compared to English Heritage’s 32%, over twice as much.

But it’s not all plain sailing. There is the persistent stereotype that public archaeology leads to dumbing down. And when this is combined with the relatively good resources historically enjoyed by the PAS and Time Team, it can generate resentment within other parts of the discipline. You have to be prepared for slings and arrows if you are going to work with the public, and most particularly if you are trying to win new audiences that the existing outreach services have failed to reach. It’s a hard old

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slog of missionary work, not only to those outside the discipline but also unfortunately to those within it.

I think I should end by looking to the future. The lesson from Time Team is perhaps that archaeology and history programmes should be developed within the contemporary light entertainment framework, and not merely made as straight documentaries. They should be original to a certain extent, but their formats need to be instantly recognisable by the public too.

The big gap in archaeology programming today, I think, is the personal quest. Within historical research there has been for many years now a great army of people pursuing their own individual research, mainly aimed at working out their family trees.

SLIDE 35 - WDYTYAThe programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are’ has been phenomenally successful. The format has been sold to other countries and it has spawned DVDs, a live show that you can visit, a magazine and of course most famously a weeping Jeremy Paxman.

Who Do You Think You Are has taken family history and made it the vehicle for telling the stories of the people who don’t usually make it into history – ordinary people – with the twist that their descendants have become famous, and therefore interest us. We like to see them cry.

Using history to explore people who we think we know, and using celebrities to make history interesting – it’s a perfect combination.

So many of us want to find out more about our forebears, and there is much the same impetus to find out more about where we live. I’d like to see a Where Do You Think You Are, which can use history and archaeology – without digging – to work out the story of a place.

SLIDE 36 – maps etcMap analysis, architectural history, looking at aerial photographs and decoding the landscape can all be done by someone on their own without vast resources. The worthy side is that this constitutes the nuts and bolts of basic archaeological research; but it can also have personal stories of people who lived where you live now, who saw the same landscape or townscape every day that you do, but had such very different experiences.

Of course, I’m not naive enough to think that this will make millions rise from the sofa and take out their maps and guides to vernacular buildings.

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I’ve watched enough cookery programmes to know that they don’t actually turn anyone into kitchen goddesses. But archaeological television programmes do increase interest in and support of what we do – research into the past. (And of course they also create employment for some of us).

SLIDE 37 David Starkey and Phil HardingSo in conclusion I think my last slide sums up the appeal of Time Team.

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