By Sue Young:
The venue was Tarmac’s latest quarry excavation at Maxey and anyone who walks the banks of the Maxey Cut cannot fail to be curious about what is going on there. The passionate man was archaeologist Ian Meadows. And his enthusiasm for his subject brought alive this piece of seemingly barren earth, conjuring up an amazing scene of activity and a mysterious people going about their daily lives.
Ian Meadows
It was as I was walking the dog that I came across Ian Meadows and arranged to talk to him for the Tribune. I had a lot of questions, but by the end of my site visit I had even more, because the very nature of archaeological research means that questions lead to questions!
That is the hook. And I think I got hooked.
Ian is a Senior Project Officer, working for Northamptonshire Archaeology. The whole archaeological works are funded by Tarmac, all details being laid down in the original planning consent and the experts will be on site for at least another month carrying out what is known as a Strip, Map and Record. Every five metres in all directions, a ‘spot height’ was taken so that a model could be made of the ground’s surface The whole area will be planned and features excavated.
I asked if the people digging, scraping and recording were student volunteers. In fact they are all qualified people and applicants have come from as far away as Canada and New Zealand.
The present work is not the first phase here as archaeologists were working on this part of the site five years ago. Hundreds of aerial photographs were ‘tied in’ to an Ordnance Survey map via a computer, enabling them to plot obvious points of interest. Then trial trenches were dug and recorded to provide archaeological information all as part of the planning application.
‘Skiving’ off school as a teenager to go digging or investigate the stone blasted from Blue Circle cement quarries, giving up A-level History and going home to read up privately on Geology to the same A-level standard, gives you a clue about how this passion for the past seized Ian from an early age.
‘At seventeen I was a volunteer washing pots’, he told me. ‘The 70′s were good times – the days of old hippies! It could be that women and alcohol were an attraction too!’ Ian went on to gain his degree at Durham University
An inspirational teacher, he waves his arms about a lot and his blue eyes flash as he interprets the meaning of various shadows, pits and undulations of the ground.
It’s a fact that the site dates from between 3500BC to 1500BC – the Neolithic and Bronze ages, the Bronze age starting around 2000BC, with some variations.
Ian explained: ‘In Europe they have a Copper age, so there is a ‘fuzzy edge’ between Neolithic and Bronze.
‘We should be grateful to Tarmac’ he says, ‘because the excavations around here have enabled us to get a very big picture of what was going on here all those years ago. Most excavations are limited to a very small area, indicating only a tiny snapshot of an area.’
He is able to say that although the Cut was, of course, non-existent at this time, to the North of it is evidence of a site for worship demonstrated by ring ditches, probable burial mounds of Bronze age, ceremonial routeways (Cursii) and other monuments; the whole relating in some way to the sun, moon or seasons. To the South was an area for living, proven by the discovery of over a thousand pits, wells, the availability of water nearby and some buried artefacts.
‘We do not find much pottery as it is so almost bio-degradable, if it gets frosted and rained on’, Ian told me, explaining that any pots would have been fired only at bonfire temperature. He put a fragment into my hand, which strangely had the appearance of a piece of gritty road surface. ‘That might be 3,500 years old,’ he said. I thought it best to give it back quickly before it broke apart in my hand. Those items which are being found have not been left on the surface, but have been deliberately buried.
‘Very few metal objects have been found here’ Ian told me, ‘only a few bits of bronze, but we know that much of the copper needed to make the bronze came from Great Orme, near Llandudno’.
It surprised me to find out that there is evidence to suggest that metal working was viewed in much the same way as witchcraft. As with so much in science, it would have been new and incompletely understood, so superstitions were attached to it.
Pieces of flint, scrapers for de-fleshing hides, and broken axes have been found buried; but there are some puzzling things too, particularly in the old watercourses – a saddle quern for instance.
‘Why bury a high quality and valued item?’ ponders Ian.
‘Why bury upside down the skull of a big cow with its jawbone missing and horns a metre and a half wide?’ Why indeed? Apparently there are ‘odd things’ going on in the pits.
I was told that it is tempting to put a label of ‘Ritual’ on some of the finds and this is something firmly resisted by the archaeologist for he says: ‘As soon as you put a ‘Ritual’ label on anything, it stops you thinking’.
Why would anyone put burnt and blackened stones into a pit?
I was reminded of the idea of putting hot stones into a cooking pot to heat the water. Could it be that with shallow water available from the rivers, wool close at hand, the discovery of bone pin beaters, baked clay triangular loom weights, we might come up with the idea that this was a place for felt-making? (Ian went on to explain that Bronze Age bodies found in Jutland show that they knew how to make felt).
Perhaps these people even had trance-inducing saunas?’ he suggested.
This area of the Welland valley was wide and flat – flooded in winter when it would have been uninhabitable and dry in summer when people would have been able to live there. It is possible that it was surrounded by oak woodlands.
Over the whole current excavation area more than a thousand pits have been discovered. This suggests that either a great many people were living here at one time, or that fewer numbers of people lived here over a very long period of time.
Indicating white patches on the earth’s surface, Ian crumbled this substance in his hand, pointing out its similarity to limescale in our kettles. ‘This shows us that there were springs here’, he said, ‘so there would be plenty of water available, even in the dry periods’.
There is evidence of numerous old shallow water courses criss-crossing the site; also ditches. What were the ditches for? Drainage? As a boundary to territory or a field? As protection against the wolves and bears that would have roamed around?
Looking around at the dark, shadowy marks on the terrain, it was explained to me that some of them which looked like ‘blobs’ were actually places where blocks of ice from the ice age had melted. The gravel, now highly prized and the reason for the excavation, was dropped by rivers as their flow diminished. There is localised evidence of a Roman plough soil underneath a clay from medieval times.
More questions can be raised about the proximity of the site to the sea. Was the water in the river fresh or salt in various places? Apparently we can tell this from things called ‘diatoms’ – micro organisms which indicate water quality. Were the monuments to the north meeting places for markets or worship or social gatherings?
When the enormous plant is seen at work scraping and shovelling, manoeuvring tons of earth from place to place, it is incongruous to believe that this is in fact very fine work. When the top two and a half to three feet have been removed, what’s left is the surface that the experts want to see with all its little dips and bumps. To achieve this, Tarmac’s drivers operate with great care and skill and they are supervised most of the time by archaeologist Chris Jones, also of Northamptonshire Archaeology. He is the person to be seen standing keeping a watchful eye on this aspect of the job.
I also talked to Alan Baker, Manager for Tarmac at Maxey, about the eventual outcome for this site.
‘It is going to be intense wet woodland’, he said ‘with four small lakes, a lot of ‘tussocky’ grassland and a tree canopy tight over the water.’ He went on to speak in glowing terms about the work with Northamptonshire Archaeology and their relationship as they work together to achieve the best result all round.
Now we know a little more about the mysteries of holes in the ground and great mounds of earth.
Who knows what else may come to light?
