An Experiment in Field Archaeology

Abstract

Ideas about the prehistoric past have for long been based upon pieces dug from the mounds and hollows which are the remains of man’s activities. Only recently has it been clearly realized that monuments are continually being modified by nature and that evidence of weathering, denudation and silting can be as informative as the artifacts sometimes found in them. A recent conference showed that there was relatively little exact knowledge of how such processes take place and, in particular, of their quantitative aspects. As has been recently emphasized archaeological excavation is a means of investigating the truth of an hypothesis by destructive analysis. It thus emerges that any study of the action and interaction of natural processes affecting a prehistoric monument must clearly involve the converse, i.e. a monument must be built and studied, in all its component parts, under controlled conditions. Today an impressive and substantial ditch and bank, cut into and heaped upon the chalk of Overton Down in Wiltshire, stands a shining witness to the execution of this principle.The work of construction was undertaken with hand tools, but not all of these were modern picks and shovels. A part of the bank was dug and heaped with primitive tools and appliances—antler picks, shoulder-blade shovels and wicker carrying-baskets. It has long been known (from the not infrequent discovery of examples apparently discarded) that antler picks were the primary digging tools of those who dug the ditches and heaped the long and round barrows, the causewayed camps, the henges and the cursuses, but precise appreciation of the real potentialities of antler picks was slight. Greenwell and Pitt Rivers commented upon the use of such implements, while the subject was pursued in some detail by Horace Sandars in his paper On the Deer Horn Pick in the Mining Operations of the Ancients, among others. Curwen’s accounts of the Sussex flint mines further stimulated such studies as did Clark and Piggott’s classic paper. From Sandars’s, Curwen’s initial and subsequent study and from summaries of the past two decades the view emerged that the antler picks were almost invariably used as punches and levers to break up chalk. Thus, such thought as has been given to prehistoric mining and digging has been to some extent inhibited by acceptance of that notion.