Pitt-Rivers in Kent

image: an example of the rare money of Matilda, struck by the moneyer Sweting at Oxford. This coin was excavated from Castle Hill, Folkestone by Pitt-Rivers in 1878, misidentified by him as a coin of Stephen, and appears not to have been passed to the Pitt Rivers Museum by the General when he donated his collection in 1884. Through another route, however, the coin came to the Ashmolean Museum, where it is now held. The full story is explored in the 'Pitt-Rivers an Kent' paper below.

We have published a draft of our first Excavating Pitt-Rivers project report today. The full paper, on Pitt-Rivers' fieldwork in the county of Kent, is published online here - and the opening lines are below. We actively encourage comments on this paper from researchers with knowledge of the history and archaeology of Kent, who can help us to add to the details that we have been able to assemble so far - please email comments to dan.hicks@prm.ox.ac.uk

This paper explores the evidence for General Augustus Pitt-Rivers’ archaeological fieldwork in the county of Kent, with particular attention to using the archaeological material from the founding collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), University of Oxford – which has been documented through the Arts Council England-funded  Excavating Pitt-Rivers project – as a primary source.  A major aim of the project is to demonstrate the potential for museumcollections to represent resources for the writing, and re-writing, of the history of science, using 19th-century archaeological activities of General Pitt-Rivers as a case study.

Continue reading this paper at http://www.academia.edu/3071375/Pitt-Rivers_in_Kent 

Cataloguing ceramic sherds from Mount Caburn, Sussex

The Excavating Pitt-Rivers team is now working on the material from Sussex, starting with the excavated artefacts from Mount Caburn.  Pitt-Rivers conducted a large-scale excavation at Mount Caburn - an Iron Age hillfort on the South Downs near Lewes - during the summers of 1877 and 1878. We estimate that the PRM holds c. 1,546 ceramic sherds from the excavation of this site by General Pitt-Rivers - representing one of the earliest assemblages from a modern scientific open-area excavation ever created.

The pottery has never been documented at this level of detail, so we are working bag by bag, laying out the contents and labelling each sherd with its own unique museum accession number.

The next step is to catalogue the material on the PRM database, enhancing the records with measurements, weight, object descriptions and information from old labels.

Once all the material has been catalogued, each object is photographed then bagged up individually along with the old documentation, before returning to storage.

This will be keeping us busy for the next few weeks at least!

Flintwork from Yorkshire

Stone scrapers, collected by Canon Greenwell and Pitt-Rivers, from various sites in Yorkshire illustrated in the PRM Accession Book VI and photographed as part of the project. (PRM 1884.133.169-77)

Prior to the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project little was known about Pitt-Rivers' time in Yorkshire. As detailed in an earlier blog post we now have a much better understanding of his activities in 1867 and 1879. The majority of objects collected during Pitt-Rivers' time in Yorkshire were flint arrow-heads and scrapers. Much of this flintwork has specific dates written on them, possibly in the General's own hand, giving us a very detailed account of where Pitt-Rivers was working day to day.

Flint flake (PRM 1884.127.47. 18) marked 'Ganton Wold APL-3-67. ALF [Augustus Lane Fox]'.

The Yorkshire founding collection includes excellent examples of leaf-shaped arrow-heads, barbed and tanged arrowheads, scrapers and hammer-stones.

A selection of 8 barbed and tanged arrow-heads collected in the Yorkshire Wolds by Pitt-Rivers and Greenwell.

A selection of 9 leaf-shaped arrow-heads collected from various locations in Yorkshire by Pitt-Rivers and Greenwell.

As our studies of the artefacts proceed, we shall continue to explore how Pitt-Rivers' archaeological fieldwork in Yorkshire, including that undertaken with Canon William Greenwell, influenced his later field methods.

In Our Time (BBC Radio 4) - Pitt-Rivers

Image: A Romano-British Samian ware bowl from Richborough Roman Fort, Kent (PRM Accession Number 1884.37.26), photographed and documented by the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project team in February 2013.

Public engagement is a central element of the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project. This week, Dan Hicks, who leads the project, spoke about the project to archaeologists at the University of Leicester, and to the A Town Unearthed project in Folkestone, Kent - where Pitt-Rivers excavated at Castle Hill (Caesar's Camp) in June-July 1878. 

This continues next week, when on 28 February Dan will be in discussion with Adam Kuper, Richard Bradley and Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time programme. More details on the broadcast are here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qwgxx 

Image: Base of the Romano-British Samian ware bowl from Richborough Roman Fort, Kent (PRM Accession Number 1884.37.26).

Meanwhile, the documentation process continues: we are finalising our reports on Pitt-Rivers' excavations in Yorkshire, Kent and Surrey, and Judy and Carlotta are starting to open the boxes for the many ceramic sherds excavated by the General from sites in Sussex. The reports, and the updates on our documentation process, will be posted here in the coming weeks.

Two objects from Kent

The Excavating Pitt-Rivers project is continuing to work through the Kent material, photographing and documenting the objects excavated by the General in the county. Here are two of the more unusual examples of the many archaeological objects excavated from Kent by General Pitt-Rivers that our team is documenting.

This unusually shaped natural flint (PRM 1884.140.1308) is covered in a black deposit.  It was excavated in 1868 from a pit located between St. Peter's and Reading Street on the Isle of Thanet.

This chalk object (PRM 1884.138.13) was excavated at Caesar’s Camp in 1878.  Pitt-Rivers described the object as a “Fragment of dish or mould, in chalk, with a hole bored from both sides; found in an oblong pit at the foot of the interior slope of Upper Rampart, June 8th (1882:464).” 

Below is an illustration of the chalk fragment, from Pitt-Rivers' report on the Caesar's Camp excavations, published in 1882.

References

Pitt-Rivers, A. H. L. F. 1882. Excavations at Caesar's Camp near Folkestone, conducted in June and July 1878. Archaeologia 47(2): 429-465.

Pitt-Rivers in the Isle of Thanet

Image: Photograph (2013) and illustration (1869) of the flints excavated and collected from the Isle of Thanet (Kent, England) by General Pitt-Rivers.

The Excavating Pitt-Rivers team is currently working on the material that the General collected and excavated during his time in Kent. Whilst looking at material from the Isle of Thanet we found a number of lithics, previously unrecorded, that match illustrations in one of Lane Fox’s earliest publications (Lane-Fox 1869), as shown in the photograph above, which is reproduced alongside the 1869 illustration.

In this 1869 publication, he described his ‘examination’ of the Isle of Thanet. Pitt-Rivers explored an area stretching from ‘a mile north of Margate to Broadstairs and Ramsgate, and to a distance of a mile or two inland from those places’. The paper described his methods of identifying ancient flints:

“…there is no real difficulty in detecting the ancient from the modern flakes; dark flakes with a dull surface must be rejected as modern, those of ancient date are of a light blue colour on their fractured surfaces.” (Lane-Fox 1869: 6-7)

The paper also discussed the sourcing of raw materials and the importance of understanding this. He compared his finds of flint objects in Oxfordshire to those found on the Isle of Thanet, contrasting the lack of available flint sources in Oxfordshire with their relative abundance in Kent.

Keep an eye out in the upcoming weeks for more exciting finds from Kent, as our documentation process continues.

References
Lane-Fox, A. 1869. 'On some flint implements found associated with Roman remains in Oxfordshire and the Isle of Thanet.' Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1869-1870), 1.1: 1-12.

Pitt-Rivers in Surrey

Carlotta and Judy, from the Excavating Pitt-Rivers project team, working on the ceramic urns from Whitmore Common, Surrey.

The work on the material that General Pitt-Rivers acquired from Surrey has been completed.  We originally believed there to be 245 objects from this county but whilst working through the collections we came across many more and the total now stands at 487!

Surrey has been an interesting county to work on.  Not only because General Pitt-Rivers resided in Guildford between 1873 to 1877 whilst commanding the West Surrey Brigade Depot (Thompson 1977: 37), but also for revealing some of the diversity of his methods for obtaining objects.

Pitt-Rivers acquired some of this material from barrow-digging: he conducted excavations of a number of tumuli in Surrey. During his excavations of tumuli at Whitmore Common, he recovered five Bronze Age urns [PRM Accession Numbers 1884.35.33-37], while artefacts recovered during excavations at Merrow Down included an Anglo-Saxon knife [1884.121.11].  

Whilst these excavations were planned, others were purely accidental, and closer to an early form of rescue archaeology.  For example, the discovery of an assemblage of Iron Age pottery from St. Martha’s Hill, as indicated by the label below.

The label, probably in the General's hand, found with the urn sherds from St Martha's Hill, indicating their accidental discovery during tree planting.

However, the General's field-walking accounted for the majority of finds.  Around 300 worked flints, labelled 'surface' ('S'), derive from find-spots within walking distance of the General’s residence at Uplands in Guildford, where he lived between 1874 and 1878.

Other items from the country were not excavated by the General himself. These include the hinge of an iron flail [1884.12.30] 'dug up at Reigate' and obtained by Pitt-Rivers in 1877 from the collection of Ambrose Glover, and a Romano-British bronze figurine [1884.67.72], reportedly discovered in the River Thames at Chertsey, which is recorded as purchased from 'Williamson'.

This work on Surrey will result in the production of a report, which will be available in the next few weeks.  Next county…Kent!

References

Thompson, M.W. 1977. General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and archaeology in the nineteenth century. Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press.