A brief history of History at the University of Leicester
The image above has been compressed for the web, but you can view a slideshow of each panel below, and download a high resolution copy using the buttons beneath the slideshow:
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You can view and download the full-size originals using these buttons (PNG image file, 7mb):
Please feel free to share it, use it in the classroom, adapt it, print it etc. It will work on A4 but is probably most readable on A3 or on screen. It is licensed under Creative Commons licence CC-BY SA. This means you may use it however you wish, provided that you: a) credit the creator, and b) offer any adaptations under a license that is no less permissive.
History at Leicester was ranked 2nd in the UK in REF 2021 (the UK’s method for assessing the quality of research in UK Higher Ed institutions). However, its future is uncertain. History at Leicester is one of a number of subject areas that was given notice of ‘pre-change engagement’ in June 2025: https://le.ac.uk/news/2025/june/leicester-responds-sector-financial-pressures. Staff and students are awaiting an announcement on the nature and scale of proposed changes. That announcement is expected in October/November 2025.
Source material for this comic included images and information from the University of Leicester, the East Midlands Oral History Archive, the Leicester Mercury, and Black Cultural Archives.
Further reading:
The early history of the University of Leicester was researched for So that they may have life: a University Heritage Project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
An edited volume of FW Buckler’s South Asian writings was drawn together by Michael Pearson in 1985. Physical copies are hard to find, but it is available on the Internet Archive.
I’ve been stuck indoors for a while (doctor’s orders), unable to do any sort of physical work, or exercise, or even sit at a desk all day. But I’m not really one for box-sets, so I decided to take a bit of a mental journey by drawing a few of my favourite archaeological landscapes.
For a long time I’ve dabbled in selling things through print-on-demand services, but to be honest I’ve never quite found the right one that’s a good balance of ethics, quality, and sustainability. But then I came across Teemill, which ticks all the boxes so far.
So, I made a little shop featuring some of my designs from Britain and Ireland. There’s Carreg Samson, the Neolithic dolmen near Abercastle in Pembrokeshire. If dolmens are your thing there’s also Poulnabrone (Poll na Brón), County Clare. For Iron Age fans, there’s Dun Carloway (Dùn Chàrlabhaigh) broch, on the Isle of Lewis; and British Camp, the imposing Iron Age hillfort atop the Malvern Hills.
If you‘d like to see more sites/landscapes/artefacts, let me know: happy to oblige! At the moment I’m limited to a small range of products and colours, but if demand is there I will expand to add more – just drop me a line to request a product or a design.
Teemill’s clothing is good stuff – all organic cotton, printed sustainably in the UK. There’s a QR code on the label so at the end of life, you can send it back for recycling to earn store credit. The ‘Remill’ range of garments is made with 50% post-consumer recycled cotton; they have a more textured feel and appearance. They’re slightly pricier than the standard organic cotton, so I’ve added a range of both to suit all budgets.
Here’s me wearing a sample of an early draft of the Carreg Samson Remill T-shirt:
This weekend there’s a free delivery offer on everything, so if you’re after Christmas gifts for your pet archaeologist, or you fancy treating yourself to some decent apparel that won’t cost the earth, take a look: https://incurablearchaeologist.teemill.com/
I drew this comic for Womens’ History Month, March 2023. The version above has been compressed for the web, but you can view a slideshow of each image below.
Kathleen Kenyon 1
Kathleen Kenyon 2
Kathleen Kenyon 3
Kathleen Kenyon 4
Kathleen Kenyon: 5
Kathleen Kenyon 6
Kathleen Kenyon 7
Kathleen Kenyon 8
Download links and permissions:
You can view and download the full-size originals using these buttons (PNG image file, 13 mb):
Please feel free to share it, use it in the classroom, adapt it, print it etc. It should be readable printed on A4 but probably works best on A3. The full image is 6075 x 3975 pixels. It is licensed under Creative Commons licence CC-BY SA. This means you may use it however you wish, provided that you: a) credit the creator, and b) offer any adaptations under a license that is no less permissive.
Source material for this comic included images and information from University of Leicester Archaeological Services, the staff and students of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, europeana.eu, and the publications listed below.
Further reading:
The only full-length biography of Kathleen is Miriam C Davis’: Dame Kathleen Kenyon: Digging up the Holy Land As an archaeologist herself, Davis does a great job outlining the context of her work, but equal attention is paid to her personal life, and it’s an enjoyable read. Someday I’ll have to do a whole other comic on the fate of Ponty, her beloved 1946 Pontiac…
For more on the background of women in archaeology from the 1930s to 1970s, placing Kenyon’s career in the context of the post-war contraction of opportunities for women in the field, I recommend a paper by Rachel Pope: Processual archaeology and gender politics: the loss of innocence
The Beyond Notability project is building a database of women’s work in archaeology between 1870 and 1950. You can explore their database here: Beyond Notability Database
Of Kenyon’s work, her accessible books for the lay reader are a lively insight into the sheer scale and ambition of her excavations: Digging up Jericho (1957) is hard to find, but well worth a read. And if that sparks your interest in the site, and her legacy, then Digging Up Jericho: Past, Present and Future, by Rachael Thyrza Sparks, Bill Finlayson, Bart Wagemakers and Josef Mario Briffa (2020) sets Kenyon’s investigations in context and discusses the wider history of the archaeology of the site.
You can find out more about her work on Roman Leicester on Leicester City Council’s Story of Leicester resource, and read the University of Leicester Archaeological Services’ thoughts on the Jewry Wall dig in Kathleen Kenyon and the Jewry Wall.
If you’d like to dive deeper into her work on the Jewry Wall, the monograph she published in 1948 is available to download from the Archaeology Data Service: Excavations at the Jewry Wall Site, Leicester
Inktober is an annual drawing challenge: a drawing a day, throughout October, following a particular set of prompts. This year, I followed Dr Katy Whitaker’s #archink prompts. Some of the sketches relate to my work or research; others are loosely connected to places and things I’ve encountered in the course of my archaeological life.
In 2022, I began posting them online… and then I got fed up with social media and the posts tailed off. I carried on drawing, though, and thought it would be good to bring them all together and post them here.
I hope you find them interesting and/or informative. If you’d like to use or adapt any for your own purposes, feel free. You can save images from the gallery below, or use this link to download a PDF (17mb) of them all: archink 2022
This is a drawing of a drum made 15,000 years ago from the skull of a mammoth, in what is now Ukraine.
Illustration of mammoth-skull drum from Mezhyrich, Ukraine
There’s a small village in central Ukraine, where the Rosava and Ros rivers meet. From here the Ros flows east, joining the mighty Dnieper about 10km downstream.
Mezhyrich has a population of under a thousand. It is one among hundreds of villages in the province of Cherkasy Oblast, and I doubt if I would ever have heard of it if a local farmer hadn’t wanted a bigger cellar.
He started digging in 1965, and found he’d bitten off more than he could chew when he encountered the jawbone of a mammoth.
This is not, in itself, a remarkable discovery in the loess soils of central Ukraine. However, it soon became apparent that it was stacked, upside down, within another mammoth jaw. And another.
Excavations revealed circular walls, 5m in diameter, constructed entirely of interlocking mammoth jaws. Socketed into the tops of the low walls were dozens of tusks, arching up to form a roof and porch.
Image of a Mezhyrich hut from Dolní Věstonice museum. The mammoth drum is inside the porch.
The remains of at least 95 mammoths were represented, bones scavenged from carcasses and hauled miles to this spot. I don’t know if you’ve ever lifted mammoth bones. I have. They weigh a ton. Four of these structures have been found at Mezhyrich.
There are quite a few such sites in this part of the world, most dating to the later stages of the last Ice Age. Some are colossal, and show no sign of having been lived-in. But the Mezhyrich huts had hearths, and the detritus of everyday life: knapped flint; bone needles.
Mezhyrich lay within a huge area of Ice Age tundra known as the ‘mammoth steppe’. At its peak, this colossal biome stretched around the globe from Atlantic shore to Atlantic shore.
15,000 years ago, you could have walked from my door in the west of England to Mezhyrich without getting your feet wet or leaving the lush plains of herbs and grasses: home to the mammoth and the humans who followed them.
What makes Mezhyrich really special is the artefacts found within that first structure – among them objects carried hundreds of kilometres. Amber ornaments. An ivory plaque, inscribed with what’s thought to be a map.
Pen and watercolour pencil illustration of the Mezhyrich mammoth-skull drum
And the mammoth-skull drum. It lay at the entrance to the hut. Battered surfaces spoke of frequent use. On the high forehead, there were enigmatic red ochre designs. There are various theories about what they mean: one is that they depict flames and sparks of a fire.
Flames. Sparks. What would those people say, to see this land on fire on an unimaginable scale? What would they — who had no need of national borders — make of one country’s desire to crush its neighbour underfoot?
Their world was changing, too. Did they know? The mammoth steppe was entering a long, slow decline. Within a few thousand years, the mammoths were gone.
Today, one of the structures is reconstructed in the National Museum of Natural History. Another was partly excavated in the 1970s. In the village, there’s a small sheet-metal barn; inside, a neat white picket fence; and inside that, you are stepping back 15 thousand years.
A 2018 summer school hosted excavators from Ukrainian and French universities. That year, we built our own little homage to the Ukrainian mammoth-bone huts in Worcester Museum. We filled it with blackboards for children to draw their own cave art. Books to fire their imaginations.
Children’s book corner in the style of a mammoth-bone hut, Worcester Museum Lost Landscapes exhibition 2018
I sat down inside and read to my son. I told him that 700 generations ago, children curled up with their families and told stories in huts like these, in a place called Ukraine. I told him I’d take him one day.
We have not made it to Mezhyrich. Not yet. But one fine summer’s day I hope to walk around the village, step into the little barn, and listen to the chatter of students as they bring the hubbub of voices and laughter back to the mammoth-bone hut.
I have been lost for words of late, to see this part of the world and its people— whose history is dear to my heart — suffering so terribly. And there seems little I can do.
Proceeds will go to the Red Cross through the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian appeal. If you’d like to make an offer for the original, message me through the contact form. Take care. Slava Ukraini.
Mammoth-skull drum against a blue sky and yellow steppe-grass background.
Forgive the deviation from the normal fare of archaeology and history. But sometimes politics becomes personal, and inescapable, and I am angry.A letter to @WalkerWorcester:
Rt Hon Robin Walker MP
Dear Mr Walker,
I’ve never written to my MP before. It’s not that I’m apathetic. It’s just that I’ve never believed it would change anything. My wife writes to you. At length. And, to be fair, you always respond. But her latest letter was brief. She’s got a lot going on. Her father died last week.
He’d spent much of the last couple of years under treatment for cancer. So we were careful, Mr Walker. We stuck — religiously — to the rules, for fear of putting him at risk. We had a birthday party in June 2020, Mr Walker. We sat on separate rugs, in a National Trust garden. We brought our own food. We did not hug. It was one of the few occasions our baby daughter got to meet her grandfather. And even after the rules relaxed, Mr Walker, we were cautious. We did not want to put our family at risk.
Our son was 5 when this all started, Mr Walker. Formative years. So many firsts their grandparents missed. But it seemed like he was on the mend. There’ll be time to catch up after, we thought. Well, Mr Walker, there wasn’t. Because he’s gone. And now, of course, there’s a whole heap of self-doubt. Did we do right? Shouldn’t we have just bent the rules?
Do you see why this matters, Mr Walker? Do you see why this isn’t going to blow over with a non-committal apology and a redacted internal report? Because it’s not just the daily drip of damning evidence that exposes each improbable denial. Your government asked us to make sacrifices. And we did. But it turns out that the Prime Minister was less capable of restraint on his fifty-sixth birthday than my son was on his sixth.
People say you are a decent man, Mr Walker. Politics necessitates compromise. I understand that it is possible to put up with a lot from one’s colleagues if you believe you are serving the wider public interest. But it’s no longer possible to hold your nose above the stench of arrogance and exceptionalism emanating from the heart of your government. The thing about rotten apples, Mr Walker, is that they taint the whole barrel.
Our little private turmoil, and my mounting anger, is mirrored across the city. Most of your constituents will have their own stories of absence and loss. Keep them in mind when you consider this matter, Mr Walker. That’s all I ask. I think you probably know the right course, and I wish you the conviction to take it.
With best wishes,
Rob Hedge.
Update: To his credit, Robin Walker was quick to respond, and in the interests of balance his reply is copied below
Thank you for your recent correspondence which I read with the greatest of sympathy. My thoughts are with you and Hannah in respect of your late father in law. I lost my own father to cancer soon after being elected and have also been taking extra precautions through the pandemic as a result of a relative who is undergoing chemotherapy. I entirely appreciate the difficult choices that you and your family have been having to make and therefore the added concern that this might generate about some of the media coverage of events in Westminster. I understand and share the anger felt by people across the country at allegations of gatherings in Downing Street during the pandemic. So many of us have made extraordinary personal sacrifices throughout the pandemic. We followed the rules to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities. I know for many people, it is deeply upsetting to think that anyone in Downing Street, who was involved in setting the rules, did not follow them. The Prime Minister, in comments to the House of Commons, has accepted that there were things that they did not get right and has taken responsibility for this. He has offered his heartfelt apologies. I made clear at that time that I thought the Prime Minister was right to apologise. A number of constituents have contacted me about this matter and I have made their views known to my colleagues in government. It is right that this should be properly investigated and I welcome the ongoing investigation into these allegations which will establish all the facts and report back as soon as possible. This is an independent investigation and is being led by Sue Gray, second permanent secretary at the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. I want to reassure you that the Terms of Reference for this investigation make clear that wherever there are credible allegations of gatherings, these may be looked at. It has been confirmed that this includes the allegations relating to November and December 2020 as well as 15th and 20th May 2020. The Government has been clear that if wrongdoing is established, then appropriate disciplinary action will be taken. I await the outcome of the inquiry at which pointthe Prime Minister will make a statement in Parliament. In the meantime it is important that I as Worcester’s MP remain focused on all of the things that matter to the people of Worcester. These priorities are investing in jobs, growing our economy, supporting our treasured NHS and improving our local schools. I recently made the announcement that schools in Worcestershire will next year receive a £23 million increase in core schools funding (6 per cent in per pupil terms) and a significantly higher increase for high needs funding which rises by £10 million to a total of £78 million. Work is underway on the £15 million upgrade to the Emergency Department at the Worcestershire Royal as well as a much needed expansion of bed capacity at the hospital, and last month was the tenth month in a row that unemployment fell in the constituency. I can assure you that when the report is published I will consider it carefully but I do not think it is right to draw conclusions based on a series of selective leaks to the media. I recognise that there is a great deal of concern about these matters and I respect your strongly held views. I know from my work as a Minister, the vast majority of which was done remotelyduring the period of lockdown, that ministers and officials in all parts of government were working hard to protect both lives and livelihoods and the type of events that have been alleged to have happened in the various leaks and briefings, neither reflect my own experience or that of any colleagues with whom I have discussed them. I do think it is right therefore to get to the bottom of what actually did happen before sitting in judgement on anyone. Thank you for taking the time to contact me regarding this matter and please accept my condolences for your family’s loss.
Inktober is an annual drawing challenge: a drawing a day, throughout October, following a particular set of prompts. This year, I followed Dr Katherine Cook’s archink series, each the title of an archaeology-related book. Some of the sketches discuss the books themselves, others explore concepts or objects loosely inspired by the title, related to my work and research.
I hope you find them interesting and/or informative. If you’d like to use or adapt any for your own purposes, feel free. You can save images from the gallery below, or scroll to the foot of the post to download a PDF of them all. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
It’s been a long time since I last wrote. Forgive me; there’s been a lot going on. But this is something that matters to me. The University of Worcester has decided to cease the teaching of archaeology, and to make its archaeologists redundant.
For nine years, I’ve worked for Worcestershire Archive and Archaeology Service, in The Hive: a hub that houses the University of Worcester’s library. There’s rarely been a time during that period when our service hasn’t been under threat. There will, no doubt, be further hard times ahead once the financial impact of COVID is felt by local authorities, a year or two down the line. But right now, higher education is the canary in the coal mine. It is the university staff who face redundancy, and Worcester’s woes are not unique.
I’ve spent a lot of time with the University of Worcester’s staff and students. Statistically, their results are impressive: a student satisfaction rate of 100%, and one of the most impressive graduate employment records around. But I believe that the best measure of the success of a department is the quality of its students. Many have passed through my door, eager and willing to learn the rudiments of finds work. Plenty of my colleagues began their careers at Worcester, and I have encountered many more of their graduates elsewhere in the sector. I can honestly say I’ve never met a bad one. And that is entirely down to the passion and care of their brilliant staff; their level of personal investment in their students should be the envy of larger departments.
Looking back, is there cause for regret? Undoubtedly. Our input into the department dwindled to a trickle over the years, a casualty of austerity. The Council could no longer subsidise teaching work, and the Uni wouldn’t pay. My own aspirations for closer relations were often dashed against twin cliffs of University and Council bureaucracy. But in the last few years, a new appetite for collaboration has gathered pace, centred around an interest in the unremarkable: projects to peel back the layers of life in and around Worcester across millennia, through the domestic detritus recovered from fieldwalking and test-pitting. The sort of deeply unfashionable work through which a university could, if it so wished, become enmeshed in the lives and stories of the city it calls home.
But Worcester, it seems, has little time for such niceties. In its boundless ambition, wrapped up in a programme of acquisition and expansion, and of gleaming new facilities, archaeology has no place. Enrollment had been suspended, pending a restructure of the courses. But only a week ago, I was chatting to two of the staff about their efforts to mould a programme that the university could support. Now the axe has fallen. No right of appeal, no lengthy consultation, no redeployment.
A demographic dip notwithstanding, there has been no long term decline in the numbers of prospective students. Looking ahead, recruitment will be more challenging. But the closure of Worcester is not an indication of a subject in terminal decline. Rather, it is the result of a market-driven approach to Higher Education that is bent on weeding out the less profitable. Between them, Worcester’s staff have dedicated more than a century to teaching and researching archaeology. A market that cannot find a place for that expertise is not a market that is functioning effectively.
The loss of archaeology at Worcester has bigger ramifications for the sector than student numbers alone suggest. It has always been a department that attracted a much more diverse demographic than most. It was a haven for mature students; for local people with caring responsibilities; for the first in their families to enter higher education; for those with huge potential but fewer academic qualifications; for the neurodiverse; and for anyone who longed to learn more about how the world beneath their feet shaped the world we inhabit today. In a profession that is unhealthily homogeneous, it has been a force for social mobility. And for a profession that struggles to train and retain staff, it has been an invaluable source of passionate and capable archaeologists. Our subject is all about understanding human behaviour: Worcester has consistently taken the life experience of its students and spun it into a web of expertise that has enriched our sector.
It is often argued that archaeology is important because it underpins the planning system. No archaeologists = no-one to complete the requisite surveys or excavations in advance of development. This argument is predicated on acceptance of the existing system. If your aim is deregulation of the planning system, then a shortage of archaeologists is no longer an issue to be tackled, but a means to an end. Much is also made of archaeology’s STEM credentials, in efforts to cater to the government’s stated preference for such qualifications, but to my mind the beauty of archaeology is its position at the crossroads between science and the humanities, with all the resulting tension. Staff shortages and STEM credibility have their place in the list of arguments for the importance of archaeology degrees like Worcester’s, but they’re not enough.
So why is archaeology worth fighting for? Well, it’s enormous fun. Honestly. There are few more rewarding things than digging a hole and finding stuff in it. Or piecing together clues to unpick the history of a house. Or pulling together all the evidence to make a map that reveals a landscape in a whole new light. But beyond that, none of the challenges that humanity faces can be solved by shiny tech alone. Archaeology is about understanding how people respond, change, adapt. How they react to crises. How they persist, endure, or thrive.
Much of the University of Worcester’s rapid property acquisition in recent years has been on the northern outskirts of the Roman town. It’s driven welcome regeneration of a tired area, but the University should remember that its growth is — quite literally — built on the city’s archaeology. Excavations on its City Campus site showed that the site was occupied as the town grew in the later 2nd century, buoyed by the flow of revenue from Imperial coffers in exchange for Worcester’s iron. But a century later, it was abandoned. The town shrunk, as the empire descended into a 50-year economic and political crisis, born of its own hubris. There’s probably a lesson in there.
Archaeologists excavating Roman remains on the University of Worcester City Campus site
Archaeologists: be more visible. Share what you do, hot off the trowel or straight from the screen. I’m rubbish at this – I get so consumed by the work I fail to step back for 5 minutes and share it. I know permissions are a pain, but get it sorted. If it’s too much hassle, hire an outreach officer. Oh, and above all, treat your staff well. Show people there’s a future in this. Otherwise, if this decline continues, we’ll all be pushing wheelbarrows til our knees give out and we’re carted off to a museum ourselves.
And right now? Sign the petition. Make a noise. Show the University of Worcester that you care about the future of our discipline. #SaveArchaeologyAtWorcester
With much fanfare and a new fatuous 3-word slogan, Boris Johnson announced yesterday… well, very little of substance. Except maybe that the £12 billion funding for housing announced in the budget earlier this year would be stretched over 8 years rather than 5. In case your head is still spinning with the circular brilliance of ‘build build build’, like the figures in an Escher drawing trying to work out how one stops the country and gets off, he also talked about newts. Specifically, he promised that:
“this government will shortly bring forward the most radical reforms to our planning system since the end of the second world war… time is money, and the newt-counting delays in our system are a massive drag on the productivity and prosperity of this country” Boris Johnson, 30/06/2020
Unfortunately, as people were quick to point out, it’s not regulation that slows down house building. In 2017-18, planning permission was granted for 382,997 homes, well in excess of the government’s target of 300,000 homes a year. But developers aren’t building them. There’s a comprehensive 2018 report by Sir Oliver Letwin setting out exactly where the issues lie. But Johnson is ripping that up, possibly because it was commissioned by that notoriously partisan body, the… er, Conservative Government.
So why tear up the rulebook? It’s about whose heritage you value. In the same speech, he also said:
“I don’t believe in tearing people down any more than I believe in tearing down statues that are part of our heritage” Boris Johnson, 30/06/2020
In defending statues and trashing environmental protections, the government’s message is clear: whose heritage matters? Not yours.
The cold edifice of a man who inherited a fortune and bloated it further through the traffic in human lives? Heritage.
The wildflower meadows your grandparents played in? The Roman town whose walls hold the stories of the people who came from across the empire to live, love, and work there? The shop your parents set up; the street you were born on; the dock where your husband’s family first set eyes upon this country? Nah. Bulldoze them. Sweep them away for a cluster of naff executive homes, ready to lie empty as their cheap mortar crumbles because no-one can afford to buy them. Call them Roman Way or Windrush Close, the last faint echoes on the breeze. And who knows, maybe someday a child will dig up a few scattered Roman potsherds and wonder what stood before. Maybe a grandson will stand before a locked gate and peer through the railings, straining for a glimpse of a dock basin before the security guard hustles him along.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot said that “any historical narrative is a bundle of silences”. Whose story gets told? Whose story does not?
“History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.” Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995)
Take a look at the statue of Rhodes. Of Colston. Ask yourself, who do these statues represent? Is it you?
Many of you who value the heritage and environmental protections of our existing planning system will also abhor the removal of statues. I’ve written before about statues: how they become a flashpoint, a comfortable symbol to defend because they insulate us from darker and less comfortable contradictions buried in our own local and family histories. But, after all, Colston was Grade 2 listed. If I care about heritage protection, should I not deplore his sudden immersion? No. Heritage is not fossilisation: places are for people. But where will it end, you might ask? It ends when everyone’s stories are told. It ends when the silences in our historical narratives are broken by the voices of people we have marginalised and othered for too long. It ends when we understand how power is distributed unequally. It ends when we expose its roots.
Field sketch of Gloucester Docks.
This is Gloucester docks: stunning industrial heritage, and a great example of the collision of heritage, planning, and inequality. They are now a thriving and desirable mix of apartments and commercial development. Their survival and regeneration owes much to the warehouses’ status as listed buildings. But the docks owe their 19th century prosperity to the investment of Samuel Baker and Thomas Philpotts, whose profits came from the backs of slaves; they received £4283 in 1834 (equivalent to £561,000 in today’s prices), in compensation for the freedom of 240 slaves upon abolition. The docks stand as a monument to the tangled, pervasive web of racial inequality, and tell that story in a far more powerful and nuanced fashion than a lump of Bronze on a tall plinth ever could. Baker later went on to purchase Thorngove House, near Grimley. I cycled past it last night, oblivious to that link. I never knew. The roots run deep and wide.
Heritage and environmental regulations are not perfect; there’s room for improvement. But they do put some of the power in the hands of those who would champion the small but valuable corners of our country: the distinctive, the local. The places and the stories that matter to people. The untold stories. They are a brake on the excesses of unchecked profiteering. They are a mechanism through which we are able to fill the gaps, to add voices, to ensure the histories of the extraordinary everyday are told and re-evaluated with each new discovery.
Black Lives Matter. Heritage matters. These are not contradictory statements. It’s the same fight. The same argument for value, respect, and representation. The cold dead stare of a statue and the cold hard cash of unregulated development are two sides of the same coin: they are marks of power, and a signal that, left to its own devices, power cares nothing for people, and nothing for place. Interrogate that power. Hold it to account, for the sake of all whose lives are held in its grip.
At this time of year, I’d usually be at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference, getting my annual dose of theory. But this year I can’t make it, due to parenting commitments. I’m sorry to miss it, as it sounds like there have been some brilliant sessions. But I’m following from afar, and reflecting on a funny old year. In the Spring I finally got my knee put back together. As a finds archaeologist it amuses me that my left leg is now partly ceramic! I’ve had some time off, seen many good colleagues made redundant, and gone back to work part-time.
And last month I got a few more letters after my name: MCIfA. Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. I should be delighted. I am, in a way. It’s nice to be recognised by one’s peers, and I put a lot of work into the application. But it comes with a sense of responsibility, too.
It took a lot of work: collate a portfolio; compile a list of over 200 examples of my reports, papers, lectures, and resources; draw up a statement of competence; and update all my professional development records and plans. But I got it done. Almost immediately, I fell into a complete panic. I went through the CIfA yearbook. I looked at all the MCIfAs. Surely I didn’t belong in their company? And I saw all the people I respect and admire who aren’t at that grade. If they weren’t, what right did I have to presume that I belonged? I almost convinced myself that they would reject me, that I should apologise and withdraw my application.
They didn’t reject me. And it is satisfying that a group of people, who don’t know me, took a look at my work and thought I’d earned those letters.
But professionally, archaeological institutions have been mired in controversy lately. Earlier this year, ripples from across the Atlantic were widely discussed in UK archaeological circles. The Society for American Archaeology badly mishandled a situation in which an archaeologist banned from his university for sexual misconduct was permitted to attend their conference. And then, on this side of the pond, came a weekend in which members of the Society of Antiquaries voted against the ejection of a convicted abuser, and a young researcher received an award for her work on sexual harrassment to a soundtrack of laughter from the audience.
Given that our whole discipline is devoted to recognising change in patterns of human behaviour, we’re remarkably myopic when it comes to ourselves. I’ve seen a good many comment pieces on the working life of an archaeologist, but in truth no-one has hit the nail on the head for the British/Irish workforce quite so well as Stuart Rathbone in this article. It rang painfully true, and still does. Many great people, brilliant in many respects but curiously inept in others. Low rates of union membership and employees with little collective bargaining power. And a set of working conditions that bakes-in poor health and precarity, within which abuse can thrive.
It’s not just in commercial archaeology: museums, planning departments, HERs — anywhere you’ll find archaeologists you’ll find a maze of temporary posts, staff ‘acting-up’, recruitment freezes, overwork, and poor pay. There’s a perception among many of my generation that things are, at least, substantially better than they were 30 years ago. That may be true for some. But for the striking MOLA archaeologists, pay in real terms is 30% less than it was in 1989. In my own local authority, pay across most grades has fallen below 1989 levels once you account for inflation. And that’s before you even factor in the cost of housing, which has leapt by 69% above the rate of inflation in that period.
These situations create the spaces in which the rotten fruit can poison the barrel. Power inequalities and precarity lead to chronic under-reporting of abusive behaviour. If your contracts are measured in weeks, you don’t want to rock the boat. Perpetrators of abuse can move freely between organisations without much scrutiny. Academia was once the promised land, to which one might hope to escape to the promise of a healthy salary and a degree of permanence. But, as the striking university staff of the UCU can testify, conditions for the majority of the peripatetic early career academics who carry so much of the universities’ teaching load are every bit as hand-to-mouth as the rest of the sector.
It gladdens my heart to see many organisations investing in staff. There’s a new breed of small, dynamic outfits who recognise that the work they do can only ever be as good as the people they employ to do it; a workforce of archaeologists with security, stability and professional development will move mountains. But too many still view staff as at best a commodity, and at worst an expensive liability.
It feels, in short, like the time is ripe for a new generation to step up and lead. But to be brutally honest, it’s hard work just keeping afloat. Many of my generation of archaeologists have exerted so much just to tread water that the prospect of a battle for the soul of the profession is daunting. I don’t honestly know how long I can afford to stick around, especially with the prospect of workers’ rights joining the bonfire of the environmental protection regulations which underpin much of today’s archaeology sector. There seems little doubt that the government will pursue economic growth through a feast of deregulation. A rising tide raises all ships, the doctrine goes. But as I skirt the floodwaters of the River Severn on my way to work, it’s not much help if you’re holed below the waterline.
Swans on the swollen Severn
But while I’m here, and now I have those letters after my name, I’ve got a responsibility to do what I can to set the tone and set the course for those that come after. There are many who view organisations like CIfA as too compromised, and will not join. That’s a position I respect. But my view is that the culture of an organisation is set by its membership, and if change is to take root, it has to be championed from within.
Join your union. And if you’re one of those people to whom I look up, and you’ve been putting off your CIfA paperwork, dust it off over Christmas. I don’t know how much longer any of us have got in this game, but while we’re here, let’s look out for each other.
the incurable archaeologist 