1. Antiquities, archaeology and the public
For the ‘Public and Popular History’ seminar, University of Cambridge, 8th February
2011.
SLIDE 1
I 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 points
So. 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 map
I 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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2. 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 website
We 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 gardener
Most 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 detectorists
Metal-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 Mail
An 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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3. 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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4. 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 archaeology
So 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 public
BUT
• 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 Team
OK 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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5. 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 sites
What’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 PD
Jim 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 Schedule
Here 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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6. 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 Script
We 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 crew
There 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 Tim
This 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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7. 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 Mick
Tim 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 research
We 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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8. 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 Anneka
Anneka 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 programmes
And 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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9. 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 trench
Once 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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10. 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 PAS
The 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
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11. market 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 - ages
Here 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 - questions
So, 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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12. 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 – knives
On 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 Tottiford
On 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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13. 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 - WDYTYA
The 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 etc
Map 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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14. 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 Harding
So in conclusion I think my last slide sums up the appeal of Time Team.
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