Visits to Stonehenge, 185 years apart
I was at the real Stonehenge yesterday, in warm sunshine that came from nowhere to talk to Tom Holland for the Radio 4 Making History programme (listen out on May 8). Work will start on the new centre before long, and already I’m getting little niggles of nostalgia for all the tarmac, signs and mess. The sun helps.
And here’s a nice little sketch from somebody else’s notebook, of the real thing. It’s in Abbott & Holder’s May list, where it’s described as a sketchbook page 5×14 inches, dated “Sept.3, 1826”, anon, £275.
Filming in Dorset (& reprogramming the TV)
I’m giving you my essential guide to retuning your TV soon, but first a bit of archaeology. This is Maumbury rings, a nice earthworky sort of earthwork near the centre of Dorchester. It looks how it does now because of corporate curation, remodelling during the Civil War and before that as a Roman amphitheatre, but it began as a neolithic henge around 2000BC. The now invisible ditch just inside the bank consisted of a ring of around 50 or so interlocking pits that went down 10m into the chalk. It was partly excavated shortly before the first world war, so really we need to go back and dig some more. Were those pits great empty shafts, as most believe, or could they have held large posts?
I was there yesterday filming for a TV programme, and I was reminded that I should update the Time Team/Mick Aston saga. The public support for both Mick and the TV series (and all the crew, including Mary-Ann Ochota) has been striking. I will be publishing a selection of the many, sometimes quite moving letters I have received in the next British Archaeology. Among the online pieces worth seeing I’ve not noted before are these:
A piece from Mick in the Western Daily Press, that tells about the member of the public stepping in to identify a find (worth reading the whole story):
A brief statement from Mary-Ann, that puts her own spin on the affair:
And this from Mick, defending (quite rightly) the quality of the fieldwork on Time Team:
So I get home from Dorset, and later switch on the TV. No signals. We’ve just had the second round of analogue switch-off. I spent much effort trying to figure it out the first time, and only last night did I get there. Looking for online help, I saw I’m far from the only one who had trouble with this, and curiously many of those struggling with it seem to be people who really know their way around gadgets. If you Google phrases like
i cant find any of my TV channels (25,700,000 results)
how do i find digital channels on my tv? (71,700,000 results)
how do i program my tv for digital? (599,000,000 results)
you get masses of debate, information, gossip and whines, and strikingly most of it seems to lead nowhere useful. It’s not that we weren’t told about the digital switch-over: it’s that we were told too much. Expensive TV adverts, leaflets, press notices, a big website, everywhere for many months, spilling out all sorts of stuff. It certainly got me worried. But I never learned, plain and clear, the simple thing I really needed to know: what to do.
For most of us the TV set is not a piece of technology, but a thing we look at for what it shows us. Many TVs must have been set up by nice delivery men, and the instruction manual (if it’s still around) is long, complex and intimidating. We just watch the thing, we don’t wire it up and re-invent the silicon chip every time we switch on. We want to know how to get BBC1, not what a relay transmitter is or how many sugars the operator needs in his tea.
So if anyone falls on this who hasn’t yet got it sorted, this is what you need to know.
1. The old type of TV signal (analogue) is being switched off so we can move to a new and better one (digital)
2. When that happens, you have to re-program your TV set. That means going back to the beginning, as if you’d just bought it, and telling it to find all the channels. Every set has its own way of doing this, but it’s quite simple. You press “menu”, and select something like “set up” or “installation”, and look for channel selection, retuning or something like that (one of the sets I did actually had a button that said “digital retune”). The key point here is that you want to completely wipe out the old stuff and start again. So you don’t want to find more channels, or update your list: you want to delete all the old channels, and go for factory reset, first installation etc.
3. If none of this seems to work at all, you probably need to buy a new TV.
The Dig
John Tyrrell has posted a comment mentioning John Preston’s novel about Sutton Hoo. Preston talked about “the dig” for British Archaeology in 2007, and as the page is not on the magazine website, here it is.
I will write a note soon about the new British Archaeology which is out later this week. In the meantime, those of you who received their Current Archaeology this morning and wondered about the “Royal Wedding Special” cover and its succumbing to a “wedding fever sweeping the nation”, might like to know that British Archaeology features what’s happening to Egypt’s ancient past during the revolution, and a beckoning people’s archaeology in Britain.
In defence of geophysics
You never know what’s going to catch journalists’ imagination – no matter how hard you try to direct attention to the stories you’d like them to publicise. The new British Archaeology, which hit the shops on Friday, features the Crosby Garrett Roman helmet on the cover. And inside is a great piece on the find, with new information and new photos – and much else besides.
But it is a footnote to a reader’s letter that became a story in today’s Mail on Sunday (and thence to Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, courtesy of a rather confused Sister Wendy Beckett). This shouldn’t get out of (more…)
Dr Who and Stonehenge
Putting finishing touches to Foamhenge, Jun 2005
As has been widely publicised (you don’t get to film there with a large crew, floodlights and smoke machines without being noticed, even in the middle of the night in early February), Stonehenge features as a location in the new Dr Who series. This will start a new chapter in Stonehenge trivia: I think this is the first time the doctor has been to the stones (notwithstanding a claim in a 1965 episode by a Time Lord called the Monk to have put them there in 1500BC).
He did visit a stone circle in Cornwall (or the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire, where the (more…)
Listening to Pagans
Here are two photos of Pagans thinking about prehistoric human remains, under rather different circumstances, but both within the same world heritage site: at Stonehenge (above) and Avebury (below). I put these up because this evening I will be talking about a Pagan reburial request on Night waves (BBC Radio 3, 9pm), with Piotr Bienkowski (the Manchester Museum) and Emma Restall Orr (founder of Honouring the Ancient Dead).
We are expecting any time soon to hear the results of a survey conducted by English Heritage, into public attitudes towards the idea that ancient human remains should be (more…)
Wind up your radios!
Maiden Castle, Dorset
Now the new British Archaeology is out (featuring the usual archaeological stuff – collapse of the Roman empire, a major first world war communal grave excavation, human origins, Stonehedge [sic] and much else – as well as statements from the arts minister and her two shadows), I have a moment to write. I want to mention two radio programmes I’ve been making with Sian Price, and a third with Terry Lewis.
I’m excited about these. Beyond Time Team, archaeology does not get as much broadcast coverage as it could support (though look out for news of a new TV series later this (more…)
Radio in the snow
Everyone in Britain’s posting snow photos, so here are a couple of mine. Having sold my 4-wheel-drive car (good move) and anyway being very busy with the next issue of British Archaeology which goes to the printer soon, my excursions are brief. Above is a view across Marlborough from St Mary’s church, towards Savernake forest, and below looking down the High Street after the A4 had been cleared. If it looks cold, it is.
The snow is lovely, and of course my three-year-old is having a great time with it, but it doesn’t help work. I’m supposed to be at Sutton Hoo on Saturday to record an (more…)
Remembering Timothy Bateson
Timothy Bateson (right) on Windmill Hill, with June Barrie and Martin Friend seated
One of the first things I did after leaving the Alexander Keiller Museum in 1984 was to write an Avebury guidebook. I hoped Shire might publish it, but John Rotheroe thought the market too small (though later he commissioned a guide from another author), so I decided to publish it myself – the start of what became Digging Deeper.
I had to get advance orders before the bank (more…)
Following the Staffordshire hoard
The next British Archaeology is now with the printer (and will be out on December 11), so here’s a chance to catch up on the past month – though that was mostly of course devoted to the magazine.
The Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire hoard continues to fascinate me, with its mix of gorgeous art and craft, sensational discovery story, politics, gossip and, rather in the (more…)
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Spent most of yesterday out in the woods filming, pleasantly peaceful with the sun occasionally shafting through, or the rustle of light rain on the canopy above making the space feel indoor, like a huge, spreading cathedral. We were in the valley we visited last week, where sarsen boulders excavated 90 years ago were abandoned in their trenches by a bankrupt business. It has a sense of loss about it, vaguely redolent of an (more…)
A film (not about grapes)
Another TV job today, this time with a bit of filming (in the rain) of something I am sworn to secrecy about – in fact if the crew’s hotel printer had been working, I would have signed up to silence as well. I’ll let you know when the programme is to be broadcast (I’m a consultant to the project), but it’s likely to be some time yet. In the meantime here is a photo of some garden grapes (looking like our biggest fruiting yet, they must like the rain). And of Bruce Bradley, a skilled flint knapper at Exeter University, whose work like that of all good experimental knappers is so important and (more…)
Splitting stones
A huge sarsen boulder in West Woods, excavated by Thacker & Johnson in the 1920s and saved by their bankruptcy
I went out on a TV recce yesterday, enjoying a rare bit of warm sunshine on the Marlborough Downs. We were looking at sarsens, the strange stones that lie scattered on the surface that were used for megaliths at nearby Avebury and to the south at Stonehenge. You hear a lot about the Welsh bluestones there, but the sarsens are far bigger and more engineered, and would have been a greater challenge to move, despite the shorter distance. There have been endless demonstrations for TV films of (more…)
