Alastair Oswald is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Inspired? Join the Council for British Archaeology today!
It’s difficult to pinpoint one single reason why I became interested in archaeology so early. I loved reading Asterix and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, digging on the beach, collecting fossils, old bottles, minerals. My parents took me to visit historic monuments of all sorts, all around Europe: Maiden Castle in Dorset, megalithic tombs in Menorca, and the burial mound of Harald Bluetooth in Denmark stand out.
My first explicitly archaeological memory, when I was less than 10 years old, was trailing round after Professor Barry Cunliffe during his excavations at Portus Lemanis in Kent. I have a very clear memory of someone eventually taking pity on me and offering me a lift in the Landrover in which he was being ferried around the site. A decade later, I was proud to be one of Barry’s trusted shovellers when he excavated at Danebury hillfort. Those hot, beery summers in the Hampshire countryside were wonderful and, thirty years on, the people I bonded with there remain some of my closest friends.
I am an unusual variety of archaeologist, who studies whatever can be seen on the surface, without digging. It’s worth mentioning how I got into this specialism. As an undergraduate project, I did a geophysical survey of a site that had become visible as ‘parchmarks’ in the pasture near Woodhenge in Wiltshire. The parchmarks had been mapped by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, and I asked Mark Corney, who had done that mapping, if there were any opportunities for volunteers with the RCHME. Consequently, I spent three very happy weeks immediately after graduation being driven round Salisbury Plain (in a Landrover again), surveying the humps-and-bumps of barrows, prehistoric enclosures and Romano-British villages and dodging army battle-games. I had found exactly what I wanted to do and never looked back. I rarely dig now.
These days, I am half-way through a PhD studying the landscape settings of the monuments of the Early Neolithic. But right now, I am drawing up a survey of the Roman fort at Malton, North Yorkshire, where I have been training University of York students for the past four years. For me, it’s the ideal training site, because the massive defences of the fort are overlain by not one, but two, castles, the garden earthworks of a 17th century mansion, and the remains of Second World War military activity. All these remains can be seen with the naked eye – no digging required.
Being able to use nothing more than my eyes and my brain to read the past in the world around me, and enabling others to do the same so that they can make their own discoveries, is the aspect of archaeology I think is most important. It is these visible remains, rather than what lies buried beneath the surface, that shape our everyday experience.
Interview - Elle Crawshaw
Design - James Rose
