#PhilipWeek A favourite find!

Today we’re going to be chatting to Philip about his favourite site and his favourite find.. a slightly different #FindsFriday for you all! You might be surprised to read that Philip’s favourite site in Colchester wasn’t the Roman Circus!

We hope you’ve all enjoyed reading about and celebrating Philip Crummy’s illustrious career in archaeology for #PhilipWeek

What’s been your favourite site to work on in Colchester?

There have been quite a few of them. Forced to choose, I suppose I would go for the fantastic doctor’s grave in Stanway (1996). Amongst other things, this included a range of medical instruments and a hinged wooden gaming board complete with glass counters all set out as if a game had just started.

What’s been your favourite find?

Surprisingly, it wasn’t from Colchester – it was from a Neolithic chambered long barrow in Ascott-Under-Wychwood in Oxfordshire. I was a student at the time (1960s) studying maths and physics at St Andrews University and used to go digging at Ascott every summer. One of the things I was asked to do one year was to excavate “Chamber 2”. Like the other chambers, this had a layer of jumbled bones at the bottom of it and my job was to uncover, plan (draw) and lift them all. The whole thing was a bit gruesome though. The bones of several people were in there. There were no complete skeletons. In fact, practically all of the bones were ‘loose’. However, some were still articulated showing that some of the body parts had still had enough tissue surviving to hold the bones together in the right anatomical relationship with each other. As I remember, part of a rib cage was there as was part of a spine and at least one leg. There were also some foetal bones showing that one of the dead had been pregnant at the time of death.

At break times, it was customary to go down to the site caravan and have a cup of tea. On this occasion, I had just lifted a vertebra from the base of a spine so I took the bone with me so to have a good look at it as I drank my cuppa. We already knew that the vertebra was particularly interesting because the spine was deformed on account of the fact that the person concerned had suffered from spina bifida. And then, as I sat by the caravan, I spotted it – the tip of a flint arrowhead peeping out the side of the vertebra. I rubbed my eyes. Yes, it was an actual Neolithic leaf-shaped flint arrowhead! Amazing! No wood survived of course but it could be nothing other than the end of an arrow which had penetrated this person’s body! It looked as if the arrow had been fired with considerable force into the right side of the poor person’s back. My immediate reaction was to blurt out with great excitement, “It’s flint arrowhead!!!”. Don Benson, the director of the excavation and the Oxfordshire County archaeologist, was standing nearby. Without pausing for breath, he snatched the prize out of my hand and vanished at light speed into the caravan. The whole thing was over in a flash!

Many years later, I saw an interesting TV programme describing a modern burial practice in Naples whereby relatives cared for the corpse as it decayed. First of all the body was buried in a yard. Some time later, it was uncovered by which stage the corpse had dried out (it’s hot in Naples) and become literally as stiff as a board. The relative then balanced the ‘board’ on the top of his head and walked it to the morgue where he he laid it on a big cloth on a table and sprinkled the rigid remains with some kind of powder to kill off insects wanting to nibble the fleshy bits. He then wrapped the bony ‘board’ up in the cloth and placed the neat package on a shelf just like the other bodies in the morgue.

Buildings of this sort today are known as columbaria from the Latin word for dovecot where the remains were ‘pigeon holed’. Normally these constructions were designed for cremations but the Naples example shows how unburnt bodies could be treated in the same sort of way but on shelves as opposed to inside their own little boxes. There is an important difference here though. Cremated remains wouldn’t change much over the years but the Naples-style treatment was different. The body would continue to decay and gradually the bones would separate. Consequently, the relative would repeatedly return to the columbarium and take the corpse off the shelf. He would carefully uncover it so that he could bundle up any loose bones and put the whole lot back, the body first having been dusted afresh and then wrapped up again. This process was periodically repeated until eventually the body was reduced to a neat bundle of nothing but loose bones wrapped in that single cloth.

The whole process was captured on film over a period of what must have been many months, maybe even years. When watching the finished result on TV, I couldn’t help wondering if the jumble of bones in the chamber at Ascott was the product of similar post-mortem care almost six thousand years ago by grieving relatives. And what about that arrowhead I wondered? It’s hard to imagine that the person could have survived such a severe injury. Was the fact that the arrowhead was embedded in one of the deformed vertebrae significant? In other words, was the deformity a deliberate target? Or was warfare to blame perhaps? Or punishment? Or even some kind of mercy or ritual killing? The last seems like an overly-dramatic explanation for what we found but then who knows? That’s archaeology for you!