2016 - Review of the Year

One of basic principles that always governed my professional practice in commercial world was “Always do what you say you are going to do”, if everyone sticks to this, then even quite complex projects can come together successfully.   Since the year started with a bold statement of intent concerning building a model of a CAD Class Ei building, some form of progress report is probably due.   However, what happens, or is reported on this blog, is a separate issue to what is going on in terms of research; you can do it or write about it; it is not that there is nothing to report, but that things are changing; you can spend weeks illustrating and writing a post about a particular problem, only to find that you have solved it. 

There are other things going on; I am virtually busy working on a range of other case studies, methodology, and projects with other people; there is even the real world, which exacts its a terrible crushing toll on a daily basis.  

Virtual Archaeology; A Roman Timber Rampart

The need to illustrate recent speaking engagements, has necessitated the revisiting a virtual model of the Roman timber rampart based on foundations found at Shields Road, Byker, which a real place in Newcastle. [1]  In addition, live reaction to my work, provides an opportunity to reconsider and improve its subsequent presentation, and thus every question, comment or observation is important. 
Since this particular technological approach, and in particular the underlying reverse engineering, has proved  too advanced for a parochial academia, it is worth restating the fundamental methodical differences between CAD modelling and visualisation of the past.  

The use of engineering  in the understanding of structures can produce models with varying degrees of certainty and spatial accuracy, but what it cannot really do is tell you what the past looked like.  While the artist’s reconstruction has become the de facto money shot of archaeotainment staples such as Time Team, and even on the front of serious archaeological reports, a picture is worth a thousand peer reviewed words, ultimately, there is no inherent entitlement or legitimacy to a visual culture of the past. 

Deconstructing a Stonehenge "House"

A game of blind house detective

When a reader contacted me to ask my opinion on a reconstruction that was referred to as “the Stonehenge House”, I saw an interesting opportunity for a blind test.  In truth, I had not looked at this, so I requested and received a copy of the archaeological plan from Durrington Walls on which the reconstruction was based. I fully expected to produce a different conclusion since, as an archaeologist, I try to work by deduction, rather than by comparison or projection; it's the difference between astronomy and astrology.

I sent my reply back in just over a day, in the form of the drawing reproduced below.  It was just a quick hack; it has taken a lot longer to write it up for this post, probably because in term as of scale it is more like a Stonehenge Shed, and I have more significant structures I should be working on, but being an Aries, I can’t resist a challenge.   

Regular readers will be aware that I do have serious prejudices about the nature of built environments in this period, which included  large class Ei buildings like “Durrington Walls” [1].  My interest is mainly in this main structure, which  I know was a building, even though only half survives, because I have done the maths; post-processual academics know it is “ritual” because they haven’t.

Dumbing down the past.

Dumbing down through abstraction.

In two previous posts, [ 1 + 2 ] I have demonstrated that one of the central images of British Prehistory, the Wessex Roundhouse, is a construct which does not accurately represent the evidence.  It is not a discovery, or rocket science, I just read the relevant reports and looked at the plans and sections.

While I am happy to call these roundhouse constructs dumbing down, what to call the scholarship they generate presents a problem, since it represents the application of presumably perfectly acceptable theory to an imaginary data set. 

Archaeology is often at its best and most incisive when it has borrowed from other disciplines, but left to their own devices some academics have wandered off through the dewy system to delve into ideas about the relationship between people and built environments. But perhaps sometimes they just look at the pictures.

It is possible for anthropologists to study the relationship between people and their built environments; the humans can be questioned and observed, and the spaces inspected. In such a study, we might also wish consider factors of age, status, and gender, as well as more complex issues pertaining to the ownership and creation of spaces.

In anthropology, a theory, a set of ideas or a cosmology which explain the patterns of behaviour associated with particular places can be developed through the study of people and spaces. 

However, in Archaeology the people we study are dead and their spaces destroyed, or they usually are after we have finished with them....

Roundhouse Psychosis

In the previous post I explained why the large Wessex style “roundhouse” as illustrated and rebuilt is a fiction which is not supported by the evidence.  To be fair to all concerned, it never was a “peer reviewed” idea, but like the artists reconstruction that decorate the front of some archaeological texts, it has a far greater impact on our collective perception of the past than any sterile rendition of the evidence. 

The problem is that Roundhouses are more than just infotainment, a bit of harmless hokum for Joe Public, they are taken seriously, not only by those who commission and build them, but also by academics, and even fellow archaeologists who are obliged to shape their reports around this simplistic construct.  While dumbing down the academic system lightens everybody’s load, it is not good for the long term mental health of the profession, who have responsibility with ‘doing’ the day to day archaeology.  We like to think what we do is meaningful, making a contribution, and that we are collectively getting somewhere, it is about the only reward you will get.

As a field archaeologist, writing up sites, I had realised that the simplistic roundhouse only made sense if ignored a lot of the actual evidence from these structures, and, the majority of the structural features from elsewhere on the site.  Furthermore, those aspects of the evidence that reflected the archaeology of other published sites [roundhouses] were deemed particularly significant, reinforcing the cycle of belief.  Thus, apart from square four post granaries, circles are generally the only acceptable shape for a prehistoric buildings; both excavation and post-excavation were approached with same expectation, and to some extent purpose, of finding roundhouses.

Debunking the Iron Age Round House

Is Prehistory is more or less bunk ?

In 1916, when archaeology was in its infancy, the industrialist Henry Ford expressed the view that History is more or less bunk, so what he would have made of Prehistory would probably have been unprintable.[1]  However, perhaps as an engineer, his concerns were elsewhere, solving the problems in the present and helping to mould the future.

In his remark, we might perceive a fundamental dichotomy of science v arts, but while this is clearly simplistic, there is a certain resonance for archaeology which sits, sometimes uncomfortably, between the two. Much of what is important, incisive and certainly less bunk in archaeology originally came from outside, from the borrowing of scientific techniques from other disciplines.  Further, in Henry Ford’s prejudice one might also perceive a divergence between practical v theoretical, or practitioners v academics; for archaeology, the latter are often from an “arts background”, and by creating the past in their own image, have divested Prehistory of its engineers, architects, builders; a prehistoric built environment fabricated almost entirely from bunk.

In the West, Archaeology is fairly new discipline, not much older than the motor car, but prehistory is not vital, and so nobody cares if you get it wrong or make it up. Unlike engineering, archaeology can be a faith based study, with objectivity, and even the evidence being secondary, what is important is belief in the narrative and its institutions.  In archaeology things can be true because people believe them, not because they are supported by the evidence. 

This is hard concept to grasp if you come from another discipline, or importantly, if you believe in the intellectual integrity of archaeology, but ideas about ancient building are a classic case in point.

Hadrian's Timber Wall; Reverse engineering a Roman rampart in Google SketchUp

Caesar’s account of the war in Gaul contain over forty references to ramparts, some native, but mostly those built of timber with a ditch in front constructed by his army in the field. [1] I have argued that the three lines of double postholes with a ditch in front to the north of Hadrian Wall represent such a rampart.

Recently, I have been trying out Google SketchUp as tool to explore the engineering of this structure, and express structural ideas visually.  In a previous article I have discussed the issues of visual representations of the past, as distinct from models and diagrams.

CAD and the Archaeology of postholes

I bought my first CAD system in 1990, using it for my work in Essex, and subsequently offered my services to all the archaeological units and trusts working in England at the time; there were no takers.

However, I had also realised that as a tool in my attempts to understand the evidence of prehistoric posthole structures, CAD was not yet the answer.  It was not just that it was slow, a 486DX 25 MHz computer running at would take 12 hours to print a shaded view, but even more critically, putting a cone on cylinder and calling it a roundhouse did not advance my understanding, it was simply an aid to drawing more accurate ‘artistic’ reconstructions.

Doubt, and the archaeology of the imagined past.

 One thing that was apparent at the CAA conference [Computer Applications in Archaeology]  at Southampton, was the ability of our current technology to produce any image we can imagine with a remarkable degree of realism.  The look of the past, the shared visual culture, is commercially important to the entertainment industry, and in some senses is the end product offered to consumers of archaeology as infotainment.  As a structural archaeologist, while I am groping towards an understanding of how a Neolithic longhouse was engineered, the one thing I am certain of is that I don’t know what a building ‘looked’ like.

So, given the ability to visually express anything we can imagine - how do we express doubt?

26. Impossible Drains

All journeys start somewhere, even those in the mind, and the mental expedition exploring the uncharted depths of my ignorance that became Theoretical Structural Archaeology started at a site called Orsett ‘Cock’, to the north of the Thames in Essex.

The Orsett ‘Cock’ enclosure, Essex, during the 1976 excavation,
showing the position of buildings S1 and S9, discussed below.

The Orsett ‘Cock’ enclosure had, appropriately for an archaeological site, taken its name from a local hostelry, the ‘Cock’ Inn. The complete liability this would become in a Google search could not have been foreseen when the site was excavated in 1976 (hereafter to be known as the Orsett Enclosure, so as not to attract unwarranted attention). After a brief interim report,[1] the site vanished into the great black hole of unpublished sites known as ‘The Backlog’.

22. Iron Age Graphs; an important discovery

To be a theoretical structural archaeologist, you are going to have to understand (or at least believe in) Pythagoras, the sine rule, and pi; but there is no need to panic -- I think they still teach this to children, so it might be useful to have one to hand.


Digging holes for a living is an ideal place to hide from maths, not to mention reading and writing, but, unfortunately, Iron Age roundhouses only really make sense if you understand their geometry. Maths is important to help us model the nearly 2-dimensional evidence of prehistoric postholes, and encourages us to think 3-dimensionally about structures.

11. A Strange Receding Past

The past is much further away than it used to be. The rapid change in our culture over a few generations has disconnected people from the countryside and agriculture, as well as from the skills, crafts, and materials of previous generations. The past will always be mysterious, because the vast majority of it leaves no trace and is ‘invisible’ to archaeology. These invisible bits, like buildings, we have to make up or imagine.


Increasingly, the past has become the realm of theory, abstract thought, and introspection for archaeologists operating in the wide-open spaces of our ignorance. Novel theoretical approaches are borrowed from other subjects with obscure and unfamiliar vocabularies, and these are used to conceptualise our lack of understanding. If all else fails in the strange world we are reconstructing, archaeologists pass off what we don't understand as ‘ritual’. It therefore passeth all understanding and can be used to justify all manner of absurdity.




How the original palimpsest at Mucking in Essex was ‘solved’. A: All features. B: Roundhouses & (4-post?) structures located. C: Simplified Plan. D: Reconstruction [1]

9. Building - it's just not that simple

Archaeology is based on the understanding that artifacts can tell you much about the culture and individuals that created them. We don't have buildings to study, but the simple models and realisations of the prehistoric built environment, and the visual information they convey, are entirely at odds with the evidence from the study of other key technologies.


Building is a key technology; the traditional sedentary mixed farming model of the rural economy is possible only with the appropriate built environment. Southern England can provide abundant good quality timber for building, and, historically at least, building has been an important method by which society, or individuals, express themselves. Buildings protect people, activities, processes, and materials from the environment, including other people. If individuals or groups in a society gain disproportionate control over these resources, they will require a larger built environment.

8. Who would live in a house like this?

Since roundhouses were first defined 60 years ago, a consensus has emerged as to how these buildings were built, and how they should look. Physical reconstructions have become quite common. Since prehistoric post-built roundhouses never survive above floor level at best, on what are these reconstructions based?

Visualising the past: Which is which? Roundhouse or African mud hut?