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 After a brief interim report,[1] the site vanished into the great black hole of unpublished sites known as ‘The Backlog’.

25. A world of Invisible Walls

How to account for things that are invisible is always tricky, as priests would no doubt testify, and in some respects archaeologists have a comparable problem to religions, in that what we are asking you to comprehend and visualise happened a long time ago. However, archaeologists, unlike priests, are happy to admit (if pushed) that what we are asking you believe is an educated guess, even if, as often the case, we have a story and we’re sticking to it with almost religious zeal.

For British prehistory the problem is that some significant pieces of the visual jigsaw have been destroyed forever, and they have become ‘archaeologically invisible’. I can tell what the woods and the trees looked like -- I have photos that must be fairly close – but the evidence for the human part, particularly the built environment where human life is played out, is somewhat sketchy.