Thornborough "debate"

[Paul Barford]

quote: the real issue, which Paul is quite right to ask, is attitude to sites which are threatened by plough damage and the best way to mitigate. I would like to hear Paul's views on this topic, as I honestly think it would be worth listening to... over to you Paul... I realise it might take a bit to gather info... but I would like to hear your suggestions - and as we are on Thornbo... what would you go for here. (and no this is a serious non ironic/sarcastic request)

I think Thornborough is a difficult case to discuss on its own as the plough damage has been brought into the discussion of the quarrying application. But rightly so, because the argument is all about what we mean by "preservation in situ". OK, so the site's not going to be quarried away (a decision arrived at at a large cost to everybody involved), but what's left of it being "preserved in situ" looks from present evidence as if its going to be damaged if not destroyed over the next few decades of ploughing. And that is a site which is being "preserved" because its been declared by our representatives as "nationally important".

To what extent can those figures be extrapolated to other sites which are also being "preserved in situ"? I think there are problems with the interpretation of the Nosterfield experiments (even in their modified form) which I think even their designers will allow, but they do provoke thought and should provoke discussion which goes further than how to pick up the pieces after the damage is done.

And of course, let us recognise that this is a problem with a European dimension - not to say a problem occurring worldwide. This is I believe going to be one of the things discussed at the EAA conference here in Cracow in the autumn.

Yes, some sites should be (and of course are) taken from under the plough totally, some should be taken under CS schemes and suchlike which are intended to reduce or halt plough damage. Financially though we cannot afford to keep up compensation payments on doing this for all sites which need it on a sustainable basis.

But in order to operate some kind of programme of selection, using the resou4rces to safeguard the most worthy and most threatened sites, we need to be able to understand the processes involved more closely than it seems we do at the moment.

We still have very little idea about the effects of ploughing (and use of agricultural chemicals - and indeed organic fertilisers) on buried archaeological deposits and their contents. We've done some work on what happens to wetland sites as a result of falling water tables (another unstoppable disaster to the heritage), but our work on plough damage has seldom gone beyond the anecdotal and incidental. We need a proper programme of study of the effects of slope, soil type, ploughing regimes and so on in order to produce regional models of just what degree of damage is occurring.

And yes, looking at the corrosion products and breakage rates of MD finds brought in for recording is one of the tools that can be used for such a study - except... no such study has ever been carried out and published (there was a talk last year on this at the AML, but I was unable to get any details of what was said and whether the results will be published). Fieldwalking material from Poland has been examined from this point of view (breakage and erosion of potsherds), but I have not seen comparable work from the UK (any references anybody?).

We have discussion documents such as "Ripping up the Past" which follow on from CBA and other (RESCUE?) material produced a decade or more before that about this problem, but it seems to me that this is another of those problems that we as a milieu tend to say "tut tut, yes its terrible, but what can we do? The farmers need to make a living"... and leave it at that. But still insist that preservation in situ is the only option - because its the only one we can afford. We then cross our fingers and hoping that nobody notices that this PIS is nothing of the sort, and that maybe future generations will find when they have to investigate one of the sites we "saved" for them, that by some fluke, something has survived in the subsoil for them to ponder over.

I think those generations of archaeologists of the future will be more likely pondering over the double-speak of the archaeological milieu and policy makers of our times when they look (as we look back at the work of our predecessors) at what we were writing about what we do, and what we were actually doing - or failing to do. I feel sure we will be accused of at the least unjoined-up-thinking and probably blatant hypocrisy in more than one area of the way we go about doing archaeology and especially ARM. And I think we will be castigaed for the blind way many of us unthinkingly put policies into action without careful and critical discussion of how they all relate to each other. Preservation in situ as a banner under which we gather but not a proper joined-up concept for example.

And this I think damage to "preserved" sites is one of the problems we have singularly failed to address properly. There has been some criticism of PARIS (the Museum of London seminars being some eye-opening examples), but where has this been taken by our theorists? To what extent has any of this thought penetrated ARM practice in the UK (or any other country in fact)?

But although Thornborough is the origin of this part of the thread, I think this is a subject which goes beyond just that site and also detracts from the main topic of the thread which was the evaluation and the quarry planning application. Maybe if you want to discuss this, you could move this whole block of posts to a thread of their own, as I have a feeling given present company we may be hearing the hackneyed "disc-harrow" argument here very soon.

Paul Barford