Arriving on Sark for the first time on a day visit in 2003, Barry Cunliffe must have felt a little like one of the island’s pioneer visitors from the prehistoric past: Neolithic farmers prospecting for land suitable for husbandry or unusual stone to fashion into polished axe heads, or Beaker people looking for metal deposits to mine and smelt. In Barry’s case, he was seeking archaeology that nobody else had yet studied. All three found an island full of potential. We don’t know how our prehistoric ancestors celebrated their discoveries, but Barry tells us that he ‘bought a map of Sark from the Little Shop to begin a plan of campaign and a bottle of champagne from the Bel Air [one of Sark’s two pubs] to celebrate the birth of a new project.’
Previous archaeological work on Sark could be summarised in a short paragraph. A rich hoard of 1st-century BC silver coins and metalwork had been found in 1719. Axes had been collected locally as finds from ploughing in the 19th century. Systematic archaeological work began as recently as 1980 with David Johnstone’s investigations of two ‘megalithic’ cists. In 1992, T D Cawood carried out some trial excavations in pursuit of evidence for medieval settlement on Sark, and he surveyed one of two French forts on the island. Thereafter nothing.
In the first of his two volumes of Sark : a Sacred Island? (see ‘Further Information’ on p.28), reporting on his subsequent campaign of fieldwork and excavation, Barry tells us that he set up the Archaeological Survey of Sark in 2004 as a partnership between the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford; the Museum of Guernsey; and La Société Sercquaise, the island’s history and natural history society. The first two-week field programme was intended to assemble information on artefacts in museums and private collections and to do some preliminary fieldwalking to identify potential sites for excavation.
