Back in CA 40, our Editor-in-Chief Andrew Selkirk described being abandoned by a taxi driver and left to pick his way across a building site towards a row of condemned cottages. This unlikely setting was the scene of launch celebrations for a new arrival in the heritage world – the Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit – and, 50 years later, it was my turn to travel to Oxford to mark an equally important milestone: the unit’s half-century. Today, the organisation is known as Oxford Archaeology, and the festivities were held in the rather more comfortable surroundings of an airy conference centre a stone’s throw from the unit’s present head office in Osney Mead. Afterwards, I caught up with OA’s founding director, Tom Hassall, and its CEO, Ken Welsh, to share their thoughts about commercial archaeology’s past, present, and future.
Oxfordshire and the city of Oxford itself had long been a centre of archaeological activity, spearheaded by the Ashmolean Museum and with important fieldwork also undertaken by Oxford University’s Archaeology Society. As development boomed in the region, though, it was decided in 1965 to found a county-wide museums service to lead responses to the twin threats of urban growth and rural gravel extraction. The fledgling Oxford City and County Museum was unable to meet the accelerating demands of rescue archaeology, however, and a number of independent excavation committees sprang up to help (see CA 35). One of the first was the Oxford Archaeological Excavation Committee, founded in 1967 with Tom Hassall as its first director; the historic towns of Abingdon and Banbury also had their own dedicated committees, as did the Upper Thames Valley, and another team focused on the construction of the M40.
While each of these groups had specific aims, they soon found themselves competing for funds and personnel – and so they pooled their resources to create a single archaeological service that could tackle projects across historical Oxfordshire and North Berkshire. The result was the Oxfordshire Archaeological Committee, a registered charity with public benefit at its heart, which held its first meeting in the summer of 1973. Its fieldwork was to be carried out by the new Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit, with Tom at its helm. ‘“Unit” was the trendy word of the time, taking inspiration from the Research Unit that Martin Biddle had founded in Winchester in 1968,’ he added.
