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From test pits in rural villages to major infrastructure schemes – as well as a certain king buried beneath a car park – for the last 30 years University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) have played a major role in transforming our understanding of both the history of their home city and the wider Midlands region. Today an award-winning commercial unit, its origins were not easy: ULAS was born after the local authority Leicestershire Archaeological Unit was closed down in 1995, and two LAU archaeologists, Richard Buckley and Patrick Clay, co-founded a new organisation with the support of the University of Leicester and the then-Head of School, Professor Graeme Barker.
Despite these early challenges, the fledgling unit was fortunate in a number of ways. It was based in a city rich in Roman and medieval remains, with widespread evidence for a long history of occupation in the county, which had been steadily revealed through the efforts of the long-established Leicestershire Fieldworkers (who celebrate their 50th anniversary next year). Together with a suite of dedicated museums in the city and county market towns, and the tireless efforts of individuals from Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated the Jewry Wall in the 1930s, to the former County Archaeologist Peter Liddle, ULAS began their work in an area which already had a strong framework of archaeological investigation. Leicester is said to be one of the most-excavated cities in the UK, and over the last three decades ULAS has added many new chapters to this story.
ULAS’ relatively unusual position, being one of only a small number of independent commercial units that are also embedded in universities, has been a key strength, too. Based within the School of Archaeology and Ancient History (which was recently renamed the Kathleen Kenyon Building), the team can draw on cutting-edge analytical resources as well as the insights of academics working in related fields. With the recent addition of colleagues from Museum Studies, following a merger of the two departments, ULAS are looking forward to even more fruitful and interdisciplinary collaborations.
ULAS is unusual, too, among the major UK units because its staff do not tend to do ‘away work’, instead concentrating their investigative efforts within the Midlands. This more focused approach has forged a deep knowledge of the region’s distinctive archaeology, geology, and topography, as well as close links with its modern residents. Many ULAS staff grew up locally, many came through the University of Leicester, and most are actively involved in various community groups, efforts to re-establish the local Young Archaeologists’ Club, and other outreach initiatives including working on new exhibitions with museums across the region to share archaeological stories more widely.
Piecing together prehistory
This continuity of focus from project to project means that ULAS can chart – and has contributed significantly to – the ways in which knowledge of the area’s archaeology has evolved over the last three decades. During a recent meeting in the Kathleen Kenyon Building’s comfortable common room, I spoke to the unit’s current Director and Deputy Director, Vicki Score and John Thomas (Patrick Clay and Richard Buckley retired in 2017 and 2020 respectively), and three of ULAS’ in-house specialists, who told me that the greatest advances in understanding involved prehistoric sites. Back in the 1990s, this picture was decidedly patchy, but one of ULAS’ early projects – at Husband’s Bosworth, in 1998 – helped to fill in an important blank when a geophysical survey undertaken ahead of planned quarrying revealed the first Neolithic causewayed enclosure to be identified in Leicestershire. The 2.6ha oval, formed from two concentric ditches, was subsequently scheduled, safeguarding it from future quarrying – though industrial extraction did continue in the surrounding area, prompting further ULAS excavations in the 2000s that added further Neolithic features to the map, as well as evidence of Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Anglo-Saxon activity.
The most dramatic changes, however, have been to our appreciation of the region’s Iron Age past. Large areas of Leicestershire were previously thought to be Iron Age backwaters, with claylands in particular stereotyped as being essentially uninhabitable, but, thanks to recent decades of developer-led and community projects, this perception has completely changed. One of the most significant – and most unusual – Iron Age sites excavated by ULAS was the enigmatic shrine identified at Hallaton, on which the unit worked with the local fieldwork group in 2001-2003. Enclosed by a ditch but lacking any obvious central structure, this apparently open-air ritual centre produced no fewer than 14 coin hoards, as well as other deposits of coins and metalwork, extensive feasting debris and, most famously, an ornate Roman cavalry helmet (see CA 188, 233, and 236). The Hallaton shrine was Vicki Score’s first ‘big job’ with ULAS and, more than 20 years after the excavations concluded, the site’s archaeological afterlife continues, with finds feeding into numerous enlightening research projects. Most recently, an experimental archaeology initiative saw the creation of two reconstructions of the Hallaton Helmet, one using cutting-edge modern technology, the other Roman armoury techniques (CA 415); both are now in the Harborough Museum.
Another aspect of local Iron Age archaeology that was previously poorly understood was the region’s hillforts. These monumental constructions are notably scarcer in the East Midlands than other parts of the country, and have historically been subjected to much less-intensive research than examples in south-west England and the Welsh Marches, which have tended to dominate discussion of such sites. An important rebalancing came in the form of a University of Leicester training field school for undergraduate Archaeology students that ULAS led at Burrough Hill, a hillfort near Melton Mowbray, between 2010 and 2014. This project shed vivid light on the lives and livelihoods of the hillfort’s Iron Age inhabitants, revealing outlines of numerous roundhouses, and evidence of diverse craft production and, with a hoard of chariot fittings and harness pieces (CA 301 and 424), rather more enigmatic activities.
The Burrough Hill research represents one of the key themes in an exhibition that is running at the University of Nottingham Museum until 13 July – and another ULAS excavation recently inspired an exhibition at the Charnwood Museum in Loughborough. This latter investigation explored part of a Bronze Age barrow cemetery at Cossington, which was about to be impacted by gravel quarrying (CA 216). As well as tracing the different forms and development histories of three of the barrows, between 1999 and 2001 ULAS were also able to document the cremation and inhumation burials that had been placed within and around the mounds.
One individual had been laid to rest with an unusual composite necklace made from beads of various materials – jet, amber, shale, faience – drawn from across Britain and further afield. While the Cossington barrows feature in the Charnwood Museum’s permanent displays, the necklace sparked a recent exhibition in which archaeological ornaments were shown alongside jewellery loaned by members of Loughborough’s diverse modern population, exploring ideas of identity and heirlooms. The initiative drew on community workshops that, John said, had proved invaluable in reaching groups that would not typically come along to an archaeology open day.
Mosaics and missing monarchs
As ULAS was founded after the introduction of PPG-16 in 1990 embedded archaeology in the legal planning process, the unit has always been well-placed to participate in the major urban developments that Leicester has seen over recent decades, uncovering echoes of the city’s Roman and medieval past.
During the Highcross development, a huge retail and regeneration initiative (CA 207), ULAS carried out significant excavations in the area of Vine Street. There they uncovered the remains of a Roman townhouse measuring over 40m long, whose rooms were arranged around a courtyard and adorned with painted walls and mosaic floors (CA 325). Two more townhouses emerged at the nearby Stibbe site in 2016-2017, one of which contained a 10m by 6m section of an ornately tessellated floor, whose colourful geometric design saw it hailed as one of the finest mosaic floors yet found in Leicester (CA 332). The same excavation also uncovered part of what has been interpreted as a small Roman theatre, as well as an unusual key handle decorated with a dramatic damnatio ad bestias scene, showing hapless captives being devoured by lions.
ULAS’ work within Leicester has uncovered important medieval structures, too, including a trio of parish churches – St Peter, St Clement, and St Michael – whose locations had become lost following their demolition in the 16th century. Excavations in the 2000s and in 2018-2019 rediscovered not only the lost churches, but their cemeteries as well, from which more than 2,000 skeletons were carefully exhumed. Their subsequent study has offered unprecedented insights into the city’s medieval population, which will be further advanced following the discovery of 1,237 burials during recent excavations at Leicester Cathedral.
It was another lost church, though, that set the scene for what remains ULAS’ most celebrated discovery: the grave of Richard III. The search for the medieval monarch, who famously died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and is infamously caricatured as a villainous hunchback in one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, had been initiated by Philippa Langley, and was carried out by ULAS in partnership with the Richard III Society and Leicester City Council. Historical sources held that Richard had been buried in the choir of Grey Friars church, but it, too, had been demolished following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and its precise location lost to history.
What followed, in 2012, was a stunning piece of historical and archaeological detective work that gradually uncovered the remains of the friary, which were surrounded by modern buildings but had escaped destruction as they had been covered by a car park. From these fragmentary foundations, the Grey Friars project team were able to relocate the friary church, then its choir, where they found a grave containing the skeleton of a man with an unmistakeably S-shaped spine and brutal battle wounds still visible on his bones. Analysis at the University of Leicester – including matching DNA to known relatives on the female side of Richard’s family – confirmed ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that this was indeed the skeleton of the king (CA 272 and 277). Now forever associated with the epithet ‘the king in the car park’, Richard was reinterred at Leicester Cathedral in 2015, and a life-sized 3D-printed model of his skeleton is proudly displayed inside the entrance of the Kathleen Kenyon Building.
ULAS had achieved what many at the outset of the project had dismissed as impossible – and it caused a media sensation. ‘That was the big one,’ John recalled. It was not the only ULAS project that had attracted press attention, however: the unit received extensive coverage following the excavation of the remarkable ‘Trojan War’ mosaic in Rutland in 2022 (CA 383), and another Rutland example that John highlighted during our meeting was an earlier investigation that took place at Glaston in 2000, ahead of the construction of a new housing estate (CA 173). This work uncovered the remains of a rare Upper Palaeolithic open-air site used by some of Britain’s latest Neanderthals or earliest early modern humans c.40,000 years ago. Stone tools and butchered horse remains were found alongside a contemporary hyena den, packed with the bones of long-extinct prey including woolly mammoth and woolly rhino. The discoveries received widespread coverage in the press, with a witty Sun subeditor crafting the headline ‘Den of Antiquity’.
The discovery of the Hallaton shrine, helmet, and hoards came just on the cusp of social media taking off, Vicki recalled – but it was another find from the site that really ‘went viral’. This was the double-grave of two 14th-century individuals which was excavated at the Chapel of St Morrell, very close to the Iron Age remains, in 2014. The press suggested that the pair had been buried holding hands, and suddenly the story was everywhere: ‘It was in the Polish press, CNN was getting in touch, everyone was contacting us – someone even made a photo of the skeletons into a Valentine’s Day card,’ Vicki said.
Sharing stories
As well as in the popular press, ULAS’ projects have appeared on the small screen, featuring in numerous episodes of Time Team (and, more recently, Digging for Britain). The first of these did not follow Time Team’s famous three-day format, though. It was the ‘Big Dig’ in Easton: a single day of investigations in 2003 that saw more than 40 test pits opened across the Leicestershire village. At the time, test-pitting was not a major part of archaeological investigations, but it proved to be a brilliant way not only to sample a wide area, but to help people engage with their local history. ‘Often, in test pits, you find very everyday objects, and ones that are quite recent in date,’ Vicki said. ‘They are so recognisable, they help people make a real connection, and to link the finds to their own lives or locality.’ During one community project at Hallaton, she remembered, a test pit produced a button from a railway worker’s uniform. By happy coincidence, one of the volunteer diggers had a great-grandfather who had worked on the railways – and suddenly this small find was no longer a button, but a narrative.
Such tangible traces represent powerfully relatable connections to the past, and ULAS have also found that creating reconstructions of fragile finds can help people to engage with the originals. To this end, with the help of SAAH staff and their in-house facilities, they have created a number of 3D-printed models of the Stibbe key handle (painted by a talented staff member who enjoys model-making in his spare time) that can be handled and examined up-close, as well as large printouts of mosaics that can be rolled out during outreach events. Replicas are used to explore how fragmentary finds may have looked, too, and how they could have been made and used. These include the Glenfield cauldrons, a rare group of 11 Iron Age vessels that had been deliberately buried within the ditches of a Middle Iron Age settlement. They were excavated in 2013-2014, and subsequent analysis has revealed a wealth of information about how the cauldrons were made, and even what they had contained. This importance was, however, difficult to get across using the remains themselves (which John described as ‘pancaked jigsaws’), and so a recent experimental archaeology project saw the creation of a full-sized replica that will be included in the new displays at Jewry Wall museum in Leicester when it reopens later this month (CA 424).
Another experimental reconstruction focused on the Enderby Shield, which was discovered during ULAS’ excavations at Fosse Park in 2015 (CA 353). Dating back 2,300 years and crafted from willow bark, split applewood and hazel, and with a central woven boss of willow and lime bast, the shield is the only example of its kind known in Europe. It had been placed or discarded in a livestock watering hole close to an Iron Age settlement, and although its remains were fragmentary and damaged, many clues to its construction have survived across the centuries. Intriguingly, the bark had been used inside-out, with the material’s smooth internal surface used for the front of the shield, and this had been decorated with fine lines cut to form squares and rectangles, some of which were infilled with red ochre. In 2018-2022, ULAS staff worked with specialists to make seven replicas of the shield, demonstrating that they could be quickly made with simple tools, and that, despite their apparent fragility, they were very effective at withstanding some impacts. As I examined one of the replicas in the Kathleen Kenyon Building, feeling its weight and the grip of its handle, it did help to bring home what it would have been like to carry such an object into battle. The original has recently gone on display at the British Museum, with a panel showing results of the experimental work.
ULAS are keen to develop the skills of their team, Vicki and John said – whether putting their extracurricular interests to archaeological use, or fostering the next wave of finds specialists who will be so vital to future investigations (environmental archaeology has been a particular priority for the unit from its earliest days). Above all, though, they emphasise the vital relationship between commercial archaeology and community engagement: drawing on the ‘living library’ of local knowledge preserved in previous generations of ULAS staff and the work of long-lived amateur groups, and sharing the stories of past populations with the people who now call the same landscapes home.
Further reading: For more information about these and other excavations from ULAS’ first 25 years, see: Gavin Speed (2020) Secrets from the Soil: a Quarter Century of Discoveries from Palaeolithic to Modern Times (University of Leicester Archaeological Services, ISBN 978-0957479272, £9.95). For the latest updates on ULAS’ work, see http://www.ulasnews.com.
All images: University of Leicester Archaeological Services
