Subscribe now for full access and no adverts
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.
Tom’s team were riding the crest of a wave that was set to transform the way that archaeology was done in the UK. In 1971, the gauntlet had been thrown down by the creation of RESCUE and its campaigns for state funding of development-led excavations, and in this period the seeds of many of today’s major commercial units were sown. The York Archaeological Trust (born in another historic city facing a crisis of rapid development; see CA 400) was founded in 1972, while London’s Department of Urban Archaeology (a forerunner of MOLA) was established in 1973, and Wessex Archaeology began in 1979. Over in East Anglia, 1973 also saw Peter Wade-Martins founding the Norfolk Archaeological Unit under the auspices of the local council, and similar conversations were happening across the nation.
Early investigations
The new Oxfordshire unit hit the ground running, undertaking influential surveys of historic towns and excavating Iron Age and Roman remains in the Upper Thames Valley (see CA 86 and 121). Two of the most significant projects of this period, both on the outskirts of Abingdon, were at Barton Court Farm, the intended site of a new housing development, and on the Ashville Trading Estate, close to the old MG Car factory (which closed in 1980; see CA 63 for more on both sites). Ashville yielded Bronze Age ring-ditches and Roman field systems, as well as the remains of a long-lived Iron Age settlement, its frequently shifting footprint reflected in the intercutting outlines of numerous roundhouses. Meanwhile, Barton Court Farm was home to a Roman villa and associated cemetery, as well as a number of Anglo-Saxon buildings and a handful of furnished graves that had been inserted into the by-then ruined villa.
Back in Oxford, the unit’s staff were hard at work on the site of the new Westgate shopping centre. The planned development was set to cut a swathe through the city centre, crossing the line of its medieval defences and encompassing the site of the 13th-century Greyfriars friary. The team was also offered the opportunity to explore a slice of the main east–west route into Oxford, exposing a fascinating layer-cake of 19 late Saxon-to-medieval road surfaces.
The Westgate finds attracted so much attention that, when the late Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh visited Oxford in 1976, they were shown the results of the excavations (and presented with a copy of the unit’s historic towns survey). Tom Hassall recalled: ‘When Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh were standing in the central square at Westgate, and I was showing them the archaeology and the architect was showing them the development, Prince Philip turned to me and said: “I wonder when they will pull this down and excavate it too”. As it happens, he lived so long that he did see the shopping centre demolished and OA excavate the site again – I have always found that amusing.’
Despite such a proliferation of work, however, the unit’s access to development sites – and their underlying archaeology – was far from guaranteed. In the decades before PPG16 formally embedded rescue excavations within the planning process, developers were under no obligation to allow archaeologists to explore their sites before construction began. Instead, every two weeks Tom and the County Museum’s field officer would go through all new planning applications for the county, trying to spot potential projects so that they could negotiate with the developers. They were given a tantalising early glimpse of how things could be, though, when Tom and some of his colleagues were invited to address the American Association of Archaeology in 1975. They came away with intriguing insights into how practices were changing Stateside. ‘We learned about a new law that stated that, in all federal development projects, the polluter had to pay for the archaeological work – “What an interesting idea!”, we thought,’ he said.
Turbulence and transformation
The later 1970s were a period of great opportunities for the Oxfordshire unit, but also significant challenges. In 1976, Northamptonshire County Council invited them to move outside their traditional territories to dig in Towcester, and investigations in Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, and Berkshire followed, prompting the organisation to drop the ‘-shire’ from its name, becoming the Oxford Archaeological Unit (this was simplified further to Oxford Archaeology in 2001).
Financial waters, however, were becoming choppy. The unit had always enjoyed the City and County Councils’ support, and had received core funding from the Department of the Environment. Towards the end of the decade, though, this model changed and the team suddenly had to apply for funding on a project-by-project basis. ‘Projects at the beginning of the alphabet seemed to get the larger grants, so I remember that we thought of putting forward the mythical site of “Abingdon Aardvark” in the hopes of securing massive funding,’ Tom said.
In such trying times, job-creation schemes that had been set up to combat the decade’s high level of unemployment proved an invaluable source of staff for the unit’s projects: many volunteers from the Manpower Services Commission became permanent staff who remain with OA today. Oxford University’s Archaeology Society was another key place for recruitment; as the university only introduced an undergraduate degree in (Anthropology and) Archaeology in 1992, prior to that the Society was the main place to find students keen for fieldwork experience. Come the 1980s, though, and state funding and administrative support ended altogether: OA was on its own. The unit responded by becoming a Limited Company (but retaining its charitable status), and while it ultimately managed to weather the financial storm, this period was a useful introduction to the sometimes harsh realities of the commercial world that the organisation was about to enter.
The introduction of PPG16 in 1990 changed everything. Units were now able to submit competitive tenders for projects and to work anywhere in the country. OA, which was by now well-established in the south of England, was one of the first units to take advantage of these new opportunities – but such perceived incursions on to other groups’ turf proved controversial. Geographically based organisations and county units resented the arrival of ‘outsiders’ who were seen as lacking understanding of the local archaeology – indeed, OA’s present CEO Ken Welsh, who was working for the Department of Greater London Archaeology at the time, recalls his ‘outrage’ when he heard that Oxfordshire archaeologists were excavating in Southwark.
Expanding excavations
Despite this initial reluctance, in 1995 Ken joined the Oxford Archaeology Unit and witnessed the sheer scale of some of the projects it was undertaking. ‘I was told I would initially be carrying out bread-and-butter evaluations, but almost immediately I was set to work on the Eton Rowing Lake site, which was an enormous excavation in the Thames Valley,’ he said. ‘It was an incredible site that really introduced me to what could be achieved through commercial excavations.’
In a callback to the unit’s earliest investigations, this was a gravel-extraction site covering some 150ha on the north bank of the Thames at Dorney. Eton College intended to turn the site into a rowing lake, and the landscape was found to contain a former channel of the Thames that had been open and flowing during prehistory but had silted up by the Roman period. In doing so it had preserved a wealth of waterlogged wooden remains, including a series of successive Bronze Age and Iron Age river crossings spanning 1300 BC-300 BC (CA 148).
Large infrastructure projects continued to be a key aspect of the unit’s work, including road improvement works on a 25km stretch of the A417-A419 between Swindon and Gloucester. In 1991-1997, OA excavated 35 sites along this route, revealing features dating back to the Neolithic period, including a significant Roman roadside settlement that had grown up beside Ermin Street (the Roman road linking Cirencester and Gloucester, not to be confused with Ermine Street, which ran between London and York).
This road scheme was an undeniably ambitious undertaking, but OA’s biggest challenge was still to come, in the form of the construction of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. An initial 4ha area of the site had already been explored by MOLA in 1996, but the demands of subsequent work were so enormous that OA teamed up with Wessex Archaeology to form Framework Archaeology, the first joint venture in UK archaeology. Between 1999 and 2007, they excavated a further 76ha, revealing archaeology on a landscape scale, spanning 8,000 years and ranging from Neolithic monuments and Bronze Age field systems to Iron Age settlements and ladder-like arrangements of Roman cattle pens and droveways (CA 256).
Present practices and predictions
The early 2000s saw the former Lancaster University Archaeological Unit become part of OA, and in 2008, Cambridgeshire County Council’s Archaeological Field Unit became it’s third regional office, extending its geographical reach across the country. Today, Oxford Archaeology is one of the UK’s largest commercial units, with staff from its offices in Oxford, Lancaster, and Bar Hill (just outside Cambridge) carrying out work across the UK and abroad. Recent projects have seen OA excavating outside Maryport Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall (CA 353); uncovering a Viking cemetery at Cumwhitton, near Carlisle (CA 294); and documenting an entire Roman villa estate at Priors Hall near Corby, Northamptonshire (CA 370 and 395). Further-flung initiatives include the excavation of a First World War mass burial in France associated with the 1916 Battle of Fromelles (covered in issue 68 of our sister-magazine Current World Archaeology; see http://www.world-archaeology.com/features/fromelles). Closer to home, OA has even returned to the familiar ground of the Westgate site – their findings are set to be published later this year, and we will bring you more detailed coverage in a future issue.
While the unit’s geographical scope has expanded over the decades, so too has the range of work it undertakes – early additions included the then-new fields of building survey and industrial archaeology, and most recently geoarchaeological approaches have enabled the team to model subsurface deposits and target efforts on particularly large sites. Technological changes over the past 50 years have also been enormous: ‘It feels like the only tool we have in common with our first excavations is the trowel,’ Tom said. Far from the theodolites and dumpy levels of their early days, surveying is now done using GIS, allowing data to be sent from the field to office-based staff, and for excavation strategies to evolve in real time.
Drone photography, as well, has revolutionised how sites are recorded: ‘Before that we were working from scaffolding towers or, if we were very lucky, we could borrow the Oxford Fire Brigade’s 120ft ladder,’ Tom said, ‘and very scary it was, too!’ The advent of PPE and health and safety guidance have similarly transformed practices, while public access to commercial sites has become more limited and archaeology itself has become more professionalised, with many entry routes now involving a degree in the subject (OA runs graduate training programmes for its new starters).
For OA, a major milestone came in 1982, when the unit acquired its first computer, revolutionising their post-excavation cataloguing/cross-referencing and publishing processes. It was a Research Machines of Oxford RML 380Z FDL system which, the unit’s newsletter of the time excitedly notes, was ‘capable of storing up to 1 megabyte of data on its dual drive 8” floppy discs.’ Even in the 1990s, Ken remembers queuing with his colleagues to use the office’s ‘email computer’ – today, smartphones mean that most of us carry small computers in our pockets, invaluable tools for onsite data entry and photography (‘Though they still don’t like the rain,’ Ken noted).
Looking further ahead, Tom and Ken both expect that artificial intelligence will feature in future archaeological practices; while nerves jangle about which human roles it might make obsolete, Tom jokingly expressed his hope for ‘robotic pot-washers’. With OA having recently carried out work at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, Tom is also excited about the prospects of space heritage. ‘Around the time that we changed our name, the Voyager probe had just gone out into space carrying a gold disc that included an image of Oxford,’ he said. ‘Clearly that is a sign that Oxford is the centre of the universe, and maybe that is where we should go in the future.’
Back on Earth, where both main political parties have been talking about streamlining the planning process, Ken and Tom are concerned about what these changes might mean for archaeological protections – but they also note recent positive changes in law, including making Historical Environment Records statutory services, as well as the introduction of the 2021 (Public Services) Social Value Act, which obliges publicly funded schemes in England and Wales to factor in social, economic, and environmental benefits. Archaeologists can play an important role in ensuring that these obligations are met, Ken said.
Public benefit has been a key part of OA’s mission from its earliest days, with a focus on sharing their results, data, and stories with wider society. To help achieve this, the unit recently launched the Knowledge Hub, a digital library of more than 7,000 of their reports, as well as themed sections allowing interested individuals to dig deeper into their finds (https://knowledge.oxfordarchaeology.com/explore), and it has plans for a virtual museum. These aims also inspired their original logo, which depicted the dual-faced Roman god Janus: looking backwards to explore the past, and forwards to help explain it to future generations. The key to commercial archaeology surviving for another 50 years, Ken said, is in ensuring that it stays relevant. For example, in new housing developments, people are often very interested in what was found beneath their feet – archaeologists can have a powerful role in building communities and giving them a sense of place: connecting people with where they live.
All images: Oxford Archaeology
You must be logged in to post a comment.