Friday, 29 March 2024

Hinterland: rurality, community and heritage in Ceredigion (conference paper)

 Between 2011 and 2013 I worked on a project in rural Wales to increase community engagement with heritage.  The project had difficulty in achieving all of its aims.  My reflections on the experience formed the basis of a paper I presented at the CHAT conference in 2016.  I prepared a text for publication but plans for the conference volume fell through, so I present it here as written at the time.

I should note that since then, the temporary Pilgrim statue mentioned has been replaced by a crowdfunded permanent statue,  and the Strata Florida Trust has developed a museum, excavation and heritage events programme, and has published a series of books about the abbey and its landscape.


Hinterland: rurality, community and heritage in Ceredigion

Martin Locock, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, Orkney, 21-23 October 2016

 

Abstract

The village of Pontrhydfendigaid in rural Wales is a long way from anywhere.  It shares its landscape with the remains of the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida, now in the care of Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments, promoted as one of the jewels of Welsh heritage.  Alongside research excavations by University of Wales Trinity Saint David, an EAFRD funded project was run in 2011-2013 to promote understanding of the heritage by local businesses and the community. 

The project encountered a variety of responses reflecting disengagement with the conventional connoisseur narrative, going beyond apathy and lack of knowledge.  This paper explores how the community defines itself in relation to tourists, authorities, and the past, rejecting the imposition of external agendas in favour of an identity constructed from social networks, in which the association with agriculture, mining, and Welsh language culture is of greater significance that the monument on their doorstep.  In addition, working with the community revealed the complexity of the population’s cultural and social affinities, suggesting that it should rather be thought of as a group of overlapping communities with distinct interests, membership rules and practices. 

The relationship between local inhabitants and their neighbouring icon is enacted through different cultural forms, including family history, poetry, ghost stories, leisure activities and well and cemetery visits; their understanding of its formal academic history and significance may be minimal.  Rather than assume that their interest can be readily attracted through exposure to generic heritage discourse, it is necessary to consider the distinctive elements within the heritage bundle and the emotional baggage they may carry.

The paper concludes by reflecting on the construction of place and identity in a rural context and the tensions inherent in living alongside an asset valued highly by others.

 

Introduction

One of the beneficial by-products of the instrumentalist approach to heritage, seeing it as a mechanism to build community identity, social inclusion and a tourism-based economy, has been a democratisation of heritage.  Previously, heritage was considered a national good, to be preserved and passed on to future generations.  Efforts were made to engage the majority of the nation in actually enjoying the heritage as visitors, but it was clear to all that identification, selection, and custodianship lay in the hands the knowledgeable few who held both power and knowledge.  For a decade, this view within the profession has shifted towards acknowledging that ‘we are all archaeologists now’ (Holtorf 2015: 217).  The community archaeology of the last decade has links that can be traced back to the Manpower Services Commission schemes of the late 1980s which for the first time sought to include members of local communities with the examination and presentation of heritage, both as workers and audience.  There remains a debate about whether all values should be driven from below, or if there should remain a role for the expert in defining what LauraJane Smith in The Uses of Heritage has called an ‘authorised heritage discourse’:

The AHD is considered a self-referential discourse that ‘privileges monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time depth, scientific/aesthetic expert judgement, social consensus and nation building'” (Smith, 2006: 11)

Thus Smith describes a discourse in which straightforward power relations are moderated by the inclusion of expertise and social context, what Brand (2004: 15) describes as the tripartite definition of cultural value between specialists, the public and the government.  The Faro Convention (Council of Europe, 2005) adopts a bottom-up approach where a ‘heritage community’ is conceived as an ad hoc collaboration between individuals and bodies who share a common goal in the management of heritage, implying that a consensus should be sought that satisfies all parties.  There is a danger with this that a community becomes ‘The Community’, essentialising group identity and masking the complexities of social relations (Smith and Waterton 2013: s.6); rather it may be necessary to think of a series of communities with memberships and relationships.  

These theoretical questions came to the fore in the course of recent work by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David near the village of Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion, Wales, and this paper explores how, in practice, a community relates to and constructs its own heritage.

 

Hinterland

This paper takes its title from the recent TV detective series co-produced by S4C and BBC Wales, and filmed in both English- and Welsh-language versions.   The aesthetic of the series is consciously derived from the ”Nordic Noir” dramas of Wallander and Forbrydelsen (The Killing), featuring loving panoramas of bleak skies over barren hills, scattered farmhouses heavy with feuds and secrets, and a feeling that modern civilisation is a long way away (Moss, 2013). 

The series is filmed in the area of Ceredigion to the north and east of Aberystwyth, the western edge of the Cambrian Mountains, what the poet Harri Webb has called “the Green Desert”.  Those familiar with the area will recognise that the impression of isolation and emptiness is artfully created by the use of selected camera positions, the creation of a virtual location from a mosaic of real locations, and showing only the most telegenic of weather.  Nevertheless, this artifice reflects a core truth – that this is an area where nature is unconfined but culture is.  There are few people, and population change is slow; the combination of push factors leading some to leave, and pull factors leading incomers to settle, creates a distinct and specific social milieu detached from metropolitan Britain.  It might be expected that such a context would be highly hospitable to the valuing and enjoyment of heritage.

Pontrhydfendigaid is a small nucleated linear settlement to the northeast of Cors Caron, a large lake and peat bog.  Its name (literally ‘the bridge over the ford of the maiden [Virgin Mary]’) reflects its location on the banks of the River Teifi.   Although its history can be traced back to a medieval settlement of bondsmen of Strata Florida Abbey, it owes its size and character to the 19th century boom in silver lead mining in the vicinity (Bezant 2014, 61; Austin, 2013a; Dyfed Archaeological Trust, n.d.).  There are a few hundred residents.

 

Pontrhydfendigaid’s authorised heritage discourse

The picturesque ruin of Strata Florida Abbey has been part of antiquarian consciousness for 200 years; it was the subject of the largest 19th century excavation in Wales in the 1880s, funded by the Cambrian Archaeological Association, yielding decorated floor tiles that went on display in the British Museum.   When the Manchester and Milford Railway arrived, day excursions to the ruins were advertised. 

The significance of the site has been endorsed through legal protection: it is a Scheduled Ancient Monument (among the first batch of sites in Wales to be included) and a Grade I Listed Building.  It falls within the Upland Ceredigion Landscape of Outstanding Historic Interest in Wales and is one of the 123 sites managed by Cadw: Welsh Historic Monuments. 

As a Cistercian monastic house, it has enjoyed academic prominence (Austin 2013b).  The Cistercians are the rock stars of monasticism, subject of a steady stream of conferences and publications.  “For many, the Cistercian order remains the medieval monastic success story par excellence” (Stober, nd).

The iconography of the abbey and, in particular, the graves of the princes of Deheubarth and the key role of the scriptorium in preserving Medieval Welsh literature, has made it a touchstone for Welsh nationalism, lying outside the more politically sensitive Norman edifices of North and South Wales.

National and regional tourism campaigns have promoted the Abbey, basing its importance of this cluster of endorsements from experts and professionals, defining and perpetuating an Authorised Heritage Discourse.  

 

The project

Since 1999, the University of Wales Trinity Saint David has been undertaking a long-term research project into Strata Florida and its landscape, including documentary research and mapping of landholdings (Bezant, 2009), geophysical and ecological survey (Bezant, 2007), building recording, and research excavations in areas around the Scheduled Ancient Monument designated site.   The programme’s centrepiece has been a four-week training excavation with up to 100 students from Lampeter working on the site (Austin 2004).    The project has featured on TV including Digging for Britain (2012) and Hidden Histories (2010).  Although efforts were made to publicise the University’s work and involve the local community, it proved hard to establish and foster connections. 

In 2011 UWTSD successfully applied for £0.4m funding from the EAFRD (European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development) for the Strata Florida Heritage Landscape Tourism Project under Ceredigion’s Axis 323 (Connecting People, Nature and Heritage strand).  This was a two-year programme intended to develop the local economy by encouraging the use of heritage by local businesses in their marketing, improving interpretation and access to the Abbey environs, and undertaking events and activities to engage the community and to promote the area to tourists.  The mid-term evaluation of Axis 323 noted “With a view to maximising their potential impact, projects should be encouraged to avoid an over focus on ‘preaching to the converted’ and targeting ‘new’ groups to participate in the project” (Wavehill, 2012), and in keeping with this the activities included open days, talks, school sessions, and a conference.  One of the requirements of the funding was for the documentation and evaluation of the impact of the activities, involving measures including visitor counts, questionnaires and surveys, and as a result it is possible to assess objectively the extent to which the community became engaged. 

 

Community engagement

Prior to the commencement of the project, Cadw recorded 5,000 visitors per year to Strata Florida Abbey (Peate, 2010).  It was recognised that the vast majority of these visitors were from outside the local area (95% or more).  From a tourism point of view, this can be seen as a positive characteristic, since these visitors bring new spending into the local economy, but on the other hand this reflects a disengagement by the community.   The project therefore targeted the local population through activities aimed at outreach through linking up with existing networks, and offering accessible pathways to encourage engagement with the heritage.  A quarterly Community Liaison Group was set up, bringing together local councillors, landowners and representatives of community groups, to consult on and promote activities.  An intensive effort was made to raise the heritage component of primary school teaching in the area through a programme of weekly talks to the four local primary schools over a term, culminating in a site visit.  

A baseline survey of all users of the visitor car park was undertaken on one day in August 2012; individuals were asked about their main reason for visiting, whether they had visited before, and their home address.  The results confirmed that the visitor profile was dominated by long-distance tourists.

In 2012 a two-day series of site Open Days were held, focused on the continuing archaeological excavation of the monastic gatehouse, but also including children’s activities, living history performers, storytelling and musical performances, craft displays and activities, and site-specific sculpture.  Although it was expected that these Open Days would prove attractive to heritage tourists, it was hoped that the addition of the range of less formal attractions would encourage the inhabitants of Pontrhydfendigaid to visit (the excavations were open to visitors throughout the digging season).  As it happened, the weekend coincided with extremely heavy thunderstorms, high winds and flash flooding, rendering travel difficult.  It was considered that this would reduce the proportion of people travelling longer distances to attend.

A further event was arranged in October 2012 in the form of a one-day conference in Lampeter, ‘Celtic Myth and Landscape’.  It was hoped that broadening the topics to include elements of literature and art would appeal to those whose interests lay outside conventional archaeology.

Table 1: Home address of participants at Strata Florida events 2012

Home address

Baseline survey

Open Day

Celtic myth and landscape

 

No.

%

No.

%

No.

%

Pontrhydfendigaid postcode

0

0%

33

50%

2

6%

Other Ceredigion/Lampeter postcode

4

29%

13

20%

14

45%

Other Wales

5

36%

14

21%

12

39%

England

5

36%

6

9%

3

10%

Total

14

100%

66

100%

31

100%

 

The pattern of engagement is broadly consistent:  however locally-focused the event, the bulk of participants are drawn from elsewhere, despite the various attempts to expand from a strictly archaeological agenda to include ancillary sectors and activities.   Broadly speaking the approach adopted was the Fields of Dreams model: if we build it, they will come, or if we make people aware of the heritage, they will become interested in it.  The conclusion reached by the project was that this approach is naïve: after so many opportunities for engagement, lack of take-up must reflect something more fundamental, a decision to not engage.

The problem of reaching new parts of community was encountered across the RDP programme, even though its importance was recognised:   “The impact of the projects, in terms of making people aware of and interested in local heritage, will be / has been substantially greater if they are able to engage with groups of visitors and/or local residents who were previously unaware or uninterested in that heritage” (Wavehill, 2015).

Fundamentally, the question can be redrafted as “why does the Authorised Heritage Discourse fail to appeal to many in the local community?”  With that framing, disengagement becomes more explicable.  Parker has argued in Neighbours from Hell? that the Welsh cultural experience can be seen as a long history of being told what to do by their English rulers (2007, passim).   In the case of Pontrhydfendigaid, it has been accustomed to the literal and metaphorical hegemony of English kings, French monastic orders, the English church, English and Irish gentry estate owners (the Stedmans and the Earls of Lisburne), government agencies such as the Forestry Commission and Cadw, and parliaments and assemblies in Cardiff and Westminster.  In the circumstances, the community might legitimately see the university as just the latest external authority seeking to define how they should behave.

 

Complexities of identity and the Unauthorised Heritage Discourse

Drilling down from “the Community” in order to establish how engagement might be more effective, it is clear that it would be more accurate to talk of communities- an overlapping set of groups and sub-groups with differing memberships reflecting their identity, interests and social relations.  In such a small community, the pattern in surprisingly complex, perhaps reflecting the rurality of the region.   In a larger conurbation, individuals are free to seek out and link up with others who match their outlook closely, often relying on informal networks and a stream of one-off events.  In an isolated settlement, there are fewer such opportunities to develop and strengthen bonds with others.  In their stead, membership of multiple groups, and avoidance of other groups, can be used to reflect an individual social persona.

Table 2: Oppositions and communities in Pontrhydfendigaid

Welsh speaking

:

English speaking

Native

:

Incomer

Anglican

:

Nonconformist

Young

:

Old

Working class

:

Middle class

Farmer

:

Villager

Ecology

:

History

Dog walker

:

Horse rider

Women’s Institute

:

Merched Y Wawr

 

Not all of these oppositions are necessarily hostile, but they do represent a fragmentation of identity which affects the viability of efforts to engage with the community.   It is also reflected in the variety of cultural practices that have developed in which people engage with heritage on their own terms.

The Unauthorised Heritage Discourse comprises the elements of culture and history that are valued by the community (or parts of it) without reference to the gatekeepers of authority.  Usually these elements are left unexpressed, but in this case local tourism businesses had been asked to identify what made the area special as part of a Sense of Place workshop (Visit Wales 2015).   After adding the obvious, authorised, elements, a hinterland of more visceral and individualistic emerged: ghost stories, folk tales, mining lore, onomastic and family stories, poetry, and traditions linked to places.   For example the local mysterious big cat, The Beast of Bont, was cited with pride rather than being seen as a negative aspect (Coard, 2007; Hurn, 2009; Furness, 2012).

 The key components of the Unauthorised Heritage Discourse are those that are embodied in cultural practice; the performative element celebrates, reinforces and transmits the meaning.  The annual Bont Eisteddfod provides a focus for Welsh-language music and literature creation and performance within the community.  Another ritual specific to Wales is the ‘Sul y Blodau‘ (Flower Sunday), the annual practice of visiting all the family graves on Palm Sunday and decorating them leaving flowers.  

Another local tradition is the leaving of flowers and candles at a spring (or holy well) in the bank of the Afon Glasffrwd at Ffynnon Dyffryn Tywel (‘the spring in the quiet valley’).   This is anonymous and individual (it is unclear who is responsible, and how many different people are involved), but is presumably associated with some form of pagan or earth magic belief.  It is interesting that this practice has emerged in a place with a long history of ritualised practice using water, including the chalybeate springs whose iron-rich health-giving properties were one of the attractions cited for railway day-trippers in the late 19th century, the Ffynnon Lygaid (‘eye well’) of early post-medieval date, and Pantyfedwen, which may be medieval in date (Evans 1903, 32).  Proponents of ‘deep mapping’ would argue that such recurrences reflect a continuity embedded in the relationship between human and landscape (Kavanagh 2015), but it is curious that the specific locales vary over time.

A final recurring practice are regular visits to the Anglican church at Strata Florida, whose graveyard contains a yew tree traditionally associated with Dafydd ap Gwilym, the foremost medieval poet in the Welsh language.  

What these features have in common is that they are not arbitrary visits to arbitrary places of some notional interest: they are imbued with a hinterland of meaning and purpose reflecting the value to the individual.  This applies a symbolic meaning of the landscape which could be co-opted into the Authorised Heritage Discourse.  As Belford has noted, a community may wish to influence the discourse, not develop their own (2011, 64).

 

Semi-authorised heritage discourse

From a pragmatic point of view, the issue faced by the custodians of the authorised heritage discourse is how to replicate the enthusiasm and interest arising from the Unauthorised Heritage Discourse instrumentally to achieve their desired ends in terms of the public good of increased engagement with heritage by previously disengaged groups.  Are there any narrative strands that might be used to bring together the power of story with the physical heritage?  

One aspect of the rural community is the longevity of families and their associations with places.   In the case of the post-medieval ‘squatter settlement” of Rhos Gelligron on the edges of the common to the southeast of the village, the limited archaeological evidence of the abandoned buildings was supplemented by a much richer social history narrative preserved by descendants of the occupants, who had moved into the village (Tarlow, 2009).

The Nanteos cup is a small wooden bowl (a medieval mazer) held by the successors to the Stedmans, the post-Dissolution owners of Strata Florida; its actual provenance and history is unknown, but for more than a century it has been the subject of a speculative narrative that associates its use for healing in the 19th century, arrival at Strata Florida in the final days of monasticism, and before that perhaps a role in the Last Supper as the Holy Grail.   In the 1900s, Evans sought to popularise this account as part of his efforts to preserve and promote the Abbey ruins (Jenkins, 2009: 5).  

As part of the 2012 Open Days, nine members of Sculpture Cymru were commissioned to produce site-specific works, created and installed during the week and displayed at the Open Days.   The works were intended to be ephemeral responses to the heritage and landscape of the area, and included references to metalworking, ceramics and textiles.  The most ambitious work was The Pilgrim, by Glenn Morris, a 3m-high statue positioned on the summit of the small hill overlooking the Abbey.  The statue comprised wooden elements bolted to a steel frame anchored into the ground by concrete. In allusion to the use of the uplands by the Abbey for sheep pasture, the statue was clothed in a woollen smock.  The appearance of this new feature on the skyline had an immediate effect and was adopted as a local landmark by the community.  Although it had been intended that the statue would be dismantled after the project, the reaction was so positive that it has been left standing, and has become an icon for the area (for example, it was used on the cover of the photograph collection Ceredigion At My Feet (Hughes 2016)). 

If it proves possible to harness the power of stories like these, the heritage of Pontrhydfendigaid may come to be seen as part of the community rather than simply located within it.  The Strata Florida Trust is currently in the process of taking ownership of farm buildings adjacent to the ruins with the intent of developing the Strata Florida Centre with true community involvement (Bettley, 2016).  Alongside a continuing increase in the number of visitors (to 6,391 in 2014 (GSR, 2015)), the economic and cultural impact of the heritage appears to be growing.

Conclusion

A project working in an area with a large population can afford the luxury of narrowcasting: if it only reached 5%, or 1%, of the audience, there will still be hundreds of people packing out events and completing evaluation forms.  As a result, it may never occur to funders or implementation staff to consider who they are missing, and why they might not be responding as desired.  In a rural context, disengagement is visible.

The experience of the Strata Florida Heritage Landscape Project shows that even with good intentions and local knowledge, a conscious re-learning is necessary to reframe an Authorised Heritage Discourse to appeal to a community which may have little interest in an official or academic narrative whose stories stir in them no recognition or emotion. 

 

 


 
Acknowledgements

The Strata Florida Heritage Landscape Tourism Project was part-funded by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development through the Welsh Government.  The author is grateful to Professor David Austin for his contribution to the development of this paper; the views expressed are his own..

 

Bibliography

Austin, D. (2004), 'Strata Florida and its Landscape', Archaeologia Cambrensis, 153, 192-201.

Austin, D. (2013a) ‘The Archaeology of Monasteries in Wales and the Strata Florida Project’, in Burton, J & Stober, K. (eds) Monastic Wales, New Approaches, Cardiff, University of Wales Press.

Austin, D. (2013b), ‘Mountain landscapes and the tradition of industry: the Cambrian Mountains of central Wales’, MADE, J. Welsh Sch. Architect. 8, 6–15. Available from: https://issuu.com/wsarchi/docs/made-issue-8/32  .

Belford, P. (2011) “Archaeology, Community, and Identity in an English New Town” The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice 2 (i), 49-67. DOI:10.1179/175675011X12943261434602

Bettley, C. (2016) “Step forward for heritage centre plans”, Cambrian News, 13 August 2016.  Available from: http://www.cambrian-news.co.uk/article.cfm?id=107822  [Accessed 16 08 2016].

Bezant, J. (2007) 'Geophysical Survey at Strata Florida Abbey, Henfynachlog Farm and Troedyrhiw Upland Settlement, Ceredigion', Archaeology in Wales 47.

Bezant, J. (2014) ‘Revisiting the monastic ‘grange’: problems at the edge of the Cistercian world’, Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies 3, 51-70.

Bezant, J. (2009) Medieval Settlement and Territory: Archaeological Evidence from a Teifi Valley Landscape. Oxford, British Archaeological Monographs British Series 487.

Brand, S. (1994) How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built.  London, Viking Press.

Coard, R. (2007) “Ascertaining an agent: using tooth pit data to determine the carnivore/s responsible for predation in cases of suspected big cat kills in an upland area of Britain”, Journal of Archaeological Science 34, 10, 1677–1684.  Available from: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440306002718.

Council of Europe (2005) Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Faro Convention) (Council of Europe Treaty Series 199)   http://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list/-/conventions/rms/0900001680083746  [Accessed 31 August 2016]

Dyfed Archaeological Trust (no date) http://www.dyfedarchaeology.org.uk/HLC/uplandceredigion/pontrhydfendigaid.htm

Evans, G. E. (1903) Cardiganshire: a personal survey of some of its antiquities, chapels, churches, fonts, plate and registers. Aberystwyth, privately printed.

Furness, H. (2012) “’Beast of Bont returns’ as 20 sheep found massacred”, The Telegraph 15 May 2012.  Available from:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9267032/Beast-of-Bont-returns-as-20-sheep-found-massacred.html  [Accessed 31 August 2016].

GSR (2015) Visits to Tourist Attractions in Wales 2014: Report for Visit Wales (Welsh Government Social Research report 54/2015, Pontypridd). Available from: http://gov.wales/docs/caecd/research/2015/151020-visits-tourist-attractions-2014-en.pdf.

Holtorf, C. (2015) “Are we all archaeologists now? Introduction”, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2 ii, 217-219.

Hughes, I. (2016) Ceredigion Wrth Fy Nrhaed / At My Feet. Llandydul, Gomer.

Hurn, S. (2009) “Here be dragons? No, big cats! Predator symbolism in rural Wales”, Anthropology Today, 25 (i), 6-11.

Jenkins, G. H. (2009) “Our Founding Fathers and Mothers: The Cardiganshire Antiquarians”, Ceredigion 16 (i).   Available from:  http://cymdeithashanesceredigion.org/centenary-lecture.php  [Date accessed: 31 August 2016].

Kavanagh, K. E. (2015) “Rethinking the conversation: a geomythological deep map” Paper presented at Theoretical Archaeology Group 2015 conference, University of Bradford.  Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r0dFKiaugM.

Moss, S. (2013) “Hinterland – the TV noir so good they made it twice”, The Guardian, 30 July 2013.  Available from:  http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/jul/30/hinterland-tv-noir-wales [Date accessed: 31 August 2016].

Pendlebury, J. (2013) “Conservation values, the authorised heritage discourse and the conservation-planning assemblage” Int. J. Heritage Studies, 19 (7), 709-727.  DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2012.700282

Parker, M. (2007) Neighbours from Hell? English attitudes to the Welsh.  Bow Street: Y Lolfa.

Peate, C. (2011) Visits to Tourist Attractions in Wales 2010:  Research on behalf of Visit Wales.  Welsh Assembly Government Research, Cardiff.   Available from: http://www.tourismhelp.co.uk/objview.asp?object_id=580

Smith, L., (2006). The uses of heritage. London: Routledge.

Smith, L. and Waterton, E. (2013) Heritage, Communities and Archaeology.  London: Bloomsbury.

Stober, K. (no date) “Review of The Cistercians in the Middle Ages, (review no. 1321).  Available from: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1321 [Date accessed: 27 June, 2016].

Tarlow, S. (2008). “Who are you calling marginal? A squatter settlement in upland Wales”. In P. Rainbird (ed) Monuments in the landscape: studies in honour of Andrew Fleming. Oxford, Tempus, pp. 177-189.

Visit Wales (2015) “About Sense of Place”, Visit Wales website [Online].  Available from: https://businesswales.gov.wales/dmwales/about-sense-of-place-2 [Date accessed: 30 August, 2016].

Wavehill (2012) Ongoing evaluation of the delivery of the Rural Development Plan (phase 2) in Ceredigion Report 2: Mid-term evaluation.

Wavehill (2015) Evaluation of the delivery of Axis 3 the Rural Development Plan (phase 2) in Ceredigion Final evaluation – Executive Summary Report.

 


Friday, 8 March 2024

An Archaeologist's Guide to British Species - Matthew Law

Matthew Law is one of the few British archaeologists to have persevered with the blog format and is now partway through creating An Archaeologist's Guide to British Species, with a page describing each plant or animal and its archaeological relevance, accompanied by a photo.     

This is a great resource for archaeologists trying to make sense of a palaeoenvironmental report, a hedgerow survey, or a landscape history.   It'll keep him busy for a while as he's on entry #94 and still in the Cs.



Upskilling yourself with Historic England

Historic England has relaunched its online training resources and there are a ranges of short courses of interest to readers of this blog.

  https://training.historicengland.org.uk/

It is free to register and undertake the courses; each takes 1-4 hours.


I would recommend:

KEY SKILLS

Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment - MoRPHE

This is a detailed walkthrough of Historic England's MoRPHE project management system and its manager's guide, which was developed as an application of PRINCE2 to replace MAP2.  Organisations undertaking work for Historic England are required to use MoRPHE, and it is also used by some as standard practice regardless of funding. (and if this description is a baffling set of acronyms you should do this course!)

Research Ethics & Integrity

This is based on UKRI guidelines for (academic) research, and is focused on potential harm to living participants, although cultural heritage is also covered.  It is interesting to compare and contrast with the CIFA Ethics workshop; I don't think either provide much of a handle for those facing the small everyday ethical dilemmas (am I knowledgeable/competent enough to make a judgment call on whether this bit of heritage can be destroyed?, my client wants me to ignore part of the impact - what can I do?).

HERITAGE FOR PLANNERS: ESSENTIALS

Despite the label, this section has courses that are of interest to anyone involved in presenting heritage information to planning authorities, and cover Historic England's guidance on heritage values, e and setting.

HISTORIC ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT

There's an excellent course on Statements of Heritage Significance and NPPF4.



 

      


Sunday, 26 January 2020

10 Simple Steps: the e-book

The 2012 2nd edition is now available as a free pdf ebook from Carreg Ffylfan Press.



There are a few physical copies still available to purchase.

Tuesday, 12 January 2016

The Grand Challenge for Archaeology- the information cycle

In the 1950s, archaeologists had a clear idea of their role.  Wheeler says 'unrecorded excavation is the unforgivable destruction of evidence (Archaeology from the Earth (1954), p. 209), and goes on to insist that proper publication is the duty of the excavating  archaeologist.  His final chapter, What are we digging, and why?, is uncharacteristically slippery, though.  It appears that this duty is primarily imposed to ensure that the contribution to knowledge would be shared with current and future peers, to establish a truth that could in due course be communicated to the world.

In the 1970s Philip Rahtz's Rescue Archaeology implicitly followed the same view  - volunteers were welcome to view or help, but the core of the work was the excavation, recording, and academic publication of the site for the benefit of the specialist reader.  (It is interesting to see that he estimates that there were in 1971 about 200 professional archaeologists in the UK).

When the IfA (now CIfA) was founded in the 1980s, it embodied this approach in its Code of Conduct, specifying that excavators had a duty to publish a site within 10 years.

I rehearse this ancient history as a reminder that the contemporary view I often encounter that an archaeologist's primary audience is a non-technical, popular, community one, that involving non-professionals in the process of excavation and recording, that digging and showing is more important than reporting and analysis, is a recent development, and one that has had an unwelcome effect on the profession at a time when resources are tight and hard choices must be made.

The Grand Challenge that I see facing UK archaeology is that archaeologists need to re-engage with all stages of the information cycle, from research, to reporting, to sharing data, placing a high value on prompt availability of credible data and on using the data of others.


SMRs and HERs

The aspect of archaeology I find most frustrating is the way archaeologists use Historic Environment Records.  As the concept emerged in the 1970s, as Sites and Monuments Records, they were transformative.  Previously archaeology had to be understood by laborious research using printed gazetteers and hand-drawn distribution maps; instead, all known sites were plotted on large-scale (1:10,000) maps and accompanied by standardised data (initially on paper but transferred to computer in the 1980s).  The shift to computers meant that thematic searching was expedited - all Bronze Age cairns could be listed by a simple query.  It wasn't until the 1990s that the paper maps were replaced by online mapping and GIS so that it was easy to zoom in and out, relate distributions to topography, and overlay historic mapping.  Many are now available online.

Given these incredible research tools, we should be enjoying a golden age of high quality research and publication, with thousands at work, excavating hundreds of sites, generating new data and contextualizing the results.  Instead it appears that most are content with superficial and credulous research and an apathy about the value of their contribution.  One trend I have learned to dread is the use, in grey literature reports, of an HER site listing included as supplied.  I can only assume that those using the data in this way have misunderstood what HERs seek to do and how they are compiled.

Historic Environment Records are intended to be an index to known archaeological sites in an area.  They do not, in principle, consider themselves to be primary sources (and most do not hold primary archival material).  As an index, they bring together published and unpublished information and classify it in order to aid retrieval.  Their interpretation and analysis is restricted to a basic health check and then an attempt to make the data most likely to be found.  HERs will usually accept the source's conclusion about what they found.   It is quite common to find that many of the sites are less definitive than they at first appear:  antiquarian reports will be given an estimated NGR, wholly unjustified by the convoluted and vague locational information (and it is also common for any finds or records to have vanished), or an excavator's over-enthusiastic conjecture about a site is taken at face value.

In the early rush of creating the SMRs, a lot of thought went into providing a handy synthesis of the evidence in a newly-written description, to save users the necessity of checking each source and reaching their own conclusions.  Increasingly this has been abandoned, partly because of the increase in workload, but also because the validity of the synthesis is questionable.  Of all the people writing about a site, you can be quite sure that the HER Officer won't have had the chance to visit it.  They are worst placed to rule on the weight assigned to sources.  Descriptions will therefore quote from successive sources without necessarily reaching a judgement.  Elsewhere, decisions cannot be ducked: the site must be given a category - cairn, natural feature, modern feature, and a date.  HER listings for Roman roads, prehistoric ritual landscapes, or Dark Age burials often vanish into mundane, modern or natural features, their more dramatic classification being a relic of past fancy.  HERs cannot completely expunge such records, since a researcher may come across the original source and seek the relevant HER record.

The questions lying behind the maintenance of an HER are thus complex - addressed in the MIDAS data standard towards which many are working.

There are, as well as these unavoidable issues, other problems: sources may have been mistranscribed or misunderstood, or not consulted, and, fatally, NGRs may be mistyped.  When HERs were undertaking audits it was found that backlogs of 2 years of data awaiting input were not unusual.   Some sectors are much worse at making their results available: academics, independents, community groups, all unconstrained by planning, are much less likely to feed into HERs.

So HERs are, as an academic said about Wikipedia, a good place to start your research and a very bad place to stop.


Recording and reporting

Yes I know, don't call it excavation call it preservation by record.  But if we say this, and mean this, why is that the standard of records is so low, content with simple standardised descriptions with all the pondering on interpretation and significance left out.  This then feeds through into dull reports which say very little.  I was looking at a report on an evaluation by a professional unit that encountered a complex of prehistoric features.  Their date and purpose were left uncertain by the evaluation, but the conclusion decided that since they were of unknown significance no further investigation was warranted.   Somebody who considered themselves a professional was so incurious that they were happy to shrug their shoulders and walk away,  Even worse, there had been another development on adjoining land, not mentioned in the report, which had found more features, dated this time.  There is a case for archaeologists seeing themselves as technicians, servants of a process, creating data for others, but that seems to me to be an abdication of responsibility.  The excavator of  a site has spent weeks onsite and off engaging with the site and its  features occupying the forefront of their brain.  They, if well informed and thoughtful, are by far the most likely person to establish the truth.  One of the sad features of modern corporate archaeology is that there is little room for the bold hypothesis or imaginative site narrative - the passion and vision we hope to encounter on a site tour is routinely smoothed into tedium by the reporting process.


Reading


Which brings us back to Wheeler and publications.  Archaeologists need to be interested in more than their particular site or region.  They need to understand the context, the research questions, the developing narratives.  Otherwise they will end up making silly claims, that their watching brief with a Roman burial will 're-write our understanding of the conquest of Britain', or a ditch will change the way Bronze Age barrows are interpreted.  For much of the 20th century, sites were dug with unskilled, volunteer, or lackadaisical staff, with minimal resources.  That work produced the big books and the big theories that we still refer to.  Somehow, the plethora of data and the ease with which it can be accessed has narrowed our thinking.




Note

This essay is not intended to criticise any individuals or organisations; I genuinely believe that they are doing the best they can in difficult circumstances.  My examples are anonymised and included to highlight where I believe we have gone wrong.



This post is part of the Archaeology Blog Festival

Friday, 21 March 2014

The future

"Next month is the SAA session on blogging so this will be the final question for #blogarch. Learning from my mistakes this will be an actual question this time.
The last question is where are you/we going with blogging or would you it like to go? I leave it up to you to choose between reflecting on you and your blog personally or all of archaeology blogging/bloggers or both. Tells us your goals for blogging. Or if you have none why that is? Tell us the direction that you hope blogging takes in archaeology.
Short and simple and I hope a good question to finish off #BlogArch with."

The great value of this blog to me is that it's a playground where I can write whatever I want, and people do find their way to it.   I am currently involved in two initiatives which build on my 10 simple steps work: the setting up of a Project Management Group for the IfA, and a research project I am currently developing  interviewing archaeologists about how they construct their sense of professional identity.  Both of these initiatives will exist in other forms, but here is where I can add quick updates, try out bits of text, and provide pointers to related sources.

This last point sounds trivial, but it is easy to overlook.  Before websites, the following up of an article's references was a long, tedious and frustrating experience, even for people who had the chance to drop in to a university library that might hold the relevant journals.   Now there's a lot that is readily available, and linked directly.  It's true that much academic publishing is locked off to all but specialists in academia, but even so it is much easier to be well-informed than it used to be.

Tuesday, 14 January 2014

Blogging archaeology - my top posts



This post is part of a blog carnival in the run-up to SAA 2014:

Over the last seven years there have been 20,900 pages viewed. Whether you think that's a lot depends on your expectations. Most of the traffic comes from Google searches, although some follow links from university archaeology courses cite it as an online resource. It is notable that most of search terms are post titles, which means that 'meat and potatoes' post titles work better than clever allusive and obscure ones.

EntryPageviews
1434

20 Dec 2007, 1 comment
717
478
385
303
1 Jan 2013, 3 comments
261


241
14 Feb 2012, 1 comment
191
28 Nov 2007, 1 comment
189
136
I am pleased that the post on How to get your first job in archaeology is popular, reflecting a bit of a vacuum elsewhere (the CBA website's careers advice is vague and optimistic). The otehr popular posts get significant traffic from people searching for general advice on PRINCE2, lean management, training action plans,  and Powerpoint.  The essay on Commercial archaeology  is an interesting case, where the academic published literature on ethics and development in archaeology  are sparse and therefore this contribution to the debate fills a gap.

If I was to take a gloomy view I could say that it is impossible to predict which of the posts will go viral, to the extent of finding most readers, and I am disappointed at the much smaller number of readers who explore the site at length.  But in away that's not surprising: the potential audience of new archaeology graduates or people working in generic management is much larger than my core audience -  commercial arcaheologists who have just been promoted to project managers.