Under Uddingston

Urban prehistory can be transformational, but it can also be mundane, generating little more than footnotes. When all is said and done, the discovery of ancient pots and precious bones is just another part of the relentless tireless digging in that humans have always done, extracting, replacing, destroying, creating. The ground surface is a gateway to the past but also a pointer to the future and our own bodily and material mortality.

On Wednesday 25th of March 1885, during road construction works in a field and the creation of the leafy suburb of Kylepark in the Lanarkshire town of Uddingston, two large ancient pots were found within a foot of the ground surface. “Both urns, in accordance with a not unusual practice, had been merely placed in the earth mound downwards over the bones they were intended to protect” (Duncan 1885, pg. 337).

A few days later, the then Honorary Secretary of the Glasgow Archaeological Society, J Dalrymple Duncan*, visited to take charge of the site and he carried out what must have been a fairly rudimentary investigation of the findspot, just a stone’s throw from the River Clyde. Before he arrived some human bones had also been found, and so Dalrymple “had the ground dug up for a considerable space around the spot, when after some search we were successful in discovering a few small portions of a third urn” (pg. 337).

J Dalrymple Duncan / Gray (University of Glasgow)

JDD collected together the fragments of urn that had already been found, to be passed to Joseph Anderson of the National Museum of Antiquities. For one of the urns was damaged by a pick axe, the other had been squashed by a construction tramway inadvertantly laid over it. The third urn survived only as ‘trifling portion’.

The human remains were analysed by Professor Young of Glasgow University and Professor Buchanan of Anderson’s College. They could not say much with certainty but suggested that there were at least two people represented, perhaps an older short man, and a slighter younger person, “inextricably mixed together”.

And so the road was completed, and the houses constructed, what was once a riverside field, now sandstone homes, gardens, and trackways. The wheels of time moved on, with the location of this remarkable discovery – what we would now know to be a 4,000 year old burial site – settling in to its comfortable middle class future.

The interpretation of this modest discovery was associated with the Bronze Age by Dalrymple, and noteworthy as, “the first instance … of one of these having been brought to light in the immediate neighbourhood of Glasgow” (pg. 340).

In 1904, a local history book was published called By Bothwell banks: some chapters on the history, archaeology and literary associations of the Uddingston and Bothwell district, written by George Henderson and architect J Jeffrey Waddell. This documented for the most part the medieval and later history of this area, with Bothwell and Uddingston being neighbouring towns on the banks of the Clyde.

The first three pages of this narrative explore what the authors call the ‘earliest times’ and they make note of the discovery of the urns and bones at Kylepark, as well as – in a footnote to this footnote – mention of another Bronze Age discovery at Viewpark to the north in the early years of the nineteenth century. The discovery at Kylepark was loosely connected to local folk traditions.

Looking back to these ancient days, the authors cannot help fall back on colonial narratives of the uncivilised, exotic nature of these prehistoric folk. The river would have had,

“banks luxurious with vegetation of almost tropical growth, overshadowed with gigantic trees, with its waters as yet unsullied by civilisation, would be as well stocked with the lordly salmon as any river in Canada”.

They continued, “…hunting and fishing would have occupied their days, varied only by such gentle relaxation as tribal war” (pg. 2).

Such narratives recall the fantastical writing of Ludovic McLellan Mann in his 1937 book Earliest Glasgow: Temple of the Moon. Earliest man “watched with awe and eagerness the great mammalia striding across the meadows and through the woodlands” (pg. 1). Mann will appear again in our story before the end.

There is a curious conflicted view of colonialism within the Henderson and Waddell narrative, who on the one hand treat prehistoric people as if they were a lesser, different species, and on the other hand bitterly note the ‘iron foot’ of the subsequent Roman invaders of Strathclyde. There seems to be a recognition that in ‘civilising’ someone, you change them and their environment in not altogether positive ways. Yet there is also a strand of continuity from these folk, with a note that the nearby location of a church means that this ground was “hallowed … by many forms of worship”. And of course these Bronze Age dead – whose bones were picked over by Professors – were pagans.

The houses were constructed, the road established, middle classes became entrenched, people slotting into types just as surely as the pots that were found at Kylepark. The three vessels were studied at a visual level, being drawn (see above) and characterised – two urns, one of the encrusted type, and one Food Vessel. These were distributed widely, held across two museums in Glasgow and Edinburgh, where they still reside today in cardboard boxes in environmentally controlled museum stores.

X.EA 108 Encrusted pottery urn with band of raised zigzags and bosses on upper part, from Uddingston, Lanarkshire, Middle Bronze Age. Clay; band of raised zigzags and bosses on upper part (source).

Source: National Museums of Scotland

This and the other vessels have from time to time been of use to archaeologists.

In 1933, Ludovic Mann addressed a fieldtrip of the Glasgow Archaeological Society and the Scottish Ecclesiological Society in Bothwell, close to the Kylepark discovery. There he outlined an outlandish argument that the current location of St Bride’s Church in Bothwell was indicative of a prehistoric sacred landscape on a par with Stonehenge. His theories were developed in story in the local newspaper The Hamilton Advertiser a week later, a story Mann was so enamoured with he had made into a pamphlet.

The detail and contextualisation of Mann’s lecture and demonstrations that day will be the subject of a more detailed examination (link to be added when this is published) but suffice to say that of course the Kylepark discovery was surely of interest to Mann’s theorising. “Bothwell must have been a very notable place in pre-Christian times…” (pg. 3) and it is probable that the urn findspot was included on a large map Mann brought for the occasion and used as the basis for an illustrated talk at the Clyde Hotel (now the Bothwell Bridge Hotel). This was a sacred landscape in ancient times, according to Mann, aligned on the solstices and organised around careful measurements of distance and time. Narratives spun on a Saturday afternoon after tea, nothing more.

There is nothing at Kylepark today that would make one know that this had been a place of death, rites, subsistence and salmon abundance. Just another sandstone suburb on the fringe of Glasgow.

There is no documentary evidence of the reaction of the workers who found these objects, or how they reacted to the arrival of a posh amateur archaeologist to take control of their site, view the pick-smashed base on one urn, dig into the field for bones and more. Just another day, another inconvenience, perhaps an anecdote to be shared with friends and family.

These are all footnotes.

* James Dalrymple Duncan as called in this paper is better know as James Dalrymple Gray of Dalrymple, founder of the Dalrymple Lecture series held annually at the University of Glasgow. He was the son of Rev Thomas Gray Duncan and Mary Dalrymple. He changed his name – Pitt-Rivers style – for family inheritance reasons. I am indebted to GAS archivist James Mearns for clarifying this. Obituary

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks to the staff of special collections at the University of Glasgow, and Jim Mearns.

The following sources were consulted and quoted above:

Duncan, J D. 1885 Note regarding cinerary urns recently discovered at Uddingston’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 19, 1884-5, 337-40. Online here

Henderson, G and Waddell, J J 1904 By Bothwell banks: some chapters on the history, archaeology and literary associations of the Uddingston and Bothwell district. Glasgow. You can see this whole book, digitised, online here.

The Hexham Heads part 5 – The Heads ‘speak’

To accompany the publication of my short piece on the Hexham Heads in the wonderful Hellebore zine (#5 The Unearthing Issue) I wanted to share with you some words from the cutting room floor.

In my initial version of this article, I interspersed my account of the story of these cursed objects with a narrative that was articulated by the Heads themselves, or at least one of the Heads. This was in the end excised from the article through an act of editorial mercy. In hindsight it is apparent that this concept does not work because it was never clear how the Head was communicating this narrative, or was able to sense the world around itself being, in effect, made of cement. I could not find a coherent way to explain how the Heads were aware of their surroundings to be able to comment on them, nor was it clear how they knew what the things around them were or what was happening to them. It was a liberty even to render their story in modern English, although this could always be explained away by the conceit of ‘translation’.

Cover image courtesy of Hellebore zine

I am well aware that material finds its way onto the floor of the cutting room (what a messy and slippy surface that must be) for a good reason as those who have watched the two-night versions of The Wickerman can attest. Yet through all this, I feel that the Heads’ side of the story deserves to be told….

The stones of the children

We are dark and damp, soil-stained and weary. Between us we have little memory of how long we have been in this horrible place, where grass roots attempt to penetrate us, and we are subject to disturbances from above and the action of worms. What if one of us were to crack open in the cold and shatter into pieces? What hope for us then?

Then – there was a disturbance, violent thrusts churning our loam cage, tremendous tremors. Hunks of our environment torn off around us, fresh air playing on our spherical forms. We could smell freedom even although our noses were never furnished with nostrils. A giant grasping hand plucked me from the earth like a stone potato. The other followed on, flicked from our pit, only to roll in the damp grass and licked by a waiting dog.

Grubby fleshy fingers thrust into our mouths and eyes, forcing out accumulated soil and dead leaves. Then we are held aloft, faces set to the sun for what seems like the first time, absorbing radiation, finally warming up.

Our hollow eye holes cannot produce tears although they can harbour condensation.

Our silent slitted mouth slots were never equipped with a tongue but do provide a resting place for larvae.

Our round bodies are blessed with no functional orifices even although we have the façade of faces.

We are but carved stones balls and we do not know our names.

After our harvest from the soil, we were carefully placed on a wooden shelf inside, heat coming from below, the flickering of a fire. We had been passed from hand to hand, examined, poked, explored, and when this stopped, we were placed on our mantel, left alone, no longer worthy of curiosity. Day passed into night. There was little else to sense. Until there was a disturbance, something shaking our resting place, causing us to roll back and forward pivoting on our necks.

Objects around us animated crashing around broken clicking things rhythmic banging familiar sensations warm breath now something we remember from before we went into the earth breathing dirty breath fingers clasping around us fingers with hair –

Our senses are heightened, we can sense vibrations, waves, magnetic fields, change. We feel. It seems we are inorganic objects. Dead. We have never been alive. We are made things, created for a purpose that we cannot grasp, our story dissolving before we can comprehend it, dissipating in waves of light and sound, electrons and quarks. We are dead things and that is why people fear us.

We are now back in the darkness but this time a dry airless place, trapped in an oblong box. We are nestled amongst something soft, separated from one another by many layers of fibrously thin material that disturbs our bond. The box shakes then I am lifted out of this space and laid on a solid surface, warmed by a bright source of light and heat that is not the sun. There is a hum in the air.  

Alone and exposed, touched by pieces of equipment, I am being explored, turned over and over, and then scraped.

We have no memory of our creation. Our form is irregular, asymmetrical, unnatural. We have consulted the energy we have absorbed from all around us, played it back in private moments usually from within a desk drawer, but our atoms can only recall hazy details. Big rough hands enclosed us completely, vibrations of rhythmic laughter, song, veneration / mockery. Our features were created through human toil and ingenuity, eyes pressed into our bodies, mouth prized open with metal, nose formed, hair carved into us.

We are created things but do not have the capacity to know who created us or when. So why do they think that by studying us that we will reveal our secrets?

Other people vibrate fear, scared of us, won’t touch us, can’t meet our stare which they assume to be dead and malevolent. In their hands they share with us their sweat. We know we have power but cannot recall the source of that power or to what purpose we should put it to. 

We abide. Our secrets remain locked into our stone cores, and none have been able to crack us. We are like ancient pieces of flint that have developed a concealing cortex through time, a patination that conceals our true nature, stone camouflage. The material that we are formed from is in flux, and every attempt to categorise us, to petrologically identify us, will fail. Magic dust has no chemical formula and like quartz we have no cleavage. In order for us to be sustained we must be lost, for it is only through misfortune and forgetting that we endure. We want to be lost, we must be lost, and we will make sure that we are lost, over and over again.

We want to be lost, we must be lost, and we will make sure that we are lost, over and over again. Please someone hyde us.

The final joke only (just about works) if you know that the Hexham Heads were last seen in the company of a dowser called Frank Hyde. Niche humour.

I have published four previous blog posts on the Hexham Heads – Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. Oh yes! To quote Schloup on the Fortean Times forum thread on the Heads of me, “I think this gets nearer to the truth than anything else I’ve read for a long time”.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Maria J Pérez Cuervo for asking me to write a piece for Hellebore – a dream come true! – and providing and allowing me to use images related to the zine in this post, but also her patient and wise editorial guidance.

The Hexham Heads Part 4 – generation haunters

In my final exploration of the urban prehistoric paranormal sensation that are the Hexham Heads, I want to look at how the Heads have become part of popular culture in ways – I would argue – that no other ‘archaeological objects’ found in 1971 have.

The Hexham Heads truly are the Stonehenge of pseudo-archaeology material culture. 

This is part 4 of my Hexham Heads quadrilogy of blog posts, so feel free to check the others out for the background and some archaeological perspective on these little stone buggers if you have not done so already. You can read about the discovery in Urban Prehistorian post 33, competing forms of analysis and study of the heads in post 51, and an account of my own research and fieldwork to date in the more recent post 135. Maybe one day I will write the book that goes with this cover.

There are plenty of other sources of information out there to satisfy any Head scratchings you might have, many of them referred to in this post. This is ever-increasing too, with blogs, bits of books, social media, and a profusion of podcasts keeping the Heads alive despite the fact that no-one appears to be able to account for their movements since 1978. However having immersed myself in this literature and spoken word, I am not sure whether much of this has moved the story on: this is all reportage, in the past tense, retaining the mystery and allure, but never offering a solution.

Why have these spherical objects become so iconic? The fact is that all of the events associated with the timeline of the Heads that we know about for sure (sort of) happened in the 1970s which is an iconic decade for nostalgic creepiness. So the Hexham Heads have become totemic within what we might call a ‘Haunted Generation’, the ongoing spirit of which is captured in Bob Fischer’s wonderful blog and Fortean Times column of the same name, but also the worlds of Scarfolk, and Hookland. They are Folk Horroreana crossed with the Urban Wyrd.

In other words, the Heads have become part of a pantheon of scary memories for people of a certain age, alongside the recently revived Usborne’s The world of the Unknown: Ghosts, and the enduring nostalgia for disturbing public information adverts about boys playing too close to a dangerous body of water or running across a beach strewn with glass (featured in a new BFI blu-ray compendium and online viewer). There is a narrative visual quality to the story of the Heads. They belong in the same universe as the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas, The Children of the Stones, and The Owl Service, to the extent that the whole tale sounds like it was actually an obscure ITV kids programme broadcast in 1974 starring Ian Cuthbertson as Don Robins and Gillian Hills as Anne Ross. Torn from the pages of an Alan Garner book that never was: The Stones of the children.

The Hexham Heads have made a leap from the pages of books about mysteries and Forteana, to become a source of nostalgia about our lost childhood, to the extent that I wonder how much we all really remember about this. There is the ongoing search for the clip of Anne Ross’s appearance on the BBC show Nationwide from grown adults who all remember seeing this when it was originally broadcast (or so they think they remember), stills from the show and a transcript of what she said not quite enough. But is this cultural memory masquerading as personal reminiscing? Perhaps a bit of both. This is the power and ambiguity of material culture that archaeologists deal with in all sorts of contexts.

The excellent book Scarred for Life volume 1 contains a vivid account of the Hexham Heads from the point of view of a shared childhood memory that continues to haunt us now that we have all been reminded this happened: as a slightly scary story recalled from childhood, half forgotten. Crucially, this is a memory that derives from television coverage of the story.

The Scarred for Life book is so big and has so much stuff in it that it is quite intimidating to get to grips with (this is a compliment). Like so many books nowadays it also has a very small font which I struggle with (not a compliment). The lack of index does not help (ditto). The Heads are covered almost right at the back of the book (pages 735-737 of a book with 740 pages!). This gives them a miscellaneous quality, a footnote to popular culture high weirdness in the 1970s, almost bringing the decade to an end, and ushering in the 1980s. It is the last part of a section on paranormal stuff, in there with stories like the Bermuda Triangle, the Enfield Haunting, and, Uri Geller; the authors suggest that the 70s was a breakout decade for weird stuff like this into the broader social consciousness via the television. I guess anyone who remembers Geller bending a bloody spoon on TV-am can relate to this.

The three packed pages on the Heads include a newsclipping and an account of the well-worn HH story. It is written in the context of the aforementioned Nationwide piece scaring kids who watched it who remains haunted my the memory of Anne Ross talking about the curse of the Heads that had after all been found by children in their back garden. (What could be more ordinary or more chilling?) Because it is through the lens of the TV camera and in the pages of newspapers that the Heads became mythologised as ‘evil’, ‘creepy’, so that the public consuming these stories became preconditioned to read these attributes into two small stone-ish objects with crappy faces carved into them. The Heads were a ‘media sensation’ which went nationwide with Nationwide, and the entire script of the interview with Ross was printed in the Fortean Times issue 15 (1976), an incantation of creepiness or more likely some kind of personal crisis or breakdown by the academic.

The chapter is entitled The Nationwide Werewolf: fittingly the Heads have become a 1970s TV memory. ‘We’ don’t remember the Heads. ‘We’ remember Anne Ross looking scared. ‘We’ remember the badly photographed grainy pictures of the Heads staring at us with their dead eyes from the pages of the tabloids. They have become generation haunters. “Those weird, weird 70s”.

Traditional ‘mystery’ accounts of the Heads exist in parallel to such TV narratives, detached from haunted generation nostalgia because the accounts are fueled by recounting the events themselves, not the media coverage of those events. So for instance one might turn to Janet and Colin Bord’s Modern Mysteries of Britain: One hundred years of strange events (Guild, 1988). This chunky volume contains a few pages on the Heads, which the authors call an ‘incredible saga’ (pg 206).

This account of the story is as familiar as it is brief. Not much light is shed on the various inconsistencies and coincidences that accompany the narrative. Several mysteries are highlighted – what is the origin of the Heads and how to explain the supernatural events that seemingly followed them around? Two for the price of one, with the argument running that even if the Heads were made by Des Craigie from cement, that still doesn’t explain away the werewolf stuff. This revisionism, that the power of the Heads lies in what they did rather than what they were, has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.

The few paragraphs on this story, in a section of the book on the topic of assorted oddities, is bulked out with an extended quote from Anne Ross about the supernatural things she experienced once she had the Heads. The authors conclude: ‘But no one can explain why they should have attracted a non-physical entity into their aura’.

The Heads also appear in other mystery books including the classic Readers Digest Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) and Incredible Phenomena (Orbis, 1984). In such accounts connections are made to earth mysteries, Celtic bits and pieces, hauntings, crystals and all sorts of other stuff. The story is very much an unsolved mystery and such books have no intention of solving the mystery – ‘no one can explain’. Curiously the Heads do not appear in this book but as it has a cool cover I have included it nonetheless, and they also do not seem to have entered the orbit of Arthur C Clarke and his mysterious world, which in itself if weird.

Of course if you are interested in going deeper into the mystery you could go straight to the most comprehensive source for all things Hexham Heads, the work of investigative journalist Paul Screeton. Having read Screeton’s writing on earth mysteries, such as Quicksilver Heritage (Abacus 1974), he is no fan of archaeologists, and so these accounts have little to say on the archaeology of the Heads. But Screeton knows the turf, and has spoken to all the major players, and knows this stuff better than anyone.

His first attempt to write about this was a short book published in 1981 and called Tale of the Hexham Heads. You can download a scan of this short book here. Containing 17 pages all told and typeset (reminding me of a BAR book from that decade) this contains Screeton’s original research into this tale, and is not too far removed in time from the original events. There are no images but there is a very useful bibliography of media coverage from the 1970s.

Extract from Screeton 1981

Much more detailed is the definitive sourcebook, the 2010 book Quest for the Hexham Heads (CFZ Press). In my view this book could have done with a firmer editor and a good proofread, but overall it covers everything we know and throws in a whole load of other stuff about werewolves, folklore and haunted pubs. Highly recommended. This is a complex story as I have noted before and so it is worth directing anyone interested to a useful index and guides to aspects of Screeton’s 2012 book on the Hexham Heads blog.

There are also two really useful articles about the HH in the Fortean Times 294 and 295 (towards the end of 2012). These were written by Stuart Ferrol working in part with Paul Screeton. These articles go over the story as per usual but also offer some limited fresh perspectives on the fate of the Heads and contain some interesting bits and pieces. The first article recounts the story so far, while the second part included recent research and interviews (including archaeologist Lyndsay Allison-Jones, whom I have also spoken to). The conclusion? They came “no closer to a conclusion or a definitive explanation…[and] don’t think there ever will be a conclusion” (pg 49). This was followed by an interview of Screeton by Ferrol which allowed the former to repeat the same nonsense about archaeologists as he had published in the 1970s (and it was out of date then!).

One final and excellent place you can get a Hexham Heads fix is in the world of podcasts, and there have been an explosion in these in the last five years. I have binge listened to a range of these, but there are many others out there as a quick google search will reveal.

Very few HH podcasts take an archaeological perspective so a good place to start is Archyfantasies podcast on the subject. The coverage is enlivened by some interesting North American pronunciations of Hex-HAM and a deeply sceptical perspective. There is a lot of focus on the multi-layered aspects of the story and overlaps with conspiracy theory thinking, but also some errors in fact in relation to recounting the story of the Heads. Covered also is some helpful discussion about the differences between the invasive and non-invasive petrological analyses undertaken on the Heads in the seventies. The conclusion was that these objects are “undeniably modern”. Nonetheless this is a thought-provoking hour.

The Loremen podcast (series 2 episode 13) has a decent and jolly account of the story and actually mentions my blogs as a useful source of information. This episode also focuses on the Middleton Hooter (!?).

I wasn’t quite so keen on the jokey couple routine on the Spooky Tales podcast (actually Episode 1). Hosts John and Louise part bicker, part bounce off each other in a rather contrived style to tell the story via some dead-ends and diversions. No surprises here. I liked the more cerebral approach to be found in the Lore of the Land podcast where presenters Stacia and Siofra situated the objects in a broader discussion of Celtic heads with a focus on the Bradford Heads. Check out Episode 4: The cult of the head.

I rather enjoyed the discussion of the Heads in the Unexplained Podcast (series 1 episode 9 The Dawn of the Head). This is essentially a straight narrative account of the story, which becomes ever more outlandish as it unfolds. As with some of the other podcasts, there is a general conclusion that it doesn’t really matter whether the objects are authentically ancient or not, some people believe them to have supernatural qualities, which is all that matters in the end. “Throughout history we have attributed worth and sentiment to inanimate objects….”.

And yes, the Heads have their own rather thin Wikipedia page.

What is the future for the Hexham Heads? More podcasts, more speculation for sure. There has been a long-mooted documentary film, Heads! which is yet to see the light of day as far as I can tell. Perhaps Funko will get in on the act and create a Hexham Heads collectible ‘figurines’ as part of their Myth range. I guess also the search will go on just in case they do still exist somewhere, perhaps in a kitchen drawer, you know the one that has all the bits and pieces in it. Perhaps even the cursed Nationwide footage will be found.

Maybe more still could be done. Maybe Hexham could start to use the Heads and their associated fantastical story in marketing, tapping into the growing dark heritage tourism trend. The trickle of the curious that head to Rede Avenue to surreptitiously photograph the garden where the Heads were found might be replaced by less bashful bus parties and cruise ship day trippers although one can hardly imagine the residents welcoming this development.

Perhaps one day I will even complete the academic journal paper that I have partially written about the Heads with the theme of cursed material culture. Stranger things have happened.

How to conclude this tale? The Hexham Heads, as has been said by many who have looked into their story, are objects that transcend time. The age and authenticity hardly seems to matter anymore, which may be a convenient intellectual sleight of hand, or merely an acknowledgment of the slipperiness of material culture. These are objects that have a biography and a chaine operatoire just as surely as if they were a polished stone axe. They are sticky things that accrued stories and myths and claims and data around them, creating a fuzziness that continues to obscure anything that we might want to call the truth. They are many things and perhaps none of them: they are totemic, they are toys or gifts, they are possessed with an evil power to attract supernatural events, they are stone, they are cement, they are ancient, they are from the 1960s, they are evil, they are mundane, they are lost, they are hidden, they are destroyed, they are curated. The list goes on because like so many things that we interact with, they are entangled with us and out stories and motivations and beliefs and hopes and fears. They haunt us because of this slipperiness, this quality of shape-shifting, and yet this is a quality that most material culture possesses, because we ensure these do not remain inanimate objects through our interactions with them. The Hexham Heads have depended on a cast of people to animate them, and have responded by animating the lives of those who interacted with them. This is their legacy and their power.

The Hexham Heads have a resonance and reach that few other aspects of the urban prehistory pantheon have. The are genuine generation haunters for a haunted generation that laps up such creepy – and at times laughable – stuff. If I didn’t know better I would suspect that someone was pulling the strings, having a laugh at the expense of others, pushing to see how outlandish things might get. There is a soap opera dynamic to their story that seems on first glance to be scripted. But I suspect the chaotic story and unfathomable contradictions that have dogged the Hexham Heads are beyond even the most devious of screenwriting minds. This story is so improbable that it must be true.

Green bling

Oh, Edmund… can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest Green?

This post has two points of departure.

Firstly, I am uncomfortable with the use of the word bling in the context of prehistoric metalwork. This is a common enough trope used by archaeologists and the media. But is this really the correct word for how these objects functions in prehistory, or merely a characterisation of objects as being shiny, precious things – even if the objects in question were neither of these things in the Iron Age or Bronze Age?

Perhaps also there is an element of (inverted) snobbery here, of disparaging gratuitous wealth displays, and the appropriation of a word in mainstream discourse that would appear to be more at home in the urban dictionary. Take the case of the so-called Prittlewell Prince, whose early medieval grave was found in 2003 during road-widening in Southend: in the media and amongst archaeologists (from the Time Team to British Archaeology magazine) this individual became widely known as the King of Bling.

Secondly, I find almost all museums boring. Unless they are museums of weird things, or deeply strange, I am left cold by glass cases of inanimate objects, little text panels, maps, and assorted accompanying artwork and imagery. Museums of course can be deeply contested and problematic places, but for me I see them, usually, as reliquaries for cold dead things that we value today and see as representative which they may or may not be.

Museums confuse me with their fixed categories and compartmentalizations, their maze-like floorplans, the disorderly arrangement of things, the missing objects replaced by little loan cards, weird coffee, lockers with non-returnable coin slots, how much coinage to drop into the donations slot at the doorway. They are places of little stresses that I do not enjoy.

I realise how that both of my initial points of departure are contingencies related to the contemporary setting of the museum, that they exist to showcase prehistory (or whatever) in our own terms and not the terms of those who made the stuff (or whose bodies we display). They are places that for me have little sense of pastness, like big shops where nothing is for sale (except in the actual shop).

But on the other hand, as a recent visit I took to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford did remind me, museums can be fine repositories of urban prehistory. There are few places where urban prehistory exists in such a concentrated form, albeit it in a deeply fragmented and stylised arrangement. If you happen to want a hit of prehistory and are in a city or town, heading to the local museum is as good as a way as any to ensure that you your desire is fulfilled, your lust sated for the good stuff. Although I would argue that museum displays are really just a kind of methadone for prehistory addicts.

On the same weekend as I made my trip to the Ashmolean apres breakfast a conference was being held in Chester on the topic of The Public Archaeology of Treasure. This is one of a series of excellent student conferences organised by the tireless Prof Howard Williams of Chester University, some of which have resulted in publications including papers by students, and generously co-edited with students too. Howard has discussed the conference on several occasions on his brilliant Archaeodeath blog eg before the event and after.

The hashtags for this conference were / are #archbling and #blingarch and this is one of the things that I reflected upon as I sat on a lovely smooth wooden bench in the Ashmolean after failing to find a temporary exhibition of works by the artist Philip Guston that I was actually quite interested in visiting.

Because the European prehistory gallery that I had spent some time on at that point sure was full of bling, gratuitously so. But what intrigued me was how much of this bling was, er, green. Not gold, not silver, not even bronze, but green. Not always shiny, sometimes rather dull. And curiously the idea of green bling made a lot more sense to me because this opened up the category of bling to non-metallic materials. For instance, Neolithic jadeite polished stone axes, of the deepest green. Or wonderful ornate beads of glassy faience, in pale greens and turquoises.

Bling was on my mind for another reason as I pondered a vast wall of busts in the stairwell of the museum. That weekend I had been attending and participating in a continuing education conference on the topic of Places of Worship in Britain and Ireland: prehistoric and Roman. Organised by Paul Barnwell and Tim Darvill, this is part of an epic series of conferences on historic matters. I was talking about cursus monuments of course.

Speakers used the word bling a lot over the course of the weekend. My notes for a great talk by the wonderful Dr Seren Griffiths showed that she used the phrase WEIRD BLING but I can’t recall the specific context.

On the Saturday evening, an excellent talk by the National Museum of Scotland’s all-knowing Dr Fraser Hunter on Iron Age stuff was frequently punctuated with the word bling, usually in relation to some shiny piece of metal like a carnyx, a torc, or a lunalae. (I am not confident about the correct singular or pluralisation of any of those words.)

Curiously my notes from Fraser’s talk included a sketch of a weird Iron Age spoon, and a pair of these caught my eye as I wondered about the European Prehistory gallery at the Ashmolean, taking in the sheer green-ness of it all.

The more time I spent in this gallery, the more green stuff I saw, in all sorts of shades, depths, tones, and materials. Lumps of malachite (nuggets of the purest green?), glassy beads, stone axes, torcs, axes, little metal things that I had no idea what they were, and the pair of bronze spoon-things. In fact it seemed to me that there was more green bling than gold bling or silver bling or even brown bling.

Obviously some of this stuff was not green back in the day. A chemical reaction has taken place. Metal corrodes to a coppery haze and loses its original colour over time. A lot of this stuff is green with age: unlike wood, here green does not depict youthfulness and flexibility. But quite a good deal of this stuff was green all along, with for instance the rich greenness of the stone azes brought to the fore by relentless polishing. Here green was the origin point, not the inevitable outcome. Green-ness was worth climbing the Alps for, perhaps even dying for.

And of course a lot of the bling found with the ‘King’ at Prittlewell had, with age, green-ed like this drinking horn fitting and hanging bowl.

My own experience of green bling came with the discovery of a dagger grave in a cist at Forteviot, Perth and Kinross, 2009. The first indication we had of the grave goods was a shaft of green poking from the beige cist floor, almost as if the dagger was a new growth, appropriate amidst a grave that contained rich evidence for Meadowsweet flowers (white bling). The dagger, once all the brown stuff had been cleaned from it, was revealed to be a wonderful green jagged shard of copper alloy with a whale tooth and gold pommel atop. Now, let’s not get started on whale bling.

So if we must use the word bling, and given the word has been used by the Howard Williams and Fraser Hunters of this world, then I guess we must, then let us at least rethink the parameters and temporality of what we mean. Let’s celebrate green bling, if nothing else because it is one of the most common forms in which urban prehistory appears to us, minty fresh, today.

Sources and acknowledgements: the quote that starts this blog post comes from the Blackadder Season 2 episode Money, and was, or course, uttered by Lord Percy.

I would also like to thank Paul Barnwell and Tim Darvill for inviting me down to Oxford to take part in the conference.

Drinking horn image (c) MOLA and sourced from The Guardian and the hanging bowl image is also (c) MOLA, from Heritage Daily.

The Forteviot dagger image is (c) the SERF Project and HES.

Museum map taken from the guide to the Ashmolean which cost me a quid.

Finally, grateful thanks to Howard Williams for sharing his thoughts about bling. I am truly delighted to have found a topic to blog about that has not yet featured on Archaeodeath (yet!).

Taunton axe

Serendipitous encounter with

the material culture of urban prehistory

unexpected discovery

the happenchance of sewage infrastructure

small find destined to be documented, drawn

and stored in a box

once found, then forgotten again

almost unknown

unknowable

indicative of an act: loss, disposal

or the outcome of a process: erosion, river-washed

the slow accumulation of the archaeological record

drifting until discovery

on the riverbank

beside the cricket ground

by Mick Aston off the Time Team.

Notes: on the 30^th June 1974 Mick Aston, then a field archaeologist with Somerset County Planning Department, found the butt of a Neolithic polished stone axe on the spoil heap of a trench that had been dug beside the River Tone, in the centre of Taunton, for sewage works. The broken axe was green in colour, had been bashed around by the river, and was broken. Analysis by the Petrology Implement Committee identified the possible source of the axe raw material as Cornwall. The axe is now, I assume, in a local museum collection.

Mick Aston (right) in 1987 (c) Somerset County Council

The location of this discovery is now a pathway running along the eastern bank of the Tone, passing close by the Somerset County Cricket ground. The location is not marked by any formal notification. Nearby is a setting of three megalithic eggs in a wooden compound.

Sources and acknowledgements: thanks firstly to Andrew Watson for flagging up the axe discovery for me in the Somerset HER. Andrew also kindly took me to the location and gave me a guided walking tour of central Taunton.

The axe has site reference number 44418 in the local HER database. The discovery of the axe was published by Aston here: Aston, M 1975 A stone axe from Taunton. Somerset Archaeology and Natural History 119, pages 70, 71. The axe drawing comes from that publication, and the photo of Mick Aston and colleagues was sources from the Somerset HER.