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Destroy or Preserve?
There are many influences on the preservation of below-ground archaeology. Very often archaeological deposits can be under attack from bacteria, chemicals, water movement, unfavourable soil conditions and agricultural regimes. All of these factors can result in very poor preservation of archaeology.
English Heritage in its recent paper 'Ripping up History’, July 2003 (download pdf file), has drawn attention to the long recognised problem of sensitive archaeological sites being damaged through agriculture; the first paper was penned by Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1870, a mere 133 years ago. English Heritage points out that 3000 scheduled ancient monuments, that is sites legally recognised as being of national importance, are being actively ploughed.
There are also hundreds of thousands of unscheduled sites also being routinely degraded by ploughing. To quote the report 'We are, quite literally, ripping up our history.’ The EH paper doesn’t blame farmers since, as it points out, they are only responding to the demands placed upon them by society. The same society that also demands new homes and improved communications, all of which demand raw materials such as sand and gravel.
The surrounding landscape at Nosterfield has been ploughed since medieval times right up to the present day. Delicate features such as these Bronze Age cremations have been severely damaged by modern ploughing. The blue arrow in the image (top right) shows where the plough has travelled through the burial damaging the pot and dragging the cremated bone from the burial pit. The dragged bone is highlighted by the red arrow.
The double cremation burial (lower right) survived to a few centimetres depth and most of the pottery and bone has been lost to the plough. We know from complete examples that the pots may have originally been up to 15cm high and full of cremated bone.
The recent excavations at Nosterfield have allowed this cremation cemetery, which would otherwise have been progressively eroded by ploughing, to be excavated by professional archaeologists. The pottery is being treated and reconstructed by a conservator and the human bone is being analysed by an archaeo-osteologist.
A recent experiment examining how the plough is impacting on the buried remains at Ladybridge Farm is now published on the Occasional Papers section of the APC web site.
