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Unearthed 2012: Top archaeological finds

Professor Tim Murray

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Matt Smith: Hello. This is me, Matt Smith, welcoming you, the listener, to this particular La Trobe University podcast. I'm joined today by Professor Tim Murray, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and an archaeologist in his own right, to talk to us today about his top 5 memorable archaeological stories of 2012. Welcome, Tim, thanks for joining me.
Tim Murray: Thanks Matt. Good to be here again.
Matt Smith: Yes, this is now ... we can call this a tradition.
Tim Murray: You mean it’s happened more than once?
Matt Smith: Yes, it has happened more than once, therefore it’s a regular occurrence, an annual event.
Tim Murray: OK, good. I'm suitably impressed.
Matt Smith: Would you first like to preface a bit. What is your intention by identifying five archaeological stories from 2012?
Tim Murray: I mean, there are an enormous number of things discovered every year. There’s a lot of archaeology happening all over the world, so I’ve tried to find five that kind of were interesting in of themselves, interesting discoveries, interesting applications of scientific analyses to provide information, and kind of quirky. One or two of them are definitely quirky. I suppose the thing it celebrates most of all is just the sheer, amazing discoveries that can come from archaeology. I mean, we have a whole set of preconceptions about what the past looks like, about what human history is like, and here we have a perfect opportunity to rip that all to pieces and start again on the basis of the discoveries that are being made.
Matt Smith: So where do we begin then? What is the first item you would like to discuss on Professor Tim Murray’s top five archaeological discoveries for 2012?
Tim Murray: This one’s quirky. And it comes from the island of Uist which is in the Hebrides, on the west coast of Scotland, an absolutely spectacular part of the world to be in, with some very interesting archaeology. What makes this one really interesting is that is has to do with some really quite strange burial behaviours that have taken place at a place called Clad Hallen on the island of Uist. And what the archaeologists have found is that they’re dealing with burials that have got bodies composed of more than one person in them. And these are bodies that have been buried some six hundred years after death. There are two bodies that are up for discussion at the moment. Both of them are composites of other skeletons and the reason they’ve been able to establish that these are composites, apart from the fact that sometimes the jaws look a bit odd with the heads, is on the basis of isotope analysis of the bones. They’re different people. So it raises a whole range of questions about what kind of activity is happening here. This is some thousands of years ago, when it’s taking place, and one of the other good things about archaeology is that it causes endless speculation as to what might or might not have happened. It’s one of those things we’re probably never going to be able to resolve, but you can think of a number of reasons why that might occur.
Matt Smith: These bodies were discovered in 2003, weren’t they?
Tim Murray: They were.
Matt Smith: Why has it taken this long to come to this conclusion about them?
Tim Murray: Because the analyses take time. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that people don’t actually walk into this stuff thinking that they’re going to find composites of bodies. It’s when people look closely and they see that the matches between say, skulls and jaws may not seem as right as they might have done, they start to ask questions about what might have occurred. And you then run these isotope analyses and establish that in fact they’re not the same bodies. This is not behaviour that you see very often, which is one of the reasons why of course you go in with the assumption that you’re dealing with an intact human skeleton.
Matt Smith: So what is the forerunning theory then? Is there probably no way to know for certain how something like this would happen?
Tim Murray: Oh, there’s absolutely no way you’ll way for certain I think. One of the excavators who deals a lot with burials, he believes it’s a way of demonstrating people’s claims to ownership of particular pieces of land over long periods of time so if bodies are buried there, they’re all part of the same clan, therefore you have this composite skeleton which is kind of like a historical document in and of itself, establishing peoples’ rights of ownership. Or demonstrating them I suppose, more particularly. Bits and pieces get lost when skeletons are not buried and they have a desire to make them look complete, so go and forage around in some more skeletons and pick up some heads, or jaws, or arm bones or whatever, to make them look real, make them look whole.
Matt Smith: The bodies are also partially mummified, weren’t they?
Tim Murray: I mean, it’s not uncommon to see bodies thrown into bogs, and it’s the bogs that in a sense mummify them. You know, like Tollund man or the bog people, where literally the human body gets pickled. Bogs are very acidic environments and they’re very good for the preservation of organic material. It’s why you get a lot of wooden artefacts in bogs.
Matt Smith: Is it also a chance that these bodies were kept with the people for a long time and they were just jumbled up a bit, like you get in ossuaries?
Tim Murray: These things always stimulate minds to fantasy. I'm not entirely sure whether we really need to go down the,” Here is a document establishing peoples’ rights of ownership of land”. It could be as simple as, there’s a jumble of stuff out there and this is how they all finished up when people decided to bury them. They just put the wrong head with the wrong jaw.
Matt Smith: Can I share an interesting fact that I have about this story?
Tim Murray: Certainly.
Matt Smith: Putting them in the peat bog was actually an early Scottish experiment gone wrong with deep frying.
Tim Murray: Instead of a deep fried Mars Bar, it’s a deep fried human being, is this the idea? The most disgusting meal I ever had was in Orkney, at a place called Stromness. I was doing some work there when I was a graduate student at Cambridge and we got off the ferry from the mainland and the only place to eat in town was a chippy, and the only thing they were doing at the time was deep fried battered haggis. It was unbelievable. That was 1981 and I can still remember it, very well.
Matt Smith: So what is story number two?
Tim Murray: Well story number two is completely different but again it’s one that challenges our understanding of the ways things work. And I’ll do a little bit of digression about this, because there are some theories about human history which are very longstanding. Really since the mid nineteenth century. And one of them is that when people domesticated plants and animals, in other words the origins of agriculture, they settled down in villages and they started to make things like pots. Okay? If you think about the sweetest stuff that happens with the Neolithic, or the new Stone Age or the domestication of plants and animals, there’s a range of stone tools that go with it, there’s a range of pots and various other bits of material culture.
Matt Smith: The Neolithic Revolution?
Tim Murray: Exactly so. Now we all know in Asia, Eurasia, the earliest agriculture is around about ten thousand years ago. And we know that there’s pots happening before the Neolithic, so you have what’s called the pre-pottery Neolithic, so that’s not too surprising. What is surprising is when pots get to be twenty thousand years old. And that’s what’s happened in central China, in Jiangxi Province. A cave site which had been excavated many times in fact over the last thirty years, was redated. The stratigraphy was more clearly understood and more sophisticated radio-metric dating was applied to these particular sediments and lo and behold, the pottery is nineteen thousand years old, between nineteen and twenty. Now, is this real? Are the dates real? Is the stratigraphy straight? All of those questions have still got to be answered. These days we’re so used to getting surprised by redating, about the consequences of applying new methods to old sorts of problems, that it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we’re dealing with pottery much earlier than we thought it was going to be. And it’s again not surprising that it’s in China, in the heartland of early civilisation that you see it. I mean, China has a very, very long pottery history.
Matt Smith: So we thought previously that pottery was all part of the Neolithic Revolution. Does that mean that possibly the other events of the Neolithic Revolution also happened a lot earlier than ten thousand years ago?
Tim Murray: Well, indeed, yes. But perhaps even more startling is it helps us to get to grips with some other strange things which have been noticed, again over the last thirty years or so. One of the most interesting things that ever happened in Australian archaeology was the discovery of ground edged axes in Arnhem Land that are very old indeed, about nineteen thousand years old. Now ground edged axes are typically part of that suite of lithic material that goes with the Neolithic. The reason why you have them is because they were good for chopping down trees. The reason why you’re chopping down trees is that you’re clearing land for agriculture, right? So, it was seen as being absolutely extraordinary, quite anomalous that you would get ground edged axes in Northern Australia where there is no agriculture that early on. But subsequent to that, there have been a whole range of other discoveries, particularly in Papua New Guinea on the Huon Peninsula, with again stone tools being discovered that are quite clearly being used to chop down trees, and this is in tropical rain forest, some thirty thousand years ago. So, what you’re really looking at with the Neolithic I suppose is a kind of basket of options, but they’ve all got different histories. It’s not just a single bunch of stuff that goes together.
Matt Smith: Can I share an interesting fact about the pottery discovery that I have right here?
Tim Murray: You may.
Matt Smith: The pottery seen in Ghost also originates to a lot further back in Neolithic times than we thought, showing just how well Whoopi Goldberg has aged.
Tim Murray: Don’t give up your day job!
Matt Smith: All right. What is item number three on Professor Tim Murray’s list of the great archaeological discoveries of 2012?
Tim Murray: Okay, this one is really close to my heart because it’s a great piece of urban archaeology. It goes to show, I suppose, several things about contemporary archaeology. First up, that if you’re digging in cities, and in this case it’s the city of London, you’re usually generally absolutely amazed by the preservation. This idea that cities can in a sense erase their pasts as they grow it’s in fact completely the opposite. So what’s happened is that as part of a development in the city of London, the archaeologists have uncovered the first Shakespearean theatre, the Curtain Theatre, where Romeo and Juliet for example, was first performed. And this is one of the three theatres that Shakespeare was associated with. Of course, most famously the Globe, which has been reconstructed on the banks of the Thames, and the Rose, which was not so far away, and this one, the Curtain. And it’s a great piece of archaeology in the sense of being able to use the development process to get a really big exposure, and to recover a piece of London’s history, which has gone since the sixteenth century.
Matt Smith: How is this site being reused? Is there more than one layer of archaeology that they’re discovering, or is it just the theatre?
Tim Murray: Almost certainly there’s going to be more than one layer, but the one they’re really interested in is the Curtain Theatre of course, because it’s no small matter to, if you like, stand where Henry V was first performed or Romeo and Juliet. It gives you an extraordinary window into something about which there’s quite a lot of documentary information. There are even pictures of the Curtain Theatre, and the players described the stage. I mean, in some of Shakespeare’s plays or Ben Jonson’s plays. But it’s an entirely different matter to actually be in the space and the foundations are there, you can see where people sat. When they were digging the Rose Theatre they even found lots of hazelnut shells and saw that the people had dumped while they were munching away while the performance was going. That’s that incredible connection between past and present which as an archaeologist endlessly fascinating. And I'm not going to get all weepy about it, but it can be almost a mystical experience to sort of have a sense in which you can actually experience the space. You can stand there and say, those people over there and this is what the space looked like. You get a sense of how it actually operated. You don’t get that from a written document and you don’t get it from a picture.
Matt Smith: With archaeology sometimes in these city excavations, I find that it’s returned to one period that has been romanticised in a way and you lose all the archaeology that’s happened in between. So what comes to mind mostly in this case is the Colosseum and all the use that happened in between with ... there were Christian temples there, there were people living there, refuse piled there and lots of mining going on from the Catholic church for the quarrying the rocks and the bricks. The same thing happened with the Parthenon when it was restored to what it is now – you lost all that Turkish history that was on the site in the middle.
Tim Murray: Quite so.
Matt Smith: So is there a risk that we’re going to be losing part of our history if we just concentrate on: This was the Rose Theatre and what happened between then and now is maybe a bit lost in history?
Tim Murray: A very good point, and I’d have to confess that, particularly in the city of London, the idea that you could, in a sense, take the entire history of the site as being interesting and important, is kind of novel. When I first started working with the Museum of London, particularly their archaeological service, I was a person who dug nineteenth century cities. It was very hard to persuade them that the nineteenth century was an interesting place for them to be. Their natural tendency was to get that stuff out of the way as quickly as possible and head for the Roman temples, which were below. It’s very different now. I think people are much more conscious of the fact that there are a whole range of different histories to be told here. It’s different obviously in Australia where you don’t have anything like that level of complexity. But if you go to London, you go down to, say, the Temple of Mithras which is in the centre of the city of London. You’re down quite a way and there is a hell of a lot of archaeology that’s on top. Now I know that the Museum of London now, or it has for the past decade, focussed hard on getting a total picture. So they won’t finish with the excavation of the Curtain in the sixteenth century. They’ll keep going, because in a sense that site is going to be lost, not all of it, obviously. The development were very sensitive in trying to retain as much of the Curtain as they can, but we do need a total history of the site and the museum is much more focussed on achieving that now.
Matt Smith: Can I share an interesting fact that I happen to have here about the Curtain Theatre. This isn’t a joke of any sort. There is a reference to the theatre and its structure in Henry V which is “Can this cockpit hold this wooden O?” which is a reference to the stage itself. “The very casks that did affright the air in Agincourt.”
Tim Murray: Agincourt was the battle that took place between the French and the English, and it was a battle that Henry V was at, and the English won, just. It was a battle with the longbow, and a whole lot of mud sank the French cavalry. It was a great battle. There’s a good film actually, Kenneth Branagh plays Henry V. You see it in glorious detail there.
Matt Smith: So they found that wooden O didn’t they? They found that stage.
Tim Murray: They found the foundations of it, yeah. Pretty amazing stuff, eh? So you can stand in the space and, I don’t know, pretend you’re Kenneth Branagh ...
Matt Smith: I hope somebody said that line when they uncovered it, right.
Tim Murray: Probably. Probably. If they were sober at the time I think they would have been out at the local pub celebrating.
Matt Smith: Okay, what is number four?
Tim Murray: Now we’re going to do something completely different, because with all of these ones, it’s really important to have something from central America. This site is in and of itself not incredibly spectacular. It’s a classic Mayan site. But it is important in the sense that it has some decorations on the side of one of the pyramids which are truly extraordinary and these are sun masks. The site is called El Zots and it’s in Guatemala, and it’s a standard Mayan city of the classic period. These cities take a long time to dig. They’re kind of a really serious commitment on the part of the excavators. Sites like Tikal for example, were dug for decades. This one is obviously shaping up the same way, but what this one has is a set of decorations on the exterior of the pyramid that tell us a lot about representations of Mayan religion, particularly the role of the sun. And the sun was very closely linked with kingship. This is a pyramid which is directly associated with the royal house of this particular city. Now, cast your mind back to what life was like before we could decipher Mayan hieroglyphs. There was a whole range of theories about what these cities were for. Most of the theories focussed on the fact that the cities were only occupied by priests and not for very long. At various periods of time people would come to the city for the purpose of sacrifice or celebration of various important events. But we now know that these cities in fact were occupied all the time. They functioned as cities, but they had ceremonial areas in them, and this pyramid was right up on top of the escarpment, could be seen for miles away. It was coloured red, extraordinarily visible, and it’s a great statement about the linkage about the power of people on earth and the power of the sun, if you like, of religion. And we hadn’t seen anything like this before. It just happens all the time in the Mayan heartland in Guatemala. Dig up another pyramid and something amazing gets discovered.
Matt Smith: So it wasn’t just the masks there. There’s also a temple, there’s a palace and there’s a tomb as well, of what they think was the first king of the area.
Tim Murray: Indeed.
Matt Smith: Why is it that the only Mayan story we heard last year was about how their calendar predicts the world is going to end, which was a misinterpretation by the media?
Tim Murray: It’s a very interesting thing, that one, because there is something about the Maya that really does attract a lot of controversy, a lot of interest. The whole notion that the Mayan calendar didn’t go beyond a particular time, which is, you know, the end of December last year, was seen by certain people, particularly New Age people, as being the end of the world, a major transformation in human history, when in fact it was nothing of the sort. What had been known for a long time was that the calendar went past that. You go to other sites and in fact the site that was dug last year, where it was perfectly clear that the calendar continued. And the excavator of that particular site said, it was a bit like, you’re in your car, the odometer gets to the end of the six digits, and doesn’t stop, it just goes back to one. In fact, that’s what’s occurring.; There’s a certain mystery about the Maya. Mind you, if you go to Mexico City and you go to the site of Teotihuacan which is to the north of Mexico City, it’s full of people who believe in lines of force and astral voyaging and all that sort of stuff, and they’re wandering all over the site performing ceremonies. There’s a certain part of the population that’s attracted to by this sort of thing.
Matt Smith: With the Sun God masks directly, do you know a lot about their design and what they might have said about the Sun God?
Tim Murray: What you’ve got probably is a very clear set of images about various aspects of the Sun God in terms of its transformation over time, much more clear there than you’ll get virtually anywhere else in the Mayan heartland. Doubtless these images exist elsewhere and have existed elsewhere. They’ve just not survived, or we haven’t seen them. I think we have dug so little of it, and some of these places are so huge that I think these sorts of discoveries are just going to keep on happening.
Matt Smith: So I do have an interesting fact which is a fact again. There’s been three masks that have been uncovered, five feet tall. One mask is sharklike, a reference to the sun rising from the Caribbean in the east. The noonday sun is depicted as an ancient being with crossed eyes who drank blood, and the final in the series resembles a local jaguar, which awake from their jungle slumbers at dusk. So it’s tracking the passage of the sun that way.
Tim Murray: But notice it’s maritime. There’s a mystical element in terms of this being that doesn’t exist, but it exists as a symbolic thing, and then the jaguar. Because as you know, the jaguar is incredibly important in Mayan life. The great murals that have been painted of ceremonies, the rulers are always clad in jaguar skins.
Matt Smith: One more fact is that the Mayan Sun God never had a vitamin D deficiency, but we’ll just leave that there.
Tim Murray: Move on.
Matt Smith: So the final ...
Tim Murray: This one is where vitamin D deficiencies really come in.
Matt Smith: This one also in some ways ties back in with a Shakespeare reference, if we want to go there.
Tim Murray: This one’s a great one. Years ago there was a comedy program, it had a whole bunch of people recreated an ancient English battle in the carpark of Sainsbury’s in Bristol. It was amusing – they were attacking each other with supermarket trolleys and that sort of stuff, all dressed up with horny helmets and whatever. This one’s the grave of Richard III, who as you know died at Bosworth Field, and was well, pretty unceremoniously buried, I think is probably the best way of describing it. For reasons which again were not entirely clear, the priory that Richard III was buried in, was lost, eventually demolished. Whether it happened during the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VII or slightly before or after it is somewhat uncertain, but this is in Leicester. It’s very close to Leicester, and in fact the site was dug by archaeologists from the University of Leicester. And it was dug as the result, again, of a development process that was occurring.; During the course of excavation a skeleton was uncovered, very close to where this priory was originally established. And the analysis of the bone indicated the body had been very severely damaged. There was a blow to the back of the head with a sword or an axe that had chopped off the back end of it, and there was an arrow embedded in the spine. What made it I think more interesting in terms of who that person might be, was that the body clearly showed evidence of scoliosis, which Richard III suffered from. Shakespeare had a rather unflattering portrait of him, because he knew which side his bread was buttered on. He called him crookback. He didn’t actually have a hunchback, he had scoliosis.; But while it is not yet completely clear that it is Richard III, the bones are going to be used to synthesise some mitochondrial DNA in which they can test against his direct lineal ancestor, who happens to be living in Canada. And it was one of the fantastic things about this discovery when it came out. Britain is very well served by a popular press that reports a lot of archaeology, and all these people started coming forward and saying, well, I'm a descendant of Richard III, but in fact a lot of people were disabused, that whatever family stories have been around, quite a bit was known about the lineal descendants of Richard III, and they weren’t among them.; So essentially what they’ll do is take a sample, a swab from the lineal descendant and match them up. If the mitochondria are there, they’re away.
Matt Smith: A lot that we know about Richard III though, comes from interpretation during Shakespeare times, what was said about him then, but also, Tudor-style propaganda. Because he was only the king for two years and two months, not a really long time. There’s no portraits of him from that time, so isn’t it completely possible that he didn’t have a hunchback, he didn’t suffer from any of these ailments, he didn’t have one shoulder lower than the other, as accounts say, that the picture that we’ve built up are just fabrications from well after the fact?
Tim Murray: It’s true that there were a lot of fabrications, in particular the Tudors, who, being descendants of Bolingbroke who was responsible for the death of Richard III. They had a lot at stake, to make sure that the Angevin line which Richard III was the last of, was extinguished. But there are reports from the time of what he looked like, and the fact that he did have a crooked back. There are very close reports of his death, they knew what had happened to him, because it was widely reported. I think it’s an extraordinary coincidence, let’s put it that way. You have a person that’s quite clearly suffered major battlefield trauma, who’s buried in the place where Richard III was reported to be buried, and who had scoliosis. I don’t know, if I were a betting man, I’d wager a few bob that that’s him. But of course, we’ll know for sure, one way or the other. It’s a testimony to the power of DNA.
Matt Smith: So what will be done with his remains? What do you think should be done?
Tim Murray: I think they should be reinterred. He should be left in peace.
Matt Smith: In the carpark?
Tim Murray: No. Possibly not the carpark. I don’t know actually, that’s a good question. I doubt very much whether the Queen would want him buried in the grounds of Windsor Castle or whether he would go to Westminster Abbey. Actually I don’t even know where he was crowned. He probably was crowned at Westminster.
Matt Smith: He is rumoured to have killed his two nephews, the Princes in the Tower, who are also interred in Westminster Abbey.
Tim Murray: Oh, that’s a pleasing sense of completion.
Matt Smith: A family reunion.
Tim Murray: Yes. Well, again whether or not he did kill the Princes in the Tower, maybe, I mean, they played for keeps in those days. They weren’t backward. I don’t know. He was King of England.
Matt Smith: And the last king to die in battle.
Tim Murray: Yep, boy, by the look of what happened to his skull, he went down bigtime. It’s an extraordinary thing to think though. Here we are, however many hundreds of years later, there he is. It’s the power of discovery, it’s the power of this stuff to survive. It’s something which I think is a great aid to contemplation. Would we be talking about Richard III now? Maybe, I suppose. But you wouldn’t be thinking about him in quite the same sort of way.
Matt Smith: Can I share an interesting fact about Richard III?
Tim Murray: Yes.
Matt Smith: No, again, fact. Yes. During Shakespeare’s time, and as a result of Shakespeare’s play, having a Richard III is cockney rhyming slang for going to the toilet.
Tim Murray: Yes, yes, yes indeed.
Matt Smith: So another way that he is fondly remembered, it seems. That’s our top five.
Tim Murray: Interesting though, weren’t they?
Matt Smith: Yes, yes. Let’s keep going with the urban archaeology though in the city and get an update from you of what’s going on with the Carlton United Brewery dig, this year.
Tim Murray: Ah, yes. At long last, after years of waiting, it’s happening. At present, the first phase is largely related to making sure that the site is free from contamination of various forms, because as you can imagine, it’s had a long industrial history, so that’s occurring. And then excavations, full tilt, will begin fairly soon, once that’s done. We have an opportunity to peel back quite a bit of history of the centre of the city. It, as you know was first occupied by miners on their way to the goldfields in the ‘50s. It was the area first outside of the grid that was laid down when the city was established. It had a complicated history since then, but obviously most of it has been related to the growth of the Carlton United Brewery.; I think it’s going to be an interesting piece of urban archaeology, to try and establish the level of impact that establishing a brewery can have on earlier occupation, but it’s also good to get an archaeological perspective on the evolution of the brewery itself. Like most things that started small, it got bigger. But it utilised or reused older buildings to do new functions and it changed quite a bit over time. It’s a great opportunity for our graduate students to get direct experience in directing major excavations. This one’s a big one. And for our students to get experience excavating and working with material culture, and we’re hoping to be able to run some public programs on the site, which talk about the importance of urban archaeology. Just how much is going to survive, I don’t know. But it’s one of those things you never really want to lose sight of is the capacity of stuff to survive you.
Matt Smith: That’s all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. I’d like to thank my guest, Professor Tim Murray, for his time today, and if you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.

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