What drives our interest in following the trail of evidence from aerial photographs to the archaeology in ground that has been shown in the VM 365 images over the last few days?
The image for Day 30 of the VM 365 project shows a human skeleton, a young adult that was buried in a small grave that was excavated into the terminal of the round barrow that was shown in yesterday’s image. The grave fill overlying the skeleton was covered with a large fragment of whale rib.
Rather than focus on the excitement of the excavation process that revealed this burial, we should pay attention to the motivation for carrying out the investigation which is often overwhelmed by the excitement about the external character of the results.
The fundamental reason for developing the methods of archaeological investigation was, and remains, curiosity about the places we live in and about the people who have occupied the same places in the past. There are no written records describing the circumstances and experiences of life in periods such as the Bronze Age which are represented in such abundance in the Isle of Thanet. There is no evidence that emanates from their direct experience, which could be used to reconstruct their lives. The people under investigation in these circumstances are truly pre-historic, we lack any tools but archaeological methods to generate knowledge about them and to create narratives of the events that affected them.
Our interest in the universal set of questions, who, where, what, why, and when will not rest for lack of easy evidence and careful exploration and analysis can be used to describe the circumstances of discovery in ever greater detail. Once we understand as much as we can about the circumstances of discovery, and describe them with as much precision as possible, we can begin to interpret the meaning of the things we have discovered. Archaeological investigation must also be used to established the limits of our knowledge. If we take careful note of the present conditions of our discoveries we can begin to understand that many things that are lost from the image of the past we can generate.
Archaeology is about exploring the deliberate construction of messages by people in the past, the signal, as well as the inadvertent or deliberate destructive processes that can distort part of the message, the noise. To produce good and thoughtful interpretation; assumptions should be questioned; different perspectives adopted on the data and our ideas subjected to critical review.
There is always something new to said and new information that can be gathered from the evidence collected by archaeologists. In the case of this burial, its inclusion in a research programme investigating Isotopic data that can be extracted from the teeth will in due course add more to the constellation of knowledge that gathers around the physical remains we recover from excavations.