It is not the first time I have had to search endlessly for a holiday villa
(incomprehensible directions, signposts in Spanish, too many Bloody Marys on
the plane).
But it is the first time I've had to look for one with a trowel. And, boy, did
it take some digging up. The previous occupants of the property concerned
had headed home somewhere between 456 and 500AD and hadn't left either a key
or even any indication of where the front door might be. Inconsiderate
Romans, the lot of 'em.
And so, together with an assortment of fellow tourists from across the globe,
I genuflected in a cornfield in deepest Lincolnshire to find what just what
they had left behind - and to try to discover why anyone sane would want to
spend their summer holiday scraping around in a load of soil.
Even as specialist holidays go, an archaeological dig is an odd one. But then
again the opportunity for ordinary mortals to hunt for treasures on the site
of a buried Roman villa is as rare as Tony Robinson telling BBC Time Team
viewers: "I think what we have here are the foundations of a 1930s
council house - possibly semi-detached."
So there were plenty of takers for the three-week excavation run by Lindum
Heritage - a rapidly developing web-based historic breaks company, busily
opening up Lincolnshire's hidden past to the wider world.
We arrived in the wilderness to find two trenches dug among the ripening
shafts of wheat, a shed full of buckets, trays, sieves, plastic "finds"
bags, and box files awaiting the important data we would gather under the
auspices of chief archaeologist, Craig Spence. He was complete with Indiana
Jones-style hat and - as we were later to discover - a metaphorical bullwhip
to drive us all to greater efforts.
Among our number were a graphic designer and her teenage daughter who had
flown from the US just for the privilege of sifting earth once inhabited by
the envoys of emperors. There was an Aussie gran who had sojourned from Down
Under to search for Roman tiling and pottery with an implement that looked
to my uneducated eye rather like a wallpaper stripper.
Colin Porter, a 48-year-old electrician from Staines, Middlesex, had travelled
only a short distance - but was long on enthusiasm. Yet despite displaying
all the bounce of a Robinson, he admitted that six months ago archaeology to
him was just a word you could easily misspell. Then he read the Britain BC
and AD books by Francis Pryor, bought a Time Team DVD, and was hooked.
Is it an age thing? "When I was younger I really wasn’t that interested
in archaeology," said Colin over a trestle table full of mugs of
steaming tea during a break from the exertions of rediscovering history. "Now
I can’t get enough of it. This is paradise for me. I suppose the Time Team
had a lot to do with it."
But that Tony Robinson isn’t the only culprit - and Colin’s not alone. History
has swamped our living rooms. TV rejigs of the lives of our monarchs abound.
You can't flick through cable without stumbling across a plethora of trendy
historical revisionists moodily striding bleak landscapes and telling us
everything we learned in school was pants.
But, like so many exhibits in museums you might gaze at on a normal holiday,
they remain trapped behind a glass screen. Here we were free to touch
history.
Fifteen-hundred-year-old pottery, tesserae (Roman mosaic), tiling, painted
plaster and even pieces of what looked like decorative jewellery slowly
began to emerge from the two trenches to whoops of delight from the holiday
archaeologists.
My first find was an oyster shell, puzzlingly 50 miles from the nearest coast.
This pearl of a mystery was solved when archaeologist Zoe Tomlinson, the dig
manager, told me oysters were the favourite dish of invaders who believed
them to be an aphrodisiac. Soon a veritable orgy of shells would be
discovered.
Nearby gran-of-five Joan Langston, trowel in hand, was busily explaining why
she had come all the way from New South Wales to test the durability of her
ageing knees in the corner of a foreign field.
"Believe it or not, it’s a dream come true for me," said the
retired doctor. "I’ve always loved geology, fossils, anything to do
with finding our past in the rocks and earth. I had to take this chance
while I’m still active – and I’m loving every minute of it."
The same ancient adrenalin was to be found coursing through 51-year-old
Kathleen Brody and her 16-year-old daughter Rachel from Marblehead,
Massachusetts. "Rachel has studied the Romans at school so when I saw
this holiday on the net I thought, let’s go for it – make it part of a visit
to the UK," she said, "and I’m really glad we came here."
Even Rachel seemed to have caught the archaeology bug at an age when most
teenage American girls on holiday in Britain would surely rather be
unearthing designer gear in Oxford Street. "It’s great fun - honestly,"
she said, kneeling beside me examining a piece of tesserae and dropping it
into a plastic finds bag.
The hard work was punctuated daily by relaxing hands-on workshops from the
likes of the wonderfully named local Roman pottery experts Barbara Precious
and Maggie Darling, while the secrets of taking great detailed close-up
pictures of finds were revealed by top photographer Lynne McEwan.
But after the clicking of our camera shutters, it was back to the clicking of
our knee joints as we knelt in homage to archaeology once more, the
beachcomber gene in all of us kicking in again.
A whoop. Jill Wadsley – a 47-year-old bone densitometrist from Lincoln – had
just found... a bone, part of a human foot hinting at the presence of
possible burials on the site. It was bagged and sent away for analysis.
Later Jill was to be reminded further of her hospital employment when she
pulled a shoulder muscle with some over-enthusiastic sieving. But even that
failed to take the shine off her summer holiday.
"Look," she sighed, wearying somewhat of my probings into the nature
of her sanity, "where else would you get the chance to do something
like this!"
Her aching arm swept around the trenches while a peaceful, almost Zenlike look
played across her features. And at that moment, I knew. There is something
truly Zen about all this. Prescribed practices, your own patch of earth to
carefully examine for an hour, then an hour’s sieving, an hour cleaning the
finds around a table as you chat with new friends, then back to the
solitary, concentrated pleasure of trowelling in wonderful peace and quiet
amid a gentle breeze rustling the corn.
If we had all shaved our heads and moved to Tibet we couldn’t have got nearer
to Nirvana. So that’s the secret, I thought, slipping my trowel into the
back of my jeans as we headed towards the setting sun – and of course, that
greatest find of all on an archaeological dig, the excellent pub.
Next summer the Lindum Heritage dig will resume. It will still be a villa
holiday, but Indiana Spence believes – as the excavations go even deeper –
it could well be a Roman farm holiday too. That’s the beauty of this
archaeology lark. You just never know what you’re going to find.
Need to know
Next year’s dig starts on July 10 for four weeks. Cost is £150 a week and
includes lunch at the site and transport. Lindum Heritage will help guests
find good accommodation in and around the historic city of Lincoln. The firm
also offers a variety of weekend breaks covering Lincolnshire’s history from
Roman to Medieval times. For more details call 01522 851388 or visit www.lindumheritage.co.uk
