Five Years of Joined-Up Archaeology in Faversham
Five years ago, a community archaeology group was launched in Faversham, the Faversham Society Archaeological Research Group (FSARG). FSARG’s website, set up in December 2005, was the first to use community-archaeology as a domain name. FSARG also provided Wikipedia with its first definition of community archaeology, which started with the deceptively simple statement 'by the people, for the people and about the people'. Nowadays, the term 'community archaeology' is everywhere – our Wikipedia definition is almost entirely superseded.
Ten years ago, roles for the dedicated archaeological volunteer seemed to have disappeared, this loss being an unintended outcome of the exponential rise of the post-PPG16 professional sector. Yet according to Lisa Westcott, editor of Current Archaeology, in summer 2009 over 300 opportunities were open to volunteers in the UK. Many of these opportunities were with specifically-funded short term projects, open to paying volunteers and managed by professionals.
FSARG was set up with a different community remit, which was to counter the fragmentation and inaccessibility of archaeological findings resulting from Faversham being visited repeatedly by different commercial units. The professionals do excellent work but have no time to join everything up once their job is done. Developer funding means that non-developmental areas are left uninvestigated. Finally, the Faversham community was being left out of the loop – archaeology, it seemed, had become the business of developers, their employees and the Kent Heritage Team. The local feeling was that something had to be done.
For the first three years, a tightly focused project was run, with a simple research aim, to Hunt the Saxons. For two years, the oldest part of Faversham, Tanners St and Lower West Street, was investigated. In the third year, central locations with potential based on documentary evidence and stray finds were explored. Although looking for evidence for Saxon settlement, every scrap of data was processed, recorded and analysed.
These three years involved non-stop development and training. Desktop skills, particularly the use of historic maps, improved enormously. Surveying skills were developed and refined. Excavation, which started with one metre square test pits in gardens, evolved into larger trenches excavated using single context methods. Finds processing skills were developed to a high degree. Field walking, resistivity surveying and metal detecting were built in and historical structures recorded. All of these involved an increasingly elaborate recording system, involving proformas, databases and visual records of various types which were used for report writing. Finally, a system of long term archiving was set up. Health and safety training was continuous.
Equal attention went into the community side. All volunteers are locals, with flexible participation keeping around thirty active each field season. A core of twenty has developed specialist skills in e.g. pottery identification and excavation supervision, supported by visiting expert trainers. Over the five years, we have dug in 41 gardens (involving households), run open days, exhibitions, lectures, workshops and Archaeological Road Shows at the annual Medieval Fair. Monthly archaeological updates are published in the newsletter of the Faversham Society. Our latest project involved well attended public meetings at different stages. Last but not least, we have been publishing reports and other data on our website www.community-archaeology.org.uk - see this for Hunt the Saxons. Yes, we found them - in Test Pit 1 behind the Bull Inn (mid-Saxon pot is shown below).
For the last two years we have been working on a project called Understanding Ospringe. Around Ospringe, archaeologists had concentrated heavily on the Romano-British site of Durolevum (Syndale), the Saxo-medieval Stone Chapel and the Hospital of St Mary Ospringe (Maison Dieu). Little attention had been paid to the post medieval, early medieval before the building of the Hospital in AD1234 (except for the parish church), or the prehistoric. The last two became our research priorities.
North Kent shelly ware, very familiar to us from the Tanners Street area, is dated by John Cotter to the early medieval: he sees production as ceasing in north east Kent around AD1205. We found shelly ware in four places along Water Lane, but hardly any along the Street (Watling Street). Interestingly, the report on the major excavation of the northern part of the Hospital site in 1977 gave shelly ware as the main foundation level deposit, dating it to the 13th-14th centuries. If we accept Cotter's dating, this gives an earlier date for the earliest buildings of the Hospital, a conclusion which fits with the latest documentary evidence.
Our most startling success was with the prehistoric. The archaeology of Ospringe village is much shallower than that of Faversham: in Ospringe, 0.8 metres depth exposes three thousand years or more. In seven closely spaced locations along the west side of the Westbrook valley, considerable evidence for prehistoric settlement was found. A keyhole behind the former Anchor pub yielded Neolithic grooved ware, scrapers, calcined flint, animal bone including red deer and two aurochs teeth. Another keyhole further up Water Lane, but at the same distance from the stream, yielded worked flints, including cores, waste flakes and blades, tentatively identified as Bronze Age. This keyhole was reopened and extended this summer and is still being worked at the time of writing, using meticulous coordinating techniques for every item. A larger trench near Ospringe Church's Bier House yielded a number of possibly early tools, although this has yet to be confirmed. There is certainly an important report due in the near future, contributing to the patterns emerging along the north Kent coast.
FSARG has come a long way in the last five years. We see ourselves as complementary to the professional sector, with our multi site, micro-archaeological fill-in the gaps approach, very much aware of our limitations but also aware of our independence and responsiveness to local need. We look forward to the opportunities for learning from others which will arise from the new KAS landscape project.
Dr Pat Reid
Honorary Archaeologist for the Faversham Society, Director FSARG.
Test Pit 1 behind the Bull Inn