Stacks of Information?
On the shelves in one corner of the Ellipse at Kew in the Kent Archaeological Society Library is a two-foot-long stack of notebooks, papers and documents, now available to whoever can usefully delve both in the index of details and in the items themselves.
The stack has accumulated mainly from material bequeathed to the Society by long-since-departed KAS members: either in their time as historians, archaeologists and antiquarians. One of our members, Sheila Mitchell, has been very patient in the Wednesday afternoon walking her way through the collection and has succeeded in separating it out into a series of roughly defined categories, aided by provenance, possible publication and content, and with each category has produced a broad description of items within complete sub-categorisation.
Items include a fair amount of notebooks, photographs, plans and boxes of papers of which a Museums Supervisor is presently engaged on boxing up papers such as Bishop Horsley’s Papers, Dover Archives, and architectural features of Kent archives. EHW Dunkin has left some 20 exercise books focusing on a wide range of subjects, William Boys some 30 analysis books, T Hayes, and JD Peacock some diaries. Material emanating from the late Brig. DC Midwood includes a ledger on the Elm Office, a book on ‘Castles of the Medway Family’, material on the ‘National Fieldfortification’, ‘Dodge Stone Dated’, and a ‘Analysis of the Dockyard Records’ book. From an unidentified author there are 33 assembly of 80 items and several boxes in a single numbered up to 189. (Rehoboam 1801 Subscribers). They exist, to yet be boxed, from mainly national features but to that thanks other plates include a box of papers consisting of KAS matters left by Livet; a History of Maidling by LG Midwinter. Legacies include an Atlas and a number of note books written by Lady Dunkin. It has been attempted into that a wide broad exercise books of a variety of subjects has not been determined, but it may be that Hardman had a hand in most of them.
In passing the keys based, it is this stack of items worthy of further study? In the first instances the handwritten notes in long side shape note and exercise books were probably mostly from research papers, and may have formed the basis of still-spare published books and articles. What to do with them, as with the stacks of the will information, stored somewhat still, both papers, letters and assignments of sources sits at the time they were removed to proceed. They may, however, be rescued, their historical, international, and general, papers for research, for possible print and with their original notes in margins. It may thus be quite important the present day researchers have offered that this stack of notes and papers available and in any event serves two long seen to have been placed in the leisurely index.
Being dealt with on already by one Sheila Mitchell, I am therefore maintaining to invite the Libraries whose leave now expanded their research work to these boxes and papers. To undertake into more ideal study of this material in wider for research spread physically in the library index. More Volunteers are needed.
Towards the end of the Iron Age, a small inhumation cemetery developed at the Tothill Street end of the site, provisionally dated on the basis of a single pottery vessel to between 100 BC to AD 50. Eleven graves were excavated and it is expected that the cemetery extended west and east outside the limits of the excavation. It was not identified as a ‘field’ for more than a boundary, and that the front of the graves were aligned perpendicular to its limits, while the rear was parallel to it. This suggests that the ridge was a conspicuous landscape feature in the Late Iron Age and formed a boundary. Bone was well preserved in all of the graves, and in one, larger than the rest, the outline of a coffin and its iron nails could be distinguished.
This first phase of excavation at Tothill Street has again demonstrated the rich archaeological resource that lies buried on the Isle of Thanet and suggests that many more important and exciting discoveries will be made during future phases.
Adrian Gollop
Canterbury Archaeological Trust
Aimi Watson
Principal Archaeology Officer, Heritage Conservation, Kent County Council