The Amesbury Archer : 20 Years On

[Music] in may 2002 archaeologists from wessex archaeology were excavating on the outskirts of amesbury in wiltshire when they made an unexpected and astonishing discovery this is archaeology at its most dramatic no one has seen anything like it before the wessex team excavating just a mile or two from stonehenge at boscom down have discovered a bronze age man with riches beyond compare his grave cannot be left overnight this man an archer was buried over 4 000 years ago with a huge collection including jewelry arrows knives and pots to hold food and drink for the afterlife ten times the quantity ever found in a bronze age grave and jewelry delicate gold jewellery it is an extraordinary discovery what's unusual about this burial is just a number of fines in it just the sheer quantity of fines which is exceptional and it may be no coincidence we are at about the time of stonehenge we're not very far from stonehenge [Applause] some exceptional fines uh there'll be a lot of interest in it for these guys it really is gonna be one of the highlights of their careers it doesn't get any better it doesn't get any better than this six four four eight [Music] well he's right i mean i've done lots of fun things but it's never really got any better than that but you know what the thing that strikes me most about that video is how different i look in my head i me doing that excavation but actually i'm some long-haired child at the time but yeah the footage just kind of unlocked quite a lot of other memories from the time which are which are really good and it's really taken me back to how amazing a job being an archaeologist is i mean there's a lot of downsides to being a digger but like in many professions kind of the early stages of your career are the most exciting ones and the ones you'll remember for the longest and that's certainly been the case for me i think actually just the noise of the um the noise of the engines running in the background because we had the minibus up shining the um the light to for the dick is yeah to be right back it is very powerful actually remembering the relationships with the people at the time as well people used to work with an awful lot so that doesn't seem that long ago i'd really love to get some of the team back together after after all this time if they're willing i think that would be really interesting because my memory is you know some of it's clear some of it's a little bit hazy so it'd be really good to see what the rest of them think won't be tempting with a free breakfast [Music] well 20 years 20 what may bank holiday was it i think so we're here to try and remember between us what was going on when we dug this up which has been a very long time well i actually remember it very well do you i do because i was in a really tedious pottery seminar learning about anglo-saxon pops and the call came through saying they found gold on seoul's replay they were still there because she was supervising the site weren't you yeah your site so i wasn't there so i got got really excited about the fact that i could be all important and leave the seminar to go and uh find out what was going on and so drove up to the site and the first thing i saw was laura jumping up and down on the bronze age burial that is that i mean that is yeah cutting to the chase is is one of the reasons why we had to excavate it so uh promptly over the weekend wasn't it because somebody had shouted very very loudly gold and they were dog walkers nonsense but it was you that found it yes me and dougie did yes it just sort of pinged out the top and doug went oh my god it's golden i'm like no be ridiculous oh so the goal came up before the skull the came up before the school it literally it flicked up and it looked like a ring pull from an old you know old-school beer cat dog it went don't be stupid laura it's gold it was serendipity to a certain extent because we weren't supposed to be digging the site that this was on um the actual site was the roman one and the only reason we stripped this bit of ground just because the digger was i think i it was yeah but we weren't supposed to be doing it at this phase so i just talked to fitz and said look should we just strip a bit more and see what's what um was then asked to go and dig whatever this feature was that is really interesting because in in my head we were doing what we often do which is like tests to the features that we didn't really think were necessarily anything and this this very much didn't fit in with the roman cemetery this is waved at people constantly about having to dig tree throws but i i will say it didn't look like a classic tree throw but it did look like something that might be a tree throw it it's basically a irregular blob isn't it um but pretty big but yeah we were used to getting our eye into roman graves wouldn't we whereas this was the wrong orientation the wrong shape i remember a stage at which thinking we could get it done before it get dark later on but i think that's reasonable though isn't it for a burial it wouldn't take you that long if it didn't have much in it the problem with this one is just yeah that's it so much stuff so we didn't we we never thought we were going to have to completely like excavate everything and finish it we just needed bones up treasure up recorded properly yeah this is i mean this this case is roughly the right size yeah it's deeper than the grave was so you know even in the normal course of events it's a lot of soil to shift yeah if you're not trying to pick around all but yeah it was a little lighter it was the sheer fiddliness wasn't it once the the tv crew was there i was there before the tv crew he got a sniff of it what happened was i was in the office writing up a different site um and someone someone came in and said that some gold had turned up up at nielsen's site and i've been up there to look at the roman graves i think a couple of times yeah because that was my thing yeah um and it was it was honestly it was i was just curious on my way home so i just turned up at probably half past five quarters and the top half of the grave was almost the top half and this half the sort of top right hand was was being dug because i started sort of back of the left shoulder to help there and the legs were kind of exposed but not not hugely and we were just beginning i think then to find arrowheads i think did you find the first arrowhead maybe oh definitely there were a lot like 15 or 16. definitely a few i remember doing to find that big biggest flattest one yeah just get it a little bit yeah that was that was really striking that one so they were coming up earlier because they were a little bit higher up and then it was once you get down to near the floor of the um the grave the amount of bling started really slowing it down but i i i i mean when when i first turned up there weren't we hadn't found you hadn't found a lot of artifacts i don't think i don't think because i remember the questions the cushion stone i i remember finding and i think maybe we'd found one of the wrist things by the time i got there i wish we'd have known at the time what it was yeah what it was because that's actually the most significant thing in i still don't it's um i'm no expert i should say but it's it's a gold working metal working tool so that there's a bit of a smoking gun to him actually being involved in doing exciting metal work yeah so i do remember as talking about what to do about it because we we knew it by time we got to about seven so this was may so it's still light until about eight quarter to eight or something about weighing up the options of leaving it over the bank holiday weekend and what we'd have to do we talked about getting yeah by parking the truck over the top of it yeah yeah some planks down parking a laurier van over the top and then paying someone just to sort of stay on site as a security guard security of the issue wasn't it yeah yeah that's it the worry that i mean well well also validly so because we'd already had things stolen from the site yeah why anyone wanted to steal our chairs i don't know but the chairs were stolen about that yeah my view at the time was very clear that i think we should have done that but not waited the weekend just come back on saturday yeah you're right the right thing would be to persuade somebody to keep in their car overnight and everybody come back the next morning and do it again but the thing that we didn't know of course was how many objects there were because we've got it we've got the skeleton basically well yeah i mean the unknown quantity was oh it can't be much more yeah that's it so we've had by that point i think we'd if we had an arrow ahead or two and yeah because the arrow had started coming up when it was dark and yeah i want my abiding memory of that was that we sort of had them on little yeah we did on the soil pillars because we want had to get them surveyed in you know do everything in one go um that is one thing you miss from a flat display like this isn't it is yeah i mean if the stuff was in the right place yeah it would be so there's a there's a depth of field yeah you don't get the depth of the tools so the arrowheads came up earlier some of them because they were quite above the body having been on shafts are pretty sure well of course the other thing as well is that the body wasn't flat no absolutely and i think the way the way we worked we kind of worked from that corner this way because i remember the last things we were doing were down by the legs and the flint's coming up quite late um but by then there was a whole load of people involved wasn't there because there was and we were kind of taking this yeah rachel turned up with some andrew a flask in some whiskey which was very very warmly received someone went off with some torches at some point i remember well we have been we had we had the mini bus and the truck pointing at it with the headlights on and yeah so um yeah you're not the ideal digging light well not not for the sort of the find of a generation at the end of the day we we got him out the ground he's been properly recorded as well as we could in the situation and all the artifacts came with him there were lots of frustrations about this and they always are when you're a digger because i think you have you kind of invested in it aren't you and then the interpretation initial interpretations come out and it's all king of stonehenge oh yes there's more interest to this than than just status stated status you've got somebody who has to have been supported through his life right absolutely the caring community that's venerating him well yeah i mean my when when the isotope analysis came back on the teeth and the location of his birth was kind of more readily ascertainable you can in my mind picture this guy for all his imperfections potentially being the person who bought the knowledge of metal working technology to this country yeah yeah it can be tied down potentially that specifically and that's that's what i find intriguing about the whole thing i remember um actually i think it was andrew fitzpatrick said very soon after this that this was a once in a lifetime and you'd always remember it uh that's definitely true but it's only two years later that i took the boss combo just so actually it was it but this is this is the biggest highlight but actually to an extent if it wasn't for this i wouldn't have necessarily recognized what we had with the with the bowmen down the road um so yeah it's got to be a career topper really i was only a year out of university a year into digging when i got this so this i was never going to top this i've had sites where i've i've found the landscape obviously when you're digging as part of a bigger landscape i found those really interesting absolutely and sometimes they probably don't get as much attention but they are to me more significant but yeah in terms of snapshot it's this one yeah definitely about you nick your millions of conquests i've always felt slightly um weird about this one because it wasn't my sight i know as you say i was an interloper but you can't you can't get past the fact all i can say is i feel really lucky to have been involved in digging it um i've dug stuff roman stuff that meant more to me you know in a weird sort of way because that was what my phd was on i got to dig one of the sites i did my phd on in winchester and found a gold-plated copper brooch in one of the graves but i think in terms of sheer importance you can't you can't overlook this i don't think i'll ever see it's like in the field again well it was the beginning of the end for me for the same reason as you said i mean fitz came up to me afterwards and said this is the pinnacle of your career it will never get any better than this oh i'm going to do something else then i guess didn't you already have your eye half on lawyering no not not then no um but this this was the point at which i said i'll give myself a year because if i can't get excited about this i shouldn't be doing the job effectively you know i i think it is a remarkable thing and it gives me yeah it makes me tingle to think about what it actually could mean in terms of who he is and what what his role in our history was but it was yes you know it was a fitting conclusion to uh to my time for all our grandbores and we would have maybe done things slightly differently i don't think we're actually missing any information no except maybe we would we would probably put the fact the arrow heads were at different levels and and we're pretty positive about being on shaft that's probably the only thing that isn't really ramped home but we didn't lose any scientific material we didn't lose any art no and to a certain extent the what and the wear is only a tiny part of the story i mean the the interest from this chap has been the sort of the chemical analysis that came afterwards and that type of thing that that allows you to sort of paint that picture of a man very very slowly trudging his way across helping carried triumph [Laughter] yeah the recent dna stuff is really exciting i'm actually quite proud not i had anything to do with it but of us as archaeologists for flagging up that actually dna would be useful because we had it there wasn't any enough collagen to even think about it at the time but it was flagged up that actually in future that would probably be viable and it and it was i mean it's not often you dig a burial that's that's still being reanalyzed 20 years later who was this man where did he come from 20 years ago these were questions that were unanswerable but with new advances in archaeological sciences we're unlocking the secrets hidden in these human remains i know him as 1291 everybody else knows him as the amesbury archer this is nothing to do with the bone in the first instance this was to do with the fact that he got lots of arrows heads were found within i mean this is a very rich grave and chances are that most men at that time would have been archers to some degree the first thing i always do when i'm looking at bone is i think right how old is this person what sex are they and i could see immediately this is an adult probably a mature adult male quite chunky build but the most obvious thing that stuck out to me was that there was something not quite right about his legs his left leg particularly looked looked wasted at what i would call atrophied but basically wasted and that told me that that leg had not been used very much because bone is a plastic material it reacts to the pressures that are put on them so if you're putting more pressure on one side than the other like building up muscle on it you'll also build up the bone the other thing i could also see was that actually he had no kneecap on the left side and we could see that because there's there's a a tendon that runs across your knee that is that is part of that movement that helps you sort of move your knee up and down um and the the patella the kneecap sits within that tendon and it helps it glide over that joint now in this particular case there was no facet there was no articulation for that patella in the femur the distal end of the thigh bone but there was a deep groove going where that patella should be and that's where the tendon because it had not got the patella to glide over and actually made an impression into the femur and that was the very first you know that sort of went wow this is this is weird i haven't seen this before this is unusual and because he got no kneecap he couldn't bend his knee properly particularly over long periods of time when he was when he was older so he will have been disabled there is a professor chris ruff at john hopkins university in america who is a specialist in biomechanics and he's done further work both on looking at the legs and on looking at the arm bones of the archer by looking in more detail at the structure of that of the bone the actual micro structure of the bone um so what he got from looking at the legs was to see that what i'd suggested was was a missing patella from something he had from youth is indeed the case because of the way the right leg had developed compared to the left leg so that was one of the the things that we got from there the other thing that he looked at with the biomechanics was looking at the arm bones the archers humeri particularly were amongst the strongest and most developed within the sample from this area so he had very strong upper upper upper arm movement but unusually his left arm was stronger than the right and that doesn't fit within the normal pattern at all what i can tell you from looking at the holistic thing is that he was not charging around the landscape shooting at stuff because he couldn't charge around so if he was doing that archery you might have been doing something slightly different with it to what some of the other people were doing so that's one side of it okay the biomechanics has had much more work done on it but the other thing which has been a really important development is looking at the dna which we just didn't have access to back then but there's a lot of work being done in the last 10 years looking at ancient dna particularly in this beak what we call beaker or early bronze age period and what that's enabled to do is is help us understand a bit more about the relationships between individuals both genetic relationships particularly potentially familial relationships but also bigger broader relationships with with people across the whole of europe so what that dna has shown us is that there was a general westward movement of people from the steppe region of continental europe which eventually ended up in the british isles and you've got a change in that but between the late neolithic and the beaker period in what we call the genome and it became this step ancestry so we it came to dominate basically in the beaker period and the ames b archer was one of these people who has an elevated step ancestry genome but he wasn't the only person within this area that we looked at there are about 31 i think individuals who were not entirely contemporaneous but within that sort of beaker period early bronze age period that we've we've excavated from this area quite a number of whom including him have had the dna looked at and although he's got an elevated genome from the step region he's got that that there it's not as elevated as the rest of them within that group are including the individual the companion in inverted commas is buried next to him now the interesting thing about this is if you tie this in with the isotopic data strontium and oxygen isotopic data which we'd had done originally anyway which gives you a likely geographical origin for those individuals and we know that the archer had come from the alpine region within continental europe whereas the companion was local so we know he'd already moved but when they have looked in detail at that dna for for him that seemed to be most common in areas of france so the interesting thing about combining the isotopic data and the dna data is that what it demonstrates is that people you didn't just get a you know you didn't just go oh we're here we're going to go to here we're going to go to here we're going to go to here we're going to go to you and you didn't get a mass movement of people people were going backwards and forwards all the time they were moving between different areas both within europe and then across to the british isles and other places i mean we had some ideas about some of this because the cultural links that we've got with materials we get a lot but but actually being able to confirm and get a greater vision of this from looking at the human remains themselves it's just fantastic absolutely fantastic and we're in early days still this is going to this is going to carry on developing so that's the big picture that we've got the small picture is looking at links between individuals now one of the things i was interested in knowing is the link between the archer and the companion because i'd already been able to recognize that there looked to be a close familiar link between the two of them and that was due to the fact that they had um a very rare what we call a morphological variation they had what's called um a coalition a pseudo joint not actually not a proper articulation but a pseudo joint between the calcaneum which is the big heel bone and the navicular which is the little bone that sits in the almost like the arch of your foot now they don't they don't normally have a joint between them but they had a coalition they that coalition only occurs in between 1.5 and 2.9 of population of the population modern populations that's very rare and we already know that that's normally got a familiar link and they both had it i've never seen it before and i've looked at probably thousands of skeletons so this said to me and they were next to each other and they both got similar materials buried with them so this suggested they were they were they were probably close family what the dna has proved is they are not first degree they're not father-son brothers they're not second degree so they're not uncle nephew they're not grandfather or grandson but they could be third degree they can't they can't rule that out so we we don't know what they are but we know what they're not so sometimes that's what doing something like the dna does it can it can help highlight details and give you greater definition to what we know and that's just one of the things you know it can also give you hair color and it can give you eye color unfortunately for us we have not yet got the that dna data back for the archer we have and for the companion unfortunately it didn't work for others in that region from that area with that assemblage that 31 we had about 10 of them were done their dna was looked at we mostly we have blonde hair with blue eyes but we also have that quite unusual black hair and blue eyes in one individual and the others were mostly brown-eyed and black-haired but i said unfortunately for for these two we don't know now that's because your ancient dna is not perfect in a very basic form the dna date signatures that you get look like barcodes and in modern dna you'd have the whole pattern and you'd be able to read everything and that that contains so much data it's it's staggering but in ancient dna you get bits of though that data is missing it's degraded we've lost it so we can't always get all that information and unfortunately in this particular case we we haven't got it the dna is is so exciting it's unbelievable but one of the things we do have to bear in mind all the time with this is these are destructive processes radiocarbon dating is destructive isotopic analysis is dna is destructive the dna analysis is is getting smaller and smaller what they need to do it's getting more focused that dna analysis it's always there the data's there so once we've got it but i i have to make sure that it's not it's not going to destroy completely [Music] what we've got to look at in the future [Music] as techniques advance further it's likely we'll be able to tell even more from his dna but to place this man in context in his society in his culture we have to examine the objects buried with him in the grave [Music] dna is such an interesting thing for the future as they've been able to look more closely at the people rather than them to rely on artifacts and you know clues that we're finding in the graves it's interesting that we can challenge our narratives as well as look where people have come from what their backgrounds are just but it goes with this strontium work and things like that it's exciting times i think indeed but we still have to have that humility and common sense to make our own interpretations oh absolutely based on our own observations it's interesting that the evidence tends to converge so the conclusions that have been drawn through looking at the objects for example the little antelope pin that was in the cloak of the archer it has its best parallels around the alps in eastern france and western switzerland so the objects the stable isotopes the dna they're all in broad agreement and although there's still a lot of work to be done it should give us confidence that we can still make very good predictions and draw conclusions from quite traditional methods we were raising questions at the museum about what we knew about the beakers what we knew about them the problems of the wrist guards and the gold and things like that i don't know if any work had been been done on any of those but well we've got you both on the phone it would be great to find out if we'd done any work on those well we were never really able to nail down the source of the wrist guards that fiona did uh fiona rowe did a wonderful job she made many journeys in her own time across europe trying to identify the sources of the stone and i think what we can say is that the black wrist guard is continentally european but the absolute source isn't known the suspicion is that the red one might be from wales but that's not proven and it could also be from continental europe so we didn't resolve that question the stone tool for metal working the cushion stone is lidite and which is presumed to be from continental europe but gold well there's an interesting contrast between the gold and the grave of the archer which is almost certainly from continental europe and that buried with the companion which may be from cornwall now that's something which hadn't been identified when we published the report so the identification of cornish gold accompanying cornish tin at the beginning of the metal ages was a new discovery after we finished the report and it was published fantastic is there anything unusual about the beakers or apart from the fact that there are lots of them well to have five was definitely unusual one is standard basically if you're going to get a pot at all you get one uh so to have five and to have the three oxidized ones in front of the archer's face and the two much less well-fired more reduced blacker ones behind him probably has some kind of special significance at the time as well that's fantastic you mentioned that because we remember that really strongly the black and red of the oxidized and the and the sort of charcoal beakers come and very much compared with the wrist guards the black and red wrist guards and yeah i couldn't remember if we made i'm not sure what more you can make of it than observing it well no it would be nice and it is likely because it does follow the same pattern two have had some significance but unfortunately that significance is something that we just can't dig up it was an abstract in the mind well the expert who wrote the report on the pots from the grave dr ross cleal she thinks that the black ones may have been made specially for the burial and that's why they weren't as well fired or at least they were fired differently from the red ones which used a little bit before they were placed in the grave so it could have been the case that some things were made specially for the grave many of the flint objects had never been used so there may be a reproduction of things to be placed with the person just before the burial was made that's terrifically interesting i understand now that we i only found this out the other day that um there's seems to be evidence of the boars tusks being used in metal working as well there have been some sort of um bits of metal found in the in those sort of burnishing tools yes it was one of the things that we weren't sure about when we published a report but it's been noticed by german colleagues that in graves in continental europe you would often find a set of stone tools for metal working so anvils or hammers and some polishing and some sharpening stones and quite often you would find them in a group as if they'd all been placed in a bag and next to the stones would be boar's tusks so the suspicion was that the tusks were used in metal working and it would make sense if they were used in some form of polishing or planishing and it was only a few years ago that colleagues in the czech republic were able to show using dispersive x-ray fluorescence that's when you fire x-rays at something and it releases uh x-rays back and you can measure the chemical composition of the material that analysis showed that on the boars tusks or in the tusks there were traces of copper and also gold so i look forward to work that has yet to be done on the fines from the archer and the companion and also the boss and bowman to see if that's the case here because certainly one of the tusks in the grave of the archer has been modified it's been changed so it's clearly been used and it's something that needs to be pursued but i think for now we can anticipate that the board's tasks are going to be shown to be used in metal working we were talking to laura on saturday about when she found the gold uh in the interior it was actually one of the first things um that came up and and the the loud exclamation of that led to us understandable but dog walkers around led to us having concerns about um security i i think i'm right in saying it was laura in the finds room who may have found the gold in the companion scale as well i think you could be right but i can't actually remember which one of them i know she was involved and it was that burial wasn't washed for another five or six weeks after the excavation had finished because we had so many of them to do so it was a total surprise that suddenly somebody found gold in the finest room i think it's only ever happened twice in portway house it really was very exciting this poor man had really been second best to the archer we kind of thought he was a nobody because he had what i think it was seven flints did he even boast tasks i think he had yeah seven flint's aboard's tusk and that was about it so compared to the guy next door to him he was very much poor relation i think i'm writing saying i called him the companion almost thinking of him like a servant somehow because he didn't have the kit yeah not enough bling and then suddenly he was actually not quite the same because he didn't have the quantity of stuff but he was clearly right up there because he had those gold ornaments but because we were so close as well wasn't he must have been right on the edge of the mound if not just within it because we had the name he needed a name too we had to he had to be given some kind of status i remember very clearly andrew you're actually on site you're telling me this is a once in a lifetime you won't get anything like this again and there's only two years later so you're kind enough to pass me on to the boss component but i must have it it's a it's a very different kettle of fish the bone marrow is obviously an incredibly important and exciting burial but it doesn't touch the archer in terms of an experience although it's no less important well i could see from standing close up exactly what was going on and i just had a slightly different perspective because i wasn't doing the actual excavation it's a fantastic thing to be involved in and really they don't come along very often you may and i hope you will be involved in other great discoveries but something like this is something to remember and to and for me it was very definitely a career highlight the whole of that year was coloured by it really but it started well i started off having my photograph in country life we moved on through the amesbury archer in the summer um his inquest happened to coincide with my 40th birthday um appearances on the tv news radio tv right the way through i don't think a single year or sorry a single week of that year went by without the archer being shown to somebody and being laid out especially for the occasion it just went on and on and on and the whole thing was just monumentally exciting and busy and a huge learning experience because you know i do romans basically and suddenly i was thrust into the beaker period a little bit of me i think it's remained there ever since really having been charged with taking the excavations through to publication obviously my involvement particularly the research side lasted longer so that stayed with me but the public interest is still there so earlier this year the fines or some of the fines buried with the archer were included in an exhibition in hala in germany and they've now been included in the blockbuster exhibition at the british museum that's rolled over from that work in germany so now they're in london but they will always otherwise be on display in salisbury museum and so there's a continuing interest and it's undoubtedly one of the most famous finds that has been in the last 20 years or so and something new about the find just keeps coming along the archer now lies in the wessex gallery of salisbury museum the bones are laid out just as they were found in the grave with the objects around him and he's surrounded by a wealth of other neolithic and bronze age discoveries from the chalk downs around stonehenge [Music] this museum has outstanding archaeology collections we're somewhat blessed in being in south wiltshire and we've got some of the most amazing archaeological sites on our doorstep obviously we've got stonehenge eight miles up the road from the museum so if you took even the archery of the equation we've got an amazing collection and we're designated by the arts council because they're nationally important they're the kinds of collections which are on a part of what you'd see in a national museum but then you add in the aspiatcha as well i mean the story i think is what sort of elevates him beyond perhaps some of the other things that we've got this this grand idea of this man who traveled here from central europe sort of 4 400 years ago i mean absolutely amazing and that's what captures people's imagination so that that's what really elevates him i think so you know we can put a real story around him we can actually almost almost put flesh on the bones this idea that somebody's placed in the ground with a huge array of artifacts which were unrecoverable they're there forever to go into the afterlife or they're placed there as part of the ceremony when he dies that's something very powerful about how he was respected so we know that 4400 years ago that the gold objects he was buried with were probably the the rarest objects you could possibly imagine there was hardly anybody owning gold artifacts at the time yet he was buried with them so no one else could have them he could have them he had these amazing arrowheads buried with him again which were just beautifully manufactured possibly specifically for him to be buried in the ground the copper daggers knives those again very rare artifacts placed in the ground unreachable so that tells you he was highly respected in what respect we don't know it appears he may have been a metalworker so maybe he was respected because he had this specialist knowledge of transforming objects and creating objects in his idea of making something out you know into a liquid that would then go solid again to become an object was almost magical at this period we think so was that why he was respected is that why he was an important member of the community we also have to look at his bones and the fact that he was disabled uh he obviously had a limp we don't know how it happened whether he was born with it or whether it happened earlier on in his life but again he had to have been supported by the community maybe that's why he had this specialist knowledge because he couldn't perform other activities in the wider community but again it all points towards this mutual respect that people had for him i'm a very strong believer in the fact that you you want to come to a museum and encounter the real thing museums are about real artifacts from the past and the arch was one of the richest burials that was found or it has been found from from from the early bronze age and you could display those in a case without the burial but or you know we've already got a situation where artifacts have been taken out of the ground and they're completely out of context of where they were discovered it's just making it even worse and more complicated i believe very strongly that you need to put these objects these with with the people they were found with that's how it was found they're his items or the items that were placed with him when he died and i think that's how people need to see them when they come into the museum to understand the context they've got this individual this amazing array of things see them how they were actually laid out when he died i think that's a very powerful experience i love archaeology i trained as an archaeologist but i spent most of my working career in in museums and you know i love artifacts and looking after them it's i like telling the stories behind the artifacts as well so to have this this nationally internationally important burial in the museum is is a real real privilege [Music] he was clearly an important person in his community perhaps an archer perhaps a smith and he's still important today his story has captured the imagination of the people of amesbury people who now live where he lived and died the whole legacy thing there has been done really well i think isn't it perhaps it might be seen as heavy-handed you could you can't move i think the ice cream van man is might be uh archer themed like the whole places but it is it does give a really terrific thing to to hang activities off for the school children gives the place a real identity doesn't it yeah and i think that's important because it was a new school it was possible to create a new identity and margaret bunyard who was the education manager at the time and the head teacher maggie edwards they worked very carefully to create this new identity so that when the first intake of children arrived they had a sense of belonging and from day one there's been something special i i remember jane brain who created her wonderful comic book for children about the amesbury archer which is much more interesting than the excavation report i remember jane saying she painted a life-sized mural in of the archer in the hallway of the new school but boscom down isn't just famous for archaeology there's the airfield next to it and so a test pilot a jet fighter jet pilot uh was sent over also to be a model for a mural and it was only later that jane realized that that pilot was tim peake oh really he went on to become the famous astronaut so the children of the school have got two very famous and inspiring figures one from the ancient past one from recent times who both got amazing stories but jane's book had really quite an effect on me actually i was really quite emotional about it when i saw it which i wasn't expecting at all you know archaeology is stories isn't it it is narratives and that we don't have to make them boring you know there's there's no reason that what jane produced there is less valid than our monographs than site reports and actually i think in many ways this is the future of a large part of hopefully what publication will be is making things accessible but still giving access to the underlying scientific research and things like that yeah i i think it's terrific and it's interesting how now we're 20 years on what hasn't been done is to look at the effect of the discoveries over the long term so the archer and the companion have an important role in the place making of the the school and the new community and so we have the bowman and the community center we have the development named as archer's gate we have the pub the aims reaction pub down at solstice park and it's expressed in the in the community by arts such as the arrows on the gates of the school or the statue of the archer opposite the community center but how well is this understood by the people who live there now 20 years on we're not sure so that's another study that merits attention [Music] so what have you got in your box the wessex archaeology community engagement program has a really important schools element so we go into the local area and indeed nationally to help young people understand the lives of people in the past and to draw parallels with life today the amesbury archer provides a really useful access point for that he's a very relatable character like many children in schools today he's come from somewhere else he's come to this country he's made a home here and because of all the things that were found in his burial the jewelry the tools we're able to better understand him and almost become part of his story beside me is one of our loan boxes that we lend out to schools and one of the most important things we can do as an archaeological company is enable people hands-on access to artifacts let them touch things feel things it's only through getting hands-on with archaeology that we can really enable people to connect with their past so by sending these boxes into schools and indeed to local community groups we can enable people to explore that story for themselves they can understand in their own way access the archaeology in their own way and that's really really valuable the greatest satisfaction for me in my role is the moment when you see children understand that people in the past are just like us we are so distant from those ancient cultures and the beaker people and the stone age people were so distanced by the passing of time and the development of technology that we forget that they were physiologically identical to us in every way they would have had feelings they would have been artistic we have evidence of their creativity and they would have faced the same emotional struggles that we do in our daily lives and to be able to help young people build those connections with people in the past is a great honor what makes the tangible archaeology important is the story that goes with it it's the story of the people to whom these things were relevant to who to the people to whom these things enabled their survival and in many ways we owe it to the archaeology to find the story to tell that story to give them the meaning that they had all those thousands of years ago and that's what i love about the ames pre-archer [Music] 20 years on from his discovery and 44 centuries since he was alive the amesbury archer is still providing us with new insights into the early bronze age and the people who lived in the landscape around stonehenge he was alive at the dawn of a new technological age a new age of metal the investigation of this burial reveals just how much archaeological science has advanced since his discovery [Music] what will the next 20 years add to the story [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you

Channel: wessexarchaeology

Views: 123,369

Keywords: Archaeology, Archeology, Stonehenge, UK, King, Amesbury Archer, Neolithic, Beaker, Bronze Age, Gold, Alice Roberts, Jacqueline McKinley, Prehistory, Discovery

Id: W3bPqkoMliU

Length: 51min 54sec (3114 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022