Digging The Dirt At Last
The blurb at the back of each of my books lists ‘armchair archaeology’ as one of my interests. To research the archaeological background to my novels I’ve watched every TV programme on the subject going and read more books and magazines about history and archaeology than I can possibly list; as well as spending many happy hours searching for information on the Internet. I’ve done everything, in fact, apart from getting out of my armchair and getting my hands dirty at a real live dig.
But in July 2004, all this changed. After writing nine books featuring archaeology, I thought it was about time I experienced the reality of a dig. So when I learned about a training excavation in York - one of England’s most historic cities – I seized an opportunity that seemed too good to miss.
The York Archaeological Trust were excavating a large medieval hospital (a monastic house caring for the sick and poor rather than a purely medical institution) called St Leonard’s that had been built on the site of a Roman legionary fortress (a tower of which still stands to this day). St Leonard’s hospital was largely demolished in the middle of the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII closed England’s monasteries, and the site was then used for industrial purposes before being landscaped in the nineteenth century. The Victorians created a ‘garden of antiquities’ and brought in massive Roman stone sarcophagi from outlying cemeteries (the Romans buried their dead outside town boundaries) which can still be seen on the site. The twentieth century’s contribution to the archaeology was a concrete air raid shelter built in World War II (the subject of a Time Team investigation a few years ago).
So what’s it really like digging up a place with such an exciting and eventful history? At 9am on a fine summer morning, I finally found out.
After a tour of the site, I began digging. The trench I was working in had two levels – a Roman level and, some four or five feet above that, the level of the medieval hospital.
A Roman rampart in trench 3
I started at the bottom, as it were. When the Roman fortress had fallen into disuse, a wall had collapsed and my first task was to save as much Roman mortar and plaster as possible. This was delicate work as Roman mortar tends to crumble after seventeen or so centuries in the earth, and digging it out wasn’t as easy as the more expert archaeologists made it look. My star find was a large piece of painted Roman plaster, suggesting that particular part of the building was somewhat more lavishly decorated than the average soldiers’ barracks. Perhaps it was the quarters of some important Roman commander who had ordered his walls to be painted in the latest fashion. It was certainly fun to speculate.
I was finding it all so fascinating that a 9 to 5 day (with customary tea breaks) seemed to pass in a moment. We even received a visit from a Roman centurion (not an irate ghost come to complain about the state of his fortress but one of York’s costumed guides).
By the time I moved up to the medieval section of the trench, I was getting used to the hard work of digging and climbing in and out of the trench with heavy buckets of soil to be sieved in case anything had been missed. In this hospital layer I uncovered a medieval nail, several pieces of medieval brickwork and a part of the mortar floor of the medieval infirmary. This may not sound too exciting until you begin to think of the people who created and used these everyday things, of their lives and their stories. By now I was hooked.
And what about archaeological mysteries? Well it seems they don’t only exist in the pages of my books. In the medieval layer in trench 5 there was a rather strange cut in the earth – the shape of a grave, cut into what would have been the infirmary floor. In view of the position and the fact that it wasn’t aligned east-west, this was unlikely to have been a proper burial. What if, at the time the huge monastic hospital was destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII, someone wanted to settle old scores or get rid of an unwanted relative or a witness to a dirty deed? What better place to dispose of the body than in the wreckage of a newly demolished building? But perhaps I’m letting my imagination run away with me - it will probably turn out to be yet another rubbish pit full of butchered animal bones, broken pottery…and worse. But I’m sure it will inspire a future book.
Finally I’d like to thank everyone at the St Leonard’s excavation and York Archaeological Trust for making my research so very enjoyable. I can’t wait to wield a trowel again!
Kate digging in the medieval part of trench 5