Trip to Ireland

Photos from our trip to Dublin

• Knowth, Ireland 
• Archaeology Museum, Dublin 
• Dublin Castle 
• Out and about in Dublin 
• Dublin Harbour boat trip 
• Dublin Botanical Gardens 

Celtic field systems

I have just created a Google map of Celtic field systems on Claverton Down, Bath (near where I work). You can see some of them as quite big banks on the ground, but the aerial photos on Google maps also show them up quite nicely.

in small things forgotten

The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Every year many thousands of objects are discovered, many of these by metal-detector users, but also by people whilst out walking, gardening or going about their daily work. Such discoveries offer an important source for understanding our past.

Save the Portable Antiquities Scheme

At a meeting of the Portable Antiquities Scheme's Advisory Group the Chief Executive of the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) announced that funding for next year would be frozen at the 2007 level, even though at the press conference for the Annual Report he and the Minister announced that the funding for current levels of activity would be preserved.

The PAS as an organisation of 50 staff needs £1.49 million to keep going at the same level of activity in 2008 and freezing the PAS budget will mean losing 5 posts out of 50.

The MLA also wants to review PAS's funding for 2009-11 and integrate them into the programme called Renaissance in the Regions which it is funding 42 hub museums. If that happens the work of the Finds Liaison Officers will be diluted and the national side of PAS will be weakened. This will result in 9 separate PAS groups, all with their own priorities.

The DCMS (Department of Culture, Media and Sport) should reassign the PAS from MLA to the British Museum that is fully committed to the long term work of PAS.

At a time where Heritage and recognition of the public interest in our shared heritage, to act in such a manner is contrary to the principal of providing support to the public and providing a secure and sustainable future for the PAS.

What this means in layperson's terms is that what is currently a unified service to receive small archaeological finds from the public will be split up and have its funding cut. I suspect also that this is yet another instance of heritage and the arts being squeezed to pay for the Olympics. Grr.

A Finds Liaison Officer is the one who actually is the point of contact for the Portable Antiquities Scheme in each local authority.

This is not just about the current funding issue (frozen for this next year at present) meaning 5 lost jobs, but about the ultimate safekeeping of the PAS as it is. What the MLA propose to do is effectively break the PAS up and move all the Finds Liaison Officers out to Renaissance Hub Museums. This will mean the demise of the PAS in all but name. This potential move will bring differing standards that will result in losing the scheme's cohesion; also the fact that many FLOs would just leave and get a different job. Then factor in that the end-users of the scheme will now be forced to have to travel to record their finds, because Dorset and Somerset for example don't have a Hub Museum.


Sign the petition to show your support for the Portable Antiquities Scheme.

we're all Basques

Apparently Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings only represent about 5% of the British population anywhere in the British Isles; the highest concentration of Anglo-Saxons is in Norfolk, where it's about 15%. The rest of us are in fact related to the Basques; both Britons and Basques are largely descended from the first hunter-gatherers to settle in the area after the ice retreated, who would have spoken a language rather like Basque. And, even weirder, we may have been speaking a Germanic dialect before the arrival of the Romans, and they reckon modern English is directly descended from this language. That is weird. The only thing I don't understand is, when did we change from a Basque-type language to the Germanic fore-runner of English? Presumably as a result of cultural interchange with the Belgae. Well, in response to people who are fiercely "Celtic" and accuse the English of being Saxon interlopers, I've always said that I am a pre-Celtic indigene, and that the Celts were invaders too. But, as always, the picture is far more complex than was previously thought, and there were not waves of invasions and massacres. The new understanding of all this is supported by genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA and the male Y chromosome, and by the classical writers (Tacitus, Herodotus etc).

Eup lagunak. Kaixo aspaldiko! Zer Moduz?