From his obsession with peatlands and ‘bog bodies’ to being a regular on Time Team, Professor Henry Chapman opens up about his 40-year career in archaeology
I was always interested in history from a very young age, watching television programmes and reading. I had the opportunity to try excavation on a Roman villa site near where I lived when I was about 12 and loved it; not just the archaeology, but the sense of community and practical working outside too. I ended up studying archaeology at Exeter, then became an archaeological landscape investigator for the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England, surveying sites primarily on Dartmoor and Exmoor. Afterwards, I got a job at the University of Hull on a wetlands project funded by English Heritage, while doing my PhD part-time. When the project finished, I continued funding myself through commercial and research projects –including being a member of Channel 4's Time Team – before coming to Birmingham.
I love being outside and the teamwork. I do a wide range of activities – including excavation, GIS digital modelling and borehole survey – and love the fact that it’s always about problem-solving. You refine your strategy and approach as you learn more about the site. I also love that it provides you with a deep engagement with other communities and places. The opportunities to work with interesting people and to continually learn make the job constantly surprising, fresh and stimulating.
It depends how you measure value: knowledge, financial worth or emotional connection. The financial one is least appealing to me, but would include some tremendous Viking tortoise brooches or Roman jewellery. My favourite finds are really about finding out something new, like my work on Iron Age bog bodies. Just through borehole surveys you can find out so much more about the circumstances surrounding these curious deaths.
Children's footprints on the foreshore in South Wales that dated to the Mesolithic period, nearly 7,000 years ago. What was remarkable was that, by the indentations, you could tell that they were running about and suddenly stopping, as if they were playing tag. The footprints were only visible for one day, being washed away by the tide.
Time Team has three days compared to three weeks and has a lot more specialists on site. But the biggest difference is the filming, which means you’re constantly switching from working to describing, making the experience much more intense.
I really wanted to work with more archaeologists and Birmingham had some great research, particularly in relation to digital approaches, which I was focusing on myself at the time. Birmingham also had a good mixture of cultural and scientific archaeology, including environmental archaeology, which was a big part of much of my own research. The research environment of Birmingham was perfect for me.
I am a little bit obsessed by peatlands. They are amazing and dynamic environments, but also great for preservation of organic remains. If you consider that perhaps 95% of everything made and used in prehistory was made out of wood, leather or other organic materials that normally rot, then you get why bogs are so important. But they also preserve microscopic and macroscopic remains such as pollen, insects and plants that allow us to reconstruct past environments. By understanding how a peatland has developed through different periods, alongside evidence of plants and agricultural practices, you get a much more complete picture when trying to understand the role of people within these landscapes.
Much of archaeology is about changes over time. But bog bodies represent events that happened over minutes and seconds. As unexplained deaths, they immediately raise questions of why they were killed. Their exceptional preservation is a massive help, allowing us to understand what their final meal was, for example, and when they ate it. But my particular interest is in reconstructing the conditions at the time. In forensic terms, we have evidence from the victim, but what I like to add is the environmental context – effectively the scene of crime. From this, so many new avenues arise for interpretation. I enjoy thinking about the evolution of the whole bog and how people have used it in the past, with bog bodies being perhaps the most significant events.
We face huge environmental problems now. Understanding how much we have altered the natural 'grain' of the landscape can help determine if there are better ways that environments can be managed. Much of the rhetoric about environmental problems emphasise a return to 'natural' conditions. But there are very few places on the planet that have not been created through the interaction of people and their environments. Understanding the past allows us to consider the science of environmental change alongside the important positive contributions that people can make, not just their negative impacts.
Traditionally, heritage has focused primarily on cultural heritage – the monuments and other residue from human activity – and this is clearly a very narrow view. Our past does not stop at the emergence of Homo sapiens. Research in Earth Heritage is obviously important to understand our place on the planet, but is also incredibly relevant to today for understanding things like the threat of mass extinctions. Natural heritage, geological formations and fossilised remains are also important for tourism and public wellbeing.
It really doesn’t. While there is protection for cultural heritage through scheduling and listings, and some protection for natural heritage, such as SSSIs and World Heritage sites, there is no direct protection for sites rich in fossils, for example. Tourism doesn't make a distinction between these different types of heritage sites, but protection measures do. And this is something that urgently needs to be addressed.
I think the integration of different technologies offers the greatest potential for the sector. For example, integrating digital 3D recorded data – such as Lidar, laser scanning and photogrammetry – undertaken for research with accessible content, either at heritage sites and museums or through their online presence and apps. Another great potential is for citizen science. Given that many phones now have 3D capture capabilities, there are now huge numbers of people who could be contributing to heritage. And all this data can be represented through things like game engines for wider popular appeal. I think it’s less about a single digital approach, and more about how these are brought together.
Two places come immediately to mind. Siberia, on the Ukok Plateau, where immaculately preserved human burials have been discovered in the past dating to the Iron Age. And the wetlands of Florida; again an area where well preserved human burials have been discovered. There seems to be a bit of a theme!
Professor of Archaeology
Biographical and contact details for Dr Henry Chapman, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Birmingham.
