{"id":3831,"date":"2016-06-16T19:59:57","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T00:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=3831"},"modified":"2016-06-16T19:59:57","modified_gmt":"2016-06-17T00:59:57","slug":"meta-archaeology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2016\/06\/16\/meta-archaeology\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta-Archaeology"},"content":{"rendered":"

It didn’t occur to me, but it’s reasonable: sometimes archaeologists\u00a0have to dig out the archaeology of previous researchers, as Eric Powell details in “Letter From England<\/a>” (Archaeology<\/strong><\/em>, July\/August 2016):<\/p>\n

Young has a personal investment in [archaeologist Brian] Hope-Taylor\u2019s work. He grew up visiting Bamburgh and credits the formative experience of exploring the castle as a boy with inspiring him to become an archaeologist. In 1996, he and his colleagues contacted the castle owners to request permission to follow up on Hope-Taylor\u2019s excavations. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know where he had dug,\u201d says Young, \u201cso we were hoping to use geophysics and small-scale excavation to determine that.\u201d The owners gave their permission, and the small team began their work. Twenty years later, Young shakes his head and smiles at the memory. \u201cWe were thinking of it as a short project that we\u2019d do on weekends among friends,\u201d he says. But that short project quickly bloomed into a much bigger effort when it became apparent to the team that the richness of the site meant it would take years to understand it properly. They also became the unexpected heirs of Hope-Taylor\u2019s considerable legacy.<\/p>\n

While searching for office space, Young and the castle\u2019s groundskeeper broke the locks on the small rooms built into the castle walls that had sat unopened for decades. What they found inside was a kind of time capsule of Hope-Taylor\u2019s fieldwork. Still astonished by the discovery, Young shares pictures of the rooms that show they were filled with dust-covered boxes of bones, artifacts, and soil samples, all excavated by Hope-Taylor. A 1974 copy of the Daily Telegraph still resting on a chair helped establish the date of the last field season. \u201cWe\u2019ve accidently inherited an enormous body of work at an extraordinary site,\u201d says Young. Hope-Taylor\u2019s students later found years\u2019 worth of Bamburgh excavation notes, and even artifacts, such as a sword, in his apartment. Now, the Bamburgh team\u2019s task is not only to understand their own excavations, but to synchronize their findings with the copious record Hope-Taylor left behind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It didn’t occur to me, but it’s reasonable: sometimes archaeologists\u00a0have to dig out the archaeology of previous researchers, as Eric Powell details in “Letter From England” (Archaeology, July\/August 2016): Young has a personal investment in [archaeologist Brian] Hope-Taylor\u2019s work. He grew up visiting Bamburgh and credits the formative experience of \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3832,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3831\/revisions\/3832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}