Works. I've been told my microphone's a little quiet. So if anybody has any trouble here, he made them feel free to give me a wave or shout.
Sorry. OK. So, yes, Ted, I want to talk about some fairly recent research I undertook looking at a specific burial that was found in Stanley,
just that sort of Colchester in Essex. It called the doctor's burial.
It's a unique burial that had the kind of branches, the late Iron Age to early Roman transition.
So the transition between prehistory and history in Britain.
And it's unusual because of the arrange of graves that were found within the burial,
which were interpreted by the excavate, is as serving both a medical function, but also a magical function.
So I'll just give you a little bit of background.
The site itself was excavated between 1987 and 2003 by the Colchester Archaeological Trust ahead of gravel extraction at the site.
It's this is the volume that they produced in 2007, which is available to download for free,
if anybody would like to, from the Archaeology Day service to the site itself.
Circled here in red is just outside of the modern town of Colchester in the late Iron Age when the site was founded.
It lay outside of what we call an operative. So a major centre of occupation during that period.
But it was also a contested region.
And after 1843 and the the invasion of Britain by and precluded from the Roman army, they founded a legionary Fortress at the site.
So there was a period of domination over the local populace.
And it was during this period that this area was interned. The site itself is multi period.
It starts off as a midline age farmstead. It's very much an agricultural site.
But by the first century B.C., we have the construction of a large enclosure, a burial enclosure, enclosure,
one here, which is the first burials are undertaken on the site after the life of the farmstead had gone out of use.
And very quickly in that period, just across the.
The invasion of Britain.
We see the establishment of three more buried enclosures, three, four and five, which have themselves a whole host of burials.
And my research really just focussed on one burial within one enclosure,
but only to give you a sense of how many different burials and different types of burials were at the site during the time.
So in Enclosure five, where the doctor's burial is located, we have evidence for a mortuary enclosure, PIRE sites.
We have a number of other important burials which were called approaches burial at the mirror burial.
But I want to focus today on the doctor's burial.
This is just to give you an indication of the divine, a diversity of burial rites that were undertaken during the period.
This is the doctor's burial. A photo of the excavation at the time.
It's cremation, burial dates to around 80, 40 to 1850.
And here is a plan of all of the different grade kids that were found within the burial, which was excavated in the summer of 1998 eight.
The reason it was called the doctor's burial is because of this fine.
This is the one of the earliest known examples of a full surgical kit that was found in Britain or in many places across Europe.
It formed a unique set of implements, which I'll talk to in a little bit more detail in a minute.
But this is why it was named readopted burial. And this grew through a lot of interest from different areas.
And particularly after the publication of the volume in 2007, we saw lots of newspaper articles which related to potentially the the person in this
burial being a druid based on both the medicinal aspects of some of the great good found,
but also some of the magical aspects of the great good sound.
And what I wanted to do with my research was to have a little bit more of a deeper
dive into the burial itself and try and dispel some of these myths and complications,
as we heard from Professor Hutten earlier about the paganism involved.
And there has been taken rites associated, modern pagan rites associated with this site as well.
But calling the person a druid I think allows it doesn't allow us to really see the complexity of the burial rites,
involve the supernatural elements involved, the belief systems involved when we take a deep dive.
So my research looked at two aspects materiality and performance to try and really get a better sense
of what these items were and how they related to the overall performing of rights in this period.
Let's go back to the surgical instruments. Here is a replicator version of the instrument that you can see them in a little bit more detail.
And as you can see, they are quite a diverse range of implements, which includes saws, forceps, Schoop probes.
In this period, they would have been quite gruesome instruments to use, I would imagine.
But they as despite the fact that they are referred to as a surgical kit, is is maybe slightly a misnomer.
They are a collection of different instruments that were brought together over time.
What we have here is importations from the Roman world where we see many parallels to Roman military context and surgical kit used there by medicks.
But we also have some implements there were made of Ion's and are likely of more local manufacture.
And what we might see is that they have replicas of instruments found elsewhere.
So it's probably better to see this as an amalgamation of items over time to create a surgical kit rather than a medic's kit that is used by a period,
a person of a particular skill set. And it's also important to realise that these items themselves.
And this is well established in archaeology more generally have a lifecycle of themselves.
So the creation of iron implements in them in the Iron Age has been likened to some two
magical processes the ability of metal workers to be able to create one item out of another.
Turn it into a liquid form and reformulate. It may be seen to have some sort of magical or mysterious property.
The deposition of these items as well. Many parallels that we see on the continent are found in which all contexts are placed in watery locations,
which have a very high occurrence of ritual aspects in this period.
And therefore, the deposition of these items in the grave may not necessarily reflect the ownership.
It may reflect more of a ritual or belief system aspect associated with it.
But it wasn't the only item in the greater precipitant potentially of a medical function.
We have these items here, which is a saucepan, but also a straining bowls,
straining bowl itself had the remains of some environmental material in them which were undertaken are environmental samples.
And the material that was extracted is called our T media, which you some of you may have been heard of.
This has lots of parallels in historical and classical text that refers to it being used for a whole host of medical functions,
including the inducement of sweating or to calm the nerves.
So this relationship in the original excavation volume was seen as quite keen.
However, in terms of the late Iron Age context, these strain of bones have been seen in more of a kind of feasting role that the strain
of bones have in other contexts been found to have the remains of beer in them.
And our team, Mesia, has been used in other contexts to flavour wine as well.
So maybe we need to think about this in a slightly different way,
which is that these items serve the dual role where they were also an aspect of feasting and ritual.
Piecing the related to kind of social context of the late Iron Age are related to more power structures occurring and the formations of communities,
particularly in opera sites where we see this burial.
We also need to look at the possibility that this was maybe associated with general feasting, which is paralleled in other burials in the Iron Age.
And there was a platter of cups and plates which were also found in the grave.
And there might be an aspect there of last feasting rites of the dead.
Moving on to the magical items. This is two sets of of US aspects were considered potentially magical, these iron and brass rods.
There were eight of them for long and for short. They formed these nice kookier pairs in each material.
And these eight rings, which you see on the right hand side here, which were found together, almost stacked on top of one another as well.
The roads themselves were interpreted potentially as representing some sort of divination.
And this quote by Tacitus at the bottom here,
it talks about the casting of lots in order to predict the future and potentially call on spirits and the gods in order to help.
And potentially that might have been a strong association with undertaking some of these medical procedures.
We see parallels in other mediaeval burials of short sticks like death, mostly in would rather than metal, and they're considered one.
So I think the context of the of the burial is quite important.
But some of the objects also share similarities to stylus.
They have the flat flattened end or one or two of the objects.
And literacy potentially forms a role if a a strong theme in the late Iron Age, particularly when it comes to coinage.
And with the preliterate society, potentially the ability to write may have been seen as something is of a mystical,
magical or as part of kind of wider belief system.
The wings themselves had been argued to represent terrorists, which are horse trappings, the elements of the arrival of the horses.
As you can see from this image, they are quite different and they likely were collected over a lifetime as well or over several lifetimes,
much in the same way as a surgical instruments may have. And the context in which they were found is very interesting.
They appear to have been joined together by a small piece of leather and then attached to a piece of wood.
So the the potential there is that they may have been used together essentially as a rattle where they were joined together.
And there's been parallels with musical instruments in the late Iron Age,
although they mostly win these swing instruments rather than rattle such as these.
In other context, raffles have been used to ward off evil spirits and protect the deck.
So this may have been a possible alternative use of this implements.
There are a number of items in the grave, and I think this is one that just worth mentioning,
maybe not because it fits into a magical or medical category, but also because it fits into the wider belief system.
The first being this this gameboard, as you can see here, and I'm doing the outline on that photo, is quite hard to see.
It was made of wood in the head, eroded over time.
It formed an important aspect to the burial because the cremated human remains were placed on top of it,
as were a number of pieces of the surgical toolkit, as were a number of the iron rods that were seen as a potential divination.
And there's been many studies based talking about the symbolic association of of game boards and life and death,
the progression of a game, a journey through life. And it appears from the depositional activities in the grave that we can see that
there were a number of moves made at beginning of the game but didn't finish.
And maybe this was a parallel to life and death in the period.
A modern example might be the movie The Seventh SEAL, where death is it playing a game of chess against the person.
And we see that kind of parallels in other cultures as well. Moving on to a performance.
So this was the largest scale analysis eventually, which looked to the stemware enclosures, as you could see on the left there.
But it was a very detailed an occupied site and there was a number of earthworks that split the settlement to the areas of burial.
What Stanway? So we undertook some quite detailed analysis, experiential analysis.
Are you on the ground looking at some of the routes through the landscape to
understand how people may have moved through the landscape and move to the site?
And we use Blyde, our analysis as well, and looked at the position of the earthworks as they survive in the landscape today.
And we concluded that potentially people move from sites within the settlement along a stream bed, which is quite flooded in the winter.
So that potentially suggests seasonal activity and they may have branched from a spring that's
found on the inside of the settlement along the stream and then up to to the site itself.
And that's important because of the ritual connotations in the late Iron Age with water and in earlier periods as well.
And then this may have been part of the wider process in order to to undertake the burial of the dead.
What I wanted to do with the research is where we should try and reconstruct who's best I could,
how the burial may have undertaken, how the supernatural may have may have occurred.
So this is my attempt. A slight narrative of what's going on and how it may is how that the grave may have ended there.
So we start with the procession.
The body is transported from the spring, within the settlement, along the course of the stream and up the hill to the burial enclosures.
The body is then displayed or stored within the enclosure while the pyre site is constructed and then laid on to the pyre and the pyre itself is lit.
The cremation process takes some time, perhaps six to seven hours, and the sites left to burn out and cool potentially overnight the next day,
the grave has been dug and some of the cremated remains of the deceased are collected
and brought to the gravesite to meet the mourners who have brought the grave goods.
The grave goods were deposited in the grave in a specific order. The gameboard is laid out, several early moves made,
the cremated remains laid on top of the board and there followed by one of the divination rods and then the surgical instruments,
several smaller rods are cast over the items and the remainder of placed in a bundle in the grave.
The rattle, shaken to ward off evil spirits, are placed in the grave also, and the items are covered in a textile substance.
A series of cuts and classes filled with food and drink is offering the place at the other end of the grape as well at a strange bowl and the Penn.
The burial ends, an oak board is placed over the grade. A full emperor is placed in the grave as well.
The mourners disperse while the site is covered over by a mound of earth for potentially commemoration is sometimes later, perhaps a year or two.
The mourners process again along the line of the stream and gather at the site.
They consume food and drink ceremoniously and break the cups and throw them into the ditch that surrounds the enclosure.
I think the process of the kind of analysis of this day, one of the reoccurring themes that I wanted to share was that of memory memory.
It occurred in many different ways.
And we see this in the context of this site because we don't have a written history of the site in the late Iron Age,
but we have more of a pre history, oral traditions, which may have lasted to 300 years and are passed down from one to another.
And part of this oral tradition is through practise,
through the agency and structure in which people undertake their interactions with space and place and undertake these burials.
But these memories are also different and they're persistent in different ways.
The site itself had an midline age origin and a later Iron Age burial ground.
There were ceremonies between event. There was revisiting to the site.
But it was also my individual memories. I visited this site when it was excavated when I was 17 years old.
And this led in part to me being an archaeologist today.
And the site itself only exists in memory because the site has now been destroyed.
And it's now a gravel extraction site. So I feel memory is an important aspect.
So just to conclude, archaeology allows us to understand these complex burial rights,
but it requires us to think beyond one scale, beyond the burial or the site or the landscape.
And it requires us to understand how memory works and how that was passed down.
And I think through constructing in constructing a compelling narrative to discuss these stories,
we need to maintain the accuracy of the archaeological record. But hopefully tell us something that is important.
Thank you very much.