Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for coming.
Well, let's just begin by giving you a sense of the sort of the pattern of this morning what we're going to be doing.
I'd say a little bit about why we're here.
And to some extent, at least, what we're doing here is continuing a conversation that Al and I have been having for some years now,
seems very many years about the different things that we do and the overlaps between the materials, the places that we work on.
Now, just to put it in context, I'm an archaeologist. Archaeologists deal with old things.
And time was when most archaeologists dealt with objects with a fairly limited number of questions in mind whether from how old is it?
What was it for? The function of things often the most important.
And of course then there's also the question that we're asked more commonly than any other.
How much is it worth?
So there's been a sort of fairly sort of common thread through a lot of archaeological work on objects from the historic and the prehistoric past.
But over the last ten, 20 years,
archaeologists have started to sort of stretch themselves a little bit and started to ask very different kinds of questions of their material,
because things aren't just for particular purpose.
Things just aren't from a particular time.
Objects, as we know, from our kitchen drawers and our mantel pieces, have all sorts of funny connections with ourselves,
ideas that connect people through objects, people from our families, from distant generations, or other members of families of other connections.
And so there is a connection between objects and biographies, which is starting to snap into focus in a lot of archaeological writing.
And essentially what a lot of people are trying to experiment, though, is the idea that objects tell stories.
Objects have histories. They have biographies. Sometimes they act on people and encourage them to remember certain things places, people, ideas.
Now as archaeologists have started to stretch themselves, maybe a little more imaginative in the way that they approach the things that they excavate.
So they begin to realise that the language that they use, the forms of expression that they commonly use to try and explain,
describe or put across what's important about those objects. Now that language comes up short.
That language is found wanting because I'm sure some of you at least may have read one or two archaeology books occasionally a long time ago.
They were absolutely thrilling to read, but a lot of them are very, very boring.
This thing is ten centimetres long and weighs after a kilogram, whatever.
But as we started to look at different qualities to things, so we begin to realise that we need to write about them in different ways.
And that's where the conversations that Alan and I have been having over the last few years have really started to explore overlaps.
Because in Alan's work, work that I've certainly been reading since I was a child,
you find just that sense of the connections between things and people and things and places.
So I'm not going to turn into an academic.
The way the pattern of today is going to run is that we're going to look at three plate, three objects, three places and three books.
In each case, we're going to look at an artefact which has loomed large in the imagination of our own writing, three of three of these books.
We'll get to talk about those for a few minutes.
And then Roberts is very kindly agreed to read passages from each of those books and will introduce those passages.
So we're going to talk for a few minutes about each object and then move on.
And because some of the objects are relatively small, we will have them up there on the screen and I'll sort of scroll through those.
We'll deal with first two objects and then we'll move to the third.
And after we finish talking about the third book for Robert Rees, the final passage, which is slightly longer,
it's probably a good idea if we have a couple of minutes just for people to stretch their legs,
because I'm sure I probably already don't need to tell you that these benches are a little unforgiving and I've got a very comfortable seat here.
So perhaps we should have that set to something.
Okay. So we're going to begin by looking at this thing and perhaps if you'd like to start by hand, how did this come to you?
I'll tell you how it came to me a bit later. But I knew of this thing and things like it all my life.
My family live at the foot of Alderley edge and these often used doorstops that nobody
else asked questions about and they were just doorstops and very efficiently are.
Then in 1901, the typical gentleman and trickery of the day,
I started to ask questions of these things because he was finding them in specific places on Alderley edge,
which were associated he felt intuitively with.
Pre-history. And in his paper of 1901.
Dozens of these things are illustrated.
And how I came to find it was that I was running up the 400 foot screen of Alderley edge,
which is it consists of the spillage from various periods of mining.
And if you grow up on the edge, you you don't have to do what you're doing.
And I was going up on all fours it so steep.
And I wasn't looking where I was putting my hand because I knew where I was.
Yeah, I did that. I froze.
I just don't look. Because I could feel this polish.
Well, then I did look. And then I covered it over with grass.
And run all the way back home and got a camera. And before I lifted it like a good archaeologist, I photographed it.
It's a fascinating photograph. And in my lifetime, I found two.
And I've also found. A stone hammer that makes the groove.
So for me, until I was 18.
This was a doorstop and probably a very effective doorstop as well.
And just a little bit about how how old it is and.
It's basically it's a it's a hammer a ball dates to the early to the middle part of the Bronze Age.
So best part of about 4000 years old. And it's one of thousands that are found both around Audley and around other
natural sources of copper in the British Isles and elsewhere and indeed elsewhere.
I've handled identical ones in Armenia and in Ohio.
It looks up there and in the hand like a fairly crude and ill shape and piece of stone.
But the fact that you find things like this at mines, particularly places where there's copper working,
going on in pre-history, and they all look so similar, broadly, very similar.
It's telling us that actually this is a really good shape to do the work.
The thing is made for.
You may be thinking, why haven't we turned up here with a really pretty object, very fine polished blade and jade or something like that.
The thing about this is that when you actually start to look at it and look closely,
it has its own kind of beauty and has its own kind of story that draws you in because it's a fairly simple tool,
but it carries on it the marks of its use and the marks of its making very, very clearly.
As Allen says, the hand just drops straight onto this group,
which was packed with other stone hammers to create a recess around which with a some kind of strap
would have been that would have been bound in order for this to be used as a sort of large hammer,
but also sometimes suspended. I was trying to think of an analogy like those Oval Office toys where you knock the
bowls together and there's no archaeological evidence suggests that did not happen.
But it's been it's been work very effectively to create this very heavy, very dense, massive tool with extraordinary amounts of pecking and scarring.
On the end, you can see up there and these dents in the surface are the dents created by this being pounded against the stone.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that these are the things that survive.
They're made of stone. So they're very durable, but they are the tip of the iceberg because associated with this would have been a lot of timber
framed was for holding the hammers when they're being used ladders for getting up the rock face,
bonfires that would have been lit to split the stone and crack it and prepare it for extraction.
And these things are littered around all over the over the of the edge where there is this natural outcrop of copper coming through.
And one of the things, again, that as an archaeologist we got very interested in is the idea that.
Rather than just saying there's a cop.
I saw some people who wanted to make metal objects, went and extracted the copper and smelted it to mix it to that,
to make bronze that people were coming to a place that had a greater significance than that,
that actually the people in the beginning of the Bronze Age, Bronze was not just a useful material for making tools.
It was something that was working, was shrouded in magic prescription, perhaps even taboos.
It was a material that could only be found in certain places, places that required journeys.
And certainly from the point of view of you growing up near the edge, I mean,
the stories that are attached to the place and to some of the workings as well.
Give us a sense of just how complex those ideas can be. Very complex.
If you're born to a place and you're actually at a disadvantage because everything's so obvious, you don't ask questions about it.
So I came rather late to being intelligent about I am inside a lot.
My grandfather, who was a Smith, he had an intuitive knowledge and feel for a place and he would talk about things in terms of the late 19th century.
Smith. Which I now know she was.
Remembering from a great deal further back in time.
And if you want to know more about that, you will have to turn up at 5:00 this evening when I shall be extremely fascinating on the subject.
Excellent. What are the other things that I think is quite interesting about subjects like this is, again,
is it holds up a bit of a lens to the way that archaeologists think commonly think problems.
And a lot of us, when we find prehistoric or historical objects, we concentrate on the moment when it was made and when it was first used.
But actually, an object like this has a life that carries on right the way through to the present.
And actually it's the way that things are being picked up, then recognised in different ways and given different meanings.
It's often just as interesting as what that piece may have meant during that during the course of the Bronze Age.
One of the things that is really interesting, though,
is the fact that there are hundreds of these scattered around all sources of opportunities, like those found an orderly.
And for a long time it was common for archaeologists to recognise this lettering
of stones of roughly hewn shape as indicative of them being largely disposable,
the sort of polystyrene cups of the day you'd use them,
and then you toss them to one side, which wasn't that small, because when eventually these things are taken seriously,
it upsets a lot of modern living still working academics who didn't want there to be a Bronze Age on Alderley Edge.
In fact, Alderley Edge is the oldest dated.
Metalworking site in England as a result of these things are the arguments of what they what they were by the people who didn't want,
for their own reasons, to be a Bronze Age alderley edge where they were used to hold down the temporary heather.
Covering the of the bothers that the miners work.
There's no evidence of these structures. But that's what these must be.
That's hold down the roof. And of course, once they would do it.
But there was no evidence of there were ever structures to be used on and on.
Mark is in the world where he has to suffer this.
People become fanatical and they do not want stories.
They simply want to know that they are right. And that's very, very sad.
But I think if we move on to the next one, Mark, that's the one that really brings everything together very smartly, I think.
Ken Before Robert does his reading, it is the one other thing that I think is nice about about these objects is that although they
look rough and we imagine we used to imagine that they were disposed that found at the source.
And one of the things that this tells us is that people left the tools where they were at the source, at the rock place,
where they were working, so that when they left back to the settlements, they anticipated returning.
They were going to come back and pick up the tools again and use them again. So again,
you can sometimes find there are hints of people's relationships with places that can be
found not only in the materials and things made from the way they've been attended to,
the way it's been left in certain settings. And so to move this out of reality into fiction.
When I came to write the way to Southern England and I was aware of the power of these things in my imagination, they really did get to me.
And so I use them. And in the centre of a single moment, there are some very unpleasant creatures that live underground.
They are a SWAT Alpha, and they have weapons.
And Robert, if you will now go and read, we shall see how I use it because of the way it's shown.
Ahead of them are lights flickered red on the channel wall.
What would you do now, cousin? Said, dear, after all, do we run like shadows or do we snuffing out?
We are too near said they know the tree. We must not turn back.
Good. Then we shall do this. Now the men children stand here.
You go forward to that opening and stay hidden with Widowmaker drawn till I call.
I shall wait behind this boulder. Hold your ground, stone maiden. Be not afraid.
No smart shall touch you that I can promise.
The light grew stronger and cast shadows on the wall Spindly shadows with broad heads and hands and around the bend in the tunnel came the swats.
There were ten of them. Each carried a pine torch that had been dipped in the flames of the fire dregs.
Blood from a girl around each of their waists hung a crude axe or hammer.
The head was a roughly worked stone, kidney or dumbbell shaped.
There was a groove about the middle round which was bent a withI lashed tight with songs.
The lamp trembled in Colin's hand. The smarts halted inside, and slowly they began to advance.
Colin flushed the lamp into their eyes, but they did not do more than blink and laugh.
The children retreated. The Swats rushed and your Astros step from behind the Boulder.
His sword Derwin in his hand. He bowed low before them and spoke in their own tongue.
Greetings. We are well met. The spots fell back, hissing like lizards and those to the rear had more courage.
See? It is he whom we must kill.
The men children are of no matter. But our Lord's have long wanted his life.
So there is courage in SWAT of our high said roar.
This is a day of marvels. Let my sword test the mettle of your new found backbones.
We come, we come. Gun them are cried jaw after all, and he well done when above his head with both hands.
Two swats died under that stroke. They buckled at the knees and crumbled into dust.
Gundam are the sparks flew from iron on stone, but they were now six spots in the tunnel and four torches guttering on the sand.
The sparks wrapped. Giraffe's roar rested on his sword.
Cousin. It would seem that done. One is too bitter for their taste.
Let them save a widow maker. Then either we came from hiding.
He lied about him in silence. He did not share duress.
Rose Joy and the uproar grew less then ordered his helmet spun on the foot and his mail shirt rang.
But not for long. The dwarfs stood gazing at each other across a litter of torches and stone hammers.
We don't make her as well named, said Dorothy Rule. She is going to upon me in this fight.
I must find me more spots. Come away, cousin said for another.
We must not turn from the past, nor rest till we are beyond their reach.
Colin picked up a hammer. It was heavy, but balanced.
Well. Shall we take some? They could be useful.
They would drag you to your death. Where we are going said for now, they re leave them.
We do not need such tainted things.
Okay. We'll move on to the second object and object that when Allen, with all due ceremony dropped into my hand, created quite a spark.
It's an extraordinary, rather small thing. And the pictures up here and again, perhaps if you want to just start us off,
this is perhaps one of the most exciting and important archaeological objects that resonates.
Forever. And it came into my hands.
1950. And a mile and a half from Alderley Edge is the reduced peat moss of lindow, which is used for extraction peat to provide you with grow bags.
And in 1950, a peach digger who were and this is the important part was digging by hand,
not by machine at a depth of about 4 to 6 feet in his trench in the peat found this.
He recognised that it was important and he took it to the Museum of Manchester, who,
without any recognition of his extraordinary sense of duty or without his permission,
filed pieces of the document and the report says it's a piece of haematite with cork crystals on it.
And because they'd done it without his permission, this untutored piece,
Digger took it back and said to his drinking mate, The postman, give it to our alma.
We look after it better, which I did, because it's an extraordinary object that was 1950 and because it was dug by hand.
We know the approximate depth and the peat where it was found.
And to make it short, it was found at the same depth and within 100 metres of Lindow man who was discovered
in 1984 the first really significant by by that I mean studied bog body in
Britain so a piece of haematite Manchester University got that bit right and of
course and they totally missed the question how on earth did it get 4 to 6 feet?
And the people in Cheshire expect me to answer that.
Yep. And it's an extraordinary object because again, with my archaeological hat on an object like this,
the details of which you can see up there, really challenges, really basic taken for granted.
I work in a discipline, a discipline that was formed out of antiquarian interests in the later 18th and certainly particularly the 19th century.
And it's a discipline that formed alongside others like geology.
And that means that quite often when we're working as archaeologists, we say, well, these objects belong with us because we're archaeologists.
Those objects along with geologists.
So artefacts that have been fashioned by people in the past that for us, objects like this belong in the world of geology and geological discussion.
The very fact of the placement of this object in the peat at the same depth as the as the bulk body
that's become known as Lindow man tells us that this was also an object of thought in the past,
that people perceived it, they thought about it, they gave it some form of significance.
And that kind of significance, whatever it was, completely cuts across the boundaries between our disciplines.
We see history on the one side and geology on the other. People in the past may have understood the world around them in very, very different ways.
And actually, if you start to ask yourself, you realise that we do that to just have a glance on Ordnance Survey map and just
see how many named places there are out in what appears to be the middle of nowhere.
So we have a very complicated relationship with nature and that's what this piece really does to me,
is to bring out some of those ideas, some of those qualities.
Now, there are parallels for this, not in the sense of other pieces of quartz and haematite laid to rest with bodies in box,
bodies that appear to have been placed there as various forms of sacrifice.
Sometimes the person has been has been killed and then placed into the boat.
And that seems to have been something that was done with due ceremony.
So objects have been placed in or near the boat with the body or near the body, perhaps part of that same process.
But there are other sites where we find quartz used in other kinds of arrangements.
For example, there's there's a number of tombs, Neolithic and Bronze Age tombs, where the entire surface of the floor too is coated in quartz.
There are other places where you find quartz has been rammed into the interstices of the stone warning that defines defines a tomb.
And there were stone circles, particularly in Scotland, where quartz again is laid out as a carpet around the circle,
which would create a very dramatic visual effect, but also much of what's what's it called, peaceful.
Thank you.
Piezo electricity, the rubbing, of course, the crushing and the crunching quartz, particularly at night, can create a light like pale moonlight.
And so again, there may well be all sorts of qualities to the way in which this material reacts when people.
Which may be important to folk at the time. If you dance on a floor of this stuff underground.
It can light up. Your feet catch fire? Yeah.
Just think about what that could mean if you had no knowledge of science.
And. It's not only Europe.
It's worldwide. And I'm going to throw Marc back in.
I'm going to hold on to this for a moment. It's always seems to have a very strong connection with life, life and death.
Birth rebirth. And in Australia it is the ultimate spiritual object.
It is the seam of the dream taught.
The ancestors seem left behind. So.
I came to write a book based on fact.
I don't make things up. I find things.
And I'm a five miles from Alderley edge.
There was a man called William Buckley who in 802 was transported for life to Australia.
And the converse. Had a very strange to us now perception of space time that it was quite ordinary to them.
They believe that when they got to Australia, if they walked north to China and turned left, they would come to the elephant and castle.
But of course they needed the map so they would take a piece of shirt, tail scrap of anything, and on it they would draw.
A cross with. The top two at a point, you know, and they would hold the thing like that and follow it.
As a result of which very few of them were ever seen. Again, William Buckley decided that he was going to walk home.
And after the first few minutes, this is regular practice of being shot at.
The guard decided to save their ammunition and William Buckley disappeared.
And to cut the story short. It wasn't short for him.
He must have walked for two years alone.
In that dreadful outback, not knowing where he was.
And at the end of his life, he was cruel.
And he saw stick. In the amount.
Just ahead of him. And he thought that would help him get to China.
He crawled, reached up. And died.
The effort. You. He was found by a group of Aboriginals who had no concept of Europeans.
But they did believe that the dead. Became white.
And the state was not the state. It was a spear on the mound was not a mound.
It was a burial mound of the great Arthurian figure, except that you'd been done a few years only living work.
And they thought Warren would come back. And for 32 years, William Buckley lived as a revolutionary.
Now for the. For the writer in me and the anthropologist.
That's a lot of the story, but it doesn't make sense. If you have come back from the dead.
Okay, we accept that you are six feet, five and 7/8 inches tall, which he was.
We accept your weight and it's quite acceptable that you don't understand a word of what we're saying.
But at the end of the 32 years, William is saying the next whites to appear from being massacred.
Now, the anthropologist in me knows that for him to have the authority to do that, he was an elder, a leader and a shaman.
And to come from being a liberal in Malton Cheshire was a considerable journey.
Now. Roberts is going to read two short passengers one from before the time that William Buckley.
Goes to Australia. He is sitting on the edge of a mirror.
Because the love of his life. And he had seen a rainbow strike the water.
Rainbows again are very important. These things produce rainbows.
And. His love.
Esther wants to go to the end of the rainbow. So they walk along a fallen old log.
And the rainbow, of course, isn't there. And they sit there. And the first section is what happens next.
So Robert will read the first section of links, the to the second section.
So you stay up. Yeah, I will come back. Oh, before you start, Robert.
There's that word. There is a special word which is used as a love token, and it's called Swaddle Reader.
I love to read. This is the first excerpt from Strand Loper.
He caught hold of her wrist and wrote with her hand in the water.
I do love the.
She pulled her hand clear. The water shimmered and was still.
I do love thee, he said. And I do love the she said.
But you'll get that [INAUDIBLE] job first. He tried to kiss her.
No, not. Why do you get that [INAUDIBLE] off? I do love you.
Hit. She laughed and splashed water at him.
She reached down to scoop more, but her fingers caught on a hardness in the mud.
She took it and put it into his hand there.
Don't say I never give you nothing. It was a stone.
A black stone flecked with red part bubbled as a brain part rough as frost, and all stuck about with clear crystals that winked in the light.
He held it on his palm. It's a subtlety that she said from the end of the rainbow, said William, our swaddled giraffe.
She said from me to the. The rainbow was gone.
So when William is sent to Australia, he takes one thing with him.
He keeps a squad leader.
And of course when it when it goes into an Aboriginal context, it changes its function completely and is a sign of great authority.
It is the seaman of the dreaming and he has it in his hand and he is found by the Aborigines.
All the more reason to be certain that this is more than good.
Come back. And he is given a little bag to keep it in while he's recovering.
And the next section is a dream.
Or is it a dream? It's the beginning of his reabsorption into the culture of the Aboriginal mind, and it is his first real initiation.
They were asleep now he knew. But he was dreaming.
He was dreaming. The fires and the sleepers all as they were.
The man with feathers in his hair who had given him the woven bag for the swaddle.
It came towards him. He was painted with red clay and he looked down into his eyes and turned and walked.
William followed him. They walked among the trees, beyond the firelight, under the moon, and came to a lake near.
It was a rock. In front of the rocks at the old man in a circle, and all were painted with the red clay.
They sang and clapped the ringing sticks together. The man led him into the circle and painted him as the man and then stood him before the rock.
He forced his right hand open against the stone and sprayed red clay over it with his mouth.
The print of the hand was sharp on the stove. The man wound a net about his head so that he could not see and held him by the arms from behind.
The old man stopped dissing singing, but still beat the sticks slowly.
And the echo of them bounced off the rock and grew louder until the rock itself was ringing.
And he could no longer hear the sticks behind him. But only the clashing of the rock before.
He felt the hands on his shoulders tighten and they moved him into balance, holding him.
And then as a pause between the echo, he was shoved forward and would have fallen, but for the hands.
And the echo was behind him, then silent everywhere.
The hands unwound the net. He was inside the rock and the old man was sitting in a circle.
And the walls and the roof were all of shining crystals.
He turned around. There was no way out of the cave.
He was in a scrap of brightness and humming light.
Each crystal fitted the next, though they were of different size and shape.
But he saw that they had five sides. Even the smallest made a clutch of five.
But the war was not right. There was a hole. He went to it and touched it.
Yet, though, he could see the hole. He could not put his fingers in the air, would not yield.
He looked at the man. The man looked at him. He looked again at the hole.
He knew the shape. It was not five sides, but an egg, rough and black.
There was no moon outside, but the black was full of stars and it was not one sky.
But many bubbled as a brain, and every sky had stars.
And the stars were of the humming. He took the swatted it off from the back of his shoulder and placed it against the hole.
The shape fit it and the air held it.
The swirl did off, left no gap. The wall was made.
The reading tells us that the meanings of things are not grafted onto objects after the fact.
They are the fact. And that what we want to try and understand why things are treated the way they are or the deposited in the way that they are,
and why that picked up again over time. It's because we need to think directly about the perception of those things,
the way they were given meaning by people in pre-history, a right way through to the present.
The first time I read that I had read that passage,
I just bowled me over because I was working on the study of a stone source in Cumbria at the time and I was just it just chimes so strongly,
so much so that it's now on my reading list at university.
Let's move on to the to the third object now and again up here on the on the screen, a little dimly lit, a small stone book, family feud.
Anybody who gets involved with our family changes.
We and we were looking for extending our medieval hovel so that it had a septic tank,
an extra room as a result of which we ended up dismantling a ten room Tudor apothecaries house 18 miles away and redirecting it.
And one of the men who was working on that, who started off as an unemployed,
lowest level, cheapest we can get off the dole queue at the labour exchange.
A crew, please. She and his brother in law were employed as muscle, and they ended up being skilled craftsmen.
They knew how that house came down because they took it down like it was a Tudor level and they put it back up again.
And in doing so, they they found the things in the house.
That is another subject we could spend a whole day on the things that have been placed
into the House various periods from its building in around 1500 to protect the house.
So Cedric. Cedric Wheeler said the great said took to spending weekends looking at old buildings.
And he appears one Monday morning with this.
Which he found in an old crumbling shed in an old, crumbling farmyard.
And as you can see it. It is it works as a book is actually credible up to within about a foot.
It will have had a brass. Cross set into it.
That was gone. It's also been damaged.
There are groups that are being cut.
And they would have either been behind the cross if they predate the cross or they are part of the removal of the cross.
And what was done to the stone? Now if you're going to take a stone walk.
And take the cross off. Perhaps you're going to recycle it?
Don't know. But why attack the book?
And what is the point of having a book that you can't read?
Well, I've written a few of those and I've seen things of this nature before,
and they crop up at various times in the history and they're interpret in lots of different ways.
This one, made of Slate is very similar in its general character to a number of pieces that I've
seen working on quarries in the northern part of Wales around Penryn and Llanberis.
And one possible suggestion as to how these things come into being and why they come into being is that they're apprentice pieces.
The people learning to work of given an opportunity to not just late at the roofing where they're arriving and splitting sheets of slate,
but when they're actually making more decorative slate for the houses and particularly in the Victorian period,
that they would be expected to make something to demonstrate that they had skills in working against the grain of the slate.
And so something like this might be the sort of apprentice piece that would be created, but that actually isn't usually what happens.
Apprentice pieces tend to be rather more rather more flamboyant than that.
And what we often find in North Wales and indeed in other parts of the country is that
people make these for themselves and they make them for themselves for other reasons.
And there are several different reasons,
but several of them within that take the point of departure from Alan's point about what's the point of the book and can't read.
One suggestion that's been made by historians is that books like this matter
because they are owned by and carried into church by people who can't read.
They are a symbol of the boat which they carry or Psalter or hymnal.
And it doesn't matter that you can't open it in the conventional sense,
because what it signifies is your adherence to the word, even if the word on it's printed is printed in this case.
That's certainly one one possibility. Another possibility is that their campus has memorials and a book that cannot be opened.
Certainly in terms of the sort of iconography, the symbolism of memorials in the Victorian era,
it's very common to find books in stone where that's the kind of imagery that's being evoked.
A book that can't be, can't be open to book that can't be read. A life that's been drawn to a close.
So these things in that character might say something about adherence to a particular set of values, a particular set of beliefs.
They might also hold in the pages that you can't read the memory of particular people.
And of course, they stay in the house and in the family.
Handed on, handed down, perhaps through the generations.
Which brings us back to the point that Alan made at the at the beginning of his description about why these things are found in houses.
You said little bit more about it. It's a big subject, but I shall not make it be the magic.
I like to think of it as it's the science that we've not yet discovered.
And if you think of all the things that can go wrong when you have no sense of science whatsoever.
Your cow drops dead for no apparent reason.
And the only connection you can think of is that old Biddy Garner looked at you strangely.
But it happened.
I mean, this is behind a great deal of the horror of the witch trials.
And so we find and I mean, we because of the work we did on dismantling the house and adding it to an earlier house,
a medieval house, we have found in the fabric of both buildings what are called aperture paint objects.
And even marking little scratches in the wood and these objects or place the weak points of the house.
Usually in the context of a doorway or a window, a chimney, if there is one.
And very commonly. And we have them worn shoes.
They are at the chimney. Why? Is it a kind of distraction for the witch or the manoeuvre?
Malevolence? We don't know. Are these because these also have been found in the context of the building.
And they haven't been lost. They have been placed.
They've actually been placed behind wood, solid timber.
So. They're powerful in themselves.
And before we end this session, because Robert is going to give you the whole works on this,
I'd still like to have Mark's thoughts because I don't have any.
And I promise you, we have not set this up beforehand.
This is coming cold. Why would anybody set out to damage the book?
The scratches that you can see. On the surface that you can't see, that you cannot see on the surface are really deep.
I put my thumbnail backwards and forwards in them several times when we've had this conversation about why these deep gouges should be there,
whether they're before the cross, whether they're as a function of taking the cross off where they are after.
On balance, I'd say probably that they've been gouged into it after the cross has come up.
I don't know. Nothing wrong with admitting. I don't know.
Doesn't mean to say I can't make up a story. But if this is an object that matters to people.
If this is an object that is important to somebody, that importance might be marked by treating with reverence.
Treating it with respect. Placing it somewhere where it serving useful purpose in protecting the household.
But things change. People die bad deaths.
People fall out of favour. And objects that are somehow connected to them have some kind of biographical link.
Sometimes they need to be dealt with.
Sometimes you need to scratch away the familiar surface and take the the negative connotations out of an object before it can be used,
treated or handled in different ways. When we talk about Australia and Aboriginal understandings of the world in stone,
our imaginations are perhaps more inclined to accept that that might well be the case that people thought about and think about things in that way.
It's exactly the same for us and it certainly is a very important thing in understanding people's relationships to seven in the 18th,
19th and even 20th century. People were still putting stone axes in water troughs in the 1950s and 1960s because a
stone axe from the Neolithic in a water trough would protect your cattle from being ill.
And if you scratch the surface of one and put the dust in some milk and gave it to your children that sleep well.
We always making stories about these things and when we're working and reworking those stories, editing as we go along.
But then also to his question, I don't know why, and I think that's important.
Why should we we come into this world and are educated in places and we're always expected to come up with an answer.
Perhaps the answer is something that is beyond our comprehension or beyond our retrieval.