Hare boots deep in winter mud, Greenwich Park community archaeologist Andrew Mayfield runs through the findings of the latest of the park’s volunteer digs. “We found a swallow brooch, piles of clay pipes and coins, the lens of a sextant and, oddly enough, a Sony mobile phone that was buried quite deep,” he says.
Mayfield gestures to the volunteers, who range in age from 20s to 70-somethings, waist-deep in dirt trenches and armed with trowels and brushes.
“We have one last push to uncover Charles II’s steps today,” Mayfield continues. “Steve and Karen over there are brushing up a nice vertical [step] for the photos.”
The dig is part of a boom in community archeology which is seeing everyone from children to retirees join groups up and down the country digging up Britain’s history.
Hundreds of volunteers, including primary school children, unearthed a 1,400-year-old last month “possible temple” near Sutton Hoo in Suffolk as part of a project that started three years ago.
In Cardiff, school children were also involved in the excavation of bronze age Caerau hill fort in 2022, while further north, Newcastle University’s citizen science project, WallCapexcavate and preserve Hadrian’s Wall with the help of local residents.
The Operation Nightingale scheme, in partnership with Wessex Archaeology, offers ex-servicemen injured in conflict the chance to take part in excavations on Salisbury Plain, while recent years have seen the rise of have-a-go archaeologists working their own gardens dig up with trowels bought online.
Chloë Duckworth is the lead archaeologist on More4’s The Great British Dyke: History in your back garden and author of the accompanying book. She says that Britain’s historically densely populated countryside offers a rich picking for amateurs, with back garden archaeologists unearthing such treasures as Roman finds under children’s garden trampolines.
“Community archeology in particular is great for well-being,” she said. “You’re doing something mindful, outdoors, with a team.”
The hilltop excavation on which the Royal Observatory stands in Greenwich Park is part of a three-year, £12m lottery-funded park renovation that seeks to restore the remains of a baroque water garden laid out by Charles II digging, which dates. from the 17th century, when the park was royal palace grounds.
It follows the community excavation of a second world war air raid shelter east of the park, and 2021 and 2022 digging of a Saxon burial mound and the remains of Dam’s Magnetic Observatoryan enclosure built in 1817 to analyze the earth’s magnetic field.
The latest digs have uncovered trinkets dating back to the park’s heyday as the setting for the biannual Greenwich Fair. For more than a century from 1730 to 1857, 250,000 Londoners descended on the park on May Day and Whitsun to enjoy sweet wine and stout, don papier-mache comic noses and enjoy games such as “Kiss in the Ring” (in which a player can kiss any player he catches) and “tumbling”, which involved taking young women up and then Observatory Hill and One Tree Hill (then nicknamed “Holiday Hill”) in states of disarray dragged.
The latter is narrated by Charles Dickens in his 1836 Sketches by Boz: “The chief amusement is to drag young ladies up the steep hill leading to the Observatory, and then drag them down again, at the top of their speed, much to the disturbance of their curls and bonnets, and much to the building up viewers from below,” writes Dickens, in a passage that delineates beautiful sights and sounds, including “oysters as big as cheeseboards,” the “roar of speaking trumpets” and “occasional roars of the wild animal shows” .
Greenwich historian Horatio Blood points out that pensioners from the Napoleonic Wars made a brisk living by renting out their telescopes at the fair, partly for the purpose of peering up tumbling women’s skirts.
Greenwich Fair was banned in part in 1857, Blood says, because of the number of broken bones and head injuries sustained by the tumbling revelers.
Park regular and local Sarah Costley, 47, likes the fact that the digs have shed new light on Victorian Londoners. “In this day and age, it seems like a crazy thing to do to go out to the park and effectively flash people,” she says. “Were young ladies tumbling with wild abandon of propriety, or were they under pressure? Were they reckless, or were they led astray by their male partners? It’s eye-opening.”
At the top of the dig, volunteer James Wisher, 22, a recent archeology graduate, says he found remains of a drinking cup, bone stems from smoking pipes and Victorian coins lower down, although finds at the top layer were minimal thanks to the clay layers poured by later Victorians on Charles II’s descending parterres.
“I like to work out when the coins date, of the changing faces of the monarchs,” he says.
Finds like this also help date the layers the volunteers are digging through, from the upper layers of shingles to the compacted ocher and terracotta clays of earlier periods. An early find, the swallow brooch was a forget-me-not traditionally gifted by Victorian naval men to their loved ones.
The growth in community digs like this, which in Greenwich’s case have attracted overseas tourist volunteers as well as local residents, coincides with the advent of archeology tours, including the Vindolanda Charitable Trust‘s digs from Roman Britain – its Hadrian’s Wall digs are fully booked for 2024 – and commercial equipment DigVenturesleading group digs at sites including Lindisfarne in Northumberland, Weoley Castle in the West Midlands and Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire.
However, the increase in community digging has led to warnings from bodies including Historic England that storage space will soon run outas finds increase at the same time as financially strained museums close their archives.
The assumption of traditional archeology is that “only white men are agents, economically and otherwise,” says feminist archaeologist Lucia Nixon, who discusses the growing diversity in the archaeological corps that also includes the rise of advocacy groups such as Women in Archaeology and the Association of Black Archaeologists.
“It makes sense,” she adds, “that digs populated by young people, women and people of color would see finds through fresh eyes.”
