Digging

"The past is not behind us but beneath, and the ground we walk on is nothing more than a pit of bones, from which the grass unstinting grows."¹

Olivia Laing was writing about a place in Sussex, but I thought about her words as I sat on a bench in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire, looking out over this landscape.

This area will be the subject of an archaeological dig in the summer months as part of the University's Fieldschool. I've spent the last week devising a way to make a creative response to the dig as part of my residency.

Reading through the excavation plan, I've picked up some terms new to me:  LiDAR, a sort of laser-scanning of the landscape, that can "see" through buildings and trees to create a beautiful graded monochrome image of the land's undulations; and lithics, the study of flints and stone tools, our earliest form of tool making. New and old technologies converging.

Bradgate Park has a long history, but as a protected area most of it has not been excavated so there are many secrets still hidden. As a place that I walk often, it will be really exciting to be a part of an investigation here.

I'm already thinking about the area in a different way. I watch the people enjoying the winter sunshine, walking the paths and tilting up the slopes, not giving a thought to what might be beneath them in suspended time. I wonder how my work will respond to the unlayering of some of this landscape.

The University's Fieldschool now have a blog and a Facebook page where you can follow progress and find out about the public open days.

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1 To The River, Olivia Laing, 2011^↩

A Reliquary for a Hen Harrier's Wishbone

Reliquary for a Hen Harrier's Wishbone, acrylic, gold leaf, 2015

I have just completed this reliquary. The box is a plastic specimen box from the Bone Lab; the design is in gold leaf, based on a medieval manuscript illumination.

The box measures 5.5cm x 4.3cm,  and just under 2cm high.  The wishbone of a hen harrier would fit inside exactly.

I was fascinated to discover in the collection that the wishbone (furcula, or "little fork" in Latin) of different birds are very different shapes. Some are quite straight and stiff, some very curved and fluid; some skinny, some wider and flatter. The hen harrier's wishbone is rounded, almost heart shaped. You can see the shape of it in the centre of the curling gold leaf.

It seems to me that the furcula is a very special bone. It is (almost) only birds that have them, and their function is to keep the bird's chest from tearing apart each time it beats its wings. The force of the wing stroke would be enough to do this if it wasn't for the strengthening power of the wishbone.

The wishbone is a charmed bone, too. I remember from my own childhood making wishes on these bones from the Sunday roast.

My Reliquary for a Hen Harrier's wishbone is an empty box. We still have hen harriers in this country, but their continued existence is threatened; their numbers are fast declining and the RSPB think that only three pairs bred in England last year. The hen harrier needs our wishes. I have left the box empty because it is a reliquary for the future, perhaps for the last hen harrier. I hope it will never need to be filled.

Click here to read the RSPB's appeal for the hen harrier.

Display and burial

Archaeology is a continuous play between the hidden and the displayed.

Sketch for Wrapped Bone, 2014

It is curious that the things that prehistoric people would have displayed are now gone, the act of displaying them making them subject to corrosion by the elements.

Whereas the things they buried were then preserved...

...in order for us to then dig them up and reveal them again, and display them in museums.

The act of displaying something is an act of transformation.  A prehistoric tool made from bone is transformed by us, by placing it in a glass case, from a useful material thing into an object for admiring, revering its age, beauty and ingenuity. A relic.

However, prehistoric people buried their special things.

"British prehistory represents a complex dialectic between hiding and revealing things..."¹

Prehistoric peoples buried things in pits, placed things in tombs, concealed their hoards and buried objects as well as bones in careful and specific ways. But were they separating things out as special, such as we do with display? Or were they returning things to the earth, thereby reuniting them with the original source of all things?

When I'm working in the Bone Lab I think a lot about boxes. I'm surrounded by labelled boxes, categorised bones placed in bags and boxed, stacked around the room. Boxes come and go, occasionally there is a delivery from a Roman site, another set of boxes that need to be sifted through. Objects that have been excavated, revealed, from a site, only to be concealed once again in a box with an esoteric label with numbers and letters.

They might then be taken out of the box, sorted, and placed in other containers, transparent plastic bags or acrylic boxes. This time the boxes reveal their contents so that students can study them.

The relic container, the reliquary, is a box that conceals and displays simultaneously. The relic itself is hidden within the box, though sometimes the box is made around the relic to form the same shape, like clothing, describing what is inside. The outside of the relic displays something about the relic itself; often there are depictions of the life of the saint whose relics are held within.

The reliquary as an object of display and concealment represents, perhaps, the practice of archaeology itself as well as the practice of display and burial of both prehistoric and contemporary people.

You can see examples of medieval reliquaries on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. There are more, including Buddhist reliquaries, in the British Museum.

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1 Making and display: our aesthetic appreciation of things and objects, Chris Gosden, in Substance, Memory, Display, Ed. Colin Renfrew et al: McDonald Institute for Archaelogical Research, 2004^↩