Archaeological Asset-Stripping in Crosby Garrett: Two Google Earth Games (1)

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I hate secrets, don't you? I hate it when somebody swipes something which should belong to us all from under everybody's noses and flogs it off for 2.3million quid and will not tell anyone where he got it, or even tell us what his name is. Where, oh where is the land of the equally anonymous landowner (let's call him "Farmer Flogitoff") where "Anonymous Persistent Single Finder" (who is plural) from Peterlee eighty kilometres away has been going back by himself, but with his mates and finding "nothing"? Actually, I think the public [who are the real stakeholder in the bit of overpriced archaeological heritage sold off to some anonymous buyer] have a right to know. Why should the origin of this nationally important find be known only to one farmer, one metal detecting artefact hunter (or group of them) and a few boffins in the Portable Antiquities Scheme? (And perhaps a few nighthawks who've been down the pub in Crosby Garrett and listened to the gossip)?

Until the full story comes out, we can play an amusing game with Google Earth. Please join in if you have it installed, its quite an eye opener.

We have some clues from what the PAS and others have been saying about the site they were shown by Mr "Anonymous Persistent Single Finder" (bear in mind he is now revealed to be a they).

Or we could do it the other way round. We could imagine we are metal detector using artefact hunters out to find some collectable or saleable (remember one of us is currently unemployed) loot. Let's start off with this approach first.

GAME ONE- FIND A SITE TO LOOT (LEGALLY OF COURSE)

Well, as any looter knows, goodies will be found anywhere, but its boring and unprofitable going over empty fields, so we have to find a "productive" site. Preferably not too far from the road, but far enough so your searching won't be interrupted by passers by asking stupid questions. Obviously there are areas up in northern England where nothing much happened, bits of the landscape which for large parts of the past were wasteland, fields, pasture, woodland etc. Then there are places "where people were" and where they may have dropped, lost or buried things. Obviously the best thing to do is look for known archaeological sites and search around them. As we know collectors like Roman stuff, its easy to understand, classical roots of western civilization and all that... So out comes the Victoria county History (for those counties with useful ones) and the OS map of Roman Britain (could be any edition really bought in a secondhand bookshop for pennies). There we see where the romans "did things". Like build Roman roads, lots of them shooting across the province joining up places, places "where people were". Lots of dots around them, marking where the OS had records of Roman sites.

But the Roman roads are a good place to start. Now obviously its along these roads, major and minor that people were settling and "doing things". That's where the collectable finds are. So we can look in Google Earth and pretty soon, once you've got your eye in, you can see where many of the Roman roads ran, some are roads and tracks today, some mere hedgerows in a discontinuous line - some just soilmarks or earthworks. We can narrow down the search even more and look for traces of settlement, old field systems, banks and ditches of settlement enclosures. That's where to dig! Indeed, many ancient sites like these are perfectly visible on Google earth to a satellite kilometres up in the sky. Amazing. Once we've spotted a likely one, a trip out there will probably be rewarded with something collectable.

So let us imagine we have some urge to go to a peaceful little village somewhere - like Crosby Garrett (good pub there). Let us have a look, Roman road, yes, you can see one snaking across the hills... and around them all sorts of earthworks. Field systems, trackways, something that look like pillow mounds to me (but cannot be, not here surely, unless they are monastic, was there a monastery up here?). The field archaeology of this parish looks fascinating. How many of those shallow earthworks have been surveyed and recorded? What proper fieldwalking and field survey projects (amateur or professional) have taken place here? Like most of Britain, this needs documenting properly before destroyed by agriculture, development and - artefact hunters.

To sum up, in this parish there are all sorts of places to look, but here on Google Earth I can see some sites that if I was a looter I'd be on like a shot. There are one or two things visible on just this one source without any need for looking in books and other boring things about archaeology. There's enough information here to go a'looting on if we were looters trying to get artefacts out to fill our own collections or to sell. There are one or two sites just crying out to be looted for collectables here. Can you spot them? I bet even if you cannot, somebody else already has (even before the days of Google Earth), and probably most of them have already been stripped of part of their artefactual content by daytime (legal) detectorists and nightime (illegal ones).

[Let us note that the PAS database where the location data is "fuzzy" does not contain a single artefact which looks as if it is coming from those sites you've just looked at. Do we really believe that ten thousand artefact hunters over the past decade or so have not yet visited them, either by day or night? Some of them are so obvious, aren't they?]

For GAME TWO: FOLLOW THE CLUES, see the post below this.