From field to media fodder: a cautionary tale from the trenches

Introduction

In the context of mounting pressure to pursue the goals of ‘public engagement’, ‘knowledge exchange’ and ‘impact’, I wish to reflect here on what can happen when these broader research endeavours take on a life of their own. For a short period during the summer of 2009, my doctoral fieldwork became the subject of public debate, a flashpoint created by the media that amplified personal doubts and professional insecurities. One commentator on The Times website even went as far as to liken my research to ‘a big pile of poo’. ¹

Located at the interface between cultural and historical geography and ‘contemporary archaeology’, ² my doctoral thesis sought to explore archaeological thought and practice through the lens of non-representational theory. Placing particular emphasis on the temporality of Deleuzian ontology, its empirical focus was the changing landscape of the Royal Forest of Dean. During the 18th and 19th centuries the Forest of Dean was a significant industrial region, a landscape dominated by pitheads, tramroads and railways, coal mines, ironworks, and quarries. However, the 20th century saw the radical transformation of this landscape, from industry to leisure. Of course, no ‘archaeological’ thesis would be complete without time spent in the field. Fieldwork by means of excavation ‘remains a strong symbol of what constitutes a “proper” archaeologist’; ³ professionalism is measured by the wear on one’s trowel, and knowledge by the interpretation of site stratigraphy. It was with these established disciplinary concerns, expectations and pressures in mind, that I led a week-long archaeological investigation in August 2009 at a disused 1970s campsite located in the heart of the Forest. Occupying 4.4 hectares of open fields, Worcester Lodge campsite was opened in 1971 as part of plans to reduce overcrowding at the Forest’s two principal campsites: Christchurch and Bracelands. It was mainly used for club rallies and special events, including the ‘Forest of Dean Folk Festival’, and ceased operating as a fully functioning campsite in 1996. However, the site has been maintained for occasional use, including in the week preceding fieldwork − when it was used as an overspill car park and campsite associated with the 2009 ‘Bristol Boomtown’ weekend, held at the nearby Beechenhurst Lodge.

The central aim of my fieldwork was to explore the remains of camping as an ephemeral leisure activity, to understand what they might tell us about this most recent period in the Forest’s history. But beyond these stated goals, I also wanted to reflect upon the nature of archaeological practice: on archaeology as bodily regime, archaeology as knowledge-as-practice or thought-in-action, ⁴ and archaeology as textual practice. Engaging with the mundane and everyday aspects of fieldwork, I sought to document a series of encounters that generate affective registers; encounters with things, people and places that have the power to evoke and to unsettle. This was in part to recognize the ineluctable role of the body, ‘the gut instincts, the breathless anxieties and the gall that sees us get things done’, ⁵ but it was also to focus attention on other bodies, both human and non-human entities. I also sought to acknowledge the fluid, unbounded nature of the field site, which extended beyond Worcester Lodge to include a series of other spaces and times, such as Christchurch campsite, our temporary home during fieldwork at Worcester Lodge. However, while these matters do have a peripheral role, they are not the focus of this particular commentary on cultural geographies in practice. Instead, I wish to take time here to consider the media’s reaction to this open-ended experiment, and its subsequent reception in public and academic spheres.

Fieldwork I: in the field

I had spent months preparing for the fieldwork. As time wore on, my days became filled with a series of never-before-encountered and seemingly never-ending tasks: selecting the site, agreeing access arrangements, writing risk assessments, arranging insurance, negotiating an on-site water supply, ordering equipment and signing up volunteers − only half of whom had any archaeological experience. I pulled together a fieldwork guide containing background information about the site, maps and instructions on basic field practice. I met the Forestry Commission’s Community and Business Services Manager at Worcester Lodge for pre-site checks and to go over the plan. And, rather reluctantly, I agreed a press release with the Forestry Commission’s Public Relations Officer. I had no idea then of the events that would later unfold.

The approach was simple: divide the site into a grid, field walk ⁶ it, and dig a series of test pits at 30 m intervals. The first morning was spent field walking. Standing in line, sample bags at the ready, we made our way in transects from the south to the north of the field, repeating the exercise until the field had been completed. We recovered a mass of material, much of which was associated with the Bristol Boomtown weekend: glass bottles, a pair of flip-flops, beer cans, a woolly hat, tent pegs, and plenty of food items. We were half way through the exercise when I was contacted by local press. I spent the next 15 minutes on the end of a mobile phone, defending the concept of 20th century archaeology. ⁷ Later that day, the Forestry Commission’s Public Relations Officer arrived, accompanied by a number of photographers. Dispatched by several local papers, their task was to capture us at work. We posed for a series of shots, trowels in hand, kneeling over the first of the test pits that had been started that afternoon.

Also serving as an amenity for the local community, our location at Worcester Lodge field provided a perfect opportunity for dialogue and debate about the nature of the project. And, as word of our exploits spread in the local press, the number of visitors started to increase. All walks of life were intrigued by the project and keen to find out more. Engagement with the local community was hugely positive and I was proud of what we achieved in this regard.

By the end of the week we had dug a total of 25 1 m x 1 m test pits, and, generally, finds had been fairly limited. This is perhaps a reflection of the ephemeral nature of activities on the site. However, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a site over which great care had been taken. I had previously been told by the Forestry Commission that the warden had been meticulous. Maybe the site itself evokes this level of care. I know that we were meticulous too, in taking our litter back to be disposed of at Christchurch every evening, in replacing soil and turf in such a way that meant to locate previously dug test pits, one had to look really hard. We were careful and respectful of the site and the local community, and always respectful and watchful for the wild boar that are also frequently seen at the site.

Fieldwork II: finds analysis

I spent the next few days processing my finds: photographing, describing, weighing, and measuring. The sheer number of field walking finds was almost overwhelming. Slowly and methodically I made progress, cataloguing a series of bottles, cans, cigarette butts and roll-up papers, food packaging, flip-flops, hair grips, hats: the spoils of a good-time, festival weekend. While I meticulously and objectively quantified these items in terms of their material composition, dimensions, and number, I made no mention of the sensations they induced. Despite wearing disposable gloves, some were so repellent that I could not even remove them from their finds bags. These sensations were not limited to organic materials, for when handling items such as the hair clip and the flip-flops I also experienced a strong feeling of discomfort. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas ascribe this sensation of nausea, or the notion of the ‘abject’, ⁸ to the ‘archaeological act’ itself and the ‘“fragile limits” it negotiates’, to the decomposition of flesh and waste, to the ‘“instinctive” aversion to the object of study’, including ‘perceived violations of privacy’ ⁹ − with reference in particular to their archaeological ‘excavation’ of a recently abandoned 20th century British council house. ¹⁰

The test pit finds provoked no such reaction. Although they were less ‘personal’ in nature, it was also as if time had sanitized them, removing all trace of their previous lives. They included a series of metal and wooden tent pegs, an Allen key set, a festoon bulb from a caravan, and very little else except an excess of iron slag. Based on several conversations with members of the local community and Forestry Commission staff, I had already concluded that the ubiquitous iron slag was most likely dumped at some point, possibly to level off the site. Reflecting on those camping-related artefacts, I speculated that they might have been lost rather than discarded; they were all utilitarian objects that could be ‘put to work’ on the site.

Fieldwork III: dissemination

Less than two weeks later, I was in Manchester at the RGS/IBG annual conference. It was there that I received a message from Simon de Bruxelles, a journalist at The Times. Having seen the local press coverage, he was keen to write a piece on the Worcester Lodge project as a feature for the bank holiday weekend. News is always quiet in late summer, Parliament is in recess, and there is often little of sufficient interest to grip the nation. At the same time, most people are full of the holiday spirit, hoping to soak up those last rays of sunshine as the end of the summer draws near. A tongue-in-cheek article on camping and campsite archaeology probably seemed like ideal fodder. The main thrust of the full, page-four spread can be summed up in the following lines:

A team of archaeologists has spent a week excavating a campsite in the Forest of Dean with the same painstaking attention to detail they would apply to a prehistoric settlement. While some may scoff at the need to dig up a past so recent that some people still have nightmares about it, it is part of a growing trend in British archaeology. ¹¹

And, of course, it would have been incomplete without mention of Barbara Windsor in Carry on Camping. ¹² Nevertheless, I was somewhat unprepared for the vitriolic comments posted in response on The Times website: ‘Steve Bush’ wrote: ‘Studying more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing’; ¹³ ‘Scott Benowitz’ wrote: ‘Call Francis Pryor and Phil Harding!!! ¹⁴ We’ve found a hubcap from an AMC Pacer, a button from a polyester leisure suit and a piece of an 8-track cassette of disco music!!!’; ¹⁵ ‘Chris Parsons’ wrote: ‘Who could disagree with any of the posters thus far?! The “archaeologists” could have asked me and saved a whole load of time and money. Good grief!’; ¹⁶ ‘Ivor Point’ wrote: ‘What a complete waste of time, money and effort. That period and its artefacts are well documented and many of them recorded on film. Archaeology is a worthwhile academic discipline and activity. This is simply reducing it to the soil bound equivalent of Media Studies’. ¹⁷ There were many more.

As the prominent archaeologist Ian Hodder suggests, ‘archaeology is very much “in your face”’; ¹⁸ its popularity is unparalleled, and the manner of its engagement with the past − through physical remains and artefacts − provides a tangible and apparently irresistible link with the lives of our ‘ancestors’. To many, particularly those who have grown up with the archaeology of ancient Egypt, the excavation of Roman forts, and the sites of Stonehenge and Avebury, the idea of ‘contemporary archaeology’ must sound like a contradiction in terms. As Holtorf and Piccini admit, ‘the contribution that archaeology can make to studies of the contemporary world is not obvious’. ¹⁹ Contemporary archaeology raises a number of questions, which for those commenting on the article in The Times were as follows: What’s the point of excavating sites that are within living memory, about which everything is already known? Isn’t it all just a big waste of time (and money)?

Needless to say, it was The Times’ article that attracted interest from BBC Radio 4. I was back at home by then, spending my bank holiday fretting about the response to the article and whether I could hold on to any shred of academic credibility. Later that day, a producer from PM telephoned to ask if I would be prepared to be interviewed by Carolyn Quinn. I agreed to do it, but only if he could assure me that it wouldn’t be too derogatory and would be pre-recorded. He offered to send the radio car to my home. I spent over an hour rehearsing a series of arguments in defence of 20th-century archaeology and in support of my work, but I hadn’t really been prepared for the most important part of the argument: to say what I’d learnt about the archaeology of the site. Sandwiched between a piece on a new Iraqi law to ban smoking in public places and a report on ‘Mayor John’ of Braddock, Pennsylvania, ‘America’s coolest mayor’, the interview as broadcast on 31 August 2009 focused on the nature of the finds and whether it had been a worthwhile exercise. It started well enough. In response to Quinn’s initial questions about the role of contemporary archaeology, I suggested that ‘archaeologists choosing to engage with issues of the more recent past should be encouraged to do so’, and that ‘these topics shouldn’t be the preserve purely of economic, social or environmental historians’. I also suggested that ‘archaeological methods can tell us different things from other methods’, that they might ‘augment, contradict or challenge our ideas of the past’, and as such that might be ‘an entirely useful thing for us to be doing’. Unfortunately, there were no big ‘discoveries’, no revelations to report. I had invested so much time in what I might say to defend the concept of archaeological investigations into the recent past that I had failed say anything about the site itself or the ‘artefacts’ we had recovered.

I could cope with a degree of public ridicule, but being compromised professionally was another matter altogether, for although I would class myself as more cultural geographer than contemporary archaeologist, I have strong affiliations with the archaeological community, and would not hesitate to describe much of my work as ‘contemporary archaeology’. Dan Hicks ²⁰ caught the interview in his car, and later alerted the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) mailing list. The response was mixed. If nothing else, I should have said something about camping and caravanning being a leisure activity that involves work, which was exemplified by the finds and is often forgotten in people’s accounts of their holiday experiences. As James Symonds ²¹ suggested, ‘tell me something that I don’t already know’ is ‘still the big question that needs to be countered as we push the boundaries [of the past]’. ²² Cornelius Holtorf ²³ reiterated this point: ‘I think that both the Van ²⁴ and the Campsite (as well as a number of other contemporary archaeology projects I know of) would have benefitted in their popular perception from some major “discoveries” and “revelations”’. ²⁵ Yet, as Holtorf later pointed out, such discoveries and revelations are rare − not just in contemporary archaeology, but in the field as a whole. As the CHAT debate rumbled on, it seemed too late, and felt too risky, to admit that studying the material remains of a disused 1970s campsite was not the sole purpose of the fieldwork, that I hadn’t viewed it as a serious academic endeavour but as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of archaeological practice.

The ‘hype’ died down after a cheeky reference on Radio 4’s I Guess That’s Why They Call It The News, apart from an invitation to appear on the BBC TV’s The One Show, which I chose to ignore. Instead, my time was filled with writing the fieldwork report. Of more immediate concern, however, was the job of writing a paper for the CHAT annual conference in Oxford in November. I wanted to create a stark contrast between the two pieces of writing, to write about Worcester Lodge itself without losing sight of the things happening around it: sensations, thoughts, conversations and activities that were themselves integral to the fieldwork. I wanted to redeem myself. Archaeological fieldwork has always been accompanied by a post-excavation, post-survey phase of ‘writing up’. Although the ‘post-processual’, reflexive turn in archaeology focused greater attention on archaeological practice, ²⁶ this has been directed towards processes of on-site interpretation and the practical knowledge that archaeologists bring into the field; the broader experiences and encounters that accompany fieldwork are seldom explored. The idea of camping while undertaking fieldwork at a campsite was a designed feature of the project, and I decided that it should be the focus of my paper. It felt like a bit of a risk, for even papers at CHAT are traditional in their approach. Although a little unorthodox, attracting a few mumblings of ‘self-indulgence’, I was glad I’d stuck with it, and genuinely elated when Matt Edgeworth ²⁷ found me afterwards to tell me that he thought it was ‘brilliant’.

Fieldwork IV: on reflection

Like it or not, the goals of ‘public engagement’, ‘knowledge exchange’ and ‘impact’ are becoming embedded in our research activities; no UK Research Council grant application is now complete without a ‘pathways to impact’ statement, and ‘impact’ will account for some 20 per cent in the upcoming Research Excellence Framework 2014. Yet, as laudable and perhaps even necessary as these broader research endeavours might be, I wonder whether they can sometimes leave us exposed. Starting from a position of great naivety, I was burned by my entanglements with the press. Although I might have done better to anticipate the wider public’s reaction to my work, I still feel that there is little that I could have done to control it − except by choosing not to engage. However, it is perhaps when public debate spills over into academic debate that we are most at risk, allowing our academic credibility to be called into question. Self-doubt, often central to academic practice, can be amplified by such events to the extent that they take on a life of their own. Writing this short paper some three years later, I am safe in the knowledge that no long-term damage has been done. Nevertheless, I do wonder what might have happened had I been up front about the true aims of this work back in the summer of 2009.