Desperately Seeking Silver Salver

Peter Muir’s silver slaver – what happened to it?

The latest issue (June 2015) of Arrowhead, the newsletter of the Archer-Antiquaries, features an interesting article by Manchester Museum’s Curator of Archery, Wendy Hodkinson, about a silver salver awarded to a man called Peter Muir in 1878.  The occasion of the award was Muir’s retirement from his position as Officer and Bowmaker to the Royal Company, a role he had held for more than fifty years in an exemplary manner.  The salver is inscribed with the legend ‘Royal Company of Archers The Queen’s Bodyguard for Scotland’ above and ‘His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch Captain General’ below. The General Council and Members of her Majesty’s Bodyguard also presented Peter Muir with 450 sovereigns, which as Wendy points out in her article, is some golden handshake!

Muir was born in the west of Scotland in 1809 and was the only bowyer to win a gold medal for his products at the Great Exhibition of 1851. He was one three bowyers who dominated the trade in the 19th century. Muir competed in archery tournaments. He was champion in England in 1845, 1847 and 1863, and Scottish National Champion in 1859. One of his duties was to teach new members of the Company to use the bow. Yet Peter Muir seems to have to fallen into the position by accident. When the previous Bowmaker to the Company of Archers fell ill, enquiries were made of Peter Muir’s father to see if he knew of anyone who could fill the position, and he recommended his son. Peter Muir’s service lasted fifty years.

In the 21st century it may appear quaint, even a little strange that the Victorians attached so much importance to archery. The Victorians were fascinated with the Middle Ages because  it seemed to them to have been a golden age before the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, when it seemed to them social relations had been more harmonious. If there were strict social divisions and people were expected to know their place, at least the great and the good had acted in the interests of the commoners out of a sense of ‘noblesse oblige’. Of course this was all utter nonsense, but it was very influential at the time. It is not for nothing that in the city centre of Leeds, where I live, there is a statue of the Black Prince (not that there is any connection with Leeds), Armley Gaol was built to look like a Medieval Castle, and in Thornton’s Arcade shoppers are treated to a clock that shows characters from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe every hour.  The popularity of Neo-Gothic architectural style as exemplified by the Houses of Parliament, Manchester’s Town Hall and our very own Manchester Museum shows how important Medievalism was to the Victorians.

So popular was archery in  19th century Scotland that there was a long list of archery societies with names as eccentric as the sport was archaic: the Kilwinning Papingo (!), the Ardrossan Archers (before 1845), the Dalry Archers (c.1842),  the Irvine Toxophilites (1802-1866), the Paisley Archers (1805-1815; 1858-1910; 1968+), the Saltcoat Archers  (c.1856) and the Zingari Archers of Kilmarnock (c.1860). I mean you couldn’t make it up could you?

I would read the vogue for archery, including the inauguration of a Royal Bodyguard or Company of Archers as but one rather quaint component of their Medievalism. However, the fact that such a large amount of money and a silver salver were presented to Muir, and the elevated social circle in which he operated show that archery was taken very seriously. As an adjunct to royalty and the highest levels of the Establishment, Victorian archery was akin to another popular Medieval sport, falconry. Muir described himself as a ‘working-man’ and there is nothing unusual in that, in the same way that royalty today happily rub shoulders with jockeys in pursuance of ‘the sport of kings’.

Wendy ends her fascinating article about Peter Muir with an appeal for members of the public to come forward if they know what happened to the silver salver given to Peter Muir. It is known not to be in Archers’ Hall in Edinburgh. It’s not in the Beechin Wood Collection. Nor is it in the Museum of Scotland. So where is it?  Over to you dear reader…..

In writing this blog I have drawn heavily on Wendy’s article in Arrowhead, the newsletter of the Archer-Antiquaries, issue 129 for June 2015, pp. 6-10. I am grateful to her for sharing her archery expertise.

 

 

 

First World War Archaeology

Session for the Youth Board at Manchester Museum

Thanks to the kindness of Andrea Winn, Curator of Community Outreach  here at Manchester Museum, I can show an image of the recent session about the First World War with the Youth Board  and creative consultants. Whilst the Museum does not collect social history, some objects in the collection were acquired during the First World War. I got out some objects donated by Francis Buckley (1881-1949) when he was serving in northern France during  the First World War. The circumstances were rather unusual. 2nd Lieutenant Buckley was charged with preparing a line of trenches known as the Red Line at the village of Coigneux in 1918. This was in response to a German offensive. Buckley was there from April until the middle of August and had plenty of time to inspect the upcast soil from the excavations to create the trenches. Reginald A.Smith of the British Museum had asked Buckley to look at disturbed ground in case archaeological material was revealed.

Red Line Trenches Coigneux

The drawings above show Francis Buckley’s painstaking care in recording the stratigraphy of the trenches which had yielded flint implements of Mousterian or Neanderthal date, so going back potentially going back several hundred thousand years. The Neanderthal stone tools were found along the tops of the parapets. Buckley knew that the material on top of the parapet was likely to be from the soil from the very bottom of the trenches when they were deepened because of the German threat. Buckley noted ruefully that had it been possible to excavate the parapets  he would have found more implements. ‘But for military reasons this was quite out of the question’ he wrote in his article about the Coigneux discoveries published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia (1920-1), pp.1-9.

Francis Buckley was clearly someone to have around in an emergency and he was mentioned in dispatches (‘His Majesty’s high appreciation of the services rendered’) on 9th April 1917. Even so you wonder what Lieutenant Buckley’s commanding officer made of the close observation of the trenches for archaeological material…

This kind of behaviour is not unusual in warfare and quite coincidentally I came across the image below earlier this week in one of our archive boxes. It shows a rather charming little painting of a pot decorated with a white wavy line on its shoulder. Two views are shown.  It’s only when you read the pencil inscription underneath that you realise what this represents. ‘Found whilst deepening a well in Gallipoli – about 3 feet of mud on top of it. The well contained water and was near Cape Hellas about 2 miles from Knithia (?)’. Someone has added in ink  ‘Said at S.Kensington to be modern Turkish, possibly 200 years old’. In other words this pot was found during the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign in which so many soldiers were killed or wounded, and yet someone still took the trouble to make a record of a pot they had found. There is no name attached to the painting but one likely candidate is Lieutenant Thomas Eric Peet B.A, of the Kings (Liverpool) Regiment, Army Service Corps who worked in the Egyptology Department of Manchester Museum. In 1917 Thomas Peet commanded an Army unit dedicated to excavating and preserving antiquities discovered on the classically rich battlefields of the Salonica Front. Perhaps his promotion was the result of the beautiful records he had made of chance discoveries like the Turkish pot.

Turkish pot from Gallipoli

When I was talking to the Youth Board I said that soldiers weren’t fighting all of the time and often found time to practice some of the skills they had developed in civilian life. Perhaps the detailed recording of flints from the trenches at Coigneux or of a Turkish pot Gallipoli are evidence of soldiers finding ways to express their humanity in an inhumane situation.

Afterwards I showed the Youth Board some Roman material to explore how soldiers 2000 years ago introduced new styles of jewellery and pottery into Britain that the native British would not have been familiar with. New introductions such Continental brooches and mortaria or mixing bowls were adopted by the soldiers’ families and by civilians, making the soldiers important agents of Romanisation in newly-conquered provinces. Roman soldiers as advocates of Mediterranean culinary expertise in their spare time is a far cry from recording archaeology disturbed by the trenches or the fighting at Gallipoli. It seemed somehow glib in comparison.

Thanks to Andrea Winn and Michael Whitworth for information and images used in this blog.

Death or Glory in Whitworth Park

Death or Glory pipe from the Whitworth Park excavations

The photograph above shows an example of the ‘Death or Glory’ Pipe that was found during the Community Archaeology and History Project excavations in Whitworth Park last year. The design shows the emblem of the 17^th Lancers, whose motto is “Death or Glory” and commemorates the Charge of the Light Brigade.

An article in the Telegraph last Easter drew attention to recently-revealed accounts written by survivors of the infamous military action which took place on 25th October 1854 during the Crimean War. The letters were found in a the archives by Anthony Dawson, who is an historian of the Crimean War. They have not been seen for 160 years. They will be published in a book Letter from the Light Brigade that will be published later in the year.

It is not claimed that there is any connection between the Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitworth Park but it does show how the historical event influenced late Victorian material culture. The shift to a globalised economy thanks to mass production and the birth of marketing as an arm of commercial practice in the Victorian period is something that we still live with today.

Pollock clay pipe from the 1950s (image courtesy of Museum of Science and Industry)

After the First World War cigarettes became more popular than clay pipes for the smoking of tobacco, and many clay pipe manufactureres went into decline. In the 1950s the the Pollock clay tobacco pipe business in Manchester revived an earlier marketing initiative by creating a line in glazed pipes in bright colours, featuring more ‘child-friendly’ designs such as the football game and the skull-and-crossbones (see image above). Whether Pollocks were intentionally copying the popular earlier death’s head design I don’t know, but it is so similar they could have come from the same mould. Thanks to the helpful staff at the Museum of Science and Industry you can even see such pipes being used to blow bubbles. The Death or Glory motif shows, as I’ve said previously on this blog, there really isn’t much new under the sun, save perhaps for the cigarette.

The Death or Glory pipe is currently on show in the Whitworth Park: Pleasure, Play and Politics exhibition at Manchester Museum.

The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project was funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund Your Heritage grant. Additional funding was provided by The Council for British Archaeology, The Council for British Archaeology North West, Manchester City Council, and the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, The University of Manchester. The exhibition is supported financially by The Robert Kiln Charitable Trust and cities@manchester.

Favourite Object from the Collection

Collections Team with their favourite objects

Here we all are in this morning’s team meeting with our favourite objects. Kate had a shark’s jaw bone with some nasty looking teeth, Steve had a copy of the Salford register because it had details of the most important ethnographic objects in the Museum collection, Phil had some parasitic  flies, Campbell part of an ivory chariot fitting, Rachel had some saffron, Lindsey had some rubber stamps, Henry a mounted Ross’ gull and I took along a post-medieval watering can made of fired clay (accession no. 20838). The latter is one of my favourite objects in the collection. I kind of fell in love with it as soon as I saw it in the Museum store.

Ceramic watering can

It’s about 36cm tall and as you can see it’s made of orange-red clay with a brownish glaze. You can see where the separately made rose that spinkles the water was joined to the body of the pot. The potter pushed the clay down with his thumb to create a leaf or petal effect which is duplicated on the lid of the watering can. Calling this a watering can is a bit of misnomer of course because it isn’t made out of metal. It would be more accurate to call it a watering-pot.

That is what I really like about it. It ought to be made out of metal (zinc) or plastic as they are today. Making it out of ceramic would make it more likely to be broken but it was made at a time – presumably the 1600s or 1700s – when clay was the material of choice. It was cheap, versatile, and relatively easy to work in the hands of a good potter.  Alternative materials were either expensive or hadn’t been invented yet. In the same way that ceramic was the ancient Greeks’ plastic and was used to make objects like children’s potties, ceramic was the plastic of medieval and post medieval England and was used to make  watering-pot. Some of my colleagues were surprised by the watering pot and thought it would easily get broken. That may be true but being ceramic it could have been replaced  fairly cheaply. This example is from London. I found a reference in one of the Museum annual reports to a:-

‘seventeenth century watering pot with rose and partly covered mouth found during excavations in Finsbury’ donated by Mr. S.Gordon Hynes in 1938-9 (Annual Report p.23).

What I also find fascinating about this pot is that it seems to announce the development of gardening as a serious occupation with its specialised own tools of the trade. Good gardeners were in great demand for setting out ornamental gardens and growing vegetables. John Tradescant (1570-1638) served a number of high status households prior to his engagement by Charles I as Keeper of his Majesty’s Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms at Oatlands Palace in Surrey. He travelled overseas to collect plants. His son, also called John, followed in his father’s footsteps. What is even more interesting is that the Tradescants’ private collection of curiosities  became the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford so there’s a nice conneciton between gardening and collecting plants and collecting objects and the first museums.

Whitworth Park Exhibition Photography Session

Alan Seabright photographing finds from the Whitworth Park excavations

I have spent the greater part of yesterday  in the Moseley Room in the basement of the Museum photographing finds from the excavations that took place in Whitworth Park during the summer. Or rather, helping Alan Seabright, photographer at Manchester Art Gallery, to take pictures of the finds.

Glass bottle from Whitworth Park

Alan’s work has already been featured in this blog. It was Alan who photographed the figurines from Koma Land, Ghana, that are now on display at Manchester Museum. We were joined by Ruth Colton and Melanie Giles from the University’s archaeology department.

Group of children’s toys found during the Whitworth Park excavations

They kindly brought over a selection of the best objects to be photographed, including complete glass bottles, stoneware vessels, children’s toys and games such as marbles, jacks and a knucklebone, lead pencils, including one marked VIENNA, ceramic figurine fragments, miniature plates from a doll’s tea service, a brush handle, a lead soldier… Gosh this is sounding like the conveyor belt voice-over for an Edwardian edition of the Generation Game! Was Bruce Forsythe on the go even then?

Murderous intent? Toy (?)Pistol found during the excvations.

Sam from Conservation brought some of the objects from the excavations that she’s been looking after, including a toy gun (but or maybe it’s a real one), a penknife, a button, leather shoe soles and so on. We worked our way through it all, recording the dimensions as we went, sometimes putting a scale in shot for publication purposes, sometimes leaving it out for marketing and publicity use.

Bottle of perfume or medecine (centre) with intact stopper from the excavations

The preservation of the glass is extraordinary. Only occasionally is there a chip missing. Many of the bottles have writing on them, giving the name of the manufacturer, sometimes an address. One manufacturers at Upper Brook Street is not very far from Whitworth Park. One of the more unusual pieces was a small glass vessel with a corroded top, sealing the contents, which we speculate to be either perfume or medecine.

My thanks to Alan, Ruth and Melanie for supporting this session. Parklife: Pleasure, Play and Politics in Whitworth Park opens in May at Manchester Museum and will run until October 2014.

Another Tiger Striped Teapot

Victorian striped teapot that turned up in the States

Thanks to one of our American readers I am pleased to be able to post an image of another striped teapot.

Readers may recall that we posted photos of fragments of a similar teapot that was discovered during excvations in the centre of Manchester in the 1970s. Since then an example has turned up on a Norwegian flea market and now there’s this fine example from the States.

It is interesting that the lid has been replaced, as was that of the Norwegian example. Perhaps they get lost or broken over time and people have to find a way of replacing them. But the pewter (?) lids look very similar so perhaps that was how they were sold.

It’s very gratifying that people ‘out there’ are reponding to what they see on this blog and helping to extend our knowledge of pieces in the collection.

Where will the next one turn up? Over to you good readers…

Tigerish teapot spotted in Denmark!

Pal’s striped teapot

We are very grateful to a Norwegian reader of this blog, Pal Furuberg, who has kindly sent photographs of a ‘tigerish’, striped teapot that he bought at a  a flea market at a children’s school in the outskirts of Oslo. A friend had told him about Manchester Museum’s ‘smashing pot’ with similar ‘tigerish’, striped transfer pattern, which looks very much like the one Pal, or Paul, bought.

Victorian teapot in Manchester Museum

Pal writes to say that the pewter  lid may not be original. There is no mark or stamp, and he cannot tell for sure whether it is Georgian or Victorian, but it is most probably English he says.

Replacement lid on Pal’s teapot

Well, we might be able to set Pal’s mind at rest. I sent a photo of our teapot to the Ceramics and Glass Collection enquiry service at the Victoria and Albert Museum. One of the curators there, Rebecca Wallis, replied and told me that “From the images the teapot looks to date from the second quarter of the 19th century, underglaze brown transfer-printed decoration imitating woodgrain. The pot was probably made in Staffordshire.”

Transfer-printed design on Pal’s teapot

Unfortunately they don’t have a comparable example in the V&A collections so Rebecca suggested contacting the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery to see what they have.

Paul writes that his teapot is a bit discoloured, has an old reparation on the handle, and has cracks that makes it un-useful as a teapot, but he like its and thinks it looks good. I say good for you Pal. I only wish my trips to the car boot sale and flea market were as successful as yours!

I am constantly amazed by the power of crowd-sourcing to answer some of the questions about mysterious objects that we are faced with as curators. The coincidence of showing the Manchester teapot on the blog and Pal buying his teapot with the same design about the same time and sending us details is fantastic.

Thanks to Pal for allowing us to reproduce his photos and to Rebecca for identifying the teapot. Pity about the woodgrain though, I quite liked calling it the Manchester tigerish teapot.

Now all we need is for a reader to send in a reply to my appeal about the so-called  brothel token with an erotic scene… I mean, have you any idea how many visitors we’ve had to the Ancient Worlds blog since that was posted?

Brothel Token

Lead brothel token

A metal-detectorist brought some objects to the Collections Study Centre at Manchester Museum for identification a few months ago. I was intrigued when he showed me what he described as a lead Roman brothel token. Such discoveries have been in the news of late, one having turned up on the Thames foreshore earlier in the summer.

But was this also a brothel token? Whilst it is not in the best condition, it certainly shows an erotic scene. The lovers are standing and the woman has one leg raised. Sexual congress is taking place. Are they leaning against something or could that be a third participant on the right? It’s hard to say because of the condition of the piece and there is a (deliberate?) cut across the top of the figures.

I did a search of the Portable Antiquities Scheme website and found some references to similar pieces. I suspect that this is much later in date than Roman however. There are pieces of smoking paraphernalia with the same scene so I would guess that this piece is perhaps 18th or 19th century in date.

Another example is known from the Manchester region. I don’t know if it is a so-called brothel token. Perhaps it is more satirical than simply marking a transaction.

Hopefully someone can enlighten us. I’d have liked to have put out a press release earlier in the summer  but at that time special billing was being given to a certain rotating statue…

Smashing Pot

Teapot from Manchester

This is a recently conserved teapot from one of the Roman Manchester sites excavated during the 1970s and 1980s by the late Prof Barri Jones. The excavators dug through through more recent Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian layers before they reached the area of Roman occupation. The later material was not a priority as part of the research aims but the objects, mostly  broken pieces of pottery, were retained and are in the Museum store. We bring out the pottery every so often for events, so that visitors can try their hand at piecing together the three-dimensional jigsaws. So popular has this activity proved that we can now boast a number of almost complete Victorian and Edwardian vessels.

This example of a teapot was rebult for us by Jenna B. who has been on a conservation placement with the Museum from the University of  Lincoln. A lot of the time-consuming work had already been done by visitors and Young Archaeologists Club members who put together like with like and joined them using sticky tape. All Jenna had to do was clean the sherds and glue them together. This was one of her final projects and what a great job she has done. It is only a pity that there were insufficient sherds surviving to enable us to attach the spout. We tried to find them in the boxes of mixed sherds but it’s rather like hunting the needle in the proverbial haystack. The teapot provides a good example for staff to use when discussing the ethics of conservation. At what point does a reconstruction become worthwhile?

Victorian teapot

The teapot has a rather interesting transfer printed pattern that I can only describe as ‘tigerish’. I wonder if this is Georgian rather than Victorian or later. Perhaps a visitor to the Blog can enlighten us?

Jenna working on the Georgian/Victorian teapot

Genuine after all?

Letters to the press

In previous emails I’ve explored the controversy over two bone points found in Holderness in East Yorkshire in northern England during the early 1920s.  The Curator of Hull Museums, Thomas Sheppard, accused the people who found the objects of being charlatans. As we have seen this was the not the first time that the Hull Curator had come across the Morfitt family. In the early 1900s he had been a regular visitor to their cottage at Atwick in Holderness. Sheppard and Mr William Morfitt had a serious falling-out at the end of 1903 and afterwards Sheppard criticised the family relentlessly. In 1922 A.Leslie Armstrong published two bone points from the Morfitt collection and argued they were Maglemosian or Mesolithic. Sheppard implied they were forgeries. Two committees of enquiry met to decide whether they were authentic but the finds were so ambiguous both Sheppard and the Morfitt family claimed victory.

One of the committees noted in its report that the evidence on which Thomas Sheppard’s  judgement was based ‘was no longer verifiable’. This was rather mysterious and it would be some eight years before the truth emerged. The comment was picked up by Armstrong who responded: ‘Mr Sheppard’s charge of forgery is based upon certain evidence said to have been given him by a person now dead – therefore unverifiable’. (1923). Who was this dead person and what had they said? It was only after the last member of the Morfitt family had died that Sheppard revealed ‘The Maglemose harpoons were made by Mr B. Morfitt in the presence of his sister who was spending a weekend with Mrs Sheppard and I and told us how it was done’.

Charlotte Morfitt

The sister was Charlotte Morfitt who died in 1914. Sheppard claimed to have held back this information out of sensitivity to old William Morfitt’s feelings. William died in 1923, Beaumont died in 1929 and Sheppard revealed the source of his information – and why he was so certain that the Maglemosian points were forgeries – in 1930. Perhaps surprisingly Sheppard tried to acquire the Morfitt collection for Hull Museums when the future of the collection was under discussion. However, Hornsea District Council planned to put the collection on show though nothing ultimately came of this proposal and in the end the collection was transferred to the Yorkshire Museum, where it still is.

When the bone points were bequeathed to the British Museum after William Morfitt’s death, Thomas Sheppard obtained casts and put them on display in Hull Museum’s ‘fakes and forgeries’ cabinet. It looked as though Sheppard had had the last word. Or had he?

Another barbed point was found amongst ‘moor log’ dredged from the bed of the North Sea on the Leman and Ower banks off Lowestoft in 1931. In 1932 a bone point was found on Hornsea foreshore but it was not published until after the Second World War.  Sheppard retired in 1941 and died in 1945. No less than thirteen – thirteen! – were found in the vicinity of Brandesburton, not far from Hornsea, during gravel extraction. Some of the latter were reported by J.B.Fay, Assistant Director of Hull Museums, who, like Sheppard, spent most of his life working for the institution. In 1956 Clark and Godwin wrote ‘In view of an old controversy it may be added that close examination of the Skipsea and Hornsea specimens alongside those from Brandesburton can leave no further doubt as to the genuineness of the earlier finds.’

If the bone points were authentic what are we to make of Sheppard’s accusations and his motivation? Sheppard made much of the fact that the circumstances of discovery of one of the points seemed non-sensical. It’s in the entertaining poem quoted in an earlier blog:

‘Til Mr Morfitt passed one day,
With iron rod to find his way.
And fourteen feet it penetrated
And then it stopped; or so ’twas stated.

Aaron and Beaumont Morfitt. Beaumont is standing on the right. Is he holding the iron rod he used in prospecting?

How could Beaumont (the Mr Morfitt in question) have inserted an iron rod into peat deposits and then dug down to recover the object he had detected by probing? It doesn’t add up, does it? It doesn’t if Beaumont was standing  on the ground surface and digging down. But what if was standing at the base of a cliff that had been eroded by the sea? Beaumont could be fourteen or more feet below the ground surface as measured from the top of the cliff, but still be standing on the foreshore and probing the deposits horizontally. See photo below. The object Beaumont found would be a depth of fourteen feet relative to the top of the cliff  without Beaumont having to dig down to reach it.

Skipsea Withow

And what of Sheppard’s statement that no peat had been found at Hornsea (in which the Hornsea example was said to have been found)? In August 1902 the Hull Scientific and Field Naturalists Club visited Hornsea to see a section exposed during the erection of a new gasometer. Beds of gravel, shell marl and peat (my italics) were observed, recorded and published in the Naturalist (1902, p.366) by none other than Thomas Sheppard!

The main point of evidence – that Charlotte Morfitt told the Sheppards that her brother had made the bone points as a joke at the expense of their father could not be verified because Miss Morfitt had passed away in 1912. Elijah Howarth of Sheffield Museum said that ‘Beaumont was always fond of a joke, and had a very entertaining fashion of humour but there was no shadow of deceit about him’. There were some curious lengths of bone with crudely-forked ends and an incised groove apparently for winding string in the Morfitt collection. They are illustrated in Hull News (1/2/1902). William Greenwell refers to them in his letters to William Morfitt though he did not know what they were. Is it possible Charlotte saw her brother making them and told the Sheppards and that these fabrications became confused with the bone points that were genuine? If on all other grounds the Holderness points or harpoons are to be considered authentic, might this confusion or misunderstanding explain the controversy? Or was there a darker motive?

Sheppard’s bruising encounter with William Morfitt in 1903 changed the nature of their relationship. Having been humiliated in this way, did Sheppard allow his personal feelings to colour his judgement? No matter what the Morfitt family found, I suspect that Thomas Sheppard would have found some way to cast doubt on it or belittle it. The Morfitt family was eventually vindicated but archaeologically the controversy may have been more damaging. The mesolithic site at Star Carr is rightly famous for the preservation of a range of organic and other evidence, including the oldest dwelling. Had the discoveries along the Holderness coast at Skipsea and Hornsea been taken seriously, is it possible that this kind of evidence might have been found many years earlier? Might we be talking about Skipsea as the type site for mesolithic archaeology? We’ll never know of  course because sadly the sea has long since washed the deposits where the bone points were found away.