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.

Roman Mice at Manchester Museum

Visitor Assistants inspecting mouse bones from Roman Manchester

The gallery talk for Manchester Museum Visitor Services Assistants earlier today seems to have passed off successfully. It is hard not to register an impact  when your talking point is second only to panda cubs in the cuteness stakes. This being an archaeology gallery tour I hasten to say that we weren’t looking at any live animals only their archaeological remains. They came from a particular context from excavations on a Roman site in the centre of Manchester.

Examining the mouse bones

The mouse bones are incredibly small but the late Derek Yaldon identified them as those of the Yellow-necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis). It transpires that this mouse has an unusual distribution in south-east England and in the Severn valley northwards into Shropshire. Zoologists have argued that this distribution relates to the presence of deciduous woodland. The Yellow-necked mouse is associated with this environment even more than the Wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus). So we appear to have a good indication from these tiny bones that lots of trees were growing in and around Manchester during Roman times.  There is a record for Salford Hundred (which included Manchester)  in the Domesday Survey of 1086 to say that woodland extended  9.5 leagues by 5 leagues (about 23 km x 12 km) so there was a good habitat for the Yellow-necked mouse into the Middle Ages in Manchester.

Close up of mouse bones (scale in millimetres)

The reason why Manchester Museum has these bones is somewhat upsetting and any small children or those of a sensitive nature should look away now. The mouse bones came from the sediment in the bottom of a Roman amphora that was found during Prof. Barri Jones’ excavations in Manchester. The neck and handles of the amphora or storage vessel had been broken off and it’s been suggested that this was done deliberately to make it easier to bury the amphora in the ground, where it served as a horribly effective mouse trap. Once the poor mice fell in they couldn’t climb back out because the sides of the vessel curved inwards at the top. The mice drowned in water that collected in the bottom of the amphora and their bones were in the silt when the archaeologists excavated some 2000 years later.

The Roman army must have had a lot of experience of dealing with pests of various kinds because the food stuffs needed to feed the soldiers was stored in the capacious granaries that are a feature of Roman fort sites. In my VSA presentation we discussed the provision of cat flaps and even owl chutes to enable predators to enter granaries and keep down the mouse population. Babak asked if poisoned bait was used and referred to Chaldean rodent control measures. I’m not aware that the Romans used poisons but perhaps someone out there can enlighten us.

Roman mosaic with trompe l’oeil effect food debris and mouse

Despite their ruthlessness in this regard the Romans seem to have liked mice. There is a famous line in Plautus: ‘A mouse never entrusts its life to only one hole’ – for which quotation I am endebted to an article in The Telegraph by Victoria Lambert about celebrity pieds-a-terre, featuring a photo of actress Stephanie Beecham. If the Romans didn’t like the creatures, why have bronze figurines of mice nibbling food in a rather endearing way, or show them on those wonderful Roman mosaics depicting waste food on the floor? Sadly we don’t have a bronze mouse in Manchester Museum’s collection but I saw a fine example in a private metal-detected collection years ago in East Yorkshire.

Roman bronze mouse from East Yorkshire

We do however, have a lamp with an image of a mouse as decoration (below). It is a charming representation of a mouse sipping olive oil from the hole in the top of a lamp. Unfortunately it’s slightly damaged but the curl on the left on the photo below is the handle of the lamp, on which the mouse is sitting to get at the olive oil.

Roman mouse lamp at Manchester Museum (accession number 40647).

In an email one of our Visitor Services Assistants, Olga, had said she was really looking forward to this morning’s talk because she keeps Degu, small furry rodents from Chile, as pets. I somehow think it was perhaps just as well she didn’t come because she might have found it upsetting. By the time I’d finished speaking there were tears in the eyes of more than a few people in the group. If I give this talk in future I must remember to take along a box of tissues…

If you are of a sensitive disposition and can’t bear to attend the talk about mice in Roman Manchester you can find out more by reading:-

D.W.Yalden (1984?) ‘The Yellow-necked mouse, Apodemus flavicollis, in Roman Manchester’, Notes from the Mammal Society – No.48, pp.285-8.

This is a copy of the writer’s section which was published in S.Bryant, M. Morris & J.S.F.Walker (1986) Roman Manchester A Frontier Settlement The Archaeology of Greater Manchester, pp.81-2.

Readers may care to know that the same writer published a note on ‘Yellow-necked mice in archaeological contexts’ in Bulletin of the Peakland Archaeological Society (vol.33 for 1983, pp.24-9).

And see Greg Morton’s guest blog about Roman mice