Pitt-Rivers in Kent: musketry and excavations

Description: This talk outlines the importance of Kent to the work and thinking of Augustus Pitt-Rivers - from his time as Instructor in Musketry at Hythe, to his excavations at Castle Hill (Caesar's Camp) in Folkstone, and his role in the scheduling of the Neolithic monument Kit's Coty House in his role as Inspector of Ancient Monuments. Introducing the major re-assessment of Pitt-Rivers' work and life presented in Dan's new book Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting, the talk will set Pitt-Rivers' activities in the county in the context of contemporary debates over heritage, museums, monuments, public memory — and the so-called 'culture war'. Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College Oxford. His most recent book is Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Penguin 2025). Instagram/Bluesky: @ProfDanHicks

Transcript: Okay, well it's three minutes past so um I think we shall get started. So good evening everyone and thank you for joining us tonight. I did warn you last month that the autuminal fields were upon us. So I've already got my heating on maximum. It's getting dark early and I'm even thinking about dragging the box of Halloween decorations out of the garage. It's about that time. So you know we like to go big in our house. I think our neighbors are already dreading October. So, thank you all for coming. The team at the society continue to work hard. We've been out and about discussing options for many things, including the epic storage issues the county is facing currently, as many of you will know about. And we've also been busy readying ourselves for several exciting conferences that are coming up over the next couple of months. Please check out the event section of the website for further details on what's on and how to attend. I'm almost finished the latest newsletter, the society. So for our members, that should be with you in the next couple of weeks. I hope it's a good read. It's got all the latest news from us here and from the wider Kent Heritage Sector. If you missed any of our earlier talks, then of course you can venture back in time and watch all the incredible lectures we've had so far. All accessible on our YouTube channel and the website. So please do go and check them out. As always, we hope to avoid any technical issues, but please bear with us if there are any problems. Jacob's on hand, and as always, he'll be there to sort anything out if it goes wrong. If you're not a member, please do think about joining us. It works out about £330 a month, less than Bram Stoker's Dracula on DVD from eBay. I found out today. And for that, you'll receive a copy of our yearly journal, Archaeologia Caniana, full of the most current historical and archaeological research in the county. You'll also receive our bianual magazine, regular newsletters, exclusive access to our collections, conferences, and selected events, opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects, and you let us keep putting on uh brilliant content such as these free online talks, doing outreach in schools, community groups, and seminars, and all the things that we hope brings the benefit of Kent history and heritage to everyone. So, check the website for details on how to become a member. Right, housekeeping. The talk tonight will last for about an hour after which we'll have time for questions if you have any. Please can I ask you all to keep yourselves on mute with your cameras off throughout so that we can hear our speaker clearly. During the Q&A, you can even use the raise hand feature and we'll unmute you when it's your turn to ask the question. Or if you prefer, you can type your question in the chat box and we'll read it out for you. I hope it goes without saying, but please be courteous and polite to our speaker and to each other. We will be recording the session and it may be posted to our video channels in the future but no personal data will be shared and if you ask a question but we'll prefer it not to be published just send us an email and we will make sure it's not included. Right. So forum bits out the way onto our speaker. Dr. Dan Hicks is a professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, curator of world archaeology at the Pit Rivers Museum and a fellow of St. cross college. Dan is also a fellow of the society of antiquaries with an embarrassment of academic achievements from some of the most respected universities across the globe. Uh he's worked for over a decade. He worked as a professional field archaeologist and conducted fieldwork in the UK, in the Eastern Caribbean, and the Eastern United States. Dan has held various prestigious appointments in a triumphant and intensive career and incredibly impressively has received significant research funding totaling over7 million pounds towards many important projects. His work focuses on the impacts of colonialism and uses archaeology to explore modern and contemporary history. Dan is also an accomplished author and editor, having published nine books, including the Brutish Museums, the Ben & Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Rest, which received critical acclaim and won several awards. He's delivered numerous prestigious lectures and has written for a variety of publications. You know how prolific an archaeologist or curator must be when they have their own incredible website. And uh this one is needed to fit in all his amazing achievements which you can check out at www.danhicks.uk. So I usually consider myself to be completely maxed out um and tell everybody that there's just no time to fit anything else in in at all. But then I read the list of achievements that Dan has managed and realized that actually I am very lazy like sloth level lazy. He has had a phenomenal career and Dan continues to challenge our thinking, our preconceptions of who heritage should belong to and uh to ask important questions of our industry. He's here tonight to discuss aspects of his latest book, Every Monument Will Form. The book, and I quote, offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture and how to find hope, remembrance, and reconciliation in fragments of an unfinished violent past. It is our absolute delight and utter pleasure to welcome Dan to talk to us tonight. So Dan, over to you. Okay. Thank you so much. It's uh wonderful to be here. Uh that was a really nice introduction, Craig. Thanks. Thanks a lot. I'm going to share my screen. Um and hopefully it will all work. So if it if you can see uh the PowerPoint, hopefully that will be working well. So that all looks all right. Thumb thumbs up if it looks all right. That's not yet still yours. It's still not okay. How's How's There we go. That's super. Okay, that's great. So and so thanks so much. I'm going to try to uh to finish um in in under an hour. So we have a bit of time for a conversation afterwards. Uh it's absolutely wonderful to be here hosted by you know Kent Archaeological Society and I'm not going to summarize uh the book I just published which is the context of sort of what I'm uh uh sort of talking about at the moment. um instead because there's so much in the book and a lot of it is about you know Pit Rivers as a character as a founder you know of our discipline and of a figure that we're you know sort of sort of you know thinking about in a whole host of different ways. I thought it was useful really to revisit some work we did sort of 10 years ago and actually I mean we were hosted and my sort of colleagues and I were hosted at sort of Kent probably 12 or 13 years ago I guess when we were doing a project called excavating pit rivers when we were simply you know doing the uh the primary work of understanding sort of what is in the museum from him you know and sort of you know that he you know dug up all his AR archeological work, how that inter interrelates sort of with his, you know, his sort of role in anthropology. So, it's an update on that really. It's actually it's going to be a bit of a tour of the county as we, you know, go along. But hopefully I'm able to as we go along we talk about all of the different things he found and you know the things that he you know did in Kent which involve as you will see from the title it involves not only excavation and field walking and archaeology but also there's a lot about uh the history of you know militarism and the history of his role as a soldier uh that's a part of that and hopefully that's then a you jumping off point for understanding the sort of or or for you know talking about those sort of sort of you know wider issues that we're all interested in in the present over you know what do we make of a legacy of someone like Augustus Pit Rivers and so here's the man himself as he liked to be seen sort of later in life after he had inherited a vast sort of fortune with which he inherited a name. So really we shouldn't be you know talking talking about the you know Pit Rivers Museum. If we were strictly saying who sort of made the founding collection it would not be Pit Rivers. It would be Augustus Henry Lane Fox because uh that was his his name until until 1880 when he inherited a vast fortune. um that was made as you can imagine as ever with vast fortunes in the 19th century made as the book sort of goes into from a whole host of different routes of largely Caribbean uh that comes along sort of various routes in Yorkshire in North Wales and elsewhere. He's a Yorkshireman uh by birth, although a Londoner in terms of how he he you know grew up and he spends a lot of time on the south coast and in Kent in his early years. Um and actually Kent is a very important space for how he begins to link the militarism that's important for his sort of professional life as a soldier with his archaeology and anthropology. And actually one of the big arguments that I've sort of put or the things I found out really about about Fox as actually we might sort of call him you know Fox rather than Pit Rivers. Fox is really a character who, you know, sort of uses the military thinking that, you know, that he's involved in in order to shape how archaeology as a discipline sort of develops. Um, and so we know him well as obviously, you know, one of the the inventors, arguably the main inventor of sort of, you know, modern sort of scientific excavation. Here's an example from the pit rivers of sort of one of his so-called medelletes that he left at the bottom of the trenches of the holes that he dug stamped with a date stamp. You can see on the right hand side there's a gap there for him hammering in a date from the 1880s or the 1890s or earlier. And on the left hand side there's his sort of logo if you like uh designed by by John Evans the uh the the numismatist and his his sort of logo involves as you can see a mixture of archaeological uh uh sort of survey equipment and an archaeological pick with uh you know a dagger underground there and skull and a collared ern, a bronze age urn and also a bronze axe in the middle. So it's an interesting mix of elements which he he uses really to sum up his thinking. We think of him as the excavator. Look close on the left hand side and you can see Pit Rivers sitting in a deck chair watching excavation uh being undertaken at South Lodge in Wiltshire on the Wiltshire Dorset border or on the right hand side you can see him in the background there's a horse behind him and there is the character there is the imposing figure of you know the man that's often known as the general at that point who's overseeing the here the excavations with a sort of practiced militarism. Here is the fox or the pit rivers that we don't so often see. Uh the cart vizit on the left hand side here he is as a young uh soldier in Canada uh in the early part of the 1860s. And one thing I do in the book is is I yeah you tell the story of his various you know military postings and and where he served. And actually the you know Trent affair in the 1860s was amazingly important um for you know for him and indeed for world politics after the death of Albert and the risk you know last time there was a risk in sort of you know politics around the world that there might be a war between the the the Americans and sort of Canada uh there was a massive sort of movement of sort of troops out out there and he was part of that. We don't know much about his earlier images. There is a potential and I make this argument in in the book there, you know, there there's actually this image, it's a famous image by by the photographer and and and sort of comrade of Augustus Pit Rivers in the Grenadier Guards, Roger Fenton, that this image from the British Museum from 1857 actually shows Pit Rivers in the middle. If you look at the two men, obviously at that sort of point in history, a lot of it's it's a bit like the 1970s. There was a lot of longer hair and sort of facial hair as well, and everyone looked a little bit the same. But I like to think that maybe here's an early image of Augustus Pit Rivers there at the British Museum. So, who is this man? How do we make sense of him? and sort of what are the links to the museum that bears his name or as I put it in the book his necronym the sort of death name that he inherits with all of this money because it isn't really his name um here is the Pit Rivers it's it's an institution in which I've now worked for over 18 years as curator of world archaeology founded in 1884 with sort of $30,000 objects or so. It now has 300,000 or so objects, about 300,000 photographs, a range of other archival materials and film archives and so forth. Um and really it is a product though it's a it's an institution which is sort of set up in some ways as an intellectual legacy for his theories because Augustus Pit Rivers was important for a range of different reasons. If you if you read the text books, he's sort of sort of celebrated as a founder as I've mentioned of sort of the modern discipline of archaeology especially fieldwork but also intellectually the links with anthropology. He was a you know central individual in the founding or the all the or the merging of ethnological and anthropological thinking in the 1860s. Um he he invented a model of the sort you know what in America they would call the four field model of anthropology in which archaeology is sort of a part of anthropology in those ways. He was absolutely the key individual in the founding of anthropology and archaeology within uh the university of Oxford and thereby sort of sort of you know within our universities internationally. He was the first inspector of ancient monuments in the UK and therefore has this enormously important role in the history of sort of preservation and also the definition of what sort of counts as a monument. He was important also in the founding of museums and the idea that museums might have an educational sort of function. And this is where the typological arguments which is a sort of cultural evolutionism if you like sort of came in. And so here is the diagram that he showed in the middle of the 1870s at the time at which for the first time he had his objects on display to the public in East London in sort of Bethl Green. If any of you know the young VNA as it's now called, it was the Museum of Childhood. Until recently, that building held his first exhibition from 1874 to 1878. He then had objects at South Kensington and what's now the VNA until 1882 to three when he handed over all those objects over to the Pit Rivers. and the pit rivers was built in Oxford as a legacy collection. All the way through there is this idea of what the collections are doing which is summed up really in this sort of diagram. So it's a diagram in which every one of these objects which are from Aboriginal Australia but were not sort of based on him himself sort of paying a visit or doing sort of field work in Australia. He sort of buys these objects as they wash up from Empire at the auction houses and the dealerships of London. He arranges these objects which are all weapons as well as all from a single Aboriginal sort of culture. He arranges them according to what he calls series. These are hypothetical evolutionary series of objects. One object that's in the diagram is not a real object. In the middle there's an imaginary wooden stick. And as you see that idea of almost that idea that you know the first weapon was a stick. Think about sort of 2001 of space odyssey with that opening sequence of the bone that gets thrown up into the air and it turns into a spaceship. And in some ways I mean this is the diagram which is sort of arguing that point and making that point in a very 19th century way in that uh with each iteration each sort of moment of use that object evolves or changes. So you get the boomerangs moving out to the left hand side you've got the lances at the bottom. You've got the shields because importantly for pit rivers sort of shields were also a form of weapon. and and you've got the clubs at the top. So, in some ways, what you have in front of you is a fairly conventional sort of, you know, Victorian improvement narrative that things are always getting better and improvement and the the great exhibition was a great sort of moment in obviously sort of several years earlier in order to celebrate how you know technology is always improving. But there are really sort of other aspects that are going on here as well. On the one side, of course, they're all weapons. And what Augustus Pit Rivers is doing is he's starting to build a theory of material culture that is not only about weapons, it's about all material culture that is however, you know, based on that idea that weapons are improving all the time. So it's a militaristic kind of model for how we think about how objects sort of change over time. And the context was for that because of his sort of military background was all the evolution of how weapons were changing at the time which of course in the 18 1870s was all about the moment at which machine guns were about to be used in Africa and elsewhere. you know, by the British and that you have this enormous sort of difference in between those who are trying to defend themselves with sort of bows and arrows uh and sort of those who have you know rocket launchers and you know machine guns and steam power and so on. So this is as I argue in the book a lot of his his his sort of thinking here is about the relationships in between objects and militarism but also about these histories of empire and how a sense of the past and present might be used to do that. And so how can archaeology help us understand these things? fundamentally the educational side of what he sought to do in East London was to tell people and to tell especially because it was East London to tell the you know the the you know ethnically diverse and workingclass communities of London that you know change isn't going to happen fast that revolution is a very very bad idea it it won't work he's a veteran of 1848 of of course, you know, he's he's 21 years old when you're in the key year of the of the of the publication of the Communist Manifesto and all of the unrest across Europe. And that's a very very important sort of uh context for his thinking. So that's the background. That's the intellectual background. What does that mean that Pi Rivers was up to in Kent? How can the county of Kent and of course he interacted with the society you know where you know the Kent Archaeological Society is old enough to have had a relationship with you know Pit Rivers. So we're all in some ways sort of thinking about you know what are the histories of our organizations and that's both you know the important and ongoing important role of sort of local societies for what archaeology is in our country you know today and sort of how we receive the thinking of the people like Pit River. So I'm just going to run over now in this you know map of Kent. I haven't got a map, I'm afraid, but hopefully you know you know the county well enough or while I'm talking you can, you know, you can have your maps app open and you can look up exactly where we're talking about. Um, and we can talk about how how important the county was for his career and his thinking. So we can start at uh Chattam and we can start with the 21-year-old Augustus Pit Rivers appearing in you print in the illustrated London news in the summer of 1848 in the context of you know uprisings across Europe. There is uh Lieutenant Fox mentioned as one of the Grenadier guards who is part of an East India Company mock siege of London in front of the court of of directors of the East India Company. There's this enormous performance of what happens if London was under threat. It's an imaginary attack upon a fake riddout. And there is Fox at the front, Augustus Pit Rivers as he would be later on at St. Mary's barracks in Chattam. That idea that this is about the defense of the nation, the defense of the capital links in with his ideas in terms of prehistory. And later in 1868, here's our first object from the Pit Rivers, an object. When returning to Chattam, he picks up an undated flint scraper from uh uh Chattam. His involvement with Kent really gets important when he moves there. He moves to Hy in order to take up the role as a 26 year old in 1853 as the first instructor of musketry at the newly established Hy School. And so Fox and his wife Alice lived there until until March 1854. And then he was sort of transferred to Malta. This was in the run-up to the Crimean War. And there's a great deal about Augustus Pit River's role in the Crimean War, how he saw action at the battle of of Alma and the effect upon him of seeing the transformation of living landscapes through industrialized warfare into essentially, you know, horror scapes of archaeological sort of proportions where all of a sudden there were trenches being dug for for sort of burying the dead. There was the looting of the dead bodies, faux objects, all of these, you know, subarchchaeological elements were there in the experience of warfare. And in many ways, the relationship of archaeology with war and the militarism of the way in which we dig trenches, the way in which we, you know, use our bodies when we excavate, you know, has a relationship there. But but but at this point his sort of training of bodies is not about excavation but about musketry. He develops a uh you know theory of musketry which is about the improvement of the rifle on exactly the model that we saw that later diagram about how weapons improve which is linked into the training of the body in order to make the soldier sort of fit the weapon in certain ways. And so like Wulitch had been a center for the training in artillery, Hyde was going to be important for infantry firepower. So they moved into the Napoleonic era sort of buildings at Hy near the Sainsburries if you know Hy well and they sort of practiced on the on the dunes and the butts were set up on on the dunes. They purchased a whole whole sort of range of the beach land, you know, in order to uh you know, in order to do the training and they received many many this was the beginning of the volunteer sort of service sort of later on. And that was that that that was how in many ways these these sort of you know training regimes only got more intense, you know, under a man called Haye a bit later on. But it's really Fox that's there at the beginning. Um, and importantly in the years running up to 1853, he had undertaken a tour of Europe. He'd gone to the Piedmont. He'd gone to he he'd gone to Paris. He he'd been to Belgium and to many of the places where the new sort of cutting edge weapons technology of the rifle were being developed because he had been sort of tasked with the uh uh the role as a young officer of sort of testing and experimenting with and adopting the rifle as the service weapon of the British army. And so RI in order to replace uh the musket or the uh the brown bess as it was known with a rifle that worked on the mini system, a different sort of bullet, a different sort of rifling of the inside of the barrel that of course improved the shot. This is at the heart of his sort of theory of how material culture changes. So after the Crimean war he comes to the conclusion that a relatively small difference in sort of technological change the fact there's rifling on on the inside of a gun is something because there was there were more rifles on the Ottoman and the French and the English or the British sides as compared with the Russian Empire. that a change of that, you know, that a difference of that kind in terms of objects is something that makes empires fall or succeed, that actually these sort of changes, these evolutions not of the human species. This isn't a kind of uh uh sort of racial supremacy, although there there are there are certainly elements of sort of, you know, the fake racial sciences that sort of persist in his thinking in very interesting ways and very sort of troubling ways. But even more troubling maybe is this idea of cultural supremacism of sort of material cultural or you know technological supremacism and I talk about that that a lot a lot in the book but it's really grounded in his work with improving the rifle. We could get into the back and forth, which I won't hear now, about his arguments with sort of General Haye and the story about how, you know, the rifle is adopted and how the how the system of musketry is is sort of set up. But, you know, he tells the story in different ways in the 1870s. The key thing is that there are, you know, there is this work he does in order to develop and experiment with in sort of Wulitch and elsewhere with what sort of became an NI Enfield rifle as we see here from the Pit Rivers collections, but also the experience of the looting of these objects from the Elma and the bringing back of rifles, helmets, insignia, religious items from the bodies of the dead Russians that came into the Pit Rivers collection. So many of these museums at this time sort of before they turn into anthropology museums are museums of arms and armor. They're museums of weaponry. They have this intimate relationship with militarism. So what he's doing at Hive is he's really developing a science. you you know they're teaching classes on theory of how to work out how to point your rifle and when you look at the instruction of musketry book when you look at the at the accounts of the way in which they they they were adopting you know this sort of rifle or that and they were thinking about about the process they were developing the registers that recorded your firing practice and who who got what near the bullseye. They are making tables that record exactly what shot certain people record. These are almost the beginning of the sort of recording that we ourselves use in archaeology in terms of context sheets or recording things on site. There's an amazing relationship here in between the sorts of via tabular forms here. the measurement of distance, the surveying, how far away is the target, the drawing of sections, and the drawing of sort of plans, and even the recording of what the atmosphere and the weather was like, which certainly I mean, when I first learned how to fill in a context sheet, I was always told to say, you know, what was the weather like in exactly the same as be as it's being written down. So, there's a sort of prehistory, a sort of protohistory here of archaeological recording. that is there in how he's encouraging these these sort of troops uh you know to be sort of recording their their shots. So that's Hyde. So Hyde's very important in terms of his thinking but there's no archaeology involved yet. One relationship with archaeology that becomes very important is Augustus uh Pit River's friendship and later indeed uh relationship in the family with Labuk John Labuk who was brought up at Elm's estate near down which is a bit of a cheat because it's no longer in Kent it's now over the border into Brmley but a bit later on I think I allow myself sort of luk if talking about Kent because he did later on after Pit Rivers died. He bought sort of a big castle site up at sort of Broadstairs at King's Gate. He trained also with the Kent Army artillery militia uh from the 1850s and almost certainly you know Lukak and Pit Rivers know each other from Kent in those days. Later on, Labuk married Augustus Pit Rivers's uh uh daughter. So, even though they were the same sort of age, he became his son-in-law. And these relationships, these sort of personal relationships in the the growing antiquarian uh sort of scene in London and Kent were enormously important. I've got I've got I've got one little footnote which I wanted to mention for Craig which is simply that uh later on another link of a similar or or later generation was that a man called sort of Frederick uh James uh was the creator of the the Maidston Museum from 1891. another one of sort of Pit River's team who he trained up in excavation in the same way as many years earlier he'd been training people in rifle shooting. So that's the militaristic background if you like and some of the sort of social sort of dimensions of Kent. What about the archaeology that he did in Kent and what he thought he was doing? Well, we can start. You can see we've sort of reached uh uh where we're going to get into Folkston with sort of, you know, what is really his sort of larger excavation and then I'm going to tell you about a series of other objects which are now in Oxford in the Pit Rivers collection which are from Kent. So, we're going to keep on moving around the county and we're now off to Folkston. Um actually, we're not off to Folks. Sorry. We're off to Broadstairs first and then to Folkston. So, uh, we're going to go to Thanet, in fact, for two archaeological sites there. Um, so we start off in 1868 where he's back in Kent and he's in Thanet and he describes uh in the year after his his sort of lectures on you know primitive warfare which is really where he's beginning to build a series of links in between how archaeology might be able to help you with the history of of sort of technological ical change and civilization really based upon the idea that the history of the invasions that have happened in the United Kingdom are the same histories that later happened in terms of the invasion of the Americas and were happening at the same time that he was living in terms of the of the invasions and what he called the exterminations that were going on in Africa and Australia. So he wants to tell a story of indigenous people in Ireland, in England, uh, who were who sort of died out in a similar way because of supposedly, you know, culturally superior invaders, um, sort of back in prehistory into into the Roman period, certainly in the Iron Age, you know, and that that's also something that happened, you know, in the in the 16th century in the Americas and was happening in in his present day in in the 19th century. So, it's real deep, you know, Victorian imperialism using archaeology or wanting to find a way of using archaeology for telling that story. And he grounds it, for example, in some field walking that he does near Broadstairs. Uh so he talks about a tract of land which extends about a mile north of Margate up to Broadstairs and and uh Ramsgate. Uh and in that location he identifies a series of different flints uh which he uh uh which he which are here are drawn uh one after another. Here they are in the pit rivers. Uh so here are the actual objects that he sort of talked about these worked flints that he found at the time as he was as he was walking along those sort of coastlines. And his attempt here was to talk about the idea that these were evidence of what he thought of uh in terms of the work he was doing in sort of Sussex as evidence for sort of Neolithic arsenals. when he dug a site called Cispbury, which is the drawing we see in front of us here, he described this site for uh uh for Neolithic manufacturer of flint tools as a Neolithic armory as a woolitch of the stone age. And he's kind of trying and experimenting with sort of broad stairs. He's interested in these coastal areas. He's very much interested in the defense of Britain. He's also doing the survey of hillforts along the Sussex coast at a time at which there's a lot of investment in terms of you know military sort of defense at that at that point because they're worried about the French. Um but he's sort of talking about this idea well well actually have I found another one of these you know Neolithic armories in sort of broad stairs. he isn't sort of later on he's he sort of pulls back from that uh and he decides maybe yeah you know that isn't what he he had found but he does the same or he thinks about the same interpretation when he's at another site which were the brick earth excavations he observes an early example of rescue archaeology maybe one of the first examples in Kent of something that we would recognize as rescue archaeology where some workmen are excavating a uh a large hole for the brick earth uh in between uh reading street and St. Peter's as he puts it. Um and they find worked flint alongside a series of other objects and he he thinks at the time that this is this is about the taking out of flint and the manufacturer of weapons and then the deposition of animal bones in order to have a burial sort of feast. He's very all his interpretations are are about violence and death. Basically, this is where he he is at this point in terms of how he how he's interpreting things. Later on, he goes back and re-exavates or or or excavates the rest of the pit in 1870. And there's a long interpretation there of these pits. He he refers to them asial in context and is slightly unclear as to whether they're you know later prehistoric or Romano British. In 1881 someone called Flaxman Spo says that sort of pit rivers was inaccurate. It was simply a m pit. But in 18 Yeah. But in 1969, Anne Ross in her gazetier of uh purposeful deposition in the iron age included the pit in her list of structured deposition sort of sites as we got to know them later on. So there's a there's an interesting history of the in of the changing interpretations of that site. Certainly, you know, certainly for pit rivers, he was hoping to find evidence there of, you know, warfare. He talks, as I talk about in the book, he starts interp, he comes back from the Crimean War and is interpreting, you know, the British landscape as evidence of one enormous war that had happened in the past in between indigenous people and invaders of different kinds. And that was the the sort of archaeology he wanted to do. that was expanded more at Folkston where for those of you that know Folkston as you come in that enormous hill sort of Castle Hill known locally as sort of Caesar's camp was a site that he he did his first really sort of large open area excavations he was sort of sort of fresh at that time from the Sussex hillfort uh survey where he'd looked at all the hill fors that were on the south coast sort of down there, you know, and this large excavation of what sort of turned out to be, as we now know, or as he found out, a Norman ringwork, you know, a medieval castle, not an iron age hill fort. He essentially accidentally undertook the first sort of major excavation or or open area excavation of of a medieval castle or indeed a medieval site of any kind. So, this was in the June to July of 1870 1878. large scale excavation funded uh funded by the BAA and the and the societ and the society of an antiquaries. Um he sort of took the place name really seriously. He does this sort of quite a lot actually. He goes and digs up sort of Danes Dyke uh kind of thinking it must be something to do with sort of Denmark when he's up in Yorkshire excavating that site. And he does the same here. It must be something to do with Caesar big because that's there in the vernacular and in and in the place name. But he accidentally, as I say, ends up as the pioneer of of of sort of sort of you medieval archaeology. The comparison he's making is with Mount Cburn. Here is a drawing, a sketch drawing he did in the pub in Lewis in the Star Inn in Lewis in 1877 of his excavations at Mount Kburn. Um, and what he wanted to do, as he says at Caesar's camp, was to see to what extent we are justified, if at all, in forming an opinion upon the date of an entrenchment by its external appearance. He undertakes the excavation in sort of two parts. In the summer, early summer of 1878, a team of sappers from the near nearby Shacliffe barracks were part of it. So he's even actually using military trained engineers for the excavation early on at the beginning of the project opening the site up. Uh and then he's employing 8 to 10 men per day in terms of local excavators. Flender's Petri was in Kent undertaking his early survey of archaeological monuments. And he, you know, there's a rivalry in between the two men, it seems, and he he goes and sends a drawing or or a survey of it, you know, off to Pit Rivers on a day that Pit Rivers wasn't on site. But here is Pit Rivers uh drawing of that site. Here are the excavations and the and the profiles of the trenches, the sections of the trenches that he dug. Absolutely crucially for this moment in archaeology. And this is something for Kent archaeology. I think, you know, despite all of the slightly, you know, dodgy or or or or sort of wishful thinking interpretation that he undertook at the time, this is a really important moment for the history of archaeology in Kent because really it's the beginning of the first model of scientific excavation. We kind of think of the work he did later on on his own estate on the Wiltshire Dorset border. But not only are you getting the plans and the sections, you're also getting for the first time what he calls the relic tables. So the presentation of objects one after another these incredibly detailed drawings in which the camera is being used in order to illustrate in these ways in his excavation reports all of the items that he he finds. You see the you see in the top left hand side the bone flute which is found which we're able to identify because these sort of drawings are so are so accurate in the collections of the pit rivers. Again these other fragments of carved stone which are there in those in those images in those relic tables as he puts it are there you know sort of in the collection. So we can match those up. We can even match up an item that isn't in the pit rivers. It was sold on later on. But the the you know one of the most interesting objects in some ways from those excavations, the coin with the head of Matilda that was found on the left hand side here is here images from his relic table. On the right hand side here is what's on the Fitz William Museum sort of website in their you know in their inventory there. And actually afterund 150 years, you know, Pit River's sort of drawing is actually rather better than the information you can get on the internet about this coin. He also labeled objects. So these are some of the labels that we receive. And actually that idea of writing on on objects, writing labels and attaching them onto objects is an incredibly you know interesting thing intellectually that we that we turn an object into a document into an archive of some sorts but also just for the history of handwritten labels of you know find tags written here we have he was even sort of re sort of reusing you know greetings cards. So, I don't know who sort of Colonel Martin was, I I confess. But what I do know is that sort of Colonel Martin's name gets a line through it. And on the reverse of that card is a a note that, you know, this is where we found the pottery. Uh so, so some of the social history here, you know, links in really nicely in terms of understanding the history. So that's his big excavation really is Caesar's camp where he's again sort of going in wanting to tell a story about invasion and indigenous resistance and he ends up excavating a medi you know the evidence doesn't sort of match up to his theories. We can run through fairly quickly just in the next five minutes or so the rest of the sites and then we come to the one that I guess you know when I revisited this material in order in order to talk to you I realized that my interpretation of last time I looked at an object sort of 15 years ago or so has has really changed because of writing the book recently. But let's look at some of these other objects from Eastear Bay. We've got an iron age coin that he picks up in 1878 or someone picks up for him and he and he purchases and from Rich obviously wonderful sort of Roman site if any of you haven't. I'm sure I'm sure lots of you I'm sure you often do field trips there and so on. Here is an item. I don't know is it a fake? Is it a again a bit of wishful thinking? uh William Tolbert Ready uh a conservator and you know to some degree yeah more than a conservator from the British Museum at that time recreates uh if we can use that word this this bowl a Samian wear bowl for pit rivers from Richbra but a very you know piece of sort of Samian wear uh which is there you can just see on the bottom on the on the base you can see rip repaired by William Tolbert Ready. He was doing slightly more than simply repair. We've got as we move on. So that was Eastware Bay and Richborough. We can move on to Realva. Uh I hope I'm saying that right. Uh where there were four examples of the Paleolithic handaxes that people were picking up in the 1860s, 1870s, you know, on that bit of the Kent Coast in between Hearn Bay and Realva. um from from the gravels that cap the clays you know on that bit of um of coastline. So there are four examples of the pallet. Again, you know, he is reading these as weapons. He is reading these as the as the weapons of what he's he's seeing using his language of the primitive inhabitants, you know, or the barbarous inhabitants. He was using all of these all these terms which he's also applying to contemporary kind of populations. Fundamentally, his sort of theory of archaeology was about survival, who survives and who doesn't. the idea that he was living in a world in which there were survivals from the prehistoric present, you know, actually in the or the prehistoric past in the present. Um he's got sort of two examples from the famous uh shipwreck, a Roman Romano British shipwreck with a whole load of Samian wear that here and there with the dredging and with with other things it washes up uh you know in Kent from the putting pan rock um uh shipwreck. And so so and so Pit Rivers acquires in the 1870s you two of these examples from this site from this this underwater site off the coast of Kent and also this interesting site I reckon I mean so the Kentish knock I think reasonably counts as Kent. It's got Kent in the title. You may be again nearer to Essex or you know most of the way to London by the time you're there. You're in the in the estie. But but here is a very interesting object that is essentially you know it's a it's a marau object. It's a New Zealand sinker that is that is found under who knows what sort of circumstances in the water of Kent uh in this incredibly busy you know shipping channel of course. Um and so that's uh that's the yeah that's another object which is which is something that that you know that he acquires as as you'll have seen most of these objects we we've got images you know for because you know one of the important work you know bits of work that that I've done over the years that we all have to do in museums is to is to do the basic work of sort of documentation I'm afraid we don't have an image for you know for one of the objects I wanted to mention this evening which is a hammerstone from near no beaches the you know the famous sort of trees uh seven seven oaks but he he again he acquires at some point in the 1860s or certainly before 1874 he acquires some sort of a prehistoric hammerstone from there there are also objects though or yeah one object actually more than anything that relates to his his role as inspector of ancient monuments and so Kit's Cody house is one of the most important sites in the history of his his role as inspector because it's the first one that he visits after he takes up this new role here from this volume our ancient monuments which is a physical bound volume which we hold now at the pit rivers. Um he has a series of sort of photographs and here here on the left hand side is one of them that shows the uh graffiti that was on this monument. You can see the three sars and the capstone that survive from the Neolith where what originally was a obviously much larger monument of the Neolithic uh long barrow chambered long barrerow. It looks more like a kind of care now or or whatever you call it. But uh there it was. It was it was near the railway line and near the road to uh to the seaside basically. And so, uh, found it itself sort of being engraved with, you know, graffiti. And so, Pit Rivers acquires it from the Liberal MP Henry Abbrassi, uh, who I guess was MP for Maiden for Maidstone or elsewhere in Kent. Anyway, maybe, you know, maybe Lukak was for Maidstone. I don't he was he was a local MP anyway. Um, and Augustus Pit Rivers erect the fence that you can still see to this day. uh he erects it to his own design. Uh he obtains £100 which was a lot of money back then from the treasury to sort of build the fence. At this time he he also sort of tries to say that there should be policemen at ancient monuments uh to protect them but in this case it is simply the fence. Um and it's interesting because it sort of turns this monument into a sort of museum exhibit. There's there's a you know there's an interpretation board and there's a you know the fence operates a bit like a vitrine in a museum and it's it's a really interesting moment in the history of the development of what we would you know we would now call the you know the the sort of list that you know that that is maintained by historic England you know as the inheriting body for essentially you know the work that Augustus Pit Rivers was doing at that time. So again, you know, ideas of their time in certain ways, but you know, we're dealing with those legacies in a whole host of different ways. Here are some of the here are some of the drawings, you know, of the site from that time. And here is the object we have in the Pit Rivers collection, uh, from a series of scale models, miniature models of ancient monuments made by a man called Alfred Lionel Lewis who was based in Cornwall. Here is Kit's Cody house in cork. It's rendered in cork. Uh the material is cork and and in some of these cases, I don't know on this one, sometimes there is moss also used to show the vegetation on these sort of wooden bases and and and as you can see on the on the text, it says that Kitsky house is three miles from Alsford station. So this is a way of recording the site not in a drawing or uh or with an object from the site but actually making a model of it that is there in the pit rivers collections uh today. The uh the second from last object I want to mention is you know not an archaeological object but one of what actually is quite a surprising number of uh biscuits which we have in the collections of the Pit Rivers Museum. a memorial biscuit in this case of the biddenan maids uh near Ashford. So this is an 80 this is a biscuit from at some point before it's more than 150 years old. Uh and it represents the conjoined twins. These were given out and I I think maybe continue to be given out. I don't know. I'd be interested to hear from anyone that knows uh you know you know on Easter Sunday every year uh as part of the Easter Day service but importantly for Pit Rivers he's acquiring this because he sees in the folklore as he would see it in the in the living traditions he sees survivals of earlier forms of belief which he sees as outdated as compared with the present. So his whole theory of of the supremacism of you know modern Victorian science is that all around the world you see survivals of old worlds you know which are fading away as and here you really do I'm afraid sort of get into you know manifest destiny sorts of arguments the inevitable fading away of old ways of life old you know old sort of populations as he would have put it you know you know as there is an unfolding of a technologically superior culture. So, so this is not this is not racism in the way that we would see it with the fake racial science, but it's a supremacism and a certain form of sort of cultural supremacism which has relationships with, you know, cultural whiteness which is very much there. He's he's seeing himself as superior to the past. He's seeing his job as an archaeologist and anthropologist as sort of documenting some of that. And here we come to the final object which I in uh returning to all the all the documentation work we did uh 15 years ago last time we came to talk to your society something that I having just written this book read this object completely differently. So the record on the object which is an it's a socketed iron the iron axe head recorded later in in time as maybe being medieval in date recorded as from Big Brie Wood near Harbbled down on the outskirts of Canterbury acquired from Ceil Brent FSA son of John Brent. For those of you that know the history of antiquarianism in Kent these these might be names that you know they were both FSAs. They were both he, you know, the father was the deputy left tenant of the county and both were members of your society, but why is big wood important? And I just thought, oh, a wood in Kent. I've I've read about that. And that was because I was reading and writing about the history of the 45th regiment of foot and what EP Thompson in his uh in his writing on you know on the history of on the history of the British working class wrote in the 20th century. So the 45th regiment of foot returned from empire, returned from service in India in March 1838 and infamously were involved in the uh the killing of many civilians in the Chartist risings in Newport in South Wales in November 1839. Augustus Pit Rivers writes a lot about chartism. He writes a lot about his role both as a grenadier guard. At various points in the book, I talk about the points of insurrection and the chartist uh uh movements and the famous Hyde Park railings affair in which Augustus Pit Rivers was on duty at the point at which you almost you know saw sort of a revolutionary moment. Um, I talk about that a lot in the book, but he acquires at some point in the 1860s this object which is from Bigbury, which it turns out is actually just up the road from Bostonwood because the year before the Chartist Newport rising, the same regiment, the 45th regiment, having landed in Kent in March 1838, were involved olved in the killing of civilians in English. EP Thompson called it the last battle fought on English soil where the Cornishman William Kourtney fresh from having spent four years in the Kent County Lunatic Asylum uh developed you know there are v various interpretations a cult you know a revolutionary movements uh you know it had a lot of you know lots of attributes of a sort of cult movement of various kinds but there were the soldiers you know using the same tact tactics they had been using in India with the you know with the company against English civilians. Imperial violence, the imperial boomerang as some people call it returning to British soil. That regiment went on to the South African wars. Well, yeah, later in the 1860s around the time that Pit Rivers was acquiring this object involved in the British expedition to Abiscinia, the famous Magdala expedition. So, here is one. It's an object that fits so well to so many objects that he acquired from England. Things that relate to that idea that there are survivals of forms of resistance that the working class themselves were survivals of indigenous resistance that had to be put down or at the very least uh convinced that revolution was a bad idea. So lots of those ideas are explored in the book. I hope that's been an enjoyable excursion, a bit of a field trip, a virtual field trip around uh uh the county of Kemp. You linking it to some of the ideas of Augustus Pit Rivers, the complexity of how we think about his legacy in the present. You know, all of this at the pit rivers in our archaeological societies in the discipline of archaeology is is about holding on to the good that we inherit from these thinkers while being ready to look at the complexity of their their ideas and to reject some of those ideas which are are really out of time you know in the present. That's why the book goes into much more. You know, the questions, how do these things link to, you know, the democratic rights that people have every now and then to rename a building or to remove a me a memorial, but those are ideas that will have to stay for another time. If you want to hear more about that, obviously you you can follow me on on Instagram or on the blue sky or also in terms of face toface events, I'm doing a whole tour of sort of bookshops and elsewhere in London, but also in in the north of England, in Ireland, in in in Edinburgh. It's all on the website. So, hope to see some of you maybe at a face toface event as well. But thanks so much for now. Thanks for listening, Dan. Thank you so much. That was a fantastic story and wow, I had no idea there was so many connections between Pit Rivers and Kent. Honestly, um it's uh I'll just say quickly if you have any questions, please do add them to the chat for them. Yeah, Pit Rivers is such a familiar name in archaeology. I've heard it throughout my academic time and throughout, you know, everything. is is always there. But I honestly had no idea there was quite so much connection to Kent even despite being here. And I've stood at that fence at Kits Cody. I've even filmed a Halloween special from there and I had no idea that that was the work of of Pit Rivers as well. So what a what a incredible story. I mean I love seeing the evolution of the the context sheet and the sites drawing um the site drawings which is is really interesting and it emerged from those military essentials. you know, there's that connection between the military and systemized excavation. Does that still is there a trace of that still today or I think there is, you know, I I feel, you know, part of the way that we inherit these ideas and these attitudes is almost in our bodies. I felt when I was being trained how to dig, I was being it was only four generations or so between people that have been, you know, taught by Pit Rivers himself. And there is there is some something about that. I'm so interested in how these sort of chains of transmission work because, you know, some people say, you know, you've got to you've got to decolonize the reading list. You've got to update what we teach. Absolutely right. But the problem is nobody teaches or reads Pit Rivers anymore. Like you say, he's a name you hear. Nobody's actually sat you very rarely would it be that people sit down and read him. his ideas are with us in the present and they're in I feel they're they're not so much in the actual words they're in the attitudes the framings things we take for granted and we need to be better even in our bodies you know in in the field in the way that we think about excavation excavation trenches and so on so it's really complex but I think part of how we think about these legacies of the past has to be about the tacit and the implicit as well as just the the obvious things that they said on But yeah. Yeah, sure. I I did notice those sort of those imperial visions, you know, because I've seen a lot of those those kind of tuda images of how prehistory looked and it's always based upon what was happening in the Americas at the time. So there's always seems to be that kind of tying in what you can see at the moment, you know, with a as the empire is spreading with with what you believe happened here all those years ago, which is a strange, but yeah. Um, and also thank you very much for the Frederick James, our museum curator. I shall certainly have to to check that out and find out more about him and learn more. Um, in fact, you know, I'm interested because you mentioned a couple of people there who were part of Cass, the Kent Archaeological Society. Do you know like in your studies, do you know how much connections he he had with the society? Did he have any because obviously we were founded in 1857, so you know the timing is is good, but was he involved? Absolutely. I don't know. Um, I think so. Some of I mean when we did this you lovely lovely project with the local archaeology societies for excavating Pit Rivers some of the societies and that included Yorkshire and uh Sussex he he'd actually been their president Rivers was the because he was a very as I talk about in the book he he loved to sit he loved a committee he loved to sit on committees he's a serial you know you know bureaucrat um in the discipline I don't know I don't think he was ever president of okay so and in some ways his his interactions with Kent are kind of earlier he doesn't really go back certainly after he gets the money and becomes pit rivers he isn't you know he isn't over over there as much but of course you know D you know it's interesting there's also that yeah there's the Darwin link to some degree to where what then was West Kent uh where where Darwin was so so I think yeah uh you know to some degree it's uh it's the sort of you know Brmley end of, you know, outskirts of London being the Kent link early on. Yeah. And then there's the military coastal stuff. Um, uh, uh, yeah. Chattam down to Hy. Uh, and then he comes he comes back because he's doing the South Coast things in sort of Sussex. Uh, and then less so later on. But yeah, in terms of other interactions, not sure not sure as much. But yeah, it' be be interest. I mean, we could easily look at who the I mean, lots of this is about the collectors and and the and the and the antiquarians involved. We're going to have to go find the names, you look up where they are in the collections, you know. Yeah. I'm going to have to go through our um we've got plenty of the registry books of the meetings and stuff, so I'll have to see if he turned up to any of those. Yeah, absolutely. So, I've just seen the comment from uh Nicholas, who I think's here still. So, many thanks for confirming on Bidden. I didn't I thought they were continued to I mean it's it's been it's been many years since I thought about about those biscuits although they are on display if you want to come and if you want to come and see them uh obviously you might be a bit easier just to go down and see some less you know less ancient ones um maybe in Biddington in Biddendon itself yeah actually asking about the displays so do you display the Kent material together over at the pit rivers or is it kind of spread throughout? No, it's obviously a typological museum and lots of Yeah, lots of what I showed you isn't on display. Um, but yeah, you can do a little hunt around what's there. If you look on the website, it will say whether it's on display or not. And our front of house colleagues are very good at help helping you identify things. But no, I'm afraid there isn't a Kent there isn't a Kent case. uh the whole point of what he did he mixed up uh contexts in order to tell his story of series. So it's much more like you know you know the Sabian where almost certainly is in a is in a case of here here are bowls how do people make bowls in different societies and it's just one of one of many that's the thinking that he that he had. Yeah. And some of those recreations were interesting. I mean there's a lot of imagination going on there perhaps in in certain ones but I suppose you know if you're if you're learning by what's coming out of the ground you have to make those leaps now and again. Yeah. So Nicholas said uh some might say earlier Kent archaeologists like Brian Fulset James Douglas and Charles Roach Smith were more pioneering but less scientific and more antiquarian of course. Yeah. Yeah. It depends what what we mean by pioneering and and whether we want to tell histories about people being pioneering or or to tell other other kinds of histories. I mean I think yeah I'm I'm I think I I know Roach Smith. I don't know those other those other names offhand but you know I mean you Pete Rivers himself said we shouldn't be writing big man history. Actually he he very much argued against you know great man history and and other kinds of history. I talk about in the book quite what that means for him um and what he meant by that. But you know there are other ways I mean I'm sure as we've learned about for so many other other parts of Britain there are very important women archaeologists in the history of our discipline and it's in the regions often that we tell them but I think understanding these histories you know I'm just you know I'm sort of telling the story as I can see it from you know from Oxford. Um but a part of the reason that you know I think in some ways his sort of Kent his early Kent collecting is no different to what loads of antiquarians were doing at that time. What makes it exceptional is what he does later. The you know the thing he does at Caesar's camp um and the uh yeah the relationship of the I guess what he's doing at Hive are the different things. Yeah. Yeah. I'd love to learn more. I mean, you know, I think all, you know, one thing that that, you know, that can be done really well in sort of in sort of local archaeology societies is is is understanding who who these characters are and what they did and where they worked, you know. Yeah. I think I'm sure it's on the HR as well. That's the other thing. I mean, as you make sure some of the basic stuff that the antiquarians found out. So one thing we did early on was we sent all this information off to to the H and made sure all the and some of the sites were not there you know no there's a lot of um unpublished and even unrecognized uh older work I think we probably in our collections but we're trying to get through at the moment we we found that there are a lot of those you know in in the back of notebooks sites that were dug and and in all kinds of conditions that have never seen the light of day. So hopefully we can keep bringing them out and and exposing them and showing what was what was understood and happening at the time. Um I don't know if you've been so I noticed the Dean holes was an interesting conversation as well. So I don't know if you've been in any of the Dean holes have you before. No because I've I've just last week I I got to explore my first Deanhole experience of Kent which was pretty amazing. I love the fact that they're they're still such an enigma. You know, there still these questions about the age and their use. I think a lot of people are settled on the fact it's a kind of chalk mine for the acidic soils and and the like, but there is still that tantalizing possibility that these things are and and you know, it's not mutually exclusive. I imagine you know you could be a chalk mine which has ritual significance and and depositions and the rest but that's so pit rivers is definitely on exactly that conversation 150 years ago and what's what's I think always humbling is you real you go back to some of these early archaeologies and you realize exactly the conversation we're having now was already being had you know no one has had an answer then then either um fantastic I see we're losing people a bit and I also So, uh, it's been a long day. We might draw things to a to a conclusion. Yeah. No, no, no. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Um, that's great. Yeah. So, thank you for coming and uh, thank you everyone for attending. Um, thank you for that amazing view into the world of of Pit Rivers and the environment he was working within. It's great to see his connections with Kent and it's something that I'm very keen to explore more. So, I'll be looking through all of my documents this week to try and see how I can uh see if I can find any more mentions of him. Um, absolutely fantastic. So, we've got lots more coming up. So, please do keep an eye out for our upcoming talks. Um, on October 30th, we've got our very own Jacob Scott talking to us about medieval and historic graffiti at Rochester Cathedral, revealing 900 years of history told through the inscriptions, scratches, and marks on the walls and peers of Rochester Cathedral and the ruins of the Cathedral. Priary of St. Andrew. Um, he's going to be dressed as either a zombie or a princess. I haven't decided which yet. Perhaps both. Maybe. We'll see. It's our Halloween special. On Thursday the 20th of November, experimental archaeologist Alexander Reed will take a look at an early Anglo-Saxon sword from the cemetery at SAR and use experimental explain how it was made and show the technologies available to the Saxon blacksmiths. In December, we delve into Kentish medieval measurements with a talk from the amazing Dr. Christopher Monk. And in January, Jason Hulop will be talking to us about medieval knife crime. So, we have plenty of talks. We've got talks all the way through February and March as well. We're booking well into the year ahead. So, our fantastic histories continue. Please feel free to join us. And if you'd like to give us a talk for the society, do get in touch. As I mentioned earlier, if you're not a member, think about joining us. Only £3 pound30 a month and you get loads of amazing stuff and we would love to have you. Check the website for more details on the talks and a wide range of other upcoming Kent-based events as well as how to become a member. Thank you so much, Dan. Really appreciate you um talking to us today. Um and we hope you won't be a stranger and you'll come and visit us in Kent. So, thank you all for being here. Brilliant. All right. Thank you all. Good night. Thanks. See you. Bye.