An assessment of the human remains
Assessment of the environmental potential of the site
Post-excavation project proposal
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An assessment of the human remains Assessment of the environmental potential of the site Post-excavation project proposal |
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Ingleby Barwick is a very large housing development on the southern edge of Stockton on Tees. Windmill Fields is an area being developed by Bryant Homes on the north-western edge of Ingleby Barwick, beside the valley of the river Leven, a tributary of the Tees. The site is at an elevation of 30m; the land is undulating and the soils are developed on boulder clay. In the immediate area of the find the boulder clay is overlain by well-sorted fine sands, gravels and clays, which provide a better drained soil than is seen elsewhere in the district.
There has been little archaeological work in Ingleby Barwick, as most of the planning permissions having been granted before the implementation of PPG 16. Evaluative excavations have found the stakeholes of a fence were found with a scatter of flint implements and Iron Age pottery at Site P, Village 3 (Adams and Carne 1995) and a small quantity of flint was collected from Village 4 North (ASUD 1996). There is an extensive area of Iron Age Romano-British cropmarks at Quarry Farm, north of the site (Heslop 1984).
The burials were uncovered when builders cutting a new road found human bones in their spoil. The police and Tees Archaeology were called to the site to examine the bones. An initial inspection found that two individual burials (Sk. 1 and 2), probably crouched, had been disturbed by the mechanical excavator. All of the bone belonging to Sk. 1 and much of Sk. 2 was recovered from the spoil heap. A piece of Beaker pottery with encircling incised lines was picked up at the same time. Clearance of the surrounding area revealed a large oval pit which contained a rectangular block of fill defined by dark stains, interpreted as the remains of planks. Excavation of this timber structure uncovered two groups of human bones (Sk. 3 and 4), separated by a thin layer of soil; each contained a skull and a few long bones and one (Sk. 4), a pelvis. These individuals may have been exposed and partially defleshed before being placed in the timber cist. When the fill of the construction pit was removed a group of four stakeholes was found; these defined the edge of the presumed plank-built burial chamber.
Near this pit the fill of an individual grave was seen in the section of the road cutting. This grave contained the skeleton of an adult (Sk. 5) in a crouched position; at the feet was a fine polished stone mace-head. This was made of a micro-diorite or gabbro and has a central shaft-hole.
Figure 1. Location of the site and of other prehistoric finds from Ingleby Barwick
Following these discoveries, an agreement was reached with the builders and funding was obtained from English Heritage for a two-week salvage excavation. An area of about 23 square metres was stripped and cleaned and two more graves, each containing crouched burials, were found. Truncation by ploughing and construction work had removed the upper parts of all of the features, so no stratigraphic connections could be made between any of the graves. The pit containing the cist was markedly deeper than the individual graves.
The plough-damage appears to have moved material from the graves in a north-west to south-east direction. Some bone from Sk. 7 and Sk. 8 was found to have been moved up to 0.7m to the south-east from the burials and it is thought that Beaker sherds found just south-east of the grave of Sk. 5 (the mace-head burial) were formerly in that grave. An unusual feature of two burials (Sk. 5 and Sk. 7) was the presence in each fill of a single lump of a heavy rounded dark brown mineral, which is thought to be haematite. This is not a material which is naturally found in the area.
One grave (Sk. 7) was badly disturbed by later activity; the other was a richly-equipped burial (Sk. 6) with a secondary deposit of an adult skull and long bones (Sk. 8) within the fill. This secondary deposit was unaccompanied. Excavation of the equipped burial was carried out on site as far as was practicable. Three V-perforated jet buttons were found near the neck and a plain copper alloy bangle on one forearm. The discovery of large amounts of copper-alloy material around the hands, combined with short winter working days and frosty nights on site led to a decision to remove the torso for excavation at the conservation laboratory in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University. A block of soil was frozen solid in situ with dry ice and taken away for X-ray examination. The X-ray revealed a second bangle on the other arm, together with a number of tubular metal beads. The block was excavated in the laboratory by Jennifer Jones. In this process the two bangles were removed and forty-one tubular beads, twenty-five V- perforated jet buttons, one biconical jet bead and seventy-nine very small jet rings were found. These small rings were found in a fairly restricted area near the left shoulder.
During excavation it was noticed that the heads of Sk. 2, 5, 6 and 7 appeared to be aligned on the highest point of the site. This is not a pronounced feature, but there is an appreciable fall for some distance in all directions from this point, which is just southeast of the cist.
The excavated area seems very unlikely to represent the full extent of the burial ground although no burials were seen in the road section opposite the cist and the mace-head burial, nor were any features visible between the buildings being erected on the west side of the new road. Further expansion of the site to the east was not possible because of buildings and stockpiles, but this area had in any case been very significantly disturbed by construction work and it is unlikely that burials as close to the surface as those examined by Tees Archaeology would have survived. Despite keen interest from the building workers, there were no reports of other bones being found.
The Windmill Fields find has raised a good deal of local interest and has been taken up by the makers of Julian Richards’ new BBC television series Meet the Ancestors. Because of their interest, the high-precision dating of bones from the equipped burials has already begun.
Figure 2. Part of the site during excavation. In the foreground is the single burial Sk. 5:
the road cutting has removed part of the pelvis and the left heel, but missed the mace-head
at the feet. In the background is the excavated construction pit of the timber cist
The finds associated with the skeletons suggest an Early Bronze Age date. Burials of this period are extremely rare in the region. The Windmill Fields site provides the first opportunity to obtain radiocarbon dates for early settlement of the clay lowlands of the Tees Valley and for an unusually high-status metalwork assemblage.
The presence of a cemetery implies that there was a settlement in the vicinity. Hitherto it has generally been thought that Early Bronze Age settlements in this region were confined to higher ground, where woodland was thinner and easier to clear. There have been indications in the recent past that this picture is a result of the inability of air photography and geophysical techniques to pick up sites on the boulder clay, rather than a true representation of the Bronze Age settlement pattern; the Windmill Fields find is an important addition to our knowledge of this subject. Since the work at Ingleby Barwick took place an evaluative excavation has revealed a possible settlement site, with a cremation in a pot, less than 0.7km away at Little Maltby Farm (ASUD 1997).
Figure 3. Excavated features
Although small, the finds assemblage is varied, of very high quality and indicative of the importance of its owners. There are close parallels with Scottish discoveries, particularly the Migdale hoard (Anderson 1901). Metalwork of this date is extremely rare in this region. Jet objects are less uncommon, but the large and relatively undisturbed group from Windmill Fields will be of considerable help in the study of how these objects were used. The presence of Beaker is also uncommon in this area, outside excavations of burial mounds, and the discovery of sherds with the burials at Ingleby Barwick is an important addition to the regional corpus.
Figure 4 The Migdale Hoard. This group of jet and bronze objects was found in a cist at Loch Migdale, Sutherland, before 1901. Parallels with the Windmill Fields find include the ribbed and plain bracelets (3-10), the tubular beads (11-53), and the conical jet buttons (62-67).
From Inventaria Archaeologica, GB. 26, 19
The presence of furnished burials in single graves on the same site as the communal burial of excarnated remains is highly significant and it is possible that the use of this cemetery spans the traditions of the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age periods.
The apparently intentional grouping of graves and cist suggests recognition of, and respect for, a significant point over a period of time, despite a change in cultural traditions. There was no sign of any earthwork or other feature at the high point, but given the gentle relief of the site and the long period of later cultivation, this is not at all surprising.
The human bone assemblage, consisting of the complete or partial remains of eight individuals, is of a reasonable size and, despite the broken state of many bones, is suitable for osteoarchaeological analysis. The assemblage should provide useful data on the age, sex, physical attributes and pathology of this group of people. It seems unlikely that the cemetery as excavated represents a cross-section of the population, but comparison with other groups may help place it in context.
The bones will provide material for dating and stable isotope analysis. It has been suggested that DNA analysis on these bones would be unlikely to produce useful results because of the poor survival of the material as well as the lack of knowledge of the variability of mitochondrial DNA in prehistoric populations.
Stable isotope study will indicate the survival of collagen in the bone and so provide a check on the reliability of the radiocarbon dates. The technique also has the potential to show the proportions of marine and terrestrial food consumed by the individuals buried at Windmill Fields.
The sandy free-draining nature of the soil means that the conditions were not favourable for the preservation of organic materials. As a result, the quantity of plant material and pollen recovered from the samples was small, though the presence of a variety of tree species was detectable. In the absence of charred material and the decay of other organic remains it is unlikely that further environmental work will yield useful results.
The excavation of the freeze-lifted block has been a slow process, because of the large number of poorly-preserved finds contained in it. Conservation work has been started on the very fragile jet buttons and beads in order to prevent further damage. One tubular bead has been extracted whole and a large amount of material is available for X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis.
The finds offer a rare opportunity to study a large assemblage of jet objects from a single context and are a useful addition to the small quantity of Beaker finds from the region. The metalwork is a particularly important discovery as little metalwork of Bronze Age date has hitherto been found in the region: the opportunity to date such a find is also very significant.
The Ingleby Barwick discovery has the potential of contributing substantially to the existing record of the later Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in the region where a wealth of monuments is not complemented by an abundance of artefactual evidence. Beyond that, however, the Ingleby Barwick burials have the capacity to contribute to the analysis of artefactual remains which are significant in a northern European context and to the further understanding of the Neolithic / Bronze Age transition, increasingly seen as a critical period in European prehistory.
This is an interesting discovery in that chronologically and culturally it appears to be on the cusp of the change from Neolithic to Early Bronze Age mortuary behaviour. The (largely) unaccompanied disarticulated deposits are characteristic of Neolithic mortuary practices, while the articulated burials accompanied by grave goods are clearly Early Bronze Age in character.
The disarticulated remains constitute structured mortuary deposits - post-excavation analysis should confirm the nature of any associated structure, but it would seem that the mix of traditions represented here has more in common with the late Neolithic / Early Bronze Age cist-burials than with mortuary structures such as those seen locally at Street House (Vyner 1984). This is a most useful opportunity to compare the detailed burial evidence with that from another site which has international significance (Whittle 1997: 255).
Jet beads are relatively commonly associated with Early Bronze Age burials in north-east England. They occur individually, as at the Street House palisaded ritual structure (Vyner 1988: 194), or in groups, a nearby parallel again being found at Street House cairn, where a group of buttons seem to have been a foundation deposit made before the construction of a Bronze Age round barrow (Jelley 1984). Jet items found in the Tees valley and North York Moors area have traditionally been thought of as originating from the local jet deposits and, while this seems a reasonable hypothesis, this is an opportunity to make a further examination of a material which is notoriously susceptible to misinterpretation. The jet items are a valuable addition to the corpus of objects in this material, while the detail of their disposition contribution to the discussion of their use, still a topic of much debate.
Beakers are relatively unusual in the north-east of Yorkshire and the lower Tees valley; north of the Tees there are no nearby examples, but to the south they are found in burial mounds around the moorland fringe (Spratt 1992: 84), with finds from Mount Pleasant on the Eston Hills (Sockett 1971) and Kemplah Top, Guisborough. This discovery will make a further contribution to the understanding of Beaker assemblages in the north of England and their relationship with other burial deposits of the Early Bronze Age.
The metalwork, which can be assigned to Burgess’s Nigdale-Marnoch tradition, is seldom found in north-east England. Indeed, this is a particularly important discovery as little metalwork of Bronze Age date is ever found in the region. What there is comprises mostly flat axes and daggers, which are occasional finds on the watershed of the North York Moors and on their southern fringes, but to the north there is nothing, which makes the elaborate metalwork associated with the Ingleby Barwick burial a particularly interesting find. It is the first opportunity in the region to obtain radiocarbon dates associated with the metalwork.
The burials are part of a growing number of indicators that the lowland area of the lower Tees valley may have been more substantially settled in the Bronze Age than was once thought. Recent years have seen the discovery of probable Bronze Age deposits in the low-lying area of Greatham, near the Tees estuary, as well as further west in the vicinity of Catterick, to which may be added a growing number of cropmark sites of probable Bronze Age date.
The stone mace-head has no nearby parallels, although mace-heads and battle-axes are fairly common finds in areas peripheral to the moorland massif (Spratt 1992: 106).
In summary, the Ingleby Barwick discovery has the potential of contributing substantially to the existing record of the later Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age in the region, where a wealth of monuments is not complemented by an abundance of artefactual evidence. It is also particularly significant in its potential to extend comparisons into the lowland areas of the Tees valley and the Vale of Mowbray where a combination of chance finds, air photographic evidence, and palaeoenvironmental data is now establishing a picture of prehistoric activity which is very different from that which obtained until very recently.
The Ingleby Barwick find is an important discovery insofar as the local and regional later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age is concerned. Beyond that, however, the Ingleby Barwick burials have the capacity to contribute to the analysis of artefactual remains which are significant in a northern European context, and to the further understanding of the Neolithic / Bronze Age transition, increasingly seen as a critical period in European prehistory (Parker-Pearson 1993: 95; Whittle 1997: 366).
It is proposed to carry out a programme of post-excavation work on the material and information recovered from Windmill Fields. This will result in the publication of an article on the find and its significance for studies of the late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in the north of England and in the production of a free leaflet about the find for local distribution. The finds will be conserved and transferred to Stockton on Tees Museums Service.
A series of specific aims for the post-excavation project can be defined:
Dating this site will not be simple, as there are problems with the calibration curve for the dating of the Early Bronze Age: there are also taphonomic difficulties connected with the dating of excavated remains which may have been lying on the surface for some considerable time before their final deposition. Despite the latter point, dating of the two burials from the cist is well worth while, as much of the importance of the Windmill Fields find lies in the co-incidence of burial rituals here: evidence about the chronological spread of the overlap between the traditions is crucial to the site's interpretation.
The dating will be carried out through the Ancient Monuments Laboratory (AML). Two high-precision dates, from the furnished burials, have already been commissioned from the Belfast radiocarbon laboratory. This was arranged through the AML so that the results could be used in the BBC television programme Meet the Ancestors. The date of the excavated remains could be satisfactorily determined by the accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) method, given the taphonomic uncertainties outlined above.
An osteological report will provide information about age, sex, physical attributes and pathology of the people. It is possible that recording of some non-metric traits could provide evidence of family relationships within the group.
Research on stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen may give an indication of the proportions of marine food eaten by the individuals and the relative importance of meat and plant protein in their diet. This study will also indicate how well the bone collagen has survived at the site, which is important as a check on the reliability of the radiocarbon dates.
The copper alloy bangles will be X-rayed for evidence of their form and decoration and cleaned and consolidated as necessary. The sole complete tubular copper-alloy bead and others which are not too badly decayed will be cleaned, consolidated and examined for possible surface treatments. All of the beads will be analysed by XRF for information about alloys and manufacture.
The conservation of the jet objects will be completed and non-destructive analysis will be carried out to try to establish whether or not the material is jet. The buttons will be compared with other groups from the region, such as the Street House collection. Work will be carried out to reconstruct possible forms for the clothing and the jewellery of its owner.
The sources of the stone used for the mace-head and of the possible haematite lumps found in grave fills will be investigated by non-destructive means and parallels will be sought from other areas and contexts. It is unlikely that a certain identification of the source of the stone mace-head can be made without drilling a sample or taking a thin section; it is not proposed that either of these should be done.
Parallels for the burials and the grave goods will be sought. The presence of relatively rare high-status objects with two of the people in individual graves shows that this is an unusual group of people. Research on the dress and jewellery of the person buried with the copper-alloy and jet objects will also be carried out and comparisons made with known parallels from the continent (cf. Barber 1991: 256). This work will be of considerable value in the examination of the status of one of the individuals buried at Ingleby Barwick, in comparative work and for the eventual presentation of the results of the Windmill Fields excavation.
Information gathered in the processes described above, together with the site data, will form the basis of the descriptive part of the final site report. Parallels and comparative sites will be sought, particularly where there are similar finds and where there is evidence of similar processes of cultural transition. Comparisons will be drawn with known sites where excarnation was practiced, such as the Neolithic mortuary monument at Street House which lies about 30km to the east of Ingleby Barwick (Vyner 1984).
An article on the discovery and its significance will be prepared with a view to publication in a national journal, probably the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Because of the strong links with Scottish finds, a note will also be written for submission to the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. A popular illustrated leaflet describing the site will be produced for distribution in the area. The finds and the site archives will be transferred to Stockton on Tees Museums Service for display.
Adams, M, and Carne, P, 1995 Excavations at Site P, Village 3, Ingleby Barwick, Cleveland, Durham Archaeological Journal 11, 19-33
Anderson, J, 1901 Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 35, 266
ASUD 1996 An archaeological evaluation at Ingleby Barwick, Village 4, Fields 16, 18, 19. Unpublished evaluation report by Archaeological Services University of Durham
ASUD 1997 Little Maltby Farm, Ingleby Barwick, Teesside. Unpublished evaluation report by Archaeological Services University of Durham
Barber, E. 1991 Prehistoric Textiles: the Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages Princeton University Press
Heslop, D. H., 1984 Initial excavations at Ingleby Barwick, Cleveland, Durham Archaeological Journal 1, 23-34
Jelley, D. 1984 The jet buttons, in Vyner 1984, 177-182
Parker-Pearson, M., 1993 Bronze Age Britain Batsford/English Heritage
Sockett, E., 1971 A Bronze Age barrow at Mount Pleasant, near Normanby, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 43, 33-38
Spratt, D.A., 1992 Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology of North-East Yorkshire, CBA Research Report 104
Vyner, B.E., 1984 The Excavation of a Neolithic Cairn at Street House, Loftus, Cleveland, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 50, 151-195
Vyner, B.E., 1988 The Street House Wossit: the excavation of a late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age palisaded ritual monument at Street House, Loftus, Cleveland, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 54, 173-122
Whittle, A., 1997 Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds, Cambridge
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