Archaeology always interested me, as digging holes and playing in mud was always strangely my thing, I even used to bury my toy cars in the garden as a kid, my mother still unearths them gardening now. My interest was fired further when I took a job as a chain man with a tunnelling company operating in and around Manchester where at times I did the site engineers job as I had the aptitude and I was cheap but open cut work was my favourite cutting through made ground what came up with the excavator was very interesting especially so as we over pumped a section of canal so we could lay pipes under it, a bank we thought was a bank turned out to be a raft of butty boats from the late nineteenth century. Then on the same job sinking interlocking culverts through a river the amount of guns that came up was impressive, old flint locks and early single shot percussion pistols, their proximity to the law courts was perhaps testimony as to why they were in the river, but with an interest in archaeology I took, cleaned and recorded them, crows foot and pepperbox pistols mostly, I think they are still somewhere in my mum's garage back home.
Other suff I did was recreational archaeology recreating finds and using them to ascertain how they were probably used until I sort of settled on Iron Age Britain and did living history displays for schools, museums and out in the field at sites, Butser Iron Age farm, The Chiltern Operen Air Museum where the camping was different and a damned site more comfortable than tents. But at the Chiltern Open Air Museum I was involved in building the 'new' iron age round house as the old one was not for camping in officially as it was built wrong and so was sliding down the hill.
Later grubbing about in mud came with a metal detector and some interesting finds from field walking in areas identified from OS maps as being possible sites for human habitation and with that a definite Roman knife, confirmed by the Ashmolean and there they found another future site to consider. But Archaeologists hate metal detectorists, but without them much would stay hidden so they serve a purpose and we didn't engage in night hawk activities we did have some responsibility. I gave up with the detector when I unearthed something from ww2 as metal detecting can be very dangerous.
Now all I do is grub about in my local estuary looking for flaking iron for well interest and the metal of course which I reforge into jewellery and other bits and pieces. But the estuary is the graveyard for at least nineteen ancient sailing vessels and the actual estuary where the Tamar sailing barge ''Shamrock'' was rescued from, now fully restored and lying up at Morwhelham Quay. The iron I find, shackles bits of chain and such I burn the rust of in the forge then sand blast to reveal the pronounced grain structure, it in that state actually looks organic as if the metal was indeed silver painted wood. One piece of chain I hooked up turned out to be a slave chain it found on top of where the ballast would be on a long ago rotted away ship, that one got reforged into jewellery, the grain inlaid with copper as a contrast, although the iron when worn resisted rust due to the silica layer which came out in the forging.
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hp ... 6727_n.jpg
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hp ... 5947_n.jpg
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Some of my pics ^
But you up in Scotland, if you are going to get involved, look into the Brochs that for some reason have vitrified granite walls, what kind of heat managed to do that ;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotland_ ... man_Empire
Is it another case of ooparts and alternative theories akin to Von Daniken?
