 Well, thank you very much. I'm Katie Whittaker. I've come to you today from the West Country and I'm going to tell you the story of MS953, which is the archive collection of one of the Society of Antiquary's own archaeological research projects, the Sarson Stones in Wessex project. I'm going to cover what that project was about, who was involved in it, and I'm going to put it into context in terms of the later 20th century development of archaeology as a discipline. But the project's dataset is important geologically and archaeologically speaking. The trouble is in its analogue format, it's not very easy to use as you'll see from some of the sheets in the collection that are out here on the table. So I'm going to touch on digitising the records as the first step in realising the collection's potential. Now some of you may recognise the image in my cover slide here. I'm looking at a part of the stone circle within Avery Henge in Wiltshire. These are Sarson Stones. But to be absolutely sure that we are no doubt whatsoever, you know the really big trilathons at Stone Henge, and those stones up right with the lintels going all the way around, those are Sarson Stones. So that's what we're talking about. They are the subjects of MS953. These are the shipwrecked mariners of my presentation's title. This is a quotation from a paper of 1870 by Reverend John Adams, who was bicker of Stockcross and vice-presidents of the Newbury District Field Club. He wrote of these Sarson Stones. They are the waves and strays of an appalling wreck, and their condition is akin to that of shipwrecked mariners on some foreign shore. So he was referring to how these fascinating features of certain landscapes in southern and southeastern England appear to the unwary walker who encounters these boulders scattered about in particular the Berkshire and Wiltshire downland. While Sarson Stone has got a wider distribution than just those two counties, it's found from Dorset all the way across to Kent and up into the southern reaches of Norfolk. But in particular, on the chalk downs, these boulders stand out as out of place. They've been characterised as something that's not normal for the prevailing chalk geology for many years, and they prompted antiquarians to promote various explanations for their anomalous presence. So these included Sir Christopher Wren, whose theory was that these stones had been erupted out of a volcano and then landed on the chalk hills. Then William Stucly in the 1740s, his theory was that these boulders were hard concretions in the chalk but which had been thrown out by the centrifugal motion of the spinning glow that landed on the hills. And then a bit later on in the later 18th century, Danes Barrington's theory was that these sarson stones had been squeezed out of the earth many miles away by a distant earthquake and they'd landed on the chalk downs. So these rocks lying off often as they do on the surface with apparently no direct relation to the underlying geology of peaked people's curiosity for many years. Well, during the 19th century, this curiosity led to a practice of anthologising sarson stone. Enthusiasts collected what I've called sarsonalia. Geologists, archaeologists and natural historians, sometimes with one person, fulfilling all of those roles, they gathered scraps of information about things like where the sarson stones have been found, theories about the derivation of their name, stories and local folklore to do with particular boulders, and much more. And the new journals of the local county societies cater to this mixed interest. They were a great medium for sharing papers containing all this sarsonalia. So you'll find examples in, amongst others, the journals I've got on the screen in this slide, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History magazine, the Barks, Bucks and Oxon Archaeological Journal and the Hampshire Field Clubs Proceedings. These societies provided the perfect venue to discuss shared interest in sarson stone, and they moved seamlessly between history, archaeology, geology, natural history, even architecture. The societies also provided field trips, which meant that groups could go out and visit sarson stones in the landscape to visit these curious rocks. So this way to think about and to write about sarson stone developed over the 19th century and continued well into the 20th. The stones were treated as some sort of inscrutable presence in the landscape, but archaeologists also characterised them as local stones. This is illustrated really well by Stonehenge, where all the effort was being put into understanding where the foreign bluestones had come from, as it turned out in the 1920s in my goodness there from Wales. Because everybody knows that the sarson stones were just from the Marlborough Downs, about 30 miles north of Stonehenge, so what else is there to say about them? So by the time of the Society of Antiquaries sarson stones in Wessex project, this is how sarson stone really was seen in particular by archaeologists. So cast your minds back if you will, I know some of you can, everybody in the room. It's the 25th of April 1972. Amazing Grace by Pipestrums and Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards is at number one in the charts. Barry Cunliff, Colin Byrne and John Coles, all Fellows of the Society, had just sent a project proposal to the then Assistant Secretary of the Society, Hugh Thompson. The proposal was for a scheme of research for the society to sponsor and for its Fellows to deliver. What was that all about? At first the idea included two schemes both in response to threat. One was a churches project stimulated by the threat of church redundancy resulting from the 1968 pastoral measure and the second was the evolution of the landscape project. They wrote, the society should sponsor research into the organisation of the countryside by man with particular emphasis on the emerging possibility of recovering the earliest patterns of regular land allotment. Initial clearance and the first large scale organisation of the landscape is the prime subject for attention. The intention was to host a series of multidisciplinary projects under this programme, The Evolution of the Landscape, and John Fieldwork that was already underway elsewhere to answer questions about prehistoric population size and distribution and what the first farmers were up to. At the same time Colin Byrne made a proposal to a group of his friends about a Sarson Stones project kind of on the side. These ideas were further developed and on 23 February 1974 a meeting to discuss these proposals was held here at Burlington House. By which time Susie Quattro was top of the charts with Devilgate Drive but out of that meeting came funding to support Barry Cunliffe's work at Dainbury Hill 14 Hampshire. This is taking a really detailed site-focused view of landscape and then support for Colin Byrne's huge area of survey of three counties, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset, by looking at only one category of evidence looking for Sarson Stones. Colin Byrne's feeling was that Sarson's must have been impediments to the first farmers and studying prehistoric responses to Sarson Stones was a fundamental step as he saw it to interpreting landscape change. The meeting agreed that the first piece of work to be completed under the aegis of the evolution of the landscape should be the Sarson Stones in Wessex project. I just want to take a moment to look at the wider context of this undertaking by the society. It was during the 1960s and 1970s that archaeologists like Christopher Taylor, who was a colleague of Colin Byrne's, were advocating the idea of total archaeology or total landscape. There was no longer sufficient or appropriate just the study of monument or a site, you had to look at the whole landscape using multidisciplinary methods to understand the past. Christopher Taylor and Colin Byrne were working together in the field survey whilst in excavation practice a similar idea was being developed by David Clarke by Greg Wilbrahim and Margaret and Tom Jones excavating at Muckin in Essex. Mick Aston and Trevor Rowley published their seminal book Landscape Archaeology at this time in 1974. In addition to this idea that archaeologists should move away from a narrow site focus to look at landscape as a whole is a contemporary theme of threat to the archaeological record threat to archaeology. In 1960 Colin Byrne was co-author of this highly inferential volume, you've got the cover on the screen on the left hand side, a matter of time. This was a survey of the rapid loss to adrobots quarium of archaeological remains in River Valley Bravels. In his book Ancient Fields, which he published a year later in 1961, he highlighted the loss of previously well-preserved prehistoric field systems out on the chalkdowns to deep plowing of the industrial and agriculture stock to begin. The British Archaeological Trust, better known as Rescue, whose logo is this image of Stonehenge in a figures bucket, was founded in 1971. Throughout the 1970s Colin Byrne was complaining to his friends and colleagues about the loss of sars and stones to agriculture. At the time of the evolution of the landscape project that was being formulated in the early 1970s, his organisers were suggesting that the society needed a way to decide how best to allocate its grant money in the face of threats to British archaeology, not as funding any old project, but ones that were actually going to deal with this issue of threat. So in this sense, the society's research prompted by Colin Byrne and his peers exemplifies contemporary movements in the discipline of archaeology, awareness of archaeological loss, and the requirement to collect data that's very important, collect data that also prompted the establishment of the first county sites and monuments records at this time. So what actually happened? The sars and stones in Westick's project essentially ran from 1974 to 1976, although it took longer to complete the work in Hampshire. Around 100 volunteers worked in these three counties, Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset. They went out and about to find sars and stones, they recorded their locations on 125,000 scale maps and they filled in record sheets that were called tally cards. Nearly 900 of these records were made. The data were collected, lists of sars and stones were drawn up and distribution maps were plotted at different scales, and this slide shows you the progress that had been made in Hampshire by May 1975. You've got areas where volunteers have collected their information and sent it in, that's crosshatch, areas where they've collected the data but not yet submitted just with the diagonal lines and areas that were yet to be explored. On the 10th of May 1975, with O Boyd by Mud at number one, a large progress meeting was held here at Burlington House to review this fieldwork. Here papers from various specialists including Leslie Grinsall on Folklore and Geoffrey Callaway on Geology. Two fellows of the Society were re-driving this project, Colin Byrn and Isabel Smith. They co-authored an article that was published in the Antichrist Journal in 1977, summarising the findings and including printed distribution maps of all of the records. The project archive that's held here includes the collection of record sheets filled in by the volunteers and a range of other knowns and postcards with their assembled data. Coloured sticky dots were used to mark records on one to 100,000 scale maps of each county. So on the right of this slide is an example of the record sheet. So you'll see there are typed up pre-prepared questions and fields to complete. And on the left is an extract from the Dorset map. You will see straight away that the record sheets can be really tricky to navigate. They've often got lots of extra information on them. This example from the Hampshire set includes notes written in pen by different people. A place where the recorder was supposed to describe geological inclusions in the sarsen stone, they've written, see photographs? Which photographs? And the recorder has added notes at the bottom about local folklore that didn't actually have a dedicated place to go on the form. And you'll also notice on the map that whilst a few of the small black sticky dots are still on the paper, other larger dots have fallen off, leaving only oily marks on the map. And we don't know whether these have been the red dots or the black dots or some other colour and what they're supposed to represent. We do have the published maps in the 1977 article that bear small scale black and white distributions. There's also material relating to this project in Colin Bowen's own papers in the Historic England archive in Swindon. That throws a good deal of light on how the project progressed and Colin Bowen's thought processes along the way. Well, as archaeologist, I really couldn't do without British Geological Survey mapping of the different rock types that make up the landforms of those landscapes that I'm researching. The trouble is, the British Geological Survey has never explicitly mapped sarsen stone. The boulders are usually a part of the superficial deposits that overlie the bedrock, so take a look at this extract of the geological map over part of the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire. This area includes the valley of stones, which I showed you in an earlier slide. The green tints indicate different chalk. The brown tints indicate superficial deposits that overlie the chalk. So you've got clay with flints on the high ground, which is the darker brown, and the progressively lighter shades of brown and pink are the head that's on the slopes and in the valley bottoms. Sarsen stones have to be found across this area in the superficial deposits and scattered about on the shore. But where? Archaeologists are really keen to know where different types of stone are available to understand more about how people were actually using them in the past, but it's really difficult to start thinking about how and why people were using sarsens in prehistory without an adequate way of mapping their distribution, their location, their availability. So this remarkable archive collection, held here, of around 900 records of the presence of sarsen stones across at least three counties, could be a really valuable way for geologists and archaeologists to understand some of the finer details about sarsen formation and Latinates use. And furthermore, the collection includes rich and often unique records of human interactions with the stone in the notes. So how can these handwritten record sheets and those old maps become useful again? Digitising the data has been quite a laborious task. I had to do it by manual transcription. The record sheets are so varied both physically and in terms of the data that they contain. It's not possible or certainly wasn't possible at the time to try any kind of scanning and text recognition process to capture the data. But with the information transcribed, it can be displayed and analysed in a geographic information system, basically a computerised map, and it becomes much more useful. So this slide shows my attempt to test the dataset while trying to replicate the main map that was produced by Colin Burnan and Isabel Smith for their publication in 1977. Their maps showed the locations of individual unused sarsen stones, groups of unused stones, and stones that had been used in some way, say in prehistoric monuments or as building material. I've had to introduce a fourth category, records with no explicit classification as to whether they're used or unused, so this also starts to highlight some of the issues with the data. These are the grade-ups on the map. You can see most of the world shows Colin Burnan. Analysis of the different aspects of the record shows how reliable much of it is. Nearly 70% of the records resulted from an actual field visit, so the locational data is very good. The visits are on the whole really well dated, so it's possible to say for just over half of them exactly when the volunteers were out in the field. Perhaps to tie down losses and changes that have occurred since the project in the 1970s. Crowd sourced projects are notorious for a small number of people doing most of the work, and that is true for the sarsen stones in Wessex projects as well. The risk is that their records are bunched up in a few places and that would skew the distribution, but by capturing the names of the volunteers as recorded on the sheets and also plotting those spatially across the map, it's possible to see that even the most prolific contributors also worked over wide areas. That prompts more confidence in the survey coverage. This is Portish and Parish in Dorset. I'm just going to use it as an example of the utility of the sarsen distribution plotted from the individual project records. For example, there's a clear association of the location of the stones, which are the black dots in the upper map, with the tertiary and late Cretaceous theology in the north of the Parish. This is good, this is what we would expect to see. But what I'm going to highlight here, actually, are the notes made by the volunteer who visited and did this work. They actually spoke with a farm worker and they recorded their conversation. This included the information in a spot in the north of the Parish that, I quote, passed your grass of the field had been relayed in the past with great difficulty as many boulders are just below the surface of the ground. In the field of the hell stones, which is a prehistoric monument in this parish, in the field of the hell stones, the plowing is extremely difficult because the numbers of large rocks below the surface of the ground. This information is unique to this data set, but it's important both geologically and archaeologically speaking and it's preserved in this archive collection. And it also puzzled Colin Bowen. In his files in the historic England archive, he jotted down his thoughts. All this evidence was showing that prehistoric farmers hadn't avoided areas that were rich in sarsen stones. In fact, against his expectations, they had gathered in those places and they'd made their fields regardless of these inconvenient boulders. So this went against some of his long held assumptions about how the first farming had begun. And he even wondered of the sarsen stones, did they attract? The evolution of the landscape project and the sarsen stones survey was an aspirational response to some of archaeology's most pressing cultural resource management problems of the later 20th century. Fellows here at the society were concerned about how to spend their finite research grants in the face of widespread threats to the archaeological record. And the team driving the sarsen stones of Essex survey were trying to find a way to deliver research to tackle this idea of total landscape. The highly ambitious crowdsourced fieldwork project was ahead of its time and a novel research activity in prehistoric landscape archaeology. The valuable archive resource is strengthened by the myriad notes that back up the volunteers' records and considerable weight can be placed on their observations. So the large dataset presents some difficulties to work with, but in digital form it can be more easily visualised and interrogated. So thanks to collections cared for by the Society of Antiquaries, new life can be breathed into old archaeological records. So I'll leave it there with this photograph of my favourite sarsen stone.