 Prif Weinidog, y ffóllwch, a'r amgylch. Yn gweithio'n gilydd o'r cymdeithasol. Can everyone hear me? If you can't? I feel this is a great privilege coming here this evening to talk about the Oeddle site in North US. Mae'r cyfnod yw'r cyffredinol, sydd yn 50 yr ydyn ni wedi cychwyn i fynd i'w cymdeithasio i'r cyfnod i'w Llyfrgell. Yn ystod y cyfnod i, yw ddiwedd i'w cyflwyno, mae'n ddyn nhw i'n ddangos ar y cyfnod, is that it's one of the largest sites ever dug in Scotland. It was one of the longest archaeological projects ever undertaken there. It lasted over 31 years. And it is unfortunately one of the largest sites in Scotland that has never been published to date. So my story is not just of the noodle and what was found there and what we're hoping to do next. But it is about Ian Crawford himself, this rather enigmatic archaeologist who probably would not refer to himself primarily as an archaeologist but as an historian. In his papers I managed to find a sort of CV so I thought I'd put this up. In 1963 he began field work on the noodle. But he started about 1960 beginning his research into his published work Contributions to a History of Domestic Settlement in North Wales. It was this looking for settlement that went back in time that was the thrust of his work at the noodle. He was a very enterprising man. He was dealing with a subject, domestic settlement, that was not necessarily very popular at that point. And it was a subject area that was in its infancy. And many of the things that he was interested in we didn't have names for at that time, such as climate studies and environmental studies. He had quite an eclectic view and a holistic view on archaeology. But I want to put the noodle in context. Here it is. Right over on the west coast of the Western Isles. A difficult place to get to even now. When Ian Crawford was digging there it must have been even more difficult. He was living in Edinburgh when he started during the course of the project he moved to Cambridge and then back to the borders, the Dumfries and Galloway area of Scotland. And if you can imagine packing up your family, your dogs, your equipment, and carting a whole lot by road and ferries to North US to live in quite primitive conditions and do this for 31 years and also attract people from literally all over the world to come and help you must have been quite a feat of engineering and project management. By showing you this map of the side I wanted to put it in its geographical context. It's not facing Scotland, it's facing the ocean. To me it makes this role special. As the President said, I've worked a lot in the Northern Isles where the Northern Isles were on easy trade routes to Norway down the east coast of Scotland but the Udall is not. The Udall is away from normal coastal routes. I've pinpointed it here on this peninsula and I wanted to show you here the maca, the very fertile sandy shell areas that run up the west coast of Scotland into which prehistoric settlement was established. Its fertility, its contrast with the more inhospitable inland areas of this island group but are quite remarkable. It's famous for its spring flowers. You can overwinter cattle and sheep out on this maca environment a whole year round. It's very fertile and so where you have maca you mostly have prehistoric settlement. The modern settlement is along the lines of the road. Settlement has actually moved in land because of repeated blown sand events ever since the sand started to move in around about 5,000 years ago. I'm trying to put this in context for you but why choose this remote area? I've mentioned the fact that we have the maca fertile. Ian Crawford found evidence of documents that went back to the 15th century mentioning this area in particular. That we had place name evidence and he also knew the work, the published work of Erskine Beverage who had explored this area. He lived in the region and found a suturain and plenty of evidence to suggest that was prehistoric activity in this area. I think also because of the historical background of the archeology it appealed also to Crawford's other interests the ethnography, the environmental studies that grew ever more prominent in his work and also climate change which in the 1960s was not a phrase we would necessarily have recognised for what it is today. Before I tell you a little bit about the archeology I wanted to put the oodle in context a little bit about the way Crawford dug. In relation to other sites which I shall come on to in a moment he realised fairly early on that the depth of sand across the areas he chose to dig were in excess of 2 metres and to ask in first instance local people to come with shovels and start digging a large extent of sand away was an impractical occupation for succeeding years. So he bought from what is now the Coal Authority some rail and a little bogey and that's in the top picture and he, a little bogey on wheels and track that he laid out and literally carted the sand away from the site on what was to the northewist like railway and I think as far as I know it was the only railway track ever to see the light of day on northewist so that was new, it was innovative he used sieving machines and conveyor belts and often as far as I know where built these from his own design I think he was very clever in being able to do this We're going back 50 years where standard three-dimensional recording of finds and stratigraphy was not necessarily common practice and certainly not in Scotland and so the use of three-dimensional recording was quite new but in Crawford was very keen to make something that everything possible was recorded in the best way possible he started off by using the wheeler box method of digging in square trenches but realised I think fairly soon that that was not necessarily the most practical way of digging in sand and I actually think that's the bottom picture here is a photograph of Ian Crawford in the 1960s when he would have been about 40 in his 40s but it's not just digging techniques that were important to him but also scientific techniques for all the artefacts and finds that came up from the work from the 31 seasons he had built I don't know where it came from he had a probably called a large green house but it was probably a bit more than that it became known as Crawford's Crystal Palace where because of the light mainly young girls or women sorted out the finds and samples in the excavation this was your on-site finds hut and a lot of good work was certainly done there now through both Cambridge and Aberdeen universities he had built or acquired a flotation machine so that all the sediment sediments from the site were processed for their environmental remains now this might sound ordinary today but at the time this was quite revolutionary and it is certainly one of the first known recording froth flotation machines used in Scotland and this concern over the environmental evidence not just artefacts but what people at what they dug what they plowed all that evidence we still have today and I'm not quite certain what this machine is and perhaps I may be one or two of you in the audience that have an idea about that but it may have been a track lane piece of equipment but that will come tonight in due course I said I wanted to put Ian Crawford and the Yudel in context and I think this lecture is actually forming to me as a piece of research which I shall carry on with over the next few years and investigate further into Ian Crawford and why he dug up the Yudel but I wanted to look at what else had happened in the UK both before and during the time that Ian Crawford worked at the Yudel and we had the great excavations made in Castle Wheeler's famous site and Gordon Child at Scarborough Bray we had others who investigated the remarkable broc sites that are still public monuments at Scernus and Medhow we also often click them in Shetland or in Orkney or in Shetland so we had a tradition of large scale excavations that did go on for several years but then looking at more contemporary excavations around the time that Ian Crawford started at the Yudel in the 1960s I've mentioned Sutton Hoo and the York excavations and some of the Hillfords and rural sites and urban sites but the one I feel that is nearest in problems, shall I say more than anything else, is Muckinwin Asics that was enormous excavation it went on solidly for 30 years so not 31 years that Ian Crawford did which I think equates to about 6 years in the field I think on the whole the Yudel was about a quarter of the size and produced about a quarter of the finds of Muckinwin Asics but like Muckinwin too, as I already said remains largely unpublished and these sites are very important to our understanding not only of what happens in these areas the techniques that we used and really we need to get them published now I want you to turn a little bit to tell you a bit more about I've turned it here the sites in the Mucker you can see from this wonderful image from Google Earth the amount of sand and insular is sand overlain bedrock in some cases there are three main sites there's the Yudel North with an eroded area that's clearly visible on this aerial photograph and that's not just through excavation it was eroding before Ian Crawford started to the south of that is another large sand hill known as the Yudel South and then on the coast opposite of a little island with a tombolo is what's known as RUX6 this was his Neolithic site Neolithic Bronze Age and I'll address each of these sites in turn I've had to do quite a bit of investigation of the archives for this lecture so some of these slides which we've managed to digitise have never been shown before so the quality will vary so please excuse that and I've supplemented with some modern digital photographs where I can so this is what Ian Crawford saw when he came to work but you can see from this picture in the top of the San June area there are there are walls there are coarse stonework things are going on but you can also see that the San June has eroded here this was I think two years later and you can see the amount of soil that Ian had sifted away quite a large extent and the Crawford's Crystal Palace is not yet here so there's archaeology of the site cuts as well that can be considered I'm sorry this doesn't have an awful lot of definition but the site is here it's still a very very large sand hill and most of the archaeology is now in the way but I'm going to start at the things that Ian Crawford found first and then sort of work down in time which is not necessarily the way I like to do it but in this case I will I mentioned he found documents the earliest being about 1495 I mean most archaeologists I know when it comes to documents we're happy with prehistoric material documents and history are not really our forte so Ian being a historian primarily this was his thing this is what he started with with the documentation and he wanted to find the settlement that was mentioned in this documentation what he found first the elaborate structures of what was known as a taxman's house from what went previously and I'll come to that in a moment this was a mere shadow of earlier occupation but what's interesting is I'm just trying to get this to not coming no Lythlaram below the token or the gaming piece there is a square-ended building with a doorway you may be able to see that and that is actually a relevant to the Norse house and so I'll come back to the Norse house shortly but that's parts of that building were in use between 400 and 500 years and that's quite an impressive lineage Ian Crawford has marked this plan as about 1697 that was basically the end of the rule from that time on it looks like the weather patterns changed and what shell sand began to blow in not only over the sand dunes over the settlement but also over the fields that were being cultivated and it more or less stopped the settlement there was very little of this stratigraphically a few little bits of shillings and some walls but other than that this was the first settlement first that Ian Crawford found at the last in the sequence and here is part of the Norse house you can see these straight walls and the doorway I've just seen on the previous plan and I think as far as I know it's the only long house of this period on the site and I'm very sorry I don't have a complete photograph that I've been able to find of it all up to the same level so you can probably see its extent I don't mind I can't easily show you the extent of the house I've put on some of the more iconic finds from this settlement Ian Crawford thought it was a very high status settlement we have they're not beautiful pieces of pottery but they're extremely interesting pieces of pottery the top picture of the little open vessel it's quite small but it's easily into your hand that the next piece lower down is part of a bake plate in ceramic some of you may know the bake stones from Norway that are found across Viking sites usually made out of a shister type of stear type or soap stone but here at the Udl we have them in clay of baked legs that example being one beneath are four fragments of a Viking home case that is decorated there is a coin that I think is dated to about 1065 to 1066 King Harold Hardrad Harold Hard ruler and then a piece bottom left hand corner a piece of animal boat with a typical design a step design which is probably indicative of Norway's occupation Ian Crawford did write something in antiquity who wrote an article with about what he'd found I think it's dated in 1976 and he didn't really publish an awful lot more detail about the sites after that so it's our intention in the future to investigate both the site stratigraphy and the finds put them back together and try and sort out the full sequence of events and dates at the site Ian Crawford thought originally these curved lines of rather large post holes were actually a Viking fort and it was the focus of cremations and also iron age smelting or later smelting of furnaces I think in the bottom left hand corner but reading a little bit more for this lecture I realised he changed his mind that this was not a Viking fort but possibly a later iron age a Pictish one so there is an anomaly there that we hopefully will be able to get grips with a little bit later on coming down stratigraphically and back in time we come to the later iron age settlement a lot of what we would call jelly baby type houses in Crawford called the figure of eight they had a lot of bone working typical iron age pottery lots of bone pins and the nearest equivalent that he knew at the time that was being excavated was Anna Richie's Bakoy houses on Auckland he was actually breaking new ground more or less everything he did he was doing something that very few other people have done and very few other people have done in Scotland I think Anna Richie had at least two to three houses we find that here at the Udl we may have had eight something like that but in the late 70s I think he decided that he'd got enough information from this sand hill and moved to another part of the project area at the Udl South but I wanted to show you this picture was taken in 1991 and this in 2005 I think I'll have daily griffiths to thank for showing that some change but not necessary a lot so it means that the erosion perhaps is not as bad as we first thought it's useful to have this archive of photographs that we can date to see how things have altered over time I'm now moving to the Udl South which is, as you can see from this little inset of a map I've put in there's a number of little wheel houses in fact not just little but large wheel houses you can see shape like circular shape like the spokes of a wheel related to the broc sites that you may be familiar with there were ancillary structures to some of these sites and again Ian Colford was breaking new ground here because he found that some of these buildings actually were going back into the late Bronze Age and it may seem remarkable to us today but he was using radiocarbon dating for what must have been one of the first times in Scotland as well because it was in its infancy the modern way we look at our radiocarbon dates and samples was not yet tried and tested and he was also using or other people were experimenting on the Udl with thermally luminescence dating so there's a lot of things that really have lost their thunder because they didn't write up at the time just like to show you one of the smaller wheel houses with now I'm not entirely certain these finds went with this wheel house but these are typical finds of this period we haven't done any research into this material yet but there are some beautiful objects and I hope you like the fragments of combs that I've got in the bottom of the picture there a black and white photograph of yet one of the other wheel houses with a view out to the west and to the site I'll come on to in a few moments and two very typical finds from this period part of a decorated vessel and obviously a little miniature sword and I am wondering whether that was to do with weaving activities in beating down the west of the war on the moon it's very worn at one end the hilds and the handle of the sword may have been used literally as a handle but a very very nice piece Ian Crawford that's him in the yellow I think I don't know who the other person is but again he found interesting things that these were not just habitations or domestic habitations they also had a ritual element and in pits in the floors of some of these buildings were lung burials and if there was one we must have about 15-20 lung burials scattered throughout these buildings so I don't know the whole story so I can't give it to you but there's a lot of interesting information tied up in this particular site and just to show you what it looks like now some of the buildings can still be seen they've been fenced off so that capital can't get in and destroy them and I think the local community is our best to preserve these sites because they're the only ones of the whole project that still exists now we go back in time to the Bronze Age and also to the Neolithic and this is a coastal site it's no longer with us at all it's disappeared and early in the 1960s he started to trench this area in the bottom of the picture local labourers, flat caps, vests it takes them, it puts them at a specific time and Ian Crawford came back in the 1970s about 1974 to the little lump on the right hand side of the picture before the water and that comes up now as this partly excavated cair it's very interesting that there was an exceptionally high tide combined with the moon and the sun in a certain phase, a perihelion tide I think Ian Crawford called it and this site was not known about before it had not been identified but it found a new type of monument that curved Cairn and it had three phases of evolution and beneath that were about 50 pits dug into the sand which he thought were completely empty it would be very interesting to now go back over his documentation to find out what was actually going on there we found evidence of two neolithic houses two circular houses with associated finds and we have a stone carved stone board in the left hand picture and a polished axe in situ in the colour picture next to it which have both come from these houses and again we need to have the radiocarbon dates now recalibrated for all this site it's not a particularly picturesque one from the point of view of the archaeology but it's setting, it's certainly magnificent and it must have been a pleasure to have done on this site and you can see evidence of small lithic objects which are extremely tiny showing you that the resources were not always easy for settlements in this area these are actually a flint that must have come in with the sand from the continental ridge out to the west but a lot of resources were based on quartz local stone and turf and things like that well in 1994 in Crawford stopped work at Beoodle I don't know whether that was by design or whether certain things happened and he could not continue but if you, I said about him taking his family, the dogs and everybody up to Beoodle he also had to bring all these samples and stone and pottery back down with him and during the course of the project he moved from Scotland to Cambridge and then back up to Scotland again and all this material has been up and down the country on more and more occasions and unfortunately some of it's got lost some of it I don't know where it is but can't get at it and I do know other things are completely lost during the research for this lecture I came across a reference to a silver ring I have no idea where that is I've never seen it I don't have a record of it at the moment unless it's in findscast this movement of material also brought problems in that I've still got to research where he put it in Cambridge but there was certainly water damage we've had rodent damage and I think in moving things you know yourself moving house things get lost things have got lost here as well and when I visited at his house in Dumfriesha and his wife kindly showed me their basement I didn't really know what to think because this was one bay of I think four with all the finds I mean I had to barely squeeze down to the end the house built into the hill a little bit I'd like you to remember the Hague whiskey boxes we won't impact those and the teachers we had a huge number of teachers to deal with later but at the time he did his best with the resources that he had you go shopping today you go to a supermarket you can buy freezer bags you can put your food in freezer you can put your finds in freezer bags at the time you crawled was digging at the Udall there was no supermarket on the Isle of Lewis how he managed I do not know very very difficult and so I think we can only congratulate him and his family and for other people that worked on the archive in the past that we have as much remaining as we did now sorry about this slide but I had to put it in because I received a phone call I think it was one November 2008 saying do you want the stuff come and get it what stuff? everything and what had happened was that Ian unfortunately had been suffering from depression and possibly had also become well got the beginnings of dementia or Alzheimer's and had to go into a home and his family were reorganising the house and all sorts of things and so with the help of Historic Scotland I went down and measured up how many finds and through a long series of other things we moved it in safety and the first thing I did and it took a year to do this was to excavate the documentary archives now I know some of you may have had to do this for relatives that have died but to do this for a living person and to go through all this personal papers everything that I got from the family was quite a traumatic business especially when it's hard to throw out and what to keep what do you do with multiple copies of papers mostly handwritten what do you do with newspaper cuttings what do you do with notes that are on the back or bills from the butcher or out of your checkbook what do you do with all these things I extricated 2kg of bulldog clips and paper clips from all this material I had to deal with mould and damp and other damage it was not a pleasant task but at the end we've got got it sorted out this is how I got it at least we've got this material and it will be handed over to the Royal Commission in Edinburgh in due course but at least we've got it and then through another interesting series of circumstances in 2011 Historic Scotland paid for a two year assessment of both the documentary archives and the finds and samples and this has been a major job it's all very well if you work on a site you know what you've got because you dug it but when for example myself and my team all dug it everything we looked at was like a Christmas parcel it was a treasure trove of beautiful cones and other places everything we opened every box, every bag was completely unknown to us very difficult task not a pleasant task either I will say that so I've shown you little bits of the basement where some of the most of the finds were here's the crystal palace and today that's what we have of most of the finds the animal bone is on the left hand side and the back and the pottery on the right hand side and this is only from the Udall North this is from one side with stone in the middle so it's not up to museum standards it's not being re-bagged but at least it's safe from damage from damp and vermin and other things so at least we've done a containment exercise that will keep that in some sort of order for the future before until we can work on it again and due to the kind of species of my former colleagues at the University of Glasgow I managed to get a corner of their basement in their new premises anyway but the corner wasn't enough so we expanded along the back wall and you can see from not just colleagues working on artefacts but the different boxes on the back wall and the different shaped boxes and how it is more or less today we've done a tremendous amount of work well I haven't but my colleague Chris in the picture there has he's done a huge amount of work but that's what we've done it's teamwork getting people in, assessing the material how much is this going to cost to work on in the future what have we got what needs conservation let's get things into museum standard boxes it's just been a very interesting and quite demanding time but another thing we have done and this has been at the request of the local North US communities they never received very much information about what was found at the site and so we were asked to put on an exhibition and I produced a booklet and I have one or two of those here tonight they would like them last year we actually went up as a small team to give demonstration of what we do as archaeologists in stone and bone and plant remains what we do, we have school parties we went on tour of the sites what was left of them and explained those for the local communities and I think that's been very valuable we've also had lots of visiting academics and other visitors who have come to see our work it makes me reflect on things I think this is Ian Crawford in the red and black in the picture and James Grae Campbell in the white and the grey beside him in the centre there the sheer determination of Ian Crawford to keep on going keep on fact finding keep on going back in time against what must have been extremely difficult circumstances just to point out that Ian and James Grae Campbell are actually together in the middle of the picture above the ladder game I think that may have been properly from the same season it's very difficult if you don't write up and write some sort of narrative about what we've been finding to come back after 31 years and think where do we start where do we start the story what do we start with how do we begin Ian relied on a number of trusted staff to get through the difficult process of excavation on-site for all that length of time the site by all accounts is enormous and focusing on people's aims throughout 31 years must have been very difficult personally I think Ian tried the impossible I don't know whether he would admit defeat that I would have done somehow I felt when I worked with him around about 2000 that he was still very determined to write this up and do it himself but this was far beyond the realms of just one person you need a trusted team to carry on the work and to make it into a publishable project in 2011 John Scofield published a book called Great Excavations The Udl should have been there without doubt the Udl should have been there and for all these reasons that I put down it was an inspirational excavation we all knew it it was legendary when I was working on Auckland this was the site and Ian Crawford's name was more or less on everybody's lips a lot of what he did probably developed from his innovation and how he worked on his sites he brought a lot of money and people to the islands and this is a great social benefit which islands still enjoy it was a legendary site and Ian Crawford has become legendary as well because of this site but I personally my personal opinion I think this site made him made him who he was but also in a way destroyed him because I think he became riddled with defeats and disappointment that he could not publish as he wanted to publish and because it was not published it probably does not fulfil the requirements of a great excavation there are lots and lots of people to acknowledge I have had personally a huge amount of help and comfort from a lot of people this has not been an easy project in fact one of my colleagues said you've got a poison chalice there and it is a poison chalice it still remains a poison chalice but we can only hope that in the future we can get money to carry on and I finish now with a little plea please I'd love some stories if you've got the art photograph and I actually received two today from Northern Ireland from somebody who has come today so thank you very much art of the legend of archaeological history do we have any questions? I couldn't really need that but one of the diggers from 70 something we did receive an introvert report I still have it it was a copy of a fool's cap not made for of course the digger was memorable for many reasons I was essentially being on an island where I sat on a terrorism's rife where the way of escaping back to Glasgow was to go up to the ferry at night and discover the great man and he would drive you from US all the way back to Glasgow and other sort of delightful aspects from recollection in asking him why he was digging it I thought he said he found it and his primary perhaps I was hearing what I wanted to it was as if his primary purpose was actually a study of anacular architecture to discover what preclearance houses were like and it gradually became something more and more and more but when he actually found it on the map we were just looking for it I don't know for the one who was technique he was wearing socks in several of those pictures and socks are very important to be footprints and digging sand with whole separate exercise you had to have a long trowel you had to hold the trowel vertically you couldn't dig into it and it is the only dig I have ever been on when every single bucket was sealed the only excavation I've ever heard of that was done I don't have the quotation but every single bucket was sealed on the side so what was that from sand used in the sea in the spring flowers thank you other questions or comments yes I was there as a leader from 1966 to 1968 ending up as a side supervisor along with James Graham Campbell and what I remember particularly about digging on the side was the flies which was never easy I don't know if they're still there there must have been a bit of a western desert in the second world war you were just surrounded by flies and all the paradoxes of the context of the excavation in the way that you looked at it in the 1960's and 70's was that it was a time when other medieval archivists were just beginning to introduce single context recording a metric grid and I think particularly of Brian Davison and Martin Biddle and their excavations and I wonder whether because Ian Crawford used a very different system of recording he used interpret things as he went along and the sign FSABC and so on to what he thought was the sequence I wonder whether you're going to have to recreate that unique system unique context recording system and the metric grid in writing of the excavation Ian Crawford argued on one occasion I heard him speak and in other things that there's been a very violent viking of imprint on this site destroying of hittish buildings and quoted the fort as evidence of that so I'm interested to see what the fort has now been perhaps rethought in that respect and we're actually we're now, it's quite obvious at the recent Viking Congress that we're having trouble characterising the early viking period in Scotland that long-hacks with the hard-rada coin is perfect for the sort of developed phase and there are numerous comparisons of that in the northern arts as you know but the early stuff the 9th century only 10th such as there is in that we have is quite often very very closely associated with so-called hittish buildings and seems to be a development of the hittish phase in a way perhaps relying on this idea that there was a complete cultural break so it would be very interesting to see through your work how many north or north star artifacts are maybe that are associated with what he argued were the hittish buildings or whether they perhaps need to be rethought in that respect and just one more point obviously you did share one of my slides which I'm very grateful to you for I went there on my own in a very desolate day in 2005 and one thing I found very interesting about the site is the linkage of Crawford's tents and his sheds a lot of which lies out there and is almost an archaeological site and it's overrhynt above and beyond all the Iron Age and Viking stuff so that I hope is going to be reported before it finally blows away thank you Yes I think that to avoid any potential confusion there the actual question about the fault the interface between the and the Viking revival is not associated with that kind of thing but it was actually a stone construction on the very peak of the site which was a short lived duration is indeed of course the north on-house we've shown is the regular phase of the house of the settlement and the earliest presence on the site does certainly re-model some of the building to the corporate elements of the site so it was very different the takeover of the site was I don't know but there is just the electricity point of course I really would like to say that someone I think has to spend something over a year of my life actually really working at the new job I'm very grateful that having taken on this you might indeed see it through to the publication that he had wanted but of course it is true that he had never anticipated this and indeed yes, he wanted to find as he did find preclearance settlement and it just don't happen preclearance settlement sitting on top of a man went back to late damage yes, in checking out what happened on the site it turned out to be to do houses on the site in doing some best of archaeology it's going to be the Viking burial because it was a part there was a rescue exhibition looking at that can it was the only thing that we thought of anywhere in the area that could potentially have been a Viking burial sadly for me it turned out not to be but unfortunately for me it was sitting on top of a whole lot of archaeology which was definitely at risk so it went into the rescue phase so the site just grew and grew and grew and indeed it sort of got out of control in the sense of being something that won that possibly to the station so more part of the investment market thank you Adrian, you wanted to unlike many in the audience I had no connection with you at all and I'd like to thank you for a very interesting lecture and an interesting experience I was however and participated for quite a long time in the mucking exhibitions where you've drawn a number of comparisons and mucking did decide the same sorts of feelings and did generate many of the same problems as you know, only too well one of the things that Chris Evans did when he was carrying through a roll that was sort of fairly analogous to your own roll was that he he actually commissioned a number of pieces from people who had been at the excavation actually soon to record their feelings about the site not in terms of trying to capture archaeological information but in trying to capture some of that social history of the sites that it ran through several generations of archaeologists and I would recommend that to you because I think we all found it an interesting experience it was also a very catharsis experience, nothing was one of the most unpleasant sites to have worked on in the universe on the 15 foot contour of the Thames gravel was that and the one thing that everyone talked about when we were going to be reading the compilation of essays was how horribly, bitterly cold it was and how difficult a person was to work for in this place so I think it was an interesting social strata that runs through what you were saying one more question down here please, yes I would like to say thank you very much for what you have brought together all the legendary aspects of it I too heard that it was a legendary site and went to visit it when I went to the West Nile unfortunately not when he was there but now it's a turning to get an article on the universe so I contacted here and I managed to get down to his cottage in Dumfrieshire and I think I've spent three or four days there extracting from him the story of his explorations and then I remember at the end of it I said well yeah and how much inspiration have you got a slide box a favourite slide to it he said nothing like that I have my slides here about 5,000 of them but they're all in order but they're not selected and they're all out can I see them all? because they said yes certainly I took about two days to see all 5,000 slides being projected on the wall all of the explorations and I then stole some of the information which I wanted to use and publish I think he maybe realised I was stealing the information and he did get them back eventually but I'm very sorry I managed to get those slides from him I know there was one occasion when I said well where's the next box of such a slide over in this cupboard over here and we went to them and the cupboard was above a radiator and I had to reveal to him the unfortunate fact that the radiator fried the slide and there were examples I think in several years the slides would be fried but I think eventually we've given our talk I think he's gone really he's won a few comprehensive offers of what I thought he said when he discovered and I'm very grateful to do it one of the things I do remember is that when he was at Cambridge when he finally left Cambridge we took the caution taking with him whilst talking to this of the hated note paper of the college and so on and he ever offered to wrote to people on the hated note paper from the Cambridge College because he thought it was a test and so and the other thing I would say is that he was very much an innovator in trying to gather the documents and the argument which was something that was very unpopular in those days I think he taught himself a dialect in order to read some of these documents again, something I think is pioneering which now I think will begin to take on more Thank you very much I think it's testament to you setting up appreciation of me in Crawford while most of the comments tonight but people who also benefited loved it in a sense of that and archaeologists so I didn't get many questions out of that but I'm sure you've got some comments I'd like to thank you all for your few comments and advice which I've taken though at all in the process of doing I'd just like to say that it wasn't always an easy person to work with and so there are other parallels with Robert Jones no doubt I will be in contact with you those that knew or visited him for more information and I'd just like to say thank you very much for what you've given back to me this evening as well Thank you