The Educational Purpose of Archaeology: A Personal View from the United Kingdom

Abstract

The United Kingdom (UK) has a very rich historic environment. Everywhere we go, we see remains of the past all around us; where we live, work, and travel. Archaeology concerns itself with all physical traces of the human past, and therefore archaeology in Britain covers upstanding buildings, roads, and field boundaries just as much as ruins and buried sites. Dwellings and shops built in the 1960s are archaeological evidence in the same way as ruined medieval monasteries, Roman forts, and prehistoric burials. Many people often take for granted the landscapes they walk through and seldom explicitly recognize the depth of time involved in what they can see. In London, we can stand at the new Millennium Bridge with our backs toward the former Bankside power station, built after the Second World War and walk across straight toward St Paul's Cathedral, built after 1675 (Fig. 16.1). In the space of perhaps 250 m, we can walk through 300 years of history. Many towns and villages throughout Britain have similar time depth to their streetscapes, and few even more depth of time than this. A city like York is dominated by its medieval Minster (cathe-dral), with the current structure built 800 years ago. Yet, although most people who live in and visit the city are aware of the building as old, there is no real sense of what that 800 years means; of how many lives have been spent in the Minster's shadow, nor of the Minster as a historic building since it is still in use as a Christian church. What are consciously accepted as old and historic are often those parts of the historic environment that are consciously marketed as such. From the World Heritage Sites at Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall to the faint traces of Bronze Age field systems 3,000 years old, the ruined and abandoned past is obvious. Sometimes, what seems to be old is not old. Right next to the Bankside power station is the reconstructed Globe Theatre a faithfully done creation, representing what the builders' think the original Globe Theatre of the 1590s would have looked like (Fig. 16.2). The original