We are all accustomed to the joy of museums. They provide great centres for getting to know a new location or understand the history of a holiday destination. They offer a wonderful way to spend a rainy day, and are brilliant places to occupy children. Many provide a mean cup of coffee. Occasionally, we even venture inside to look at specific aspects of their collections: an assemblage of prehistoric stone tools; the finds from a particular site; a single iconic artefact; a new display or exhibition. From an early age I learnt about ‘museum feet’.

But museums are so much more than the contents of their well-polished cases. One aspect we rarely stop to consider is the important role they play as repositories for the material which we, as archaeologists, excavate. As anyone who has participated in a dig knows, finds, and related material, accumulate rapidly. Yet the immediacy of discovery and unpicking the meaning of what we find is such that we devote little thought to what becomes of our discoveries once the processes of analysis are complete. Most countries have well-tested methods for allocating finds to an institution that will look after them (here is the Scottish practice)  and, perhaps, even put them on display. There may be rival competitors, for example between local museums and those in larger centres of population, but the systems are there. Many of us take this safeguarding role of the museum for granted.

It is not without problems. We rarely consult the local museums before we dig, we simply expect them to house increasing numbers of finds without question. Those finds have to be cared for in appropriate conditions. It is not always an easy task to resource or undertake. Museum collections are like icebergs: while it is, for the most part, only the tip that impinges on our consciousness, the main body is highly significant.

As archaeologists we tend to focus on collecting ‘new’ data, but I am increasingly aware of the benefits of considering older, pre-existing, material. There must, for example, be millions of stone tools safely packed away around the country – all available for study (with a little bit of bureaucracy). Here in Scotland, we have found that it is well worthwhile re-examining these old collections. In many cases advancing methods and new narratives mean that we are recognising significant contributions to our understanding of Scottish prehistory that it was just not possible to pick up before. It is a useful way to expand our knowledge without the expense (and destruction) of excavation. It is good professional practice.

Museums are great places. We have sadly been unable to experience them in person for most of the last twelvemonths, but that is not to say that they have simply been hibernating. Many have developed enhanced virtual experiences. All have been keeping an eye on their materials. Strange to say, the customer may not always be at the front of their thoughts: the collections are far more important. Whether we visit for simple joy, to teach and educate ourselves or others, to research, to find a coffee, or to get out of the rain, they deserve our support. The next time you find yourself near to one, I recommend popping inside to see what there is to offer.

One of the most common calls I get is about coastal erosion. Orkney, indeed Scotland, is known for its archaeology. It is not surprising, therefore, given the length of the coastline, and high energy content of the surrounding seas, that the remains of ancient sites are to be found, dropping out of the cliffs and sand dunes around the coast.

It is a distressing occurrence. Every wall that collapses; every midden that crumbles; every hearth that disappears: they all represent the loss of information about our common human past. You would be forgiven for thinking that it should be a simple task to record and document them all. As with so much in life, however, it is rarely that easy.

The investment of time required to record eroding archaeology is considerable. Professional archaeologists have little spare time, and prefer to spend it on the other elements of life (shopping, relaxing, gardening, you know the score). Archaeological employers are rarely prepared to pay people to focus on generic ‘good works’. Citizen archaeologists can play a fantastic role, especially those who follow a daily walking routine, perhaps along a particular stretch of coast. But they need advice, supervision, support. And they have to be dedicated: the sea will not hold back just because you have gone on holiday, or it is raining. There are places around the UK where eroding sites are noted, and there are organisations prepared to help. There is a lot of good work going on. But it is a never-ending task and has yet to be comprehensive.

The problem is that once you have recorded the eroding face of a site, you are merely waiting for it to collapse once more before you have to start again. Behind the section of every eroding wall or midden lies the rest of the site: vulnerable to the elements as soon as the face of the shore is cut back. There is no doubt that many eroding sites merit full scale excavation. And equally no doubt that, given the cost of any archaeological excavation, finance for this will never be forthcoming. There is no developer to pay for the project where coastal erosion is concerned; the fragile sites here become the responsibility of the local council or national heritage authority. Neither have adequate funding to tackle excavation and all the associated analysis of every, or even some, of the coastal sites in their area.

There is, undoubtedly, more work that could be done. Funded analysis of the coastline would allow us to target stretches that are more vulnerable to erosion and improve management by prioritising recording towards those sites that are more in danger of loss. Local people could be encouraged to take responsibility for monitoring and recording erosion as it happens. In Scotland, the excellent Scape Trust provides a variety of resources and training to support those who are enthusiastic about walking the coast on a regular basis in order to keep an eye out for archaeological losses. In England, the CITiZAN Discovery programme facilitates a variety of recording projects around the coast.

Our coasts are beautiful, and undoubtedly a resource to be treasured. Sadly, they are also fragile, and as such, the source of considerable archaeological loss. Coastal walking is a great way to get in to archaeology and it is undoubtedly rewarding – you won’t have to look far before you spot a site to record. In the absence of unlimited personnel and funds, we can but do our best to make sure that we have a note of every site as it falls in to the sea.

Someone got me thinking recently about the way in which destruction is embedded in archaeology. This occurs in three ways. And I find it rather fascinating.

Firstly, an element of destruction is necessary in order to turn anthropogenic material into an archaeological site. Thus, your active house, burial, fireplace, or pit not only goes out of use, it becomes buried by sediments and is often damaged in the process. It is rare for the traces of past human activity to sit on the surface of the ground, totally pristine, waiting for excavation. There are a whole range of processes, human and natural, that will impact on it and both diminish it and add to it. Erosion may truncate and diminish it; sedimentation may cover and add to it. In the process, original material often becomes muddled and, inevitably, acidic soils and other processes will dissolve and obliterate the more fragile elements such as organic elements like bone.

Thus, an archaeological site is born from destruction.

Secondly, the archaeological site is never stable. There are processes of change that operate across the surface of the earth and work, constantly, to reshape its individual features and elements. This is known as taphonomy. It impacts on the archaeological site with a destructive force that may be slow or fast. Thus, remains become disordered. Some sites may be well preserved, others severely disturbed, but all are unquestionably diminishing. A scatter site becomes more scattered, a coastal site eroded, buried sites compress and unravel. In recent millennia, human actions compound the picture. The archaeologist, coming across a site and deciding to excavate it, interrupts these processes and part of our essential skills lies in unpicking and defining the stages of destruction through which the site has passed. The study of the taphonomy of any individual site is important because it helps us to understand the formation of the site and, thus, its original nature.

Thus, an archaeological site is nurtured by destruction.

Thirdly, the archaeologist, themself, will, in excavation, destroy those final archaeological remains. Excavation is a destructive process. The painstaking recording and removal of the traces of past human activity will, if undertaken to completion, result in the obliteration of the site itself. True, the individual elements will survive, as assemblages of flint or pottery, bags of charcoal, even carefully curated masonry or wood. But the site will be no more. Even where a site is simply recorded and managed with a view to preserving its long-term future, this cannot be for ever. Uncovery often precipitates destabilization. And of course, many sites simply disappear without recording or excavation. Nature helps us there.

Thus, an archaeological site is ended by destruction.

Of course, the human eye does not perceive these processes as an immediate problem. We are trained to do our jobs and we do them well. We practice the skills of archaeology and tease out the details that we need to understand the past, while managing and preserving as much as we can. But in the grand scale of things our efforts are meaningless. In global terms the safe storage of our best museums is no more long-term than the lifetime of our cities and civilizations. Inexorably, the world will change. And in recent years we have, perhaps, become a little more attuned to the nature of that change, especially given our best efforts to speed it up.

I’ve been writing a document and I had been using the term ‘destruction’ rather loosely. I was picked up on that, and I am glad about it. It got me thinking. I’m wondering about the word ‘destruction’. We generally give it very negative overtones. But, in an archaeological sense, perhaps destruction is not so much negative as inevitable. You could argue that it is constructive: the process by which archaeology becomes available and by which we can study it.

Destruction as an inherent part of the world and one which we need to learn to embrace – discuss. Now there is an undergraduate essay title, sadly one I never thought of when teaching!

Mesolithic sites rarely make glamorous excavations. All too often they seem to comprise a corner of a muddy field where there is little to be seen except for a strange pattern of discolourations in the subsoil, and possibly some accumulations of broken stone. I spent much of my early career crouching down to investigate the fascinating archaeological remains that indicate the location of a Mesolithic settlement or activity site.  I was lucky, many of the sites I have worked on were single period sites, preserved beneath a thin skim of ploughsoil. Visitors would be surprised how little overburden lay between the detritus of 8000 years ago and the present day. The survival of Mesolithic archaeology is often dependent on a fragile skin of ploughsoil or sediment.

We might come across a site during fieldwalking, when someone noticed a spread of characteristic microliths in the surface of a ploughed field. Other sites were noted by the farmer; local dog walkers or ramblers might spot the flints eroding out of sand dunes or at the edge of a loch or river. You can’t excavate every site but sometimes we would be lucky enough to raise money and put together a research design. The ploughsoil would be carefully peeled back, perhaps with the aid of a small mechanical digger, and a sample of the sediments would be sieved in order to identify and remove the precious fragments of worked flint and other stone that denoted Mesolithic activity. Working to remove the bottom of the ploughsoil would take place by hand, using an excavation trowel in order to clean the surface of the subsoil and expose the pits and post holes that provided vital indications of prehistoric activity.

Once down into these in situ remains then excavation takes place more slowly. Surfaces have to be carefully cleaned and small finds of flint or other stone are recorded in place before they are bagged and sent to the finds hut for packing and further analysis. Excavation like this allows the locations of post holes, pits, hearths and other features to be recorded and planned so that it is possible to work out the original positions of huts, shelters and all the ephemera of everyday life. Accumulations of worked flints can indicate the positions of activity areas where people were making tools or processing hides and other tasks. The soil that fills the features is carefully sampled and sieved so that the process of unpicking Mesolithic life can begin. Fills like this may contain traces of pollen, insects, and other matter that provide vital clues to things like local vegetation and the environment.

Excavation is only the first part of a long process that involves analysis by many different specialists. Careful record keeping allows full detail of the excavated site to be reconstructed, but for every month of fieldwork, it may be several years before the results of the investigation are ready to be published. It is interesting to see how people made use of the resources available to them. Stone tools can be examined for information relating to the raw material, manufacturing techniques, types of tools made and even the uses to which those tools were put. Everything adds to the picture of Mesolithic life. It is rare to find traces of organic material on a Mesolithic site, but charcoal and carbonized nutshell can survive. These can help with dating the site using radiocarbon dating, as well as with the investigation of local woodland and plants.

On occasion a special type of Mesolithic site, known as a shell midden, will be excavated. These exciting sites comprise the remains of rich waste heaps where the presence of large quantities of shell create a good environment for the preservation of the sort of material, such as bone, that usually decays elsewhere. Excavation of a shell midden is slow and painstaking, but it can reveal a lot of information about diet and even the manufacture and use of bone and antler tools such as harpoons and spear points.

Because our Mesolithic ancestors did not build permanent structures or monuments, their sites rarely contain upstanding remains. A series of shell midden sites on the island of Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides provide an exception to the rule because they comprise great mounds of midden material that once stood well above head-height. These sites were created towards the end of the Mesolithic, around the time that the first farmers were creating small farms and settlements around the coasts of Scotland. Oddly they are also some of the only Mesolithic sites to contain human remains, albeit only in very small quantity. We still do not know precisely how the Mesolithic community in Scotland disposed of their dead.

Mesolithic excavation continues around the country. As excavation techniques advance, so every new site reveals new detail of Mesolithic life. In recent years there has been more evidence relating to the houses, often quite large round structures, that were built. Other sites have helped us to understand links between different parts of Scotland as different types of stone were transported from one place to another to make arrowheads and flakes. In Aberdeenshire a series of new sites has added detail to our knowledge of hunting strategies, both in the uplands of the Cairngorms and with a series of pits for hunting deer in the lowlands. It may not be glamorous work, but for those with an interest in the past there is nothing like getting down and dirty and sifting out the evidence for yourself.

I’ve been thinking about lithic scatters a lot recently. For the uninitiated a lithic scatter is a collection of stone tools. They tend to be found on the ground surface, usually across the surface of a ploughed field, but they may also occur in other places such as within a blowout between eroding sand dunes, in the gravels at the edge of a lake, or along a hillside footpath. Of course, the material that you pick up from the ground is only part of it, the bulk of the pieces from any lithic scatter site will lie within the soil below, whether that is ploughsoil, blown sand or whatever.

Lithic scatters are a reflection of the past presence of human groups, who left behind their debris, most of which has long dissolved away into Scotland’s acid soils. Flint (or other worked stone), being durable, survives. Sadly, the existence of a scatter site is usually testimony that the site itself has succumbed to the processes of nature and people so that in situ remains such as the traces of hut circles or hearths, have long since disappeared. In many cases the stone tools result from several episodes of human activity, often separated by long periods of time, and frequently representing different types of activity. A lithic scatter is rarely the result of a single event, though it can happen.

It may also be the case that below the disturbed upper layers of a scatter site, some material has survived in its original location. For these reasons, it is a complex business to unpick the multiple histories of a scatter site.

It is first necessary to assess the material on the ground surface: how large an area is covered; are there distinct boundaries to the site; what types of find are present? This is usually achieved by fieldwalking, crossing the field, or surface, in transects with the eyes to the ground in order to look for material such as stone flakes. These will usually be picked up, bagged, and the location recorded using a digital Global Positioning System (DGPS). Occasionally finds are left in position on the surface of the field. Fieldwalking is best done on a recently ploughed field that has been left to weather and expose the stone tools. The morning after rain is always good because the flint surface shows nice and shiny when it is wet. Some advocate intense examination on hands and knees, but most people prefer to remain upright and, with practice, it is possible to get your eyes accustomed to spotting even tiny slivers of stone.

Fieldwalking is a good technique because it does not disturb the site itself apart from the removal of material that has already been disturbed. From this analysis it should be possible to provide preliminary information relating to the likely period/s and type/s of site concerned. The next stage is to dig test pits across the field. These comprise small pits usually hand dug and measuring anything around one or two metres square. The aim of test pitting is usually to assess the material within the ploughsoil and look for any archaeological features that may survive intact below the ploughzone. To this end, all, or a sample, of the soil will be sieved in order to locate and remove finds and the surface below the ploughsoil is carefully cleaned by hand.

Where traces of the original site are found, this information can assist management of the site, and may lead to full-scale excavation.

Given the ubiquity of the agricultural landscape across Scotland, and an erosive natural landscape outside farmed areas, it is not surprising to find that scatter sites form one of the most common ways in which archaeological material is to be found. It is also relevant that for much of our past people have not been in the habit of making stone buildings or monuments so that few, if any, upstanding traces of a site will appear on the ground surface.

Nevertheless, despite their importance, scatter sites are generally neglected as an archaeological resource. To date the management powers of bodies such as Historic Environment Scotland make it difficult for scatter sites to be included in any mandatory protection scheme. Many archaeologists regard them as so disturbed and damaged that they are rarely worthy of detailed attention.

I’d like to argue for the significance of scatter sites. They provide an important indication of prehistoric sites which rarely show up on the surface of the ground. They can often mask well-preserved material below ground surface. And, investigation has shown that, with care, it is possible to extract a considerable amount of valuable information from a scatter site. Along the River Dee in Aberdeenshire, the HLF funded work of the admirable Mesolithic Deeside group has shown just how much one group of enthusiastic people can find from scatter sites. By fieldwalking and occasionally test pitting they have discovered a number of new prehistoric sites and contributed much additional detail to our understanding of existing sites.

Some of the Deeside sites have been fieldwalked over a number of years (see here). A few have now been test-pitted and one has seen a major excavation. From this it has also been possible to build an intruiging picture of the way in which archaeological information is constructed. From the initial recovery of some rather nice pieces such as arrowheads and scrapers, to later finds of small microlithic points, and the ubiquitous presence of flint cores, we can see understanding of the archaeology of these particular fields growing over the years. It is a fascinating story and one which archaeology rarely gets the opportunity to uncover.

Scatter sites are a complex archaeological resource, worthy of better attention.

It can’t have been the Spring Publicity campaign that Cadbury planned. On the face of it, the idea: to encourage families into exploring the outdoors and engaging with heritage, was such a good one. How could it all go so horribly wrong?

Not only have they been encouraging illegal behaviour (the ransacking of archaeological sites is covered by legislation in each of the countries of the United Kingdom), it is also irresponsible. I doubt that they would suggest that kids go out and collect birds’ eggs from nests. So why was it deemed acceptable to suggest that the fragile remains of the past were, and I quote, ‘fair game’.

It smacks of lazy research. Perhaps the ubiquity of archaeology in community projects and heritage activities around the country has led to a downgrading of general understanding of the specialist skills that are involved.

Those who read my blog will know that I love a good community project. There are plenty of examples of high-quality work being undertaken by local groups from Lands’ End to John O’Groats. Archaeology could not survive without them. But maybe I have got complacent. Maybe I mix too much with the enthusiastic people who make up the backbone of such projects. They have taken time to develop skills and understanding, often over years of hard slog, and they know the importance of working with a professional who can offer the odd nugget of advice and make sure that high standards are adhered to.

But there are, of course, many people for whom the intricacies of archaeology are less enticing. Perhaps they see so much of it on television and in the media that they assume it is easy. Among them, one has to presume, are those who dreamed up this misplaced scheme. Though I am still surprised that it passed the legal boffins. I assume Cadbury check the legality of their campaigns.

It is such a shame. With a modicum of consultation and cooperation Cadbury could have had a really imaginative project that drew kids and their families to some of the wonderful sites and monuments we have around the country. Not only do we have the ‘national’ sites, there are plenty of local sites, and often even less well-known monuments that could be visited. Archaeologists love talking about the past: reaction to the campaign as it stands indicates that there would have been no shortage of people willing to help draw up fieldnotes and advice to encourage people to get out and about. It is also worth noting that there are already many opportunities for kids to get involved in the process of archaeology. From Young Archaeologists’ Club meetings to working as part of an excavation or fieldwalking team, there is so much that can be done, and so many ways in which Cadbury and archaeologists could have worked together.

It is a horrible wake-up call for archaeologists. Perhaps we are not quite as embedded into twenty-first century culture as we would have liked to think. Perhaps we still have some way to go before everyone shares our love of the past and understands the technical and ethical niceties of unearthing and looking after it.

Meantime, I look forward to seeing how the story develops. As I write, the Cadbury’s website ‘Treasure Island’ pages are down, apparently for modification. Freddo Treasures are not, currently, available at my local supermarket. There is some hard work necessary to repair the damage, but plenty of opportunity exists. Sponsorship of the Young Archaeologists Club across the United Kingdom for a year would be a good start. Don’t let it put you off archaeology, or chocolate. But, as with everything nowadays, you obviously need to think carefully before you indulge.