Dutch shipwrecks to neolithic tartar: A rare insight into Fort Cumberland, the ‘Q Branch’ of British archaeology With a faded sign and barbed wire-topped fences the sole evidence of its presence opposite a pleasure boat marina, Fort […]

With a faded sign and barbed wire-topped fences the sole evidence of its presence opposite a pleasure boat marina, Fort Cumberland is purposefully unobtrusive. Entry to the forbidding Napoleonic-era bastion is gained only via a heavy automatic gate surveyed by security cameras.

To passers-by, this official facility on a wind-blown promontory on the eastern edge of Portsmouth could easily be taken for a cloak-and-dagger military facility. After all, just a few miles away is the home dock of the new flagship of the Royal Navy, the £3bn aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth.

“We are seeking information about our past, we are trying to find out about how people lived and applying our knowledge to that end.” The i newsletter cut through the noise Email address is invalid Email address is invalid Thank you for subscribing! Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription. Gill Campbell, acting head of archaeological conservation, Historic England

Operatives

Instead, the collection of faded redbrick buildings behind the brambles and stonework is home to crack operatives of a different variety – the experts who form the archaeological arm of Historic England, the heritage watchdog which protects and researches the fabric of the past, and granted the i rare access to the facility.

From poring over 2,000-year-old bones to see whether Roman Britons were getting enough sunlight to carefully unpicking the fused cargo of a shipwreck which has spent the last 300 years lain in the muddied, shifting waters of the English Channel to scrutinising atomised neolithic tartar, Fort Cumberland is effectively the “Q Branch” of British archaeology.

Lethal fountain pens and Aston Martins pimped out with invisibility kits à la James Bond are admittedly thin on the ground. But the fort is nonetheless home to 34 scientists and experts dedicated to reading the runes of the past in exotic ways – from zooarchaeologists who can identify any unearthed animal bone from the fort’s reference collection of more than 3,000 skeletons of pretty much every animal that has stalked or flapped over the British Isles; to geophysics specialists who probe beneath the landscape by dint radar and electro-magnetic signals to precision guide excavations.

Compulsory excavations

As such, the facility acts as a hub for Britain’s burgeoning – but stretched – archaeology industry, setting down best practice guidelines and offering expertise as the sector faces one of the busiest periods in its history with work beginning on dozens of infrastructure projects requiring compulsory excavations, such as the HS2 rail link, over the next decade.

Gill Campbell, acting head of archaeological conservation and technology for Historic England, said: “We can be asked to anything from helping a member of the public to advising on projects, and from working with a university on a collaboration to conducting our own research.

“But at the end of it all we are seeking information about our past, we are trying to find out about how people lived and applying our knowledge to that end.”

Paddling pool

Marinating in a motley collection of vessels ranging from ice cream boxes to a large paddling pool is a prime example of this quest for insight into the murky depths of the daily lives of our forebears.

One of the many former ammunition stores in the fort is currently home to nearly 2,000 artefacts retrieved this summer from the wreck of the Rooswijk, a trade ship belonging to Dutch East India Company which sank in a storm in 1740 on the notorious Goodwin Sands, some eight miles off Dover. The vessel had only days before left its home port of Amsterdam bound for Batavia – otherwise known today as Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Under an agreement with the Dutch equivalent of Historic England – the Cultural Heritage Agency – the material is being conserved and researched in Britain during a 12-month period where the material must remain on UK soil before it is surrendered as sovereign property of the Netherlands.

Coconuts and a nit comb

In the meantime, the Fort Cumberland team are seeking to piece together a picture of life on board from remarkable finds that include an 18th-century flat pack building kit, two coconuts and an intact nit comb.

Angela Middleton, the archaeological conservator working on the artefacts, said: “The importance of these objects is they tell us things that were never written down. We have building materials such as copper sheeting and bricks, almost like a kit to make a structure. We will examine the sludge from the nit comb to see if there are nits on it to tell us about standards of hygiene and as to the coconuts – why on earth were they transporting coconuts back to Indonesia?”

One of the most remarkable spaces in the fortification, which until 1973 was home to a detachment of the Royal Marines, is the meticulously curated bone yard that is Historic England’s animal reference collection.

Aurochs

Gathered from specimens supplied by institutions from zoos to wildlife conservation groups, it contains the skeletal remains of 3,500 creatures found on the British Isles, ranging from songbirds to an aurochs – the giant wild cattle that finally disappeared from Britain in the Bronze Age.

The collection and its expert staff are an invaluable tool to allow archaeologists to identify even fragments of bone unearthed in excavations, including sections of the jaw bone of pigs recently found in neolithic pits near Stonehenge which cast light on the butchery techniques of 1,300BC.

The skeletons have also helped in work to conserve and explain one of the more unusual construction techniques of previous centuries – the paving of floors with the knuckle bones and teeth of animals.

Theatre

In east London, the Elizabethan audience attending the plays of one William Shakespeare at the defunct Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch entered the playhouse via a yard paved with sheep knuckle bones while at Wrest Park, a stately home in Bedfordshire, the floor of a bath house was inlaid with deer bones in the late 18th century.

Polyadora Baker, senior zooarchaeologist, who has studied the floors, said: “It is a technique that raises lots of questions. Were the bones just a cheap product for builders? Or was it a fashion among owners of stately homes? Certainly, it is something which stopped quite abruptly – the whole technique is an area that hasn’t really been looked at.”

It is absorbing work which takes place at a time when British archaeology faces something of a dilemma. With some 40 major infrastructure projects, costing more than £460bn, due to be completed over the next 18 years, archaeologists are in massive demand due to legislation brought in 25 years ago which means that developers must fund a survey of their site – and any further excavation deemed necessary – as a condition of planning permission.

Not enough archaeologists to go around

The problem is that there are not enough archaeologists to go around. A study published by Historic England in 2016 warned that the sheer amount of work associated with large-scale building schemes means that as many as 2,000 extra archaeologists – most of whom are employed in the private sector – will need to be found by 2022 to meet demand.

It is in some ways a nice problem to have, not least because the shortage should provide leverage for issues such as low pay in the industry – the average wage for an archaeologist is £25,000, some 15 per cent below the UK average.

It also comes at a time of rapid advances in the techniques that the archaeologists in Fort Cumberland and beyond can bring to their work.

DNA sequencing

Alongside the arrival of DNA sequencing and the use of isotopes to track the geographical origins of human remains, clues to the past are now being found in the unlikely source of “calculus” or tartar on human teeth.

Working with experts at the University of York, staff are able to take calcified deposits from skulls and analyse them for insights into the diet and health of ancient Britons.

Much can also be told by simply looking at human remains. Simon Mays, a human skeletal biologist at the fort, has recently completed a study to assess the incidence of vitamin D deficiency by visually examining bones from the skeletons of 300 Roman Britons discovered in Lincolnshire as part of a wider study with a Canadian team to discover whether the first round of urbanisation in Europe caused rickets by depriving early Britons of sunlight.

Anywhere else, such labours would be rarefied and extraordinary. But in this timeworn stronghold, variously targeted in its day by the French navy and the Luftwaffe, it is all in a day’s work.