The Amesbury Archer : 20 Years On

In May 2002, archaeologists from Wessex Archaeology were excavating on the outskirts of Amesbury in Wiltshire, when they made an unexpected and astonishing discovery. This is archaeology at its most dramatic. No one has seen anything like it before. The Wessex team, excavating just a mile or two from Stonehenge at Boscombe Down, have discovered a Bronze Age man with riches beyond compare. His grave cannot be left overnight. This man, an archer, was buried over 4,000 years ago with a huge collection including jewellery, arrows, knives and pots to hold food and drink for the afterlife. Ten times the quantity ever found in a Bronze Age grave. And jewellery. Delicate gold jewellery. It is an extraordinary discovery. What's unusual about this burial is just the number of finds in it. Just the sheer quantity of finds, which is exceptional. And it may be no coincidence that we are, at about the time of Stonehenge, we're not very far from Stonehenge where we know there are many well-furnished burials. It's an exceptional find. There'll be a lot of interest in it for these guys. It really is going to be one of the highlights of their careers. It doesn't get any better. It doesn't get any better than this. 6-4-4-8. Well, he's right. I mean, I've done lots of fun things but it's never really got any better than that. But do you know what? The thing that strikes me most about that video is how different I look. In my head, I'm me doing that excavation. But actually, I'm some long-haired child at the time. But yeah, the footage has kind of unlocked quite a lot of other memories from the time, which are really good. And it's really taken me back to how amazing a job being an archaeologist is. There's a lot of downsides to being a digger. But like in many professions, the early stages of your career are the most exciting ones and the ones you'll remember for the longest. And that's certainly the case for me. And actually, just the noise of the engines running in the background because we had the minibus up shining the light to the diggers. Yeah, it took me right back. It is very powerful actually remembering the relationships with the people at the time. There were people I used to work with an awful lot. That doesn't seem that long ago. I'd really love to get some of the team back together after all this time. If they're willing, I think that would be really interesting because my memory is, you know, some of it's clear. Some of it's a little bit hazy. So it'd be really good to see what the rest of them think. Why don't we tempt them with a free breakfast or something? 20 years. 20, well, May Bangholiday was it, I think. So we're here to try and remember between us what was going on when we dug this up, which has been a very long time. Well, I actually remember it very well. Do you? I do, because I was in a really tedious pottery seminar learning about Anglo-Saxon pots. And the call came through saying, they found gold on Salisbury Plain. I thought you were still there because you were supervising the site, weren't you? Yeah, yeah. So I wasn't there. So I got really excited about the fact that I could be all important and leave the seminar to go and find out what was going on. And so I drove up to the site. And the first thing I saw was Laura jumping up and down on the Bronze Age burial. That is, I mean, that is, yeah, cutting to the chase is one of the reasons why we had to excavate it so promptly over the weekend, wasn't it? Because somebody had shouted very, very loudly, GOLD! And there were dog walkers and stuff. Nonsense. It was you that found it, wasn't it? Yes, me and Dougie did, yes. Just sort of pinged out the top. And Doug went, oh my God, it's gold. And I'm like, no, be ridiculous. Who said the gold came up before the skull? The gold came up before the skull. It literally, it flicked up and it looked like a ring pull from an old school beer can. Still does. And Dougie went, don't be stupid, Laura, it's gold. It was serendipity to a certain extent because we weren't supposed to be digging the site that this was on. The actual site was the Roman one. And the only reason we stripped this bit of ground, just because the digger was standing idle. I thought it was on the haul raid. It was, yeah. But we weren't supposed to be doing it at this phase. So I just talked to Fitz and said, look, should we just strip a bit more and see what's what? Doug was then asked to go and dig whatever this feature was. That is really interesting. So in my head, we were doing what we often do, which is test the features that we didn't really think were necessarily anything. And this very much didn't fit in with the Roman cemetery. Oh, very much so. It looked like some random tree throws. Yeah, because there were three or four of those big tree throws that have been seen on the other side of the site. And so I just said, yeah, Doug, go and stick a shovel in there. This is waved at people constantly about having to dig tree throws. But I will say, it didn't look like a classic tree throw, but it did look like something that might be a tree throw. It's basically an irregular blob, isn't it? But pretty big. But yeah, we were used to getting our eye into Roman graves, weren't we? Whereas this was the wrong orientation and the wrong shape. I remember a stage at which thinking we could get it done before it got dark later on. But I think that's reasonable, though, isn't it, for a burial? It wouldn't take you that long if it didn't have much in it. The problem with this one is just so much stuff. So we never thought we were going to have to completely excavate everything and finish it. We just needed bones up, treasure up, recorded properly and finished. Yeah, I mean, this case is roughly the right size. Yeah. Deeper than the grave was. So even in the normal course of events, it's a lot of soil to shift. Yeah. If you're not trying to pick around all the little items. It was the sheer fiddliness, wasn't it? Nick, you were called in, weren't you? So you barged, barged. Absolutely. I shuffled everyone out of the way and dived in. The word got out that the TV crew was there. I was there before the TV crew. He got a sniff of it, fame and fortune. What happened is I was in the office writing up a different site. And someone came in and said that some gold had turned up at Neil's site. And I'd been up there to look at the Roman graves, I think, a couple of times. Yeah. Because that was my thing. And it was honestly, I was just curious on my way home. So I just turned up at probably half past five, quarter to six. And the top half of the grave was almost... The top half and this half, the sort of top right hand, was being dug. So I started sort of back of the left shoulder to help there. And the legs were kind of exposed, but not hugely. And we were just beginning, I think, then to find arrowheads. I think, did you find the first arrowhead? Maybe. I definitely... There were a lot, like 15 or 16. I definitely dug quite a few. I remember finding that biggest, flattest one. Yes, I remember that. That was really striking, that one. So they were coming up earlier because they were a little bit higher up. And then it was when she'd get down to near the floor of the grave that the amount of bling started really slowing it down. But when I first turned up, we hadn't found... You hadn't found a lot of artefacts, I don't think, I don't think. Because I remember the cushion stone, I remember finding. And I think maybe we'd found one of the wrist things by the time I got there. I wish we'd have known at the time. What it was. Yeah, what it was. Because that's actually the most significant thing. I still don't. It's... I'm no expert, I should say. But it's a goldworking, metalworking tool. So it's a bit of a smoking gun to him actually being involved in doing exciting metalwork. So I do remember us talking about what to do about it. Because we knew it was... By the time we got to about seven, so this was May. So it's still light until about eight, quarter to eight or something. About weighing up the options of leaving it over the bank holiday weekend. And what we'd have to do. We talked about getting... Yeah, we talked about parking the truck over the top of it. Yeah, putting some planks down, parking a lorry van over the top. And then paying someone just to sort of stay on site as a security guard. It was security was the issue, wasn't it? Yeah, that's it. The worry that... I mean, well... Well, also validly so. Because we'd already had things stolen from the site. Why anyone wanted to steal our chairs, I don't know. The chairs were stolen. I'd forgotten about that. My view at the time was very clear that I think we should have done that. But not waited the weekend, just come back on Saturday. Yeah, you're right. The right thing would be to persuade somebody to keep in their car overnight. And everybody come back the next morning and do it again. But the thing that we didn't know, of course, was how many objects there were. Because we've got the skelly, basically. Yeah, I mean, the unknown quantity was... Oh, it can't be much more. Yeah, that's it. So we'd had... By that point, I think we had an arrowhead or two. And... Yeah, because the arrowhead started coming up when it was dark. And my abiding memory of that was that we sort of had them on little... We did on little soil pillars, because we wanted to get them surveyed in. So do everything in one go. That is one thing you miss from a flat display like this, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, if the stuff was in the right place. Yeah, it would be... So there's a depth of view. Yeah, you don't get the depth at all. The arrowheads came up earlier, some of them, because they were quite above the body, having been on shafts of pretty shore. Well, of course, the other thing as well is that the body wasn't flat. No, absolutely. And I think the way we worked, we kind of worked from that corner this way, because I remember the last things we were doing were down by the legs and the flints coming up quite late. But by then, there was a whole load of people involved, wasn't there? There was, and we were kind of taking it in turn. Yeah, Rachel turned up with a flask and some whisky, which was very, very warmly received. Someone went off with some torches at some point, I remember. Well, we had the minibus as well. We had the minibus and the truck pointing at it with the headlights on. You're not the ideal digging light. Well, not for the sort of the find of a generation. At the end of the day, we got him out the ground. He's been properly recorded as well as we could in the situation. And all the artefacts came with him. There were lots of frustrations about this, and there always are when you're a digger, because I think you're kind of invested in it, aren't you? And then the interpretation, initial interpretations come out, and it's all King of Stonehenge. Oh, yes. Yeah, and you think, you know what? There's more interest to this than just status, status, status. You've got somebody who has to have been supported through his life by the caring community that's venerating him. Well, yeah, I mean, when the isotope analysis came back on the teeth and the location of his birth was kind of more readily ascertainable, you can, in my mind, picture this guy, for all his imperfections, potentially being the person who bought the knowledge of metalworking technology to this country. It can be tied down potentially that specifically, and that's what I find intriguing about the whole thing. I remember, actually, I think it was Andrew Fitzpatrick said very soon after this, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime, and you'd always remember it. That's definitely true, but it's only two years later that I dug the Boscombe Bowman just over there. So actually, but this is the biggest highlight. But actually, to an extent, if it wasn't for this, I wouldn't have necessarily recognised what we had with the Bowman down the road. So yeah, it's got to be a career topper, really. I was only a year out of university, a year into digging when I got this, so I was never going to top this. I've had sites where I've found the landscape, obviously, when you're digging as part of a bigger landscape, I found those really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes they probably don't get as much attention, but they are, to me, more significant. But yeah, in terms of snapshot, it's this one. Yeah, definitely. What about you, Nick, of your millions of conquests? I've always felt slightly weird about this one because it wasn't my site. And as you say, I was an interloper, but you can't get past the fact. All I can say is I feel really lucky to have been involved in digging it. I've dug stuff, Roman stuff, that meant more to me in a weird sort of way because that was what my PhD was on. I got to dig one of the sites I did my PhD on in Winchester and found a gold-plated copper brooch. In one of the graves. But I think in terms of sheer importance, you can't overlook that. I don't think I'll ever see this lichen field again. Anything else? Well, it was the beginning of the end for me. For the same reason as you said. I mean, Fitz came up to me afterwards and said, this is the pinnacle of your career. It will never get any better than this. I thought, oh, I'm going to do something else. Didn't you already have your eye half on lawyering? No, not then, no. But this was the point at which I said, I'll give myself a year because if I can't get excited about this, I shouldn't be doing the job effectively. I think it is a remarkable thing. It makes me tingle to think about what it actually could mean in terms of who he is and what his role in our history was. But it was, yes, it was a fitting conclusion to my time. For all our grumbles, and we would have maybe done things slightly differently, I don't think we're actually missing any information. Except maybe we would probably put the fact the Arrowheads were at different levels and we're pretty positive about them being on shafts. That's probably the only thing that isn't really ramped home. But we didn't lose any scientific material. No, and to a certain extent, the what and the where is only a tiny part of the story. I mean, the interest from this chap has been the chemical analysis that came afterwards and that type of thing that allows you to paint that picture of a man very, very slowly trudging his way across Europe. Helping carried triumph. The recent DNA stuff is really exciting. I'm actually quite proud, not because I had anything to do with it, but of us as archaeologists for flagging up that actually DNA would be useful because there wasn't enough collagen to even think about it at the time. But it was flagged up that actually in future that would probably be viable and it was. I mean, it's not often you dig a burial that's still being reanalyzed 20 years later. Who was this man? Where did he come from? 20 years ago, these were questions that were unanswerable. But with new advances in archaeological sciences, we're unlocking the secrets hidden in these human remains. I know him as 1291. Everybody else knows him as the Ainsbury Archer. This has nothing to do with the bone in the first instance. This was to do with the fact that he got lots of arrows. Heads were found within. I mean, this is a very rich grain. And chances are that most men at that time would have been archers to some degree. The first thing I always do when I'm looking at bone is I think, right, how old is this person? What sex are they? And I could see immediately this is an adult, probably a mature adult, male, quite chunky build. But the most obvious thing that stuck out to me was that there was something not quite right about his legs. His left leg particularly looked wasted, what I would call atrophied, but basically wasted. And that told me that that leg had not been used very much because bone is a plastic material. It reacts to the pressures that are put on them. So if you're putting more pressure on one side than the other, like building up muscle on it, you'll also build up the bone. The other thing I could also see was that actually he had no kneecap on the left side. And we could see that because there's a tendon that runs across your knee that is part of that movement that helps you sort of move your knee up and down. And the patella, the kneecap, sits within that tendon and it helps it glide over that joint. Now, in this particular case, there was no facet, there was no articulation for that patella in the femur, the distal end of the thigh bone, but there was a deep groove going where that patella should be. And that's where the tendon, because it had not got the patella to glide over, had actually made an impression into the femur. And that was the very first, you know, that sort of went, wow, this is weird, I haven't seen this before, this is unusual. And because he'd got no kneecap, he couldn't bend his knee properly, particularly over long periods of time when he was older. So he will have been disabled. There is a professor, Chris Ruff, at John Hopkins University in America, who is a specialist in biomechanics, and he's done further work both on looking at the legs and on looking at the arm bones of the archer by looking in more detail at the structure of the bone, the actual microstructure of the bone. So what he got from looking at the legs was to see that what I suggested was a missing patella from something he had from youth is indeed the case because of the way the right leg had developed compared to the left leg. So that was one of the things that we got from there. The other thing that he looked at with the biomechanics was looking at the arm bones. The archer's humeri particularly were amongst the strongest and most developed within the sample from this area. So he had very strong upper arm movement, but unusually his left arm was stronger than the right, and that doesn't fit within the normal pattern at all. What I can tell you from looking at the holistic thing is that he was not charging around the landscape shooting at stuff because he couldn't charge around. So if he was doing that archery, he might have been doing something slightly different with it to what some of the other people were doing. So that's one side of it, the biomechanics, that's had much more work done on it. But the other thing which has been a really important development is looking at the DNA, which we just didn't have access to back then. But there's a lot of work being done in the last 10 years looking at ancient DNA, particularly in this beaker, what we call beaker or early Bronze Age period. And what that's enabled to do is help us understand a bit more about the relationships between individuals, both genetic relationships, particularly potentially familiar relationships, but also bigger, broader relationships with people across the whole of Europe. So what that DNA has shown us is that there was a general westward movement of people from the steppe region in continental Europe, which eventually ended up in the British Isles. And you've got a change in that between the late Neolithic and the beaker period in what we call the genome. And it became this steppe ancestry. So it came to dominate, basically, in the beaker period. And the Amesbury archer was one of these people who has an elevated steppe ancestry genome. But he wasn't the only person within this area that we looked at. There are about 31, I think, individuals who were not entirely contemporaneous, but within that sort of beaker period, early Bronze Age period that we've excavated from this area. Quite a number of whom, including him, have had the DNA looked at. And although he's got an elevated genome from the steppe region, he's got that back there, it's not as elevated as the rest of them within that group are, including the individual, the companion in inverted commas, who's buried next to him. Now, the interesting thing about this is if you tie this in with the isotopic data, strontium and oxygen isotopic data, which we'd had done originally anyway, which gives you a likely geographical origin for those individuals. And we know that the archer had come from the Alpine region within continental Europe, whereas the companion was local. So we know he'd already moved, but when they have looked in detail at that DNA for him, that seemed to be most common in areas of France. So the interesting thing about combining the isotopic data and the DNA data is that what it demonstrates is that people, you didn't just get a, you know, you didn't just go, oh, we're here, we're going to go to here, we're going to go to here, we're going to go to here, we're going to go to here, and you didn't get a mass movement of people. People were going backwards and forwards all the time. They were moving between different areas, both within Europe and then across to the British Isles and other places. I mean, we had some ideas about some of this because the cultural links that we've got with materials, we get a lot, but actually being able to confirm and get a greater vision of this and looking at the human remains themselves, it's just fantastic, absolutely fantastic. And we're in early days still. This is going to carry on developing. So that's the big picture that we've got. The small picture is looking at links between individuals. Now, one of the things I was interested in knowing is the link between the archer and the companion because I'd already been able to recognise that there looked to be a close familial link between the two of them. And that was due to the fact that they had a very rare, what we call a morphological variation. They had what's called a coalition, a pseudo joint, not actually a proper articulation, but a pseudo joint between the calcaneum, which is the big heel bone, and the navicular, which is the little bone that sits in almost like the arch of your foot. Now, they don't normally have a joint between them, but they had a coalition. That coalition only occurs in between 1.5% and 2.9% of the modern population. That's very rare. And we already know that that's normally got a familial link. And they both had it. I've never seen it before, and I've looked at thousands of skeletons. So this said to me, and they were next to each other, and they've both got similar materials buried with them. So this suggested they were probably close family. What the DNA has proved is that they're not first degree. They're not father, son, brothers. They're not second degree. So they're not uncle, nephew. They're not grandfather or grandson. But they could be third degree. They can't rule that out. So we don't know what they are, but we know what they're not. So sometimes that's what doing something like the DNA does. It can help highlight details and give you greater definition to what we know. And that's just one of the things, you know. It can also give you hair colour, and it can give you eye colour. Unfortunately for us, we have not yet got that DNA data back for the archer. And for the companion, unfortunately, it didn't work. For others in that region, from that area, with that assemblage, that 31, we had about 10 of them, the DNA was looked at. Mostly we have blonde hair with blue eyes. But we also have that quite unusual black hair and blue eyes in one individual. And the others were mostly brown eyed and black hair. But as I said, unfortunately, for these two, we don't know. Now that's because ancient DNA is not perfect. In a very basic form, the DNA signatures that you get look like barcodes. And in modern DNA, you'd have the whole pattern and you'd be able to read everything. And that contains so much data, it's staggering. But in ancient DNA, you get bits of that data is missing. It's degraded, we've lost it. So we can't always get all that information. And unfortunately, in this particular case, we haven't got it. The DNA is so exciting, it's unbelievable. But one of the things we do have to bear in mind all the time with this is these are destructive processes. Radiocarbon dating is destructive, isotopic analysis, DNA is destructive. The DNA analysis is getting smaller and smaller, what we need to do, it's getting more focused. That DNA analysis, it's always there, the data's there. So once we've got it, but I have to make sure that it's not going to destroy completely what we've got to look at in the future. As techniques advance further, it's likely we'll be able to tell even more from his DNA. But to place this man in context, in his society, in his culture, we have to examine the objects buried with him in the grave. DNA is such an interesting thing for the future, isn't it? Being able to look more closely at the people rather than having to rely on artefacts and clues that we're finding in the graves. Interesting that we can challenge our narratives as well as look where people have come from, what their backgrounds are. This goes with the strontium work and things like that. It's exciting times, I think. Indeed, but we still have to have that humility and common sense to make our own interpretations. Oh, absolutely. Based on our own observations. It's interesting that the evidence tends to converge. So the conclusions that have been drawn through looking at the objects, for example, the little antler pin that was in the cloak of the archer, it has its best parallels around the Alps in eastern France and western Switzerland. So the objects, the stable isotopes, the DNA, they're all in broad agreement. And although there's still a lot of work to be done, it should give us confidence that we can still make very good predictions and draw conclusions from quite traditional methods. We were raising questions at the museum about what we knew about the beakers, what we knew about the provenance of the wrist guards and the gold and things like that. I don't know if any work had been done on any of those, but while we've got you both on the phone, it would be great to find out if we've done any work on those. Well, we were never really able to nail down the source of the wrist guards. Fiona Rowe did a wonderful job. She made many journeys in her own time across Europe trying to identify the sources of the stone. And I think what we can say is that the black wrist guard is continental European, but the absolute source isn't known. The suspicion is that the red one might be from Wales, but that's not proven. And it could also be from continental Europe. So we didn't resolve that question. The stone tool for metalworking, the cushion stone is lidite, and which is presumed to be from continental Europe. But the gold, well, there's an interesting contrast between the gold from the grave of the archer, which is almost certainly from continental Europe, and that buried with the companion, which may be from Cornwall. Now that's something which hadn't been identified when we published the report. So the identification of Cornish gold accompanied Cornish tin at the beginning of the metal ages was a new discovery after we finished the report and it was published. Fantastic. Is there anything unusual about the beakers, or apart from the fact that there are lots of them? Well, to have five was definitely unusual. One is standard, basically. If we're going to get a pot at all, you get one. So to have five and to have the three oxidized ones in front of the archer's face and the two much less well fired, more reduced, blacker ones behind him probably has some kind of special significance at the time as well. That's fantastic that you mentioned that, because we remember that really strongly, the black and red of the oxidized and the sort of charcoal-y kind of beakers very much compared with the wrist guards, the black and red wrist guards. Yeah, I couldn't remember if we made... I'm not sure what more you can make of it than observing it. Well, no, it would be nice, and it is likely, because it does follow the same pattern, to have had some significance. But unfortunately, that significance is something that we just can't dig up. It was an abstract in the mind. The expert who wrote the report on the pots from the grave, Dr Ros Cleel, she thinks that the black ones may have been made specially for the burial, and that's why they weren't as well fired. Or at least they were fired differently from the red ones, which were used a little bit before they were placed in the grave. So it could have been the case that some things were made specially for the grave. Many of the flint objects had never been used. So there may be a production of things to be placed with the person just before the burial was made. That's terrifically interesting. I understand now that we... I only found this out the other day, that there seems to be evidence of the boar's tusks being used in metalworking as well. There being some sort of bits of metal found in those, some sort of burnishing tool or something. Yes, it was one of the things that we weren't sure about when we published the report, but it's been noticed by German colleagues that in graves in continental Europe, you would often find a set of stone tools for metalworking. So anvils or hammers, and some polishing and some sharpening stones. And quite often, you would find them in a group as if they'd all been placed in a bag. And next to the stones would be boar's tusks. So the suspicion was that the tusks were used in metalworking. And it would make sense if they were used in some form of polishing or planishing. And it was only a few years ago that colleagues in the Czech Republic were able to show using dispersive x-ray fluorescence. That's when you fire x-rays at something and it releases x-rays back and you can measure the chemical composition of the material. That analysis showed that on the boar's tusks or in the tusks, there were traces of copper and also gold. So I look forward to work that has yet to be done on the finds from the archer and the companion and also the Boscombe Bowman to see if that's the case here. Because certainly one of the tusks in the grave of the archer has been modified. It's been changed. So it's clearly been used. And it's something that needs to be pursued. But I think for now, we can anticipate that the boar's tusks are going to be shown to be used in metalworking. We were talking to Laura on Saturday about when she found the gold in the Ainsbury Archery Grave. It was actually one of the first things that came up. And the loud exclamation of that led to us... Understandable, but dog walkers around led to us having concerns about security. I think I'm right in saying it was Laura in the finds room who may have found the gold in the companion's skull as well. I think you could be right, but I can't actually remember which one of them. I know she was involved and it was... That burial wasn't washed for another five or six weeks after the excavation had finished because we had so many of them to do. So it was a total surprise that suddenly somebody found gold in the finds room. I think it's only ever happened twice in Portway House. It really was very exciting. This poor man had really been second best to the archer. We kind of thought he was a nobody because he had what... I think it was seven flints. Did he have a boar's tusk? I think he had a boar's tusk. Seven flints, a boar's tusk, and that was about it. So compared to the guy next door to him, he was very much poor relation. I think I'm right in saying I called him the companion, almost thinking of him like a servant somehow because he didn't have the kit. Yeah, not enough bling. And then suddenly he was actually not quite the same because he didn't have the quantity of stuff, but he was clearly right up there because he had those gold ornaments. But because we'd already... He was so close as well, wasn't he? He must have been right on the edge of the mound, if not... just within it. Because we had the name, he needed a name too. He had to be given some kind of status. I remember very clearly, Andrew, actually on site, you telling me this is a once in a lifetime, you won't get anything like this again. And then only two years later, so you're kind enough to pass me on to the Boscombe Bowmen. It's a very different kettle of fish. The Bowmen are obviously incredibly important and exciting, but it doesn't touch the archer in terms of an experience, although it's no less important. Well, I could see from standing close up exactly what was going on and I just had a slightly different perspective because I wasn't doing the actual excavation. It's a fantastic thing to be involved in and really they don't come along very often. You may, and I hope you will be involved in other great discoveries, but something like this is something to remember and to savour. And for me, it was very definitely a career highlight. The whole of that year was coloured by it, really. But it started well. I started off with having my photograph in country life. We moved on through the Amesbury Archer. In the summer, his inquest happened to coincide with my 40th birthday. Appearances on the TV, news, radio, TV, right the way through. I don't think a single year, sorry, a single week of that year went by without the archer being shown to somebody and being laid out specially for the occasion. It just went on and on and on and the whole thing was just monumentally exciting and busy and a huge learning experience because, you know, I do Romans, basically. And suddenly I was thrust into the Beaker period. A little bit of me, I think, has remained there Having been charged with taking the excavations through the publication, obviously my involvement, particularly the research side, lasted longer. So that stayed with me. But the public interest is still there. So earlier this year, the finds or some of the finds buried with the archer were included in an exhibition in Halle in Germany. And they've now been included in the Blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum that's rolled over from that work in Germany. So now they're in London, but they will always otherwise be on display in Salisbury Museum. And so there's a continuing interest. And it's undoubtedly one of the most famous finds that there's been in the last 20 years or so. And something new about the find just keeps coming along. The archer now lies in the Wessex Gallery of Salisbury Museum. The bones are laid out just as they were found in the grave with the objects around him. And he's surrounded by a wealth of other Neolithic and Bronze Age discoveries from the Chalk Downs around Stonehenge. This museum has outstanding archaeology collections. We're somewhat blessed in being in South Wiltshire. And we've got some of the most amazing archaeological sites on our doorstep. Obviously, we've got Stonehenge eight miles up the road from the museum. So if you took even the archer out of the equation, we've got an amazing collection. And we're designated by the Arts Council because they're nationally important. They're the kinds of collections which are on a par with what you'd see in a national museum. But then you've added in the ace of the archer as well. I mean, the story, I think, is what sort of elevates him beyond perhaps some of the other things that we've got. There's this grand idea of this man who travelled here from Central Europe 4,400 years ago. I mean, absolutely amazing. And that's what captures people's imagination. So that's what really elevates him, I think. So we can put a real story around him. We can actually almost put flesh on the bones. This idea that somebody's placed in the ground with a huge array of artefacts which were unrecoverable. They're there forever to go into the afterlife or they're placed there as part of the ceremony when he dies. That's something very powerful about how he's respected. So we know that 4,400 years ago, that the gold objects he was buried with were probably the rarest objects you could possibly imagine. There was hardly anybody owning gold artefacts at the time, yet he was buried with them. So no one else could have them. He could have them. He had these amazing arrowheads buried with him again, which were just beautifully manufactured, possibly specifically for him to be buried in the ground. The copper daggers, knives, those again, very rare artefacts placed in the ground, unreachable. So that tells you he was highly respected. In what respect, we don't know. It appears he may have been a metal worker. So maybe he was respected because he had this specialist knowledge of transforming objects and creating objects. This idea of making something into a liquid that would then go solid again to become an object was almost magical at this period, we think. So was that why he was respected? Is that why he was an important member of the community? We also have to look at his bones and the fact that he was disabled. He obviously had a limp. We don't know how that happened, whether he was born with it or whether it happened earlier on in his life. But again, he had to have been supported by the community. Maybe that's why he had this specialist knowledge, because he couldn't perform other activities in the wider community. But again, it all points towards this mutual respect that people had for him. I'm a very strong believer in the fact that you want to come to a museum and encounter the real thing. Museums are about real artefacts from the past. And the arch was one of the richest burials that was found, or it has been found, from the early Bronze Age. And you could display those in a case without the burial. But we've already got a situation where the artefacts have been taken out of the ground and they're completely out of context of where they were discovered. It's just making it even worse and more complicated. I believe very strongly that you need to put these objects with the people they were found with. That's how he was found. They're his items or the items that were placed with him when he died. And I think that's how people need to see them when they come into the museum to understand the context. They've got this individual, this amazing array of things. See them how they were actually laid out when he died. I think that's a very powerful experience. I love archaeology. I trained as an archaeologist, but I've spent most of my working career in museums. And I love artefacts and looking after them. I like telling the stories behind the artefacts as well. So to have this nationally, internationally important burial in the museum is a real, real privilege. He was clearly an important person in his community, perhaps an archer, perhaps a smith. And he's still important today. His story has captured the imagination of the people of Amesbury, people who now live where he lived and died. The whole legacy thing there has been done really well, I think, isn't it? I mean, perhaps it might be seen as heavy-handed. You can't move. I think the ice cream van man might be archer-themed, like the whole place is. It does give a really terrific thing to hang activities off for the school children. It gives the place a real identity, doesn't it? Yeah. And I think that's important because it was a new school. It was possible to create a new identity. And Margaret Bunyard, who was the education manager at the time, and the head teacher, Maggie Edwards, they worked very carefully to create this new identity so that when the first intake of children arrived, they had a sense of belonging. And from day one, there's been something special. I remember Jane Brain, who created her wonderful comic book for children about the Amesbury archer, which is much more interesting than the excavation report. I remember Jane saying she painted a life-size mural of the archer in the hallway of the new school. But Oscombe Down isn't just famous for archaeology. There's the airfield next to it. And so a test pilot, a fighter jet pilot, was sent over also to be a model for a mural. And it was only later that Jane realised that that pilot was Tim Peake. Oh, really? Who went on to become the famous astronaut. So the children of the school have got two very famous and inspiring figures, one from the ancient past, one from recent times, who've both got amazing stories. Jane's book had really quite an effect on me, actually. I was really quite emotional about it when I saw it, which I wasn't expecting at all. You know, archaeology is stories, isn't it? It is narratives, and we don't have to make them boring. You know, there's no reason that what Jane produced there is less valid than our monographs, than site reports. And actually, I think in many ways, this is the future of a large part of hopefully what publication will be, is making things accessible, but still giving access to the underlying scientific research and things like that. Yeah, I think it's terrific. And it's interesting how now we're 20 years on, what hasn't been done is to look at the effect of the discoveries over the long term. So the Archer and the Companion have an important role in the placemaking of the school and the new community. And so we have the Bowman and the Community Centre, we have the development named as Archer's Gate, we have the pub, the Angsbury Archer pub down at Solstice Park, and it's expressed in the community by art, such as the arrows on the gates of the school or the statue of the Archer opposite the community centre. But how well is this understood by the people who live there now 20 years on? We're not sure. So that's another study that merits attention. If you put pictures down here... The Wessex Archaeology Community Engagement Programme has a really important schools element. So we go into the local area and indeed nationally to help young people understand the lives of people in the past and to draw parallels with life today. The Angsbury Archer provides a really useful access point for that. He's a very relatable character. Like many children's schools today, he's come from somewhere else. He's come to this country. He's made a home here. And because of all the things that were found in his burial, the jewellery, the tools, we're able to better understand him and almost become part of his story. Beside me is one of our loan boxes that we lend out to schools. And one of the most important things we can do as an archaeological company is enable people hands-on access to artefacts, let them touch things, feel things. It's only through getting hands-on with archaeology that we can really enable people to connect with their past. So by sending these boxes into schools and indeed to local community groups, we can enable people to explore that story for themselves. They can understand in their own way, access the archaeology in their own way. And that's really, really valuable. The greatest satisfaction for me in my role is the moment when you see children understand that people in the past were just like us. We are so distanced from those ancient cultures and the Beaker people and the Stone Age people. We're so distanced by the passing of time and the development of technology that we forget that they were physiologically identical to us in every way. They would have had feelings. They would have been artistic. We have evidence of their creativity. And they would have faced the same emotional struggles that we do in our daily lives. And to be able to help young people build those connections with people in the past is a great honour. What makes the tangible archaeology important is the story that goes with it. It's the story of the people to whom these things were relevant, to the people to whom these things enabled their survival. And in many ways, we owe it to the archaeology to find the story, to tell that story, to give them the meaning that they had all those thousands of years ago. And that's what I love about the Amesbury Archer. Twenty years on from his discovery and 44 centuries since he was alive, the Amesbury Archer is still providing us with new insights into the early Bronze Age and the people who lived in the landscape around Stonehenge. He was alive at the dawn of a new technological age, a new age of metal. The investigation of this burial reveals just how much archaeological science has advanced since his discovery. What will the next 20 years add to the story?