Herm 2011
This was an excavation organised by Professor Chris Scarre from 2008-2011, but it wasn’t meant to
run on for 4 years! His grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council was designed for 3
years, so it would have stopped just as I was started University, but he managed to make it stretch
and find some more money from elsewhere. I was fortunate that he did, because not only were we
on the beautiful island of Herm, next to Guernsey in the Channel Islands, but also because we were
excavating some of the earliest Neolithic tombs and cairns in Western Europe (the additional grant
money also paid for our accommodation and food, so I only had to book a flight to Guernsey). This
was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Coming from an area of England that is as far away from the sea as you can get (heavy clay soils that
dry up quickly and become sludge when it rains), 3 weeks of excavating sand was a pleasant
experience, but you are really exposed, so when it rains, you are in trouble! If the wind picked up,
the sand did start backfilling the trench and getting into your eyes. There are also no motorised
vehicles for us, so every morning we had to take all the equipment to the site, which was great if it
wasn’t windy or raining, but it was a half mile walk. We had lots of tourist groups visit our site
(surprisingly lots of Germans!), since this was the tail end of the tourist season- loads of cruise liners
docked in St. Peter’s Port (we could see them from Herm).
Chris Scarre’s main motivation for the Herm project was to discover if Herm really was an “Island of
the dead”, for many Western European islands along the Atlantic coast have lots of tombs, but little
evidence of human activity. The actual area he was interested in is called The Common on the north
of the island (see map above), which has a number of tombs scattered on Le Petit Monceau and Le
Grand Monceau (hills), and in the low lying part of The Common. The sand dunes on The Common
formed much later, meaning that the tombs were more exposed to higher sea levels in the early
Neolithic today, but the formation of the dunes allowed sand to bury the tombs, preserving a unique
landscape not seen on mainland Britain or France to the same extent. The tomb that he was most
interested in was noted briefly by noted Guernsey antiquarian F.C. Lukis in the 1830’s-1840’s, which
had not been found since then. It stood next to another tomb, which was visible but covered, and he
also wanted to explore this tomb to identify its type.
What did we find? We rediscovered the tomb that had been recorded vaguely by FC Lukis between
Le Petit Monceau and Le Grand Monceau (it was covered under so much bracken!), which was on a
slight ridge (perhaps a beach back in the early Neolithic?), redefined the type of tomb that was next
to the one that we rediscovered (it was chambered, not bottlenecked), and continued work on a site
of a chambered tomb from the previous year (trench H on the website). Previous years’ work had
uncovered very early agricultural activity (which disproved the hypothesis that Herm was an
exclusive “Island of the dead”), a 1930’s golf clubhouse, and a strange alignment of stones next to a
circle of stones, but they were very small compared to late Neolithic examples (trench C). The
artefacts themselves varied from early neolithic pottery (some of which contained residues- maybe
we can find out what they ate/drank?), polished stone tools, and a cairn partially blocking the
entrance of the tomb. More modern finds included a Victorian bottle (name of the maker still
visible), animal bones and golf balls! Luminesence (2009 and 2011, confirmed the early Neolithic
contexts of some of the trenches), pollen analysis (2008), and geophysics (2008) had also been done
on the common, so we had some idea of the landscape of Herm in the early neolithic. 6,000 years
ago the common was more inundated. Some of the tombs themselves had also partially collapsed;
we believe an earthquake in the 8th century AD caused this, either directly or by causing a tidal wave
that hit Herm.
Team photo! (Chris Scarre is top row, second from left, I’m second from right)
So my thanks go to Chris Scarre for organising the project, everyone else who was on the trip who
made it so great to be with (including Ruaridh and Kacey!) and the 50 or so residents of Herm, who
put up with us going into the pub every single day for 3 weeks for dinner, usually having not
showered!
Here is the website for the Herm project, with all the previous trenches noted:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/herm.project/; unfortunately the website hasn’t been updated to include the
2011 excavations!
Alistair Galt
Summer ball 2011 in the undercroft restaurant in the cathedral!
Neolithic flint arrowheads from Climperwell Farm, Gloucestershire
(http://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/450285)