Face to face

In response to Psalms in a bog, Tehmina wanted to know about the plaster lion plaque I uncovered during my days of getting muddy. The discovery of the psalter had already started me thinking about my own encounters with the past but the new website from Oxford Archaeology discussed on Past Thinking and Tehmina’s comment reminded me of the times I have come face to face with visages from years gone by.

I suppose the lion at Wood Hall and the way in which it was discovered was my first enounter with a face from the past. It was the surprise of finding something so lion-like looking straight back at me. Alas, I do not have a picture (there is one on my parents’ wall, along with a working shot of a friend who now works for West Yorkshire Archaeological Service and I excavating the feature). Faces crop up everywhere: on pots, in plaster wall schemes, in sculpture and in manuscripts.

In a later job with another archaeological unit, the finds officer and I were cleaning a carved stone. The carving depicted a the face of a bearded man with wavey hair and what looked like an up-turned beaker on his head: theories abound as to his identity (favourites being a deity of some sort). The stone was rather large and heavy and consequently difficult to clean. Being resourceful people, we got round it by the finds officer perching on a lab stool, while I sat cross-legged on the bench. One of the site directors given to post-modern tendencies came in and became frantically excited at the sea of, well three, faces ‘looking’ at him. He spent the next half hour photographing us all.

I personally went a little loopy when discovering a potter’s thumb print on a vessel or a cat’s paw print on a floor tile. In such circumstances, my imagination had a tendency to run riot and construct stories about the making of the pot or the fate of the unfortunate pussy cat. But I still do get excited about faces.

In part, because faces remind us of people we might actually know, they provide a way in which it is possible to connect with the past very closely. Faces mean individuals and individuals sometimes get lost in the academic debate and theorising that accompanies our discipline. The success of programmes like the BBC’s Meet the Ancestors in which facial reconstruction of skulls found on the excavations the programme covers provide a peg on which to hang more personal stories are a useful reminder that the past is about people, their pots and their cats.