Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 26 January 2010.

Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle was a Danish archaeologist who helped to transform Britain’s approach to ecclesiastical archaeology in a career excavating important Early Christian sites in England.

Rumours went round the archaeological world in 1964 of the arrival at the huge excavations in Winchester of a dynamic pipe-smoking young Danish woman who was imposing new standards of rigour on an already exemplary project. Birthe Kjølbye, then studying at Aarhus University, came from an archaeological milieu where the clarity of research, design and technical brilliance of excavation were taken for granted and she would brook nothing less on the site she was to supervise on the Cathedral Green at Winchester.

The excavation was highly complex. Evidence suggested that it contained the remains of the Old Minster, the Anglo-Saxon cathedral demolished by the Normans. Successive seasons gradually revealed that it did — but of the original buildings hardly a stone survived in place. Kjølbye (she married Martin Biddle in 1966) and her team were faced with robber trenches, the long pits left after the Norman builders had removed the walls and foundations for re-use on their new cathedral. These and the original foundation trenches, by dint of minutely careful excavation and recording, proved to reveal traces of the church of Cenwalh of Wessex (c 648), the massive additions between 971 and 980 by Bishops Aethelwold and St Alphege, and the original burial place of St Swithun in 862, the site of his shrine and evidence of his cult.

In achieving the first near-complete excavation of an Anglo-Saxon cathedral, the Biddles changed perceptions of the architectural achievements of the pre-conquest Church and provided a backdrop for court life in the kingdom of Wessex. In 1967 a joint paper, 'Metres, Areas, and Robbing', in World Archaeology, established the problems and principles to be used in excavating and recovering the plans and structural sequence of buildings from which most stonework had been removed.

Birthe Kjølbye was born in 1941 in Sonderborg, south Jutland, into a Denmark under Nazi occupation. One of her earliest memories was of British airmen being passed through her parents’ flat en route to safety in Sweden. Her father, Landsretsagfører Axel Kjølbye, was a vital link in the local resistance. His busy solicitor’s office (which was also their flat), with Danish and German clients, was opposite the Gestapo headquarters in Sønderborg, and thus an ideal and unsuspected base.

She entered Aarhus University in 1960. An interest in Vikings took her to the Department of Archaeology, where in the Danish fashion of the ten-year Magister degree (awarded in 1972) she spent long periods working on excavations, including the defences of Viking-age Aarhus and at Haithabu in Slesvig. An interest in the early Bronze Age led to a year at the University of Edinburgh with Professor Stuart Piggott, and, looking for British excavation experience the summer beforehand, she chose Martin Biddle’s investigations at Winchester.

The Cathedral Green dig necessitated the excavation of many thousands of burials. Kjølbye-Biddle worked out sophisticated methods that enabled the sequence of graves to be established and in many cases the graves to be assigned to periods and sometimes dated. Her work transformed perceptions of what could be learnt from the careful excavation of such cemeteries, even though she later published an apology for the perfunctory excavation that had been necessary for the medieval and later graves.

The Biddles’ next big project was the excavation of the mausoleum of the kings of Anglo-Saxon Mercia at Repton in Derbyshire and the church and cemeteries associated with them. These were in and around Repton School, where between 1974 and 1988 the Biddles, their two small daughters Signe and Solvej, their dog Wiglaf and a motley crew of diggers became familiar figures during the summer holidays. For some of these years her husband was director of the museum at the University of Pennsylvania. The Repton seasons were a relief for Kjølbye-Biddle, for she did not take well to the social duties expected of the wife of a US museum director.

Her fierce excavation discipline and meticulous elucidation and recording of the micro-stratigraphy of the Repton cemeteries enabled them to unravel a story as remarkable as that at Winchester, complementing a stone-by-stone analysis of the Anglo-Saxon tower and crypt of the church of St Wystan carried out by the doyen of Anglo-Saxon church studies, Professor Harold Taylor. Surprisingly the church turned out to have been utilised as the strong point and gate structure of a D-shaped temporary earthwork fortress thrown up by the Danish Great Army in 874-5 when it overwintered in Repton during its conquest of Mercia.

A mound in the vicarage garden near by proved to be the site of a destroyed Mercian mortuary building — perhaps another royal mausoleum — re-used for the burial of at least 249 persons (sturdy males of Scandinavian physical type and females more akin to the Anglo-Saxon physique) again dated by coin and other finds to the period of the Great Army’s brief sojourn in Repton.

Kjølbye-Biddle and her husband were jointly awarded the Frend Medal of the Society of Antiquaries (of which she had been elected Fellow in 1976) in 1986 for their work on the early history of the English Church, cited as a “really monumental contribution to our knowledge of the archaeology of this country during the Dark Ages”. By then the Biddles had spent several excavation seasons at St Albans Cathedral, work begun as rescue archaeology to help their friend Robert Runcie, then Bishop of St Albans. His project for a new pilgrimage centre at the cathedral had obvious archaeological implications. The traditional association of the abbey with Britain’s proto-martyr St Alban led to a big research project that continued after Runcie was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury.

When Archbishop Runcie was asked to recommend experts for an investigation of that ultimate Christian shrine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Biddles were an obvious choice. The story of this most sensitive of projects — sensitive because of its significance to Christianity, the delicate state of the structures and the complexity of the interchurch administrative arrangements that govern the site — is well set out in Martin Biddle’s book The Tomb of Christ (1993).

Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle was recently collating the prodigious volume of data from a lifetime of digging, being old-fashioned enough to believe that publication is a duty — she was fiercely critical of modern standards of excavation and reporting. She will be remembered not only for her innovation and discipline as an archaeologist but for the coming publications, the result of one of the most remarkable partnerships in British archaeology.

She is survived by her husband and by two daughters.

Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, archaeologist, was born on July 15, 1941. She died of ovarian cancer on January 16, 2010, aged 68.

The following appreciation of the life and achievements of Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle is extracted from the encomium compiled by Fellows Martin Henig, Thomas Beaumont James, Anthony King and Nigel Ramsay for the Festschrift for Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle  published by Archaeopress (2010) under the title Intersections: the Archaeology and History of Christianity in England 400-1200, edited by Fellows Martin Henig and Nigel Ramsay.

‘Birthe came from a well-known Copenhagen family, her father being Landsretssagfører Axel Kjølbye. Amongst her earliest memories are wartime ones in occupied Denmark, when her parents sheltered Allied airmen at very great risk to themselves. After graduating as a Magister student (the equivalent of a PhD) from Aarhus University, Birthe Kjølbye came to Winchester on her way to study the Early Bronze Age at Edinburgh. In her very first season as a field archaeologist she showed such skill in the techniques and management of excavation that she was put in charge of excavations at the Cathedral. In 1966 she married Martin, and they have been partners ever since in an almost countless series of excavations and publications.

‘Two major sites other than Winchester have claimed the interest of the Biddles. From 1978 excavations were conducted on the site of the new Chapter House at St Albans, which proved the existence of a Roman cemetery on the site and hinted at the possibility of a late Roman martyrium for St Alban. One of Birthe’s many distinctive contributions to the project was to reveal that the St Alban’s Cross of distinctive form was very probably a Coptic antiquity, brought to St Albans in the Middle Ages.

‘Then there was the great Repton project, which revealed not simply the structural history of an important Middle-Saxon church but a history of bloody conflict as Mercians confronted Vikings. Here as elsewhere excavation resulted in major studies of Saxon sculpture and physical anthropology. Work commenced here in 1974, unearthing  the remains of the Great Heathen Army that had overwintered there in AD 873—4, their archaeological findings (which included the massacred remains of at least 264 individuals, dated by coins to the Viking period) corroborating an account in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The most spectacular find from that excavation, however, was perhaps that of a memorial with a carving of an Anglo-Saxon ruler — possibly commemorating the murdered King Æthelbald, who is known to have been buried at Repton.

‘Famously working together as a team, the Biddles have combined a thorough awareness of all that past scholarship can contribute with the introduction of new techniques of archaeological recording, devised in order to understand the complicated stratigraphy of Winchester. These techniques revolutionised the discipline of excavation itself, replacing the Wheeler system as modified by Sheppard Frere and others, with a far better model — used today but rarely with such skill and intelligence as by the Biddles in all their investigations. Experienced field-archaeologists of the older generation, like Dr Graham Webster, actually came to dig at Winchester in order to re-learn how to excavate and came away enormously impressed. It has rightly been claimed that the Winchester excavations trained a whole generation of archaeologists and that all well-conducted excavations conducted since are effectively tributes to the Biddles’ methodology.

‘Birthe’s publications have frequently been focused on Winchester, but have also ranged far and wide, with essays on a Nubian church at Qasr Ibrim, on the remains of frogs and toads from the excavations at Repton and on the technical problems of excavation in general — and especially on complex urban sites.

‘On a personal level Martin and Birthe have always been great encouragers of other people, having a generosity of spirit which is not so commonly found in these dark days of hectic competitiveness. By their kindness, hospitality and courtesy, they have always maintained an outstanding level of friendship. For decades they have been a famous duo, to the extent that it is often hard to disentangle what each has done; but if that partnership can be compared to a style of dress, it might be said that while Martin has always been very respectably turned out, Birthe has always dressed with distinctive flair and style.’