Paul Ashbee

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 30 September 2009

Ashbee, left, overseeing the 1949 dig at Verulamium, St Albans, run by the University of London (for further comment on the photograph, see the note from our Fellow Martin Biddle, below)

Paul Ashbee, archaeologist and author, was born on June 23, 1918. He died on August 19, 2009, aged 91

Paul Ashbee was perhaps the most talented and certainly the most prolific postwar archaeologist concerned with the excavation of prehistoric British burial mounds. His record in this often physically exhausting field of research was extraordinary, not least because most of it was done in his holidays. Working in seven counties, from Yorkshire and Suffolk to Cornwall, from 1949 to 1961 he excavated 30 barrows and cairns, including two long barrows and 13 flat graves (cists).

He played a significant role in exposing the remarkable 100ft-deep ritual shaft at Wilsford, near Stonehenge; in addition he worked extensively on two important settlement sites in the South West. All this work received detailed publication illustrated in his beautiful draughtsman’s hand.

Paul Ashbee was born near Maidstone, Kent, in 1918. An only child, his instinctive fascination for the past was nurtured by Norman Cook, then assistant curator at Maidstone Museum, who always made time to look at the boy’s latest finds. Ashbee had little liking for school. His inability to grasp mathematics prevented him from obtaining his school certificate and ruled out his progression to university. When war came he became an enthusiastic conscript, enlisting in the Royal West Kent Regiment.

After the war, ex-servicemen were often able to enrol at university without the expected school qualifications. Ashbee’s command of German, which had enabled him to remain of use to the British Army in Germany until 1949, stood him in good stead when he applied to the University of London Institute of Archaeology to study for a diploma in European prehistoric archaeology. This facility appealed to the director, Professor Gordon Childe, and to his colleague, Mortimer Wheeler, and Ashbee’s successful grounding in archaeology was thus assured.

Ashbee’s postwar prospects were greatly enhanced by the practical help he received from B. H. St J. O’Neil, Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments at the Ministry of Works. O’Neil, whose love for the Isles of Scilly ran deep, appointed Ashbee on a hunch to supervise the excavation of a cist-grave cemetery of the Roman period at Porth Cressa, St Mary’s, in 1949. Appreciating Ashbee’s promise, he also arranged for him to spend time in the drawing office of the ministry in London, where his supreme skills as a draughtsman were honed.

Later the same year he was appointed by Rupert Bruce-Mitford, of the British Museum, to be his principal field assistant for the excavation of an early Christian settlement at Mawgan Porth, near Newquay, Cornwall. It became one of the most comprehensive excavations of a domestic site to have taken place in Cornwall and it gave Ashbee an appetite for this field of study. His subsequent work at the late Iron Age/Roman period settlement at Halangy Down on St Mary’s, and elsewhere in the Isles of Scilly, owed much to the experience he had gained at Mawgan Porth.

It was at Mawgan Porth, too, that his love for his future bride and devoted collaborator, Richmal Disher, was confirmed. A history student at Westfield College, University of London, Disher had first met Ashbee at the institute’s training dig at Verulamium, St Albans, in 1949. They met again — on a bus in Baker Street — early in 1951 and Ashbee saw to it that she accompanied him in the next season at Mawgan Porth. They were married in September 1952.

Ashbee gained his diploma in 1952 but this was only the start in his determination to obtain the academic qualifications that his schooling had failed to provide. Generously supported by his wife’s aunt, Richmal Crompton (the author of the Just William books), he went first to the University of Bristol to obtain a diploma in education and subsequently to the University of Leicester for an MA. As late as 1984 he was awarded a DLitt from the same university.

In 1954 the Ashbees moved to London, when he took up the appointment of assistant master at Forest Hill School to teach history. And from then until 1966 his holidays were spent excavating barrows for the Ministry of Works. Ashbee’s contribution to the study of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial practice was formidable and set new standards. Apart from the recording of mound shape, details of structure, sequence, burial and grave offerings, he became expert in exposing and interpreting features in perishable materials such as wood.

His recognition of the four wooden corner posts and wall planks of a small mortuary house built in a pit beneath a barrow at Amesbury, Wiltshire, was masterly. So, too, the remains of a wooden coffin under a barrow at Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire. Barrow structure fascinated him. His recording of stake circles preserved beneath barrow mounds, which he found at a number of sites, led to a major study and classification of this puzzling phenomenon. The hands-on style of his training at the Institute of Archaeology taught Ashbee how to recover and preserve grave objects and his enthusiastic handling and analysis of man-made finds was always a feature of his reports.

In 1957 Ashbee excavated a Neolithic long barrow at Fussell’s Lodge in Wiltshire, which remains one of his most significant contributions to the study of prehistoric burials. The technical excellence of his uncovering and reconstruction of the mound’s timber features and burials shed light on the findings in earlier excavations of long barrows, and set new standards for excavators to follow on this type of site.

Nothing, however, had prepared British archaeologists for the need to excavate a prehistoric chalk-cut shaft, more than 100ft in depth and 6ft in diameter, which was discovered at Wilsford in 1960. Ashbee was leader among those who were able eventually to devise a means of emptying such a huge shaft, recording the details of its construction and recovering the objects of wood and other materials that occurred within its ancient fill.

As a prehistorian, Ashbee retained a certain bitterness about his role in the re-excavation of the royal burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk from 1965 to 1970, feeling that, in the final publication, too little had been made of the prehistoric material that had been recovered within and beneath the make-up of the covering mound.

Ashbee’s excavating career had begun in the Isles of Scilly in 1949 and he worked there on various sites until 1977, when this side of his career closed. Here his great achievement was to uncover and record in detail the late prehistoric and Roman period settlement at Halangy Down. In 1974 Ashbee brought together all that he and fellow workers had discovered about the early history of the Isles in his book Ancient Scilly. It was, and remains, a synthesis of paramount importance.

Ashbee was appointed archaeologist at the Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia, in 1968 and most of his fieldwork thereafter was devoted to the Isles of Scilly. His teaching commitments enabled him to write three of his four major books, The Earthen Long Barrow in Britain (1970), Ancient Scilly (1974) and The Ancient British (1978). Although tentatively received within the profession, the latter was nevertheless a bestseller. The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain had appeared in 1960. Ashbee contributed a stream of papers and shorter notes on his favourite topics, including reviews on German publications for the Society of Antiquaries of London, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1958. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than his presidency of the Cornwall Archaeological Society from 1976 to 1980. He was also a notable commissioner of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) for ten years. Ashbee retired in 1983 from the University of East Anglia but not from archaeology: in 2005, ever a man of Kent, he produced Kent in Prehistoric Times.

The death of his wife in 2005 ended a remarkable partnership. Whether on site or at their desks, Ashbee relied heavily on her well-informed, astute support. Once, while working at Halangy, she prevented him from asking an inquisitive visitor to leave the site; she had recognised him as the Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, who maintained a holiday retreat on St Mary’s. In a growing friendship thereafter the Ashbees were able to give the Wilsons invaluable briefings on the state of archaeology in Britain.

In a happy retirement spent in country pursuits around their home at Chedgrave in Norfolk, a great joy first for his wife then for Ashbee was the presidency of the Just William Society. This big, amiable man left no dig unfinished, but a legacy of signal achievement. He is survived by his son and daughter.

Commenting on the photograph that appeared in the Times obituary, our Fellow Martin Biddle contributed the following note to the Lives Remembered section of the newspaper.

I was moved to read your well informed piece about Paul Ashbee, but taken aback to see in your photograph myself (aged 12) talking to Paul over the fence of the excavation at Verulamium (St Albans) directed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Mrs M A (Molly) Cotton. 'Site G', as it was known, was my first proper dig: I was allowed to search the wheel-barrows for anything which might have been missed (nothing!), but
not allowed in the trenches. The discipline and order of that excavation, of which Paul was one of the supervisors, made a strong impression on me then and still does.  The Wheeler grid with its 'box' trenches looks old fashioned now, but the intellectual rigour and
precise dissection demanded in the actual work of excavation has not been bettered.  'Passed RB' (Roman Britain), as it was then called.
Derided now, wrongly so. Many, later well known, were trained on that site, including Eric Gee, later of the Royal Commission on the
Historical Monuments of England, and Sylvia Matheson, authority on the archaeology of Persia and Baluchistan, neither of whom sadly visible in your picture, but both well remembered by this schoolboy.

We are very grateful to Eric Houlder (Past Chairman CBA Yorkshire,  Archaeology Editor, Royal Photographic Society Archaeology & Heritage Group) for the following memories of Paul Ashbee, and for the accompanying photograph, which shows Paul taking photographs from the A-frame at Sutton Hoo in 1968.

In early 1968 Paul Ashbee asked me to be one of four site supervisors at Sutton Hoo for the forthcoming excavation seasons. I had already worked with him there during the previous summer, and had come to know and respect both Paul and Richmal, his wife. Paul was, of course, already well-known in the rather small world (I think it was Current Archaeology which calculated that there were fewer than a thousand of us, including amateurs) of ‘fifties and ‘sixties archaeology, and the initial invitation to dig with him at Britain’s premier site was received with gratitude, so that his subsequent request for me to supervise there was a cause for celebration.

Many memories stand out from those times, particularly of his own reminiscences of both archaeology and his war service. I was then a budding site photographer. Paul taught me much of value, and from him I learned something of Maurice Cookson, his mentor in photography at the Institute of Archaeology. These conversations took place as we meticulously plumbed-in every ranging pole for every picture. His preparation for photography’ was equally painstaking; I only hope that those whom I have subsequently taught will remember the details, and whom it initially came from.

As regards both his war service, and his attitude to life and archaeology, the following anecdote will, I hope, illustrate both. An unexploded mortar bomb had been uncovered on ‘my’ part of the site. In fact the finder had sliced off the fins with a spade, and work had stopped whilst we decided what to do with it. This was long before 'Health & Safety', so it was up to the excavation staff to do something. Naturally the Bomb Disposal Squad had been called, but could not be expected to arrive for several hours, and in the meantime no work was being done. Paul approached me and said that this was where I would earn my supervisor’s pay (about £36 per week). We prepared a wheelbarrow by lining it with sandbags, and then he and I carefully lifted the bomb, placed it gingerly in the barrow, and covered it with more sandbags. We then wheeled it to a spot behind the main spoil-heap, and very carefully put it on the ground and covered it with more sandbags. I have never wheeled a barrow as slowly and carefully, listening all the time to Paul describing, in his avuncular tones, how during the war he had sandbags placed on the floor of his jeep to protect ‘one’s undercarriage’ from landmines. His account of what such mines could do was not really appropriate in the circumstances!

After Sutton Hoo, I kept in touch with the occasional letter, and was saddened when Richmal died some years ago. Early last year, discussing the new visitor centre at Sutton Hoo, he confided in me that ‘we had been air-brushed out of the Sutton Hoo story.’ I had to agree with him, the ‘we’ being Dr Bruce-Mitford and of course himself and his team.

Paul was a meticulous archaeologist, in many ways typical of that generation whose careers spanned the Second World War. To have worked with him was a privilege which the passing years continue to emphasise.

The following obituary, by our Fellow Henrietta Quinnell, first appeared in the Guardian on 6 October 2009.

Archaeologist Paul Ashbee directing operations on the Isles of Scilly in 1950

Paul Ashbee (archaeologist and prehistorian, born 23 June 1918; died 19 August 2009) has died aged 91. Paul was a pioneer of rescue archaeology – excavation on sites about to be lost or destroyed – in the postwar period, when an expansion of building and agriculture coupled with the realisation of the importance of archaeological sites prompted a great increase in rescue excavation work. He came into archaeology after war service in the army and, through ability and commitment, became one of the best-respected British prehistorians of the last 60 years. He was still engaged in research and writing until his death.

Ashbee grew up near Maidstone, Kent. His interest in local antiquities and informal excavation was encouraged by Norman Cook, assistant curator at Maidstone museum (and later director of the Museum of London). Military service in the Royal West Kent Regiment and then with the Government Control Commission for Germany until 1949 provided Ashbee with a wide range of practical skills and a good knowledge of German.

On leaving the army, he made contact with archaeologists in London. Brian O'Neil, chief inspector of ancient monuments, asked him to direct excavations at Porthcressa on the Isles of Scilly and subsequently arranged training in the Ministry of Works drawing office; here Ashbee developed his distinctive illustrative style, which he was to use throughout his life. Although Ashbee had not obtained his school certificate, Gordon Childe and Mortimer Wheeler at London University's Institute of Archaeology agreed to admit him to study, as an ex-serviceman, for the diploma in archaeological studies, 1950-52.

Archaeological posts were scarce in the early 1950s. Ashbee took the practical step of studying for a diploma in education at Bristol University. This ensured that he never got caught up, as many others did, in a continuous sequence of rescue excavations for financial reasons. He taught history at Forest Hill school, in south London, and dug and wrote in the holidays and in out-of-school hours. In 1969 his growing reputation as an excavator and his wealth of published work led to the invitation to become the first archaeologist at the University of East Anglia, a post he held as senior lecturer until retirement in 1983.

Ashbee's work concentrated on sites of neolithic and bronze age date in southern England. He became especially interested in barrows, and did more than any other excavator to establish good stratigraphic practice on these burial sites, with publications enriched by relevant background research. To refer to just two: the early neolithic long barrow at Fussell's Lodge, Wiltshire, dug in 1957 (published in Archaeologia, 1966) is still crucial in the debate on complex prehistoric funerary practices. The bronze age Wilsford shaft, 30m deep, near Stonehenge, remains the focus of discussion about the ritual purpose of such deep features; this work was published in 1989 as Wilsford Shaft: Excavations 1960-62, with M Bell and E Proudfoot. Ashbee also used his barrow excavation expertise while working with Rupert Bruce-Mitford on the Saxon site of Sutton Hoo, 1964-69.

As early as 1960, Ashbee produced the first of his overviews, The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain, still a classic work of reference. This was followed by The Earthen Long Barrow in Britain (1970) and The Ancient British (1978). In both excavation and teaching, Ashbee enjoyed supporting younger archaeologists in whom he saw promise. In 1960, I was treated to a detailed demonstration of lighting a Primus stove – then a key piece of excavation equipment – and remember the sentence: "If you can master the essentials, you will never go far wrong." His many lifelong friendships, with all the riches of wisdom passed on to the next generation, benefited archaeology in Britain as a whole.

Cornwall remained important to Ashbee throughout his career. He was assistant to Bruce-Mitford on the excavations of early medieval settlement at Mawgan Porth, Cornwall, 1950-52, and contributed a chapter to the report.

He returned to Scilly to dig, both a complex exercise at the megalith of Bant's Carn which involved reconstruction, and a long investigation of the prehistoric and Roman–period settlement on the slopes below at Halangy; this was published as a whole volume of Cornish Archaeology in 1996.

At Halangy, Ashbee met Harold Wilson, on his regular vacation, and a friendship developed, which helped inform the subsequent Labour government on archaeological issues. Ashbee's 1974 Ancient Scilly remains the most comprehensive study of the islands' archaeology. Ashbee was president of the Cornwall Archaeological Society from 1976 to 1980 and then vice-president, positions he saw as providing support to amateurs. His home county of Kent also remained special to him and was the focus of a range of publications in his eighties, culminating in Kent in Prehistoric Times (2005).

Ashbee was awarded a DLitt from Leicester University in 1984. He had been elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1958, which meant that for the last year of his life he belonged to a small group of Fellows of more than 50 years' standing who did not pay fees. He was a member of the Royal Commission for Ancient Monuments from 1975 to 1985.

Ashbee enjoyed a long, happy and supportive marriage to Richmal Disher, whom he had met at a field school in St Albans in 1949 and married in 1952. Richmal ran many of Ashbee's excavations and was warmly acknowledged in his publications. He considered her a more literate person than himself and deferred to her judgment on the written word.

Richmal was also an author, and niece and literary executor of Richmal Crompton. After his wife's death in 2005, Ashbee proudly became President of the Just William Society, although nothing could fill the gap left in the last years of his life.

Ashbee is survived by his son Edward, daughter Kate and grandchildren Jonathan and Francesca.

The following obituary first appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 10 October 2009.

Paul Ashbee, who has died aged 91, was one of the country's leading archaeologists, celebrated for his many excavations of barrows, or burial mounds, and for co-directing the Sutton Hoo digs from 1964 to 1972; he was perhaps less well known as president of the Just William Society, established in 1995 to celebrate the literary oeuvre of Richmal Crompton.

Ashbee's main interest lay in the excavation of burial mounds from British prehistory (usually considered to end with the Roman invasion of these islands in AD 43) of which he excavated, and meticulously recorded, some 30 examples between 1949 and 1960.

As he noted in The Earthen Long Barrow in Britain (1970), many such structures used materials that have been particularly susceptible to decay and collapse, giving them an earthen character. In fact, they were carefully planned and often complex structures built over a considerable period of time.

They might involve, for example, the construction of an enclosure surrounded by timber, sods, stones or a ditch, inside which there would sometimes be a pitched mortuary house or a structure of sods and stone, perhaps with a façade. Into this, in certain circumstances, would be put corpses which had perhaps lain in the enclosure, or round which the mortuary house might have been built.

More frequently bones were exhumed or brought from another place where they had been exposed, and stacked within the confines of the mortuary house. The filling-in of the enclosure with the spoil dug from ditches or the raising of a mound would be the final act.

Ashbee became well known for his skill in interpreting the ephemeral traces of perishable materials such as wood. Thus he was able, for example, to detect the remains of a small mortuary house built in a pit beneath a barrow at Amesbury, Wiltshire, and the remains of a wooden coffin under a barrow at Bishop's Waltham, Hampshire.

His excavation of Fussell's Lodge mound in Wiltshire showed that it resulted from the filling in and covering over of a large timber enclosure with a porched entrance at one end. He also published a major study of stake circles found preserved beneath barrow mounds.

Perhaps one of his most dramatic excavations was of a site that had been thought to be a simple pond barrow at Wilsford, Normanton Down in Wiltshire, in 1960. Underneath the barrow the archaeologists came upon a shaft, more than 100ft deep and 6ft in diameter. A range of deposits was recovered, the earliest being Bronze Age in date, comprising a shale ring, amber beads and bone pins, along with animal bone and organic materials.

While some of Ashbee's colleagues suggested that it was a well shaft, Ashbee, who was particularly interested in what he called the "the non-material component of prehistoric monuments", felt that the ring, beads and pins should be interpreted as votive deposits. The sinking of artificial shafts is known throughout England and mainland Europe during the Iron Age and Roman periods, and these have been interpreted as a means of access to the beings of the underworld.

An only child, Paul Ashbee was born on June 23 1918 at Bearsted, near Maidstone, Kent. A childhood interest in historical objets trouvés was encouraged by a curator at Maidstone Museum, and as a teenager he made national headlines when he uncovered the remains of a Roman villa on a farm at Thurnham.

He showed little academic promise at school, however, and it was only after service with the Royal West Kent Regiment during the war and with the Control Commission for Germany after it that he decided to apply to the University of London to study for a diploma in European prehistoric archaeology.

Though he did not have the requisite school qualifications, his fluency in German impressed the director, Professor Gordon Childe, and his colleague, Mortimer Wheeler, and he was admitted.

In 1949 he got his first taste of responsibility when he was appointed by the Ministry of Works to supervise a cist-grave cemetery of the Roman period at Porth Cressa on the Scilly island of St Mary's. Later the same year he was invited by Rupert Bruce-Mitford of the British Museum to be his principal field assistant for the excavation of an early Christian settlement at Mawgan Porth, near Newquay, Cornwall.

He went on to conduct a number of excavations in the region, most notably of a late Iron Age/Roman period settlement at Halangy Down on St Mary's. In 1974 he published Ancient Scilly, a synthesis of all that had been discovered about the settlement of the islands from the first farmers to the early Christians.

After gaining his diploma in 1952, Ashbee went on to study at Bristol University, where he took a diploma in education, and at Leicester University, where he took an MA. In 1954 he secured an appointment as an assistant history master at Forest Hill School, Britain's first comprehensive, where he remained until 1966, working as an archaeologist in his holidays. His first book, The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain, was published in 1960.

In 1964 he joined Rupert Bruce-Mitford as a co-director at the re-excavation of the main burial mound at Sutton Hoo, which had first been excavated in 1939. After the removal of the remaining rivets of the 7th-century burial ship, Ashbee was given the task of examining the fabric of the mound itself. But the prehistoric aspects of the site were, in his view, given insufficient attention in the three-volume account of the excavations which Bruce-Mitford edited for the British Museum.

In 1968 Ashbee was appointed the first archaeologist on the staff of the University of East Anglia and the following year he moved to Chedgrave, Norfolk. It was there that he wrote his studies of ancient Scilly, of long barrows and a book on The Ancient British (1978), as well as numerous papers, articles and reviews. After retirement from the university in 1983 he published Kent in Prehistoric Times (2005).

In 1997 Ashbee caused something of a flurry when he suggested, in an article in the journal Antiquity, that the Mildenhall treasure, a magnificent hoard of Roman silver plate supposedly dug up 50 years earlier in East Anglia, may have been looted by American troops in Europe or North Africa and flown to Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk just after the Second World War.

The official version of events was that it had been found by a farmhand ploughing a field. But the story told by the supposed finders was riddled with inconsistencies; and when archaeologists examined the site they found no trace of any excavation or any other artefacts.

British Museum curators had been well aware of the treasure's doubtful origins, Ashbee claimed, but were told to keep quiet to avoid a diplomatic row; and once they had declared the treasure to be British, they could not voice doubts publicly without risking their reputations. Ashbee explained that he had decided to break five decades of silence to ensure that future historians would know that the treasure's provenance is uncertain.

Ashbee served as a president of the Cornwall Archaeological Society from 1976 to 1980 and was a commissioner of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England) for 10 years.

Paul Ashbee, who died on August 19, married, in 1952, Richmal Disher, a history student whom he had met in 1949 at a dig at Verulamium, St Albans, and who became an active partner in his archaeological work. She was the niece, and later literary agent, of Richmal Crompton, author of the Just William stories. Following the establishment of the Just William Society in 1995, they served successive terms as president.

Richmal Ashbee died in 2005, and Paul Ashbee's son and daughter survive him.