Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-199)
10 DECEMBER 2003
MR ROBERT
YORKE, MR
GEORGE LAMBRICK,
MR DAVID
MILES AND
MR IAN
OXLEY
Q180 Joan Ruddock: Presumably, many of
those that you have already given us as a number are not investigated
thoroughly?
Mr Oxley: That is right. Out of
England's 42,500, only 5,200 have their positions known. That
is quite a small percentage.
Mr Yorke: There is also the aspect
of submerged land surfaces.
Mr Miles: We know of 33,000 wreck
sites from historical records. When Ian mentions 5,200, those
are the ones that are more precisely known to location. In terms
of investigation, it is a mere handful that have been investigated
and only a handful that are legally protected. Most people think
of the underwater cultural heritage in relation to wrecks and
they are terribly important. The Mary Rose is probably the most
vivid survivor of the Tudor age next to the Works of Shakespeare,
frankly. As well as that, much of the underwater environment used
to be a dry environment because we are an island now but 8,000
years ago we were not. If you go back 8,000, 10,000 or 12,000
years ago, the North Sea and the Channel were a dry environment
where Europe's major rivers came together so it is an area that
would have attracted both people and animals. One has to imagine
that what we are looking at is a flooded world, a kind of lost
world, in which people and animals used to cross backwards and
forwards and live. Those prehistoric sites, these camp sites and
the places where animals were killed and so on, are extremely
well preserved. We know from surveys off the south and east coast
that some of our most exciting, best preserved, prehistoric archaeology
is now under the water.
Q181 Joan Ruddock: That is obviously
fascinating in itself but why is it particularly important?
Mr Lambrick: There are various
things that you can say Britain has given to the world as a key
part of international heritage, things like Stonehenge and big,
ceremonial, prehistoric landscapes. In a sense, these submerged
areas are part of that because north west Europe is unusual in
the extent of land which has been submerged. That is on a worldwide
scale. Similarly in Britain as a maritime power, certainly from
the middle ages onwards, is another aspect of Britain's heritage
being of global significance.
Q182 Chairman: If we have this underwater
landscape which represents a point in time where geology changed,
do studies in this area give you any predictive tools to help
us understand what is going to happen in the future?
Mr Miles: Yes. It is worth emphasising
that our knowledge of the underwater historic environment is really
quite slight compared with land. British archaeology as a subject
is one of the most advanced in the world, but the one area where
we are really not well developed is in maritime archaeology and
that is because of various factors, such as the way that archaeology
has been organised in this area. It was not the responsibility
of English Heritage until a couple of years ago, for example.
As a result, it has been a neglected area. While on land we have
been carrying out surveys for a couple of centuries and aerial
photography in particular has given us a detailed knowledge of
the land surface, the maritime environment is very little explored.
Where we have explored it, the results are tremendous. Just in
the past year, for example, we have been carrying out underwater
surveys off the south coast. That is giving us the predictive
ability to model the seabed and to start to predict where the
archaeology will be, not just wrecks, but these prehistoric sites
as well. It can be done but it is only being done in very small
area.
Q183 Chairman: Is it resources that prevent
you from going further?
Mr Miles: It is resources but
it is also that we have only just started. This has been a neglected
area so we have literally only started doing this kind of detailed
survey over the last 18 months or so; whereas, if you were to
look at the land surface, we have been doing air photography since
the Second World War.
Q184 Mr Breed: The British Council is
extremely concerned about potential threats to these sites. Perhaps
you could go through the sorts of threats that you think are evident
and give us some evidence, bearing in mind that you have only
got to grips with some of this in fairly recent times. What are
the threats? What sort of evidence have you that these threats
are being realised?
Mr Yorke: Underwater cultural
heritage is a unique, irreplaceable resource. I know there is
a great threat to the ecology in our seas but some of that, with
luck, can regenerate. Once you destroy a wreck or land surface,
it has gone for good. We have to remember that. It is also very
physically fragile. A lot of it is sometimes exposed in the intertidal
zone or on the seabed. The sorts of things that are threats include
natural erosion, tides, induced erosion where people do engineering
works and it changes flows over the seabed, fishing trawling,
oil and gas platforms and pipelines, undersea cables, wind farms,
harbour works and channel dredging, aggregate extraction, coastal
development, salvage and of course ubiquitous divers, who we need
to educate to conserve the underwater cultural heritage.
Q185 Mr Breed: Unless you have a survey
of the whole area, you are saying that almost every square foot
of the marine environment is potentially something that might
be worth preserving. You are not going to be able, presumably,
with all these threats, to stop all those, particularly not natural
erosion and such. How effectively can you start to address some
of these threats without saying, "We want to preserve everything
at the present time until we find out an awful lot more"?
Mr Lambrick: Perhaps we can have
an analogy with terrestrial archaeology where things have been
developed rather more clearly. With terrestrial archaeology, through
the planning system, we have a very clear basis on which an assessment
of potential is made and surveys can be carried out, although
relatively speaking our database of sites is well developed. Nevertheless,
we need to know more to be able to make informed decisions about
what happens. That partly involved doing further archaeological
surveys on the ground to establish what is there and how important
it is. In a sense, the maritime environment is probably even a
step further back because we need techniques to predict where
the potential areas of interest are and those need to be interdisciplinary:
we need to know about the hydrographic information, the sedimentation
patterns and so on, to know where survival is likely to be greatest.
Then there is the question of can you start to predict where the
threats are most likely to happen. For example, I was involved—again,
a terrestrial analogy—with some work for Defra, looking
at the risk of plough damage to archaeological sites where we
used soil characteristics, cropping patterns and that sort of
thing to predict where the risk would be highest. An analogous
system is probably needed, but we are starting from a much lower
base of firm knowledge. There does need to be a development of
these techniques of predictive modelling.
Mr Miles: The assumption is not
to go for large scale preservation. We want better decision making
so that we can manage the resource. Preservation specifically
is applied to the most important sites, certainly not the generality.
Mr Yorke: You did ask what was
under threat. There are a number of wrecks: HMS Colossus, Stirling
Castle, Hazardous, which are known to be affected by erosion and
human actions. There is also the Mary Rose site itself which is
subject to threat from the Ministry of Defence which wants to
dig a new channel into Portsmouth for these new large draft aircraft
carriers.
Q186 Mr Breed: We might have some good
news tomorrow; they may not be quite as big.
Mr Yorke: You know something we
do not.
Q187 Chairman: How much more of the Mary
Rose is down there for you to dig out or bring up?
Mr Yorke: There may be more than
people think. Ian worked on it so I will let him answer that question.
Mr Oxley: There are substantial
areas of the bow structure still surviving to the north east of
the site.
Q188 Chairman: Are there any plans to
excavate?
Mr Oxley: I think that is a resource
issue for the Mary Rose Trust. It is also an issue of management
for ourselves because we are responsible for managing the site
and the protection of the wreck site.
Q189 Chairman: Going back to a point
you were making in answer to Joan Ruddock's question when she
said, "Can you quantify it?", you have given us one
example of one channel where there is a threat. In terms of marine
activity and your knowledge of where the archaeological sites
are, or where there are particular landscapes that need protecting,
have you a hit list of things that are live and under threat at
the moment, apart from what you have just described to us?
Mr Oxley: Yes. We have issues
with the major port developments. You can take the analogy again
of a linear land development, a new motorway or a runway. Within
that linear development you might have Neolithic long houses,
Roman villas, mediaeval houses. In the same way, in an approach
to London or Southampton or Harwich or any of our major ports,
there will be evidence of past activities in terms of a landscape
which is now drowned. There will also be evidence of seafaring
or maritime activity, quite possibly from the Neolithic onwards.
We get indications from the surveys where a geophysical survey
may pick up two or three hundred anomalies or indications or features
along the track of the linear development, but at the moment we
do not know what they all are. They could be of that timescale
and depth.
Q190 Mr Mitchell: I do not want to be
philistine about this but why on earth should we get worried?
We do not know what is down there. When you mentioned the sinking
of the North Sea and the possibility of transit campsites and
so on, there may or may not be, but it is not the same as archaeology
and sites on land which you can protect, dig and work at. It is
inordinately expensive to do anything down there. Nobody can visit
it if you do anything, so why bother? If the threats are to a
beneficial development like oil or cable laying or reclamation
or sediment removal or even beam trawling, that in itself is a
means of exploration, so why should we get excited about it?
Mr Miles: For exactly the same
reason as we do on land. I have been having these arguments with
people who have been philistine or pretending to be philistine
for donkeys' years. Those are the same sorts of questions that
were asked about land archaeology in the 1960s in relation to
motorways, gravel digging, house building and so on. As archaeologists,
we are not trying to stand in the way of sensible, economic development.
For a start, we do know there are things down there. We know,
for example, that there are Dutch trawlermen who are making more
of a living out of trawling up archaeology than they are from
fishing. They have websites that you can go and look at and buy
the antiquities that they are bringing up. We know the sites are
there. We have seen the sites in certain favoured circumstances.
For example, just recently we were looking at a site in the North
Sea found by some of our Danish colleagues where we have Mesolithic
houses still surviving as houses and, when you go inside them,
all the tools and the gear are there. It is like being able to
go back and look inside an 8,000 year old house. You cannot do
that on land anywhere in Europe but you can do it in the sea.
We may have many sites like that in the sea. We know we certainly
have plenty of Mesolithic sites. We can model the kind of density
of those sites. They are a fundamental part of our history. You
might as well say, "There is an unknown work of Shakespeare.
I have not read it but it is in the way of something so we will
burn it." This is an aspect of our past, of our history,
part of our culture, that we know is in there. We could look after
it better. We could find out lots more about it and it could help
to rewrite chapters of our history. If we were to take the attitude
you put forward, we would be writing that off and I would say
it is philistine.
Q191 Mr Mitchell: You are not saying,
"Stop developing"?
Mr Miles: Absolutely not. In the
past week, we have had two absolutely fabulous sites that have
turned up during construction of roads, one in Yorkshire and one
in southern England. Nobody is suggesting that the Yorkshire site
should be preserved, but it would be a tragedy if in order to
build a road you destroyed something as historically important
as that without recording it.
Q192 Mr Mitchell: What happened in the
North Sea? Did it sink suddenly?
Mr Oxley: Over thousands and,
in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years, it receded and
in some cases came back again. The land moved at the same time.
It is a phenomenon that took place over a long period of time,
so there was a changing landscape, harbours, estuaries and lagoons,
which would have been attractive for resource exploitation or
habitation.
Mr Miles: During the ice age,
the water was captured in the glaciers. When the climate warms,
the glaciers melt and the sea comes back through, so the English
Channel was previously a river valley. It then floods and goes
underwater, but it is essentially how much water is captured in
the ice, as opposed to how much has melted.
Mr Lambrick: You asked why bother.
There is another answer which is that the public is extremely
interested. We monitor TV viewing figures for archaeological programmes
and they are regularly hitting the three million plus mark. They
are in the top 30 viewing figures virtually every week and quite
a number of those are underwater archaeology and they hit just
as many viewing figures. There is a real interest in underwater
history. It is very iconic. The point is that these time capsules
that you do not get on land is an incredibly interesting thing
that really sparks people's interest and imagination. It is very
much part of our history that we have no other source of evidence
for. There is no written documentation about an awful lot of this.
Q193 Mr Mitchell: Where does responsibility
lie in government for conservation of this heritage?
Mr Yorke: The statutory role stays
with DCMS. There are a number of legislative Acts but most of
the protection is based on salvage. It is very much out of date
and it cuts across a lot of the different departments. You have
the Protection of Wrecks Act, which protects about 50 sites in
the UK. You have the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas
Act which is also under DCMS, which does not cover any underwater
sites in England but does cover some in Scotland now, in Scapa
Flow, where the remains of the German High Seas Fleet were scuttled.
You have the Merchant Shipping Act which is in the Department
of Transport, where you have a Receiver of Wreck, to whom all
wrecks found on the seabed have to be reported. You have the Protection
of the Military Remains Act 1986, which is in the Ministry of
Defence, and which covers all naval vessels but particularly those
of last resting place and loss of life. They have scheduled about
16 sites, including some of the Falklands sites. You have the
FCO which deals with the East India Company vessels. You also
then have a number of other cross-governmental things which Ian
can talk about because he deals with them on a daily basis.
Mr Oxley: In English Heritage's
role as a statutory adviser to government, we are involved with
a number of different departments and agencies. There is first
of all Crown Estates, which is the landlord of the seabed, and
the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister for aggregates. These
are all sectorally based, as you know. We speak to the DTI, the
Department of Transport and a number of the different agencies,
according to the remit of their regulations. It is quite disparate.
Mr Lambrick: On top of that, there
is a broader policy agenda about responsibility. In some cases,
it is statutory. For example, the Environment Agency has a statutory
obligation to take account of the historic environment alongside
wildlife and access to recreation in all its functions. That is
a very general statutory responsibility. In terms of government
policy, the government statement on the historical environment,
"A force for our future", has established the principle
that the historic environment should be part of the responsibility
of green ministers, so that they should be taking a look at all
the ways that the departments interact with it. This obviously
as much applies to the maritime environment as to the terrestrial
environment. Responsibility also comes through the principles
behind the strategic environmental assessment and the project,
EIA, process. That again in a sense has a kind of policy basis
of responsibility behind it.
Q194 Mr Mitchell: That sounds more like
a confused mess rather than a coherent strategy.
Mr Oxley: Yes. We would agree
with that.
Q195 Mr Mitchell: If there is an important
historical site like the one you mentioned where you have round
houses that survive or indeed some other parliamentary constituencies
that were washed away on the east coast of Yorkshire, is there
a procedure for designating them as preservation sites?
Mr Lambrick: The Ancient Monuments
Act is one of the ways that you can designate things.
Q196 Mr Mitchell: Have many been designated?
Mr Lambrick: Virtually none. Indeed,
one of the flaws in the ancient monuments legislation is that
at the moment it does not cover things like the buried land surfaces
that we have been talking about, simply because they do fall within
the definitions. That is something that the DCMS designations
review is looking at.
Mr Miles: The answer to that is
that there is one: Scapa Flow, in Scotland. That is a shipwreck
designated in that way in order to make diving possible, but around
the English coast there is none.
Q197 Chairman: In paragraph four on page
two of your evidence to the Committee[2],
you said, "What we believe is urgently needed is the full
implementation of the general standards for responsible management
of the cultural heritage to which the UK is committed, acknowledging
its exceptional, international significance." Do I interpret
from that that you want some kind of revision of all these pieces
of law welding together into one single piece of legislation that
deals with the preservation of the marine, cultural, geological,
archaeological environment? Is that what that means?
Mr Yorke: Yes, it is. DCMS is
issuing a consultation paper, "Protecting our marine historic
environment", on the protection of the marine historic environment.
It is also doing the same thing on land, on designations and scheduling.
The consultation paper should hopefully go out in January and
will, we are told, feed into a White Paper some time in the spring.
This review does present a unique opportunity to put in place
cross cutting legislation that will bring it under one body and
will give proper protection for both submerged land surfaces and
wrecks and may well encompass a larger amount but will treat it
more in the same way we treat the protection of monuments on land.
Q198 Chairman: Would you say that the
land based legislative provisions that currently exist, if they
were transferred with appropriate modification into an aquatic
regime, would provide in totality the kind of protection you are
seeking?
Mr Yorke: Not quite. We had hoped
it would be a seamless drift from land into the sea but unfortunately
the marine side is a little more difficult because of the question
of establishing ownership. On land, you have owners where things
are found. The Crown Estate is the owner of the seabed, but there
may well also be owners of wrecks and cargoes of wrecks, so that
has to be established. It is also more difficult to police. We
need to get information. We need to get reporting. We need to
get disturbance and finds reported.
Mr Miles: In relation to the question
"is the land system satisfactory?", the answer to that
is no for one particular reason. That is that much of the evidence
of the early, prehistoric landscapes we have been talking about
consists of activities of people who were not building monuments.
They were killing animals; they were at camp sites and so on.
Much of the evidence is quite ephemeral forensic. One of the most
important sites on land is Boxgrove in Sussex which is the earliest
hominid site in north western Europe. It goes back 400,000 years.
It is brilliantly preserved. It is a camp site and a kill site
and we cannot preserve it as a scheduled monument because it does
not count as a scheduled monument under the present definition
of the Act. English Heritage has recently purchased that site
in order to protect it because we cannot make it into a scheduled
monument. It could be a world heritage site but it cannot be a
scheduled monument, so we need changes to scheduled monument legislation
that recognise that these very early sites which are not monuments
in the sense of something constructed are also worthy of preservation
and that applies very much to the sea.
Q199 Mr Lepper: In the evidence from
the Council for British Archaeology[3],
Mr Lambrick, you give me the impression that we have been very
good in this country at signing up to international agreements
about what we should and should not be doing in terms of marine
nautical archaeology, but when it comes to doing anything in terms
of domestic policy to forward some of those international agreements
we have perhaps not been as far reaching as we could have been.
Is that an accurate interpretation of your view?
Mr Lambrick: Not quite. Over the
last, say, five years, the UK has signed up to a number of international
conventions, particularly the Valetta Convention on the archaeological
heritage, which defines the archaeological heritage more widely
than our ancient monuments legislation. It envisages all sorts
of other things which would be really helpful to protect the marine
environment. We have also signed up to a whole lot of conventions
on portable antiquities and trade in antiquities. The one where
we have not signed up is the UNESCO Convention on underwater cultural
heritage, for various reasons that do not quite match up to some
of what is being done in practice. For example, we have just recently,
in the last couple of days, heard that the government has sorted
out an international agreement about archaeological work on the
Titanic which is entirely in line with the Valetta Convention,
but one of the things we are very concerned with is that other
cases—the Sussex warship exploitation is an example—are
not in line with those international standards. We need to get
up to the basic principles that clearly are being applied in the
case of the Titanic and the very careful, interdepartmental negotiations
that have gone on to establish that. We then need to sign up to
the UNESCO Underwater Cultural Heritage Convention to establish
what the government has, after all, said it is committed to do
in principle but seems to be rather variable in its application.
2 Ev 84 Back
3
Ev 152 Back
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