contd.
Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews, - the NHDC Archaeology Officer- is originally from Letchworth Garden City. He worked for the Museums Service's Field Archaeology Section in the 1980s, then joined Chester City Council as a Senior Archaeologist in 1990. Having now returned to North Herts, Keith is developing the Archaeological Service by expanding its community activities such as The North Herts branch of the Young Archaeologists' Club, which holds regular meetings, and he is also making the extensive library and archives more widely available for consultation. Keith's interests are in the transition from the Iron Age to the Roman period, the transition from the Roman to early medieval periods, the archaeology of sexuality and archaeological theory. He has published extensively on these subjects. Keith runs the Museum Service's artefact identification service. He lectures to groups of all ages on aspects of local archaeology and archaeology more generally. He has recently completed editing a report on the results of excavations carried out in Baldock between 1978 and 1994, working with Gil Burleigh, who directed the original fieldwork. The most important finds are an internationally important series of burials, which were excavated by the Council's Archaeological Service and the North Hertfordshire Archaeological Society.
The Archaeology of Norton.... Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews BA (NHDC Archaeology Officer) When looking at the archaeology of a single parish, there is a tendency to focus on spectacular monuments and excavated sites. This may give an impression that change occurs in fits and starts, that there are sudden revolutionary changes, which is, of course, quite wrong. Life goes on, change happens mostly imperceptibly and even the big changes are soon forgotten as what was once new and innovative becomes an everyday part of the landscape. For this reason, it would be wrong to focus on either Wilbury Hill, the hillfort first mentioned in 1007, or Blackhorse Road, where excavations from 1957 to 1974 found evidence for prehistoric occupation. The historic core of the village Another approach is to look at every stray find as if it is evidence for human settlement, so that every Roman coin becomes a fort, every Mesolithic flint a hunter-gatherer's temporary encampment and so on. Life is not like that, either. People lose things in all sorts of places, both close to home and distant from it. Around their homes, they tend to leave much more definite traces of their activity. Treading a path between these two extremes, if we are to understand the archaeology of Norton, we need to look at all of the evidence and try to synthesise it into a story of change and development over millennia. It is much more than the dry enumeration of sites or catalogues of finds: as well as describing what we can see, we need to understand what it means and explain why things happened the way they did.
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