By and large this is the report on PPG 16-generated excavations of 5,850 sq m in advance of housing development in the important town of Middlewich, Cheshire. Following evaluation by Gifford and Partners, the subsequent excavation was conducted by Leigh Dodd for Earthworks Archaeological Services (acting as a ‘subcontracted archaeological field team’ (Dodd 2005, 26)) under the management of L-P: Archaeology, the latter being responsible for the post-excavation work.
The site investigated was close by King Street Roman Road, but the street frontage could not be investigated. Instead excavation was conducted on the ‘backlands’. Nevertheless, buildings were identified that extended beyond the excavation towards the Roman road. Preservation was good on the site with organics recovered. Among the waterlogged remains were shoe leather and wooden artefacts, including a branded plank and stylus tablet. Interestingly, the works involved the re-excavation of a brine-evaporation hearth first uncovered some 40 years previously by Harding and Blake. This robust feature appeared to have made use of a brine springline across the site. A superbly constructed, timber-lined brine-extraction well, the evaporation hearth and 13 deep pits represent the salt-related features, although a seemingly later building has a briquetage floor. Building B, despite being cut by a possible brine pit, is the only building of the saltmaking period (fig. 35 Flavian and Trajanic). This unprepossessing structure, suggested in the volume as domestic in use, contained a pit with a tankard, a cauldron and chain, the last two items ‘both high status objects, deliberately (symbolically) buried in a hearth pit in Building B’. It is suggested that the items may have been part of rituals, ‘which included feasting’, but no attempt is made to link them to the numerous ritual elements of salt and saltmaking, an activity with which the building appears contemporary and adjacent. Similarly, the use of lead pans in saltmaking is strongly suggested but the lead found on the site is rarely related to that one known on-site use of the metal.
Following the demise of the saltern activity, a settlement with wooden buildings and boundaries was set out, apparently by the military, aligned on King Street. Between a.d. 120 and 200 an east–west road was constructed at the south end of the site and the area was divided into ditched plots. Industrial activity in the form of lead, iron and leather working was identified. The site continued to be occupied during the third and fourth centuries, when the boundary ditches were re-cut.
Really, the second part of the book’s title, Excavations at King Street, Middlewich, Cheshire, 2001–2002, is a pretty accurate reflection of its contents, whereas the main titular element, Salt: Life and Industry, less obviously describes the core content. Yes, there are salt-related features on site, spectacular ones at that, but salt extraction seems to have ceased by the mid-second century and to have been replaced by domestic features including the timber buildings.
One frustration for a non-Romanist reader is the constant change between citing actual dates and lifespans of emperors (which I, for one, had to look up). For example, the four main phase plans are fig. 35 Flavian and Trajanic periods, fig. 36 Hadrianic and Antonine periods, fig. 37 third and fourth centuries, and fig. 38 Medieval; some standardisation would have been welcome, preferably calendar years. It is worth remembering that Salt (and Life and Industry) occur in periods either side of the Roman. Presumably the use of emperors to delineate time stems from, and ties in with, the work of the Roman pottery specialists (Ruth Leary and Margaret Ward) who together contribute comprehensive pottery reports taking in a whacking 93 pages, almost 47 per cent of the volume.
The book is, on the other hand, readable and refreshingly typo-free. I much appreciate the authors’ honesty in setting out near the beginning the ‘constraints in post-excavation analysis of the stratigraphy and the construction of a stratigraphic narrative’. From this statement we know where we stand and there are others elsewhere in archaeology who could learn from this honest assessment.
In addition to the three separate companies who undertook the evaluation, excavation and post-excavation work, L-P: Archaeology also acknowledge the original client, Miller Homes and British Salt Limited for undefined ‘kind help and support in producing the report’. Co-author (along with L-P’s Matthew Williams), was Consultant Archaeologist Malcolm Reid. No criticism is implied in all of this, indeed it must have been a feat to manage the various inputs successfully. In this case the Acknowledgements section provides useful insight into the tangled workings of commercial archaeology in England at the turn of the twenty-first century. Well done to L-P: Archaeology for steering a course through it and ending up with a publication.
As a salt-interested person I would be attracted to this volume on its Salt title alone; but, while there is more than just a pinch of the white stuff inside, it remains not really a book on salt as such but a useful and detailed one on Excavations at King Street, Middlewich, that will feed into the much needed review of the town’s archaeology that the authors seek.
