Pic: Dear Kitty

The Guardian reports that archaeologists are exploring the Greenham Common site in the UK. They may not rank with the Pyramids or Sutton Hoo, but the traces of one Britain’s best-known protest camps are being sifted by a team of archaeologists.More than 600 artefacts have been catalogued at the skeletal remnants of Turquoise Gate camp, Greenham Common, as part of a project to tell the “full story” about the women’s anti-nuclear campaign 25 years ago.

Scouring woodland and scrub near the old cruise missile bunkers, which themselves have been given scheduled historic monument status, a team from Southampton University and English Heritage has already rewritten minor parts of history. One of the major finds at Turquoise, set up as a vegan offshoot from the large camp at nearby Blue Gate, has been a “significant number” of milk bottles. John Schofield, of English Heritage, who reports the survey results in the latest issue of British Archaeology magazine, says: “Were the women really all vegan, were they re-using old bottles, or were there children on site who needed milk?”

Such issues are now being raised with veterans of the camp, some of whom acted as advisers on the dig and helped to rediscover a forgotten outpost of the protest. This was the previously unrecorded Emerald Gate camp, where a few women directly monitored Gama – the Ground-launched missiles Alert and Maintenance Area – the other side of the base’s famous fence.

The carefully hidden nook, with fragments of “bender” shelters and a fire pit, are compared in the survey to a long tradition of spying points in communities studied by archaeologists. Schofield says:

It reminded me of Lewis Binford’s work on the Mask Site (in Arctic Alaska) where Nunamiut hunters watched and waited.

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