Cotswold Archaeology’s Alistair Barber reaches 25 years with CA on 23 August and is the first member of staff to achieve this.
Here, he muses on the last 25 years:
I can’t believe its 25 years since I took up an offer from Tim Darvill of two weeks digging work, and drove up from Bath to Cirencester in a rusty Fiat 127 with my tent. It’s impossible to summarise all the experiences since then but amongst the things I’ve learnt are that:
- wearing a Barbour jacket and tweed hat aged 21 wasn’t a great look. Although they were immortalised in a picture in the Standard they both got dropped quickly (the jacket literally, as I remember it getting accidentally backfilled in a trench in Tetbury).
- I shouldn’t have examined Roman walling in a contractor’s trench in Cricklade Street with a broken but still flushable foul pipe above me. I never made that mistake again.
- I was wrong in looking forward to CAT’s first 4×4 being delivered. The UMM Altar was allegedly popular with the Belgian army (enough said). Steering-wise it had a mind of its own, and a propensity to convert to three-wheels mid journey.
- I was, however, justly excited when it was later sold to a local farmer (or possibly traded for a sack of potatoes). Our vehicle fleet has come on a long way since then, as has so much else at CA – I still remember our first tool store being a flooded, dark, air raid shelter and our finds room being a former mortuary building.
- musing with a colleague on site about ‘what might be around the next corner in life’ shouldn’t have been followed a few seconds later by a dead, eviscerated, pigeon dropping out of the sky right next to us.
- awful projects are quickly forgotten, but that great sites stay in your memory. Among my favourites have been finding waterlogged Roman wooden objects during an early evaluation at City Bank, Cirencester, and a brilliant summer recording a Roman riverside structure at Swainshill, Herefordshire, with Rick and Mark B (I have a lasting memory of Rick, tied to a rope, precariously cutting the long grass on a steep slope above the River Wye. I also remember being berated by a passer-by on that site for having had the audacity to have fallen off the front of a canoe whilst looking, through a modified plastic fish tank, for Roman masonry beneath the waters). Other favourite projects included uncovering a Roman villa in Wantage, working on Uley long barrow, at Ryall Quarry, on several interesting Roman and medieval cemetery sites and seeing some fantastic archaeology in beautiful countryside on the first half of the Welsh pipeline project.
Above all I’ve appreciated working with a great bunch of people, past and present, on a huge variety of sites – people who really care about doing a professional job but also have fun doing it. Thanks to you all.
Chief Executive Neil Holbrook:
‘Al has been an exemplary colleague over the last 25 years. Utterly loyal, reliable and dedicated, he has week in, week out, delivered high quality work for us. He has accumulated a great breath of experience of all kinds of archaeology since 1989, and when he goes into the field we can be confident that he will do a first class job and that nothing will faze him. To be the first member of CA to clock up 25 years of service is a great achievement, and he deserves all the plaudits that he have come his way over the last few days’.
Al, CA salutes you and here’s to the next 25 years!
