Roads to Ruins
Keith Nurse explores how archaeologists have managed to gain financial funding for excavations from the Department of Transport.
After months of haggling in Whitehall, a principle of far-reaching importance to archaeologists has been established whereby the Department of Transport is to help towards the funding of excavations on sites which lie in the path of projected road works.
Sadly, it took the almost total destruction of an Iron Age settlement site in Hampshire, one known to archaeologists since the 1930s, to bring the issue to a head.
In early October it was disclosed that the site, at Lains Farm, near Andover, had been severely damaged during preparatory work on a Department of Transport road improvement scheme off the A303.
To the dismay and fury of the archaeologists, the bulldozers moved in, unannounced. Yet the Trust for Wessex Archaeology had been seeking, over a period of some five years, finance from government agencies, in particular from the Transport Department, to undertake an excavation in advance of the road works.
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