Update: 5th February 2023 Following The Death of my Mother, and having observed a suitable period of mourning, I am now free to finish my business with the grifters in the Academic system and Media infotainment outfits  peddling their racist tropes Despite millions in public funds - no university has achieved what a dyslexic archaeologist with cancer has done free.  5/2/2023  Victim impact statement Loss of my career Lost my Life Savings Knowing your ideas can’t be accepted while you are alive A decade of Depression  - mental illness Suicidal Deression  5 ..read more

  Introduction  1.1 What I study  I reverse engineer archaeological buildings & structures from posthole evidence. Using  traditional architectural technical drawing, CAD, and deductive reasoning to build functionally accurate models. Working with the complete scaled dataset to identify basic structural components. I started in 1990 [1] & published online here since 2008. {so they are not all new} Postholes are the most numerous archaeological features on certain types of sites. Thus, Theoretical Structural Archaeology represents a set of analytical ..read more

One Sunday, in hole under a road in Colchester, a lad on community service cautiously removed the gravelled surface of a Roman Street, to reveal a layer of yellow sand.  With great care he removed the sand to reveal a darker layer of mud with wheel ruts and the footprint of an ox. Presumably, the ox was pulling the cart from which the sand was shovelled as the first stage of surfacing the street, thereby preserving its own imprint in mud. It is probably my favourite piece of archaeology, somehow enhanced by the circumstances. It was the earliest Roman street from the Legionary fortress wh ..read more

If Academic Archaeology has become a bastion of science denial, who is to blame? I realised British Archaeology was unwell, when I attended TAG 90, where the psychosis was already becoming evident. The Theoretical Archaeology Group, ;[or theoretical archaeologist group as I would characterise a group of academics temperamentally unsuited to practice archaeology, and for whom knowledge is not constrained by evidence or the English Language]; was a stepping stone for many who have subsequently helped fabricate the mindless melange of the New Post-rational Archaeology. When, in 2006, I started m ..read more

To test the water, and offer English Heritage a chance to consider the matter I sent an e-mail explaining the Science that proves Bede, writing in the C8th was wrong to suggest Hadrian built a Wall of turf aka The Turf Wall. Twenty years ago their own excavation Appleby produced unequivocal evidence that this section of Wall was made of Timber, information they failed to comprehend at the time.[1] The science is simple and irrefutable. 1.Soil science. If turf is blocks of local soil held together with plant roots, then the composition of the "Turf " Wall deposit at Appletree with its complet ..read more

How to build a mortared structure in a stony river bed  1. Dig a diversion Channel 2 Dam the river at both ends & Divert the river 3 Constructed mortared stone peers in river bed 4 Construct bridge 5 Remove Dams 6 Block diversion channel Notes 1 The initial Bridge was intended to carry the Wall only. 2 In theory, second [undetected] Bridge would have carried the Road south of the Wall. this road is evidenced by its construction trench aka The Vallum. 3 [This itself was have replaced another lost bridge for the Staingate road, although piled timber would be adequate for road brid ..read more

 Found Down The Back of a Digital Sofa.            Just to avoid confusion and to let off steam under the pressure of lock down I have created a new blog as repository for Non Archaeological satire, art, cartoons and photography. It is called: Found down the back of a Digital Sofa, and represents a few persistent stains on the fabric of time that have proved difficult to remove.   The sort of thing found in my twitter feed.  When you work is not good enough for sector of Higher Education increasing reliant on Science denial and academ ..read more

1. Context. In the precious post I was quite hard, if not downright disrespectful about some of strange conceptions about how cavalry horses might be stabled. So it’s time to put some cards on the table, and explain how horses and built environments are meant to interact – from a more traditional perspective, after all, cavalry barracks have existed and continue to exist since ancient times, and horse care in a variety of contexts is hardly a forgotten art. My work for Philip Crummy in Colchester on Britain's first legionary fortress taught me to respect the accuracy of Roman Military surveyo ..read more

Hadrian's Wall sits on the boundary of Archaeology and History, apart from its scant remains, it exists as a literary and artistic creation, it is already something imagined, a myth.  It is thus, an individual conception, part of the visual conditioning of a pictorial past and subject to cognitive dissonance when this imaginary world is challenged. Literacy is the key divide, the dead weight of Latin, a the slim volume of Historical data, and the need to justify knowledge of both, has distorted archaeological dataset along the Proto-historical interface. At this important boundary we are ..read more

Hadrian's Wall was an elaborate frontier system designed by the Emperor with stone built forts linked by a continuous wall  and serviced by road with naval bases at either end, at least that was the plan. What actually happened has remained obscure, but archaeological discoveries over the last twenty years have provided the key pieces for a puzzle.  Using evidence based archaeology it is now possible to tell a more coherent story of this ill-fated project, which was unfinished on Hadrian's death and was abandoned by his successor.  This a concise summery, broken down into the t ..read more