Carlisle Archaeology Ltd - What went wrong?

It was a unit in an important UK city sitting on a wealth of Roman and medieval archaeology. It had just completed a major excavation. It had a well-respected university behind it. Yet Carlisle Archaeology still went bust, throwing staff on the dole and losing local expertise gathered over almost 25 years of operation. And even though a year has passed since it went to the wall, controversy still dogs the old unit. The latest twist is that police are investigating the disappearance from the units old HQ of artefacts that could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. So what went
wrong at Carlisle? In a special report, The Digger investigates...

Three years ago, it must have seemed like the perfect match. Bradford University
was on the lookout for new training digs and opportunities to dabble in the world of
commercial archaeology. Carlisle Council was eager to privatise its city archaeology
unit. As a result, Bradford University acquired the unit in 1999 and Carlisle
Archaeology Ltd was formed.

When the takeover was first announced, a senior Bradford lecturer held a meeting
with Carlisle staff. He said something about "using Carlisle as a training area for
their students", one of our contacts told us. "I never found this all that convincing a
reason though, as there was only ever 2 or 3 students there at any one time."

Another promise was that "diggers and other staff would be employed at Bradford if work dried up at Carlisle," our contact said. "It was also suggested that Carlisle staff would be able to undertake postgrad courses funded by the new company, but by the time the deal was finally done, this had been quietly dropped." As our contact wryly observed, "They weren't going to
make me a guest lecturer."

But at the time of the takeover the future looked rosy. A £7.2 million construction
scheme in the heart of Carlisle was on the cards. The Millennium Project was jointly
funded by the City Council and the Millennium Commission who put up about half the money each. The scheme included the construction of a gallery with an underground passageway that involved archaeological investigations around the castle. Roman remains were known to survive here, particularly the Castle Green area.

The excavations, led by Mike McCarthy, made some astonishing discoveries. These
included important Roman structural timbers and articulated Roman armour hailed by experts at the Royal Armouries as "a unique discovery from anywhere in the Roman world."

But things started to go wrong in the autumn of 2000 when the local newspaper
ran a story headlined Roman Chief's House Makes Way for Millennium
Gallery. The Cumberland News reported that the Castle Green finds "could put Carlisle in the same league as York", but that part of the Roman fort would have to be destroyed to make way for the new gallery. By this time, a local campaign to save the Roman remains was gathering momentum. One letter to the local press described the proposed removal as an "abdication of responsibility in allowing needless destruction of an irreplaceable asset."

The campaign succeeded in forcing a statement from English Heritage defending the scheme. EH said that the benefits outweighed "the loss of such a small part of the archaeological remains." But the City Council was already approving a redesign of the Millennium Gallery, even though the additional archaeological work would increase costs.

"The whole [Millennium] scheme was a nightmare from start to finish," a source close to the City Council told us. "When it was originally costed, there was no budget for further digs on the Castle Green. The Council was picking up a £5 million cost for what was supposed to be £3.5 million."

Perhaps this very public debacle soured relations between the Council and its
recently-privatised archaeological unit. Because there was more trouble when the
post-excavation budget for the archaeological works came to be discussed. Rumour has it that the quote for the work was much higher than the Council expected.

The Council and Bradford University are both tight-lipped about what arrangements
had been made about post-ex funding. But former managing director of the unit Mike
McCarthy is explicit that Carlisle's demise was because the unit "was unable to come to an agreement with the client with regard to the post-excavation programme for the Millennium project." He also blamed "insufficient contracting work to sustain staff." These were fatal body blows. The unit closed in August 2001 and staff were made redundant. Mike McCarthy secured a post as Senior Lecturer at Bradford University.

So what did Bradford do to defend the unit? A source in the archaeology
department told The Digger that the feeling there is that the university let the
unit go into liquidation rather than stand up to the City Council. The unit had been
reliant on Bradford to support it financially for a long time. Three months
later, the unit's work was taken over by the ubiquitous Oxford Unit in the form of
Oxford Archaeology North - ironically itself once a university unit.

Lost Artefacts.

A stock-take last November revealed that
more than 150 finds from the Castle Green excavation had vanished, including
the rare Roman armour. News of the disappearance has only recently been
made public. The finds had been stored in six boxes at Shaddon Mill - the former
HQ of Carlisle Archaeology.

"It's a huge blow for historians. Some of the items were unique and extremely rare," said Gerry Martin, who led the dig with Mike McCarthy. "The lorica squamata is very rare - there has only ever been one found here before." Artefacts of this nature can be sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds over the internet to overseas collectors, Mr Martin added.

Cumbria Police confirm that they have been called in to investigate. The City
Council refuses to speculate about the disappearance of the artefacts now it is a
police matter. But a spokesman stated that: "The council has liaised closely with and taken the advice of English Heritage and the county archaeologist" in matters connected with the finds, which were "being stored in good condition and thorough checks were made to ensure their continued upkeep."

Whatever the outcome of this latest twist, it marks another undignified episode for a
unit that has fallen victim to a number of factors.

The privatisation of the unit was the beginning of the end. The City Council are not the first local authority to discover that selling off public services does not always bring cost savings and improved quality - the opposite can be the case. The unexpected increase in the costs of the Millennium Project suggests a lack of foresight, and the council must be squirming with embarrassment that nationally important artefacts have gone missing and that the police are poking about.

What about the role of Bradford University?

Apparently some in its own archaeology department feel that the university was not robust enough in standing up to the City Council over the post-ex funding - an issue that was ultimately to sink the unit. Promises to Carlisle staff were not kept and work to sustain the unit was not secured. Did the university fully appreciate the cut-throat
nature of commercial archaeology today? Presumably it was not the university's intention to have its new unit close down after only two years.

The outcome of this sorry tale is that Carlisle is now without a regional unit, local expertise and important finds have been lost, diggers have been made redundant and the archaeology in the city will be carved up between units parachuted in from hundreds of miles away. Not a great success for British archaeology.

STOP PRESS:

Carlisle City Council have written to tell us that despite extensive
reports in the national news to the contrary, ?the armour was never lost?. It
is undergoing conservation at Durham University. Since the police investigation,
many of the items have been recovered, although a few are still outstanding.
Don?t miss the next issue of The Digger for more responses to this article!

With thanks to the many people who contributed to this article. - Ed