A RENOWNED archaeologist has released a new book, about the history of Salisbury pieced together through archaeological excavations.

Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology, well-known for his appearance in the long-running Channel 4 programme Time Team, has written the book with fellow archaeologists Lorrain Higbee and Lorraine Mepham.

Phil explains that Joining the Dots: uniting Salisbury’s past through holes in the ground is true to its words, in that it tells the story of Salisbury through the discoveries that have been made from holes dug into the ground.

The discoveries compiled include those from excavations dating back to the 1980s performed by the Manpower Services Commission, designed to find work for the long-term unemployed.

One of the fields that the out-of-work were encouraged to enter was archaeology. While these workers were useful in digging holes and making discoveries of artefacts, there was little training in the aspect of writing reports to document findings.

Phil said: “So, in a way, Wessex Archaeology, have had these skeletons in the cupboard, since the 1980s with no funding to be able to fill the shelves.”

Following years of more prosperity, Wessex Archaeology asked Phil to do the post-excavation work for these decades of holes.

Phil said: “All these little different bits of work, they’ve all produced reports and archives, but nobody’s ever actually pulled them together to tell the story through the archaeology.”

One result of this work was the ability to develop a more complete reconstruction of what mediaeval Salisbury would have looked like before many of the timber frame buildings were lost. It was discovered that many of the buildings still in existence fit within the old foundations found underneath modern buildings. The New Inn proved to be a very useful building, whose layout fit many of the old foundations.

This mediaeval cookie-cutter like method of building the city enabled a visual reconstruction that simply replaces modern buildings with old ones. Within the pages of Joining the Dots are images of a computer-generated reconstruction of Salisbury in the year 1500.

One of the objectives of the book was to look at the entire history of Salisbury as far back as possible, rather than focussing mainly on the mediaeval era as many other works throughout the years have done.

Some of the earliest inhabitants of the area lived in the Stone Age, 300,000 years ago.

Phil said: “I thought I was going to tell the story of mediaeval Salisbury. But I thought, ‘Hang on, Phil. What happened before? Where’s the blank canvas? What do we know about that?”

In his quest to tell the history of Salisbury from the beginning, Phil used holes to fill in holes. Archaeology was used to tell the story beyond what records could.

He said: “Up until, what shall we say? The Saxon period- the Norman period, there are no written records. You can’t tell the story of Salisbury through history; you can only do it through archaeology.”

The approach allows readers the unique experience of following Salisbury’s story from the beginning, before it became Salisbury.

Phil said: “People have been living around here since the dawn of time. You can’t cut in part way through the story. You really got to go back to the start.”

Another objective of the book was to make the history of Salisbury, as documented through archaeology, accessible to all people, and create a collated resource of information that could be understood and useful to both academics and popular readers.

Phil said: “I spent 20 years on Time Team, trying to make archaeology accessible to ordinary people and if I’ve failed in writing the book, then, you know, I’ve almost failed in 20 years of being on Time Team, because that’s what we wanted to do, and as an archaeologist that’s what I’ve got to try and do.”