Douglas Speirs, the county archaeologist

Protect and preserve
Douglas Speirs is the county archaeologist for the Fife region of Scotland. This means he is responsible for monitoring, researching and protecting over 323,000 acres of landscape, 186 kilometres of coastline and 9,000 years of human occupation – including this site.

Douglas is the man who called in Time Team for this excavation; and he's also responsible for liaising with the developers to make sure that everyone is happy. County archaeologists are always involved with a Time Team dig somewhere along the line, so what is the job all about?

A large part of the job is about protecting the environment. 'I work with the planning and building control service,' says Douglas. 'That essentially means that I try to mitigate any accidental impact on the archaeological resources of Fife. I advise in situations where development work may come into conflict with archaeology and devise strategies to avoid any problems.'

The cist cemetery
Douglas first became aware of the cist cemetery at Leven about a year before Time Team became involved, when plans for new housing in the area caused him to start researching the site in advance of any development. 'A planning application came through for this area and I started scanning through the resources that I already had. I was concerned that there would probably be prehistoric remains here because we had evidence from a small excavation back in 1944, when a single cist burial was found. These are usually associated with cemeteries here in Scotland so I was keen to have a closer look.'

Calling in Time Team
The next step was a small evaluation excavation, which soon indicated that the site was quite substantial. 'I soon discovered that the site was considerably bigger than I had first imagined,' says Douglas. 'The next step was to try to secure funding for a full excavation of the site. Getting funding can be very difficult, so as a long-shot I contacted Time Team to ask them if they'd be interested in making a programme about it. It was a fantastic surprise when I heard back from them and they said they'd love to dig the site.'

The county archaeologist's responsibility doesn't end there. Time Team can be a great help in situations such as these, but the Team only has a limited amount of time in which to dig. Douglas was responsible for continuing the excavations, together with local archaeologists, after the cameras stopped rolling.

A stop to development?
So will the archaeology discovered here mean an end to development? 'A lot of difficult questions will have to be addressed when we finish up here,' says Douglas. 'Of course we do our utmost to preserve archaeological sites in-situ, but we are faced with competing claims on the landscape. People desperately need houses and this area has been identified as an area for housing. We'll have to come to some kind of balance. Yes, houses need to come in here, but we need to mitigate as much as possible to make sure that the archaeology is protected. That's all part of the county archaeologist's job.'

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