Волонтеры раскопают забытый монастырь в Дорсете благодаря поддержке местных жителей

The hot English sun is starting to cast long shadows over the trenches at Cerne Abbey, and the trays by their edges are overflowing with the day’s finds: animal bones scarred with ancient butchery marks, warped and rusted nails, carved stone, small metal fragments and shards of green-glazed, 14th-century pottery. More than 30 volunteers − students, working professionals and retirees − have travelled from around the world to uncover these treasures, exposing the remnants of a 1,000-year-old monastery that, until recently, had been forgotten beneath metres of Dorset dirt. Now, the amateur archeologists take sips from their water bottles and pull off their gloves, weary after a day of trowelling. The volunteers, under the supervision of Hugh Willmott of the University of Sheffield, are more than mere labour. As university budgets have become strained in Britain, leaving little spare cash to support fieldwork, digs like the one at Cerne Abbey increasingly rely on volunteers and the fees they pay to carry on research. Domestic tuition caps have limited university revenues even as costs have grown and international student enrolment has fallen. The result: As at other universities, Prof. Willmott’s own world-renowned archeology department was combined with the school’s history department four years ago. Archeology programs escaped a 2021 funding cut that saw government grants for other “high-cost” disciplines, valued at £250 per student, reduced by half. But this June, the Department for Education changed tack, ruling that archeology would lose all its funding through that stream in 2026. And so the fees paid by the volunteers − about $660 per five-day session this year, which includes tent accommodation and all three meals per day − are what fund much of the medieval monastery dig, including the costs to hire the excavating machine and operator (upwards of $1,500 per day) and to run post-excavation lab analysis. Along with the use of some equipment, “the university’s contribution is my salaried time,” said Prof. Willmott, from under the shade of a tree near the open pits. “Everything else comes from crowdsourcing the money.” Despite the funding challenges, Prof. Willmott has returned to the bucolic village of Cerne Abbas for four years now, to piece together the story of medieval monastic life here while searching for the earliest traces of development on the southern English site. Cerne Abbey was founded in 987 by Æthelmær the Stout and quickly became a significant Benedictine monastery, with a church, cloisters and outbuildings. It was destroyed after King Henry VIII gave the order in 1539 to dissolve it, along with 800 other Catholic monasteries across England, Wales and Ireland. The destruction of the abbey was so rapid that just decades after its razing, locals were unsure of its precise former location. It wasn’t until 2022, when Prof. Willmott’s team ran geophysical surveys of the site, that it was rediscovered. A question that lingers alongside the hunt for walls, floor surfaces and artifacts: What is the relationship between the abbey and the nearby chalk hill drawing of the fully naked Cerne Giant, thought to have been created between 700 and 1100 AD? “Each season, we’re adding a little bit to the bigger picture,” Prof. Willmott said. Volunteers start their day at 7 a.m., when they pull on dusty dig clothes, assemble for breakfast in a circle of white plastic chairs and pack their lunches for later: sandwiches, clementines and crisps. At the excavation site a few minutes’ walk away, the volunteers carefully extract finds from refuse pits beneath the former kitchen’s floors, reveal hearths and stone walls and uncover layers of burnt material to help establish different periods of building use. Some days, the work is strenuous and can involve heaving out heavy, sharp-edged flints to help identify the purpose of a ditch or taking picks to layers of sun-hardened soil to reveal the different colours beneath. But for volunteers, the physical effort − and the financial contribution − are worth it. “I’m driven by the same sense of wonder and curiosity I had as a kid,” said Andrew Calderwood, an educator from New York State. Mr. Calderwood has volunteered at Cerne for the past three years. “I feel I’m directing my resources toward efforts that provide those glimpses − that allow us all a better understanding of the past,” he said. Luckily, the Cerne Abbey dig, now in its fourth year, has something else to help keep it going: the villagers, many of whose homes contain materials removed from the abbey centuries ago. The local historical society has raised funds for the excavation, and residents act as on-site stewards to welcome and inform visitors and tourists. Others take turns delivering cake for the diggers’ afternoon break or sign up to be “shower families,” allowing dusty volunteers to use their homes every evening to wash up. The village of about 800 residents comes alive during the highly anticipated dig weeks, said local pub owner Denise Hendrie, who spends some afternoons cleaning finds on-site with her daughter Catherine Rose. “Everyone really gets involved,” Ms. Hendrie said, gently scouring an animal bone with a toothbrush. “It’s sparked an interest in archeology for me, personally. I just love seeing how it all develops.”