Journals of a Time Traveller

Whilst rebuilding the Thetford Forest Archaeological Survey website, it occurred to me that when examining the late prehistoric Brecks NCA (National Character Area), it is important that we do not divide the district from the nearby Fen-edge. In the sandy, drought-prone soils of the Brecks, water has always been important. Historical parish boundaries in Breckland often stretch out to water supplies, enabling shepherds and herders to reach vital watering spots for livestock. This importance was perhaps equally important during late prehistory. Any forms of settlement most likely concentrated on the river valleys, and along the fen-edge of the Brecks. Just as they still do today.

The rivers of the Brecks flow westwards to discharge into the waterways of the Fen wetlands. The edge of the Fens, was likely attractive to human occupation, then and now. This is supported by the archaeological record.

I have produced this map, highlighting wetlands, rivers, meres, and pingos, known to have existed during Late Prehistory. The red star represents the Grimes Graves Late Neolithic flint-mine site. Here I am showing the rivers and waterways of that period as an extension of the yellow highlighted fen-edge. This is nothing new, but I want to reinforce, that to understand the late prehistory of the Brecks from the Mesolithic through to the Iron-Age, it important not to divide it from the wetlands of the Fens.

The Post-Glacial Landscape of the Fens (c. 10,000 – 6,000 years ago) Early to Mid Mesolithic.

At the end of the last Ice Age, the area wasn't a wetland but a dry, forested valley. The Fens were a very different, dry environment for the visiting hunter-foragers of the Earlier Mesolithic. The rivers we now recognise as the Great Ouse, Nene, and Welland were inland tributaries flowing towards a coastline much further north. As the climate warmed, and sea levels rose, Britain separated from continental Europe. By approximately 7,800 years ago, a major marine transgression began to absorb the dry, forested valleys into a coastal body of water.

The Rise of the Wetlands (c. 6,000 – 2,000 years ago) Early Neolithic to Late Iron-Age

As the sea pushed inland, it created a complex, fluctuating environment: 

The "Black Fens". Inland, away from direct marine influence, impeded drainage caused rivers to flood, creating vast, stagnant freshwater bogs. Here, thick layers of peat accumulated, trapping ancient forests that had once thrived on the valley floor. These are the "bog oaks" often discovered today—remnants of the forests drowned as the water table rose.

The "Silt Fens".  Closer to the Wash, marine and estuarine clays and silts were deposited during successive tidal advances and retreats.

Human Adaptation. Early prehistoric societies lived on the "islands" of higher Jurassic clay (like Ely) and along the fen edges. By the Bronze Age (notably sites like Flag Fen and Must Farm), communities had mastered the landscape, building sophisticated wooden track-ways and platforms to traverse the marshy, water-logged terrain.

One of the most distinct features of the Fenland are the roddons. These are raised, winding banks of silt and sand that stand 2–3 metres above the surrounding peat. They represent the fossilised beds of ancient tidal creeks. As the surrounding peat shrank due to subsequent drainage and oxidation, these silt-filled channels were left standing as positive topographical features, tracing the paths where water once flowed through the marsh.

Benefits of this landscape (Brecks combined with Fen-edge and rivers)

The Breckland Plateau offered light soil that could easily be broken for agriculture. It has been suggested that the sandy soils of Early Neolithic Breckland, would have supported a more open wildwood, a natural woodland pasture for livestock.

It also offered access to incredibly high quality raw material of flint. Not only the hard to obtain floorstone flint. But spread all over the surface of its sandy soils.

The river valleys of the Brecks in turn, offered transport corridors. The prehistoric highways of the British wildwood. Their riparian margins and lower terraces would have offered seasonal alluvial pasture. The westward flowing river valleys of the Brecks, discharged into the ever-changing waterways of the Fens - and onwards to the South and the West. Or northwards to the North Sea and coastal resources.

The Fen-edge offered high-protein hunting and fishing (including eel trapping). And it gave access to building materials of reed and sedge. The edges would have offered rich, seasonal grazing of livestock.

The sands of the Brecks, and the peat of the Fens together, provided an attractive nexus, for trade, and social life. We are aware that on the Fen-Edge itself (and at mere sites in the Brecks), that the open waters and marshes had a ritual, and belief-system value. A meeting of two worlds as epitomised by the Middle Bronze Age Flag Fen site. With such a rich mixture of local resources.

The Thetford Forest Archaeological Project revealed that flint knapping debris, waste cores, and hammer-stones often increase  with frequency on the terraces closest to the rivers.

Above. A fist full of flint flakes in Thetford Forest, Breckland. Picked up on a forest path.

Looking for old images to use on my reconstructed Thetford Forest Archaeology website, I came across some photos of prehistoric struck flint that I had forgotten about. One day in 2019, I was facing a life-changing and very painful process. Consequently I took a walk around the Lynford and Santon areas of Thetford Forest, where I discovered some exposed soils close to the Little-Ouse-River.

Hyper-focus is my distraction method. I was in the heart of Frances Healy's Grimes Graves Belt of late prehistoric flint flake scatters. There in sight of the river meadows, I found some thick clusters of roughly struck flint. It almost felt as though I was walking through the workshops of knappers more than four thousand years ago. I imagined them roughing out flint to transport away on the river. These scatters appear to be multi-period, throughout late prehistory from the Mesolithic, through to the Iron-Age. But perhaps there is a relationship of increased productivity linked to the flint-mines during the Later Neolithic.

Among the rough flakes and waste debris, I saw several flint hammer-stones, including that which I hold in my hand in the image. I had AI time travel back to the very local, Late Neolithic Grimes Graves flint-mine complex. Perhaps the wrist watch spooked the locals. They were quite happy working when I first arrived:

Actually there are a few problems with the above AI-generated image. You see the pick? The shape of a modern pick, rather than a utilised red deer antler as found in excavations of the flint-mine shafts at Grimes Graves. The AI tried, by giving it an antler colour. And the people are possibly a little too fair for Neolithic EEF (Early European Farmers). The housing in the background might be more representative of a later prehistoric time. I discuss these issues of AI time travel reconstruction in another recent post. But I'm glad that the AI hasn't dressed them roughly like Og the caveman, in badly tailored furs.

You can see in the image below, the crazed, impacted face of that hammer-stone. Look how well it fits into my hand. When I pick up something like this, and hold, feel and examine it, I reflect on the unrecorded life of the last person to hold it over 4,200 years earlier. There wasn't much hard stone in the Brecks area, and clearly the late prehistoric knappers would manage to use flint to fracture flint. Perhaps along with soft, organic hammers and punches for finer work? Reconstruction archaeologists find that antler tines make great punches, and are useful for pressure flaking.

Time is a strange thing. Our lives are so brief. The person that made this tool, and who sat here close to a river, thousands of years ago left no name, no ethnicity. We don't know how they identified, or how they saw the Universe. We do not know the course of their life. There were no records. Perhaps, a 140 to 180 generations have passed between the knapper's life, and my own life. Other than this hammer-stone and some lithic debris, they passed through a process of existence that was no less important than that of any other living being. Looking at these artefacts in a landscape helps me deal with the difficult times. My life isn't so important. My issues do not matter across the great span of Time. I survive, as a process, as an observer for now. Just like the person who fashioned and used this tool.

Thetford Forest Archaeology Portal & Local History Hub  - Live website.

I’ve lived through plenty of chapters—more than I suspect most people do. In one, I was a licensed radio amateur (G0AGP), keying in Morse code, studying trans-equatorial propagation and the 11-year solar cycle on the 10-metre band. When I had to move on from that world, I needed new learning curves; I needed to seek the patterns beneath the surface.

Or, as it turned out, on the surface of disturbed soils. I found myself drawn to recognising and searching for prehistoric struck flints. That, too, was a lesson in pattern-matching—a growing fascination with siliceous beauty and conchoidal fracture. I would scan the ground, filtering through the chaos of natural stones for the telltale signs of human intervention: bulbs of percussion, ripples, striking platforms, and flake scars. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel the distinct conchoidal curve of a flake struck by a knapper millennia ago. Soon, I saw how these patterns could scale up, mapping themselves onto entire landscapes. With no formal training at the time, I developed my own field techniques and methodology.

Then, computers arrived. I quickly grasped spreadsheets and databases, seeing instantly how they could help me organise and arrange these spatial patterns. Next came dial-up modems. The driving catalyst for buying a 56k modem wasn't to browse, but to build—I wanted a website to share my archaeological data.

That pursuit unlocked a new obsession: web-building. A metal-detecting webmaster of the era once joked on his links page that I would radically transform my website every few weeks. He wasn't wrong. It was a relentless search for a sense of resolution, found only in error-free perfection. In the strict syntax of HTML and XHTML 1.0 Transitional, I found a new universe of patterns.

Twenty-five years ago, web-building was a radically different landscape. There were no AI agents, no VS Code extensions, and no Git. Software packages for building websites were bought on CD-ROM; professional tools were prohibitively expensive, while the cheaper alternatives generated notoriously horrible code—bloated, messy, and unfriendly to browsers.

As an amateur webmaster working on a shoestring budget, I decided the only elegant solution was to learn how to write the code myself. The gold standard at the time had recently shifted from HTML 4 to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I mastered it, and even taught it to my young daughters. By hand-coding XHTML in basic text editors and early syntax-highlighting code editors, I built a 140-page digital estate—a cluster of interconnected micro-sites. I even wrote a tutorial over twenty years ago on how to code by hand.

Timeline

• 1999 – 2006: Writing XHTML, building and maintaining my websites.

• 2008: Interests had moved on. I stopped paying the server bill and the websites were erased. However, the Wayback Machine had archived copies on web.archive.org. Many of the images were lost, but much remained.

• 2026: A conversation with an LLM triggers a decision to attempt a total restoration and revival of my old sites.

Step 1: The Extraction (Excavation)

Gemini AI guided me to the Archivarix service. All I had to do was select the range of dates over which the Wayback Machine had originally captured the websites. (A little tip for anyone else trying this: choosing a wider date range might have captured a few more of the original images). I decided to pay the $10 USD fee (around £7.38 GBP)—a service well worth paying for. A short while later, the ZIP file was ready.

I operate from a modest Acer Chromebook. Initially, I had some issues trying to extract the files. That process would have been much easier if I had decided to reinstall the Linux (Crostini) environment right away. I have plenty of Linux experience using a variety of distros years ago, and I had used Crostini on this Chromebook before, but right then I was reluctant to set it up again. That was a wrong move. Instead, with Gemini assisting me, I bypassed the extraction issue for the moment and took the archive straight to the next stage.

Step 2: Upload to Live Status (Conservation)

Twenty-five years ago, you either used one of the awful, ad-funded free servers like Yahoo! GeoCities, or you paid for hosting and uploaded your files via FTP. Things have moved on. I prompted the AI to help me find a free home for my website, and found myself at the front door of Netlify.

Initially, I used an AI interface to help process the raw archive data. I fed the archive into the workspace, watched the AI perform its magic, and suddenly the core structure was back online. Next, I updated the URL, choosing https://thetford-forest-archaeology.netlify.app/. Naturally, twenty-five years ago, the .app top-level domain didn't even exist. But boom—there it was.

Restoration of a Broken Website

My websites were once again live on the World Wide Web, no longer confined to a dusty archive. Yet I had massive amounts of work to do. The Wayback Machine had graciously saved the text, but many of the image files were gone (specifically those that lay too many clicks away from the index file). I managed to retrieve some of these from other old repositories, my old Flickr account, and alternative archive sites, but dozens remained lost forever.

I had a lot of tidying up to do. Furthermore, I had hand-coded these 140+ files in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, only to find in 2026 that the world had moved on to HTML5. My pattern-matching tendencies wouldn't tolerate such a structural mismatch. As a hyper-systemiser working in partnership with Gemini and Claude, it took me about three weeks of editing to rationalise everything down to 116 clean web pages, alongside their supporting JPEG, CSS, and XML files.

Step 3: The Coding (Reconstruction)

I finally did what I should have done at the start: I enabled the Chromebook's Linux feature and updated the system. My Linux commands were rusty, but I had my AI friends to guide me. I generated a website folder within the Linux partition and, using Bash commands guided by Gemini, I extracted the compressed files there. Now I had a full local clone of the website sitting in my Chromebook's local storage.

A tip for Chromebook Linux newcomers: The Linux folder partition won't automatically appear in the native ChromeOS Files app unless you have opened the Linux terminal at least once during your session to mount the container.

Next, I installed Flatpak via the terminal, using it to download Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as my environment of choice. While there are countless AI extensions available for IDEs, many require paid tokens or API credits. To keep this project entirely free, I utilised a simpler workflow: I would copy my code blocks, paste them into the free-standing browser interfaces of Gemini or Claude for structural analysis, and paste the corrected code straight back into VS Code. Money saved.

What to do with the websites themselves? Three distinct components were salvageable:

1. Thetford Forest Archaeology

2. Portuguese Thetford

3. Wesley's Metal Detector Finds

I didn't want to completely modernise everything; I wanted to preserve their history while ensuring modern browser compatibility. My approach varied across the four sites:

• Thetford Forest Archaeology: A hybrid approach. I converted the skeleton to HTML5 but maintained the period-accurate CSS and styling of the early 2000s. I updated all .htm extensions to .html. This was always my prized showcase website—the original motivation for me learning to code.

• Portuguese Thetford: I let Gemini take the lead on rewriting the CSS. I didn't just sit back and blindly accept prompts; I meticulously updated the structural tags, but permitted the AI to modernise the responsive presentation layer while keeping the original text fully intact.

• Wesley's Metal Detector Finds: This old site is a classic end-of-the-20th-century creation, complete with an animated GIF and a tiled background. I chose to preserve this one completely untouched, keeping the original code exactly as it was, save for updating the broken hyperlinks.

• How to HTML!: I had entirely forgotten that I wrote this! Originally coded in strict XHTML with .htm extensions, I left the core tutorial preserved, simply removing old CSS references to background graphics that have been lost to time. Later, I decided to delete this micro-site as a distraction and no longer relevant to 2026.

To bridge the personal knowledge gap between XHTML and modern standards, I provided Claude with a link to my old "How to HTML!" tutorial. I asked the AI to use my own 20-year-old text to form the basis of a personalised transition course into HTML5. It felt as though an earlier version of me from 2005 was reaching forward across the decades to teach the 2026 version of me how to code for the modern web.

Isn't that clever? Perfect for a Time Traveller.

Step 4: The Relaunch (Publication)

To handle updates without relying on automated AI build tools, I shifted to Netlify’s direct manual folder deployment feature. This method is entirely free and bypasses the need for automated build credits.

The deployment process is incredibly elegant. It uses a local checksum mechanism: I simply select the entire website folder from the Linux directory on my Chromebook. The interface might flag that hundreds of files are being processed, but it instantly identifies the precise files that have changed and uploads only the modifications. Updates are seamless, uncomplicated, and incredibly fast. The key is simply maintaining that perfect, updated clone within the Linux environment.

I am pleasantly surprised by how straightforward it has become to maintain a web presence today. With the files live, all that remains is some foundational SEO work—submitting updated XML sitemaps to the search engines and tidying up metadata.

Digital Archaeology.  AI Image prompted by Gemini to illustrate this post. An archaeology website that has itself, become a digital artefact.

I just checked Google Search. The index appears using the string: Thetford Forest Archaeology. May the SEO prosper, and a new generation of archaeology students learn from how an amateur did it twenty years ago.

Update - 2026-06-19

I've totally succumbed to modernism and AI intervention, by allowing Anthropic Claude AI to move the Archaeology website into the 2020s, completing its move from XHTML to HTML5, and giving it a complete fresh restyle. I have removed the HTML Tutor website as obsolete.