P. J. Pikes

Who is P. J. Pikes?

With a background in timber-framed building, he began his archaeological career in the early 1970's. He worked on what was then known as 'the circuit', he moved from excavation to excavation, living in tents and old caravans. He excavated on Bronze Age, Iron Age, Romano-British and Medieval sites in Oxfordshire, Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Hampshire and Milton Keynes. He worked for the National Maritime Museum on their excavation of an Iron Age boat at Brigg in Lincolnshire, where he was responsible for crating and loading the boat for its journey to Greenwich.

In the mid-70s he supervised large-scale excavations in the West Country for the then Committee for Rescue Archaeology for Avon, Gloucestershire and Somerset and then for the Central Excavation Unit of the DOE's Directorate of Ancient Monuments (the organisation that later became English Heritage) at sites including Ardleigh Bronze Age cemetery in Essex, Dartmoor, Stonehenge and Hadrian's Wall.

PJ was part of the team which pioneered the UK's first computerised archaeological databases in the late 1970s, using a remote mainframe based in Cleveland, Ohio and wrote a manual on field recording, which for many years was used on English Heritage excavations. He was a data capture consultant on major English Heritage projects such as Raunds, Northamptonshire and Maiden Castle. He subsequently spent several years as a systems analyst in industry and project managed the introduction of integrated software packages on IBM mid-range computers, PC local area networks and UNIX systems.

Having returned to archaeology in 1999, he is currently researching the early development of the settlement at Hereford. He is also the author of the two archaeological chapters in 'Landscape Origins of the Wye Valley: Holme Lacy to Bridstow', the book about the LOWV project, edited by Heather Hurley and published by Logaston Press.