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Different Interpretations of Archaeology

• Message 1.Ìý

  Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Monday, 8th February 2010

  In a rushed post last night I mentioned multivocality and this morning serendipity strikes again. I've just listened to an excellent programme on Radio 4, 'The Voices Who Dug up the Past'.
  Using clips it discussed Wheeler's excavation of Maiden Castle and his interpretation of his findings as evidence of an assault by Vespasion. It then introduced other, more recent, ideas of the monuments role as an expression of tribal identity, status etc and touched on issues of reflexivity and subjectivity.
  Taken along with the '100 objects' series, I'm very struck by how these programmes on radio are addressing archaeology today so much more profoundly and accurately than anything I've seen on television. Is this because they can escape the tyranny of the image or do the producers of Radio 4 have more respect for the intellect of their listeners?
  I would highly recommend catching this on iplayer and there's another episode next Monday on Suton Hoo.
  
  Regards
  
  Ferval

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• Message 2

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  Posted by rooster (U14062359) on Monday, 8th February 2010

  Ferval
  
  If you go to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Archive service, you can access a wealth of archaelogical programmes from yesteryear.
  It is well worth a look, and I think you'll find it fascinating.
  Kind regards.

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• Message 3

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  Posted by TwinProbe (U4077936) on Monday, 8th February 2010

  Hi ferval,
  
  Radio 4's programme was indeed excellent and the contrast between the interpretations of Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Niall Sharples was very striking. I can't believe that this area is unfamiliar to you however. Your posts are so astute and well-informed (except for a momentary hiccough over the spelling of Antoninus Pius) you must, surely, be a professional historian.
  
  I think that Wheeler's tendency to see military invasions is perfectly understandable for someone who served through two World Wars, and was once mistaken by General Sir Brian Horrocks for a regular soldier. From his enthusiasm for placing Roman artillery in the landscape you would guess he was in the RA.
  
  I think you are absolute correct about the 'tyranny of the image'. Watching archaeology being revealed in the ground is so completely fascinating that it is hard for observers to escape from the process into the interpretation. This is true of real life excavation as well as TV archaeology.
  
  Wheeler was a really excellent archaeologist and unsurpassable as a populariser of the subject. But as a theoretician he was not the equal of Gordon Childe for example. I think we know quite enough about the British Iron Age to ask how hillforts, or perhaps we had better be neutral and say hilltop enclosures, functioned in the landscape and what impression they had on residents and visitors. The idea which Sharples suggested, that the process of creating the earthwork also created the 'tribe', is a very challenging one and sounds, to me anyway, perfectly credible. I'll be listening next week.
  
  Best wishes,
  
  TP

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• Message 4

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  Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Monday, 8th February 2010

  Hi TP,
  Thanks for those flattering if undeserved words - not the one about spelling though, I can't spell when I type but give me a fine quill... - from you that's a real compliment, I'll bask a bit, if you don't mind. I'm no historian, more of a superannuated apprentice archaeologist, old enough to remember 'Animal, Vegetable and Mineral'and the man himself.
  The idea of the building of the earthwork as creating the community is very much in sync with a theory I've heard proposing that, by creating the organisation and bureaucracy to build the Great Pyramid, the nation of Egypt was itself created and then there's a fair degree of agreement that the process of construction of Neolithic monuments was as important as the finished structure.
  I have a slight reservation though about being a little too ready to dismiss warfare and violence in general as a another factor. Battlefield and conflict archaeology was sidelined for a long time in the 'love and peace' years; there are pendulums in every field, I certainly have experienced some violent swings in my 'real' professional life.
  It was a welcome change from the overemphasis in the past but can be a bit utopian and I suspect we are about due for a reappraisal, I note a resurgence of the Neanderthals as bushmeat ideas and the latest discoveries in the LBK area are making the Talheim Pit look like a minor unpleasantness. Personally, as an noted old cynic, I think to underestimate the human propensity for violence is as misguided as to imagine the past as unrelieved misery, blood and death.
  
  Regards
  
  Ferval

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• Message 5

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  Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Wednesday, 10th February 2010

  
  Is this because they can escape the tyranny of the image or do the producers of Radio 4 have more respect for the intellect of their listeners?
  Ìý
  
  I would suggest that both these assessments are equally true.
  
  A particular bugbear of mine (and expressed with monotonous regularity by me on these boards, I'm afraid) is also how TV's treatment of historical subjects now defers almost exclusively to that which will produce the most dramatic accompanying images, a trend which has all but obliterated a more intelligent approach especially since the advent of CGI and a slavish devotion to "re-enactment" as a means of representing the topic to the viewer. So absolute is this deferment that long debunked theory, or at least theory which is challenged by equally convincing extrapolation from the evidence, is frequently and erroneously presented as the most popular theory, and sometimes even as indisputable fact.
  
  No amount of pleading that the main purpose of the programme is to popularise history as a subject can mitigate what in many cases, after all, amounts to little more than a lie. That those who produce the programme do not care about their dishonesty is worrying. That they often seem not even to be aware of how dishonest they have been is even more worrying stil.

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• Message 6

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  Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Wednesday, 10th February 2010

  think that Wheeler's tendency to see military invasions is perfectly understandable for someone who served through two World WarsÌý
  No, your view of Wheeler is tainted by the fact that for the last 60 years we have, in Western Europe, been living in profound peace. As there has been a lot of peaceful immigration and cultural mingling, some archaeologists seem obsessed with showing that past invasions by Saxons and Vikings etc were mostly without any opposition.
  
  The modern ideas that I have come across seem to be half baked and highly questionable. But of course people do get qualifications, and sell books, by inventing them.

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• Message 7

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  Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Wednesday, 10th February 2010

  hi fascinating,
  I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as that. The less militaristic interpretation was, in many ways, a refreshing corrective to earlier ideas which had a degree of imperialist self justification embedded in them; the world has always been this way and so we've been following in a fine old tradition. It's just that, as so often happens, the young turks, presumably of the Vietnam generation, swung to the opposite end of the spectrum.
  The real story, I suspect, lies somewhere between the extremes and is probably so enmeshed and complicated that untangling it will always leave lots of wriggle room for different opinions, thank goodness.
  
  regards
  
  Ferval

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• Message 8

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  Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Wednesday, 10th February 2010

  I don't think there was any "imperialist self justification". The Victorian historians looked at the written evidence they had, and it is easy to see that much of it does show a lot of armed conflict, including imperialism. Modern historians seem to try to gloss over the wars of the past.

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• Message 9

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 10th February 2010

  Re: Message 5.
  
  Nordmann,
  
  how I agree with you.
  
  Read in a paper last time from an "official" that the task of the "public" television (since the split it is the VRT (Flemish Radio and Television)) is no longer to educate the public as before. There would be in the man's mind other channels for that, but if I recall it well he didn't give examples. The other way would perhaps be the balderdash of the "commercial" channels?
  
  What a great time it was, when I was young in the Fifties, to see, when the BRT/RTB (Belgische Radio en Televisie/Radio Television Belge) started as a replica of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã. How passionate those first producers were. Really great men. I agree now that that black and white and the accessories are now quite old fashioned in the age of all kind of gadgets, but at least they did their best to be honest and logic with the means they had in that time. And yes by the last 8 years on this messageboard I became more critical, but I have the impression that the pioneers of the Belgian TV, perhaps by the lack of "gadgets" were more prudent and logical with their texts. I especially remember a series about WWI, which with maps and words and some photographs was able to give an insight in what happened.
  
  Not to say that modern programs can't be excellent too. I remember from the immediate past on the French/German channel Arte a film about the ascension of Mussolini with as guide line the life of one of an earlier lower echelon party member. Also on Arte the conquest of America by European plants and fauna as for instance the horse, also the bacteries with devastating consequences, but also vice versa as the tomatoes, potato, cacao and also for example the wider spread of syphilis. And all that with a not too exagerated re-enactment and an attention for the logical text.
  
  No, what I mean, if the programs of the commercial channels are our future, we will need special channels for critical people as we are. Two years ago in New-York and looking to the American channels it is really to become hysterical, the programs each five minutes broken by a commercial and five or more channels at the same time with "Judge X" programs or something even worse. From the 32 channels we can watch here in Belgium I am only able to "endure" "some" programs of some three or four channels. I think in the US I wouldn't need a TV set. Or perhaps a Pay TV channel carved up to my critical attitude? If I could find it overthere ? Is that the future of TV?
  
  Hope you can catch there in Oslo with your parabole the Arte channel. And I suppose that you among your many languages as Greek and Norse also understand French?
  
  Hmm, I think I deviated a bit into the out of topic...although there is a link with the subject...
  
  With esteem,
  
  Paul.

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