Issue 107

July / August 2009

Contents

news

Scottish dig has big surprise in the post

Urine to navel fluff: the first complete witch bottle

Celtic tankard adds value to Welsh treasure

In the press

In Brief & Phase 2

features

on the web

Recommended websites
Websites of univeristy archaeology departments and a community site for Digging Vindolanda.

letters

your views and responses

CBA Correspondent

Some recent projects benefiting from Challenge Funding.

my archaeology

Simon McBurney is a writer and actor; his father, archaeologist Charles

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

my archaeology

A sense of immense change

Simon McBurney is a writer and actor, and artistic director of theatre company Complicite. With archaeologist Charles McBurney as father, the past was always present.

Simon McBurney at home with photos of Le Chauvet, the French cave art dated to 30,000 years ago.

I became accustomed to living with strange artefacts. I was delighted, because nobody else had a father who was an archaeologist. He spent 20 years digging at La Cotte de St Brelade in Jersey. Every year we would take off in March, and live in tents for two and a half weeks on a wild peninsula. Of course in the 60s when I was a child, it was incredible. Undergraduates for me were heroes, nobody washed, people even slept in their boots, nobody cut their hair. I absolutely loved it.

It became the largest neanderthal site in northern Europe. The animal bones were like digestive biscuit in their consistency. They used to put plaster of paris around them, and the things weighed the most unbelievable amount. They had to climb down these cliffs and round the headland at low tide and get it into the Landrover which would then sink into the sand so everyone had to come and pull it out, the whole thing was like a kind of incredible adventure. Then they discovered this polyurethane foam which was part made up of cyanide. My father was quite absent minded – my mother would have a dinner party, and he would simply forget to turn up – so my mother was convinced that he was going to fall into the cyanide.

It was one of the most potent parts of my childhood, to be with people who were outside the community of other people, focussed on one activity. Every night we would sit around long tables and my mother would cook and everyone would be in the same mess tent. It was very beautiful, they would tell jokes and stories. I would try and sit as close as possible to the people who I thought were the funniest, people like Pat Carter and John Clegg (now a rock art specialist at the University of Sydney), Derek Sturdy and John Harris. Prince Charles came one year.

I don't ever remember thinking I'd become an archaeologist. There was a huge amount of it that I found absolutely incomprehensible… the endless books on flints which meant nothing to me. I had a powerful sense that we had lost something. I remember asking myself, am I an East Anglian? What was my community? I never felt attracted to an academic life.

In my father's study, on the wall was a section that he'd taken from one of the caves in Wales. I remember him saying to me that that was time, and thinking of time as a vertical thing, rather than a horizontal thing, because the deeper you went the older it was. I have a powerful sense of an immense change, not just in terms of how we live, but how we see, and how we place ourselves as a result in relation to everything else in this world. Perhaps the most profound discovery of the 19th century was that of the immensity of the past. It is endless.

Mnemonic was a Complicite production that drew on the story ofthe 3300BC iceman.

The iceman was extraordinary, and sometimes suddenly those stories become things that you want to tell. When we made Mnemonic, we went with Konrad Spindler's version of the events – he was escaping from something – which gave an opening into a meditation on the idea of European violence, or the violence that we commit upon our own species. I rang him, and I think he thought I was just another crank, so he was affable but quite cold. I really wanted to persuade him to come and see it.

The last section of the piece that I did with John Berger, the Vertical Line, was about the discovery of the Chauvet cave, a bolt of lightening for me – the pictures are just beyond startling. We did it at a deserted tube station at the Aldwych, so people had to descend 200 stairs below ground. That was mixed with our own history, our own present. That's something which has remained with me, the sense that the past is always present.

John Berger, a man of extraordinary sensibility and imagination, went to the Chauvet cave. From the observation of the way that the animals are painted, from having spent a lifetime of looking at people painting, he wrote a wonderful essay on the relationship between man and animals – not attempting to produce a theory of why they did it, but to imagine the living and the living act of painting.

Archaeology for me is about our humanity, and human continuity. It is completely apposite that a theatre maker or a critic should use the subject of archaeology, because it's a thing which exists, and it needs light shone on it from every single angle. What is archaeology's relationship with people who are not scientific, or with the idea of the imagination?

Interview Mike Pitts

CBA web:

British Archaeology

CBA Briefing

Fieldwork
Conferences
Noticeboard
Courses & lectures
CBA Network
Grants & awards

CBA homepage