Issue 63

February 2002

Contents

news

Glastonbury lake village and prehistoric tracks ‘drying out’

Rare Bronze Age metal working site found on Eigg

Log boat from Tay estuary dated to the later Bronze Age

Archaeologists uncover history of the Royal Arsenal

Hidden collection of cross slabs at Co Durham church

In Brief

features

Commanders and Kings
Tony Wilmott on how post-Roman kingdoms were formed

People of the Sea
Barry Cunliffe on the lure of the sea from earliest prehistory

Great sites
Julien Parsons on 19th century excavations at Belas Knap

letters

On defleshing, ancient roofs, plague and conservation

issues

David Baker on regulation of developer-funded archaeology

Peter Ellis

Regular column

books

London Under Ground edited by Ian Haynes, Harvey Sheldon and Lesley Hannigan

Northumberland: the Power of Place by Stan Beckensall

Archaeology and the Social History of Ships by Richard Gould

Prehistoric and Roman Essex by James Kemble

Landscape Detective by Richard Muir

A Fortified Frontier by Iain MacIvor

CBA update

favourite finds

Memories of Callanish. Aubrey Burl had a ‘eureka’ moment in pondering Callanish.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Simon Denison

Peter Ellis

The cover of one primary school history text book has a glum-looking churl ploughing the fields in the foreground, church and rook-infested woods beyond and the (these days) rather spooky shape of Concorde lifting off just overhead blotting out much of the sky. The meaning is clear. It is that, believe it or not, the wonderful world in which we presently live emerged from this complete idiot fooling about with his dreary tasks.

So youngsters are encouraged to look at the past as a spot-the-invention exercise with man's ingenuity the key to how we got to our present technological heaven. This means a focus on the really important inventions - medicine, travel and communications, all leading to the great questions of civilisation: where are my pills? where are my car keys? and where's the remote?

From the evidence of archaeology, it's amazing that any progress was made at all. According to the theory of man's inventiveness we should have signs that people wrestled with solutions to the difficulties of, for example, digging postholes - our most ubiquitous finds - but there's no evidence of this at all. The problem here is how to get depth without losing solid sides, but for thousands of years we find the same solutions occurring.

Frankly some postholes look a complete disaster with not enough stones jammed in if it's soft ground or nothing like enough depth if it's nice solid rock. But that's neither here nor there. The point is that in the entire record there is no sign that anybody anywhere stood back from the problem and thought - yes what we need is a Massey Ferguson with a back-acter.

Similarly with pits, ditches, banks, graves and all those amorphous uninterpretable semi-features that abound on sites. The same goes for big monuments - causewayed camps, Silbury Hills, henges, etc. The thing, and archaeology keeps dully showing it, is that everything was done by work and not by invention. We live in landscapes created by the cheerless churl on the front cover of the schoolbook not by Prof Brainstorm.

It's not that people in the past weren't keen on some inventions. Herodotus, the Halicarnassian village bore (odd isn't it that the first historian and the first village bore were one and the same - only joking, historians), gets on to inventions early on in Book II of his 5th century BC ramblings.

Interestingly the invention in question, the first known to us from history, was a way of holding a shield, and so was to do with warfare. When it comes to legalised murder there has been no shortage of bright ideas. Archaeological finds show all kinds of inventions in weapons - needless to say especially with the leading civilisers the Greeks and Romans - and other developments have come about from the kick start of the military, with progress in travel and communications driven by the need to get troops around or send orders out.

Curiously this has had no effect on medicine, the other vast gap between the present and the past. With all those guys bleeding to death in their armour you might have thought there was room for a bright idea or two but not a bit of it, medicine looks unchanging till very recently when a boom in patent medicines seems to have led the way, as witnessed by the pots and bottles one has to shovel aside in archaeology to get past the Victorian levels.

Our worship of inventiveness means that all other eras are ruled out from sensible discussion and are seen as curiosities because they didn't have transplants, cars and mobiles. The main question in everyone's minds as they look at an archaeological site is: how on earth did they get by?

But judging from our schoolbooks, it looks as though inventions will get ever more attention as we educate our children in the view that ours is a problem-solving species that just loves to scratch its head and say, I've got it. The real truth is that the main aim in the past was to keep things as they always had been not to lay the foundations for our present paradise.

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