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Issue 71July 2003ContentsnewsNew Neolithic settlements found on Orkney Medieval double watermill found at Stafford Iron Age hilltop ‘town’ found at Margate Prehistoric landscape of settlement, ritual and magic Coins reveal how Hannibal bankrupted the Romans featuresUnderground warfare Great sites Islands in the Neolithic Tale of the limpet lettersRoman burials, medieval fields, and Saxons in Scotland issuesGeorge Lambrick on the looting of antiquities in Iraq Peter EllisOn archaeology and today's mentality of hurry, hurry, hurry booksA History of Childhood by Colin Heywood Conserving landscapes reviewed by Christopher Catling Farming in the First Millennium AD by Peter Fowler CBA updatefavourite findsPaul Pettitt on an antiquarian book found in a junkshop
ISSN 1357-4442 Editor Simon Denison |
Peter EllisWatching archaeology is very restful. Few archaeologists will have tried it, and so know nothing of the soothing nature of seeing people scratching at the ground, struggling with wheelbarrows, washing pots, sieving, and so on. This is because we are all caught up in a 'must get this done' attitude, and are driven to hurry by our self-imposed time limits. We seem to have come to the conclusion that this hurry is a good thing - witness our frenzied methods of explaining archaeology on tv. Undoubtedly tv archaeology would have benefited from less input from archaeologists and more from the stand-and-stare school of passers by. Archaeologists are responsible for all the running around, the constant watch watching ('we've only got three more hours') or that exhausting business of illustrating every word with a picture: 'This is' - heavy orchestral prelude - 'a 4th century pot' - picture of pot - 'from Oxfordshire' - picture of Oxfordshire plus climactic music. The more sober archaeology lecture is turning into the same sort of thing with slides and overheads all merging into one as the long afternoon wears on. This is all in startling contrast to the printed-word presentation where we are asked, in mid text after many similar trials, to absorb a table showing the quantities of different ecofacts found from various holes in the ground, without any music, swirling blue fog, or pictures of seeds sprouting in fast forward mode. However even the archaeology report is under threat and publishers are working on hotting them up. Perhaps the next time you pick up 'Excavations at 44 High St' you'll get a free bag of bones to assemble into an aurochs that then sings a little ditty. But this phenomenon is not confined to archaeology and everyone seems to agree that these media presentations illustrate that the public has a short attention span. The assumption is that this is a new thing and due to fast food. But people who have given a lot of time to studying the mind, from the Buddha on, agree that few thoughts last longer than a minute. This is born out in the archaeological evidence for low attention spans in the past. One is struck, for example, by the number of broken pots, surely witnessing a lot of absent-minded gestures, or by the coins the Romans dropped and forgot. Neolithic and early medieval house builders seem particularly noteworthy since they invariably omitted the fourth corner of their buildings. Monuments were forever being fiddled around with in ever more phases. Poor attention spans must explain why it's not clear whether castles were for defending or showing off, whether monasteries were for abandoning the world or for developing the latest agricultural and industrial techniques, and whether the medieval house was for humans or animals, let alone the endless on-site puzzles posed by pits, postholes, houses and tracks turning up in the wrong place. In fact it looks as though the whole mass of information studied by archaeologists has just been left there in a prolonged bout of absent mindedness. It is just the detritus of people like ourselves suddenly caught up in an enthusiastic project which is then abandoned in pursuit of another. Behind them lies a trail of dropped coins and brooches mirroring the discarded thoughts passing through their heads, while in front of them another phase of improvements to their surroundings briefly beckons. Some people obviously tried to concentrate their attention by building things like long barrows where they could wave grandpa's bones at you, or cathedrals where they could put lifelike statues that glared down at you - but it seems to have done little good.
One interpretation of modernity is that people have managed to give up the tedium of trudging up and down the same holloway, ploughing the same furrow, flaking yet another flint core, or shaping yet another pot, and have really developed the short attention span that is our proud contribution to the planet. The question is whether archaeology's function is to follow the trend and try and grab people's fleeting attention, or whether to go against the current and to occupy a little backwater with diggers gently trowelling in front of a group of onlookers lost in their thoughts. |
CBA web:British ArchaeologyFebruary 2000 CBA BriefingFieldwork CBA homepage |
