Issue 75

March 2004

Contents

news

Ancient timbers found near South Yorkshire's oldest church

Mapping the Forest of Dean

Stonehenge Public Inquiry

Education Awards

New Light on Roman Rampart

In Brief

features

Who Owns Our Dead?
Vince Holyoak and Andy Saunders debate plane crashes

Corroded In Action
Excavating plane crash sites can bring special rewards

Archaeology At Sea
George Lambrick goes to sea

Heathrow Today, Tomorrow The World
Mike Pitts finds dramatic archaeology at Heathrow

Home and Heritage
Lynne Walker describes a battle won to preserve local homes

Yorkshire's Holy Secret
Jan Harding and Ben Johnson reflect on 10 years’ fieldwork

Bone People
Terry O’Connor’s quick guide to recognising human bones

letters

Piltdown, Orwell, Roman villas and hetrosexual values

opinion

Sue Beasley is not impressed by treasure

spoilheap

Neil Mortimer fails psychic link-up with Medieval Wales

books

Britain BC. Life in Britain & Ireland before the Romans by Francis Pryor

Pompeii. A Novel by Robert Harris

Anglo-Saxon Crafts by Kevin Leahy

Viking Weapons & Warfare by J Kim Siddorn

Glastonbury: Myth & Archaeology by Philip Rahtz & Lorna Watts

The Port of Medieval London by Gustav Milne

The City by the Pool by Michael J Jones, David Stocker & Alan Vince

Revealing the Buried Past by Chris Gaffney & John Gater

Essex Past & Present by Essex County Council

Seven Ages of Britain by Justin Pollard

The Complete Roman Army by Adrian Goldsworthy

Tracks & Traces: the Archaeology of the Channel Tunnel by Rail Link

CBA update

tv in ba

Angela Pinccini introduces a new review feature.

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

my archaeology

Beneath The Volcano

Robert Harris thinks a novelist's guess can be as good as the experts'—almost

Pompeii is an extraordinarily haunting place. I went towards the end of the day, by the amphitheatre rather than the main public entrance. I had been there a couple of years earlier, briefly, but with two young children in the baking heat. This was my first proper look around on my own.

The shops looked as if they’d only just been left. I walked up the hill towards the Vesuvius Gate, feeling the heat of the sun on my back and seeing the volcano. Then I smelt water on stone, that very evocative smell. For all the difficulties of writing about Romans, what I was experiencing was exactly what people experienced 2,000 years ago. So I searched for the source, which turned out to be this place where the aqueduct had come into the town.

Scottish engineer

I’d decided in 1998 not to write a historical novel: I was going to write about America, about a superpower, a utopia and the idea of hubris, but I couldn’t make it work. I read about a book by the superintendent of the Pompeii excavations, Antonio Varone. It gave an account of Pompeii based on the new knowledge from Mount St Helens. I realised that it wasn’t just one big bang that had destroyed the Roman town, but that actually it had gone on for 18 hours and there’d been two or three days’ warning. It was a longer and more complicated story, one that would be worth retelling.

So the first thing I did was go to Pompeii, and I came across this castellum aquae at the top of the town. That led me to the story of the aqueducts. I thought it would be very interesting to write about a Roman engineer. I wanted to get away from emperors and gladiators: I had in mind a mid-19th century Scottish engineer. I came back and went to the Ashmolean in Oxford, and read up all I could on the whole region.

Spadework

I was very struck by the waves of different interpretations. Was Pompeii wrecked before the eruption or was it booming? How much of it had been damaged by the earthquake? First it was a sleeping beauty, it was all perfect and it was destroyed, and we got everything out. Then the idea became that actually it was pretty much a ghost town. Now there is a new wave which is saying that if a lot of things were missing, it’s probably because the Romans under the emperor Titus were able to dig out stuff like the equestrian statues. Nobody knows which is the truth. Your guess as a novelist can be almost as good as the experts’.

I don’t want to belittle academics at all, because I owe everything to scholars and archaeologists who’ve literally done the spadework. However, especially for a general readership, I do think there is a place for the historical novelist who can remain true to the facts, and yet try and bring the whole thing alive: if nothing else stimulate people to go and look at the proper text, or to visit the site. I think that when I wrote Enigma, it encouraged people to go to Bletchley Park. I hope that I take from what archaeologists have done, and at the same time perhaps encourage people into taking a more serious interest in archaeology.

Our span here is so brief, it would be conceited to think that all that mattered is the here and now. So much of our institutions and our civilisation comes from ancient times and reaches down to us through history. Unless you know where you’re coming from, it’s very hard to work out where you are and where you might be going. Collective memory is incredibly important for humankind. It’s been terrible to see the downgrading of history in schools, whilst at the same time on television, and to a certain degree in books as well, it’s become ever more important. History is absolutely vital.

Pompeii (see Books) and Enigma are published by Hutchinson/Arrow. Robert Harris talked to Mike Pitts

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