Issue 78

September 2004

Contents

news

Third Neolithic longhouse found in Scotland

Rare Medieval track excavated

Decorated shears trimmed Celtic hair

Iron Age 'bender' in Margate

Barrow saved from walkers

In Brief

features

Pagans
Robert J Wallis and Jenny Blain report from the other side

Boscombe grave
The truth behind the latest Stonehenge Beaker finds

Digging up art
Clive Waddington reveals first dates for British rock art

Bronze bog hoard
Surprising objects in prehistoric hoard in Armagh

Seahenge story
Mark Brennand excavates on the beach

Forest fire
Peter Fowler describes new discoveries in the Languedoc

letters

Ethnicity, mysticism, Roman disputes and hedges

opinion

Peter Drewett bemoans the lack of field skills

Spoilheap

Neil Mortimer fights stone circle power on Ebay

books

Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of WB Yeats & Seamus Heaney by Christine Finn

Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Rosemary Sweet

Trethurgy: Excavations at Trethurgy Round, St Austell: Community & Status in Roman & Post-Roman Cornwall by Henrietta Quinnell

Urban Growth & the Medieval Church: Gloucester & Worcester by Nigel Baker & Richard Holt

Behaviour Behind Bones: the Zooarchaeology of Ritual, Religion, Status & Identity by Sharon Jones O’Day, Wim Van Neer & Anton Ervynck

Public Archaeology by Nick Merriman

The Victoria History of the Counties of England. Stafford vol IX: Burton-Upon-Trent by Institute of Historical Research

Archaeology, Ritual, Religion by Timothy Insoll

Charter Quay: the Archaeology of Kingston’s Riverside by Wessex Archaeology

Melrose Abbey by Richard Fawcett & Richard Oram

Places of Special Virtue: Megaliths in the Neolithic Landscape of Wales by Vicki Cummings & Alasdair Whittle

Human Evolution Cookbook by Harold L Dibble, Dan Williamson & Brad M Evans

CBA update

tv in ba

Looking back on a season of wars and battles

science

Chief archaeological scientist Sebastian Payne's new column

my archaeology

Philip Beale left his job for an archaeological experiment

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

tv in ba

Dig for victory (or defeat)

Tutor Angela Piccini and students on Bristol University’s MA in Archaeology for Screen Media review recent programming

We have been wondering what really matters in TV archaeology. In the last issue Neil Mortimer (Spoilheap, July) reported on archaeological cheating. This kind of criticism highlights the tension between lived life and material trace: as soon as we point a camera at something we make a fiction, we close off other stories that might exist. Yet this is also the archaeological conundrum. How can we get at what really happened? Whose reality is it anyway? In the case of televisual fabrication, where do we draw the line? How much reality is enough?

Questions of authenticity are central to the archaeology of conflict. The 60th anniversary of D-Day dominated late May television schedules. As the number of veterans attending these services diminishes each year, the commemoration also signals the passing of responsibility for remembrance onto generations with second-hand knowledge provided by stories, books, films and television.

Time has seen the representation of these events change. From a quest for broad understandings to ensure ‘never again’ our focus has shifted onto the personal accounts. We want to know what it was like to run up the beaches into a hail of machine-gun fire, how the German conscripts in Normandy felt, what it was to parachute behind enemy lines – not through morbid voyeurism, but because experience connects us to the past.

Television programmes have used archival footage and re-construction, with narrative driven by diaries, letters and oral history interviews. But archaeological practice, with its reliance on material objects, can provide a different perspective, a promise of direct communication with a maker or user. Perhaps recognizing this, Channel 4 asked Time Team to produce an hour-long special on the landings. D-Day: a Time Team Special (31 May 21.00) seemed aware of the need to provide new insights and to engage with the ethical issues surrounding excavation of WWII sites.

Some of us joined the team as excavators, providing the fantastic opportunity to be makers and watchers. We were especially interested in the relationships between production pressures (director Dominic Ozanne had only nine weeks between filming and broadcast) and the sense of archaeological responsibility.

Our first glimpse into this was the preliminary evening briefing, when we were made fully aware of the main risk: unexploded ordnance. French metal detectorists helped by scanning spoil heaps and areas to be excavated. Several artefacts were discovered and while Phil Harding did his bit for the Entente Cordiale centenary by shouting at one Frenchman who stepped into his clean trench, it demonstrated how archaeologists and detectorists can work together to share knowledge and skills.

Archaeological process drove everything, with camera crews directed to follow the archaeology wherever it unfolded. A senior production crew member was castigated for suggesting that archaeology could be repeated for the camera. If cameras were absent during a vital moment, an alternative method of representation would be devised or the story re-shaped.

What was left out of the final version then became very interesting. The production team’s faith that reality can be captured paradoxically allowed them to omit events without concern. Even more intriguing was how the directors and camera crews defined ‘moments’, particularly where they began and ended. The questions of when to turn on/off the camera and where to edit are important, and not so dissimilar to familiar archaeological problems of data selection.

Five exploded onto our screens with Fighter Plane Dig Live (30 May 21.00, producer/director James Cutler), telling the story of WWII fighter pilot Ray Holmes, who single-handedly brought down a Nazi plane targeted to bomb Buckingham Palace. The producer’s lack of confidence in Holmes to tell his own story was very clear while John Suchet’s aggressive tone undermined him and left him perplexed by the experience.

From the opening sequences of the excavation in action it was clear that this was about liveness, to up the ante on time-restricted Time Team’s immediacy. Dig presenter Edwina Silver’s enthusiasm together with JCB diggers, hard hats and yellow luminous jackets conveyed a powerful sense of people doing something important: yet we felt aspects of the story were lost. Suchet and Silver superficially declared Holmes a war hero, without recognising that this was not just the recovery of a plane, but an object powerfully meaningful for its former pilot. We wondered how being live helped viewer understanding?

Carthage: the Roman Holocaust (8 May C4 19.00, producer/director Joseph Maxwell) depicted the archaeology of long-gone conflict. The city and civilisation utterly destroyed by the Romans in 146 bc could inspire a great documentary spanning historical and archaeological sources. However, Richard Miles is no Michael Wood and fails to convince on screen. The script’s sweeping statements did not answer our questions. More archaeology was needed in a programme struggling to fill its two-hour slot. This was location-led history programming with the archaeology as add-on: we were left disturbingly unmoved by the scale of the tragedy. Given the moves in more contemporary archaeology to connect through objects, Carthage missed a real opportunity.

Where Carthage failed, the movie Troy (director Wolfgang Petersen, Warner Brothers) succeeded. Troy is not a film of the Iliad – there were no gods, the war took only ten weeks, and there are major discrepancies over who died, when, and how. Yet we were really impressed. Not only was Troy fun, but the cinematography was superb, the soundtrack phenomenal and the battle scenes spectacular. Why are we reviewing this in an archaeology magazine? Because of the attention to detail in keeping the costumes, props and sets as archaeologically grounded as possible, despite Bronze Age warriors with iron weapons. Troy itself was real, the northern Turkish ruins brought to life through elaborate sets and computer graphics. Even the horse was believable.

We enjoyed this and felt we could be there in the story in a way that is not possible with broadcast factual output (as distinct from investigative, current affairs documentary programming). The vast effects departments of Troy indicate just how central that sense of materiality is to fiction film.However, it fell down in the script. The 15 hours of epic poetry had to be condensed, but we almost felt that too much attention was paid to creating a hyperreal experience through the clanging of weapons, the feel of cloth and so on.

We have all taken issue at one time or another with Hollywood’s misrepresentation of archaeology. However, we did not watch Troy to learn and we doubt that any audience did, although they may have felt they knew something about the conflict after watching it. More importantly for TV archaeology, perhaps, is the confidence with which fiction relies on mise en scène rather than narrative to drive the story. Maybe that is what connects Troy with Time Team’s D-Day: that understanding of the power of things, that we do not simply produce material culture, but that at a real level it produces us.

TV In BA was written by Rosemary Armitage, Shevaun Fergus and Edward Richardson, with Angela Piccini

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