Why Dont You Blog?

TW’s last post referred to the New Scientist report that archaeologists are displaying common decency and refusing to list monuments to be protected in the event of a US strike on Iran.

Clearly, America hates anywhere that starts with the letters “IR”

And needs help to draw up attack maps. I will do the job that the archaeologists are too humane to do and list places that the US might like to attack:

• Iraq (Sorry, too late, they already thought of that )
• Iran
• Ireland
• the Iroquois nation (Sorry, too late)

Well there’s only Ireland left. And I don’t think it’s overburdened with recognised world-class archaeological sites to obstruct the handily disposable population. Be very afraid, people of Dublin. (Dublin museum has some fantastic Viking era relics but the site they came from has already been dug up, with an office block stuck over it. The artefacts are all in the museum, in handily lootable form.)

Don’t worry, USA. I checked your own states and only 4 even start with the letter “I” (Idaho, Illinois,Indiana, Iowa) However, I don’t want to worry the citizens of these states but you may be next in the frame after Ireland. Or at least, after wars have been waged against Italy (Luckily for Italy, it has way too much archaeology to be a first strike choice), Iceland, Indonesia and the Isle of Man. Oh, and Israel… (well maybe not that one.)

A few more suggestions for quick and easy wins, thanks to online dictionaries and wikapedia:

• Irish stew (an Irish excursion should do for this without using any extra firepower)
• Iridium (some sort of chemical. No idea if this is actually part of weapons tech but that would be killing two birds with one stone if it was)
• Ira Gershwin (He seems to be dead though.)
• Irenaeus 2nd century bishop of Lugdunum, Gaul (He’s likely to be already dead too. He may even count as archaeology.)
• Irapuã - a municipality in São Paulo state (seems to have population of 6,000 or so, barely worth the effort)
• Irony
  (Not much good. You can’t wage war on an abstract noun, can you? Oh sorry, yes, you can. Terror. Drugs. Obesity, even. Ok irony stays in)

Popularity: 12% [?]

Popularity: 12% [?]

Charges were dropped against 6 people who were arrested in July, when they protested at a council meeting against the remains of the 4,000 year-old Rotherwas Ribbon being buried under a road.

The road building is going ahead. Hereford Council has a site with its news. It seems that, after unsuccessfully and half-heartedly trying to pass it off as a natural artefact, the council’s arguments are:

• the roadbuilding uncovered it in the first place;
• they’ve done everything they reasonably could to get it investigated;
• covering it up won’t do it any harm;
• moving the road would damage other nearby sites;
• the cabinet office says go ahead with the road as fast as possible

All reasonable points. It still seems a pity that we have to discard irreplaceable treasures just to make yet another road.

There is interesting information on the Ribbon on the Megalithic Portal written by one of the people in our blogroll at the right, Alun Salt from clioaudio

He says:

Archaeologists believe this major find may have no parallels in Europe, with the closest similar artefact being the 2,000-year-old serpent mounds of the Ohio river valley in America.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

On Discovery Civilisation (UK version) today, Tony Robinson claimed to have unearthed the “real” heir to the British throne. (I assume this was a repeat of old programme, which I never saw. Noone needs to catch history and science programmes on terrestrial TV if they have cable…)

Humbug! “Real” heir to the throne, indeed? It turned out to be an English Lord somebody who was living in the Australian desert. As an English Lord, albeit no longer owning stately acreage, it was hardly a surprise to him that he was an aristocrat. He hardly needed the genetic fingerprinting, but it got thrown in anyway , so the progarmme seemed more like serious science.

This is the sort of nonsense that passes for history programmes on TV. How do you define “real heir” to the throne? It appears you

• ignore 6 centuries of history, in which the monarchy was abolished and reinstated, and in which contenders to the throne have been imported from Holland or brought as marriage partners from Greece and Germany
• assume the House of Windsor (nee Battenburg) is somehow functionally identical with the House of Tudor
• go back no further than the Plantagents. No need for stressful searching out of Harald’s family or Cnut’s or Aelfred’s, let alone the descendants of Boudicca and the other pre-Roman ruling families
• base your whole claim on one missing marriage from the times of the Plantagenets
• assume the whole nature of royalty is passed on in the blood rather than struggled over in the real world

This is taking the history - the struggles over power and wealth - out of History and replacing it with a strange genetic determinist alternative pesudohistory.

I have ranted before about how TV archeaology’s 3-day-limited bulldozing of sites makes it necessary to find something amazing everywhere - or at least to make an impressive 3-d graphic reconstruction if the best find is a chipped piece of pot.

Is there now also an audience for this absurd genetic determinism? Some dumbing down is more than stupid. It can distort the very nature of how we understand history and society.

You were good in BlackAdder, Tony. In fact, you can get a better understanding of the past from the average Black Adder episode than from 30 Time Team episodes or, Toutatis forbid, Real Royal Family shows.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

This blog (as a collective being) loves megalithic structures and sites.

So, it was interesting to read on clioaudio’s excellent blog and in an English Heritage press release that Silbury Hill is being excavated.

Ironically,the half-arsed attempts to nose around in Silbury Hill were what is putting it at risk, after about 4000 years of being pretty solid. It’s a pyramid shaped man-made hill so it was inherently steady.

It was dug into by the Duke of Northumberland, in 1777, and by a Professor Atkinson, in the 1960s. The shafts they dug have made the monument unstable. Hence English Heritage is going in to shore it up with concrete. Hmm.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Popularity: 32% [?]

If you were ever entranced by reading HP Lovecraft or Victorian horror stories as a kid you will know that the word “necropolis” has a fascinating but chilling power. ** This news item is for you.

A BBC reports archaeological discoveries in the Saqqara necropolis south of Cairo. It is estimated that only about a third of the finds in the site have been discovered.

These are three to four thousand year sold and include a carved wooden sarcophagus (another fantastic word) and the tombs of a royal scribe and a butler.
There are sketchy pictures on the BBC site but the paintings and carving still look amazing.

It seems a little ironic. Ancient Egyptian culture was so focussed on preparing for the afterlife that bodies and artefacts can revealed as fresh to us, who live almost an eternity, in human terms, after them.* So the technology was pretty effective, it’s just the god stuff that didn’t quite pan out.

Although, ancient Egyptian gods are generally pretty engaging, with their jackal heads, and so on. And they kept plenty of artists and builders in work. It’s a pity at least some of them aren’t still around.

* In fact, from the creationist perspective they might have almost predated the creation of the universe, unless I’ve mixed up whatever 4,000 years is. (Maybe it was 4,000 BC. I am buggered if I am going to pay enough attention to the rantings to find out) That makes it an actual eternity. It makes you wonder why the Abrahamic world-religion God started out with a people who didn’t even recognise him, let alone pay constant obeisance to him. You think he’d have demanded a few first-born son sacrifices or handed out rules cut into stone or something, not just damned them as unchosen.

**And yes, I know all that Victorian exotica and horror stuff was a mixture of imperialism and childlike fascination with the Orient. Edward Said was completely right to criticise it. And the Victorian distortion applies to all history, the Victorian story-telling that turned snippets of historical information into myths, (Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Vikings, and all). The knowledge doesn’t stop it having power over the imagination, though.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Popularity: 23% [?]

A huge settlement has been dug up at Durrington Walls, Wiltshire (near Stonehenge) according to the BBC. The BBC has footage and a radio summary as well.
This is fascinating. All the same, I can’t resist a rant about the BBC report and the archaeologists’ comments, assuming the BBC quoted them correctly.

• Firstly, the article is entitled “Stonehenge builders’ houses found.” Surely this says that the homes of the Stonehenge builders have been located. Clearly not.
  The body of the article says that the “The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC, the same period that Stonehenge was built.” Well, this is precise to within 100 years. I didn’t know that we could date Stone Age remains with such precision (but I will assume that some scientific method, such as radio-carbon dating was used, rather than assumptions based on “culture.” ) Giving the researchers the benefit of the doubt that both structures were built in the same 100 year period, where is there any evidence that the people who lived here put in shifts on Stonehenge? I’d love to be proved wrong on this but it seems unlikely.
• If it was the builders’ village, why did they carry out miles of extra walking every night, after a tough day’s megalithic rock shifting? Durrington is “near” Stonehenge, if you are in a car driving along the Salisbury road. It is no mean stretch on foot.
• The text suggests that the archaeologists have identified a huge village. Why do they have to assume that it was mainly a ritual site? Did Stone Age people not bother with the normal business of living ANYWHERE? Do we only care about ritual sites? So, when we find signs of everyday life, they have no value unless they can be tied to a ritual site? (Preferably, one that’s known around the world and would attract preferential funding?)
• Orienting sites to get the most sunshine in the winter must have been a practical necessity before electric light. We build our own houses to get the most light in the kitchen. Does facing the winter sun necessarily suggest some obscure calendrical purpose, what about practical architectural knowledge?
• The claim is that the site wasn’t occupied all year round- hence it was ritual in origin. From my limited understanding of early agricultural societies, I would have thought that some of the year would be spent in semi-nomadic search of food. After wandering around finding the best sources of game and vegetables, a return to permanent winter quarters makes senses. With little else to do in the bleak months, humans create occasions, like Christmas, to fill their time and cement social bonds. This doesn’t mean that rituals are the primary purpose of the winter lay-off, rather that the ceremonies are created during the leisure and social time it provides.
• Another piece of “evidence” for a largely ritual purpose is the large number of burials on the site. It was a large village. People must have been died with regularity. Do our current cities exist for mainly ritual purposes because we bury or cremate our dead within them?

Congratulations on a really important find. This rant is just a complaint that archaeology can be blinkered by ritual-centrism. This stops us from seeing Stone Age peoples as human beings - our own not very remote ancestors - who must have had more urgent things to do than to spend their entire lives focussed on cosmic rituals.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Popularity: 33% [?]

Great programme on Channel 5 tonight. Current archaeology in Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Incredibly only a quarter of Herculaneum has been excavated. Fantastic things on this programme included wooden furniture, half-painted statues, half-painted frescos.

It also showed my favourite thing- the pavements and kerbs and stepping stones.

There was a fascinating trip down an incredibly sophisticated sewer system. They also looked at human excrement and various odds and ends using an electron microscope. There was a visit to a baker’s shop and they showed how the grain was ground. The oven was brilliant- just like the sort often used today to bake pizzas. There was even a loaf of Roman bread.

Catch the repeats or buy the dvd if they release it.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

This is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the shortest in the Southern Hemisphere). This is as good an excuse as any to go to visit megalithic sites. A few thousand people were at Stonehenge and smaller number at Avebury and, no doubt, people went to many sites around the UK and Europe. Some of these people are so engagingly and entertainingly eccentric that you want to capture them for your own private zoo. Most are just people with a developed sense of history.

It’s hard to quarrel with anything that gets people enjoying visiting prehistoric sites. The automatic association between the summer solstice and megalithic sites is sometimes a little doubtful though. Some sites appear to be better understood as midwinter sites, anyway. I just object to the way that practical considerations rarely enter into our thoughts about these sites. No one considers that they may have been used in any other way than the rituals we project onto their builders, thus distancing us from any sense of their builders as just like ourselves. Which inadvertently opening the conceptual gate for those who think the stones were levitated into place or dropped by aliens.

We happily believe that generations of people would do the enormous amounts of work needed to construct these monuments, just for the sight of the sun coming up in one location on one particular day of the year (if there are no clouds - which is rare in the UK). If this were the sole purpose of these constructions, I suspect a simple sundial would have sufficed.

One of my cavils is with the idea of ceremonies being held on a specific day (the Solstice) and of people having to travel miles to attend them.

We are asked to contemplate people with no clocks or calendars except the likes of Stonehenge. So how do they know they are leaving on the right day, for a journey that may take weeks, until they get there?

You can only solve this problem by imagining a scenario where the religious leaders have to check the sun’s alignment everyday as it approaches midsummer, then have to send out messages to all their potential congregation a couple of weeks or so before the Solstice to tell them the time is close. Otherwise, everyone would have to have their own mini solstice clocks so they could tell when it was 5 to midsummer and start planning their journey.

Yes, this blog is ridiculous. It’s just a challenge to accepting whatever the latest archaeological fashion says is the purpose of these awe-inspiring creations.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]