Something, somewhere, has gone terribly wrong

May 29, 2005 Alun The Past 7 Comments Archaeology, Art, Art History, Ice Age, Nigel Spivey, Palaeolithic, Review, Television

I see this has been lis­ted on the Car­ni­val of Bad His­tory. Vis­it­ors from there might find the first post­ing on How Art Made the World useful.

I saw Epis­ode II of How Art Cre­ated Made the World on cave art and the inven­tion of the image and I felt a bit guilty about run­ning down the pro­gramme in the pre­vi­ous week. Nigel Spivey con­cen­trated on Palaeo­lithic art and com­pared it to eth­no­graph­ical records of the San of Nam­i­bia. I wasn’t sure I agreed with it all but it seemed plaus­ible and I thought it was a much bet­ter pro­gramme. There was still some­thing that bothered me, but I couldn’t put my fin­ger on it.

I found out what it was in Epis­ode III. This was the one where Spivey’s ambi­tion drove him to the clutches of the Dark Side.

Ken­neth Feder wrote about read­ing Morn­ing of the Magi­cians in his book on pseudo-archaeology: Frauds, Myths, and Mys­ter­ies: Sci­ence and Pseudos­cience in Archae­ology. He said that it was one of these secret lost wis­dom of an ancient high civil­isa­tion etc books. It all seemed very plaus­ible. That is until he got to the bit of the book where the author wrote on some­thing Feder knew some­thing about. That was com­plete tosh. That when Feder real­ised that if the author was equally bad about the other fields then he, Feder, wouldn’t be in any pos­i­tion to tell.

I thought Spivey was good on Palaeo­lithic cave art and his com­par­ison to African sites. But while I have a few books on Palaeo­lithic art, I haven’t actu­ally got round to read­ing them prop­erly yet. Des­pite my fer­vent wishes the know­ledge doesn’t leak out like radio­activ­ity. On top of that I know noth­ing about African art. I’ve already said Spivey is an excel­lent presenter, but all that means is that if he was talk­ing non­sense he’d simply do it much more con­vin­cingly than me. How can I tell if what he says is any good?

I found out in the third epis­ode on Art and Polit­ics, which was poor.

There were two sort of fault in the pro­gramme. The first was opin­ion. He seemed to be arguing that Augus­tus secured the empire with a clever use of imagery. I’ll con­cede that he was a mas­ter manip­u­lator of image and that his use of pro­pa­ganda did help. Yet I can’t also help but won­der if the pres­ence of an army at Actium also helped. This is a mat­ter of opin­ion. I say one thing, he can say another and with him being the boffin of Clas­sical Art at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity I have to con­cede that I may be wrong. He should have a bet­ter grasp of the facts than me. Which brings me to the second sort of error.

“This [Stone­henge] is the biggest pre­his­toric monu­ment in Europe”. I’ve wound the DVD back to check that. Those were his words. It’s not even the biggest pre­his­toric monu­ment in Wilt­shire. I don’t know in what sense he’s using the word ‘big’. Big in area? Ave­bury is so massive it holds a vil­lage in its centre. Big in volume? Sil­bury Hill was the biggest pre­his­toric mound in Europe. I sup­pose he could mean big in the sense that U2 are the biggest rock group in the world des­pite there only being four of them of aver­age height and weight.

I doubt he means big in the U2 sense because he also says later that “The people who lived around Stone­henge would have worn noth­ing but simple animal skins.” There’s evid­ence of tex­tiles from the Palaeo­lithic period. We know they must have had rope, which shows pro­cessing of nat­ural mater­i­als in the Neo­lithic, unless you want to believe that Stone­henge was built by hand. It seems that when I know the facts I find Spivey at best shal­low or at worst flatly wrong. This makes me feel like a ped­ant, but it reveals a cas­ual unfa­mili­ar­ity with evid­ence that runs through the pro­gramme and under­mines any con­fid­ence in it.

This both­ers me a lot. There is so much you can say about the his­tory of Art which means a lot more than “Hey look at this pretty vase!” There are ser­i­ous ques­tions to ask about cog­ni­tion. Why do we have art when no other animal does? Spivey should be a good choice for the series. He is tech­nic­ally a very good presenter. Yet the whole pack­age isn’t work­ing. My Da, who will often tell me how much I could make as an account­ant, saw this. “He’s just pick­ing out the bits of evid­ence to sup­port his pet the­ory. In his own way he’s like that guy who traces everything back to 10,000 BC.” Some­thing, some­where, has gone ter­ribly wrong.
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