Whither Ancient History?

Alun Life, Politics, The Past 3 Comments , ,

This week­end the Guard­ian blogs had Tom Hol­land post on the pro­posed abol­i­tion of Ancient His­tory. It’s lead to some debate. There’s a follow-up with let­ters from Peter Jones and Thomas Har­rison. In the com­ments there seem to be defences of scrap­ping Ancient His­tory, but they seem to be based on false premises.
More

300

Alun The Past 8 Comments , , ,

Sparta, View from by the Temple of Athena
Mod­ern Sparta

I went to see 300 and it was quite an exper­i­ence. The plot, and if you’re an ancient his­tor­ian you will need this explain­ing, is more or less as follows.

For no appar­ent reason an emis­sary arrives from Per­sia demand­ing a minor trib­ute. The king, Leo Nydas, refuses and asks the coun­cil to send an army to Ther­mo­pylae to fight the Per­sians. A woman takes her top off. The coun­cil refuses to send an army. Another woman takes her top off. Then Leo and 300 volun­teers go on a trip to Ther­mo­pylae to fight Per­sians for the remainder of the film in a het­ero­sexual way.

It’s not fair to judge the film by its his­tor­ical accur­acy. The Per­sians weren’t really Orcs. How­ever some of the inac­curacies are inter­est­ing because they reveal how badly we under­stand Sparta. There’s a point in the film where one of the coun­cil­men of Sparta is angry because the Queen hasn’t taken her top off recently. He tells her he’s a politi­cian rather than a war­rior. Ouch! The film itself makes clear that to be a Spartan was to be a war­rior. He also says that not all Spartans were born equal. But the Spartans, as opposed to the peri­oikoi or hel­ots (slaves) called them­selves the Homoioi, the Equals.

Does is work as an action movie? More

Archaeology is a Brand! by Cornelius Holtorf and illustrated by Quentin Drew

Alun Science, The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

Archaeology is a Brand! by Cornelius Holtorf and illustrated by Quentin DrewI did have some qualms about review­ing this book before it arrived. It’s a free review copy, so I was won­der­ing what to do if it turned out to be awful. I tend not to write neg­at­ive reviews if I can help it, unless some­thing is sur­pris­ingly bad, because I prefer to spend my time talk­ing about things which deserve atten­tion. For­tu­nately this remains an unsolved puzzle, because Archae­ology is a Brand! by Cor­nelius Holtorf and illus­trated by Quentin Drew is (unsur­pris­ingly) good.

In fact I shall be cheer­fully tak­ing ideas out of this book for a few posts in the future. The reason is that this book tackles an under-appreciated aspect of archae­ology, it’s pub­lic per­cep­tion. Holtorf argues that archae­ology is in an envi­able pos­i­tion com­pared to other aca­demic sub­jects as it is one of the few fields which seems to enjoy mass appeal. Yet des­pite this the pub­lic per­cep­tion of archae­ology seems to remain a major prob­lem for some in the pro­fes­sion. In one of the many quot­able pas­sages he says:

I have given up count­ing the num­ber of exhib­i­tions, edu­ca­tional events and pub­lic­a­tions that are shout­ing into the reader’s face that “the real archae­olo­gist works prac­tic­ally never like Indi­ana Jones/Lara Croft.” Trans­lated, that means as much as “If you hap­pen to be inter­ested in archae­ology because of Indi­ana Jones/Lara Croft, then this isn’t for you!” Archae­ology is thus sud­denly outed as a dif­fer­ent kind of ‘per­son’ that you thought and hoped it was, a per­son that lacks some of the traits you found most appealing.

Well so what? He con­tin­ues:

It is the equi­val­ent to Green­peace begin­ning a pub­lic present­a­tion about its work by stat­ing that “the real Green­peace act­iv­ist works prac­tic­ally never in a small rubber-dinghy fight­ing illegal whalers.” Although true, this would achieve noth­ing except ali­en­ate an ini­tially favour­able audi­ence before it has had an oppor­tun­ity to hear what you actu­ally want to convey.
p134

Cor­nelius Holtorf argues that the pub­lic per­cep­tion of archae­ology is of huge value, and that under­stand­ing how archae­ology is received by the pub­lic could be a major asset in pub­lic com­mu­nic­a­tion. Archae­olo­gists simply don’t know how well-loved they are.
More

I may have spotted an inaccuracy in Robin Hood

Alun Politics, The Past 4 Comments , , , , , , ,

Robin Hood
What is wrong with this pic­ture? Apart from the fact it isn’t of Marian.

I’ve tried to like the BBC’s new series Robin Hood. I know some people didn’t like it, but I thought the first epis­ode had some redeem­ing fea­tures and I think I’ve been proved right, because they were removed for the second epis­ode. I grudgingly admire the way they’ve sought to hide the poor qual­ity of the story by dis­tract­ing the viewer with truly awful cuts in edit­ing, but it’s not work­ing. Take the shot above for example. In the lead up to this Robin breaks into the Sheriff’s room and threatens him with an arrow. The Sher­iff, being Keith Allen, just laughs and sneers because he thinks Robin doesn’t have the guts to kill him. He’s prob­ably right, des­pite all the fight­ing no-one’s died yet. He sig­nals to a sol­dier sneak­ing up behind Robin. In an instant Robin turns round, shoots the guard dead and returns to threaten a now cower­ing Sher­iff. The prob­lem is that he didn’t kill the guard. The guard was a Merry Man act­ing dead. To pro­tect him from the arrow he was wear­ing a board over his heart, which you see later hence the shot above.

If the pro­gramme had a plot then this would be called a spo­lier, but fair play to the BBC they’ve done that already.
More

Time Team Conclusion

Alun The Past , , , ,

Buckingham Palace
Buck­ing­ham Palace, one of the sites in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by sml!

The final pro­gramme was fairly typ­ical of the whole week­end. The only site that was presen­ted as hav­ing moved on a lot was Buck­ing­ham Palace.

Buck­ing­ham Palace

If the earlier days at the palace has been like the final day then I’d have been won over. There was at last an obvi­ous plan of action where the archae­ology was mean­ing­ful. Using Ground-Penetrating Radar they were able to loc­ate the pos­i­tion of Arling­ton House and Gor­ing House, two pre­vi­ous build­ings on site. Of more interest to me was what they found in the garden. The strata revealed agri­cul­tural use. For some­where that’s in the centre of mod­ern Lon­don that’s inter­est­ing. You can ask how did open fields sur­vive to the sev­en­teenth cen­tury or flip the ques­tion round and ask what pro­cesses led urban Lon­don to migrate into this area? Either way you have an inter­est­ing prob­lem. They con­cluded the shape of the palace gar­dens was defined in pat by the medi­eval field sys­tems that it came to be built upon.

Wind­sor Castle

The excav­a­tion at the Round Table was slow. They have dated the build­ing to the four­teenth cen­tury, so it’s the right period. They also decided that the build­ing was an arena for reen­act­ment which was par­tially covered. I didn’t catch how their archae­olo­gical finds led to that con­clu­sion. Hav­ing found the site the pace has under­stand­ably slowed.

In the Lower Ward the Great Hall was in the second loc­a­tion they looked at, close to the cur­tain wall. The wall of the Great Hall was robbed out where they dug, but a look fur­ther along revealed it was still stand­ing to quite a height. The his­tor­ian got in a nice dig that “His­tory res­cues Archae­ology” in iden­tifing the wall. In a per­fect world you’d expect the two to inform each other.

Holyrood House

I com­pletely lost the point of this sec­tion. They didn’t find Queen Mary’s ten­nis court though I still didn’t under­stand why they’d want to. They did find tene­ments. This could have been inter­est­ing if they’d spent more time look­ing into it. The palace site became occu­pied by squat­ters who used it as a royal sanc­tu­ary to escape the law. This phase could be fas­cin­at­ing, how did the decline occur. How were the people evicted, when did the Royal Fam­ily reclaim the site and why? What we got was a quick com­ment that they’d found Vic­torian rubbish.

There were also missed oppor­tun­it­ies else­where. There was the bath house, which wasn’t a bath house. The build­ing was laser-scanned but I don’t know exactly what prob­lem they were hop­ing to solve with it. There was James IV’s lost tower which they found. That allowed them to check some plans of the lost palace, but the implic­a­tions of that were lost as they sped elsewhere.

- — -

Over­all I think the three days weren’t a tele­visual suc­cess, though I sus­pect they were archae­olo­gic­ally suc­cess­ful. The usual three-day dig is frantic, but with the edit­ing and nar­ra­tion done later there’s a chance to build a mean­ing­ful nar­rat­ive so that with hind­sight finds can be placed in their wider con­text. In this series of digs I never really under­stood what the con­text was, bey­ond “These sites are all Royal!” In the case of medi­eval Wind­sor and Holyrood that’s a really tenu­ous link. There could have been much more of interest in explor­ing the dif­fer­ences between the sites.

On the plus side there are grounds for optim­ism. This is pre­sum­ably being filmed dur­ing the 2007 series sched­ule. The chem­istry between the presenters is still there and when they iden­ti­fied a prob­lem they weren’t bad at tack­ling it. The pro­gramme has sur­vived the loss of one or two mem­bers of the team, and the fash­ion among some TV sta­tions to take some­thing that works and ‘update’ it. While these pro­grammes were miss­able I reckon if they get their hands on a good Roman site in the new series, it’ll remain excel­lent TV.

You can read more about the Big Royal Dig at Chan­nel 4.

Time Team on Sunday

Alun The Past 4 Comments , , , ,

Windsor Castle
Wind­sor Castle on of the loc­a­tions in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by this­Ro­bot.

It’s as if they’ve listened to Alan’s com­ments and decided to prove him right. The Sunday pro­gramme was worse than the Sat­urday pro­gramme, partly because of the split between the sites.

Buck­ing­ham Palace

They’ve con­firmed that they’ve found the canal. Addi­tion­ally parch­marks on the lawn show where they think the steps lead­ing to the canal were. There were two seg­ments that per­suaded me that a good pro­gramme on the his­tory of Buck­ing­ham Palace could be made. One was the phrase “polit­ical gardener” that they dropped in when dis­cuss­ing the sit­ing of the palace. They were inter­est­ing on how the Duke of Buck­ing­ham used pre-existing land­scape fea­tures to emphas­ise his own prestige and how he manip­u­lated the garden to amp­lify this.

The other good bit was the brief trip into the wine cel­lars of the Palace. Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging things up, and they scratched the sur­face of what some exam­in­a­tion of the lower levels of the palace could tell you about its his­tory. Sadly I still don’t see how either fits into the prob­lem they’re research­ing, but then I can’t work out what the prob­lem they want to solve at Buck­ing­ham Palace is. It seems to simply “Wahey! We’re at the palace let’s see what we can dig up!” — which isn’t at all like Time Team usu­ally is.

This was par­ticuarly brought home when they recon­struc­ted what Buck­ing­ham House would have looked like. The recon­struc­tion was good, but based on maps and his­tor­ical records. I couldn’t see why any excav­a­tion was necessary.

Wind­sor Castle

The digs at Wind­sor Castle are quite a con­trast to the Buck­ing­ham Palace digs, but not without prob­lems. In the Upper Ward they’ve found the Round Table, the best bit being a bit of floor tile in situ. Floor tile can be dat­able by its pat­tern­ing, so it’s feas­ible that by the final show they’ll be con­clus­ively be able to say where the Round Table is — if not what it was used for. Though I’ll be hon­est I’m not sure why any­one would want to tile the floor of an arena. There are lim­it­a­tions on where they can go with this due to the pro­tec­ted nature of the site.

In the Lower Ward things are just as inter­est­ing, but prob­ably a lot less tele­visual. They haven’t found the Great Hall. They seem to have dug to the right level, but it’s not there. That’s inter­est­ing because it does mean that the under­stand­ing of the lay­out of the Castle in Henry II or III’s time is wrong. They’re look­ing else­where and the inform­a­tion they get could mean that the under­stand­ing of how the castle developed is greatly changed. In light of this the care­ful plan­ning makes slightly more sense in that it appears to have been done to settle whether or not the Great Hall was where is was expec­ted to be. Fas­cin­at­ing stuff, but it’s hard to show no major finds on TV and get excited about them. Nev­er­the­less this might have been the most excit­ing find on last night.

Holyrood House

The seg­ment was the last of the three to get a lot of air time, and a lot of that was a brief his­tory of Mary Queen of Scots. This site is where Alan is right in say­ing the pace is too quick. There’s a lot of inter­est­ing strati­graphy at Holyrood House with lay­ers from dif­fer­ent times obscur­ing each other in pos­sibly unex­pec­ted ways. Strati­graphy is one of these con­cepts which sounds simple, new stuff over­lays old stuff, but when newer drains are cut through older depos­its it starts get­ting dif­fi­cult to keep a grip on it. Sadly there’s simply not the time given to the excav­a­tion that it deserves.

It gets more bizarre with the new trench they’re open­ing to find Mary’s ten­nis court — hence the long his­tory sec­tion. This is a sched­uled monu­ment, they’re not open­ing trenches on a whim so they’ve got a good reason to dig there. Maybe the maps are ambi­gious or con­tra­dict­ory there, but if they gave a reason I missed it. It seems they’re simply keen to see where she played tennis.

- — -

Over­all I don’t think the three sites are work­ing well together. I can see why they have three sites — they have to have a pro­gramme by the dead­line and hav­ing three excav­a­tions max­im­ises the chances of hav­ing some­thing to talk about and three-site pro­grammes have worked in the past. The spe­cial they did at York look­ing at a Roman, Vik­ing and Post-med site, was excel­lent. I think the dif­fer­ence is that in that case the finds from each site also fed into an over­arch­ing nar­rat­ive. This isn’t hap­pen­ing this year. If the word Royal isn’t over­whelm­ingly excit­ing, there’s no com­mon thread. At each site they have to explain the his­tory and the loc­a­tion. Three medi­eval sites would have been inter­est­ing, or multi-period digs on one site, but three sites from three peri­ods is too diffuse.

There are two good pro­grammes they could have made on the archae­ology of the sites. Hope­fully when it con­cludes tonight they’ll prove me wrong and they’ll have some­thing archae­olo­gic­ally inter­est­ing from Buck­ing­ham Palace.

Time Team on Saturday

Alun The Past 6 Comments , , ,

Holyrood House
Holyrood House one of the sites in the Big Royal Dig. Photo by Ozz­zie.

Don’t know if I’ll write a proper entry on this so here are my notes. There are bits I missed or mis­un­der­stood, par­tic­u­larly on the Buck­ing­ham Palace dig, so it’s not going to be a 100% accur­ate account of the programme.

19:25

Stock foot­age of Royal pomp to remind us what roy­alty is. Doesn’t she ever get tired of hear­ing that tune?

19:30

For­tu­nately the pro­gramme resur­faces from what could have been wear­ingly hagi­o­graphic. They’re explain­ing how George IV decided he needed a fan­cier house, hence Buck­ing­ham Palace. George’s lack fo restraint appar­ently exten­ded to thou­sands of mis­tresses, alogn with his open fin­ances and massive ego. Buck­ing­ham Palace is part of a rivalry with Napo­leon. He wanted to sur­pass Napoleon’s imper­ial palaces by import­ing French fur­niture en masse. “George IV was the most the­at­rical mon­arch.” The bill came to 3/4 mil­lion pounds. The mod­ern equi­val­ent is £1.7 billion.

19:40

They start Pick­ing apart the phases of Buck­ing­ham Palace. Sur­pris­ingly little known before Gor­ing House. Geo­phys­ics, usu­ally a magic wand for the pro­gramme fails. They go into more detail into the build­ing of Buck­ing­ham House to explain more about what they might find. Brief his­tory of Buck­ing­ham House. It owned by the Duke of Buck­ing­ham, a man who after mak­ing “a brisk attempt on the King’s Daugh­ter” was banned from palace and pos­ted to Tangi­ers. Mar­ried ille­git­im­ate daugh­ter of the last Stu­art King.

19:45

They’ve not found the canal, but they reckon they have found the course of the River Tyburn by cor­ing. The reason they don’t think it’s a canal is that the sed­i­ments are coarse grains. Canals it seems carry fine grains because their flow is more gen­teel. They decide to open a trench so they bring in the dig­ger. They’re run­ning the dig­ger along boards across the lawn!

Digger at Buckingham Palace

19:50

They’ve found a brick. It must be some­thing about the name Phil. The trench does not look fun. The base is all clayey and stodgy. Five seconds later… I win the slow on the uptake award for the day. What else would you line a canal with? The bricks are also part of the lin­ing. The canal is orna­mental, a garden fea­ture. From this we know the upper-classes used to like nice gar­dens. The canal may have oblit­er­ated the earlier remains on site.
More

Time Team’s Big Royal Dig

Alun The Past 6 Comments , ,

[Cross-posted to Revise & Dis­sent]

Time Team at the Palace
Tony and Phil visit the Queen to get per­mis­sion to dig up her lawn.

I like Time Team even though it’s fash­ion­able to scoff at it. For any­one who hasn’t seen it, it’s an archae­ology doc­u­ment­ary series. Rather than talk about what has been found though, it fol­lows the pro­cess of an archae­olo­gical dig over three days. Its not a view of a typ­ical dig, there are masses of equip­ment that simply aren’t avail­able to the aver­age excav­a­tion teams and it only lasts three days, but it’s a very good attempt at show­ing the archae­olo­gical pro­cess. In recent years the idea has been taken fur­ther with ‘live’ digs. These are digs usu­ally over the August bank hol­i­day where instead of the one-hour sum­mary you get daily shows on the finds.

This year they’re hit­ting three sites similtan­eously: Buck­ing­ham Palace, Wind­sor Castle and Holyrood­house as part of their Big Royal Dig. That’s a lot of medi­eval and post-medieval archae­ology for one week­end — but they did have a Big Roman Dig a couple of years back, so I can see the attrac­tion of the palaces. My ini­tial reac­tion was that this was a mis­take. The three sites are dif­fer­ent. Buck­ing­ham Palace is quite mod­ern, while Wind­sor Castle was a Nor­man found­a­tion. Holyrood­house, belongs to another royal tra­di­tion and the three sites have ten­ded to have dif­fer­ent func­tions. Bey­ond the fact they’re asso­ci­ated with mod­ern roy­alty is there enough to sens­ibly draw them together? Hav­ing seen the first pro­gramme last night I think there might be, and it’s the mod­ern con­nec­tion that makes the pro­gramme inter­est­ing. It’s the dif­fer­ence that could high­light what the Brit­ish per­ceive as regal and how that has changed over time. If I can get over my own repub­lic­an­ism* then it could be an inter­est­ing weekend.

Improve­ments in com­mu­nic­a­tions for this dig over pre­vi­ous years are plen­ti­ful. As before Chan­nel 4 has a web­site, but this year there’s a lot more to it. There are also blogs being updated through­out the day and live live cov­er­age on More4. If you can’t get More4 then you’re miss­ing the oppor­tun­ity of watch­ing someone scrape a trowel over the same block of bricks for ten minutes. Or the archae­olo­gist who patiently cleans a trench by pulling back the loose soil and softly swears under his breath as the cam­era fol­lows him along — stand­ing in front of him.

If you can register and get the link to work you can also watch the show over the net via a sim­ul­cast. It’s on at 19:25 to 21:25 today, 20:00 to 21:00 tomor­row and 21:00 to 22:00 on Monday — all times BST.

*To say you’re a repub­lican in the UK car­ries a dif­fer­ent mean­ing to the USA. A Brit­ish repub­lican thinks it’s a bad idea for someone to become Head of State simply because their father was.

Academic Idol — or do we need Historical Rock Stars?

Alun Politics, Science 2 Comments , , ,

The BC-52's
The BC-52’s — His­tor­ical Rock Stars.

Pick­ing up from Coturnix and Afar­en­sis there’s a dis­cus­sion about Sci­ent­ist Rock Stars. It comes from a com­ment by Mor­gan Spur­lock:

We’ve star­ted to make sci­ence and empir­ical evid­ence not nearly as import­ant as punditry–people using p.r.-speak to push a cor­por­ate or polit­ical agenda. I think we need to turn sci­ent­ists back into the rock stars they are.

I’ll widen the net by look­ing at it from a His­tory and Archae­ology per­spect­ive and then take that back to the sciences.

Assum­ing the stars can­not be fic­tional, and ideally not dead so that they can inter­act with the media, are there any his­tor­i­ans or archae­olo­gists that the pub­lic get excited about?
More

1 2 3 4