Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?

Alun Life, The Past 1 Comment , , , , ,

Cromford Canal

Crom­ford Canal. Click for lar­ger image.

It’s easy to take a World Her­it­age Site for gran­ted when it’s on your door­step. I had thought of shoot­ing a short port­fo­lio of Crom­ford for a com­pet­i­tion. They required ten pho­tos. After look­ing into the pro­ject I’ve decided that the com­pet­i­tion isn’t going to hap­pen for me, but a short photo essay on Crom­ford, or pos­sibly the Derwent Val­ley Mills, remains an inter­est­ing idea.

Indus­trial Archae­ology can get short shrift from other archae­olo­gists. Often there’s writ­ten records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archae­ology neces­sary? Mark Hen­shaw, the Archae­ology Dude, makes a good argu­ment that Archae­ology can draw mul­tiple lines of evid­ence to inform his­tor­ies of the past. I wouldn’t dis­count that, and I think his point, Archae­ology isn’t just about dig­ging, is very import­ant from an Amer­ican per­spect­ive because there Archae­ology is seen as a branch of Anthro­po­logy. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archae­ology paired with His­tory or Clas­sics. So do we really need Indus­trial Archae­olo­gists when there so many Early Mod­ern Historians.

I think another factor Archae­ology brings is spa­tial think­ing. Look­ing at the early days of the pro­fes­sion­al­isa­tion of Archae­ology in Bri­tain, one of the fea­tures is an attempt to dis­tin­guish Archae­ology from His­tory by tak­ing on ideas of Geo­graphy. People like OGS Craw­ford were keen to emphas­ise that Archae­ology stud­ied human activ­it­ies in space as well as time. Again, in the UK, when Pro­ces­su­al­ism was tak­ing off in the USA, the Brit­ish aca­dem­ics took inspir­a­tion from it, but also from the ‘New’ Geo­graphy.

The Manager's House, Cromford.

The Manager’s House, Cromford.

Apply­ing this prac­tic­ally, it’s easy to say what the pos­i­tion­ing of the Fact­ory Manager’s house, oppos­ite the main gate of Arkwright’s Mill at Crom­ford, means by its loc­a­tion. There are other more subtle ques­tions though. What did draw­ing a second water chan­nel through the Derwent Val­ley mean for land use and access­ib­il­ity? Why was Willers­ley Castle, a grand house that Ark­wright built for him­self, placed where it was? How did it relate to the church he built? If you want to know why a mill owner would want to build a church for his work­ers then, as Mark Hen­shaw says, you have to look at his­tor­ical records too.

You can write a his­tory purely from his­tor­ical records and archives, but if you want to exam­ine the human exper­i­ence, espe­cially of humans that weren’t writ­ing much, then an Indus­trial Archae­ology can yield a richer, more four-dimensional exper­i­ence, than Anthro­po­logy or His­tory alone.

Survey: How do you know you’re doing it right?

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Archae­olo­gical sur­veys tend to be samples of a site. How do you know you’re doing it right when you can’t see the arte­facts you’ve missed? Couldn’t you be miss­ing large chunks of inform­a­tion because it’s not what you’re expect­ing to see? David Pet­ti­grew guest blogs at The Archae­ology of the Medi­ter­ranean World,

Theorising Space Archaeology

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The future archae­olo­gical site of Spa­ce­port Amer­ica. Photo (cc) Jared Tar­bell

There’s a thought-provoking post on Space Archae­ology about how you define the term Space Archae­ology. I’ve gen­er­ally just thought of it as the archae­ology of remains asso­ci­ated with space­flight, but I’ve never seen the need to give the defin­i­tion any ser­i­ous thought. It’s a small enough field as it is without draw­ing up bound­ar­ies. Steve Wilson (I assume, the blog is uncred­ited) has given it more thought, and he’s come up with a much more inter­est­ing way of look­ing at it. He sees Space Archae­ology as being made up from Aerospace Archae­ology (the bit I was think­ing about), Xenoar­chae­ology (the mater­ial remains of alien civil­isa­tions) and Exoar­chae­ology (any mater­ial remains that are offworld).

My first reac­tion was does this add any­thing? Adding in Xenoar­chae­ology is awk­ward as there are no known alien arte­facts. There’s crank mater­ial of ancient astro­nauts and vari­ous forms of SETI which are anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns and not spe­cific­ally archae­olo­gical. Adding Exoar­chae­ology only adds fic­tional mater­ial. Things like the archae­ology of ter­ra­form­ing would fit in this cat­egory. As it stands it only adds an archae­ology of things that don’t exist. The dia­gram also excludes Space Her­it­age and Space Junk, which do exist. As a defin­i­tion, I’m don’t think it helps. How­ever as an ana­lyt­ical tool, I think it could be very clever.

I’ll start with Xenoar­chae­ology, because that’s the field that’s easi­est to dis­miss as barmy. What’s the evid­ence of palaeo­con­tact? There isn’t any really. But think­ing about how people do Xenoar­chae­ology, and what would be neces­sary to show the pres­ence of alien mater­ial on earth could be use­ful. Tools developed in this area can then be applied to ‘crash sites’ like Roswell in the dia­gram where Xenoar­chae­ology and Aerospace Archae­ology inter­sect. You won’t learn any­thing about alien civil­isa­tions by study­ing Roswell, but you could learn about how humans react to per­ceived alien vis­it­a­tion. Such research could have helped at Caran­cas. Like­wise a ser­i­ous study of how xenoar­chae­ology is prac­ticed could give genu­inely use­ful insights into the assump­tions in SETI programmes.

Sim­il­arly Exoar­chae­ology poses its own prob­lems when look­ing at inac­cess­ib­il­ity. Think­ing about these issues could high­light how the archae­ology of space­flight in orbital space makes demands and chal­lenges that we simply don’t have on the ground. Think­ing about it this way Space Her­it­age and Space Junk could straddle every zone between Exoar­chae­ology and Space Archae­ology. It depends on whether you class the human waste mat­ter on the Moon as part of Aerospace Archae­ology or not. I’d include Space Junk / Exog­ar­bology too, because a lot of ter­restrial archae­ology is the study of junk.

While Space Archae­olo­gists might not need bound­ar­ies, draw­ing up defin­i­tions can high­light what makes a field inter­est­ing and also throw some basic assump­tions that need ques­tion­ing. The one that both­ers me is the idea of Xenoarchaeology.

Oddly, it’s not the Xeno bit. I could be pedantic and say archae­ology is the study of the human past through mater­ial remains. Still, the stick­ing with human is a throw­back to the early nine­teenth cen­tury when Man (prefer­ably with a mous­tache and stovepipe hat) was a cre­ation apart from the anim­als. Early palaeo­lithic archae­ology, palae­on­to­logy and prim­ato­logy are sim­ilar enough that it’s look­ing more and more like an arbit­rary dis­tinc­tion about where human ends. It’s the archae­ology bit that troubles me. The study through mater­ial remains when, so far as is known, there are no known mater­ial remains of extra-terrestrial activ­ity near Earth. I think study­ing the human reac­tion to pro­posed alien inter­ven­tions is an inter­est­ing research prob­lem. We study ancient faiths, so why not study mod­ern faiths too? It’s just that archae­ology isn’t always the best way of doing it. Some­times a bet­ter approach is anthropology.

Think­ing about Space Anthro­po­logy could have two advant­ages. One is that it recog­nises the inter­est­ing work done by eth­no­graph­ers. Alice Gor­man has poin­ted out that indi­gen­ous peoples have a rough enough time as it is get­ting any recog­ni­tion in their sac­ri­fices for space explor­a­tion. Tak­ing American-style four-field anthro­po­logy as a model also points to some other inter­est­ing research top­ics. For example is there any­thing bio­anthro­po­logy could con­trib­ute, and how do bio­anthro­po­lo­gical con­cerns integ­rate with research that is already being done?

I real­ise that by now my response is a bit longer than the ori­ginal post, which was flag­ging up an idea and not inten­ded as a fully formed model of Space Archae­ology. Even so I think it’s an inter­est­ing way of think­ing about what archae­olo­gists of space explor­a­tion do. I’d love to see it developed further.

World Archaeoastronomy

Alun The Past 1 Comment ,

rabbitmoon
Does every­one see the same Moon around the world? Photo (cc) Luz A. Villa

Last week I put up a review of Ed Krupp’s Sky­watch­ers, Sham­ans and Kings, which was a book about archae­oastro­nomy around the world. Next week or the week after, I hope, it’ll be Anthony Aveni’s People and the Sky, which is a book about the vari­ous uses people had for the sky using vari­ous examples from around the world. I’m also try­ing to get my hands on Giulio Magli’s new book, Mys­ter­ies and Dis­cov­er­ies of Archae­oastro­nomy. The sub­title is From Pre-history to Easter Island, which should be a hint that he looks at prac­tices around the world, though he has a twist in the second half of the book. It’s an approach you could all World Archaeoastronomy.

Mar­tin Rundk­v­ist has said about Archae­ology that it’s a heav­ily region­al­ised dis­cip­line. His view is that if all Japan­ese archae­ology dis­ap­peared overnight, that really wouldn’t have much effect on Vik­ing archae­ology. While there may be sim­ilar interests like farm­ing, build­ing and burial, you don’t need to know about Japan­ese farm­ing to under­stand Vik­ing farm­ing. In fact the dif­fer­ence in food­stuffs means that Japan­ese agri­cul­tural prac­tice tells you noth­ing of use for Scand­inavia. I’d cer­tainly be very wary of a notion of World Archae­ology (though I should note that oth­ers would cer­tainly not, like a former uni­ver­sity where I got an MPhil in the sub­ject). I’m not sure what com­mon theme could mean­ing­fully tie Palaeo­lithic Europe, Mayan Guatem­ala and Mod­ern Africa without being some­what super­fi­cial. It raises the ques­tion: Does it make sense to pur­sue a World Archae­oastro­nomy view? Isn’t a book which draw on lunar mark­ings on Palaeo­lithic bones, the Mayan Cal­en­dar and Mursi mark­ing of time going to be equally shal­low? How can you jus­tify tak­ing a global per­spect­ive?
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Creating Prehistory by Adam Stout

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

I could draw up quite a list of people who won’t like this book. Adam Stout pur­ports to be an unapo­lo­getic relat­iv­ist (more of that later). His his­tory of archae­ology in Bri­tain, mainly in the inter-war period, comes from this pos­i­tion and is allied to his interest in altern­at­ive pasts such as druidry and earth mys­ter­ies. If you think the his­tory of archae­ology is primar­ily a story of how our know­ledge of the past came to be more accur­ate, you’ll struggle with this. If you think the suc­cess of people such as OGS Craw­ford and Mor­timer Wheeler was down to employ­ing sci­entific meth­od­o­logy you’ll struggle with this. If you think the only sane response to mod­ern druids is mock­ery you may struggle with this. I cer­tainly dis­agree with a few of the author’s char­ac­ter­isa­tions of archae­ology. Des­pite (or even because?) of this it’s a chal­len­ging and enga­ging view of the devel­op­ment of archaeology.

cover

The first point of dif­fer­ence between myself and Stout is a mat­ter of how Polit­ical with a cap­ital P archae­ology is. I accept that archae­ology is a polit­ical action, but so is going down to the shops to buy a loaf of bread. I might be reify­ing abstract ideo­lo­gies and rein­for­cing eco­nomic roles in soci­ety, but if I want to cri­tique those ideo­lo­gies and roles, I don’t think I’d start by ana­lys­ing my shop­ping list. Adam Stout starts with an account of writ­ing against the back­drop of the Occu­pa­tion of Iraq. He states that the cover story for May 2003 ‘PREHISTORIC WAR’ was cash­ing in on the war fever in the USA. It might, but as a counter-example I’ll offer a quote from the intro­duc­tion to Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin’s new book:

A war is raging in the Middle East as you read this intro­duc­tion or, at least, one is immin­ent and the world is on high alert. We can assert this with some cer­tainty, regard­less of the shelf life of this volume, because this con­di­tion has char­ac­ter­ised the region for most of the last 1000 years.

Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin 2008:11

I can’t say Archae­ology magazine wasn’t using the war to boost sales. I sus­pect it wasn’t an openly cyn­ical ploy to use the deaths of thou­sands of people as a sales drive. Equally I wouldn’t be sur­prised if someone wanted to put war in a his­tor­ical per­spect­ive but didn’t think about what the upcom­ing event would mean for many people’s lives. It’s hard to say because if you want to pub­lish on war when the USA isn’t either con­tem­plat­ing invad­ing some­where or else actu­ally invad­ing some­where you have a very small win­dow to aim for. One dif­fer­ence between us then is that I think the interest in war reflec­ted pub­lic opin­ion rather than led it. This mat­ters because it shows how Stout works from the pos­i­tion that archae­olo­gists are largely work­ing in the ser­vice of the state. This is point of depar­ture for most of the book, the cre­ation of archae­olo­gical authority.

The first part is most expli­citly about the cre­ation of archae­olo­gical author­ity. It’s fer­tile ground for any­one who wants to find evid­ence of self-congratulation amongst aca­dem­ics. It’s the strongest sec­tion of the book because it’s most clearly here that Stout mar­shalls the evid­ence to demon­strate his point. He’s able to draw on let­ters from vari­ous prot­ag­on­ists to show that polit­ical mach­in­a­tions were a major part of the aca­demic archae­olo­gical pro­gramme of the the 1920s and 1930s. I was fas­cin­ated to see how a group of motiv­ated people effect­ively col­lab­or­ated to take the Pre­his­toric Soci­ety of East Anglia and take it for their own use as a national soci­ety. Yet while Stout is mak­ing a point, it doesn’t come across as axe-grinding.

The second part is, for me the least sat­is­fy­ing of the four. It tackles a fight against dif­fu­sion­ism as propsed by anthro­po­lo­gists. Again the hand­ling of the polit­ics is very good, but I’m not sure how well it squares with the con­tent. Stout’s argu­ment is that archae­olo­gists were eager to show inex­or­able pro­gress to the mod­ern era, and that dif­fu­sion­ism was a threat to this. In the case of someone like Childe, I’d argue that dif­fu­sion was the means by which pro­gress occured.

The third sec­tion is a case study of Stone­henge. If you’ve wondered where the mod­ern Druids came from and how they decided to claim Stone­henge, then this is essen­tial read­ing. Once again the polit­ics are covered well, as are some of the beliefs of the 20th cen­tury Druids.

The fourth sec­tion is about The Old Straight Track and the chal­lenge from other inter­pret­a­tions of the past and the chal­lenge to archae­ology. It provides some inter­est­ing examples of how unwanted inter­pret­a­tions could be neutered and the emphasis of archae­ology as some­thing voca­tional. Stout hints at the chal­lenge being in part that ley-hunters were con­tex­tu­al­ising sites into their place within the wider land­scape and fact-obsessed archae­ology was less the­or­ised at this time. It is fair com­ment, though I doubt it would be pop­u­lar amongst many archaeologists.

My biggest con­cern with most of the sec­tions is that the con­flict is seen as polit­ical rather than fac­tual. Pos­sibly for reas­ons of space there’s little exam­in­a­tion of the archae­olo­gical con­tent. In the case of ley-hunting, to what extent was the stat­ist­ical like­li­hood of leys occur­ring known at the time The Old Straight Track was pub­lished? What were the archae­olo­gical objec­tions? The second sec­tion in par­tic­u­lar would have bene­fit­ted more from a dis­cus­sion of the con­tent as well as the context.

Another con­cern is that Stout never goes bey­ond pre­his­tory. To some extent this is cri­ti­cising him for not writ­ing a book which he didn’t intend to write, after all the title is Cre­at­ing Pre­his­tory. At the same time the reader could come away with the impres­sion that archae­ology in Bri­tain was almost entirely the archae­ology of pre­his­toric Bri­tain. Romans are occa­sion­ally men­tioned, but the effects of Roman or Medi­eval archae­ology on the devel­op­ment of pre­his­toric archae­ology aren’t really tackled.

This may be where the dif­fer­ence between his relat­iv­ist pos­i­tion and my own mat­ters. He sees his­tory and archae­ology as a mat­ter of telling stor­ies. Even if this is the case, stor­ies have forms. The Iliad is not going to be rendered into a lim­er­ick. Sim­il­arly sci­entific explan­a­tions have forms, and there is no real tack­ling of meth­od­o­logy or the­ory in Stout’s book. If you think coher­ence to real­ity played a part, even if it not the sole part, then there’s a big hole in the his­tory. It can­not be dis­missed simply as a mat­ter of incom­men­sur­able epi­stem­o­lo­gies as Stout him­self shows.

Stout argues that bet­ter is not neces­sar­ily more accur­ate, using the example of Maiden Castle. On page 235 he uses Niall Sharples’ account of Maiden castle to show how Wheeler was cap­able of spin­ning his own tales based on his own pre­ju­dices. This I agree with, but I would also ask how we can accept Sharples’ explan­a­tion as more cor­rect. The answer lies in the meth­od­o­logy of archae­ology which has developed, in part from Wheeler’s own work. The method Wheeler used gave some of the tools to under­mine his work. In con­trast I don’t see that pos­sib­il­ity from Iolo Morgawg’s work. Even if sci­ence were only story, it’s clearly a dif­fer­ent sort of story.

Another mat­ter I’d like to see Stout explore would be the devel­op­ment of archae­ology as an anti-religious sci­ence. Archae­ology as Whiteley and Hays-Gilpin (2008:20n1) say tends to shy away from reli­gion. Cer­tainly archae­olo­gists are happy to dia­gnose any­thing they can’t under­stand as being ‘ritual’, but once it’s in that box study is often closed. They put this down to sci­ence and reli­gion being com­pet­it­ors in claims for dis­cern­ing truth in the first half of the 20th cen­tury. In chapter nine The Eso­teric Revival Stout attrib­utes the neg­at­ive view many of the inter-war archae­olo­gists had towards early reli­gion as being due to their athe­ism. Per­haps more could be made of the con­flict between sci­ence and reli­gion at the time, and hence the ant­ag­on­ism to the reli­gious claims of con­tem­por­ary druids, which then fed back into views about the past.

Non­ethe­less while it’s clear that I don’t agree with some of Stout’s con­clu­sions I still think there’s much to like about the book. For a start it’s read­able. It’s clear that he’s writ­ten the book because he wants to be under­stood and make a dif­fer­ence rather than pad out a CV. It’s also well-argued. I might not agree with the argu­ments, but it’s not a mat­ter of pluck­ing ideas from the air. Stout clearly has done the read­ing, got the ref­er­ences and uses them to back up his claims. Hence while it is pos­sible to dis­agree with him, it’s not a good idea to simply dis­miss his work. It’s also a genu­inely novel piece of work. There are many books which take to a greater or less extent the whole of the his­tory of archae­ology as their sub­ject. Quite a few a clearly attempts to pro­duce the­ory text­books in a very dull way. In con­trast the more focussed approach Stout takes enables him to look more closely the pro­cesses that cre­ated aca­demic archae­ology. If any­thing I’d like to see an tighter focus still. There are the seeds of four inter­est­ing books on the devel­op­ment of archae­ology. Most import­antly it’s the least telel­o­gical his­tory of archae­ology I’ve read. Many his­tor­ies of archae­ology could be sub­titled How did we get to the won­der­ful state we’re in today?. This book in con­trast is focussed on the inter-war years rather than the even­tual out­come. This puts him smartly out of step with any­one who mis­takenly believes his­tory of archae­ology is a branch of archae­ology rather than his­tory of science.

It’s not the one book you need if you’re study­ing the his­tory of archae­ology in the UK, but it is per­haps the one book you need to read as a com­pan­ion to a his­tory of archaeology.

See also:
Whiteley, D.S. and Hays-Gilpin, K. 2008 ‘Reli­gions bey­ond Icon, Burial and Monu­ment: An Intro­duc­tion’, Belief in the Past: The­or­et­ical Approaches to the Archae­ology of Reli­gion. eds. D.S.Whiteley and K.Hays-Gilpin, Left Coast Press:California, 11–22.
Find it at World­Cat or Lib­ra­r­yThing.

Indiana Jones and the Post-Processual Archaeologists

Alun Politics, The Past 3 Comments , , , ,

Every­one else is link­ing to the trailer, so I’ll link to a paper from The Nor­we­gian Archae­olo­gical Review, ‘Why Indi­ana Jones is Smarter Than the Post-Processualists’ by John Bint­liff.

The most remark­able fea­ture of this latest con­fer­ence was the way in which speaker after speaker, Brit­ish and Con­tin­ental, dis­played a total dis­reg­ard for affil­i­ation to ‘Pro­ces­su­al­ist’ or ‘Post-Processualist’ fac­tions, and deployed an eclectic atti­tude to the vari­ous object­iv­ist and sub­ject­iv­ist approaches debated over in the last 20 years. Yet equally con­sist­ently, this mer­ger of formerly oppos­i­tional tra­di­tions within a new prag­mat­ics of prac­tice, saw the speaker ground­ing his or her feet on evid­ence, an archae­olo­gical record, test­abil­ity.

It dates from 1993, but has stood up well. The per­sist­ence of pro­ces­sual and post-processual camps in archae­ology and earn­est dis­cus­sion of them says much more about the social rela­tion­ships between archae­olo­gists than it does about the past.

I need to read more Wittgenstein.

Postmodern scepticism

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How do you get a hun­dred people in tin foil hats to queue out­side your door? Easy — you stick a sign like this one outside.

Ufology sign
Made with txt2pic

I men­tion this because Bing McGandhi has asked what a Skep­tical Human­it­ies Journal would look like. He ima­gines it as a journal against post­mod­ern­ism — except that wouldn’t work for a few reas­ons, three of them being attrib­utes three, four and five of a New The­ory. I’ll dig them out so you don’t have to traipse back to the ori­ginal post.

  1. Whatever it is you’re study­ing will provide the per­fect example of the bold insights that New The­ory can bring to a topic.
  2. Any praise of another New Theorist’s work is also praise of your work as it recog­nises the import­ance of New The­ory.
  3. Any cri­ti­cism of another New Theorist’s work does not apply to your work as your work will be sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent in at least three import­ant aspects, and the cri­ti­cism does not recog­nise the vibrant diversity of New The­ory.
  4. Any fail­ure of New The­ory to solve any ques­tions people were ask­ing before its arrival simply illus­trates that people were ask­ing the wrong questions.
  5. Old The­ory is the product of the polit­ical pre­ju­dices of the time. Awk­ward ques­tions from Old The­or­ists can there­fore be dis­missed. The same would apply to New The­ory, were it not for the fact that New The­ory is far too new to be cri­tiqued in the same way.

I can sym­path­ise with Bing, a lot of self-consciously post­mod­ern writ­ing hits these fea­tures head-on. The prob­lem I have is that I’ve also read some awful wannabe-science papers which do exactly the same. In archae­ology there are some good papers on com­plex­ity, but at the same time there are some aston­ish­ingly bad papers too. A new cliché which is catch­ing on is that an indi­vidual is a fractal of soci­ety. It’s an appeal to homo­lo­gies from the math­em­at­ics of com­plex­ity and dis­cov­er­ies in phys­ics. It’s very pro-science and pro-modernity. It’s only flaw is that it’s utter rub­bish which actu­ally removes mean­ing from what it being said. If you dis­agree read the pre­vi­ous link, or give me the Haus­dorff dimen­sion of the Church of England.

The exist­ence of bad post­mod­ern­ists isn’t an argu­ment against post­mod­ern­ism any more than some awful meme paper­backs are argu­ments against social evol­u­tion. Post­mod­ern­ism, being the main­stream since the 1980s has been the safe choice for bad aca­dem­ics. As fash­ion changes and agency or memet­ics become pop­u­lar then these growth areas will attract light­weight schol­ars of their own and we’ll have some really atro­cious papers based on other ideas to look for­ward to.

I’m actu­ally quite com­fort­able with a lot of ideas which are post­mod­ern­ist. I simply have grave doubts about whether post­mod­ern­ism, as a philo­soph­ic­ally mean­ing­ful term, exists. It helps if you think about what post­mod­ern­ism is and Bing is spot on when he says a lot of self-proclaimed post­mod­ern­ists really don’t want to do that. Indeed if you hold to point 3 it’s impossible, or is it? I think post­mod­ern­ists are like lions.
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Deep History?

Alun The Past 6 Comments , , , , ,

There’s an art­icle on his­tory in the week’s Times Higher Edu­ca­tion Sup­ple­ment which has baffled me. It’s by Daniel Lord Smail of Har­vard and its part of the pro­mo­tion of his new book On Deep His­tory and the Brain. It’s stuck in my mind because it also appeared in New Sci­ent­ist (sub) and baffled me there as well. Smail’s idea is that there is a flaw in think­ing that his­tory starts with Meso­pot­amia in 4000 BC. The depend­ance on Meso­pot­amia for the start of his­tory is, for Smail, a sec­u­lar Garden of Eden Myth. The reason I’m baffled it doesn’t match any per­cep­tion of His­tory that I’ve come across. When I talk to people in the UK, it seems that his­tory starts with either the Egyp­tians or Stone­henge or, if they’ve been in the news recently, Neander­thals. Smail is talk­ing about aca­demic his­tor­i­ans, rather than the public.However, I don’t know any his­tor­i­ans who work from this pos­i­tion. It is quite pos­sible that I’m in my own little bubble.

For instance one excel­lent his­tor­ian I can listen to is Camp­bell Storey. I know for a fact that Camp­bell Storey is a fant­astic his­tor­ian because I sat through a talk of his on the his­tory of the Con­ser­vat­ive Party in the 1980s and was genu­inely inter­ested. I’m not sym­path­etic to party polit­ics in gen­eral nor the Con­ser­vat­ives in par­tic­u­lar, but he was bring­ing out some inter­est­ing prob­lems in the sub­ject from a his­tor­ical, rather than overtly polit­ical, point of view. I’ll admit you simply don’t meet people like that in real life, so I could be in my own private world. What do you ask a his­tor­ian like that? There’s plenty of ques­tions you could ask, but one I didn’t ask was when he felt his his­tory star­ted. I’d be will­ing to bet a small amount of money his answer wouldn’t have been Bronze Age Meso­pot­amia. It’s an extreme example, but a lot of his­tor­i­ans tend to be based in a period. The ori­gins of his­tory don’t impinge on most stud­ies.
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Foundations Beyond Doubt?

Alun The Past No Comments , , ,

Jardin archéologique
The Greek found­a­tions of Mar­seilles? Photo (cc) amelaye.

Tim Jones at Remote Cent­ral dis­cusses the latest post from Den­nis Price’s Eternal Idol blog. Den­nis Price thinks he can identify Stone­henge as the temple of Apollo of the Hyper­boreans as men­tioned by Pyth­eas of Mas­salia. The latest post com­pares the Tholos at Delphi with the cir­cu­lar design of Stone­henge. Per­son­ally I’m not con­vinced. Stone­henge could be the site descrfibed by Pyth­eas, but I don’t think the evid­ence sur­vives to be sure of where the temple may be. Both posts are worth read­ing, but I think part of the prob­lem is that Price is more will­ing to move from plaus­ible to cer­tain than I am. I wouldn’t dis­miss his idea out of hand, but there are prob­lems. One that there’s likely to be a big shift in what clas­si­cists think is cer­tain about the found­a­tions of sites like Mas­salia. At the moment many clas­si­cists would agree with the state­ment:

…[I]t is bey­ond doubt that set­tlers from Phocaea, the most north­erly of the Ionian cit­ies in Asia Minor, foun­ded Massilia around 600 BC. By mere vir­tue of the fact that the Phocae­ans suc­cess­fully estab­lished a flour­ish­ing city at the oppos­ite end of the Medi­ter­ranean in the sev­enth cen­tury BC, it is clear that they were out­stand­ing mar­iners, while we also learn this from Hero­dotus, who wrote that the Phocae­ans were the first of the ancient Greeks to embark on lengthy jour­neys by sea.

There are prob­lems with this. The same tra­di­tion says that the set­tle­ment was foun­ded when the nat­ive prin­cess, Gyptis, mar­ried the leader of the Phocaean set­tlers, Protis. That sounds plaus­ible until you real­ise that Protis means First. That sounds a bit odd to me. It’s pos­sible Protis was an early vic­tim of Nom­in­at­ive Determ­in­ism. Altern­at­ively it could be made up. Can you test it?
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5 things (about a new theory)

Alun Life, Politics 1 Comment , , ,

I was tagged a while back by Wil­liam J. Turkel at Digital His­tory Hacks. He’s taken the 5 things about me meme and changed it into 5 Things (about Memes and the Blo­go­sphere), along with a request for tagged people to take it and twist it. I wrote the meme below. Spe­cific­ally it was writ­ten after read­ing a fairly dull paper which pulled the trick of put­ting points 2 and 3 in suc­ceed­ing sen­tences with no trace of irony. I left it in the draft bank in case any­thing bet­ter occurred to me. It’s a couple of months later and I’m off to take a break after think­ing about what a good Archae­olo­gical The­ory course would look like. Look­ing at it, I think I’m broadly right.

I sus­pect the fol­low­ing points could describe any the­ory in the social sci­ences that annoys you.

  1. Whatever it is you’re study­ing will provide the per­fect example of the bold insights that New The­ory can bring to a topic.
  2. Any praise of another New Theorist’s work is also praise of your work as it recog­nises the import­ance of New The­ory.
  3. Any cri­ti­cism of another New Theorist’s work does not apply to your work as your work will be sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent in at least three import­ant aspects, and the cri­ti­cism does not recog­nise the vibrant diversity of New The­ory.
  4. Any fail­ure of New The­ory to solve any ques­tions people were ask­ing before its arrival simply illus­trates that people were ask­ing the wrong questions.
  5. Old The­ory is the product of the polit­ical pre­ju­dices of the time. Awk­ward ques­tions from Old The­or­ists can there­fore be dis­missed. The same would apply to New The­ory, were it not for the fact that New The­ory is far too new to be cri­tiqued in the same way.
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