Learning From History: a thread about politics, history and archaeology

My favourite "using 'history' for polical ends" story is the revival of the Arthurian cycle (obscure bits of Welsh myths handed down from Roman Times) by the Norman Conquest to validate their oppression of the Anglo-Saxons, ie, "look, the Saxons aren't even entitled to be on this island anyway, they stole it from the Britons".

And it's interesting that this myth was re-vitalised again during the Victorian Age.

"israel = best country for archeology" means there's really a lot of stuff lying around underground, going back a long way
"worst" = but sadly it is politicised

i know nothing about israeli architecture and too much about sentences

Also on related topics - the amount of books that I've seen recently portraying the Anglo Saxons as some kind of perfect, semi-socialist Arcadian Dream of working class Englishness seems to be an interesting re-writing of history to support left-wing ideology.

And, throwing this also in the pot, but how is the romantic view of Archeology (as evinced by films like Indiana Jones) in conflict with the actual process of archeology. (And also with pop culture views of archeology such as Time Team, etc.?)

We spent hours sorting through boxes of sheep-goat bones...

Anglo-Saxon society is important to more than just left-wing ideologues. The roots of parliamentary democracy have often been ascribed to the Anglo-Saxons, and in fairness they did seem to have a far more economically democratic polity than the Normans, as did the Vikings.

Paul Johnson's The Offshore Islanders is a classic example of reading early history thru modern politics. But that's what historians do, isn't it? Neutral history is a myth.

*OK, OK, American War Of Independence if you must.

Besides, the latest American thinking is that Ben Franklin nicked it from the Iriquois Seven Nations anyways, and nothing to do with the stinking European oppressors they were trying to overthrow.

Which is funny, given the whole 'no-taxation-w/o-representation' slogan, which arguably lay at the heart of the First British Revolution as well.

I've never studied the American Revolution very much - most of my knowledge of it comes from the Richard Holmes TV series of a couple of years back - but I was under the impression that, yes, a lot of the American settlers saw themselves as preserving English traditions of freedom that were being lost in the home islands. I know it's fiction, but it's interesting in connection with this that in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, the Puritans are portrayed as fighting for the right to make money without paying as much tax just as much as they were fighting for the right to worship freely - and most of the second-generation puritans in those books are very rich men who start a financial revolution.

(what was the Boston Tea Party about? Not paying the exorbitant, Westminster-imposed taxes, right? No, apparently, it only happened after the tea taxes were dropped; the tea smugglers were suddenly undercut by the legitimate trade, and got rather upset)

(hah, that was an xpost from before teabagging was invoked)

yeah real life archaeology is quite dull isn't it? if you do it properly. and many of your colleagues are scary

This is the thread where I scare dahlin by posting the photo of her that I got back unexpectedly from the developers the other day...

(if you're puzzled, D, I think it's from the picnic that preceded the B&S / Delgados charity gig that was at Glasgow Concert Hall two years ago)

Apparently [Israel]'s so utterly soaked in history that you find important archeology no matter where you dig.

Part of the Fertile Crescent, innit - the other end of the crescent being at Basra. The area where farming was invented, and all of the common Old World farm animals and plants were first domesticated. Probably. Sheepgoats probably came from the higher lands at the northernmost bits of the crescent - basically, modern Kurdish Iraq and Turkey.

how is the romantic view of Archeology (as evinced by films like Indiana Jones) in conflict with the actual process of archeology. (And also with pop culture views of archeology such as Time Team, etc.?)

Mostly because whenever anyone meets an archaeologist, they say "so you're Indiana Jones then HAR HAR HAR" and the archaeologist wants to thump them.

Time Team *does* have the effect of making archaeology look much quicker and simpler than it really is. How long does their average dig last? Three days? That's how long the cameras, and Tony, Mick and Phil are on site for; it then takes a couple of weeks to properly record the results of three days' digging before the site gets filled. People don't realise just how much paperwork is involved - on most digs, for every context you dig,* you have a 1 or 2-page form to fill in describing it. And then there's all the plans, sections, surveying, photographs, artefact records, etc, etc, etc. Which is all why people *want* to be able to tip stuff over the edge of a cliff - digging is expensive, but looking after the stuff you dig up properly is *far more* expensive.

* the context is the basic unit of digging - it mostly means "a volume of soil with consistant properties which is different and distinct from the other soil around it", but can also mean "a break between contexts that indicates a past event". For example, if you're digging out a ditch, there will be lots of "fill" contexts making up the stuff that silted the ditch up over time; but there will also be a "cut" context which consists purely of the line in the soil marking the original sides of the ditch. I know Kate and Dahlin already know this, but I thought I'd explain anyway.

(not that they were Angles yet) (but anyway, the point was, the justification for the tudor revolution - which lit the blue touchpaper for the Empire and put the UK on the map, Europe-wise - wz a royal appeal to the mythical pre-norman past)

ps in mark s political mythology, this is bcz the coming of the first twinges of democracy are linked to the first twinges of mass literacy and book-publishing)

The Victorian Romantic revitalisation of the Arthur legends and the related material - the first English translation of the Mabinogion, for example - has left the average man in the street thinking that King Arthur was English anyway. If you try to explain to them that he's famous mostly for killing English people in battle, they give you a funny look.

Xpost: the evidence that Pelagius was British is entirely circumstantial. It's mostly on the grounds that Pelagianism was particularly popular in Britain. The saints usually attributed with Christianising the English and Irish, Patrick and Augustine,* were actually sent to persuade people to follow mainstream Christianity rather than the Pelagian heresy.

(I am simplifying a hugely complex situation here, I have to admit, partly because I can't remember the details)

* not the North African philosopher, the other one.

Lots of people *have* used the dating of Easter as an excuse to say that the Celtic church was proto-Protestant. It's a load of rubbish, though, and is mostly only used by extreme Unionists. I would say "people like Revd Paisley", but I don't know if he personally supports that idea.

i think "anglo-saxon" as in "spout freeborn yeoman" style ideology wz a bit vague abt where celts came in (let alone picts!)

After the British were fragmented into separate communities following the slow development of England, *all* the remaining British communities - Welsh, Cornish, Cumbrian, Strathclyde, probably the Bretons for all I know - claimed that Arthur was theirs.

He does crop up in the Mabinogion, but it's mostly not about him. He's basically your stereotypical Good King surrounded by his circle of knights, but only in Culhwch and Olwen and I think also one of the later stories near the end.

Incidentally, another of the kings in the Mabinogion, Macsen, can be traced back to a genuine historical figure: a Spanish-born Roman general who commanded the British legions and, following a revolt, became co-Emperor.

the pig thing is just common sense surely? *flees onto island in mystical lake guarded by vapoury ladies w.swords*

i think the french stories mallory translated claimed aurthur was breton!

I will come back later after having dug up some barking-mad British Israelite stuff :-)

(They stole my trainers, they did.)

http://www.livius.org/a/turkey/troy/troy_i_houses_schliemann_trench.JPG

And he still discovered Troy!

(the other side to this is that cleaning your trench too much can result in nasty cock-ups when you clean too much. One story I heard at university was of a student archaeologist - allegedly someone in my own year - who would pick stones up from the trench, clean underneath them, then put them back down again.)

The other thing that Bill touched on, and that I meant to mention when talking about contexts, is that when you look at a plan or a section of a site there are Thick Black Lines neatly separating out all these contexts, all these distinct areas that can be differentiated from the rest. The real world isn't like that. On paper everything is black and white; in the real world it's all shades of brown. On my first dig, I remember having a bit of a breakdown trying to reconcile the drawings I'd seen up to then with the mud; the supervisors could see distinct lines *everywhere*, and I couldn't spot any of them.

Back in the 1940s, there was an archaeologist who tried to introduce the idea of drawing nice artistic section diagrams full of subtle shading. I forget his name, but he was mostly famous for digging up a pre-Roman site on the site of Heathrow Airport. His drawings didn't take off, though, partly because they're much harder to do.

(and also because Sir Mortimer Wheeler - the TV archaeologist of the time - wrote books saying that these artistic diagrams were useless and sharp black lines were the way to go)

(I knew an archaeologist called Bill at university. He smoked a pipe a lot.)

And spending weeks living in very basic conditions.

Like run-down farmhouses close to nice stone circles on remote parts of the West Coast? Or like the time some archaeologists I knew nearly got thrown out of Aberdeen youth hostel?

The aforesaid Sir Mortimer Wheeler, top archaeologist of the 1950s, was in one particular way a very bad archaeologist, and that was because he started out as a classical historian. Because of that, he saw archaeology mostly as a way to provide supporting evidence for the historical narrative provided by classical writers. When he had a free choice in what to dig, he went for places in England or France that he believed were places classical historians had been writing about, and specifically looked for features that matched the narrative.

(there is another good story about him, and a money-making scheme. One of his digs found pits and pits of slingshot ammunition - basically, big, round beach pebbles. As they were fairly useless as museum pieces, he decided to sell them off to passing tourists to raise a bit of cash. Even in the 1930s, archaeologists were always skint. However, they were so popular as souvenirs that they couldn't find enough of the stuff to meet demand, so resorted to going down to the local beach and collecting slingshot-sized pebbles themselves to sell as ancient artefacts)

Of course, in the bigger picture, it matters not a jot that sections aren't straight - considering how small some site samples are etc, so much is left in the ground etc etc etc. But they do look nice - and do make drawing them easier. (I still don't understand plans though...the last dig I went on, I couldn't remember how to draw one...shit).

Many interchangeable farmhouses across the world...

(what was the Boston Tea Party about? Not paying the exorbitant, Westminster-imposed taxes, right? No, apparently, it only happened after the tea taxes were dropped; the tea smugglers were suddenly undercut by the legitimate trade, and got rather upset)

This my suit our cynical modern mood and may have been a motive for a few smugglers but it really was about whether the colonists should pay taxes that they had no say in approving.

The colonies refused to pay the levies required by the Townsend Acts claiming they had no obligation to pay taxes imposed by a Parliament in which they had no representation. In response, Parliament retracted the taxes with the exception of a duty on tea - a demonstration of Parliament's ability and right to tax the colonies. In May of 1773 Parliament concocted a clever plan. They gave the struggling East India Company a monopoly on the importation of tea to America. Additionally, Parliament reduced the duty the colonies would have to pay for the imported tea. The Americans would now get their tea at a cheaper price than ever before. However, if the colonies paid the duty tax on the imported tea they would be acknowledging Parliament's right to tax them. Tea was a staple of colonial life - it was assumed that the colonists would rather pay the tax than deny themselves the pleasure of a cup of tea.

The colonists were not fooled by Parliament's ploy. When the East India Company sent shipments of tea to Philadelphia and New York the ships were not allowed to land. In Charleston, the tea was consigned to warehouses and allowed to rot. Only Boston permitted three tea-laden ships to dock, igniting furious reaction among the townspeople.

The crisis came to a head on December 16, 1773 when as many as 7,000 agitated locals milled about the wharf where the ships docked. A mass meeting at the Old South Meeting House that morning resolved that the tea ships should leave the harbor without payment of any duty. A committee was selected to take this message to the Customs House to force release of the ships out of the harbor. The Collector of Customs refused to allow the ships to leave without payment of the duty. Stalemate. The committee reported back to the mass meeting and a howl erupted from the meeting hall. It was now early evening and a group of about 200 men disguised as Indians assembled on a near-by hill. Whopping war chants, the crowd marched two-by-two to the wharf, descended upon the three ships and dumped their offending cargos of tea into the harbor waters.

Surely there weren't 7,000 people involved in smuggling in colonial era Boston.

The Bretons can rightly claim him as theirs. They are descendants of the Britons as much as the Welsh or the Cornish. There is even a Corouailles in Brittany and the end of the peninsula is called Finisterre, 'Land's End'. One of the historic provinces, Gwened, corresponds to the North Wales kingdom of Gwynedd.

Which takes us nicely round in a circle to Israel and the start of the thread :-)

Unlike famous-archaeologist predecessor V Gordon Childe who - I believe - chucked himself off a cliff in Australia when the consensus that everything he'd ever believed in was bullshit.

There was an interesting series of editorial columns about that in Antiquity in the early 80s, with various correspondants debating whether his death was deliberate or accidental. It certainly could have been either.

(I read them when I was in the Main Library feeling bored one afternoon.)

Many interchangeable farmhouses across the world...

Oh, definitely, archaeologists live in terrible living conditions the world over!

I'm sorry if I'm coming across as a little creepy in an "I know who you are! Ner ner!" way; but for personal reasons, especially recently, I try to give out as little personal information as possible here. I certainly graduated from University in the same year as someone with your name, though. I'm trying to remember what courses we were both on - Gallia, certainly, and possibly the Celtic Art course that only had about 6 people.

(plus I think you might be the Bill C I knew because I can imagine him saying the things you write)

Yes. I sat in Bismarck's chair in his study at the museum in Friedrichsruh.

There is another book I wanted to talk about, but I can't remember its title or where I last put it right now

"A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history. Bellerophon masters winged Pegasus and kills the Chimaera. Perseus, in a varient of the same legend, flies through the air and beheads Pegasus's mother, the Gorgon Medusa; much as Marduk, a Babylonian hero, kills the she-monster Tiamat, Goddess of the Sea. Perseus's name should properly be spelled Pterseus 'the destroyer', and he ... probably represented the patriarchal Hellenes who inveded Greece and Asia Minor early in the second millennium BC and challenged the power of the Triple-Goddess. ... Perseus beheads Medusa: that is, the Hellenes overran the goddess's chief shrines, stripped her priestesses of their Gorgon masks, and took possession of the sacred horses ... Bellerophon, Perseus's double, kills the Lycian Chimaera: that is, the Hellenes annulled the ancient Medusan calendar, and replaced it with another."

(the Chimaera supposedly is a mythical representation of a sacred calendar because it was a combination of three animals, and the ancient calendar had three seasons)

He later says:

"... all detailed interpretations of particular legends are open to question until archaeologists can provide a more exact tabulation of tribal movements in Greece and their dates"

At the time that that was written, archaeologists treated the map of the world like a plan of battle, with well-defined ethnic groups moving around and occupying clearly-defined areas; much as they draw site plans with bold, clear lines. Worse, archaeologists felt they had to make the assumption that the boundaries of archaeological cultures - groups of similarly-designed artefacts - apart from artefacts that had obviously been moved by trade, coincided with the boundaries of linguistic and ethnic groups. The clear boundaries of cultural areas mirrored the sharp boundaries between states on a modern map.

whereas ships under the auspices of the brit navy (inc.merchant navy) worked on the principle that the ship's captain was autocratic lord and master - and sailors were often there against their will - pirate ships generally worked on the principle that they were masterless men drawn together under a written constitution: for practical daily purposes the captain was in charge, but he could be challenged constitutionalyl and overthrown by vote (cf treasure island and the "black spot" episode) (i know TI isn't history but this illuminates the point)

some of the early agitation for a revolutionary constitution among the free-born, as a preferable political set-up certainly came, in coastal areas, from those involved in illicit sea-work, and there were a LOT of them

golden age of piracy = 1680s-1750s, latter part of which period brits controlled the african slave trade and at least some corsairs were, well, "terrorists", kinda, dedicated to disrupting the slave trade (many pirates were freed or escaped slaves); american sea ports - far from official british scrutiny, despite being a colony - were notoriously the rat-runs of a lot of minor pirates; subterranean US cultural ideology of lawlessness partly fed by this underground (haha submarine) tradition; capt.flint - whose ghost presides over treasure island - retired to and died in savannah!!

cf writings of marcus rediker

But, let's face it, all archaeologists called Bill probably sound the same, right?

Only if they all have a strong Scottish accent.

I want to give up my job in banking to become a pirate now after reading Mark's post. Sigh.

(Except, that's Hal1f@X0r where all the bankers in the ad decide to become pirates, start singing "we are saving..." and sail off into the sunset Monty Python stylee, not us. Unfortunately.)

it is a little discussed but huge phenom apparently

also i am not sure it is any more much like the days of ann bonney

http://www.rowfant.demon.co.uk/annebonny.jpg

AAarrrrrrr, avast ye LAN-lubber and surrender thy data!!!

(We *were* talking about Pi rates, weren't we?)

In several of the battles of the American Revolution, the proportion of American-born members of the British Army was the same or higher than for the rebel army.

(most Americans probably don't realise that; but, most Americans probably don't realise that the rebels only won when they did because the French navy was fightin on their side)

There are lots of things in Upstate NY (near where the battles of Saratoga and Ticonderoga were fought) named after General Thadeus Whatsitcalledski. (No one is ever able to pronounce his name - in fact a quite famous bridge named after him is still referred to in traffic reports as the "Dolly Parton Span" instead due to its shape.)

I think this goes a long way to explaining the use of the Bible by reforming Protestant sects in Europe and the States, as an authority which couldn't be trumped by appealing beyond it: "When Adam delved and Eve span".

In the 19th century, the Trade Union movement grew more out of Methodism than it did from Marx's economics. That's why in some industries - journalism, for example - union branches are still referred to as "chapels".

(I'm bored, so I'm going back through the thread and commenting on all the bits I skipped yesterday)

Xpost: I didn't realise that; not being American, all I see is the stereotypical "Freedom Fries" image of pro-war wingnuts hating on everything French.

Lafayette was a big hero in the American Revolution, yes; and then when he returned to France he became a big player in their own revolution a few years later.

Bill, when you graduate, are you planning to stay in related work?

For that matter, how many people on this thread - or on ILX as a whole - have archaeology experience or qualifications? I know me and dahlin do, but does anybody else?

When I was 18, I went on an open day to the university I eventually went to. We were shown round by one of the administrators in the department's commercial division, which did employ people as full-time archaeologists rather than as teachers or researchers. She had graduated from the same university a couple of years earlier, and told us that of the 30-odd people in her year, only 2 were working in related jobs.

damn good mustard.

My ex-bf's mum was a Practising Archeologist who (before she retired) was always going on digs in Israel. Then she retired from field work to curate the icky medical curio collection for John Hunter.

While most Americans know about Lafayette, fewer seem to know about Rochambeau and interestingly, about Admiral François Joseph Paul, marquis de Grasetilly, comte de Grasse whose French fleet boxed Cornwallis in at Yorktown in a rare French naval victory over the British. The Count of Grasse was born in Bar-sur-Loup, a town I have vacationed in, and he is rightly well remembered by the municipality.