Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2000 - 68

uments for a textual history, a story in words, thin out and
we must rely on archaeology For example, the written
sources about Roman Britain amount only to a few hundred words for four centuries. Decade by decade, textual
historians have squeezed a little more understanding from
them, but the actual texts are not increasing in number. By
contrast, the archaeology of Roman Britain amounts to
many thousands of sites, and the number of sites and the
amount of knowledge archaeology can make of them with
ever more ingenious methods grow decade by decade. So
as time passes one can see how the story of Roman Britain,
as told from all the sources, becomes more and more an
archaeological account.
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The historical sources for
Roman Britain- the likes of Julius
Caesar (a solder-cum-politician)
and Tacitus (a historian writing
about events of which he had no
first-hand knowledge) - are those
of the winners, as usual. We know
nothing of what the northern Europeans - the losers and the colonized - thought of Rome. By the
standard historical view, the
Roman era was one of progress and
improvement, a time of good highways and a disciplined order. Then
Rome withdrew and there was a
collapse into the so-called Dark
Ages of early medieval times. One is reminded of the Soviet view of eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989, countries in
.sanempire whose lucky people were rescued from American and German capitalism and brought into the happy
socialist world of the peoples democracies. Seen from the
archaeology, especially in the light of studies in the last two
decades, there were no Dark Ages. Instead there was a
period of unparalleled sea-trade and interaction around the
North Sea coasts, of great golden treasures and fine craftsmanship; also of war, death and plunder. Still, one can reasonably call it instead the "Bright Ages," and realize how
the experience of the colonized is not the same as that of
the colonizers. The people of eastern Europe - some of
them living in the very lands of the North Sea coasts which
experienced those "Bright Ages"- took a different way forward from the Soviet ideal, when in 1989 they were given
a choice. One of the few facts the textual sources provide
concerning Roman Britain is that the country was known
for its export trade in slaves.
In 1999 the archaeological find of the year in Britain was
"Seahenge," a strange wooden structure built in the shallow
waters off the English east coast. In age and other ways it
bears similarities to Stonehenge, hence its name. At its center, set upside down, is the stump of a great oak tree, already
dead of old age or disease when Seahenge was made with it.
Around the inverted oak, a close wall of split oak makes an
enclosing palisade. What was it for? What does it mean? As
archaeologists we have some reason to know.
Francis Pryor, archaeologist with the Seahenge research
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group, believes it has to do with death and the after-life. It
is in a liminal place, and it has strong resemblances to mortuary structures of the same era. Excavating it with difficulty from the mud, Pryor and his team have a most difficult conservation task on their hands. The recovery of
Seahenge was made difficult for another reason, the passionate commitment of neo- Druids and others that Seahenge should and must remain in its proper place in the
coastal mud - even if it perishes there as the tides that
exposed it come to break and wash it completely away.This
is yet another case where the physical object, what David
Lowenthal calls the "materiality," has force which abstract
knowledge, the kind existing
only as words, does not have.
Seahenge is exactly 4,050 years
old (an age just established
through dendrochronology) ;
there is no distinctive ethnic
group, or minority "Native
Britons," that can claim a special affinity to the site or direct
descent from its makers. Nevertheless, the same issues arise
as they do in Australia or North
America, lands with divided
histories of native peoples and
more recent arrivals: who owns
Seahenge? who deserves to
own Seahenge? Pryor, asked by
a TV interviewer what he would do differently if he was
starting now his work on Seahenge, had only one regret,
that he had not sufficiently built bridges and found common cause with the neo-Druids. Deep though the differences in knowledge and attitude are, what the archaeologists have in common with the neo-Druids, as they do with
Native Americans and with Aboriginal Australians, as they
do even with David Lowenthal, is a concern and respect for
the past, for its physical remains, for the wisdom the experience of the past has to offer a rushing modern world
which is too confident in celebrating its own success, its
own self-concern. That is why archaeologists have a valuable role, as David rightly notices, through three special
aspects, its concern with remote as well as recent epochs of
human experience, its concern with physical remains that
are tangible relics of what once was, and its concern with
pressing contemporary issues of identity and possession.
Welcome to archaeology, David! Can we tempt you out of
your text-historians study into the experience of fieldwork
with real, physical artifacts in the company not just of other
academics but of indigenous people with their own understanding of what the past was and of what it means for
them in the world today?
Chippindale is a field archaeologist and
Christopher
museum curator. From a 'post at the Cambridge University
Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology ; England , his
fieldwork mostly concerns rock-art in Aboriginal Australia
and prehistoric Europe.
Archaeology * March/April2000

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Archaeology Magazine - March/April 2000

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