Written and Unwritten Records

Extract

Archaeology has, for its own good or ill, caught the popular mind. A generation ago the average person was quite unable to divest his mind of the idea that an archaeologist must have a long white beard, large spectacles and a pathetic enquiring look on his face: it was equally suspected that, when roused, he would burst into a paroxysm of rage if his views were doubted. There was, in fact, a good deal of truth in this popular conception, for in the first half of the 19th century what then passed as archaeology was largely a hobby reserved for the aged and the retired who, by virtue of curious minds and an inquiring nature, spent their leisure in probing the ancient sites of the past, and collecting ancient relics and ‘curios’. Some less aged men, but nevertheless men of leisure, made very important contributions to knowledge, such as Boucher de Perthes, a French customs officer, who in the '50's was the first to identify palaeolithic implements; or Harrison of Ightham, a Kentish villager, who, with great insight identified, not long after Boucher de Perthes, a still earlier phase of the stone implement industry, the so-called Eolithic. But for the most part the elderly white-bearded men did in fact represent the activities of the student of Antiquity, both in England and elsewhere. Then, slowly, it was seen that there was a difference between the Archaeologist and the Antiquary : that the former was a student of one of the branches of humanist study which can serve, in the historic periods, to add enormously to historic knowledge, and in the prehistoric periods to formulate chronology and create a history recorded not by written records, but by archaeological facts. But the power of the written word, reinforced by the tremendous prestige associated with Holy Script, has given such kudos to what was written that records not consisting of words were considered by scholars as trash. Archaeologists were called, until quite recent years, ‘collectors of pots and pans’, men unworthy to rank with those who in the quiet of their studies had spent long hours emending and correcting the ancient literary records of literary men. To make an emendation in the text of a Greek manuscript was held by many to be a far greater achievement than to have recovered two hundred years of unrecorded history, even if the emendation was a pure invention of the emendator.