Who Shot British Prehistory in the Head?

If Academic Archaeology has become a bastion of science denial, who is to blame?

I realised British Archaeology was unwell, when I attended TAG 90, where the psychosis was already becoming evident. The Theoretical Archaeology Group, ;[or theoretical archaeologist group as I would characterise a group of academics temperamentally unsuited to practice archaeology, and for whom knowledge is not constrained by evidence or the English Language]; was a stepping stone for many who have subsequently helped fabricate the mindless melange of the New Post-rational Archaeology.

When, in 2006, I started my Ph.D. at Newcastle, a University so awful that even the staff had walked out, a small detail curiously omitted from their website, I had little idea how prevalent Science Denial had become. Not only was my engineering science of no interest, I was told to write about how buildings were perceived; in the Iron Age. While being ejected from a building bequeathed to the University by one of most region’s most famous engineering families, I had for a fleeting moment imagined that this bottom feeder of the academic system was just a venally corrupt nadir of mediocracy; but no, it's about par for the course.

Archaeology is an easy subject to dumb down, helping the University achieve the expected return on it’s property portfolio. Students are churned in their hundreds to find the next generation of credulous youth to maintain the tradition of copying out other peoples work in your best handwriting to obtain "research" funding.

What you learn at University is how to be a lecturer.  As a result, the standards in archaeology, as it descends further into mere infotainment, are scandalously poor on many levels, with publicly funded institutions routinely promoting science denial, myth and faith based archaeology.

For me, an essential prerequisite of a Theory is a dataset; but, given their monopoly, many academics have dispensed with the need for evidence and even the constrains of the English Language to revel in tautological self-indulgence and linguistic prestidigitation designed to conceal the nature of their conceits from those students & colleagues easily intimidated by a few polysyllables.

Let's Blame the BBC

However, I finally realised British academic archaeology was brain dead, when I chanced upon A History of Ancient Britain Series 1 Episode 3 Age of Cosmology. Even the title only makes sense if we completely redefine the Words "History" and "Cosmology" to mean the exact opposite of what they used to mean.

This is knowledge that is neither based on, or limited by, fact or meaningful language.  So I leave you in the capable hands of embryonic national treasure Dr Neil Oliver, as he and the BBC redefine the concepts of History, Cosmology, The Neolithic Revolution and intelligent thought, all in about 60 seconds.

Faith, Archaeology and the Gods

Recent events in the Middle East, or rather several millennia of tragedy in the area, has highlighted the issues of Gods, and the problems they cause, so should archaeologists have any dealings with the supernatural? 

Meta-parables

Faith changes people’s lives, although it is often other folk’s beliefs, rather than our own that have the most significant impact; my life changed forever at Newcastle University where my work based on mathematics proved no match for a revelatory “Iron Age Building Cosmology”; as we shall see, when creating myth a power-base is more important than an evidence base. While rationality, at least as expressed in science and maths is universal, Gods, despite their claims are usually fairly locally based, archaeology is aware of this because we know where they lived. While Gods clearly can inhabit a variety of elements and dimensions, it probably saves confusion when interacting with human society if they have a principle residence from where they can transact their business.

Dumbing down the past.

Dumbing down through abstraction.

In two previous posts, [ 1 + 2 ] I have demonstrated that one of the central images of British Prehistory, the Wessex Roundhouse, is a construct which does not accurately represent the evidence.  It is not a discovery, or rocket science, I just read the relevant reports and looked at the plans and sections.

While I am happy to call these roundhouse constructs dumbing down, what to call the scholarship they generate presents a problem, since it represents the application of presumably perfectly acceptable theory to an imaginary data set. 

Archaeology is often at its best and most incisive when it has borrowed from other disciplines, but left to their own devices some academics have wandered off through the dewy system to delve into ideas about the relationship between people and built environments. But perhaps sometimes they just look at the pictures.

It is possible for anthropologists to study the relationship between people and their built environments; the humans can be questioned and observed, and the spaces inspected. In such a study, we might also wish consider factors of age, status, and gender, as well as more complex issues pertaining to the ownership and creation of spaces.

In anthropology, a theory, a set of ideas or a cosmology which explain the patterns of behaviour associated with particular places can be developed through the study of people and spaces. 

However, in Archaeology the people we study are dead and their spaces destroyed, or they usually are after we have finished with them....

The archaeology of the Imaginary Spaces

One of the first things you learn as an archaeologist is that “History” is the study of specialist artefacts involving writing and other forms of recording, and that “Prehistory” is marked by the absence of such material. There is period we call “Proto-history”, in which “Prehistoric” issues are alluded to in later documents, providing plenty of scope for conjecture; ideas like “Druids” inhabit these spaces, along with more peripheral characters like Merlin and Arthur.
Narrative History on the BBC Television is a cultural phenomenon in its own right, and while Prehistory has always had the attraction of the mysterious, and offers the potential of a “Detective Story” format, in reality it has no recognisable narratives. Thus, I was very rude about “The History of Ancient Britain” series’ attempt to manufacture one, and so I greet the news of Neil Oliver's  “Sacred Wonders of Britain” with some degree of scepticism.   However, Neil is keen to get his retaliation in first;

 “We were at all times sensitive to one absolute truth – that it is quite impossible to put yourself in the mind of a Neolithic farmer, or to understand the thinking of an Iron Age druid.”

Good; this did seem to be lacking from the last outing into the past. However, as the program promises an exploration of Prehistoric sacredness, I suspect there is going to be a “but” in there somewhere.  Luckily there are experts on hand; in academia you get the “truth” you pay for.

Doubt, and the archaeology of the imagined past.

 One thing that was apparent at the CAA conference [Computer Applications in Archaeology]  at Southampton, was the ability of our current technology to produce any image we can imagine with a remarkable degree of realism.  The look of the past, the shared visual culture, is commercially important to the entertainment industry, and in some senses is the end product offered to consumers of archaeology as infotainment.  As a structural archaeologist, while I am groping towards an understanding of how a Neolithic longhouse was engineered, the one thing I am certain of is that I don’t know what a building ‘looked’ like.

So, given the ability to visually express anything we can imagine - how do we express doubt?

Inside the mind of a New Archaeologist

In my view, the inability of conventional archaeology to interpret the majority of the excavated evidence from prehistoric sites, in particular postholes, has led to development of “New” archaeology, where academics study and become experts in those aspects of culture we don’t find.  In those countries like Netherlands and Germany, where their archaeology is better understood, their narrative of the Neolithic is generally  about agriculture, while in Britain it is more often expressed in terms of the perceptions, beliefs, rituals, personhood, and cosmologies.

The Archaeology of a strange and alien land

As a professional archaeologist, I owe my existence not just to a planning system and government legislation that protects our heritage, but also, and more fundamentally, to a wider public interest in the past. This popularity is evidenced by highly rated series like Channel 4's Time Team in mainstream television schedules, as well as by specialist commercial channels like Discovery History, History, and Yesterday.
The BBC’s series a History of Ancient Britain, is an interesting proposition, not least because history is primarily based on written sources, and the program is mostly about prehistory, which, by definition, is not. I have already made my feelings fairly plain about the Age of Cosmology episode: It is a perfect example of the loss of rationality that afflicts much modern archaeological thinking and clearly informed this script.
If archaeologists start imagining beliefs, cosmologies, and perceptions for people who left no records, there is the real danger that our audience will lose faith in the narrative. However, one thing that I found most challenging, was one of the opening lines in the set up;

" . . .This Britain was a strange and alien world . . "

Is Post-Processual Archaeology a New Age Cult?

I recently suggested that post-processual archaeology was a faith-based approach that mystifies the evidence, but on reflection, thinking of it as a religion, is probably to exaggerate its objectivity. This time, I’m looking at the messages we're getting about, and apparently from, the past, and asking if this new archaeology a New Age cult?

I shall do this with the help Neil Oliver’s BBC program, History of Ancient Britain, which has, through no fault of its own, been singled out to be my Auntie Sally. His program is more than just a warm glass of intellectual Drambuie on a Sunday night, but actually reflects some state of the art archaeological thinking, as one might expect of the BBC.[1]

For the sake of balance I will try to explain why some archaeologists have painted themselves into the corner of their yoga mats, and readers should be warned be there maybe some intellectual cartoon violence, and outbreaks of Kermodian ranting.

Is Post-processual archaeology a form of religion?

Anyone who has excavated a complex prehistoric archaeology site will have realised that they are quite difficult to understand. Some archaeologists, faced with deciphering this complex phenomenon, decided the easiest thing to do was abandon objectivity, go beyond the empirical limits of the evidence, and simply ‘make up’ something to explain it, redefining the terms of reference for archaeology to allow them to do this. For convenience, I will use the term ‘Post-processual’ for this new archaeology [1], although this term covers quite a wide and very complex can of worms.
Among university academics, these post-processual archaeologists are in the probably unique position of being paid to invent knowledge to cover those topics currently beyond our understanding, especially in those areas where objective knowledge is impossible. 
Traditionally, this is the province of religion, whose prophets have special insights beyond our shared objective reality, and whose texts can testify to events that transcend normal physical laws. While priests can report on opinions and beliefs of prophets, and even gods, at least they have some written records to work with; professors of prehistory can profess a detailed knowledge of the minds of people who left no records at all, and use it to explain the physical evidence.
Is it time to reclassify this form of archaeology as a religion, differentiated from mainstream scholarship, and fund it accordingly?

Why the Gods created slavery

Slavery, by common consent, is no longer viewed as ‘a good thing’, however, in the ancient world, it was seen as a perfectly natural and normal state of affairs.
For an archaeologist like myself, slavery is not primarily a race issue, it is to do with class, or status; take a close look at the ancient world, and a slave was merely the lowest rung on a remarkably steep social ladder.

In ancient Mesopotamia, it is ladder that goes all the way to heaven and the world of the gods; here the Great Gods created lesser Gods to be their slaves and work in their fields and gardens.

While nowadays, we expect somewhat more liberal attitudes among Gods, their next move was, one level at least, socially progressive, they freed the lesser gods from their bondage – by creating mankind to do their work.