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THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF ARCHAEOLOGY: PRE-MODERN VIEWS OF THE PAST
Paul Bahn
Introduction
Like any area of study, archaeology has no fixed point of origin. A certain curiosity about the past seems to be widespread among human beings and is by no means a new phenomenon. The marked interest in archaeology displayed by modern royalty, especially in Britain and Scandinavia, also seems to have remote and eminent precursors.
People have always been aware that others came long before them. Before archaeology or even antiquarianism had come into existence, knowledge of these past times came only from written records, oral histories, religious beliefs, legends and superstition â in many rural areas this remained true even into the twentieth century. The most obvious relics of the past were the standing monuments or ruins, often shrouded in mystery and folklore. They stimulated the imagination and were often attributed to the fabulous heroes of mythology, to demons or elves, with the larger ones naturally being ascribed to giants. In some Christian communities, ancient monuments were eventually linked to the devil, while prehistoric rock art sites and megalithic tombs in south-west Europe were often given names linking them with the Moorish conquerors of the early medieval period.
The fact that most people travelled little, and occupied or worked in the same places for generations, engendered a strong sense of lineage and continuity in the ancient world and an attachment to native soil; but neither in ancient times nor in the medieval world was there yet any grasp of the fact that this soil could be a source of information about the past. Most antiquities came to light accidentally, through ploughing or construction work; any digging for objects involved a search for treasure, or â in medieval Europe â for saintsâ relics. The first glimmerings of archaeology lay with the pioneers who not only took a closer interest in the past but also realised that a history different from that of, for example, Classical texts, could be gleaned from traces left behind in the soil and landscape.
The earliest known âarchaeologicalâ probings are usually reckoned to be those of Nabonidus, last native king of Babylon. The Mesopotamians looked on their past with reverence and this prompted them to preserve and restore earlier monuments and temples, on occasion excavating to trace lost structures, and to search records in order to revive earlier traditions. Nabonidus (r. 555â539 BC) thus excavated a temple floor down to a foundation stone laid 3200 years earlier. He was concerned with tracing out the floor plans of ruined temples and collecting artifacts from these âexcavationsâ. Nabonidus was not an early archaeologist, however much his techniques may have resembled those of nineteenth-century archaeology. However, his daughter En-nigaldi-nanna had a special room in her house for her collection of local antiquities.
A fifth-century princess in Thrace (the eastern Balkans) had a collection of Stone Age axes in her grave; and even divine emperors were not immune to the attractions of âarchaeologyâ â the historian Suetonius informs us that the Roman emperor Augustus, in the first century BC, âhad collected the huge skeletons of extinct sea and land monsters popularly known as âgiantsâ bonesâ; and the weapons of ancient heroes.â This interest in âancient heroesâ can be traced back to Homer, often considered the âFather of Archaeologyâ for his role in turning peopleâs eyes to the past, through his descriptions of the Trojan War in the Iliad, and of different peoples in the Odyssey.
The Near East
Mesopotamia, the region of western Asia defined by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, enjoyed a roughly 2500-year literary âstream of traditionâ, with another 1000 years encoded in myth and oral tradition. The ancient prestige of Mesopotamia ensured that many of its traditions passed into the literature of adjoining regions, including the Bible. This literary tradition included a variety of ostensibly historical documents, such as king lists, chronicles, annals, epic poems, lamentations and other forms. This literature was accumulated from its third millennium BC beginnings, repeatedly copied as part of the training of scribes and disseminated through libraries. By the time of the great Assyrian kings (in northeast Mesopotamia) and of Nebuchadnezzar in the first millennium BC, educated Mesopotamians were heirs to a long historical consciousness. The Bible, Classical literature and early Christian writings preserved in the Western tradition a memory of Iron Age civilisations in western Asia. The historical sections of the Bible like Kings and Nehemiah describe the petty kingdoms of southern Palestine (Israel, Judea, Samarra and their neighbours) and their relations with the neighbouring Phoenician and Aramaean kingdoms to the north and with the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires.
The Classical world
Classical literature provided another view of the âorientalâ, and particularly of the Persians. The Greek perspective on the Persians combined admiration of social and military virtues with contempt for political subservience and âoriental despotismâ; after the failed Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century BC, the Greek attitude also carried a smug conviction of Hellenic superiority. At the same time Classical literature established a western stereotype of âoriental despotismâ, it also preserved a memory of eastern cities, civilisations and history. Herodotus, an admirer of the Persians, left a description of Babylon that guided antiquarian research well into the nineteenth century. Other Classical historians and geographers also recorded details of various places and cultures east of the Mediterranean as far as India, especially in the wake of Alexanderâs conquests and the later Roman sea trade. While their details are often literally fabulous, many of these descriptions have proven valuable sources. For example, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, an anonymous trading manual of the first century AD, inventories the goods available in the ports of the Indian Ocean from East Africa and Malaysia. The body of Classical literature also contains information that was crucial to the eventual decipherment of cuneiform scripts and the early study of Mesopotamian political history. And a Babylonian priest named Berossus even wrote, in Greek, a history of his country from the creation to Alexander the Greatâs invasion in the fourth century BC.
The emergence of Greece from the so-called Dark Ages in the eighth century BC led to a renewed interest in the extant remains from the Bronze Age. In particular the monumental Mycenaean âbeehiveâ tombs were markers of groups who had gone before. As states tried to find their identity these tombs appear to have been seen as the burial places of the forerunners of the community. As a result many Mycenaean tombs seem to have attracted offerings that have been interpreted as veneration for heroes. One tomb where such Early Iron Age activity occurred was at Menidhi in Attica. Its contents include pots decorated in the Geometric style with scenes of processing chariots, an allusion to earlier periods reflected in heroic oral poems like Homerâs Iliad.
These Mycenaean tombs were also used in subsequent periods. During building work in the Athenian agora, the market place of ancient Athens, a tomb was uncovered by accident during the fifth century BC and offerings in the form of oil containers were left. Likewise in the hellenistic period (the final centuries BC) tombs seem to have again attracted offerings.
The construction of new towns and the erection of new buildings sometimes brought to light remains of former times. When Julius Caesar laid out the new town of Capua (Casilinum) near Naples, the biographer Suetonius records that âa number of vases of ancient workmanshipâ were found in âvery old tombsâ; while the geographer Strabo tells us that when Caesar founded a Roman colony on the site of ancient Corinth in Greece, his soldiers discovered numerous sixth- and seventh-century BC pots and bronzes of such quality that every tomb was rifled and the objects were sold for high prices in Rome as âNecrocorinthiaâ (i.e., from the tombs of Corinth) â an early example of grave-looting and trading in antiquities.
In Greece itself there was a continuing fascination for the past even when incorporated into the Roman Empire. In the second century AD the geographer and historian Pausanias wrote what was in effect a travel guide to the monuments in Greece. In some parts, monuments and artifacts were placed against one of the key events of Greek history â the defeat of the Persian invasions in the early fifth century. Elsewhere he came across ruined temples in the countryside, which in his view had been left derelict since their destruction by the Persian invader. He noted that the paintings in the fifth-century BC sanctuary of Theseus at Athens had deteriorated through the ravages of time.
The past continued to be revered even after the fall of the western Roman empire. As Christianity became established in the lands of the Mediterranean, pagan cults started to be abandoned. Yet in spite of this, church officials started to build up collections of ancient statuary. A Byzantine chronicler recorded an array of major statues from the Classical world in the palace of Lausus â destroyed by fire in AD 475 â at Constantinople: these included Praxitelesâ famous statue of Aphrodite from Knidos, the statue of Lindian Athena given to the sanctuary by Amasis the Egyptian, and finally Pheidiasâ gold and ivory cult statue of Zeus from the main temple at Olympia.
Medieval Europe
The Europe of the Middle Ages saw a potent mixture of Christian belief and popular mythology. From the story in the Book of Genesis the geographical origin of the human race was placed in the Near East, both at the Creation and after the Flood when Noahâs sons repopulated the earth. Paganism was thought to have developed by a process of degeneration as people moved away from the Near East and lost touch with the mainstream of Jewish and Christian belief. Pagan monuments were thus considered the work of degenerate peoples and wherever possible were destroyed, neutralised or Christianised. Standing stones or menhirs were sometimes Christianised by having a cross carved into their surface or on their top. Churches were built alongside major prehistoric ritual monuments such as Avebury, and many sacred springs were rededicated to Christian saints.
The standing stones or âmenhirsâ erected in several regions of western Europe by Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, thousands of years before Christ, were seen by early Christian clergy as intolerable pagan symbols. Legends and beliefs still attached to them during the Roman period, even if they were no longer the focus for religious rituals. It was not always necessary to destroy them, however, since they could be rededicated as Christian monuments. The best examples are the menhirs of Brittany with tops recarved in the shape of a cross. In other cases, a cross was simply carved into the stoneâs surface. There is an example in the life of the sixth-century Welsh saint Samson. Landing one day in Cornwall, he saw people worshipping at a menhir and hastened to denounce their idolatry and convert them to Christianity. To set his seal on their conversion, he carved a cross in the menhirâs surface with his own hand, using an iron tool.
Coupled with this was a general lack of historical awareness. The world was thought to have been created by God in a literal seven days, as part of a divine plan whose end was to be Christâs second coming and the Last Judgement. There was little understanding of long-term natural or cultural change. In medieval art, Old Testament prophets and New Testament characters alike are represented in the garb of contemporary medieval people. The idea that human technology and society had been constantly changing over the centuries barely registered in the medieval perception of time.
A third factor was the power of scholarly mythology. In the ninth century, the Welsh monk Nennius claimed that Brutus, a Trojan prince, had been the first to settle the British Isles after the ravages of the Biblical flood. A powerful argument in favour of this hypothesis was the proposed derivation of âBritainâ from âBrutusâ. Two centuries later, the Welsh chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his totally fictitious History of the Kings of Britain, felt able to put a precise date on the arrival of Brutus in the southwest: 1170 BC. Similar mythologies and speculative genealogies were developed on the European mainland, where the Goths, for example, were thought to descend from Gog, a grandson of Noah mentioned in the Bible.
There are cases of early and unusual interest in antiquities in central and eastern Europe. In some cases, this interest was mercenary: finds of ancient silver coinage enriched the state treasury. For instance, Gustav Vasa, king of Sweden, following a 1547 find of ancient coins in the Ă
land Islands, indicated that more such finds would be desirable. At other times, the way in which the finds manifested themselves provoked curiosity, as in the âmysteriousâ appearance of pots: in his Historia Polonica, the chronicler Jan DĹugosz (1415â80) reported extraordinary occurrences near the town of Ĺrem, where whole ceramic vessels seemed to emerge from the ground as if by magic. At Ĺrem and other localities in western Poland such events had become commonplace and there was a long-standing folk tradition about the âmagic crocksâ that sprang from the earth. In 1416, on the orders and in the presence of WĹadysĹaw II Jagiello, king of Poland, excavations took place at Nochowo, which unearthed some of these vessels.
This event marked one of the first conscious efforts to investigate the remains of the prehistoric inhabitants of eastern Europe. We know today that the âmagic crocksâ emerging from the ground were probably cremation urns from the Late Bronze Age (1200â700 BC): large urnfield cemeteries of buried vessels with ashes are distributed widely across east-central Europe. Legends of âmagic crocksâ abounded throughout much of central Europe and corresponded closely with the area in which the Bronze Age Urnfield cultures flourished! The erosion of the soil that covered the shallow pits in which these urns were placed would have created an impression of their rising from the ground by themselves. Still, it is important to note that such reports engaged the interest of the monarch of what was then one of the largest states in this part of Europe.
Chroniclers, like DĹugosz, were especially common in eastern Europe, and they frequently set down tales and legends of cultural origins and homelands. Burial mounds were ascribed to âpagansâ, while other excavated objects were curiosities. DĹugosz pondered the origins of two massive burial mounds near KrakĂłw, speculating that they housed the remains of the legendary Krak, whom he identified as a Roman in an attempt to connect the early Poles with Classical antiquity. Megaliths (large prehistoric stone monuments) along the Baltic coast were also attributed to murky âpaganâ tribes or even to antediluvian giants. The German term HĂźnenbett, used to denote megalithic tombs, is derived from the Old German for âgiantâs bedâ.
There are also isolated incidents of what could be called âhistorical archaeologyâ. For instance, in 1390 Prince Louis of Brzeg in Silesia undertook excavations at the Slavic stronghold at Ryczyn on the Oder in order to determine whether it was the seat of the bishops of WrocĹaw (Breslau) three centuries earlier. In 1091, excavations were carried out in Kiev in an attempt to find the grave of Theodosius, founder of the first Russian monastery. Battlefields were also subjects of study, with chroniclers noting the piles of slightly-buried human bones at some locations. But such excavations were rare in an era in which magic and mystery were the main explanatory tools.
Traces of Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) people were encountered repeatedly in central and eastern Europe prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, but, as in western Europe, the interpretative framework was lacking to appreciate their significance. In eastern Europe, early finds were almost invariably linked to the discovery of mammoth bones of the last Ice Age. In 1679 a Cossack troop engaged in the digging of a mill dam near Kharâkov uncovered a collection of mammoth bones which, like finds of human and animal bones from caves and other sites in western Europe, were attributed to a giant. When the leader of the Cossack troop publicly exhibited a mammoth tooth several years later, Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich ordered a formal investigation of the site entailing excavation and measurement. But if artifacts and other traces of human occupation were encountered at this locality, they were not reported.
The Tsarâs action set a pattern of state involvement in Russian archaeology that has continued to the present day. In 1718, Peter the Great issued instructions to civilian and military authorities throughout Russia to collect and record finds of âancient things in the soil, namely unusual stones, bones of animals, fish, or birds, unlike those we have nowâ. Among the various discoveries brought to Peterâs attention were mammoth bones from the Don River, collected from what later became known as the famous concentration of open-air Palaeolithic sites near the village of Kostenki (âkostâ being the Russian word for bone). The Tsar personally examined some of the mammoth bones from Kostenki, which he thought to be the remains of war elephants from a wandering army of ancient Greeks (similar interpretations were placed upon mammoth remains recovered in Germany during this period).
For centuries, European farmers had also been turning up humanly-flaked flints and polished stone implements as they ploughed their fields. Popular belief had explained them away as elf-shots or thunderbolts (âcerauniaâ, as the ancient Greeks had already christened them). The thunderbolt theory was even given scientific elaboration by some writers. In the midseventeenth century, for example, one authority described their origin as âgenerated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumposed humourâ. Such pseudoscientific obfuscation did not help towards discovering the true nature of these strange objects, which gave rise to a wide variety of beliefs. Many virtues and marvellous powers were ascribed to these stones â Etruscans and Romans had used such ancient arrowheads and polished stone axes as amulets, and in southern France, until the late nineteenth century, shepherds would often put a polished stone axe in a bag around the neck of the leading ram to protect the flock, hang one in the sheepstalls or bury one on the threshold of the barn to protect the ewes from disease, or carry one themselves as an amulet.
Other continents
Similar beliefs existed in other parts of the world, such as Central Africa where polished axes were likewise thought to be thunderbolts and preserved by the inhabitants of the region for many generations, while in West Africa perforated stones were called thunderstones (kwes, sokpe, nyame akuma). Two bored stones from the western shore of Lake Tanganyika were given to E.C. Hore, a Master Mariner of the 1877 London Missionary Society Expedition to Central Africa, by local people who regarded them as messages from ancestors and kept them carefully in baskets or small huts. Indeed oral traditions throughout the dark continent indicate that an interest in ancestors and relics from the past existed long before the arrival of Europeans.
The first recorded finds of polished stone axes in India, from the 1840s to the 1860s, all came from ben...
