Writing Archaeology

Telling Stories About the Past

Brian M. Fagan

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315415598
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Archaeology

Archaeology's best known author of popular books and texts distills decades of experience in this well-received guide designed to help others wanting to broaden the audience for their work. Brian Fagan's no nonsense approach explains how to get started writing, how to use the tools of experienced writers to make archaeology come alive, and how to get your work revised and finished. He also describes the process by which publishers decide to accept your work, and the path your publication will follow after it is accepted by a press. The new edition contains chapters on academic writing and on writing in the digital environment.

1
Come, Let Me Tell You a Tale

Rule 1: Always tell a story.

In 7000 B.C., a small group of hunter-gatherers camped in a sandy clearing near Meer, in northern Belgium. One day, someone walked away from camp, sat down on a convenient boulder, and made some stone tools, using some carefully prepared flakes and lumps of flint he or she had brought along. A short time later, a second artisan sat down on the same boulder. He or she also had brought a prepared flint [rock], struck off some [flakes], and made some [drills]. Later, the two stone workers used their finished tools to bore and groove some bone. When they finished, they left the debris from their work lying around the boulder....The second stone worker was left-handed. (Fagan 1995:23)

WHEN THE BELGIAN ARHAEOLOGIST David Cahen excavated the Meer site 9,000 years later, all he found were some amorphous scatters of stone-tool debris, seemingly unpromising material for telling the tale of the two stone workers. But by plotting the position of every chip and flake, and by using retrofitting and use-wear analysis, Cahen reconstructed a convincing story of Stone Age daily life. How did he know that one of the individuals was left-handed? Use-wear expert Lawrence Keeley examined the flint borers under low- and high-power magnification, and found abrasion marks from counterclockwise twisting on some of them—only a left-handed user could have employed an awl this way.

Cahen and his colleagues work far from the limelight and publish their work in specialist journals and monographs. Few archaeologists other than fellow specialists peruse their work, yet much of this kind of research unlocks the past by linking it to our own lives through things we have in common. Left-handedness is a good example. I’ve found that lecture audiences are electrified by the Meer story. When I talk about ancient left-handedness, they gasp. As I take them step by step through the research, you can hear a pin drop, especially when I show them a picture of left-handed abrasions. The power of this seemingly prosaic tale comes not from the events, but from the ingenious, logical way in which an archaeologist pieced it all together.

The story can be a trivial event, or it can involve a larger historical theme, like that of the camel. Strange that a camel saddle changed history, but it did. South Arabian nomads first domesticated camels sometime before 2500 B.C., but ten centuries passed before camels came into common use. The problem was not the camel, but the saddle. The first Arabian camel saddles were mounted over the animal’s hindquarters. Seated near the rear of the beast, the rider lost the major strategic advantage of the camel—the height of its master above the ground. The first breakthrough came with the development of the North Arabian saddle sometime during the five centuries before Christ. This is a rigid arched seat mounted over the camel’s hump that distributed the load evenly over the animal’s back. Now a rider could sling packs from both sides of the saddle and, even more important, could fight from camelback.

For centuries, the powerless camel breeders and owners had been the servants of the producers and buyers of frankincense and other commodities. Now they found themselves in the proverbial saddle, armed masters of the long caravan routes that crisscrossed southwestern Asia and the Nile Valley. Profits from the caravan trade flowed into their hands; Petra in the Jordanian desert became the first of the great caravan cities. So efficient was the camel with the North Arabian saddle that wheeled carts effectively vanished from southwestern Asia for many centuries.

Again, a near-invisible artifact in the archaeological record makes for a compelling story and explains the seemingly mysterious disappearance of wheeled carts over a wide area for many centuries.

Writing archaeology for a general audience requires storytelling, not the just-so stories rightly castigated by legions of archaeologists, but compelling narratives based on the best scientific data available.

Storytelling

Come, let me tell you a tale: the phrase conjures up images of a storyteller by a campfire or a grandfather reading to his grandchildren in a deep armchair. Since the beginnings of speech, humans have passed beliefs, folklore, and essential skills from one generation to another by storytelling. The Old Testament is a series of stories and teachings. So are The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s great poems. The Greek authors Herodotus and Thucydides were expert storytellers. Great nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians like Francis Parkman and Samuel Eliot Morison were consummate masters of stirring narrative: “A brave wind is blowing and the caravels are rolling, plunging and throwing spray as they cut down the last invisible barrier between the Old World and the New . . .” (Morison 1942:226).

Who else but Morison could communicate the excitement of Christopher Columbus’s landfall in the Indies in so few words? Only a handful of archaeologists have ever tried to write such powerful narrative. Howard Carter wrote wonderfully understated accounts of Tutank-hamun’s tomb, including these famous sentences:

The very air you breathe, unchanged through the centuries, you share with those who laid the mummy to its rest. Time is annihilated by little intimate details such as these, and you feel an intruder. (Carter and Mace 1923:124)

There’s an immediacy about Carter’s writing that makes you feel you were in on the discovery.

Some of the best archaeological writers worked in the nineteenth century, notably Englishman Austen Henry Layard, who excavated at Nimrud and Nineveh in Iraq. He wrote of his excavations in 1849:

The great tide of civilization has long ebbed, leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore. . . . We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind, as children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands. (Layard 1849:112)

“What they had left behind”: Layard’s five words epitomize the challenge of the archaeologist as a storyteller. Not for us the rich chronicles of medieval Spain or the blow-by-blow accounts of the Battle of Trafalgar or the events of 1776. As the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott reminded us a half-century ago, archaeology is “the science of rubbish.” Our archives, our blow-by-blow accounts, come from the trivial detritus of history. This debris comes in many forms: stone flakes and finished projectile points, potsherds, grinding stones, house foundations, beads, animal bones, and humble seeds. These artifacts and food remains are the equivalent to the historian’s archives. Like the crabbed records of medieval monasteries or obscure government documents from a century ago, they are often unintelligible to anyone but the handful of experts who delve into them.

We’ve largely forgotten how to tell stories about the past. In an era of daunting specialization and high-tech science, we archaeologists, like other scholars, communicate in tongues alien to the outsider—laws of association, stratigraphic profiles, processual approaches, and so on, to say nothing of obscure cultural names like Acheulian, Bandkeramik, Clovis, and Mississippian. Then there are technical terms like “pre-pared core technique,” “reductive technology,” and “slip.” It’s as if we have a secret code for communicating with one another, which is unintelligible to the world at large. This is a product of the intensely specialized nature of twenty-first-century archaeology, where people working in one area will use a completely different set of cultural terms from researchers laboring only a few hundred miles away. There’s also a need for precise terminology, so that everyone in a particular specialty knows exactly what the others are talking about. Add to this the generally appalling standards of writing in archaeology, and it’s easy to understand the huge chasm between archaeological research at the technical level and our wider audience. And there is such an audience, just as there is for astronomy and Civil War history—readers passionate about the past, often well informed, and anxious to learn more. As another British archaeologist, Barry Cunliffe, remarked some years ago, archaeology as we practice it is like an unperformed play, waiting in the wings for the actors to appear on stage.

The challenge is to make the past come alive, using an archaeological record that is often, to put it mildly, unspectacular.

All archaeological sites, all finds, have a story to tell, not about artifacts and food remains, house foundations or fortifications, but about the people behind them. Much general writing in archaeology buries itself in dreary lists of artifacts and turgid journeys from one obscure archaeological site to the next. I, among many others, have been guilty of this.

We forget that all archaeology is the result of human behavior, of people like ourselves. Like us, they were born and grew up, loved, got married, had children, and died. They negotiated with one another, quarreled, sometimes got in fistfights, were occasionally hungry, and revered their ancestors. We have a common bond over the centuries and millennia, epitomized by the left-handed stone worker at Meer. Archaeologists have rich, compelling stories to tell, but all too often we shy away from the challenge.

Approaching a Story

Duncans Point, near Bodega Bay, 6000 B.C.: the hunters sidle ever closer, moving quietly on the slippery rocks, spears and heavy wooden clubs in hand. Well spread out, sure of foot, and carefully downwind, they move in so close that they can literally touch their prey. Then the killing begins. Quick spear thrusts, brutal blows with the wooden clubs as the men set about them left and right, trying to kill every seal in reach. Many of the adult males escape quickly, wriggling to safety in the breakers. The hunters take the mothers and their young, also older beasts, which wake up confused, to stare death in the face.

A few hectic moments and the hunt is over. The men club any dying beasts, then carry and drag away the fresh carcasses. They skin and butcher them on the low cliff above the rookery. Back at camp, they hang strips of meat out to dry in the afternoon sun, while the women peg out the seal skins and scrape them clean. (Fagan 2003:62)

This brief account of a seal hunt is reconstructed from the finds at a coastal site in northern California. The scenario is fictional but based firmly on the available archaeological evidence. Note the use of the words “slippery,” “downwind,” and “literally” to make the environment come to life and to dramatize the strategy of the hunt, which requires the hunter to stalk his prey from downwind with great expertise. I wrote this reconstruction as the hook for a chapter on early coastal settlement in a book on ancient California commissioned for the general public. The raw material for the chapter was far from exciting, but the brief reconstruction set the stage for the story that followed.

Telling any archaeological tale convincingly is hard, especially when the raw material for the narrative is both sparse and visually dull. If you want a quick analogy, make a list of six convenient objects close to your computer—in my case, an electric clock, a pencil, a stereo remote, a paper clip, and a box of blank CDs. Then try to construct a meaningful story about the person who owned them. A seemingly impossible task, until you remember Sherlock Holmes and his brilliant capacity for logical observation. The image of the archaeologist as a kind of detective piecing together clues from arcane finds is a well-worn cliché, but it must be admitted that there is some truth in it.

You can approach your storytelling in many ways, but every story needs a plot, a central thrust that carries the reader through to a satisfying end. I always remember a New York editor quoting Alice in Wonderland at me, the immortal words of the King of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning, go on to the end: then stop.” How right both my editor and the King were! An article, each book, every chapter needs a beginning and an outcome—if nothing else, a link to the next chapter. This means that you must have a genre that is appropriate for the story. There is no set formula, no easy solution. With every book I have written, I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about, and sometimes agonizing over, the best potential approach to the story.

There’s a bewildering array of options, but everything depends on the subject matter. Ivor Nöel Hume is a superb excavator, an exemplary historical archaeologist, and a wonderful writer. He is most famous for his excavations at Martin’s Hundred, a small Colonial settlement near Williamsburg, Virginia, attacked by Indians on March 22, 1622. He spent five years excavating the village and perusing court and legislative records to fill in historical details. In a cellar filling, his excavators found a short length of twisted and glued golden wire called a “point,” a type of decoration sported by the gentry and military officers of the early seventeenth century.

In Martin’s Hundred, his popular book on the subject, Nöel Hume brings his carefully reasoned archaeological detective work on the gold thread to life. He makes the reader feel as if he or she is at his side as he finds the thread in the foundation, then identifies it as an ornamental “point” worn on gentlemen’s clothing. He researches early seventeenth-century costume in England, then learns of a Virginia Council resolution of 1621 that permits only “ye Council & heads of hundreds to wear gold in their cloaths” (Nöel Hume 1982:60). William Harwood, the head administrator of Martin’s Hundred, had signed the resolution. Could the thread have been his property? The case was a weak one until Nöel Hume’s team unearthed a cannonball in the same house:

Fortunately William Harwood’s immortality does not hang solely by a thread. We found another, more substantial link in the form of a cannonball. . . . In the 1625 census, Harwood was the only person in Martin’s Hundred listed as possessing a “peece of Ordnance, 1 wth all things thereto belonging,” and nothing belonged more than a cannonball. On the other hand, does one ball make a cannon? Who can say that someone did not borrow the ball from Harwood’s magazine and use it to grain wheat into flour? (Nöel Hume 1982:63)

In this piece of deceptively effortless writing, the reader becomes a detective at the author’s side and shares in the triumph of identification, also in the legitimate questions about it. Trivial historical detail, perhaps, but a marvelous example of good archaeological writing and storytelling.

Martin’s Hundred is an example of the personal approach to archaeological writing. Nöel Hume writes a first-person account that has an immediacy that works well. Take an archaeologist who feels strongly about his finds and can write, and you will find the most compelling stories of all.

An increasing number of science journalists have come to archaeology in recent years. They often meld discoveries with stories about the archaeologists in field and laboratory. The reader embarks on a journey of discovery through the eyes of the scientists engaged in the research. This kind of storytelling mingles a first-person approach with serious science, highlights personality traits, even dress, to make the subject matter come alive. This approach was fashionable in the days of the titanic disputes between different factions of paleoanthro-pologists back in the 1970s and 1980s. Large grants and powerful egos were at stake, the potential readership for science writers enormous. It’s questionable whether the public airing of academic quarrels did the field any good. Fortunately, things have calmed down now.

Sometimes, a professional writer will team up with an archaeologist. James Adovasio, a noted first-Americans scholar, teamed with a freelance writer to craft a highly personal account of a subject that was heavy on feelings, interpersonal relationships, and quarrels, while at the same time making a case for early settlement of the New World (Adovasio and Page 2002). The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery is a lively account of an often arid subject with few spectacular finds, but the personalities and disputes sometimes crowd out the archaeological story.

Some accounts of major research projects and excavations involve teams of scholars working on a common problem. Science writer Michael Balter wrote a book about the early farming settlement at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, a spectacular site with houses and shrines. Instead of writing a straightforward account of the excavations, Balter chose to develop a story around the diverse personalities and intellectual biases of the major participants. They named him the “project biographer.” The Goddess and the Bull: Çatalhöyük: An Archaeological Journey to the Dawn of Civilization weaves archaeobotany and other scientific approaches together with details about the archaeologists, creating a book that is unusual and perhaps tells you more about the scholars than about the site itself. Here’s an example of Balter’s approach, which leads from the personal into science:

Christine Hastorf was back after a year’s absence. Christine had not come to Çatalhöyük for the 1995 season. Her teaching load at Berkeley, her ongoing archaeobotanical work in South America, and the responsibility of caring for Nicky and Kyle had been more than enough to keep her busy that year. Ian had replaced her temporarily with an archaeobotanist from the Institute of Archaeology in London, Ann Butler, who built the project’s first flotation machine with the help of a local village blacksmith. The basic principle behind flotation is simple: charr...