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Innocence retrieval in archaeology

Christopher Hawkes

The discussion on archaeology's nature, destiny and philosophy, which the Editor wants me to continue (1973, 93), might risk becoming a bore unless I am brief. I will try to be. The prior articles he mentions, of course, are only the three most recent; he has printed others earlier, and now has added further letters (93-5) from Drs Salway, Myres and Webster. The best of the articles certainly seems to me to be Cecil Hogarth's (1972, 301-4). But I sympathize with David Clarke, in his 'Archaeology: the loss of innocence' (1973, 6-18), because of his scorn of claimed results from 'instinctive excavations', of the 'immortalization of subjective classifications', and of people who come to constitute 'elites'. Instinctively, even if innocently, I greatly want to agree.

On subjectivity, first, in interpreting excavations, as part of our whole problem of what to accept from the earth as true, I suggest a re-reading of this spring's Rescue News: notably Addyman, Barker and Jarrett there, and the editor Graham Thomas. That should be a preliminary to further meditation. To this itself, I will offer only a single point as relevant. In Archaeological Journal CIV, 1947, I interpreted some of Pitt Rivers's Excavations in Cranborne Chase. Thomas kindly remembered this; and the essay is seemingly still (despite some others' amendments) mostly accepted: see VCH Wilts I, i, and Agrarian History of England and Wales I, ii (both 1972) for the uses each has made of it. Would Clarke not scorn that essay, at least in parts, as being 'subjective'? And then, in case he were to might he be right?

Pausing at that thought, he may let me turn to classifications. These, when subjective, he is committed to deeming bad. Good Theory, however (1973, 159) should - just as in Good Rescue - issue in Good Classification. We think at once of his Beaker pottery of Great Britain and Ireland (1970), second to none as a work of its kind. Yet his system there has features for which 'subjective' is a quite fair word: see the review in Helinium, 1972, i, 'British Beakers as seen from the Continent', by Lanting and Van der Waals. If we insist on full objectiveness, then, as a test for immortalization, he passes it less than totally. Still, I want to persist in sympathy: his so assailing elites (as it has now come about) has made him an elite himself, for assailing in turn. His adoption of far-out language, which so many have found so painful, only furthers his elite status; how disown it? But what moves me up from sympathy to something higher, admiration, is his burning to assail all 'dictatorial censorships upon progress' (1973, 160); he has the right fire in his belly. Clouded in smoke - that language! - yet still the fire that is always vital. Was not ANTIQUITY meant by Crawford as a hearth for it (preferably smokeless)? What was Crawford's work altogether, air photography and such, but progress? Lighting the fire in his juniors too, a Myres or Hawkes, or a Piggott? Perhaps we have been, since then, becoming 'disciplinary dinosaurs' - though myself I have all too often found that notions I believed were good ones, and others were pleased to accept from me, must be altered (or just abolished). My notions of classification have seemed to me hardest of all to discipline - no doubt because too subjective, but see above; one tries again. I have certainly encountered 'dinosaurs', too unaware of being 'doomed'. But the worst are never people: they are ideas. I will give two specimens.

The first is the simple equation, Archaeology=Prehistory. Plainly false as it is (see Hogarth, cited above), why is it so seductive - as it nowadays often seems to be? What is plainly true, indeed, is that archaeology always needs, and always ought to get however historic the period dealt with, as great a care for whatever pertains to material data for study - in excavation, comparison, processing, everything analytical - as it needs and ought to get in dealing with primary prehistory. But the truth of this (and the force of the claim) can so impress some minds, that they fall to forgetting anything which prehistory itself has not got. The Dutch, at Bergumermeer (see the cited review by Clarke: 1973, 159), of organic remains and of artifacts retrieved seventeen thousand, four hundred and seventy-six. They were Mesolithic, so that artifacts include fabrication residues. With this now compare Hope-Taylor's Yeavering, in Northumberland: his finds and residues of any sort were virtually none at all. He had emplacements for major timber structures instead (one still unique). Yet despite their grandeur and size, he could show the site for what it was - a palatial establishment of King Edwin of Northumbria - only because its place-name fits a lucky mention in Bede. He could otherwise never have proved it so, nor defined its regal character. Yet once aware of that, one may account for its dearth of artifacts: all the scatter and residues can be thought to have been swept up, and dumped away from the site so as not to be found. Interpretation is affected, thus, by the notion of a royal household, a notion which pure prehistory has not got. Though archaeology evoked its structures here, it is nevertheless historical: identification of its sites depends, in the last resort, on texts.

Royalty means the top of a class society, graded, stratified. The Mesolithic, researched objectively, has not been found to match it; economies based on gathering seem unlikely to show it up. Sites significant institutionally, and to be viewed as types accordingly, enter the question only later. How much later? Try it backwards. Start with sites having known institutional significance: Medieval, Anglo-Saxon. Note the special case of Roman ones. Then attempt the case of the Iron Age. It had certainly institutions; of a class society, too, as is well enough known from history. As with the early Anglo-Saxon age, this is mirrored in its burials, and the ornaments and weapons befitting an upper but not a lower class. On sites of habitation, with every care for material data (one naturally thinks of Gussage: 1973, 109-30), the interpreter cannot escape from facing institutional factors. What were these for a hillfort? What farther back in the Bronze Age? When will the thread of class society, spun from history, snap? As soon as it does, archaeology can be purely prehistoric; but on the way, can we forget the peasant and lord, with ranks between? Isn't the way, the long road back, what other tongues call Protohistory? At all events, taking to that or keeping our loose 'prehistory' still, we should stop equating this, even in fun, with all archaeology. Might any who have done so think again, and set a better example?

The second 'dinosaur' idea springs from another slovenly usage. Are there really things called cultures? How do they issue from Good Theory? Clarke, conspicuously right, made his title 'Beaker pottery. . .'. If cultures, as a viable concept, are indeed fit to be recognized, they can be defined only by total enumeration of their parts. How does this simple rule of logic apply to Britain? or Ireland? The concept is originally German: from Kultur in the abstract came Kultur in the concrete (die so-and-so Kultur), with Kulturen as its plural. Its popularity in English, owed largely to Gordon Childe, deserves a stricter analysis than it commonly seems to get. How do our Neolithic Cultures (plural) stand today, beside their received plurality when archaeology was more innocent? Beaker Culture or Cultures: Food-Vessel Culture: What was its food? Woodbury Culture: Will anyone please enumerate all its parts? Would innocence be retrieved? Perhaps I should stop.

In Helinium, 1972, ii, I tried in an article, 'Europe and England: fact and fog', to peer out farther. Also in Études celtiques, volume for 1973 (Congress of Celtic Studies, 1971 at Rennes), with a title beginning 'Cumulative Celticity. . .'. I tend to prefer specific themes to general philosophical ones, like that of the current sequence in ANTIQUITY. But I hope what I offer to this may help in sustaining Good Archaeology - the purpose, I know, of all who have written before me.

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