It helps if you know what Alternative Archaeology is for

While clearing out stuff I found a letter from Michael Dames about the Lampeter TAG session we attended. I wasn’t happy about my performance there and if you asked me at the time I wouldn’t have been complimentary about his talk either. Asimov said “If you can’t be good, be loud,” and he was certainly loud and colourful as he talked about Neolithic / Tudor/ 18th century ploughing festivals. He was a good talker. I could be slightly sour as it was the first day in ages I’d worn a tie and he opened his talk by strangling himself with his tie, to show how uptight archaeologists were. What I wasn’t happy about was his drawing a line from a Mummer’s Play back to the Neolithic. It was a well-played and passionate performance, but it seemed weakly founded. The session we were both in was “What is Real and What is Not?” and I would have firmly said his past was certainly not real.

With the benefit of time I think this is rather a harsh assessment. A lot of the session was about engaging with alternative archaeologies. I think that faced with Michael Dames, the one person in the session was alternative, the archaeologists fell at the first hurdle. This isn’t about accepting everyone’s views as equally valid, but it is about acknowledging that the archaeological is far from complete, is not correct and by its nature cannot be exact. Paul Mellars* told me there are two types of people who enter Archaeology: Scientists and Artists. The Scientists are those who want to try and find exactly what we can know about the past. These are the archaeologists who make minimal interpretations of the data. The Artists are those who take archaeological data and see what stories they can paint with them. I don’t think it’s a question of being one or the other, but I could agree with there being an axis between minimalism and maximalism.

I’m happiest when I’m reading more minimalist material. I’m enjoying reading Palaeolithic archaeology which seems to attract minimalists. Later prehistory seems to be much more maximal. If I’m going to create a weird idea about the past then I’d prefer build it on firm foundations so for this reason I prefer minimal archaeology. So is minimal archaeology the best archaeology? It depends what you’re using it for.

Academics might lose sight of what history and archaeology is used for by people. For the average archaeologist the past exists for people to write academic papers about. A successful academic paper spawns further papers.This would seem to make minimalism the best approach, leaving room for further interpretation. While it is a usable representation of the past, it’s not an accurate representation of the past.

I remember reading that Oppida fortifications were built as an exercise in social bonding. I think that the work may well have helped social bonding, but I’m pretty certain the sound of building wasn’t one of people shouting to each other, “What ho Crispin! Care to join us for a spot of social bonding?” Similarly I think the tri-radial cairns of Northumbria were used for some sort of ritual, but I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what. I’d be amazed if the opening lines of the ritual uttered by the archpriest were “Hear us spirits as this undetermined number of participants combine to perform a generic ritual which may, or may not, have some form of astronomical symbolism, in order to encode collective identity.”

Minimalism produces useful material for building up an array of facts which make pin possible pasts to a certain shape, but it will never produce a plausible past itself because the data simply isn’t there.

What happens if you take a different view? What happens if there’s more to the past than an academically acceptable past?

I think Michael Dames is interested to know what it was like in the past. I think he’s aware, unlike many archaeologists, that archaeology isn’t the way to do this. It can help, but there simply isn’t the data to create a vivid archaeological past. It can provide some details, but so much is missing. That why he uses folklore to fill in the gaps. This is anathema to prehistory where, by definition, there are no historical records. Even maximal academics are only maximal to a certain extent. They like to at least claim they their work is sound even if they’re engaging in highly personal phenomenologies⁺ of the past. These archaeologists tend to argue that minimalism is also built on a variety of assumptions, so they’re no less minimalist than their critics.

Michael Dames simply isn’t interested in minimalism. He’s trying to create a picture of the past. I think the hardest thing, which no-one really grasped at the session wasn’t that he was claiming his work was as archaeologically sound as anyone else’s. He was quite emphatic in rejecting archaeological method as the arbiter of what is a ‘real’ past.

Looking back I think he was one of the few people in the session who really took the session concept and thought hard about it. The other ‘fringe’ speakers were all showing how their approaches were valid archaeological approaches or partners to archaeology. Michael Dames doesn’t produce alternative archaeology it’s an alternative to archaeology. That’s more threatening to some archaeologists.

It shouldn’t be, especially to non-processualists, The only history quote that nearly everyone can remember is “History is written by the winners.” You can argue over that, but history is certainly written. Unlike hard sciences not only do we have our own social networks, but our society does shape our view of the past. There is no Marxist boiling point for water, but there’s certainly a Marxist history of the world that could be written. What role does history play in our society? When studying the past we’re happy to accept history as a society’s just-so story, a justification for the present as a biased reading of the past. We’re happy to see past uses of history being entertainment, moral tales or explanations of what it is to be human. Are academics rejecting these uses of history and thinking that their use of the past is the only reasonable use of the past?

We’re happy that Suetonius is a historian, but I wonder what our reaction would be to a historian working for the Fox Channel producing the history “When Good Leaders Go Bad: Presidents of the 20th Century”. Not as an accurate or objective reflection of what happened, but simple for the entertainment of Clinton’s exploits, or Dubya’s comical triumphs. Would that be a Bad Interpretation of the Past, or would it simply be and interpretation of the past?

Looking back I think Michael Dames’s strongest challenge was the question why does archaeology or history matter? I think it matters because minimalist approaches produce facts that receive general consent and that can be a common frame of reference for action. This is why I’d pick my interpretation of Avebury over Michael Dames’s. But my interpretation would be incredibly slight compared to his. If you’re not tied to the academic world or the heritage industry then is this a satisfying past? If not, then what should the people who are employed to work with the past full-time do about it?

* It was Prof Graeme Barker, now Disney Professor at Cambridge, who taught me to name-drop. I had to explain to my Grancha that it’s citation, it’s about not passing off good ideas as your own. But it does look like name-dropping.

+ Phenomenology is where you talk about your sensations of something. If you do it with short words you’re just anybody, but if you do it with long words then you’re an academic. —–