Thoughts on Europe’s oldest Civilisation

Athena and Orbis Quintus have both been talking on the new oldest civilisation in Europe. There’s consensus that it’s interesting stuff, but no-one seems too clear what it is that we’re getting excited about. Athena seems to lay the blame for the confusion at the door of David Keys, the Independent’s archaeology correspondent, but I’m not so sure. Looking over his past work I’d say Keys is terribly enthusiastic about archaeology and sometimes uncritical in his reporting, but I’d argue it’s not his job to write the archaeological report for publication. Athena laments the poor information on dating and, as an archaeologist she’s right to. It’s important for archaeologists to know how the dating was done but is it important to the general public? When you go out for a meal you just want the food, you don’t ask who made the oven it was cooked in. Similarly the public want results from archaeology. They want to know how old stuff is, and they’re not usually too fussed about the methodology.

There are flaws. The Independent dates Stonehenge to 2100BC. I’d argue that given the newly discovered temples are earthworks it’s fairer to compare them to the earthwork phase of Stonehenge from around 2900BC, but that’s my pet peeve at the moment. One the whole though I’d argue that grabbing the whole front page and page two for an archaeology story is a bit of triumph. It was competing against the whole Live 8 farrago that’s going at the moment. Getting Neolithic Germany onto the two most prestigious pages of a national newspaper in the Jerryphobic UK must have required some form of journalistic superpowers making David Keys something like Namrepus (the opposite of Superman).

Yet much grouchiness exists. The paper makes nice claims but where is the meat? Why did Keys not bother to tell us where these astounding results were recently published? And that’s where it gets interesting. Because when you read closely you can see it’s another success for the team in Saxony-Anhalt and they are having an awful lot of success at the moment.

A few years ago they recovered the Star Disc of Nebra, which had been illicitly excavated and smuggled out of the country. There’s been a publication in Archaologie in Sachsen-Anhalt the journal of the local museum, but I’m not aware of anything else that’s been peer-reviewed. Claims have been publicised by the team, notably in National Geographic and on BBC Horizon, but these claims have not been widely subjected to peer-review. While the basic disc is interesting, their claims of eclipse prediction and so on are massively optimistic.

A few months ago they were in the news, this time with Stone Age Porn. Athena’s grumbled mightily (and rightly) about that too. Again there’s been plenty of publicity but no publications apart from an article in Archaologie in Sachsen-Anhalt. You may not have heard of the Sun temple at Goseck. That didn’t quite splash across the news in the same way. Once again big claims on the astronomical front, though nothing in the peer-reviewed archaeoastronomy journals. In fact I don’t know of a peer-reviewed article on it anywhere, though I haven’t checked the obvious journal. I’d love to be wrong on this, so if anyone can correct me please do. Now it seems Goseck is one of many such temples. Evidence of German civilisation or another over-hyped claim? It depends by what you mean by civilisation. It requires a lot more than a settler and a worker.

With my ancient history hat on I’d smugly say that to have a civilisation you have to have a city. It’s what makes a culture civilised. Archaeologists don’t always go for this. Civilised societies are thought to be superior in some way, so they like to point out the complexity of Native American cultures and the brutality of the Romans who civilised much of Europe. The usual rejoinder is that Ancient Historians mistake plumbing for civilisation. But if it’s not longer the presence of cities that makes a civilisation then what is it? I’m concerned the answer is whatever I wish it to be.

Looking closely at the newspaper report what we have is earlier evidence of ritual structures than we previously thought. I don’t know, so far of any evidence that they were linked in one complex. The users may have, for all I know, have seen themselves as using their enclosures the correct way unlike the godless heathens just down the valley. Each village may have had their own. That’s a culture, but is it a civilisation? Only if you’re a fan of pseudo political correctness.

There is growing tendency to refer to civilisation as a synonym for culture so that in the extreme you get nomadic civilisations. The Mongols spring to mind or the Aboriginal civilisation of Australia, neither of which were civilisations. It’s supposedly a way of acknowledging their equality, so even though their technology was worse or their societies less stratified they were just as valuable as human beings (true) their cultures are just as worthy of study (true) and so in their own way they are civilisations. This only works if you don’t stop to think about how patronising this is.

I’m happy with the concept of all members of the human race being equal, but I am unhappy with the notion that it has to be a race. I really struggle with the concept that it’s white guys who have laid out the track and defined the rules. By referring to how civilised non-Graeco-Roman cultures are you’re reinforcing the belief that the Graeco-Roman way is normal behaviour or the ideal. I can see that as a person in a culture descended from the Romans I might compare other ancient peoples to the Romans, but there’s a need to acknowledge the differences. I’m not sure that the report does this. It seems to be centred around being the oldest step to modern Europe.

At this point I could recognise that the paper will only skim the results and the academic publications will give a more sophisticated picture. But where is this information? The story hasn’t come through the usual press release channels. There’s no way of examining the data and if that’s the case ultimately no way of using it. I cannot refer to their findings if I don’t know how they came to be. I can’t take their work on trust because I’m a sceptical rapscallion.

I remember Paul Mellars saying that two sorts of people become archaeologists; scientists and artists. The scientists, he said, want to gather data and test ideas. They tend to be minimalists and want to be certain of facts. Artists on the other hand want to take the evidence and see what stories they can tell with it. It would appear that Archaeology in Saxony-Anhalt is very much in the story-telling camp, but without the science the stories are unsatisfying and people will eventually grow tired of them.

Unless publications start to stream from Saxony then the next time I hear of an amazing find in East Germany I’ll know I can ignore it.

I’ll finish with a joke I heard.

English archaeologists announced a press conference. They were terribly excited. They announced to the world’s press that they had found copper five metres down. This, they claimed, was evidence that Iron Age Britons had a telephone network.

The French were intensely vexed. Their superiority had been challenged and the government ordered their archaeologists to dig deeper. Six months later they held their own press conference. Ten metres down an archaeologist has found some glass shards. This, the French proudly said, proved that they had a fibre-optic network in the Neolithic.

The Germans were now unhappy. Their technical superiority was under attack. This would not do and so their archaeologists dug. And dug. And dug. Two years later they had holes all over the country twenty metres deep and they had found nothing. Ecstatic they held their own press conference where they proclaimed that Palaeolithic Germans kept in touch with each other by cellphone. —–