The glories and controversies of archeology
Archeology is one form of science that astounds and delights almost everybody. Like any schoolchild, I learned about pyramids and took them for granted. And I was only slightly interested to see Petra, a vast archeological site in Jordan’s southwestern desert.
Once I looked at its many tombs and temples carved into pink sandstone cliffs (by people we can’t even imagine), I was enraptured. Then I began to understand that there are mysterious locations all over the globe, many I know little or nothing about. Petra is clearly one of the great, not- to- bemissed experiences.
No better than an amateur in this field, I’ve read with pleasure A Little History of Archaeology ( Yale University Press) by Brian Fagan, a University of California professor who teaches and writes about that subject. Fagan has a deft hand with anecdotes. He circles the world to pick up incidents about discoveries made by archeologists on various continents.
He tells us that many were tomb robbers who made large sums by selling through dealers whatever they found. He describes how many who started out with nothing but curiosity were slowly turned (by what they found) into experts teaching in universities. He’s eager to tell us all about these valuable scholars and what they have done for the world.
The theme that emerges is archeology’s revelation of human history as the world knows it now. Not long ago, in the early 19th century, it was assumed that humans had been on Earth for 6,000 years, more or less. History began, roughly, with Julius Caesar and the Romans. Before that, it was all blank. But archeology fundamentally transformed our knowledge of the past.
“Now the timescale is three million years and counting,” Fagan writes. The effect of archeology was to push humanity’s knowledge backwards, creating a new historical horizon for all of us. They opened a vast unknown landscape of the past.
Many rivers flowed into that crucial discovery. Human- like bones of Neanderthals raised questions that still need answers. Exotic, totally different art objects cropped up, suggesting that one form of humans lived and expressed themselves in Egypt and another in Russia. As geology advanced, it set researchers to working out a new chronology of human life. So did Darwin’s increasingly accepted theories.
Archeologists saw their duty: combine all these forms of research into one commanding explanation.
Fagan’s stories frequently
emphasize the bizarre workings of archeology, which have often depended on the eccentric views of amateurs with wealthy relatives. In 1883, the study of Egypt was in chaos, without digging rules or trained excavators. One man who modernized the system was Augustus Lane- Fox Pitt Rivers ( 18271900), an army officer with a rich uncle.
The uncle left Augustus a vast estate and a large income, providing that he changed his name to Pitt Rivers. With his new name and his inherited wealth, Gen. Pitt Rivers could vigorously pursue his interest in Egyptology for the rest of his days. He hired teams of trained workers, led by six supervisors, who excavated beneath the pyramids and collected a multitude of objects from around the bodies of pharaohs and other leaders. The Pitt Rivers fortune paid for widespread publishing about the art objects and for two museums the general created to house them. One of them, the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford University, still flourishes under that name.
It’s rare now for archeologists to make spectacular discoveries, such as richly decorated tombs. But sometimes research shows that a discovery is larger than the first archeologists realized. The magnificent
archeology... transformed our knowledge of the past.
12th- century Angkor Wat in Cambodia turned out to be a much larger city, more heavily populated, than anyone guessed. The recent Crossrail Project, an underground railway line being constructed across London, England, involves archeologists. They identify unexpected corridors whose photographs will appear in a book, Hidden London: Discovering the Forgotten Underground, to be published in September.
Archeologists study the long- term view of climate change, providing background to today’s forebodings. Fagan notes that Egyptian civilization nearly collapsed because of erratic Nile flooding in 2100 BC. But the pharaohs shrewdly invested in agricultural irrigation canals and grain storage facilities. As Fagan writes, “Their civilization lasted for 2,000 more years.” Maybe we should study that example.
Often, ownership is disputed of objects seized out of cultural curiosity. The community on Easter Island is anxious to retrieve from the British Museum the eightfoot-high, four-ton sculpture collected by a Royal Navy captain in 1868. It is sacred, t he i ndigenous Easter Islanders say, and should be repatriated. The British Museum disagrees.