Robert Macfarlane’s Underland on Radio 4

Inasmuch as archaeology (in my definition at least) is about the invention, manipulation and transformation of the material – and recently, the virtual – world by our species, I see it everywhere. Or, when I’m listening to bbc Radio 4, hear it everywhere.

“Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions of miles away. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil… Why go low?” asks Robert Macfarlane.

This was Underland, Radio 4’s Book of the Week (five episodes April/May), read by its author. “Deep time,” he says, “is the chronology of the Underland; and deep time is measured in units that humble the human instinct: epochs and aeons.”

Just so, even if, as when the writer recounts the 1797 discovery of Mesolithic burials in Aveline’s Hole, Somerset, we travel from geological to archaeological time a mere 10,000 years ago. Two young men out rabbiting described ”A large and lofty cavern the sides of which are most curiously fretted and embossed.” “It is, they see,” continues Macfarlane, “a charnel house. On the floor and ledges to their left are scattered bones and complete skeletons lying promiscuously almost converted into stone. The relics shine with calcite, and dusting some of the bones is red ochre powder.”

Crikey! See what the dull archaeological report becomes in the hands of an award-winning storyteller. Later on, still in episode one in the Mendips but in a different, yet more precipitous cave-system – and now describing his own direct experience – the author has it that “Nerves tingle as I pass between the hanging waves of stone.”

More nerve tingling occurred in the second episode as Macfarlane reported an overnight stay in the Salle de Drapeaux. Here was underground (in every sense) revolutionary wall-art, with more human skeletons in a disturbing Paris catacomb ossuary. His “mouth dries up instantly” on contemplating his passage through a tunnel, a miniscule floor-level opening through which he is instructed to crawl without shouting or touching the ceiling in case of roof collapse. “Fear”, says the narrator, “slithers up my spine.”

And so it goes. In remote northeastern Italy, on the border with Slovenia and allegedly near the entrance to Hades, our protagonist encounters what he understands as “unmistakably, a votive space”, in which hundreds of coins and dozens of oil lamps and jars were found. This was the Duino Mithraeum, a rare example of a natural limestone cave employed for the Roman cult of Mithras.

Macfarlane travels to Norway’s Lofoten archipelago. Here at this island chain that extends nearly 100 miles into the ocean he tells of Bronze Age stick figures, “Arms or legs wide, as if dancing or leaping,” painted in red ochre in near inaccessible sea-caves, “where cliffs fall sheer to the ocean.”

The author’s accounts of dangling, slithering and clambering in the cause of geology, archaeology and literature culminate in a visit to East Greenland and the Knud Rasmussen, “a glacier so great that it makes its own weather.” “Ice fills our ears and our dreams and our speech,” says Macfarlane. “We enter the ice and the ice enters us.”

Why go low? Many archaeologists would agree with Robert Macfarlane that “Actively to retrieve something from the Underland almost always requires effortful work.” And perhaps there is also something to be said for a first-person account of their own archaeological adventures, if not necessarily always couched in the historical present.

Perhaps less wildly adventurous but arguably equally archaeological, Underland was succeeded as Book of the Week by Babita Sharma’s The Corner Shop: Shopkeepers, the Sharmas & the Making of Modern Britain ( bbc

Radio 4, May).

Greg Bailey researches tv archaeology in the Department of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Bristol