History With A Heart
After years of studying humanity’s history, the TV historian explores how his discoveries have affected him
TV’s Neil Oliver explains the deep emotional sentiment behind his new book
YOU could say that Neil Oliver has a little bit of a history with the past. The Scottish archaeologist and historian has spent the last 18 years on our screens, entertaining and educating us in equal turns.
He has covered everything from Scotland’s past and the UK’S extraordinary coasts, to the ancient Egyptians and the Vikings.
When he’s not on TV, Neil is busy penning books. The Stirling-based author’s latest title, Wisdom of the Ancients, reflects on life lessons from our distant past, but also draws on his own life experiences and observations.
“This book is very much personal, it’s not a history book or an archaeology book,” Neil says. “It’s an expression of what thinking about these places has meant to me for 30 years. I’ve drawn from places like Callanish on Lewis, the little Viking grave of the Birka girl in Sweden, the Laetoli footprints in Tanzania – places I have been moved by.
“Some of the assumptions I’ve drawn on, they are my own, and I’m not offering them up with any kind of scientific fact.
“But I don’t see how you can fail to be moved by the humanity of it – going into a cave and seeing ancient art painted with ancient pigments 30-40,000 years ago. It’s powerful to see the emotions expressed there, and it’s important to see that those emotions survive.
“Take the Vedbaek mother and baby for example – the thousands-of-years-old mother who seemed to have died in childbirth and was buried together with her baby, laid on a white swan’s wing.
It seems to me, that as well
as finding their bones and other hard items, archaeologists also found grief and love.
“The rediscovering of these ephemeral human emotions serve to remind us that people thousands of years ago in unimaginably different worlds and unimaginably different circumstances, still found the need to express their sadness and their loss in ways that we can recognise instantly without having to be told what we’re looking at. That shared humanity across millennia – to me, it’s a comfort.”
Neil explains that he took inspiration from some of the world’s great nature writers, while penning the book.
“More than a writer, I’m a reader, you know, I read all the time. I’ve always drawn much pleasure from nature writers, all the way back to the likes of John Muir right up into the modern era. Writers like Robert Macfarlane, John Lewis-stempel, Roger Deakin, Hilaire Belloc, Nan Shepherd – all those people who wrote so movingly about the natural world. As L.P. Hartley famously said, ‘the past is a foreign country’. The past really is another world.
“As well as knowing exactly how many millimetres tall the great pyramid is, or how to use radiocarbon to establish the date of the grave of a Neanderthal in a cave in Shanidar, it seems valuable to me to allow yourself to be moved, because ultimately you’re looking at human beings. We’ve been the same physiologically and cognitively for hundreds of thousands of years, it’s only our circumstances that have changed. We can honour the people of the past just by stopping for a minute and trying to understand what they were saying to us.
“It’s like a message in a bottle that bobs up into our time. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to write about the past as if it was a beautiful landscape and to express the way it made me feel.”
Neil loved writing since he was a boy, but decided to pursue his love of archaeology after leaving school. After qualifying, the presenter worked in the field for a while, before retraining as a journalist, which in turn led to his presenting career. But what was it that made him step away from being a hands-on archaeologist?
“I wanted to make a living! I was working outside in all weathers and there was no sort of career structure to it. I wasn’t interested in following an academic path, so I couldn’t see a future in it. I got the opportunity to do a journalism training course on my local paper and decided that I’d be mad not to add that string to my bow.
“Journalism set me on a different path and the things I learned – the shorthand, the touch typing, interviewing people, quickly writing things up so that they are comprehensible for an audience – those things have been
"That shared humanity across millennia – to me it is a comfort"
more use to me for more of my life than my archaeology degree, really.”
Neil says archaeology and journalism actually have lots in common.
“People said, ‘how can you go from one to the other like that?’ but to some extent, being on a dig, it’s just about being nosy about people.
“And so, when you’re an archaeologist, you’re poking about trying to find out what somebody did and why a thousand years ago, and then as a journalist, you’re poking and digging about trying to find out why somebody did something yesterday. I’m fascinated about the reasons people do the things they do, be it 10,000 years ago or yesterday. And that curiosity manifests itself into wanting to tell these stories to the world.”
Neil is already working on another non-fiction project, and has been working on his podcast over lockdown.
“I’ve been working with one of my good friends on Neil Oliver’s Love Letter to the British Isles, which has been a real tonic during lockdown, as well as writing a new book. Increasingly, I’m trying to write about history and archaeology in a different way, in a way that I haven’t read before.
“I’m trying to forge my own style and find ways of going from the distant past all the way up to the foot of the present – almost make a novel out of it. I want to make it a read that takes you from 5000 years ago to the present as quickly as possible and give people a sense of the whole picture rather than just focusing in on a very narrow span of time. I’m interested in giving people the big picture and being personal about it.”
Neil enjoys making history accessible to audiences whether they are watching, listening or reading along.
“People can be intimidated by it, because well, literally history is everything that’s ever happened, you know, everywhere in the world! Quite often people will think, well, in 1215 Magna Carta was written in England, but what was happening in China in 1215, or in Africa? You don’t always get the whole picture. You get these isolated islands, things that you know about; the English Civil War or the Bubonic Plague or the
Charge of the Light Brigade. People can think it’s too much, and they don’t know how it all fits together.
So, I’m interested in finding ways to try and bring it all together.”