Neal Ascherson on Archaeology

Tell us something about the early figures in archeology, such as Christian Thomsen.

Christian Thomsen [1788-1865] was the first to to invent the idea of the three ages: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. He, and later Oscar Montelius [1843-1921], were both patriotic Danes, who cooperated with the King and the court, who wanted to create a national narrative and create a glorious past that Denmark could allude to and be proud of. Several kings, in other Scandinavian countries as well, were keen archaeologists, getting down there in the mud and digging away themselves.

These Scandinavian kings encouraged the development of a professional Archaeology?

Yes. Generally speaking archeology as a profession could never have emerged without the state nurturing it, fostering it and shaping it as a structured profession. With the spread of subsidized national museums throughout Europe and the appointment of curators came the beginning of national archaeology services, often structured almost militarily, like tax collectors or police, with ranks, hierarchies and local officers in each region or district. Also we see the spread through universities of chairs and professorships of ancient and pre-history. These of course continued to spread and served not only national but imperial interests.

I was surprised to see a book by Agatha Christie on your list: "Come , Tell me How You Live".

Well you see Agatha Christie was married to a man named Max Mallowan, a well-known archaeologist, particularly in the near east. She wrote "Come , Tell me How You Live", in 1946, a tremendously chirpy account of absolutely colonial archaeology, of expeditions in Syria or parts of Iraq and digging up mounds.

It's a fun read, very cheerful, but one of the difficulties of archaeology has is to try to extract itself from being a colonial profession, and one of the very big questions now is what does archaeology mean to indigenous people in post-colonial continents? Does it really mean only the material relics of the past, or does it mean something broader and quite different from old-fashioned Eurocentric archaeology? Could it be that indigenous perspectives are more valid, more interesting than ours?

Why is Bruce Trigger's "A History of Archaeological Thought" a good introduction to the development of archeological theory.

Trigger had one of those wonderful comprehensive minds who see synoptically backwards and forwards. He was a Marxist, and this is a Marxist account of the history and self-understanding of archaeology. It is still today acknowledged as one of the best general introductions to the subject and the history of the profession and what it thinks it's doing. It’s not perfect, he’s very respectful to some aspects of soviet archaeology which perhaps he shouldn’t have been. However a Marxist point of view in archaeology is usually extraordinarily useful; it is about cultural evolution and not just concerned with pots and typologies and taxonomies; it asks what does this material assemblage of culture tell us about what sort of society this was?

I notice that your next book is also a Marxist book?

Yes, Vera Childe’s ''Progress in Archaeology'', published in 1944. Childe became one of the great archaeologists of his time, and his account of cultural evolution is very powerful and convincing. Although people have moved away from these ideas in many respects, it is still very important and influential.

Childe was someone who originally believed in something called the Culture-Historical approach, but subsequently moved to a more liberal perspective. Can you explain what the Culture-Historical approach is?

Yes, it was invented in the very early 20th century and was associated with the German prehistorian Gustaf Kossinna. Culture-Historical theory or, sometimes, Settlement Archeology, roughly says that where you find a given assemblage of material culture there you are dealing with a given people. If say, 300 miles away you dig another hole and find the same pots, the same sort of sickle blades, the same way of constructing a thatched hut you know the same ‘biological’ folk lived in both places, speaking the same language and probably looking similar too.

But there is a great big hole in the theory: similarity of material cultures does not necessarily mean similarity of ethnicity at all, otherwise every time in the future archaeologists dug up coca cola bottles they would say ‘oh Americans lived here.’ See what I mean? There's a big hole in the theory. However it was hugely influential. Kossinna died just before the Nazis came to power, luckily for him. They built a ferociously nationalistic pre-history out of this, and they said, “We are going to show that the Germans were once predominant all over Europe. We’re going to dig a pit and find this Germanic culture and we will know that once the Germans were here and speaking this language’. So in the end, Kossinna’s idea became an expansionist political gospel based on archeology. Essentially, “All you have to do is dig a hole, if you find traces of Germanic culture that means the land once belonged to us.”

Central Europe has never really recovered from the Kossinna method. Even the people who hated the Germans adopted exactly the same methods. The Slavs, the Czechs and the Poles for example, none of whom were independent until 1918, said the German archaeologists are telling vicious lies and we shall use the spade to show that we the Slavs were here before the barbaric Germans and so on and so forth.

Then came 1939 and the invasion of Poland.