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Sheridan, J A (2002) Antiquity and the Old World, Antiquity , 76 (294). pp. 1085- 1088. 0003-598X

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Deposited on: 13 March 2014

NMS Repository – Research publications by staff of the National Museums Scotland

http://repository.nms.ac.uk/ 1085 sheer breadth of archaeological enterprise as cases publish for the first time, major signposts Count BBgouen’s contention that Upper Palaeo- of this evolution. As intellectual history the lithic cave art ‘was born of magic’, and Leonard papers by Hooton, Childe, Oakley, Singer, Napier Woolley’s excavation report, which as Crawford & Weiner and others are major contributions excitedly reports, demonstrates ‘that the flood of to the field, and document the realization of Genesis was also the flood of the far older Sumerian modern palaeoanthropology. Clearly, by the early records’ (both in volume 3). 1960s, the new paradigm had arrived, and ar- A maturation of archaeology is evident from chaeology was now, in Daniel’s phrase ‘a hu- this period, one in which a nascent palaeo- manity scientifically pursued.’ anthropology working with an extremely poor fossil hypodigm, no absolute chronology and Acknowledgements.I amvery gateful to the editor and deputy a concomitant falsely short Pleistocene, and editor for inviting me to take part in the ‘Celebrating ANTIQ- UITY’ symposium at the Society for American Archaeology within a highly Eurocentric paradigm, evolves 67th annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, to all of the sym- into the essentially professional discipline of posium speakers for making it such an enjoyable session, today. ANTIQUITYwas able to report, and in many and to Mark White for reading a draft manuscript.

ANTIQUITYand the Old World

ALISONSHERIDAN”

Introduction ures of the day, and also generous references As with its treatment of world archaeology as to young scholars of note. Much of this infor- a whole, ANTIQUITY’Scoverage of Old World mation has been conveyed in the witty and often archaeology has been encyclopaedic. All the acerbic Editorials, which have provided an important sites, excavations and discoveries are invaluable and unique insight into the world there, from Stonehenge to the frozen tombs of as viewed from Cambridge. Siberia, and from the Acropolis to Old Zimba- I do not propose to offer a statistical analy- bwe. In addition to site-specific contributions sis of ANTIQUITY’SOld World content, or to at- there have been many invaluable syntheses of tempt a distillation of 75 years’ contributions. evidence, such as Dilip Chakrabarti’s review Rather, I have chosen to highlight some of the of the beginning of iron-use in India (1976), or topics that have particularly entertained and the numerous articles dealing with plant and informed this reviewer over the years and which, animal domestication and the transition to farm- arguably, reflect Old World preoccupations, ing (e.g. Higgs & Jarman 1969). A wide range namely: sex, alcohol, scandal and the eccen- of issues affecting Old World archaeology - tricities of the British. All have featured promi- and equally applicable to the New World - nently in the pages of this august journal. have been covered, with much attention being paid to heritage management topics such as the The Cerne Abbas giant problem of looting and the restitution of cul- My first ‘case-study’manages to combine three tural property (e.g. Daniel 1971: 246-8). Meth- out of these four topics, and concerns a male, odological advances, and in particular ithyphallic, club-wielding figure cut into a chalk developments in absolute dating techniques, hillside in Dorset (FIGURE1). Archaeological have been followed closely. But perhaps most opinion has been divided as to its date, although interestingly, the pages of ANTIQUITYprovide many favour the view proposed by Stuart Piggott us with a chronicle of the development of Old (1932) that it probably dates to around the 1st World archaeology itself, with accounts, anec- century AD, was carved by Roman-influenced dotes and obituaries concerning the great fig- natives, and may well represent the god Hercules

* Archaeology Department, National Museums of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 lJF, Scotland. [email protected] ANTIQUITY76 (ZOO): 1085-8 1086

it. It is its impassioned obscenity that offends all who have the interest of the rising generation at heart, and I . . . appeal to you to make this figure conform to our Christian standards of civilization.

The Home Office’s response is a model of Brit- ish diplomacy and Civil Service-speak. They approached the National Trust and even wrote to the head of the Dorset Police, seeking his view, before replying to Mr Long that, since the figure was a national monument, ‘the Sec- retary of State regrets that he cannot see his way to take any action in the matter’. But they also filed away a splendid minute from some- one in the Home Office that said:

This is a serious charge of indecency against a sched- uled prehistoric national monument, made,. . . after a lapse of 2,000 or 3,000 years . . . What does the complainant want us to do? Commit a nameless out- rage? We cannot contemplate that. Plant a small grove of fig trees . . . in a strategic position?

The Editor of ANTIQUITYadded that the Secre- tary of State should have pointed out that since the Cerne Abbas Giant was a National Monu- FIGURE1. The Cerne Abbas Giant, from Grinsell’s ment, images of it were the only indecent pic- article in volume 54: an air photograph taken 28 tures that could be sent through the Post Office! June 1978. (Photo John White, West Air And there is a little post-script to this story: Photography.) ANTIQUITYbeing the journal that it is, this was not to be the last word on this figure. In vol- (see Darvill et al. 1999 for a recent debate). As ume 54 (1980), Leslie Grinsell published a pa- well as being a scheduled ancient monument, per showing how the appearance of the Giant it has long been popular with courting couples, had been modified several times since it was and folk belief has, for obvious reasons, attrib- first illustrated in 1764 - not least with the uted fertility powers to it. elongation of its principal feature to take in the Professor Glyn Daniel’s Editorial in volume navel, probably on the instructions of the great 50 (1976b: 93-4) refers to a Home Office file Wessex archaeologist General Pitt-Rivers. concerning this figure, dating to 1932. This well- Jacquetta Hawkes once said that each genera- thumbed document is headed Obscene Publi- tion gets the Stonehenge it desires or deserves. cations: the Cerne Abbas Giant, and concerns The same would appear to be true of our friend a letter of complaint written by a Walter L. Long the Cerne Abbas Giant! of Dorset. Mr Long had appended a sketch, and had covered this with a paper flap. He wrote: Bronze Age alcohol My second case-study concerns the contribution If this sketch offends, please remember that we have ANTIQUITYhas made to the history of alcohol. the same subject, representing a giant 27,000 [sic] In a brief article in volume 52 (1978), Dr Jim times life size, facing the main road from Dorchester Dickson reported on the pollen analyses which to Sherborne. . . . With the support of the Bishop of he and his wife Camilla had undertaken on a Salisbury . . . and representatives of other religions, well-preserved deposit of ‘black,crumbly matter’ I appealed to the National Trust [who care for the monument, asking them to cover the offending sec- found in an Early Bronze Age cist at Ashgrove tion, but the National Trust] . . . does not consider in Fife, Scotland. The cist, whose stones had [that] the obscenity of this figure is a matter on which been luted with clay to keep it watertight, had I can act. . . If the Cerne Giant were to be converted contained the crouched body of a man aged into a simple nude, no exception would be taken to around 55. He was accompanied by a dagger 1087 and a beaker, which had toppled over after being with a strange form of writing on them, along set upright beside the body. The organic de- with small phallic figurines and other crude posit, rich in macroscopic plant debris, was carvings in stone, bone and antler, discovered found over the skeleton and the cist floor; in- in the vicinity of an underground boat-shaped vestigation inside the beaker revealed further ‘chamber’. Inside this chamber were some frag- organic residues. ments of glass and a Neolithic stone axehead. Dr Dickson concluded that the body may have The finder and his supporters (including a Dr been covered with leaves and fern, and the Morlet in the local archaeological society) dagger had probably been wrapped in moss. claimed that the Glozel site was at least as old The pollen suite found in and around the beaker as the Neolithic, and that the so-called - which included small-leaved lime and ‘Glozelian’ language on the inscriptions made meadowsweet -was interpreted as the remains the site of world importance. of either honey, or (more probably) an alcoholic This claim, and the results of the subsequent drink containing honey: mead, or an ale sweet- analytical work (including thermoluminescence ened with honey and flavoured with dating) undertaken to examine its veracity, pro- meadowsweet, given as sustenance for the de- voked fierce and international controversy ceased during his journey to the afterlife. among archaeologists and archaeological sci- The presence of pollen from the small-leaved entists. Some (e.g. McKerrell et a]. 1974) ac- lime tree indicated that the honey must have cepted the find as genuine. Others regarded the been imported, as this species is not native to unusual finds as a forgery - perhaps using re- Scotland (see Dickson 1978: 108-10 for discus- constituted ancient pottery for the ‘tablets’ [Dan- sion). Furthermore, the Ashgrove find consti- iel 1976a: a) - with the ‘chamber’ being a tuted the earliest direct evidence for the use of medieval glass-working furnace, and the stone honey in prehistoric Scotland. axehead a genuine but chance find. The ‘dis- This research has since been republished in covery’, and the ensuing massive publicity the Dicksons’ archaeobotanical synthesis, Plants within and outside France, certainly served to and people in ancient Scotland (2000, reviewed put Glozel on the tourism map at a time when in ANTIQUITY76: 585-6). Its initial publication there was increasing interest in French prehis- in ANTIQUITYproved to be of immense signifi- tory. That it was an elaborate and effective hoax cance, not only to the history of intoxicating would seem, on archaeological, linguistic and substances, but also to the study of funerary common-sense grounds, the most likely inter- practices and plant use in Bronze Age Britain, pretation (see, for example, the Editorial in and it served to alert excavators to the possi- volume 51, Daniel 1977: 89-91). The ‘serious bility of organic funerary offerings surviving grounds for unease’ outlined by Colin Renfrew in Scotland’s unforgiving climate. Much of the in his Notes and News article in volume 49 subsequent research in this area was directly (1975), and the intriguing loose ends hilariously stimulated by this brief article. outlined by Glyn Daniel in the same volume (1975: 2-3), have never been resolved by the Scandal: l’affaire Gloze1 ‘Glozelians ’ . As one might expect of a journal that was en- After a particularly acrimonious exchange joyed by Agatha Christie and her husband Max of views with thermoluminescence specialist Mallowan, scandal and intrigue loom large in the Dr Mejdahl in Denmark, Professor Daniel was pages of ANTIQUITY,and over the years several moved to write - in his own inimitable style contributions have dealt with the famous forgery - as follows (1980: 86): cases that rocked Old World archaeology. One such scandal, whose progress was However acrid the Editor of ANTIQUITYmay appear charted over several decades, concerns the dis- to those scientists who work north of Copenhagen covery of a remarkable set of unusual artefacts and south of Paris (there are, alas, no squeaks from Scotland these days!) [a reference to McKerrell], he by a farm boy at Glozel in rural France in 1924, should say he is feeling rather picric as he writes not so very far from the world-famous these words: the problem remains. To most archae- Palaeolithic cave site at Les Eyzies (see Index, ologists and to most sensible people who have care- for full references). Briefly, the the whole thing is a nonsense. The objects (apart Glozel finds included some fired clay tablets from some genuine things picked up from neigh- 1088 bouring fields or from other collections (what was paper dots at random”.’ ‘Dots at random?’ he Dr Morlet doing in the Pyrenean excavations of the splutters (1976a: 8). ‘It seems to us that the twenties?) are hocus-pocus, palpable forgeries. geomants are dotties at random.’ Eccentricity was not the exclusive preserve And elsewhere (1977: 90-91): of the Brits, however. In volume 60 it is noted that in 1787, on the island of Jersey, the head We do not propose to darken the pages of ANTIQ- of the local militia, one Colonel La Vingtaine UITY any more with Glozeliana: but we leave with ow readers this tale. At a conference at Saint-Gennain de la Ville, gave to the Governor of Jersey an - and we have this from three sources - Henri entire newly-discovered megalithic chamber Hubert asked Salomon Reinach why, if he thought tomb, which was shipped over to England and Glozel was so important, he had not insisted on some re-erected at Henley-on-Thames. Glyn Daniel examples of the finds being in a special exhibition commented that it must have been the only time at the Musee des Antiquit& Nationales? Reinach flew in Western Europe that someone had been given into a rage and said ‘Not while I am Director of this a megalith as a present. Museum!’ How right he was: he must have realized, Archaeologists were also celebrated for their in his old age, how he had been fooled by Morlet idiosyncrasies, and it is in the Editorial asides and Co. . . . that we receive vivid impressions of the legen- The afffflre Glozel is salutary in several respects, dary figures of a bygone era such as Sir Mortimer not least in highlightingthe tensions that can emerge, Wheeler. In his obituary of Wheeler in volume over questions of authenticity,between profession- 50 (1976~:180-83), Glyn Daniel recalls: als in different (and indeed the same) disciplines. Friendship has been described as a conspiracy for And incredibly, nearly 80 years on hom its discov- pleasure: Wheeler has often been said to cultivate ery and despite the ringing condemnations men- enemies rather than friends. All we can say here is tioned above, Glozel still manages to attract debate that from 1950 onwards we built up a friendship - - conducted now in cyberspace - . survived a quarter of a century . . . We lunched to- gether each month alternately in his Club and ours Eccentricity (‘I cannot understand, dear boy, why the food and Just as ANTIQUITYwas fearless in exposing fakes wine in your Club is so much better than in mine’), and frauds, it relished stories of British eccen- and built up the closest possible relationship with a man who knew he was brilliant, and slightly re- tricity. Professor Daniel particularly enjoyed sented any criticisms of his advice and judgements tales of the lunatic fringe, who saw astronomi- until what he had decided to say, as he strode quickly cal significance and ley-lines in the most un- from Piccadilly to Pall Mall, had been changed by likely of evidence. In his typical forthright style, two dry martinis, a bottle of claret, and his ready he lambasted the newly-formed ‘Institute of awareness that there was another point of view. Geomantic Research’, set up close to his be- loved Cambridge, and said: ‘It looks alarmingly Envoi as though the lunatic fringes of archaeology are I defy anyone who consults ANTIQUITYlook- closing in on Cambridge. . . what is geomancy, ing for one particular article not to be distracted anyhow? The Oxford English Dictionary says by many other intriguing nuggets and enter- “it is ‘the art of divination’ by means of lines taining asides. It is a great journal, which has and figures, formed originally by throwing earth provided an invaluable service to archaeology, on some surface, and later by jotting down on Old World or otherwise. Long may it flourish!

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