Archaeology

En arche en ho logos, begins that most theological gospel of St John. In the beginning was the Word. And so began one of the strangest dreams I've ever had, in which I dreamt I was leading the life of a specialist in Greek tablets unearthed on the ancient and shifting boundary between Wales and England.

I remember the dream in great detail because I kept waking up to pen notes on my own real-world thesis, which continued to exist after I had woken up. But the dream persisted despite these useful interruptions, and it involved watching Barcelona thrash Manchester United from a friend's house, at a party involving his many relatives, to which I'd been invited by his late mother.

I remember other details, some involving the evolving house of my dreams, which in this particular iteration was a cross between stacked campervans and shophouses from the south of this island. But the last I remember of the dream was a voice saying to me, "If you find it in Phtakis, it will tell you a lot about Welsh-English relations."

Naturally, when I was sure I was awake, I did an Internet search on Phtakis. The results astonished me. There were few hits. But the hits I got were for a long-dead scholar of that name, whose speciality appeared to have been the collection and cataloguing of... stone tablets with Greek inscriptions, in Asia Minor. Brrrr.

China's Hidden History

I am taking a break from my usual work to read through recent issues of my long-neglected core journal, Science. As a member of the AAAS, I get this huge journal every week, 52 weeks a year. It's full of stuff I can't digest, but it also contains stuff I can either digest profitably and with relative ease, as well as stuff I can digest if I work hard.

However, my historical instincts were hooked by pp 930-940 of the 21 Aug 2009 issue. In those pages, a summary of the findings about Chinese civilisation is presented, with nice charts and pictures.

Well well well, as the farmer said, looking at the three holes in the ground.

What we call 'Chinese civilisation' is widely supposed to have erupted from the Yellow River region and spread inland. At least, that's what most of us learnt. But the evidence shows multiple high-level cultures all over that part of the world. In fact, for the last 30 years, people have been setting out the idea that this civilisation 'grew out of a complex interweaving of many regional cultures' (p 932).

In 1987, archaeologists at a site called Sanxingdui, north of Chengdu, found traces of a previously unknown civilisation. Gold, jade and huge bronze statues were found. The site was not even hinted at in texts or myths. Later, a culture that appears to be the predecessor of that civilisation was discovered by people digging elsewhere on the Chengdu plain. The history of the Sichuan region is now not the same anymore. That's on p 935.

And so on, and so on. If this sort of discovery can still be made, what else is there to be found in the hidden history of mankind? Stuff like this keeps my sense of wonder alive. I am happy just to read about it; I would be overjoyed to someday have a part to play in it.

Tidying

The problem with living with an archivist is that everything is kept and nothing is thrown away. Anything with text on it is piled in archaeological layers which one is afraid to disturb or otherwise disrupt. And one fears that the removal of a single item will bring about catastrophe.

Today we removed 20 kg of what we thought was likely to be disposable fissile material: disposable in the sense that it could be bagged and thrown away, fissile in the sense that it was likely to spread in some sort of proliferative manner by falling apart spontaneously, material in the sense that it was only too tangible.

After that, brother and I looked at each other with a strong sense of 'mission accomplished'. Yes, another satisfying male-bonding sibling moment. Heh.

Spike

Hurrrrr. The picture I'm assembling in my mind is not anywhere as pleasant as the cardboard jigsaw puzzles of my youth. Rather, it is a litany of obfuscatory, mendacious and ill-considered pagan rituals. It reminds me of my bedtime reading from that long-lost youth: The Glory that was Greece, The Grandeur that was Rome and other such archaeological tributes to civilisations that no longer occupy the lands which now contain their descendants.

The buildings stand, the chronological heritage stands, perhaps the legal occupancy is indisputable. But the heirs cheated and lied and stole and thought to befuddle the historians (if they ever thought of such at all). And as it was with Agamemnon, that most ambitious of the Atreides (beautiful word, that, in all four syllables), the end will be ignominious and rather sad.

I suppose that's what you get for writing stories and poems when sitting around feeling bleak. Then again, there is always a bright spot. As Hopkins says in The Windhover:

...blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Archaeology

Someone once said that archaeology begins with the end; once you have found where something ended, you work your way back to the midden and that will tell you why and how it ended. And if not, you just keep digging. But not really – what archaeologists call 'digging' is actually a slow and careful process of scraping, sifting, and surveying.

To put it all in simple terms, if you want to know something of the truth, you need to know that something happened, and then be willing to spend inordinate amounts of time in digging up what is buried under the fact of that happening. I've learnt that it pays to persevere; even the driest of texts, the least inspiring-looking websites – they can all be grist to your mill.

It was in that spirit (I think) that an anonymous historical source left me this link. No words of explanation were attached. Fortunately, I persevered. It is a very exciting site indeed. Excavation brings great satisfaction. I commend it to you.