RELICS OF THE PAST

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 May 1940, Page 2

RELICS OF THE PAST

UNCOVERED BY WARFARE IMPLEMENTS FOUND NEAR ARRAS. ADVENTURE THAT APPEALS. If I could have had my way at one period, I would have become a professional archaelogist. T'he adventure of finding things appealed to me; and so did the mysteriousness of processes that had once gone on, and events that had once taken place. It is this altogether non-scientific appeal of archaeology which sent me out to search for scrapers and flint arrow heads and which makes archaeology, alone of all semi-scientific activities, into very acceptable news for the cheapest of newspapers. And it is this appeal which should draw the common reader to Dr Grahame Clark’s book. "Archaeology and Society.” Dr Clark cheerfully agrees that there are plenty of non-scientific reasons for the growth, if not for the very existence, of archaeology. Then he goes on to explain how the archaeologist works, how discoveries of ancient skulls, or spearheads, or gold cups are made, how excavations are carried out, and how the funds are interpreted. AT THE MERCY OF LUCK. It is a strange story, showing how much the advancement of knowledge is at the mercy of luck. A farmer grubs up a decayed hedge in Cornwall, and his mattock comes on a Bronze, Age jeweller’s hoard. The steamtrawler Colinda goes to work on the North Sea, between East Yorkshire and West Jutland, one day in September, 1931. The trawl scapes along over what was once a great freshwater fen; and up comes a great lump of the stuff which the' fishermen call “moor-log.” Bedded in it, the captain finds a barbed prehistoric fish-spear. In China, they sell “dragon’s bones” to be powdered and taken with tea. In 1899 a German naturalist bought samples of “dragon’s bones” and brought them back to Munich to be examined by Professor Max Schlosser. The professor analysed them as fossil remains of 90 different kinds of animal and wrote a standard monograph on the subject:— It was partly under the influence of Schlosser’s book that towards the end of the Great War the Chinese Geological Survey determined to trace some of these dragon’s bones to their source. In the course of this search the Swedish scientist, J. Gunnar Andersson, at that time acting as Mining Adviser to the Chinese Government, discovered in 1921 the extensive bone-deposits in the cave of Chou K’ou Tien. Five years later further work on the “dragon bone” deposits produce the first human tooth.

And so it goes on. Even war produces its discoveries, as a kind of benevolent by-product of what Coleridge once called the “leachery of barrenness.” During the last war, defence l works in East Prussia brought to light an important cemetery of the first to the sixth century A.D. Hindenburg himself took a great interest in the discoveries. On the Western Front, an English officer, who was also an archaeologist, made an important collection of early palaeoliths, or stone implements, in the British trenches at Coigneaux, near Arras. He found them thrown up from the subsoil on to the parapet of the trenches. In the scientific paper recording his war-time discoveries he rather wistfully remarked that “had it been possible to excavate the parapets at suitable places, no doubt much greater finds of implements would have been made.” But for military reasons this was quite out of the question'. The hard disciplinary logic which archaeologists apply to their work is no doubt quite as impressive as the chain of luck by which archaeology benefits; but the really horrifying thing to think about is the probable—no, I suppose the certain chain of bad luck. Think of all the things that are missed, all the things that turn up and are never recognised and are smashed up. or else returned to oblivion. DESTROYED BY CLIMATE. And then how much evidence is absolutely destroyed by climate. A tropical climate like the climate of Yucatan brings it about that only the very hardest objects survive. A climate like our own is destructive enough, so that tough objects like flints become disproportionately large in our casual picture of prehistoric life in England. And think how little we should know of Egypt if it was not for that admirable dryness that preserves even wood and grains of corn. Dr Clark gives a less familiar example of dry climate coming to help the archaeologist. Sir Aurel Stein excavated a house in Central Asia in 1901, dating back to the third century A.D. He found parchment and rings and pens, and tablets and a guitar, and a wooden mouse-trap, all of them as good as new. i Another thing that Dr Clark emphasises is the very unscientific way in which archaeology, for the most part, is financed and supported. It is humiliating enough in some respects to see why archaeology first began to flourish a hundred years ago —not for the pure sake of knowledge, but because of that romantic urge to the past which produce the Gothic Houses of Parliament and Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Byron’s misbehaviour. Archaeology fitted in with the architecture, the poetry, the painting, and the novel-writing and the spirit of the time; and Dr Clark quotes one writer on burial-mounds, of 182 G, who declaims. romantically, about the "wild piercing shrieks of expiring victims, the "blazing pile flinging its lurid beams around” and the "mystic songs of the bards.”

PROPAGANDA FOR NATIONALISM. If that is how archaeology found its legs, it runs now on the bounty of Nationalism and political enthusiasms. Small nations take up archaeological investigations and pay for them to prove that they had a large past. Eire, for instance, has gone the whole hog. with an Austrian to direct the National Museum. Danish scientists and Americans to do fieldwork, and train Irish talent.

Under Hitler, archaeology is encouraged to the greater glory of all things Nordic and German. “The best of' what is German is Germanic and must be found in purer form in early Germanic times, ” so in 1939 there were official courses in archaeology in 25 universities. In Italy. Il Duce takes care to magnify Imperial Rome, and so classical archaeology is magnificently exploited. “The prehistoric remains of Italy have been sadly neglected under the present regime in favour of those more flattering to its imperial pretensions.” In England, archaeology gets along

as best it can. with a little liole-in-the-corncr help from the Government; but the sad thing is that archaeology having gone beyond private enterprise, as Dr Clark says, there is hardly a country in the world civilised and cultured enough to finance and encourage it for humanity's sake —for the simple and unselfish reason that archaeology is an extremely important branch of human knowledge, by which human beings can learn to live more sensibly, with less waste, and rivalry, and war.