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Archaeology today
Avebury, drawn by William Stukeley
Early archaeologists laboured under a tremendous lack of solid data. Museum collections were full of objects whose cultural context was poorly understood (if at all), excavation consisted of little more than digging to collect more objects for museums and there were whole periods and regions for which no real data existed. It was still possible for a single scholar of the early twentieth century to be intimately familiar with all the archaeological data available for the prehistory of Europe. This allowed impressive woks of synthesis by people such as V Gordon Childe (1892-1957). But all the time, not only the quantity but also the quality of the data was improving. Spectacular sites such as Avebury (portrayed here by William Stukeley in 1724) could now be compared with others that were contemporary. Today, we can begin to ask questions that wouldn’t have occurred to archaeologists before, based on our better understanding of the societies that produced these remains and using techniques that were unimaginable even twenty years ago.
In Chariots of the Gods?, Erich von Däniken called for “a Utopian archaeological year… during which archaeologists, physicists, chemists, geologists, metallurgists, and all the corresponding branches of these sciences ought to concentrate their efforts…”. He wanted them to concentrate on a single question (“did our forefathers receive visits from outer space?”;) but was blissfully unaware not only that by the 1960s, archaeologists were regularly using the expertise of these scientists, but also that in the very year he was writing (1968), a major conference on science in archaeology had taken place and been published. By then, archaeologists no longer saw themselves as simple data collectors: they were concerned to analyse and, above all, explain their data, not alone, in dusty museum basements, but with the cooperation of experts in many other disciplines.
In the same way, Graham Hancock appears quite ignorant of the ways in which archaeologists deal with data. He has said time and again that there is an ‘orthodoxy’ that rejects any new interpretation of the past, that deliberately ignores and even suppresses new information that might upset the established views. He presents himself as one of a small band of independent-minded researchers who are prepared to speak out and tell the truth about the past. This, of course, is a cliché and it is one that von Däniken has built a career upon. Worse, it is a cliché founded on a complete misconstruction of how academia works. While the media may portray scholars as people who deal in certainties and facts, the reverse is the case. There is no academic ‘orthodoxy’ to vet all contributions for strict adherence to the message. Far from it. Academic careers are often built by trying to overturn long-cherished theories, by challenging established opinions, by offering new interpretations of the evidence. So where do the ‘fringe’ researchers fit in?
Erich von Däniken, Graham Hancock and so many of their followers fix on those phenomena that archaeologists have difficulty explaining. There is nothing wrong with this. Yes, there will be anomalies that pose problems of interpretation; yes, there are monuments so unique that we cannot be entirely sure of their function; yes, some aspects of ancient cultures seem out-of-place. But these things are a tiny part of the whole. Archaeology has developed by collecting as much data about the cultures it studies as can be recovered. Whilst the Great Sphinx is a tremendous and unique achievement, it does not sit in glorious isolation from the culture that produced it. Redating it and ascribing it to another civilisation raises all sorts of problems (for instance, archaeology has given us a very clear picture of what was going on in the Nile valley at the time Graham Hancock believes the Sphinx was built, around 10,500 BC, which completely precludes the construction of a monument of this scale). We understand enough of the everyday lives of the people of Fourth-Dynasty Egypt, of their religious beliefs, of their symbols, to understand that the iconography of the Great Sphinx is not at all out of place in that context but that it would be very out of place in the eleventh millennium BC. Only by separating the monument from the hundreds of thousands of potsherds, hundreds of houses, numerous inscriptions and environmental data that have been collected, analysed, reinterpreted and synthesised can ‘fringe’ authors begin to assign it to a much earlier period in history