Why do people believe bizarre things?
There is no doubt that people enjoy seeing pompous experts made to look stupid, especially when those experts are the sort who destroy peoples’ fondest romantic ideas. The supposed psychic, such as Uri Geller, will always find television audiences more sympathetic to him than to the sceptic pitted against him in a ‘debate’.
Failure of mainstream archaeology to excite
Until recently, archaeology was seen as a dull, dry and dusty sort of pursuit. The image of its practitioners was one of the tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking professor with wild hair or of the long-haired hippy type with beard, long hair and brown cord trousers (they were almost always men). Typical stereotypes are found in pre-1980s horror films, from The Mummy to The Exorcist. In the early 1980s, a new stereotype was created: the gun-slinging adventurer typified by the Indiana Jones series of films. Instead of being office bound or grubbing about in pits for scraps of unprepossessing potsherds, this sort of archaeologist fought Nazis, discovered long-lost mystical treasures and was constantly in danger of losing his life. So, by the late 1980s, there were two competing views of the profession.
During the 1990s, things began to change. Firstly, the rise of the archaeological consultant – a new branch of the profession that developed as a result of changes in planning law – brought about a breed wearing expensive suits (“in order to be taken seriously by our clients” was always the excuse used) who rarely interacted with the public but were more visible to professionals working in the engineering and development sectors of the economy. But much more important than this was the growth of archaeology as a popular subject for television. Before the 1990s, archaeological programmes were infrequent and were highly academic (with a few honourable exceptions).
All that changed with the screening of Time Team, a regular long-running series shown by Channel 4 in the UK. It is fronted by a popular comedian whose rôle in the programme is to ask the ‘silly’ questions that members of the public might be too embarrassed to ask professionals (on the level of “who lived first, Queen Victoria or Julius Caesar?”) who works with a respected academic archaeologist, who acts as the ultimate arbiter on the show (his position as an academic is tempered by his outrageous choice of multicoloured pullovers). The team has three days to “find out” about a particular site, so the show works almost as a game or challenge show worthy of an Indiana Jones; it has also spawned a series of best-selling books, a fan club and a tremendously useful website. Other television and production companies quickly caught up and by the mid 1990s, every terrestrial television channel had its own regular archaeological programming, not all of it very good.
The effect has been remarkable. People who in 1990 had never heard of stratigraphy could now discuss the finer points of layering on a site, understood something of the process of excavation and came to realise that archaeology was neither dry and dusty nor was it romantic and exciting. It has served to make it clear that its information comes from scraps of evidence, sometimes very uninspiring scraps at that. The imposing monuments (like Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid or Zimbabwe) that people are most familiar with are no longer central to how these programmes treat the subject. As a consequence of the phenomenal growth in the number and quality of television programmed dealing with archaeology, the subject has become increasingly popular as an undergraduate subject.
Nevertheless, with this increased understanding of the subject and of its reliance on minute pieces of evidence, it becomes possible to make the accusation that archaeologists can’t see the wood for the trees. Whilst we are so busy trying to understand the sequence of layers on a site and whether one potsherd is older than another, we might just be missing the bigger picture.
Lack of romance
So, modern archaeology may now be seen by some – those who watch particular television programmes especially – as an interesting subject with the appeal of alternative lifestyles. But this was always the case.