Time for Skill
Approach to Archaeology. By Stuart Piggott. (A. and C. Black, 15s.)
A CENTURY ago history began, for all practical purposes, with the first Olympiad in 776 BC. Archaeology transformed its very terms of refer- ence. To the spade we owe our knowledge of Sumerians and Hittites. Schliemann at Mycenre, and Sir Arthur Evans in Crete, added new dimen- sions which, ever since, have gone on expanding. No discoveries, until the Sputnik, so captured the imagination, so radically altered our view of man's place in the universe. This, for a generation or more, was the secret of arche=ology's universal appeal. Today it is different, and Professor Stuart Piggott's honest little book reveals the reasons why. It is as though the brilliant young actress, whom none could resist, is settling down to staid middle age. Archaeology is not yet, like history, a vested interest; but technical skills, rather than vision and enthusiasm, are its criterion; and the individualists and pioneers are being displaced by highly organised joint stock companies.
It is an inevitable process. bringing gains as well as losses. There was something rather brash about
many of the old-time archmologists. Their self- assurance impressed, but it also disquieted. Were their time-charts really so secure? Was their evi- dence convincing enough (as in the case of the Anglo-Saxon settlements) to brush aside historical tradition as myth? But what was disquieting above all else was their 'technological-evolu- tionary' approach—their assumption that pots and sherds were a key to the whole evolution of human history, the leap which so many made from material survivals to social forms and spiritual values. Archleologists today, as Professor Piggott shows, are more cautious. The evidence they use forces them to concentrate on technological pro- cesses; but we only need to look around us in the world today to see that societies may have a common technological basis and yet be different in almost every other particular.
It is here that Professor Piggott, with his matter- of-fact, down-to-earth approach, is so salutary. He is more conscious of archaeology's limitations than of its potentialities. Archxologists, he insists, can only give limited answers to limited questions. Almost deliberately, it would seem, he has pitch- forked romance out of archaeology; and perhaps there has been too much romance. But what, we may wonder, will be the effects on the 'beginner' he is addressing? Will the mysteries of dendro- chronology and of Carbon 14 fire his imagina- tion? Or will he conclude that archaeology today has become the closed preserve of experts? Pro- fessor Piggott's case for technical skill and scien- tific precision is logically unanswerable; but we must also remember, in Sir Leonard Woolley's words, that the justification for archeology is that it concerns everyone. If, like history, it becomes so full of expertise that this ceases to be true, still another avenue of human understanding will be
Previous page
