A growth industry

Magnus Magnusson

The Etruscans Massimo Pallottino, revised edition edited by David Ridgway (Allen Lane £4.00) Full Fathom Five Colin Martin (Chatto and Windus £4.50)

However parlous the economics of the publishing world nowadays, there is one area which can be confidently labelled a growth-industry: the publication of books on archaeology. Every month sees a new outpouring of books for the specialist and the lay reader, text-books, 'popular' books, coffeetable books, definitive books. Every publisher worth his salt is currently scouring the hind to find archaeologists whose pens are not committed for years ahead to other projects.

There are two major reasons for this thriving position and prospect. One is the apparently insatiable public demand for a more knowledgeable and reliable view of the past as defined by archaeology — a demand, I feel, that is not unconnected with uncertainties about the present and the future. The other is the rapid growth of archaeology itself as an intellectual discipline — not just expansion, but growth. Part of the fascination of archaeology is the simple fact that every single excavation, no matter how insignificant, contains an inherent potential to refine or refute, to modify or revolutionise, our received knowledge of the past.

The wind of change has been blowing through the corridors of archaeology with increasing force recently. Long-established theories which had become ossified by time into 'facts' have been challenged all along the line. To mention only one, Professor Colin Renfrew of Southampton University has recently proved, with brilliant and ruthless logic, that the conventional view of cultural diffusion from the East as a way of 'explaining' the development of Western material culture is quite simply wrong, and will have to be re-thought from scratch. His splendidly-argued book, Before Civilisation (Jonathan Cape, 1973), turned the accepted model of the past upside-down. In no other field of historical study are events, and thinking, changing at such a bewildering speed.

In their very different ways, the two new books under consideration here reflect the striking advances that archaeology has made in the areas under discussion, and the healthy tendency to challenge conventional wisdom or correct popular misconceptions.

The Etruscans, by Professor Massimo Pallottino of ,the University of Rome, the doyen of Etruscan studies, is much the most, significant of the two: authoritative, definitive, the book about the Etruscans. It is the second English edition, much revised and enlarged, of a book originally published in English twenty years ago (thirty years ago in Italian), translated by Dr J. Cremona and now scrupulously edited and introduced by David Ridgway of Edinburgh University, the leading Etruscanologist in this country. The intervening years have seen a tremendous surge of activity in the recovery of new Etruscan evidence, highlighted by the discovery of the inscribed tablets at Pyrgi in 1964, the excavation of Gravisca (the port of Tarquinia) and the realisation of its commercial significance, the uncovering of the remarkable site at Poggio Civitate, near Murlo, with its wealth of evidence about Archaic architecture and domestic life, the whole new trend of 'sanctuary archaeology' in Southern Etruria, Tuscany, and Etruria Padana, and

much, much more besides.

All this new material has been relatively inaccessible to the general reader who is not conversant with Italian. English books on the Etruscans are not only few and far between; but the more 'popular' of them tend to be seriously misleading, harping as they all do on the 'mystery' of the Etruscans — mysterious people coming mysteriously from the mysterious East with mysterious death cults and a mysterious language.

This is not to say that there are no problems left; but Professor Pallottino, in a masterly chapter on Etruscan origins, devastates the

simplistic attitudes of'those who state unequivocally that the Etruscans 'migrated to Italy

from Asia Minor in the late eighth century BC', and of those who claim a northern origin, and of those who argue for autochthonous origins: The inadequacy of the theories of Etruscan origins is due to the fact that the problem has been considered as one of provenance instead of ethnic formation.

Discussion has centred on whether the Etruscans came from the east or by the north, or whether they were in Italy all the time: whereas in reality they formed a complex of eastern, continental and indigenous elements which must be isolated, weighed, and compared one with the other ...

The language has its problems, too. But they are not problems of 'decipherment', if by

decipherment we mean the reading of a set of unknown symbols like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Linear B. Anyone can read Etruscan with a little practice, for the Etruscan script is written in a version of the Greek alphabet. The problem is understanding the meaning of it. Professor Pallattino comments, "Even today, ninety per cent of the educated public firmly believes that Etruscan is totally indecipherable. This belief is echoed in the press and repeated in the majority of text-books, even though it is over 209 years out of date." The problem of

understanding remains, however; there are no documents written in a closely-related language, for there is no surviving closely-related

language, despite comparatively recent attempts to drag in Albanian and Hittite. The nearest that has yet been found to a parallel text such as the Rosetta Stone are the gold tablets of Pyrgi, where one of the inscriptions is in Punic and is a version (though not verbatim) of a similar inscription in Etruscan. In spite of this, the Etruscan text is still extremely hard to follow, and cannot provide the instant breakthrough in the interpretation of the language that romantics would have liked to see.

Professor Pallottini's book is an indispensable text-book for specialists and lay reader alike. There will be no excuse in future for anyone to pretend a 'mystery' where the Etruscans are concerned. The only real mystery that remains is the extent of the illicit traffic in Etruscan antiquities — and -sometimes fake antiquities at that — to foreign museums and foreign tourists alike.

Full Fathom Five by Colin Martin is the story of the excavation of three Armada wrecks — the Santa Maria de la Rosa and La Trinidad Valencera on the coasts of Ireland, and El Gran

• Griffon off Fair Isle. Mr Martin, who is the founder and director of Britain's first Institute of Maritime' Archaeology, at the University of St Andrews, was closely involved in all three excavations, and tells their story vividly and most readably.

Underwater archaeology is still a relatively young discipline. It has emerged only recently

from the kind of enthusiastic treasure-hunting that passed for land archaeology for most of the nineteenth century. It has had to improvise its techniques on an ad-hoc basis, and many of the problems of how best to conserve objects, particularly organic material, that have lain underwater for centuries have not yet been fully solved. Nor do wreck-sites enjoy much protection under the law from marauding amateurs intent only on salvaging metal for scrap.

Full Fathom Five illustrates very clearly the immense difficulties of excavation in northern waters and the growing effectiveness of the

techniques devised to overcome them. It also shows how much valuable information can be gleaned from the most meagre remains, because there is very little left of these Spanish ships after 400 years on the sea-bed. But the detective work makes fascinating reading: the finding of the wreck-site, the identification of the wreck from casual evidence like an inscribed pewter plate, the lifting and conservation of the finds, the constant battle against hostile elements (and sometimes hostile rival divers). From these excavations, important new light has been shed on the armament and equipment of the Armada — and its real purpose; because the Trinidad, a requisitioned Venetian merchant-ship and the fourth largest ship in the fleet, was found to have been crammed with land-artillery for the invasion that was designed to follow the naval victory that the Invincible Armada was expected to win over the English fleet. The massive gun-carriage wheels which were found on the sea-bed, the yoke, even the bundles of sharpened pallisades for throwing up emergency barricades — all these could be identified from a contemporary painting of a Spanish artillery regiment on the move.

Perhaps not the least instructive and heartening aspect of the Trinidad excavation was the way in which the City of Derry Sub-Aqua Club, who found the wreck in Kinnagoe Bay, asked for expert assistance from the St Andrews Institute of Maritime Archaeology, and got a lot more than they bargained for. To their surprise, they found themselves being turned from carefree weekend divers into a disciplined archaeological team — and found in it a satisfaction they had never dreamed possible.

Magnus Magnusson is editor of the Bodley Head Archaeologies. The next volume in the series, Rome and the Barbarians, by Professor Barry Cunliffe, is due out shortly.