from
The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History
by
Colin McEvedy

The great pioneers who led archaeology beyond the frontiers of recorded history invested very considerable personal fortunes in their chosen sites; striding confidently round their estates they would label an unexpected pot as an import and expect obedience. The habit of omnipotence spread to lesser men in colder climates; amazingly it proved possible to give blow-by-blow accounts of prehistoric battles and, in a more tender mood, tell how Woman shaped the First Pot. Archaeology was acclaimed as the science of rubbish and as fast as the rubbish was dug up it was written down.

Inevitably poetic license bred a puritan reaction within the profession, the puritans gained power and there was a ruthless clean-up. Not only was speculation condemned, intellectual activity of any sort came to be frowned upon. The new style archaeologist showed signs of distress if he uncovered an object of beauty or value; salvation lay in the meticulous description of humbler finds. Classification was allowable; sub-classification was better; attempts at synthesis or interpretation met with stony silence. As a corrective, puritanism has certainly been valuable but as a permanent attitude it is unnecessarily limiting; the recovery of the human past is after all the only reason for digging up pots.

History being a branch of the biological sciences its ultimate expression must be mathematical. As yet we have only just groped our way from narrative history with its colour and crises, its national heroes and nations personified, to the era of economics, of steel production figures and graphs of agricultural prices. The classical world is not comprehensible in the new terminology; it usually returns a ‘no’ or ‘don’t know’ to the economic questionnaire; and the study of ancient history is probably going to continue unchanged until history as a whole passes into the next stage. This is foreshadowed by the increasing interest in sociology, and though currently most sociological work yields only platitudes expressed in jargon, in time a language will undoubtedly be created for the description of human societies and statements concerning their cohesion.

There is little to be gained from discussing the racial varieties of upper palaeolithic man. In the nineteenth century every skeleton discovered was minutely described and each became the type of a new race. When the number of discoveries reached double figures, the classification broke down under its own weight. It is now realized that the range of variation in any population renders such exact description of the individual pointless, the more so in the case of upper palaeolithic man because the variation in his case was probably particularly wide.

Using leather and basket-work containers (that have perished) and ground stone vessels (that survive), the seventh millenium villager no doubt managed happily enough; pots matter more to archaeologists than they do to people.

The spread of a characteristic artefact can be explained either by the diffusion of an idea or by the migration of a people who were its sole manufacturers. The difference between the two modes is not altogether sharp even in theory, for ideas are spread by example, and in archaeological practice the distinction is often dishearteningly difficult to make.

In the opening years of his reign, Philip II, King of Macedon (359-336), transformed the levy of his backwoods state into the largest and most efficient force in Greece. The discovery of gold deposits permitted the increase in size; the increase in efficiency stemmed from Philip’s refusal to accept two conventions of Greek warfare that were responsible for its typically indecisive quality: the restriction of campaigning to a recognized season and of seige technique to blockade.

Speculation ran way beyond the testable and dwindled into metaphysics; technology remained tradition-bound and sluggish. Only the evolution of a scientific stance – one foot inside the boundary of the known, the other just outside – could have guaranteed the superiority, and consequently the integrity, of Mediterranean society, and the world was still too young for that.

So however moving we may find the Greek awakening – the sudden discovery of the question and of the delights of intellectual precision – we must remember that this was an event of the pre-scientific era. It was not the first chord of a majestic theme but something more exciting and less important, a fashion. The golden age is in the eye of the beholder.