EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE OLD WORLD (CHAPTER 1 PART 0-1)

HOW DOES THE PAST ILLUMINATE THE PRESENT?¹

time by itself does not exist; but from things themselves there results a sense of what has already taken place, what is now going on and what is to ensue. It must not be claimed that anyone can sense time by itself apart from the movement of things or their restful immobility. 

(Lucretius De Rerum Natura, trans. R.Latham, 1951)

What are the operating principles upon which the world is based? How do things in nature and society work and how do they inter-react? We need to know this to make some sense of our lives. For consciousness itself has a double aspect: selfawareness and awareness of environment: the inside and the outside world. The comprehension of each is of course highly problematic and answers can be wrung only from their interrelation. It is easy to see the relevance of anthropology to answering the question of why the world is the way it is: anthropologists study other societies by participating in them, so what is learned from one, or better still, several, helps us to understand others. But why bother with ancient societies if it is present and near-future society you want to understand? For this it is surely politics and economics you need, anthropology, plus a close watch on emerging technologies? What have longgone societies got to do with the here-and-now and the Internet? A lot more than you might think. 

In the first place, ancient societies are interesting as a form of anthropology. If we can get a fairly full picture of what any ancient society was like and what went on there, from that we can learn the same sorts of things about social organization and human motivation as we can from the study of living societies: what forces shape them and what ongoing effects those particular patterns have. In the second place, there is the role of ancient societies in chains of cause and effect. Science consists of establishing chains of cause and effect—that is, of specifying mechanisms. In Western Europe we are all at least vaguely aware that the modern period was preceded by the medieval (‘feudal’) period, which was separated by a DarkAge from the previous period of the Roman Empire. Most people also know that the Roman Empire existed for several centuries before and after the time of Christ, which, from the calendar, was obviously about 2,000 years ago. But we know too that ‘the glory that was Greece’ was a bit earlier than Rome and that one of the major glories of Greece was its remarkably broad breakthrough into rational science, philosophy and drama. But did it not do this on the basis of the newly acquired alphabetic script, and did this not come from the ‘Phoenicians’ who inhabited the Mediterranean’s eastern shoreline (the Levant)? The Levant is halfway between the earlier civilizations on the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Mesopotamia). 

Egyptians and Mesopotamians had different ways of writing, with the Egyptian more or less pictorial, the Mesopotamian formed by marking wedges in wet clay using a stylus. Could it not be, therefore, that the alphabetic writing that has been so important in shaping the modern world was the outcome of the interaction of Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations? Well, it is; archaeology tells us so. And if this is true of writing, what of other forms of culture, with culture defined as the cumulative intergenerational transmission of techniques (technology), beliefs and institutions?2 This results in shared conceptions and perceptions of reality and the standards which flow from that. In terms of formative beliefs and institutions, the Near East is the region in which the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Koran were written. This is something that could not have taken place without the prior existence of thousands of years of complex society and the state,3 and indeed of recorded theological thinking (cf. Malamat 1989). Archaeology shows us that recording and calculation techniques, which are essential for the progress of complex thought, have their origins around 3000 BC in Egypt and Sumer (Iraq). But this period is also the one when states had just recently come into existence in Egypt and Mesopotamia, so where did the state come from? It arose on the basis of a relatively dense population numerous enough to fill towns and cities. 

So how did that come about? The basis was successful farming villages multiplying and expanding over previous millennia. But humankind had only quite recently become farmers well within the last 10,000 years—before that all were hunter-gatherers. How did this transition occur and, more important, why? After all, farming marks a whole new way of life, employing new technologies and forms of organization, so it could not be a matter of chance discoveries. And anyway farming is both risky and hard, so why bother? What really happened? Did all the game animals die out, or what? The general answer lies in ‘process’, while the specific answer turns upon the way in which initially small human choices have cumulatively large and unintended consequences. In other words, it is all down to chains of cause and effect! As we look about us it is clear that we are embedded within everlengthening chains of cause and effect. The origins of mathematics lie between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, and those of astronomy and physics too. The Sumerians developed thepositional or place value notation, and, well beyond Pythagorean ‘triples’, knew the value of root-two accurate to six decimal places. Does this matter for where we are today as I type this into my PC? It matters for several reasons, one of which is sheer intellectual curiosity concerning origins.

A second, and related, reason is that to comprehend the world and our place in it we need to have an integrated mental map situating us in time and space. The spatial map has, of course, to be a good representation of what the surface of the earth looks like in terms of landmasses, oceans, mountain chains, rivers, forests and deserts. This tells us what is where. The time-map is, of course, about what went on, when and where. And without an integrated spacetime grid relating events and processes to places, we are left wandering in the kaleidoscope world of myth where we are prey to all kinds of vapourings and fairy-stories. The twentieth century has, after all, been the century of hallucinatory fairy-stories for the masses—in other words of totalitarian political ideologies—intended, after a period of mass mobilization and war, to result in a closed society with a ‘final’ end to real, evolutionary change. From a broad understanding of the past, by tracing linkages, we can learn about the processes of evolution, natural and social, to which we are all individually and collectively subject. And then maybe we can do something about it in the here and now. 

At the very least we will have satisfied our need to know how things came to be the way they are. For this archaeology is essential. Historical accounts rely on texts and inscriptions. Writing is only 5,000 years old, and even where it survives (and can be read) it is so fragmentary that it cannot possibly answer the range of questions we need answered about the constitution of societies, their origins and dynamics. By going straight to the physical evidence of what nature has provided and what people have actually done—material remains of tools fashioned, earth dug, animals killed, structures built, pottery shaped and painted, meals eaten, and so forth—archaeology both circumvents and complements the partiality of texts. Those anyhow could never deal with early formative processes, such as the origins of farming, or, way back beyond this, to the very origins of culture itself (Knight and Maisels 1994; Knight et al. 1995). It is, then, the task of this book, by employing archaeology, anthropology and some textual material, to try to answer those questions concerning the formative processes of the four originating civilizations of the Old World: Egypt, Levant/ Mesopotamia, India and China. First we must know how archaeology emerged and why only so comparatively recently.

THE EMERGENCE OF ARCHAEOLOGY AS A SCIENTIFIC DISCIPLINE

There are three basic requirements for a discipline to come into being: the social basis, the intellectual basis and the specific theoretical apparatus of the discipline (the latter is a set of linked operational concepts and methodology). This set of requirements runs from the broadest and most encompassing —the social order—through the intellectual, to the most particular or technical, and of course back again to the social, changing as a consequence of new inputs from technical advances. Nonetheless, the major factor in social change is economic activity, and it is economic expansiveness which, if sustained, provides the social conditions for a broad cultural, intellectual and technical dynamic which are the pre-requisites of science.

The social basis The technological package put together in northwestern Europe by the sixteenth century under expanding mercantile conditions meant that technology could expand in scope and develop in depth at an accelerating rate. As it did so, transforming not only the economy but the social order, ideas necessarily underwent sustained development. Empirical and technical information became sounder and denser. As the new knowledge was systematized, old disciplines were transformed and new ones emerged. So the broad cultural basis for archaeology was not just widespread literacy and numeracy, but the whole mindand indeed universe-expanding enterprise of the post-Renaissance period, culminating in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. 

The socio-political characteristics of the Georgian period in Britain are, of course, those of the ruling Whig aristocracy, themselves a product of trade (and closely allied to the London ‘money interest’, or financiers), in opposition to the ‘country party’ of traditional lesser gentry or ‘squirearchy’, who supported the Tory Party. A working and liberal aristocracy (Baugh 1975:8–13), Whig selfconfidence and therefore openness to new ideas, were a consequence of ‘the concentration of wealth and both political and social authority in the hands of one small, unchallenged class, sophisticated, civilised and, except for purposes of sport, urban in its inclinations’ (Steegman 1986:xv). Writing generally of ‘the rule of taste’ in the eighteenth century, Steegman observes that by the middle of the century antiquarianism had already become the fashion.

Not that every squire or wealthy nabob who Gothicised his country seat during the 1750’s and 1760’s was a mediaeval scholar; but there was certainly, after about 1740, a widespread interest among educated people in archaeology, and an interest in the past became a fashionable affectation.

(ibid.: 80–1)

Like the seventeenth century the eighteenth tended to think of itself as old in time. Only a few scientists and philosophers were beginning to think in terms of a time-scale so vast that the few millennia of recorded history became insignificant. But age now signified maturity rather than decay. Men compared their civilization with historical Greece and Rome, rather than with classical legend and the Old Testament and its uncompromising story of the Fall. (Hampson 1968:147)

Although the likes of Samuel Johnson regarded contemporary writers as pale reflections of classical authors,the fire had gone out of the controversy between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’. Where civilizations, rather than individual authors, were concerned, most people—for the first time perhaps in modern history—preferred their own age to any that had gone before. Johnson himself could pontificate, in a different mood “I am always angry when I hear ancient times praised at the expense of modern times. There is now a great deal more learning in the world than there was formerly, and it is universally diffused”. 

(ibid.)

Thus classicism was used in a new unslavish way which had stimulating effects on the built, as well as the mental and natural landscapes. Ancient Greece and Rome, the latter championed against the former by the Venetian architect Piranesi (whose Antiquita Romane was published in 1748), provided architectural, artistic and political models for the Age of Enlightenment. One of the Enlightenment’s political monuments was the United States Constitution. Logically, neo-classicism became the dominant architectural style. The elegant neo-classical style and the buildings of Robert and James Adam are well known, especially to graduates of Edinburgh University. Less well known perhaps is that theirs was not a ‘bookish’ style drawn from Vitruvius and Palladio (or even Piranesi, whom Robert Adam greatly admired), but was developed from Robert’s own studies in Rome and on the Dalmatian coast at Split. He made hundreds of drawings in Rome, where he also studied and was greatly influenced by the public baths of Caracalla and Diocletian (Bryant 1992: 6). Working with assistants, Robert measured and drew Diocletian’s enormous palace at Split (currently occupied by private dwellings) in July and August of 1757. This was published in 1764 as The Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro, in Dalmatia, with engravings supervised by the French architect Charles-Louis Clerisseau (ibid.: 14). The pre-Christian Graeco-Roman world was thus no longer filtered through Renaissance rediscovery. In addition to knowledge of Latin and Greek, first-hand experience of its monuments was expected, and was a prime purpose of the Grand Tour undertaken by gentlemen and aristocrats. Such travellers tended justto visit; scholars and artists stayed and recorded, as, for example, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who spent the years 1751–1754 in Athens measuring, drawing and recording (Daniel 1975:21). Their first volume of the Antiquities of Athens was published in 1762, financed by the Society of Dilettanti. Formed in 1732, the Dilettanti also paid for the ‘first Ionic expedition’ of 1764 by Revett, Richard Chandler and William Pars, published as the Antiquities of Ionia between 1769 and 1797. In 1766, Chandler identified the site of ancient Olympia. Earlier, in 1753 and 1757, Robert Wood published scholarly accounts of his travels with James Dawkins through Greece, Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine. His Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and the Ruins of Baalbek (1757) by Wood and Dawkins was followed in 1758 by Le Roy’s Ruines des plus Beaux Monuments de la Grèce. As the Industrial Revolution flowed from the Mercantile Revolution over the following hundred years, all manner of things became possible, most importantly the nineteenth-century scientific revolution in which Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin are pre-eminent. In turn they helped provide further intellectual space for the emergence of archaeology by pushing back the time-span during which the earth and mankind had existed (‘deep time’) and which therefore made an evolutionary ‘prehistory’ of man inevitable. However, the term ‘prehistory’ was not even used in English until 1851, when Daniel Wilson published his work on The Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, though in French it had been used by d’Eichthal in a paper published in 1845 (Clermont and Smith 1990: 98–9). Wilson also seems to have been the first to use the term ‘archaeology’ in its modern form and fully modern reference.

The intellectual basis From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Europe contained a class of scholar peculiar to it, and those were the antiquarians, people who had an abiding curiosity about artefacts as such: who wanted to know who had made them, when, why and how (see Evans 1956). Those artefacts could be anything from henge monuments to barrows, other earthworks, worked stones—anything in fact for which the origins and use were not apparent. Now the usual approach of their time was to scan the ancient authors, preferably classical, for ‘answers’. Since, however, few if any of the above remains were actually mentioned in any text, these artefacts were simply assigned to peoples and periods ‘known’ from ancient authors or the Bible, or, worse still, were assigned to mythical kings and conquests by ‘inference’, for which read ignorance. But the antiquarians were not content with this literary-speculative approach. Though they were often ultimately reduced to such modes of explanation, they got out and interrogated the monuments by measurement and comparative survey, and by the collection and association of artefacts. In other words, they provided wholly new and independent sources for the writing of history, and rationalist history at that. For antiquarianism was an aspect of the postRenaissance enquiry into the world at large, which, associated centrally with map making, came to change qualitatively the mediaeval world-picture amongst the educated. During the sixteenth century triangulation by means of compass, plane table and sight rule (the alidade), became commonplace, with numerous illustrated handbooks to enable amateurs to do it themselves. From hilltops and church towers, or towing measuring wheels along the roads, the recording of Europe’s surface passed into the hands of hundreds of surveyors, highly skilled or merely enthusiastic. Distance scales began to be incorporated into maps. Symbols for towns, cities, castles, river-crossings made them easier to read. 

(Hale 1993:17)

By the latter half of the century,maps had become for the first time [in history], the spur to a rationally grasped personal location within a clearly defined continental expanse. And this source of self-orientation on a flat surface was given depth by the parallel development of chorography: the description in words of the topography, antiquities, customs and more recent history of the diverse regions of which Europe was composed. 

(ibid.: 27; my emphasis)

A major outcome of the chorographic impulse was William Camden’s Britannia, published in Latin in 1586. However, John Aubrey (1626–97)— well known now for his posthumous Brief Lives (Letters by Eminent Persons) —and his friend Edward Lhwyd (1660–1708), author of the first volume of the Archaeologia Britannica (1707), were probably the first in Britain to study antiquities in their own right (Daniel 1975:19). Complementary to fieldwork was the collection of ‘curiosities’ often kept together in ‘cabinets’. Collections ranged from fossils and lithics and specimens of contemporary plants and animals to artefacts and coins. Each collection, some of which went on to form the core of our great museums, was as individual as the collectors’ interests, pockets and contacts. 

This spirit of open-minded enquiry where everything is of interest and nothing is excluded because it has no present use is the true spirit of pure science. This was all part of a broad scientific curiosity conducted by ‘virtuosi’: people with scientific interests and expertise. There were only a few professional scientists in the seventeenth century and not many until the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly therefore, ‘men of science’ were interested in just about everything. In order to become archaeologists, antiquaries had first to become geologists. It was only under the aegis of geology that excavations could be conducted thatwould produce secure and thus compelling artefact associations within an objective temporal framework. The physical basis had first to be securely understood before human actions modifying aspects of the earth’s surface could be realistically interpreted. Uniformitarian geology, under which ‘no processes are to be employed which are not natural to the globe; no action to be admitted except those of which we know the principle’ commenced with James Hutton’s (1788) revolutionary paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His Theory of the Earth; or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land Upon the Globe4 was the substantive launchpad for ‘deep time’, genuinely geological time, with ‘no vestige of a beginning— no prospect of an end’. In the light of this, but perversely, perhaps because of the furore Hutton’s enlightenment naturalism had caused, little notice was taken of the findings of John Frere. Frere wrote to the Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries in 1797, enclosing some Acheulian hand-axes from Hoxne, near Diss in Suffolk, remarking that they were apparently ‘weapons of war, fabricated by and used by a people who had not the use of metals’, and adding that ‘the situation in which those weapons were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed; even beyond that of the present world’. 

Frere had been rigorously careful in establishing the geological context, so the ‘situation in which they were found’ was really incontestable and the implications likewise. This letter (reproduced in Maisels 1993a:10–11) was not published until 1800. But in 1816 there appeared the descriptively titled Strata Identified by Organized Fossils, wherein William ‘stratification’ Smith (1769–1839) applied classificatory methods analogous to those used by Thomsen in producing his ‘Ages System’ two decades later. As Daniel (1975:24) remarked, ‘there could be no real archaeology before geology, [that is] before the doctrine of uniformitarianism was widely accepted’ (my emphasis); and uniformitarianism turns on the concept of ‘manifest causes now in operation’ (actualism) being those also operating in the recent and distant past. ‘Causes now in operation’ form a key part of the very title of Charles Lyell’s great three-volume work, Principles of Geology (1830–3), wherein uniformitarianism is demonstrated. Nonetheless, Lyell, like his predecessor Buckland, was so reluctant to accept a deep antiquity for man (with all it might imply for creationism) that both resisted the association of human bones and artefacts with those of extinct or ‘prediluvial’ animal species. This reluctance held even when the associations were well recorded in secure contexts at Paviland Cave (‘Goat’s Hole’) by Swansea (where Buckland himself found human skeletal remains in 1822); at Hoxne in Suffolk and at Kent’s Cavern in Torquay (carefully excavated by McEnery). 

At the last mentioned, the association was even locked into place beneath a dense layer of hard travertine. Indeed, Buckland prevailed upon McEnery to change his mind on the interpretation of his own excavations at Kent’s Cavern. Sadly this induced a mental impasse in the Reverend McEnery, who, beset with the contradictions between evidence and ‘acceptable’ interpretation, proved unableto publish his reports on the site although they existed in manuscript for several decades (Grayson 1983:76). And when R.A.C.Godwin-Austen declared at the eleventh meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1841 that, on the basis of his own excavations at Kent’s Hole, ‘arrows and knives of flint, with human bones, in the same condition as the elephant and other bones, were found in an undisturbed bed of clay, covered by nine feet of stalagmite’ (cited Grayson 1983:77), Buckland still refused to believe it, claiming without any evidence that the human artefacts had been ‘dug into’ the animal material.5 In general, those resisting a deep history for humankind used the acknowledged complexities of cave stratigraphy to dismiss everything. Hampson (1968:278) observes that the concept of evolution was a real bogey in the early nineteenth century. Boucher de Perthes (1788–1868) was of course the archetypal antiquary, and without his decades-long campaign of insisting, in the light of his own excavations in the gravels of the River Somme, that the lithic artefacts found with ‘antediluvial’ animals were in fact those of man, no prehistory for mankind could be established (Cohen and Hublin 1989). 

Indeed, the first use of a ‘prehistorical’ term—megalithic—for specific chronological purposes appeared in The Archaeological Journal as late as 1870, and the full vindication of de Perthes’ arguments did not take place until the 1860s, which in turn rehabilitated the earlier work of Frere, Schmerling, McEnery and others. Only when Brixham Cave was excavated in 1858–9 by Hugh Falconer and William Pengelly, with the support of a committee of the prestigious Geological Society of London that included Lyell, Prestwich, Godwin-Austen and Richard Owen (the anatomist and palaeontologist), was the matter favourably resolved in scientific opinion. Though not published in detail until 1873, the status and findings of those involved at Brixham Cave led to a positive re-examination of earlier work, which prejudiced scepticism had kept from general acceptance. After 1860, however, in both Britain and France only those motivated by bad faith (as Lartet remarked) persisted with this false scepticism. By then, Boucher de Perthes had clearly won (Grayson 1983:194), thanks to his ‘perseverant and fortunate zeal’ as it was put at the time by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Until the breakthrough of 1859, long-standing rejection, as Grayson (1983:207) explains,

stemmed from the sheer belief that such things could not be. In addition, however, there was the problem that the right person had not made the discovery. With almost no exceptions, the people arguing for a great human antiquity were not influential scientists whose word alone could convince. Boucher de Perthes was a customs official, Rigollot and Schmerling physicians, Tournal a pharmacist, and so on. Unlike, for example, Lyell, who was trained for the law but did geology, these men worked full time at their chosen professions; their geological studies were done as time allowed.

As in technology, China had made a promising start in geology too. No floods and catastrophes as their explanatory mechanism, but a processual understanding of erosion, deposition, uplift and further erosion by water and wind. As the famous Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi AD 1130–1200) wrote:

The waves roar and rock the world boundlessly, the frontiers of sea and land are always changing and moving, mountains suddenly arise and rivers are sunk and drowned. Human things are utterly extinguished and ancient traces entirely disappear; this is called the ‘Great Waste-Land of the Generations’. I have seen on high mountains conchs and oyster shells, often embedded in the rocks. These rocks in ancient times were earth and mud, and the conchs and oysters lived in water. Subsequently everything that was at the bottom came to be at the top, and what was originally soft became solid and hard. One should meditate deeply on such matters, for these facts can be verified. 

(cited in Temple 1986:169)

Similarly, China led in antiquarianism in which great strides were made during the Sung Dynasty (AD 960–1279) but thereafter went into major decline (K.C.Chang 1986a:9). Many works were written during this period, beginning with Kaogutu published by Lu Dalin in 1092. Most, however, had a rather narrow focus on bronze vessels and jades. Why did this not broaden out into a topographic perspective and thence, with further advances in geology, become archaeology rather than a limited antiquarianism at the service of traditional historiography and collectors of ritual and art-objects? The difference, of course, is situational: mere literary talk as against ideas informing action on a cumulative scale. Hutton was a medical doctor and an agronomist. Wilson was an engineer. The society to which they belonged was undergoing the world’s first Industrial Revolution which itself was the consequence of an Agricultural and Mercantile Revolution that preceded and accompanied it. It is thus a historical irony that archaeology came to China through the aegis of the Geological Survey of China, established by foreign geologists in Peking in 1916 (K.C.Chang 1986a:13–14). The members included a Swede, J.G.Andersson. In addition to several geological firsts, he had had, in 1921, in his own phrase, a red-letter year:

the Neolithic dwelling site at Yangshaocun, the Eocene mammals in the Yellow River, the Shaguotun cave deposit in Fengtien and the still more remarkable cave discovery at Zhoukoudian, which became world famous by the work of those who followed after us.

(Andersson 1934:xviii

This was, of course, the excavation in 1929 revealing ‘Peking Man’ (Sinanthropus pekinensis or Pithecanthropus itbecanthropus sinensis or Homo erectus pekinensis) at Zhoukoudian, southwest of Beijing in Hebei Province. Those highly important Homo erectus remains disappeared during the Japanese invasion. Meanwhile, in 1927 Andersson’s work in Gansu province revealed a large group of painted-pottery culture sites (K.C.Chang 1986a:14). Those belonged to the widespread Yangshao Neolithic culture, and it was one of those, called Xiyincun in Xiaxan, Shanxi Province, that the 28-year-old Li Chi (1895– 1979) excavated, making him the first Chinese archaeologist. From 1928 until 1937 he was director of excavations at Yinxu—the late Shang capital near Anyang—and came to be regarded as ‘the father of Chinese archaeology’, not least because so many Chinese archaeologists were trained there (K.C.Chang 1986a:17).

The specific theoretical apparatus of the discipline The Three Ages system of Vedel-Simonsen and Thomsen belongs to the third requisite, namely the specific theoretical apparatus of the discipline. Demonstrated in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the tripartite scheme did indeed provide the crucial organizing principle for archaeology—of necessity chronological—the Ages of Stone, Bronze and then Iron. However, the Ages System could not by itself establish the discipline: after all, a version not much different from Thomsen’s appeared in Lucretius’ (c. 99–55 BC) De Rerum Natura, and in China was approached by Yuan Kang in his Yue jue shu. However indispensable such a classification was, it was not yet sufficient. For that to happen, as with any science, there would have to be experiments—in our case actual excavations—in the doing of which substantive information on prehistory and history would emerge. In gaining this knowledge, the methodological limitations and errors would become apparent and could be addressed. Additionally, since a theory is but a structure of linked operational concepts specifying the components of a mechanism, some necessary concepts could be derived from other disciplines, notably anthropology, geography and history, as they also developed, all of which would take time (for a full history see Trigger 1989). The key experiments confirming Thomsen’s classification came from the clear Neolithic to Chalcolithic/Bronze Age sequences manifested at Swiss lakeside pile villages. By 1879 the author of the first Pile Dwelling Report of 1854, Ferdinand Keller, the excavator of Obermeilen on Lake Zurich, could report no less than 161 authenticated sites in Switzerland, with others in surrounding countries also. And, although metal objects were few, the Three Age System received further validation from Jacob Messikommer’s careful excavations, beginning in 1857, of the pile village of Robenhausen by the tiny Lake Pfaffikon, east of Zurich. He used 3 by 6 metre sections, controlled for depth, and kept accurate records of what was found and where (Bibby 1957:247).

Gabriel de Mortillet accordingly adopted the term Robenhausen to designate the first period of the Neolithic, and the Swiss sites became a decades-long magnet for visitors with interests in prehistory, thereby serving as a catalyst for prehistoric research in continental Europe.6 The first scientific excavation seems, however, to have been not in Europe but in the New World. It was of a burial mound in Virginia, excavated in 1784 by its former Governor (1779–81) and future President of the United States (1801–9), none other than Thomas Jefferson. 

He describes the situation of the mound in relation to natural features and evidences of human occupation. He detects components of geological interest in its materials and traces their sources. He indicates the stratigraphical stages in the construction of the mound. He records certain significant features of the skeletal remains. And he relates his evidence objectively to current theories. No mean achievement for a busy statesman in 1784! (Wheeler 1954:58–9)

No mean achievement indeed for an academic in 1984! However, as the history of archaeology makes clear, instead of a steady advance on a broad front in the techniques of excavation, recording and publication, in every period from Jefferson onwards it has taken generations for best practice to become standard practice. In archaeology it seems, knowledge accumulation and dissemination have been particularly haphazard.7 This is particularly troubling in our discipline, because in contrast to laboratory experiments, a badly dug or reported site cannot be restored for others to try again later! Consistency of funding and continuity of personnel are thus essential to good excavation and reporting. In Europe, classical archaeologists were probably the first to employ extensive stratigraphic profiles, possibly the earliest being Giuseppe Fiorelli (1823–96) who took over from the wreckers of Pompeii in 1860 and began proper excavations, in this following in the footsteps of Carlo Fea in the Roman Forum (1803 and 1813–20). Fiorelli insisted on careful stratigraphic excavation to reconstruct buildings and their uses, and was probably also the first to declare that the recovery of works of art was not the prime purpose of archaeology. Instead he concentrated on the recovery of organic remains, especially human bodies, by filling in with plaster of Paris the forms they had left in the ash deposits. He also recognized the importance of proper publication, and accordingly started the Journal of the Excavations of Pompeii. Plans and stratigraphy were drawn by Alexander Conze who began excavations on the island of Samothrace in 1873. His was also the first site to use both professional architects and photography. Similar standards were employed at Olympia between 1875 and 1881 by Ernst Curtius and Wilhelm Dorpfeld for the German Archaeological Institute, at which site they fortunately forestalled Schliemann (though a French team under Abel Blouet had dug there in 1829).

Of Schliemann, Wheeler wrote:

We may be grateful to Schliemann for plunging his spade into Troy, Tiryns and Mycenae in the seventies of the last century, because he showed what a splendid book had in fact been buried there; but he tore it to pieces in snatching it from the earth, and it took us upwards of three-quarters of a century to stick it back together again and to read it aright, with the help of cribs from other places. (Wheeler 1954:59)

Before about 1860, then, excavations were essentially pre-archaeological, and most eighteenth-century digs, such as those conducted at Pompeii and Herculaneum by the execrable Alcubierre, were just plain horrifying. A doubly promising start was, however, made in India, first by the efforts of Captain Meadows Taylor, an administrator in the employ of the Nizam of Hyderabad. According to Wheeler (1954:22–3), during the 1850s, ‘Meadows Taylor dug into a number of the megalithic tombs characteristic of central and southern India, and drew and described sections which preserve an informative and convincing record of what he found, with differentiated strata’ (my emphasis). Then, in 1862, General Alexander Cunningham was appointed (temporary) Director of Archaeology, becoming Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1871 in order to conduct ‘a complete search over the whole country and a systematic record and description of all architectural and other remains that are remarkable alike for their antiquity or their beauty, or their historic interest’ (cited in Wheeler 1955:180). Cunningham, though outstandingly energetic and wide-ranging, concentrated on north India and the medieval period. He did, however, make three visits to the mounds of Harappa (1853, 1856, 1872–3), during the last of which he conducted a small excavation and drew a plan of the site (Possehl 1991:6). Dr James Burgess became responsible for South India after 1874. He succeeded Cunningham as Director General in 1885, but retired in 1889, after which the Department fell into one of its periodic torpors from which it was only awakened by the appointment of John Marshall in 1902 through an initiative of Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, to get things moving. In a renewed burst of energy, Marshall tackled everything from classical Taxila to Moghul architecture, built up an epigraphic department of the highest calibre, according to Wheeler (1955: 181), and drafted an Ancient Monuments Act. Most importantly, however, he oversaw the first systematic excavations at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, fully revealing the importance of a major pristine civilization (Marshall 1926–7). Marshall’s three volumes (1931) are the basic literature on Mohenjo-daro, followed by two reporting further excavations from E.J.H. Mackay (1938); while M.S.Vats reported on his work in progress from 1926 to 1934 in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India, publishing his full report of ‘Excavations at Harappa’ in two volumes in 1940.

Of those major reports, however, Mortimer Wheeler who took over directorship of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1944 until Independence in 1947, wrote scathingly:

It is almost beyond belief that as recently as 1940 the Survey could publish in monumental form ‘sections’…the one showing walls suspended, such as those of Bethel, in a featureless profile of the site, with neither building lines nor occupation strata, varied only by indications of the completely unmeaning piles of earth on which the excavator left some of his walls standing; the other showing the burials of two variant cultures floating, like a rather disorderly barrage-balloon, without hint of the strata and the gravelines which would have indicated their scientific inter-relationship. It is sad to compare these caricatures of science with the admirable sketchrecords of Meadows Taylor, nearly a century earlier. 

(Wheeler 1954:34)

It was, however, the Archaeological Survey of India that promoted Aurel Stein’s explorations in south-central Asia in 1900–1, 1906–8, 1916–18 and 1930. It was in 1907, while ranging into western China to the ‘Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’, that he discovered at Tunhuang a whole library of ancient Chinese texts, one of which—a Chinese translation from the sanskrit of the well-known Buddhist work, the Diamond Sutra—was actually block-printed in AD 868. In the form of a roll with a total length of 5.3 metres and 27 centimetres wide, this is the world’s oldest surviving book printed on paper. It also contains the earliest woodcut illustration in a printed book (Temple 1986:111). Printing itself dates from the first half of the eighth century in China, the impetus coming from the needs of Buddhist proslytising (ibid.: 113). In sum, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century archaeology was becoming established as a scientific discipline, thanks to the efforts of such leading workers as Alexander Conze, and his meticulous work at Samothrace in 1873; Ernst Curtius, who led the German expedition to Olympia between 1875 and 1881; Petrie’s individualist work in Egypt from 1880, and, of course, PittRivers at Cranborne Chase (beginning on 9 August 1880). Prior to that, digging was undertaken for one of four reasons: to find art for private collectors or museums; to extend the historicity of the wide and deep classical stream in European culture (which Schliemann notoriously tried to do for Homer); or to give substance to biblical accounts, of which, especially since the Enlightenment, educated opinion was beginning to doubt the literal veracity (‘biblical archaeology’ began, indeed, as the search for ‘proofs’); or for nationalistic reasons, with the triumph of the nation-state across Europe in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century.