Avebury:
the Biography of a Landscape by JOSHUA POLLARD & ANDREW REYNOLDS
Tempus 2002, 288 pages, 115 b/w figures,
25 colour plates. ISBN 0-7524-1957-9 pb. (£18.99)
Monuments
of the British Neolithic: the roots of architecture by MILES RUSSELL
Tempus 2002, 192 pages, 100 b/w figures,
26 colour plates. ISBN 0-7524-1953-6 pb. (£17.99)
A
Zest for Life: the Story of Alexander Keiller by LYNDA J MURRAY
Morven Books 1999, 134 pages, 56 b/w figures.
ISBN 0-9536039-0-3 pb. (£9.99)
SRAE demands at university, and the absence of archaeology
in the English school curriculum, appear to discourage those who know
most about prehistoric Britain from writing for those who know least.
Many archaeologists, even some proclaiming the importance of reaching
a wide public, instinctively dislike books that follow a populist rather
than academic agenda. Yet here are three books aimed at a non-specialist
market, two written by university academics and one by an amateur, of
potential interest to readers of a deeply specialist website. This is
an exciting time for archaeological publication.
The publishing house Tempus, responsible for two of
these volumes, is an important player, with a stock list approaching
its second hundred in less than five years. With such a prolific output,
and as their archaeological publisher has recently written, a dearth
of ‘appropriate authors’ (Kemmis Betty 2002, 1054), perhaps
there are bound to be a few lacklustre titles. On the other hand, there
are already some substantial classics, among them Ian Stead’s
Salisbury Hoard, Martin Green’s Landscape Revealed
and Ann Woodward’s British Barrows. And here is yet another
to delight the prehistorian.
Pollard and Reynolds, authors of Avebury: the
Biography of a Landscape, have the right qualifications for the
job: hands-on knowledge of local archaeology and history acquired through
survey and excavation over several years, and active engagement nationally
with leading theory and research. The benefits are clear throughout
the book, but an example will illustrate the point. A discussion of
the early Neolithic environment blends well-known work in the upper
Kennet valley by John Evans, Alasdair Whittle and others (‘much
of the Avebury landscape was covered by closed, oak-dominated deciduous
woodland, making it difficult to perceive the subtle details of topography
so evident today’), with a review of ideas about natural clearings,
and the practical and other uses of woodland (‘Trees ... could
provide a rich source of symbolic meaning’). It’s only a
page and a half, but it is a good introduction to the issues and the
literature, useful to the essay-writing student as much as a senior
archaeologist trying to keep up, yet likely to appeal also to the more
casual reader.
When such an approach is pursued consistently for
an entire book the outcome is more than an intelligent review, valuable
though this is. Here we have also an informed creative essay that inspires
new ideas and will underpin much future research. This, it seems to
me, is where Peter Kemmis Betty’s publishing project scores most,
when professional archaeologists, writing for a lay readership, advance
thinking in ways that would not have happened if they addressed only
their academic colleagues.
Never before, for example, has the dating problem
emerged so clearly. One is constantly reminded how poor the chronology
of Neolithic and Bronze Age Avebury is, even for the major monuments,
for which one example will suffice: the West Kennet enclosures.
By the high standards set for Stonehenge (Allen &
Bayliss 1995), all of the West Kennet radiocarbon dates would be rejected
if no further data could be made available. More information is needed
on chemical and other processing, quality assurance, precise sample
provenances (eg CAR-1294 and CAR-1295, 3620±70 BP and 4050±70
BP respectively, are from adjacent ‘postpipe cores’) and
sample details (CAR-1294 and CAR-1295 are described as ‘bone samples’,
but species, element, condition and state of articulation are not stated).
Whittle found the wide span of dates (around 750-1000
calibrated years) ‘wholly at odds with the lack of other indications
for longevity and development’ (1997, 138). Here Pollard, while
recognising that recent cropmark evidence suggests a slightly more complex
history at the site, similarly finds no ‘grounds for assuming
a particularly long sequence of construction and use’ (page 115).
It doesn’t help that several dates at the more extreme ends of
the range come from apparently contemporary contexts (as the two above).
At least until further data on these determinations are made available,
the enclosures will remain dated by artefacts and not radiocarbon, a
most unsatisfactory position.
Another reason for professional interest in this book
is that both authors describe research not yet fully published. So we
have a review of the continuing Beckhampton excavations, a new geophysical
plot of a probable early Iron Age enclosures at West Overton, and a
convincing revision of the early history of Avebury village, with extensive
information on the still unpublished school site excavation by Faith
Vatcher.
The text is easy to read (if not immune to occasional
lapses: you don’t etch a canvas; ‘scholarly research’
doesn’t have shoulders to ‘rest on’), and the illustrations,
almost all previously unpublished, are almost worth the price of the
book alone.
From a potential classic to one that will soon be
forgotten. The best one can say of Monuments of the British Neolithic
is that building a backlist of excellence involves risks, and if sometimes
the gamble fails, that is perhaps the price we pay. As a professional
writer of both books and book reviews I know how much easier it is to
criticise than to praise, and that criticism can hurt. I do not knock
lightly, and must justify my opinion. This is far from Russell’s
first book: if he listens to counsel, and focuses his evident energy
and enthusiasm with more thought, we might all be the richer.
It’s difficult to know where to start: even
the old stand-by of summarising the book is a challenge. What is it
about? Russell opens with the less than eloquent assertion that ‘The
Neolithic ... represents the most fundamental period of change ever
to occur within the history of human society ... [T]he end of human
reliance upon solely the hunting and gathering of foodstuffs and the
origins of farming ... [mark] the origin of the modern world’.
His first colour plate illustrates the theme. It shows
a public sculpture in Moscow, ‘originally constructed as a monument
to the Soviet state, in reality commemorat[ing] a much earlier revolution
than that of 1917; intensive farming, industrial production and the
building of monuments were all fundamental aspects of the Neolithic’.
These extraordinary statements (the Neolithic an era
of ‘intensive farming’ and ‘industrial production’,
apparently leading directly to ‘the modern world’: surely
Russell does not actually mean to say that the Soviet statue was designed
to celebrate the Neolithic) are not explained or defended. But then
it hardly seems to matter, as the rest of the book considers Neolithic
earthworks, palisades and standing stones with little reference to either
the ancient ‘revolution’ or the present. There are occasional
hints of a thesis trying to escape. If I may be so bold, I suggest this
is grounded in an unease with the dominant model of Neolithic Britain,
in which population ‘invasions’ and a sedentary economy
with causewayed enclosures as settlements, finds small support (notwithstanding
Russell’s’ belief that ‘Neolithic society is usually
thought of as being sedentary’). This widely accepted model has
been developed over decades, with many well-argued, thoughtful texts.
Intelligent critique would be welcome, so Russell’s failure to
deliver is doubly frustrating. Even a clear, well-referenced summary
of the status quo would have been valuable, if only to get the reader
up to speed: to give a further example, he writes as if no one had before
noticed a similarity between barrow and house plans (I recommend Avebury:
the Biography of a Landscape as an excellent introduction to current
thinking).
‘Why?’, he asks in the Introduction (a
question that stuck in my mind to the end). Why farming? ‘The
vast majority of the world’s population today ... buy their food
... from supermarket shelves... It is almost as if [there were] ...
two very different species of human: ... the industrialised agriculturalist
who largely dominates the planet [and]... the hunter-gatherer’.
I suspect few but a reviewer would read further than
such nonsense (if Russell got out a bit more he might find significant
areas of the world with no supermarkets; or just try the internet, where
Google lists 28,400 websites featuring “subsistence farming”).
Sadly the reward for continued reading is more nonsense.
Strangely for someone with a poor sense of English,
Russell seems obsessed with jargon. He rejects ‘barrow’
in favour of ‘structured mound’, because barrow ‘implies
a burial or funerary function, something which should not be taken for
granted’ (although the Oxford Dictionary allows several definitions
of barrow as no more than a mound). The emphasis on the scarcity of
human remains in long barrows is challenged by the many ‘case
studies’, almost all of which consist of long barrows with human
remains: an apparent contradiction that goes without comment.
Jargon paranoia takes flight when he comes to henges.
He professes a ‘severe objection’ to ‘cursus’,
‘bank barrow’ and ‘henge’, informing us that
such terms are ‘largely meaningless’ (we are not told why).
He rounds up no less than 15 such hated names in the following paragraph.
Yet he then uses them, framed in quotation marks, in his discussion.
Either these categories exist or they don’t. As Russell manages
several pages describing them, presumably, for him at least, they do.
So why irritate the reader with meaningless posturing? Perhaps there
is, buried inside Monuments of the British Neolithic, an intelligent,
provocative book. It is, however, up to the author to deliver this work,
not us, to extract it from the present text.
So back to Avebury, and another good read. Two of
the great regional fieldworkers who dominated the early 20th century
development of archaeology have at last received their first biographical
treatments - none too late, as the two authors use interviews with people
who have since died. Maud Cunnington (1869-1951) and Alexander Keiller
(1889-1955) both worked in Wiltshire, and though the man was 20 years
younger than the woman, their most active years were the 1920s and ‘30s,
and both did little of archaeological significance after the outbreak
of the 2nd World War. Julia Roberts’ ‘reassessment’
of Cunnington’s life is motivated by a perceived need to correct
misunderstandings (Roberts 2002), while Lynda Murray’s self-published
biography (A Zest for Life: the Story of Alexander Keiller)
is less righteous and more subtle, and perhaps the better for it.
Poor Keiller. He may have been born into wealth, but
he suffered a childhood few would envy: both parents dead before he
left school, a lone child incarcerated in Eton, he was only 9 when his
father passed away overseas. Could this be one reason why his career
seems to be a succession of confrontations, from his first publication
on Scottish witchcraft that set out to rubbish a book by Margaret Murray,
to his attempt to remove the stone circles at Avebury of the village
that cared so little for its inheritance? The Windmill Hill excavations
originated in a protest against the Marconi wireless company, and became
a fight with Harold St George Gray; Keiller struggled to found a museum
at Stonehenge, eventually giving in to pressure from the Cunningtons,
only to reach a near-manic level of anger over their excavation of the
Sanctuary; and the implement petrology programme, which he helped to
found, was an opportunity to rail against backward-looking museums that
didn’t want their stone axes sliced up.
He also, we learn, could be extremely rude to visitors
to his excavations, and to his own staff. Yet he was clearly a popular
man, fielding four wives and an unknown number of mistresses, receiving
praise and thanks as well as complaints from the hapless W E V Young,
who variously worked for Gray, Keiller and the Cunningtons. His charisma
and energy added vision to his archaeological disputes, so that his
excavations, his work with O G S Crawford on Wessex from the Air and
his restorations at Avebury all benefited the profession and a wider
public.
In her delightful little book, Murray writes with
a dry sense of humour. Keiller liked to send friends personalised Christmas
cards. In 1928 they received a photo of Felstead, the dog skeleton from
Windmill Hill, and the following year of Duffine, the goat: ‘interesting
(though not terribly festive)’ she notes. She has unearthed much
that is new, and knows when to curb speculation. On one occasion Keiller
wrote ecstatically to Stuart Piggott about a man he’d met in a
London hotel: ‘His eyes are lustrous, and I am told he sews divinely’.
‘The remarks are on the whole cryptic’, comments Murray,
‘but suggest ... that he was not indifferent to all of his male
associates’.
Murray is interested in Keiller’s many cars,
and the detail on these is a bonus that might not have graced a more
conventional archaeological biography. On the other hand, her archaeology
is not always right. For example, in the early 1900s three, not four,
West Kennet Avenue stones ‘remained upright’: the fourth
was re-erected by Maud Cunnington in 1912 (page 70). Young had not worked
for the Cunningtons at Woodhenge (1926-8) and the Sanctuary (1930) before
Keiller at Windmill Hill (1925) (footnote 65a). The suggestion that
the East Kennet long barrow was bombed in 1940 (page 104) sent me to
W E V Young’s diaries, where I learnt that in fact it was the
field between the barrow and the road that suffered.
Such things, however, are likely to be noticed by
those archaeologists to whom they really matter. There is enough here
to make this one of the more rewarding recent archaeological biographies.
The book is pleasantly laid out, with many well-selected photos, and
a continuously-numbered footnote system that is today easy to do but
rarely seen.
Keiller made much of his scientific methods and his
modern equipment, but it was mostly show. Instructive comparisons can
be made between Keiller and Mortimer Wheeler, on the one hand, and Cunnington
and Cecil Curwen on the other. Keiller and Wheeler both insisted on
straight, tidy trenches. One of Wheeler’s great contributions
was to develop Pitt Rivers’ theory of stratigraphy. Keiller, however,
dug in horizontal spits, making his comprehensive, even obsessive finds
recovery almost meaningless (Hamilton & Whittle 1999, 42). Despite
Keiller’s famous protestations to the contrary, and notwithstanding
his more expensive equipment, Robert Cunnington’s surveys seem
every bit as accurate.
Yet neither was Maud Cunnington perfect. The young
Stuart Piggott visited the Windmill Hill excavations and returned, deeply
impressed, to the Neolithic enclosure on the Trundle, West Sussex. The
effect is clear from Curwen’s photos. Before Piggott’s Wiltshire
visit we see a Cunnington-like excavation, where modern surfaces gently
elide with what may, or may not, be Neolithic fill or a ditch bottom;
after, we are in Keiller territory, everything clean, straight and neat.
By the mid 1930s Cunnington’s style of excavation was archaic.
Curwen possessed a vision and a literary fluency that Cunnington did
not have (and, perhaps because of the number of flint mines in Sussex,
he recognised and valued flint artefacts). Both Cunnington and Curwen,
however, were highly efficient publishers of their work. It is surely
wrong to describe Keiller, with his appalling publication record, as
‘very modern’ (Roberts 2002, 55).
With these two biographies, it is time to stop bickering.
Cunnington and Keiller were quite different personalities with different
goals. Both made substantial contributions to the history of Wiltshire
and to public engagement with its ancient past. For this we should all
be thankful.
Mike Pitts
Marlborough
References
Allen, M.J. & Bayliss, A. 1995. The radiocarbon dating programme.
In Cleal, R.M.J., Walker, K.E.W., and Montague, R.E., Stonehenge
in its Landscape: Twentieth Century Excavations. London: English
Heritage, 511-35.
Hamilton, M & Whittle, A 1999. Grooved Ware of the Avebury area:
style, contexts and meanings. In Cleal, R. & MacSween, A. (eds),
Grooved Ware in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 36-47.
Kemmis Betty, P. 2002. Anyone for writing? Antiquity 76, 1054-8.
Roberts, J. 2002. ‘That terrible woman’: the life, work
and legacy of Maud Cunnington. Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural
History Magazine 95, 46-62.
Whittle, A. 1997. Sacred Mound, Holy Rings. Silbury Hill & the
West Kennet Palisade Enclosures: a Later Neolithic Complex in North
Wiltshire. Oxford: Oxbow Monograph 74.
Review Submitted: February 2004
The views expressed in this review are not
necessarily those of the Society or the Reviews Editor.
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