back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

I like Archaeology.  In fact, so much do I like archaeology that I used to be head of finance for an archaeological consultancy.

I was reading a post from f4f3 about his recent visit to Kilmartin Glen and it set me thinking about what I find interesting about archaeology.

I am interested in the archaeology of the classical period, mainly Roman, but if you’ve got Hellenistic I’ll take Hellenistic.  I’m also interested in the archaeology of  pre-historic Britain (mainly Britain).

I like them for different reasons.

One of the things I like about Roman history is that they were pretty similar to us.  I could imagine living in the Roman Empire.  People lived in houses that I would recognise. They bought and sold goods and services that I still use today. Some of the jobs that people do today are the same as jobs that Romans would have had.  Carpenters, butchers, book keepers, bath attendant, commodity brokers, estate managers. I see lots of similar economic activity. Many jobs were done in ways that the people doing them today would find recognisable, perhaps even exemplary. The politics feels very familiar. The role of religion seemed similar. Some people pious, some not. Some believers, some atheists. A formal role for religion in society, sometimes as a custodian of public morals, sometimes as a prop to the Establishment.

The social, political and economic ecosystem feels similar to the one I live in.  People seemed to do and build things for reasons that I would recognise. The landscape of Roman streets makes sense to me.

So I can walk around a Roman archaeological site and picture myself there a few thousand years ago. I can even picture myself having a pretty similar life to one I currently have.

Not so with neo-lithic Britain.  When I look at sites like Avebury, Kilmartin Glen or Neo-lithic Orkney I think I just don’t see the landscape the way the people who embedded their buildings in it saw the landscape.  The landscape clearly meant a lot to them. They seem to have placed their buildings with great care. Perhaps greater care than insula in a Roman city. The buildings are hugely economically valuable.  Silbury Hill is estimated to have taken 18 million man-hours to build. That’s

Did they live in a magical realm like the Dream Time where the real and the unreal inhabited the same landscape? Did ordinary people see the landscape the way the people who commissioned the stone circles and howes see them?  Are the buildings religious? Are they used by many people during acts of collective peopleness or reserved for the elite or for the strange?

Did the Iron Age kings who stood in Dunadd’s footsteps really believe that this created a mystical connection between them and the land or did they believe it was only symbolic? 

When I visit Orkney and go to the Stones of Stenness or the Ring of Brodgar I struggle to imagine what these places meant to the people who built them. Are the places sacred or do they mark places of flow in a sacred landscape. Are they the words of the hymn or the punctuation?  Scara Brae is much easier to understand. Homes, small and cosy, near sources of food and water and friendship.

How did these people who lived in a home I can recognise as a home live in a landscape that seems richer to them than it does to me?

I just don’t know.  

When I used to work the archaeologists they would often talk about ritual. I once asked them what they meant by ritual. Ritual, it turned out meant “anything we don’t understand.”

I can’t connect to the neo-lithic landscape in the same way I can connect to the Roman Forum, the Kaiserthermum in Trier  or Chedworth Villa.  What were these people doing when they went to Avebury? Did they even ever go? This is what makes neo-lithic archaeology fascinating for me.  I am baffled by the lack of connection to a world view that seemed to be so important to the people who build neo-lithic Britain.

Roman archaeology satisfies my desire to see how people who I think were similar to me lived when their technology and their geo-politics was somewhat different to my own world. In my mind I can inhabit that world and stand in the place

Neo-lithic archaeology shows me something that I can’t connect to.