A LITTLE HISTORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Copyright © 2018 Brian Fagan

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 To
Vernon Scarborough
Water expert extraordinaire
Who told me about Bali and offers
encouragement at every turn
 Contents

1 The ‘Backward-Looking Curiosity’

2 Donkeys and Pharaohs
3 Reading Ancient Egypt
4 Digging into Nineveh
5 Tablets and Tunnelling
6 The Maya Revealed
7 Axes and Elephants
8 A Huge Turning Point
9 The Three Ages
10 Stone Age Hunters in an Icy World
11 Across the Ages
12 The Myth of the Mound Builders
13 ‘Stepping into the Unknown’
14 Toros! Toros!
15 Searching for Homer’s Heroes
16 ‘Organised Common Sense’
17 The Small and Unspectacular
18 The Palace of the Minotaur
19 Not ‘Men’s Work’
20 Mud Bricks and a Flood
21 ‘Wonderful Things’
22 A Palace Fit for a Chief
23 East and West
24 Shell Heaps, Pueblos and Tree Rings
25 A Fire-Breathing Giant
26 Around the River Bend
27 Dating the Ages
28 Ecology and World Prehistory
29 ‘Dear Boy!’
30 The First Farmers
31 Defending the Emperor
32 Underwater Archaeology
33 Meeting the Colonists
34 The Ice Man and Others
35 Warrior-Priests of the Moche
36 Tunnelling for the Cosmos
37 Çatalhöyük
38 Looking in the Landscape
39 Shining a Light on the Invisible
40 Archaeology Today and Tomorrow
Index
 CHAPTER 1

The ‘Backward-Looking Curiosity’

O n 24 August AD 79, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius erupted like a great cannon.

An enormous fountain of ash, red-hot lava, rocks and smoke burst from the
volcano. Daylight turned into darkness. Ash fell like heavy snow, blanketing
the nearby cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii.
About midnight, an avalanche of scalding gases, mud and rocks slid down
the mountain slopes and cascaded through the two Roman towns.
Herculaneum vanished completely. Only the roofs of Pompeii’s larger
buildings poked through the volcanic debris. Hundreds of people perished.
Wrote an eyewitness, the author Pliny the Younger: ‘You could hear the
shrieks of the women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men.’ Then
there was silence.
Soon only a large, grassy mound marked the site of Pompeii. More than
sixteen centuries passed before anyone disturbed the two buried cities. Then,
in 1709, a peasant digging a well on top of Herculaneum uncovered some
sculpted marble. A local prince sent workmen underground. They recovered
three intact female statues. This chance discovery led to treasure hunting in
the heart of the buried city. From this casual looting of Roman artefacts
buried deep in volcanic ash emerged the science of archaeology.
Gold-laden pharaohs, lost civilisations, heroic adventures in remote lands
– many people still believe that archaeologists are romantic adventurers who
spend their lives digging into pyramids and lost cities. Today’s archaeology
is far more than hazardous journeys and spectacular discoveries. It may have
begun as treasure hunting – and alas, the looting of sites continues alongside
serious archaeology today. But treasure hunting isn’t proper archaeology: it’s
fast-moving, ruthless digging with one objective – to uncover valuable
objects to sell to wealthy collectors. Contrast this with archaeology, the
scientific study of the past, of human behaviour over 3 million years.
How did archaeology develop from uncontrolled searches for astonishing
finds and forgotten peoples into the serious pursuit of the past that it is today?
This book tells the story of archaeology through the work of some of the
most famous archaeologists, from the casual observers of four centuries ago
to the close-knit research teams of the twenty-first century. Many pioneering
archaeologists were colourful individuals who spent months working alone in
remote lands. At some point in their lives, all of them developed a fascination
for the past. One early scholar called archaeology the ‘backward-looking
curiosity’. He was right. Archaeology is curiosity about what’s behind us.
I first experienced archaeology as a teenager on a rainy day in southern
England, when my parents took me to Stonehenge (see Chapter 38). The
massive stone circles towered above us. Low, grey clouds swirled in the
gloom. We walked among the stones (you could in those days) and looked
out at silent burial mounds on nearby ridges. Stonehenge cast its spell over
me, and I have been fascinated by archaeology ever since.
I became curious about Englishman John Aubrey (1626–97), who often
visited Stonehenge and discovered another dramatic stone circle at nearby
Avebury, when he galloped into it while foxhunting in 1649. Aubrey puzzled
over both Avebury and Stonehenge, both of them said to have been built by
‘Ancient Britons’. Who were these savage people who wore skins? They
were, Aubrey supposed, ‘two or three degrees less savage than the [Native]
Americans’.
 Aubrey and his successors knew little of Europe’s past before the
Romans. Certainly, there were burial mounds, stone circles and other
monuments for them to examine; also a confusing muddle of stone tools,
pottery and metal objects that appeared from ploughed fields and the
occasional digging of crude trenches into burial mounds (see Chapter 9). But
these had belonged to completely unknown people – not Romans from a city
like Pompeii, buried on an exact date that is recorded in historical documents.
Serious digging began at Herculaneum in 1748. King Charles II of Naples
commissioned Spanish engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre to probe the
depths of the city. Alcubierre used gunpowder and professional miners to
blast and tunnel his way through the ash to uncover intact buildings and
magnificent statues. The king displayed the finds in his palace, but
nevertheless, his excavations were a closely guarded secret.
A German scholar, Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–68), was the first
serious researcher. In 1755, he became librarian to Cardinal Albani in Rome
(which required him to convert to Catholicism, much to the horror of his
Protestant friends). This gave him access to books, and also to the objects
uncovered by Alcubierre. Seven years passed before Winkelmann could
actually visit the secret excavations. By then, he had unrivalled knowledge of
Roman art – more like the knowledge of modern archaeologists than of his
contemporaries. He was the first scholar to study artefacts from the towns in
their original positions.
Winkelmann pointed out that these objects were vital sources of
information about their owners and about daily life in Roman times – about
the people of the past. In an era of uncontrolled looting, this was a
revolutionary idea. Unfortunately, Winkelmann could never test his theories
with his own excavations: he was murdered by thieves for some gold coins
while awaiting a ship in Trieste in 1768. This remarkable scholar was the first
to establish a basic principle of archaeology: all artefacts, however humble,
have a story to tell.
Sometimes the stories are unusual. I once visited an abandoned Central
African village dating to the 1850s. The site was a jumble of tumbledown
cattle enclosures, grinding stones and pot fragments. There appeared to be
nothing of any great interest. Then I picked up a 500,000-year-old stone axe
lying among the pottery. I realised at once that the axe must have been
carried to the village from elsewhere, for there were no other stone tools or
signs of very early human occupation around.
This was perhaps the first time that I thought about tools from the past as
storytellers. I imagined a villager, perhaps a child, picking up the beautifully
shaped axe in river gravel about 8 kilometres away and carrying it home.
Back home, people looked at it, shrugged and threw it away. Perhaps an
elderly villager remembered coming across another such axe in his youth,
and so the finder kept it for years. There was a story here; but alas, it had long
vanished. Only the stone axe remained.
The story of archaeology begins with the curiosity of landowners and
travellers. Wealthy Europeans with a taste for classical art often took what
was called the ‘Grand Tour’ to Mediterranean lands. They returned laden
with Roman, and sometimes Greek, works of art. Stay-at-home landowners
started digging into barrows (burial mounds) on their properties. At dinner
parties back home, they would proudly display ‘rude relics of 2,000 years’.
The diggers were amateurs, people with no archaeological training
whatsoever; their ancestors were antiquarians (people interested in the
ancient past) like John Aubrey, who had puzzled over Stonehenge.
Archaeology was born about 250 years ago, at a time when most people
believed in the biblical creation. Then large-scale archaeological excavation
began when French diplomat Paul-Émile Botta and English adventurer
Austen Henry Layard searched for, and found, the biblical city of Nineveh in
northern Iraq. Layard was no expert digger. He tunnelled into the great
mounds of Nineveh and followed the carved walls of Assyrian King
Sennacherib’s palace deep underground in a search for spectacular finds for
the British Museum. He even discovered the ruts left by chariot wheels in
limestone slabs at the palace gates.
Layard, John Lloyd Stephens, Heinrich Schliemann and many others:
these were the remarkable amateurs who discovered the world’s earliest
civilisations, described in the chapters to follow. There were other amateurs
too – people who puzzled over stone axes and the bones of extinct animals,
over the primitive-looking skull of Neanderthal man. They showed that the
human past stretched back far further than 6,000 years (the figure that had
been calculated by the Christian Church from the Bible – see Chapter 7).
Professional archaeologists were virtually unknown until the late nineteenth
century. And, indeed, the number of professional archaeologists worldwide
remained in the hundreds until the years before the Second World War.
Archaeology revolves around human lives. No discovery brought this
home to us more than the famous opening of the Egyptian pharaoh
Tutankhamun’s tomb by Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter in 1922.
Carter’s painstaking clearance of the tomb painted a unique portrait of a
young man from over 3,000 years ago. It took Carter eight years to complete
the work and he died before he published it. Experts have studied the life of
this little-known pharaoh ever since.
A much humbler story comes from a sandy clearing near Meer, Belgium,
where a small group of hunters camped in 7000 BC. One individual walked
over to a boulder, sat down and fashioned some stone tools using a lump of
flint that he (or she) had brought along. A short time later, a second person
joined the stoneworker and also made some tools. Belgian archaeologist
Daniel Cahen carefully pieced together the waste flakes from the toolmaking.
The direction of the hammer blows revealed a remarkably intimate detail: the
second stoneworker was left-handed!
Modern, scientific archaeology is not just about finding sites and digging.
It unfolds as much in the laboratory as it does in the field. We’ve become
detectives who rely on all kinds of tiny clues from many often unlikely
sources to study the people of the past – whether an individual like an
Egyptian pharaoh or an entire community.
As we’ll see, archaeology began in Europe and the Mediterranean world.
Now it has become a global quest. There are archaeologists working in Africa
and Mongolia, Patagonia and Australia. The crude diggings of a century ago
have become highly controlled and carefully planned. Today, we focus not
only on individual sites, but on entire ancient landscapes. We rely heavily on
remote sensing, using lasers, satellite imagery and ground-penetrating radar
to find sites and to plan very limited excavation. We move less earth in a
month than many earlier excavations did in a day. In collaboration with
professional researchers, amateur archaeologists with metal detectors have
also made remarkable discoveries in England. These include a hoard of 3,500
pieces of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver found in Staffordshire in central
England, dating to about AD 700. This is modern, scientific archaeology,
which surveys and excavates in search of information, not goodies.
Why is archaeology important? It’s the only way we have of studying
changes in human societies over immensely long periods of time, over
hundreds and thousands of years. We add fascinating details to written
history, such as the findings from the rubbish dump of a nineteenth-century
sauce manufacturer’s factory, discovered while excavating in central London.
But most of our work is concerned with human history before writing – that
is, prehistory. Archaeologists are uncovering the unwritten past of African
societies that flourished long before Europeans arrived. We’re tracing the
first peopling of the remote Pacific islands, and studying the first settlement
of the Americas. In some countries like Kenya, we’re writing unrecorded
national histories with the spade.
Above all, archaeology defines us as human beings. It reveals our
common ancestry in Africa and shows the ways in which we are different and
similar. We study people everywhere, in all their fascinating diversity.
Archaeology is people.
The development of archaeology is one of the great triumphs of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century research. When our story begins, everyone
assumed that humans had been on earth for a mere 6,000 years. Now the
timescale is 3 million years and counting. But for all the serious scholarship,
we still marvel at astounding, and often unexpected, archaeological
discoveries that bring the past alive. The terracotta regiment of Chinese
emperor Shihuangdi, found during the digging of a well (Chapter 31); a
3,000-year-old village in eastern England destroyed so rapidly by fire that an
uneaten meal survives in a pot (Chapter 40); or finding out that 2 million
years ago some humans were left-handed. These are the discoveries that
make our blood quicken – and we make new finds every day.
And so, the actors are on the stage and the curtain is about to rise. Let the
historical play begin!
 CHAPTER 2

Donkeys and Pharaohs

P eople forget that 200 years ago Egypt was a remote land about which little
was known. Today, the pharaohs and their tombs and pyramids are familiar
to everyone. In 1798, when French General Napoléon Bonaparte arrived at
the Nile, it was almost like visiting another planet. Egypt was far off the
beaten track. It was a province of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire that was
based in Constantinople (now Istanbul); it was an Islamic country and hard to
reach.
A few European visitors wandered through Cairo’s bustling markets or
visited the nearby Pyramids of Giza. A handful of French travellers
journeyed far up the Nile River. (I actually own a remarkably accurate map of
Egypt drawn by Robert de Vaugondy, France’s royal geographer, in 1753.)
Some visitors purchased powdered ancient Egyptian mummy – prized as a
powerful medicine, even by the King of France. A few ancient Egyptian
sculptures reached Europe, where they caused considerable excitement.
No one knew anything about ancient Egypt and its spectacular
monuments, although it had long been recognised as a centre of early
civilisation. A few diplomats realised that there was money to be made from
its exotic artworks, but the remoteness of the country was against them –
until Egypt moved centre stage in the 1790s. The Isthmus of Suez (the Suez
Canal was not built until 1869) was a natural gateway for those with an eye
on British possessions in India.
In 1797, the twenty-nine-year-old Napoléon Bonaparte defeated Italy,
whereupon he developed a taste for classical art. His restless mind was filled
with visions of military conquest, and he had a deep curiosity about the land
of the pharaohs. On 1 July 1798, his army of 38,000 men reached Egypt in
328 ships. Among them were 167 scientists charged with mapping and
studying Egypt, both ancient and modern.
Napoléon had a passion for science, and especially for archaeology. His
scientists were talented young men – agricultural experts, artists, botanists
(plant experts) and engineers. But none were archaeologists, for Egyptology,
the study of ancient Egyptian civilisation, did not exist. Napoléon’s soldiers
called the scientists ‘donkeys’ – because, it is said, during a battle both
donkeys and scientists would be placed in the middle of infantry groupings.
Their leader was Baron Dominique-Vivant Denon, a diplomat and gifted
artist. He was the ideal leader, and his fine drawings, excellent writing and
infectious enthusiasm put ancient Egypt on the scientific map.
Napoléon himself was preoccupied with reorganising Egypt, but he took
time to visit the pyramids and the Sphinx, the statue of a mythical creature
with the head of a human and the body of a lion. His interest in science was
genuine, marked by his founding of the Institut de l’Egypte in Cairo. Here,
Napoléon attended lectures and seminars and kept track of his ‘donkeys’. He
was fascinated when, in June 1799, French soldiers building defences near
Rosetta in Egypt’s Nile Delta found a mysterious stone in a pile of boulders.
It was covered in three different types of writing. One was formal ancient
Egyptian script; the second a freehand version of the same writing; and the
third was Greek. This stone would prove to be the key to unlocking the
strange code that the French had seen covering the temples and tombs along
the Nile.
 The soldiers sent what became known as the Rosetta Stone to scientists in
Cairo, who soon translated the Greek text. The stone bore an order issued by
Pharaoh Ptolemy V in 196 BC. The order was nothing exciting, but the
experts realised at once that the Greek lines could potentially be the key to
unlocking the unintelligible hieroglyphs (a word that comes from the Greek,
meaning ‘sacred symbol’) that were used by the ancient Egyptians. It would
be twenty-three years before the code was cracked (see Chapter 3).
Meanwhile, the scientists travelled throughout the country in small
groups. They accompanied the army, sometimes fighting alongside the
infantry. Denon and his colleagues sketched under fire. At the temple of the
cow goddess Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt, Denon wandered among the
columns, ignoring the sunset and darkness falling, until his commanding
officer led him back to the army. Denon’s enthusiasm was infectious. His
engineer colleagues would abandon their work to sketch temples and tombs
and loot small objects. When pencils ran short, they made more from melted-
down lead bullets.
The architecture was exotic and totally unlike Greek or Roman temples.
Even the humblest private was overcome with wonder. And when the army
sighted the temples of the sun god Amun at Karnak and Luxor in Upper
Egypt, the soldiers formed ranks and saluted as their bands played in tribute
to the ancient Egyptians.
Napoléon may have been a military genius, but his Egyptian campaign
ended in defeat when British naval commander Admiral Horatio Nelson
destroyed the French fleet at Abukir Bay, near Alexandria, on 1 August 1798.
Napoléon fled to France.
When the French army surrendered in 1801, the scientists were given safe
passage back home. The British allowed them to keep most of their Egyptian
finds, but ensured that the Rosetta Stone went to the British Museum.
Though militarily a failure, the Egyptian expedition was a scientific
triumph. The general’s ‘donkeys’ examined the passageways of the Pyramids
of Giza and measured the Sphinx. Aside from sketching the Nile, they also
drew the interiors of the great Egyptian temples at Karnak, Luxor and Philae,
far upstream. The drawings of the great columns with their hieroglyphs and
of temple walls with gods and pharaohs were remarkably accurate for the
day. Their twenty-part Description de l’Egypte depicted scarabs (a sacred
beetle) and jewellery, statues, elegant jars and gold ornaments. Delicate lines
and skilfully used colour brought exotic Egyptian art and architecture to life.
The volumes caused a sensation. When people saw the riches of ancient
Egypt, there for the taking, they went wild for them.
The excitement unleashed a frenzied scramble for Egyptian antiquities in
a Europe hungry for anything exotic. Inevitably, a steady stream of
collectors, diplomats and shady characters descended on the Nile in search of
valuable discoveries. No one was seeking knowledge – just spectacular finds
that could be sold at top price. Serious research, such as that undertaken by
Napoléon’s scientists, took a back seat to treasure hunting.
Egypt remained part of the Ottoman Empire and was ruled by
Muhammad Ali, an Albanian soldier in Turkish service. He did much to open
his domains to merchants and diplomats – and also to tourists and dealers in
antiquities. There was big money to be made from well-preserved mummies
and fine art objects – so much so that governments got into the collecting
business. Both Henry Salt and Bernardino Drovetti, the top British and
French diplomats in Cairo, were urged to collect spectacular objects for
museums at home. They did so eagerly – which is how a circus strongman-
turned-tomb robber came to be one of the founders of Egyptology.
Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) was born in Padua, Italy, the son
of a barber. He made a living as an acrobat, performing across Europe. In
1803, he arrived in England, where he acquired a contract as a strongman at
Sadler’s Wells theatre (then a lowbrow music hall). Belzoni was a handsome,
imposing figure. Standing nearly 2 metres tall, he was a man of remarkable
strength. He became the ‘Patagonian Samson’, a brightly dressed
weightlifter, who strode across the stage carrying twelve performers on a
massive iron frame.
During his years as a performer, Belzoni acquired practical experience of
weightlifting, the use of levers and rollers, and ‘hydraulics’ – stage acts
involving water. All these were useful skills for a tomb robber. A restless
traveller, Belzoni and his wife Sarah arrived in Egypt in 1815. British
diplomat Henry Salt recruited him to recover a massive statue of Rameses II
from the pharaoh’s temple on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor. This
well-known figure had defied the best efforts of Napoléon’s soldiers to move
it to the river. Belzoni assembled eighty workers and built a crude wooden
wagon, which moved on four wooden rollers. He used poles as levers and
employed the weight of dozens of men to raise the heavy statue, then to move
the wagon and rollers beneath it. Five days later, the pharaoh was on the river
bank. He floated the statue downstream and returned to Luxor. Today, you
can see the Rameses statue in the British Museum.
Whenever local officials gave him trouble, Belzoni’s height and strength
proved to be powerful weapons (he was also prepared to use firearms if need
be). His determination and ruthlessness, combined with his expertise at
bargaining, served him well, and he acquired a dazzling haul of antiquities.
Now Belzoni targeted the cemeteries located on the west bank, where he
befriended the tomb robbers of Qurna. They took him deep into the narrow
passages in the cliffs where hundreds of bandaged mummies were to be
found. Mummy dust, he noted, was ‘rather unpleasant to swallow’. The
people lived in the tombs, ignoring piles of mummified hands, feet and even
skulls. They used mummy cases, and the bone and rags of the bandaged dead,
as firewood on which to cook meals.
Belzoni’s French rival, Bernardino Drovetti, responded to his success by
claiming digging rights everywhere near Luxor. He caused so much trouble
that Belzoni preferred to sail away to tackle the Abu Simbel temple far
upstream. Despite having to deal with rebellious workers and dodge sand
cascading down the cliffs, with the help of two British naval officer travellers
Belzoni succeeded in opening the doorway. He found himself in a pillared
hall with eight figures of Rameses II, but few small artefacts to take away.
Back at Luxor, he found Drovetti’s men digging at Qurna. Their leader
threatened to cut his throat, so Belzoni moved on to the Valley of the Kings,
burial place of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. The valley had been explored since
Roman times, but Belzoni had brilliant archaeological instincts. He located
three tombs almost immediately. Shortly afterwards, he made his most
astonishing discovery: the sepulchre (tomb) of Pharaoh Seti I, father of
Rameses II and one of Egypt’s most important rulers, who reigned from 1290
to 1279 BC. Magnificent paintings adorned the walls. In the burial chamber
lay the king’s translucent, but empty, alabaster (soft rock) sarcophagus, in the
shape of his body. Unfortunately, the tomb had been robbed soon after the
pharaoh’s death.
Belzoni was on a roll. He had opened four royal tombs, and, ever restless,
back in Cairo he succeeded in penetrating the interior of the huge pyramid of
Khafre at Giza, the first person to do so since medieval times. He painted his
name in soot on the wall of the burial chamber, where it remains visible
today. Ever the showman, he decided to make an exact copy of Seti’s tomb to
be exhibited in London. He and an artist lived in the tomb for a summer.
They copied the paintings and numerous hieroglyphs, and made hundreds of
wax impressions of figures. By this time, Drovetti was so jealous that his men
threatened Belzoni with firearms. Fearing for his life, the showman left Egypt
forever.
Back in London, he put on a wildly successful exhibition of the tomb and
his finds in the aptly named Egyptian Hall, close to today’s Piccadilly Circus,
and wrote a bestselling book about his adventures. Inevitably, the number of
visitors fell and the exhibition closed. But the former strongman still craved
fame and fortune. In 1823, he went on an expedition to find the source of the
Niger River in West Africa, only to die of fever in Benin.
Giovanni Belzoni was a larger-than-life character who ultimately was a
showman and tomb robber. One could describe him as a ruthless treasure
hunter, but he was more than that. He certainly began as a booty-seeker, out
for fame and fortune; but was he an archaeologist? There is no question that
he had superb instincts for discovery. Today, he might well have been a
successful archaeologist. But in his day, no one could read hieroglyphs, or
had any clue how to excavate and record the past. Like others at the time,
Belzoni measured success by the value of his finds. Nevertheless, the
flamboyant Italian did lay some of the rough-and-ready foundations of
Egyptology.
 CHAPTER 3

Reading Ancient Egypt

‘I ’ve got it!’ a panting Jean-François Champollion cried out as he fainted at

his brother’s feet. Champollion had discovered the complex grammar of
ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and had solved a centuries-old mystery.
Napoléon’s scientists, Giovanni Belzoni and many others had studied the
inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone without success. The ancient Egyptians and
their pharaohs were anonymous, people without history. Who were the kings
depicted in temple inscriptions? Who were the gods and goddesses receiving
their offerings? Who were the important people buried in richly decorated
tombs close to the Pyramids of Giza? Belzoni and his contemporaries
operated in an archaeological fog.
At first, the experts wrongly assumed that the glyphs were picture
symbols. Then in the 1790s, a Danish scholar called Jørgen Zoëga came up
with the theory that the scripts represented not objects, but sounds: that they
were a way of turning human speech into writing – a phonetic script. The
discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone, with its two hieroglyphic texts, was a
major step forward. One text was in a formal writing system that no one
could unlock. But the other was a simplified script used by ordinary people.
This was clearly an alphabetic version of hieroglyphs, and is now known to
have been widely used by scribes.
The Rosetta Stone was the first breakthrough. A second was the work of
Thomas Young, an English doctor and expert in languages and mathematics.
His knowledge of ancient Greek allowed him to read one inscription. This
enabled him to go on to identify the pharaoh Ptolemy V’s name within six
cartouches (a group of hieroglyphs within an oval, representing the name of a
monarch) in the Rosetta inscriptions. He then matched the hieroglyphs to the
letters of the Greek spelling of the pharaoh’s name. Unfortunately, though,
Young assumed that most hieroglyphs were non-phonetic, and so his efforts
to read them ultimately failed.
Young’s great rival was Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), a
linguistic genius with a volcanic personality. The son of an impoverished
bookseller, Champollion didn’t begin formal education until he was eight
years old. But he soon displayed a remarkable talent for drawing and
languages. By the age of seventeen he had mastered Arabic, Hebrew and
Sanskrit, as well as English, German and Italian. The young Champollion
was obsessed with hieroglyphs. He also learned Coptic, believing that the
language of Christian Egypt might have retained some ancient Egyptian
elements.
In 1807, Champollion and his brother Jacques-Joseph moved to Paris,
where they lived in poverty. The young linguist turned his attention to the
Rosetta Stone. He studied it for months and pored over numerous Egyptian
papyri (documents written on papyrus-reed stems). The research was
frustrating and full of dead ends. Unlike Young, Champollion became
convinced that Egyptian script was phonetic. He widened his study to include
both Egyptian and Greek papyri, as well as an obelisk from Upper Egypt with
cartouches of Queen Cleopatra.
In 1822, he received accurate copies of the hieroglyphs at Abu Simbel,
which allowed him to identify the cartouches representing Rameses II, and
then another pharaoh, Thutmose III. He realised that hieroglyphic writing did
not include vowels: there were twenty-four symbols that represented single
consonants (much like letters in English) and that functioned like an alphabet.
The script was usually, but not always, written from right to left. No blanks
or punctuation marks separated words. By the time Champollion rushed into
his brother’s room, he had deciphered a script that he called ‘at times
figurative, symbolic and phonetic’.
On 27 September 1822, Champollion presented his findings to the French
Academy of Inscriptions and Literature. The discovery was considered so
important that the King of France was informed. However, years were to pass
before Champollion’s work was universally accepted. In 1824, he published a
summary of hieroglyphs that was savaged by his critics. It seems likely that
his argumentative personality and inability to tolerate criticism added to his
difficulties.
Champollion became curator of the Egyptian section at the Louvre, where
his knowledge of hieroglyphs allowed him to arrange the collections in their
correct time order. This was a major advance.
But the man who had unlocked the formal script of ancient Egypt had
never visited the Nile. In 1828, influential supporters persuaded the king to
back a joint French and Tuscan expedition under Champollion’s leadership.
Thirty years after Napoléon’s experts sailed for Alexandria, Jean-François
Champollion, Egyptologist Ippolito Rosellini and a team of artists,
draughtsmen and architects – all wearing Turkish clothing, which was more
comfortable in the heat –embarked on a journey up the river.
The expedition was a triumph. For the first time, the master and his
companions could read the inscriptions on temple walls and understand the
significance of some of the oldest monuments in the world. At the goddess
Hathor’s temple at Dendera, excited members of the expedition jumped
ashore one bright moonlit night. For two glorious hours, they wandered
through the ruins, only returning to their boats at three o’clock in the
morning.
After brief stays at Luxor, Karnak and in the Valley of the Kings, the
expedition rode the summer flood down to Cairo in triumph. Champollion
was the first scholar to identify tomb owners and to translate the inscriptions
on temple walls of pharaohs making offerings to gods. Exhausted, he
returned to Paris in January 1830. He would die of a stroke two years later at
the age of just forty-two, but the controversy surrounding hieroglyphs
continued long after his death. And fifteen years would pass before everyone
agreed that his translations had been correct.
 A flock of less scrupulous visitors descended on the Nile. The success of
Belzoni and Drovetti encouraged other treasure hunters to seek fame and
fortune there. Ancient Egypt rapidly became a money-making enterprise.
Champollion was disgusted at the destruction: people were openly robbing
tombs for their treasures, digging up statues and hammering art off temple
walls, all with a view simply to make a profit.
He wrote to Muhammad Ali to complain about the antiquities trade and
the damage being done. Champollion’s letter was the trigger for Ali to pass a
law that forbade the export of antiquities, to authorise the construction of a
museum, and to make it illegal to destroy monuments. Without officials in
place, the law meant nothing. But it was a move in the right direction, even if
Ali and his successors did give or sell most of the museum exhibits to
prominent foreigners. Fortunately, a few visitors now started to come to the
Nile in search of information rather than artefacts.
Champollion’s dramatic claims to have deciphered the hieroglyphs
encouraged a move towards research rather than collecting. At last there was
a way of learning the secrets of ancient Egyptian civilisation. Influential
scholars like the classical archaeologist and traveller Sir William Gell
encouraged promising young men. One was John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–
1875), whose parents had died when he was young and left him modest
private funds. While awaiting an officer’s commission in the army, he went
on a tour to Mediterranean lands. In Rome, he met Sir William Gell, who
probably knew more than anyone about ancient Egypt at the time. Young
Wilkinson arrived in Alexandria in late 1821, armed with a little Arabic and
boundless enthusiasm. This was shortly before Champollion deciphered
Egyptian script. But Wilkinson knew enough of Thomas Young’s approach
to hieroglyphs and of Egyptian artefacts to be better prepared than anyone
before him. He travelled upstream and threw himself into Egyptology.
Here was a different kind of archaeologist. While Belzoni and his kind
were excavators, digging for art and artefacts, Wilkinson took a much
broader view of Egyptology. In this, he was far ahead of his time. He realised
that the civilisation and people of ancient Egypt could only be understood by
combining archaeological finds and inscriptions.
Wilkinson had no interest in acquiring artefacts. He was a copyist of
inscriptions, monuments and tombs – a true student of the past. Though done
freehand, his work was remarkably accurate by modern standards –
especially his drawings of hieroglyphs, which were better than those of
Napoléon’s experts.
For the next twelve years, Wilkinson travelled widely throughout the Nile
Valley and into the desert. Sometimes he was alone or just with his friend
James Burton. At other times a small number of like-minded archaeologists
and artists would join him. To ensure their safety in this remote land, they
adopted Turkish ways and passed themselves off as Muslims, even to their
servants.
Wilkinson worked at first without any knowledge of the glyphs. But in
1823, Gell sent him a copy of Champollion’s summary. This made him
realise just how much progress the young Frenchman had made. But as he
got better at comparing Coptic and ancient Egyptian words, Wilkinson came
to realise that Champollion was careless. He had made ‘terrible mistakes’
with inscriptions that he deciphered.
Wilkinson never met Champollion, but he disliked the way the
Frenchman sought fame while tolerating no criticism of his work. He was
secretive, quarrelled violently with other scholars and made false claims
about his research. Wilkinson, by contrast, preferred to stay in the
background, quietly sketching, recording and working on the dating of
temples and tombs.
Once he had acquired a working knowledge of hieroglyphs, the ever-
curious Wilkinson moved on to other research. From 1827, he spent most of
his time on the west bank of the Nile, at Luxor. There he occupied the tomb
of a high official named ‘Amechu (fifteenth century BC), living in
considerable style and enjoying magnificent views across the Nile Valley. He
put down carpets, erected partitions to create rooms and installed his personal
library. He would entertain his friends, burning wooden mummy cases in the
hearth to keep warm, as everyone did – not the done thing today!
Wilkinson was not a morning person – he would breakfast at half past
ten. But he accomplished an astonishing amount, including creating the first
maps of the west bank cemeteries. He numbered the tombs in the Valley of
the Kings, and his system is still used today. He concentrated on the tombs of
nobles, realising that they provided rich insights into Egyptian life. The
monuments offered a chance to travel back in time and to live, as it were,
among the people – as though you were a spectator watching the events
unfolding on the walls.
 I love exploring Egyptian tomb paintings, even if they are often very
faded today. You can witness life on the nobles’ estates – labourers gathering
in the harvest under the watchful eye of a scribe, cattle being butchered, and
brightly clothed guests gathering for a feast. There is even a charming
painting of a nobleman fishing, accompanied by his cats.
Wilkinson was one of a small group of scholars who placed Egyptology
on a firm footing during the 1820s and 1830s. They were serious researchers
with a passion for their work and for the knowledge that came from it. They
worked both together and independently. Wilkinson himself left Egypt in
1833 with an idea for a book about the lives of the ancient Egyptians.
Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians appeared in 1837 and sold
well, its reasonable price bringing it within reach of the middle class.
The book took readers on a journey in time through ancient Egypt,
providing a wealth of information. Its people were brought alive thanks to
details acquired from paintings, papyri and inscriptions. Wilkinson had the
rare gift of being able to communicate important, original research to a wide
audience. He became a household name and was knighted by Queen Victoria.
Champollion and Wilkinson were a new breed of scholar. They painted a
vivid portrait of a colourful, vigorous civilisation. And both realised that
archaeology alone could not reconstruct ancient civilisations. Any serious
research depended on teamwork between excavators and the people who
worked on inscriptions and written records.
Wilkinson’s brilliant popular account of the Egyptians placed the serious
study of the world’s earliest civilisations centre stage. Wholesale destruction
along the Nile slowly gave way to more disciplined research.
Six decades were to pass before new copyists came to the Nile. But
thanks to Champollion and Wilkinson, they were professionals.
 CHAPTER 4

Digging into Nineveh

B abylon and Nineveh: these great biblical cities were the stuff of romance.
The Old Testament told of King Nebuchadnezzar (who reigned from about
604 to 562 BC), the greatest king of ancient Babylon (in today’s southern
Iraq). He was a ruthless conqueror, famous for holding Jews captive in his
capital. The proceeds from his mighty empire created a magnificent capital.
According to later Greek accounts, thousands of slaves erected city walls so
thick that chariots could race along the top.
Nebuchadnezzar allegedly created fabulous hanging gardens for his
terraced palace which became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World. Whether they ever existed is an open question. His capital vanished
when Assyrian civilisation collapsed. The few European travellers who
reached Babylon found themselves in an arid wilderness of dusty mounds.
Centuries passed before German archaeologists could reconstruct parts of it
(see Chapter 20).
 Nineveh lay far upstream in what is now northern Iraq. In 612 BC, it was a
major Assyrian city, mentioned in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.
According to the prophet Isaiah, God doomed the arrogant Ninevites. He
made Nineveh ‘a desolation, and dry like a wilderness’. No buildings or
temples remained to be seen above the ground. Later European visitors
remarked that God’s wrath had indeed destroyed the Assyrians.
Babylon and Nineveh passed into the historical shadows, known only
from the Bible. There they remained until amazing archaeological finds
confirmed biblical history. In 1841, a group of influential scholars in the
French Asiatic Society seized on Nineveh as another opportunity for dramatic
excavations that would reflect well on France. In 1842, the government
appointed Paul-Émile Botta (1802–70) as its consul (representative) in
Mosul. Botta had been a diplomat in Egypt, and it was his fluent Arabic that
led to this new appointment. His unofficial task was to excavate Nineveh,
even though he had no relevant experience.
Botta’s unsophisticated diggings were largely fruitless, since he was
penetrating only the sterile upper layers of Nineveh’s Kuyunjik mound (that
is, layers with no bones or tools). City mounds like Nineveh’s were formed
gradually, layer by layer – the earliest, often most important, levels were at
the bottom. But Botta knew nothing of such sites. He dug around near the
surface and found some inscribed bricks and alabaster fragments, but nothing
spectacular.
Then, after months of labour, his luck changed. A villager from
Khorsabad, some 22 kilometres north of Kuyunjik, showed Botta some
inscribed bricks. He told stories of numerous finds around his house, in an
ancient mound. The consul sent two men to investigate. A week later, one of
them returned in great excitement. A little digging had revealed walls carved
with images of exotic animals.
Botta rode to Khorsabad at once. He was astounded by the elaborate
carvings exposed in the walls of the small pit that had been dug. Unfamiliar
bearded men wearing long gowns walked alongside winged animals and
other beasts. Botta quickly moved his workers to Khorsabad. Within a few
days, the excavators uncovered a series of sculpted limestone slabs from the
palace of an ancient and unknown king.
Botta wrote to Paris in triumph, claiming to have revealed a biblical truth.
‘Nineveh is rediscovered,’ he proudly reported. The French government gave
a grant of 3,000 francs for further excavations. Botta employed more than
300 workers, knowing that he had to dig on a large scale to make important
finds. He started a tradition of enormous excavations in Mesopotamia (from
the Greek, meaning ‘the land between the rivers’) that continued well into the
twentieth century.
Wisely, the French also sent out Eugène Napoléon Flandin, an
experienced archaeological artist from Paris. The two men laboured on the
mounds until late October 1844. They unearthed the outline of an enclosed
palace compound that covered over 2.5 square kilometres. The workmen
merely followed the walls of the palace wherever they could. They uncovered
scenes of a king at war, besieging cities, hunting game and engaging in
elaborate religious ceremonies. Human-headed lions and bulls guarded the
palace gates. Never had an excavation yielded such treasures.
Flandin arrived in Paris in November 1844 with drawings that filled
French scholars with joy. This was an entirely new art tradition, quite unlike
that of Greece, the Nile or Rome. Botta also returned to Paris. He completed
a report on the excavations, accompanied by four volumes of Flandin’s
drawings, and this caused a sensation. Botta claimed, wrongly, that he had
rediscovered Nineveh at Khorsabad. You can’t blame him. Like Belzoni in
Egypt, he was unable to read the palace inscriptions. We now know that he
had excavated Dur-Sharrukin, the palace of Assyrian King Sargon II (722–
705 BC), an aggressive, successful conqueror. Years were to pass before so-
called ‘cuneiform’ (from the Latin for ‘wedge’, because of its shape)
inscriptions identified his capital (see Chapter 5). In that time, Botta retreated
from view, being assigned to an obscure post in Lebanon, and never returning
to archaeology.
But just as Botta was starting work at Nineveh in 1842, a young
Englishman by the name of Austen Henry Layard (1817–94) was becoming
fascinated by archaeology in Mesopotamia. He had spent two weeks at
Nineveh in 1840, studying the site. Blessed with insatiable curiosity and
outstanding powers of observation, he became determined to excavate
ancient city mounds. Archaeology became his passion.
Like many great archaeologists, Layard was always restless. He went off
to spend a year among the Bakhtiari nomads in the mountains of Persia (now
Iran), becoming a trusted adviser to the tribe. He knew so much about local
politics that the British envoy in Baghdad sent him to Constantinople to
advise the ambassador there. At this point, in 1842, he spent three days in
Mosul with Botta, who encouraged him to dig. Layard, however, was
penniless.
He spent three years as an unofficial intelligence officer in
Constantinople. Then the British ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning,
reluctantly allowed him two months to excavate at Nimrud, a series of
mounds downstream from Mosul. Layard gambled that he would get to the
heart of the city from the bottom, and so he tunnelled into the mounds.
Almost immediately, the workers uncovered a large chamber lined with
cuneiform-inscribed slabs. We now know that this was the North Palace of
Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal (883–859 BC). That same day, Layard moved
men to the south and unearthed the Southwest Palace, built by King
Esarhaddon (681–669 BC). Layard remains the only archaeologist ever to
have found two palaces within twenty-four hours.
His excavations simply followed the decorated walls of the palace rooms.
Layard found stockpiled carvings from an earlier palace, including scenes of
a battle and of a siege. These finds soon overshadowed those at Khorsabad.
Layard worked with one objective in mind: to discover breath-taking
artworks and artefacts that could be shipped to London. He knew that exotic
finds sent to the British Museum would place him firmly in the public eye.
By no stretch of the imagination could his work be described as careful
recording.
Layard and his Assyrian assistant Hormuzd Rassam set up camp atop the
Nimrud mound, which gave them a superb view of the surrounding plains.
Layard was constantly on his guard against sudden raids from neighbouring
tribesmen in search of treasure. He lavished the local chiefs with gifts to buy
their loyalty, but did not hesitate to use violence if needed. Eventually, he
became a kind of chief himself, settling disputes and arranging marriages.
Extraordinary discoveries followed, including three winged-bull
sculptures which guarded the palace. Layard threw a three-day party for his
workers to celebrate these finds. In the North Palace, his men unearthed a
magnificent carved pillar depicting a king receiving tribute. It recorded the
military triumphs of King Shalmaneser III (859–824 BC), who fought
constantly with neighbouring states, including the Hittites (see Chapter 20).
Layard built a large wagon and hauled the heavy finds to the Tigris. The
artefacts were floated downstream to Basra on rafts supported by inflated
goatskins, identical to those shown on Assyrian reliefs. Next, Layard dug into
the Kuyunjik mound at Nineveh, where tunnels soon exposed nine chambers
adorned with bas reliefs (sculptures where the figures barely stand out from
the surface).
The first load of Nimrud sculptures reached the British Museum on 22
June 1847, and when Layard arrived in England he found himself the hero of
the hour. In 1849, he published Nineveh and Its Remains – ‘a slight sketch’ of
his work that became a bestseller.
Excavations at Kuyunjik resumed in 1849. Layard dug a labyrinth of
tunnels which followed decorated palace walls, and ignored the precious
room contents. Again, he spent days underground sketching the carvings as
they appeared, by the light of ventilation shafts and candles. Dimly lit tunnels
led to great lion figures that guarded palace gates. The limestone slabs of the
entrances still bore the ruts of Assyrian chariot wheels. Layard’s workers
exposed the entire southeast façade of the palace of King Sennacherib (705–
681 BC), who campaigned in Mesopotamia, Syria, Israel and Judea.
The palace inscriptions offered a chronicle of conquests, sieges and royal
achievements. Lifelike monarchs and gods appeared in relief, as if they were
stepping forward to question the intruding visitors. Many Kuyunjik reliefs are
now on display in the British Museum, and I always make a point of visiting
them. The carving is stunning. A set of reliefs shows nearly 300 labourers
dragging a great human-headed bull from a river raft to the palace. A man
seated astride the bull directs the work. Meanwhile, the king supervises from
his chariot, shaded by a parasol.
Layard’s most sensational discovery came when he uncovered the siege
and capture of an unknown city – unknown, that is, until the accompanying
cuneiform inscriptions were deciphered in the 1850s (see Chapter 5). Reliefs
were his primary concern: small finds, unless valuable, were of little interest.
The excavations yielded the occasional clay tablet with a cuneiform
inscription, but many of these fell to dust, being unfired and fragile. Then
Layard struck gold, although it was some time before he realised it. Towards
the end of the dig, he shovelled hundreds of inscribed clay tablets into six
crates. These had formed part of the royal library and turned out to be one of
his most important discoveries. After the 1850 excavations, he shipped more
than a hundred crates down the River Tigris.
After an unsuccessful excavation attempt at Babylon and another early
southern city (which failed because his methods were too crude to handle the
unfired brick), Layard returned home.
The British Museum has many sketches in Layard’s hand – the only
record of the finds that he could not ship. He had the great archaeologist’s
instinct for the important rather than the trivial; and, like Giovanni Belzoni,
he had a nose for discovery that led him to royal palaces and spectacular
finds. But his methods were appallingly crude, and much was lost. Half a
century was to pass before German scholars turned archaeological excavation
in Greece and Mesopotamia into a scientific discipline (see Chapter 20).
Layard is hard to figure out. By any standards, he was a hurried, ruthless
excavator in search of exciting discoveries and treasure. He dug entire cities
with only one or two European assistants and hundreds of local workers.
Ultimately, all he cared about was fame and dazzling Assyrian finds for the
British Museum. He did excel, however, at dealing with local people, many
of whom became firm friends – unusual among the early archaeologists.
For all his eloquent writing and fluent descriptions, Austin Henry Layard
was ultimately an adventurer as much as an archaeologist. But he did bring
the biblical Assyrians into the spotlight and showed that much of the Old
Testament was based on historical events. The deciphering of cuneiform
script soon made his finds even more important (see Chapter 5). Exhausted
after his demanding excavations and fed up with the constant struggle to
obtain funds, Layard gave up archaeology at the age of thirty-six. Instead, he
changed gears and became a politician, then a diplomat – a job that drew on
his expertise at dealing with people from other cultures. Eventually, he was to
become the British ambassador in Constantinople, at the time one of the most
important diplomatic posts in Europe. Not bad for an adventurer
archaeologist.
 CHAPTER 5

Tablets and Tunnelling

E ven during the 1840s, archaeology was more than just digging for lost
civilisations. Layard made brilliant discoveries at Nimrud and Nineveh, but
he was working with one hand tied behind his back: he couldn’t read the
cuneiform inscriptions that accompanied the magnificent carvings on
Assyrian palace walls. Who were these powerful monarchs who went to war,
besieged cities and erected human-headed lions in front of their palace gates?
The young excavator was aware of the problem, but was no expert in ancient
languages. He needed someone who could read the wall inscriptions and tiny
writing on the clay tablets that came from his trenches. In his first book,
Nineveh and Its Remains, he had assumed that Nimrud was ancient Nineveh.
But that was sheer guesswork, and he was about to be proved wrong.
Investigation of the Kuyunjik mound and Nimrud was very much on his
mind – and on that of Henry Rawlinson, a British diplomat in Baghdad.
Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–95) was a brilliant horseman, a crack
shot and a skilled linguist. He joined the Indian Army at the age of seventeen
as an officer in the Bombay Grenadiers. Rawlinson worked hard to learn
Hindi, Persian and other languages.
In 1833, he joined a military mission based in the Kurdish town of
Kermanshah. He found time to ride out to the Great Rock of Behistun. King
Darius the Great of Persia (550–486 BC) had commissioned a huge carved
relief that covered 111 square metres of smoothed and polished Behistun rock
face. A huge Darius stands in triumph over Gaumata, a rival for his throne in
522 BC, 90 metres above the ground. Three inscriptions in Old Persian,
Elamite (a language once spoken in modern southeastern Iran) and
Babylonian announce his triumph.
Like others before him, Rawlinson realised that this virtually inaccessible
inscription on a limestone cliff was the Rosetta Stone of Mesopotamia. The
Old Persian script, which was alphabetical, had been deciphered in 1802. He
scaled the cliff and copied it. But the Babylonian and Elamite texts lay across
a deep chasm. Rawlinson threw together makeshift scaffolding and risked his
life perched high above the ground to make copies of the Elamite text.
Rawlinson’s military duties were demanding, leaving him little time for
the texts, and so his research slowed until he got his diplomatic job in
Baghdad in 1843. His new post allowed him to spend time on cuneiform and
on making further accurate Behistun copies. He got in touch with others
puzzling over cuneiform, notably Edward Hincks, a country priest in Ireland,
and Jules Oppert, a French-German linguist. The three of them were the
eventual architects of decipherment.
The breakthrough came in 1847, when Rawlinson made a third trip to
Behistun to copy the inaccessible Babylonian inscription. A young Kurd,
nimble as a mountain goat, hung ropes from pegs and clawed his way across
the face. Eventually the boy rigged up a simple cradle seat for himself. He
then pressed wet paper into the carved writing. The paper dried into moulds
that could be used to duplicate the symbols. With the entire inscription,
Rawlinson could now use the Persian translation to decipher the Babylonian
text.
Rawlinson’s research now extended to the inscriptions found by Layard
at Kuyunjik and Nineveh. As he pored over the reliefs on the walls of King
Sennacherib’s palace at Kuyunjik, he identified the siege and capture of a
city. A huge Assyrian army is encamped before the city walls. Soldiers fight
their way through the fortifications. Despite ferocious resistance, the city
falls. King Sennacherib sits in judgment on the defeated citizens, who
become slaves. Rawlinson could read the accompanying inscription:
‘Sennacherib, the mighty king, King of Assyria, sat on the throne while the
booty of Lachish passed before him.’ This was sensational – the siege of
Lachish in 700 BC is described in the Bible’s Second Book of Kings.
Londoners flocked to view the carvings when they arrived in the British
Museum. They are still on display there, and are well worth a visit. All these
discoveries raised public interest in archaeology to fever pitch at a time when
biblical teaching was prominent in schools.
Rawlinson encouraged others to dig in southern Mesopotamia, including
J.E. Taylor, a diplomat at Basra in the south. Rawlinson sent him to explore
possible biblical cities, including some low mounds near the town of An
Nasiriyah, which were often flooded by the nearby Euphrates. Taylor found
an inscribed cylinder that enabled Rawlinson to identify the place, which was
known locally as Muqayyar, as the biblical city of Ur of the Chaldees,
associated in Genesis with Abraham (see Chapter 20). Compared with the
cities of the north, those in southern Mesopotamia yielded few spectacular
finds until excavation methods improved dramatically. The unbaked mud
brick was simply too fragile for the diggers to handle.
In 1852, the British Museum appointed Hormuzd Rassam (1826–1910) as
director of excavations under Rawlinson’s supervision. Rassam was himself
an Assyrian with local connections, and he had worked as Layard’s assistant
(see Chapter 4). He was ambitious, ruthless, sneaky and quarrelsome. He
desperately wanted to be recognised as a great archaeologist and assumed
that wonderful finds were the way to success. When he resumed work at
Kuyunjik, he dug into an area that had been assigned to the French, and so he
worked secretly at night. His tunnelling revealed a carving of an Assyrian
king hunting lions from his chariot. Ultimately the dig uncovered the whole
story of a carefully managed royal lion hunt, complete with cheering
spectators and a dying lioness. Like the Lachish siege, you can see the hunt
up close in the British Museum.
Unfortunately, Rassam’s excavations of the palace were so hasty and
slapdash that only some drawings of the building survive. These were made
by a skilled artist, William Boutcher. Rawlinson divided the carvings
between France and King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. The French
packed 235 crates for the Louvre in Paris. Their shipment and that bound for
Berlin were floated downstream on goatskin-supported rafts. South of
Baghdad, marauding tribesmen attacked and plundered the rafts, tipping the
crates into the Tigris and killing several of the crew. Only two crates of
French discoveries at Khorsabad, upstream of Nineveh, ever reached Paris.
Fortunately, the lion hunt was shipped separately and arrived safely in
London.
Henry Rawlinson left Baghdad in 1855. He became active in Indian
affairs and was a frequent visitor to the British Museum. The museum had
already decided not to sponsor any more Assyrian excavations. So much
sculpture had been found that there were almost too many Assyrian kings in
London. Public interest faded during the years of the Crimean War (1853–56)
between Britain, France and Russia. Only a few scholars maintained an
interest in the hundreds of tablets shipped from Mesopotamia by Layard,
Rassam and others, or in the collections purchased by dealers from illegal
excavations.
When Rassam cleared the floor of the Kuyunjik lion chamber, he also
found a huge cache of clay tablets. Considering them unimportant, he stacked
them hastily in packing cases. How wrong could he have been? Three years
previously, Layard had recovered part of King Ashurbanipal’s royal library in
two small rooms (see Chapter 4). Now Rassam had found the rest, which had
landed on the floor of the great hall when the ceiling collapsed. The king’s
archive contained records of wars as well as administrative and religious
documents. One tablet records how he ordered his officials to collect tablets
throughout his kingdom. Over a century and a half later, the 180,000 tablets
in Ashurbanipal’s library are still being deciphered. They have yielded
enough information to allow an entire dictionary of Ancient Assyrian to be
compiled.
The focus of Assyrian research passed from the field to the museum and
library. A small band of cuneiform scholars sifted through the tablets from
King Ashurbanipal’s library. They worked in a cramped study room without
the aid of dictionaries or grammars. One was George Smith (1840–76), a
quiet, shy engraver’s apprentice who was passionately interested in
cuneiform, having read Rawlinson’s work at an early age.
By 1872, Smith had already sorted many tablets into categories, one of
which was ‘myths’. He came across half a tablet and found a reference to a
ship on a mountain, and mention of a dove being sent out to find a resting
place and being forced to return. Smith realised at once that he had part of the
flood story contained in Genesis. The tale is familiar to everyone who has
read the Bible: Noah gathered the animals into an ark, survived the rising
waters, then sent out a dove and a raven to look for land. Noah and his ark
saved humanity from destruction. The normally calm Smith jumped up and
rushed around the room in a state of high excitement.
On 3 December 1872, George Smith addressed the Biblical
Archaeological Society, an organisation of the day concerned with
excavations to study the scriptures. The prime minister, William Gladstone,
attended the meeting. Smith’s lecture was a triumph. He translated key parts
of the narrative that bore a startling resemblance to the biblical story. Smith
suspected that they could be traced back to much earlier myths. The story
was part of a classic of early Mesopotamian literature, The Epic of
Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh, a king of the city of Uruk in about 2600 BC, long
before the Bible, undertakes epic journeys in search of immortality, but fails
to find it.
The flood tablets seemed to prove that the Bible was true. The Daily
Telegraph newspaper offered the British Museum 1,000 guineas for a new
excavation at Nineveh to find the missing gaps in the story, provided Smith
led the investigation. Amazingly, in just a week of excavating at Kuyunjik in
Layard’s dumps Smith found the crucial missing seventeen lines about the
beginning of the flood.
After only a month of digging, Smith set off home. Four months later, the
British Museum sent him back to try to find more of the royal library. Smith
recovered more than 3,000 tablets in three months, mainly by excavating the
contents of rooms where Layard had tunnelled around the walls. At times,
Smith had 600 men working on the excavations. In 1875, while returning
from a third trip, he died of a stomach infection – a great loss to the British
Museum.
The Kuyunjik excavations resumed under Hormuzd Rassam. His team
cleared the floors of palace rooms and recovered yet more tablets. One 1,300-
line inscription on a clay cylinder described Ashurbanipal’s conquests.
Rassam moved on to Babylon, but, like Layard, his methods were too
unsophisticated to find unbaked brick palace walls.
He hurried from site to site, ending up at Abu Habbah, formerly an
ancient city called Sippar, where he excavated around 170 rooms and
recovered as many as 70,000 tablets. One of them described how a
Babylonian king named Nabonidus became interested in archaeology and dug
into the cities of his predecessors. When Rassam departed for England,
dealers moved in and caused an unseemly scramble for cuneiform tablets that
pitted museum against museum across Europe. The damage was incalculable.
Layard, Rassam and Rawlinson were pioneers, working in remote lands
in conditions of tribal unrest. This was rough-and-tumble archaeology,
without any careful forward planning; but it was archaeology that validated
much of the history set down in the Old Testament and placed ancient cities
firmly within recorded history. In those days, when archaeology was in its
infancy, many archaeologists were as much opportunists as excavators. And
yet some of them were giants in their field. It is on their broad shoulders that
succeeding generations of professional archaeologists have stood.
 CHAPTER 6

The Maya Revealed

C opán, Honduras, 1840. Monkeys were on the move in the tree tops. The
crackling of the dry branches they broke shattered the silence of the forest
and disturbed the peace of the deserted city across the river. Forty or fifty of
the apes moved in procession, like the spirits of those unknown people who
had once dwelt in the mysterious ruins. Overgrown pyramids towered up
among the trees.
John Lloyd Stephens (1805–52), an American traveller and lawyer, and
Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), a talented English artist, were transfixed
by their first glimpse of ancient Maya architecture. They pushed their way
through the undergrowth and stumbled across some elaborately carved
upright stones. They had never seen architecture or art like this before.
Both men were experienced adventurers. Stephens had been born in New
Jersey. He entered Columbia University at the age of thirteen and graduated
top of his class in 1822. His training was in law, but he preferred politics and
travel.
Stephens cut his teeth on a trip out west as far as Pittsburgh and beyond.
In 1834, he set off on a two-year expedition that took him across Europe as
far as Poland and Russia. Then he explored the Nile Valley and Jerusalem.
He also went to Petra, at the time a remote and dangerous place. The great
camel-caravan city with its rock-cut temples electrified him. Petra gave
Stephens a passion for ancient civilisations almost overnight.
A gifted storyteller, he started writing to his family about his travels.
Some of his letters appeared in New York newspapers and were widely
enjoyed. He wrote two books about his adventures, both called Incidents of
Travel. One was about Egypt and the Holy Land, and the other was an
account of Poland, Turkey and Russia. Stephens had a direct, entertaining
writing style, and he was a perceptive observer of people and places. Both
books became bestsellers and established him as a first-rate travel writer.
Through his fellow authors he met the artist Frederick Catherwood.
London-born Catherwood had superb artistic talent, which came to the fore
when he visited Italy in 1821. Like Stephens, he was a restless wanderer.
Between 1822 and 1835, Catherwood travelled widely in the Middle East. In
Egypt, he worked with traveller Robert Hay, who visited and studied
numerous sites. He also visited Jerusalem, where he drew the virtually
inaccessible decorated roof of the eleventh-century Islamic Dome of the Rock
shrine. To do so, Catherwood used a camera lucida – basically a mirror that
reflected the image of the roof onto his drawing board.
Back in London, Catherwood created an enormous panoramic scene of
Jerusalem, which proved hugely popular. Stephens and Catherwood met for
the first time at the exhibit in 1836. Later that year, Catherwood brought it to
New York and set up business as an architect. By then, the two men had
become friends, sharing an enthusiasm for adventure and ancient
civilisations. An unsmiling man, Catherwood had an entirely different
personality from Stephens.
Constantly searching for new opportunities, the artist drew his friend’s
attention to two little-known publications that described mysterious ruins in
the forests of Central America. They agreed that they would look for them
one day. Fortunately, both Catherwood’s architecture and the exhibit made
good money, as did Stephens’ books, and so they were able to travel. To
smooth their passage, Stephens managed to land a job as an American
diplomat in Central America. On 3 October 1839, the two friends left New
York for a small, isolated coastal town named Belize, now in the country of
the same name. From there, they would travel inland to ruins at a place called
Copán.
The overland journey through the forested Yucatán Peninsula was tough.
The political situation was chaotic. Their mules sank into the mud on the
narrow trail. Eventually they reached the village of Copán, with its half-
dozen rundown huts. The next day, a guide led them through fields and dense
forest to a river bank. On the opposite side, they spotted a wall of the Maya
city.
Stephens and Catherwood arrived not knowing what to expect. They
crossed the river on horseback and found themselves in a complex of terraces
and pyramids. Unexpectedly they came across a square stone column
sculpted in high relief with the figure of a man and elaborate hieroglyphs. It
was instantly clear to them that the architecture and art styles at Copán were
different from anything in the Mediterranean world. The builders had erected
pyramids (now overgrown), separated by courts and plazas. Elaborate
hieroglyphs carved into stucco (fine plaster) covered the buildings, and there
was a series of richly decorated, individual columns (known technically as
‘stelae’). Copán’s stelae – which depicted portraits of rulers – lined
processional ways in the central plaza. They were also to be found near a
large royal complex of overlapping, stepped pyramids, plazas and palaces
that formed the main core of the city. The tallest pyramid, now known as
Temple 16, once stood more than 30 metres high.
Stephens was moved to eloquence about the brooding forest and the
plazas, as perfect as any Roman amphitheatre. ‘The city was desolate,’ he
wrote. ‘All was mystery, dark impenetrable mystery.’ Who had built these
amazing monuments, he wondered? The hieroglyphs were quite unlike those
of the Egyptians, and the local Indians had no idea who had constructed
Copán. Stephens compared it to a shipwreck: ‘It lay before us like a shattered
bark.’ With a compass and a tape measure, they mapped the ancient city by
cutting straight lines through the forest. This was the first plan of any Maya
site. Unlike Layard in Mesopotamia, they did no digging, but instead relied
on measurements and careful observations to tell Copán’s story.
Catherwood settled down to draw the elaborately decorated stelae and
reliefs – a complex task that tested his artistic ability. Meanwhile, Stephens
pondered who had built Copán. He realised at once that it was not the work
of ancient Egyptians, or of some other civilisation that had sailed across the
Atlantic many centuries earlier. This was an exotic, unique city. If they could
transport even a small portion of the ruins to New York, it would make a
wonderful exhibit. After much bargaining, Stephens bought Copán from the
local owner for $50. Fortunately for future archaeologists, the river would not
support barges, and so he could not actually move anything.
Stephens spent only thirteen days at Copán, but Catherwood stayed much
longer. He worked in heavy rain, with mud up to his ankles, plagued by
mosquitoes. The reliefs were hard to see except in strong light. His task was
enormous, for Copán extended over nearly 3 kilometres and had three main
courts, pyramids and temples.
Eventually, Stephens and Catherwood met up in Guatemala City.
Stephens now abandoned any thoughts of a diplomatic career. The two men
decided to check out reports of another overgrown city known as Palenque in
southern Mexico, said to be as spectacular as Copán. The journey took them
through very rough terrain. By this time, they had switched to broad-brimmed
hats and loose-fitting clothing for comfort, just like the locals.
The final stages of the journey were appalling, despite the assistance of
forty native porters. They often had to cut their way through dense
undergrowth. But finally, Palenque loomed out of the forest. This centre was
much smaller than Copán. It had been ruled by Pacal the Great from AD 615
to 683, and his funeral monument was the magnificent Temple of the
Inscriptions. He was buried under the temple pyramid, which was finally
excavated in 1952.
Stephens and Catherwood set up camp in Pacal’s palace complex. It was
so wet that candles were useless, and Stephens amused himself by reading a
newspaper by the light of fireflies. Besieged by mosquitoes and heavy rain,
the two men stumbled through buildings that were practically invisible
because of the clinging vegetation. While Catherwood sketched, Stephens
built crude ladders and cleared the walls of the palace for the artist. The
thick-walled and elaborately decorated structure enclosed several courtyards
and measured 91 metres in length. The men made a rough plan in a few
weeks, but the humidity and swarms of insects drove them away.
Aware of the money-making and scientific potential of Palenque,
Stephens attempted to buy the ruins for $1,500 – far more than the $50 for
the much remoter Copán. But when he discovered that he would have to
marry a local woman to seal the deal, he backed off hastily. The two men fled
in search of another Maya centre, Uxmal. Unfortunately, Catherwood fell
seriously ill with fever and only managed a single day at that magnificent
site.
In July 1840, the two men returned to New York, where Stephens started
work on Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, which
became a bestseller a year later. The book showcased Stephens at his best,
being written in an easy narrative style. It was, of course, a travel book, but
Stephens approached the three great sites from the perspective of someone
who was thoroughly familiar with the local Indians. He recognised that the
people who had built Copán, Palenque and Uxmal shared a common culture.
Their art rivalled the finest works of the Mediterranean civilisations and was
of local origin. Stephens ended the book with a clear statement based on his
observations and conversations with the local people: the ruins he had seen
had been built by the ancestors of the local Maya.
Stephens was not alone in writing about the Maya. His book appeared
two years before the Boston historian William H. Prescott published his
classic Conquest of Mexico in 1843. Prescott drew on Stephens’ work,
ensuring that it was widely read by fellow scholars. Meanwhile, only fifteen
months after their return to New York, Catherwood and Stephens went back
to Central America, determined to spend more time at Uxmal.
From November 1841 to January 1842, they stayed at the ruins, mapping,
surveying and drawing perhaps the most magnificent of all Maya centres.
Uxmal is famous for its temple pyramids and long palace buildings. It
controlled a local state from AD 850 to 925. Once again, the men did not
excavate, but concentrated on getting a sense of the site and of its main
building, the so-called Nunnery. Catherwood tried to make as accurate a
record as possible so that he could create a replica back in New York.
Despite attacks of fever, Stephens managed to visit other sites in the
vicinity, such as Kabah. He recovered a few wooden door beams inscribed
with hieroglyphs, which he eventually took to New York. Travelling light,
they rode across the Yucatán. They spent eighteen days at Chichén Itzá,
already famous for its great stepped pyramid, the Castillo, and its huge ball
court. They also met some local scholars who shared valuable historical
information with them.
Catherwood and Stephens visited Cozumel and Tulum, places noted by
the first Spanish explorers, where there was little to see except clouds of
mosquitoes. With that, the two travellers returned to New York in June 1842.
Another bestseller, Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, duly appeared
nine months later. In the final chapters of the book, he reaffirmed that the
Maya ruins were the work of local people, who prospered until the Spanish
Conquest. All subsequent research on Maya civilisation is based on his
forthright conclusion.
This was the end of the two men’s archaeological adventures. Both
returned to Central America to contribute to railroad projects. When malaria
caught up with them, they left. Stephens died in New York in 1852,
weakened by years of tropical fever. Catherwood perished in a collision at
sea off Newfoundland two years later.
Forty years were to pass before any scientific work was done at the sites
they had recorded in words and sketches. Like Austen Henry Layard, John
Lloyd Stephens was content to describe and record, leaving excavation to his
successors. Apart from the difficulties of travel, he had no funds for digging.
And in any case, he was writing a travel book.
Ancient Maya civilisation was swallowed up by the forest after the
Spaniards arrived in the fifteenth century. However, the modern descendants
of those who built Palenque and the other great centres still maintained many
elements of the old Maya culture, including ancient ritual traditions. With
their drawings and publications, Catherwood and Stephens ensured that Maya
civilisation never again vanished into historical oblivion.
 CHAPTER 7

Axes and Elephants

A ccording to the Book of Genesis, ‘In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth.’ He completed that task in six days. Then he formed a
man – ‘a living being’. God placed the first human in the Garden of Eden.
Four rivers flowed from Eden, two of them being the Euphrates and the
Tigris in Mesopotamia, ‘the land between the rivers’.
So how old is humanity? How long has the earth been in existence?
Two centuries ago, Christian teaching considered the creation story in the
Old Testament to be an actual historical event, calculated from the scriptures
to have occurred in 4004 BC. To suggest otherwise was to challenge Christian
belief, a serious offence.
But there was a major problem with this: could all human history have
unfolded in a mere 6,000 years?
 The question of human origins had surfaced in scholars’ minds as early as
the sixteenth century. Antiquarians throughout Europe puzzled over the
collections of stone tools discovered in ploughed fields. Many called them
natural objects formed by thunderbolts. Then John Frere came along and
everything changed.
John Frere (1740–1807) was an English country landowner and a
graduate of Cambridge University, where he had studied mathematics with
some success. He became the high sheriff of Suffolk and a member of
parliament from 1799 to 1802, but his major interests in later life were
geology (the study of rocks and the earth) and archaeology. His political and
social connections were excellent, and he was elected a fellow (member) of
the Royal Society and of the Society of Antiquaries of London, both major
learned societies of the day. By all accounts he was a charming man, blessed
with a deep curiosity about the countryside around his home at Roydon Hall
in Norfolk, eastern England.
In 1797, some brick workers uncovered stone axes and the bones of large
animals in a clay-mining pit at Hoxne, a small village some 8 kilometres
from Frere’s home. He rode over and dug carefully into the walls of the brick
pit, recovering more axes and the bones of long-extinct elephants (now, of
course, tropical animals) sealed between sterile layers.
Frere realised that this was something extraordinary. He did what most
antiquarians did at the time: he wrote a short letter to the Society of
Antiquaries of London, knowing that most people interested in the past were
members. As was the custom, on 22 June 1797 his brief report was read
aloud to the membership and was published three years later. A trivial event,
one might think; but what Frere wrote was truly memorable. He described his
finds as ‘weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the
use of metals’. So far, there was nothing particularly astonishing as many of
his fellow members believed that the ancient Britons had no metal. But what
he wrote next was really remarkable: ‘The situation in which these weapons
were found may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even
beyond that of the present world.’
Frere’s words were fundamentally at odds with religious teachings and
must have struck the Society of Antiquaries like a thunderclap. The members
were cautious, respectable folk, and numbered among them many priests.
And so they quietly published Frere’s letter . . . and set it aside. John Frere’s
discovery was ignored for sixty years.
Even before the Hoxne finds, there had been a few discoveries of
elephant bones alongside stone tools fashioned by humans in Europe. This
was surprising, for there were no elephants there in the nineteenth century.
As more elephant remains and stone tools came to light, it gradually became
obvious that humans had lived in Europe long before anyone had used
metals, and had dwelt alongside long-extinct animals. Apparently, they had
even hunted them. Did they do this before the biblical creation of 6,000 years
ago?
Those six millennia of human existence were becoming more crowded.
For instance, how could one explain the mysterious stone circles of Avebury
and Stonehenge? These were already ancient when the Roman general Julius
Caesar invaded Britain just over 2,000 years ago. People started pondering a
hitherto unthinkable question: had the world existed before divine creation?
Christian teaching considered such a thought both irresponsible and criminal.
We tend to think of archaeology as just the study of ancient human
societies, but such a narrow viewpoint is wrong. You can’t rely on
archaeological excavations and artefacts alone to reconstruct the past.
Archaeology developed alongside other disciplines, such as biology and
geology. And they all came together when scientists started to confront such
tough issues as human beginnings. There was no way of understanding our
origins without studying both fossil animals and the geology of the earth. To
show that humans had flourished long before 4004 BC required proof that
they had lived alongside the long-extinct animals found in the layered rocks
of the earth.
Geology and religion came into sharp conflict. Christian teachings of the
day proclaimed that God had created earth’s geological layers in a series of
divine acts. There were several creations, separated by catastrophes. Some of
these events led to the extinction of animals – the last of them being Noah’s
flood. As far as the Bible was concerned, humans and extinct animals had
nothing to do with one another. Yet with increasing frequency, archaeology
was turning up evidence of their coexistence in obviously very ancient
geological levels.
John Frere unearthed his stone axes and elephant bones at Hoxne during a
time of major change across Britain. Cities were booming. Canals and other
large-scale construction activities exposed many feet of geological layers in
all kinds of places. While the Society of Antiquaries forgot Frere’s work, a
humble canal expert named William Smith (1769–1839) revolutionised
geology with his field observations while designing the routes of waterways
across the countryside. Smith mapped rock formations over long distances.
And he identified long sequences of them, clearly formed over lengthy
periods of time. His enthusiasm for geological formations was infectious, and
he soon became known as ‘Strata Smith’ (‘strata’ being the geological term
for layers or levels).
This remarkable geologist was also a keen fossil collector. His vast
experience of geological layers helped him realise that many layers of the
earth contained distinctive fossils, and that changes in fossils represented
changes in time. This was an entirely different way of looking at the world.
There were no snapshots of sudden catastrophes or dramatic divine acts. It
became increasingly hard to assume that God had all of a sudden created
these complex strata. Surely they had been formed by such natural processes
as rainfall, flooding, blowing sand or earthquakes . . .?
A new scientific doctrine emerged, that of ‘uniformitarianism’. In other
words, the same slow-moving geological factors that had formed the earth in
the past were still in operation. The earth as we know it had developed from a
continuous process of constant change that extended far back into a remote
past.
A celebrated British geologist, Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), took over
where Smith left off. He studied geological sequences all over Europe and
wrote one of the classics of nineteenth-century science. His Principles of
Geology was an attempt to explain changes in the earth that resulted from
natural processes that were still in progress. This, of course, made it possible
to argue that humans had originated over a far longer span of time than 6,000
years. But the Church was still all-powerful, and Lyell was careful not to
discuss the thorny issue of human origins in his book.
Like so many great scientific advances, Lyell’s brilliant study influenced
field researchers in other disciplines. Among them was the young biologist
Charles Darwin, who read Principles of Geology while on a five-year
scientific voyage around the world on HMS Beagle in 1831–36. Darwin
observed geological layers in South America that had clearly been formed
over long periods of time. He also recovered fossils and observed modern
animal species, especially birds, that had changed gradually over time. These
observations were to lead him to his revolutionary theory of evolution and
natural selection.
Interest in extinct animals intensified, especially when their bones
emerged from buried layers in caves. Cave excavations became a fashionable
way of finding long-extinct animals. In Belgium and France, stone tools
started showing up in the same cave layers as the bones of extinct animals. In
Britain, a Catholic priest, Father John MacEnery (1797–1841), excavated
Kents Cavern, a large cave near Torquay in southwestern England, in 1825
and 1826. There he found stone artefacts and extinct rhinoceros bones sealed
in the same level, under a layer of stalagmite (a limestone deposit formed on
cave floors by drips from the ceiling). MacEnery may have been a priest, but
he became convinced that people and (now extinct) animals had lived
alongside one another longer ago than 6,000 years. Prominent churchmen
disagreed, and some even claimed that later people had dug pits into the older
levels and left their tools alongside fossil animal bones.
Nevertheless, thanks to the Kents Cavern finds, the leaders of the
scientific establishment started to take notice of the human artefacts and
extinct animals that were now routinely being found together. They were
particularly interested in the discoveries of Jacques Boucher de Perthes
(1788–1868), a minor customs official, at Abbeville in northern France’s
Somme Valley. Boucher de Perthes visited the gravel pits around the town
almost daily. He unearthed finely made stone axes in the same levels as the
bones of extinct elephants and other bygone beasts. He became obsessed with
his tools and said they were the work of people who had lived before the
biblical flood.
Unfortunately, Boucher de Perthes was given to delivering long, dull
lectures about his finds. And in 1841, he wrote a book, De la Creation, a
five-volume discourse on human origins that caused scientists to label him a
crank. By 1847, when he published the first volume of another long-winded
essay, Boucher de Perthes was convinced that his Somme axes were very
ancient indeed. His persistence paid off. A few French experts visited the pits
and concluded that he was right. Their influential opinions reached both Paris
and London. Had Boucher de Perthes not been such a bore, his discoveries
might have been recognised for what they were much sooner.
In 1846, the Torquay Natural History Society set up a committee to
explore Kents Cavern anew. They employed a schoolmaster and talented
geologist, William Pengelly, to lead new excavations. His discoveries
confirmed Father MacEnery’s conclusions. Another cave came to light
during quarrying above the town of Brixham, across the bay from Torquay,
in 1858. A distinguished committee of the Royal Society observed Pengelly’s
investigations there. Beneath a thick layer of stalagmite on the cave floor, he
unearthed numerous bones from extinct animals. These included cave lions,
mammoths (a long-haired cold-loving elephant), ancient forms of rhinoceros
and reindeer, alongside human-made stone tools. The association between
human tools and extinct animals was now beyond doubt.
In 1859, just before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species,
two leading members of the scientific establishment paid a brief visit to the
Somme sites: geologist Joseph Prestwich and antiquarian John Evans, the
leading expert on stone tools. Evans himself dug a stone axe from the same
level as a bone from an extinct elephant. The two scientists returned to
London convinced that humans had lived on earth long before the biblical
creation. They published their findings in papers that were read to the Royal
Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, where John Frere’s brief
letter about Hoxne had been presented six decades earlier. Times had finally
changed, and the scientific evidence was beyond dispute. There was no
longer any doubt that humans had a very long history indeed.
The Brixham and Somme finds raised serious questions about human
ancestry. Obviously, humans had first appeared far earlier than 6,000 years
ago. But how much earlier? Charles Darwin’s famous theory of evolution and
the discovery of an exotic-looking human skull in Germany would set the
stage for the study of an open-ended human past.
 CHAPTER 8

A Huge Turning Point

T he bombshell exploded a few months after John Evans and Joseph

Prestwich returned from their visit to the Somme gravel pits with axes and
elephant bones. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species placed
archaeology at the centre of the debates on human origins. The archaeologists
and geologists had proved that human beings had lived on earth alongside
extinct animals. Now Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection
provided explanations for how animals and other living things had developed
over time.
Darwin’s new theory removed all possibility of a boundary between the
modern world and any previous world inhabited by extinct animals. No
terrible floods or great extinctions separated mid-nineteenth-century scientists
from the landscapes inhabited by earlier animals or humans. There could no
longer be any doubt that now-extinct animals and people had lived on earth at
the same time.
 The year 1859 was a huge turning point in archaeology – and in science
generally. New questions confronted archaeologists and biologists alike.
Were there earlier forms of humans on earth before ourselves? If so, how
long ago did they flourish? And how could you account for the great
differences between living human societies and their ancestors? The Darwin
bombshell sent archaeologists on a search for answers to these questions –
and for early humans and their tools.
Charles Darwin (1809–82) had become an enthusiastic biologist while
still an undergraduate at Cambridge University. His lengthy voyage around
the world aboard HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836 provided him with data on
numerous plants and animals. Soon he began keeping notebooks on changes
in animals over time. He observed geological layers in South America and
realised that Charles Lyell’s arguments about the theory of uniformitarianism
were correct. But the clincher came when Darwin read the scholar Thomas
Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798. Malthus
argued that animal populations, including humans, expanded to the limits of
their food supplies. Darwin took the argument a stage further and wrote that
human progress was a product of nature, and the mechanism was the gradual
process of natural selection.
Natural selection causes changes in the properties of organisms from
generation to generation. Animals display individual variation in their
appearance and behaviour, such as body size, number of offspring and so on.
Some traits are inherited – they pass from parent to offspring. Others are
strongly influenced by environmental conditions and are less likely to be
passed on. Individuals who had traits well suited to competition for local
resources – what Darwin called ‘the struggle for existence’ – survived.
Natural selection preserved small, beneficial changes that members of
different species passed on to their offspring. The advantaged individuals
survived and multiplied as the inferior ones died out. Natural selection
applied to all animals, including humans.
Charles Darwin brought the mechanism of natural selection to the table.
But he did not take up the issue of human evolution, for he felt it would
prevent the book from getting a fair hearing. He merely remarked that his
theory would ‘throw light’ on the development of humans. Twelve years
passed before he published The Descent of Man, which explored the
relationship between natural selection and human evolution.
 Darwin also theorised that humans originated in tropical Africa, where
many apes flourished. Today, we know he was right. His brilliant research
provided a convincing reason for archaeological research into early humans.
Evolution made it certain that humans had descended from apes. Respectable
Victorian households were horrified. Mothers drew their children to their
skirts and whispered to one another that they hoped the rumours were untrue.
Satirical magazines mocked human ancestry among the apes with cartoons
showing Darwin with a chimp’s body, and a gorilla upset at Darwin’s claims
to be one of his decendants. Clergymen preached against evolution in their
sermons.
Fortunately, Darwin had powerful allies, among them Thomas Henry
Huxley (1825–95), one of the greatest biologists of the nineteenth century.
Huxley was a striking man with lion-like features, black hair and whiskers. A
brilliant public speaker, he made the case for evolution and natural selection
so forcefully that he became known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’. Gradually the
opposition to Darwin’s ideas faded, except among the most committed
Christians.
No one had any idea what an ancestral human would have looked like.
Three years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, quarrymen
working in the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf, Germany, had discovered a
thick-set skull and limb bones in a cave. The primitive-looking skull had a
massive, rugged brow and was bun-shaped – quite unlike the smooth,
rounded heads of modern people. The experts puzzled over the find. A well-
known biologist, Hermann Schaaffhausen, proclaimed that the remains were
those of an ancient and savage inhabitant of Europe. Schaaffhausen’s
colleague Rudolf Virchow, also a distinguished surgeon, dismissed the bones
as those of a deformed idiot.
But Darwin’s Bulldog had a different opinion. He realised that the
Neander skull was that of a primitive human who had lived before modern
humans, ourselves. He made a detailed study of the remains and compared
them bone by bone with a chimpanzee skeleton. The similarities between the
two were striking. Huxley wrote a classic of human evolution about his
findings. In Man’s Place in Nature, published in 1863, he declared that the
Neanderthal skull was from the most primitive human ever found and one
clearly related to our apelike ancestors. Here was the proof that humans were
descended from apes, as Darwin’s theory hinted. All modern studies of early
human fossils originated in this short but beautifully and clearly written book.
Huxley was heavily influenced by recent findings in geology and
archaeology, as well as by evolutionary theory.
More Neanderthal skeletons came to light in caves and rock shelters in
southwestern France during the 1860s and 1870s. With jutting jaws, heavy
brows and sloping foreheads, the compactly built Neanderthals looked
primitive, almost apelike. They became caricature cave people, armed by
cartoonists with heavy clubs. Many more fossil discoveries were needed to
establish even the basic details of human evolution.
Increasingly there was talk of a ‘missing link’ between apes and humans,
the link being the ultimate human ancestor. Many people believed Darwin
was correct that such a link would be uncovered in tropical Africa. Since that
was where the most forms of apes flourished, it was logical to assume that
humans originated there. Instead, the next important human fossil discoveries
after the Neanderthals were elsewhere.
Eugène Dubois (1858–1940) was a Dutch physician who became
obsessed with human origins. He believed that our ancestors came from
Southeast Asia, where many apes were also to be found. Dubois was so intent
on discovering them that he wangled a job as a government medical officer in
Java in 1887. For the next two years he patiently searched in the gravels of
the Solo River, near the small town of Trinil. There he unearthed the top of a
skull, an upper leg bone and the molar teeth of an apelike human. He named
it Pithecanthropus erectus, meaning ‘Ape-human who stands upright’, but it
was popularly known as ‘Java Man’. It was, he said, the missing link between
apes and humans. Today, it is known as Homo erectus.
The European scientific community scorned Dubois’s claims, partly
because all early human fossils had hitherto come from Europe. The
scientists laughed at him. They were mesmerised by the Neanderthals, who
‘looked’ primitive. Dubois was devastated, returned to Europe, and is said to
have hidden the fossils under his bed.
By the turn of the century, for most people the Neanderthals had become
the shambling, savage cave people depicted in newspaper cartoons. Instead,
scientists became obsessed with a remarkable ‘discovery’ made by a lawyer
and fossil hunter, Charles Dawson, in a gravel quarry at Piltdown in southern
England in 1912.
Dawson also claimed to have found the ‘missing link’ – but it was a
forgery. It had been fashioned from a medieval skull, a 500-year-old human
lower jaw and carefully filed fossil chimpanzee teeth, all the bones stained
with an iron solution to look ancient. It was almost certainly Dawson, hungry
for scientific recognition, who created this outrageous fake. Dawson knew
that scientists of the day believed that the development of a large brain came
before the consumption of a broad-based diet by modern humans. And so (it
is thought) he quietly created a fossil human with a large skull from an
anatomically modern person, and then added suitably modified chimpanzee
teeth to create the primitive ‘Piltdown Man’.
Astonishing though it may seem, no one questioned the find. But it
should be remembered that at the time there were not the analytical tools
required to verify its age. Chemical analysis of the bones finally exposed the
forgery in 1953. By that time, however, other fossil finds from both Africa
and China were casting doubt on Piltdown, which did not look anything like
them.
Dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus was more or less forgotten until the
1920s when a Chinese geological survey excavated a deep cave at
Zhoukoudian, southwest of Beijing. There a Swedish fieldworker and
Chinese scholar Pei Wenzhong unearthed human bones. The specimens
proved to be virtually identical to Dubois’s Trinil find. Soon the two forms of
Pithecanthropus were united under the single label of Homo erectus, ‘the
human who stood upright’.
Despite the discovery of the Neanderthals and Homo erectus, enormous
gaps remained in the story of the past. Many thousands of years separated the
stone axes from Hoxne and the Somme Valley from later human fossils and
much more recent archaeological sites such as Stonehenge. No one could
date either Dubois’s fossils or the Neander finds. All that filled the gap
between the Java fossils and the Neanderthals were museum drawers full of
undated stone tools. And they showed only that technology had become more
complex over time – nothing else.
One pressing question was who the earliest humans had been. Another
was how the widely differing human societies had lived together.
Theories of human social evolution appeared, notably in the works of a
social scientist called Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). He worked at a time of
rapid industrialisation and major technological change. Hardly surprisingly,
Spencer argued that human societies had developed from the simple to the
complex and the highly diverse. Such a theory allowed archaeologists to
imagine orderly progress from simple ancient societies to complex modern
ones.
But what had the ancient societies been like? Spencer was writing at a
time when knowledge of non-Western societies in Africa, the Americas, Asia
and the Pacific was becoming widely available. Using explorers’ descriptions
of hitherto unknown tribes, as well as the work of Catherwood, Stephens and
others, you could easily imagine a tree of progress. At the base were the
Neanderthals, as well as hunting peoples like the Australian and Tasmanian
aborigines. Higher up were the sophisticated civilisations of the Aztecs,
Maya and Cambodians. And at the top, of course, was Victorian civilisation.
People were trying to slot both human fossils and archaeological finds
into a framework that was easily understood and that made sense. Theories of
human progress brought a convenient framework to the little-known past
uncovered by archaeologists. But some people went further.
Another British social scientist, Sir Edward Tylor (1832–1917), thought
of human societies in three stages: savagery (hunting and foraging societies),
barbarism (simple farming societies) and civilisation. A simple, stepwise
perspective on the past appealed to Victorian audiences, who believed
strongly in technological progress as a mark of civilisation. And who can
blame them? At the time, almost nothing was known of archaeology outside
the narrow confines of Europe. These simple theories reflected the common
assumption that nineteenth-century civilisation represented the peak of
humankind’s long history. As it appeared in the 1860s and 1870s, the
evolution of humanity did seem ladderlike and orderly.
But all that was to change when archaeological discoveries in Africa, the
Americas and Asia revealed a far more diverse and fascinating prehistoric
world.
 CHAPTER 9

The Three Ages

E arly nineteenth-century European archaeology was a confusing mystery.

For most students of the European past, real history began with Julius Caesar
and the Romans. This was nonsense, of course, for there were many earlier
archaeological sites. But everything earlier than Caesar – polished stone axes,
bronze swords and often elaborate ornaments – was a jumble of finds stacked
in the drawers and cabinets of museums and private collections. The chaos of
artefacts and archaeological sites made no historical sense.
The scriptures, a commonly used historical source, had nothing to offer.
How could you create a framework for the remote past? Had different
peoples used stone tools or developed metal swords? What were they like?
Were there people living in Britain and other European countries who had
resembled the Native Americans, as John Aubrey had suggested (see Chapter
1)? No one knew what human societies had lived in Europe before the
Romans.
 Few Europeans took archaeology as seriously as the Danes. The Romans
had never conquered Denmark, which meant that its people felt a strong
attachment to the country’s ancient inhabitants. Archaeology was the only
way of studying them, and developed alongside a strong patriotic interest in
pre-Christian artefacts. But Danish excavators, like their English and French
counterparts, wrestled with a confusion of archaeological finds. It was no
coincidence that the first attempts to create order out of chaos arose in
Scandinavia.
In 1806, the Danish government set up a Commission on Antiquities to
protect archaeological sites and to found a national museum. In 1817, its
members appointed Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865) to set the
national collections in order and put them on display (at the time, they were
stacked in a church loft). Thomsen was the son of a wealthy merchant and
was an enthusiastic coin collector. His tidy and precise mind made him the
ideal person to put the museum in order. Anyone who collects coins seriously
becomes a classifier, accustomed to placing objects in sequence according to
their style. By all accounts, Thomsen also enjoyed meeting people and
engaging in conversation. Add to this a gift for letter-writing, which gave him
contacts throughout Denmark and beyond, and you have an ideal museum
official.
The industrious Thomsen began by entering the collections into a ledger
or logbook, just as in business. Each object received a number. New
acquisitions were catalogued and numbered as well. This gave him
immediate access to any object in the museum. Within a few months, he had
catalogued 500 artefacts. The dull process of cataloguing and ledger entry
gave him familiarity with a broad range of prehistoric artefacts. The
Copenhagen collections included thousands of stone tools from early hunting
sites, and rows of stone axes and adzes (a cutting tool with a blade set at right
angles to the handle) used for woodworking far back in the past. There were
beautifully made stone daggers, bronze swords and numerous brooches.
Cataloguing was one thing, but making sense of the jumble of stone axes
and small knives, bronze adzes, shields and occasional gold ornaments was
quite another. Thomsen observed that much of the collection came from
burials, where people had been laid to rest alongside clay vessels or stone
axes, and perhaps with brooches and pins. The groups of grave offerings
varied from each other, marked by changes in the artefacts. After examining
numerous burials, Thomsen noticed that some of the graves contained metal,
but others only artefacts of bone or stone. He decided to employ the raw
materials used to manufacture tools as the basis for classification.
In 1816, he divided Danish history into three phases. The earliest,
corresponding to what today we call prehistory, the time before written
history, was the ‘Heathen Period’. He subdivided this into three ages: the
Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Thus was born the famous
Three-Age System, which transformed perceptions of prehistoric times.
The Three-Age System was based entirely on Thomsen’s museum
collections. The Stone Age was a period when only stone and antler, bone
and wood were used for tools and weapons. The Bronze Age followed, with
bronze and copper artefacts. Then there was the Iron Age, when iron tools
came into use. Thomsen thought of the three ages as a timeframe for the
prehistoric past. He developed it carefully, using different groupings of finds
in undisturbed burials and living sites.
One might expect Thomsen to have been an object-obsessed museum
curator, but he was not. His museum galleries did display artefacts from the
three ages; but they offered far more, for he made sure that his visitors knew
that archaeology was not about objects, but about people.
Thomsen told museum visitors of burial mounds that dotted the
countryside where once living men and women lay; of gold and bronze
ornaments that had glittered on a woman’s chest or glowed in the sunlight on
a long-forgotten battlefield. The museum was open for two days a week, and
then for longer periods. Every Thursday at two o’clock, Thomsen would
show visitors around, full of enthusiasm, even placing ancient gold necklets
around young girls’ necks. He made the past come alive.
Thomsen wrote only one book, a short Guidebook to Northern Antiquity,
published in 1836 and read throughout Europe. In this, he described his
Three-Age System, which was simple and based on well-documented
museum collections. Thomsen’s three ages cut through the confusion. Within
a surprisingly short time, the Three-Age System became the framework used
to subdivide the prehistoric past.
Archaeology is based on excavations and field surveys, but indoor
research in laboratories is equally important. No one would call Thomsen a
fieldworker: he was, above all, a museum man. His career was in museum
galleries. He only excavated once, in 1845, when he and a colleague
investigated a Bronze Age burial. The dead man had been cremated, his
sword and a fine brooch laid out on an ox hide. Thomsen’s excavation was
remarkable for his accurate recording, a reflection of his precise mind and
passion for detail.
Thomsen spent much of his time on small finds and tiny artefacts. But he
also revolutionised the big picture of the past. With the development of the
Three-Age System, the modern science of archaeology and archaeological
classification was born.
It still needed to be proved that the three ages followed one another in
time, and they still needed to be dated. In 1838, a young university student,
Jens Jacob Worsaae (1821–85), came to meet Thomsen. He had long been
interested in archaeology and had acquired a large collection of antiquities.
The highly intelligent Worsaae became an unpaid museum volunteer, but
soon offended Thomsen because he was not afraid to express his opinions
and was a fluent writer.
Fortunately, King Christian VIII thoroughly approved of Worsaae’s work
and sponsored the young man’s research. Worsaae’s first book, The Primeval
Antiquities of Denmark, was published in 1843 and translated into English in
1849. It was a brilliant essay on the Three-Age System. Worsaae insisted that
excavating archaeological sites was the only way to write Denmark’s earliest
history, using artefacts in the same way as a historian uses documents. The
king was so impressed with young Worsaae that he sent him on a tour of the
British Isles to study the remains of the Vikings, Scandinavian seafarers and
traders between the eighth and the eleventh centuries. This yielded another
book, and on the strength of that the king appointed Worsaae inspector for
the conservation of antiquities.
Worsaae travelled constantly, recording sites and saving many from
destruction. Above all, he excavated numerous sealed Stone and Bronze Age
burials, recovering the dead themselves as well as their possessions, which
included swords and shields, clay vessels and the remains of leather
garments. Such finds provided snapshots of different people and their
technologies – glimpses of the Three-Age System unfolding in the past.
Worsaae’s excavations were highly significant. His careful observations
confirmed that Thomsen’s three ages were in the correct time order. Until
Worsaae’s digs, the scheme had depended entirely on museum collections.
Now it was based on excavations as well.
 As he worked, Worsaae showed that archaeological research could
produce facts about the past. When a well-preserved corpse of a woman came
to light in a bog in southern Denmark, traditionalists who believed in legends
claimed that it was the body of the legendary Queen Gunnhild of early
medieval times. Worsaae publicly disagreed and showed her to have been an
Iron Age individual.
Much of Worsaae’s research was concerned with burial mounds. Indeed,
a great deal of Denmark’s past was preserved in such monuments, but by no
means all of it. Along the country’s coastlines lay hundreds of large shell
heaps from earlier times – enormous piles of oysters and other mollusc shells.
Some were simply rubbish heaps. But on others people had lived and built
houses. The first person to investigate these was Japetus Steenstrup (1813–
97), professor of zoology (the study of animals) at the University of
Copenhagen. He called all such sites kjokkenmoddinger, or ‘kitchen middens’
(midden comes from the Danish word meaning ‘kitchen scraps’).
The only way to understand the middens was by studying still-living non-
Western societies whose diet was mainly shellfish. Steenstrup and his
colleagues, notably the English archaeologist John Lubbock, were
particularly interested in the Fuegian Indians who lived at the southern tip of
South America. Charles Darwin had described them during his Beagle
voyage. He – and indeed Lubbock and Steenstrup – had a low opinion of
their abilities and commented on the primitive lifestyles of shellfish
collectors.
The Danish government now appointed a three-scientist commission –
including both Steenstrup and Worsaae – to examine the middens. Other
scientists were also brought in, including a zoologist to identify shells.
Worsaae examined many shell heaps. His largest investigation was of a shell
midden found during road works at Meilgaard. A large cross-section of the
mound revealed thick layers of oyster shells and mussels. He also recovered
antler spearheads, stone tools, hearths and evidence of long-term occupation.
He described Meilgaard as ‘some kind of eating place’.
Steenstrup and Worsaae were years ahead of their time. They not only
studied artefacts, but also recorded the mollusc species found in the middens
– this was the earliest known research into how people lived.
Meanwhile, Worsaae’s colleagues studied ancient climate change, using
layers of peat bogs and the plant remains in them. As the Ice Age ended, open
country around ice sheets had given way to cold-tolerant birch forests. Then,
as the climate warmed further, oak forests replaced birch. Steenstrup even
identified the bones of migratory birds to establish the seasons in which the
middens were in use. This was truly revolutionary archaeology, which
emphasised ancient environments. Steenstrup published his work a century
before such approaches became commonplace.
Worsaae was a major force in Scandinavian archaeology for decades. He
taught prehistory at the University of Copenhagen, the first such teacher in
Scandinavia. He left to become director of the National Museum in 1866, a
post he held until his death in 1885.
At the time of his death, Scandinavian archaeology was years ahead of its
competitors. Worsaae’s rigorous application of the Three-Age System and his
careful observation of occupation layers provided a general framework for
archaeology in Northern Europe. His outline was much refined in later
decades, as the Three-Age System and detailed classifications of all kinds of
prehistoric artefacts became routine throughout Europe.
Thomsen and Worsaae laid the foundations for European prehistoric
archaeology – indeed of archaeology generally. The Three-Age System
brought a broad order to the prehistoric past. The Stone Age included the
Somme axes and Frere’s finds, Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, as well
as early farming societies. The Bronze and Iron Ages covered the more recent
periods of the past, up to the appearance of civilisation in the Middle East and
elsewhere, and beyond.
This general framework provided a kind of orderly bridge that linked the
earliest known sites with much more recent times. But there remained
significant gaps. Important discoveries in the river valleys of southwestern
France and by the Swiss lakes would soon fill in the empty spaces with
remarkable hunting societies and sophisticated farming communities.
 CHAPTER 10

Stone Age Hunters in an Icy World

I n 1852, a road worker accidently stumbled across a cave in the foothills of

the Pyrenees mountains, near the small village of Aurignac in southern
France. The labourer dug into the soft cave earth, looking for buried treasure.
Instead of gold, he uncovered the remains of seventeen people buried with
shell beads and mammoth teeth. The local priest promptly reburied them in
the village cemetery.
The news finally reached Édouard Lartet (1801–71), a country lawyer
with a passion for geology, fossils and ancient stone tools. Some eight years
after the original find, he rode over to Aurignac and poked about in what
remained of the cave filling. His hasty dig exposed a hearth of ashes and
charcoal, as well as nicely made stone tools that were clearly very ancient.
Lartet puzzled over his finds. Who were these ancient toolmakers? The
Aurignac tools were completely different from the stone axes found by
Boucher de Perthes along the River Somme (see Chapter 7).
Lartet’s geological training kicked in, and he realised that the best chance
of finding the answers lay in humanly occupied caves and rock shelters
(rocky overhangs in cliffs). If many generations of people had visited the
same location, the chances were that there would be layers of human
occupation extending over long periods of time. He turned away from
geological fossils and became an archaeologist. In the process, he pioneered a
new approach to excavation that involved not burial mounds, like those in
Scandinavia, but caves and rock shelters.
Lartet excavated several other caves and found both animal bones and
stone tools. His contacts among geologists led him to the tiny, and at the time
remote, village of Les Eyzies in southwestern France’s Dordogne region.
This is a wonderful part of France to explore. The Vezère and other rivers
flow through deep valleys carved out by ancient floods. I always love visiting
this well-watered countryside, with its green fields, thick woods and riverside
meadows. High limestone cliffs tower above you. These are riddled with
deep caves and rocky overhangs in sheltered gorges that would have provided
welcome protection during sub-zero winters.
Lartet had no funds himself, but he joined forces with Henry Christy
(1810–65), a wealthy English banker, who was involved in numerous
businesses (including one that experimented with woven silk instead of the
traditional beaver fur for top hats). Christy was also an enthusiastic collector
of antiquities and became interested in Native American societies. In 1853,
he visited Scandinavia, where the museum collections in Copenhagen and
Stockholm fascinated him. While in America in 1856, he met Edward Tylor,
an anthropologist (a person who studies living non-Western societies), and
travelled with him to Mexico.
Hearing stories of Les Eyzies, Christy visited the Dordogne caves with
Édouard Lartet. The two men became friends and collaborators. Christy
provided the funds and acquired most of the finds; Lartet carried out the
excavations.
By the standards of today’s cave excavations, this was primitive digging.
Lartet was a geologist used to examining layers with changing fossil animals.
He knew that the earliest occupation would be at the bottom. The excavations
yielded numerous antler, bone and flint artefacts. Drawing on the distinctive
stone tools and the different animals found in each layer, such as reindeer and
wild horses, Lartet identified several levels of human occupation. His
diggings explored caves and rock shelters that are household names for
today’s archaeologists – Le Moustier and La Ferrassie, as well as La
Madeleine.
La Madeleine rock shelter lies at the water’s edge on the Vezère River.
Here Lartet unearthed the finest antler and bone artefacts of all – delicate
antler points, harpoons with barbs on one or both sides, and needles. To his
astonishment, he also found bone fragments decorated with fine engravings.
Some bore simple patterns, while others were more intricate. Yet others had
been carved into lovely animal shapes. One carving of a bison licking its
flank was so detailed that the tear duct in the eye could be seen.
But who had been the artists of La Madeleine? After several years of
excavations, Lartet and Christy had discovered a sequence of changing Stone
Age societies. The earliest was the Neanderthal occupation at Le Moustier
cave. The Neanderthals, with their heavy brows, were quite different from
modern people. They were not like us at all. So who were our ancestors?
The answer came in 1868, when workers digging foundations for the new
Les Eyzies railway station uncovered a buried rock shelter at a cave called
Cro-Magnon. Lartet dug into the back of the shelter. He excavated five
human skeletons, including the remains of a foetus and several adults. One
was a woman, who may have been killed by a blow to the head. The
skeletons lay among a scattering of shell beads and ivory pendants. These
were no Neanderthals with heavy brow ridges: they had round heads and
upright foreheads. Their appearance was identical to that of modern people.
Lartet believed, correctly, that he had found the remote ancestors of modern
Europeans.
The skeletons came from the same layer as the bones of reindeer and
other cold-loving animals. This was proof that modern humans lived in
Europe at a time of intense cold, during the last Ice Age (now known to have
been about 18,000 years ago). Lartet and Christy wrote of an ‘Age of
Reindeer’, but was this a reality? The Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz had
spent many years studying the movement of glaciers high in the Alps. In
periods of intense cold, ice advanced far down mountain valleys. During
warmer periods, the glaciers shrank, just as they are doing during today’s
global warming. Agassiz wrote of a Great Ice Age, which ended with rapid
warming before written records began. The last cold period of the Ice Age
coincided with Lartet and Christy’s Age of Reindeer.
What were these late Ice Age people like? Before Darwin’s Origin of
Species, people had turned to the classics and the Bible for explanations of
the past. Now there was a new source of information: anthropology. The
immediate and obvious living equivalents to the Cro-Magnons were the
Eskimos, who had adapted brilliantly to extreme cold and found solutions to
living in sub-zero conditions. There were indeed many parallels. For
example, Eskimo hunters preyed on migrating caribou herds in spring and
autumn; the Cro-Magnons harvested reindeer during the same seasons. Also,
the ivory and bone needles that were found showed that the inhabitants of the
Dordogne rock shelters probably wore tailored clothing, such as trousers and
anoraks, just like living Arctic peoples.
The Cro-Magnons became Eskimos in the popular and archaeological
imagination. They were often depicted wearing Eskimo-like garments,
including hooded parkas. Despite the huge time gap between the Cro-
Magnons and living Eskimos, the comparison at least gave an impression of
what life might have been like. Just as Darwin had compared Fuegians to
very primitive ancient hunters, so Sir John Lubbock and the early
anthropologists used contrasts with living non-Western societies. They gave
birth to a new archaeological method. Such similarities, known to
archaeologists as ‘analogies’, are a fundamental part of archaeology today.
Lartet and his contemporaries excavated crudely, with picks and shovels
(occasionally with something smaller). Their work was somewhat like fossil
hunting, but instead of fossils they were looking for people, which required
much greater care. Everyone was searching for finely decorated tools and
weapons made of reindeer antler and stone tools. Layer after layer, they dug
rapidly through the remains of one short visit after another, through the
hearths and other traces of temporary dwellings.
Contrast this approach with today’s, when expert cave excavators adopt
the mindset of the original visitors. They always dig with trowels, dental
tools and fine brushes, so that they can distinguish each thin layer that
represents just a brief visit. Everything is passed through fine sieves, and
even the smallest seeds, fish bones and beads are recovered. A square grid
laid out over the floor and electronic survey devices guarantee that every
object of significance is recorded in place.
 The changing forms of tools provided Lartet with a record of developing
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon societies. Antler and stone implements
recorded technological changes through time. There were close similarities in
the ways in which tools changed over time at many of his sites. Lartet, being
a geologist, had a somewhat impersonal approach to ancient peoples. But he
was at least aware that people had made the tools and had hunted animals.
Others were thinking about the French cave discoveries as well. In 1865,
the British archaeologist Sir John Lubbock published Prehistoric Times, the
first general account of the subject. In his book, Lubbock divided the Stone
Age into the Palaeolithic period, or Old Stone Age (Greek: palaeos, old, and
lithos, stone), and the more recent Neolithic period, or New Stone Age
(Greek: neos, new, and lithos, stone), when Europeans became farmers.
These terms are still used today.
Lubbock produced a very general framework, just as Christian Jürgensen
Thomsen had done with the three ages in Scandinavia. Lubbock, with his
interest in living non-Western societies, was very much a people person.
Others were not, obsessed as they were with the enormous numbers of stone
tools in the French caves, rather than with the people who made them. Their
changing artefacts became signposts of human progress, notably in the hands
of Gabriel de Mortillet, a French geologist turned archaeologist.
Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–98) joined the National Museum of
Antiquities at Saint-Germain as overseer of the Stone Age collections in
1863. He was fascinated by artefacts and brought his geological ideas to
them. He had a fanatical belief in inevitable human progress that could be
measured by changing tool forms. And he adopted this approach after
organising displays about the history of labour for the 1867 Universal
Exhibition in Paris, a celebration of human progress through the past and
present.
Mortillet borrowed from geology and wrote of changing ‘type fossils’,
using what was a geological term to refer to tools like antler spear points and
harpoons. Distinctive ‘type fossils’ marked different periods of Stone Age
technology. Humans and their societies had evolved in almost the same way
everywhere. Mortillet believed there was a ‘universal law’ of human
progress.
This rigid-minded, geologically trained archaeologist’s ideas dominated
Stone Age archaeology for generations. The approach persisted, because it
created an impression of orderly progress through ancient times and was
simple to understand.
You can still see Mortillet’s approach in the new museum at Les Eyzies.
The upstairs gallery displays rows of antler, bone and stone tools, arranged in
order through time. I find the beautiful displays depressing: it all seems as
coolly detached as it was in Mortillet’s day. Fortunately, other displays talk
of the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as people, but the tool displays
highlight a problem with archaeology. Finds like knives, scrapers and spear
heads are excavated, classified and stored in boxes. They become impersonal
symbols of human behaviour. You tend to forget that they were made and
used by once-living people. We lose the human connection.
For all this, Mortillet did leave one legacy. He subdivided the different
archaeological levels and their artefacts, using cultural labels for each one.
He named the layers after the archaeological sites where they were found.
One culture with split-based antler points he named Aurignacian (after the
Aurignac cave), another Magdalenian (after the La Madeleine rock shelter),
marked by antler harpoons. This was all very geological: he forgot that stone
tools were fashioned by humans, whose behaviour varied constantly. Despite
this limitation, Mortillet’s rigid approach persisted, especially in French
circles, well into the twentieth century.
The French cave excavations may have been crude, but they launched a
new era in Stone Age archaeology. They revealed Neanderthals with simple
technology, followed by the reindeer-hunting Cro-Magnons with much more
elaborate weapons. Lartet and Christy’s Palaeolithic discoveries revealed
vanished European societies that adjusted brilliantly to bitter cold. But they
raised questions about the people who lived in Europe immediately after the
Ice Age. Were they also hunters in a much warmer world, or did they become
farmers? As we’ll see in the next chapter, their settlements first came to light
in the picturesque setting of the Alps.
 CHAPTER 11

Across the Ages

F ishermen on the shores of the Swiss lakes had complained for years. Their
lines caught on the bottom, then snapped, and they lost the hooks. Their nets
mysteriously clung to the bottom. Fragments of torn netting tangled up with
branches would occasionally float to the surface. There was talk of sunken
underwater forests.
No one took any notice of their complaints until 1853–54, when a major
drought reduced lake levels dramatically. The ‘forests’ turned out to be
wooden posts, or ‘piles’, sunk into layers of dark sediment. These had once
supported huts built above the water. Local antiquarians followed up, and by
1869 they had located more than 200 such lakeside sites.
The finds came to the attention of Ferdinand Keller (1800–81), a
professor of English at the University of Zürich and president of the Zürich
Antiquarian Society. He led major excavations at a maze of piles visible in
the exposed bed of Lake Zürich near the village of Obermeilen in 1854.
 This was an entirely new kind of archaeology for Switzerland, involving
organic materials that normally never survived. Unless kept wet, such finds
soon dry out, crack or even crumble into dust. The damp mud had preserved
an astounding range of objects that would usually have perished: axes and
adzes with timber handles, wooden wheels, fishing nets, baskets and ropes.
There were lots of cattle, sheep and goat bones, and the remains of red deer,
beaver and boar. There were numerous wheat and barley seeds, wild fruit,
hazelnuts, peas and beans.
Keller’s methods were crude. He dug around the posts and recovered as
many objects as he could. However, he had no way of dating the site and its
contents.
The lake dwelling discoveries came just as Gabriel de Mortillet and
others brought a ladderlike order of human progress to the Palaeolithic
period. But many people interested in the remote past wondered about later
prehistoric societies. What had happened in Europe as temperatures rose after
the Ice Age? When did farming begin in Europe? What crops did such people
grow? Keller’s discoveries at Obermeilen drew back the curtain on some of
Europe’s early farmers.
Keller knew from his finds that his lake dwellings were occupied over
several thousand years. But why did the inhabitants build houses on the
water? Like Lartet and Christy with the Cro-Magnons, Keller turned to
anthropology. He thought immediately of French explorers’ descriptions of
New Guinea villages, comprising stilt houses built in shallow water. Thus,
Keller imagined that the wooden piles were from similar prehistoric stilt
houses, whose inhabitants had dropped the tools and food remains into the
water beneath their dwellings. He referred to the houses as ‘pile dwellings’.
Much later, more careful excavation proved Keller wrong. Some Swiss
lake dwellings lay on swampy land that had been flooded by rising lake
levels. Others had been built above the water and had had posts sunk into the
ground to stabilise the structures. As the water rose, fine silt covered the
house floors and hearths between the posts, preserving numerous perishable
remains of early farming life.
Ferdinand Keller’s discoveries hit the headlines. Artists painted
reconstructions of the villages. They located them (wrongly) on platforms
joined to dry land by gangplanks, as if the settlements were on humanly made
wooden islands. Unlike the Cro-Magnons, who moved around constantly,
these villagers lived at the same location for long periods of time. They had
to, because they were farmers tied to their fields. The remains of their crops
survived at the sites.
Today, we know that most lakeside settlements like these date to between
4000 BC and somewhere after 1000 BC. Similar kinds of villages occur by
alpine lakes in France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. In the late nineteenth
century, Obermeilen and sites like it became a benchmark for the study of
early European farmers. They provided such rich archives of tools and food
remains that they became a kind of dictionary for understanding such people,
even those who dwelt far from the Swiss lakes.
Farmers crave salt – to supplement their diet of mainly cereal grains, but
also for preserving fish and meat for later consumption. Rock salt was like
gold dust for those lucky enough to live close to a source and who were able
to trade in it. The Salzkammergut Mountains contain vast quantities of rock
salt. People were mining it near Salzbergtal, a small village above the
lakeside town of Hallstatt, close to Salzburg, Austria, by at least 1000 BC, and
probably earlier. Generations of miners worked the Salzkammergut
Mountains, among them Johann Georg Ramsauer (1795–1874). He became a
mining apprentice at the age of thirteen. Soon an expert, he rose to the
position of Bergmeister, manager of all mining activity.
Ramsauer was quite a character. He lived in a medieval fort called the
Rudolfsturm, close to the mine. Very much a family man, he raised twenty-
two children who survived to adulthood. His other passion was
archaeological excavation. He devoted his leisure time to excavating 1,000 or
so graves in an enormous Iron Age cemetery, discovered during construction
between Rudolfsturm and the mine. The dead were the Hallstatt people, their
culture named by Ramsauer after the local town. They were miners, who had
dug into the hills by the light of pine torches. The salt had preserved their
leather backpacks, gloves and hats.
Ramsauer excavated the cemetery between 1846 and 1863 – a period that
coincided with the first Neanderthal discovery and the excavations of Swiss
lake villages. To assist him, Ramsauer employed a painter, who spent years
sketching and recording the finds and the graves. His watercolours show the
positions of vessels, metal objects and other grave furniture relative to the
human bones or cremated remains.
As the graves were cleaned, they were sketched and described in
comprehensive notes. About half were cremations and half were burials. The
dead were not chieftains or important people. They were miners and
metalworkers, buried with ornaments and their tools and weapons. These
were expert traders, whose metal products and salt spread across wide areas
of Europe. They were clearly in touch with long-distance trade networks:
some of them owned ivory ornaments from distant Africa, while others wore
amber (fossilised tree resin) beads from the Baltic Sea area.
Unfortunately, in 1874 Ramsauer died before publishing his work. Nor
did he record the bones or details of the objects found in the graves. His
handwritten notes vanished, only to be found in a second-hand bookstore in
Vienna in 1932. How reliable they are as a record of the work is uncertain.
But they were finally published in 1959. It is a miracle just how much
valuable information survived from the enormous excavation. Sadly,
however, it represents just a fraction of what could have been learned from
the cemetery today.
But how old were the lake villages and the Hallstatt cemetery? Today we
know that the Hallstatt culture flourished from the eighth to the sixth
centuries BC. But in the mid to late nineteenth century there was no way of
guessing this. The new geology, the theory of evolution and the Neanderthal
discovery had all opened up a vast, unknown landscape of the past.
Worsaae’s excavations and the Three-Age System provided a general
framework, but still no actual dates for any pre-Roman European society.
Fortunately, a Swedish archaeologist, Oscar Montelius (1843–1921), took
over where Jens Jacob Worsaae and others had left off. He devoted his career
to building chronological frameworks (records of events as they occurred in
time) across Europe.
It takes a special kind of personality to be an expert on artefacts,
especially when almost nothing is known about them. The work requires
endless patience, a passion for obscure, often tiny details, and a love of the
past. Montelius possessed these qualities in abundance. A brilliant linguist, he
was easy-going and personally engaging. In demand as a lecturer, he did
much to keep archaeology in the public eye.
Montelius was born in Stockholm and spent his entire professional life at
the Museum of National Antiquities there, rising eventually to become its
director. He was one of the first museum archaeologists. Such scholars spend
their careers totally immersed in collections and artefacts.
 Accurate chronologies (timelines) based on artefacts and the positions in
which they were found were Montelius’s passion. He realised from the start
that the only way to achieve such timelines was to travel throughout Europe,
the Mediterranean and the Middle East. There, one could find objects dated
by the known age of the sites where they were found or by historical records.
These artefacts would be the chronological anchors for similar objects found
hundreds of miles away in prehistoric Europe.
And travel he did. Montelius visited hundreds of museums, many of them
in small towns far from big cities. There were no cars, only railways and
endless journeys by horse-drawn coach or on horseback. Electric lighting was
still unknown, and of course there were no typewriters or computers.
Everything had to be recorded by hand. Montelius acquired information not
only from his own travels, but also from a wide network of colleagues whom
he encountered during his journeys or contacted by letter.
Over many years of research, Montelius developed his ‘cross-dating’
technique. Using objects of known age from the ancient Egyptians and other
Mediterranean civilisations, he linked artefact after artefact across Europe by
comparing their minor details and stylistic features. He also compared them
to dated objects. Bracelets, daggers, clay vessels and pins – all formed part of
Montelius’s chronologies. He ended up with interconnected networks of
dated artefacts of all kinds that extended from one end of Europe to the other.
In 1885, Montelius published his masterpiece, On Dating in the Bronze
Age. This brilliant work, based on his study of thousands of objects and the
sites where they came from, produced the first timeline for ancient Europe.
Using axes, brooches, swords and other artefacts, he subdivided the European
Bronze Age into six time periods. His evidence for these stages, based on
huge numbers of finds, was so convincing that it was very soon almost
universally accepted. Sometime later, Montelius dated the beginning of the
Bronze Age back to 1800 BC. Many of his colleagues thought this too early.
But more than three-quarters of a century later, in the early 1970s,
radiocarbon dating, unknown in Montelius’s day, proved him correct (see
Chapter 27).
Montelius also believed that archaeologists should share their discoveries
with the public. To this end, he lectured and gave guided tours of the
museum, talking to a wide variety of audiences. He spoke eloquently in
English, French, German and Italian – all without notes. Numerous popular
articles and books flowed from his pen. Influenced by his wife, he also fought
for women’s rights. In many ways, the leading European archaeologist of his
day was far ahead of his contemporaries.
By the time Montelius became director of Sweden’s Museum of National
Antiquities, archaeology had come a long way. Thanks to his thorough
research, and that of his Scandinavian predecessors, many Europeans were
now well aware of the importance of the prehistoric past. However,
excavation methods (with a few notable exceptions) were still rough and
ready, especially in Mediterranean lands. The lust for museum specimens and
spectacular finds continued unabated. But for the first time, there was a
framework for Europe before the Romans, based on artefacts and their
contexts, and not just on a few great discoveries.
In the late nineteenth century, professional archaeologists were a rare
breed. Much archaeology was still little more than casual collecting. And
almost all of it was still done in Greece and Italy, the Middle East and
Europe. But archaeology was on the move elsewhere, and especially in the
Americas. There, the sensational discoveries of John Lloyd Stephens and
Frederick Catherwood helped direct other archaeologists’ minds towards
three fundamental questions. What was the ancestry of the Native
Americans? Where had they come from? And how had they crossed into the
Americas?
 CHAPTER 12

The Myth of the Mound Builders

O n 12 October 1492, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, Spain’s

Admiral of the Ocean Sea, set foot on an island in the Bahamas. There he
found people whom he thought would make ideal servants. Within a few
generations, however, unfamiliar diseases and mistreatment had drastically
reduced the island populations of the Caribbean. Few paused to wonder
where these native people had come from or how they had reached their
homeland.
The debate over Native Americans began when Columbus paraded some
of his captives before the Spanish king. Who were these strange people?
Were they human beings? It was assumed that they were simple,
uncomplicated souls until Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés and the soldiers
under his command revealed the dazzling, sophisticated world of the Aztecs
in 1519. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán (‘the place of the prickly pear
cactus’), which stood where Mexico City is now, was home to more than
200,000 people, with a great market that rivalled those of Constantinople and
Seville.
The staggering diversity of Native American societies, from simple
hunting bands to wealthy civilisations, posed challenging questions in a
Europe raised on the biblical creation story set in the Middle East. How had
the Indians reached the Americas? Had they come by land, or from Asia? Or
had some unknown pioneer crossed the Atlantic long before Columbus?
American archaeologists are still researching these issues.
In 1589, a Spanish Catholic missionary, José de Acosta, announced that
the first settlers had crossed into North America from Asia, with only ‘short
stretches of navigation’. We now know that Acosta was correct and that the
Native Americans are indeed of Asian origin.
Nearly three centuries later, in 1856, this theory received a boost when a
scholar named Samuel Haven affirmed that the Indians had crossed the
Bering Strait in ancient times. Haven was a lone voice at a time when
thousands of settlers were moving westward across the Allegheny Mountains
into unknown territory. Most of them were farmers eager for fertile land.
They were astounded to find hundreds of large mounds, earthen enclosures
and banks in the Ohio Valley and from the Great Lakes and Nebraska to
Florida. Lusting after gold and buried wealth, many farmers went treasure
hunting. They found numerous human skeletons, shell ornaments and
weapons, but no gold.
The mysterious earthworks (artificial banks of soil) emerged from often
thick woodland as pioneer farmers cleared their lands. Some of the mounds
stood alone; others were in tightly arranged groups. Great enclosures
surrounded some of them. The earthworks were clearly ancient, for no
modern Indian peoples constructed anything of the kind. Some were
obviously burial mounds, with well-defined layers of skeletons or elaborate
log-lined burial chambers. When the farmers trenched (dug) into the mounds,
they recovered stone pipes, finely hammered copper axes and ornaments,
well-made pottery and other tools that were clearly the work of skilled
craftspeople. The few experts who looked at the finds saw no similarities
with Egyptian or other artworks. The Mound Builders became something
unknown and mysterious.
So who were the Mound Builders? Almost everyone assumed that the
Indians were too primitive. And so tales of gold, valiant warriors and exotic
civilisations spread like wildfire. These were the stuff of dreams for
adventurous settlers in an unfamiliar land. Tall tales entertained farmers on
winter evenings. In the early 1830s, popular writer Josiah Priest wove stories
of great armies of white warriors, of war elephants charging over the plains,
and of larger-than-life heroes. He gave the North Americans an entirely
fictional, heroic past, usually known today as the Myth of the Mound
Builders.
Treasure hunting was commonplace, but there were relatively few
spectacular finds. The digging was quick and destructive. Mounds were
flattened by ploughs, and few of the settlers examined the earthworks and
mounds at all systematically. But there were one or two exceptions.
Caleb Atwater, postmaster of Circleville, Ohio, surveyed and excavated
large numbers of mounds in the early nineteenth century. He found hundreds
of burials and numerous fine ornaments made from mica (a transparent
mineral), some in the form of bird claws or humans. The deeply religious
Atwater insisted that those who had built the mounds were shepherds and
farmers from Asia who had crossed the Bering Strait soon after the biblical
flood. As for the Indians, he assumed that they had arrived long after the
earthworks were abandoned.
In developing his theory of ancient migration, Samuel Haven had relied
on the work of another researcher, Ephraim Squier (1821–88). Squier was an
intelligent, well-educated American with a serious interest in the past. He
began his career as a journalist in New York State, then worked for a small-
town local paper in Chillicothe, Ohio. Later on, he would become a traveller
and successful diplomat, and on assignment to Peru in 1868 he would
become one of the first outsiders to describe the breath-taking Inca sites in
the Andes. But long before he went to South America, Squier teamed up with
a local Chillicothe physician, Edwin Davis. Between 1845 and 1847, the two
excavated, surveyed and puzzled over the bewildering array of earthworks
and burial mounds in the Ohio Valley.
The major force in the partnership, Squier was responsible for the
partners’ accurate plans of many major earthworks. His surveys were so
precise that they are still used today and appear in several guidebooks.
Supported by the American Ethnological Society, the two men hurriedly
tunnelled into more than 200 mounds, surveyed many earthworks and
enclosures, and assembled a huge collection of artefacts. One important site
they surveyed was the Great Serpent Mound, a long, curving mound on a
ridge in the shape of a wriggling snake holding a small oval mound in its
open jaws.
All this research came together in Squier and Davis’s 1848 book, Ancient
Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Squier wanted to produce facts to
replace wild theories, and the 300-page volume was a handsome publication,
with lavish illustrations. It remained the only account of the Mound Builders
for generations. The authors attempted to classify the earthworks and mounds
into such imaginative categories as ‘Mounds of Sacrifice’ and ‘Temple
Mounds’, but their inventories of sites and their detailed plans are a delight to
examine and can be linked to modern maps. In many cases, the authors
recorded features that have since vanished.
Squier carefully described the small finds from his hasty excavations. He
even correctly identified the copper ore from near Lake Superior, far to the
north, that had been hammered into simple axes and adzes. There were
carved soapstone pipes and animal figures. The latter struck Squier as far
more sophisticated than anything fashioned by the local Indians.
Squier and Davis wrote of the Mound Builders in general terms, pointing
out that the mound people were expert at constructing defensive earthworks.
Their ideas were influenced by popular tales of great armies and huge battles
in earlier times. They painted a portrait of peace-loving early Mound
Builders: when attacked by ‘hostile savage hordes’, they had frantically built
defences to protect themselves. But it had all been in vain: the invaders
conquered them and the Mound Builders disappeared. Squier and Davis
assumed that the Indians encountered by Europeans were these warlike,
hostile newcomers, who were thus no more entitled to Ohio than the
Europeans.
Squier and Davis may have been prejudiced, but their catalogues and
surveys placed the controversies surrounding the Mound Builders on an
entirely new footing. Nevertheless, wild speculation continued. William
Pidgeon, who claimed to be a trader in the west with long experience of
Indians, announced in 1858 that the biblical Adam had built the first mound
in America. Many others had followed, including Alexander the Great and
various Egyptians and Phoenicians. Pidgeon made a fortune from his book,
which he said was based on conversations with an Indian named De-coo-dah.
His informant conveniently died after passing on his secrets.
 For all the mythmaking, change was afoot. Archaeological research
received a major boost from the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of
Species and from the Neanderthal discovery (see Chapter 8). A new
generation of research began, centred on institutions like Harvard University
and the Smithsonian Institution. But despite numerous claims, no one found
any Somme hand axes or Neanderthal fossils anywhere in North America.
The major controversies still surrounded the Mound Builders of the Midwest
and South.
So intense was the speculation about the Mound Builders that in 1881 a
group of archaeologists persuaded the US Congress to set aside funds for
Mound Builder research. A Division of Mound Exploration attached to the
Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology set to work under Professor Cyrus
Thomas (1825–1910). Little is known about Thomas, who was a geologist by
training. However, we do know that he originally believed that a race of
Mound Builders – separate from the Indians – had built the mounds.
Thomas and eight assistants fanned out over mound country, especially
the Mississippi Valley. Here farmers were digging into mounds in search of
treasure, and there was now an active market in artefacts. A paper merchant
named Clarence Moore spent his summers floating along the Mississippi and
Ohio Rivers on houseboats. He would stop, his labourers would dig, and
thousands of artefacts would vanish below deck – to be sold or added to his
collection.
Most of Thomas’s work concentrated on the country between Ohio and
Wisconsin. He spread his team thinly on the ground, and they worked all year
round surveying and excavating with the minimum of destruction. He
laboured for more than seven years. This was planned archaeological
research, collecting accurate data on a large scale. He and his men sampled
more than 2,000 mounds and earthworks of every size and complexity. Some
38,000 artefacts came into Thomas’s hands via excavation or donation.
In 1894, Thomas published a 700-page report, in which he described
hundreds of earthworks and mounds in minute detail. Although Thomas’s
work is not an easy read, it is based on carefully collected data.
As he described the earthworks and finds, his beliefs about the Mound
Builders changed radically. As a careful researcher, he compared the artefacts
and artworks from his excavations and from private collections to the objects
made by living Native American societies. He found close similarities
between ancient and modern tools and weapons. He also studied accounts by
European travellers, who described mounds that were still in use as late as the
eighteenth century.
No longer did Thomas believe in a vanished Mound Builder civilisation
in the Mississippi Valley. Instead he stated that all the sites he had examined
were constructed by ‘the Indian tribes inhabiting the corresponding area
when it was first visited by Europeans’.
Thomas’s data-driven book changed the archaeological game, and science
came to replace speculation. But prejudice against Native Americans endured
and their lands were seized, often on flimsy legal grounds. Gradually,
haphazard digging by non-experts gave way to the systematic fieldwork of
professional researchers.
Many years were to pass before well-trained archaeologists came along.
But the corner had been turned. Tragically, apart from some rare sites in
public parks, nearly all the places in Thomas’s monograph (a detailed study)
have suffered at least some damage.
Thomas’s report remains a basic source for archaeologists today. But the
legacy of this energetic fieldworker extends even further: he commented on
the great diversity of peoples who had lived in Mound Builder country in
ancient times. The challenge for future archaeologists was to identify these
diverse societies and their relationships with both earlier and later cultures.
Over a century since Cyrus Thomas finally debunked the Myth of the
Mound Builders, research has revealed some of this remarkable diversity.
Today, we know a lot about the so-called Adena, Hopewell and Mississippian
societies who built the earthworks, and about their elaborate ritual beliefs.
We also know that many of the rituals and religious beliefs of those who built
North America’s great earthworks survived into the period of recorded
history.
Thomas’s work failed to halt the tidal wave of destruction, but he at least
managed to persuade a group of Boston ladies to raise $6,000 to buy the
Great Serpent Mound, which he restored as a public park for visitors in 1887.
It is now an Ohio State Memorial and a National Historic Landmark.
 CHAPTER 13

‘Stepping into the Unknown’

I n April 1883, the soldiers at Fort Apache, Arizona, were astonished when a
lone traveller on a mule rode up to the gate. The Apache were on the warpath,
and that made travel very difficult.
The rider was Swiss-born Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier (1840–
1914), who was wandering through the remote Indian territories of the desert
studying the ‘ruined cities’ of the people who had lived there long before
Columbus.
Bandelier was travelling through the virtually unknown American
Southwest. A few Spanish-led expeditions from Mexico had visited Hopi and
Zuni Pueblo Indian villages in search of gold, but they had left empty-
handed. There had been tales of crowded, multi-storey Indian settlements,
commonly called ‘pueblos’, but there were few details.
 The first lengthy description of the ancient pueblos came in 1849, when
US Army Lieutenant James Henry Simpson and artist Richard Kern visited
ten ancient pueblos, including the great ruins at Pueblo Bonito, in Chaco
Canyon, New Mexico, and the Navajo pueblos in Canyon de Chelly in
northeastern Arizona.
The number of outside visitors to the region increased dramatically after
the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, as ever more settlers
moved westward. The US government organised official expeditions to map
and explore what was essentially a huge environmental laboratory. Their
tasks included studying the geology of the area and gathering knowledge
about the Pueblo Indians and their settlements.
Most government expeditions were more concerned with geology and
potential mining opportunities than with Indian pueblos. Adolph Bandelier on
his humble mule had quite different interests. A small-town banker in upstate
New York, then a coalmine manager, the quiet and scholarly Bandelier used
his spare time to study Spanish records of Mexico and the Southwest at a
time of public fascination with the American West.
A skilled linguist, he scoured little-known archives, but learned virtually
nothing about Pueblo Indian history. His hobby became an obsession, and he
soon realised that he needed to extend his library-based research by going
into the field in the Southwest. Bandelier dropped everything to travel to
Santa Fe, New Mexico, with only a small grant to his name. Though almost
penniless and with few possessions beyond his mule, at least he could now
study Pueblo Indian archaeology and history in situ.
Bandelier knew that any investigation of the past would start with
existing Pueblo Indian communities. He stopped first at the recently
abandoned Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico. As late as the seventeenth century,
as many as 2,000 people had lived at Pecos. The last of them had left by the
1830s, fifty years before Bandelier arrived.
Having mastered the local language in an astonishing ten days, he
collected vital historical information from elderly residents. He also described
and surveyed the ruins of the large pueblo, but did not excavate: he had
neither the knowledge nor the money to do so. His Pecos research convinced
him that the only way to study earlier Pueblo history was by working
backwards from living societies into the distant past, using archaeology.
Bandelier wrote a detailed report on his Pecos research, but it attracted little
attention.
He now searched for other promising sites. In late 1880, he spent three
months living with the inhabitants of Cochiti Pueblo. New Mexico’s Catholic
priests helped him extensively in contacting Indian informants, especially
after he converted to Catholicism.
The pueblos that Bandelier visited consisted of closely packed adobe
(mud) rooms, connected to one another by a maze of entrances and narrow
passageways. Some of the larger pueblos had two storeys – or even more,
like the great semi-circular, multi-storey Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon.
Large, circular underground chambers were to be found in the open centre of
the semi-circular structure. These kivas were places where secret ceremonies
were held. Seemingly ramshackle and somewhat untidy, the pueblos were in
fact highly organised communities, where extended families had lived for
generations.
From 1881 to 1892, Bandelier wandered across Arizona and New
Mexico. Though he made extensive notes during his travels, he didn’t live to
see them in print (they were finally published in the 1960s and 1970s). They
contain information of great archaeological and historical importance.
Strictly speaking, Bandelier was not an archaeologist; but he was in all
but name. He never drove a spade into an archaeological site. Instead, with
his plans and site descriptions, he laid the groundwork for later researchers’
excavations.
Bandelier approached the history of the Pueblo Indians using written
sources and oral traditions, as well as his own observations. He was the first
American archaeologist to use his observations of living Indian tribes to
interpret the past. He regarded archaeology as a study not of objects, but of
the history and information that the finds supplied. He tracked back from the
present to ancient times, using everything from Indian pot designs to local
histories passed from generation to generation. As he put it, he worked ‘from
the known to the unknown, step by step’. Bandelier’s remarkable fieldwork
formed the foundations for the pioneering archaeological work that was to
come a generation later. All those who followed in his footsteps worked from
the present back into the past, as Southwest archaeology does to this day.
Bandelier supported his wanderings by writing a Catholic history,
magazine articles – and even a novel, The Delight Makers, set in prehistoric
times. His object in doing so was more than just to make money (although
that would have been welcome). He wanted to share Southwest Indian history
with a broader public. The novel was not a commercial success, but it was
striking for its insights into Indian society. Bandelier left the Southwest in
1892 and spent the rest of his life working in Mexico, South America and
Spain.
Unlike archaeology in many other parts of the world, which began with
large-scale digging, the Southwest’s past began with Bandelier’s careful
studies of living societies and historic pueblos. He realised that to succeed,
archaeologists would have to work back through the centuries by digging into
pueblo garbage heaps, with their thousands of broken pot fragments. He
could not do so himself, and so he contented himself with maps, surveys and
talking to living Pueblo Indians. There was another problem, too. Many of
the most promising pueblos for archaeology were still occupied, which made
digging impossible.
Alongside Bandelier was another visitor who helped lay the basis for later
excavations – a remarkable anthropologist who lived among the Zuni Indians
and acquired an insider’s knowledge of their society. Frank Hamilton
Cushing (1857–1900) was the son of a physician. A smooth-talking scholar,
he liked drama and had a taste for carefully managed publicity. In 1875,
Cushing was appointed assistant in ethnology (the study of non-Western
peoples) at the Smithsonian Institution, where he learned of the Pueblo
Indians of New Mexico.
In late 1879, Cushing accompanied US Army Colonel James Stevenson
on a Smithsonian expedition to the Southwest. Cushing arrived at Zuni
Pueblo as the September sun was setting behind the village. He described the
densely inhabited pueblo as ‘a little island of mesas [flat-topped hills], one
upon another.’ He was supposed to stay for just three months. Instead, he
remained for four and a half years, after which time he left to attend to his
neglected duties in Washington.
Cushing stayed behind after Stevenson and his companions moved on.
Even after a few days, he was aware that his work had hardly begun.
Bandelier had wandered freely across the Southwest, collecting information
and identifying abandoned pueblos. But Cushing took a totally different
approach. He realised that a true understanding of the Zuni could only be
achieved by living among them, mastering their language and recording their
lives in detail. Today, anthropologists call this ‘participant observation’, but it
was a novel idea in Cushing’s time. Cushing was not an archaeologist, but he
was aware that Zuni culture extended far back into the past. And he knew that
his research provided a baseline for studying much earlier history.
At first the Indians threatened to kill him when he tried to record their
dances. But his calm response made a deep impression on them and he was
never harassed again. The Zuni allowed him to study the structure of their
society, and he was even initiated into their secret Priesthood of the Bow.
Cushing had his ears pierced and he dressed in Indian clothes. Eventually, the
Zunis came to trust him enough to appoint him a war chief. Next to his
numerous transcriptions of Zuni folktales and myths, he recorded his own
title: ‘1st War Chief of Zuni: US Assistant Ethnologist’.
Cushing became a passionate supporter of the Zuni and did much to
protect their lands against European settlers. But he upset some powerful
people in Washington who had their eyes on land in the area, and he was
recalled. Despite ill health, he lectured widely on his experiences and wrote
about them for popular audiences. Frank Cushing’s strong personal
magnetism and his public-speaking skills did much to heighten public interest
in the Southwest. His books and lectures presented a romantic vision of
pueblo life that was often far from reality. Nevertheless, his accounts of Zuni
oral traditions and ceremonies are of lasting value, even today.
Cushing would be the first to admit that he was no archaeologist; but he
considered archaeology a way of carrying his research on living people back
into earlier centuries. Excavation, he knew, was the way to work from
modern times into the past. On a later, brief expedition to the Southwest, he
did excavate a cemetery in Arizona’s Salt River Valley. A powerful
earthquake had destroyed a nearby pueblo, which he also investigated. But
his Southwestern researches were over by 1890.
Bandelier and Cushing showed the potential for serious excavation. Dry
conditions in caves and pueblos preserved ancient baskets, painted pots,
woven sleeping mats and even dried-out human burials. Many of these finds
trickled back to America’s East Coast and fetched high prices.
Inevitably, pothunters and antiques dealers moved in on the pueblos.
Richard Wetherill, a Colorado rancher-turned-trader and artefact collector,
was one of those who indulged in treasure hunting, acquiring painted pottery
and other artefacts from dozens of archaeological sites.
 In 1888, Wetherill and another rancher, Charlie Mason, were looking for
stray cattle in the canyons of Mesa Verde in southern Colorado when they
came across a large pueblo set in a cave – the largest cliff dwelling in North
America. Now known as the Cliff Palace, the pueblo was built of sandstone,
with mortar made of soil, water and ash to hold the stone blocks together.
About a hundred people dwelt in the Cliff Palace between AD 1190 and 1260,
before it was abandoned, perhaps following a long period of drought. This
was an important administrative and ceremonial centre, with twenty-three
sunken kivas.
Mesa Verde and other sites in the region became a gold mine for Richard
Wetherill’s family. His last years found him at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco
Canyon. In 1897, he opened a store near the site selling artefacts and
provisions. By 1900, he had cleared more than 190 rooms – over half the site
– and had sold their contents. His ‘excavations’ were sponsored to the tune of
at least $25,000 by private individuals, who gave the finds to the American
Museum of Natural History in New York. After rumours of huge profits
reached Washington, Wetherill’s excavations were suspended by official
order. In 1907, he signed over ownership of the land to the government.
Meanwhile, the few professional archaeologists in the Southwest, led by
Edgar Hewett (1865–1946), a disciple of Adolph Bandelier, lobbied
successfully for some laws to protect archaeological sites on public land. The
American Antiquities Act of 1906 offered limited protection to key areas like
Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. Hewitt started a field school to train young
archaeologists in proper excavation methods – not those used by pothunters.
Much of the work involved cleaning up sites damaged by looters.
Bandelier, Cushing and others established a basic principle about the
Southwest: you need to work backwards from the present into the past.
Archaeologists have followed this principle ever since.
 CHAPTER 14

Toros! Toros!

I n 1868, while out fox hunting, a Spanish hunter, Modesto Cubillas, lost
track of his dog among some rocks. From below ground came the sound of
barking. Cubillas found the hole through which the dog had disappeared,
widened it and stumbled upon a long-hidden cave. He didn’t explore the
cavern, but reported its existence to the landowner, the Marquis de Sautuola
(1831–88), a lawyer who owned several estates in northern Spain. Sautuola
had many interests, among them books, gardening and archaeology.
But investigating the past was not a high priority for the busy landowner.
Eleven years passed before he visited Cubillas’s cave (now known as
Altamira, meaning ‘a high viewpoint’). Wandering through the cavern, he
noticed some black marks on the wall, but thought nothing of them. Soon
afterwards, however, he visited Paris where he saw a display of beautifully
engraved antler and bone fragments – ancient Cro-Magnon artefacts from
southwestern France. His mind turned to Altamira, and he wondered whether
similar finds might lie in the layers of the cave.
Back home, he decided to excavate. His nine-year-old daughter Maria
begged to come along too. As father and daughter looked on, labourers dug
into the earthen floor with picks and shovels in a hasty search for engraved
tools. But Maria soon tired of the muddy work and wandered off to play
deeper in the cave. Suddenly, from a low side chamber, the marquis heard a
cry: ‘Toros! Toros!’ – ‘Bulls! Bulls!’
Sautuola hurried over and Maria pointed to a polychrome (multi-
coloured) bison, one of numerous animal paintings on the rock. Bison, wild
boar and deer all appeared in a jumble on the roof. The vivid colours of the
paintings made the beasts look as if they had been painted only the day
before. Maria had made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the
nineteenth century.
The Altamira painted chamber, with its low ceiling, is like a zoo of large,
Ice Age beasts. Long-extinct bison painted in black and red stand there, their
hair bristling, sometimes with lowered heads. Others crouch. A wild pig
prances across the rock. There are deer with huge antlers. The animals fill the
ceiling, and many seem more alive because of the bulges in the rock that
emphasise their bodies. Among the beasts are red handprints. Some of these
were made by blowing red powder onto the ceiling, while others were
carefully painted in place.
Sautuola recognised at once that the Altamira cave paintings were similar
to the engraved figures he had seen in Paris. He published a pamphlet on the
cave in which he proposed the idea that the wall art could be from the same
period as the artefacts he had seen on display in France. To his dismay,
French archaeologists immediately rejected the notion: the fresh-looking
paintings were, they said, modern and too sophisticated to be the work of
prehistoric savages. Some went so far as to call the paintings forgeries,
created by a modern artist, perhaps in collaboration with the marquis. Bitter
and heartbroken, Sautuola retired to his estates and died in 1888, still
suspected of forgery. It would be many years before his name was cleared.
A few paintings and engravings had also been found in caves in
southwestern France. The experts also considered them to be modern. This
was hardly surprising, since, at the time, most people believed that
‘primitive’ ancient hunters could never be artists. Soon, more prehistoric
paintings came to light. In 1895, the owner of the La Mouthe cave near Les
Eyzies in the Dordogne – Lartet and Christy’s hunting ground – removed
some of the earthen fill. He found himself in a hitherto sealed gallery, with an
engraved bison and other figures covering the walls. They were obviously
ancient. More painted caves came to light, at locations that are now popular
tourist attractions – Les Combarelles (which is famous for its engravings) and
the Font de Gaume cave, close to Les Eyzies (with its woolly mammoth
paintings). The case for Ice Age art grew stronger and stronger.
In 1898, a small party of archaeologists visited Les Combarelles. They
included an eminent French archaeologist named Émile Cartailhac (1845–
1921) and a young Catholic priest, Henri Breuil (1877–1961).
The engravings deep underground left a powerful impression on
Cartailhac. Four years later, he and Breuil visited Altamira. The young priest
firmly believed that the paintings there dated back to the Ice Age, but
Cartailhac had long maintained that they must be modern. Now, however, he
changed his mind – the paintings were ancient. Indeed, he found the evidence
so strong that he published a famous paper apologising for his previous
beliefs. He declared that Altamira was a prehistoric art gallery. The Marquis
de Sautuola and his daughter were finally proved right.
Much of the credit for Émile Cartailhac’s change of mind must go to
Henri Breuil, who was to become a giant of rock art research. A native of
Normandy in northern France, Breuil was the son of a lawyer. He was
ordained a Catholic priest in 1900. A man of profound faith, Breuil was also
an exceptional scientist. The young priest’s faith was so strong that the
Church ignored his Ice Age research (which was against its teachings) and
gave him permission to pursue his studies – not as a priest, but as an
independent scholar.
Soon after he became a priest, Breuil met two French prehistorians, Louis
Capitan and Édouard Piette, who gave him a thorough grounding in the
antler, bone and stone tools from the French caves. Breuil was strong-minded
and did not suffer fools gladly – you disagreed with him at your peril. But he
was a superb artist at a time when both controlled lighting underground and
high-quality photography were near impossible. Copying delicate rock
paintings required the artist to make rough sketches and then measure the
figures. This obliged him to lie on sacks filled with ferns and straw, using
only candles or flickering lamps for illumination. Breuil spent days wedged
into narrow passages in near-total darkness, tracing engravings and faint
images onto paper. He once calculated that he had spent more than 700 days
underground, copying paintings and engravings.
Breuil finished his rough sketches in watercolours, checking them against
black-and-white photographs whenever possible. Inevitably, some of his
copies were somewhat imaginative; but even today, when colour images are
available, they represent an invaluable rock art archive. Unfortunately, many
of the paintings he recorded have now vanished because of air changes
generated by frequent visitors.
An astonishing discovery came in 1940, when some schoolboys hunting
rabbits near the town of Montignac lost their dog down a rabbit hole. On
hearing him barking underground, they opened up the rabbit hole and
scrambled down. The boys found themselves in a large hall covered in
magnificent paintings of wild bulls, bison and other animals. Breuil hastened
to what is now known as Lascaux cave. The huge bulls and fierce bison, the
colours as vibrant as the day they were painted, astonished him. Thanks to
radiocarbon dating (see Chapter 27), we now know that the paintings and
engravings had been sealed underground for at least 15,000 years.
After copying the Altamira paintings, Breuil had devised a theory that
there were two different Upper Palaeolithic art styles, which evolved from the
simple to the more complex. He was convinced that the artworks were a form
of what he called ‘hunting magic’. The images were a connection to the
spirits of the animals painted on the walls, created to ensure hunters’ success.
He also believed that some of the paintings and engravings, especially on
portable objects, were of such artistic merit that they were made for pleasure
– evidence of the creativity of Cro-Magnon artists.
Colour and infrared photography, as well as later, often spectacular
discoveries, such as Lascaux, has shown that this theory was too simplistic.
Another painted cave, Grotte de Chauvet, discovered in 1994, contains
magnificent paintings of Ice Age rhinoceroses and other extinct animals,
which were painted around 30,000 years ago. The Chauvet paintings are even
more elaborate than Lascaux, yet they are earlier.
No one has yet devised a generally agreed sequence for what is obviously
a complex and very old art tradition. Nor can the experts agree on what the
art means. Soon after the Lascaux discovery, Breuil went out to South Africa,
where he stayed until 1952 studying the rock art of the San (indigenous
people once known as Bushmen).
He had first seen San rock art during a visit to the country for a
conference in 1929. Early travellers and anthropologists had found San
paintings long before Altamira was discovered. As early as 1874, South
African anthropologist George Stow told of meeting some San hunters who
were not painters themselves, but who knew people who were.
San rock art is quite unlike the works in French caves. In southern Africa,
there are scenes of the chase during a hunt, of people collecting honey, of
dances and ceremonies, and of camp life, as well as signs and symbols.
Breuil again considered this art a product of hunting magic, but we now
know it had far more complex meanings.
Not that Breuil was the first scholar to puzzle over San rock art.
Ironically, not long before Altamira was discovered, a German linguist,
Wilhelm Bleek (1827–75), learned several San dialects while living in Cape
Town. He did so after persuading the authorities to release twenty-eight San
convicts working on the breakwaters of Cape Town harbour to act as his
teachers. They lived at Bleek’s house while he and his sister-in-law Lucy
Lloyd compiled not only vocabularies and grammars, but also a valuable
body of mythology and folklore. Bleek and Lloyd were well aware of San art,
but had only a few copies to show people.
In 1873, another researcher, magistrate J.M. Orpen, travelled through the
Maluti Mountains of Lesotho, a short distance from the Drakensberg range.
He recorded oral traditions recited by his San guide that were remarkably
similar to Bleek and Lloyd’s mythologies. Both placed major emphasis on a
large antelope, the eland, favoured prey for San hunters.
Bleek became convinced that the paintings illustrated San myths. But
researchers who came after him either ignored the carefully assembled
accounts he’d gathered or regarded the information as being of dubious
value. They focused instead on recording the art systematically.
Breuil himself spent 1947 to 1950 copying art in what is now Namibia
and Zimbabwe. Rather than photography, he used a pencil and thick paper,
which led to numerous inaccuracies. In Namibia, he copied the famous
‘White Lady of the Brandberg’. The 2,000-year-old painting shows a human
figure with a partially white-painted face and legs, carrying a bow and arrow
and striding along holding a flower. Breuil stated that the painting was of a
woman. It was an exotic painting, and he claimed it was not of a San, but of a
visitor from a Mediterranean land, perhaps Crete, where ancient female
figures were common. Breuil, who seems to have had little respect for the
San, was completely wrong. After he died in 1961, research using colour
photography showed that the painting is of a man, perhaps a shaman, with
white-painted features.
Bleek and Lloyd’s nineteenth-century research has helped unlock some of
the secrets of both European and African rock art. But fundamental questions
remain unanswered. Why did Cro-Magnon artists paint and engrave animals
and complex symbols in dark caves? Did the artists experience powerful
visions alone and in total darkness, then remember them with their paintings?
Why did they work far from daylight, their only illumination coming from
animal fat lamps?
San art is mostly in open rock shelters, much of it involving elongated
human figures sometimes dancing around dying eland. Without question,
their art also had supernatural meaning. Some experts believe that the
paintings were a way of communicating with the supernatural, whose powers
would pass to humans through their handprints on the cave walls. We will
never know exactly what the art meant, but the research continues.
 CHAPTER 15

Searching for Homer’s Heroes

H einrich Schliemann (1822–90) is among the most famous – and most

controversial – of all early archaeologists. He was the fifth child of a
Protestant clergyman from northern Germany. A poor student, he left school
at the age of fourteen. In his teenage years, though, he fell in love with the
poems of Homer.
Writing during the eighth century BC, Homer created two great epics
packed with Greek heroes. The Iliad and The Odyssey were probably based
on tales recited and sung by Greek poet-singers over many centuries. The
Iliad tells the story of the Greek siege of a city named Troy. The Odyssey
recounts the adventures of one of the warriors involved, Odysseus, as he
returned home. They are some of the finest adventure stories ever written.
If Schliemann is to be believed, his father would recite stories from
Homer’s epics in the evenings. From an early age, the young Heinrich was
desperate to discover Troy, believing the two great poems to be accurate
historical accounts.
Did Troy exist and where was it? Did the siege actually take place?
Schliemann spent much of his life trying to find out. His obsession with Troy
stemmed from his love of Homer, rather than from any scientific basis.
Scholars did not even believe that the city had ever existed: experts on the
epics held that they were the product of Homer’s imagination. At best,
Schliemann’s fascination with Troy seemed eccentric. And anyway, there
was little chance that he could prove the experts wrong – he was dirt poor,
lacked education and was apprenticed to a grocer.
In 1841, Schliemann walked away from the grocery business and ended
up in Amsterdam. He had a talent for business and languages, and made a
fortune from trading dyes in St Petersburg, Russia, from banking in
California and from war supplies during the Crimean War. Now a
multimillionaire, in 1864 he retired from business to devote the rest of his life
to archaeology and Homer.
In 1869, he toured Italy and Greece. He learned modern and classical
Greek, the latter in two years. His travels included Odysseus’s homeland,
Ithaca, the Greek islands and finally the Dardanelles strait in Turkey. There
he met Frank Calvert, an English diplomat who owned half a large mound
named Hissarlik, near the entrance to the strait. Like Schliemann, Calvert was
interested in archaeology, Homer and Troy. He had dug some shallow
trenches into Hissarlik, but had found almost nothing. Nevertheless, he firmly
believed that this was Troy.
His visitor rode around the dusty mound and its surroundings, The Iliad in
one hand. He tried to reconstruct the landscape where Homer’s battles raged.
Schliemann came to share Calvert’s conviction that Hissarlik really was
Homer’s Troy. With deep pockets and restless ambition, Heinrich
Schliemann decided to dig for the siege of Troy.
Schliemann had no excavation experience whatsoever. All he brought to
the dig was a conviction that Homer had recorded historical fact. He started
modestly in April 1870 with a small trial trench and found a huge stone wall.
But was the Homeric city at the top of the mound or at its base? The wall
merely whetted his appetite for a much larger dig.
He applied for a permit from the sultan of Turkey, which did not arrive
until 1871. Meanwhile, he looked for a Greek wife, interviewed several
candidates, and finally married the young and beautiful Sophia
Engastromenos, the daughter of a shopkeeper. She was seventeen; he was
forty-seven. The marriage was a success, and she became a partner in his
work.
In October 1871, Heinrich Schliemann started excavating at Hissarlik. He
recruited eighty labourers and set them to work on the northern side of the
site, searching for the city described by Homer. He was now convinced that it
lay at the bottom of the mound. Armed with pickaxes and wooden shovels,
the men dug a large trench 10 metres deep in six weeks. This was no
archaeological excavation: Schliemann quarried ruthlessly through stone
walls and foundations. A jumble of stone blocks, perhaps the remains of the
walls of a great city, emerged from the bottom of the cutting.
Schliemann had started work at Hissarlik with no firm plan. He had his
copy of The Iliad, and pot fragments and partially exposed stone walls
suggested that rich pickings might lie below the surface. His methods were
direct and simple – move lots of soil using lots of men. He remarked that the
scale of his excavations required at least 120 men. Schliemann readily
admitted in his account of the excavations that he had been forced to
demolish the remains of temples, fortifications and even burials in his single-
minded quest for the Homeric city.
In 1872, the Schliemanns returned with a huge stockpile of picks, shovels
and wheelbarrows. They built themselves a house on top of the mound.
Living conditions there were harsh: strong winds whistled through the thin
planks of their dwelling, and once a fire threatened the house.
Schliemann attacked Troy on a huge scale. Three foremen and a surveyor
supervised up to 150 men. Large teams peeled away the strata of the mound
like a layer cake, and the excavations finally reached the base of the mound at
a depth of about 14 metres.
Schliemann renewed his reckless assault, cutting a huge trench through
the mound from north to south. At season’s end, he had excavated almost 250
square metres of earth and archaeological layers. Even with modern
earthmoving equipment, this would have been a stupendous feat; but he did it
all by hand. It was no coincidence that some of his supervisors had worked
on Egypt’s Suez Canal, which cut through Egypt from the Mediterranean to
the Red Sea.
The results were astounding. It turned out that city after city had
flourished at Hissarlik. Each had erected its buildings on the foundations of
earlier settlements. By the end of the 1873 season, Schliemann had identified
no fewer than seven Troys (by 1890, he had added two more). The earliest
city was too small, and so Schliemann announced that the third city from the
base was Homer’s Troy. ‘Many treasures’ of copper, gold and silver were
contained in a dense layer of burnt masonry and ash. This showed that the
city had been burnt down. Obviously, said Schliemann, it was the city
destroyed by the Greeks. The later cities in higher layers were more recent.
From May 1875, the diggers focused their efforts on this third city. One
hot morning, Schliemann spotted gold gleaming 8.5 metres below the
surface. Dismissing the labourers, he himself quickly cut into the soft earth
and removed the priceless finds. Or so he wrote, for no one witnessed this
sensational discovery.
Back at base, Schliemann spread out his ‘treasure’ of gold pendants and
earrings, chains, brooches and other unique ornaments. He seized the
opportunity and named it ‘Priam’s Treasure’, after the legendary Homeric
King of Troy, claiming it was the monarch’s property.
The discovery caused a sensation, but there are real questions as to
whether the treasure was in fact all found together. Many experts believe that
the Schliemanns assembled it from isolated gold finds made during the
excavations. Whatever the truth, Schliemann quietly smuggled all the gold
out of Turkey and hid the artefacts in a garden shed in Athens. He later
decked out Sophia in part of the treasure, like a Trojan princess. When the
Turks learned of the find through a German newspaper, they were furious.
The controversy over Heinrich’s smuggling was only settled with the
payment of a huge sum to the Ottoman government.
Troy and ‘Priam’s Treasure’ made Schliemann an international celebrity.
But many scholars were profoundly distrustful of him, some even accusing
him of buying the horde’s ornaments in Constantinople’s bazaars.
Having accomplished so much, many archaeologists would have taken
things easy, but not Heinrich Schliemann. For some time, he had had his eye
on the walled fortress of Mycenae in the north corner of the fertile plain of
Argos, southern Greece. Mycenae was said to be the palace and burial place
of the legendary King Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks at Troy. Schliemann
was firmly convinced of this, and in 1876 the Greek government reluctantly
gave him permission to excavate there.
 Once again, Schliemann operated on a huge scale: sixty-three men
cleared the famous citadel gate adorned with a lion sculpture; others worked
inside a circle of stone slabs (which Schliemann called ‘tombstones’). Even
before he had dug below them, Schliemann announced that he had found
Agamemnon’s burial place. After four months, the Schliemanns had
unearthed five graves containing fifteen bodies, each dripping with gold.
Until the discovery of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922,
the Mycenae burials were the greatest ever archaeological treasure. Several
gold death masks featuring beards and clipped moustaches came to light.
Hammered, embossed gold plates, delicate crowns and vessels, and dozens of
small ornaments emerged from the graves.
Schliemann basked in international glory and the entire world followed
the excavations. Two ruling monarchs and a prime minister visited the dig.
Schliemann announced that he had found the bodies of Homer’s heroes.
German scholars promptly dismissed the claims. By 1900, archaeologists like
Arthur Evans (see Chapter 18) had shown that Schliemann had, in fact,
discovered the Mycenaean civilisation, a magnificent Bronze Age society that
flourished around 1300 BC – so, later than Homeric times.
Heinrich Schliemann remains something of a mystery. He himself seems
to have thought he was God’s messenger, sent to bring the truth about Homer
to a waiting world. His admirers called him a genius. His enemies labelled
him an egocentric lunatic. He may have been single-minded in his pursuit of
wealth and Homer, but behind it all, both he and Sophia were gentle, kind
people.
The Mycenae discoveries turned Schliemann into a respected elder
statesman of archaeology. He returned to Hissarlik in 1878, this time with an
esteemed German scholar, Rudolf Virchow, who studied the geology of the
Trojan plain and mound. Schliemann was smart enough to realise that his
methods were outdated. German archaeologists at Olympia, the ancient site
of the Olympic Games, were revolutionising scientific excavation (see
Chapter 16). From 1882 to 1890, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, an archaeologist and
architect trained at Olympia, excavated alongside Schliemann. They worked
closely together and established that the sixth city, not the third, coincided
most closely with Homer’s Troy – if it had actually existed.
Meanwhile, Schliemann continued to excavate elsewhere. He dug into
another Mycenaean palace, on the summit of Tiryns, also on the Plain of
Argos. It was famous for its fortified walls made of colossal boulders. But he
was now paying closer attention to small finds like potsherds (fragments of
ceramics). Many of them bore geometric, painted patterns very similar to
those found on Crete.
Schliemann’s restless mind then turned to that island, home of King
Minos, ruler of Crete in Homer’s epics. Legend has it that Minos kept a bull-
human, the Minotaur, in a labyrinth beneath his palace. Theseus, son of the
King of Athens, was said to have killed the Minotaur with the help of
Minos’s daughter Ariadne, who guided him out of the labyrinth by means of
a thread. The story of Theseus and the Minotaur was the kind of historical
mystery that Schliemann found irresistible.
The palace allegedly lay at Knossos, a hillside near the capital, Heraklion.
With characteristic boldness, Schliemann tried to buy Knossos. Fortunately,
he was unsuccessful and returned to Athens in disgust, leaving the Minoan
civilisation for later – and better trained – archaeologists to investigate (see
Chapter 18).
A whole new generation of archaeologists was inspired by Schliemann’s
work and by his ability to make great discoveries. Schliemann died suddenly
in Italy, convinced that he had proved that what Homer wrote in his epics was
historical truth. In that he was wrong. But he did make thousands of people
aware of archaeology.
 CHAPTER 16

‘Organised Common Sense’

K arl Richard Lepsius (1810–84) became professor of Egyptology at the

University of Berlin in 1839. With his ordered and logical mind, and after
years of studying ancient Egypt – especially Jean-François Champollion’s
work on hieroglyphs – he was the ideal candidate for a job that required the
careful organisation of field research. Above all, Lepsius was a scholar who
collected both artefacts and data.
Three years after his appointment, he became leader of a huge German
expedition to the Nile, similar to those mounted by Napoléon’s scientists half
a century earlier. Then, Giovanni Belzoni and Bernardino Drovetti had
plundered Egypt (see Chapter 2). But Lepsius’s objectives were high-minded
and ambitious. He was to develop the first history and timescale for the
pharaohs, who were known only from Greek writings and fragmentary
ancient Egyptian records. With Lepsius, we come to the beginnings of a new
era in archaeology that stressed scientific recovery of finds and information
about the past.
Lepsius began in the Nile Delta in 1842, recording previously unknown
pyramids and tombs. He then moved upstream, deciphering inscriptions and
carrying out some of the first excavations along the Nile to pay attention to
different occupation levels. Lepsius returned to Berlin with 15,000 artefacts,
plaster casts of inscriptions, and a mass of information that laid the
foundations for serious Egyptology. Between 1849 and 1859, he published a
magnificent twelve-volume book on the expedition. This remains a standard
source on many sites that have now vanished, and is testament to what can be
achieved with an orderly mind.
Careful organisation, responsible, slow-moving excavation, and prompt,
detailed publication: Karl Lepsius’s report helped trigger a profound change
in Mediterranean archaeology. By modern standards, his excavation methods
were still rough and ready, but his carefully organised work was pioneering.
He surveyed many of the sites he visited and recorded the exact positions of
artefacts – something almost unheard of in his day.
Lepsius was well aware of the urgent need for better standards of
excavation. He spent much of his later career training a new generation of
archaeologists, who were as much concerned with reconstruction and
preservation as they were with digging. One of those was Alexander Conze
(1831–1914), who was professor of archaeology at the University of Vienna
from 1869 to 1877. Another well-organised fieldworker, Conze excavated on
the island of Samothrace in the northern Aegean Sea as Heinrich Schliemann
was digging into Troy. But while Schliemann excavated as though he were
digging potatoes, Conze went to Samothrace to answer important historical
questions, not in search of goodies.
Conze’s focus was the shrine of the Cabiri, rather mysterious supernatural
beings closely associated with the Greek fire god Hephaistos, who protected
sailors. In ancient times, a big festival honouring them drew visitors from all
over the Aegean every July, with a sacred play that involved a ritual wedding.
The sanctuary itself occupied three terraces on a mountain slope. A winged
statue, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, discovered there in 1863, became
famous when it was moved to the Louvre in Paris.
Conze excavated the sanctuary in 1873 and 1876. He cleared several
structures using advanced excavation techniques that were unknown at the
time. His main concern was architecture. An architect was on site throughout
the dig, while a photographer recorded the excavations. Two lavishly
produced volumes detailed the work there.
As Conze’s excavations drew to a close, the Germans turned to Olympia,
site of the Olympic Games. Another carefully trained archaeologist, Ernst
Curtius (1814–96), conducted meticulously planned excavations. In an
important gesture of respect, the archaeologists gave up all claims to the finds
and built a special museum on the site. Between 1875 and 1881, they cleared
the Olympic stadium, with its runners’ starting blocks and judges’ seats. The
excavators uncovered nearby temples with columns that had been shattered
by ancient earthquakes, as well as numerous small shrines and lesser
buildings. An architect and photographer were always in attendance; records
were accurate and complete; and once again the excavations were published
in comprehensive detail.
Both Conze and Curtius set new standards for archaeological excavation,
and were well ahead of their time. They also paid attention to all finds, both
large and small. The Germans realised that the very act of archaeological
excavation destroyed sites permanently, which made accurate record-keeping
essential.
Curtius and Conze were not alone, for others were increasingly disturbed
by the widespread destruction. Unfortunately, the sponsors of excavations
were anxious to get exciting results, not necessarily to fund the carefully
organised research that recorded even minor details. Much archaeology was
still in the hands of people with an interest in the past and some private
money, but no formal training. Then, just as Curtius finished his work at
Olympia, an English general with a passion for artefacts received a fabulous
inheritance. He now devoted much of his time to prehistoric sites on his land,
and in the process helped revolutionise archaeological excavation.
Augustus Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) was an unlikely excavator. A
conservative Victorian gentleman, he combined soldiering with being a
landowner. In 1880, as a little-known army officer named Lane Fox, he
inherited from a rich uncle great wealth and a huge estate at Cranborne Chase
in southern England – on condition that he adopt the surname Pitt Rivers.
Lane Fox’s inheritance brought him nearly 11,000 hectares and the leisure to
do whatever he wanted.
Pitt Rivers was a formidable man. Ramrod straight, he was always
formally dressed, even on an excavation. His military speciality had been
firearms, and this led him to spend years researching how these and other
artefacts had developed over time.
The general’s marriage to Alice Stanley, a baron’s daughter, drew him
into aristocratic circles, with connections to various intellectuals. Among
other things, he proved an expert conference organiser, and this brought him
into contact with leading thinkers. He fell under the influence of Charles
Darwin’s ideas and became obsessed with the notion that, like biological
organisms, human tools had evolved. Such evolution produced more efficient
and usable tool kits.
With his almost unlimited resources, Pitt Rivers could acquire large
collections of objects from non-Western societies in all parts of the world. He
founded two museums in his lifetime. The first was the Pitt Rivers Museum
in Oxford, which still flourishes. The second was on his estate. Both were
intended to teach what he called the ‘processes of gradual development’.
The move to excavation was a logical one for a scholarly, well-read man.
Pitt Rivers would certainly have heard of the work of Lepsius and other
German excavators who stressed the importance of studying changing
architecture and artefacts through time. Pitt Rivers’ expertise in military
organisation made carefully arranged and logically planned excavations quite
straightforward.
The general would set up his excavations from scratch. Everything was
scrupulously organised and would proceed with military-style discipline.
Small teams of trained workers did the actual digging, while six supervisors
oversaw the work. They had two assistants – one a draughtsman, the other a
model maker. Comprehensive records documented each layer and the finds
discovered in them.
Pitt Rivers was a strict taskmaster, who insisted that the exact location of
every find, however trivial – even animal bones and seeds – must be
recorded. His workers were nervous whenever he visited the dig! Pitt Rivers
only dealt with his supervisors, or his ‘clerks’ as he called them. His eyes
would dart to and fro, and he never missed even the smallest detail – an
untidy pile of pottery, some tools lying too close to the trench. He would
visit, look at some finds or glance through the site notebooks, his black hat
jammed firmly on his head in the wind. Then he would ride off, usually
without a word.
 He began with Bronze Age burial mounds, then moved on to Winklebury
Camp, an Iron Age fort in Hampshire, southern England, where he cut cross-
sections of the defences to date the earthworks on the basis of the objects
found in them. In 1884, he dug a Roman military camp, several hectares of
low banks, humps and hollows. Here he had his workers clear off the topsoil,
then dig out the dark irregularities in the white chalk subsoil to trace the
outlines of ditches and other structures such as hearths and pits. No one had
used such discolorations before to identify ancient buildings.
Throughout each excavation, the general thought in three dimensions,
something that is a cornerstone of today’s methods. He excavated each site
down to bedrock, recording each layer and noting human disturbances of the
soil.
But he dug narrow trenches, which were filled in as he progressed across
the site. Inevitably, then, some features were missed, because larger areas
were not exposed at the same time. Nowadays, large trenches, capable of
uncovering major features such as hut foundations, are a fundamental feature
of any excavation to study the layout of an ancient settlement. But Pitt Rivers
was interested in ancient technologies and culture change to the exclusion of
virtually everything else. Thus he included food remains, but missed
postholes and other evidence of structures.
In 1893, he investigated Wor Barrow, a long Stone Age burial mound that
contained six prehistoric burials. Earlier excavators had simply dug carelessly
into burial mounds, then removed the human remains and grave furniture. Pitt
Rivers excavated the entire mound, including sixteen skeletons. He left a row
of earth pillars down the centre, which kept the layers intact, so that they
could be recorded accurately. Exposing all the ground under the mound
revealed a rectangular outline of discolorations in the underlying chalk over a
large area. These were traces of the wooden uprights of a large building that
had once protected six burials.
When originally dug by the builders, the Wor Barrow ditches were deep,
with steep edges. An archaeologist of infinite curiosity, Pitt Rivers left the
excavated ditches exposed for four years. Then he re-excavated them to see
how chalk ditches broke down and filled with sediment after they are
abandoned. This venture into experimental archaeology was a major advance
on any approach seen theretofore. Indeed, it was not repeated in England
until the 1960s, when a team of archaeologists built a copy of a prehistoric
earthwork to study its decay over centuries.
Pitt Rivers had the funds to publish his excavations in a series of
handsome monographs that are now collectors’ items. He had no patience
with archaeologists who dug to find artefacts rather than information.
Science, he said, was ‘organised common sense’. So was the logical way in
which he conducted his excavations. His contemporaries considered him
eccentric and were put off by his energy, his rigid behaviour and his
enquiring mind. Even in death, he was unusual: he was cremated, rather than
buried – something almost unheard of in 1900.
Almost no one followed up on Pitt Rivers’ work until the 1920s. With his
military background and passion for organisation, he developed excavation as
a highly disciplined process of discovery. But the general was self-taught, as
were other excavators in Britain and elsewhere. Except for the Germans in
the Mediterranean, archaeology was still a casual business – you learned as
you went along. Only a few archaeologists even attempted to train students.
And those who did were looking for people who were prepared to work hard,
not young men seeking adventure.
According to J.P. Droop, a little-known British archaeologist who wrote a
manual on excavation in 1915, excavation was men’s work. And on the
whole it was, except for a handful of talented women (see Chapter 19). To be
an archaeologist near to home required curiosity, at least some interest in the
past, and patience. To work overseas with local people called for the same
patience and an ability to supervise large numbers of workers.
If you were lucky, you served an apprenticeship under an experienced
excavator. He might not be a good digger, but you learned by watching – and
from the mistakes he made. A few better digs, especially on Roman sites,
adopted some of Pitt Rivers’ ideas. But these were still crude excavations by
today’s standards.
Young Leonard Woolley, a British archaeologist who later became
internationally famous for his excavations of royal graves at Ur in Iraq, found
himself in charge of a major Roman excavation even though he had
absolutely no experience (see Chapter 20).
Almost everyone who was an excavator learned on the job. There were no
field schools or courses in archaeological methods. But with their structured
minds and organisation, Conze, Curtius and Pitt Rivers led the way.
 CHAPTER 17

The Small and Unspectacular

In the 1880s, Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza near Cairo attracted both

archaeologists and the eccentric. Imaginative astronomers talked of them as
ancient calendars that used the heavens to measure time. Strange visitors with
theories about ancient Egyptian units of measurement, such as the cubit,
clustered around the Great Pyramid with tape measures. Some even
attempted to chip away the edges of boulders to make them correspond to
their calculations! Fortunately, two members of the Petrie family of English
surveyors became interested in Giza.
The Petrie family had a long history of casual scientific inquiry. Flinders
Petrie (1853–1942) was largely self-educated and something of an eccentric.
He learned surveying and geometry from his father, and in 1872 the pair of
them made the first precise survey of Stonehenge. They always talked of
surveying the pyramids accurately, a task no one had attempted before. In
1880, at the age of twenty-seven, Flinders Petrie left for Egypt to survey the
Pyramids of Giza, just as General Pitt Rivers was starting his excavations at
Cranborne Chase.
Within a week of his arrival in Egypt, Petrie was settled comfortably in a
rock-cut tomb near Giza. His survey took two years to complete, during
which time he set up accurate survey points and studied the construction of
the pyramids. His work attracted numerous visitors, among them Pitt Rivers.
Petrie thoroughly enjoyed himself, living simply and padding around the
pyramids in bare feet, well clear of the tourists.
His first book, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, appeared in 1883 to
universal acclaim. His measurements provided a new basis for the study of
the pyramids. At the time, Egyptology was in turmoil: it lacked precision and
looting was commonplace. Sickened by the destruction, Petrie decided to turn
from surveying to excavation. Influential scholars urged the Egypt
Exploration Fund to send him to work in the Nile Delta, excavating cities.
From the beginning, there was order and method to his work, although he
used huge numbers of workers and proceeded very speedily by modern
standards. He employed trenchers, shaft sinkers and stone cleaners, supported
by gangs of earth carriers. Work started at half past five in the morning and
ended at half past six in the evening, with a noon break in the heat of the day.
Unlike his predecessors, Petrie was always on site. He solved the problem of
looting by paying his labourers well and by providing housing to ensure their
loyalty.
By 1885, Petrie was operating at Naukratis, a commercial centre that had
a powerful monopoly on trade between Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean
after the seventh century BC. There were 107 men working on the site, with
only two European supervisors. They moved tons of earth as they cleared part
of a temple and a great enclosure built by the pharaoh Psusennes I of the XXI
Dynasty (1047–1001 BC). Petrie also recovered enormous quantities of
pottery and baskets of papyri. Some of these he mounted between glass and
had translated. This was when he realised that small objects were of great
importance. Earlier excavators had largely ignored them.
With his Naukratis excavations, Petrie established a routine that he
followed for years. All the finds, however small, were shipped to England. A
report on the excavations appeared promptly at the end of each winter season
of excavation, ahead of the next season. He paid his workers fixed sums for
their finds, thereby keeping important artefacts from falling into the hands of
local dealers.
It was fortunate that he did so. For at Naukratis, many of the objects
buried in foundation trenches were easily portable coins with dates, or
inscribed ornaments that could be dated precisely. Using these, he could then
date the surrounding structures. This was a major innovation that had never
before been tried in Egypt.
In 1887, Petrie became an independent excavator. He moved from the
Nile Delta to the fertile Faiyum depression west of the Nile. There he
tunnelled into the pyramid of the XII Dynasty pharaoh Amenemhat at
Hawara (around 1840 BC).
That excavation was unsuccessful, in that he found nothing of any
significance, but he became interested in a nearby Roman cemetery dating to
AD 100–250 that was filled with mummies adorned with vivid portraits of
their owners, painted in coloured wax on wooden panels. The pictures had
once hung on house walls and had been lashed to the mummies after death.
Petrie found so many that he complained that his tent with filled with stores,
cooking utensils – and mummies stored under his bed for safety.
Back in London, he mounted a major exhibition of his finds, including
some portraits, in the same Egyptian Hall where Giovanni Belzoni had staged
his exhibition some seventy-five years earlier (see Chapter 2). An elderly
visitor to the display recalled the original exhibition and the tall figure of
Belzoni. Large crowds turned out to view the finds, which contributed to
making Egyptology a respected and popular science.
Season after season, Petrie returned to the Nile. In 1888, he investigated a
worker’s community at Kahun in the Faiyum depression. This XII Dynasty
settlement had housed the families of those building the nearby El-Lahun
pyramid of Pharaoh Senusret II (1897–1878 BC). The compact, walled town
was virtually intact. Petrie cleared numerous houses, recovering many
domestic artefacts. These enabled him to reconstruct the existence of an
ordinary person at the time – a life of constant, often brutally hard work.
Apart from work in the fields, many commoners laboured on public
works for meagre rations. Their skeletons show clear evidence of hard labour.
Theirs were lives of anonymous drudgery: they supported the state and its
leaders, but to all intents and purposes were invisible. Unlike most of his
contemporaries, who were more interested in large monuments and tombs,
Petrie realised that ancient Egyptian civilisation was a complex society that
depended on the toil of thousands of humble workers.
Next Petrie turned his attention to the small XVIII Dynasty town of
Ghurab near Memphis, which dated back to around 1500 BC. After noticing
some unusual painted pot fragments on the surface, he cleared a small walled
enclosure close to the temple. He soon found more of these fragments in
houses. The mysterious finds turned out to be Mycenaean vessels from
Greece, similar to those unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae.
Three years later, Petrie himself visited Mycenae, where he recognised
vessels imported from Egypt that dated to about the same period as his
Ghurab finds. This was a classic example of the cross-dating method that
Oscar Montelius had relied on generations earlier – using objects of known
age from one area to date sites elsewhere (see Chapter 11). Petrie declared
that the later stages of Mycenaean civilisation dated to between 1500 and
1200 BC.
Petrie had a profound knowledge of European and eastern Mediterranean
archaeology. He built a reputation based on accurate plans, good excavations,
comprehensive records and prompt publication. This made him almost
unique among archaeologists of the day and secured him access to a circle of
knowledgeable scholars, whose interests ranged far wider than their own
excavations.
From Ghurab, Petrie moved to el-Amarna, the capital of Pharaoh
Akhenaten in Upper Egypt. This king was a controversial figure, who
abandoned worship of the powerful sun god Amun in favour of a new form
of sun worship involving the solar disc, Aten. Akhenaten moved his capital
downstream to el-Amarna, away from Thebes, in 1349 BC. On his death, this
capital was abandoned, providing Petrie with a unique opportunity to
examine a sacred city. His large-scale excavations uncovered the royal
palace’s decorated pavements and wall paintings. Tourists flocked to see
these and trampled over the local villagers’ fields during the growing season.
One farmer was so infuriated that he smashed the priceless floors.
One of Petrie’s most important discoveries came when he located the spot
where a woman had found some tablets written in cuneiform, the
international diplomatic script of the time. He excavated a chamber and two
pits filled with tablets in what became known as ‘The House of
Correspondence of Pharaoh’.
 The 300 or more Amarna tablets provide an archive of Egyptian dealings
with the little-known Hittite civilisation in Turkey from about 1360 BC into
Akhenaten’s reign. There are letters about the exchange of gifts, about
alliances and diplomatic marriages. And there is correspondence with the
unstable patchwork of states to the east, with minor rulers promising to kneel
before the pharaoh seven times – and then seven times again. Egyptian
officials were also corresponding with independent kingdoms like Alashiya
on Cyprus, an important source of copper.
Then, as now, the Middle East was in constant turmoil. There were plots
and counterplots, rebellious kings, and military campaigns, usually
accompanied by political grandstanding. To describe the archive as priceless
is a huge understatement!
Petrie encouraged young archaeologists to excavate with him, and he
trained up a generation of future Egyptologists. Among them was a young
Englishman named Howard Carter, an artist with the Egypt Exploration
Fund. Nothing could have prepared Carter for the excavation camp, where he
had to build his own mud-brick house and roof it with reeds. There was no
bedding, but newspaper worked quite well. Empty food cans stored small
finds. Newcomers received a week’s supervision and were then left on their
own with a few trained workers. But Carter flourished and worked at the
Great Temple of the sun god Aten and elsewhere in the city. His experience
under Petrie would prove invaluable in later years (see Chapter 21).
In 1892, without any university degree, Petrie became the first professor
of Egyptology at University College London. He promptly celebrated by
discovering Predynastic Egypt – societies without hieroglyphic script that had
flourished along the Nile before the time of the pharaohs. This occurred when
he stumbled upon a vast cemetery near the town of Naqada in Upper Egypt,
filled with skeletons accompanied by simple clay vessels. In 1894 alone,
Petrie excavated 2,000 burials!
As always, Petrie developed a system for his cemetery excavations. As
soon as boys had detected soft patches in the sand and had traced the edge of
the burial pit, he moved them on. Then ordinary workers cleared soil away
from the pots. Finally, expert excavators with a delicate touch cleared around
the skeleton and pots, before leaving the final work to Ali Muhammad es
Suefi, Petrie’s burial expert, who did nothing but clear graves.
It was all very well that these pots were nice to look at, but there were no
inscriptions or papyri to provide a chronology. However, similar jars came to
light at other sites nearby, like Diospolis Parva. Eventually Petrie had
excavated enough graves for him to be able to study the gradual changes in
vessel shape. The handles were especially useful for classification purposes,
changing as they did as time passed from functional grips into mere painted
squiggles.
Petrie arranged the finds into a series of stages categorising grave
furniture groups, starting with Stage 30 (ST30) (he assumed that he had not
found the earliest, which would have been ST1). ST80 linked the sequence to
the time of the first pharaoh, in about 3000 BC. ‘Sequence dating’ was one of
Petrie’s most important contributions to archaeology. It was, of course, no
substitute for dating sites in years, but that was not to come until the arrival
of radiocarbon dating (see Chapter 27). Nevertheless, Petrie introduced an
ordered sequence for the history of Egypt before the pharaohs.
Flinders Petrie’s range of work and his legacy were extraordinary.
Unfortunately, however, he was tactless and quarrelsome. His lack of formal
education would often lead him to insist that he, and he alone, was right –
hardly a positive quality in an archaeologist. In 1926, as new and more
restrictive regulations came into force in Egypt, Petrie moved his operations
to Palestine. There he continued his work until the Second World War began,
dying in Jerusalem at the age of eighty-nine.
During his long years along the Nile, Petrie brought order to excavation,
established a firm chronology for ancient Egypt, and brought small,
inconspicuous objects to the forefront.
 CHAPTER 18

The Palace of the Minotaur

I t was 1894. The antiques dealers in the Athens city market knew the
Englishman well. A short, aggressive man who spoke fluent Greek, he would
arrive every morning and walk slowly from stall to stall, sorting through
small trays of jewels and seals. Sometimes he would pick up a tiny seal and
peer at the almost invisible script in the sunlight. The dealers found him a
tough customer. He would haggle and haggle, sometimes walking away, until
the price was right. As he wrapped his purchases in paper and slipped them
into his leather shoulder bag, he would ask questions. Where did the seals
come from? Which site yielded the seals? The answer was always Crete.
Arthur John Evans (1851–1941) is the only archaeologist ever to discover
a civilisation thanks to his eyesight. He could read even the tiniest letters
without spectacles or a magnifying glass. Like a terrier, Evans followed the
archaeological scent to Crete in 1894. The island’s major city, Heraklion, was
a treasure trove of Cretan gems and seals. Most came from an olive tree-
covered hillside named Knossos.
Evans combed the Knossos hillside for hours, collecting artefacts and
copying exotic marks on potsherds. A stone vessel from Knossos was
identical to those from Mycenae, and so there was clearly a connection
between the two. Without further ado, Evans decided to buy Knossos. He was
not the first archaeologist to try: Heinrich Schliemann had done so, believing
it to be the palace of the legendary King Minos. But whereas Schliemann had
failed, Evans succeeded, although it took him two years of bargaining.
As Evans was to discover, Knossos was indeed the major palace on Crete,
and perhaps the home of legendary King Minos, if he ever existed. Evans had
no interest in speculation about Minos, and nor did he believe Schliemann’s
claims about Troy and Mycenae (see Chapter 15). He was no self-taught
archaeologist out for sensational discoveries, but rather a scholar in search of
reliable information.
Arthur Evans had been plunged into archaeology from childhood. He was
the son of Sir John Evans, a wealthy English papermaker. Sir John had
supported Boucher de Perthes’s claims in the Somme Valley (see Chapter 7)
and was an expert on ancient stone tools, as well as on Greek and Roman
coins. Encouraged by his father, Arthur was drawing coins by the age of
seven. And three years later, he started accompanying John on archaeological
trips.
As a student, Arthur was always restless, complaining that his Oxford
University lecturers were dull. He spent his summers wandering through
Europe on foot and fell in love with the people of its southeast in the Balkans.
Known locally as the ‘mad Englishman’, Evans dabbled in journalism and
reported on political unrest in the Austrian Empire so effectively that he was
jailed for six weeks. The authorities expelled him from the empire, and he
returned to England in search of a career.
For all his political reporting, Evans was devoted to archaeology. He
spent every spare moment collecting artefacts of every kind. He had inherited
an instinct for style from his father, and he acquired an encyclopaedic
knowledge of archaeology.
In 1884, he became keeper of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, a post he
held for twenty-five years. This was a neglected institution, but the new
keeper reorganised the displays and acquired numerous artefacts. He spent
most of his time in the Mediterranean, however, collecting and making
geological investigations. His assistant would inform visitors that the keeper
was ‘in Bohemia’. The university did not seem to mind, perhaps because he
was less of a nuisance when he was absent.
No one knows when Evans first became aware of Crete. His research
started with objects from Mycenae on the Greek mainland. This was such an
important trading centre around 1350 BC that artefacts had arrived there from
all over Greece and the Aegean. As he examined the hundreds of minute
seals and engraved gemstones, Evans realised that the Mycenaeans had their
own writing. Symbols like those scratched on Mycenaean pots came from as
far afield as Egypt. The search for the unknown script brought Evans to the
Athens market, and from there to Crete.
While waiting to close the Knossos deal, Evans had explored the length
and breadth of Crete on a mule. He had found seals like those at Mycenae for
sale in even tiny village markets and realised that there were at least two
writing systems that had belonged to the great civilisation that lay under his
feet at Knossos. In fact, there were four!
The palace became his property just as the Cretans rebelled against their
Turkish masters. Evans helped the rebels, providing food and medicine at his
own expense. The victorious Prince George, the new ruler of Crete, was so
grateful to him that an excavation permit for Knossos arrived within a few
months. The excavations began in March 1900.
Evans knew a great deal about artefacts and archaeology, but his digging
experience amounted to little more than a few small excavations. Now he was
to tackle a palace. Fortunately, he had the sense to hire an excavation
assistant, a Scot named Duncan Mackenzie, who was to work at Knossos for
more than thirty years. Mackenzie managed the workers in fluent Greek with
a Scots accent. Evans decided where to dig, examined every find, and kept
detailed notes. He also engaged architect Theodore Fyfe to prepare drawings.
Unlike Schliemann’s digs, this was a carefully planned excavation from
the start. On the second day, Evans found himself gazing at a house with
faded wall paintings. The site became a maze of rooms, passages and
foundations. There was nothing Greek or Roman about Knossos, which was
clearly earlier than Mycenae. Soon the workforce numbered 100 men, all
clearing the palace rooms.
Thousands of artefacts emerged from the foundations. Great storage jars,
hundreds of small cups and even a complex drainage system came to light.
Best of all, Evans had dozens of clay tablets with writing to test his
microscopic vision. In April 1900, a magnificent wall painting of a cupbearer
with flowing locks and a wasp waist emerged from the soil. Mackenzie
carefully backed it with plaster for removal to the Heraklion museum.
Joyfully, Evans announced the discovery of the ancient Minoan
civilisation of Crete, although King Minos and Theseus were but myths. The
Knossos excavations soon covered 1 hectare. In April 1900, the men
unearthed a room where there was still a ceremonial bath, together with a
stone throne. Stone benches lined the walls, with fine paintings of wingless
griffins behind them. This may have been where a priestess appeared,
representing the mother goddess, who was believed to oversee the land.
Evans sent for Émile Gilliéron, a Swiss artist who had long experience of
ancient inscriptions. The two men pieced together the Knossos wall
paintings. There were olives in flower, a young boy gathering saffron (a spice
collected from crocus flowers), and solemn processions on the march. A great
painted plaster relief of a charging bull haunted Evans’ mind. Bulls appeared
everywhere: in frescoes, on vases, on gems, as figurines. He was beginning to
form a picture of a long-vanished civilisation.
Evans began each morning by checking the previous day’s work. Page
after page in his tiny handwriting documented every layer, every find and
every room. Day after day, the palace became ever more complex. It was an
extraordinary structure. You entered the great central courtyard through a
large pillared hall. Rows of narrow storage rooms lay west of the courtyard,
each opening onto a narrow passageway. Many had been lined with lead to
house valuables as well as huge grain stocks. Evans estimated that nearly
100,000 litres of olive oil were once stored at Knossos.
Two imposing stairways led to a second storey of state rooms above the
shrines. A western palace entrance led through a paved courtyard, past huge
pictures of young men leaping over bulls. It took Evans and Mackenzie
months to decipher the royal chambers with their plastered walls, within
which remains of wooden thrones were found. Knossos was far more than a
palace: it was a commercial and religious centre, and a workshop where
craftspeople fashioned everything from pots to metal objects and stone
vessels.
Knossos absorbed the rest of Evans’ life. When he inherited great wealth,
he embarked on a partial (and somewhat imaginative) reconstruction of some
of the buildings to give visitors an impression of the palace. Unfortunately,
his reconstructions used concrete, which is impossible to remove without
damaging original structures. He was gambling with the past. Any form of
archaeological reconstruction is difficult to carry out successfully. How can
you be sure that the buildings looked the way you think they did? What was
the purpose of each room? What were the different levels of the palace used
for?
Evans and Gilliéron wrestled with a set of buildings that were a maze
when in use – and even more of one after excavation. On a recent visit, I
quickly became confused, and I came to realise why Greek legends refer to a
labyrinth: Knossos was not a well-planned structure!
Evans and Gilliéron had a somewhat romantic vision of the Minoans.
They thought of the civilisation as colourful, carefree and peaceful. The
archaeologist and the architect produced their reconstruction using concrete
pillars to replace wooden columns. Thanks to draughtsman Theodore Fyfe’s
accurate drawings, the workers rebuilt walls and the great stairway at the
heart of the palace, even as excavations continued.
Evans spent much time painstakingly restoring the wall paintings from
small fragments in the trenches, like a huge jigsaw puzzle. You get a
somewhat romantic impression of the Minoans, and undoubtedly Evans
added imaginary details to scenes like the bull dance. In one case, he even
reconstructed a single kinglike figure instead of the three people preserved in
the fragments. These were the mistakes of a man obsessed with Minoan
civilisation.
Between 1900 and 1935, Arthur Evans commuted between Knossos and
Oxford. He built himself a villa on site where he studied the vast collections
of pottery from the excavations. His expertise with artefacts enabled him to
identify occasional Egyptian finds that he matched with vessels from the
Nile. In addition, English Egyptologist Flinders Petrie had unearthed
Mycenaean pottery near Memphis that he dated to between 1500 and 1200 BC
(see Chapter 17). Using Petrie’s findings to cross-date (the technique used by
Oscar Montelius), Evans dated the beginnings of Minoan civilisation to about
3000 BC. It was at the height of its power between 2000 and 1250 BC. But
invading Mycenaeans from the mainland finally destroyed the palace.
Years of work produced a magnificent narrative of Minoan civilisation,
presented in full in The Palace of Minos, published between 1921 and 1935.
In this masterwork, Evans put the palace at the centre of a chronological
survey of Minoan civilisation. Stage by stage, he built up his story. In the
final volume, he bade farewell to his beloved Knossos. He had but one regret:
he had failed to decipher the four scripts that emerged from the excavations.
Arthur Evans may have been a romantic who tended to dwell on the
positive aspects of Minoan life. But we are fortunate that this remarkable
archaeologist with microscopic eyesight had the sense to rely on skilled
experts. Nevertheless, the vision of the Minoans and of Knossos was all his.
Every time I visit Knossos, I look around in awe at what Arthur Evans
achieved. New excavations, deciphered scripts and radiocarbon dating have,
of course, modified his portrait of an almost forgotten civilisation. Today, we
know more about the lesser Minoan palaces and can imagine some of the
complex political and social relationships that lay below the colourful
surface.
Few archaeologists describe a civilisation from scratch, without written
records, almost single-handed and to a high scientific standard. But Arthur
Evans did just that. He died in 1941 at the age of ninety. By that time,
archaeology had changed beyond all recognition.
 CHAPTER 19

Not ‘Men’s Work’

A ll the archaeologists we have met so far have been men. For quite a long
time, archaeology was a male pursuit. But two pioneering women, Gertrude
Bell and Harriet Boyd Hawes, proved that it was not just men’s work. They
blazed a trail for the women archaeologists of today.
The two women were complete opposites: one was a solitary desert
traveller, the other an excavator. Most male archaeologists at the time
believed that women were most useful as clerks or librarians, yet today many
of the world’s finest archaeologists are women.
Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) was the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire
ironmaster. In 1886, at a time when few women attended any university, she
went to Oxford. She was a brilliant student and graduated with a degree in
modern history. Moreover, she emerged with a passion for travel and a
reputation for speaking her mind. In 1892, she visited Tehran, Persia – at the
time a remote destination. She then travelled extensively and took up
mountaineering – very much a male pastime – becoming one of the leading
female climbers of the day.
Gertrude was a talented linguist, and in 1899 she moved to Jerusalem for
seven months to improve her Arabic. From there she travelled farther afield,
to the temples at Palmyra in Syria and across the desert to Petra. She
discovered the discomforts of desert travel – black beetles and muddy
drinking water. As she chattered away to sheikhs and storekeepers in her
now-fluent Arabic, she began to understand the complex and sometimes
violent politics of these arid lands. This was also where she developed an
interest in archaeology. She was never an excavator: she surveyed remote
sites, photographed them and wrote about them.
After taking more than 600 photographs of ancient monuments, Gertrude
Bell spent the next few years travelling in Egypt, Europe and Morocco, and
studying archaeology in Rome and Paris. In 1902, she worked on excavations
in western Turkey. Then in 1905 she went to survey and study monuments in
Syria and Cilicia (Turkey) dating from the Byzantine Empire (the eastern
continuation of the old Roman Empire; it finally fell to the Turks in 1453).
Her travel book, The Desert and the Sown, was published in 1907, and her
report on the churches in the Byzantine city of Birbinkilise – most of which
no longer exist – established her as both a travel writer and a scholar.
Gertrude Bell was, above all, a desert archaeologist. Tough and fiercely
independent, her primary interest was architecture and little-known but
important sites from the time after the Roman Empire collapsed in the west
(in AD 476). With Birbinkilise behind her, she now set off from Aleppo in
Syria across the Syrian Desert to the Euphrates. She travelled through
dangerous country with a small military escort. Her destination was the
Abbasid castle of Ukhaidir, a huge rectangular fort built in AD 775. (The
Abbasid Dynasty, descended from an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad,
governed the Islamic Empire from AD 750 until about 1258.)
For four days, she photographed and surveyed the fort, which no one had
described before. Her soldier guards insisted on clutching their rifles as they
held her measuring tapes. ‘I can’t persuade them to put the damnable things
down,’ Bell complained. She did not excavate, but contented herself with a
general description of Ukhaidir’s architecture. This was a major contribution,
for Ukhaidir was virtually unknown. Her most famous book, Amurath to
Amurath, which appeared in 1911, described the site for the general public
and attracted much praise. Her academic report on Ukhaidir was published
three years later and is still a principal source.
She was soon off again – to Baghdad and Babylon, and then on to Assur
in the north, where German archaeologists Walter Andrae and Conrad
Preusser were excavating the Assyrian capital. Expert archaeologists working
on Greek sites had trained both men and she admired their careful
excavations. They taught her how to use flashlights when photographing dark
interiors.
On her way home, Bell stopped at the Carchemish excavations in
northern Syria, where she found British archaeologists Reginald Campbell
Thompson and T.E. Lawrence (later to become famous for his desert exploits
in the First World War, which earned him the name ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ –
see Chapter 20). With her usual bluntness, she told them that their
excavations were ‘prehistoric’ compared with those of the Germans.
Campbell Thompson and Lawrence were not best pleased and tried to
impress her with their archaeological expertise. They failed. The Carchemish
workers jeered as she left. Years later, she learned that Lawrence had told
them she was too plain to marry.
By the outbreak of the First World War, Gertrude Bell had completed
major survey work, but she also had vital knowledge of Arabia and the
neighbouring regions. Her briefings for British Intelligence were so valuable
that in 1915 she was posted to the Arab Intelligence Bureau in Cairo. A new
chapter in her life began a year later when she was transferred to Basra, at the
head of the Persian Gulf, to study local tribal politics. She was fascinated by
Arab culture, became a champion of Arab independence and served as an
expert adviser to local British officials.
Once the war ended, numerous foreign expeditions sought to return to
Mesopotamia to investigate Eridu (said to be the earliest city in the world)
and Ur (where the biblical Abraham, founder of Judaism, had lived). But
times were changing and no longer could foreign archaeologists dig where
they liked. Nor could they export all their finds. Governments were now also
insisting on excavation permits, issued to qualified archaeologists.
The government of the new state known as Iraq was rightly concerned.
Gertrude Bell was the only person in Baghdad with any knowledge of
archaeological survey and excavation, and so she was appointed director of
antiquities. No one expected her to excavate, but her experience of site
surveys and her knowledge of archaeologists were invaluable. She also wrote
laws governing the treatment of antiquities and organised the Iraq Museum.
The new laws required all excavation finds to be divided between the
foreigners (usually a museum) and Iraq. Bell was a tough negotiator and the
Iraq Museum collections grew rapidly. In March 1926, the government gave
the museum a permanent home in Baghdad, where Bell displayed finds from
all the major excavations, including the German digs at Babylon (see Chapter
20).
Gertrude Bell was rather a pushy woman, with strong opinions about
local politics. She did not suffer fools gladly and she made numerous
enemies. Government officials came to distrust her. Increasingly isolated, she
buried herself ever deeper in archaeological matters. Overworked and in poor
health, Bell committed suicide in July 1926. All Baghdad attended her
funeral.
Though Bell’s intelligence and archaeological learning were legendary,
she does not enjoy a good reputation in Iraq today: many Iraqis believe she
gave too much away to the foreign expeditions. There may be some truth in
that, but Bell always tended to put the interests of archaeology and science
above purely national goals; and at the time there were no facilities in Iraq to
preserve the delicate objects. Nevertheless, the Iraq Museum stands as an
enduring memorial to a unique and important figure in the history of
archaeology.
The feisty Harriet Boyd Hawes (1871–1945), the first woman to excavate
on Crete, was digging at the time Gertrude Bell was travelling. The daughter
of a firefighting equipment manufacturer, Harriet Boyd’s mother died early.
With four older brothers, she learned to stand up for herself. She started
attending Smith College in Massachusetts in 1881, just as Gertrude Bell
entered Oxford. A lecture at the college about ancient Egypt by the English
traveller, novelist and archaeological writer Amelia Edwards sparked in
Harriet an interest in ancient civilisations. After graduating, she worked as a
teacher, eventually saving enough money to visit Europe in 1895.
While in Greece, Harriet developed a keen interest in the ancient Greeks.
She returned the following year to study at the British School of Archaeology
in Athens. Between the balls, dinners and other social engagements, she
found time to study ancient and modern Greek and to visit archaeological
sites. She also caused a stir by cycling around Athens.
War between Greece and Turkey broke out in 1897. Harriet immediately
volunteered for Red Cross duty in central Greece. Tending to the wounded
under fire gave her first-hand experience of the horrors of war. Hospital
conditions were dreadful: the men lay so close to one another that dressing
their wounds was near impossible. After the war, she stayed on to nurse
victims of a typhoid epidemic. The local people never forgot the debt they
owed her.
Back in the United States, Harriet won a research fellowship to study
inscriptions at ancient Eleusis, near Athens. She wanted to excavate, but the
American School of Classical Studies in Athens was scandalised: it
considered digging ‘men’s work’. Instead, a war refugee from Crete
suggested she should dig on that island, where almost no one was working.
So Harriet contacted Arthur Evans, who was about to start digging at
Knossos, and the Oxford University archaeologist David Hogarth, who was
already excavating on Crete. Sophia Schliemann, Heinrich’s widow, also
arranged for her to meet other important archaeologists passing through
Athens.
Encouraged by these influential backers, and defying those who thought
her adventure scandalous, Harriet arrived on Crete at a time when there were
just 19 kilometres of paved roads on the island. Like everyone else,
archaeologists travelled by mule. Evans and Hogarth advised her to talk to
the local people as she explored a stretch of the north coast. Word of this
unusual solitary female traveller spread through the local villages. A Cretan
schoolmaster took Harriet to Mirampelou Bay. There she found a maze of
partially exposed stone walls, numerous painted potsherds and traces of a
narrow, stone-paved alleyway.
The next day, she returned with a crew of workers, who exposed blocks
of houses. She displayed a remarkable flair for excavation. Soon she had a
hundred men and unusually – perhaps a first – ten women uncovering what
turned out to be the small Minoan town of Gournia.
Far smaller than Knossos, Gournia provided an unrivalled picture of a
small Bronze Age community, with artefacts identical to those at Knossos.
Harriet worked on the town in 1901, 1903 and 1904, focusing mainly on the
highpoint of its existence, between about 1750 and 1490 BC. The excavations,
sponsored in part by the University of Pennsylvania Museum, uncovered
entire blocks of more than seventy houses, cobbled alleyways, a Minoan
palace and a cemetery. Gournia was an astounding achievement for any
archaeologist.
Four years after the excavation ended, Harriet published a large report in
which she presented every detail of her excavations. No one could now
accuse her of scandalous behaviour or challenge her archaeological
credentials!
This was Harriet’s last fieldwork, and it made her an admired pioneer of
American archaeology in the Mediterranean. She became the first woman to
lecture before the Archaeological Institute of America.
In 1906, she married British anthropologist Charles Hawes, and they had
two children. In 1916 and 1917, during the First World War, she was heavily
involved in nursing in Serbia and on the Western Front. Her involvement
with archaeology continued, but strictly in the classroom: she taught ancient
art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, for many years.
Both Gertrude Bell and Harriet Boyd Hawes were the equals of any male
archaeologists of their day. Bell, the desert traveller and expert government
administrator, understood desert people better than almost any outsider. For
her part, Harriet Boyd Hawes was a superb excavator. She returned to Crete
once more, as a welcome guest, in 1926. Arthur Evans gave her a tour of
Knossos, and she travelled to Gournia on a mule, arriving to a noisy welcome
from the local people.
 CHAPTER 20

Mud Bricks and a Flood

B abylon was one of the great cities of the ancient Mesopotamian world.
From a small settlement founded around 2300 BC, it grew to become the
centre of the Babylonian Empire between 609 and 539 BC. King
Nebuchadnezzar II (r. 604–562 BC) turned it into a great city with eight gates,
the northern one named after the goddess Ishtar. After its destruction in 612
BC, Babylon vanished from history as a confusion of dusty mounds.
The excavation of Babylon defeated several early archaeologists,
including Henry Layard (see Chapter 4). They could make nothing of the
decaying, unbaked bricks that remained. Then the Germans arrived and the
great city came to life in the hands of a careful excavator. Robert Koldewey
(1855–1925) was an architect and archaeologist. He was a precise excavator
in the German tradition. Koldewey was certain that systematic excavation of
the decayed brickwork would uncover Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon. His work
there started in 1899 and continued for the next thirteen years.
German archaeologists, and Flinders Petrie in Egypt, had nailed the basic
organisation of large-scale excavation. No longer did workers dig
haphazardly into a city mound. Instead, they employed teams wielding picks
and others using baskets. They worked closely together. Koldewey
formalised the process, with light-rail wagons dumping soil away from the
trenches. Then he trained labourers for specialised tasks.
He started with fired-brick structures that were easily identified. Unbaked
mud brick was a huge challenge, for it tended to melt into the soil once
abandoned and when exposed to rain and wind. So Koldewey trained skilled
teams that did nothing but trace unbaked mud-brick walls. He and his
colleague Walter Andrae (who was to excavate the Assyrian capital at Assur
on the Tigris) found that the best excavation technique was to scrape the
ground with hoes. The expert diggers looked out for changes in soil texture –
or for actual walls. Once walls appeared, the workers traced them delicately
until rooms were exposed. They left intact the fillings over the floors so that
these could be dug later and the contents of each chamber recorded. The
Koldewey system revolutionised city excavation.
Koldewey’s greatest Babylon discovery was Nebuchadnezzar’s Ishtar
Gate on the north side of the city, dedicated to the mother goddess of fertility.
He found that the king’s architects had dug deep into the underlying sand for
the foundations. The walls were still intact, allowing him to uncover huge
reliefs of dragons and bulls made of glazed bricks. The actual gates and the
archway were roofed with cedar.
In an inscription that stretches over ten columns, the king himself made a
proud boast about his masterpiece, which was also described by the Greek
author Herodotus. Patiently, Koldewey and others washed thousands of
glazed brick fragments to free them of salt, then pieced them together. He
reconstructed the gate brick by brick in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. A
paved Procession Street led through it to the temple of Marduk, Babylon’s
special god. The Ishtar Gate and its Procession Street stood over 13 metres
above the surrounding plain.
Meanwhile, Walter Andrae ran parallel excavations far upstream at Assur
from 1902 to 1914. He adopted the Babylon approach for an Assyrian capital
that had stood on a cliff above the Tigris. His expert teams traced city walls,
many houses and temple quarters. The major structure was the Temple of
Ishtar, wife of the city’s god, Assur. A deep trench uncovered six earlier
temples on the same site. Andrae was the first excavator to dissect a
Mesopotamian city layer by layer. Realising that excavation was destruction,
both he and Koldewey recorded every single building before they removed it
to access lower levels.
Andrae, Koldewey and others made possible the scientific excavations at
Ur and other Mesopotamian cities after the First World War. Excavations
were now sponsored by national museums, not individuals. In 1911, the
British Museum decided to excavate the little-known Hittite city of
Carchemish on the Euphrates River in northern Syria. The excavations began
under David Hogarth (1862–1927), an experienced excavator who had
worked with Arthur Evans at Knossos. Hogarth was notoriously bad
tempered before breakfast, prompting his workers to call him the ‘Angel of
Death’. Hogarth’s two seasons of excavation were so promising that the
museum started a long-term project and chose thirty-three-year-old Leonard
Woolley as the new director.
Charles Leonard Woolley (1880–1960) was a short man with a
commanding personality. He went to New College, Oxford, to study to
become a priest, but while still an undergraduate the warden of the college
predicted that he would become an archaeologist. Woolley spent five years in
the Sudan – from 1907 to 1911 – mainly working on cemeteries. There he
gained expertise in dealing with labourers from other cultures, learning their
languages and treating them firmly but fairly. He was an excellent choice for
Carchemish.
Carchemish had guarded a major ford across the river until 717 BC, when
the Assyrians captured the growing settlement. It later became a Hittite city,
but almost nothing was known of these rivals to the Assyrians and Egyptians
in the eastern Mediterranean world. More than 15 metres of occupation levels
awaited excavation.
Woolley was an inspiring leader – one of those rare people who are never
at a loss. He also had a lively sense of humour, essential when dealing with
the shifting sands of local politics and a workforce that was given to violence
if dissatisfied. Respect was his motto, but he could also be firm. When a local
official refused to issue an excavation permit at once, Woolley just smiled.
He produced a loaded revolver and held it to the man’s head. The official
raised his hands in terror and said there had been a mistake. Minutes later,
Woolley left with the signed permit.
Woolley was a brilliant storyteller and a fluent writer, which sometimes
makes it hard to decipher what really happened at Carchemish. The
excavations were successful, largely because Woolley and T.E. Lawrence –
who had been recruited from Oxford University because of his archaeological
experience, and was travelling in Syria – got on well with each other and with
the workers. The dig foreman, a Syrian named Hamoudi, whose two interests
were archaeology and violence, was a genius at managing labourers. He
became one of Woolley’s closest friends, and they worked together on
several digs from 1912 to 1946.
In 1912, little was known about the Hittites, except for what had been
learned from the Amarna tablets found by Flinders Petrie in Egypt some
years earlier (see Chapter 17). Woolley unravelled the layers of the citadel
and uncovered two palaces. Stately figures of kings and marching soldiers
adorned the palace walls.
The Carchemish excavations ended with the outbreak of the First World
War. Like Gertrude Bell (see Chapter 19), Woolley became a valued
intelligence officer, before being taken as a prisoner of war by the Turks.
After the war, in 1922, Woolley became director of an ambitious, long-
term excavation at the biblical city of Ur (Ur of the Chaldees), sponsored by
the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum. Quite apart
from its location in a harsh desert landscape of extreme heat and cold, Ur was
a complex and difficult site to excavate. A ruined temple pyramid, entire
buried city quarters and many occupation layers all presented a tough
challenge for even the most skilled excavator. But Woolley was ideal for the
job, being energetic and full of ideas.
He was an exacting taskmaster, who ran the enormous dig with a handful
of European assistants and the formidable Hamoudi. The excavations began
at dawn and, for the European staff, rarely ended before midnight. Woolley’s
best colleague was Max Mallowan, who was later to become a first-rate
archaeologist and the first to follow Layard’s work at Nimrud. Mallowan
married detective novelist Agatha Christie, and she is said to have based
some of the characters in her novel Murder in Mesopotamia on people at Ur.
A trench in the 1922 excavation season yielded gold objects, possibly
from a cemetery. Woolley suspected that he might be dealing with royal
graves filled with great treasures, perhaps in fragile condition. He knew the
task of clearing the burials would stretch his technical abilities to the limit,
and his labourers would have to be trained for delicate work. So he waited
four years before digging further there.
In the meantime, he dug trial trenches to establish the city’s layout. Then
he excavated a small village mound close to the site. It yielded very early
painted pottery, but no metals. The inhabitants were perhaps the ancestors of
the Sumerian builders of Ur.
Woolley had 400 labourers working under Hamoudi, who was strict, but
sensitive to trouble and skilled at combating fatigue and boosting morale: on
one occasion, he impersonated a Euphrates boatman, using his spade as a
paddle as he sang lilting songs while the men cleared heavy soil.
Finally, once he had cleared the royal cemetery, Woolley dug a large
trench down to the bottom of Ur. At the base, he unearthed a layer of flood
deposits, but no artefacts. There was more evidence of occupation below,
with pottery similar to that from the previously excavated small farming
village.
Woolley’s wife Katharine casually glanced into the pit and suggested that
the mysterious layer could be from Noah’s flood in the Book of Genesis. The
suggestion was a public relations dream for a dig that was constantly short of
money. Privately, Woolley doubted the idea, because the trench was a small
one, and anyway, Ur lay in an area that was prone to flooding. But he made
full use of Ur’s flood in his popular writings, realising that the discovery of a
possible biblical flood would have enormous popular appeal and would help
raise funds.
By the time the Ur excavations ended, Woolley had cleared the great
ziggurat (pyramid) of Ur-Nammu, which dominates the site today. He also
uncovered dozens of small dwellings and hundreds of tablets which have
thrown much light on Sumerian history.
Excavating the royal cemetery was an enormous task. In fact, there were
two cemeteries: one Assyrian and the other Sumerian. During four years of
painstaking work, the excavators cleared the largely undecorated graves of no
fewer than 2,000 commoners. Woolley also excavated sixteen lavish royal
burials. Using seal inscriptions and clay tablets, he dated these to between
2500 and 2000 BC, the earliest period of written Iraqi history. These lay at the
base of 9-metre shafts, accessed by sloping ramps. The royal corpses lay in
stone-and-brick burial vaults and were surrounded by sacrificial victims. In
one instance, ten women wearing elaborate headdresses were arranged in two
rows. Recovering the delicate ceremonial objects took a lot of imagination
and ingenuity. For example, by pouring liquid plaster into an inconspicuous
hole, Woolley managed to make a cast of a decayed wooden lyre, decorated
with a copper bull’s head and shells.
After months of backbreaking work, Woolley wrote a popular account of
a funeral ceremony. One of those rare archaeologists who can imagine
himself in the past, he brilliantly re-created a royal burial: resplendent
courtiers and soldiers filed into the mat-lined burial pit; royal ox wagons with
grooms were steered by their drivers into the pit; everyone carried a small
clay cup, took poison and lay down to die; and, finally, someone killed the
oxen and the shaft was filled in.
Unfortunately, Woolley’s field notes are incomplete, and so we cannot
check his story. In fact, new research has shown that the royal attendants did
not take poison, but were killed by blows to the head. The corpses were
somehow treated to preserve them and were laid out in the burial pit. But you
can forgive Woolley’s use of drama and vivid re-creations, when you
remember that he believed that archaeology was above all about people.
This excavation was the last of the huge digs run by a single archaeologist
that defined early archaeology. Leonard Woolley rightly occupies a place
among the greatest of all archaeologists.
But in 1922 Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the pharaoh
Tutankhamun in Egypt (see Chapter 21). And in the end, Woolley’s popular
books were overtaken by the general obsession with golden pharaohs.
 CHAPTER 21

‘Wonderful Things’

V alley of the Kings, Egypt, 25 November 1922. Howard Carter, Lord

Carnarvon and Carnarvon’s daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert waited in the hot,
crowded passageway of the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb. Workers removed
the last of the rubble fill in front of a sealed doorway. From another door that
bore the king’s seal, they already knew that this was Tutankhamun’s burial
place.
Tense with excitement, they sweated in the dense, humid air laden with
dust. With trembling hands, Carter made a small hole in the plaster door and
pushed an iron bar through. There was a rush of hot air from the space
behind. He enlarged the hole and inserted a candle, the others crowding
round behind. The candle flame flickered, then settled. ‘Can you see
anything?’ asked Carnarvon impatiently. ‘Yes, wonderful things,’ Carter
gasped.
 He enlarged the hole and shone a flashlight into a crowded chamber, open
for the first time in 3,000 years. Golden beds, a throne, collapsible chariots
and a jumble of treasures swam before his eyes. After seven years of fruitless
searching, they had found Tutankhamun’s undisturbed tomb.
The road to the discovery began in 1881, with the sensational find of a
cache of royal mummies and their burial goods in a rocky crevice in the hills
on the west bank of the river opposite Luxor. By the 1880s, Egypt had
become a fashionable winter tourist destination for both wealthy Europeans
and travellers passing through the Suez Canal. The tomb robbers of Qurna on
the Nile’s west bank, opposite Luxor, were making good money. In 1881,
rumours spread of exceptional antiquities for sale: lovely offering jars,
magnificent jewels and fine statuettes. Some of the objects were unique and
clearly from royal tombs.
Suspicion fell on two locals, Ahmed and Mohammed el-Rasul, known
tomb robbers, who smuggled their loot into Luxor in bundles of clothing or
baskets. They were arrested and tortured – but to no avail. Until, that is,
Ahmed turned against his brother after they quarrelled over how to share out
the loot. Mohammed confessed and led German-born archaeologist Émile
Brugsch, a member of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, to a remote crevice
on the west bank. Inside lay the mummies of some of Egypt’s greatest
pharaohs, including Thutmose II, Seti I and Rameses II.
Three thousand years earlier, the cemetery priests in charge of the Valley
of the Kings had moved the royal mummies from one hiding place to another
in a frantic race against ruthless ancient tomb robbers. They had worked in a
hurry, and so the crevice was cluttered with priceless finds, the coffins of
queens lying in heaps. Once Brugsch had recovered from his shock at the
discovery, he employed 300 men to recover 40 pharaohs. Later, some of the
mummies were unwrapped and archaeologists gazed on the faces of some of
the ancient world’s most powerful men. Seti I, whose tomb Belzoni had
discovered, was the best preserved, and had a gentle smile on his face (see
Chapter 2).
The royal mummies caused a sensation. Wealthy tourists flocked to the
Nile, dreaming of finding a magnificent, gold-laden burial and hoping in vain
to excavate in the Valley of the Kings. They spent lavishly on items found in
less important tombs. Inevitably, the destruction and looting continued, with
many officials looking the other way. Fortunately for science, a few
archaeologists, notably Flinders Petrie, trained up some younger excavators.
He took young assistants into the field for years, among them a British
draughtsman, Percy Newberry. During the 1890s, Newbury worked with a
gifted artist named Howard Carter (1874–1939). He sent him to work with
Petrie to learn excavation methods. Thus one of the two central characters in
the Tutankhamun discovery was on the scene long before 1922.
Carter was of humble birth, the son of an artist. But he displayed
exceptional talent, which brought him to the attention of William Tyssen-
Amherst, a wealthy Englishman with a large Egyptian collection. In 1891, the
Amherst family hired the seventeen-year-old Carter to draw items in their
collection. And later that year, the Egypt Exploration Fund sent him to work
as an assistant draughtsman to Percy Newberry, who was recording the
decorated tombs of nobles at Beni Hasan in Middle Egypt that dated to about
2000 BC. Carter’s copies of the Beni Hasan tomb murals were so exceptional
that he was sent to work with Petrie at el-Amarna. The young artist took to
excavation like a natural.
In 1899, French Egyptologist Gaspar Maspero, director of the Egyptian
Antiquities Service, appointed Carter chief inspector of antiquities for Upper
Egypt – one of only two such officials in the country. As inspector, Carter
was a busy man. Much of his work centred on the Valley of the Kings, where
he installed electric lights in some of the tombs.
A few wealthy visitors applied for permits to excavate in the valley, but
they were turned down on the grounds that they were ill-prepared to search
for a tomb. Carter was the archaeologist who judged applicants. The best
prepared was Theodore Davis, a rich New York lawyer, who received a
permit to work in the valley in 1902. Carter had excavated for Davis and
helped him reveal the tombs of a noble named Userhet and Pharaoh
Thutmose IV. Carter recovered part of the pharaoh’s chariot and one of his
riding gloves. Davis was a rough excavator, but he had the very good sense to
employ archaeologists to carry out the excavations. Much of Carter’s
approach to Tutankhamun stemmed from his experience with Davis.
After Carter’s brilliant success in the north, in 1904 Maspero transferred
the chief inspector to Lower Egypt. There his work included preserving sites
and dealing with sometimes difficult visitors. A stiff man, Carter barely
tolerated tourists, and following a violent argument with some drunken
French sightseers at Saqqara in 1905, he resigned in disgust. For the next
couple of years, he scratched a living as an artist and guide in Luxor. In 1907,
at a low point in his career, he met George Edward Stanhope Molyneux
Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon (1866–1923). The other principal in the
Tutankhamun discovery was now on the stage.
In complete contrast to Carter, Lord Carnarvon was a privileged
nobleman, an art collector with fine judgement and exquisite taste, and a
gambler on racehorses. As a boy, born Lord Porchester, he had been sickly
and withdrawn, and was frequently bullied at Eton College in his teens. His
education had been disastrous – perhaps he had learning disabilities. While at
Eton, he struck up a lifelong friendship with an Indian maharajah’s son,
Victor Duleep Singh, who was a habitual gambler at the races. Lord
Porchester went to Oxford and dropped out, considered a military career, and
indulged his passions – horseracing, sailing, shooting and travelling.
Meanwhile, he devoured books and educated himself in art and the
humanities.
In 1890, Lord Porchester became the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon and
inherited his father’s estates. Five years later, he married aristocrat Almina
Wombwell, who moved in the highest social circles. Carnarvon’s weak lungs
made the dry and warm Nile Valley a desirable place for him to spend the
winter months. During his regular visits, he developed an interest in ancient
art and photography. By 1905, he was bored with the endless round of balls
and the usual tourist circuit. His mind turned to archaeology.
Carnarvon was one of many wealthy visitors who dabbled in excavation.
Archaeology became an entertaining way to pass the time. Thanks to
influential contacts, in 1907 he received an excavation permit for an already
well-worked area of the Theban cemetery. He carried out his first six-week
season with no expert assistance – and apparently thoroughly enjoyed it. His
only significant finds were a mummified cat and an inscribed, plaster-coated
tablet. However, once deciphered, the tablet turned out to be a major find: it
commemorated the victory of the pharaoh Khamose over the hated Hyksos
kings, who had occupied the fertile Nile Delta in about 1640 BC. It is now
known as the Carnarvon Tablet.
At this point, Antiquities Director Gaspar Maspero introduced Carnarvon
to the unemployed Howard Carter. Carter was becoming increasingly
obsessed with the Valley of the Kings, but to dig there required wealth and
access to the highest levels of government. While Davis laboured in vain in
the Valley of the Kings, Carter and Carnarvon became not only friends, but
also an efficient team. Carter, with his long experience, was the leader. His
standards of excavation were much higher than those of either Davis or
Flinders Petrie. Meanwhile Carnarvon provided the funding and acted as a
sounding board. He realised early on – when they were clearing tombs in the
well-worked area of the cemetery – that Carter had an exceptional nose for
discovery: he continued to make finds even when everyone else thought an
area had been exhausted. The two men published a valuable account of five
years’ work as they waited for a chance to excavate in Theodore Davis’s
patch in the Valley of the Kings.
The meticulous Carter made a point of keeping in touch with Davis,
although he disapproved of his methods. Unlike Carnarvon, who was almost
always on site, Davis was the classic hands-off archaeologist. Rather than
excavating, he preferred entertaining guests on his boat, which was moored
on the Nile. But he was always present when a tomb was opened, and had
been lucky in his assistants (not least Howard Carter).
Davis worked fast, with little attention to detail; but he was systematic in
his search for tombs. He found several royal tombs, among them that of the
XVIII Dynasty pharaoh Amenhotep II, who died in 1401 BC. The tomb of
Yuya, a senior officer of chariotry around 1390 BC, and his wife Tuya
contained a complete chariot, two beds and three gold-inlaid armchairs, as
well as three coffins. Yuya and Tuya’s tomb had been robbed, but it was the
most complete tomb in the valley until the discovery of Tutankhamun’s.
Davis had the self-control and resources to dig for season after season,
clearing rubble without success. He persisted until 1912, when he withdrew,
proclaiming that the valley was exhausted. He had come within 2 metres of
the entrance to Tutankhamun’s undisturbed sepulchre. The excavation permit
for the Valley of the Kings passed to Carnarvon in 1914, just as the First
World War broke out. He and Carter started work in 1917.
Carter was a different kind of archaeologist from the casual Theodore
Davis. He had walked every corner of the valley and was familiar with all the
known graves. But one was missing: that of a little-known pharaoh,
Tutankhamun, who had died in 1323 BC. Carter was convinced that
Tutankhamun’s tomb awaited discovery, probably in an area near the well-
known sepulchre of Rameses VI. For seven years, the two men followed
Carter’s instincts and laboriously cleared rubble from the valley floor,
looking for the tomb.
In 1922, Carnarvon was on the point of stopping – the hunt was costing
him several thousand pounds a year. Carter offered to pay for one more
season himself, but Carnarvon reluctantly agreed to support a dig close to
workers’ huts erected during the digging of Rameses VI’s tomb.
On 4 November 1922, four days into the season, with Carnarvon still in
England, the workers uncovered a rock-cut stairway leading to a sealed
doorway. Carter waited for three weeks until Carnarvon and his daughter
Lady Evelyn Herbert arrived. Then, on 24–25 November, they exposed the
doorway, found Tutankhamun’s seals on the plaster, and experienced that
remarkable moment when Carter probed the barrier and saw ‘wonderful
things’.
Tutankhamun’s tomb put a severe strain on Carter and Carnarvon’s
friendship. Carter insisted that the tomb be accurately and systematically
cleared, whereas Carnarvon, a gambler since childhood, wanted to empty the
tomb at once. After all the expense, he wanted to sell some objects and
display the others. The pressure mounted and there were violent quarrels,
especially after the formal opening of the burial chamber in February 1924.
Tragically, a few weeks later Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite (as,
curiously, had Tutankhamun), which put an end to the fourteen-year
partnership.
Howard Carter took eight years to clear Tutankhamun’s tomb. He
completed the task with the aid of an expert team in 1929. His notes and
records were meticulous and are still consulted by experts today. He worked
on the clearance during a difficult time, when Egypt was claiming all the
finds from the tomb. In 1930, Lady Carnarvon signed over to the Egyptian
government all claims to the tomb and its contents; in exchange, she received
the cost of the tomb’s clearance. Howard Carter was exhausted from the
stress and never completed the lavish report he had hoped to write. But his
work on the tomb was a triumph, given the facilities available to him.
Tutankhamun’s tomb was a landmark in archaeological research. The
pharaoh’s golden mask that rested on his shoulders is an iconic ancient
Egyptian artefact that can be seen in the Egyptian Museum. The pharaoh
wears a gold and blue headdress with a royal cobra ornament. He stares
straight ahead. His carefully woven beard was recently broken off in an
accident, but has been restored.
We owe the remarkable array of exquisite finds to Carter’s skill. Despite
his ferocious temper, the tomb clearance was a disciplined team effort. Other
scholars now brought serious research to the Nile, among them University of
Chicago Egyptologist Henry Breasted, who in 1929 commenced a long-term
project of copying inscriptions that continues to this day.
Increasingly, Egyptian archaeologists came to assume an active role in
excavation, survey and recording. In Egypt, as in other countries, the more
international and professional archaeology became, the more the discoveries
– both major and minor – became a matter of national pride. The discovery of
the boy king and his treasures opened a new chapter in archaeology – one in
which teamwork and slow, painstaking excavation became the norm.
 CHAPTER 22

A Palace Fit for a Chief

I slipped through a narrow entrance in the high stone enclosure and found
myself in a tight passageway between an outer and an inner wall. I had no
idea what lay inside. A conical tower of carefully laid stone blocks stood in
front of me – a solid structure, with no doorway and no obvious purpose.
As I wandered through the jigsaw of masonry (stonework) and hut
foundations inside Great Zimbabwe’s Great Enclosure, a feeling of confusion
swept over me. I had spent much of the day visiting local African villages of
thatched huts made of poles and clay. The contrast now was overwhelming.
Why had farmers and herders living in such communities come together to
build such a remarkable structure? It seemed a strangely alien and mysterious
presence in the wooded landscape. There was no sign of great palaces or
temples: only the imposing Great Enclosure stands high.
 Great Zimbabwe occupies over 24 hectares. A large granite hill covered
with enormous boulders overlooks a mishmash of stone structures, among
them the Great Enclosure, the most prominent feature of the site. The hill,
commonly known as the Acropolis (Greek: ‘high city’), is a maze of
enclosures formed of boulders and stone walls. The largest of them – the
Western Enclosure – was occupied for a long period of time.
The Great Enclosure is famous for its high, stone walls, built without
mortar, and for its solid conical tower, which pokes just above the outer wall.
The chief who ruled over Great Zimbabwe lived in this compound, probably
isolated from his subjects. Several other smaller enclosures lie to the
northwest.
But what exactly was Great Zimbabwe? Clearly, it was an important
ritual centre. The Acropolis was a sacred hill isolated from the rest of the site.
To judge from the various imported things like Indian glass beads, Chinese
porcelain and seashells, the chiefs traded their gold, copper and elephant
ivory with people from the East African coast.
We know that the men who lived here were chiefs because iron gongs –
traditional symbols of African leadership – have been found in the Great
Enclosure. Thanks to radiocarbon dating (see Chapter 27), we know that
Great Zimbabwe flourished between about AD 950 and 1450. It was
abandoned shortly before Portuguese ships arrived off the Indian Ocean coast
in 1497.
The Portuguese sailed into coastal towns like Malindi and Mombasa in
modern-day Kenya, which traded in ivory, gold and slaves from far inland. In
1505, they built a trading post at Sofala, a long-established Islamic trading
station near the mouth of the Zambezi River. They found half-African
merchants who would lead small parties upriver and into the highlands of the
interior, carrying cheap Indian cloth, strings of colourful glass beads and
seashells. In exchange, the traders obtained gold dust carried in porcupine
quills, copper ingots and, above all, elephant tusks.
Some of the traded goods, such as Chinese porcelain and cloth, reached
Great Zimbabwe. From their sporadic explorations inland, the Portuguese
learned of a settlement built of stone, but never visited it. In 1531, Vicente
Pegado, captain of the military force at Sofala, called it ‘Symbaoe’, a place
built of ‘stones of marvellous size’.
There matters rested until 1867, when a German-American hunter and
prospector named Adam Render stumbled upon the ruins. Four years later, he
showed them to Karl Mauch, a German explorer and geographer, who was
astounded. Mauch claimed that Great Zimbabwe was the palace of the
biblical Queen of Sheba, the remains of a great, gold-rich Mediterranean
civilisation in southern Africa. He even claimed that a wooden door beam
was carved from Lebanese cedar, brought to the site by travellers from the
ancient Mediterranean world.
By this time, a stream of white settlers were moving north of the
Limpopo River, now the boundary between South Africa and modern
Zimbabwe. Some came to find gold and get rich; most were hungry for land
and set about establishing farms. Many of the newcomers were poorly
educated and looked down on Africans. A large number of them settled on
the fertile land of what was called Mashonaland, where Great Zimbabwe
stands. It was widely believed that a fabulously wealthy ancient kingdom
created by white people from outside Africa lay in the north.
My wonderment when I visited Great Zimbabwe was probably nothing
compared to that of the first Europeans to set eyes on the ruins after 1871.
They stumbled through a maze of crumbling masonry masked by clinging
vegetation. The conical tower was barely visible through the trees and
undergrowth. Great Zimbabwe came as a profound shock. And it was an
archaeological mystery. Who had built these unique stone structures? Were
they the work of a long-vanished foreign civilisation? How long ago were
they abandoned? When some gold beads turned up during casual digging in
the Great Enclosure, excitement mounted.
The rumours reached the ears of British businessman Cecil John Rhodes
and the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1891.
Together, they sponsored a season of excavations at Great Zimbabwe and
other stone ruins north of the Limpopo. They chose British antiquarian J.
Theodore Bent to undertake the excavations. Bent had no formal
archaeological training, but had travelled widely in Arabia, Greece and
Turkey (which seemed an admirable qualification). Fortunately, he took with
him E.W.M. Swan, an expert surveyor.
Swan produced the first map of Great Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, Bent found
gold objects, dug rough trenches and announced in The Ruined Cities of
Mashonaland, published in 1892, that the site was very ancient and the work
of either people from the Mediterranean or Arabs. Local colonists loved a
book that said a wealthy, non-African civilisation had built Great Zimbabwe!
Academics and white settlers alike maintained that foreigners had built the
site: no one believed that the ancestors of the local African farmers could
have constructed the great buildings – such people were thought too primitive
and lacking in expertise.
When gold and copper objects emerged from Bent’s excavations, all the
local settler talk was of long-vanished, fabulously rich civilisations from the
Mediterranean world, and of great rulers who had colonised Mashonaland for
its gold. This is hardly surprising, since many of the early colonists had
themselves come to Africa to find gold and make their fortunes.
Moreover, if foreigners from the Mediterranean had built Great
Zimbabwe, then it could be argued that their successors – the new arrivals
who were displacing the local people and carving out farms for themselves –
were merely repossessing land that had been seized by the Africans when
they had overthrown this once-great kingdom.
The more ambitious among the settlers were so impressed by Bent’s
Zimbabwe gold finds that they established the Ancient Ruins Company in
1895 to exploit archaeological sites for their wealth. This was nothing more
than an attempt to get rich quickly by digging out Great Zimbabwe and other
archaeological sites. It was like Egyptian tomb robbing, but organised as a
public company. Fortunately, it soon collapsed because of a lack of valuable
finds.
Then Richard Hall, a local journalist, stepped in. His archaeological
qualifications were non-existent, yet he was appointed curator of Great
Zimbabwe. In 1901, he began some destructive excavations. In fact, all he
did was to shovel out all the occupation levels from Great Zimbabwe’s
largest structure, the Great Enclosure. His trenches yielded fragments of gold
sheet and beads, copper ingots and iron gongs, among other objects. He also
found fragments of imported Chinese porcelain.
Hall was not aware of archaeological finds elsewhere and knew little
history other than the popular, racist kind. First and foremost, he was a
journalist and a creative storyteller out to make money from his writings. He
wove the miscellaneous finds from his diggings into stirring tales of a long-
vanished civilisation. A man of great energy and infectious enthusiasm (albeit
with the colonial views typical of the day), Hall considered Great Zimbabwe
the work of people from the kingdom of Saba in southern Arabia, in what is
now Yemen. This was the land of the biblical Queen of Sheba who had
visited King Solomon.
While Hall’s excavations caused great excitement among local white
settlers, the sober members of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science were eager for disciplined excavations. In 1905, they organised an
investigation of the ruins by archaeologist David Randall-MacIver (1873–
1945). Randall-MacIver had extensive digging experience in Egypt, where he
had learned the importance of artefacts for the creation of a timeline.
Objective and well-practised, Randall-MacIver was struck by the absence of
any artefacts of foreign origin that were earlier than medieval times. Nothing
dated to the time of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations or the kingdom of
Saba.
Fragments of Chinese porcelain vessels brought from the East African
coast were found in his trenches. From their design, these could be dated
accurately, and on the basis of these finds, Randall-MacIver stated firmly that
Great Zimbabwe belonged to the sixteenth century AD or perhaps a little
earlier.
Careful analysis of the datable, imported objects showed that Zimbabwe
was built long after the Mediterranean civilisations alleged to have
constructed it. All the porcelain found with the stone structures was medieval,
imported along Indian Ocean trade routes. So local Africans, not foreigners,
had built the structure. This was good, logically argued archaeology, but the
settlers were furious and refused to believe him. So heated did passions in
local white circles become that a quarter of a century would pass before
anyone else excavated at Great Zimbabwe.
When the British Association for the Advancement of Science arranged
for their annual meeting to be held in South Africa in 1929, to mark the
occasion they decided to sponsor new Great Zimbabwe excavations. They
turned to English archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1888–1985). A
tough, no-nonsense woman, she had learned archaeology in Egypt with
Flinders Petrie. But while Petrie looked for the tombs of nobles, Caton-
Thompson laboured on much earlier Stone Age sites. She had mounted her
own Egyptian expedition in 1924 with London geologist Elinor Gardner.
They worked in the Faiyum depression, west of the Nile, and found small
farming sites. Caton-Thompson estimated their date at about 4000 BC, the
earliest farming settlements known at the time.
 This up-and-coming archaeologist was an ideal candidate for the
excavation of Great Zimbabwe. Her training with Petrie had included both
small artefacts and the importance of cross-dating, using objects of known
age to date prehistoric settlements.
Caton-Thompson arrived at Great Zimbabwe by ox cart in 1928. She
placed her trenches with meticulous care and dug a deep cutting into the
Western Enclosure on the Acropolis. Using fragments of imported Chinese
porcelain and Islamic glass found in her trenches, she showed how Great
Zimbabwe had begun as a small farming village before expanding
dramatically to become a major centre, with masonry and enclosures. Her
conclusions confirmed that Randall-MacIver had been correct: Great
Zimbabwe had been at the height of its glory in the centuries before the
Portuguese arrived off the East African coast in 1497. This most remarkable
of archaeological sites was entirely of African inspiration and construction.
Caton-Thompson presented her conclusions to the 1929 British
Association meeting. Once again, there was uproar from settler interests. But
archaeologists everywhere accepted her carefully argued conclusions, which
have stood the test of time. Her work ignited such fury among white settlers
that no one returned to dig at Great Zimbabwe until the 1950s, when
radiocarbon dating confirmed her chronology. Caton-Thompson stood firm
despite the abuse. She put away the numerous crank letters she received in a
file marked ‘Insane’. After the Second World War, her brilliant 1928
excavations laid the foundations for the study of black African history.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson never worked in Africa again, but her research
led to a powerful conclusion: racist interpretations of the past do not hold up
against carefully argued and well-excavated archaeological data. And her
Great Zimbabwe excavations came at an important moment, when
archaeology was taking hold in places far from Europe and the
Mediterranean.
 CHAPTER 23

East and West

A rchaeology took different paths of development in Asia and Europe – in

East and West. Some 2,000 years ago, Chinese historians worked to trace
historical events back to at least 3000 BC and the three major dynasties of
rulers in the north: Xia, Shang and Zhou. They charted the various conflicts
and the rise and fall of small kingdoms, until finally, in 221 BC, the country
was unified under the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shihuangdi (see Chapter
31).
The Chinese realised that their history was complex and constantly
evolving; that dynasties came and went, but that civilisation endured. In this
they were helped by the distinctive Chinese writing system, which dates back
to around 1500 BC. It had originated in picture symbols, but gradually
developed into a script that was widely used by government officials after
500 BC.
 For the most part, Europe had a different experience of history. Written
records there began with the Romans and with the conquest of Gaul (France)
by Julius Caesar in 54 BC. Anything earlier can only be studied using
archaeological methods. For example, the Three-Age System and the
research of Oscar Montelius and others documented prehistoric times after
the Ice Age (see Chapter 11). Instead of relying on written records, European
archaeologists refined their excavation and survey methods, paying close
attention to such small objects as brooches and pins.
China’s scholars were curious about their remote history well over 2,000
years ago, and there was enduring interest in the history of the ancient
civilisations. Archaeology in China began with a passion for collecting – with
the prestige that came from owning fine objects from the past. Antiquarians
were active as early as the Song Dynasty (AD 960–1279). From then on,
Chinese emperors habitually collected fine antiquities.
For centuries, farmers in northern China unearthed ancient animal bones
of all kinds in their fields, calling them ‘dragon bones’. They ground up the
fossil fragments to make medicines. In 1899, some inscribed bones came into
the hands of Wang Yirong, chancellor of the Imperial Academy in Beijing.
Wang collected ancient bronzes and realised that the script used on the bones
was identical to that on some Zhou Dynasty vessels, among the earliest in
China. In 1908, Lu Zhenyu, an antiquarian and language expert, translated
some of the bone inscriptions and traced them to Anyang in the Yellow River
valley, capital of the ancient Shang Dynasty, one of the earliest Chinese
civilisations.
Excavations at Anyang by archaeologist Li Ji from 1928 to 1937
recovered 20,000 inscribed bone fragments – ox shoulder blades. These were
oracle bones that had been heated then cracked with hot metal pointers.
Priests interpreted the cracks as divine messages and added the inscriptions.
When translated, the inscriptions turned out to be prophecies performed for,
or by, the Shang royal household. They covered everything from health to
agriculture and prospects of victory in war. Li Ji also excavated eleven Shang
royal tombs and discovered numerous priceless bronzes.
Except for the excavations at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, which yielded
bones of Homo erectus (see Chapter 8), in the early days of modern
archaeology, most excavations were in the hands of non-Chinese explorers
(or a few local private archaeologists who worked on their own). Most of
them operated in northwestern China, Mongolia and Tibet. The most famous
of these scholars was Aurel Stein (1862–1943).
An explorer, obsessive traveller and archaeologist, Stein was one of the
last true archaeological adventurers. Born in Budapest, as a teenager he
displayed considerable intellectual talent. His Hungarian military training
also gave him an eye for landscape and expertise in surveying. Like other
archaeologists working in remote lands, Stein had an exceptional flair for
languages, which enabled him to travel widely in little-known Central Asia.
Except for the ancient Silk Road and other trade routes, this was virtually a
geographical blank in the Western world. (The Silk Road was a network of
trade routes across Central Asia that linked China and the West.)
Stein joined the Indian Education Service in 1887, but transferred to the
Indian Archaeological Survey in 1910. By then, he had already penetrated
deep into remote country on the Chinese and Indian borders. There he
investigated the mysterious Khotan Empire, an early centre for the spread of
Buddhism from India to China. Khotan had grown rich on the Silk Road
trade during the eighth century AD. Stein’s major interest was in artefacts and
sacred books that were being sold to European collectors.
Between 1906 and 1913, Stein vanished into the least accessible parts of
China. He visited the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, where painted
sculptures had been carved into sandstone at Dunhuang in the far west of
China. Chinese monks had established the earliest shrine in the caves in AD
306. Eventually, there were 492 temples at what had become an important
junction of the Silk Road. Some 45,000 square metres of wall art adorn the
caves, some of the earliest Chinese art known.
Stein heard rumours of a collection of ancient manuscripts, and a monk
showed him a sealed chamber crammed with documents of all kinds. These
were Chinese versions of Buddhist texts, written between the third and the
fourth centuries AD. Many were designed to be hung in shrines.
Stein bought the entire collection, plus another seven cases of
manuscripts and more than 300 paintings, for four silver horseshoes. He
discreetly packed everything onto his camels and ponies and spirited the
collection away to the British Museum. Though Stein has been criticised for
his dishonest looting, he did manage to save numerous priceless artefacts of
early Buddhism and ancient Central Asian culture from being sold on the
open market.
 Quite apart from Stein’s collecting activities, the Indian Archaeological
Survey supported his expeditions and long absences as a way of gathering
vital geographical and political information. Between 1913 and 1916, he
penetrated deep into Mongolia and traced long stretches of the Silk Road. By
now, though, he faced competition from other archaeologists and suspicion
from officials. Despite these difficulties, Stein returned with another rich haul
of manuscripts, jade artefacts and fine pottery, all purchased at the lowest
possible price or collected from the surface of deserted sites.
Stein stayed constantly on the move in remote parts of Central Asia until
he was well into his seventies. During the 1920s, he scoured little-known
regions of Persia and Iraq for cultural links to the Indus cities of Harappa and
Mohenjodaro (see Chapter 25). As late as the 1940s, he was mapping the
remote eastern frontiers of the Roman Empire. Almost single-handedly, this
remarkable traveller linked the ancient East and West. To the Chinese, who
regard him as a thief, his methods were questionable; but he opened the eyes
of Western archaeologists and historians to the huge blank that had been
Central Asia.
What influence did the Middle East and China have on ancient Europe?
Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957), an Australian-born archaeologist and
philologist (a specialist in language), provided some answers. The son of a
Church of England clergyman, he rebelled against his respectable upbringing
and became a political activist while still at the University of Sydney. Childe
then went to study the archaeology of Greece and Rome at Oxford
University. After a brief involvement in Australian Labour Party politics, he
returned to Britain and then spent five years travelling through Europe,
studying its past.
Gordon Childe always thought of prehistory as a form of history. His
sources were not documents, but the artefacts, sites and behaviour of
prehistoric societies. Unlike many earlier archaeologists, he took a very broad
view of the past, which contrasted dramatically with the narrow, artefact-
based obsessions of other archaeologists. His extensive experience of sites
and tools throughout Europe allowed him to build up a portrait of the
development of later European societies, starting with farming and ending
with the arrival of the Romans. For inspiration, he looked to the ancient
societies of the Middle East, whose innovations and ideas had spread into
Europe.
 This idea was nothing new. Childe’s archaeological predecessors had
long believed that civilisation had developed in Egypt and Mesopotamia. But
Childe thought differently from those who assumed that Europe had imported
everything new from outside. Whereas Middle Eastern societies had formed
larger political units, and eventually civilisations, their European
contemporaries had fragmented into numerous smaller political units. Childe
argued that this fragmentation allowed craftspeople and traders to move and
spread their ideas and innovations over wide areas. Then, when iron became
freely available to all, the first truly democratic states came into being.
A fluent writer with an easy-going style, Childe wrote a series of widely
read books. Most famous was The Dawn of European Civilization, published
in 1925, which became a bible for generations of students right into the
1960s. The Dawn was narrative history, based on archaeology. Childe talked
not of kings and statesmen, but of human cultures, identified by groupings of
artefacts (such as clay vessels, bronze brooches and swords), and also by
architecture and art.
He believed that the Danube Basin in Eastern Europe, with its fertile soils
and ample rainfall, was the region where many European farming and metal-
using societies developed ideas and technologies before these spread
westwards towards the distant Atlantic.
Childe also used artefacts and ornaments to trace changes in human
societies through time. This approach is called ‘culture history’ and has
become a basic tool of archaeologists everywhere. His dates for
developments such as early farming were, for the most part, closely argued
estimates and are now known to be inaccurate (see Chapter 27).
In 1927, Childe was appointed professor of prehistoric archaeology at
Edinburgh University. But he was not a good teacher, and instead spent his
time travelling and writing. He has relatively few excavations to his name –
at around fifteen sites in Scotland and Ireland. His most famous dig was that
of Skara Brae, a Stone Age village in the Orkney Islands off northern
Scotland, where he found still-intact stone furnishings, now dated to about
3000 BC. These he interpreted by comparing them to the stone furnishings of
nineteenth-century rural dwellings in the Scottish Highlands.
From artefacts, Childe’s interests shifted to economic developments in
the past, especially agriculture and the origins of civilisation. He argued that
widespread droughts at the end of the Ice Age had driven human societies
into oases. There they came into contact with wild grasses and wild animals
that could be tamed. They turned to farming and animal herding, in what he
called the Agricultural Revolution (see also Chapter 30). In 1934, he spoke of
an Urban Revolution, which led to the emergence of cities and civilisations.
These two revolutions, Childe concluded, encouraged major
technological advances, produced more food supplies and large population
increases, and then ultimately craft specialisation, writing and civilisation. He
argued that the Agricultural and the Urban Revolutions had as great an
impact on human history as did the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution,
with its steam engines, factories and cities.
In 1946, Childe left Edinburgh to become professor of European
archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London. By the 1950s, though,
his ideas were coming under attack. The advent of radiocarbon dating
overturned many of his European chronologies (see Chapter 27). Partly on
these grounds, a new generation of archaeologists downplayed the influence
of the Middle East. New research emphasised internal change in societies,
rather than external influences. Childe became depressed and began to regard
his life’s work as a failure. Nor did his well-written stories of the past
influence the direction of contemporary society. Childe retired in 1956,
returned to Australia and committed suicide a year later.
To the vigorous and outspoken Gordon Childe we owe some of the first
grand narratives of human prehistory, which embraced areas far larger than a
single country or region. He, Aurel Stein and the Chinese archaeologists who
worked at Anyang brought together East and West. They turned archaeology
into a global study of the past.
 CHAPTER 24

Shell Heaps, Pueblos and Tree Rings

T here is a motorway exit at Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco
in California, that is named Shell Mound Street. And with good reason, for it
was with this enormous shell heap that Max Uhle (1856–1944), a German-
born archaeologist, boldly challenged the widespread assumption that
California Indian societies had not changed over thousands of years. The
situation was similar to that of Great Zimbabwe: simply, no one believed that
Native Americans in California were capable of innovation.
The huge prehistoric shell mound that Uhle excavated has long since
vanished under modern buildings. But back in 1902, Uhle, who had worked
for years on archaeological sites in Peru, was employed to excavate shell
mounds in the San Francisco Bay area. He started work on the one at
Emeryville, which was one of the largest. The site was 30 metres long, more
than 9 metres high, and towered over the surrounding flat land. His trench
went down to the water level and below.
Uhle drew detailed cross-sections of ten major layers and counted the
number of artefacts found in each. At a time when few California excavators
thought about long sequences of occupation layers, this was a major step
forward. Hitherto, people had dug shell heaps quickly and untidily, mainly in
a hasty search for burials and artefacts. These were unspectacular sites,
monotonous to excavate and haphazardly accumulated by shellfish collectors.
Earlier prejudices persisted that such people were at the bottom of the human
ladder.
In the end, Uhle reduced the ten strata to two major components. The
people of the lower one had lived mainly off oysters, had buried their dead in
the mound and had made tools from local stone. The later inhabitants had
used cremation, had consumed enormous numbers of clams rather than
oysters, and had imported fine-grained stone for toolmaking. Uhle estimated
that the Emeryville mound was in use for more than 1,000 years.
Uhle was an unsophisticated excavator by today’s standards, but his
methods were far better than the crude digging that was commonplace at
other sites. Furthermore, he had enormous practical experience of both
excavating and analysing artefacts and occupation levels in different
environments. He had worked at the pre-Inca ceremonial centre at Tiwanaku
in highland Bolivia in 1894 (when he had stopped local soldiers from using
the carvings there for target practice). And after 1896, he had worked on the
arid Peruvian coast, where he paid close attention to pottery and textile styles,
the latter preserved by the dry environment, as they changed through time.
Everywhere he worked in Peru, he developed chronological sequences, using
graves in cemeteries for the purpose. In a way, he was another Flinders Petrie
in a different desert landscape. His harsh criticisms of local archaeologists
offended both his Bolivian and his Peruvian colleagues, who accused him of
selling artefacts for profit. He left South America and became involved with
California’s shell mounds.
Uhle was both efficient and very experienced. He published his
excavations promptly and in detail. It might have been expected that other
archaeologists would welcome his thorough assessment of changes in the
lives of the Emeryville shellfish gatherers. His conclusions were clear, well
documented and based on his long years of studying evolving Native
American cultures in Peru. But instead, the wrath of local archaeologists
descended on his head. They had long assumed that California Indian
cultures had remained static throughout the past, and they saw no reason to
change their minds. A powerful anthropologist named Alfred Kroeber
dismissed Uhle’s conclusions out of hand. Knowing he was right, Uhle just
kept working. Later generations of shell mound researchers have proved him
correct.
Max Uhle was not alone in showing that ancient American societies did
change profoundly over thousands of years. He worked with unspectacular
shell heaps, stone tools and mollusc shells. But in the American Southwest,
there were much more impressive archaeological sites and multi-storey
pueblos. The dry climate there preserved far more than stone tools and
pottery – baskets, textiles, sandals and even burials. There were few
archaeologists in the Southwest in Uhle’s time, but some of them tried to date
pottery styles and pueblos. One such was Alfred Kidder (1885–1963).
Kidder introduced to the Southwest the practice of excavating in layers,
and later became a major force in Maya archaeology. Born in Marquette,
Michigan, he was the son of a mining engineer. Admitted to Harvard
University as a pre-medical student, he soon shifted his focus to
anthropology. At the time, Harvard was the country’s foremost centre for
anthropology.
In 1907, Kidder’s Harvard mentors, including a distinguished Maya
expert, Alfred Tozzer, sent him on an archaeological survey to the Four
Corners region of the Southwest, where four US states meet. Kidder had
never been west of Michigan, but he immediately fell in love with the area
and became fascinated by its archaeology. He graduated in 1908, visited
Greece and Egypt with his family, and then entered graduate school in 1909.
Early on, he took a course in archaeological field methods run by George
Reisner, a well-known Egyptologist. Kidder visited Reisner’s excavations in
Egypt and the Sudan and learned his methods for stratigraphic (layer)
analysis and for excavating large cemeteries, a major part of Sudanese
archaeology.
Kidder’s doctoral dissertation was a study of Southwestern pottery styles.
He found the work near impossible, because excavators of the day ignored
stratified layers. For his fieldwork in New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau, where
modern-day Los Alamos lies, he used both ancient and modern pottery to
develop a cultural sequence. This he published in an influential paper in
1915.
That same year, the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology in
Andover, Massachusetts, appointed Kidder director of a long-term excavation
project at Pecos, New Mexico, where deep, undisturbed refuse heaps marked
an abandoned pueblo. However, the First World War intervened. Kidder
served with distinction on the Western Front, being promoted to the rank of
captain in 1918. The Pecos research resumed in 1920 and continued until
1929. The project was a brilliant success. Kidder was an enthusiastic and
dynamic leader with a personality that attracted young students. Many of
them went on to enjoy distinguished careers elsewhere.
Like other Southwestern archaeologists, Kidder cleared pueblo rooms,
but with a difference. He looked closely at changing pottery styles and asked
what the changes meant. He dug into the Pecos refuse heaps on a massive
scale. But instead of digging in arbitrary levels, he took careful note of
features, such as heaps of discarded bones and broken utensils. He followed
Reisner’s practice of recording every find in three dimensions, so that he
could document even the smallest stratigraphic differences. His detailed
pottery logs followed Reisner’s practice.
Within a few seasons, Kidder had put together a remarkable chronicle of
changing Pecos pottery styles, marked especially by surface decoration, such
as black painted designs. He had also excavated hundreds of human burials.
Harvard anthropologist E.A. Hooton, an authority on ancient human
skeletons, visited the excavations, observing the bones and determining their
sex and age. Valuable and unique information on both life expectancy and the
effects of hard work on the human skeleton emerged from this research.
Hooton showed that most ancient Pecos people died in their twenties.
Actual excavation virtually ceased at the Pecos site after 1922,
whereupon Kidder changed his strategy. He had acquired information on the
architecture and expansion of the pueblo and had excavated its earliest levels.
Now he extended his research to surveys and excavations at other sites while
analysing the enormous quantities of finds. His studies ranged much further
than archaeology, delving into modern Pueblo Indian agriculture and even
public health. The Pecos project was a remarkable example of team research
at a time when most North American archaeology was very unsophisticated.
Pecos foreshadowed the close-knit field projects of today’s archaeology.
 In 1927, Kidder had enough information to compile a detailed sequence
of Pueblo and pre-Pueblo cultures in the Southwest. His long sequence began
with Basket Maker cultures that were at least 2,000 years old. These people
made no pottery and had no permanent homes. They were followed by pre-
Pueblo and Pueblo cultures. At Pecos, Kidder found no fewer than six
settlements, one above the other. There was enough information for him to
argue for eight major cultural stages between 1500 BC (the Basket Makers)
and AD 750. Then there were five Pueblo stages after 750, ending in the
period of written history (which began in 1600). The Pecos sequence showed
that Southwestern people developed their cultures and institutions quite
independently of other areas. Kidder’s sequence for the Southwest has been
the basis for all subsequent research. There have, of course, been numerous
modifications, but that is only to be expected.
Kidder took his ideas further. He arranged an informal conference in his
excavation camp at Pecos in August 1927. Forty archaeologists attended to
review progress and to lay the foundations for a basic cultural framework,
which was essential as more archaeologists began work in the Southwest.
The conference established three stages of Basket Makers and five stages of
Pueblo inhabitants as a provisional chronological sequence. Like the Three
Ages in nineteenth-century Europe, the Pecos scheme reduced the chaos that
surrounded earlier excavations. The Pecos conference is still an annual event
in the Southwest and is attended by several hundred people.
The Pecos sequence had one major disadvantage. There was no means of
dating the sequence in calendar years. Fortunately, a University of Arizona
astronomer, A.E. Douglass (1867–1962), had been studying climate change
since 1901. He was interested in the effect on the climate of astronomical
events like sunspots. With brilliant insight, he argued that the annual growth
rings in Southwestern trees could document major and minor climatic shifts.
Douglass found that there was a direct relationship between the thickness of
growth rings and the amount of annual rainfall. Thin rings marked drought
years, thicker growth wetter years.
Douglass’s initial experiments took him back about 200 years. From the
oldest living firs and pines, he extended the technique to dead trees, using
beams from Spanish churches of the colonial period. Then he turned to
prehistoric ruins. In 1918, he devised a wood borer that enabled him to take
tree-ring samples from ancient beams without disturbing the structures they
supported.
Douglass’s first borings came from ancient pueblo beams, made from
trees that were felled long ago. Because they were so old, they could not be
linked to rings from living trees of known age. There was a sequence of
eighty years from the Aztec ruins in northern New Mexico and another from
the great semi-circular Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. But Douglass could
not pin down the dates accurately – the tree-ring sequences ‘floated’ about in
time.
It took him ten years to link up known tree-ring history and his earlier
floating chronologies. In 1928, the Indians allowed him to bore into the
beams of Hopi villages in northern Arizona; that took him back to AD 1400.
A year later, a charred beam from a ruin at Show Low, Arizona, had a tree-
ring sequence that overlapped with the floating chronologies of earlier sites.
Now he could link tree-ring sequences from Pecos to his master timescale.
The new science of dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) finally dated the
Pecos sequence and provided a chronology for the great flowering of Pueblo
culture from the tenth to the twelfth centuries AD.
Alfred Kidder’s methods of artefact analysis and excavation spread
gradually across North America. All subsequent research in the Southwest,
and much of the Americas, stems ultimately from the Pecos project. Thanks
to his field training, his gifted students took the latest field methods with
them when they worked elsewhere. Kidder himself moved on to an important
position supervising Maya research at the Carnegie Institution in
Washington, DC in 1929.
In 1950, he retired to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his house became
a gathering place for archaeologists and students until his death in 1963. By
then, American archaeology had built on Kidder’s foundations and was ready
for more detailed research. He made accuracy, careful observation and team
research the basis of American archaeology.
 CHAPTER 25

A Fire-Breathing Giant

M ohenjodaro, Pakistan, 1947. A small group of young archaeologists and

students gathered in front of a confusion of mud bricks and sand high above
the ancient city on the banks of the Indus River. Silence fell as an upright,
middle-aged archaeologist with a bristling moustache strode up to them.
Mortimer Wheeler was a formidable man, and the students were terrified
of him. With few words, but commanding gestures, he set them to
supervising teams of local labourers who attacked the sand. A few weathered
bricks became many. The stark walls of a huge platform emerged from the
hillside. A fort, he announced in a loud voice. ‘It towers grim and forbidding
above the plain.’ The archaeologists and students nodded their heads timidly
in agreement. The bold announcement was typical of an archaeologist once
described by a disgruntled colleague as a ‘fire-breathing giant’.
Many early archaeologists had strong personalities. They had to have, as
they often worked almost alone and often in remote lands. Many of their digs
were on a large scale, using small armies of labourers. Mortimer Wheeler was
a born leader, but those skills were developed while he was an artillery
officer in the First World War. At Mohenjodaro, he directed an excavation
that trained young Indian archaeologists in his rigorous methods. Wheeler
managed them with a firm hand and left no one in any doubt about who was
boss. If he told his students that a mass of bricks was a fort, it was a fort.
There was no argument.
The ‘fire-breathing giant’ was not the first archaeologist to work at
Mohenjodaro. Archaeology was new to India, where written history began
with Alexander the Great’s invasion in 326 BC. The first professional
archaeologist to dig there was an Englishman, John Marshall, who became
director-general of India’s newly founded Archaeological Survey in 1921.
Marshall moved into Mohenjodaro in strength: during the 1925–26 field
season, he used a workforce of 1,200. He also trained young Indian
archaeologists in excavation. The digs uncovered entire blocks of brick
houses, networks of streets and elaborate drainage systems. A huge stone-
lined water tank that served as a ceremonial bath came to light among
buildings high above the city. When archaeologists working in Mesopotamia
found artefacts identical to those from Mohenjodaro that dated to the third
millennium BC (the period between 3000 and 2000 BC), Marshall had a rough
chronology to work with. His report on Mohenjodaro and the Indus
civilisation was the standard reference work on the subject – until Mortimer
Wheeler came along.
Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler (1890–1976) burst onto Indian
archaeology like a thunderclap, becoming director of the Archaeological
Survey in 1944. He inherited a dying institution, but the decisive and
flamboyant Wheeler was the ideal man to breathe new life into it.
The son of a journalist, he was born in Edinburgh. He studied classics at
University College London. After graduating, he went to Germany’s
Rhineland to research Roman pottery. His artillery experience during the
First World War convinced him that he had a gift for logistics and
organisation, essential qualities in an excavator. In 1920, Wheeler became
keeper of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and then,
four years later, its director.
While in Wales, Wheeler and his wife Tessa undertook a series of major
excavations of Roman frontier forts. They had studied the almost forgotten
excavation methods of General Pitt Rivers (see Chapter 16). Like him, they
paid careful attention to even shallow layers in the soil, recovered the
smallest of artefacts and published their work promptly. Wheeler’s fine
drawings served as illustrations. Nothing like this had been seen before in
Roman archaeology. Wheeler went even further. Convinced that the public
had the right to know about his work, he encouraged visitors to the site and
gave numerous popular lectures.
Prehistoric and Roman Wales, published in 1925, the same year as
Gordon Childe’s Dawn of European Civilization (see Chapter 23),
established Wheeler’s reputation. He turned down a professorship at
Edinburgh (which Gordon Childe subsequently accepted) and in 1926
became keeper of the neglected London Museum. With his boundless energy,
Wheeler rapidly transformed the place. Meanwhile, he and Tessa excavated
more sites, carefully chosen to study the relationship between native British
people and the Roman settlers. He also trained a new generation of young
archaeologists on his hectic excavations.
In 1928 and 1929, Wheeler excavated a Roman sanctuary at Lydney,
Gloucestershire. Then he turned his attention to the Roman city of
Verulamium, just north of London, in open country where large-scale
excavation was possible. Between 1930 and 1933, he and Tessa exposed
nearly 4.5 hectares of the city. They unravelled the complicated history of its
earthworks and of earlier settlements.
Still full of energy, having set the London Museum in order, he went on
to found the London Institute of Archaeology in 1937, becoming its first
director. Under his leadership, the institute became famous both for its
fieldwork and for its excellent training in excavation and scientific methods,
such as pottery analysis.
Tired of the Romans, the Wheelers undertook their most ambitious
British excavation, the huge 2,000-year-old Maiden Castle hillfort in southern
England, with its massive earthworks. From 1934 to 1937, the husband-and-
wife team dissected the complex fortifications with deep, vertical trenches.
They also investigated parts of the interior with shallow trenches laid out in a
series of boxes. Such a horizontal layout enabled them to trace different
layers over a wide area. With the trenches carefully labelled and recorded,
stratigraphy allowed them to build a chronology of the site from one side to
the other.
 The Maiden Castle excavations achieved a level of sophistication that
was unheard of at the time. Wheeler actively encouraged visitors and wrote
vivid accounts of the site. His most famous tale describes a Roman attack on
the fort in AD 43, with survivors creeping back in the night to bury their dead
(whom Wheeler had found in his trenches). This is Wheeler at his most
enjoyable and flamboyant best.
Wheeler was a formidable personality, with flashing eyes and flowing
hair. He disliked criticism and did not suffer fools gladly. He drove both his
paid workers and his volunteers hard, and cared little for their feelings. He
made enemies with his abrupt ways and his ambition, as well as his love of
publicity. But with their disciplined planning and carefully laid-out trenches –
dug to get information, not goodies – he and Tessa brought British excavation
into the modern world.
The outbreak of the Second World War found Wheeler back in the Royal
Artillery. He fought at the Battle of El Alamein in North Africa,
distinguishing himself under fire. Then, out of the blue, in 1944 the viceroy
of India invited him to become director general of the Archaeological Survey
of India.
Wheeler shook up that lazy organisation almost overnight. In a rigorous
six-month training programme at Taxila, sixty-one students learned a
standard of excavation previously unheard of in India. Wheeler’s first Indian
excavation was at Arikamedu, a trading station on the southeast coast. He
found Roman pot fragments, which showed that Roman goods had been
traded as far afield as there.
But his greatest challenge came at Harappa and Mohenjodaro. Wheeler
had excavated towns and forts before, but he had never tackled sites as large
and complex as these two ancient cities. For five years, his trained staffers
joined him in probing the two sites.
Wheeler divided Mohenjodaro into two sections: the higher buildings, the
citadel, on the west side; and the predominantly residential lower town. His
excavators uncovered a grid layout of narrow streets lined with brick
dwellings. These ran from north to south and from east to west. Covered
drains linked the streets and alleyways. The sophistication of the drainage
and sewerage systems was unparalleled in the ancient world. Both Wheeler
and Stuart Piggott, another very competent British archaeologist who also
spent part of the war in India, were struck by the technological achievements
of what appeared to have been a modest civilisation: there were no godlike
rulers boasting of their conquests on palace and temple walls, as was the case
in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
When Wheeler excavated the Mohenjodaro and Harappa citadels, he
interpreted the structures on top as public buildings. One jumble of bricks he
proclaimed to be a granary. We now know that Wheeler was wrong: it was a
columned hall. A careful excavator, though at times aggressive, he was
keenly aware of the public relations value of an important discovery. He
often immersed himself totally in the past during his excavations, a
characteristic that could lead him to exaggerate the importance of his finds.
Flashes of inspiration – like the Mohenjodaro granary – were typical of much
of his research. Like Leonard Woolley, he was also a vivid writer and would
use even small finds to paint a picture of ancient behaviour that appealed to a
wide audience.
For all its cities and citadels, the ancient Indus civilisation was very
different from others. There were no palaces or royal sepulchres. Few
portraits of Indus people survive, but one well-known sculpture shows an
apparently calm man, who gives the impression of a priest rather than a
powerful ruler.
Wheeler and Piggott described a civilisation that was distinct from those
of Egypt or Mesopotamia. Its cities lay within walls with imposing gateways.
At first they were compact. Then, as their populations grew, suburbs
developed outside the walls, where archaeologists uncovered barrack-like
buildings. Wheeler argued that workers had lived there. But again, later
research suggests that they were probably workshops for the manufacture of
metal tools and pottery; those who worked in them likely dwelt in the cities.
It should be remembered that Wheeler arrived in India straight from a
battlefield and that he was an expert on Rome, a society in which armies
played a leading role. He thought of the Indus city walls as defensive. When
he discovered the skeletons of thirty-seven men, women and children lying in
Mohenjodaro streets that dated to the closing period of occupation, he
immediately jumped to the conclusion that there had been a last-ditch
massacre of people defending their homes. But he was just plain wrong: the
‘victims’ came from different groups in the lower town, not from the citadel,
which would have been defended to the last. None of the burials shows any
sign of violence. Biological anthropologists believe they perished from
disease rather than war. In fact, the massive platforms and walls were erected
to defend not against invaders, but against unpredictable and sometimes
catastrophic Indus River floods.
Wheeler never published the full details of his Indus excavations. He
wrote a preliminary report and a general book on the Indus civilisation for a
broader audience. This is one reason why his interpretation of the Indus cities
has endured. Today, we know that the Indus civilisation flourished in a fertile
(if unpredictable) environment, where farming land, grazing grass and all
kinds of resources were scattered over an enormous, diverse landscape. This
was a civilisation that arose because people and communities needed one
another to supply the necessities of life. Apparently they thrived without
conflict.
After leaving India in 1948, following its independence, Wheeler spent
five years as professor of the Roman provinces at the London institute he had
founded. Then he became administrator of the declining British Academy,
revitalising it. He carefully directed funds to young archaeologists working
overseas.
To Wheeler, archaeology was a global happening, far wider than Gordon
Childe’s vision of Europe and the Middle East. In Wheeler’s later years, he
became a TV celebrity, thanks to his appearances on the BBC’s Animal,
Vegetable, Mineral? programme, in which experts identified objects from the
past. He also continued to write for the public and to lecture widely, for he
believed that archaeologists had to share their work with general audiences.
Wheeler may have been a vivid personality, but his brilliant excavations
set new standards. He may have been outspoken, but his achievements were
enormous. Mortimer Wheeler was an international figure who helped lay the
foundations of world prehistory.
 CHAPTER 26

Around the River Bend

M ost people have never heard of the Shoshone Indians of the Great Basin
in western North America. More’s the pity, for their way of life had a
profound influence on how a whole generation of American archaeologists
thought about the past.
Unlikely heroes, the Shoshone people lived in small bands in one of the
driest landscapes in the United States. They ate small game and plant foods
of many kinds, used only the simplest of digging sticks, grinders and bows
and arrows, yet thrived in a very harsh, arid environment for thousands of
years. Why were they so successful?
Anthropologist Julian Steward (1902–72), who was very aware of
archaeology, spent many months with the Shoshone. He attributed their
success to their constant mobility, and to their remarkable knowledge of the
available foods in what he called an edible, if very dry, landscape. The
Shoshone moved across the Great Basin landscape constantly, their
movements dictated by food and water supplies. In a classic anthropological
study, Steward mapped how their patterns of settlement changed from one
season to the next. But he was no narrowly focused anthropologist: he
realised that changing settlement patterns across different landscapes were
key to understanding ancient societies. His approach became known as
cultural ecology, the study of the relationship between people and their
environments.
Much of Steward’s career brought him in touch with archaeologists
through a huge archaeology project on the Missouri River, known as the
River Basin Surveys programme, which began after the Second World War.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, a surge in dam construction began to
transform the United States – and archaeology. The large-scale water works
provided hydroelectric power, stored water for agriculture, controlled floods
and expanded navigation on major rivers. But they also destroyed thousands
of archaeological sites. The most ambitious project involved harnessing the
Missouri River. This would drown 1,600 kilometres of valley land and
destroy over 90 per cent of the historical and archaeological sites along the
river.
The River Basin Surveys developed as archaeologists fought to salvage
the past. Such surveys transformed American archaeology beyond
recognition. Previously, most research had unfolded in limited areas like the
Southwest. By the time the programme ended, we had the first portrait of an
ancient North America, far more diverse than merely burial mounds and
pueblos.
The scale of the Missouri River dam building and survey operations alone
was enormous. There were still only very few qualified archaeologists
available to do the survey work. Twelve universities, four museums and
various other organisations joined in at once. By 1968, when the River Basin
Surveys ended, hardworking fieldworkers had surveyed about 500 reservoir
basins big and small. They had tested more than 20,000 archaeological sites.
Many of them filled in blanks on the archaeological maps, for the surveys
examined hitherto unknown areas. Nearly 2,000 significant reports came
from the surveys.
An avalanche of new data in the form of artefacts and other finds
descended on archaeological laboratories around the country. Perhaps most
important of all, many archaeologists became aware of the threat to the
fragile archives they relied upon. Excavation destroyed sites, and so they also
came to believe that digging was a last resort. Ever since the surveys ended,
most archaeology in the United States has been devoted to conserving the
record of the past that remains.
Many young American archaeologists served their apprenticeships on the
River Basin Surveys and on projects in the Southeast funded by the Works
Project Administration. They surveyed threatened landscapes and digging
sites before they vanished under water. The sheer number of artefacts, many
of them from sites occupied over long periods, was overwhelming. Bag after
bag of stone tools and pot fragments had to be washed, labelled and
classified.
The people who undertook this work confronted a problem similar to that
of Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in Copenhagen 150 years earlier (see
Chapter 9). How did you create a chronological framework for America’s
remote past? There was no Three-Age System in North America.
Some River Basin Surveys archaeologists devoted their entire careers to
this past. One of them was James A. Ford, an artefact expert, who assembled
hundreds of collections from thousands of sites into long, elaborate charts
that extended over thousands of years. I recall sitting through one of his
presentations, complete with graphs and flip charts. Ford was not an
interesting lecturer – this was long before computers – and his endless stream
of data was unintelligible and boring. I must confess that I dozed off.
Much archaeology of the day was obscure, bogged down in minute
changes in artefacts, and nothing more than a framework of changing
technologies. Fortunately, a few scholars approached their work with a
broader perspective, a determination to move away from pure data to the
study of ancient people. Gordon Randolph Willey (1913–2002) was one such
visionary. He was destined to become one of the best-known archaeologists
of the twentieth century.
Willey worked on the River Basin Surveys and on another survey in
northwestern Florida while still a student. The experience gave him not only
a grounding in artefacts of many kinds, but also an understanding of how
people adapted to changing landscapes over thousands of years.
Willey served as an anthropologist at the Bureau of American Ethnology
at the Smithsonian Institution from 1943 to 1950. While there he worked on
the River Basin Surveys in the southeastern United States. He collaborated
with Ford and others on a series of reports that raised the study of culture
history (see Chapter 23) to new levels. This work was far more sophisticated
than Kidder’s work at Pecos in the Southwest thirty years earlier (see Chapter
24). During his survey years, he worked closely with Julian Steward, who
told Willey and others that they should stop examining single sites and look
at people and their settlements in the context of their landscapes.
When he finished with the surveys, Willey had almost unrivalled
experience of archaeological survey work in the field. But as well as being an
archaeologist, he was also an anthropologist. His training had combined the
two, for his teachers made it clear that you could not study ancient North
Americans without taking account of living Indian societies as well. In North
America, archaeology was not only excavation and survey, but also
anthropology.
Steward strongly encouraged Willey to carry out an archaeological survey
in one of the river valleys of the arid north coast of Peru. He helped him set
up a project to study the varied landscape and changing prehistoric settlement
patterns in the little-known Viru Valley. Willey looked at the entire valley
with the help of aerial photographs (images taken from the air). He surveyed
the most promising areas on foot, and carried out limited excavations. In his
report on the project, published in 1953, he told the story of the valley as a
series of ever-changing complex economic, political and social landscapes.
Stratigraphic sequences and artefacts were but a small part of the story.
Willey’s Viru research founded what is now called settlement archaeology,
an important strand in today’s archaeological world.
The Viru research earned Willey the prestigious Bowditch Professorship
of Central American and Mexican Archaeology at Harvard University in
1950. He worked there for the rest of his career, carrying out important
fieldwork on the Maya civilisation. He also worked on settlement surveys at
important sites in Belize and Guatemala. The emphasis of his research was
not on major cities, but on the lesser settlements that flourished in their
shadows.
Gordon Willey was a charming, learned archaeologist and a superb
mentor of young students. Above all, he stressed that good archaeology is
based on data, not just on high-flown ideas. As we shall see in later chapters,
this was an important point.
Willey was not, of course, alone. There were other larger-than-life figures
who worked in North America during this time. Jesse David Jennings (1909–
97) was a major figure in the archaeology of the American West. Jennings
joined the University of Utah in 1948. His first field research in the Great
Basin involved excavating several dry cave sites, especially Danger Cave (so
named because a falling rock nearly killed two archaeologists). Here he
excavated 4 metres of occupation levels with painstaking care. They revealed
an estimated 11,000 years of occasional visitations.
Preservation conditions in the dry levels were near perfect, allowing
Jennings to study the small adjustments the inhabitants had made to changing
climatic conditions in the area. At the time the cave was occupied, there had
been nearby marshes, where fish, edible plants and waterfowl abounded.
Jennings found cords made from plant fibres, leather clothing fragments,
basketry and stones used for grinding nuts. He even excavated well-preserved
beetle remains and human faeces, which revealed much about the
predominantly plant diet of the inhabitants. He wrote of a long-lived cultural
tradition, which endured until AD 500. Like Willey and Ford in the Southeast,
he laid sound foundations for all later Great Basin work. Witty and
sometimes sarcastic, Jennings preferred data and digging to theories. His
excavations set standards for a generation.
Meanwhile, in eastern North America, Kansas-born James B. Griffin
(1905–97) of the University of Michigan also helped transform North
American archaeology. Griffin was, above all, an artefact man. He spent a
great deal of time studying the enormous collections assembled by the River
Basin Surveys. Like Ford and Willey, Griffin tried to bring order to storage
rooms full of unsorted artefacts. His knowledge of archaeological finds in
eastern North America was legendary. He founded a Ceramic Repository at
the University of Michigan. This vast pottery collection is a fundamental
archive for today’s researchers.
By the early 1960s, a general framework for the North American past
before Columbus was in widespread use. It was based on excavations,
surveys and artefacts. Like Gordon Childe in Europe, those who developed it
assumed, quite reasonably, that the distribution of human cultures over wide
areas meant that they flourished at much the same time. Griffin, Jennings and
Willey were, above all, data experts. However, as Willey with his Viru
research well knew, change was afoot.
A new generation of archaeologists was aware of research into ancient
environments, pioneered in the Southwest by, among others, A.E. Douglass
of tree-ring fame (see Chapter 24). They began to ask new questions, some of
them arising from the River Basin Surveys. How had environments and
landscapes changed through time? How had human societies living in them
adapted to such changes? What impacts did the need for such adjustments
have on society as a whole?
North American archaeology from the 1930s to the early 1960s was
mostly a matter of describing the past, classifying minor details of different
tools, and defining changing societies on the basis of their technologies. Few
people thought about why these cultures had changed. Why, for example, had
people taken up agriculture instead of hunting, fishing and collecting plant
foods? Why were some hunting and gathering societies, like those in the
Pacific Northwest, more complex than those in, say, the Great Basin or
central Alaska?
The new generation wanted to move beyond classification to more
sophisticated approaches to the past. They were also looking for new ways of
dating ancient societies. It was one thing to say that one culture was older
than another. But how old were they both in calendar years? How much older
in years was one than another? As we shall see, the development of
radiocarbon dating (Chapter 27) was part of a major revolution in
archaeology that was about to take place.
Until the 1950s, the centre of gravity of archaeology had rested in Europe
and the Mediterranean, and also in southwestern Asia. Gradually,
archaeological research expanded far from European shores. The process had
long been under way, in part because of the global distribution of British and
French colonies. Both archaeology and anthropology had been activities
associated with colonial rule, whether in India, Africa or the Pacific. The
roots of what came to be called world prehistory had been put down in the
nineteenth century. Now world prehistory was to blossom.
 CHAPTER 27

Dating the Ages

H ow old is it? This is one of the basic questions that archaeologists ask
whenever they excavate a site or examine an artefact. As we have seen, any
dating – in years before the present, or in AD/BC – used to be generally little
more than a ‘guesstimate’. Only tree-rings and objects of known age, such as
Roman coins, could date prehistoric sites (see Chapters 11, 24 and 26). Then,
in 1949, Willard Libby came up with the radiocarbon dating method, which
made it possible to date sites and artefacts as far back as 50,000 years.
Willard Libby (1908–80) was an American chemist, not an archaeologist.
Yet he did more than almost anyone else to revolutionise archaeological
research. A farmer’s son, Libby became an expert on radioactivity and
nuclear science. During the Second World War, he worked as part of the
Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. After the war, he
moved to the University of Chicago, where he started work on radiocarbon
dating. This, he believed, could offer a way of dating archaeological sites in
calendar years. He won a Nobel Prize for his efforts.
Libby’s research assumed that radiocarbon (radioactive carbon, known as
carbon-14) is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of
cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. Along with normal (non-radioactive)
carbon, some of the carbon-14 in the air is absorbed and stored by plants.
Animals then acquire the radioactive carbon by eating the vegetation. When
an animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with the environment.
From that moment on, the carbon-14 content decreases as it undergoes
radioactive decay. Libby realised that measuring the amount of carbon-14 left
in a dead plant, wood fragment or bone provides a way of calculating how
old it is. The older the sample, the less carbon-14 it contains. He also
determined the rate of decay: half of the radioactive carbon in any sample
will decay after about 5,730 years (the half-life).
His experiments took many years to refine. Libby and his colleague,
James Arnold, tried dating samples of known age, using wood from the
tombs of Egyptian pharaohs Djoser and Sneferu, which, according to
historical sources, dated to about 2625 ± 75 BC. The radiocarbon dates came
out at 2800 ± 280 BC. Libby and Arnold published their research in 1949. By
1955, Libby had processed almost 1,000 dates both from objects of known
age and from hitherto undated prehistoric sites.
Initially archaeologists wondered just how accurate radiocarbon dating
was. For various reasons, some of them were reluctant to provide samples of
known age. Many were sceptical about Libby’s experimental dates. Others
were afraid that radiocarbon dating would disprove their cherished theories.
As research progressed, so more and more collaborators provided samples.
There were, of course, uncertainties, as was only to be expected with a new
dating method. But by the early 1960s, archaeologists had embraced
radiocarbon dating with enthusiasm, for it had the potential to revolutionise
knowledge of the past 50,000 years of human existence. Anything older than
50,000 years contains traces of radioactive carbon too minute to be useful.
If radiocarbon dating was accurate, the potential was enormous.
Archaeologists drooled at the thought of being able to date the first
Americans, or the origins of agriculture in different parts of the world.
Theoretically, too, it would be possible to measure the rate of cultural change,
like the transition from hunting to farming, or the spread of different
prehistoric peoples into Europe or across the Pacific thousands of years ago.
The prospects were tantalising.
There were, however, serious technical obstacles to surmount. The results
with some types of samples seemed to be more accurate than with others. At
first, wood and charcoal set the standard, while bone and shell were regarded
as less accurate. It soon became clear, too, that samples had to be collected
meticulously to avoid contamination. Their exact position in a site was also
important. Results could be skewed by whether a sample had come from a
hearth, from the contents of a cooking pot, or simply from charcoal scattered
through an occupation level – to mention only a few possibilities. These
difficulties were gradually overcome, as radiocarbon dating became
increasingly sophisticated.
Another fundamental problem was that radiocarbon dates were ages in
radiocarbon years, not calendar years. Libby had originally assumed that the
concentration of radiocarbon in the atmosphere remained constant through
time. But this is wrong: changes in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field
and fluctuations in solar activity alter the concentration of radiocarbon both
in the atmosphere and in living things. For instance, samples from 6,000
years ago were exposed to much higher radiocarbon concentrations than are
samples from today.
The solution came by comparing radiocarbon dates against tree-rings. By
the time radiocarbon dating was developed, tree-rings provided accurate
calendar dates in the American Southwest and elsewhere to as far back as
12,500 years. This was just before the end of the Ice Age. In recent years,
comparisons using fossil corals from the Caribbean and ice cores from
Greenland and elsewhere have allowed scientists to date even older objects in
calendar years.
Environmental fluctuations through the ages mean that the dates
calculated solely from the carbon-14 samples and the dates obtained with the
assistance of such sources as tree-rings, ice cores or historical documents can
vary – sometimes by as much as 2,000 years. Intensive research using ice
cores and other sources has resulted in tables that allow researchers to convert
carbon-14 dates into accurate calendar chronologies.
The first radiocarbon dates for developments such as the origins of
farming and the spread of agriculture into Europe caused both amazement
and confusion. Gordon Childe’s widely used dates for major events in Europe
were far too late: the origins of farming, for example, jumped from about
4000 BC back to 9000 BC. Today, thanks to even more accurate dating,
farming is thought to have originated around 12,000 years ago. With
thousands of radiocarbon dates to work with, researchers can analyse the past
in ways that were unimaginable in Willard Libby’s time.
By the time radiocarbon dating was developed, archaeologists were
working in many parts of the world. The new technique raised basic
questions. How long ago did farming take hold in Egypt and Syria, in Turkey
and across Europe? How old was Stonehenge and what were the dates for its
different architectural stages, carefully dissected by excavation? For the first
time, it was possible to date the arrival of farmers in Scandinavia, the first
human settlement of the Americas, and the arrival of iron-using farmers in
southern Africa.
By the early 1960s, rough outlines of a global prehistory had been
assembled from a small patchwork of radiocarbon dates. Samples poured into
radiocarbon laboratories from all over the world – Australia, Iceland, Peru
and remote Pacific islands. For the first time, scholars could compare the
dates in calendar years for the beginnings of farming in different parts of the
world. They established, for example, that agriculture began at about the
same time in the Middle East and in northern China.
Above all, one could seriously contemplate writing a history of
humankind before literate civilisation within a well-established chronological
framework. Such an advance was of great importance, especially in regions
like Africa south of the Sahara, many parts of India, and the Americas, where
the first written records dated to recent centuries. In some parts of Central
Africa, the first historical archives date to the 1890s.
As radiocarbon dating became more refined, researchers turned to
accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) for more accurate readings. AMS was
a huge advance. It allows samples to be dated on the basis of a single tree
ring or an individual wheat seed (or even fragments of a seed). It also allows
for the dating of many more samples, so that scientists can statistically
analyse dozens – or even hundreds – from a single occupation level. Until
recently, timescales in prehistory were still somewhat loose. But the
introduction of sophisticated new statistical methods is now producing
startlingly accurate chronologies.
One famous archaeological site, the West Kennet Long Barrow in
southern England, is a case in point. It held the remains of around forty men,
women and children, and had long been dated to about 3650 BC. It was a
communal burial place, but for how long was it in use? Highly accurate
radiocarbon dates were the only way to find out.
Sophisticated analysis of dozens of samples from the dead showed that
the sequence of the burials unfolded over a mere thirty years, beginning in
about 3640 BC. Other burial mounds nearby were actively used for three or
four generations at most. The West Kennet Long Barrow was a communal
burial site used for a short time – almost a family history of some Stone Age
farmers. Because it was in use for such a brief period, those buried in the
barrow’s chambers were not just remote, anonymous ancestors: some of them
had been known personally to the people still going about their business.
Looking slightly further afield, we now know that the use of long burial
mounds was brief and ceased around 3625 BC. All this raises some
fascinating questions. Were people buried in the long barrows in order to
claim territory in a place and at a time where competition for land was
increasing? Or were the communities that buried their dead in them short-
lived because they were unstable and did not endure during times of political
stress? The new chronology revealed a time of occasional rapid change and
sudden events.
Radiocarbon is not the only means of dating the past. The earliest
chapters of the past date back more than 3 million years – far beyond the
scope of radiocarbon dating. And so we rely on a geological dating method,
potassium–argon dating.
The potassium–argon method dates rocks by measuring the ratio of
radioactive argon to radioactive potassium contained in them. Radioactive
potassium-40 decays to radioactive argon-40 in both minerals and rocks. The
ratio of argon-40 to potassium-40 in a mineral or rock provides an age for the
sample. Argon is an inactive gas that escapes when rock material, such as
volcanic lava, is in a molten state. When it cools, and crystallises into
volcanic rock, the argon can no longer escape. A spectrometer can measure
the concentration of argon in the rock. Researchers can then use the known
rate of decay to calculate the rock’s age.
Fortunately, many early human sites, like those at Olduvai Gorge in
Tanzania and near Hadar in Ethiopia, lie in areas of volcanic activity, where
potassium–argon dating is useful. Some are buried between layers of volcanic
ash. At Olduvai, Louis and Mary Leakey used the potassium–argon method,
developed in the late 1950s, to date human fossils to more than 2.5 million
years (see Chapter 29). Humanlike footprints in volcanic ash at Laetoli, also
in Tanzania, date to about 3.5 million years. Potassium–argon dating has
extended the timescale of human evolution to dates that are unimaginably
earlier than the few hundred thousand years of previous estimates.
People are constantly experimenting with new dating methods, but none
rivals the radiocarbon and potassium–argon methods, which span the entire
human past. The accuracy improves every year, so soon we will routinely
date individual generations.
We have come a long way since the 1950s. When, for example, did
people settle the offshore islands of the South Pacific? Over 1,500
radiocarbon dates provide a fascinating answer. The settlement of all the
islands in the central and eastern Pacific, including Hawai’i and Rapa Nui
(Easter Island), took place within a mere century after AD 1000. These were
long voyages that unfolded over a remarkably short time. Now we must find
out why people made them.
Above all, the new dating methods have allowed archaeologists to think
of a truly world prehistory – of a human past that linked continents long
before the European Age of Discovery in the fifteenth century. Now we have
a sense of human history, where events like the development of farming and
urban civilisation unfolded in a world that was as diverse as it is today.
 CHAPTER 28

Ecology and World Prehistory

T he skipper of the English trawler Colinda cursed when his nets brought up
a lump of peat from the North Sea’s Leman and Ower Banks in 1931. But as
his crew bent down to throw the dark mass overboard, the peat split open. A
brown, barbed object fell out onto the deck, some peat still clinging to it.
The skipper was intrigued and – fortunately for science – he brought the
find back to port. Eventually it reached Norwich Museum, where experts
identified it as a classic bone harpoon of a type made by Stone Age hunters in
Scandinavia. It was exhibited at a meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East
Anglia in 1932. Among those in the audience was a young archaeologist from
Cambridge named John Grahame Douglas Clark (1907–95).
As a teenager at Marlborough College, Clark had been nicknamed
‘Stones and Bones’ for his fascination with stone tools and animal bones. His
first exposure to archaeology was in the narrow world of flint tool collecting.
Most archaeology was still in the hands of amateurs, who haunted quarries
and river gravel exposures looking for stone tools and pottery. These were
people with limited interests, but Clark learned a great deal by associating
with them.
The world of archaeology was still focused on local sites. Only a few
scholars like Gordon Childe had a broader vision. Childe thought of the
European past as a form of history, in which artefacts, rather than people,
were the main players. Clark found this far more interesting than merely
describing stone tools.
In the 1920s, Cambridge University did not offer a three-year degree
course in archaeology alone. And so when Clark went there in 1926, he spent
his first two years studying history – an invaluable experience, for it exposed
him to some remarkable scholars, among them world historian George
Trevelyan. Economic historian Michael Postan also introduced Clark to the
latest research on medieval economies, which would play an important part
in his thinking in later years.
When the time came for Clark to embark on the two-year archaeology
honours curriculum, he had knowledge not only of prehistory, but also of
biological and social anthropology. Logically, he looked at the past by calling
on a range of academic disciplines. This was an unusual approach.
At the time, Cambridge archaeology was concerned almost entirely with
Europe. But Clark did sit in on lectures by Leonard Woolley about the Ur
burials (see Chapter 20), by Gertrude Caton-Thompson on her findings at
early farming villages in Egypt’s Faiyum (see Chapter 22), and by Gordon
Childe about Bronze Age Europe. At the time many archaeologists assumed
that prehistoric cultures developed in the same way everywhere, and so what
was found in Europe would be repeated elsewhere. In 1928, Clark heard
another British archaeologist, Dorothy Garrod, boldly inform the Prehistoric
Society of East Anglia that this was not so. Their cherished European cultures
were quite different from those of the Middle East. This was not a popular
idea at a time when Stone Age archaeology centred on Europe. Clark
absorbed all of this eagerly. He also spent long hours in Louis Leakey’s
laboratory, examining stone tools from Africa (see Chapter 29). The lectures
and laboratory experience exposed him to archaeology far from home – to
what was slowly becoming a global subject.
Clark’s Cambridge mentors encouraged him to study the Stone Age
cultures of Britain from the end of the Ice Age to the arrival of farming.
These were termed ‘Mesolithic’ (Greek: mesos, middle, and lithos, stone), a
‘Middle Stone Age’ that was thought of as a transitional period before
agriculture. Clark found himself looking at thousands of small flint
arrowheads and razor-sharp stone barbs in museums and private collections.
His dissertation was, inevitably, a dull study of tiny stone tools, most of them
collected casually from the surface and not from occupation levels. However,
his book The Mesolithic Age in Britain appeared in 1932 and established him
as an authority on this obscure subject.
As part of his research, Clark travelled extensively in Scandinavia,
realising that he needed to know what had happened on the other side of the
North Sea. There, the record of Mesolithic cultures was much richer, thanks
to sites preserved in waterlogged marshes. They yielded perishable finds,
such as antler and bone spear points. There were even the remains of fish
traps and nets from camps covered by shallow water.
Clark also walked along beaches situated above the modern sea level, left
by an earlier version of the Baltic Sea that had been far more extensive than it
is today. This was a wake-up call, for it made him realise the magnitude of
the changes that had affected Northern Europe immediately after the Ice Age.
To understand human societies of the time, you often had to relate them to
dramatic environmental change.
The dissertation years were busy ones for Clark, who became
increasingly impatient with amateur collectors obsessed with artefact trivia.
Grahame Clark did not hesitate to criticise the status quo. He and Stuart
Piggott, another future great who was working at Avebury, were among a
group of young rebels who engaged in animated discussions in college
rooms. They became increasingly influential voices, despite their youth. In a
closing appendix to The Mesolithic Age in Britain, Clark pointed out the huge
potential for environmental archaeology in the Fens, the marshy terrain close
to Cambridge. This research would have to include botanists, geologists and
others, not just archaeologists. The finding of the Leman and Ower Banks
harpoon was one of the events that sent Clark’s research in a new and
exciting direction.
The North Sea discovery inspired Clark and others to look for stratified
Mesolithic sites in the peat levels of the East Anglian fenlands. While
working on his doctorate, Clark had become friends with botanists Harry and
Margaret Godwin. The Godwins were students of Arthur Tansley, the
founding figure of British ecology. Tansley recommended that they learn
palynology, the science of pollen analysis. This method uses minute pollen
grains in peat bogs to study major changes in vegetation since the Ice Age. It
had been pioneered by Swedish botanist Lennart von Post during the First
World War. The Godwins studied the peat attached to the Leman and Ower
Banks harpoon and showed that it was of the same period as identical
weapons found in Denmark. They were ideal partners in Clark’s new
projects.
The Godwins, Clark and others formed a multidisciplinary research
group, the Fenland Research Committee, in 1932. Clark was its most active
member, starting work at a site buried under peat at Plantation Farm, 11
kilometres east-northeast of Ely. He found flints on a sandy ridge, then dug
down to uncover a scattering of stone tools on what had once been a sandy
island in a swamp. The excavation revealed a sequence of two peats,
separated by fine sand formed by a higher sea level. The site extended from
the Stone Age to the Bronze Age.
In 1934, Clark and the Godwins excavated Peacock’s Farm, another
location close by. They sank a trench into peat and this time struck
archaeological gold. A handful of Mesolithic flints lay below a layer with
Stone Age pot fragments. Above this Neolithic layer was Early Bronze Age
pottery. They had unearthed a rare stratified sequence that covered much of
prehistoric times. With pollen samples and molluscs, the small group of
researchers documented major environmental changes over time. This was
the first effort at multidisciplinary, environmental archaeology in Britain.
In 1932, Clark became a fellow of Peterhouse College at Cambridge
University, and soon afterwards an assistant lecturer in archaeology. He
would remain at Cambridge for the rest of his life. From 1932 to 1935, his
fellowship freed him from teaching. He used this time to travel extensively in
Northern Europe, mostly by bicycle. There he learned to appreciate the great
range of perishable artefacts made from wooden and other organic materials.
He developed a major interest in waterlogged sites, believing that it was only
a matter of time before one came to light in Britain.
Clark’s northern travels, during which he explored folk cultures,
ethnography, archaeology and environmental change, resulted in his second
book, The Mesolithic Settlement of Northern Europe, published in 1936. In
this brilliant volume, he pointed out that ancient societies had interacted with
their environments. They could be thought of as part of much larger
ecological systems, the elements of which interacted with one another. This
was a radical idea at the time. The dominant themes of this superb book were
ecological and environmental.
If ever an archaeologist was single-minded, it was Grahame Clark. He
devoted himself totally to environmental archaeology, the study of people
and their changing environments. He was also convinced that archaeology
had a major role to play in society. Clark argued that the most important
function of archaeology is to explain how ancient peoples lived.
During the war years, Clark (who could not serve for medical reasons)
wrote a series of articles on economic archaeology, the study of how people
made their living in the past. In Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis,
published in 1952, he brought these articles together into a series of essays on
everything from ancient beekeeping to whale hunting.
He combined archaeological evidence with traditional folk culture that
still survived in Scandinavia, collected during his trips to Northern Europe.
His economic and ecological perspectives became highly influential, even in
the United States, where he himself was virtually unknown. Just as this
important book was published, Clark was elected Disney Professor of
Prehistoric Archaeology at Cambridge, at the time the leading professorship
in prehistoric archaeology in the world.
Clark had never abandoned his hope that a waterlogged Mesolithic site
would come to light. In 1948, an amateur archaeologist reported a likely site
at Star Carr, near the North Sea in northeastern Yorkshire. Clark realised at
once that the stone axes found on the surface resembled those from
Scandinavia, and there was a strong likelihood that they came from
waterlogged peat deposits. He excavated Star Carr on a shoestring budget
over three seasons between 1949 and 1951. The site, on the shores of a long
dried-up glacial lake, lay on a birch platform, among reeds. A radiocarbon
date of about 7500 BC provided a basic chronology.
In his excavation report, Clark painted a picture of a tiny encampment set
in a landscape of birch forest, where the inhabitants hunted red and roe deer.
He described Star Carr not just from tools and animal bones, but in the
context of its surrounding environment, a first for Britain. Fifty years later,
teams of researchers with the latest high-technology methods re-excavated
Star Carr and found that it was actually a larger settlement than Clark had
reported. AMS radiocarbon tests now date the site to between 9000 and 8500
BC.
As Disney Professor, Clark followed Dorothy Garrod, who had taught the
first world prehistory course at Cambridge. He created a department that
treated prehistory as a global subject, and he travelled widely – as far afield
as Australia. Clark and his colleagues trained a generation of young
archaeologists, whom he encouraged to work overseas, often in little-known
archaeological areas. (I was one of them and went to Africa.)
His travels and the radiocarbon revolution resulted in one of his best-
known works, World Prehistory. The book was unique in 1961. Other
authors – such as Gordon Childe – had written summaries of ancient Europe,
of Maya civilisation and North America’s prehistoric past. But no one before
had attempted a work that explored early human history in every corner of
the world. World Prehistory ran to three editions and was widely read.
Grahame Clark was a shy, retiring figure, who was nevertheless capable
of harsh criticism of his fellow archaeologists. But his authoritative writings
and his insistence on the importance of economic archaeology endured long
after his death. Not only did he make this a central part of twentieth-century
archaeology, but he also helped turn archaeology into the global discipline
that it is today. Clark, like others who emerged later, rebelled against an
obsessive concern with artefacts and chronological sequences. His writings
influenced a generation, while his students worked – and some still do work –
all over the world.
 CHAPTER 29

‘Dear Boy!’

O lduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa, 17 July 1959. Louis Leakey was in
bed in camp with a slight fever when his wife Mary left to re-examine a
location where they had found stone tools eight years earlier. At the site,
Mary brushed away fine soil from two large teeth that were set in what
appeared to be a human jaw. Her heart stopped. Leaping into her Land Rover,
she raced back to camp. ‘I’ve got him!’ she cried. Fever forgotten in all the
excitement, Louis and Mary examined the teeth together.
But what form of hominin (a species related to, or an ancestor of,
humans) lay in the soil? When all the pieces were recovered, Mary assembled
the skull of a robust-looking ape-human. They named the find Zinjanthropus
boisei, ‘Southern ape-human of Boise’, after a Mr Boise who had sponsored
the research. Zinjanthropus boisei was a strongly built hominin, the first
discovered outside South Africa. The Leakeys called him ‘Dear Boy’.
 The modern search for human origins had begun many years earlier. In
1924, South African anatomist Raymond Dart (1893–1988) identified a tiny
hominin skull found in a lime quarry at Taung in South Africa’s Cape
Province. The teeth looked quite modern, the face jutted forward and the head
was somewhat rounded – a mix of modern and ancient features. Dart called it
Australopithecus africanus, ‘Southern ape from Africa’. He proclaimed that
Australopithecus was the link between living apes and humans. But Dart was
prone to jumping to conclusions.
As we saw in Chapter 8, the scientists of the day had rejected Dutchman
Eugène Dubois’s find of Pithecanthropus erectus from Java in 1889 as a
potential missing link. Mesmerised by the Neanderthals, they were also
obsessed by the forged Piltdown skull, with its large brain and small teeth,
found in England in 1912. Dart was laughed to scorn. He joined Dubois on
the list of discredited fossil hunters.
Even by the mid-twentieth century, we still did not know much about
early human evolution. More Neanderthals had come to light in Europe, and
now in the Middle East. The Homo erectus fossils at Zhoukoudian in China
had proved Dubois correct (see Chapter 8). The Australopithecus finds from
South Africa were now accepted as possible human ancestors. Otherwise, the
African slate was virtually blank. Then Louis and Mary Leakey came along
and changed everything.
Born to Church of England missionaries in Kenya, Louis Seymour Bazett
Leakey (1903–72) became one of the most remarkable archaeologists of the
twentieth century. Brash, driven and opinionated, Leakey studied
archaeology at Cambridge University, where he caused controversy by
wearing shorts on a tennis court!
Leakey had always wanted to dig in Africa, where he was convinced that
human origins lay. After graduating in 1926, he organised a shoestring
expedition to Kenya and excavated Gamble’s Cave in the Great Rift Valley.
He found stratified layers of human occupation dating back at least 20,000
years. The earliest visitors were probably contemporaries of Neanderthal
cultures in Europe. The later levels yielded finely made spear points, knives
and other tools. These much more sophisticated people were the African
equivalents of the Upper Palaeolithic folk found in French caves (see Chapter
10). The stone tools showed conclusively that prehistoric African societies
were very different from those of Europe. There were also hints of much
earlier Africans from crude artefacts found at other sites. Louis Leakey
became convinced that East Africa was where humans originated.
In 1931, Leakey accompanied German palaeontologist Hans Reck to
Olduvai Gorge. Some 40 kilometres long, Olduvai is a jagged slash in the
Serengeti plains of northern Tanzania, where violent earth movements
exposed deep, stratified layers of ancient lake beds. Reck was looking for
fossil animals. Meanwhile Leakey was convinced that there would be
evidence of early human settlement in the gorge. Reck bet Leakey £10 that he
would not find stone tools at Olduvai. Leakey collected on the bet on the very
first day.
Leakey was a fluent Kikuyu speaker from boyhood. He was therefore a
natural candidate for a year-long anthropological study of the tribe, which
began in 1936. That same year, he married his second wife, Mary. London-
born Mary Leakey (1913–96) was the opposite of Louis. Quiet, modest and
methodical, she was a superb technical artist, a meticulous excavator and an
expert on stone-tool technology. She kept many of her husband’s more hare-
brained schemes in check and completed many of his excavations.
Neither of them let the Second World War stand in their way. In 1943,
they excavated a series of sites at Olorgesailie in the Rift Valley, near
Nairobi, where ancient hunters had butchered big game. These sites date to
about 300,000 years ago. Olorgesailie is a fascinating place to visit. You can
see dozens of large stone butchery tools lying just where their users dropped
them hundreds of thousands of years ago. The Leakeys also found dense
concentrations of stone tools and fragmentary animal bones, as well as places
where the hunters had camped, eaten and slept. No more than a few metres
across, these sites are priceless archives of ancient human behaviour. With
careful excavation, you can find everything from tiny tools to mouse bones or
even snake fangs.
After the war, and operating on a virtually non-existent budget, the pair
worked at Olduvai, excavating thousands of stone tools from stratified lake
beds. In 1951, the Leakeys published a report on the long stone-tool sequence
at the gorge, starting with crude chopping tools that were little more than
simple flaked lava cobbles.
Once the stone-tool sequence provided a framework, the couple switched
their focus from stone tools to the fine clays and sands exposed in the gorge.
As you look up at what were once lake beds, it’s hard to imagine that animals
large and small drank from their shallow waters. This time, the Leakeys
searched for lakeside camps where people had butchered their prey with
crude stone choppers and sharp-edged flakes of stone. Except for a few
fragmentary teeth, there were no traces of hominin fossils. Then, in July
1959, Mary Leakey found Zinjanthropus boisei, or ‘Dear Boy’.
‘Dear Boy’ made the Leakeys international celebrities. The National
Geographic Society funded the complete excavation of the Zinjanthropus
site. Mary excavated the scatter of bone fragments and stone debris with
meticulous care. She recorded every artefact and bone where it lay before
lifting it. For the first time, archaeologists could reconstruct very early human
life.
I once visited Mary’s excavation. She crouched under an umbrella, her
Dalmatian dogs lying nearby. With brush and dental pick, she gently eased
lake sand away from a small antelope bone. Her patience was remarkable.
Mary’s slow-moving excavation methods are now common practice for
excavating sites this old.
How old was Zinjanthropus boisei? Louis had dated the fossil by
guesswork to about 600,000 years. When two geophysicists from the
University of California, Berkeley used the new potassium–argon method to
date it to 1.75 million years (see Chapter 27), the Leakeys and the
international scientific community were stunned. From one day to the next,
human origins had nearly trebled in age.
The search for human ancestors now widened. Large-scale excavations at
other Olduvai locations yielded more hominins. Skull fragments and an
almost complete foot from a slightly earlier site belonged to a slender, more
slightly built hominin, quite different from Zinjanthropus. South African
biological anthropologist Phillip Tobias studied the remains and identified
Homo habilis, ‘Handy person’. With characteristic boldness, Louis Leakey
called habilis the earliest toolmaker of all, dated to 2 million years before the
present day.
Mary Leakey undertook the massive task of writing up the early sites. Her
report was a detailed study of a simple technology of stone choppers and
flakes. She named this technology ‘Oldowan’ after the gorge. Meanwhile,
Louis travelled widely, lecturing and forever proposing new theories of
human origins. He also encouraged young researchers to investigate the
behaviour of living primates such as chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas.
Such studies might provide insights into early human behaviour. Louis was
an important mentor for Britain’s Jane Goodall, who became a world
authority on chimpanzees, and American Dian Fossey, who specialised in
gorillas.
Louis died in 1972. In 1977, Mary opened excavations at another
promising location at Laetoli in Tanzania. She amazed her colleagues by
uncovering in hardened volcanic ash two trails of hominin footprints that
were made 3.59 million years ago. The Laetoli footprints came from the bed
of a seasonal river. Thin layers of fine volcanic ash had formed a pathway for
animals travelling to nearby waterholes. The hardened volcanic ash also
preserved the footprints of elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, a sabre-toothed
tiger and many antelope species.
The two trails of hominin footprints, about 24 centimetres apart, were
probably made at different times. The distinctive heel and toe prints were left
by two individuals under 1.5 metres tall. Mary described their gait as rolling
and slow-moving. Their hips swivelled as they walked, unlike the free-
striding gait of modern people. Most likely, the footprints were made by
individuals like ‘Lucy’, the diminutive Australopithecus afarensis found in
Ethiopia by Don Johanson in 1973, one of many such finds. The Laetoli
hominins walked upright, bipedally (on two feet). Since coming down from
the trees was a distinctive human characteristic, bipedalism was key to
successful hunting and foraging in open country.
For years, those scientists who studied human origins, working with few
fossils, tended to think of early human evolution as linear (proceeding in a
straight line). But by the 1970s, it was clear that there was a far greater
diversity of hominins in East Africa and perhaps elsewhere, and that most of
them were still unknown. This diversity became clear as more researchers
began work in East Africa, among them Don Johanson and the Leakeys’ son,
Richard.
Palaeoanthropology (the study of human fossils) itself now relied on field
teams of different specialists as interested in the local environment and
human behaviour as they were in fossils. The Leakeys tended to work alone.
They did their own geology, and only little by little began to call on experts
in other fields, such as botany, dating and zoology. But this limited use of
specialist colleagues changed the research. New chronologies based on
molecular biology showed that chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, and
humans split from one another some 7–8 million years ago.
The search for human origins now included fossils far earlier than Homo
habilis and Zinjanthropus boisei. Richard Leakey investigated fossil-bearing
beds on the east side of remote Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. His team
found a range of well-preserved Australopithecus fossils and the remains of a
human ancestor that displayed a mixture of both primitive and more
advanced features. Now that there are more fossils to study, Homo habilis is
today called early Homo, our earliest direct ancestor.
During the 1990s, another American palaeoanthropologist, Tim White,
found at least seventeen small hominins at Aramis in the arid Awash region
of Ethiopia. They come from Ardipithecus ramidus, a hominin who probably
lived between 4.5 million and 4.3 million years ago. ‘Ardi’ seems closer to
chimpanzees than to humans, and may have lived in more wooded
environments than did his successors. This little-known creature, which stood
on two feet, was close to the first hominins to diverge from African apes. Its
bones have been found in layers at Aramis underlying later
Australopithecines. By the standards of Ardipithecus, Don Johanson’s
‘Lucy’, at 3 million years old, is much younger.
Today, we know that a great array of hominins flourished in eastern
Africa between 7 million and 2 million years ago. Many of them are still
unknown, but it appears that Australopithecines were among the most
common. And among them were hominins with more rounded heads, as well
as other distinctive features in the hips and limbs that justify them being
called early Homo, our earliest ancestors. Quite when they appeared remains
a mystery, but they apparently made stone tools and may have evolved
around 3 million years ago.
Like other archaeologists of the earlier twentieth century, the Leakeys
spent much of their careers working alone and with minimal funds. Their
discoveries helped put the study of human origins on a modern footing.
Today, with many more fossils to work with, we think of human evolution as
a tree with numerous branches, most of which led to dead ends. A few,
however, led to early Homo, Homo erectus and ultimately to modern humans.
 CHAPTER 30

The First Farmers

D uring the 1930s, Gordon Childe wrote of an Agricultural Revolution that

supposedly began during Middle Eastern droughts (see Chapter 23). He
estimated that the changeover from hunting and gathering to farming and
animal herding began around 4000 BC, or perhaps somewhat earlier. Childe
was guessing, and had very little information to support his ideas. What had
happened to change human life fundamentally in this region? Three-quarters
of a century later, numerous excavations, radiocarbon dating and new
climatic data are providing some clues.
Childe wrote of a revolution that changed history. Agriculture did indeed
alter the course of human life; but it was a changeover, not an invention, as
Childe well understood. Everyone who collected edible grasses knew that
they germinated, grew and then shed their seed. But why go to the effort if
there were wild grasses for the taking? People began planting wild cereal
grasses as a survival strategy, when natural harvests dwindled. The
changeover from hunting and gathering plant foods to farming was one of the
major turning points in human history. Where and when did it first occur, and
why?
These questions have fascinated archaeologists for more than a century.
But, unfortunately, early farming sites are few and far between. It is hard for
archaeologists to distinguish between wild and domesticated (cultivated)
grains, and the bones of wild goats and sheep are almost identical to those of
tamed animals. This is archaeology that requires good preservation
conditions, slow-moving excavation, and the use of very fine sieves to
recover tiny seeds. It also needs teamwork, as one man in particular
understood.
Robert John Braidwood (1907–2003) was the son of a pharmacist. He
enrolled at the University of Michigan to study architecture, and eventually
graduated with degrees in architecture, anthropology and history. Braidwood
then worked for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he
became an expert on chronology, building timescales from deep, stratified
trenches. He married his wife Linda in 1937, and they worked together for
sixty-six years in one of the most enduring partnerships in archaeology. They
died in their nineties within just a few hours of one another.
Braidwood asked a fundamental question: where had people found wild
grasses that could be cultivated? He talked to biologists and botanists, who
directed him to mountain country in the northern Middle East. Braidwood
accordingly headed for northern Iraq. His research took him to Jarmo, a
village mound in the foothills of Iraq’s Zagros Mountains in the late 1940s
and early 1950s.
This was a project with a difference. For generations, archaeologists had
asked specialists to identify the occasional animal bone sample or carbonised
seed found in their digs. But Braidwood realised that he needed more than
part-time specialists. He insisted on close partnerships with expert scholars,
and on carefully planned research work. He took along a geologist to study
the interactions between the inhabitants and their environment. Other team
members included a zoologist, a botanist, a pottery specialist and a
radiocarbon-dating expert.
Jarmo had twelve occupation levels. It consisted of some twenty-five
houses with mud-brick walls and clay roofs, laid out on stone foundations.
Perhaps 150 people had lived at Jarmo. Braidwood’s teamwork paid off, as
his specialists pieced things together. The inhabitants had cultivated two
forms of wheat, also lentils, and had herded goats and sheep. Being an expert
in chronology, Braidwood was naturally fascinated by radiocarbon dating. To
his surprise, the earliest Jarmo dates came in at about 7000 BC, far earlier than
the generally assumed date for early farming of 4000 BC.
Jarmo was remarkably old, and yet farming was already well established
there. Clearly there was a significant time gap between these farmers and the
earlier hunting societies. Braidwood assumed that the very earliest farmers
had lived in simpler villages than Jarmo, and so he set out to find them.
He moved to Çayönü mound in southeastern Turkey. To his
astonishment, he unearthed another well-planned village, now known to date
to between 9400 and 7200 BC. Braidwood realised that the changeover to
farming was a much more complex process than people had thought. But he
was unprepared for the extraordinary discoveries made around the same time
at Jericho.
Kathleen Kenyon (1906–78) was a British archaeologist famous for her
love of excavating, fox terriers and gin. She had studied history at Oxford,
and then in 1929 had accompanied Gertrude Caton-Thompson to Great
Zimbabwe, where she developed a passion for excavation (see Chapter 22).
Kenyon’s training was impeccable. Her remarkable digging skills came from
four seasons under Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler at Roman Verulamium from
1930 to 1934 (see Chapter 25).
Kenyon built such a formidable reputation as an excavator that she was
invited to dig in Palestine, at Samaria, the capital of ancient Israel. The rest of
her career was spent in the Middle East. While Braidwood was digging
Jarmo, Kenyon was funded to excavate the ancient city mound at Jericho,
now in Jordan. Her expertise in deciphering complex, stratified layers filled
with pot fragments was unique. No better person could have been chosen for
the work.
Jericho was, of course, a biblical location, and also a major Bronze Age
walled city. Kenyon was concerned with the entire history of the place. She
dug down to the base of what is called Tell es-Sultan, close to the modern
city, and collected numerous radiocarbon samples from the early levels. At
the base, by a spring, lay a tiny settlement that had been occupied before
9500 BC. Jericho had soon become a compact settlement of small, circular
dwellings built of clay and sun-dried brick. After a century, there were about
seventy houses. Between about 8350 and 7300 BC, it became a small town,
perhaps with several hundred inhabitants, surrounded by a massive stone wall
over 3.6 metres high. A stone tower with an internal staircase stood inside the
wall. It is not known if the tower and wall were a defence against the River
Jordan’s floods or against people.
The inhabitants of the town were certainly farmers, as were their
successors, who lived in rectangular houses built on stone foundations. By
6900 BC, the inhabitants were burying the heads and the (sometimes headless)
skeletons of their ancestors under the floors of their houses. Some skulls had
the facial features reconstructed with plaster to create crude ‘portraits’, with
seashells used as eyes. Under a house floor, Kenyon found one pit containing
ten tightly packed plastered skulls.
Kenyon’s Jericho excavations were a classic example of what is
commonly known as vertical excavation. Deep, usually narrow trenches
provide details of who lived in, say, a city and when. They show changes in
ancient societies through time. In fact, vertical excavation was Kenyon’s only
option, as Jericho’s city deposits were very deep: to expose more area of the
earliest levels would have been prohibitively expensive. But her vertical
excavation provided the basic history of the city through many centuries.
Kenyon’s Jericho excavations confirmed what Braidwood suspected: the
beginnings of farming had been a long process that had taken hold in many
places. Today, we know of a scattering of small villages running from
southeastern Turkey into Syria and farther south that were farming at least
11,000 years ago. Few of them have been extensively excavated, except for
Abu Hureyra, a small village on the edge of woodland and more open
country in Syria’s Euphrates Valley. British archaeologist Andrew Moore
excavated the settlement’s mound in 1972–73, knowing that a hydroelectric
dam would shortly flood it. Abu Hureyra provided a remarkable portrait of an
early farming village of 10,000 BC, reconstructed by expert digging and team
research.
The climate of the whole region was somewhat warmer and damper than
it is today. A few families dwelt in small houses that were partially dug into
the ground and roofed with reeds. The inhabitants lived off a wide variety of
wild animals and edible grasses and nuts. They hunted the gazelle (desert
antelope) herds that migrated from the south each spring: more than 80 per
cent of the animal bones from the tiny settlement came from these small
animals, the meat dried for later consumption. The villagers also consumed
half a dozen staple wild plants and used more than 200 other species as mind-
altering drugs, dye pigments and medicines. The Abu Hureyra people
carefully managed and tended their environment, and some 300–400 people
dwelt in this successful village. Then, abruptly, they abandoned the
settlement in the face of persistent drought.
We know this from profound changes in the different edible grasses and
nuts in the occupation layers. One of Moore’s experts, botanist Gordon
Hillman, collected plant remains from the occupation levels. He floated seed-
rich soil samples through water and fine screens, and this provided him with
large plant collections. He showed that as conditions became drier after
10,000 BC, the nut-bearing forests and wild grasslands retreated ever farther
from Abu Hureyra. As the drought intensified, so plant foods became scarcer
and scarcer.
One can imagine the growing catastrophe. Day after day, the sun shone
from a cloudless, pale-blue sky. The horizon never darkened with rain.
Clouds of dust swirled across the usually green plains by the Euphrates River.
The open, now brown grasslands receded with every month of the drought.
And each year, the villagers had to walk longer distances to the forests to
gather nuts and edible grasses. The harvests were far poorer than before, so
that by winter the villagers were hungry. By spring, they were starving.
Hillman and Moore believe that a combination of drought and deforestation
(caused by a growing demand for firewood – a result of the cooling
temperatures and rising number of people) eventually forced the inhabitants
to leave.
In about 9000 BC, an entirely different, larger settlement arose on the
original village mound. At first, the inhabitants continued to hunt gazelle.
Then, within the space of a couple of generations, the people switched to
herding goats and sheep. Over the next ten centuries, goats and sheep became
ever more important as gazelle hunting declined. The village came to cover
12 hectares. Visitors would have found themselves wandering through a
community of rectangular, single-storey mud-brick houses joined by narrow
lanes and courtyards.
Experts estimate that it must have taken between 1,000 and 2,000 years to
domesticate and control wild grasses for human harvest. The need to
safeguard the supply of food in the face of prolonged drought may well have
been the trigger that led people to cultivate crops. At first, the inhabitants of
Abu Hureyra (and elsewhere) probably planted wild grasses to increase seed
harvests – first rye, then wheat and barley. After a while, they became full-
time farmers, tied to their fields and the grazing lands of their animals. Their
agriculture depended entirely on rainfall, and the first planting required
careful timing lest the crops wither before it rained. This was high-risk
farming in an environment with unpredictable rainfall.
Whether it was the thousand-year drought in the eastern Mediterranean
region from about 10,000 BC that triggered agriculture is still open to debate.
But it probably was one of the major factors that turned hunters and foragers
into farmers.
Abu Hureyra is just one of the many early farming villages dating to
around 10,000 BC that are now known across a wide area of the Middle East.
All of them share the general characteristics of the changeover seen at the
Syrian site. The origins of farming were much more drawn out – and far
earlier – than anyone thought even a generation ago. And the shift was not a
unique development confined to the Middle East. Farming began at much the
same time on the other side of the world, in China; and a little later in the
Americas.
From this changeover came an explosion in population growth, far more
complex human societies and, within a few thousand years, the world’s
earliest civilisations in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
 CHAPTER 31

Defending the Emperor

C hinese emperor Qin Shihuangdi wanted to be remembered for all eternity.

In 221 BC, this brutal, violent ruler turned China from a patchwork of states
into a single kingdom, only to die eleven years later at the age of just thirty-
nine. There was an ancient Chinese belief that mercury brought everlasting
life, and so Shihuangdi had swallowed countless mercury pills. Instead of
making him immortal, they probably killed him.
The emperor died at the coast, but he was to be buried some way inland.
As his coffin travelled slowly by carriage, accompanied by trusted royal
officials, rotting fish was used to mask the smell of the decomposing body.
Shihuangdi had started building his burial mound about 40 kilometres
east of Xian, in northwestern China, long before he became emperor. But
work intensified during his reign. Some 700,000 men dug and shaped his
burial place at the foot of the prominent Mount Li. Then a small army of
craftspeople created an entire underground kingdom.
 The workers dug down until they came to a series of freshwater springs.
Then they filled the sepulchre with replicas of palaces and other buildings in
special caverns. A bronze outer coffin was fashioned for the emperor. The
ceilings mimicked the night sky, with pearls as stars. According to a guide to
Chinese civilisation written in 94 BC, mercury was used to model the ocean
and major rivers, which even appeared to flow. Once again, mercury – the
substance that probably killed Shihuangdi – was being used as a symbol of
immortality. This makes the burial mound a dangerous place: soil samples
taken around the tomb display high levels of contamination.
Written sources tell us that craftsmen set up mechanical crossbows
primed to shoot any intruders. Immediately after Shihuangdi’s funeral, those
who had worked on the tomb were sealed inside, to prevent them from
passing on any information.
Shihuangdi’s burial mound rises 43 metres above the surrounding
countryside. The builders planted trees and bushes so that it blended into the
landscape. The emperor’s burial place was part of a huge death park,
surrounded by a 5 kilometre-long outer wall.
What else lay within the enclosure remained a secret until 1974, when
some workers were digging a well 2.5 kilometres east of the unexcavated
burial mound. There they found a full-sized terracotta (clay) soldier. Then
another. And another. A team of archaeologists and conservation experts
found themselves digging up an entire royal regiment. These are the famed
terracotta warriors. The team excavation was so large that no one person can
take overall credit for the work.
Unfortunately, I was unable to visit the excavations up close, and could
only see the warriors at a distance, as a tourist. And so my description must
be a general one. But I was astounded at the sight. The figures are incredibly
realistic. They stood in eleven parallel corridors, each about 200 metres long.
A roof of woven matting, strengthened with clay, covered the passageways. I
could easily imagine a real military force. The men parade in forty ranks,
mostly four abreast. Alert and disciplined, every figure stands up straight,
ready for battle. The troops wear replica coats of mail originally made of
stone slates joined by copper wires that opened and closed on the right side.
They are without helmets, looking forward. Each man has a different face, as
if they were all modelled from actual people. But they are expressionless and
apparently without emotion. The figures now are all light brown in colour,
with only a few traces of paint; but when the regiment was buried, they all
had brightly painted uniforms – the effect must have been dazzling.
Almost 200 bowmen and crossbowmen stand in three rows in front. They
wear cotton garments (modelled in terracotta) but no armour, as those using
bows and crossbows shot from a distance rather than fighting in close
quarters. The ranks took turns to fire volleys so that there would be a
continuous stream of arrows or crossbow bolts in the air. Modern
experiments show that the crossbows of the time had a range of about 200
metres.
Six chariots and three unarmoured infantry squads parade behind the
archers. Four terracotta horses pull the chariots, each with a charioteer. Two
or three soldiers would have accompanied each one into battle. Two of the
chariots were command vehicles for officers, from where drums would be
beaten or bells struck to signal an advance or a retreat. Some of the officers
have flowing moustaches and wear a slight smile.
I found the scene overwhelming. These were attack soldiers, who went
into battle without shields. We know from historical records that soldiers of
the Qin Dynasty were ferocious. Their commanders believed that attack was
the best form of defence. Their close-range fighting would have been bloody
and vicious. Everyone fought with bronze swords and spears, or with
halberds – combined spears and battle axes that could kill a man with a single
blow.
Shihuangdi protected himself with a powerful, well-trained regiment. But
they guarded him in terracotta, perhaps because such elite soldiers were too
valuable to sacrifice.
There was more. A second pit contained just over 1,500 soldiers and
horses, divided into four groups. In one corner, ranks of unarmoured
spearmen surrounded kneeling archers. The rest of the pit held chariots, with
sixty-four in one unit alone. It was all meant to send out a message of
vigilance, of soldiers on guard against a surprise attack.
A third pit, dug in 1977 after five years of arduous excavation and
conservation work, held the chariot of the commander and his guards. They
were exceptionally tall men at over 1.9 metres, some 10 centimetres taller
than the average soldier in Pit 1.
Just uncovering the fragile figures was a delicate exercise in teamwork.
The local clay was heavy enough to allow the sculpting of full-size figures.
Each figure had been modelled in parts and then assembled, the head made
separately from the body. This allowed the artists to produce more or less
standardised figures, while the heads were sculpted as individual portraits.
The conservation work has been extremely demanding. Quite apart from
reassembling many of the figures, the conservators have also tried to discover
what colour uniforms they wore from tiny paint fragments. The slow-moving
conservation work has been completed with an eye to the tourist trade.
Emperor Shihuangdi’s terracotta regiment has become a major international
attraction, visited by tens of thousands of people every year. This is
archaeology carried out on the public stage, where archaeologists face
problems such as overcrowding and air pollution affecting the figures.
The discoveries keep on coming. A pit found in 1998, southwest of the
burial mound, held thousands of armour fragments and helmets, and was
perhaps the site of an armoury. But there is far more appearing from the soil.
A year later, another pit, just to the south, yielded eleven clay figures and
a bronze cauldron. Judging by the gestures of the exquisite figures, these
were acrobats, perhaps intended to entertain the emperor in the afterlife.
Other pits contained fifteen musicians who had once held instruments (long
decayed), perhaps to divert the emperor as he walked in his garden.
Forty-six bronze birds from yet another pit stood on a platform by a water
channel. One even had a (bronze) worm in its beak. It is chance finds like
these that instantly transport you back into the past. The bird with its worm
reminds you that the ancients also appreciated beauty, quiet ponds and
wildlife.
Shihuangdi’s park is awe-inspiring in its size and complexity. For
instance, the emperor’s stables lay outside the central area – a place where
real horses were buried with kneeling terracotta grooms. Why they had to be
living horses, we do not know. Perhaps they were some of the emperor’s
favourites, in a land where horses had high prestige. There are unconfirmed
reports of a pit full of terracotta models of the emperor’s women. A nearby
series of mass graves reminds us of the enormous human cost of the
emperor’s quest for a happy immortality.
As recently as 2012, a huge palace complex 90 metres long and 250
metres wide came to light, complete with central courtyard and a main
building overlooking it. There will be archaeologists working on
Shihuangdi’s memorials for generations.
 And there remains the burial mound. Chinese archaeologists have paused,
for they doubt that they yet have the technical expertise – or the funds – to
excavate and conserve the burial chamber. And of course, there is the danger
posed by mercury contamination.
So far, they have relied on magnetometers – devices that measure the
different levels of magnetism deep inside the mound. Such instruments react
to iron, brick, burned soil, and even decayed wood and other organic
materials. The magnetometers have revealed that an underground palace lies
at the centre of the mound, surrounded by a wall. Experts also know that
there is an abundance of metal within the burial chamber, and an excellent
drainage system. Unusually high levels of mercury are present, perhaps
confirming the description of the interior from 94 BC (see above).
Intense controversy surrounds the potential excavation of Shihuangdi’s
tomb. Archaeologists argue that the methods they currently have at their
disposal are not adequate (as the damage caused to some of the terracotta
soldiers during excavation shows). Nevertheless, some people push for
immediate excavation, claiming that it will deter looters; others point to the
huge tourist potential and the economic benefits offered by the royal tomb.
All of this raises an important question for archaeologists everywhere.
Should the needs of the tourist industry take priority over pure archaeology?
The hordes of visitors who swarm over sites such as the Pyramids of Giza in
Egypt or Angkor Wat in Cambodia raise real fears about wear and tear at
important sites. Chinese archaeologists know that the excavation of
Shihuangdi’s burial mound will be the most important excavation of the
century, if not of all time. Quite rightly they want to wait until they have the
necessary tools and knowledge to conduct what will be a unique research
project.
As the debate rumbles on, the Chinese are gaining experience by digging
other royal burials. In 74 BC, the Han clan overthrew Emperor Liu He (92–59
BC) after a mere twenty-seven days in power. He was dethroned because he
was a playboy with an ‘inclination to pleasures’ and loose morals. He also
had no talent as a leader. Instead, high officials made him the Marquis of
Haihun, a small kingdom in the north of Jiangxi, near Nanchang. Despite his
disgrace, Liu was honoured with a lavish walled cemetery containing ten
tombs, including one for his wife.
A research team under archaeologist Xin Lixiang has been excavating the
cemetery since 2011. Liu’s burial included gold ingots and plates, amassing
78 kilograms of gold alone. Ten tonnes of bronze coins and ten cauldrons
accompanied the marquis. There were lamps in the form of wild geese, and
chariots with real horses that had been sacrificed.
Liu’s coffin was raised in 2015 when the entire inner section of the tomb
was removed using hydraulic lifts and taken to a nearby research centre for
detailed analysis. A seal inside the coffin bears his name, and his identity has
been confirmed from writing on some of the accompanying bronze items.
The tomb is unique, having been totally undisturbed. The marquis’s body has
been tested for DNA to establish his relationship to other Han nobles. As was
the custom, jade ornaments covered his eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Liu’s
burial is proof of the astonishing wealth of Han China 2,000 years ago.
Shihuangdi’s tomb is an example of the huge challenges that Chinese
archaeologists of the future will face, especially with rich burials. Their task
will be made somewhat easier by increasingly sophisticated scientific
methods, such as remote sensing, DNA and studies of the isotopic
(radioactive) content of human bones that can reveal changes in diet through
life. They know that long-term team projects will be the rule, and that
discovery must be balanced with conservation and with the demands of the
enormous domestic tourist industry.
We can be sure that some of the best archaeology of the future will come
from China. And we can be certain that spectacular discoveries await us.
 CHAPTER 32

Underwater Archaeology

A rchaeologist George Bass (born 1932) is an expert on the Mycenaean

civilisation of mainland Greece. He is also one of the world’s leading experts
on underwater archaeology. Bass became an underwater archaeologist by
chance, as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. The
university museum needed someone to direct the excavation of a shipwreck
on the seabed off Cape Gelidonya in southwestern Turkey. They chose Bass.
He knew nothing of diving, and so the museum sent him to a local youth club
for some scuba training. It was an inspired choice.
In 1954, Kemal Aras, a Turkish sponge diver, had spotted a pile of bronze
objects off the cape. Apparently, a ship’s bottom had been ripped open on a
rock. As she sank, the vessel spilled artefacts in an irregular line at a depth of
almost 27 metres. Enter Peter Throckmorton, an American journalist and
amateur archaeologist, who in 1959 was cataloguing ancient wrecks along the
coast. He realised that the shipwreck was unusually old and suggested that
the museum organise a scientific excavation to investigate it, the first such
deep-water enterprise ever undertaken. Underwater archaeology was born.
George Bass is, above all, an archaeologist. As soon as he saw the wreck,
he insisted that the same standards of excavation and recording had to be
upheld under the water as on land. He pointed out that the merchant ship had
been carrying a cargo of goods from one place to another. This could provide
vital information on ancient trade routes. It had sunk, taking its cargo to the
bottom of the sea, and until its discovery many centuries later, no human had
disturbed the wreck. It thus differed from archaeological sites on land, such
as a hunting camp or a city, which are constantly moved or rebuilt, and are
disturbed by all kinds of later human activity. They are never ‘sealed’ in the
same way as underwater wrecks, which often lie in deep water accessible
only by divers.
The Cape Gelidonya wreck lay on a bare, rocky seabed. First, Bass and
his divers photographed it. They couldn’t use paper to record measurements
and the position of artefacts, and so they relied on sheets of frosted plastic
and graphite pencils that write underwater. The cargo itself consisted mainly
of solid masses of copper, bronze and artefacts that had fused together on the
bottom. All Bass could do was lift the lumps using a heavy-duty car jack.
Then the excavators took them apart ashore.
The cargo proved a valuable one. Much of it consisted of copper ingots
that could be traced back to Cyprus. And then there was tin, used to make
bronze weapons. Metal was so precious that the crew had even packed bronze
scrap in wicker baskets. Many of the artefacts from the wreck had come from
Syria and Palestine. Bass reckoned that the ship had travelled to Cyprus to
load copper and scrap metal on its way to the Aegean Sea. But when had it
gone down? Painted pots and radiocarbon samples from the cargo gave a date
of 1200 BC. The vessel had sunk during the late Bronze Age.
Bass moved on in 1967 from the relatively straightforward Cape
Gelidonya wreck to a Byzantine ship near Yassiada, an island off western
Turkey. The wreck was essentially a pile of amphorae (large clay storage
jars). He built two underwater towers over the ship for taking photographs.
The archaeologists set up a grid over the site, just as they would at an
excavation on land. Divers hovering over the grid recorded the position of
every artefact before carrying it to the surface. Big hoses sucked seabed mud
and shell away to be examined.
 This time, coins dated the shipwreck to the first half of the seventh
century AD. Enough survived of the hull for the excavators to be able to study
the tile-roofed galley (ship’s kitchen) that sat midway between the bow
(front) and the stern (back) of the ship, deep in the hull (the body of the ship).
There was a tiled stove, and tableware and cooking utensils were still in
place.
Some iron objects had decayed inside lumps of sand and shell that littered
the site. One member of the research team, Michael Katzev, sawed through
the lumps, then filled them with an artificial rubber compound. When the
mould was broken, he was left with a cast of the original tools – double-
bladed axes, woodworking tools, files and even a device for caulking the hull
of the ship (making the joins watertight).
Underwater archaeology is more time consuming than excavation ashore.
It took 3,575 dives to investigate the Yassiada ship. Its timbers were so light
that divers had to clear them of sand, then pin each one to the seabed with
bicycle spokes in order to measure and record it, otherwise the fragile wood
would have floated away before being brought to the surface. One team
member, Frederick van Doorninck, studied records of every wood fragment,
even of joints and bolt holes, to draw the hull of the 21-metre vessel. He
succeeded, but both bow and stern were very incomplete.
The Yassiada excavation resulted in the basic methods used to study all
shipwrecks. The technology became more refined with Katzev’s 1967–69
excavation of a humble Greek vessel of the fourth century BC off Kyrenia in
northern Cyprus. The almost 15-metre merchant vessel had settled on its port
(left) side and had later split open. Fortunately, three-quarters of the hull
timbers survived.
The ship had had a hard life. It was well worn and had been repaired
several times. The cargo was far from glamorous: 35 tonnes of almonds and
amphorae filled with olive oil and wine, as well as millstones. Ships like this
were the anonymous traders that spent their lives sailing from port to port
between the Aegean Sea and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. The
Kyrenia ship was an important find because it documented not wealthy royal
cargoes, but humble folk going about their daily business at sea.
The Kyrenia excavation was of a modest ship carrying basic goods. But
there were others at sea with far more valuable cargoes, such as the heavily
laden vessel that crashed onto the vicious rocks of the Uluburun cliffs in
southern Turkey in 1305 BC. We do not know why it sank: perhaps a sudden
storm hurled it onto the rocks. As the crew jumped overboard to perish in the
waves, the cargo ship sank in 45 metres of water.
Some 3,300 years later, sponge diver Mehmet Çakir reported to his
captain that he had spotted metal objects ‘with ears’ on the bottom, close to
the Uluburun cliffs. For several years, underwater archaeologists had been
giving talks in local ports, showing pictures of what ancient shipwrecks
looked like. They hoped that local sponge divers might report any ships they
came across. Fortunately, the skipper had been to one of the lectures and
knew that the eared objects could be copper ingots. He reported the find and
expert divers visited the wreck in 1982, confirming that it was a Bronze Age
ship.
Archaeologists Cemal Pulak and Don Frey from Texas A&M University,
a leading centre of underwater research, inspected the site in 1996. They
found undisturbed rows of copper ingots and huge storage jars from Cyprus
stretching more than 9 metres down a steep slope. Bass called the Uluburun
ship an archaeologist’s dream – not for its rich cargo, but because it was a
priceless sealed time capsule of exotic goods from several lands. Tree-rings
from the ship’s timbers dated the wreck to about 1305 BC. Even more
important, it was from a period when little-known trade routes linked Egypt
with Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, Crete and the Greek mainland.
The ship had gone to the bottom at a time of intense competition for the
very profitable eastern Mediterranean trade. Egypt to the south was a brilliant
civilisation at the height of its power. To the north were the Hittites, who
were expert traders and warriors. In the west, the palaces of Crete and the
kings of Mycenae on the mainland traded olive oil, wine and other
commodities throughout the Aegean islands. Hundreds of merchant ships
plied the coasts and ports of the eastern Mediterranean.
The 15-metre Uluburun ship was not unusual, and its short mast and
square sail would not have stood out at a crowded quay. Only a close
observer would have noticed the dozens of ingots being loaded. The vessel
carried a shipment so exceptional that Bass and Pulak wondered if it could
have been a royal cargo.
They faced an underwater investigation of extraordinary complexity that
would take years. The depth at which the wreck lay created serious problems:
divers could only spend a limited time on the bottom and had to receive doses
of pure oxygen on their way back up to the surface to avoid becoming ill.
Between 1984 and 1992, 18,686 dives resulted in 6,000 hours of excavation,
followed by more in the last two seasons.
The Uluburun excavation required exceptional teamwork – far closer than
during land-based digs. Bass estimated that the laboratory analysis resulting
from a month’s underwater investigation was the equivalent of that generated
by a year’s work on land. The excavation began with teams of divers making
cross-sections of the wreck and the rows of ingots. The measurements from
each ingot were essential in order to reconstruct the curvature of the ship’s
hull. A hand-held ranging and positioning system recorded the location of
large objects such as stone anchors.
The Uluburun ship held enough copper and tin to make 300 bronze
helmets and corsets. More than 6,000 weapons lay in the holds, enough for an
infantry regiment. Chemists and metal experts from Harvard and Oxford
identified the distinctive elements in the copper to tie the ingots to northern
Cyprus, a major copper source 3,500 years ago. The tin, essential for
fabricating bronze, was much harder to pin down, but probably originated in
central Turkey or Afghanistan. The lead came from Greece and Turkey.
Uluburun’s metals were mainly from east of the wreck site. The large
storage jars aboard carried pottery from Cyprus. The amphorae came from
the Syrian and Palestinian coast, farther east. Some of the cargo was
transported in large Minoan and Mycenaean jars from the Aegean region.
Egypt provided scarabs (sacred beetle ornaments) and a stone plaque
inscribed with hieroglyphs. Cylinder seals (small clay or stone cylinders
bearing cuneiform inscriptions) may have come from the trading city of
Ugarit in northern Syria.
Most likely, the Uluburun ship sailed westward from a Canaanite port in
Syria to Cyprus, following a circular route travelled many times before: a
ship would sail as far west as Sardinia before crossing the open
Mediterranean to the North African coast and back to the Nile. Egypt would
have supplied some of the exotic items on board, including short logs of
ebony – the same precious black wood that was used for a bed, chair and
stool found in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Gold objects, including a scarab inscribed with the name of Egyptian
Queen Nefertiti, Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s mother; amber beads from the
Baltic coast; even a writing tablet – all this came from the wreck. Judging
from the artefacts, the heavily constructed ship carried an international crew.
It was a clumsy vessel, but it had a large sail which allowed it to lumber
along in following winds. It carried twenty-four stone anchors and would
have spent days at rest, waiting for favourable winds. Densely woven fibre
fencing protected the deck cargo and the crew.
The Uluburun ship excavation is a classic example of the kind of
carefully organised teamwork that underwater archaeology requires. The
vessel carried a cargo from at least eight locations. High-technology analysis
and meticulous conservation and excavation have provided a unique glimpse
of an international trade route that existed more than 3,000 years ago. The
same methods applied on land have provided unexpected snapshots of
America’s first colonists.
 CHAPTER 33

Meeting the Colonists

‘T he past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ To

understand the people of the past, what is needed is a time detective. Ivor
Noël Hume (1927–2017) was just such a man. He was one of the first
archaeologists to blend history and archaeology into what is now known as
historical archaeology. Apart from being a superb excavator, he was untiring
in his search for small historical clues to throw light on his finds. And he was
an entertaining writer, who made archaeology (and history) accessible to all.
Born in England, Noël Hume first worked at London’s Guildhall Museum
(now the Museum of London) from 1949. He learned his archaeology the
hard way, working on bomb-damaged London’s building sites. Radiocarbon
techniques were useless for dating the different levels in a crowded historical
city rebuilt time and time again. So instead, Noël Hume taught himself to
identify seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pottery and glass wine bottles.
So expert did he become that in 1957 historians at the living-history museum
of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia invited him to study their glass and
pottery. For thirty years he was director of Williamsburg’s archaeology
programme.
The incomplete historical records tell us relatively little about the pioneer
settlers in Virginia who arrived by ship from 1607. Their settlements were
often temporary, and their houses were built of wood and thatch, which
rapidly vanished once they were abandoned. Jamestown on Chesapeake Bay
was the first settlement. It served as Virginia’s capital until 1698, when a
nearby plantation, soon named Williamsburg, became the centre of
government for eighty-one years. The state government moved to Richmond
in 1780, and Williamsburg became isolated and fell into decay. The
eighteenth-century town had practically vanished by 1926, when the
restoration of what is now called Colonial Williamsburg began. The work
continues today, but now the architects rely heavily on archaeology as well as
historical records for their work. They realise that valuable, invisible data lies
below the ground.
Colonial Williamsburg was the perfect place for Noël Hume. Previous
work had focused entirely on architecture, but he had a different perspective
– the lives of the ordinary people who had lived there, out of the historical
spotlight. Outspoken and something of a perfectionist, Noël Hume’s
approach to historical archaeology combined the skills of a detective and
master storyteller with an encyclopaedic knowledge of china and glass. The
result was archaeological magic.
One of his first excavations was Wetherburn’s Tavern, where he refined
his already state-of-the-art methods. The architects knew the layout of the
building, but only archaeology could reveal what life had been like inside the
tavern. Some 200,000 artefacts were uncovered, including forty-seven buried
wine bottles filled with cherries. Coins and other finds emerged from a 12-
metre well. Life in the pub came alive.
Noël Hume also excavated a cabinet shop and several houses, with equal
success. One of his largest digs was the Eastern State Hospital, which housed
the mentally ill and had burned down in 1885. He excavated the foundations
before it was rebuilt in 1985. It is now a museum.
Wolstenholme Towne, part of the Martin’s Hundred plantation along the
James River, presented a different problem. (A ‘hundred’ is a subdivision of
an American county.) Founded in 1619, this was a tiny colonial village, just
over 11 kilometres from Williamsburg. The settlers had built a fort with a
low watchtower and wooden palisade (fence) to protect themselves against
Indians and Spanish pirates. On 22 March 1622, local Powhatan Indians
attacked and set fire to the village. The survivors fled as their houses burned.
No one returned to the settlement, and it was soon forgotten.
When the investigations began, only the basic facts were known from
historical documents. There were just a few references to the unimportant
settlement in court books and in the records of the Virginia Company of
London. Only archaeology could reconstruct the buildings and lives of the
inhabitants. Wolstenholme was like a shipwreck on the seabed – a snapshot
of a moment in the past. After his excavations at Colonial Williamsburg,
Noël Hume was a master at chasing down historical clues from tiny objects.
He excelled himself at Wolstenholme.
Noël Hume and his wife Audrey spent five years digging Wolstenholme.
They started in 1976 and revealed a jigsaw puzzle of graves, postholes and
rubbish pits. The site was shallow, and so it was relatively easy to uncover
almost all the settlement. Postholes in the subsoil traced the outline of the fort
with its two gates. A square marked the base of a watchtower. A gun
platform protected the southwestern corner.
Inside, the settlers had dug a well. There was a store and a dwelling. To
the south stood a Virginia Company compound with a pond, sheds and a
wooden longhouse, lying behind another wooden fence. In one spot, Noël
Hume excavated an earth-filled pit. It looked like a cellar, but there were no
signs of a dwelling above it. At first, he was baffled. Then he learnt of a
description of early settler houses in New England that had been written in
New Amsterdam (now New York). They were pit-houses, the roofs resting
on the ground. Once the owners could afford it, they moved above ground
and built a more conventional house. He had found such a dwelling.
Who had lived in the pit-house? The excavators had unearthed a short
length of twisted, woven gold near the foundations – a form of decoration
worn by gentlemen and military officers. In 1621, a law was passed that
forbade anyone in Virginia to wear gold on their clothing except members of
the governing council and ‘heads of hundreds’. The head of Martin’s
Hundred was Martin Harwood, one of those who had passed the law. Could
this have come from his clothing? Another find on the site – a cannon ball –
bolstered the idea. Again, the archives provided a clue: Harwood was the
only person at Martin’s Hundred allowed to own a cannon.
Noël Hume also found burials, among them casualties of the attack. A
pathologist who had investigated a gruesome murder in England identified
the marks on one of the Martin’s Hundred skulls as identical to those on the
modern victim, a man killed by his wife with a garden shovel.
Archaeologist William Kelso (born 1941) learned his excavation from
Noël Hume. He became well known for his work on the slave quarters at
Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello. In 1994, Preservation Virginia
asked him to excavate at Jamestown Island, the earliest European settlement
in Virginia. Kelso was to find the original James Fort, used from about 1607
to 1624.
Three Virginia Company ships landed the first English settlers in
Chesapeake Bay in April 1607. The colonists built a fort on a marshy
peninsula about 80 kilometres upstream. Every historian believed that the
original settlers had died out from fever, hostile Indians and starvation. They
had come in search of gold and had failed in their quest. The original fort was
a triangular structure, which everyone assumed had been swallowed up by
the river. Kelso proved them wrong.
By 2003, his excavators had uncovered the perimeter of the fort. Only
one corner had been lost to the river. Since then, Kelso has excavated several
dwellings within the fort, recovered thousands of artefacts, and the skeletons
of some of the residents. The Indians attacked the fort in 1608. Two
casualties – one an adult and the other a fifteen-year-old boy – lay in shallow
graves just outside the palisade.
Kelso filled in many details of what had been a disastrous start for the
settlement. Historians had always assumed that the settlers were poorly
equipped. But the archaeologists have shown that this was not so. They have
found fishhooks and weapons, woodwork tools and traces of glassmaking –
apparently German craftsmen were brought to Jamestown to make glassware
for sale back in London.
A cellar from one building had been filled with junk in 1610 on the orders
of the newly appointed governor. It contained a surprising amount of Native
American arrowheads and pottery. This may be an indication of peaceful
contact between the local Powhatan Indians and the settlers – peaceful
contact that did not last.
 By 1608, Jamestown was in trouble: the settlers were starving, even after
three growing seasons. But was the hunger their fault? Kelso and his
colleagues believe that it was not. They learned of a 1998 tree-ring study
based on local cypress trees which shows that tree growth slowed
dramatically between 1606 and 1612, just when the settlers arrived. The
previously unsuspected drought was the worst for 800 years. It dried up water
supplies and destroyed the crops on which both Indians and colonists relied.
Food shortages may have triggered war between the two sides. Certainly,
relations improved when the drought eased.
William Kelso’s Jamestown findings have rewritten Jamestown’s history.
What were once seen as lazy settlers were, in fact, hard-working folk
confronted by a savage drought which almost killed the settlement. There
may have been some idle gentlemen at Jamestown, but they must have been
in the minority. Not that life was easy for anyone, of course. Seventy-two
poor settlers lie in humble, unadorned graves west of the fort.
In 2010, Kelso struck archaeological gold when he found a series of large
postholes, marking the site of the colony’s first church. There were four
graves at the east end of the rectangular building, the most sacred part of the
church, near the altar. The bones were in poor condition, making it hard to
establish what the four people had died of, though it was most likely fever or
starvation.
One grave held a fine silver-decorated silk sash; another a military staff
and a small silver box, too fragile to open. The investigators used an X-ray
machine to reveal a tiny lead capsule and some bone fragments inside the
box: it was a religious reliquary, a container for holy relics, used by
Catholics, but not by Protestants. Few Catholics had lived at Jamestown,
which was very much a Protestant settlement.
Douglas Owsley, a biological anthropologist at the Smithsonian
Institution, examined the bones. He found that they had a high lead content,
probably a consequence of the fact that people at the time ate and drank from
lead-glazed or pewter vessels. (In those days, pewter was an alloy of tin and
lead, which is toxic to humans.) The bones were also high in nitrogen,
suggesting that the deceased had had a better diet than most settlers. Burial
records and archaeology identified them. One grave was that of the Reverend
Robert Hunt, the first pastor to the colony. Sir Ferdinando Wainman was a
horseman, with exceptionally strong thighbones. He had supervised cannons
and horses. Captain William West was a gentleman, who had died aged
twenty-four, fighting Indians. He was the owner of the silvered silk sash.
Finally, Captain Gabriel Archer was a Roman Catholic, which accounted for
the reliquary in his grave.
Archaeological and biological research is allowing us to get to know the
first English settlers in North America. Kelso and Noël Hume’s detective
work has led the Virginia settlers out of the shadows by combining historical
records from both America and Europe with the data acquired in the trench
and the laboratory. The breadth of knowledge needed for such research is
much wider than is usually required on a dig. For instance, some of the
buildings inside the fort used architectural styles found in eastern England.
Why? Because one of the first Jamestown settlers was William Laxton, a
carpenter from Lincolnshire. It is as if we are looking over the shoulders of
the colonists, as archaeology, history and science tell their story. A
magnificent site museum now takes visitors through the archaeology and the
finds, and weaves them into a fascinating narrative.
At both Jamestown and Wolstenholme Towne, Virginia’s colonial past
has come vividly to life. Here, archaeologists study people as individual
players in their history in unique ways. The timescale is short by
archaeological standards, which allows us to use historical sources to fill in
the picture.
The challenges of studying individuals from much earlier times are very
different, especially if they are humbler folk. Only rarely does a combination
of archaeology and modern medical science allow us to study the life of
someone who lived over 3,000 years ago. But that is what happened when a
Bronze Age man was discovered high in the Alps.
 CHAPTER 34

The Ice Man and Others

I n September 1991, German climbers Helmut and Erika Simon spotted

something brown protruding from ice and meltwater at the base of a gully
some 3,210 metres up in the Alps, near Hauslabjoch, on the border between
Italy and Austria. They realised it was the skull, back and shoulders of a man
who had his face in water.
At first, police assumed he was the victim of a climbing accident, and he
became simply corpse 91/619 on the local coroner’s dissection table
(coroners are the officials who certify deaths). But the official soon realised
that the body was very old and called in the archaeologists. An excavation
was organised at the site, now buried under fresh snow. Diggers used a steam
blower and a hair dryer to recover a grass cloak, leaves, tufts of grass and
wood fragments. By the end of the quick excavation, the recovery team had
named the victim Ötzi the Ice Man. He had put down his axe, bow and
backpack on a sheltered ledge. Then he had lain down on his left side, his
head resting on a boulder. His relaxed limbs suggested that the exhausted
man had gone to sleep and frozen to death within a few hours. Ötzi was
preserved undisturbed in cold storage, just like a side of beef.
A complex detective story now unfolded. Experts radiocarbon dated the
body to between 3350 and 3150 BC, the early European Bronze Age. They
calculated that he stood 1.6 metres tall, and was forty-seven years old when
he died some 5,000 years ago. Ötzi was a self-sufficient man and had spent
his last day on the move. He was carrying a leather backpack on a wooden
frame, a flint dagger and a copper-bladed axe with a wooden handle. He also
had a long bow made of yew wood and a roe deer-skin quiver with fourteen
arrows. He had spare arrowheads on him, together with dry fungus and iron
pyrite – equipment for lighting fires.
His clothing was well suited to the mountains. He wore a sheepskin
loincloth fastened with a leather belt. Suspenders from the belt held up a pair
of goatskin leggings. His outer coat was a sturdy garment made from
alternating strips of black and brown skin from several different animals.
Over his coat he wore a cape of twisted grass – just like those worn in the
Alps as recently as the nineteenth century. A bearskin cap fastened below his
chin kept his head warm. Bearskin and deerskin shoes stuffed with grass
protected his feet, the grass kept in place by string ‘socks’.
Height and age calculations were routine stuff. But where had Ötzi lived?
A research team used his bones, intestines and teeth to answer that question.
Dental enamel is fixed when a tooth is first formed, and so the teeth the
researchers examined contained traces of chemical elements from whatever
foods Ötzi had eaten when he was three to five years old. Bone re-mineralises
(regenerates) every ten to twenty years, and so the researchers also had
information on where the Ice Man had lived as an adult.
He was born in one of the many river valleys of the southern Tyrol (the
most likely candidate being the Eisack Valley, south of the mountains).
Ötzi’s bone chemistry showed that he had lived at a higher altitude as an
adult. The scientists zeroed in on the tiny fragments of mica in Ötzi’s
intestine. They believed that this mineral came from grindstones used to
prepare his food. Potassium–argon dating (see Chapter 27) of the specks
identified them as belonging to mica formations in the lower Vinschgau area,
west of the Eisack Valley. Ötzi’s biography was complete. He had spent his
early years in the lowlands, and then lived in the nearby mountains. He never
moved more than about 60 kilometres from his birthplace.
The Ice Man’s corpse also provided a wealth of medical information. His
bones revealed that he had experienced malnutrition in his ninth, fifteenth
and sixteenth years. He suffered from an irritating intestinal parasite caused
by whipworms, the eggs of which were in his intestines. Two fleas came
from his clothing. The smoke he had inhaled from indoor fires had made
Ötzi’s lungs as black as those of a heavy tobacco smoker today. His hands
and fingernails were battered, scarred and chipped from constant manual
labour. Ötzi’s stomach was empty, and so he was probably weak and hungry
at the time of his death.
It is almost as if we are meeting Ötzi face to face. But what was he doing
in the mountains and how did he die? Originally, the researchers thought that
Ötzi had died a peaceful death, perhaps caught out in bad weather. But they
changed their minds when they discovered an arrowhead buried deep in his
left shoulder. There is also a dagger wound on one of his hands, as if he had
defended himself against a close-quarters attack. DNA came into play again.
Samples revealed that he had fought with at least four people. In the end, it
was the arrow wound that proved fatal, causing him to bleed to death.
Perhaps Ötzi had fled into the mountains and died of his wounds at high
altitude.
The Ice Man has a surprisingly complete biography, pieced together at
enormous expense by teams of scientists from many countries. Hundreds of
scientific papers describe his body and his medical conditions. It was the
deep-freeze of the high Alps that allowed us to study him: the cold preserved
his clothing, equipment and weapons. We know far more about Ötzi than we
do about millions of other prehistoric hunters and fisherfolk, farmers and
cattle herders, Roman soldiers and medieval craftspeople. He gives us a vivid
impression of the difficult conditions in which he and others of the time
lived. We’re lucky to know what we do from this single humble individual.
The find reminds us that archaeology is about people, not things.
Archaeologists have always been fascinated by human skeletons. We
have long relied on biological anthropologists to get at the details of the lives
as they were lived. They can determine the sex of a skeleton and its age,
identify lower backs ruined by hard labour or leg bones bowed by constant
horse-riding.
 Recently, we have moved beyond bones and can look at the once-living
human being behind them. Thanks to cutting-edge medical technology, even
skeletons can be made flesh-and-blood bodies from the tiniest of clues.
Biological anthropologists use DNA to trace human migrations. And they use
medical imaging technology to study mummies without unwrapping them.
Analysis of bone chemistry tells us where people lived their early lives and
what diets they preferred. Thanks to medical science, we know more about
the Ice Man than he knew himself. Ancient bodies, whether well preserved or
mere bones, are a hot topic in today’s archaeology.
Thousands of individuals have come down to us, most of them skeletons,
but also a few well-preserved bodies found in swamps. Ancient Egyptian and
Peruvian mummies are mines of information about both noble and common
folk. Medical imaging has peered through their bandages and revealed the
painful dental abscesses (swellings) suffered by Egyptians of 3,000 years
ago. They must have been in agony for months, or even years.
Occasionally, a sacrificial victim is found, and so we learn of violent
death. In Peru, some 6,210 metres up in the southern Andes, American
anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian assistant Miguel Zarate came
across the mummy bundle of a fourteen-year-old girl who was sacrificed five
centuries ago. She wore a finely woven dress and leather moccasins. Scans of
her skull showed that she had died from a swift blow to the head: blood from
the head wound had pushed her brain to one side.
The wounds inflicted in hand-to-hand medieval battles could be
horrendous. I once examined the bones of some of those who had died during
one such encounter. At Towton Hall in northern England, a burial pit
containing thirty-eight individuals left a shocking impression of the savagery
of medieval warfare. The victims had died in a bloody conflict fought during
a snowstorm on 29 March 1461, during a series of conflicts known as the
Wars of the Roses. All the skeletons were of men aged between sixteen and
fifty. They were active, healthy individuals, whose bodies displayed signs of
hard toil from an early age, as one might expect of peasant farmers. Some
also displayed elbow injuries resulting from pulling longbows.
Most of the dead perished from savage blows to the head, but there was
one whose face had been cut in half by a sword. Another man had suffered at
least eight blade wounds from close combat, before being killed by being
struck on the head. Crossbow bolts, arrowheads and war hammers inflicted
terrible injuries, many of them fatal. The forearms of several men carried
wounds caused by fending off blows from attackers. The men had perished in
a bloodbath. Not that life at that time was easy for anyone: scurvy and
rickets, both diseases resulting from vitamin deficiencies, were common.
Apart from Ötzi, the most thorough research on individuals has examined
well-known figures from history. Pharaoh Rameses II (1304–1212 BC) is the
best known of all Egyptian kings. He saw military service when young and
had more than a hundred sons and (literally) countless daughters. Rameses
lived a very long time: he died at the age of ninety-two at a time when most
people could only expect to live into their twenties or thirties.
The pharaoh was mummified and buried in the Valley of the Kings.
French experts used the latest medical technology on his mummy. They
admired the king’s fine nose, its shape maintained by peppercorns that had
been stuffed into it by his embalmers (the people who had preserved his
body). The pharaoh had suffered from arthritis, painful dental abscesses and
poor circulation – hardly surprising, given his age.
As pharaoh, Rameses had lived off the fat of the land. But Egyptian
commoners certainly did not: theirs were lives of ceaseless toil. A recent
study looked at workers’ burials in a cemetery at el-Amarna, capital of the
pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC (see Chapter 17). Almost all
of them died in their twenties and thirties. Their bones display tell-tale signs
of malnutrition, while years of backbreaking labour had crushed spines,
broken limbs and caused chronic arthritis in arms and legs.
There are more recent rulers whose bodies have been recovered by
historical research and the spade. King Richard III of England (1452–85)
died fighting his rival, the future King Henry VII, in the final battle of the
Wars of the Roses in Leicestershire, central England. Little was known about
Richard. Historical records stated that he was deformed, though that was not
known for sure – it could perhaps have been a metaphor for his bad character.
Richard’s body had been stripped naked and taken to Leicester, where it
was put on display. He was then buried without ceremony in a Franciscan
friary (a type of monastery). The site of his grave was known long after the
friary was demolished, but it came to be forgotten in the nineteenth century.
Prolonged historical detective work located the friary site under a city-centre
car park, where excavations began in 2012. On the very first day, two leg
bones were uncovered. The skeleton had been crammed into a grave that was
slightly too small. The backbone was curved in an S-shape and the hands
were behind the body, as if they had been tied. Everything pointed to a hasty
burial.
The skeleton was that of an adult male who suffered from severe
curvature of the spine, which made one shoulder higher than the other. There
were major injuries to the skull. Was this King Richard’s body? The
researchers turned to DNA for the answer. Samples from the bones were
compared with the DNA of living descendants of the monarch, and it was
confirmed that the skeleton was indeed that of a deformed Richard III. His
body was reburied in Leicester Cathedral.
Today’s medical technology is helping archaeologists write history in the
kind of detail that was unimaginable even just a generation ago. Some
physicians were X-raying Egyptian mummies in the early 1900s. But
nowadays we can tell where someone spent his youth and where he travelled.
We are becoming biographers, writing people’s life stories.
 CHAPTER 35

Warrior-Priests of the Moche

T he painted scene on the revolving pot tells the whole story. It is around AD
400. A Moche lord sits under a shelter on top of a pyramid on the north coast
of Peru. He is in the shade, but the late afternoon sun causes his golden
headdress to blaze. In his right hand, he holds a clay vessel filled with human
blood. Calm and austere, covered in gold and turquoise ornaments, he gazes
down on a row of naked prisoners, stripped of their armour and weapons.
A priest in a bird costume quickly slits the prisoners’ throats, catching
their spilling blood in a pot. The bodies are dragged away, to be cut into
pieces by other waiting priests. The lord drinks more blood, displaying no
emotion. His cup is immediately refilled. One day, he will be buried exactly
where he sits, as another warrior-priest takes his place.
This scene is one of many on Moche pots of all kinds that were once
burial offerings – or were possibly used in daily life, to be displayed at feasts.
Some were symbols of social status. Narrative scenes show warriors running
in line, hunting deer and seal, and in processions. Moche potters were
sculptors as well as painters. Their portrait vases of prominent men are
famous, but they also modelled birds, fish, llamas, deer – even spiders. Nor
did they forget corn, squash and other plants. Or supernatural beings. Much
of what we know about the Moche and their rulers comes from their superb
pottery – as well as from richly decorated burials.
The Moche state came into being about 2,000 years ago along Peru’s
northern coast. The coastal plain is one of the driest landscapes on earth, and
so the Moche lived off the abundance of anchovies to be fished from the
Pacific. Fertile river valley soils, fed by mountain water from the Andes,
allowed them to grow maize, beans and other crops in carefully irrigated field
systems.
As food supplies improved, thanks to more efficient farming, small
numbers of wealthy families rose to prominence. The rulers and their families
were the elite of Moche society, which increasingly became divided between
the nobles and the common folk. The rulers built ever larger mud-brick
pyramids and temples. These provided the stage for elaborate ceremonies that
had but one purpose: to show commoners that their leaders had close links
with the supernatural world.
Over the centuries, hundreds of ordinary people toiled on the great
temples that rose above the Moche River. They paid their taxes in labour – a
common practice in early Peruvian states. The great mud-brick platform of
Huaca del Sol rises more than 40 metres above the river, inland from the
Pacific. When in use and before floods and looters ravaged it, this enormous
huaca (a sacred place) was cross-shaped and faced north. It was built in four
sections to give it a stepped effect. The façade was once painted in red and
other bright colours. The pyramid that stands there today is but a shadow of
the vast structure that was both the royal palace and the burial place of the
Moche rulers who lived there.
A second pyramid, Huaca de Luna, stands about 500 metres away. This
was a smaller monument with three platforms, connected and enclosed by
three high adobe walls. Brightly coloured murals showed divine beings that
were part animal, part human. Experts believe that this was a place where the
rulers worshipped the major gods that presided over the Moche state.
In one secluded courtyard, archaeologist Steve Bourget unearthed the
skeletons of about seventy warriors who had been sacrificed. In many cases,
their bodies had then been separated limb from limb, just as shown in the
pottery frieze. Clay statuettes depicting naked men with bodies covered in
intricate symbols lay alongside some of the remains. At least two of these
sacrificial rituals took place during periods of heavy rainfall, a rarity in the
arid Moche landscape. They occurred during irregular El Niño events, which
are caused by complex climatic shifts in the western Pacific. El Niño brought
warmer water to the coast, disrupting the anchovy fisheries. The rains it
produced could wipe out entire field systems in hours.
Who were the Moche leaders? We know from the painted pots that their
political power depended on success in war. It also depended on carefully
staged public ceremonies. This was where the temples and courtyards came
in. You can imagine the scene. As the sun sinks in the west, a large crowd of
commoners in their best cotton clothing gather in the great plaza below
Huaca del Sol. Drums beat and the smell of incense rises from sacred fires as
loud chanting resounds in the still air. Brilliant sunshine bathes the entrance
to the pyramid on the huaca’s summit. Silence falls as a figure appears in the
small doorway, his brightly polished golden headdress reflecting the setting
sun with hypnotic brilliance. As the sun finally sets, he vanishes into the dark
space, as if returning to the supernatural world.
Moche pots display human sacrifice and prisoners being killed, but reveal
little about the lords themselves. We know nothing of the rituals that
surrounded them. We do not even know their names. They were not literate.
We can only guess at the powerful beliefs that guided Moche society. But we
can gaze on some of their features, thanks to the skill of the potters. The
ceremonial portrait vessels may well depict once-living individuals. That they
were important people is certain, for the vessels appear in richly decorated
graves. Some lords smile, or even laugh; but most are serious and severe.
You get the impression that Moche lords had absolute confidence in their
own authority.
All these clues give only a vague impression of the Moche lords. Few of
their burials have survived the attention of looters and Spanish soldiers. The
Spaniards even diverted the waters of the Moche River to wash away parts of
the Huaca del Sol in a ruthless search for gold. They are said to have found
some, which encouraged them to wash away even more of the huaca. This
loss makes the magnificent tombs of the so-called Lords of Sipán an
archaeological find of exceptional importance – one of the major discoveries
of late twentieth-century archaeology.
In 1987, tomb robbers broke into the undisturbed, gold-laden sepulchre of
a Moche lord, deep in the pyramids of Sipán in the Lambayeque Valley, a
major centre of Moche power. Fortunately, Peruvian archaeologist Walter
Alva, a Moche expert, visited the site almost immediately. His subsequent
excavations, carried out by a team of archaeologists and conservators, filled
in a picture of the mysterious rulers of the Moche kingdom.
By 2004, fourteen tombs had been identified in this major huaca, which
was built sometime before AD 300. Known as the Huaca Rajada, its burial
chambers consist of two small adobe pyramids and a small platform. The
graves of three Sipán lords emerged from Alva’s excavations, each wearing
rich ornaments and accompanied by grave offerings.
The first lord to be excavated was only about 1.5 metres tall and was aged
between thirty-five and forty-five. He lay in ceremonial dress in an adobe
chamber, with solid benches along the sides and at the head end. The
mourners set hundreds of fine clay pots into small niches in the benches.
Then they placed the lord in a plank coffin in the centre of the chamber, the
lid secured with copper bands. Spouted vessels stood at the head and the foot.
He lay in his full regalia (distinctive clothing), complete with headdress,
golden mask and chest ornament, earrings and other jewellery of the highest
quality. He wore two necklaces of gold and silver beads in the shape of
peanuts, an important Moche food crop.
He was not alone. Five cane coffins held the bodies of adults. Three were
women, perhaps wives or concubines (women who share a bed with a man
but are not married to him), who had died somewhat earlier. Two males, one
accompanied by a war club, may have been warriors. A third male with
crossed legs sat in a niche overlooking the burial. The feet of the warriors had
been amputated, presumably to prevent them from escaping. A dog and two
llamas also lay in the sepulchre. Once the coffin was in place, a low beam
roof had been set close above it. Then everything had been filled in.
A second tomb was uncovered in 1988, near that of the first lord. The
man in this sepulchre was his contemporary. His regalia included a sacrificial
bowl and artefacts associated with worship of the moon. He may have been a
priest.
A third chamber was slightly older, but the ornaments and clothing
showed that the occupant was a person of the same high rank as the first lord.
DNA tests revealed that the two were related through their mothers. A young
woman and a warrior with amputated feet, presumably the lord’s bodyguard,
also lay in the tomb.
Three lords in elaborate, very similar attire, went to eternity accompanied
by ritual objects. Who exactly were these individuals? The ceremonial rattles,
exquisite nose and ear ornaments, copper sandals and fine bracelets indicate
clearly that they were powerful men.
Only one possible source of information is available – the paintings on
Moche vessels. Archaeologist Christopher Donnan photographed the painted
pots as they revolved on a turntable, thus ‘unrolling’ complete friezes of the
scenes. There are hundreds of scenes that depict two men engaged in combat,
one defeating and capturing the other. In each, the victor strips off his
enemy’s clothing, bundles up his weapons and puts a rope around his neck.
Then the tethered prisoner is forced to walk in front of his captor. Other
scenes show rows of captives being displayed before an important individual,
who is sometimes sitting atop a pyramid. Then the captives’ throats are cut.
Priests, attendants and the individual presiding over the ceremony drink the
fresh blood.
The most important participants in these ceremonies wear a conical
helmet with a crescent-shaped headdress, circular ear ornaments and a
crescent nose ornament – as do the Lords of Sipán. Donnan calls these lords
warrior-priests – men who supervised the most important ceremonies in
Moche society. He points out that the regalia of the lords changed little from
one generation to the next. Nearly every artefact buried with them had
meaning. For example, they wore gold on the right and silver on the left,
representing the opposites of sun and moon, day and night. Judging from the
grave offerings, the Sipán lords were believed to have supernatural powers.
They must have been aggressive, competitive warriors, who organised raids
and wars of conquest in the constant pursuit of victims.
The graves of the Moche lords were so rich in gold that few have
survived the ravages of looters. This means that we know little about warrior-
priests other than those at Sipán. Three noble burials have come from the 32-
metre-high Dos Cabezas pyramid close to the mouth of the Jequetepeque
River. They date to between AD 450 and 550. The three lords were
remarkable for their height: each stood nearly 2 metres tall. Biological
anthropologists suspect that they may have suffered from a genetic disorder
known as Marfan syndrome, which causes thin, long limbs.
The most important individual wore a headdress decorated with gilded
copper bats. He wore a nose ornament fashioned in similar form. Bats were
apparently prominent in Moche ritual: they appear on painted pots, in scenes
of human sacrifice and ritual blood-drinking. The man may not have been a
warrior-priest, but perhaps a metalworker – a respected occupation in Moche
society.
Leaders like the Moche warrior-priests knew that their rule depended on
their ability to convince people that they had a special relationship with
powerful supernatural forces. Their elaborate clothing and ornaments,
carefully staged public ceremonies and rituals, and the endless chants were
ways in which they did so. A little human sacrifice along the way reinforced
the message.
The archaeological unravelling of the relationship between ruler and ruled
involved slow-moving fieldwork, a passion for minute detective work and
painstaking conservation of the finds. Even small ornaments like decorated
earrings revealed the spiritual opposition between the sun and the moon,
between night and day, that was a central part of Moche belief. The warrior-
priests thought they had a special relationship with the supernatural which
gave them power. To understand their complex world, archaeologists had to
assemble a jigsaw puzzle from dozens of tiny clues. Thanks to Alva and his
colleagues, we now have a fascinating picture of long-forgotten Moche rulers
– men whose wealth rivalled that of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.
 CHAPTER 36

Tunnelling for the Cosmos

S ome 48 kilometres north of Mexico City, in the Basin of Mexico, towers

the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán. This massive 71-metre high structure
makes you feel like a speck of dust in the presence of the gods. And that is
exactly what the builders intended. Those who dwelt at Teotihuacán lived at
the heart of a vast sacred landscape. The city itself covered more than 21
square kilometres, and it dominated the basin and the surrounding highlands.
By AD 100, at least 80,000 people lived there. And between AD 200 and 750,
Teotihuacán’s population swelled to more than 150,000. At the time, it was
as big as all but the largest cities of China and the Middle East.
Archaeologists have worked there for nearly a century. They’ve learned
that Teotihuacán was a vast symbolic landscape of artificial mountains,
foothills, caves and open spaces that replicated the spiritual world. Over a
period of more than eight centuries, the Teotihuacános built 600 pyramids,
500 workshop areas, a huge marketplace, 2,000 apartment complexes and
several squares or plazas.
At some point, the city’s rulers decided to rebuild much of the city. They
constructed standardised, walled residential compounds, probably to replace
crowded urban areas. Some of these housed artisans and their workshops.
Others were military quarters. Foreigners from the Valley of Oaxaca and
lowland Veracruz on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico lived in their own
neighbourhoods, which are identified by distinctive pottery styles.
Everything followed a grid plan, with the streets all running at right
angles to one another. Dividing the city in a north–south direction was a wide
avenue, known ever since the Spanish Conquest as the Avenue of the Dead.
The great Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon dominate the avenue’s north
end. Between AD 150 and 325, the city’s rulers remodelled the Pyramid of the
Sun into its present form, enlarged the Pyramid of the Moon and extended the
Avenue of the Dead more than a mile southwards to include the Ciudadela –
the city’s new political and religious centre. Until recently, not much was
known about this impressive structure, but in 2003, the National Institute of
Anthropology and History in Mexico City embarked on an ambitious long-
term programme to investigate and preserve the Ciudadela temples. In recent
years the project has made some spectacular discoveries.
The Ciudadela complex is enormous, with high walls and a large
courtyard. As many as 100,000 people could gather within the enclosed space
for major public ceremonies. The Temple of Quetzalcoatl, the ancient
feathered serpent god of Central American civilisation, lies within the
enclosure, facing the open space. This is a six-level stepped pyramid with a
huge stairway running up it, the steps of which form small terraces. Heads of
feathered serpents and a snake-like creature, perhaps a war serpent, decorate
the faces of these terraces. Reliefs of the feathered serpent also appear under
each row of heads, together with a depiction of water. The entire temple was
painted blue and carved seashells provided decoration. What the colour and
the heads and other decorations signified is unknown, but it seems possible
that they represented the cosmos (the universe) at the time of creation – a
calm ocean.
The excavators started from scratch, working on a temple that had been
badly damaged, partly by rain and high groundwater levels, and partly by
large numbers of tourists. In 2004, the World Monuments Fund provided
money and technical assistance for the conservation of this unique structure.
Excavations by Mexican archaeologists in the large plaza beside the
Temple of the Feathered Serpent uncovered the remains of several structures
that by AD 200 had been built on what was originally farmland. These had
formed the first religious complex. One of the structures was more than 120
metres long and may have served as a court for ceremonial ball games (an
ancient ritual that could include the sacrifice of the losers). The architects of
Quetzalcoatl’s temple destroyed these buildings when they erected the
Ciudadela in its present form.
The open space in front of the temple in the Ciudadela was designed to be
flooded with water to form a reflective surface. It was a kind of water mirror,
a symbolic reflection of the calm sea that existed before the creation of the
world and humans. According to ancient origin myths, a Sacred Mountain is
said to have risen from this watery mass at the beginning of time. All this
suggests that the Ciudadela was the setting for rituals in which myths about
the creation of the world were re-enacted.
Heavy rains in 2003 revealed a depression and a deep hole in the ground
in front of the steps of the Quetzalcoatl temple platform. Now, after years of
work, archaeologists have explored under the temple for the first time. One –
Sergio Gómez Chávez – was lowered by rope through the small opening. He
reached solid ground almost 14 metres down and found an underground
tunnel leading east towards the Temple of the Feathered Serpent and west
towards the centre of the great plaza. The tunnel was mostly filled with earth
and carved stone blocks, put there by the Teotihuacános.
To clear and explore the underground passageway required careful
planning. In 2004, 2005 and 2010, before they went underground, Chávez
and his colleagues used ground-penetrating radar to plot the passage from the
surface. This suggested that the tunnel was between 100 and 120 metres long,
with the eastern end at the centre of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The
radar plots hinted at a large chamber in the middle of the tunnel and an even
larger one at the eastern end. They also provided a way of planning the
underground exploration.
The investigation was based on a series of carefully thought-out
assumptions. First, the researchers assumed that Teotihuacán was a replica of
its inhabitants’ vision of the universe, with three levels formed by the gods –
the heavens, the earth and the underworld. The horizontal plane represented
north, east, south and west. And the corners of the plane were the corners of
the world.
Second, the excavators assumed that the Temple of the Feathered Serpent
symbolised the Sacred Mountain of the creation, thought to have emerged
from the calm sea at the beginning of time. The temple stood on a sacred
spot, the centre of the world. Here you could communicate with the different
layers of the cosmos.
Third, they assumed that a sacred cave, thought to lie below the Sacred
Mountain, was the place of entry into the underworld. This was inhabited by
the gods and by the creative forces that maintained the cosmos. The tunnel,
which was partly explored by Chávez with radar, was a symbolic
representation of this underworld. According to ancient cosmology (beliefs or
myths about the origin of the universe), the underworld had its own sacred
geography.
Finally, they assumed that the underground passage was visited
frequently, but only by those individuals involved in rituals that bolstered
their influence. This was where such people acquired spiritual powers by
performing ritual acts. Some objects from the rituals, perhaps even the
remains of those who gave and received gifts, might be present in the tunnel.
The underground excavations started in 2006 and continue to this day.
Chávez began in an area of about 100 square metres, where he thought the
main entrance to the tunnel once lay. A pit covering 5 square metres lay
about 2 metres below the surface. This provided access to a tunnel leading
towards the pyramid.
Artefacts and stone blocks filled the narrow passageway, making it hard
to plan the excavation. Chávez turned once again to remote sensing, this time
underground. Then he used a laser scanner – a highly accurate measuring
device – to plan the next stage of the work. A first attempt recorded 37
metres of the tunnel. Another scan in 2011 reached 73 metres. These
measurements confirmed that there was indeed a long tunnel leading towards
the pyramid, but its precise overall length was still uncertain.
Next, Chávez used a small remote-controlled robot equipped with video
cameras. This penetrated 37 metres into the tunnel to test for stability and
potential working conditions, and aided the excavation of the previously
laser-scanned segment of the passageway. In 2013, a more sophisticated
robot with an infrared camera and a miniature laser scanner managed to get
through the final previously inaccessible 30 metres of the tunnel. This was no
easy task. Ancient Aztecs had visited the tunnel on many occasions to leave
offerings there. To do so, they had to make their way through, and often
partially demolish, more than twenty thick walls that had blocked the tunnel.
In the end, the entire space was filled with offerings. Chávez and his
colleagues were the first people to enter the tunnel for 1,800 years.
By 2013, the excavation extended 65 metres into the tunnel. Two side
chambers were revealed. Their walls and roofs had been finished using a
powder created from a metallic mineral, and they shone like a starry night or
sparkling running water. One of the chambers contained more than 400
mineral metal balls. These objects remain a complete mystery. After the two
side chambers, the tunnel’s depth gradually increased by a further 2 metres
and it continued for 35 metres to the east. At the end were three chambers,
facing north, south and east.
More than 75,000 objects have emerged from the excavation, which now
extends over 103 metres of the tunnel and to a depth of 17 metres below the
surface. Thousands of offerings have come from the dig, among them
minerals such as jade, serpentine and turquoise; obsidian (volcanic glass);
and liquid mercury. Hundreds of clay vessels and mirrors made from
polished pyrite (a shiny mineral often confused with gold) lay alongside
seashells. Dozens of unusual clay vessels have come to light, as well as
rubber balls, necklaces, wooden objects and fragments of human skin.
What do all these finds mean? Chávez and his teammates argue that the
Ciudadela re-created the sacred geography of the cosmos and the work of the
gods. The Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent symbolised the Sacred
Mountain, which served as a link between the various layers and regions of
the cosmos. The underground tunnel and caves beneath the temple
transformed space on earth into a wet, cold, dark underworld. It was there
that rulers acquired the supernatural power to govern. The tunnel under the
pyramid took the city’s rulers into the underworld. Vanishing under the earth
suggested that they could visit this unknown world, an act which gave them
the ability to communicate with the forces of the supernatural realm. The
Ciudadela was where everyone in the great city participated in public
ceremonies that marked major events in the ritual calendar. It was there, too,
that the architects attempted to create the entrance to the underworld.
 The ongoing Ciudadela project is no fast-moving search for precious
objects, but rather a systematic, painstaking analysis of the meaning of the
objects in the tunnel. Everything had a ritual significance – including the way
the tunnel had been dug below the natural water table in order to re-create the
watery environment of the underworld. The last 30 metres of the tunnel had
been made even deeper, so that they were always filled with water,
representing the sacred water of the creation.
Investigations at Teotihuacán began a century ago, but the city is so
enormous that archaeologists have hardly scratched the surface. The current
emphasis is on tunnelling – not only at the Ciudadela, but also under the
Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. Here, further tunnels and rich offerings,
as well as sacrificial victims, will help decipher the complex symbolism of
one of the greatest cities in history.
 CHAPTER 37

Çatalhöyük

T he half-size clay figures looked out at me from the museum display case,
staring straight ahead. Some were double-headed, perhaps a husband and
wife. As I moved around the room, I felt their black-outlined eyes following
me. I got as close as I could to one figure and gazed into the cowrie (sea
snail) shell eyes. The black bitumen (tar) dots of the pupils seemed to burn
deep into my soul. I was hypnotised by the power of a figure buried, with
thirty others, in a pit sometime around 8000 BC.
This was one of those rare moments when I have been confronted by the
force of ancient beliefs. There have been others: Ice Age paintings in French
caves and at Altamira, Spain (see Chapter 14); a few minutes alone in
complete darkness in a pharaoh’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings;
tracing the ancient legend of the Maya creation, as painted on a clay bowl . . .
But few have been as powerful as the time spent with those figures from ‘Ain
Ghazal in Jordan – the clay modelled around bundles of twigs, the painted
clothing and hair and the tattoos. I felt myself in the presence of the
ancestors.
Like other early farmers, the ‘Ain Ghazal people buried the decorated
heads of their forebears under their hut floors. Kathleen Kenyon had found
plastered skulls under 7000 BC houses at Jericho (see Chapter 30). At ‘Ain
Ghazal, the people also made models of their ancestors, which stood in house
shrines. Even looking at them in a museum, you feel as if previous
generations of your family are staring out at you, watching over their
descendants. The more we learn about early villagers in the Middle East, the
more we uncover evidence that respect for those who went before was a
powerful force in society. Why was there such concern with earlier
generations?
We know from living traditional societies that ancestors are often
considered the guardians of the land: they ensure that harvests grow and life
continues as before. The same was definitely true in the past. A deep respect
for ancestors has been part of human belief ever since farming began – and
probably from much earlier in prehistory. The Jericho skulls and the ‘Ain
Ghazal figurines show that ancestor cults were part of societies that lived
from one harvest to the next. Crop failure, hunger and malnutrition were
harsh realities for earlier and later generations alike. A concern with the
continuity of life was central to early farming societies, which was why
ancestors were important. The beliefs about ancestors held by traditional
societies today have reached us in the form of spoken stories or songs, passed
down through the generations. But what about the beliefs of much earlier
societies, such as the first farmers? We can only rely on archaeology and
material remains of the past to tell the tale. Fortunately, a Turkish farming
settlement named Çatalhöyük and a carefully planned, long-term excavation
have shed much more light on the power of the ancestors.
James Mellaart (1925–2012) was the British archaeologist who
discovered Çatalhöyük. He had learned his excavation with Kathleen Kenyon
at Jericho, and so he knew a village site when he saw one. During the late
1950s, he surveyed the Konya plain in central Turkey in search of Bronze
Age sites. Instead, he came across the two mounds of Çatalhöyük, the larger
of them 20 metres high.
Mellaart dug Çatalhöyük from 1961 to 1963, uncovering thirteen
occupation levels of a settlement that dated to around 6000 or 5500 BC. He
thought up to 8,000 people could have lived there at the height of its power.
The excavations investigated more than 150 rooms and buildings. It was a
crowded place: houses were packed together so tightly that they had no front
doors, but were entered through the roof.
The rooms included shrines with clay bulls’ heads, plaster reliefs and wall
paintings. There were also small female figures. Mellaart believed that the
people worshipped a mother goddess, a symbol of fertility. He even
suggested that some of the wall paintings were based on textiles, ancient
prototypes for modern Turkish carpet designs. But for various controversial
reasons, Mellaart had to cut his work short, and his dig was closed.
Mellaart’s excavations caused quite a stir. Çatalhöyük covered 13
hectares, making it about ten times larger than most settlements of the period.
Many questions remained unanswered, but the Turkish authorities did not
permit new excavations until 1993, when another Englishman, Ian Hodder
(born 1948), started an ambitious, long-term research project that has
continued ever since. Thanks to his carefully designed teamwork, the
ancestors are now emerging from the shadows.
Hodder is an experienced and imaginative archaeologist, one of the few
with the vision and skills required to undertake such a job. He involved in the
excavations not only archaeologists, but experts in all kinds of disciplines.
Everyone had to share information freely, including research notes. Right
from the start, the team worked closely with the Turkish authorities, who
have developed the site as a potential tourist destination.
From the beginning, Hodder thought of the Çatalhöyük project as an
excavation concerned with people. He believes that the past was created by
people, both as individuals and as members of groups large and small. Just as
we do today, the people then interacted with one another, with their society
and with their ancestors. Hodder realised that Çatalhöyük had the potential to
reveal such interactions. Long-forgotten ancestral beliefs would come down
to us in the form of material objects found during excavation: in shrines,
temples and elsewhere.
Hodder set out three basic principles. First, we couldn’t look at the past
purely through ecology (the relationship between living organisms and their
environment), technology or ways in which people fed themselves. Second,
we must focus on neglected aspects of ancient societies, among them ethnic
minorities, women and the anonymous people, often illiterate commoners.
Third, we must always consider the wider significance of the research for the
public. Many archaeologists had voiced some, or even all, of these three
principles before. But no one had embraced all of them from the outset.
Everything depended, of course, on excavation. The team addressed two
basic questions early on: when did Çatalhöyük come into being, and what
was the first settlement like. Trenches dug down to the base of the East
Mound tell of a small settlement that flourished close to a wetland in about
7400 BC. Animal bones and seeds proved that the people had been farmers.
They also relied on fish, waterfowl and game from the surrounding
landscape.
This small village flourished for 1,000 years thanks to fertile soils, plenty
of water and a combination of agriculture and herding. At first, only a few
hundred people lived at Çatalhöyük. But as cattle herding became more
important, the population grew to between 3,500 and 8,000. This was when
the village became Mellaart’s small town of densely packed houses. It was
now an important place, known for miles around.
The villagers were lucky, for they lived within easy reach of volcanic lava
flows, where obsidian (volcanic glass) could be mined with little effort.
Shiny, fine obsidian is ideal for making stone tools. Çatalhöyük’s inhabitants
seized the opportunity to shape thousands of standardised blocks of the
material that could easily be carried and then fashioned into small, sharp-
edged tools. The obsidian trade was huge and extended as far as Syria and
beyond.
Çatalhöyük prospered, so much so that those who lived there rebuilt their
houses at least eighteen times over a span of 1,400 years until occupation
ended in about 6000 BC. Now Hodder and his colleagues could truly focus on
people and their ‘voices’. To this end, they have excavated more than 166
houses – not just single dwellings, but sequences of houses, all built at the
same location.
The settlement consisted of tightly packed clusters of flat-roofed
dwellings, separated from one another by narrow alleyways. The same
groups of people occupied and rebuilt the houses on the same spot for
generations, suggesting strong kinship ties between neighbours and those
who had lived there in earlier times. The glue that held the community
together was the close flesh and blood connections between individuals and
their families, and with other relatives who lived nearby or farther afield.
These connections also linked living people and their ancestors, which was
one reason why kinship ties were so important at Çatalhöyük.
The town’s inhabitants never built large public buildings, temples or
ceremonial centres. Everything happened inside their houses: eating,
sleeping, toolmaking and rituals of all kinds. Nor did they bury their dead in
cemeteries. Day-to-day life and spiritual beliefs blended together. We know
this because the walls of many houses have paintings of humans and animals,
such as leopards and vultures. It is as if the ancestors, animal and human,
were watching over the living. And many of the houses contained burials, as
well as the skulls of wild bulls. Sometimes the heads of the dead would be
detached and their faces plastered over. The heads were then displayed and
passed on from one generation to the next. All of this speaks of a complex
world of myths that gave meaning to daily life.
We know more about this meaning from a small number of houses that
were apparently never inhabited. Instead, the dead dwelt there. The average
inhabited house contains between five and eight burials. But these special
houses contained many more: sixty-two bodies were deposited in one of them
over a forty-year period. Their furniture included sacred wild ox skulls and
clay models of bulls’ heads. The walls bore paintings of bulls, headless
people and birds of prey, clearly actors in rituals performed in the shrines.
Each of the uninhabited houses had a history for those who built and
maintained them. Sometimes, people would even dig into the floor to recover
the prized bull skulls left by earlier generations. They also made a practice of
placing teeth from earlier burials into later ones. Hodder calls these few
uninhabited structures ‘History Houses’. They were places where people
could communicate with their ancestors and their history, using familiar
rituals employed by those who had lived before them. History Houses may
also have witnessed ceremonial feasts that celebrated wild bulls. These
dangerous animals had huge spiritual power in farming societies over wide
areas of the ancient Middle East.
The people created and maintained this history by living on (and over) the
dead, and by recycling body parts, such as ancestral skulls. Ancestors – both
human and animal – protected the dead, the house and its inhabitants.
Associations between dangerous animals, headless humans and birds of prey
shown in wall paintings reinforced the continuity of life before and after
death.
Çatalhöyük’s farmers lived by a calendar of changing seasons: spring and
planting (birth), summer (growth), autumn (harvest) and then winter (death).
This was the ultimate reality of human life – the reason why people revered
and respected their ancestors. They knew that they would become them one
day. This was also why female figures and possible fertility goddesses were
respected: they renewed life.
The Çatalhöyük project is far more than just archaeology. Hodder has
used the excavations and the research of dozens of experts to create a
complex history of a community deeply concerned with its ancestors. This
was a place filled with complex relationships and tensions. We look back on
a community with many noisy voices.
There is another voice, too: that of the modern local people. Çatalhöyük
is part of their history. But it is also far more. Many of the local farmers have
worked on the excavations. The site is becoming an archaeological museum,
visited by tourists from many countries. Hodder and his colleagues have
talked about their discoveries to the villagers living nearby. They have trained
museum attendants and guards with the help of Turkish archaeologists.
Hodder has even written the life story of one of the site guards.
The archaeologists from many lands – and their work – have become part
of the local landscape. This is what we call ‘engaged archaeology’ –
archaeology that is involved with the past and with the modern world.
Archaeological research and protection of what is found go hand in hand.
Archaeologists commonly refer to people with an interest in a site as
‘stakeholders’. At Çatalhöyük, the stakeholders include the people from the
surrounding communities. Also the foreign and Turkish archaeologists who
work at the site, and the people who look after the museum. The tourists are
stakeholders, too, for Çatalhöyük is part of the common cultural heritage of
all humankind. And when we talk of stakeholders, let us not forget the
ancestors.
 CHAPTER 38

Looking in the Landscape

A ntiquarian, lawyer and physician William Stukeley (1687–1765) was

obsessed with the stone circles at Stonehenge in southern England. He had a
joyous attitude to life and an insatiable curiosity about the past. He was
absurd, ingenious and playful. In 1723, Stukeley and his patron, Lord
Winchelsea, walked around the top of the Stonehenge trilithons (two upright
stones supporting a ‘lintel’ – a third stone that bridges them). They then had
dinner on top of one of them. Stukeley was to remark that someone with a
‘steady head’ and ‘nimble heels’ would have space to dance a minuet up
there.
For all his antics, Stukeley was a serious scholar who was interested in
ancient people. He thought of Stonehenge not merely as a wonder, but as a
sacred place within a wider setting. He completed the first survey of the stone
circles and dug into a few nearby burial mounds; but most importantly, he
walked the landscape.
His perceptive eye spotted long-forgotten earthworks, including what he
called an ‘avenue’, marked by banks and ditches. Two centuries later, aerial
photographs traced this about 3 kilometres to the River Avon, near the town
of Amesbury. Stukeley also found a pair of parallel ditches marking out what
he believed to have been a racecourse (and which he dubbed the ‘Cursus’),
complete with an earthen grandstand at the eastern end.
William Stukeley’s fieldwork was remarkable for its perception and
accuracy. Earlier visitors had done little more than describe Stonehenge in a
few words. By walking the countryside, Stukeley founded one of the basic
approaches of today’s archaeology – the systematic study of ancient
landscapes.
Archaeologists have always been obsessed with big, conspicuous
monuments. And until recently, in the case of Stonehenge, research mirrored
this preoccupation. Excavations within and around the stone circles yielded a
provisional (not final) chronology, together with lots of speculation about the
site’s significance. Only in the past few years have investigators raised their
eyes – as Stukeley did – and looked properly at the surrounding landscape.
While Stukeley traversed the countryside on foot or on horseback, today’s
archaeologists examine the landscape electronically and from space.
For generations, we have dreamed of ways to explore sites without the
backbreaking and expensive effort of excavating them. ‘Non-intrusive
archaeology’ – commonly known as ‘remote sensing’ – studies sites and their
surroundings without disturbing them or destroying them by digging them up.
Remote sensing began with aerial photography, which became a serious
archaeological tool after the First World War. Nowadays we have Google
Earth, satellite imagery, airborne radar and technologies like ground-
penetrating radar and other techniques to peer beneath the earth’s surface.
These allow us to explore entire landscapes.
Some of the best archaeologists in the business no longer really want to
dig – they know that excavation destroys archaeological sites. Of course,
selective excavation is necessary to provide dating evidence or to answer
specific questions. But today’s digs are smaller, slow moving and carefully
planned – a far cry from Leonard Woolley at Ur in the 1920s and 1930s.
Thanks to radiocarbon dating and limited excavations, we know a great
deal more than Stukeley about Stonehenge. The great stone circles were
erected in about 2500 BC, though there was ritual activity there at least 1,000
years earlier. But we have always been more interested in the stone circles
themselves than in the surrounding landscape. This is the story of what we
learned about Stonehenge when remote sensing came into play.
Vincent Gaffney is an expert on remote sensing, who pioneered work on
Doggerland, the buried Ice Age landscape under the North Sea (see Chapter
40). He embarked on a four-year study of Stonehenge in 2010, using
magnetometers and ground-penetrating radar to produce three-dimensional
images of sites under the surface. His team employed the latest technology,
mounted on quad bikes and mini-tractors, to map 14 square kilometres of the
landscape surrounding Stonehenge. The project has revealed fifteen hitherto
unknown stone circles, burial mounds, ditches and pits. It turns out that
Stonehenge lay in an elaborate and crowded landscape inhabited by the living
and the dead.
Gaffney examined Stukeley’s Cursus, just north of Stonehenge – a long
strip, marked by ditches, which runs east to west for just over 3 kilometres.
Far from being a racecourse, as Stukeley had believed, the Cursus was
probably laid out as a sacred walkway, several centuries before construction
work began at Stonehenge. Gaffney and his colleagues found several gaps in
the ditches. These may have been ‘channels’ to guide people arriving from
north and south onto the east–west axis.
All kinds of mysterious features found in the Gaffney survey await
excavation. We do know that many of these features align (line up) with
sunrise on the longest and shortest days of the year – the so-called summer
and winter solstices. The Stonehenge landscape had intense spiritual
meaning. What it meant to those who built its stone circles and earthworks,
and what emotions the dramatic sight of Stonehenge stirred in them, must
remain a matter of speculation. But there are some questions that we may
now be able to answer.
The farmers who built Stonehenge lived in a tough environment, and the
passage of the seasons governed their lives. The eternal cycles of planting,
growth and harvest – of symbolic life and death – repeated themselves
endlessly through good years and bad. These were the realities that governed
human life in the Stonehenge landscape, as they did in many other
communities, large and small, including Çatalhöyük in Turkey (see Chapter
37). Fortunately, excavations at Durrington Walls, an earthwork just over 3
kilometres northeast of Stonehenge, have unravelled some of the complex
rituals of ancient life there.
Durrington Walls is a great circular earthwork, commonly known as a
‘henge’. It was once more than 3 metres high and had a 3-metre ditch on the
inner side. The earthwork covers 17 hectares, but there is little to see on the
surface today. Next to it, on its south side, once stood a timber circle known
as Woodhenge. Two Stonehenge-sized timber circles, known as the North
Circle and the South Circle, stood inside the earthwork.
Between about 2525 and 2470 BC, before the earthwork was built, one of
the largest human settlements in Europe flourished here. As many as 4,000
people lived in about 1,000 houses with wattle and daub walls (wooden strips
plastered with mud). The inhabitants may have been those people who built
both Durrington Walls and Stonehenge. There are no signs of a builder’s
village near the latter.
Until recently, everyone assumed that the two sites were built at different
times, Durrington Walls being a few centuries earlier. However, fresh
radiocarbon dates show that the two were in use at the same time. But why
was Stonehenge built of stone, while Durrington Walls and Woodhenge were
constructed of timber? The lintels of Stonehenge’s trilithons have joints
similar to those found in wooden structures, hinting that the builders were
also carpenters.
Michael Parker Pearson is an English archaeologist with very broad
experience. Among other places, he has worked in Madagascar, where he
visited many tombs and standing stones with Malagasy archaeologist
Ramilisonina. Parker Pearson had excavated at Avebury and Stonehenge and
arranged for Ramilisonina to visit the sites. Ramilisonina took one look at
them and declared that Stonehenge, made in stone, was for the ancestors – the
dead – while Durrington Walls, with its wooden uprights, was for the living.
Could this have been the case? There were, after all, cremation burials at
Stonehenge and burial mounds nearby, but none at Durrington Walls.
Parker Pearson and his team work with huge quantities of data. They like
to take a broad perspective. Why, for example, had the famous ‘bluestones’ at
Stonehenge been transported all the way from the Preseli Hills in Wales,
about 290 kilometres from the stone circles? Perhaps even more importantly,
why was Stonehenge erected where it was, nearly 2 kilometres from the
nearest water, on top of a rather desolate ridge? And why go to all the trouble
of transporting stone and fashioning it to form a stone circle that imitated
wood?
Teamwork was the only way to address these complex questions. Parker
Pearson and some of his archaeologist friends assembled a talented research
group for a multi-year Stonehenge Riverside Project. Every stage of the work
was carefully debated. Thorny questions were thrashed out in the field, in the
pub and in the laboratory. What followed was a carefully organised series of
excavations and surveys, combined with analysis of even the smallest
artefacts. At Durrington Walls, the excavators traced a surfaced avenue about
100 metres across, with parallel banks that led from the south entrance of the
earthwork down to the River Avon. The avenue was aligned with the
entrance to the south circle. How did this fit into the wider Stonehenge
landscape?
One of the team, Christopher Tilley, had previously developed a new
approach to exploring prehistoric landscapes called ‘phenomenology’. This
involves trying to move through landscapes in the same way as ancient
people would have. Ground-penetrating radar, maps and other well-
established survey devices are all well and good, but there is more to a
landscape than that. For a start, the researcher has to ignore modern roads,
fields, hedges and paths. How, for example, did the builders of Stonehenge
use the natural landscape to approach the stone circles? Tilley walked the
avenue and other ancient features, and explored the course of the River Avon,
since these were canoe-using societies that covered long distances by river
and stream.
While Tilley went to work, Parker Pearson and his team excavated at
Durrington Walls. They stripped off the topsoil of their trenches
mechanically, exposing the chalk. One house with a chalk floor measured
about 25 square metres. Painstaking manual excavation exposed the
stakeholes where the clay-plastered walls had once stood. Between the wall
and the edge of the chalk floor, the team uncovered shallow grooves that had
once held the foundations of box beds and storage bins. The soil on the
surface of the floor of five dwellings was sifted through very fine screens in
the laboratory.
We cannot understand Durrington Walls without looking at Stonehenge,
about which we now know a great deal. For a long time, Stonehenge served
as a burial place. Its builders constructed it at the end of a natural geological
feature that extended along the axis of the solstice. The first version of
Stonehenge was built in 3000 BC. The second stage of construction, when the
trilithons and sarsen stones (made of sandstone) were erected, came in about
2500 BC, just as comparable timber circles were being constructed at
Durrington Walls. Those were erected in a settlement that housed people who
had come from afar with their herds for seasonal feasting in summer and
winter.
Most likely, Stonehenge was the place of the dead; Durrington Walls was
for the living. We know this from the alignment of the two sites. The
surrounding landscape was almost like a giant astronomical observatory. At
midsummer, Stonehenge lines up with the sun as it appears at sunrise. The
Durrington Walls avenue and the site’s southern circle align with the
midsummer sun as it dips below the horizon at sunset.
The Stonehenge Riverside Project is a wonderful example of close-knit
team research that works on carefully defined hypotheses and objectives. The
experts on the team come from a broad range of specialities – some of them
far removed from archaeology. The team members take risks, ask bold
questions and show an awareness that knowledge is cumulative – it is built up
gradually. As such, the project provides a blueprint for achieving a close
understanding of Stonehenge in the future.
In many respects, the archaeologists working in the Stonehenge landscape
represent the future of archaeology. Instead of just excavating individual
sites, we regard them as part of much larger landscapes. We have come full
circle – back to what William Stukeley was doing at Stonehenge in the
1720s.
 CHAPTER 39

Shining a Light on the Invisible

T he research at Stonehenge has revealed the power of remote sensing when

studying the past. In a few years, we will have a much better understanding
of the sacred landscape surrounding the stone circles. This is archaeology on
a far grander scale than ever before. But Stonehenge and Durrington Walls
are dwarfed by a different remote-sensing project on the other side of the
world.
When I first saw Cambodia’s Angkor Wat on a hot, humid day, its sheer
size took my breath away. You stumble on it suddenly, in dense forest, its
towers stretching up towards heaven. At dusk, the pink of the setting sun
casts a soft light on the richly decorated pinnacles. The huge shrine is a
spectacle of beauty, wonder and magnificence on an almost unimaginable
scale. I could only marvel at the vision of the anonymous architect who built
it. This is one of the great archaeological wonders of the world, the historical
roots of which extend back over 1,000 years. But the ruins lie in dense forest,
which has made the surrounding landscape almost invisible – until now, that
is.
Before looking at remote sensing here, we should offer a little
background. Angkor Wat lies close to the Mekong River and a giant lake
called the Tonle Sap. This lake is unusual: when the Mekong floods between
August and October, it swells to 160 kilometres in length and has a depth of
up to 16 metres. As the Mekong’s waters recede and the level of the lake
falls, millions of catfish and other species are trapped in the shallows.
A combination of fertile soils (ideal for growing rice) and this, one of the
richest fisheries on earth, created a very productive environment that
sustained thousands of farmers. Reservoirs and well-managed canals
distributed water over thousands of hectares of farmland and propped up the
wealthy Khmer civilisation, which prospered between AD 802 and 1430.
At first, Tonle Sap and its surroundings supported numerous competing
kingdoms whose histories are virtually unknown. Then a series of ambitious
Khmer kings created a powerful and more stable empire. They considered
themselves divine rulers and – at vast expense – built shrines in their own
honour. Angkor Wat and a handful of other magnificent palaces and shrines
dominate the landscape. Angkor Wat and nearby Angkor Thom are vast: they
would dwarf ancient Egyptian temples and the Maya centre at Copán in
Honduras, visited by Catherwood and Stephens (Chapter 6).
The rulers of the Khmer Empire created a cult of divine kingship, luxury
and wealth. Everything, including the labour of thousands of commoners,
was for the benefit of the king. In AD 1113, King Suryavarman II started
building his masterpiece, Angkor Wat.
Every detail of this remarkable structure reflects some element of the
Khmer mythology. According to the cosmology of the Khmer, the world
consisted of a central continent, Jambudvipa, with a mountain, Mount Meru,
rising from its middle. The central tower of Angkor Wat soars 60 metres
above the surrounding landscape in imitation of Meru’s main peak; four other
towers represent the lower peaks. An imposing enclosure wall depicts the
mountain range that surrounded the continent, while the moat around the
enclosure represents the mythical ocean beyond.
Suryavarman II’s masterpiece did not last long after his death. It was soon
abandoned during a period of political upheaval. Another monarch, King
Suryavarman VII, a Buddhist rather than a Hindu, ascended the throne in AD
1151. He built the nearby Angkor Thom, which was as much a capital city as
a shrine.
We can easily become obsessed by Angkor Wat. It is, after all, one of the
most spectacular archaeological sites on earth. It is also an archaeologist’s
nightmare: the ruins are so vast and elaborate that they still have not been
fully documented. With their scale and complexity, they defy conventional
excavation methods.
Suryavarman’s shrine measures 1,500 metres by 1,200 metres and is
protected by a wide moat. The central block alone measures 215 metres by
186 metres. You approach it across a 1,500-metre causeway over the moat. It
is protected by low walls adorned with mythical, multi-headed snakes. Three
levels of squares, galleries and chambers surround the central tower. Wall
carvings show the king receiving officials and in procession. Battle scenes
commemorate conquests. Beautiful maidens dance, promising eternal life in
paradise.
Astronomical observatory, royal burial place and temple: everything
about Angkor Wat had profound cosmic and religious symbolism. Everything
is on an enormous scale. So overwhelming is the site in its complexity and
magnificence that it is easy to forget the surrounding landscape. In the past,
even archaeologists did.
Research was at rather a dead end when remote sensing entered the
picture. Trained as they are in remote-sensing technologies using space
satellites, today’s researchers ask questions about the surrounding landscape.
It was known that Angkor Wat lay at the heart of a huge, densely populated
environment that had housed and fed up to three-quarters of a million people.
But the surrounding landscape is under dense forest cover, and it is difficult
to chart rainforests and thick vegetation because surveyors need straight
‘sight lines’. Unless you employ a small army of workers with axes and
machetes to cut down dozens of trees, there is not much to be done.
Fortunately, researchers have been able to turn to LIDAR.
LIDAR – Light Detection and Ranging – is a form of laser scanning that
was originally developed in the 1960s for use in meteorology (the study of
the atmosphere). It works by sending out a beam of light which bounces off a
target object and returns to the origin; the time taken for the light to travel to
and from the object is measured, and the precise distance to the target object
can be calculated. LIDAR thus collects extremely accurate, high-resolution,
three-dimensional data. A survey produces millions of dots that a computer
can then convert into a three-dimensional mesh.
From the archaeologist’s point of view, LIDAR is more cost-effective
than traditional field surveys. It can even be used on the ground to record
individual structures in extremely fine detail. This state-of-the-art technology
is perfect for the aerial exploration of large sites that lie in forested
landscapes, such as Angkor Wat. Up to 600,000 pulses are sent out by the
device each second, allowing it to penetrate leaves and other vegetation and
reach the ground below. It can record houses, temples and other structures
under thick forest canopy. Rainforests no longer have secrets.
Before 2012, archaeologists Christophe Pottier, Roland Fletcher and
Damian Evans had combined a series of small-scale ground-penetrating radar
projects with field research. To their surprise, it turned out that once upon a
time Angkor Wat had not been surrounded by dense forest, but had been near
the middle of a huge urban complex covering at least 1,000 square
kilometres, and with an estimated 750,000 inhabitants. The archaeologists
uncovered traces of canals and ponds, thousands of rice fields surrounded by
low banks, house mounds and hundreds of small shrines. But for all the new
knowledge gained, the dense forest cover of today, especially around Angkor
Wat itself, made foot surveys almost impossible.
In 2012, frustrated by the lack of progress, they turned to LIDAR since it
could ‘see’ through dense forest. Evans worked closely with the Cambodian
organisation responsible for Angkor. Meanwhile, a team of specialist
researchers from Australia, Europe, Cambodia and the United States joined
forces to work with ground-penetrating radar on foot. They combined the
results with carefully targeted excavations within the grounds of Angkor Wat
itself. An entire urban landscape emerged from the research.
For well over a century, the traditional view was that Angkor Wat had
been a temple city and capital of the Khmer Empire during the twelfth
century. The great enclosure appeared to have housed a dense urban
population, especially the elite of the ruler’s court. Isolated villages were
thought to be part of a heavily forested agricultural hinterland. The virtual
‘removal’ of the forest cover allowed the researchers to map Angkor Wat and
its enclosure as well as large tracts of the urban area around the temple.
The new findings were extraordinary. The temple complex was far larger
and more elaborate than any archaeologist had imagined. A well-developed
road grid had originated in Angkor Wat half a century before the nearby
Angkor Thom was built, and had extended far beyond the two great shrines
to take in all of Angkor’s outlying temples. A road and canal network ran
across the sprawling precincts (the suburbs) of the greater Angkor area. This
was where most people had lived.
For generations, archaeologists had assumed that ancient cities were
compact, densely populated entities like Sumerian Ur or Athens. But Gordon
Willey’s early studies of Maya landscapes and now these findings at Angkor
have revealed spread-out, unwalled cities in tropical regions. The word ‘city’,
traditionally associated with ancient walled places, has many more meanings
than we thought.
Those who worked on Angkor Wat used to believe that the elite dwelt
there, in the shadow of the most sacred place. But the LIDAR survey
contradicts this assumption. The great temple was part of a complex,
interconnected landscape that was almost invisible until the laser scanners
came along. While Evans and Fletcher examined the LIDAR data, the
research team working on the ground used their radar and careful excavation
to try to determine how many people had lived close to the temple, and who
they were. They were interested to learn that these people had lived in modest
dwellings, built mostly of materials that decayed rapidly. The researchers
now suggest that it may not have been the wealthy elite who dwelt close by,
but temple staff such as priests, dancers and officials.
Once again, remote sensing provided a thorough overview. The ground
radar – combined with LIDAR, the collection of soil samples, ground survey
and selective excavation – identified a grid of about 300 small household
ponds within the enclosure walls. This was far more than the handful known
previously. Using the newly discovered ponds and a description by a Chinese
visitor in AD 1295–96, they estimated that about 4,000 people had lived in
Angkor Wat’s main enclosure.
How many people ran the temple? The team used a Khmer inscription to
calculate that the staff numbered about 25,000. But most of them lived
outside the main enclosure, probably quite close to the temple. The same
inscription records that five times as many people were engaged in delivering
food and other produce. Almost all of them must have lived in the suburbs.
The remote sensing provides us with a totally unexpected insight into the
scale of Angkor Wat’s logistics. Thanks once again to LIDAR and earlier
remote-sensing efforts, we know that the major Angkor temples lay in the
midst of a huge network of canals, ponds and reservoirs. These managed,
stored and dispersed water from three small rivers through the city and into
the Tonle Sap. One of the reservoirs alone, the so-called West Baray, is 8
kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide.
LIDAR is becoming cheaper, as fieldworkers experiment with LIDAR-
carrying drones. We can now look at the landscapes that surrounded ancient
cities in ways quite unimaginable a generation ago. Whether compact or more
spread out, these cities depended on the surrounding communities and the
agricultural landscapes. Damian Evans, Roland Fletcher and their colleagues
have completely transformed our perceptions of Khmer civilisation.
LIDAR is being used elsewhere, too, revealing the scattered settlement
patterns of ancient Maya centres like El Mirador in Guatemala. It has been
used to plot a colonial-era plantation near Annapolis, Maryland, in the United
States.
Within another generation, the traditional symbol of the archaeologist, the
trowel, could be joined by various remote-sensing devices, operated from
balloons, circling drones or satellites.
 CHAPTER 40

Archaeology Today and Tomorrow

I magine a swampy landscape with a few ridges and low hills, crossed by
streams and rivers. Now imagine it 9,000 years ago, with a dugout canoe
making its way through a narrow channel in the tall reeds. A strong wind
carrying drizzle gusts above, but the black water is still. The woman paddles
quietly, while her husband stands up front, barbed spear at the ready. One
lightning-quick thrust and a struggling pike breaks surface. Startled birds
make a commotion. In seconds, the fisherman has tipped his catch into the
canoe, where his wife swiftly kills it with a wooden club. The water is again
calm and the fishing continues.
The story may be fiction, but this is no imaginary landscape: it is based
on archaeological and climatic evidence gathered from the bottom of the
North Sea. Today, a cold and often rough stretch of water separates Britain
from continental Europe. But 9,000 years ago, when global sea levels were
far below those of today, this was dry land.
 Known to geologists today as Doggerland, the area was only a few metres
above sea level, For the most part, it was a waterlogged world, whose
inhabitants spent much of their time afloat. We know details of this natural
landscape from remote sensing. But we know little of the human inhabitants,
except for what we can glean from chance finds such as bone harpoons
dredged from the shallow sea bed. We know these people were hunters and
fisherfolk, for agriculture was still unknown. We also know that they lived in
an ever-changing environment, so flat that a rise in the sea level of just a few
centimetres could submerge canoe landings or campsites within a generation
or even less.
Doggerland finally vanished about 5500 BC during a time of major global
warming after the Ice Age. Thanks to archaeology, we know more and more
about how people have adjusted to changes in the climate (both large and
small) – whether small hunting bands in Doggerland or magnificent
civilisations in danger of collapse during major drought. We live in a time of
global warming, of climate change triggered by human activity (much of it
since the 1860s). We archaeologists provide a long-term historical view of
climate change, and this offers a unique background to today’s concerns.
Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to adjust to more frequent
‘extreme weather events’ such as hurricanes or droughts. We’re like the long-
vanished inhabitants of Doggerland, but on a global scale. Their small bands
moved around in the face of rising sea levels. But the populations of today’s
big cities cannot do the same.
Long before the million-person city, early civilisations were vulnerable to
climate change. Ancient Egyptian civilisation nearly collapsed because of
failed Nile floods, caused by drought in 2100 BC. Fortunately, the pharaohs
were shrewd enough to invest in extensive agricultural irrigation canals and
grain storage facilities. Their civilisation lasted for 2,000 more years.
Meanwhile, great Maya cities descended into social disorder and chaos,
in part because of major droughts. We learn from archaeology that
vulnerability to climate change is nothing new. In this and many other ways
archaeology tells us a great deal about ourselves and how we face today’s
challenges – many of which are also nothing new.
Archaeology has always been about people. What has changed is not the
people, but the layers of evidence that we use to study them. We began
purely as excavators, out for spectacular finds and (sometimes) knowledge.
We preferred, for the most part, civilisations. Today, we’re interested in
everything from human origins to the Industrial Revolution and First World
War trenches. Of course, we still excavate statues and buildings – or an
emperor’s terracotta regiment; but we’re just as comfortable in the laboratory
studying pot fragments or animal bones, or discussing the religious beliefs of
Maya rulers. Archaeology is being transformed by new technological
methods, such as LIDAR, which can expose entire landscapes and sites deep
under tropical forests (see Chapter 39). We’ve become so specialised that
there is a tendency sometimes to forget the people.
It is now rare to make a truly ‘spectacular’ discovery, such as a richly
decorated tomb. Tragically, archaeology’s precious archives are vanishing
before our very eyes. Archaeological sites everywhere are under threat from
deep ploughing, industrial development and looters.
Without being aware of it, thousands of tourists – fascinated by
archaeological sites and the remains of ancient societies – are eroding the
stones of the pyramids and of ancient Angkor Wat in Cambodia. At the same
time, the terrorist organisation ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and
other criminals have deliberately destroyed ancient Palmyra and Nineveh
with gunpowder, and sold looted artefacts from ravaged museums.
Fortunately, there are heroes, too – communities that value their history
and realise that they are stakeholders in the past. Archaeologists in several
countries have joined forces with non-professionals who use metal detectors.
This has resulted in impressive discoveries, including collections of Anglo-
Saxon and Viking gold.
Many commercial companies have also helped save sites threatened by
their development plans. The Crossrail Project, which is building an
underground railway line across London, has paired archaeologists with
tunnelling contractors from the beginning. They have recovered more than
10,000 artefacts from over forty worksites along the 100-kilometre line.
Remarkable finds include 3,000 or so human skeletons excavated from
underneath Liverpool Street Station, a major London terminus. Of these,
forty-two came from a single burial ground used during the Great Plague of
1665, the ‘Black Death’. A hundred thousand Londoners perished in the
plague which swept across Europe from the east. Victims died within days,
and sometimes within hours. They broke out in black rashes and often
collapsed in the streets. At the time, no one knew what the killer disease was
or where it had come from.
The exact nature of the disease was still somewhat uncertain until the
Crossrail researchers took DNA samples from the Liverpool Street victims’
tooth enamel. These yielded traces of a type of bacteria associated with
bubonic plague, which is spread by rats. The DNA settled once and for all
what disease it was that had killed so many Londoners.
Crossrail explored centuries of vanished London history. Elsewhere,
other sites exposed by industrial activity, and then excavated with the support
of the company that discovered them, tell of dramatic moments in the past.
For example, some 3,000 years ago, a fire broke out in a small village lying
in a marshy setting at Must Farm, near Peterborough, in eastern England’s
low-lying Fenlands. The flames tore through the tiny, fenced settlement, built
on stilts above the bog. The villagers fled the blaze, leaving everything
behind them. Within minutes, five huts had slid into the water.
This is when archaeology is at its best: a long-forgotten catastrophe that
froze a moment in time; near-perfect preservation conditions in waterlogged
ground; and collapsed dwellings, where everything lies virtually unharmed.
Thanks to the cooperation of a helpful brick quarry owner, the fascinating
and tragic story could be pieced together.
The site was so waterlogged that the archaeologists could sift through the
wet mud and fine silt in huts that were preserved so completely that it was as
though the researchers had simply walked into them. Parts of the wattle walls
were still in place beneath traces of the collapsed roofs. Possessions lay on
the floor and by the hearth – even clay pots with food still in them. There
were traces of butchered lamb carcasses that once hung from the rafters.
The hut owners had a fine array of bronze axes and swords, as well as
bronze-tipped spears (two were found still complete with their wooden shafts
– a rare discovery). The mud perfectly preserved textiles made from the bark
of lime trees – some of the fibres were finer than human hair. This was a
community that spent much of its time afloat: no fewer than eight wooden
dugout canoes have been found nearby. Must Farm is Britain’s Pompeii.
Some dramatic finds in recent years have revealed long-forgotten natural
disasters. Cerén, a Maya village in El Salvador, Central America, was buried
by a volcanic eruption in about AD 580. The people had eaten their evening
meal but had not yet gone to bed. They abandoned their houses and
possessions to flee for their lives.
American archaeologist Payson Sheets and his team have been working
there since 1976. They have unearthed two houses, some public buildings and
three storehouses. The preservation is so good that they have recovered bean-
filled pots, sleeping mats and garden tools, either carbonised or preserved as
casts in the ash. The eruption buried fields with young and mature maize
plants, and several fruit trees, including guavas.
Like Herculaneum and Pompeii, Cerén and Must Farm are places where
we get up close and personal with the people of the past. And when all is said
and done, that is the point of archaeology.
Archaeology is about discovery – but discovery today means something
very different from even half a century ago. We’ve traced the history of
archaeology from its early days of antiquarians like John Aubrey, William
Stukeley and John Frere. Then came the early excavators, who dug up a
jumble of artefacts from European burial mounds. Pompeii and Herculaneum
yielded dramatic finds. General Napoléon Bonaparte’s scientists made
ancient Egypt fashionable in 1800. Jean François Champollion deciphered
hieroglyphs in 1822 and founded Egyptology.
Then came the adventurers, like Paul-Émile Botta, Austen Henry Layard,
Frederick Catherwood, John Lloyd Stephens and Heinrich Schliemann. These
were the heroic days of archaeology, when archaeologists revealed unknown
ancient civilisations. Meanwhile, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen and J.J.A.
Worsaae brought some order to prehistoric times with the Three-Age System
during the early nineteenth century.
The era of adventuring and collecting began to fade in the 1870s with the
German excavations at Olympia and Babylon. Slowly, archaeology ceased to
be an amateur pursuit. In 1900, most archaeologists were men. But a small
number of women were in the field, among them Gertrude Bell and Harriett
Hawes. The early twentieth century was a time of increasing professionalism
and truly magnificent discoveries. Among them was the undisturbed tomb of
Tutankhamun, opened in 1922. Leonard Woolley’s excavations at Ur in Iraq
were one of the last enormous classic digs; his clearance of the city’s royal
tombs rivalled the Tutankhamun excavation. By the 1930s, a growing
number of professional archaeologists taught at colleges and universities.
Slowly but surely, archaeology became global – not just confined to
Europe and the Middle East. Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s excavations at
Great Zimbabwe opened the world’s eyes to early African states. Excavations
at Pecos Pueblo put the archaeology of the American Southwest (and indeed
of North America generally) on a scientific footing.
We have traced the slow development of world prehistory, the debates
over the first farming, and have joined the Leakeys and others as they
searched for the first humans in East Africa. Archaeology has become an
international undertaking, where long-term, slow-moving projects tackle
issues like sustainability rather than merely finding and dating sites.
Excavation itself is no longer fashionable, as remote sensing has slowly
come to fulfil the archaeologist’s dream of being able to see underground
without digging. Archaeology is still exciting. It’s now highly technical, but
that allows us to decipher the medical history of pharaohs and to establish,
from the tooth enamel of skeletons, where people once were born and lived.
Archaeology helps explain why we are similar and why we are different. It
explains the ways in which we adapt. By looking backwards into the past, it
helps us look forwards into the future. And every year, new discoveries and
technical advances make it easier to peer over the shoulders of ancient people
– almost, sometimes, to talk to them.
I remember standing on the ramparts of a 2,000-year-old hillfort in
England one cloudy day. I closed my eyes and imagined the battle below in
AD 43 between a Roman legion and the local inhabitants – the shouts of the
attackers, the clash of sword on shield, the screams of the wounded . . . For a
moment, I was a spectator. Then the vision faded and I shivered in the grey
chill.
The past is around us for all to experience and enjoy – not only
archaeologists. So when you next visit an archaeological site, let your
imagination run wild.
 Index

Abu Hureyra (Syria) (i)

Abu Simbel temple (Egypt) (i), (ii)
accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) (i), (ii)
Acosta, José de (i)
adventurers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Africa
and human origins (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and San rock art (i)
see also Great Zimbabwe
Agassiz, Louis (i)
Agricultural Revolution (i), (ii)
‘Ain Ghazal (Jordan), clay figures (i)
Akhenaten, Pharaoh (i)
Alcubierre, Roque Joaquín de (i)
Altamira cave (Spain) (i)
Alva, Walter (i)
el-Amarna (Egypt), excavation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
amateurs, role (i), (ii)
Amenemhat, Pharaoh (i)
Amenhotep II, Pharaoh (i)
America
and chronology (i)
early colonial settlers (i)
Mound Builders (i)
Native Americans (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Southwest (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
see also Aztec civilisation; Maya civilisation
ancestors (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Ancient Ruins Company (i)
Andrae, Walter (i), (ii)
Angkor Thom (Cambodia) (i), (ii), (iii)
Angkor Wat (Cambodia) (i), (ii), (iii)
animals, extinct (i), (ii), (iii)
anthropology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
 biological (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
social (i)
antiquarians (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Anyang (China), excavation (i), (ii)
Aramis (Ethiopia) (i)
archaeology
and classification (i)
and conservation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
economic (i), (ii)
engaged (i)
environmental (i)
experimental (i)
historical (i)
importance (i)
museum (i)
origins (i)
professional (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and reconstruction (i)
and remote sensing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
scientific (i), (ii)
settlement (i)
and surveying (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
and tourism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
underwater (i)
Ardipithecus ramidus (i)
Arnold, James (i)
art, prehistoric (i)
artefacts
and chronology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and cultural change (i), (ii)
recording of location (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Ashurbanipal, Assyrian king (i)
Ashurnasirpal, Assyrian king (i)
Assur, excavation (i), (ii)
Atwater, Caleb (i)
Aubrey, John (1626–97) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Aurignac (France), cave finds (i), (ii)
Australopithecus afarensis (i)
Australopithecus africanus (i)
Avebury stone circle (i), (ii), (iii)
Aztec civilisation (i), (ii), (iii)

Babylon (i), (ii)

and Bell (i)
German excavation (i), (ii), (iii)
Ishtar Gate (i), (ii)
and Layard (i), (ii)
and Rassam (i)
Bandelier, Adolph Francis Alphonse (1840–1914) (i)
Bass, George (b. 1932) (i), (ii)
Bell, Gertrude (1868–1926) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Belzoni, Giovanni Battista (1778–1823) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Beni Hasan (Egypt), noble tombs (i)
Bent, J. Theodore (i)
Bible
and archaeology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
and creation story (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and flood story (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Black Death (1665) (i)
Bleek, Wilhelm (1827–75) (i)
Bonaparte, Napoléon (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
bone chemistry (i), (ii)
Botta, Paul-Émile (1802–70) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Boucher de Perthes, Jacques (1788–1868) (i), (ii), (iii)
Bourget, Steve (i)
Boutcher, William (i)
Boyd Hawes, Harriet (1871–1945) (i), (ii)
Braidwood, Robert John (1907–2003) (i)
Breasted, Henry (i)
Breuil, Henri (1877–1961) (i)
British Academy (i)
British Association for the Advancement of Science (i), (ii)
British Museum
and Chinese finds (i)
and Egyptian finds (i), (ii)
and Mesopotamian finds (i), (ii), (iii)
and sponsored excavations (i), (ii)
Bronze Age (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and chronology (i)
and Jericho (i)
ships (i)
Brugsch, Émile (i)
burial mounds (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
burials
and grave goods (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Iron Age (i)
Stone Age (i), (ii), (iii)
within houses (i)
Burton, James (i)

Cabiri shrine (Samothrace) (i)

Cahen, Daniel (i)
Calvert, Frank (i)
Cambodia (i); see also Angkor Wat
Campbell Thompson, Reginald (i)
Canning, Sir Stratford (i)
Cape Gelidonya (Turkey), shipwreck (i)
Capitan, Louis (i)
Carchemish (Turkey), excavation (i), (ii)
Carnarvon, George Herbert, 5th Earl (1866–1923) (i), (ii), (iii)
Carnarvon Tablet (i)
Cartailhac, Émile (1845–1921) (i)
Carter, Howard (1874–1939) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
cartouches, deciphering (i)
Çatalhöyük (Turkey) (i), (ii)
Catherwood, Frederick (1799–1854) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Caton-Thompson, Gertrude (1888–1985) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
caves
cave paintings (i)
investigation (i), (ii), (iii)
Çayönü (Turkey) (i)
Central Asia (i)
Cerén (El Salvador) (i)
Champollion, Jacques-Joseph (i)
Champollion, Jean-François (1790–1832) (i), (ii), (iii)
Charles II of Naples (i)
Chávez, Sergio Gómez (i)
Chichén Itzá (Mexico) (i)
Childe, Vere Gordon (1892–1957) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
China
archaeology (i)
history (i)
terracotta warriors (i), (ii)
see also Anyang; Qin Shihuangdi; Zhoukoudian
Christie, Agatha (i)
Christy, Henry (1810–65) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
chronology
and artefacts (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and coins (i), (ii), (iii)
and cross-dating (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
of pharaohs (i)
potassium–argon dating (i), (ii), (iii)
and pottery (i), (ii), (iii)
and sequence dating (i), (ii)
and stratigraphy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
tree-ring (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
see also radiocarbon dating
Clark, John Grahame Douglas (1907–95) (i)
Cliff Palace (Mesa Verde) (i)
climate change (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Cochiti Pueblo (New Mexico) (i)
Columbus, Christopher (i)
conservation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Conze, Alexander (1831–1914) (i), (ii)
Copán (Honduras) (i), (ii), (iii)
Cortés, Hernán (i)
cosmology
Khmer (i)
Teotihuacán (i)
Crete see Knossos; Minoan civilisation
Cro-Magnon civilisation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
cross-dating (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Crossrail Project (London) (i)
Cubillas, Modesto (i)
cultural ecology (i)
culture history (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
cuneiform script (i), (ii), (iii)
deciphering (i)
Curtius, Ernst (1814–96) (i), (ii)
Cushing, Frank Hamilton (1857–1900) (i)

Darius the Great, King of Persia (i)

Dart, Raymond (1893–1988) (i)
Darwin, Charles (1809–82) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
The Descent of Man (i)
On the Origin of Species (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Davis, Edwin (i)
Davis, Theodore (i), (ii)
Dawson, Charles (i)
deforestation (i)
Dendera, temple of Hathor (i), (ii)
Denon, Dominique-Vivant, Baron (i)
DNA (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Doggerland (i), (ii)
Donnan, Christopher (i)
Dörpfeld, Wilhelm (i)
Douglass, A.E. (1867–1962) (i), (ii)
drones (i)
Droop, J.P. (i)
Drovetti, Bernardino (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Dubois, Eugène (1858–1940) (i), (ii)
Dur-Sharrukin (Iraq), excavation (i)
Durrington Walls (Wiltshire) (i)

earthworks
American (i)
at Stonehenge (i), (ii)
ecology, and world prehistory (i)
Edwards, Amelia (i)
Egypt
and chronology of sites (i)
and climate change (i)
 and Hittites (i)
and Napoléon (i), (ii)
Predynastic (i)
pyramids (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
tomb robbers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Valley of the Kings (i), (ii), (iii)
Egypt Exploration Fund (i), (ii), (iii)
Egyptology
and Belzoni (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
and Champollion (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and Drovetti (i), (ii)
and Lepsius (i)
origins (i)
and Petrie (i), (ii), (iii)
and Wilkinson (i)
El Niño (i)
Emeryville (California), shell mound (i)
Epic of Gilgamesh, The (i)
Esarhaddon, Assyrian king (i)
Eskimos, and Cro-Magnon civilisation (i)
Evans, Arthur John (1851–1941) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Evans, Damian (i)
Evans, John (i), (ii), (iii)
evolution
biological (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
social (i)
technological (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
excavation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
caves (i), (ii)
scientific (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and technology (i), (ii)
underwater (i)
vertical (i), (ii)

Faiyum depression (Egypt) (i), (ii), (iii)

farming, early (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii); see also Çatalhöyük
Fenland Research Committee (i)
Flandin, Eugène Napoléon (i)
Fletcher, Roland (i)
Font de Gaume cave (France) (i)
footprints, fossil (i)
Ford, James A. (i), (ii), (iii)
Fossey, Dian (i)
fossils
animal (i), (ii)
human (i), (ii), (iii)
type fossils (i)
France
 cave dwellers (i)
and cave paintings (i)
Frere, John (1740–1807) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Frey, Don (i)
Fyfe, Theodore (i), (ii)

Gaffney, Vincent (i)

Gardner, Elinor (i)
Garrod, Dorothy (i), (ii)
Gell, Sir William (i)
Genesis
creation story (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
flood story (i), (ii), (iii)
geology, and archaeology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Ghurab (Egypt), excavation (i)
Gilliéron, Émile (i)
Giza, pyramids (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Gladstone, William (i)
Godwin, Harry and Margaret (i)
Goodall, Mary (i)
Gournia (Crete) (i)
Great Serpent Mound (Ohio Valley) (i), (ii)
Great Zimbabwe (i), (ii), (iii)
Acropolis (i), (ii)
Great Enclosure (i)
Griffin, James B. (1905–97) (i)
Grotte de Chauvet (France) (i)

Hadar (Ethiopia) (i)

Hall, Richard (i)
Hallstatt culture (i)
Hamoudi ibn Ibrahim, Sheikh (i)
Harappa (i), (ii)
Harwood, Martin (i)
Haven, Samuel (i), (ii)
Hawes, Charles (i)
Hay, Robert (i)
Herbert, Lady Evelyn (i), (ii)
Herculaneum, excavation (i), (ii), (iii)
Hewett, Edgar (1865–1946) (i)
hieroglyphs
Egyptian (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Mayan (i), (ii)
Hillman, Gordon (i)
Hincks, Edward (i)
Hissarlik (Turkey) (i), (ii)
historical archaeology (i)
history, written (i)
Hittite Empire (i), (ii), (iii); see also Carchemish
Hodder, Ian (b. 1948) (i)
Hogarth, David (1862–1927) (i), (ii)
Homer, epics (i)
hominin fossils (i), (ii)
Homo erectus (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Homo habilis (i)
Hooton, E.A. (i)
Huaca de Luna (Peru) (i)
Huaca del Sol (Peru) (i), (ii)
Huaca Rajada (Peru) (i)
human origins (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
hunters, Stone Age (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825–95) (i)

Ice Age (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

and cave paintings (i)
ice cores, and chronology (i)
Iliad, The (Homer) (i), (ii)
India see Mohenjodaro
Indian Archaeological Survey (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Indus civilisation (i), (ii)
inscriptions see cuneiform; hieroglyphs
Iraq Museum (i)
Iron Age (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Hallstatt people (i)

Jamestown Island (Virginia) (i)

Jarmo (Iraq) (i)
‘Java Man’ (i), (ii), (iii)
Jennings, Jesse David (1909–97) (i)
Jericho, excavation (i), (ii)
Johanson, Don (i), (ii)

Kahun (Egypt), excavation (i)

Katzev, Michael (i)
Keller, Ferdinand (1800–81) (i)
Kelso, William (b. 1941) (i)
Kents Cavern (Torquay) (i)
Kenyon, Kathleen (1906–78) (i), (ii)
Kern, Richard (i)
Khmer civilisation (i)
Kidder, Alfred (1885–1963) (i), (ii)
Knossos (Crete) (i), (ii)
Palace of the Minotaur (i)
wall paintings (i), (ii)
Koldewey, Robert (1855–1925) (i)
Kroeber, Alfred (i)
Kuyunjik, excavation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Kyrenia (Cyprus), shipwreck (i)

La Madeleine (France), rock shelter (i), (ii)

La Mouthe cave (France) (i)
Laetoli (Tanzania) (i)
lake settlements (i)
Lambayeque Valley (Peru) (i)
landscape
and Angkor Wat (i)
Maya (i)
and settlement patterns (i), (ii)
and Stonehenge (i), (ii)
Lartet, Édouard (1801–71) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Lascaux cave (France) (i)
laser scanners (i), (ii)
Lawrence, T.E. (i), (ii)
Layard, Austen Henry (1817–94) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi)
Leakey, Louis Seymour Bazett (1903–72) (i), (ii), (iii)
Leakey, Mary (1913–96) (i), (ii), (iii)
Leakey, Richard (i)
Lepsius, Karl Richard (1810–84) (i), (ii)
Les Combarelles cave (France) (i)
Les Eyzies (France), cave excavations (i), (ii)
Li Ji (i)
Libby, Willard (1908–80) (i)
LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) (i), (ii), (iii)
Liu He, Emperor (i)
Lloyd, Lucy (i), (ii)
London Institute of Archaeology (i), (ii)
London Museum (i)
looting of sites (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Lords of Sipán (Peru) (i)
Lu Zhenyu (i)
Lubbock, John (i), (ii), (iii)
‘Lucy’ (i), (ii)
Lyell, Sir Charles (1797–1875) (i), (ii)

MacEnery, John (1797–1841) (i), (ii)

Mackenzie, Duncan (i)
magnetometry (i), (ii)
Maiden Castle (Dorset) (i)
Mallowan, Max (i)
Malthus, Thomas (i)
Marshall, John (i)
Mason, Charlie (i)
Maspero, Gaspar (i)
Mauch, Karl (i)
Maya civilisation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
and climate change (i), (ii)
medical science, and archaeology (i), (ii)
Mellaart, James (1925–2012) (i), (ii)
Mesolithic period (i), (ii)
metal detectors (i), (ii)
Mexico
and Mayan civilisation (i)
see also Chichén Itzá; Teotihuacán; Uxmal
middens, excavation (i)
Middle East
and civilisation (i), (ii)
exploration and excavation (i), (ii), (iii)
Minoan civilisation (i), (ii), (iii)
Minos, King (i), (ii)
missing link theory (i), (ii)
Mississippi Valley, Mound Builders (i)
Moche (Peru) (i)
Mohenjodaro (i), (ii), (iii)
Montelius, Oscar (1843–1921) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Moore, Andrew (i)
Moore, Clarence (i)
Mortillet, Gabriel de (i), (ii)
Mound Builders (i)
Muhammad Ali Pasha al-Mas’ud ibn Agha (i), (ii)
mummies
Egyptian (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Peruvian (i)
Museum of London (i)
Must Farm (Peterborough) (i)
Mycenae (Greece) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

Napoléon Bonaparte (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)

Naqada (Egypt), excavation (i)
Native Americans
Basket Maker cultures (i)
Californian (i)
and Mound Builders (i)
origins (i), (ii)
Pueblo Indians (i), (ii)
Shoshone Indians (i)
natural selection (i), (ii)
Naukratis (Egypt), excavation (i)
Neanderthal civilisation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and hominin finds (i)
Nebuchadnezzar II (i), (ii)
Nelson, Horatio (i)
Neolithic period (i), (ii)
New Mexico, and Pueblo Indians (i)
Newberry, Percy (i)
Nimrud, excavation (i), (ii), (iii)
Nineveh
destruction (i)
excavation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Noël Hume, Ivor (1927–2017) (i), (ii)
North Sea, Doggerland (i), (ii)

Odyssey, The (Homer) (i)

Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) (i), (ii), (iii)
Olorgesailie (Kenya), stone tools (i)
Olympia (Greece) (i), (ii), (iii)
Oppert, Jules (i)
Orpen, J.M. (i)
Ötzi the Ice Man (i), (ii)
Owsley, Douglas (i)

Pacal the Great (Mayan ruler) (i)

palaeoanthropology (i)
Palaeolithic period (i), (ii), (iii)
Upper (i), (ii)
Palenque (Mexico) (i), (ii)
Palmyra (Syria), destruction (i)
palynology (i)
Parker Pearson, Michael (i)
Pecos Pueblo (New Mexico) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Pegado, Vicente (i)
Pei Wenzhong (i)
Pengelly, William (i)
Peru, Lords of Sipán (i)
Petrie, Flinders (1853–1942) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
phenomenology (i)
photography (i), (ii), (iii)
aerial (i), (ii)
underwater (i)
Pidgeon, William (i)
Piette, Édouard (i)
Piggott, Stuart (i), (ii)
Piltdown skull (i), (ii)
Pithecanthropus erectus (i), (ii)
Pitt Rivers, Augustus Lane Fox (1827–1900) (i), (ii), (iii)
Pliny the Younger (i)
pollen analysis (i)
Pompeii, destruction (i), (ii), (iii)
Postan, Michael (i)
potassium–argon dating (i), (ii), (iii)
pottery
 and chronology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Moche (i), (ii)
Pottier, Christophe (i)
prehistory
and archaeology (i), (ii), (iii)
and art (i)
and chronology (i)
and Europe (i)
Three-Age System (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
world (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Prescott, William H. (i)
Prestwich, Joseph (i), (ii)
Preusser, Conrad (i)
Priest, Joseph (i)
progress, human (i), (ii), (iii)
Psusennes I, Pharaoh (i)
Pueblo Bonito (Chaco Canyon) (i), (ii)
Pueblo Indians (i), (ii)
pueblos (i), (ii), (iii)
Pulak, Cemal (i), (ii)
Pyramid of the Moon (i)
pyramids
Egyptian (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
of Amenemhat (i)
of Khafre (i)
of Senusret II (i)
Mayan (i), (ii), (iii)
Mexican (i)
Peruvian (i)

Qin Shihuangdi, Emperor (i), (ii)

racism, and archaeology (i)

radar
airborne (i)
ground-penetrating (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
radiocarbon dating (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix)
and Braidwood (i)
and Libby (i)
and Stonehenge (i), (ii)
Rameses II, Pharaoh (1304–1212 BC)
mummy (i)
statue (i)
Rameses VI, Pharaoh (i), (ii)
Ramilisonina (i)
Ramsauer, Johann Georg (1795–1874) (i)
Randall-McIver, David (1873–1945) (i), (ii)
Rassam, Hormuzd (1826–1910) (i), (ii), (iii)
el-Rasul, Ahmed and Mohammed (i)
Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke (1810–95) (i)
Reck, Hans (i)
reconstruction (i)
recording, importance (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv)
Reinhard, Johan (i)
Reisner, George (i), (ii)
remote sensing (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Render, Adam (i)
restoration (i)
Rhodes, Cecil John (i)
Richard III, King of England (1452–85) (i)
River Basin Surveys (US) (i), (ii)
robots, use in excavations (i)
Rosellini, Ippolito (i)
Rosetta Stone (i), (ii), (iii)
Royal Society (i), (ii)

sacrifice, human (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)

Salt, Henry (i)
San rock art (i)
Sargon II, Assyrian king (i)
Sautuola, Marcelino Sanz de (i), (ii)
Schaffhausen, Hermann (i)
Schliemann, Heinrich (1822–90) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Schliemann, Sophia (i), (ii)
Sennacherib, Assyrian king (i), (ii)
Senusret II, Pharaoh (i)
Seti I, Pharaoh (i), (ii)
settlement archaeology (i)
Shalmaneser III, Assyrian king (i)
Sheets, Payson (i)
shell mounds (i), (ii)
Shihuangdi, Emperor (i)
Shoshone Indians (i)
Silk Road (i)
Simpson, James Henry (i)
sites, looting (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Skara Brae (Orkney) (i)
skulls, plastered (i), (ii)
Smith, George (1840–76) (i)
Smith, William (1769–1839) (i)
Society of Antiquaries (i), (ii)
Somme Valley (France), stone axes (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
South Pacific, settlement dates (i)
Spencer, Herbert (i)
Squier, Ephraim (1821–88) (i)
Star Carr (Yorkshire) (i)
Steenstrup, Japetus (1813–97) (i), (ii)
Stein, Aurel (1862–1943) (i), (ii)
Stephens, John Lloyd (1805–52) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Stevenson, James (i)
Steward, Julian (1902–72) (i), (ii)
Stone Age (i), (ii), (iii)
Mesolithic (i), (ii)
Neolithic (i), (ii)
Palaeolithic (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
stone tools (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x)
changing forms (i), (ii)
obsidian (i)
sequences (i)
Stonehenge Riverside Project (i)
Stonehenge stone circle (i), (ii)
Cursus (i), (ii), (iii)
dating (i), (ii), (iii)
and landscape (i), (ii)
surveys (i), (ii), (iii)
Stow, George (i)
stratigraphy (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Stukeley, William (1687–1765) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
es Suefi, Ali Muhammad (i)
Suryavarman II, King (i)
Suryavarman VII, King (i)
Swan, E.W.M. (i)
Switzerland, lake settlements (i)

Tansley, Arthur (i)

Taylor, J.E. (i)
Tell es-Sultan (i)
Teotihuacán (Mexico)
Avenue of the Dead (i)
Ciudadela (i)
Pyramid of the Moon (i), (ii)
Pyramid of the Sun (i), (ii)
Temple of the Feathered Serpent (i), (ii)
terracotta warriors (i), (ii)
Thomas, Cyrus (1825–1920) (i)
Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen (1788–1865) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Three-Age System (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)
Throckmorton, Peter (i)
Tilley, Christopher (i)
Tiryns (Greece) (i)
Tobias, Phillip (i)
tomb robbers (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
tourism, effects (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
Tozzer, Alfred (i)
trade
Egyptian (i), (ii), (iii)
and Great Zimbabwe (i), (ii)
Mediterranean (i)
prehistoric (i), (ii)
Roman (i)
routes (i)
Silk Route (i)
treasure hunting (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii)
tree-ring chronology (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii)
Trevelyan, George (i)
Troy (i), (ii)
Tutankhamun, tomb (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
Tylor, Sir Edward (1832–1917) (i), (ii)
Tyssen-Amherst, William (i)

Uhle, Max (1856–1944) (i)

Ukhaidir (Syria), Abbasid castle (i)
Uluburun (Turkey), shipwreck (i)
underwater archaeology (i)
uniformitarianism (i), (ii)
University of Pennsylvania Museum (i), (ii), (iii)
Ur of the Chaldees (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
and biblical flood (i)
royal tombs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v)
ziggurat of Ur-Nammu (i)
Urban Revolution (i)
Uxmal (Mexico) (i)

Valley of the Kings (Egypt) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

van Doorninck, Frederick (i)
Vaugondy, Robert de (i)
Verulamium, excavation (i), (ii)
Vesuvius, eruption (AD 79) (i)
Virchow, Rudolf (i), (ii)
Viru Valley (Peru) (i), (ii)
von Post, Lennart (i)

Wang Yirong (i)

warrior-priests (i)
West Kennet Long Barrow (Wiltshire) (i)
Wetherill, Richard (i)
Wheeler, Robert Eric Mortimer (1890–1976) (i), (ii)
Wheeler, Tessa (i), (ii)
White, Tim (i)
‘White Lady of the Brandberg’ (Namibia) (i)
Wilkinson, John Gardner (1797–1875) (i)
Willey, Gordon Randolph (1913–2002) (i), (ii)
Williamsburg (Virginia) (i)
Eastern State Hospital (i)
Wetherburn’s Tavern (i)
Winged Victory of Samothrace (i)
Winkelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–68) (i)
Winklebury Camp (Hampshire) (i)
Wolstenholme Towne (Virginia) (i), (ii)
women, as archaeologists (i), (ii)
Woodhenge (Wiltshire) (i)
Woolley, Charles Leonard (1880–1960) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi)
Wor Barrow (Dorset) (i)
Worsaae, Jens Jacob (1821–85) (i), (ii), (iii)

Xin Lixiang (i)

Yassiada (Turkey), shipwreck (i)

Young, Thomas (i), (ii)

Zarate, Miguel (i)

Zhoukoudian (China) (i), (ii), (iii)
Zimbabwe see Great Zimbabwe
Zinjanthropus boisei (i), (ii), (iii)
Zoëga, Jørgen (i)
Zuni Indians (i)
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