Couldn't Watch Euro 2016, So I'll Moan About Archaeology Instead

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Well I was working the afternoon/evening shift at work last night so missed the start of Euro 2016. The match was between France and Romania. The French won thanks to Dimitri Payet. And at club level who's got Payet? "We've got Payet,We've got Payet" (sorry,sudden bursts of singing does not work when read).

Perhaps I'm going to miss the first three days of the competition because of work is a good thing (no point recording them I'd know the results before I could watch them) because I also missed some of the English fans going retro and turning into the apes of the past. God it just makes me despair sometimes.

Suddenly you realise that there is a connection between Euro 2016 and the EU referendum in that thanks to some English fans more Europeans actually would want us to leave.

So instead of the football I'll moan about archaeology instead. I shouldn't worry about making archaeologists angry. They won't put you into a grave. They'll just dig you up thousands of years later to take anything of value (either monetary or sentimental) buried with you.

As you probably know (or guess from the background picture) I collect vintage Penguin/Pelican paperbacks and I've just finished Digging Up The Past by Sir Leonard Woolley first published in 1930. Essentially this book is an introduction to archaeology based with his own experiences in the field.

Now let me be fair to Sir Len. He would have had to a produced a book pretty spectacular for me to have been interested in the subject. Fireworks and dancing girls would've needed to have been included. After all if I wanted to be outside, bored  and covered in dirt I would have taken a far greater interest in gardening.

So I approached this with not a closed mind but let's say it was unlocked but shut. A lot of this tome is boring but I felt that it was more to do with me than him so I'll give him a pass on that. However there were moments that interested me for the wrong reasons.

Sir Len mentioned that workers on his sites (say for example Egypt) were paid "a fair wage" and yet there was no explanation on exactly how this wage was actually "fair" Len was after all an archaeologist so exactly what knowledge did he have on a living wage for the average Egyptian in the nineteen thirties? Let's not forget the conditions they would have worked under as well. Calling it "a fair wage" doesn't mean it was. It's a trick that's used to this present day. Say something often enough then some people will always believe it to be true.

Yet despite this "fair wage" he had also a scheme, "described as baksheesh" where workers who discovered any valuable objects got a bonus. It struck me as a sort of cultural equivalent of the double glazing salesman getting extra money for being the best flogger of glass that month.

Also, when talking about this bonus scheme Lenny described his Arab workers as liking it because they're...wait for it...."gamblers by nature". Now even if you take account of the time it was written, and that he was not implying that after working in the dig they were trying to place a bet at 2:30 in Haydock, it's still a pretty insensitive remark. I'd argue that it shows his low opinion of the workers on his site,

But do you know what shocked me more. It was the chapter on digging up ancient graves. He seemed to treat it as just part of the job but I was thinking to myself that here is a grave digger justifying his actions on the grounds of historical accuracy. We're not talking about rich pharaohs here. Lenny Boy talks disapprovingly about the people who raided graves to take things like jewellery but though I don't approve of that it seemed more understandable than doing the same thing to find a Celtic Warrior's sword or even worse a child's toy.

You might say it doesn't happen now. I've no idea and I don't care. If you see the results of an archaeological dig in a museum there is a possibility that the remains were treated with more care than the workers who found them and that a final dignity was taken away from ordinary people in the name of culture.

Archaeology. Didn't dig it before reading this book. Dig it less now.

So have a new Penguin book to read from the larger white spined "King Penguin" series of the nineteen eighties.

Jim Harrison - Sundog

Jim Harrison died fairly recently in March of this year. Though picking from the great unread was purely coincidental. 

Until the next time.