Might cause an argument but I'd love to see Simon Schama doing this. I really like his History of Britain series and thought the biggest thing that let it down was very little focus on pre-Roman Britian.
Schama is a good presenter but he's a historian, so pre-Roman Britain is not his field.
History just covers the written word, and that didn't exist here until the Romans arrived. Archaeology covers physical evidence left by humans including burials, artefacts, buildings and changes to the landscape.
What sort of period are they calling ancient? Wasn't there a prog on the beeb looking at ancient civilisations?
If it's stuff about stone circles, etc... I will be happy. ( With preferably not too many post holes and 'ritual' anythings)
Ancient in this context means from the arrival of humans in Britain up to the Roman Invasion in AD43. The series last year on ancient civilisations was about the first civilisations in the world and their development. This is about Britain specifically. There will be stone circles, henge monuments, causewayed enclosures etc. It'll cover each period of the stone age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, then they'll mention that those terms aren't as useful as they once were.
I doubt they'll show too many postholes 'cos they don't make good TV to non-archaeologists, but there will be plenty of interpretation, which will include the word "ritual".
It's a shame that most people don't get the "ritual" stuff, it's the best bit. In fact TV archaeology's greatest failing is that after 15 odd years of Time Team etc the 150 years of archaeological study which has led to current interpretational thinking has in absolutely no way filtered through to the public with any credibility whatsoever.
In essence it's not so hard to get across. We will never know all of the answers, that's part of the exciting bit. There are loads of attempts to put this across, the most famous being "the past is another country".
With every excavation and landscape study new information is found and many long held pieces of knowledge are reaffirmed and proved. The purpose of archaeology is to interpret those findings to explain humans' role and behaviour in the past. This can only be done through theorisation, then looking at the evidence to see if that theory can be proved, looks possible, or looks likely.
Then other evidence found is used to prove or disprove that theory. With each idea proved or disproved we grow closer to understanding what was happening in the past. Of course sometimes we get it wrong and don't realise for many years, the idea of Neanderthals being a hopeless evolutionary disaster being a well known example.
Archaeological theory has developed along similar paths as philosophy and social theory. There have been periods of Marxist interpretation, then processual theory. When I studied it in the 90's it was all about post-processual archaeology and then when I worked in the field we stopped studying settlements in the same way and started analysing their place and meaning in the wider landscape. Each new change in thinking brings a new understanding of what happened.
Without this progress archaeology would be pointless, we'd never get beyond treasure hunting, basic dating and building construction analysis. And it wouldn't be half as interesting.
