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A History Of Ancient Britain

Loads ..

When he was in longbarrow in Wilts he said the neolithics buried their dead there en masse as if to make a shrine which they would reverentially visit to commune with the dead ancestors - bollocks, he has no clue that they did that or something completely different.

He kept on making claims like that which could not be backed up by known facts. Don't get me wrong I enjoyed the program, I just think he didn't need to flesh out more than was actually known.

I see what you mean but West Kennet Long Barrow is very famous, he just didn't explain some things that are so well known that to go though all the evidence again would have precluded talking about the more interesting stuff. Something like 45 separate skeletons/partial remains were recovered from the barrow over 100 years ago, archaeologists have had a long time to think about it.

The most difficult aspect of the programme is getting the balance right between repeatedly presenting the same hard evidence and giving current interpretations of it. Some assumption has to be made that viewers will appreciate that this is based on factual evidence and good thinking.
 
Another, when in Ireland with the man who was locating walls in the peat.

He and a helper dug down to the top of a wall that the man had located and Oliver said touching the stone with his hand, "the last hands to touch this stone touched it 5,000 years ago - just imagine that" there was no way that he could support that if he had thought about it. I would have taken 2,000 years for the peat to start to cover the wall and all sorts of people could have touched and played on the wall in the meantime. Perhaps 2,000 years it may have been totally under the peat but his claim was simply too uber!! too uber for me anyhow :)

You're spot on with that, but it's just a common device used to try and get the viewer to feel some kind of connection or intimacy with the person who made the wall in the past, not an attempt to fool anyone. Yes it would have stood for a long time before being covered, but really, did someone touch all 100 kilometres of wall again after it was built? I doubt it, it's not that much of a fib is it?
 
it's not that much of a fib is it?

Thing is ringo for me it was more a question of the use of words. If he had said "possibly the last hands to touch this wall touched it 5,000 years ago" I would have absolutely no complaint.

And in the case of the long barrow, he could also have used "just imagine if.. " or "maybe.. this or that .. " words that suggest just a slight level of uncertainty.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the program, it was just that on a couple of occassions I found myself saying - that is a claim too far - or - he cannot be certain of that ...
 
Fair enough, for the most part it's an issue with Oliver rather than archaeological interpretations, and one I share to a degree. I guess its difficult to convey excitement and drama in the subject without getting carried away. Oliver lets his ego take over a bit too much when he's in TV land, and for my liking uses the word "I" a bit too much. What that does tell us though is that it's his opinion, which is fair enough, that's what he's being paid for. It worked for Clarke when he made Civilisation 40 years ago and presenters are still using that winning formula.

Like I mentioned at the start of this thread, until archaeologists work out how to put across theory without painstakingly explaining the minutiae of the research and thought process behind it people will always question the validity of those theories. Most viewers are just not willing to take this stuff at face value yet, a shame because those of us who have studied it love it. I remember Mike Parker-Pearson, one of our most important Bronze Age experts, telling me about the absolute revelation Frances Pryor, Fenland expert, had when he finally began to accept theory and apply it to his field work. It's the archaeological equivalent of a "Road to Damascus" moment.
 
When he was in longbarrow in Wilts he said the neolithics buried their dead there en masse as if to make a shrine which they would reverentially visit to commune with the dead ancestors - bollocks, he has no clue that they did that or something completely different.
He stated that the barrows weren't sealed and that you *could* enter them so we need to presume that that statement is based on evidence from a number of these barrows across Europe and the behaviour surrounding them (eg, the movement/ sorting of bones). And given the fact that these structures are quite literally places of the ancestors, built as such with great effort, it's not unreasonable to assume the meaning for those people who entered them. Think also of contemporary hangovers of this type of behaviour, such as the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

I do agree with the thrust of your point tho; him holding a skull and talking about that person's bravery was quite inane
 
News update from the Upper Palaeolithic, in an ancient Britain of 150 centuries ago,

Interpretations sublime ...
Human skull caps found at Upper Palaeolithic site of Gough's Cave were used as drinking vessels:
Three skull-cups have been identified amongst the human bones from Gough's Cave. New ultrafiltered radiocarbon determinations provide direct dates of about 14,700 cal BP, making these the oldest directly dated skull-cups and the only examples known from the British Isles.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0017026
to ridiculous :)
Archeologists uncover ancient responsible drinking posters
SCIENTISTS have found the earliest example of sour-faced meddling in a 15,000 year-old pub in Cheddar.
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...nt-responsible-drinking-posters-201102183557/
 
I really enjoyed that. I went up to those flint mines in Cumbria with Mark Edmonds when I was a student, amazing stuff. Must make it to Newgrange and Knowth one day.
 
I really enjoyed that. I went up to those flint mines in Cumbria with Mark Edmonds when I was a student, amazing stuff. Must make it to Newgrange and Knowth one day.
Yes, that was more like it!

I'm intending to see Newgrange and Knowth at the end of April/beg May after I've been to a conference on Climate Change in Prehistory.
 
Hundreds of years? The Neaderthals were around for four hundred thousand years before the homosapiens crashed their party.

Thats as may be, but modern evidence suggests we co existed for ages. You've no doubt met a man with a big beard, massive shoulders and a fearsome brow ridge before. Inter species nookie, I recon.
 
That's correct, Spion. The Great Langdale axes were made from a volcanic greenstone called 'tuff', found in the late Ordovician (450 million years ago) Borrowdale volcanic series. Outcrops are found throughout the Langdale Pikes and other nearby locations in Cumbria.
 

Oh I see, yup. We took Mr Edmonds by surprise by getting so hammered he had to introduce a rule that nobody who had had more than two pipes was allowed onto the high ledges where the stone was mined. I'm not surprised some of the facts escaped me :D
 
why the fuck they had to hire a helicopter to film him flying around in another helicopter, i don't know.
The helicopters are needed so the camera can home in on Neil Oliver from afar as he stands atop a crag, with on foot on a rock, hair flapping in the wind, looking enigmatic and er, craggy.




I can stand on a chair doing a reasonable impersonation of him looking craggy atop a crag. Well, the family like it, anyway.
 
I know, why do they bother with all the dramatic scenery photography? People would just as soon suck up the information if delivered by Discokermit sitting in a cafe in Bilston or Mrs Magpie in her old woolly socks perched on a pouffe in the living room.
 
Am enjoying what I have seen of this - I'm only up to half way through the second episode. Didn't realise Coldrum was that old or Carnac for that matter. Carnac is on my list of places to see. When I had a boyfriend who could drive, we visited a lot of ancient monuments! I get very excited about old stone or old wood. Is the Bronze Age centre still open at Flag Fen?
 
Of course they are - but you quite categorically claimed that class did not enter into the work of pre-historians full stop. I named one in which it did enter their field of vision - and pretty bloody prominently at that. So some pre-historians do, in fact, operate in terms of class.

If you do have any evidence, since there's one book of his that I haven't read yet, that Childe as a prehistorian operated in terms of class (your words), then I'd be glad to see that evidence. Ball's in your court, butchersapron. If you have proof, please do share it.

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The work of Vere Gordon Childe, despite it's historical importance and also for Childe's then unique ability to synthesise prehistoric archaeological data with archaeological interpretation, is severely dated. There seems little point in bringing him up today, apart from out of historical curiosity. For all the greatness of his work in his own time, no prehistorian today is blind to his deficiencies, and it's worth pointing out that interpretation has moved on in leaps and bounds since his heyday.

For example, no-one talks about savages or primitives anymore. Childe misunderstood the nature of the pre-capitalist prehistoric world and the relationships created by trade in 'display' goods (body adornments, highly polished tools which never saw use). His interepretation of the Neolithic isn't worth mentioning except from a history of archaeological thought point of view. He had a serious blindspot where religion/ritual and gender were concerned, and neglected its social importance. One of my favourite examples of his gender blindspot is his interpretation of the Neolithic houses with stone furniture at Skara Brae, in Orkney: Childe designates the large bed to the man, and the small bed to the woman - a common sleeping arrangement in his day amongst his class. He failed to imagine men and women sleeping in a bed together or any children in the smaller bed.

Childe made many theoretical models, but none of them actually work until the very late Bronze Age/early Iron Age (c. 800BCE onwards). Childe couldn't be classed as marxist purist either. Childe disagreed strongly with the marxist archaeologists of the Soviet Union and they with him. He used the term 'revolution' in a technological, rather than a 'class' sense. I've read all but one of his books, and in the books I've read, class and class struggle don't get a mention.

Childe was an archaeologist first and foremost. Whilst his political views did affect his writings, it would be difficult to claim that he was affected to the extent that his work could be seen to have an overtly marxist bias. Seriously, if it's marxist archaeology you want, then read the Soviet archaeologists. They're the only ones who've practiced what could be termed 'marxist archaeology'.

And whilst there have been moments of neo-marxist theory applied to archeological interpretation, there are few (if any) archaeologists living today who rely on only one theoretical viewpoint to assess and interpret archaeological data.
 
Moving on, I don't know if anyone caught the follow up to A History of Ancient Britain - A History of Celtic Britain: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010bg26 ?

Unfortunately it's now gone from iPlayer (bring it back!). My mum enjoyed it, but I'm afraid it was a bit of a busman's holiday for me, and I had a few theoretical quibbles with each programme :D However, other than the perennial problem of 'two archaeologists, three opinions' (which inevitably occurs whenever there's an assemblage of archaeologists), I found both series very good overall :)
 
Yep, it was OK, although the use of clips from the first series made it seem a bit half hearted. That said it was nice to catch up some of the finds/sites/theories which have come up since I was a digger.
 
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