One of the great joys of studying prehistory is that the subject is ever-changing. Every day, whether as the result of carefully directed research excavations or simply as chance finds made during construction work or farming, new evidence is pouring out of the ground. Some of it is spectacular and headline-grabbing but much is unsurprising and, let us be honest, superficially rather dull. Some years ago there was a revealing cartoon that showed an excavation with a pontificating archaeologist and a television team who were packing up in bored disgust. The archaeologist was saying, ‘No, no treasure but a host of fascinating detail about the socio-economic structure of the Iron Age’ – ourselves as others see us! But it is in these details and in the painstaking search for patterns in the data – and then for more data to help consolidate and expand the patterns – that the very basis of archaeological reconstruction lies. Upon these studies prehistory is written.
Those of us who are ‘dirt-archaeologists’ spend a disproportionate amount of our lives struggling to contain the detail and may perhaps be forgiven for sometimes allowing our vision to be restricted by the edge of the trench or the strict chronological limits of the period we profess to specialize in. There is still, I believe, far too much chronological or regional blinkering in the approach of the discipline. Eighty years ago the great French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales School of History, wrote in characteristic style, ‘historians be geographers, be jurists too and sociologists and psychologists’. He went on to encourage us to abattre les cloissons (smash down the compartments). As a student, my own rather pathetic response to the clarion call was to smuggle into the pages of the august Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society a description of some Roman potsherds – then an unthinkable intrusion.
The Annales School, and in particular the writing of its most famous proponent, Ferdinand Braudel, has had a profound effect on the work of archaeologists and prehistorians. Braudel has taught us to think in terms of different rhythms of time. Perhaps of most use to those who work in deep time is his concept of la longue durée (geographical time) – it is ‘a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, of ever recurring cycles’. Such a way of looking at things is particularly helpful in the study of the intricately textured Atlantic façade of Europe – a landscape whose communities have forever been dominated by the constant rhythms of the ocean. It was the ocean that, for over 10,000 years, has bound these maritime communities together, encouraging them to turn their backs on the land. It has provided Foreword
One of the great joys of studying prehistory is that the subject is ever-changing. Every day, whether as the result of carefully directed research excavations or simply as chance finds made during construction work or farming, new evidence is pouring out of the ground. Some of it is spectacular and headline-grabbing but much is unsurprising and, let us be honest, superficially rather dull. Some years ago there was a revealing cartoon that showed an excavation with a pontificating archaeologist and a television team who were packing up in bored disgust. The archaeologist was saying, ‘No, no treasure but a host of fascinating detail about the socio-economic structure of the Iron Age’ – ourselves as others see us! But it is in these details and in the painstaking search for patterns in the data – and then for more data to help consolidate and expand the patterns – that the very basis of archaeological reconstruction lies. Upon these studies prehistory is written.
Those of us who are ‘dirt-archaeologists’ spend a disproportionate amount of our lives struggling to contain the detail and may perhaps be forgiven for sometimes allowing our vision to be restricted by the edge of the trench or the strict chronological limits of the period we profess to specialize in. There is still, I believe, far too much chronological or regional blinkering in the approach of the discipline. Eighty years ago the great French historian Lucien Febvre, one of the founders of the Annales School of History, wrote in characteristic style, ‘historians be geographers, be jurists too and sociologists and psychologists’. He went on to encourage us to abattre les cloissons (smash down the compartments). As a student, my own rather pathetic response to the clarion call was to smuggle into the pages of the august Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society a description of some Roman potsherds – then an unthinkable intrusion.
The Annales School, and in particular the writing of its most famous proponent, Ferdinand Braudel, has had a profound effect on the work of archaeologists and prehistorians. Braudel has taught us to think in terms of different rhythms of time. Perhaps of most use to those who work in deep time is his concept of la longue durée (geographical time) – it is ‘a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, of ever recurring cycles’. Such a way of looking at things is particularly helpful in the study of the intricately textured Atlantic façade of Europe – a landscape whose communities have forever been dominated by the constant rhythms of the ocean. It was the ocean that, for over 10,000 years, has bound these maritime communities together, encouraging them to turn their backs on the land. It has provided a corridor of communications along which commodities, people, ideas and beliefs have flowed with changing intensity over time.
The physical detritus of these contacts, and their echoes in written anecdotes and song and in the genetic make-up of the population, are the raw materials from which archaeologists, historians, linguists, ethnomusicologists and biomolecular scientists attempt to build models of the past. Each specialist will have a viewpoint – their own cognitive model of the past conditioned by the traditions of their discipline. These undoubtedly have a value but it is only when the compartments separating us have been swept away will new, and perhaps unfamiliar, pictures begin to emerge.
Bob Quinn, intuitively, has grasped the excitement of it all and has begun to explore many of the more crucial issues. In the story he tells there is much with which we can agree and things that we might feel less happy about – so, in bold reconstructions like this, it will always be. That said, his gentle, provocative style nudges us to confront our prejudices. If, at the end, we go away inspired by the author’s love of his subject, seeing the familiar in different perspective, making new connections and eager to know more, he will more than have achieved his purpose.
Barry Cunliffe. Professor of European Archaeology, Oxford
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Originally Posted by Grace O'Malley
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