Raiders of the Lost Past -- interpretative inflation and fraud

It's been interesting to watch the three programmes in this new series, presented by Janina Ramirez.  The first one, about Sir Arthur Evans and his work on the island of Crete, pulled no punches.  It was first broadcast on 19 February, just a week after the media feeding frenzy relating to the "Lost Circle" of Waun Mawn.  Coincidence?  No chance.  But was it really suggesting, between the lines,  that Mike Parker Pearson is an opportunist and a rogue in the mould of Sir Arthur Evans?  I wonder.........

The programme showed that Evans was a powerful and well-connected (and very wealthy) archaeologist who started off on a great quest with the best of intentions but who then became so obsessed with his ruling hypothesis on a Minoan civilisation that he started to force evidence into it despite what common sense might dictate.  He had his narrative (of a unique non-Greek civilisation) and he was determined to show that it explained all of the facts -- even when it patently did not. As time went on, and his work at Knossos became more and more famous, he started to fabricate evidence -- at first, probably, without realising himself what he was doing.  Well-intentioned over-interpretation, we might call it.   But then he started to over-interpret the "evidence" to such a degree that he was actually committing scientific fraud -- as some of the commentators in the programme were prepared to demonstrate, quite frankly.  The story became far more important than the facts.  His "reconstructions" of statues and artwork were so fanciful that they were blatantly fraudulent -- and he got away with it because he was surrounded by sychophants and because he had personally become so famous that his ego became larger than the project.  He was certainly guilty of transposing modern values (for example relating to royalty and hierarchy) into an ancient people.  But he could say more or less what he liked, without fear of contradiction.  He saw everything through a Christian monarchist lens, as somebody brought up to relish and celebrate the idea of "empire" and its civilising effects.  After all, he was the world's leading EXPERT..........He was a darling of the media, and also a national hero, demonstrating that British archaeology was better than anybody else's archaeology............ Indiana Evans was not quite as eccentric and heroic as Indiana Jones, but you get the general idea.

Evans was also so self-obsessed and so famous by the time that he wrote up all his research results that he could afford to ignore those who preceded him or said anything he considered to be "inconvenient."  For example, his records entirely omit the fact that he had been shown the findings of excavations at Knossos 20 years earlier by Minos Kalokairinos, who had hoped to use them to improve the vexed relations between Crete and mainland Greece.  Sounds familiar?>Nowadays, of course, people see Evans as over-enthusiastic and misguided, but reckon that on balance his work was of huge importance, as a "father figure" of archaeological research and cultural reconstructions.  He certainly did wonders for the Cretan tourist industry! But he was also partly responsible for "post processualism" in archaeology, in which facts are deemed to be somewhat boring and in which the telling of a compelling narrative becomes the driving force behind field research.  Science is thus pushed into the background and replaced by a narrative in which the teller of the tale seeks to get inside the mind of the people being studied -- their beliefs, their priorities and their motives.  Psychology becomes more important than evidence on the ground, and the "popularisation" of the subject among non-specialists becomes an objective in its own right. The irrational becomes more appealing than the rational.

So what is the relevance of all this for the present day?  Well, not much has changed.  Technology has moved on by leaps and bounds over the last 100 years, and by and large archaeological investigative methods are much tighter and more rigorous than they used to be.  But still it is possible for ruling hypotheses to distort thinking and for obsessed individuals to falsify their research results. It is still possible for contradictory evidence to be misinterpreted and for inconvenient evidence to be ignored.  It is still possible for archaeological digs to be opened up and then closed again without any effective independent scrutiny or peer review of the evidence collected. It is still possible for interpretations and speculations to be published in learned journals without any proper presentation of the evidence.  This must all all sound very familiar indeed to readers of this blog.........

One other thing that Janina Ramirez flagged up in her TV programme was the idea of the "archaeological quest".  Arthur Evans was not the first or the last to have such a quest, but I wouldn't mind betting that he saw himself as another King Arthur in a quest for another Holy Grail in the form of a "lost civilization".  Today Mike Parker Pearson is doing exactly the same thing -- as Barclay and Brophy have pointed out -- in seeking to demonstrate that Stonehenge was the centre of the Late Neolithic universe, and the place to which all good men and true needed to travel in order to pay homage.  That's the quest, and he will stick to it, come hell or high water.  And we cannot avoid mentioning him by name, because after that TV programme about "The Lost Circle" it is now HIS quest.  What was a supposed quest or heroic act (the transport of the bluestones) involving our Neolithic ancestors has now been transposed into MPP's single-minded quest to find a lost circle:

https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-mythologisation-of-parker-pearson.html

Charlotte Higgins puts her finger on it perfectly in identifying the motives of the film's producer.  He did not want to make an archaeological programme, but a human drama involving one iconic hero, namely MPP.  She referred to "a recognisable and satisfying three-act narrative structure". 

It ran like this:  "Act one: the archaeologists – the hero being Parker Pearson himself, a hirsute figure straight from central casting – set off in hope and with an ambitious plan. Act two: an important new discovery is made, pinning down the stones to a particular pair of quarries. But then the stakes get higher: the archaeologists set out to find the place where the bluestones were once erected before being moved to Salisbury Plain. In short, a stone circle that isn’t there any more, hasn’t been there for 5,000 years. They investigate one spot, then another – in vain.  And then, Act three: the last throw of the dice, the last site to be considered. No one holds out much hope. But still, digging commences, in unpropitious circumstances. A hillside is pummelled by horizontal rain. Water is baled out of trenches. The student volunteers are becoming rebellious. All seems lost. Until: a discovery. A trace of a hole in the ground is so similar in shape to a bluestone erected at  Stonehenge that the two would fit together “like a key in a lock”. From here, the resolution rolls out satisfyingly – the dating turns out to fit. A little bit of the mystery of the circle has been chipped away at. The impossible quest has been fulfilled."

So now the person (and his reputation) is far more important than the story.  Dangerous territory indeed.

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/16/stonehenge-archaeology-documentary

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/feb/19/raiders-of-the-lost-past-review-janina-ramirez