Seeing lives from prehistory versus through written records (history)

 

Maiden Castle hillfort (c.600 BCE); Ft. Geo. Ardersier (1745)

In his 2010 book, The Making of the British Landscape, How we have transformed the land, from prehistory to today (Allen Lane, Penguin Books), archaeologist Francis Pryor looks at the land and by extension the people across the centuries. Being able to read the visible traces of earlier activity and then to posit the probable lives of that time and place is a kind of alchemy that is similar to outdoors experts who can read the traces of human and animal activity that most others do not notice; or if they seize upon a meaningful sign, their bank of experience and knowledge cannot visualize the significance of it by itself and in the larger context of the place and time. But in the case of the cultural landscape, there are major differences in available sources of information to supply hints, corroboration, and comparison.

Being a prehistorian first, Pryor is particularly at home in the lives and lands before written records began to be made. Not all documents persist for people today to study, of course, but there are enough sources to fill in a lot of detail; sometimes personalizing the place or event. In a very few cases, glimpses of the prehistoric societies encountered by the literate outsiders leaves some description, too; for example, Pytheas the Greek, who included an account of people met in Prytannia (Britannia) in c. 325 BCE. In general, though, the archaeological lens for looking at lives ancient or modern depends on physical objects and their surroundings - big picture of the time as well as in the immediate context of other finds of similar vintage and what came before and after in layers of deposition. As such there is an unvarnished honesty when looking at aftermath of activity and the actions of time.

By contrast, the lens of history privileges written records first and only secondarily (if at all) turns to the physical record of excavation and layout of cultural landscape for confirmation (or challenge) to the interpretation woven from the threads pulled from documents and sometimes visual media, too. An innate difference between the world of logic, logos, verbal expression versus the material traces of livelihoods and locations both public and private is that words can easily slip between fantasy and reality, fake and genuine. In other words, the writer can include aspirational along with actual description whereas the artifacts and their settings almost never are deliberately staged for the benefit of latter day excavators to find. That is a qualitative contrast. As well, often there is a quantitative difference for some centuries and parts of the world: written records by locals or outside observers can many times be abundant, compared to the merest traces of long-ago prehistory extracted from soil, layouts, and environmental records fitting that period of investigation. In other words, both lenses can be usefully applied to understanding times gone by, and by extension, to look at the present day, as well.

The above snapshot collage of pages 268ff (Maiden Castle hillfort) and 524ff (Fort George) from Pryor's 2010 book nicely illustrates the different lens quality and quantity when using archaeology or history to understand a place and time visible today in the cultural landscape. When the author is describing what is visible, confidently known, and reconstructed is a mix of reasonable conjecture from similar excavations and time periods then the pages of his book quickly go from one page to the next in a smooth panoramic sweep of big picture that alternates with close attention to detail and individual lives connected to the spot. In the second half of his career, Pryor has ventured into all parts of the British historical landscape, avidly consulting historical experts, their interpretations, and the (primary) source documents they depend upon. In these chapters there is rich detail and wide-angle context, too. But since he can write something like an historian while also being an archaeological thinker who keeps his feet, his trowel-wielding hands, and his sharp eyes accustomed to spotting tiny but sometimes telling fragments on the ground. But from a reader's point of view, how do the chapters differ before history is recorded and after history becomes available?

Perhaps the best analogy is family genealogy writing and knowing the past that goes with it. The people in one's family tree that are part of living memory are real, three-dimensional lives and places and events. There is so much more than birth-marriage-death (BMD) dates and sometimes locations. There are personal habits, preferences, high and low-points in the person's life, aspirations and hurdles run into. In short, the amount of detail is rich and includes many dimensions that leave no record in writing or the material traces of artifacts made, bought, or used, nor the (built) landscape associated with the person or persons. This degree of personal knowledge and personality is analogous to the rich sources sometimes available to historians for their lens on past life. 

On the other hand, going back in time before one's own living memory, there may be stories associated with the generation before that; or maybe in one or two cases the story could predate that generation beyond living memory and come from the one before it. Going back in time even further from the present, though, unless there are published materials and public records (including photos or visual art), the most that a genealogist can know are the BMD dates and locations. From those meagre facts, though, a little of the person's life can be inferred from the dominant employment available in that day and place; from local and more distant events the ancestor would know or at least be affected by; and based on technological innovations (and the forms of accomplishing work and life that were displaced by that innovation). In other words, a certain amount of the BMD can be fleshed out in a reasonable way: did the ancestor die young or old, of natural causes or some other circumstance, was it a large family of siblings and later family of offspring or small, was the person male or female, rural or urban, highly educated or not, low-middle-high wealth, physically imposing or slight (when body details can be known), affiliated with formal religion or not, and so on. This sort of educated guessing does exercise the imagination, but like a good detective story it can sometimes be surprisingly accurate in suppositions; other times with erroneous elements, though. Whereas the genealogy for ancestors of living memory is analogous to the historian's lens. This more distant genealogy sleuthing corresponds to the archaeologist's lens, relying on context and inferences by induction (surrounding conditions that guide the guessing) and deduction (firmly established facts that can extrapolate to one implication after another).

In the case of The Making of the British Landscape (2010), Francis Pryor necessarily writes of the oldest places and events, technologies and economies, rituals and cycles without knowing names or genealogical relationship of the players in the picture. But for the Roman occupation (43 to 410 CE) there are sometimes names and personality traits recorded, including occasional genealogy to include in the version of events being recounted or lists recorded (e.g. ancient historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (d. 120 CE) was son-in-law to General Agricola who was active in Britain during the historian's lifetime. In other words, prehistorians normally dig up places, including bodies, anonymously. Historians more commonly scrutinize their subject with named characters. In the case of Historical Archaeology, there is a mix of digging in the ground and digging in the documents, surveying the landscape and surveying the literature. And when proposed excavation sites are not anonymous, sometimes a living descendant will object. That is unlikely for archaeology of ancient kingdoms of Egypt or the less ancient civilizations of Meso-America, but for Korean nobles from 2000 years ago, there are still some families that tie themselves to those ancestors and so excavations have been very few and thus have been approached in this non-anonymous way.

Reading Pryor (2010) straddles the anonymous (prehistorical cultural landscapes and stages of development) and the non-anonymous (historical places, people, events, developments) chronologies. The first chapters are dominated by inference, detective work, and rolling up sleeves to get maps and hands dirty in the physicality of a place and stratum of lives unearthed at a particular depth. As such the writer and the reader freely sweep from imagined individuals or the terrain that is physically measured and the particular settings known through empirical work on site on the one hand and the much bigger picture he refers to in the environment, in the types of habitat used, and in the movements of people over the landscapes on the other hand. When he writes about events brimming with written material, then the nature of the inquiry changes from filling in blanks with probable and reasonable (generic) details to filling in the blanks with names (sometimes faces, too, on statue or other visual media) and events. In other words, the tone and intentionality change from generic to specific; from non-documentable individual lives to people with some kind of paper trail.

Naturally, a different lens produces a different visual impression. Reading The Making of the British Landscape (2010) and its tip of the hat to Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape (1954), there is a definite sea change when Pryor's interpretations are enriched by a layer of written source material. He does not switch hats from being an archaeologist to being a card-carrying historian, though. Instead, he sees places and people as a prehistorian while also making full uses of available written accounts and primary documents on which those writings are based, too. The interplay of anonymous and non-anonymous social observation and analysis puts the subject into a different light. By using both kinds of light, a particularly valuable portrait is possible to paint for others to see.