Why do we have history and archaeology?


History Today May 2009 | Volume: 59 Issue: 5 | Page 21-23 | Words:
2172 | Author: Lord Smail, Daniel

Beyond the Great Divide
Why do we have history and archaeology? In the light of our
understanding of ‘deep time’ Daniel Lord Smail argues that it is high
time that the two disciplines were reunited.

An archaeologist unearths prehistoric human remains at Maidon Castle,
near Dorchester, 1936 (Getty / Hulton)


Though obscure in other respects, 1936 was an important year for the
philosophy of the human past. This was the year in which the
Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe published Man Makes Himself,
a book that became one of the most widely read works of archaeology
ever published. In the same year, R.G. Collingwood, the Oxford don,
sat down to pen 36 lectures later published as The Idea of History, a
landmark in historiography.

There is nothing to suggest that Collingwood read Man Makes Himself
while writing his lectures, though we know that Childe, in later
years, read Collingwood. The books themselves could not be more
different in form, in substance and in their intended audience. Yet
both authors, in their very different ways, had things to say about
the curious fragmentation that afflicts the science of the human past.
For, when you come to think of it, why do we have history and
archaeology? This was not a question that motivated either Childe or
Collingwood. But today, more than 70 years on, it is a question that
is causing more and more people to scratch their heads. With enough
scratching the answer becomes clear: there is no logical way to defend
any division of human history. It is high time to reunite archaeology
and history.

Yet such a project faces enormous institutional hurdles. Teaching
mandates exclude archaeology from the history curriculum and
departmental divisions prevent the easy flow of ideas. Visions of a
unified history falter in the face of misguided insistence on
methodological purity. The division of the human past was set in place
more than a century ago, when the logic of ‘deep history’ was not yet
apparent. Overcoming the institutional inertia involved will be the
great challenge of the next decade.

So, as we work towards the reunion of history and archaeology, it is
helpful to know that the growing desire for historical
interdisciplinarity is not new. Since 1936, or thereabouts, history
and archaeology have been on converging paths. There is a history to
be written here, a history of how history and archaeology fell apart
in the 19th century and then, with the help of figures such as Childe
and Collingwood, came back together.

"Childe made a vivid claim for the place of humanity’s deep
history in the reckoning of historians"

The discovery of ‘deep time’ during the middle of the 19th century has
long been understood as a transforming moment in the histories of
biology, archaeology and geology. We are only just beginning to
realise, however, that the time revolution also shaped the practice of
history itself. For several centuries western history had been written
in the certainty that the human past could be no older than the
chronology allowed by the book of Genesis. The publication between
1859 and 1865 of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Charles
Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man and John
Lubbock’s Pre-Historic Times put an end to that. In the wake of the
excitement spawned by the time revolution, historians confronted a
question they never really had to ask before: when does history begin?
If history cannot begin at the beginning, then historians must draw a
line across the march of time and claim that this is the point at
which historical time commences. All else, necessarily, is prehistory.

As Doris Goldstein has shown, historians like Edward Freeman and J.R.
Green, writing in the aftermath of the time revolution, were intrigued
by the idea that the terrain of history could stretch to embrace the
primitive past. For others, however, the trauma of deep time generated
resistance which took shape in arguments we now find scattered across
the general histories and textbooks published in the decades before
1900. If some of the resistance was explicitly Christian, designed to
preserve the integrity of holy scripture, most was not. There were
serious concerns, raised by J.B. Bury and others, about whether
history could properly deal with humans before the advent of society.
Historians fretted about the absence of tangible dates. But the most
telling justification for excluding prehistory from the realm of
history centered on the nature of the evidence. In 1898 the French
historians Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos took a logic of
exclusion common to many authors and boiled it down to this lapidary
expression: ‘No documents, no history.’ And that, it seems, was that.

We are just beginning to write the history of the trauma of the time
revolution and the shadow it cast over the practice of history. Much
remains unclear. But this we know: as school curricula coalesced in
the decades between 1880 and 1920, at the moment when the disciplinary
boundaries of the modern university themselves were taking shape, the
venerable field of history had not yet overcome its initial suspicion
of all that lay beyond the veil obscuring the undocumented past. Never
mind the fact that the word ‘document’, used with such unfounded
confidence by Langlois and Seignobos, means ‘that which teaches’ and
has nothing intrinsically to do with written things. Indeed, the
narrowing range of meanings carried by the word, which at one time
meant a teaching, a warning, or any form of evidence or proof, is
eloquent testimony to the fix that history created for itself while
defending its terrain from the challenge of prehistory in the wake of
the time revolution.

The terrain of the debate began to shift significantly in the decades
leading up to 1936. The trend toward ‘full-spectrum’ history was
epitomised by H.G. Wells’ runaway bestseller, The Outline of History,
first published in 1919. But where Wells, with the eye of a novelist,
offered a narrative flow and a Darwinian logic that bound the early to
the late, Childe in 1936 did something radically different. Man Makes
Himself is famous as the work that popularised the twin ideas of the
Neolithic and the ‘urban’ revolutions. Historians, then as now, like
to frame the past in terms of reformations, renaissances and
revolutions, a pattern that Collingwood referred to as ‘apocalyptic
history’. By expropriating a metaphor hitherto owned by historians,
Childe made a vivid claim for the place of humanity’s deep history in
the reckoning of historians.

The reasoning is clear. If human history consists of a whole sequence
of revolutions, from the recent arguments for the human revolution
some 50,000 years ago, through the Neolithic and urban revolutions,
and on to the industrial and the Internet revolutions, then we are
forced to recognise that history is always on the move. If revolutions
predate documents, moreover, then writing can no longer be seen as a
catalysing agent. To be sure, the metaphor of revolution comes with
its own intellectual baggage, as Clive Gamble has recently pointed
out. There may be better ways to bring about reunion in history. But
we can perhaps forgive Childe for working with the metaphors at hand
in 1936.

If human prehistory was punctuated by revolutions, then it was a
history on the move. And, in good Aristotelian manner, there had to be
a prime mover. Like others writing in that decade, Childe admitted a
role for climate change as an autonomous factor in the production of
revolutions. But Childe, ultimately, was a humanist. He believed that
‘man makes himself’. In the end, his model understood ideas to be the
engine of transformation. As the British archaeologist Neil Faulkner
has observed, Childe’s Neolithic and urban revolutions were idea-
driven transformations. They sprang from ‘rapid accumulations of
knowledge and productivity that made possible a relatively sudden leap
forward to a higher stage of social development.’ This is why Childe
once wrote that ‘prehistory may, after all ... be the history of
thought that Collingwood said all history must be.’

"It may take time for historians to wean themselves from an
ascetic dependence on documentary evidence"

So far so good. The immense power of Childe’s model can be seen in the
rapid diffusion of his revolutionary metaphors. Within two or three
decades the Neolithic and urban revolutions worked their way into
virtually every school textbook and general history published in
English. If, in the 1960s and 1970s, these sections were limited to a
few pages, they have now expanded into entire chapters, a sign of the
transformations currently afoot. Yet a difficulty remained: the thorny
problem raised by Langlois and Seignobos. Must we take the absence of
documents as marking an irreparable breach between history and
prehistory? Enter R.G. Collingwood. He was a man of many talents:
philosopher and historian, of course, but also a first-rate
archaeologist. If he made distinctions between the two main branches
in the study of the human past they are not apparent. To illustrate
Giambattista Vico’s point about the errors to which historians are
prone, for example, Collingwood provided an example drawn from his
archaeological research on Roman London, for he had shown that London
had no more than 10-15,000 inhabitants: and this to the great
disappointment of Collingwood’s fellow Britons, whose parochial
conceits had led them to hope it would be more.

Nowhere in The Idea of History does Collingwood address the issue of
Childe’s punctuated deep history. Yet Collingwood shared with his hero
Vico a peculiar interest in the history of remote and obscure periods,
even if, in practice, he never breached the short chronology inherited
from Genesis. As the Canadian archaeologist Bruce Trigger has noted,
Collingwood felt that both history and archaeology must tackle
questions that lie at the place where multiple lines of independent
evidence converge. History does not set out to tell us the things we
know. It is a quest to uncover the things we do not know and perhaps
can never fully know. If we wish to make our claims about the past all
the more robust, we are obliged to practice what the 19th-century
theologian and historian of science William Whewell, nearly a century
before Collingwood, called ‘consilience’.

The bodies of evidence now available to students of the human past are
growing by leaps and bounds. To the pot shards, texts and phonemes of
Collingwood’s day we have added genes, isotopes and other traces.
Imagine each as a filter in a different colour. Using just one, you
see your subject in an unreliable light. But now layer them one on top
of the other and peer through the ensemble and, if you do so, the
bright light of the original can be reconstituted to some degree. So
if you want to find out what was really going on in Anglo-Saxon
Britain you need to layer any texts at hand on top of the coins and
the shards, the ceramics and the glassware, and then add the chemical
traces of spices left in pots, the isotopes of carbon and nitrogen
left in bones and the modern distribution of genes. The result isn’t a
truth but it is a more robust understanding of something we did not
know before. And it is a vision of the historical enterprise that is
indifferent to specialisation and method.

Here, in the practice of consilience, we find grounds for abandoning,
once and for all, the naive verities proposed by Langlois and
Seignobos. It may take time for historians to wean themselves away
from an ascetic dependence on documentary evidence. It may take time
for archaeologists to figure out that their subject isn’t demeaned by
the presence of documents. But the epistemological path we need to
take was revealed more than 70 years ago and it is time to do
something about it.

As early as 1962, the archaeologist Glyn Daniel wondered why
historians had hesitated so long to integrate prehistory into their
view of the past. There is no doubt that historians are getting it
now. In recent years, it is true, the practice of history has tipped
dramatically toward the study of the 20th century, an age that groans
under the oppressive weight of its own documentation. Were it not for
the recent flattening of history, a peculiar trend fed by a myopic
fancy for studying an ‘increasingly global society’ (has there ever
been a moment when human history was not global?), the rapprochment
between history and archaeology would be even more evident. Now, more
than ever, it is time to make history historical again. It is time to
reunite history and archaeology.

Daniel Lord Smail is Professor of History at Harvard University and
author of On Deep History and the Brain (University of California
Press, 2008).

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