Schliemann and Gladstone Sir Mortimer and Magnus

British Archaeology Collection: Sir Mortimer & Magnus 6 LMA Y606S

Now, these aerial photographs

that led to your last great discovery in Pakistan,

this is part of the new technology that arose in archaeology

this century, which didn't exist

when you started off as an archaeologist.

None of these existed at the turn of the century.

Does this mean that archaeology today is a vastly different

kind of thing than it was when you were starting out?

No, it doesn't mean, of course, that archaeology has altered at heart.

It's the same purpose.

You said, I think, when you were talking to me once,

that I wrote about men, it being about men, not about things.

Well, that was always the case.

But it is interesting that you could almost

put your finger on an absolute date,

at which everything changed in archaeology.

-Everything technologically changed.

-When was that?

I'll tell you, I'll tell you.

It happened in 1949.

I'd just come back from the East and for some reason or other

I found myself having dinner in hall at Christchurch in Oxford

and with me was a man called OGS Crawford, very well known in his day.

A man of high intelligence and knowledge.

And we sat there and afterwards went into the common room.

And there looking around, at a corner was a man whose face I knew.

Finally I discovered who he was.

He was a man who had been called Lindemann,

a Professor of Physics at Oxford,

and had been made a peer by Churchill and was now Lord Cherwell.

There he was sitting quietly at the corner.

Well, I'd met him before. I knew him in the old days a bit.

I went up and sat down beside him, and we talked.

He'd just come back from America, from Chicago, in particular.

And he'd just heard of some of the details, or many of the details,

of a new method called radiocarbon analysis,

which would enable archaeologists

with scientific aid, in future, to date...

more or less date events in human history

back all 50,000 years or more.

And he told me about it, he gave me a very good idea.

He might have been taking a little domestic tutorial.

And as we walked back across Oxford, Crawford and I,

to the college we were staying that night,

he turned to me and said, "What a scoop! What a scoop!"

And it was a scoop.

It came out in the next number of a quarterly publication

called Antiquity, which was edited by Crawford.

And for the first time, in this country, in the West,

Western Europe, something was known

about this revolutionary new method

that's being called the radiocarbon revolution.

1949.

One great advantage of this, from the point of view of the layman,

quite apart from the archaeologist,

was that the layman could begin to see pre-history in terms of,

more or less, absolute calendar years.

Not "This was late Stone Age or Bronze Age or Iron Age".

You were able to say, "This was 2500 BC,"

and people find it far more easy to put things into a perspective

if they have calendar dates.

Oh, yes, it enables you,

not only to put a local series of events into perspective,

the history of England and so on,

but it enables you to compare the history of one country with another.

-Because the Bronze Age changed as it went around the world.

-Yes, exactly.

Well, does all this mean that archaeology today has become

much more scientific?

It's put on a white coat and it's in the laboratory

and it's all sterile now, there isn't room for the same kind

of creative flights of imagination of the past.

I wouldn't say that a white coat is necessarily sterile.

Sterilised.

I don't quite see the connection.

Anyway, it has to a certain extent, I suppose.

In the sense in which you're using the term.

It's become more and more technological, more scientific,

with advantages and disadvantages.

These newer technologies, not merely the one I've been referring to,

radiocarbon, but other parallel disciplines, scientific disciplines.

They've all combined to give a new sort of precision

to events and cultures and ages,

which previously were a matter of guesswork.

What are the disadvantages, then?

The disadvantages are these.

I've seen a good many young generations grow up

in the course of my time. But...

In particular, what I call this post-scientific generation,

the generation since 1949,

the last quarter of a century, roughly.

The study of man has become more and more tied to technologies.

Technologies are easier by and large to acquire a knowledge of,

an experience of, than the old-fashioned disciplines,

the old-fashioned humanities.

And the result is that the old-fashioned humanities

are getting thinner and thinner,

the technology's getting thicker and thicker

and is overlying the old humanities to a very remarkable degree.

And we're getting now a new generation of students of man

and mankind in perspective...

..which sometimes, to my thinking forgets the man, again.

When one looks back to the origins of archaeology,

you realise just what a very young subject it is.

It's only just about 100 years ago since the great Heinrich Schliemann

was finishing his excavations of Troy.

Which, you might say, was the start of major archaeology.

And that, presumably, was the first really big excavation

to seize public attention.

Now, it's not possible to have digs like this any more

and I for one regret this.

I'm not quite sure that I agree with you that it's not possible.

In 1923, or thereabouts, that man who wrote romantic stories

-and became Governor General of Canada...

-Oh, John Buchan.

John Buchan, wrote a book, The End of Discovery,

or some title of that kind.

He thought that in 1923 - if that is the exact date, about then -

that the Age of Discovery was past.

Well, now, we're in 1973 or more

and we're still discovering

and we're going on discovering.

We're just opening up new ways of discovery,

new methods of discovery.

Yes, but compared with the archaeologists of today,

Schliemann does seem to have been much larger than life, somehow.

He was, he was larger than life.

And people today think that publicity in science,

or particularly in archaeology, perhaps, is a modern invention.

It is a by-product, to a large extent,

of things like television and broadcasting and so on.

Of course, it owes an enormous amount to television and broadcasting,

an enormous amount. There are new means, new methods, new channels.

But if you look back to the literature

the day in which Schliemann worked,

way back, as I think I said, in 1873,

when he finished Troy, he was welcomed abroad,

including this country, like royalty.

He and his wife, his beautiful Greek wife,

arrayed very often in Trojan jewellery,

which she borrowed for the purpose.

They were received over here

and I have some of the contemporary accounts here

in which a crowd in...

I remember the date, in 8th June 1877,

a crowd assembled. And everybody -

it gives a list of those who were present,

including, of course, Mr Gladstone, that well-known Homeric student.

Who sat in the front row.

And they all welcomed, in particular, Mrs Schliemann, who was to give them

an address upon the importance of Greece and of Greek things.

And there were replies or additions by Schliemann himself

and then there was a little passage of arms

between Schliemann and Gladstone.

-Do you mind if I tell you about it?

-Go ahead, I don't know this story.

I've got here the contemporary records.

I won't burden you with the whole lot, but they are interesting.

What happened was that after Mrs Schliemann had been welcomed,

Dr Schliemann got up and said that the Greeks

owed a great deal of their appreciation of the human form

to the fact that they went about without any clothes on.

Owing largely to the excellent climate,

civilized climate, shall we say.

Well, while this was going on, this conversation,

or this dialogue was going on,

it was observed that Mr Gladstone in the front row

was getting more and more uneasy.

The points of his famous collar

began to project further and further towards the enemy.

And finally, he leapt up to his feet

and said that he protested against his attribution of the skill

of the Greek artists

to the fact that nudity was prevalent in Ancient Greece.

He was perfectly certain that the Ancient Greeks

were modest people, that they were properly clad, and so on.

Well, this went on, and there were the brewings of a little storm.

A little more or less academic storm.

But Mr Gladstone took that kind of thing extremely seriously

and he said what he had to say.

Well, it boiled down to this -

that in Greek times, the women went about naked,

or were shown as going about naked by the sculptors and the painters.

Men were probably clothed, of course, the men were, but the women were not.

A regrettable circumstance.

Well, now, of course they were both utterly wrong.

They were both going up their own little tracks, you know.

Gladstone along the path of Puritanism

and Schliemann along the path of liberty,

exposure and so on.

It's rather nice to know that great men like Schliemann

-and Gladstone could make great mistakes.

-Oh, yes.

They took it all very seriously. Very seriously.

And nowadays we take serious things lightly.

They took light things seriously.

It's very curious, that difference in outlook and temperament.

But my point, my starting point was this.

That in the time of Schliemann,

way back in the '70s of the 19th century,

publicity had already been attracted, deliberately attracted

to archaeological discoveries.

And Schliemann's discoveries at Troy were heard about all over the world

in regular press communicae, which he distributed for the purpose.

And later on again, go 50 years later, Tutankhamen...

Same thing. Tutankhamen was made known to the millions by the press.

There was no television in those days, in 1922.

Well, you yourself were a dab hand

at harnessing the media for archaeological purposes.

I did it deliberately, just as Schliemann did it deliberately.

He had to create his public.

I had to create my public, perhaps from different motives from his.

Because it was the way of attracting interest

or attracting funds for research.

And the way in which in the '20s and the '30s I attracted funds,

and very considerable funds, for research for St Albans

or Verulamium or Maiden Castle or what have you,

was by popularising it. By making people interested.

By attracting people to visit these places,

talking to them on the site in language that they would understand.

So that the local charwoman understood what she was looking at.

And if you can interest the local charwoman, two things follow.

First of all, the local charwoman tells her friends, very volubly.

Secondly, it means that you express yourself articulately,

which is the beginning of the whole business, really.

You express yourself articulately,

in language which the general public can understand.

I'm a great admirer of the general public,

a great worshiper of the general public.

I depend upon the general public.

The general public today, although it doesn't know it,

provides practically all the funds

which are expended all over the country, day by day, on archaeology.

Give the poor fellow who's paying his taxes a little bit for his money.