Creating Prehistory by Adam Stout

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The history of an academic discipline might seem like esoteric navel gazing, but Stout offers us an accessible and engaging account. It tells a much wider story of the way in which “establishment” power operates – archaeology was a new “science” but it was born of, and in some ways also gave birth to, its own “old boys network”. (There were one or two women who had significant influence but for the most part it was a “boys” network...).

Marcus Brigstocke in the spoof “We Are History” at one point asks how we know some fact, and answers his own question “Well I know because I am a Historian, and you know because I told you”. A moment when the jest speaks significant truth – much of Stout's account is about the struggles over who was entitled to claim authority over the truth of the past. While archaeology can identify and describe past material with increasing precision we should not forget that the meaning attached to that material remains contingent.

Contemporary narratives are projected back onto the past, Stout shows that in the age of Empire archaeologists “saw” evidence of the civilised Romans “improving” the lives of primitive Britons (just they “saw” in their own day civilised Britons improving the lives of the primitive natives in various corners of the world). For much of the period there was confidence in progress, but as one writer, Sir John Squire, in a review in 1936 noted that “We used to think that, at any rate, that sort of thing would not happen again; that wars of extermination, enslavement of populations, killings of prisoners, burning of cities, relapses into barbarism, and 'dark ages', would never recur in a mapped and limited globe, full of petrol and printing presses. It doesn't seem so certain now.”

As so now we are more likely to look at our distance pastoral ancestors and hold them up as models for an ecologically balanced future. When we hold up the past as a mirror do we only see ourselves? Or at least the selves we wish to be?

As well as telling us of those who founded the discipline Stout also tells us of some of those were excluded from the fold. We find that often such exclusion was as much due to poor social connections as it was of any particular merit or lack in their intellectual ideas. Using Stonehenge and the Druids as examples – the confrontation between the archaeologists and the druids can not be simply boiled down to a conflict over the “facts”. While with the ley-line hunters the issue was perhaps one of over interpreting correlations and seeing false causation and yet how much of our academically creditable explanations actually rest of similar associations – every time something is explained as “ritual”?