Bees in Antiquity

Abstract

As purveyors of honey and wax, substances rated high by early man, bees would seem to deserve more attention from archaeologists than they have in fact received. In this respect they serve to point a moral. The tendency has all too frequently been to concentrate on those aspects of ancient cultures which lend themselves most easily to classification, to the neglect of those which promise the closest insight into the working of the societies under review, thus inverting the true outlook of the archaeologist and turning him away from the activities of human beings towards a world of abstractions. The thesis one would like to urge is that the prime concern of archaeology is the study of how men have lived in society, of how within the social frame-work they have striven to satisfy and multiply their wants. From such a standpoint the means adopted to gratify the taste for sweet things, a taste shared by man and beast and physiological in its basis, merits at least as much attention as current fashions in safety-pins and other topics beloved of ‘museologists’