Reading the Stones

Abstract

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/ibe Whenever I visit other countries, or even other towns in the UK, or, indeed when I visit anywhere, if I find that I am near an archaeological site I am drawn to it. It is a minor compulsion. Perhaps I need to establish a link, to look back through time. To understand, in a small way, what life used to be like. I can’t do this at every archaeological site, of course. It has to be a certain type of site. Battlegrounds and barrows are interesting but not compelling. Buildings are my thing. It is a sad reality that most people, the hoi polloi, and my choice of words will become clear later, lived and worked in buildings that could not survive. Very few people were privileged enough to live in palaces and villas or temples and churches. They lived in wooden houses, or where there were clay deposits builders could construct mudbrick houses, but unless conditions were right for preservation neither wood nor mudbrick survives the centuries. However, archaeology is a science that relies a lot on surrogates. If a hole was ever dug in the earth, the earth was scarred for ever or until that same plot was dug again to make a bigger hole. Archaeologists can ‘read’ this hole in the ground and deduce why the hole was dug and what for. Such interpretation is a skill that has to be learned. I do not have the skill and must rely on the scholarship of others. I cannot ‘read’ the hole in the ground, nor the piles of stones that used to be buildings, nor the carved fragments that decorated them. I cannot see what used to be there from what remains. How much can be seen, of course, will always be contentious. There is only so much information that a hole in the ground or an object can give. Interpretation can all too easily become overinterpretation. I once went to a lecture by the anthropologist Richard Leakey, who complained that while his excavation might reveal a human tooth and in circumstances that determined its age others would then overinterpret the evidence. The tooth would be turned into a person, in a family group, decently clad in furs, in a dwelling, with tools and artefacts. There was usually a fire burning and an animal spit-roasting, children were playing and so on and so forth. All this from just a tooth. Complete fantasy, absurd overinterpretation but the usual way that the discovery of a very old tooth is announced in the press or popular magazines. Modern science can tell a lot from a tooth but not where its owner bought their shirts. I recently had the opportunity to walk round several large archaeological sites in Thessaloniki, in Northern Greece. This city has had a troubled existence over several millennia: built up, knocked down, built up, burned down. The modern city is a mishmash of good architecture, and also some, from the fifties and sixties, that has not stood the test of time, and too many ghastly concrete apartment blocks thrown up presumably as a cheap and dirty solution to the housing crisis following the major turmoil when much of the city burned down in 1917 and then there was the little matter of World War II. The modern town is built on several thousand years of rubble. Only the churches and a very few other buildings that are not modern remain standing and these only because of sub-