Time's Anvil by Author

Author:Author
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-04T16:00:00+00:00

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely

warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them. 54

The next week becomes a month, the month turns into another month. In the event I stay for three years. This is my real university.

My colleagues include students who join us in vacations, one or two locals, ne’er-do-wells, a couple of shipyard workers from Tyneside, novices and a few diggers from ‘The Circuit’ – a fluid network of lusty, roving figures who live by moving from one Ministry of Works-funded dig to another. Off duty in pubs or the Lite Bite, we talk about what we are finding, and what we think it means. Such talk, like all talk, is conditioned by things that ‘everybody knows’. Topical in this connection (since we’re working inside a former Roman fortress) is how the Anglo-Saxons took over southern Britain after the Romans left, which of course they must have done because we talk in English and England is full of places with Old English names. Other things we take for granted include migration and invasion as causes of cultural change, the Celtic west and the English east, central southern England as the mother country of classic sites in British prehistory, 55 and human development along a line from grunting savagery to enlightenment. Not all of us are convinced by the notion that archaeology’s usefulness fades after the later Middle Ages, but this was evidently the prevailing view four years before when most of the upper deposits in the middle of the cathedral had been summarily shovelled away.

For middle-class children like me, many of these ideas had been formed from reading 1950s encyclopaedias, improving comics like the Eagle or articles in the annuals given at Christmas that contained stories about bright children catching spies, advice on how to make a crystal set and cutaway diagrams of the Bristol Britannia. Only ten years before, the Ladybird Book Stone Age Man in Britain had advised young readers that if they could see the first hunter-gatherers who colonized Britain after the last ice age they ‘should probably think that they were not human beings at all, because they were covered with hair and had fierce animal-like faces’. The account continued: ‘These men of thousands of years ago were able to talk and think, but only in a very simple way. ’ 56 The Ladybird Book about William the Conqueror said that the Norman Conquest was a kind of destiny required for England’s fulfilment, for after ‘more than six hundred years of fear and uncertainty’ England needed a strong king and William brought order and fair government. 57 In the chapters that follow a recurring theme will be how one generation’s certainty becomes the fallacy of the next.

History’s community of sources and methods might be likened to different senses or kinds of consciousness. Oral

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