Oh, I remember my first assignment now, actually - it was a practical one, in experimental archaeology. They shipped us all off to a field in West Sussex for our freshers' week and we did things like flint knapping and skinning/butchering animals and so on, and then wrote about whether this was useful or not. Coincidentally it actually was quite a good... umm... bonding exercise, if you will.
Oh. Stonehenge. *coughs* We have a course about Public Archaeology and it has been commented that most of what you need to do to pass is rant about Stonehenge.
It's hard to know where to start, really... it's such an iconic site for British archaeology and even of national identity, but in terms of the way it has been investigated, presented, and reported on, the whole thing is a mess. So many different groups see themselves as having some kind of claim to it - most notably modern Druids, archaeological researchers, and English Heritage (who run the site for tourists) - and have very different ideas of what should be done with it. As a result, nothing gets done. Then there's all the mad theories people come up with about it (and the problem with crackpot theories is that sometimes people get hold of them and take them as examples of the kind of things archaeologists come up with)... and the way it's presented, if you actually visit the site, is... disappointing bordering on depressing. You go through a concrete tunnel under the main road - which runs within 20m or so of the monument itself - past some actually kind of amusingly bad reconstruction drawings of a lot of stone-age men with neat little mustaches, and then up to the monument, which you can't get even close to (obviously there are issues with damage to the monument if you allow people right up to the stones but surely people could be allowed a little closer??). There are no information-boards about the site in this area at all. In fact, there's only one anywhere, and - much to my amusement - it was put up by the National Trust, not English Heritage. (I have this image of sneaky ninja sign-placement on the part of NT which I can't quite shake.) The overall impression I have of the site is that it's utterly divorced from its context - it's presented so much as "a site", which is a very false concept, and there's no sense of where it fits in with any culture or even with its immediate surroundings. It's part of what seems to be a very large ritual landscape, of which it is only one part, but it's all anyone knows about.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2006-06-01 07:42 pm (UTC)Oh. Stonehenge. *coughs* We have a course about Public Archaeology and it has been commented that most of what you need to do to pass is rant about Stonehenge.
It's hard to know where to start, really... it's such an iconic site for British archaeology and even of national identity, but in terms of the way it has been investigated, presented, and reported on, the whole thing is a mess. So many different groups see themselves as having some kind of claim to it - most notably modern Druids, archaeological researchers, and English Heritage (who run the site for tourists) - and have very different ideas of what should be done with it. As a result, nothing gets done. Then there's all the mad theories people come up with about it (and the problem with crackpot theories is that sometimes people get hold of them and take them as examples of the kind of things archaeologists come up with)... and the way it's presented, if you actually visit the site, is... disappointing bordering on depressing. You go through a concrete tunnel under the main road - which runs within 20m or so of the monument itself - past some actually kind of amusingly bad reconstruction drawings of a lot of stone-age men with neat little mustaches, and then up to the monument, which you can't get even close to (obviously there are issues with damage to the monument if you allow people right up to the stones but surely people could be allowed a little closer??). There are no information-boards about the site in this area at all. In fact, there's only one anywhere, and - much to my amusement - it was put up by the National Trust, not English Heritage. (I have this image of sneaky ninja sign-placement on the part of NT which I can't quite shake.) The overall impression I have of the site is that it's utterly divorced from its context - it's presented so much as "a site", which is a very false concept, and there's no sense of where it fits in with any culture or even with its immediate surroundings. It's part of what seems to be a very large ritual landscape, of which it is only one part, but it's all anyone knows about.