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The importance of sources

A historian, whether studying a battle, the rise and fall of an empire or even a football match cannot travel back in time and watch the event again. 

It is over. 

We only know - and can only know - about the past because most events leave some kind of trace that stays around for some time.

After the Battle of Hastings for example, the field would have been littered with arrows, broken swords, shields and a good number of corpses.  A few months later (or perhaps slightly longer) somebody (most likely William’s brother, Bishop Odo) commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry. A small number of scholars (William of Poitiers, chaplain to the Conquer, was probably the first) wrote about the battle.

When a historian starts to study any of these items they become a source as in ‘a source of information’. It is by studying sources – and only by studying sources - that we can be aware of any past event.

Now of course many of us reading about, let’s say Alexandra the Great, do not bother hunting down the original sources ourselves. We leave that to a professional historian and just buy their book. But the information in that book should be based on original sources. (If not, we deserve to get our money back).

To understand how important sources are, let us imagine for a moment that the Earth was crushed into dust by some cosmic event and then, some time later, an advanced species passes by. What could their historians discover about us?

Presumably they could look at the dust cloud and estimate the size of the planet that once orbited here. From the size they could work out how strong the gravity would have been. The distance from the sun would give them a fair estimation of the planet’s temperature. A great deal might be learnt from analysing the chemical make-up of the dust. A combination of such studies might indicate how likely it was that there been life on the planet at one time.

However, the aliens could never find out about  Julius Caesar, spaghetti, Galileo, the pyramids, Tom and Jerry, the Beatles, the Battle of Hastings, Thai food, dinosaurs, the Olympic Games, World War 1, World War 2, good wines, bad wines, Paris, Paris Hilton, greyhounds, chariots, jet aircraft, Hitler and so on. There would simply be no sources to indicate that any of these had ever existed.

However, even in this scenario, not every source might have been lost. If by some miracle the moon had survived the destruction, then some evidence of human life could still be found there – abandoned equipment and footsteps from the Apollo landings for example. And, from those footsteps, the aliens should be able to make a reasonable job of working out the physique of the creatures that once walked on the moon’s surface.

Alien historians might have a wonderful time arguing about where these creatures had come from

Alien historian one – These were clearly not from the destroyed planet. Consider how close that world was!  If there was life capable of making space flight, they would have been regular visitors and would have established colonies. The small amount of equipment we have found suggests it must have come from a brief visit from a passing spaceship.

Alien historian two – You do not account for the primitiveness of the equipment. Any race capable of reaching here from the nearest occupied galaxies would have had a far more advanced technology. These visitors came from close by, and as there is no significant life on any of the surviving planets, these explorers must have come from the destroyed planet.

So the key to any historian event is the sources that it has produced and which have survived……..

The number of sources increases and decreases with time

Imagine that once upon a time there was a football game. It was between a team called Burnley, who were bottom of the league

And a team called Manchester United who were top

And the team called Burnley travelled to Manchester where they beat the team called United 3-0.  

The game, just like the Battle of Hastings, will have had an impact on the world – it would have created things that only exist now because the match took place in the past.  Let us straight away break these into two categories, the relics (which are the physical objects) and the documents (which are the written accounts).

            An hour after the game the relics might have included dirty shirts in the changing room, litter on the terraces, boot marks on the pitch, video tapes in camera, blood on the steps of the pub across the road where the fans had a bit of a scuffle and so on. (If by chance a volcano covered Manchester in ash at this moment and we dug the stadium out a thousand years later, we could discover a great deal just from the preserved relics. For example, following the trial of litter might show us the route the fans took to get home and from that we might guess which part of the city United drew their support from.)[1]

However, the match would also have created a great many documents. Some examples are obvious – the match program, the preview in the newspapers. Some are less obvious. There will be files of correspondence and receipts in the offices of bus companies, catering firms, and at the local police station. There might be notes from the trainers to the managers making suggestions on team selection. There might be emails sent by the players to their families when they got to the hotel the evening before the game. In fact we would probably be amazed at how much writing a football match could generate.

However, the game will have had another impact, for we humans have the ability to retain and recall facts and events. Or, to put it another way, there would be 40,000 people who were in the stadium that afternoon who now have memories of the match.

If we were to go back a week later the relics would have already undergone changes. The pitch would have been repaired; the litter swept away, the shirts washed. The landlord of the local pub would have mopped up the blood.

Similarly, if we looked at the battlefield at Hastings a week later, the wounded would have either been helped away or would have died and some of the bodies might have been buried. Many of the weapons would have been collected for reuse, smaller items looted by the local villagers.

Generally, as soon as any event is over, the relics start to disappear. Some are destroyed (manuscripts in a library that burns down, papyrus paintings that rot when a tomb floods) but many are just lost and there is the potential to find them again – swords that are buried with a knight, ships that are sunk. Or a Burnley fan might lose his souvenir ticket down the back of the sofa, where it is discovered twenty years later.[2]

A few of the relics might also be preserved deliberately. One of the Burnley players (let us call him Peter Nichols) might have been playing his first ever professional game that afternoon, so had the shirt framed and displayed on the wall of his study. Similarly many fans save the programmes from every match.

Generally however, as we have said, we would expect the relics to already be declining in numbers and for this process to continue over the years. Guess how many relics (i.e. swords, armour, arrow heads etc) have survived from the Battle of Hastings? Answer – None.

However, while the relics tend to decrease the number of documents tends to increase.

What happens initially is that some of the memories – those of the reporters and the match officials for example - are written up. The information now exists both as a memory and a document and this is very, very important. Because….

• Once memories are put into writing they become fixed. The reporter’s memory of the game might change over time (some points are forgotten, some given unduly emphasis) but the written report remains unchanged.

• As the reports were written virtually at the time of the game, we can place some trust in them being accurate. They are what we call primary sources. (That is not to say that we believe every word and we will talk about this at great length later). 

• As a race we are conscientious about preserving our records and have been for thousands of years. Ancient emperors built up great libraries of documents and so do we!

In fact it is worth pausing and looking at how well modern documents are protected. If the reporter had been murdered coming out of the stadium, his memory of the game would have been lost for ever.  An hour later however, his match report for the Burnley News would have been typed up and safely stored in his computer, with a copy emailed to his editors desk. Should he have been murdered at this point, his report would have been safe and would have been available for football fans to read a century later.

 By the following morning ten or twenty thousand editions of the newspaper would have been printed. Within a week most of these would be lost – burnt, sent to recycling etc - but copies would have been preserved in the newspaper’s archives. Even if the newspaper office burnt down, destroying the archives and the computers, there would now be copies of the newspaper in the town library and copies of the match report in fan’s scrapbooks.

If Burnley was the subject of a nuclear terrorist attack, there would be copies of the newspaper in the National Newspaper Library in Collingdale, as well as the website version, safely stored in a computer in Taiwan or wherever. We tend to look after our documents pretty well![3]

The documents concerning the Burnley-Manchester game will probably continue to increase in number for quite a while. The match might be mentioned in the Burnley News review of the year. Photographs might appear in various Christmas football annuals. A few years later Peter Nichols might write his autobiography and mention the game. And so on.

Later people who weren’t even at the match might write about it and these will be a secondary source. (Much more of that later as well).

Interestingly, even the memories of the game can increase for a while……..

But beware of memories – they become myths

…. that evening millions of people might watch the game on TV. They will also have a memory of the game (probably a very different memory from the people who were in the stadium). The following morning football fans throughout England will read about the game in the Sunday newspapers and they will form their own memories based on the photographs, the headlines and the accounts given by the various reporters. A young Burnley boy who missed all this media attention might still notice the excitement in the school playground the following Monday and this might become part of his memories of childhood.

And, at some point, something very interesting might happened. The town of Burnley will take on a collective memory of the game. People sitting in pubs twenty years later might say things like -

‘What a load of rubbish Burnley were today. Not like the team that beat United.’

‘Yes, they were a side! Best team Burnley has every fielded.’

‘And what a game! Every man came off the pitch a hero!’

Or, at a wedding, the best man’s speech might include the line ‘this is the second happiest day of Brian’s life, the first of course being when Burnley hammered Manchester United’.

Most people from Burnley now have a collective memory, by which we mean that they share some common beliefs –

·        That this Burnley team was a great side.

·        Individually the players were superheroes who run themselves to exhaustion to get the result that afternoon.

·        The whole town celebrated.

A collective memory is shared, passed on within the community and continues to develop.  Somebody in the pub that evening might add, ‘and that Peter Nichols, if he had moved to a bigger club, he would have played for England.’

This might be picked up on and a couple of years later part of the collective memory might be that the Burnley team was snubbed by London based officials and several of the side – particularly Peter Nichols - deserved to play for England.

Examples of collective memory from recent British history include the belief that the whole country celebrated the start of the Great War (a little investigation suggests reactions were mixed and complex) or that the Second World War united the British people in one purpose and for six inspiring years we were all pulling together to achieve victory. (This is a view hardly supported by the crime figures!)

A collective memory is a belief and therefore it rests primarily on faith and at the time is accepted as being true. Indeed, collective memories usually do have some base of truth behind them. The declaration of war in1914 was marked by large crowds celebrating in Trafalgar Square, but this only tells part of the story and the collective memory does not acknowledged the equally large anti-war protests.

Because the collective memory is concerned not only what we were but also what we are it means it can project into what will be. Britain went into the Napoleonic Wars comforted by the ‘knowledge’ that Britain seamanship was the best in the world therefore we would win any major battle in the war ahead.  And, because they are based on faith, such common beliefs sometimes have the ability to become self-fulfilling. While the French fleet stayed in harbour, British ships, in part motivated by their own self-belief, took an aggressive role and blockaded the coast of Europe. These long patrols, in all weathers, hardened crews and sharpened sea skills until the British Navy did indeed became the formidable force they were expected to be.

            And, as it is based in faith, the only way such a collective memory can be proved is by demonstration. The 19^th century British navy believed themselves to be the best in the world and the evidence became a string of magnificent victories climaxing with Trafalgar. This not only confirmed, but also strengthened the belief, so that a century later Britain could confront a powerful German fleet confident in their navy’s invincibility.

This ability of the collective memory to reinforce itself can of course only go so far. The British navy supported the belief in their superiority with a vast investment in ships and training. The Russian army went into the First World War trusting in the strength and character of their peasant soldier, ‘you not only have to kill him, you also have to knock him down’,[4] but without the investment in training and modern equipment. The result was the disastrous defeats of 1914.

Only once it is questioned, does the collective memory change from being a belief to becoming a myth, the word implying that it is recognized as having elements of fiction. While the majority of Roman citizens were still worshiping in temples dedicated to Jupiter and Venus, the first Christians were holding secret prayer meetings. To them the ancient deities were already relegated to myth. British admirals might have sailed into the North Sea in 1916 certain of victory, but at the same time German officers were assuring their men that the days of British supremacy were over and the supposed British invincibility was now only a myth.

A collective memory which is accepted ═ A belief

A collective memory which is doubted ═ A myth

The collective memory poses dangers for the inexperienced historian and many students have attracted the correcting pen of their tutor by presenting a collective memory as a ‘fact’. However, they also offer opportunity. As the collective memory represents what many people believed at one time, that belief is a legitimate and fertile ground for investigation. For example, it might well be that our collective memory of public reaction to the outbreak of the Great War is disproportionately based on observations in cities and a look at the reaction in the countryside might make a promising study for some future PhD student.

So far we have been considering myths which are a ‘widely held but false belief’ but the word has another and perhaps more widely recognized definition……

Foundation myths and legends

Myth can also mean a traditional story ‘concerning the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon’.[5] This category is so distinct that it really deserves a separate name. It certainly deserves separate consideration

Myths and history are related, in that both are stories that aim to tell us what happened in the past. However there is also a very important difference. When a historian tells their story they select sources, study them with an academic discipline (we have whole chapters on this later) and present the result as evidence for the point they are attempting to make. Historians expect other historians to question their findings and for their work to one day be replaced with a new argument.

In contrast, what we now classify as a myth was once a belief that was shared by a large number of people. Once again faith was the coroner stone of that belief, so that few Aztecs probably ever questioned that their ancestors had been lead to their homeland by the sun god, Huitzilopochtli or few people in ancient Athens ever doubted that there had indeed been a time when gods and mortals had regularly interacted.

Myths are often believed because they have grown out of an element of ‘truth’ and the more wondrous elements of the story have collected – and been accepted - slowly over time.

·        The legend of Heracles might have grown from the reputation of some great warrior chieftain of the past.

·        While we would question the actual existence of Romulus and Romus, and dismiss the idea that they were fathered by Mars, the story of the boys being adopted by a shepherd might reflect the fact that Rome emerged from small, hilltop villages of pastoral farmers.

When a collective memory concerns the expanded reputation of a person (or possibly a group of people, such as a distinguished air squadron or a particularly talented football team) we consider it a legend. And, as a legend is the story of real people, it is set in a more recent past than a myth and so can usually be fitted into the current timescale of events.

A good example is the legend of King Alfred. While the stories of his great wisdom and military prowess have almost certainly become exaggerated, few historians doubt that such a king once existed and we can fix his reign to the 9^th century struggle between the Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen.

King Arthur lies even deeper in legend, to the point that it is difficult to ascertain if such a person ever existed. The problem is that our main source, the Historia Brittonum, was written around 830, a worrying length of time (perhaps three centuries) after the event. We tend not to trust information that has been passed down orally for such a long time. It is possible, but by no means certain, that the mention of Arthur in Historia was copied from some earlier document that has now been lost to us. If so, the documentation moves closer to the actual event, making it a little easier for us to accept that a real man lies at the origins of the great Arthurian legend.

 The debate about whether there was ever a king called Arthur does not stop scholars from placing the Arthurian stories into a recent timescale. The most likely date is some point after the Romans withdrew from Britain, but before the mid 6^th century when the names of kings become a little better known. The legend therefore belong to the struggle of the Romanised citizens of Britain against the invading Saxons.

The value of myths to the historian

It might be thought that myths have little to interest to historians, but that is not the case.

·        Many myths form the foundation of ancient religions and are therefore of considerable interest for what they grew into.

·        Because of their great age, myths sometimes offer insight into pre-history societies, for which few other sources exist, tempting historians to see what can be extracted from them.

Let us look for a moment at the ancient Indian Vedas to see how this works. These ancient writings were originally oral stories that might date to around 1700 BC.[6] They are set against the arrival of early migrants into the Indian continent. The logic used for extracting information is quite simple and goes something like this –

• The Vedas were originally created about 1700 BC

• The heroes in the Vedas rode into battle in chariots

• Therefore the people of 1700 BC had chariots and their chariot-warriors were greatly admired.

• If the society went to the expense of maintaining chariots, and made heroes of the chariot-warriors, it was likely to have been a warlike age.

In this way myths can give an insight into what an ancient people admired - bravery, loyalty - and  what they desired - gold and fine cattle.  In the case of the Vedas historians argue that, beyond the myth of gods and the titanic battles, they can detect a migration of aggressive animal herders, moving into the north-west river plains with their horse drawn chariots, sheep, goats, cattle and metal weapons.

However, myths generally only tell us of events in the vaguest of detail, and seldom in a way that can be trusted without some supporting sources.  The siege of Troy was believed (quite rightly so) to be a myth based firmly in imagination until archaeologists discovered a possible candidate site in what might be described as a ‘likely’ location. One layer of the city (layer VII) even showed some sign of having been destroyed in a war, at more or less the right age to be the city mentioned in the writing of Homer.

We should remember however that we have no proof that the people who lived here ever called their city Troy, or that the burning of this particular city has anything to do with the story that was passed down to the Greek orators. The discovery of the site did however increase the possibility that there might be some historical event behind the myth.

However another problem arises. The story of Troy comes to us from a long history of story telling. It was compiled (perhaps) around 900 BC, was based on much earlier events and would not appear in a written form for another century. During all these stages the stories was open to changes – omissions, exaggerations and additions - by the various story tellers, and then by the numerous scribes who lie between us and the events the story was based on.[7]

This might have influenced not only the facts (which we should be cautious of anyway) but also the background of the story. When in the Odyssey, Odysseus consults with his crew, it suggests an Ancient Greece in which chieftains lacked the absolute authority of kings, but ruled by consultation with their warriors.  An interesting observation, but which Greece is it reflecting?  

The Greece of 1100 BC, which is starting to look the most likely archaeological date for the Trojan War? The Greece of the 900 BC story teller? Or the Greece of the 800 BC scribe?

Indeed the defenders of the Vedas often make some passing reference to the ‘remarkable memory’ of the region’s story tellers and from there presume that the stories are more reliable (i.e. relatively little changed from the original version) than might actually be the case.

Yet most myths, for all their faults, still retain two great advantages. They are ancient and wonderful written accounts of our long human heritage.

The collective memory in the modern world

Modern media – first illustrated magazines and newspapers, then radio, film and TV – has had an impact on the nature of the collective memory, increasing the speed it can spread and the potential audience it can incorporate. This increases the possibility for those who control the media to manipulate the collective memory. This can even be accomplished by an individual, as when lady Diana fluttered her eyes and told the Panorama audience that she would ‘like to be a queen of people's hearts’.

The concerns become greater when manipulation is the work of governments. The policies of Hitler and George Bush were made possible because they had access to the media and used it to influence the collective memory. That Germany was a mighty nation that had been betrayed in the Great War. That Iraqi’s outdated and shattered army had somehow been transformed into a powerful military force that was a danger to the world.

However the collective memory is just as likely to form spontaneously and from a variety of sources. For example, when a photographer snapped a picture of two Burnley players cheering to the crowd after the Manchester game, he did not foresee that this photograph of the exhausted, muddy and victorious heroes would be reprinted in hundreds of newspapers and soccer magazines, that for the next twenty years the poster version would be pinned to the bedroom wall of thousands of young Burnley children, or that a framed and autographed print would have place of honour in the pub where Burnley fans so often sit and reminisce about the great teams of the past. The photographer had not planned to create an icon that would contribute towards shaping the town’s collective memory of that historic day. It had just happened.

The British collective memory of Dunkirk being a glorious moment in British history is an interesting example, in that it has elements of both government propaganda and a spontaneous life of its own. The events of May and June 1940 are open to debate, but a reasonable summary might be that Churchill set the tone with his first broadcast as Prime Minister on May 19^th.  Here he prepared the nation for the dark times ahead while, at the same time, installing the belief that although there would be set backs, Britain would eventually triumph. Once events at Dunkirk became public, newspapers headlines such as ‘Tens of Thousands Safely Home’ in the Daily Express reflected this optimism in defeat attitude (no newspaper used the headline ‘30,000 Killed or Wounded, Many More Missing’) and this was taken up by other institutions, for example when the Dean of St.Paul’s used the term ‘Miracle of Dunkirk’ in a sermon.

While it is debatable how much this was directed by the government, the authorities were certain not in full control, for Churchill eventually felt the need to readjust the mood, pointing out to the Commons that a successful evacuation ‘was not to be confused with victory.’

A collective memory created by political propaganda can obvious not be trusted, but nether can the collective memory that grows spontaneously, for it is unchecked and does not concern itself with questioning the ‘truth’. In the case of our featured football match

• This Burnley team was a great side – the Manchester result could have been a one off fluke by a team that lost every other match that year.

• They were superheroes who played themselves to exhaustion to get the result that afternoon. They might just have been a bunch of untalented, lazy players, most of whom were sold before the end of the season, but who got lucky on this one day.

• The whole town celebrated - in a city the size of Burnley there were probably a great number of people (a majority) who didn’t even notice the game had taken place!

So myths and legends are certainly not without their interest, and they might be used as a source (of information), to be considered with care and used or discarded as the historian believes appropriate. However, at this point it is the more dependable, more orthodox sources – those relics and particularly those documents - that we now need to get back to……….

Sources – the importance of writing

Is a reporter writing the history of Burnley Football Club going to use the relics or the written documents?

Well he might, if he is a Burnley fan, use the project as an excuse to arrange a visit and touch the shirt that Peter Nichols wore that famous afternoon - but he is not going to learn much from doing that. He will, like all historians, work with the documents.

Indeed we traditionally break history into

History

(which is studied through written documents)

and

Pre-history

(an era without writing, which can therefore only be studied through the relics)[8].

These stages occur at different times in different geographical regions. We have more documents from Ancient Egypt 3000 years ago, than from Britain 2000 years ago or from sub-Sahara Africa 500 years ago. (This is because the Egyptians had a very bureaucratic government for an ancient civilisation and because the dry Egyptian climate has been extremely kind to the preservation of these records.)

Neither is there always a totally clear line about where pre-history stops and history begins.

            In addition, societies do not tend to go from pre-history to great libraries of documents overnight, so the balance between a historian relying on documents and needing to make use of other sources tends to change gradually.

A good example is the Battle of Visby, fought on the Baltic Island of Gotland. Although the battle is known from documentation, the excavation of burial pits has added a depth to our knowledge far beyond what the written resources can provide. In addition to allowing us to study the weapons, the skeletons reveal some surprising details, for example a large number of the soldiers were young boys or old men.[9] However, the battle was fought quite a long time ago (1361) and as a general rule the more recent an event, the more documents we are going to be able to locate. This is because

·        Recent societies have tended to be more literate and more bureaucratic and therefore have produced more documents

·        There has been less time for documents to be lost or destroyed.

·        There is better technology to keep documents safe. It is, for example, a long time since a major library burnt down.[10]

This general rule however doesn’t always work in a neat, straight line. There is a fair amount of documents covering Ancient Greece during the Mycenaean period. Then something happened and for about 400 years Greek societies lost the technology of writing.

There are also gaps in more recent history. To the frustration of historians studying the outbreak of the Second World War, the British Embassy in Warsaw destroyed all their records before abandoning the city in 1939.

However, as we have said, generally the more recent the period a historian is studying, the more documents will be available and the less role relics will play in the study. We could, for example, exhume bodies from military graves and work out the average height of the British solder in 1916. But that would be a strange thing to do when the information is readily available in army medical records.[11]

There are always exceptions. One example of where a relic has played a part in the understanding of a recent event is with the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915. The Germans claimed that the liner was carrying military equipment and that this explains the violence of the explosion, the quick sinking of the ship and the heavy lost of life.

The documents - cargo manifestos and so on - do not support this. However, in this case there are good reasons to question the written records. If the British government was moving explosives on a liner they might well have forged the paper-work at the time of loading, or suppressed documents after the sinking.

Recent underwater examination of the wreck has ruled out the kind of major destruction that we would expect from the ignition of large amounts of explosives and theories now centre on a less sinister reason for the reported second explosion. At one point coal dust was considered the prime suspect, although attention has also centred on an explosion in the boilers.[12]  

It remains rare for archaeologists to be able to make a significant contribution to any recent historical question. However, there are periods of history for which there are no written records and the absence of writing places extremes limits what we can expect to learn about such societies.

Studying a world without writing

Let us image that modern soccer took place in a society that did not have any writing. None at all. The names Manchester United and Burnley did not even appear on the stadium gates.

What could we, as historians, looking back thousands of years later, learn about football in this ancient time? 

Well, we would not be able to discover the names of the teams and certainly could never ascertain that on one particular day a team called Burnley beat a team called Manchester United. We would never know of a player called Peter Nichols, who was a legend in Burnley but didn’t get to play for England.

Our teams of archaeologists might however excavate a football stadium which, in the absence of names, they might call Northern Arena 1 (although we know it as Old Trafford, home of Manchester United). From the size and design we could probably work out that the site was for some public event. We would no doubt argue about the purpose - military parade? Theatre? Temple? Execution ground?

Perhaps our archaeologists would excavate the trophy room and find a hoard of silverware and we would again discuss the use of this storeroom - Bank?  Treasure house for a local lord?

And what about the silver objects stored there? Offerings to gods? Works of art? Urns for ashes?  

If we then evacuated the locker room and found a pile of ancient footballs, we would probably be able to make a good guess at the purpose of the stadium.[13] However, we would still not have any idea of the nature of the game that was played there.  How many participants took part for example?

Often, with pre-history societies, we can estimate some parameters simply from common sense. We might guess, for example, that from the size of the inner arena there would be more than say 20  participants (the playing area seems quite large for any less) and (for the same reason of size) no more than say 100 if we visualize some kind of mock battle.

And how many of those plastic round objects were thrown into the arena at any time? We have no way of knowing but we might have a clue - as many of the balls are found grouped together in netting, it suggests that 10-20 were released simultaneously. You see, when we make guesses based on common sense, we can sometimes be reasonably accurate (20 ‘players’ was pretty accurate) and sometimes completely wrong!

A key question with any archaeological site is to establish an accurate date and we can do this in several ways.

• We might be able to find artefacts in the soil which would enable us to fix a date for the site. (In real life archaeology, pottery and coins are the great clues).

• Or perhaps we could compare the building materials and construction methods with the technology at another site which we have already established a date for.

• We could also use radiocarbon dating to get a reasonably accurate date for any organic matter found at the sites – such as clips of grass, a scarp of a football shirt or even a football if it was leather rather than plastic. (Other types of laboratory tests work for some non-organic material).  

Usually we can get a reasonably accurate date for any site.

Humans tend to occupy one area for many generations, so layers of occupation build up on top of each other. Therefore, as a general rule, the more recent buildings and relics tend to lie at the top of the excavations, and the further down you dig, the older the levels you are now exploring. Further excavation of our football stadium might indeed reveal the remains of concert terraces belonging to an earlier construction period. We could probably be able to estimate how long a stadium had stood on this spot and get some understanding of the physical changes that had taken place over the years. And physical changes often give us some clue to the economic and cultural developments a society has experienced.

Let us look for a moment at a site called Çatal Höyük in modern Turkey, which is a good example of what we can learn (and not learn) about any pre-history (i.e. pre-writing) society.  

Çatal Höyük is one of the oldest urban centres in the world and was occupied for a thousand years or so, from about 6500 BC, by a people who lived in closely packed houses and farmed the nearby land. Two periods of excavation, including annual digs since 1993, mean we know a great deal about Çatal Höyük.

o       From skeletons we know about the physic of the people, their life expectancy, the illness they tended to suffer from and the types of accidents that befell them.

o       From seeds and animal bones we know a great deal about their diet.

o       We can reconstruct their houses and from that make a good guess about their daily lives. (For example how they cooked).

o       We know about their technology - they had stone arrows, daggers and axes, bone needles and hairpins, wooden bowls and woven baskets.

o       From the way they buried their dead and the discovery of some figurines we can tell they had religious feelings, and that a female ‘mother goddess’ appears to have featured prominently.

However we do not know

·        What they called themselves or their town.  

·        Anything about their politics, beyond the absence of any rich graves which are usually evidence of kings or important chieftains.

·        We have almost no knowledge of events – if they were ever struck by plagues, or suffered wars or rebellions.

·        We do not know of any leaders who inspired or brought fear to the community.

When something so momentous happens that we can identify it – after about a thousand years the site was abandoned and at about the same time a new settlement was established a few miles way – we cannot explain what motivated the event.

Was the new site founded first and proved to have such an advantage of location, that the old town went into a slowly decline?

Or was the old site the scene of some sudden disaster that forced survivors to flee and found a new community?

We cannot even say with any certainty that the decline of one town was in any way linked with the rise of the second.

ü      In short we know a great deal about the village but hardly anything about the history of the village.

In many societies however we do not find just one site, but a culture that might spread over a considerable area, as with the Indus Valley civilization or the Olmecs of ancient Mexico and this gives the opportunities for comparison ……

A pre-history civilization

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A great deal can sometimes be learnt by comparing different sites from the same civilization. Not only is there likely to be more material but we will notice differences between the communities.

For example, if we find one isolated fortified town, we can presume that the people faced some kind of hostel threat (or why go to the expense and trouble of building walls).[14] However, we might not have any clue as who they were so anxious to defend themselves against. (Neighbouring cites? Invading barbarians? Bandits?) If however we have excavated a society of a dozen communities and only those settlements by the coast are fortified, we might presume whatever danger they faced, it came from the sea. Towns in early Israel (around 930BC) tend, for example,  to be more fortified in the south than the north, suggesting that aggression from Egypt was considered a greater danger than the on going squabbles with the Aramaean tribes to the north.

Let us imagine we have excavated five towns in a valley and that we have found a collection of small statues

What could we surmise? Well, the finds might suggest that this culture had a state god identified as a human with a lion’s head (or a person wearing a lion mask) and that each town also had their own local gods, represented by other figures that combined human and animal features. (The lack of a lion statue at site 4 would be interesting and would need explaining, but would not necessarily disprove this theory. Indeed, we should probably be a bit nervous if the study of any ancient civilization produced patterns that were too neat and tidy!)

Let us seek some more information; here are further details on the Lion-figures from each site.

We can now suggest that the Lion-god originated at Site 1 (the statues appear here in greater numbers and - more importantly- appeared here first) and therefore most likely have spread from here.[15]

If we could tie this in with the spread of (for example) a new pottery design we might argue worship of the Lion-god spread with trade.

However, if we were to find layers of ash in the excavations of some sites at around 3000 years before present[16] we might come to a different conclusion. Finding a layer of ash is the sign of there having been a fire. If it occurs at just one site it might be an accidental fire or a sign of violence. However, if we start to find a layer of ash at several sites, at roughly the same time, it becomes increasingly unlikely that numerous fires would have all started accidentally during a short time span.[17] We can therefore be reasonably certain that this was a period of war and turmoil. This in turn might lead us to argue that worship of the Lion-god possibly spread through military expansion.

Similarly if, in our pre-history football society, we excavated a second football ground in another town, lets call it Northern Site 2 ( although it is really Turf Lane, Burney)  we could start to make comparisons. We would guess from the size of the stadiums that Site 1 was bigger and therefore – we might presume – more important. We would be interested to see that although we find a great silver hoard at Site 1, such items seem to be lacking at site 2! (Sorry Burnley fans!) We might therefore suggest that the town that lay around the second site was a colony of the first, and they built a smaller arena as a copy of the one in their mother city. Or we might argue that the concentration of silver in the larger stadium meant the community of Site 1 collected tribute from Site 2 and probably from other smaller sites yet to be discovered

Imagine the excitement when another archaeology team, excavating in the south, discover a similar site – probably identified as Southern Arena 1 (although we would know it as Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea). It would immediately pose the question of how these stadiums were linked? 

The size and rectangular shape of the inner area would certainly suggest they shared a common architecture and the discovery of a silver horde at Southern Arena 1, with items very similar in design to those found at Northern Site 1, would argue that arenas hundreds of miles apart might have shared strong cultural links. Perhaps there was a circus of professional ‘gladiators’ who toured the country putting on performances?

All this would be difficult to prove, but fortunately many societies leave us other clues and even before writing developed human societies tended to encourage artists …… however before that, we should take a closer look at the dating of archaeological sites…….

Trees rings and Carbon 14 – the mystery world of the lab

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