Almost Archaeology

finding meaning in pop culture archaeology

[almostarchaeology]

Luthen and the Louvre: How Andor foretold 2025 (part 2)

By Adrián Maldonado

Among all the ways that Andor seemed to predict the events of 2025, shining a light on the trade in illicit antiquities was probably not on anyone’s bingo card.

In part one of this post, we established how the terror of cultural erasure was one of the most significant themes of the 24 perfect episodes of the series Andor (2022-2025). I showed how antiquities dealer Luthen Rael was able to profit off the remnants of cultures lost to the Empire's wars. The absence of museums or any kind of investment in the protection of cultural heritage management leaves the galaxy susceptible to authoritarian propaganda and disinformation. I suggested that "we are closer to the pastless society of Coruscant than we’d like to think." 

That may have seemed like a stretch until the news later in 2025 was dominated by the looting of antiquities around the world, especially after 19 October, when a group of four men broke into the Louvre Museum in Paris in broad daylight and stole a bunch of the French crown jewels. It was so audacious, it was meme-worthy. Playmobil created a new Museum Robbery set, and its Museum Theft advent calendar (from 2023) went viral.

This really happened! Playmobil Museum Theft set 71347

What does Andor have to do with the Louvre heist? Luthen's gallery of Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest on Coruscant is not quite science fiction. The marketplace for looted antiquities is booming in the real world. The media attention the Louvre heist received was phenomenal, but embedded in these stories were mentions of other recent museum thefts. It was only when I set about writing this post that I realized the full scale of the problem.

This is what 2025 looked like from the perspective of heritage crime.

JANUARY

The Helmet of Coțofeneşti, Dacian, 5th century BC (source)

Drents Museum, Netherlands: “On 25 January 2025, a group of individuals forcibly entered the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands, using explosives and stole golden artifacts valued at approximately €6 million. The stolen items were irreplaceable archaeological treasures representing the Dacian civilization which thrived in present-day Romania before conquest by the Roman Empire in 106 AD.” The theft was described as a kind of “cultural terrorism...The Dacians didn’t leave any written texts behind. The only thing we know about this civilisation are these objects.” The stolen items remain at large.

MARCH

Sudan: The Sudan National Museum, the largest collection of archaeological specimens of the prehistory and history of Nubia and the central Nile valley, was occupied by military forces during the Sudanese Civil War. When they were forced out in 2025, virtually everything that was portable was looted or destroyed, including gold objects from safe rooms not on public display, almost certainly to be sold off. Its description on Wikipedia has now changed to a “war damaged former museum.” It is impossible to be precise about how much material is now missing as the war continues: “they are erasing the oldest nation in history, erasing its history.”

JUNE

Looting pits at the historic site of Khirbet Qureini'a; the blue are pits identified since October 2023 (Al-Houdalieh and Jamal 2025, fig 8)

West Bank, Palestine: a series of new studies were published quantifying the extent of looting in the West Bank, as war rages on in Gaza. “Israel has caused Palestinian unemployment to spike because it has closed its labor market to Palestinian workers—evidently causing at least some to take to looting. ‘This is not merely opportunistic crime, but a desperate response to economic collapse.’” This is yet another example of the phenomenon of 'subsistence looting' as described in part 1 of this post.

Syria: Since the overthrow of former dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, the trafficking of looted antiquities from Syria has skyrocketed, with sales openly occurring on Facebook. “‘The last three to four months has been the biggest flood of antiquities trafficking I have ever seen, from any country, ever’ […] The ATHAR project provided the Guardian with dozens of screenshots and videos of Syrian antiquities, including mosaics and Palmyran busts, being sold on Facebook groups. A single Facebook search of “antiquities for sale Syria” in Arabic yielded more than a dozen Facebook groups dedicated to the trading of cultural artefacts, many of them public.”

SEPTEMBER

Limoges, France: “Thieves snatched three porcelain works worth millions of euros in a night raid on…the Adrien Dubouché institute in Limoges early on Thursday [4 September]. The museum said the gang made off with ‘two particularly important dishes of Chinese porcelain…dating from the 14th and 15th centuries’ and an 18th-century Chinese vase, all designated as ‘national treasures.’ Police were told the haul was worth about €9.5m (£8.2m).” The stolen items remain at large.

Exeter, UK: “About 17 antique pocket watches were stolen along with a flint lock blunderbuss attached to a bayonet” after a forced entry into the Royal Albert Memorial Museum on 9 September. The stolen items remain at large.

The rush to salvage artefacts from Gaza (Associated Press)

Gaza City, Palestine: Archaeologists were given three days to evacuate the collections of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem before an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza City on 15 September. “We got out about 60 percent of the objects. I feel as if I lost a child.” The Israeli government then released a statement patting themselves on the back about having salvaged important Christian artefacts from the fourth-century AD Saint Hilarion Monastery, even though the warehouse contained objects from various cultures going back to biblical times. It turns out this statement was aimed specifically at the American audience, as part of a new archaeological rewriting of Jerusalem’s history for the visit of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Their guided tours of Israeli heritage sites laid on by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “were intended to emphasise Jerusalem’s Jewish roots and its status...as ‘our eternal and undivided capital’. While Rubio was on this tour of ancient Jerusalem, Israeli planes bombed the most important storage depot of ancient artefacts in Gaza City, pulverising three decades of archaeological work.”

Bristol, UK: “More than 600 artefacts of significant cultural value have been stolen from Bristol Museum's archive in a high-value raid, police have said. Military memorabilia, jewellery, natural history pieces and carved ivory, bronze and silver figurines were stolen from the archive in the Cumberland Basin area of the city in the early hours of 25 September.” The robbery was not reported until December 2025, and it is argued this delay in reporting helped the perpetrators get away. The stolen items remain at large.

UNESCO: on 29 September, UNESCO formally launched their virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, featuring 3D models and information on some 600 looted antiquities from around the world. It seems more art project than useful resource, but their heart is in the right place. “Cultural objects carry the stories of their communities. When a cultural object is stolen, we lose a part of our identity. Learning about these missing objects is the first step towards their recovery.”

OCTOBER

Bronze Age gold lunula from Llanllyfni, Gwynedd, c. 2400BC-2000BC (British Museum)

St Fagans, Wales: early on 6 October, two men broke into the St Fagans Museum of National History west of Cardiff, and made off with 14 absolutely irreplaceable and highly fragile Bronze Age objects, all of gold. Two men were quickly arrested, but the gold remains at large.

Paris, France: it was only after all of those tragic events that the Louvre heist occurred on 19 October. Unlike all the others, it was done in broad daylight during opening hours. The audacity of the raid led to global news coverage and social media memes, and has its own Wikipedia page. Arrests began to be made within a week, with all four men and several co-conspirators caught by the end of November. The ongoing investigation suggests that this was not carried out by the professional organized crime networks that appear to have been involved in most of the smaller robberies listed here, and they were likely to try and sell the jewels piecemeal. The video of the raid and the victim-blaming of the Louvre Museum sucked up all the remaining oxygen. But the stolen jewels remain at large.

Langres, France: And the Louvre heist wasn’t even the only museum theft in France that day! “Around 2,000 gold and silver coins worth around €90,000 (£78,000; $104,000) were stolen during a raid at another French museum - just hours after the audacious theft of some of the French crown jewels at the Louvre in Paris.” This was at the Maison des Lumières (House of Enlightenment). “The coins were selected with ‘great expertise’…The stolen coins date from between 1790 and 1840 and are part of the city's private collection, after being discovered in 2011 during renovation work at the building that now houses the museum.” The targeted nature of the robbery means this was almost certainly carried out to order, unlike the Louvre theft. Two men were subsequently arrested, but this didn’t even make the English-language press as far as I could find. The coins, and I’m sick of saying this already, remain at large.

DECEMBER

Paris, again: “A silver steward employed at the Élysée Palace in Paris has been arrested for stealing silverware and porcelain, amid a wave of thefts from high-profile French institutions. Investigators arrested the man and two alleged accomplices last week [story reported 21 December]. They are accused of taking the objects from the official Paris residence of the French president and trying to sell them on online auction websites such as Vinted.” Around 100 items were recovered and returned to the Palace.

Looting as erasure

The context for all of the above unhappy stories is overall simple and predictable. Looting and destruction in the Sudan, Syria, Palestine was all driven by war and its consequences of unemployment, desperation and opportunism. These thefts are all the more painful as they relate to national collections of global significance, important moments in histories that go beyond the heritage of any one people. But crucially, they also have the tragic, and sometimes deliberate, effect, of erasing a people’s heritage, silencing their pasts in order to write them out of the future.

For the majority of the other thefts in the UK and France, there was no ideological goal other than profit. Unsurprisingly, gold was frequently targeted, a sign that the the value of precious metal was worth the risk. Gold spiked in price in 2025, in part due to the dismantling of a democracy and the funneling of its resources toward the ruling class in the United States. These museum thefts were joined by other audacious robberies targeting precious metals: gold nuggets from a natural history museum in Paris, a gold refinery in Lyon, and in the dying days of 2025, a German bank vault.

Screenshot of the UNESCO Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects

Lots of the looted antiquities were the paraphernalia of the elite, or the profits of former empires. But it is the loss of ancient archaeological artefacts, irreplaceable and more valuable than their market value could ever express, that is most painful and dangerous. They represent the erasure of history and culture, which feeds into the sense of rootlessness and disengagement that lead to even worse outcomes in the long term. Museum thefts of any kind reflect the diminishing value of heritage itself, exacerbated by reductions in public investment. Overall, this wave of thefts - many carried out to order - is leading us to a situation where antiquities are not witnesses to our collective past, but the playthings of the rich. And that takes us back to a galaxy far, far away.

Will the real Rael please stand up

Given the parallels from 2025 explored above, we can see in Luthen’s gallery a situation in which war and creeping autocracy have cut off any efforts to preserve galactic heritage, except within the selective galleries of the rich and powerful. Their desire to own these works of art have enabled looters and dodgy dealers alike, and the wider public have no recourse to their own history. It is no surprise that the galaxy was so easily scared into voting its own democracy into oblivion.

It is easy to blame Luthen for enabling the plundering of the galactic past for monetary gain. But another possibility is more intriguing. Luthen’s expertise seems to span the Galaxy and time periods going back for millennia. Early in season 2, he has somehow managed to track down a Chandrilan temple statue that had been lost for 25,000 years. Then there’s the odd, unremarked detail about the blue (there’s that colour again) kyber crystal that he gives to Cassian Andor before the Aldhani mission way back in season 1. He calls it a ‘down payment’, but there’s more to it than that. Luthen had been wearing it around his neck the whole time, and he insists Cassian keeps it secret and gives it back after the mission. According to Luthen, it has a very specific origin commemorating an uprising against another imperial power in ‘the ancient world’. He talks it up to Cassian in terms of monetary value first – “don’t take less than 50,000 for it” – but then adds, “just know it will always be worth more to me. I want it back when this is over.” Cassian and Luthen are echoing the role of Jynn Erso's kyber crystal pendant in Rogue One: all three crystal-bearers may not be Jedi, but are being enlisted as messengers to the Force.

Luthen also frequently equates people and antiquities. When Dedra Meero walks into his shop in episode 10, and they are both still coyly playing the part of buyer and dealer, he pointedly says, “At the moment, only two pieces of questionable provenance in the gallery” – not artefacts, but himself and Dedra, both fakes.

I think the point of this is to show that Luthen knows more – and cares more – about these ‘antiquities’ than the stereotype of the unscrupulous dealer. Fans really wanted Luthen to be a secret Jedi or Sith lord, but I have another theory. Could he have been an aspiring archaeologist in a previous life?

Let’s go back to that flashback of Luthen selling a Devaronian victory necklace described in part 1 of this post. The dealer is impressed not only that Luthen knew what it was, but that he had cleaned it up properly and knew exactly who to present it to. He asks if there are more like it, to which Luthen cryptically answers, ‘not today’. We now know that he did indeed have more, or at least knew how to get more, as he had another one in his shop in season 1.

If we read between the lines, it is clear Sargent Lear was already well versed in antiquities when he became Luthen Rael, with some skill in conservation. In season 2 we often see Kleya in the conservation workshop/spy den, and it is likely she learned more than just spycraft from Luthen.

'Condemned to use the tools of my enemy'

We have already seen how Luthen equated himself with the Devaronian blue, and carries an emblem of ancient rebellions in the form of a blue kyber crystal he wears at all times. If this is the case, and Luthen personifies these objects, this changes what we think of him. Perhaps he is only playing the part of unscrupulous dealer supplying his elite clientele only for the connections and fortunes it brings him. He is likely pained at every sale to the collaborating bastards he is forced to work with. This is partly what he means in his famous season 1 speech when he says he has made his life a ‘sunless place’, that he is 'condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them.' His scholarship of the past is part of the decency that he burned in order to get to his position in the halls of power. But it is his choice to play this role in order to help take down the Empire from within, echoing the sacrfice made by Galen Erso, who built in the flaw in the Death Star in Rogue One. The antiquities trade becomes more than just a backdrop to this gritty vision of the galaxy. Its utter indecency is a measure of how much he believes in the cause. And it was one of his items of 'questionable provenance' - the Nautolan bleeder, '60 centuries old' - which he uses to escape Dedra's clutches.

None of this serves to excuse Luthen and the real harm he did in enabling the illicit trafficking of antiquities to the rich and powerful of Coruscant. But it gives even more weight and depth to someone who was already one of the most indelible Star Wars characters we've ever had.

It also helps shine a light on the perilous state of museums, and the booming market in illicit antiquities, in our real world. Whether it is 'subsistence looting' in times of war, or high-risk heists, the destination of these objects is a booming secondary economy that we are generally unaware even exists. Andor puts the players of this underworld on full view, and through the examples of pastless people like Cassian Andor of Kenari, and the rewritten histories of the Ghor, the Dhani and so many others, exposes the collateral damage of empire. It is Andor's greatest warning to us now, and is just one more way this show was so eerily prescient about 2025.

***

Read Part 1 of this post, and see also our Handy Guide to the Archaeology of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Follow: @AlmostArch and @archaeonado.

[almostarchaeology]

Luthen and the Louvre: How Andor foretold 2025 (part 1)

By Adrián Maldonado

It is long ago, and we are far away. In the imperial capital of Coruscant, the gallery of Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest receives some visitors. One of them admires some antique jewellery. 

“The blue is lovely”, the visitor observes. Shop attendant Kleya explains it is made with something called Devaron blue. We don't know why this is important, we just assume it means rare, expensive, desirable.

"There's an inscription on that one,” gallery owner Luthen cuts in. “In a language no one remembers."

“How sad."

"No, it's liberating. You decide what it says. Your own secret language."

Luthen and Kleya welcome you to their gallery

Luthen Rael can always spin uncertainty into opportunity. When we first met him in Andor season 1, we learned that his luxurious gallery was just a façade, a way to inveigle himself into the inner circle of the Galactic Empire, numbering among his loyal customers senators and officers of the Imperial Security Bureau. Luthen is more than an antiquities dealer, but a spymaster building the rebellion that will take down the Empire.

Andor's second and final season was the TV show of 2025, and the series has now secured its role as the thing you name to describe the ambition to create something perfect.

What few noticed about season 2 is that it is now the most anthropologically rich entry into a galaxy that is notoriously unconcerned with its own archaeology. As I once wrote about Andor’s predecessor, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016):

“...the Galactic Civil War had one pernicious side effect: fighters on both sides neglected their cultural heritage in the name of military expediency. Of all the dark goings-on under the Empire, this is one of the most upsetting in the long term. In just a single generation, the shining temples and cities of the prequel trilogy have given way to the ruinscapes of Rogue One, a situation that has not much improved by the time of Force Awakens. And as that film shows, the old Imperial ideology survives like a weed, sprouting back up in the fertile soil of a pastless society.”

In this light, Luthen’s sales pitch for the Devaron blue necklace is chilling. The loss of the language inscribed on the object stems from the erasure of its cultural context, the only traces of which are artefacts being sold as lovely trinkets. And this is despite the fact that there are still Devaronians about; one of them, a cranky mercenary, shows up in The Mandalorian. He'd surely steal that necklace if the price was right.

In the context of how 2025 transpired, Andor only became more and more relevant. In a year of grinding wars, inveterate looting and museum heists, we are closer to the pastless society of Coruscant than we’d like to think. Andor provides unmissable insights into the perils of authoritarianism, but for me, none land harder than its exploration of cultural erasure as a weapon of empires.

Before we move on, two warnings. One is that ‘culture’ is a heavily debated term, but one we can still use with care. Civilization, no, even if it continues to zombie itself back to existence. But culture, let’s call it a qualified yes, as long as we learn how the concept has been abused in the past before applying it. The second warning is that this post will spoil the hell out of Andor. Spoilers for the rest of Star Wars canon may occur spontaneously and without instruction.

Silencing histories

The Jedi: good with a sword, terrible with a library

The Star Wars galaxy is positively littered with the remnants of forgotten peoples. Even Jedi temples are seen as disposable relics of the past, and in recent shows like The Mandalorian, you can just about guarantee that anytime you see some kind of Spacehenge, it’s about to get destroyed or at least blasted full of holes.

Proof there was once a Mandalorian heritage officer (source)

The Ahsoka series was particularly disrespectful to its material heritage. One could be forgiven for thinking there is no such thing as an archaeologist, let alone a sort of Galactic UNESCO (the single heritage plaque in Mando season 3 notwithstanding). As always in such matters, Prof Howard 'Archaeodeath' Williams said it best here. In a superb rundown of the archaeology of the Ahsoka series,

“...the Star Wars universe is both saturated in pastness but also bears an uncanny amnesia. By this I mean that, despite advanced technological recording systems and rapid communication via hyper space, we encounter a galaxy of near-complete ignorance almost akin to a collective forgetting regarding the millennia of history and prehistory encountered, even when regarding vast past civilizations and empires with surviving descendants…This is a stark admission of collective amnesia running through the Star Wars galaxy which is never fully explained”

Andor managed to pack its short two seasons full of erased histories, and histories in the process of being erased. In a flashback sequence in season 1, we see Cassian Andor’s childhood on Kenari, a planet so catastrophically gutted by Imperial mining its last inhabitants appear to be a group of orphaned children. Cassian's futile attempts to find his sister became theory-fodder for fans, but ultimately served to remind us that he was probably the last of his people, and couldn't even dare tell anyone of his real origins lest he give himself away. First the Empire destroyed his home, and then it made him erase his own heritage to survive.

Later in the season, we watch the Empire actively disrupting the most sacred rituals of the Dhani by their deliberate displacement, another tried and true colonial strategy. It invokes the Highland Clearances of Scotland, an analogy that hits harder for being filmed in the actual Scottish highlands. The Rebellion eventually establishes its headquarters in the ruins of another lost people, an abandoned temple complex on Yavin as covered in our Handy Guide to the Archaeology of Rogue One. The first season was spent lovingly fleshing out the traditions and built heritage of Ferrix, a sparsely populated industrial outpost in the Outer Rim. Notably, it is only in the face of Imperial attempts to silence and oppress this community that the Rebellion was truly born.

Chandrilan monuments: still notably not destroyed (source)

Season 2 doubles down on the theme of cultural erasure to the point that it becomes the moral backbone of the show. The three-episode arc centred on the wealthy Imperial collaborators on Chandrila luxuriates in this planet's traditions, showing how keen they are to continue ancient ceremonies and protect their heritage, in complete contrast to the tragedy of Ghorman that would soon follow. In a series full of indelible moments, the way the ghostly voices of the Ghor haunt the last episodes of the series will be what sticks with me the most. 'We are the Ghor' and 'The Galaxy is watching' were just some of the chants frequently adopted in real-life protests in 2025.

Luthen Rael emerges from this show as the hidden force behind the Rebellion. While Andor is the titular character, it is Luthen who puts him, and so much else, in position. Despite being set in the run-up to Star Wars (1977), this is the first time we are hearing of this character: to get to his position, Luthen had to ‘burn his life’ for the cause, cutting off all ties to devote himself only to his goal of stopping the Empire. His biography erased, he was free to make one up for himself. Luthen’s story of the Devaron blue necklace becomes more relevant, and to drive the point home, he is draped in royal blue in this scene. He can relate.

Toward the end of season 2, we finally get Luthen’s backstory in the form of flashbacks. He formerly went by Sergeant Lear, until the Imperial army finally asked too much of him. Hiding from the screams of the massacre he had been ordered to carry out, spattered in blood that does not appear to be his own, he discovers a child who had crawled into his transport for safety. This is how he first met Kleya, and these flashbacks are her memories. In order to ‘make it stop’, as he wails repeatedly, Sargent Lear defects and makes the choice to protect the child instead. Now, in the present day where the war has finally caught up with them, Kleya is readying herself by going through the earliest lessons he taught her. One of them is about making a choice, a recurring theme of the series, as the Empire's modus operandi is so often about removing this ability.

In the next flashback, they are on the run, and to fund their next move, they sell an object to a dealer in the woods. The child’s quick thinking and improvised backstory helps seal the deal, showing she will be useful to have around. When they leave the deal, he decides “We’ll be whoever we have to. It won't always be up to us…I’m Luthen now, you’re Kleya.”

It is not explained how Lear/Rael got hold of this valuable artefact in the first place, nor is it identified. But its value is mostly as bullion, as Luthen claims it is a ‘pure kilo’ of unspecified material. Even in what appears to be wartime, and out in the woods, there are several potential buyers: the informal economy is booming.

This situation recalls the very real-world tragedy of looting of historical sites and museums in the aftermath of war. A study in 2008 showed how the rates of ‘subsistence looting’ in Palestine, where victims of war eke out a living by selling ancient artefacts, matches the rates of unemployment and displacement.

“They sell finds to middlemen, who resell the goods to licensed dealers in major cities like Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa at a healthy markup. It is usually those middlemen and dealers who retain the lion's share of the profits…consumers are the main contributors to this destructive phenomenon. They encourage looting by creating a market demand for antiquities, and are therefore as guilty, if not more so, as the looters themselves.” (Yahya 2008)

The next flashback shows how Luthen taught Kleya to always wait for the opportune moment to strike, instead of throwing away her shot. Notably, in this memory, they are in the middle of another sale. This time, they are negotiating the price of something Luthen calls a Devaronian victory necklace with someone described as a ‘collector’. This is the second appearance of a Devaronian necklace in the series, the first being in the scene quoted at the beginning of this post. There are no other mentions of Devaron in the show, so I have to believe we were meant to connect these two scenes.

The link, perhaps, is not the objects themselves, but what they mean for Kleya. The Devaronian necklace stands for the pastless anywhere, those uprooted by conflict, displaced by war, fleeing from a home that has become a threat to, rather than a source of, life. Luthen was draped in blue when he described the first Devaronian necklace we see, its history rewritten, just like his. Kleya can also relate. In this flashback, she is the one wearing blue.

Kleya in blue (image: Lucasfilm)

Kleya is connecting all these lessons from Luthen. “We fight to win,” he explains. “That means we lose. And lose and lose and lose, until we’re ready. All you know now is how much you hate. You bank that, you hide that. You keep it alive until you know what to do with it.” That is exactly what she is about to do.

From Luthen to the Louvre

The question that has stuck with me, even months after this perfect show ended, is the source of all these antiquities in a Galaxy far, far away. On the one hand, the saga at the heart of all this is about the various Wars which took place in the Stars, including the Galactic Civil War and Clone Wars of the prequels, the Rebellion against the Empire in the main timeline including this show, and the less-than-peaceful aftermath of the death(?) of Emperor Palpatine, as explored in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka and the sequel trilogy. As we have already seen, in times of war, heritage is routinely at risk.

Kleya handling the Tinian Codex (source)

And it seems like there's no safe haven for antiquities to go when war comes to town. We only get the most fleeting hint of a rumour of an actual museum in this series. In episode 6, when Kleya is busy trying to extract the bug from the Tinian Codex, I noticed a hint dropped in the subtitles during a re-watch for this post. Slimy Chandrilan gangster Davo Sculdun is leading a tour of his private gallery of looted antiquities. We see him tell the story of the ‘tairn’ from the Carmeenian Forest, one of three in existence. Then at 37:05, the subtitles transcribe the chatter in the background, with Sculdun bragging, “This piece will eventually, as my greed subsides, join its sisters in the Hall of History. We’ll make an event of it”. I can’t find any other references to this ‘Hall of History’ anywhere, but I suppose it hints at a Galactic Museum somewhere, presumably on Coruscant, for which Sculdun one day expects to be lauded as a famous donor.

Anyway, the Battle of Carmeen then becomes a big, revealing fight between Krennic and Mon Mothma, as they debate the Imperial reinterpretation of history, prompted by Sculdun’s collection of Carmeenian artefacts. Luthen’s fun sales pitch on the Devaron blue necklace now takes on an even darker hue: if anyone can rewrite a culture's past, so can the Empire.

Sculdun is also trying to write himself into the famous battles of Galactic history, perhaps by getting a wing in the Hall of History named after him. But the whole instigating incident to this scene is that Sculdun’s got dodgy antiquities, and at least one item in his collection has been identified as a forgery, so he’s getting the whole gallery reappraised. This reveals that he is not above shady dealers, traffickers and looters, if they get him the items he wants to cherry-pick from great battles and ancient kingdoms. It is endemic to the community of private collectors and prominent museum donors, who are rarely caught out. And as we've seen already, there are always dealers ready to capitalise on the desperation caused by war.

Sculdun's antiquities were likely pillaged in a similar way, even if Luthen maintains his gallery is largely free of such dodgy objects. But how did he start down this road? Is it possible Luthen picked up his Devaronian and other treasures while “following orders” for the Empire? Modern museums are filled with trophies plundered under colonial invasions, another tragically familiar tale.

And this is how Andor unexpectedly helps explain one of the biggest news stories of 2025: the Louvre Museum heist of 19 October. Andor routinely captured the political zeitgeist, even seeming to track the events of 2025 as it happened. But over the long term, I think Andor’s theme of cultural erasure as a tool of authoritarianism is the one that will outlast this moment. This will be the subject of part two of this post.

***

Luthen will return in Part Two of this post.

Featured image source: starwars.com

Follow: @AlmostArch and @archaeonado.

[almostarchaeology]

The next level of videogame museums: OXO Madrid

By Adrián Maldonado

I recently happened upon a brand new videogame museum on a recent holiday to Spain. Like a glint of gold in river gravel, it popped up in the corner of my map app as I searched for the nearest supermarket. It just so happened that it was two blocks away from our piso in central Madrid. Cosmic! Destiny! I went immediately!

I have written about videogames in museums, and videogame museums, several times on this blog, and featured still more guest posts about them. Looking back now, it’s dawned on me that the period covered by this blog, from 2014 onward, actually captures the mainstreaming of videogame museums around the world. Before this, there had been a few notable gaming exhibitions but very few dedicated museums, or videogame displays within larger museums. One of the first blogs I wrote was what I thought was a pretty radical idea back then: 5 museums displaying a Nintendo Game Boy.

Radical: display of handheld videogame consoles at OXO Madrid

Then, in the 2010s, videogame museums started opening around the world – there’s probably one near you by now. It’s no longer a legend, but legit global heritage – and true archaeology.

OXO Madrid opened to the public in December 2024, just two months before my visit. The reason for this particular report is twofold: first, I’m just excited to tell everyone to go to OXO Madrid. And second, there’s a few aspects of this gallery which respond to the criticisms of videogame museum displays made on this blog over the years. It felt pleasingly validating, and I basically just wanted share my smugness with you.

The playable past

Subversive: a playable Tennis for Two (1958) at OXO Madrid

The OXO Madrid is three floors of wonders, including an outstanding permanent display which covers the traditional timeline of videogame history with an impressive amount of playable original devices.

So far, so familiar. The basic minimum offering of playable historic games is what you’d expect of any videogame museum. The measure of a great display is the level of commitment to original hardware and interfaces, matched with historical context. OXO Madrid’s permanent display starts with a playable Tennis for Two, one of the first videogames from 1958, recreated with an actual oscilloscope of a kind you’ve only seen in old movies about submarines. You’re immediately in a 1950s computer lab – decades before anyone dreamed of Pac-Man. Even though this is a recreation, the hardware it uses is real, and it feels borderline subversive being allowed to play with it.

In fact, the thing I now look forward to the most in videogame museums is no longer the games I remember playing as a kid, but those that came from the foreign country that is everything before 1987 when the Nintendo Entertainment System first arrived in my childhood living room.

Like lasers shooting straight into your eyes: the Vectrex

Call me a geek, but damn, I love a good vector monitor. I first experienced the Vectrex in a museum exhibition in 2015, and I still can’t get over how different it looks and feels from any other display: like lasers shooting straight into your eyes, but in a rad 80s kind of way. The monitor is also weirdly portrait rather than landscape in orientation, and the whole thing just feels like you’re in a sci-fi b-movie. Ditto for any game controlled by a trackball rather than a joystick – sometimes it’s the dead-ends of history that tell you the most about how we got here.

War against time

When it comes to the games I did grow up playing, I’m always impressed when museums display them on period-accurate CRT TVs. The bar of difficulty for the curators is much higher, when you think about how they managed to track down the terrible TVs of the late 20th century. Maintaining old games is one thing; finding the expertise in repairing the much less collectible televisions of the 90s is going to war with the culture of planned obsolescence itself.

And even though the curator in me feels really selfish in saying this, one of the things I’ve enjoyed most in a game museum is the ability to work an old console. For someone as ancient as me, it’s nostalgia in the form of muscle memory, the rousing of parts of the brain we never have to use anymore. In a visit to a gaming exhibition in 2017:

At one point I was able to play technician: I was able to revive a blank TV screen by switching it to channel 3. I felt like a wise elder. …In what other museum exhibition are you allowed to handle, let alone grab and generally get all up in, the archaeology? What better way to learn than by playing?

Nostalgia in the form of muscle memory

At the OXO, the consoles and controllers were all there to be played. I was able to show my kids how to correctly load an NES cartridge (resisting the urge to blow into it), to feel that clunk when it engages, and then pressing the big fat POWER button that portals you into a different universe. They thought it was all suitably foreign and weird – mission accomplished.

Timey-wimey stuff

Now that ‘retro’ games are easily emulated for play on contemporary devices and playable online, there is less need than ever to visit a museum just to play old games. A videogame museum needs to offer more than just the experience of play, but the experience of time.

The experience of time

This is where videogames and archaeology cross over for me. The best archaeological exhibitions are those that can make you feel time. To do so, a museum needs to do more than just show you old things, or try to transport you to a past era. It should jar you into the realization that you exist in time, and see your present (and ideally, your future) with fresh eyes.

Videogame museums usually begin with a console timeline – often with lifeless console chassis pinned onto a line or family tree, like an old-school natural history display of evolution. A decade ago, I had just read Raiford Guins’ Game After, and it coloured everything I wrote about games as material culture, like this response to a (since redesigned) museum gallery:

The physical game cartridge, packaging and console were displayed as disarticulated taxidermy. The package was emptied of its instruction manual, cartridge sleeve and industrial inserts of health warnings and licensing. The console was displayed disconcertingly mid-coitus, with cartridge preloaded but with game controller inputs left bare and no tangle of power and RF cables visible. All was presented in a black box behind glass in an uncanny diorama of your childhood.

Following the language of media archaeology on videogames, I once ranted:

The field of videogame history...is still focused on chronicling technological changes on a timeline of consoles. [...] All these stories deserve telling, but they don’t explain why people love these games and define their identity based on their choice of console growing up…videogames don’t only have a history, they also have a prehistory that needs to be explored…The point is not merely to hoard and present ‘dead’ media in museums. It is precisely the opposite – the mission here is to bring these pasts to life.”

Cultural detritus

The OXO answers these critiques, and goes further than I thought possible. Gaming history is more than just about the game. It includes a whole ecosystem of stuff – ephemeral, plastic garbage that no-one in their right mind would still have after all these years. And yet here it is: original packaging, weird peripherals, trashy marketing material, cash-grab magazines, and everything that localises and grounds past gaming in all its tasteless, late capitalist context. The sheer scale and depth of the cultural detritus that has somehow cheated the landfill was astonishing. But you can’t understand the culture of gaming without it.

Nintendo begins

For me as a Nintendo loyalist (having stopped at cartridge-based games), it was mind-blowing to learn the deep history of the Nintendo company on display at the OXO. I don’t just mean the old Japanese card games that the company started off with in 1889, but the home gaming consoles they zagged onto in 1977. I was amused to find that, like all great innovators, Nintendo started by ripping off the competition with another Pong clone. Their next key innovation was releasing two nearly identical versions, the Color TV Game 6 and 15, one just slightly more ‘premium’ than the other.

Amen: the Street Fighter 2 display/shrine

The OXO also pulls out some really cool and creative themes within its broadly chronological display. For me, the one that hit the hardest was their Street Fighter 2 cabinet, which I’ve name-checked three separate times on this blog since it is clearly a key turning point in gaming history. The OXO is the first display ever to do it justice. The cabinet (a Turbo Street Fighter II: Champion Edition) is displayed with ample gathering space around it, and its iconic logo graduated to a huge glowing neon sign above, like a sacred shrine in a Las Vegas casino. On the label are portraits of the 12 original fighters, a litany of the apostles. And above it, the holy pedigree: a timeline of the (mostly forgotten) fighter games going back to 1976’s Heavyweight Champ, ending with the natural culmination of the genre in Super Smash Bros. Amen.

There were plenty of other highlights to the OXO permanent display: the recreated desktop PC setup running Doom (1993), complete with external speakers, blocky VGA monitor, cables fucking everywhere; playable dead-ends of gaming history like the Nintendo Virtual Boy, and the truly how-is-this-still-here display of Macromedia Flash internet games, and how they led to mobile games today. This place has done its homework.

Worlds left to conquer

It’s obvious that the OXO Madrid is a recommendation from me. But there are still worlds left to conquer.

Going home from that particular trip to Spain, I looked up the OXO and discovered it was the second branch of a museum, the OXO Málaga, which opened in 2023 and has since become its second-most visited museum after Museo Picasso. Both are named after the pioneering digital tic-tac-toe game made in 1952. They are not the first videogame museums in Spain – that accolade goes to Arcade Vintage, now Museo del Videojuego, in Ibi (Alicante), in a town apparently famous for its role in the toy industry. The museum team have been called “arqueólogos de la diversión, los guardianes de la galaxia cultural” (archaeologists of entertainment, guardians of a cultural galaxy), and there’s now a documentary called Arcadeología about their adventures tracking down original cabinets.

One thing I wanted more of was a sense of gaming culture specific to Spain. The closest I saw was in the temporary exhibition marking 30 years of Playstation. It is here that we hear from the museum director personally, who introduces Spanish slang around ‘la Play’. Somehow this most global of game consoles – the distribution of Nintento and Sega consoles before this being much more regional – has succeeded in becoming ‘local’ everywhere through the communities it has created.

"Tapes were the worst medium": the ZX Spectrum

The original OXO Málaga apparently has more in this regard. It includes an ‘altar’ and a recent exhibition all about the Spanish software company Dinamic which operated from 1984-1992. They were at the forefront of the Golden Age of Spanish Software, from 1983, where Spain was second only to the UK in terms of game production. This is hugely fascinating to me, as it is a world of cassette-based games for systems by Spectrum and Amstrad that never really hit in the United States, but were monumental in Europe. There is now a comprehensive podcast, and accompanying 2-volume book, entitled Cinco Duros: La Historia Del Videojuego En España which is a superb oral history of a whole subculture of games I never would have heard of otherwise.

In a previous post on what an archaeology of videogames might look like, I mused about how to capture these regional stories within a global narrative, because my own interest to that point was largely based on nostalgia – on how little was left of the videogaming culture I grew up with. The OXO Madrid – and the other Spanish museums I’ve yet to visit – are providing that context, while sacrificing none of the fun, and inviting into the display what had previously been a missing part of the puzzle: the players themselves.

***

Featured image by me

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‘The riddle of the past’: on Tolkien’s archaeological trail

By Adrián Maldonado

When I was a teenager reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, a weird thing started happening. Whenever I had to walk any distance, I began to imagine I was embarking upon a great journey across Middle-earth. I remember when sitting around waiting for the bus one rainy afternoon, I saw a clump of bushes with a trickle of water streaming out to the gutter, and I thought, that looks exactly like the map of Fangorn and the Entwash.

I wish I could say then I got on the bus, realized I was being a dork and grew out of it. With apologies to Childish Gambino, I never got off that bus. I still haven’t. 

A lifetime later, I realize I’m not alone in looking for Middle-earth everywhere. It’s not hard to find a ‘Tolkien Trail’ of some description near you, wherever you live. There’s a wild one that starts in Lancashire, where Tolkien spent a month once, and ends up in New Zealand by way of Tenerife. I’m surprised they didn’t include the North Pole, which Tolkien at least wrote stories about. 

The North Pole: not on the Tolkien trail yet (source)

But I’m here to say I don’t blame anyone for flying kites about exactly which places they think inspired JRR Tolkien. Comparing someplace to The Shire is a proven strategy of getting me to go there. Just don’t expect me to believe that Tolkien really, truly based this or that chapter on your favourite country lane. The gravy train of finding Tolkien's influences very easily goes off the rails.  

That’s why one of the most-used books on my Tolkien shelves is John Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020). After writing one of the best biographies of Tolkien, Garth has combed through the whole legendarium and then some, diving into the unpublished archive to put forward the most definitive cases for (and sometimes against) the places that really inspired Middle-earth.

New job title: auteur du blog

Recently, I had the life-changing opportunity to visit some of the real-world archaeological (and geological) inspirations as part of a new documentary film (now streaming, only in Europe so far). First of all, I agree with you, it is bonkers that I got this opportunity, and you can tell from the dumb grin on my face at every stop that I’m having the time of my life. But more importantly, going to see these places for myself, to vibe not just with the ancient past but with Tolkien’s imagination itself, reopened some questions for me. Spoiler: the questions are about archaeology.  

Previously on Almost Archaeology 

A blogging resumé for anyone new here: a decade ago in some of the earliest posts on this page, I jokingly referred to Gandalf as an ‘almost archaeologist’ for the research that first led him to correctly identify Bilbo’s magic ring. While working on a follow-up about Saruman, I uncovered some shocking evidence that ol' Sharkey had actually carried out legit fieldwork long before Gandalf stumbled into the library of Gondor.  

Can we burn candles any closer to the ancient scrolls (source)

This productive period of avoiding essay-marking coincided with the release of the (mostly tragic) Hobbit film trilogy, and I had a great time cataloguing the archaeological themes in a trilogy of posts.  

Throughout all this happy procrastination, it slowly dawned on me that Tolkien and other early fantasy writers were busy inventing new approaches to worldbuilding just as archaeologists like V. Gordon Childe were writing their own sweeping European prehistories. Studying Tolkien is actually helping me study archaeology. But can the study of archaeology help us understand Tolkien? 

Chasing Tolkien 

Tolkien fans have always been fascinated by the hints of the real-world sites, texts and ideas he used as inspiration, just as he always bristled at their attempts to pin him down. But I think the search encourages close reading and travel, surely no bad thing overall.

Pub pilgrimage (source)

Most Tolkien fans, if given the chance, will try and visit Oxford some time in their life, maybe have a pint at the Eagle and Child if at all possible. For us it is more than fandom, but a pilgrimage, an act of paying respect, bearing witness, and maybe also, in some ineffable way, entering the story. Searching for his real-world inspirations is no less valid than literary scholars scouring his writings for allusions to ancient texts and medieval poetry. We don’t realize we’re doing it, but collectively, Tolkien scholars and fans alike are building a new canon: the definitive set of works, things and places which provide prophetic insight into the legendarium, a sort of Tolkien Old Testament, works that, if studied and pondered, may lead to a greater understanding of the ‘sacred’ texts.

But this is, by and large, a literary pursuit. How does Garth’s Worlds of Tolkien, dealing in earthly locales, fit in with this project? It presents the authoritative argument for the way that Tolkien’s travels in the material world shaped his vision of a mythical past as much as ancient texts. It shows that inspiration is only very rarely one-to-one, but a layering of experiences, including of real-world objects and places. There’s even a chapter specifically about archaeological inspirations, but Garth, as much as I idolise him, is not an archaeologist, and there's more to build on here. As Dimitra Fimi’s work has shown, and I explored in my worldbuilding post, there is still plenty to excavate from Tolkien’s relationship to the discipline of archaeology, as both were in their formative years at the start of the last century.  

The 'Dragon Hill' beneath the Uffington White Horse (own work)

One example is the fortress of Amon Sûl or Weathertop. Garth explores the possible inspiration for this particular place at the Dragon Hill ‘fort’ beneath the Uffington White Horse which he certainly visited many times. This was a bit of a reach for me, and now having been there, I am less convinced. While the site is certainly striking, it does not dominate the horizon the way I imagine Weathertop, as White Horse Hill looms right behind it. Nor does it have the look of an old, ruined castle. If anything, the older and bigger Uffington Castle, the Iron Age hillfort soaring above them both, would be a better candidate, but neither ring true for me.

Not to worry though, because this is ironically where Garth’s book shines. One of the things it does best is showing how it doesn’t really matter that there is not a one-to-one connection between places Tolkien visited and locations in Middle-earth. 

In the ‘Ancient Imprints’ chapter, and in an appendix dismissing any connections to the Vyne Ring, Garth discusses the relationship between Tolkien and the prominent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Sure, Tolkien famously wrote a note on the god Nodens for the Wheelers' excavations at Lydney, Gloucestershire, but it is not clear that they ever met, much less that Tolkien ever visited the site. (It remains very cool that the site was known as the ‘Dwarf’s Hill’ and had Roman-era mine tunnels, but still.)

Action-packed archaeology: Sir Mortimer Wheeler (source)

Garth discusses the popular, action-packed accounts that Wheeler published in British newspapers during his excavations at Maiden Castle, Dorset Iron Age hillfort in the 1930s. It is one thing to assume Tolkien ‘must have’ read these, but Garth has the receipts (140, n. 35). He uses this to connect the Maiden Castle burial pits to the Barrow-wights, but to me, Maiden Castle, with its tales of monumental but forgotten wars, is probably more relevant to Tolkien's description of Weathertop, even if they look nothing alike. (Actually, if you really asked me, I’d say there’s nothing more Weathertop-y than Castell Dinas Brân in North Wales, even if there’s nothing connecting it with Tolkien I know of.)

Weathertop is best explained as a mix of different touchpoints ranging from Iron Age forts to medieval castles that would have bumped around in Tolkien's mind as he wrote. But if you asked him directly, he would surely dissemble – would he even be able to isolate these diffuse inspirations himself if asked?  

Another important lesson from Garth’s book is that the stories grew in the telling. The way Tolkien understood Middle-earth at the outset of the Lord of the Rings writing process in 1938 changed dramatically by the time of its publication in 1954. Sticking with the example of Weathertop, Garth shows how this changed from the largely atmospheric, anonymous ‘old castles with an evil look’ seen by Bilbo in The Hobbit, to the very specific Second-Age stronghold of Amon Sûl as described by Aragorn (FotR 1, ch 9). 

Tolkien’s archaeological travels

It was with Garth’s book in hand that the film crew for Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings came up with a list of key places in England, France and Switzerland to visit, and Garth is of course a prominent voice in the final film. I’m more in the role of audience surrogate, tagging along for the England leg of the journey, and I can tell you, it was a life-changer. We went to some of the places with the clearest analogues in the books, places where you can pretty much read a description on a single page, look up and see what he’s describing.  

But only very few of these did Tolkien ever explicitly acknowledge. For instance, after the Battle of the Hornburg, Gimli describes in poetic detail the Glittering Caves (or Aglarond) he saw beneath Helm’s Deep.  

Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance! (TT 3, ch 8)

Tolkien’s letter 321 confirms it was the caves of Cheddar Gorge he was describing, which he had visited several times, including a heavily-freighted moment, while on honeymoon with Edith in the spring of 1916 – mere months before he marched to the Battle of the Somme. 

Caves, they say! Cox's Cave, Cheddar (own work)

In most other places, the influence is not so direct. The joy of visiting these is to commune with past visitors, up to and including Tolkien, to try and feel what they felt. More often than not, that feeling is not about what you can see, but what you cannot. Visiting ancient monuments is the search for the uncanny, of seeing and touching something that has cheated time by surviving this long, and equally ruminating on how much has been lost to time’s bastard axe. For some, reflecting on past lives can create a sincere yearning to fill in those gaps by any means necessary – by consulting the archives where they exist, or by archaeological investigation where they don’t. 

Wayland's Smithy, Oxfordshire (own work)

This is kind of how Tolkien felt when he read ancient poetry – it was a single enigmatic mention of ‘Éarendel’ in an Old English poem that arguably sparked the entire legendarium. But it is less well-appreciated that he got this feeling from places with evocative names and legends attached to them. Dimitra Fimi, also featured prominently in the documentary, has spotted this in Tolkien’s early academic works. In a brief stint as reviewer for scholarly journal The Year's Work in English Studies, we can see how the layering of languages in place-names fired his yearning for the ancient past. He ends his 1926 review with the potential for an “alliance of Philologia and Archaeologia.” He connects the discovery of Roman mosaics at Fawler, Oxfordshire with the origins of its place-name in the Old English fāg flōr, tessellated floor, meaning early English speakers came to this ruined villa and were struck by its multi-coloured pavement. This example immediately rung bells in his mind, as the poem Beowulf uses the phrase on fāgne flōr to describe the pavement of the mead-hall of Heorot. Tolkien would later go on to describe the king’s hall of Meduseld at Edoras as having a floor “paved with stones of many hues” (TT 3, ch. 6), creatively marrying archaeological and linguistic inspirations with allusions to medieval literature. 

The Rollright Stones, Cotswolds (own work)

The ancient monuments we visited for the film, including the Rollright Stones and Wayland’s Smithy, fascinated Tolkien not just because they were ancient remnants, but also because they had acquired names and legends thousands of years after they were built. The names we still use for them derive from the early medieval period, when people reimagined them in the same way as they coined the name Fawler. Maybe he wasn’t an archaeologist, but Tolkien was able to excavate these layers of meaning from a variety of source materials from Old English literature to place-names. Tolkien's Hobbits, he imagined, were something like the Anglo-Saxons, enchanted by the spirits that still inhabited these ancient megaliths. 

Tolkien the Professor 

But Tolkien was not content merely to leave us wondering about these ancient monuments. A big reason for writing the Ring cycle was the chance to explore – even excavate? – in the world he had conjured to life. In a brilliant article on the archaeology of Tolkien’s world, Deborah Sabo showed how “encounters with ruins—or, to choose a more inclusive term, archaeological places—contribute to the successful evocation of a sense of history in Middle-earth” (2007, 91). The Hobbits stand in for the readers, being taken on a walking tour of Middle-earth. When Bilbo and his Party find ancient swords in the Trollshaws, they go ask Elrond how old they are and who made them, and we get our first glimpses of the antiquity of these lands. Years later when Frodo and his party find themselves at one of Bilbo’s ‘old castles’, Aragorn is there to expound on its historical significance.  

We are conditioned to expect that Middle-earth has an epic history, but one that is precariously on the edge of being forgotten. This is not dissimilar to the rural England of Tolkien’s youth, with the search for British prehistory a very recent development at that point. But he was on a different kind of mission. His interest in place-names as artefacts all added to what he called in his 1926 review “the allurement of the riddle of the past” and this work as “the recapturing of fitful and tantalizing glimpses in the dark” (65). As Sabo points out, in LotR,

almost every encounter with an archaeological place springs a mnemonic trigger that brings to some character's mind a connection to the past, and a context for learning, either a deepening sense of his own heritage and identity, or sympathy for that of another…encounters with ruins and archaeological places in The Lord of the Rings always lead to personal growth. (2007, 108-9) 

It is striking to go back to the big book of Tolkien’s Letters with this in mind. One of the earliest (number 7) is the cover letter he wrote to the University of Oxford when he applied to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, at the age of 33. He ends it with his sincere wish to continue “the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young.”  

He of course got the job, and held that professorship for twenty years. But he'd be encouraging the youth for generations to come.

It is then no surprise the Tolkien readers are all susceptible to seeing Middle-earth everywhere. Tolkien himself trained us to peel back the layers of stories we love, and ground ourselves with roots in our own epic pasts, wherever we are. 

And some of us grow up to be archaeologists. 

***

Featured image by me

Watch Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings on Arte.tv

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[almostarchaeology]

The Brooch of the Dragon

By Adrián Maldonado

The gift and the curse of being a medievalist is that watching fantasy fiction adaptations can feel a bit like taking your job home with you. You’re still able to be a fan, but you’re also hyper-aware of the real-world inspirations for settings, props and storylines. You’re at an elevated risk of taking to social media and posting about it. 

Despite being set in the ancient past of Westeros, I never really get the sense of HBO’s House of the Dragon series as a particularly archaeological story. Sure, there’s occasional ruins like Harrenhal, and some ancient artefacts, but otherwise there’s very little of that sense of the past irrupting into the present that we associate with archaeology.  

But then in Season 2, right from the first episode, one aspect of HotD jumped out to me, and it seems like it was just me. There was a real, shocking intrusion of real-world archaeology into this fictional past.

A shocking intrusion (source)

Episode 1 opens up north at the Wall, where two of the realm’s young lords, Cregan Stark and Jacaerys Velaryon, inspect the Night’s Watch. Cregan’s costume and accent ring all sorts of nostalgia bells for fans of the antecedent Game of Thrones series. Jacaerys (or Jace for short) is less awesomely attired, but his woolly black cloak is pinned across his chest with a striking ring-shaped brooch.  

And I thought, hey, I know you.  

Since last I wrote on these pages, I have become a museum nerd, and have written a book on Viking Age artefacts in Scotland. This involved poring over museum catalogues and excavation reports to become fluent in the visual language of early medieval Europe. There’s lots of ways to be an archaeologist, as covered in nerdy detail on these pages, but dammit, nothing beats the thrill of studying an artefact made, worn and loved a thousand years ago.  

And every once in a great while, you get artefacts that reach out from beyond their museum cases and sneak into the zeitgeist. The Lewis Chessmen pop up in Hogwarts; the Sutton Hoo helmet gets everywhere. But I’m declaring the 2020s the age of the pop culture penannular brooch.  

Introducing the penannular brooch 

Aldclune, Perthshire penannular brooch, National Museums Scotland

Back in the first millennium AD, in the lands which would become Scotland, Ireland and Wales, anyone who was anyone wore a brooch in the shape of an open ring, fitted with a loose pin which speared through the cloth. Twist the hoop, and the pin anchors the fabric in place: a simple but ingenious way of fastening a cloak.  

I often see these described as ‘Celtic’ brooches, but in the world of costume jewellery, it seems you can call anything ‘Celtic’ as long as you throw some interlace or knotwork decoration on it. We’re better off calling them by their name: penannular brooches, defined by hoops with a gap, hence pen-, or almost, annular. 

In Roman and Iron Age Britain, these were mainly small and utilitarian [Editor's note: after this was posted, I spotted a Roman penannular brooch as worn by General Acacius, as played by Pedro Pascal, in Gladiator II], but by the early medieval period (c AD 400-1100), penannular brooches had grown into big silver jobs with enlarged and ornate terminals. A cloak pinned with one these bad boys was the business suit of its day, with the slight difference that instead of just buying one, you had to earn it, and only a restricted few had access to the best craftspeople. The moulds for casting these metal brooches are found almost exclusively at royal fortresses. 

These brooches remained fashionable for centuries, evolving all along the way. One of the most dramatic left-turns in the penannular brooch journey came at the start of the Viking Age. In Scandinavia, the most elaborate brooches had mainly been for women. But when Scandinavians came raiding to the Insular world of Britain and Ireland, they saw both men and women wearing these distinctive ring-shaped brooches, and they wanted them. Bad.  

Ball-type silver brooch from the Skaill Hoard, Orkney, National Museums Scotland

The result is that the archaeological record for these centuries is suddenly awash with brooches: looted brooches found in viking graves, as well as hoards of brooches stashed away so vikings wouldn’t get them. By the end of the ninth century, new kinds of penannular brooches began to be made in Scandinavia. This new generation of Insular-Scandinavian brooches grew larger, sometimes to ludicrous sizes, to suit the lavish taste of these new-money overlords.  

And then, a thousand years later, after a long day of not finishing papers about brooches that I’m terribly late on, I sit down on the couch to chill with some HotD, and out pops Jacaerys, wearing my homework across his chest. 

Casting fantasy jewellery 

Superman Targaryen (source)

It was a few years ago I started noticing the return of penannular brooches to a wider consciousness mainly through the fantasy genre. My nerdier friends were chatting about the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher. I didn’t know anything about the books, I just knew the lead guy was the actor then playing Superman in films which I also didn’t care for, but now with a long platinum wig that made him look like the Vampire Lestat on a high-protein diet.  

Despite having no knowledge or interest in the series, my eye caught on a weird feature of Lead Guy’s sword. Why did Superman Targaryen have what looked for all the world like the 9th-century Snåsa brooch glued to his sword hilt?  

Insular brooch from Snåsa, Nord-Trøndelag, Oslo Kulturhistorisk Museum

Apparently, the script called for Medieval Point Break to carry the brooch of someone he kills in the first episode (I couldn’t be bothered getting into it, but I think there’s answers here). The prop department chose a real archaeological artefact, a ‘Celtic’ brooch from a Viking woman’s grave in Norway, to play the part of a medieval-ish fantasy-looking jewel. Which is odd because the big, yellow brooch makes it look like he’s got a big smiley emoji following him around. But hey, it made me look. 

The thing about fantasy adaptations is that they have to feel ‘right’, and that usually entails feeling vaguely medieval. So you tell your costume designer to scout for something a bit different – something that will feel medieval but less familiar, even a bit strange. They go to museums and ‘audition’ all sorts of ancient accessories, and it's often the early medieval period that gets the part. Torturing this metaphor then allows me to make a genius pun about ‘casting’ penannular brooches in prestige fantasy adaptations, for which YOU ARE WELCOME. 

The Northman: authenticity Olympics (source)

2022 was basically the penannular brooch singularity. The Viking-age historical fiction film The Northman came out that year, and the press around it was that this was basically the authenticity Olympics, with a tidal wave of interviews on all the research and experts they used to build their period-specific costumes and sets. To my delight, there were tons of penannular brooches to ogle in the film (which is all good until you get to Iceland where they mainly used pins instead of brooches, but I’ll let it go this time).  

Our guy Arondir

Then the streaming wars escalated to the level of Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. In season 1, they introduced us to both Baby Elrond and my guy Arondir wearing ‘Celtic’-inspired penannular brooches, recognizable in form but pleasingly Tolkienesque in design. 

And so we come to HotD. For season 2, new costume designer Caroline McCall dutifully searched for archaeological inspiration.  

“I like costumes to feel like clothes and not costumes that the actors have to wear when they become the characters. So I started looking at ancient civilizations, medieval dress and how the clothes could be constructed so that everything felt real in the time period.” - Caroline McCall

To do so, she visited the British Museum, and came up with objects which combined early medieval “Celtic”, Roman and Viking styles, but still fit in with the kinds of jewellery used in season 1, and the visual world of Westeros as established across 8 seasons of Game of Thrones. Brooches fit the bill, and specifically, penannular ones. One of the first we see in the first episode of season 2 was Jacaerys’s brooch.  

If it was just that one thing, it would hardly be enough to write home about, much less come back and revive this blog for. But then I spotted another, and another. The whole rest of the season, I went all Leo DiCaprio pointing meme as they kept popping up (it’s a sickness). Season 2 of HotD was a brooch bonanza. So to share my trauma with you, here’s my guide to the real-world artefacts they seem to be inspired by. Fair warning – I’m so late in actually writing this that I feel no compunction in sharing spoilers for HotD seasons 1 and 2. 

The Blackwoods and the Brackens 

In HotD season 2, episode three, we are introduced to some new faces who, we quickly gather from context, are members of the feuding houses of Blackwood and Bracken. They wear different colour clothing to help us tell them apart, but, as if to communicate how they are more alike than they are different, the leaders of both parties wear very similar penannular brooches.  

This guy, who the google machine tells me is named Davos Blackwood, wears a silver penannular with elaborate circular terminals, and weirdly, what looks like a bronze pin. I don’t know of any brooches which mix metal components in this way, but silver brooches with disc-shaped terminals are fairly common down to the ninth century. They were particularly popular among the Picts, the real-life ‘kings in the north’ in what would become Scotland. 

Carronbridge, Dumfriesshire penannular brooch, Dumfries Museum

At first glance, it looked like the brooch terminals were perforated, which seemed peculiar, but on closer inspection, it looks like they have empty settings. Well, lots of these brooches in museums also have empty settings, but it’s not on purpose – it’s because they are quite old and the glass, amber or garnet insets have fallen out! 

The Blackwoods’ rivals in this scene are the Brackens, led here by a guy called [checks google] Aeron Bracken, who also wears a penannular brooch. His looks a bit different, though. It appears to be made from a copper-alloy rather than silver, suggesting the Brackens are maybe a rung lower down the social ladder. He wears it slightly differently as well, with the terminals facing in toward his chest rather than straight up. More likely to impale yourself, I might add, which may have historically affected their family’s standing, but I digress. 

Brooch from the St Ninian's Isle, Shetland hoard, National Museums Scotland

Now, this brooch looks rather like some of my absolute favourite Pictish brooches, with confronted animals. Most of these were also made of bronze, but often with an outer layer of gold, silver or even tin to mask their true colour. These were never terribly common, but they were, however, a type that vikings took a shine to, and so from Ireland to Sweden, we start to see lots of pretty awesome takes on penannular brooches with beast heads. 

But for all that, I think the artefacts that the Bracken brooch remind me of most is these ancient Greek ram’s head armlets. They do have examples in the British Museum, too, where we know the inspo came, so for all my digression, this may have been the ultimate inspiration.  

Jace and Baela 

The other most prominent ring-brooches in HotD season 2 are the ones worn by the putative future royal couple, the heirs apparent of Team Black (if they survive the next season), Jacaerys Velaryon and Baela Targaryen. These get a lot of screen time from various angles, so we have a better idea of what these look like (and for the keen-eyed, how they play against different lighting and fabric).  

We have already seen Jace’s brooch, somewhat lost in the black gloom of his northern cloak in episode 1. As the season goes on, we see his outfit and demeanour change from princeling to general, with his brooch becoming ever more prominent, announcing his station almost like a miniature crown.  

Brooch from Høm, Zealand, Copenhagen Nationalmuseet

As Jace’s brooch becomes clearer, we see the hoop is of twisted silver, with what look like dragon-head terminals and a mask at the head of the pin. It’s a mashup of lots of things, but is essentially again a Viking-age take on a penannular brooch. Like the Brackens’ brooch, the hoop ends with confronted heads, but adding a mask at the head of the pin seems to be a Scandinavian Borre-style development. The twisted hoop is drawn from Gotlandic brooches of a similar vintage. All the faceted surfaces allow the light to play across it more dynamically, making it seem to almost move or come alive.  

But then turning to Baela we get a rather different take. She wears a matching padded surcoat to Jace’s but her brooch is clearly different. To start off with, it’s not penannular but annular – a full ring. That means it looks great, but can’t work as a fastener in the same way, as it can’t anchor the cloth with its hoop. This is perhaps why Baela’s is worn with an awesome silver retaining chain, fastened to her belt. 

Tara Brooch, National Museum of Ireland

There are early medieval parallels to the use of a retaining chain. In eighth-century Ireland, there was a fashion for brooches that looked like penannulars, but with such elaborate ornament across the terminals that they were no longer terribly functional without a bit of help; the Tara Brooch is the best example.  

There’s good reasons why Baela’s brooch is different. It expresses continuity with the existing Game of Thrones adaptation's visual language, as her ring brooch with dragons recalls the brooches worn by Danaerys Targaryen and her retinue, Missandei and Grey Worm, towards the end of the series. As arguably the only legitimate heir to the throne between her and cousin Jace, it is fitting to draw a line from Baela to the future queen.  

But all this brings us back to Jace’s brooch which, while functional, actually seems to become less and less practical and more symbolic as the season goes on. Once he acquires his forever outfit of a studded surcoat with fetching red capelet, the brooch worn at the shoulder is no longer actually doing anything. It is pinned onto the cape with its pin pointing down the gap in the terminals, worryingly aimed at his heart. As one Reddit user pointed out, his brooch becomes something rather like the Hand of the King pin (for which, see more below). His brooch, now part of his uniform, is acting like a general’s medals.  

One final interesting point on the brooches of Team Black. By the end of the season, we have recruited a few new team members. At least one of them gains a dragon-brooch, and it is a doozy. It’s an annular dragon similar to Baela’s, but supercharged. New converts are the biggest zealots, and Ulf may be compensating for quite a lot – I guess we’ll find out next season.  

Penannular power: the Hand of the King 

Gathering all of the observations above, then, it seems that Westeros is currently in a historical phase akin to Scotland and Ireland in the Viking Age. Penannular brooches seem to have been widely used, but are now becoming the preserve of regional lords. At the same time, in the halls of power, there are exaggerated versions of penannular brooches being made, but they are less and less functional, and more totemic, retaining the traditional symbolism of power, but worn as medals and badges.  

Hand of the King pin as used in House of the Dragon (source)

There is one last example that convinces me that the use of penannular brooches in HotD is more than just eye candy. It takes a real sickness to even notice this, but there was a subtle change to the design of the iconic pin that the Hand of the King wears in House of the Dragon. In the Game of Thrones series, the pin was a simple hoop and hand, but the subtle redesign for HotD made me do a spit-take.  

Penannular brooch from Ireland, Walters Art Museum

The design is obvious to anyone who has spent too long looking at museum catalogues: the hand is now encircled by the early Irish bronze penannular brooch from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

If we assume that penannular brooches ‘evolved’ in a similar way in Westeros as they did in Britain and Ireland, the kind of brooch used on the Hand pin would be an antique – the Walters Museum brooch is a classic Kilbride-Jones “group C” of the sixth or seventh century, or some 200-300 years older than the Pictish examples highlighted above.

I love the HotD Hand of the King pin as the apotheosis of the penannular brooch in Westeros. While there still are apparently lots of them out there among the petty kingdoms of the Riverlands, among the halls of power we see that big silver brooches were already on their way to becoming symbolic, keeping their ring shape only as a nod to the antiquity of the brooch as a badge of power. From the annular brooches of Team Black to the antique brooch depicted on the Hand of the King pin, Season 2 of HotD is a great example of how early medieval material culture actually worked, and continues to work on us now, however imperceptibly, more than a thousand years later.

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[almostarchaeology]

The Moggalithic antiquarian: party political broadcasts from stone circles

By Kenny Brophy (the Urban Prehistorian)

If a poll of Conservative members showed a majority of them were druids, Boris would be straight down to Stonehenge to dance naked for the seasons (Mark Steel, Independent, 28 March 2019)

Stanton Drew’s stone circles may not vibrate as wildly in the English consciousness as their easterly cousins at Stonehenge, however, they remain seriously impressive pieces of Neolithic kit. (Weird Walk, The Face 4.001)

Standing

Jacob Rees-Mogg, standing in the General Election, is standing in front of a standing stone. The parliamentary candidate (and current incumbent) for North East Somerset is asking everyone to vote Conservative in the December 2019 General Election in order to deliver Brexit. He is wearing a double-breasted great coat, almost invisible glasses, and a baby blue rosette the same size as the Nebra Sky Disk.

What was this WTF moment all about?

Was it just an innocent bit of eccentric electioneering fun that just happened to take place with a megalithic backdrop?

Or perhaps the film was an appeal to a certain kind of voter who craves the nostalgic fantasies of the English countryside, windswept standing stones, comical ‘scrumpy and western’ bands like The Wurzels, and Brexit?

Or was this short film altogether something more sinister?

I will ponder awhile on these questions during this post, but the reaction to the video was of even more interest to me.

#BrexitPrehistory

This troubling little video has garnered a good deal of attention. It initially dropped on 2nd December 2019 via Rees-Mogg’s own twitter account (with approximately 369,800 followers on the eve of the General Election ten days later). At the time of writing (13th December 2019) it has been viewed almost three quarter of a million times, and this is only on the Twitter platform.

The film is a particularly egregious example of what I have come to call #BrexitPrehistory (for it was not really about the election, it was about ‘getting Brexit done’) and it indicates the increasingly casual ways that prehistory is being used to make arguments for Brexit by leavers. However, the video also became a focal point for a lot of anti-Brexit (‘remainer’) sentiment, something I would also like to unpick here.

My contention is that we should not be using a prehistoric stone circle to make any kind of points about contemporary political and social challenges although it can be tempting to do so.

Stone circles like Stanton Drew, the one chosen by JRM as his backdrop, are neither leave or remain monuments. Yet, problematically, social media reaction to Rees-Mogg’s piece to camera suggests it might be both.

Petrified

First, let’s consider the video itself. It lasts all of 35 seconds, with a further final five seconds taken up with ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘Conservative Party’ branding.

JRM stands in front of one of the standing stones of Stanton Drew. The megalith is partially obscured by his torso and head, and he speaks while performing some half-hearted hand and body gestures. His stiff delivery style mimics the standing stones behind him, his petrified voters, a captive audience.

He narrates the following election message in his curious posh robot voice:

Adge Cutler sang the famous song: 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew.' 

I'm here by the standing stones in Stanton Drew, thought to be 4,500 years old, some of the most important stones in this country. 

And I want to get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

We must get Brexit done. Only the Conservatives can do that - a majority Conservative Government can get out of the European Union and make Brexit happen by 31st January.

Please vote Conservative and get the Common Market out of Stanton Drew.

This little vignette was based on the title of an Adge Cutler song, performed by his band The Wurzels, on the theme of joining the Common Market and the impact it might have on Stanton Drew, the village (not the adjacent prehistoric monument of the same name). Both just happen to be in Rees-Mogg’s North East Somerset constituency for which he was, at the time, standing for re-election, and has since been re-elected with a decreased share of the vote.

The song, 'When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew', is, depending on your perspective full of outdated, sexist, and racist, sentiments about foreigners and their stereotypical traits. Not to say geographically challenged as to the composition of Europe.

In the evenin' times I s'pose, we'll sip of our vin rose, Just like they do in the Argentine And we'll watch they foreign blokes, with their girt big 'ats and cloaks, Flamingo-in down on the village green. We'll 'ave to watch our wenches when they dark-eyed lads gets here, And the local boys'll 'ave to form a queue, They'll say "Ooh la la, oui oui," instead of "How's bist thee?"

Or as I have also seen it expressed, the song is a rather quaint musing on the exotic effects of becoming more closely integrated with Europe, and is in fact pro-European in sentiment, a parody of the prejudices of rural Little Englanders (oh the irony).

And the Druids Arms won't close till ver' nigh two, And we'll all drink caviar from a girt big cider jar, When the Common Market comes to Stanton Drew!

Wikipedia more neutrally notes that in ‘…response to opening up of trade with Europe, Adge suggests what might happen to Somerset culture when Europeans come over’.

This slice of ye olde Englande nostalgia fits well with the JRM brand, apparently au fait with what the working class oiks get up to in their pubs and barns, using deliberately anachronistic terminology, and always wearing at least one item of clothing that belongs to clown.

In reality this is all a bit attention seeking, self-promoting an eccentric film in an election campaign where, by all accounts he had been side-lined by the Conservative Party machine for being too ‘off-message’ even for the Tories. He is, as the Daily Mirror describes him, a ‘disgraced Tory toff’.

Rees-Mogg smacks of a man who likes his stone circles rural, just like WG Hoskins. After all, this was indeed a sylvan spot before all those pesky roads, factories, and voters appeared in the surrounding landscape.

‘Views of Stanton Drew AD 1784’ (source: Dymond 1877)

Note that Rees-Mogg stands in such a position that the camera can only see the rural behind him, and no telegraph polls, roads, or other modern clutter. Another angle would have revealed a different temporal dynamic. He wants you to imagine this photo could have been taken in 1819 or 1919 because his persona is all about a timelessness that stems from a fear of change, of his privilege being undermined by progress.

Memes and mocking

Responses to the film have been largely restricted to social media, with almost no mainstream news commentary. On Twitter there has been a mixed bag of bemused, amused, and angry reactions, as well as some fine memes; a lot of this commentary has come from archaeologists, unsurprisingly.

Recumbent Rees-Mogg (Jonathan Last, @johnnythin)

Voting Conservative gets more Stonehenge (me! @urbanprehisto)

Response by @herbieherbie10 on Twitter

Others had some fun with the fact that the policy and belief system of Rees-Mogg is an anachronism, of the past, although it seems a little unfair to tar the people of the Neolithic with the same brush as this upper class twit.

Response by @snegreid on Twitter

We could be here all day having fun with this video and you can do so by looking at the many, many replies to the original tweet of the video.

‘Built by immigrants’

However, responses did not simply consist of cheap laughs at the expense of a feckless Tory MP. Some suggested that this short film was essentially a dog-whistle nod to the alt-right and far-right viewer of the video. In light of recent media coverage of far-right groups using megaliths in the south of England for rites and ceremonies (covered nicely in this blog post by Howard Williams), the choice of a stone circle could be viewed as at best naïve, or absolutely intentional, depending on your level of cynicism.

Archaeologists such as Cathy Frieman pointed out that it was important we acknowledge the tone of the video, and that it is no laughing matter.

Response by @cjfrieman on Twitter

In this respect should we be more careful about giving such tweets and political propaganda the oxygen of publicity? Certainly, it was interesting to see some responses on Twitter that we should not keep retweeting the original post (either to take the piss or offence) because this helps with the stats for the tweet and increases its visibility. When TV presenter and archaeologist Alice Roberts retweeted this, with a critique (of more below), she fired this little film into the timelines of over 200,000 of her followers. I am in a sense guilty of doing the same thing in this blog post, and it is the case that even mocking memes ensure a person, image, and message spreads across the internet like a virus.

Another theme that emerged in responses to the Rees-Mogg film was the apparent irony of using as a pro-Brexit backdrop a prehistoric monument that was ‘built by immigrants’ and which suggested we had close connections with Europe in prehistory.

Alice Roberts for instance tweeted: ‘How extraordinary that Rees-Mogg chooses to stand in front of a megalithic monument – which speaks so strongly of connections across prehistoric Europe – to make an isolationist statement!’

Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer of The Guardian (38K followers), tweeted: ‘Get the hell out of my favourite stone circle which, by the way, was built by immigrants’.

Response by @chiggi on Twitter

I don’t want to especially pick on these commentators, as the immigrants trope was suggested by lots of respondents, coming from a place with the best of intentions. And it reminds me of Jeremy Deller’s 2019 street artwork in Glasgow, Built by immigrants, which espouses a similar sentiment.

Jeremy Deller, Stonehenge artwork, Glasgow

Prehistory it seems is a blank canvas upon which we can project whatever we want to, fit into our belief systems, and bounce around within our echo chambers. And while I much prefer a narrative that supports partnership, immigration, and communal labour, over separationist and divisive arguments, I can’t help but feel uneasy about any attempts to use the prehistoric past to support or even justify our own belief systems.

The prehistoric story of stone circles should not be used to score political points.

Arguments that stone circles such as Stonehenge and Stanton Drew were ‘built by immigrants’ and had close connections to Europe and therefore we should retain those relationships today and into the future are, to my mind, as problematic as contrary arguments that, for instance, we have a long tradition of turbulent relationships with Europe, and that Brexit-like schisms are not a new thing.

Reactions to the film suggest leave and remain arguments are both claiming a form of legitimacy deep into prehistory, in the shape of Stanton Drew, which to my mind is both illogical and inappropriate.

Such arguments have become increasingly fuelled by ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope studies that suggest mobility in prehistory was commonplace especially when converted into newspaper headlines and stories. Yet our understanding of prehistory is complex and contested, and contrary views also exist. It is possible for instance to argue that at least some elements of Stanton Drew were constructed in the late Neolithic period (30th to 25th centuries BC), a time of ‘late Neolithic isolation’, even a Neolithic Brexit, according to archaeologists such as Richard Madgwick and Mike Parker Pearson. If we follow this line of argument, Rees-Mogg was correct – Stanton Drew is a leave monument. And, suggestions that stone circles are a common monument type across Europe, thus suggesting cultural connections, smacks of culture-historical thinking. No idea exists in isolation and the Brexitisation of prehistory is becoming tortuous.

The Brexit hypothesis

The use of Stanton Drew as a backdrop and theme for a political announcement about Brexit, and critical reactions to this that I have seen in social media are both symptomatic of what I have previously called the Brexit Hypothesis:

The proposition that any archaeological discovery in Europe can – and probably will – be exploited to argue in support of, or against Brexit (Brophy 2018: 1650).

Our discourse has become so entrenched in Brexit-thinking that we struggle to consider this stone circle without it becoming a synecdoche for our moral, ethical, political, beliefs. In fact, responses should have focused entirely on the wilful and inappropriate appropriation of a prehistoric megalithic enclosure for political ends as some contributors, such as Cathy Frieman, did indeed do.

Are we – the progressives, the liberal left, remainers – in danger of wanting to have our cake and eat it? At this politically dispiriting time, this is understandable.

A polarisation

There is always a depth and complexity to such issues, and this is reflected in the invisible, complex archaeology at the Stanton Drew circle JRM chose as his megalithic pulpit. An amazing geophysical survey in 1997 revealed a collection of concentric timber circles within the stone circle, and an external henge ditch. Hundreds of oak posts stood here in the Neolithic period (Davis et al 2004).

Stanton Drew geophysics results (source: PAST)

The visible megalithic Stanton Drew must be understood in the context of the organic invisible Stanton Drew. The visible political posturing must be read within the context of the invisible underlying currents given off that can perhaps be picked up on should receptive equipment be suitably attuned. As with actual, so with metaphorical geophysics: these undercurrents can be positive and negative. Rees-Mogg is attracting and repelling at the same time. That is what populist politicians – and magnetometers – do.

His deliberately divisive message is having the desired polarising effect.

The choice of site, the words, the message, of this short video are very much in the antiquarian tradition.

He is the Moggalithic antiquarian.

JRM the antiquarian, words from Dymond 1877

This is played out through his superficial understanding of the archaeological site, and an inability and unwillingness to interpret outwith his own value system. JRM uses the stone circle to valorise his world view and force that view upon others.

Yet stone circles can and should be kept out of our Brexit battles. They are no more an indicator of what Jonathan Last, in another great response to far-right use of prehistoric monuments, has called, ‘a conservative, nostalgic narrative of a lost rural England’, than they are surviving traces of an ancient utopia of free movement and European cultural cohesion.

Stone circles should be testament to the sophistication of Neolithic people. Stone circles should continue to be a source of wonder, mystery, the otherness of the past as demonstrated in Weird Walks zine #2. Their weird walk route around Stanton Drew, documented in the pages of this zine and The Face, is a wonderful counterpoint to the weird stiffness of the Rees-Mogg polemic. The stones should be hugged, and the stone circle is to be enjoyed, as is the visit to the Druids Arms pub afterwards.

Weird Walks Stanton Drew (source: Weird Walk #2 (2019), 30-1)

Prehistoric sites cannot, and should not, be viewed through a Brexit lens, whether leave or remain. 

We need to get back to seeing such ancient monuments through a camera lens and our own eyeballs.

We must take back our wonderful prehistoric monuments from the grasping hands and propaganda machines of opportunistic politicians, and avoid falling into their sinister traps.

***

Works cited:

Brophy, K. 2018. The Brexit hypothesis and prehistory. Antiquity, 92: 1650-58. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2018.160

David, A 1998 Stanton Drew, PAST 28. (Newsletter of the Prehistoric Society). Available online https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prehistoric/past/past28.html#Stanton

Davis, A. et al 2004 A rival to Stonehenge? Geophysical survey at Stanton Drew, England. Antiquity 78, 341-58. DOI: 10.1017/S0003598X00113006

Dymond, CW The megalithic antiquities at Stanton Drew, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 33: 297-307.

***

Thanks to guest blogger Kenny Brophy. Follow Kenny on Twitter @urbanprehisto. 

Read more by Kenny on his own blog, The Urban Prehistorian, and a previous guest post here.

Follow us on Twitter @AlmostArch, and pitch us your guest blog!

[almostarchaeology]

Hogwarts Needs Archaeologists, Part 2: Excavating Magic

By Adrián Maldonado

In the last blog post, I realized that despite being suffused with ancient artefacts, the wizarding world of Harry Potter didn’t seem to have any archaeologists. Instead, wizards and witches live in a weirdly eternal present with little sense of how things have come to be as they are, and this ultimately caused them no end of trouble. So much of the story hinges on prominent characters not knowing about artefacts and landscapes of medieval origin that it seemed clear that the establishment of a Wizarding Museum or department of Magical Material Culture Studies at Hogwarts may have genuinely saved them from war.

Harry Potter Studio Tour: closest we’ll get to a wizarding museum (source)

Even though wizards can’t be arsed learning about their own past, it behooves us muggle archaeologists to interrogate this invisible but fundamental aspect of our shared human past. As the books make clear, muggles and wizards are all just human. The separation between the two has its roots in the same intellectual fallacy of early modern thought which gave muggles the concept of race – that human ability could be measured in purity of ‘blood’. Beyond a focus on antiquities, attention to the archaeological context of the wizarding world is essential to the project of interrogating the human condition, and will produce new insights on the muggle past and present. To learn more, we will have to conduct some fieldwork of our own.

When is magic?

Before we start planning the Godric’s Hollow Big Dig, we need to know how archaeology might work in the wizarding world. Looking back at these stories with nerd-tinted spectacles, it seems to me that magic changes over time, and the ways it is deployed may tell us something about the human journey, magically-abled or otherwise.

No - obviously no we don’t

We know there are one or two people who care about history and magical theory, because in Philosopher’s Stone we get a list of textbooks assigned to first-years at Hogwarts which includes A History of Magic by Bathilda Bagshot and Magical Theory by Adalbert Waffling. However, we get precious few glimpses into these texts as Harry does not seem to read. We also know these are used in some of the most boring and tedious courses taught at Hogwarts, ensuring few wizards would want to go on to study them further. Occupy the curriculum!

As we explored in the previous post, it seems that history in the wizarding world seems to begin only around a thousand years ago, when Hogwarts was founded. Much of what passes for history is the merely the genealogy of famous houses. It is curiously similar to Europe in the early nineteenth century, when there was an awareness of classical antiquity, but no such concept as prehistory. Perhaps it is a world that somehow has not yet discovered archaeology?

Archaeology > time travel (source)

Perhaps, one might argue, there is no need for wizarding archaeologists because wizards have time-turners which allow time travel. However, it so happens that time travel beyond a few hours in the past is extremely dangerous and heavily regulated, and in any case all of the remaining time-turners in the Department of Mysteries were destroyed in the Second Wizarding War.

That notwithstanding, one might also argue that wizards don’t need archaeology because anyone could stand in a field and cast spells like Accio coin hoard, or Revelio Roman villa and be done with it. But as with metal detecting, simply ripping an object out the ground does not help you understand why it got there, and if done poorly it may even impede the possibility of reconstructing its context later. Similarly, chasing the walls of a Roman villa would destroy the evidence of just how it was reduced to its foundations and what happened in this spot for the next two millennia. This would not be archaeology, but antiquarianism. And we don’t even seem to have that.

That said, it would be great to magically de-turf, sieve and cart away spoil. We could sure use the help backfilling, too.

But what about excavating magical sites? Can magic be excavated? Do we even know when magic began? Could archaeologists help find out?

Awareness of enchantments

Dunno Harry - it’s either paleolithic or a horcrux (source)

A lot of our knowledge of how magic works in the Potterverse comes from the fleeting glimpses we get of masters like Dumbledore at work. In the iconic 26th chapter of Half-Blood Prince, The Cave, we watch the headmaster undertake some hardcore field survey.

“Magic always leaves traces”, he explains as he detects the curses and spells that Tom Riddle placed to secure the hiding place of one of his horcruxes.

Harry could not tell whether the shivers he was experiencing were due to his spine-deep coldness or to the same awareness of enchantments. Dumbledore approached the wall of the cave and caressed it with his blackened fingertips, murmuring words in a strange tongue that Harry did not understand. Twice Dumbledore walked right around the cave, touching as much of the rough rock as he could, occasionally pausing, running his fingers backwards and forwards over a particular spot…

Dark magic, at least, seems to be detectable, at least to those, like Dumbledore and Harry, lucky enough to have been born in Godric’s Hollow, where all of British wizarding history starts and ends. Throughout the books, we hear occasional stories of places or objects having ‘old magic’, which also gives off some sort of distinctive trace. Indeed, there seems to be nothing worse than old Dark magic, which leaves more than just a trace. This is most aptly described in the Pottermore essay on Azkaban, which was only discovered after its occupier, the dark sorcerer Ekrizdis, died and its concealment charms faded away. “Experts who had studied buildings built with and around Dark magic contended that Azkaban might wreak its own revenge upon anybody attempting to destroy it.” Wait, there are experts in magical architectural history but not archaeology? That figures, actually – in its origins, medieval archaeology was itself mainly about unearthing the ground plans of castles and cathedrals.

As many of our archaeological textbooks tell us, excavation is managed destruction. So would it ever be possible to excavate a site of old Dark magic, or would this count as an attempt to ‘destroy’ it? And how would one know until one tried to dig there? Speaking as a former archaeology health and safety officer, I can’t help but think of the threat old Dark magic might pose to any novice archaeowizard who works on such sites. Real-world archaeologists need to make sure they are up to date on all their vaccinations, but I’m not sure what can be done to prevent accidental cursing by taking a mattock to the wrong enchanted soil layer.

Revelio stratigraphy

Dumbledore’s methodology and Harry’s ‘awareness of enchantments’ lead me to believe that such threats can be averted, or at least mitigated, by undertaking preventative magophysical survey. The question is whether the traces of spells that Dumbledore and Harry can sense have a physical signature that can be isolated and detected mechanically – or perhaps, by wand. Wandmaker Ollivander’s notes on wand woods shows that some woods may be more receptive to the natural world than others; for instance, “Hazel wands also have the unique ability to detect water underground, and will emit silvery, tear-shaped puffs of smoke if passing over concealed springs and wells.” In this instance at least, it seems that wands can have involuntary, mechanical responses to certain external stimuli. Other woods and wand cores are also said to have the ability to learn and detect magical character. In short, this is an area that needs a lot more research, but would still be restricted to the wizarding population, which, as we have already seen, could barely give a toss about their own heritage.

People and things in the Potterverse

Old magic can be the most powerful (source)

Speaking of wands, these ‘objects’ open up some pretty fundamental questions about the nature of things and people in the Potterverse. This was all explored in some depth in my scriptural commentary of choice, Binge Mode Harry Potter episode 55, wherein Jason Concepcion devoted a Restricted Section to wands. From the beginning of the series, we are told that wands are semi-animate objects with agency of their own. Wands famously ‘choose’ their owners, but it does not end there; in his notes on wand woods, Ollivander observes that hazel wands die with their owners, and that 

Hornbeam wands likewise absorb their owner’s code of honour, whatever that might be, and will refuse to perform acts – whether for good or ill – that do not tally with their master’s principles. A particularly fine-tuned and sentient wand.” [Emphasis mine] 

Most interestingly, wands seem to become a part of their owner’s essence; as wandmaker Ollivander explains, “each wand is the composite of its wood, its core and the experience and nature of its owner”. What he is describing here is a rudimentary sort of assemblage theory.

Assembling the wizard (source)

It seems wands are only ‘objects’ until they choose an owner, at which point they become part-person. And as we saw in a previous post, wands and pensieves are often buried with their owners, as if they are indivisibly entwined with the wizard, even after death. In a similar but more sinister way, Voldemort is able to ensoul objects, and these Horcruxes take on shades of his person which enact his will on anyone who encounters them. The wizarding world is full of objects that are part-people, or is it people that are part object?

This should come as no surprise to anthropologists. For decades theorists have explored all the different ways in which we are entangled with the people, things, environments and social structures in which we are embedded. We look to other continents and distant pasts to seek parallels when they are all around us. For instance, ancient Egyptians had a complicated idea of what constituted the person, from the physical body to several aspects of what we patronisingly call ‘the soul’, mainly because we cannot translate its complexity into any other Judeo-Christian terminology. These include the name, the heart and the shadow, and it is striking how many of these aspects of the person could be made to reside into what we would call inanimate objects.

The Enlightenment notion of the individual with unlimited agency, existing only within the bounds of their own bodies and minds, is very much out of fashion, as I have accidentally already explored in previous posts on this blog. We have trouble dissociating people from their belongings after they die, as if they remain uncannily inhabited. We send our names to space by the thousands, because it matters that this aspect of our selves is preserved in some way. Wizards are merely cyborgs, but then, aren’t we all?

Excavating the self

His teaching style was unorthodox to say the least (Warner Bros. Pictures)

The problem here is that the Harry Potter cycle is, on the face of it, distinctly repulsed by the idea of a soul being split up and distributed among objects and people. But this critique always kind of rang false for me. Voldemort is guilty of lots of things (murder, bigotry, aversion to rhinoplasty), but not the inhabitation of objects. The story is full of ways in which people are permeable beyond horcruxes; wands, pensieves, names, portraits, ghosts, Tom Riddle’s diary and the Sorting Hat, which contains the ‘intelligence’ of the Hogwarts founders, all ‘store’ an essence of the person. As we saw in the previous post, the Hogwarts founders are represented by objects which act as relics. At one point, Hermione even becomes multiple selves in her third year with a time-turner. More mystical happenings involve the permeation of one’s self into another: Lily Potter’s love shields Harry; Snape’s Patronus becomes Lily’s doe; Harry’s Patronus is his father’s. Through the wands, the self is extended. In the pensieve, memory becomes material, reminding us that thoughts, emotions and perhaps even magic, are of the body. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”

Without digging a single trench or featuring a single archaeologist, Rowling’s universe predicted a lot that would become fashionable in archaeological theory in the 21st century. Perhaps the most important lesson imparted by the books is that the difference between muggles and wizards is simply awareness. It is not only muggles who are unaware of the magic world under our feet (and apparently latent in our blood). Wizards are also unaware of where and when their powers reside. And if wizards could be convinced to take a material turn, what might muggles achieve by exploring their own entanglement with the wizarding world? Might we excavate an awareness of the enchantment within us all?

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Back to Part 1: Fantastic Antiquities and Where to Find Them

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Hogwarts Needs Archaeologists, Part 1: Fantastic Antiquities and Where to Find Them

By Adrián Maldonado

The Harry Potterverse is crawling with ancient artefacts and old magic. That doesn’t make it a story about archaeology as such – there is very little effort from the protagonists to do more than treasure-hunt (and in at least one case, tomb-raid) to collect and then destroy these artefacts. In one sense, the Harry Potter cycle is a parable of Fantastic Antiquities and How to Break Them.

Tom Riddle, Tomb Raider (source)

Which is why I haven’t felt the need to do an ‘archaeology of Harry Potter’ post on this blog. But then I went back to the books again. Well, sort of. I am lucky enough to share a timeline with the Binge Mode podcast by the superheroic duo Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion. Their breakdown of the books and films, chapter by chapter and scene by scene, with added detail culled from the wider (so wide) Potter canon, has reawakened my appreciation for the depth of JK’s creation. And, this should surprise absolutely no one by now, it makes me think there’s lessons for archaeologists in the Potterverse.

This will take more than one blog post to tease out. To begin with, we can start by looking at the vast array of antiquities which feature in the books’ own timeline. From there, we can explore how archaeology might work in the wizarding world, and then bring it back to reflections on Rowling’s uses of the past more generally. Speaking of the past, if you don’t want books from 20 years ago spoiled, well, tough look, my guy.

Medieval archaeology

Getting medieval in Diagon Alley (source)

To begin in the most obvious place, there is a lot in the wizarding world which owes its origins to the Middle Ages. According to Rowling’s Pottermore website, Diagon Alley and its major landmarks such as the Leaky Cauldron and Gringotts go back to c. 1500, retaining a ramshackle medieval aesthetic. The prison of Azkaban originated as the fortress of the fifteenth-century sorcerer Ezkidris. Even things which don’t appear obviously medieval are revealed to be medieval on Pottermore: the Quidditch World Cup has been played since 1473, and Floo powder, the magical form of transport, was invented in the thirteenth century by Ignatia Wildsmith (which, if I have another daughter, I will definitely adopt as a name).

The structural medievalism of the Potterverse includes Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry itself, a ponderous castle-university suffused with old magic. Oddly for Britain’s premier (only?) centre of magical learning, we do not seem to know exactly how old it is, but its founders all seem to have lived in the tenth century according to Pottermore. This would make it earlier than the first Muggle universities, themselves a product of the twelfth century and later. It is interesting to think that the robe-wearing denizens of Oxbridge and St Andrews are merely replicating earlier Hogwarts traditions.

Echoes of Hogwarts (source)

What is less immediately obvious is that Hogwarts’ medieval origins are communicated largely through material culture. The Sorting Hat belonged to founder Godric Gryffindor, and so is at least a thousand years old. The Mirror of Erised is also said to be ancient, though we are vague on dates. Does age confer magical properties, or have these objects survived due to the power of their magic? It can’t be the latter, as we are continually reminded of the precarious state of antiquities in the Potterverse. The Hogwarts houses retain stories about early medieval artefacts associated with the lives of their founders, including Rowena Ravenclaw’s lost diadem, Helga Hufflepuff’s cup, and Gryffindor’s Sword; Slytherin House has no equivalent relic-mascot although it does boast its own Chamber of Secrets (not a euphemism). Each of these objects is lost, stolen, or defiled in the course of these stories.

Ravenclaw’s diadem was lost almost as soon as it was made, and Slytherin’s Locket was never kept in Hogwarts, showing the somewhat less than reverential treatment of these artefacts, even among those who should best appreciate their value. More on Slytherin’s personal effects later, but it may be worth noting here that his Chamber was until lately populated with a living balrog, I mean Basilisk, which was at least as ancient as Slytherin before its murder by a student dangerously swinging another medieval artefact in 1998. Guys. Lock down your antiquities.

Days without an accident on site: 0 (source)

Of these artefacts, only the Sword of Gryffindor was curated to any extent, even if only as a wall-hanging which, let me repeat, students were allowed to handle. Hufflepuff’s cup was kept in the common room of its founder’s house, allowing it to be stolen and inhabited with cursed fragments of soul which almost led to the demise of the rules-based wizarding world order. In the end, Helga’s cup was found in a damn bank vault instead of a climate-controlled museum store. Listen, a secure, alarmed case may not have stopped Voldemort, but we could have at least saved these precious witnesses of wizarding origins from being callously destroyed in the war. Who will be the wizarding Mortimer Wheeler next time?

Excavating Hogwarts

Reading through Pottermore, it transpires that paying no heed to the medieval material world our protagonists live in is actively causing them harm. Two of Voldemort’s horcruxes, Slytherin’s Locket and Marvolo Gaunt’s Ring, date back to the early medieval period, but were kept as personal possessions passed down the Gaunt family line, allowing them to be easily stolen or sold, and, again, be haunted by evil curses. Guys. Where do I send my CV to develop a course in Material Culture Studies at Hogwarts? Better yet, let’s make it a MOOC, train members of the public, and then maybe next time someone tries to pawn an ancient relic our world isn’t threatened by cursed archaeology.

Please don’t drink from the archaeology (source)

My favourite revelation is that the Hogwarts pensieve, the expositional device in Dumbledore’s office which allows Harry to experience flashback sequences along with the reader, is a noted antiquity itself. It is said to be a stone basin inscribed with Saxon runes, and to have been found buried on the spot where Hogwarts would be built.

I can’t just pass this by. Why would a pensieve be buried? We know that wizards are buried with their wands, as recounted to plot-driving effect in Dumbledore’s case. It also transpires that, like wands, pensieves are very personal items, and are customarily buried with their owners along with any memories they have stored. What an incredible boon this would be for a wizarding archaeologist! And how well would this explain all the now-empty vessels we have found used as grave goods since prehistory, usually explained by us dull-minded archaeologists as ‘food-offerings’. Along with the spell priori incantatem, which allows one to see the last few spells a wand was used for, an archaeowitch encountering a burial furnished with wand and pensieve would have an unparalleled insight into the lives and deaths of the wizarding dead.

Back to the Hogwarts pensieve, then, we have a massive stone basin inscribed in Saxon runes, which would be rather out of place in the early medieval Scottish highlands, where Hogwarts is based. Is this a disturbed wizard’s tomb or a ritualised offering in a wetland setting? Once upon a time, this find would be taken as evidence for Anglo-Saxon invasion, but now we recognize that objects could be transported for a variety of reasons, and indeed are themselves more likely to be used in votive deposits due to the value they have accrued in the journey. It would certainly merit further investigation whether the Hogwarts loch was chosen by its founders not for its now-isolated and depopulated landscape, itself a product of fairly recent historical processes, but because it had an existing heritage as a site of ritual deposition. We can only hope, for the sake of its students, that the founders undertook some due-diligence magical remote sensing to detect any complicating factors from buried magic, dark or light, before undertaking a major construction project. But beyond health and safety concerns, I feel that we have lost something else by not recording what has presumably been a cult place.

A medieval inheritance

Pottermore also traces the origins of several major wizarding families to the Middle Ages, most notably the Malfoys. Their lineage can be traced back to Armand Malfoy,  who helped William the Bastard become Conqueror of England in the real-world timeline: “Having rendered unknown, shady (and almost certainly magical) services to King William I, Malfoy was given a prime piece of land in Wiltshire, seized from local landowners, upon which his descendants have lived for ten consecutive centuries.” In gratitude for their help with the Norman Conquest, he was granted a manor, which has passed down the family for 1000 years to Draco Malfoy. The mansion itself is said to be filled with ancient magical and muggle artefacts and priceless artwork, as so many stately homes were by the nineteenth century. Many of Britain’s museums were founded through bequests of such private collections, and these would make an interesting, if dangerous, Dark Magic wing of a Wizarding Museum. Given the spectacular fall from grace of the Malfoy family in the second wizarding war, I do worry about the status of the Malfoy collection, and whether it is at risk of being hived off in auction. The Draco Malfoy essay does reveal that he still lives in the manor with its artefacts after the war, so we still live in hope that this heritage resource has not been lost.

Even dark artefacts need curators (source)

In light of their family history, it would be easy to laugh off the Malfoys’ malevolence as the entitlement that comes from old money, but it should be noted that Harry Potter is a noted trust-fund baby himself. For all his remarkable magical prowess, Harry Potter’s destiny is also down to some serious inherited privilege. His medieval progenitor Linfred of Stinchcombe, who also lived in the Norman era, built up the family’s wealth through his famous inventions, including potions like Skele-gro. Their marriage into a wealthy family in Godric’s Hollow is also auspicious – as home to the Peverils and the Dumbledores, whose stories are so indelibly entwined in the history of wizarding Britain, this little village in England’s west country seems to have been the epicentre of magical achievement for a millennium. Something in the water, perhaps? Or a self-segregating community of elite families? It is through these connections that the Potter family came into possession of one of the Deathly Hallows, the invisibility cloak, in another form of inheritance which increasingly looks like the secret of Harry’s success.

Godric’s Hollow - in dire need of graveyard survey (source)

The Hallows themselves are the key to Dumbledore and Harry’s success, and Voldemort’s undoing, Unbeknownst to many, the Resurrection Stone, invisibility cloak and Elder Wand all seem to be inventions of the Peveril brothers in the thirteenth century. We know this partly because Harry and Hermione stumble on Ignotus Peveril’s medieval gravestone in the churchyard of Godric’s Hollow, clearly marked with the sign of the Deathly Hallows, at which point things begin to come together. Basically, Voldemort is able to be defeated because he only trafficked in antiquities, without researching their archaeological context – but in fairness, neither did Dumbledore and Harry until very late in the game. A simple bit of churchyard recording may have brought this to the attention of local history buffs much sooner, and we may all have been safer for it. Basically, folks, local heritage is all of our heritage, and is not just for tourists obsessively chasing only their own family history.

Potter’s pedigree

And so we come to genealogy, which is the secret engine of this cycle of stories, just as it seems to be in so many of our favourite fantasy worlds. The objects, people and places profiled here all seem to be the remnants of stories which seem to begin no earlier than the tenth century or so. But it is clear that the wizarding world existed before then, and the limits of our vision can be explained by the fact that the first university was established at that time, and presumably the recording of historical events as well.  In short, the narrow focus on a small pool of influential families and their feuds are the unresolved business of the formation of medieval kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, as indeed is so much of our own contemporary politics. What if our consciousness extended to the messier early medieval kingdoms, or (whisper it) prehistory? Just how problematic would a wizarding archaeology be? And could it free us from the Great Men and Their Battles vision of the human journey? Let’s pick up our trowel-wands and find out.

***

Forward to Part 2: Excavating Magic

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Archaeotrolling the Wall

By Adrián Maldonado

There’s been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the effect of two years of the Trump presidency. One overlooked aspect of this is the surprising amount of archaeology-related activism that has arisen over the same period. From peer-reviewed takedowns of populism to fact-checking Trump’s theory of ‘wheels and walls’, archaeology has become one of the most consistent methods used to troll Trump.

The most interesting part about this is that it is not only archaeologists who are archaeotrolling Trump. The best example of this is the way journalists have begun reading up on the famous border walls of history. They have not done so of their own volition, of course, but because of Trump’s repeated misuse of ancient monuments to lend justification to one of his signature campaign promises. It is one of the most obvious ways in which archaeology is being dragged into current events, and thus deserves comment as ‘pop culture’ archaeology.

Trump’s argument for the wall has increasingly relied on citing historical walls, both specific (the Great Wall of China) and nonspecific (“medieval”), as precedent. It is the kind of ‘common sense’ argument that sounds legit as long as you don’t think about it. In response, several news sources have found themselves rushing to slap together short pieces on famous historical walls (usually just the ‘big three’: Great Wall, Hadrian’s, and Berlin), in which some light Wikipedia research is dressed up as fact-checking. But even a cursory reading of past border walls quickly allows journalists to troll Trump’s intentions. Archaeology is powerful this way.

Famous walls of history

Notably, several scholars of archaeology, anthropology and history have also taken part in this trend, whether by being cited in these pieces, or having original pieces published in news outlets. Denigrating Trump’s Wall using facts and a long-term perspective is now a whole subgenre of political commentary and is allowing archaeology to take centre-stage in matters of global import.

However, it should also be clear by now that the combined heft of these pieces have not remotely dissuaded Trump or his base from believing that the Wall is a good idea. So this subgenre of journalism is due a bit of source criticism. Here follows a preliminary, non-scientific survey of online news and commentary on ‘famous walls of history’ in light of the Trump Wall.

I am choosing here to divide the genre into two groups – those led by journalists (including some with academic credentials, but whose main output is through an online periodical) and those led by academics (whether in a blog or periodical). This is to roughly distinguish between public archaeology (in which experts share knowledge for public benefit), and the reception of archaeology by the public (in this case, journalists).

Journalist-led

History via Google search (source)

Much of this work consists of little more than going through the ‘big three’ in turn, conflating three very different times and places in the assumption that a wall is a wall.

Why Trump’s comparison of his wall to the Great Wall of China makes no sense 

8 March 2016 – early in 2016, when Trump was by no means the frontrunner in the Republican primaries, he began making outlandish comparisons between his wall and the Great Wall of China. In response, Michelle Ye Hee Lee put together a fact-checking piece for the Washington Post highlighting some unsavoury aspects of the famous world wonder. “Labor conditions were so appalling that some 400,000 people are estimated to have died building the wall…through most of Chinese history, the wall was a negative symbol of oppression, cruelty and death…the wall as a symbol of strength and resourcefulness is a part of the myth and misconception of its true history.”

The walls before Trump’s Wall

11 December 2016 – long read by Thomas de Monchaux (design and architecture critic) for the New Yorker. Shows he’s accessed good scholarship on Hadrian’s Wall, pointing out all the ways its design shows it was not meant as a hard border. Concludes with some incisive archaeotrolling: “some distant Anglo-American memory of [Hadrian’s Wall] may help to explain the political power behind the idea of a wall—even as theories suggest that this wall’s purpose may have been very different, perhaps directly opposite, from that of the wall evoked by our President-elect.”

How Trump’s Wall compares to other famous walls

25 January 2017 – Cheap rundown of the ‘big three’ for BBC Newsbeat, featuring embarrassing graphics about which is the longest and the tallest with barely hidden phallic undertones, which I’m sure Trump would actually retweet.

Trump’s Wall vs the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall

29 January 2017 – off-the-shelf roundup of the ‘big three’ again for a history news blog, including howlers like “Hadrian’s Wall was built as a defensive measure to keep out nomadic tribes, in this instance the Picts of Scotland”. (Fact-check: Scotland did not have ‘nomadic tribes’, nor was the wall built as a defensive measure against nomadism, nor did the Picts exist in the second century.)

The history of walls is long. Here’s where Donald Trump fits in

30 January 2017 – Time correspondent Olivia B. Waxman provides a very hazy history of no specific ancient walls, but does better in modern times. Notes that walls attract and bind communities of their own, as seen in the afterlife of the Berlin Wall. Sadly ends on the facile lesson that walls are some kind of inevitable social logic: “one thing is certain: walls are not going anywhere…it’s an impulse that’s only human.”

What can Scotland teach Donald Trump about walls?

2 Feb 2017 – featuring yours truly. I was approached by a reporter during this wave of wall histories for a lighthearted feature on BBC Scotland. The focus was on the lesser-known Antonine Wall, and marks its only appearance in this list. Abandoned by the Romans after little more than a generation, “The Antonine Wall is the epitome of a symbolic victory.”

The (anthropological) truth about walls

7 February 2017 – In a post for the Anthropology in Practice blog on Scientific American, Krystal D’Acosta uses a few ancient walls, but mostly Hadrian’s Wall, to troll Trump’s vision of a wall as a hard border. “As a concept, the idea of a wall suggests permanence, security and identity. Physical boundaries help define people by establishing a shared experience of place and time. But this is a very simplistic view of national barricades. It overlooks the ways in which these monuments function as sites of exchange, and the ways in which they generate their own experience of identity and place.” Negative points for, again, mistakenly making the Picts into Hadrian’s antagonists.

The fears that fueled an ancient border wall

26 April 2017 – decent history of Hadrian’s Wall by Carly Silver for the Smithsonian, with Trump slotted in as the lede. Featuring guest appearance by wallchaeologist Rob Collins, but despite expert advice still manages to make the mistake that Hadrian was fighting the Picts, who, again, did not exist yet. Valuable observation that it was fear, not strength, which fueled Hadrian.

What walls mean from Hadrian to Trump

2 May 2017 – another flying survey of walls through time from the BBC, but does well to cover the modern wall-mania sweeping the world beyond Trump. “Of course, walls remain practically rather useless barriers, rendered increasingly obsolete by new technologies like drones. Yet they clearly retain their psychological value as demarcations of a dream of purity, keeping out all those threats to self-identity.”

Building walls may have allowed civilization to flourish

5 October 2018 – National Geographic featured this interview with David Frye, author of Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick. Judging solely from this summary, it is clear the author equates wall-building with ‘civilization’, splitting peoples into ‘wallers’ and everyone else, denigrating those who didn’t build empires as the uncultured losers of history. In doing so, he ends up parroting the propaganda of emperors and autocrats through time.

via GIPHY

Academic-led

Undergirding all the above commentary were the archaeologists and anthropologists who have weighed in, producing new pieces rather than waiting to be approached by journalists. Notable here is how early these voices began to weigh in, many well before Trump was elected president. Here in the ‘expert’ column I am including early career and student voices which have joined the fray.

How Trump’s Wall would trample hundreds of archaeological sites

21 March 2016 – One of the first to enter the field was public archaeologist Kristina Killgrove in her widely-read Forbes column. Here she drew attention to the violence the Wall would perpetrate upon indigenous heritage, a symbol of the ethnocentric agenda that embodied the Trump campaign.

The Wall: a monument to the nation-state

17 April 2016 – Maximilian Forte, Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, for his Zero Anthropology blog – the densest academic tone of the pieces reviewed here, a rebuke against those that rail against Trump's 'fascism' while ignoring the forces of globalisation and neoliberalism that brought us to Trump. Some alarming rhetoric about 'globalists' and George Soros, though, and the 'Let’s watch and see' conclusion certainly did not age well.

Hole(s) in the wall: Trump’s implausible solution to the problem of immigration

22 July 2016 - Rosemary Mitchell, Professor of Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, punctures the myth that Hadrian’s Wall separated civilisation from barbaricum, but in fact acted as an “economic magnet for people and goods”, similar to the way the actual southern border in America currently acts. Negative points, and I can’t believe I have to say this again, because the wall is said to border onto the Picts, which, how many times can I say this, did not exist for the first two centuries in the life of Hadrian’s Wall.

For five millennia, politicians have proposed walls like Trump’s. They don’t work

29 July 2016 – Adam T. Smith, Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University, takes us straight back to Mesopotamia for some top-notch fact-based archaeotrolling, where “walls were spectacular failures…Barrier walls are not simply clumsy, imprecise solutions to problems of population movement, past and present; they also represent a catastrophic failure of political imagination endemic to totalitarian thinking.”

Archaeology in Trump’s America: borders, immigration, and revolutionary remembering

10 November 2016 – a fiery call to action from PhD candidate Patricia Markert, published on Binghamton University’s public archaeology blog, just days after the election in 2016. “Contemporary archaeology of the border opens spaces to critically engage those who fear undocumented migration in new conversations that include real people rather than abstract villains, foster empathy rather than hate, and lead to constructive conversations about immigration policy in our country…Trump’s discourse is one of forgetting, and a dangerous one at that. Archaeology is a discipline of remembering, and that may be one of the most revolutionary tools we have for the fight ahead.”

Trump, Brexit and the archaeology of exclusion

10 November 2016 – across the Atlantic, PhD candidate Cait Scott also submitted her take on the catastrophic politics of 2016 for her blog Archaeology Stories right after Trump’s election. Linking Trump’s unsubtle wall with Brexit’s conceptual walling off of Britain from Europe, she notes their symbolism is directed inward. “Imagined safety, though, is a seductive idea; the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum results demonstrate its power. The manipulation and misuse of immigration narratives by politicians legitimises and reinforces the desire in everyday people for this imagined safety.”

The Trump Wall in archaeological perspective

14 November 2016 – An archaeological volley written soon after the election in November 2016. Howard Williams, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester, argues that we can use history to understand Trump’s Wall, but we can also use Trump to help us understand archaeology. Extra credit for introducing the early medieval Offa’s Dyke, which rarely makes it into the discussion but may be one of the closest archaeological parallels to Trump’s Wall. “Was Offa’s hegemonic project incomplete or subverted once it was realised just how unsustainable it was as an enduring frontier work?” One of the few blogs cited here that has crossed over into academic literature, cited by Gardner in his archaeological reflections on Brexit.

Clovis anthropologist challenges Trump’s Wall

7 April 2017 - Manuel Peña, in an editorial for the Fresno Bee, argues that we forget the past when we wall it off. "I happen to be a descendant of the colonists who first settled the Texas side of the river. We did not immigrate to this country: it migrated to us… the promotion of the wall is at base a symptom of the historical amnesia that defines a surging neo-nativist ideology. Besides denying the diverse origins of our nation, this nativism is of a piece with the ethnocentric/racial intolerance that rages through several European countries at this moment."

How walls like Trump’s destroy the past and threaten the future

24 October 2017 - Andrew Roddick, Associate Professor of Anthropology, McMaster University submitted a post on The Conversation on the problems that come with walls throughout history. Archaeological perspective advises us “to carefully think about the material impact of fear and xenophobia…anthropologists and archaeologists working with contemporary migration issues demonstrate that the costs of such walls can have long-term unintended consequences, including an increase in violence and insecurity.”

Crossing between the Great Wall of China and the ‘Great’ Trump Wall

14 November 2017 – the only journal publication I’ll mention here as it is open access. Mimi Yang, Professor of Modern Languages and Asian Studies at Carthage College goes far beyond the usual explainer about the Great Wall of China, producing a meditation on the fundamental difference between the Great Wall as the violent establishment of a new empire, and Trump’s Wall as the dying cough of an imperial era. “The Trump Wall has its foundation cemented on fear, bigotry, and above all, fundamental intolerance for difference.”

How do the walls around the world function differently?

2 December 2018 – This is a student blog submitted as part of coursework for ANTH 100 at Vassar College, but credit for being one of the few to discuss the anthropology of modern walls. “Hungary and Slovenia are two countries with the region’s largest expanse of fences. …It is revealed that people living near these barriers often find that they serve little purpose and can be psychologically damaging.”

Hadrian’s Wall, education and the heritage presenced in US ‘security’ and immigration policy

5 December 2018 - A short case study by Chiara Bonacchi, Lecturer in Heritage at Stirling University. This snippet text-mines 1000 tweets mentioning Trump and Hadrian’s Wall, showing that the public forges links between them, even if only as defensive barriers and not as “places of encounter” as wallchaeologists might prefer. Notably, these tweets often refer to Brexit as well. “It is a wall that divides, but also connects regions and peoples who are experiencing populist nationalism today… it remains a powerful but contested image and heritage site, of great resonance in today’s world.”

Trump says medieval walls worked. They didn’t

10 January 2019 - In late 2018, Trump began mentioning nonspecific ‘medieval’ walls as proof that walls always work, prompting medievalists to enter the fray. Matthew Gabriele, Professor of Medieval Studies at Virginia Tech went straight to one of America’s leading newspapers. “[C]alling the proposed 700 to 1,200 mile border wall ‘medieval’ is deeply misleading because walls in the actual European Middle Ages simply did not work the way Trump apparently thinks they did. If anything, their true function may speak to Trump’s intentions: Poor tools of defense, medieval walls had more to do with reassuring those who lived inside them than with dividing self from other.”

The Wall isn’t medieval

11 January 2019 – Gabriele was soon joined by David Perry for CNN, reinforcing the point that Trump’s use of the term medieval is not just lazy, but shows how wall-logic appeals to those with the least historical awareness, and along the way, gets in some exquisite fact-based burns. “[T]he wall won’t work – not because it’s a throwback to imagined medieval barbarism, but because it’s a con.”

What works, and what doesn’t

It is clear from the above charts that the academic-led responses largely preceded the journalists’ interests, and have carried on continuously, responding dynamically as Trump shifts his narrative. It shows that archaeologists and anthropologists are actively fulfilling their responsibility for public education. In comparison, journalists really began to take interest when it was too late, in response to one of Trump’s first acts as president, the Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements executive order which formally directed the government to seek funding and design proposals for a physical barrier along the southern border.

And while this survey begins in 2016, archaeologists and anthropologists have been trolling the impulse to build border walls for years. For instance, on this very blog, I wrote an exasperated piece bemoaning the abuses of Hadrian’s Wall in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum of 2014, as did Britain’s eminent wallchaeologist, Richard Hingley, for The Conversation. Long before 2014, the work of Laura McAtackney and many others around the Belfast ‘Peace Walls’ has shown the value of recording the human effects of walling people from one another in real time.

On the other side of the Atlantic, archaeotrolling the Border Wall takes us much further back to its first major fortification (fencification?) during the xenophobic Cheney presidency. No discussion of archaeotrolling is complete without mention of Jason de León’s Undocumented Migration Project, with its devastating revelations of the violence perpetrated by fortifying borders. Similarly, the Migrant Quilt Project materialises the human costs of a fortified border, promoting cooperation and understanding. David Taylor’s photography has documented the border’s transformation from imaginary line to irrational severing of living communities since 2007.

All these projects put the focus squarely on the people and communities terrorised by the Wall, but also their continued resistance to it. As activist archaeologist Randall McGuire put it in 2013, the wall unintentionally “enables agency that the builders did not imagine or desire, and crossers continually create new ways to transgress the barrier.”

‘Walled In’ by John Cuneo (source)

So what hasn’t worked? It is clear that despite decades of archaeotrolling border walls, dating back to the days when Trump was known only as a walking reminder of failed 80s economic policies, the urge to build them has not abated, and has in fact increased. Despite demonstrating “A Wall Is an Impractical, Expensive, and Ineffective Border Plan” way back in November 2016, here we are, still debating it two years into the Trump era.

The problem lies with walls’ own brutal physicality. We can academically deconstruct these ancient walls all we want, but we are at the same time always told that they are wonders to be marvelled at. The way they remain standing after millennia gives them an obviousness that is blinding. Their recurring role in history makes them seem inevitable, as several of the pieces listed here concluded. And even those with the best intentions, even a fair few of the experts listed above, are hoodwinked by the mythical quality of the stories that grow up around these walls – like the notion that Hadrian’s Wall was ever seen as the end of the Roman Empire, and that it was put up against Pictish aggression, when it would be more accurate to say that Roman frontier policies created the Picts.

In his Myth of Nations, Geary called ethnic nationalism the 'poison' of modern history, but these famous walls seem to exude the same venom. Border walls are the toxic waste of empire, spread around the globe by short-sighted regimes with no regard for the future, which continue to poison us and cloud our view of the foibles of the human past by their stubborn monumentality. If Trump gets his wall, it will not only be his legacy, but all of ours. Don’t pollute the future with another one.

***

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The title image is not my creation, but an unwitting self-parody by the president himself; I’d rather not link to his Twitter account, so read this instead.

[almostarchaeology]

Worldbuilding, or What Fantasy Fiction Taught Me About Archaeology

By Adrián Maldonado

This post is an interim report. I have found that reading about the history of the fantasy genre has taught me something important about the history of archaeology itself. In my last post, I showed that Robert E Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was building his Hyborian Age around the same time as JRR Tolkien was conceiving Middle-earth. For all their interest in the ancient past, neither author knew much about archaeology, a discipline that was still just gaining legitimacy in the 1920s and 30s. And yet their writings have much in common with the archaeological stories of European prehistory emerging at the time.

In other words, fantasy and archaeology grew out of the same origin stories, and they both carry similar baggage as a result. Let’s poke around in that dirty laundry for a bit.

Barbarian baggage (source)

Tolkien and Howard are not seen as being in the same league as writers; indeed, they are treated as opposite ends of the fantasy genre: high fantasy vs swords and sorcery. But the more I look into it, the more I’m surprised by the parallels in their trajectories.

I’m also realizing the parallels they share with another master worldbuilder working at the same time: archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe. To Childe we can attribute the first scientific ‘grand narrative’ of European prehistory, as opposed to Tolkien and Howard’s fictional prehistories. Childe’s career-establishing volume, The Dawn of European Civilisation (1925), was the standard text on the matter for a generation, and went through six editions in his lifetime. Alongside his academic work, he continually wrote companion books about prehistory for the layperson, making him a household name as much as any archaeologist of the time. He was even name-checked by Indiana Jones (though sadly not in a film that I consider canonical).

***

Tolkien, Howard and Childe, born on three different continents around the turn of the 20th century, would go on to shape the western vision of its own ancient past, though there is not much evidence that they knew of each others’ work. Let’s just start with how closely their careers overlap in time:

JRR Tolkien (1892-1973). Born in South Africa to English parents; moved to England at the age of three. Began degree in Classics at Oxford University in 1911, but changed to English; graduated 1915. Professor of Anglo-Saxon, then English Language, at Oxford 1925-1959. Lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ (1936) promoted the literary value of myth. Major works: The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), The Silmarillion (posthumously in 1977).

Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957). Born in Australia to English parents; degree in Classics at University of Sydney in 1911-1913, then Oxford University for a BA in Classics and BLitt in Archaeology 1914-1917. Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University, 1927-1946, then Institute of Archaeology, London, 1946-1956. Major works: The Dawn of European Civilization (1925, 6th edition 1957), The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (1926), Man Makes Himself (1936), The Prehistory of European Society (posthumously, 1958).

Robert E Howard (1906-1936). Born in Texas, USA. First short story published in Weird Tales in 1925. Essay entitled ‘The Hyborian Age’ (1936) established a shared timeline for his Kull, Conan and Bran stories. Committed suicide in 1936. Reprinted collections helped spur the fantasy revival, including Conan the Conqueror (serials 1935-36, hardcover edition 1950), King Kull (serials 1929-1931, paperback 1967), Bran Mak Morn (serials 1930-1932; paperback 1969).

There are some interesting coincidences here, not least the fact that Tolkien and Childe both overlapped at Oxford, though there is no evidence they met or sat any of the same lectures. It is harder to show the link between either of them and Howard, who was born 14 years later, but despite the age gap, all three men began building their past-worlds during or in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Tolkien was first struck by the name Earendil in an Old English poem in 1914, and began writing the stories that would become The Silmarillion by 1917. Childe began his life-long quest for the Indo-Europeans during his years at Oxford (1914-17), and it is surmised that much of what became his 1926 book The Aryans was based on his research during those years. Howard, as recounted in my last post, first discovered the Picts in a New Orleans public library in 1919, and by high school was already writing essays about the peopling of prehistoric Europe.

There goes the neighbourhood (source)

What really joins all three is that they are all, in their own way, prehistorians. Though Tolkien and Howard are best known for their pseudo-medieval worlds, they both explicitly tried to create links between their fictional worlds and our own prehistory. Thanks to the careful archival research of Tolkienists, we can track the evolution of Arda from its origins as a mythical history of England. As late as his time-travel story, the Notion Club Papers (1945), Tolkien was experimenting with ways of connecting his legendarium with English prehistory or early medieval history, the two timelines interrupted by a cataclysmic flood. Howard’s Hyborian Age independently used the same device – an Atlantis-like cataclysm that reshaped the Earth into the shape we know it today. Howard and Tolkien were both in the business of crafting proto-prehistories of Europe.

Both authors claimed these were only devices to help the stories feel realistic. But Tolkien never severed the connection to England: in his letters from the 1950s, he explains that his Ring cycle took place on our Earth, with Hobbiton at the latitude of Oxford and Minas Tirith at the latitude of Florence, but 6000 years before our histories begin. “As far as I know,” he wrote enigmatically in 1958, “it is merely an imaginative invention”. As for Howard, his Hyborian Age ends by outlining how our modern European ‘races’ connect with his fictional ones, for instance: “The Gaels, ancestors of the Irish and Highland Scotch, descended from pure-blooded Cimmerian clans.”

***

There are volumes to be written about all this, but for the current post I just want to keep it about archaeology. From 1925-1958, archaeologist Gordon Childe published some 25 books and pamphlets on European prehistory, many of which, including his Dawn (1925), Man Makes Himself (1936) and his final work The Prehistory of European Society (1958), took all of Europe as their canvas, crafting a rich narrative with a time-depth even Tolkien would approve of. Like Tolkien and Howard, Childe was similarly attracted by the gaps and silences of the past. His interest in the Indo-European proto-language soon transformed into a quest for archaeological evidence for the peopling of Europe itself. The later 19th century had seen an explosion of national archaeologies, in which the emerging nation-states of Europe each sought to trace (or create) a unique ‘national character’ rooted in the ancient past. Childe, like many others, was enthralled by the discovery of these ‘cultures’ and did more than most to establish their scientific basis through the study of artefacts. But in his visits to museums across Europe, he began to see patterns cutting across national boundaries. The Dawn (1925) was his first attempt at joining the dots and telling a coherent story of the prehistory of Europe as a whole, and he would spend his life refining it.

Prehistory: all the cool kids are doing it (source)

In a time before the radiocarbon dating revolution of the 1950s, and when the concept of prehistory itself was still fairly recent, almost any vision of the deep past was based on a certain amount of conjecture. Even the Dawn’s scientific, fact-based version still retained elements of the fantastical, with technologies like farming and metallurgy being ‘diffused’ by wandering prospectors and adventurers. And more than Howard and Tolkien, his prehistories were inextricably linked to modern Europe. Towards the end of his Bronze Age (1930, p 239), he explained the weight of what he was describing: “The general economic and social structure that may be inferred from the Late Bronze Age remains persisted with surprisingly superficial modifications throughout the Roman Period in many parts of the Empire...Even in the British Isles many elements of pure Bronze Age culture survived unchanged by subsequent migrations and invasions till late in last century”.

***

Childe’s prehistories did not survive the radiocarbon revolution, but the tropes of the world he built remain embedded in the archaeological genre which he helped create, as evidenced by the number of archaeological symposia and edited volumes about his continued influence. So the question remains – why were Tolkien, Howard and Childe busy reimagining prehistory in the interwar years? One stab at a short answer is that they all touched on a similar nerve in a heightened time. All three men took a cold, hard look at the old values that had led the world to war, and rejected them for an alternative history, one that looked beyond the great empires of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, which by now seemed too much like the collapsing empires of their own time.

But they were not alone, and not the first to do so. Across Europe and throughout the 18-19th century, there were movements to rediscover lost pasts, which we now dismiss as ‘antiquarianism’. These amateur practitioners and part-time scientists established the national collections of artefacts and compendia of ancient texts which allowed the modern academic disciplines of archaeology, history and linguistics to emerge. The appreciation of "cultures” which preceded Rome, the barbarians of Howard’s work and elves of Tolkien’s, has a long pedigree, and resulted in the emergence of a bipolar Celtic and Germanic inheritance for western Europe. Tolkien, Childe and Howard were all innovators, but were also continuing a discussion that had begun a century ago. It’ll be interesting in a future post to track the ways in which the progenitors of all three genres – high fantasy, swords and sorcery and European prehistory itself – accepted or rejected these stories in the worlds they built.

***

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Cover image by @callumogden

[almostarchaeology]

Before Conan the Barbarian, There Was Bran

By Adrián Maldonado

I write about medieval barbarians in my legit academic work, and use this blog to explore how they occasionally escape from our powerpoint slides into the public consciousness.

I recently realized that for all my degrees, I didn’t know a thing about one of history’s most famous barbarians. It was high time I looked up Conan.

Stock image of Dark Age Europe

In my 80s childhood, Conan the Barbarian was a kind of folk character – a stock image of a beefy white guy in a furry loincloth with a giant sword. (I would probably be picturing Conan the Librarian, to be honest.) But I already had He-Man in my life, a knock-off Conan cartoon made to sell toys, though I could not have known that because the cartoon was so unspeakably awesome it would brook no questioning. Indeed, I only discovered the Schwarzenegger Conan films later on, when I was old enough to realize he had made other weird, non-science fiction films back in the Reagan era. I knew vaguely that the character was based on a book, or was it a comic book? This was before the internet, and before I could ever give a shit about a character with no good action figures.

Flash forward twenty years or so, when I am a grizzled Xennial hunched over his computer, writing about depictions of the Picts in pop culture. Immersed in terrible filmic depictions of ancient Scottish warriors (always warriors), it struck me that I had never thought about Conan the Barbarian. What kind of barbarian was he meant to be? Did his story take place in some kind of historical epoch? Were there Picts in it that I could add to my list?

Imagine my shock when I did find a Pict down this rabbit hole (or souterrain?), and he looked like this:

Whatever else I was working on, stopped.

***

Robert E. Howard is best known today as the creator of Conan the Barbarian. But little did I know that he was one of the first pop culture appropriators of the Picts. Indeed, he was writing about the Picts long before he even conceived of Conan. The Picts were his muse. I feel like this is important, and I may need more than one blog post to say why. But first, an introduction.

I had seen some hilarious renderings of Picts over the years, but they always fell into the usual stereotype of tattooed maniacs hurling themselves onto Roman spears.

Tattooed maniacs hurling themselves onto Roman spears (source)

This 1960s paperback collection of stories by Howard entitled Bran Mak Morn, apparently the last king of the Picts, depicted this king Pict as a Neanderthal surrounded by howling ape-men. To me, this seemed like the purest distillation of the idea of the barbarians beyond the wall as sub-human, a trope developed in Roman imperial propaganda and continually reproduced today by the Hadrian’s Wall heritage ecosystem.

The paperback was one of a series of reprints of Howard’s genre-defining pulp fantasy of the 1920s and 1930s, brought back to life in the wake of the Tolkien wave of the 60s. Closer inspection revealed that Frank Frazetta’s 1969 cover image bore little resemblance to the description of Bran himself in Howard’s tales, even if his Pictish ‘race’ was certainly of a simian variety. More on this presently. What I wanted to know first was how a Texas kid learned about the Picts in the early 20th century, and came out with this.

***

Robert E Howard had a tough childhood in his native Texas. Coming from a broken home, he moved around a lot and read books to keep himself company. In 1919, at the age of 13, his father dragged him to New Orleans while he took classes, so he squirrelled himself away in a library on Canal Street. It was there that he first read about the Picts in a book about British history. The image of a little, dark race from the north that hassled the Romans but could never be conquered fascinated him. Perhaps due to the ray of light this book gave him at a sensitive point in his childhood, the Picts remained ingrained in his mind for the rest of his short life, which he would later take in 1936, at the age of 30.

Like many other nerdy kids, he wrote stories to pass the time. In his archive were found several early writings which reveal the impact the Picts had on him. There is a school paper from 1920-23 about the Picts. The first story he ever submitted for publication was about the Picts, ‘The Lost Race’, but it was rejected by the editor of Weird Tales in 1924. He sold his first story later that year, beginning his professional writing career. A revised version of ‘The Lost Race’ was finally published in Weird Tales in 1927, introducing the world to Bran Mak Morn, a Pictish king who fought the Romans. He would go on to make several more appearances in Howard’s swords-and-sorcery tales, and the Picts eventually became one of the myriad ‘races’ in Howard’s Hyborian Age, a proto-prehistoric shared universe inhabited by Conan the Barbarian.

Bran Mak Morn by Gary Gianni (source)

Howard’s Picts are a peculiar bunch. From his first essay on them, he describes them as the remnants of the stone age inhabitants of Britain, comparing their appearance to Native Americans. In this view, they were the ‘Mediterraneans’ (as opposed to Celts or Nordics) who first brought the knowledge of farming to Britain in the Neolithic. They were eventually swept aside by the fair-skinned ‘Celtic’ race of metalworkers, at which point they were forced to mingle and interbreed with the indigenous cavemen, a barely human simian-like race. This meant that by the arrival of the Romans, the Picts had become stunted, swarthy, long-armed ape-men. All except Bran Mak Morn, their king, who had kept his bloodline pure. All pretty disgusting racial logic now, but hey, so the argument goes, it was the 20s.

Except that here it was, unfiltered and raw, in a book released during the height of the civil rights struggle in the United States. I bought this ancient artefact off of Amazon for pennies, and holding it in 2017, it felt like I’d acquired an illicit antiquity. Plenty of writers have tripped over themselves to call out and defend Tolkien and Howard regarding the racial (if not always racist) component to their mythical prehistories, so I won’t go down that route just now. But that cover image haunted me.

***

In 2005, Bran Mak Morn received a brand-new edition, the Weird Tales stories now bundled with unpublished manuscripts, fragments of Howard’s correspondence, and critical essays by Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet. Armed with an annotated timeline of Howard’s Pictish writings, which spanned his career, and supplemented with google-fu, I was able to clarify the genesis of Bran Mak Morn.

Former Canal Street public library, New Orleans, 1911 (source)

It is possible to trace the public library Howard visited when he was 13, when he first encountered a British history book and his vision of the dark, prehistoric Picts. The Canal Street public library in question must be the one that formerly stood at 2940 Canal Street at the corner of South Gayoso, opened in 1911. A photograph survives on the New Orleans library website, and Google Maps reveals it is now a Yoga studio.

Origin myths of the Picts (source)

Rusty Burke has also plausibly identified the very book that Howard seems to have read: The Romance of Early British Life (1909) by George Francis Scott Elliot. This is apparently one of the flashy, pulpy ‘Library of Romance’ published by London-based Seeley and Co, described as ‘profusely illustrated’ ‘gift books’, which included among their number volumes such as The Romance of Modern Mining and The Romance of the World’s Fisheries. The author Scott Elliot was a botanist and antiquarian, president of Dumfries and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society during an apparent low point in its history.

The fairly ridiculous book in question seems to have been written for Edwardian teenage boys, and does indeed bear the DNA of Howard’s later writing on the Picts: “In very ancient times Britain had been twice conquered, first by the small, dark Picts of the Mediterranean, and later (about 2000 or 1000 B.C.) by the tall, brown-haired, Gaelic-speaking Celts (237).” The chapter on the introduction of farming to Britain is called ‘The coming of the Picts’, in which Scott Elliot explains that they have been called by several names before – Homo Mediterraneus, Basques, Iberians, Silurians, the Firbolg, the Dolmen-builders – but he calls them Picts to save on ink (80-1). He claims they are still readily identifiable in the present day, as the short, brunette people who are mostly found in towns and cities, unlike the fairer Teutons or Kelts who prefer the countryside (92-3).

Howard’s vision of the Picts was thus formulated by the equivalent of our contemporary public archaeology, an accessible potted prehistory of Britain by one of Scotland’s leading antiquaries. Why this particular image, of a dark, forgotten people without a history, resonated so deeply with him, is a subject to ponder. But he was clearly not alone in his fascination. While racial views of the past soon died out in archaeological writing, they would go on to have a tenacious grip on the fantasy world. And which of these two genres do you think has a greater influence on people’s image of the medieval past?

***

Why does any of this matter? It is a demonstration of the role of ‘the Picts’, in various guises, as the untermenschen of what you might call western folk history. The fact that a young boy in inter-war Louisiana could head to the nearest library, read about them in a cheap history book, and then build a world-beating fictional universe that is still beloved today based on this is remarkable. As I’ve spent some time documenting on these pages, that image of the Picts is still in a way with us. A recent article in the Glasgow Herald has the reporter coming to the shocking insight that the Picts were not ‘hairy savages’ after speaking briefly to a couple of scholars. I wonder if that means we are doing our job well, or terribly.

It also opens up questions about the central role of race at the origins of both archaeology and the fantasy genre, a sticky subject that will have to be the subject of future blog posts [Editor's note: now read the follow-up to this post]. In the meantime, go check out similar topics being covered over on The Public Medievalist. 

And hey, why not donate to your local public library while you’re at it?

***

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Header image via Jeff Black

[almostarchaeology]

Why we need an archaeology of (and a better name for) Xennials

By Adrián Maldonado

You must have seen the media coverage of the exciting discovery of a new ‘lost’ culture. Lost in plain sight, these were the kids who were born too late to feel part of Generation X, but are too old to identify as millennials. Only recently has the scientific community (which in 2017 just means the Internet) proposed a name for this mysterious civilisation: Xennials.

While the label is now under consultation by a panel of experts (read: Reddit), the need for this new classification is not up for debate. As a child of 1982, Class of 2000, 8-bit native, I have long felt this was an oversight. I even mentioned it once on this blog, in a discussion of the archaeology of the mp3. While there’s always a desire to delimit a generation to a set of birthdates, my colleagues (read: perennially underemployed drinking buddies) have settled on a fairly simple but irrefutable terminus between Gen X, ‘Xennial’ and millennial: too young to go to a Nirvana concert, but too old to have caught Pokémon on a Game Boy. Irrefutable!

Terminus ante quem (source)

There are several issues with the discussion being had at the moment, though. Much of the writing I’ve seen on this so far has taken a distinctly anti-millennial stance; it is much rarer to find a similar level of disdain for Generation X. But ‘not-millennial’ is impossible to justify as the defining characteristic of a generation.

The other issue is that the label Xennial makes us seem like the middle movie in a trilogy no one asked for, like the Desolation of Smaug – sure, it’s the best of the three but where’s the honour in being the creamy filling in a shit sandwich?  (I kid, of course – I spent a lot of time with those damn Hobbit films.) It reduces us to sequel or prequel, of consequence but only in relative terms.

Further, if I may put my dusty professor glasses on for just a moment, hybridity is so 1990s archaeological theory. This assumption that new things arise from the mixture of two previously-existing things when they smash together is not only too simple, it is potentially dangerous in an increasingly partisan world. We need to see identity less as an evolution from ‘pure’ to ‘mixed’, and more as messy and continually emerging – not cultures, but contexts.

Will Smith: also continually emerging in the 90s

But back to the Xennials. The main reason I feel there is something different about the pre-millennial, post-GenX generation is, surprise surprise, because we have a different archaeological footprint.  And what is most different about it is the fact that it is nearly invisible. This is why we were not ‘discovered’ until now. We are Nintendo Power, not just old but recently erased from the Internet. We are the Nokia brickphone, nostalgic but no longer necessary. We are the first disruptive apps Napster and Netscape which were quickly annihilated by big industry. We made it safe to be a nerd through the social networks we built, which we now bemoan as killing nerd culture. As early adopters of the Net, we were all set to change the world until Nine-Eleven silenced us into thinking never-ending war was in the national interest. We are Generation N, and we are nowhere.

Generation N?

The term Generation N has its charms. It kind of reminds me of Captain N, a cartoon many of us (in America at least) grew up thinking was cool and not a weekly, 30-minute Nintendo marketing brainwash. It is also reminiscent of GenerationNext, the “reviled” Pepsi marketing campaign which seems to have been the first to discover the fact that the kids listening to the Spice Girls could no longer be called Generation X (move over/cuz it’s over!).

In fact, nearly everything that describes us relates somehow to marketing, which is depressing but rather captures us to a T, or should I say, a TMNT: Ninja Turtles pizza industry conspiracy, anyone? To identify ourselves archaeologically is to wade into a sea of cultural garbage, from some of the best-worst pop music ever recorded, to films like Independence Day (1996) which irreversibly fused our national holiday with the summer blockbuster films that dominate the cultural conversation today.

In fact, the main issue with ‘Generation N’ as a term is that it’s difficult to turn into a group term – Generation Enners sounds awful to my ears. But then, so did the portmanteau word blog (yeuch!) back when it first blew up, and here I am trying to be more serious about blogging (history will judge us all).

Archaeology as anti-nostalgia

But is any of it archaeology? This is a question I have asked of various forms of pop culture on this blog, and my most recent attempt at an answer is that this is actually the wrong question. Archaeology is not a category of stuff but a scientific mode of analysis. As much as we associate ourselves with the study of the past, it is in the most literal sense a way of understanding the way that things made in the past (read: everything, potentially) survive into the present. What we say about them changes according to the present situation – five years ago there was no need to identify an ‘Xennial’ despite the fact we were all very much alive then. If the current situation needs a category called ‘Xennials’ then archaeology should be asking why that is, not claiming its carcasses.

The better question is whether there is anything specific to our generation that emerges from our use of material culture. It is something I have been unwittingly blogging about (yeeeuchh!) for a few years now, and will take me some time to retcon fully into existence. Blowing into cartridges was one small thing I identified early on as emergent from the material culture of home videogaming. The increasingly common occurrence of stuff I grew up with ending up in museums is another sign that our artefacts are foreign enough to modern audiences as to merit explanation.

Must be ritual (source)

And as I have explored here, what we learn from doing the archaeology of my generation is not always nice. An interest in researching the material signature of Blockbuster Video or the birth of the mp3 was born out of nostalgia, but both quickly became lessons in the destructive power of late capitalism. More often than not, what we destroyed was any evidence of our own culture and the way we experienced it. You can archive the early Internet all you want, but the bodily experience of dialling up and getting eye-strain from the completely inadequate CRT monitors as images loaded painfully slowly is undeniably central to our technological education, yet nearly impossible (and unrewarding, one would imagine) to recreate in the present.

The spectre of war also hangs low over Generation N. We were not, of course, the only ones to experience 9/11 and its aftermath. I previously wrote about the 9/11 Memorial Museum as an exhibit about the death of the 90s alongside its other roles, and the idea of a ‘long nineties’ stretching into the early Aughts is now an academic reality. But it is well worth exploring the less tangible shock 9/11 had on the kids who were just coming of age. In the Anglophone world, many of us will have cast their first votes for the parties of Al Gore or Tony Blair, and see how that all turned out; I’ve argued here that it would be years before we would see ourselves as a confident and capable force for change in the world, led as much by Jon Stewart as any politician.

The war on terror has had an archaeological impact beyond the sites of military conflict across the world; it can also be read through the material culture we leave behind right here on the home front. The transformative technology of the Internet which we were just learning how to use at the turn of the millennium was existentially threatened by the dotcom bubble which was bursting just as the planes hit. We allowed our utopian vision of the World Wide Web be slowly nibbled at by the need for security and monitoring, until it was so embedded in our devices we could never again live without it. The landfills full of dumb beepers and Nokia phones will be our most tangible footprint.

Sometimes it’s OK to forget (source)

One more thing we unintentionally left behind is our digital footprints. We were the first to become addicted to social networking, and our pages are quickly becoming cemeteries. The archaeology of our generation will largely come through the excavation of tweets and facebook posts as much as physical objects. With the advent of Snapchat and an ethos of ephemerality (however naive it is to assume the Cloud isn’t always recording our every move), forgetting has never been trendier. But those of us in Generation N grew up stacking and hoarding our physical media, and find it very difficult indeed to let go. Our Facebook accounts are destined to be long-lived shrines to our (possibly?) short-lived affair with sharing; not nostalgia but commemoration.

An archaeological view on the recent past makes the case for a generational divide more than any neologism, Xennial or otherwise. We may not like what we unearth when we do, but it is our job to prefigure some of the questions that may be asked of us by future excavation.

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[almostarchaeology]

A Lesson Plan for Videogame Archaeology in the Museum

By Adrián Maldonado

I didn’t wake up that morning thinking I’d be playing an original Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade console in just a few hours. It turned out to be a very good day.

So I was on Long Island recently for our annual, far-too-short family visit to America. It was also my daughter’s second birthday but it was raining and we needed an indoor activity. She loves planes, trucks and trains, and we were assured that the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City has all that plus good hands-on activities and a toddler room. We were not disappointed on any of those fronts.

But unbeknownst to us, the Cradle of Aviation Museum also has a major videogame history exhibition on at the moment. And this was no ordinary rinky-dink travelling exhibit.  I’m talking all the consoles, or at least 60 different ones, all playable, alongside some 30 original arcade cabinets. Whose birthday was it again?

It’s been a minute since my last post, so get ready for a nerd onslaught. This post will attempt three things: a straightforward review of a videogame history exhibit; some sense of the wider context within videogame museums I’ve been to recently; and finally, something a bit different: a lesson plan for teaching kids about videogames in the museum. I should probably change the blog title to Things No One Asked For, Ever, but in the meantime, do enjoy the blatant work avoidance.

Capsule review

This exhibit is actually a sequel. It began life as a temporary event called The Arcade Age in December 2015, which focused on recreating the experience of arcade gaming using some 50 playable cabinets. The recreated arcade was only accessible in three daily 90-minute sessions. The layout showed the influence of superhero arcadologist Raiford Guins, who was consulted for this exhibit, in its attention toward recreating the dark, cramped, noisy ambiance of an arcade. Judging by photos of the original exhibit, it also had a cool sideline on related material culture like Street Fighter II action figures and Pac-Man lunchboxes. It originally ran through April 2016, and was then extended to September 2016.

After its success, it was redesigned as a more comprehensive exhibition, From the Arcade to the Living Room: A Video Game Retrospective 1972-1999 in November 2016, now including a full history of home gaming consoles alongside a reduced but still impressive list of arcade cabinets. The website doesn’t say whether this will become a permanent exhibit, but they are selling season tickets for hardcore gamers until December 2017. It was this exhibition I stumbled upon one fateful day in June.

Wall of ancestors

The games are laid out in roughly chronological order, beginning with the carcass of a Computer Space cabinet from 1971 at the start. Curator Seamus Keane has been damn near exhaustive, going beyond the usual focus on ‘Golden Age’ arcade games and providing real working examples of lesser-performing systems like the Neo-Geo and the Atari Jaguar. Fulfilling the dream of a 90s indoor kid, it was perhaps the first and last time I’ll ever play a CD-I and a 3DO (note to me 25 years ago: neither was worth the wait).

Besides the snippets of information provided next to each console, historical context was a bit light and there was no clear aim or agenda for the exhibition. Media surrounding the opening fleshed it out a little more, but not much: for curator Keane, it was “a concept I had in my head of telling what I felt was somewhat of a lost history about the social culture and the popular culture, as well as the technological history of the arcade game itself and of the arcade as a social setting.” Hope you caught all that between rounds of Marvel Vs Capcom.

There were only a few thematic displays but they worked well – a wall of ephemera included a Nintendo Power Pad, several strategy guides and a Game Genie (!). A wall display on the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 included a screen playing the documentary Atari: Game Over (2014) next to an Atari 2600 with an ET cartridge you could load yourself, a crucial part of the home gaming experience you rarely get to experience in a museum setting. A cabinet of dead peripherals was also eye-opening in an unexpected way; the juxtaposition of Sega 3D Glasses and a Sega Dreamcast mouse from a decade apart made me think of how Sega was so often ahead of its time, and yet somehow lost the console wars. In the tech world, it doesn’t always pay to be first.

Videogames in the Museum

Touch the artefacts

I’ve been to several videogame museum exhibitions now (and even some videogame museums!) and can confidently say that this was one of the most fun. There was a wall of NES games and a wall of Atari games, but the core of the arcade was in a long, low-ceilinged dark hall. There, the half-assed display cards dwindled to a minimum and the game was the thing. Original cabinets, many of them with fucked-up decals from years of play, were ready to rock, no MAME here. Aside from the usual Golden Age of Arcade stuff, there were plenty of classic 90s cabinets from my era, and even some left-field entrants like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, which I thought was a masterpiece when I first played it in 1990 and has accrued tremendous baggage since then.

Best of all was the chronological row of home gaming consoles buried deep in the bunker-like arcade hall. Here in glowing cubicles of glass but not out of reach were the venerated SNES and Genesis games of my formative years, alongside the also-rans like the Sega Saturn. I showed my 2 year-old daughter her first game of Super Smash Bros for the N64. She picked up the control and held it up to her ear like a phone. I have never loved her more.

The ragtag army of 90s CRT veterans

Each console was hooked up to a full-on CRT TV, no messing about with flatscreens, as I’ve groaned about previously. As the exhibition website puts it, they are “all on old school TV tubes!” Each TV was different from the next one, as they had clearly been scavenged piecemeal from various Long Island attics. Some had flatter screens, some bulged out lewdly, but all were hard-bitten survivors from the 90s. They are the real heroes here.

How does this rate? While the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin clearly wins out in almost every way in terms of playability, historical context and design, there was something about the scale of the recreated arcade and lack of interpretation here that charmed me. As Guins has pointed out, the material presence of the cabinets and the consoles are part of the gameplay; they are designed to draw you in and beg you to grab them, and whatever their flaws, their physical interfaces shape how the game is played.

Beyond Retro-Nostalgia: A Lesson Plan

Ready player one

At one point I was able to play technician: I was able to revive a blank TV screen by switching it to channel 3. I felt like a wise elder. I also may have felt very old because I was surrounded by schoolkids. It was a weekday, and we shared the exhibit with a group of fifth-graders (Year 6 for UK readers). For once, it was genuinely interesting to share a museum with a school trip. There have always been children in the videogame exhibitions I’ve visited previously, but they’re always there with their aging nerd parents (of which I am now very much a number). It is certainly worth recording the stories told to a new generation about their cultural heritage. But it was enlightening in a different way to hear what kids said to one another when playing these games.

What I heard blew my mind. I was playing the Double Dragon (1987) arcade cabinet (I’d only ever played the NES version, so this was very exciting indeed), when two boys walked behind me – one of them said to the other, “Double Dragon! I love that game!” How did he know? What else did he know? Has the Internet already made everyone like Wade from Ready Player One? Other kids swapped stories about the games they’d tried, and I felt almost compelled to start writing these candid observations down. They were like little archaeologists unearthing the artefacts of my past and puzzling over what they might mean – but also making more interesting connections with recent games than I could with my nostalgia specs on.

On my way out I ran into one of the schoolteachers and thanked her for taking the kids here, and congratulated her on how well-behaved they all seemed to be even though they were surrounded by a hundred flashing screens. I asked whether this was part of a specific class, and she said no, they usually take the kids to the Cradle of Aviation Museum because science and whatnot, but they dropped into the arcade exhibition because it was there. I asked if they would follow it up in class at all, and she said no.

The Atari Jaguar: and alternate future of 64-bit gaming

That struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity. Here were a few dozen kids having a great time in a museum, handling the technological ancestors of their favourite devices and games. The kids I heard were knowledgeable about videogames, native to them. For all the action in teaching history through videogames, there are no easily accessible resources out there to teach videogames as rare artefacts of a meaningful past. In what other museum exhibition are you allowed to handle, let alone grab and generally get all up in, the archaeology? What better way to learn than by playing?

Don’t get me wrong – museums with videogame exhibitions often provide their own series of educational resources and programmes for school visits, but a quick and very unscientific search shows little coherent agenda for dealing with the historicity of videogame and the material cultures of gaming. As more videogames end up in museums, we do the next generations a real disservice if the whole message is just about how videogames used to be pixellated and now they’re not. The game is not just the visual but the physical, and every console and medium enabled and constrained ways of playing, creating cultures of gaming. To get beyond nostalgia, we need to draw out the untold stories which will engage kids who are playing these objects for the first time.  

There’s at least a PhD thesis in here

Digital archaeology guru Jeremy Huggett recently reminded us about the need to deal with the historicity of technology: as the workings of our gadgets inexorably disappear into smaller and more efficient packages, we know less about how our devices work, and think little about why they are built the way they are. So break open a few controllers and cartridges to teach the history of computing. We assume a linear progression from worse to better technology on the basis that the invisible hand of the market chose the best products over time. So tell the story of the Sega Dreamcast, recognised for its merits only long after its demise. The market of ideas is always in conflict with the actual market, and real innovation is always pitted against the chance for real profit. Teach the Great Video Game Crash and its mountain of destroyed cartridges; debate the value of excavating the recent past, and what else of theirs will remain to be excavated.

It’s not all about the tech, either. You don’t have to wait for Assassin’s Creed: Cuban Missile Crisis to teach kids about the Cold War and why we’re (still) not playing nice with Russia. You can start with games like Contra and Missile Command and talk about ways in which war found its way even into children’s bedrooms in the 1980s. Maybe have a frank discussion about all those Battlefield games they’re playing now. Play the first ten seconds of Double Dragon to introduce the term ‘toxic masculinity’.

There’s a million ways to sneak learning into a trip to the arcade. Teach the kids how to critically read the artefacts; what could be more archaeological?

More photos here.

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[almostarchaeology]

Picts and Cake: Just Another World Heritage Day on the Antonine Wall

By Adrián Maldonado

If I seem a bit disoriented, it’s because I just experienced a mad evening of archaeology and cake on the Antonine Wall.

As I wrote in the previous post, Dig It! 2017 and EventScotland teamed up this year to mark World Heritage Day in style with Scotland in Six, unique experiences on Scotland’s six UNESCO World Heritage Sites. At Callendar House, Falkirk, a stately home conspicuously parked on the Antonine Wall, the event was a twofer: a Romans vs Picts 5k race followed by a Roman Bake-Off.

Picts: international piggyback champions

Now, if this blog is about anything, it’s about the ways archaeology drips off the ivory towers of academia and lands somewhere on the unsuspecting heads of casual passersby. Despite the presence of a few stalwarts of Roman frontier archaeology amongst the participants and spectators, the event was mercifully free of any lectures. Instead, it was playful party on the ruins of antiquity. It was not a reflection of an actual-factual past (technical terms, all of these), but a celebration of the past’s curious persistence into the present.

Plus: cake. SOLD.

Before

The new foederati were proving difficult to train

As the attendants gathered for the race, the Dig It! team supplied them with Roman gear or Pictish blue facepaint. Meanwhile, two local groups paraded on the grounds to get the atmosphere going: The Antonine Guard (Roman Living History Society) dutifully marched in formation, whilst the Picts, represented by the Two Left Feet dance troupe, mocked them relentlessly.

Most of the participants used the helmets and facepaint provided at the event, but a few archaeologists came a bit more prepared.

From left: respectable professionals Kirsty Owen, Rebecca Jones and Peta Glew reveal their inner selves in the name of World Heritage Day

During

Runners were of all ages and whilst I don’t have a full head count, I do believe there were more Picts than Romans on the day. My work here is done.

Every step was one step closer to cake

The Pict and Roman re-enactors all lined up at the finish line to greet the runners, giving the whole event a gleeful vibe. I was thrilled to see kids in facepaint getting cheered on by everyone; at their age, I was running Nintendo marathons.

A triumphant Pict cheered on by his mates

First past the finish line were two Romans and a Pict, and they all cordially shook hands afterward. The knives were surely sheathed somewhere though, just in case.

After

Finally.

After everyone was in, we retired into the meeting room at Callendar House for the Roman Bake-Off. My dinner that night was marshmallow and sponge cake. Well, almost – I spent a good amount of time learning from Anna Canning of Floramedica about herbs and spices imported by the Romans and demonstrated in homemade ‘Roman’ pesto. And then went back for a Fortlet Tartlet.

Ground elder, introduced to Britain by the Romans

Prizes for best costume were given out by MSP Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs, making them super legit.

Reflections

And there was peace on the Antonine Wall - until the next race

Overall, I was able to check my inner Prof Buzzkillington at the door and have a great time seeing people get inspired and creative about the ancient past. And this was just one of six brilliant events that happened on the 18th. Scotland is fairly crawling with World Heritage sites, and all of them should be on your bucket list. Me, I’m up to five of six, but until I make it there I can now visit St Kilda using Minecraft.

And this is just part of the madness. Keep posted on upcoming events, including the upcoming Hidden Gems event, during the Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology 2017 with VisitScotland and Dig It! 2017.

This is a collaborative post with Dig It! 2017.

Join VisitScotland’s Online Community to get the best advice on how to experience Scotland yourself. Start with my Top Ten Pictish Stone Sites!

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[almostarchaeology]

There Will Be Facepaint: Picts vs Romans on the Antonine Wall

By Adrián Maldonado

So it’s World Heritage Day next week, and to mark the occasion, Dig It! 2017 and EventScotland are hosting Scotland in Six, unique celebrations on all six Scottish World Heritage Sites. Much to my nerdy glee, one of these will be Pictish themed, on the Antonine Wall at Callendar House, Falkirk.

I have kind of an unhealthy fascination with the Picts. I will definitely be going.

The Event

The big event is a Romans vs Picts 5k race, for which participants will be given free blue facepaint or Roman helmets. To sweeten the deal, this will be followed by a Great Roman Bake Off (what, no Pictish cakes?). Medals will be won, costume prizes will be awarded. The event is free but ticketed so make sure to sign up online. Did I mention there will be cake? Why haven’t you registered yet? What kind of monster are you?

Who Were the Picts?

The Picts inhabited large swathes of modern-day Scotland from at least AD 297, when the Romans first started to grumble about them, to around AD 900 when they re-branded as the more inclusive kingdom of Alba. They started off as one of the Roman Empire’s least favourite dinner guests, yet they carried on inviting themselves over to dinner at Hadrian’s Wall until the Romans eventually found it easier to just move out. They later became notorious for their tattooing and graffiti skills, and left their mark by tagging numerous ancient standing stones in northeastern Scotland.

Since then, they have become one of history’s most colourful stock characters, spontaneously generating from behind any depiction of a Roman wall, appearing in thinly-veiled form in movies about any part of the Iron or Middle Ages, and even popping up in fantasy and sci-fi visions of the past and future. I used to complain about historical inaccuracies in their portrayal in pop culture, but now I just go hoovering these appearances up (in the name of research). They are timeless and weird and Scottish and great.

Stand By for a Message from Prof Buzzkillington

If you’ll excuse the interruption, I have to put in a word from my stuffy academic side here. Of course, the Antonine Wall was built, staffed and abandoned well over a century before the first mention of the Picts in historical sources. As such, there is no real evidence that a Roman ever chased a Pict (or vice versa) across the Antonine Wall. That said, it is also the case that the Antonine Wall remained visible in the landscape after its abandonment, as it does in places like Rough Castle nearly two millennia later, and it would have been well known to any Picts living there in later years. Indeed, it was for a time considered to be the border between the Pictish and Northumbrian kingdoms, and Bede reports local Pictish names for the wall in the 8th century. So there. You can read my very serious thoughts about the wall’s curious afterlife here, as I stuff Prof Buzzkillington back in his box.

How To Go Full Pict

Mostly what I want to see next week is glorious anachronism, like the movie Brave, but in trainers. Not enough Picts on Instagram, folks. I know there’s plenty of Roman love out there but I do hope there will be enough facepaint to make them think again. So to help things along, here follow some of my favourite Picts and pseudo-Picts to use as your inspiration for next Tuesday.

1.       The Noble Savage

The classic way of depicting the Picts is to graft tattoos and symbols onto a stock Native American archetype. This smashing together of the ‘primitive’ from different continents has a long pedigree, from the famous 16th-century watercolours by John White just after his first visit to colonial Virginia, straight the way through to more recent neo-colonial action films such as Centurion and The Eagle (above). Pros: may include trousers. Cons: all that cultural insensitivity.

2.       The Ginger Maniac

The kind of Pict that appears when all you need is a herd of howling, naked antagonists in a battle sequence. The name comes from a classic Blackadder special (above) in which we go back in time to Hadrian’s Wall just in time for a raid, with hilarious consequences. Pros: keeping cool during a race is easier when naked. Cons: being arrested for public indecency.

3.       The Braveheart

The most anachronistic, and yet most beloved, use of Pictish-style facepaint in pop culture is not even on a Pict at all, but on the late medieval army of William Wallace according to history expert Mel Gibson. No reason was given for the facepaint other than, you know, Scotland? Pros: just look like you’re going to a Scotland football match. Cons: the sound of history crying.

4.       The Goth

The type of pseudo-Pict often used in contemporary fictional allegories for the Roman walls, from Game of Thrones’ scarified cannibal Thenns to the hyper-Goth biker-Picts of the film Doomsday (above; they are also cannibals, natch). Pros: stylish leather trousers. Cons: think of the chafing.

5.       The Superpict

My newest favourite depiction of a Pict is Saltire, the Scottish superhero from Diamondsteel Comics, set in a pseudo-historical Pictish past. According to creator John Ferguson, “He’s big, he’s blue and he’s ginger”. Nuff said. Pros: looking like a badass. Cons: that’s gonna take a lot of body paint.

Next post will be reporting from the event - and there will be facepaint.

***

This is a collaborative post with Dig It! 2017.

Already signed up for Romans vs Picts, or any of the other World Heritage Day celebrations? Shout about it on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram using the hashtags #WorldHeritageDay and #ScotlandinSix to join the conversation!

Follow us on @AlmostArch

[almostarchaeology]

A Handy Guide to the Archaeology of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

By Adrián Maldonado

Take a drink if you’ve heard this one before, but for me, one of the things which set Rogue One apart from the previous Star Wars films was its archaeological sensibility.

While The Force Awakens had plenty of ruins, and featured one iconic artefact from the original trilogy, there was no real sense that history extended beyond the events of Episodes IV-VI. Yet with Rogue One, turn any stone and you’ll see the remnants of a past so deep that even its creators have only glimpsed it. The film also draws from the prehistory of George Lucas’ own writing, going back to his early journals from 1973. As if you needed another excuse to re-watch Rogue One, here is a handy guide to the archaeological items and motifs you may have missed. And do I really need to warn about spoilers? I’m surprised I haven’t spoiled anything already. Valar morghulis.

Jyn Erso’s kyber crystal pendant

It’s no lightsaber, but it’ll have to do (source)

The first proper artefact we see in the film is a kyber crystal pendant given to the young Jyn Erso by her mother Lyra. There is no indication of how Lyra came into possession of one, or how long it has been a family heirloom; adding to its mystery, it is apparently inscribed in Aurabesh.

To get answers, I had to turn to the awkwardly titled Star Wars: Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide (UVG) by Pablo Hidalgo, Lucasfilm’s story czar. Published for kids and incurable nerds, this volume provides canonical explanations for the tiniest details of costume, prop and set design for the film. Here we are given Lyra’s fascinating backstory, revealing she met her future husband Galen Erso while surveying cave systems on distant planets researching kyber crystals. She is also a keen student of Jedi theology, and the red sash she wears is apparently a token of her devotion to the Force. In fact, in an early version of the script, she was a Jedi herself. The crystal she wore around her neck came from Galen’s research collection. It is not clear whether it was at this point already inscribed.

Beats a rabbit’s foot, thought young Jyn (source)

Nerds are already well aware that kyber crystals are the mysterious semi-divine materials which power Jedi lightsabers, and as the film makes clear, also power the Death Star’s superlaser. They are very much the Star Wars saga’s Rings of Power, in that they are also animate objects, receptive to the will of the Force and exerting effects on the Force-sensitive. Partially organic, they vibrate and emit harmonics, allowing someone like Chirrut Îmwe with super-hearing to use them to his advantage. This is how he is able to perceive Jyn’s kyber pendant in the busy marketplace on Jedha, and it turns out Chirrut also has a sliver of kyber of his own in the metal end of this staff.

Kyber crystals thus form a clever material metaphor for the Jedi; worn or carried by two of the main characters, they are present throughout the film but only rarely glimpsed, like medieval saint’s relics. Rogue One is famously the first Star Wars film to not revolve around Jedi or Sith characters, but the Force is strong in this episode. The Jedi are not physically present, but from Lyra Erso to Chirrut, the film is full of people who are in awe of the Force, or bent on using its secrets to control the galaxy. The saga is quickly becoming less a hero’s journey and more a hagiography of canonised Jedi saints.

Yavin 4’s Great Temple

The not-quite-Mayan pyramids of Rogue One (source)

The appearance of the Rebel Alliance headquarters on Yavin 4 is pure nerd catnip, taking us into the pyramids glimpsed so briefly from a distance in A New Hope. It’s not just the Empire ransacking ancient monuments during this Galactic Civil War: the Rebel Alliance ensconced themselves in abandoned pyramids on a distant forest planet. They appear to have gutted out the ground levels of these monuments for use as hangars for their space fleet. Further research reveals these are the 5000 year-old temples of the Massassi, an extinct people with a tragic history. We don’t know much more about them, not that it matters much in the long term as they were evacuated immediately after the Battle of Yavin which follows soon after the events of Rogue One. Interestingly, Yavin 4 was not completely abandoned, as a small colony was set up there after the Battle of Endor, and this happens to be where our new favourite flyboy Poe Dameron was born. Given the impact of the events and historical figures that passed through here, I hope the Galactic equivalent of UNESCO doesn’t try to undo the modifications on these temples wrought by the Rebels, as it is a crucial part of the long-term importance of this site.

The actual Mayan pyramids of A New Hope (source)

Oh, and these pyramids are of course inspired by the real-world Mayan pyramids of Tikal in modern-day Guatemala, where George Lucas sent a crew to film for a few landscape views back in 1977. Interior shots were all studio creations, and Rogue One’s temples show some artistic license taken by the designers this time around to make them a bit Star Warsier more than Mayan, but in wide shots they are unmistakeable Earthling archaeology.

Jedha and the Whills

We’re gonna need a longer extension cord (source)

The centrality of the Force to this film is shown in the centrality of Jedha. Jedha is one of the galaxy’s main sources of naturally-occurring kyber crystals. It is also the main pilgrimage destination of worshippers of the Force, as it claims to be the site of the first Jedi temple. According to the UVG, the deserts are also dotted with ancient ruins and remnants of some of the oldest civilisations in the galaxy. The parallels with modern-day Mecca and Jerusalem are intentional, according to another nerdy companion volume, The Art of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story: “To better imbue the setting with a sense of scale and significance, artists found inspiration in human history”. As designer Doug Chiang puts it, “[we] don’t treat these movies like science fiction, but more like historical films.”

We see Jedha as a city under occupation, an Imperial Star Destroyer parked menacingly above, Imperial tanks patrolling the streets, and the attendant violence from rebel insurgents. The sacred places, including the central Temple of the Whills, have been looted for their precious kyber, which is now destined to fuel the Galaxy’s deadliest weapon. This would be like stealing the Black Stone of Mecca to power a nuclear warhead.

The involvement of Chirrut Îmwe and Baze Malbus is a direct result of the Empire’s meddling in Jedha. They were both formerly Guardians of the Whills, an order of warrior monks tasked with protecting the Temple, but now find themselves out of a job as the temple was decommissioned. These events may also have galvanized the defection of Imperial pilot Bodhi Rook, a native of Jedha. It seems in hindsight that the desecration of this holy place was a fatal overreach for the Empire.

Sometimes there is such a thing as too much statue (source)

Another way of looking at it is that the near-extermination of the Jedi 19 years previously had already resulted in a demotion of the Jedi from a core pillar of the Galactic Republic to an underground cult. Pillaging the Temple of the Whills would not have been seen as a desecration but a consolidation of Imperial rule. This turning away from cultural heritage is embodied by the fallen Jedi statue seen being slowly engulfed by the sands of Jedha. What other galactic heritage had been lost in the rise of the Empire? Along with the first Jedi Temple (or oldest surviving after Jedha?) glimpsed at the end of The Force Awakens, the addition of Jedha to the Star Wars universe shows that our generation’s post-Lucas saga is more interested in exploring the roots of the religion of the Jedi than their heroic exploits.

So what on earth is a Whill? If the ancient Temple and fallen statue are links to deep prehistory within the Star Wars universe, the Whills are Rogue One’s way of reaching into the prehistory of Star Wars itself. George Lucas’ first draft of what would eventually become Star Wars was a couple of pages of notes scribbled down in 1973 under the heading ‘Journal of the Whills’. It seems the original idea was for the stories of the Jedi to have reached us through a sort of intergalactic Red Book of Westmarch, but this was eventually abandoned. Lucas intended for the Whills to remain in the universe as a secretive cult of the Force, but the word has never been spoken on screen until now. It cements Rogue One not as an outlier to the original trilogy, but a sort of exegetical commentary on a text that has since become sacred.

Saw Gerrera’s Hideout

Sometimes there is such a thing as too much bass (source)

Just down the road from the Holy City of Jedha is a natural steeple of rock rising up from the desert which houses the secret headquarters of the extremist rebel Saw Gerrera. We only get a few glimpses of the structure but it appears to be a pretty ostentatious hiding place, in a towering Petra-like rock-cut temple approached by an avenue of space-trilithons. The UVG reveals that this is an ancient tomb called the Catacombs of Cadera, which was formerly used as an ossuary for a convenient ‘people whose name and history have been long forgotten.’ It seems it is not only the Empire who are busy pillaging Jedha’s heritage resource in times of war.

Further research reveals there are yet more artefacts hidden in the Catacombs, although I’m not sure how visible these are in the final cut of the film. The hideout apparently includes cave paintings, perhaps inspired by the petroglyphs found in Wadi Rum, Jordan where the Jedha landscapes were filmed. However, these are not the art of some lost people, but creatures from Rogue One director Gareth Edwards’ previous films, including the 2014 Godzilla.

Darth Vader’s castle on Mustafar

The realtor did tell me this area was so hot right now (source)

You may have noticed the way that, unlike previous Star Wars films, Rogue One uses title cards to name the various planets as we go along. One location that is not named is the lava planet with a massive castle straddling a river of magma, which turns out to be Darth Vader’s residence on Mustafar. This is (pushes glasses up bridge of nose), of course, the planet where Obi-Wan Kenobi nearly killed his former padawan Anakin Skywalker (now renamed Darth Vader) leaving him for dead after a vicious duel as depicted in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. After Vader was stitched up and made into the sci-fi Nazi samurai we all for some reason love, he apparently couldn’t get enough of the place and set up shop there in a big obsidian tower straight outta Mordor.

So it’s a clear link to the much maligned prequel trilogy, but wait, there’s archaeology here too! According to the Art of Rogue One, ‘The stark, modern structure is built over an ancient castle full of dark secrets’, or as explained by production designer Doug Chiang, ‘we don’t see it all right now, but the idea was that Vader’s castle was built over a natural cave — a Sith cave deep down below, in the lava world.’

What is it about bad guys occupying archaeological monuments as their lairs? There’s more than just a passing resemblance to Sauron’s preferred mode of pointy black architecture. You may remember my excavation of The Hobbit films on this blog, where I discussed the foundation of the Necromancer’s Dol Guldur on the ruins of an ancient Elven hall deep in Mirkwood. The explanation of the shape of the castle according to the designers is also distinctly Tolkienesque, or specifically Two Towers-esque. Its ‘tuning fork’ shape helps harness the Dark Side of the Force, and echoes the design of the Temple of the Whills on Jedha which apparently uses the same principle to channel the Force. Vader, like Saruman, is nothing if not a scholar of ancient myth and theology.

Red and Gold Leader

...and then she said, Yavin? I barely even know him! (source)

Rogue One will also be remembered as the first big production to digitally dig up the dead and make them do our bidding on the big screen. While Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia are digitally reconstructed to horrific effect, two other characters were welcomed back to the big screen in an altogether more fitting fashion. These are the Rebel pilots who go by the callsigns Red and Gold Leader, played respectively by Drewe Henley (who, like Carrie Fisher, died in 2016) and Angus Macinnes. They were spliced into their cockpits from forgotten unused footage from 1977’s A New Hope ‘excavated’ by director Gareth Edwards from the Lucasfilm archive on Skywalker Ranch. These clips are therefore the only physical artefacts from the original trilogy that appear in Rogue One. It is a reminder of how a movie, or any piece of intangible culture, is just the public-facing side of a much larger material assemblage including, props, sets, and yes, the physical media itself. Which leads us to my favourite bit of media archaeology in Rogue One:

The Death Star data tapes

I promise I'll remember to rewind next time! (source)

Described in A New Hope as ‘data tapes’, the Death Star plans which are the MacGuffin of our film confusingly appeared in 1977 only as a flat datacard. Rogue One (finally!) shows us how the data was transferred to this datacard from the original tapes, which sounds like a joke but forms the basis for the film’s climactic battle sequence. The tape is stored in a ludicrous Imperial cassette tower on Scarif. It needs to be physically removed from the tower and manually inserted into a tape reader set precipitously at the top of the spire, to be broadcast from an antenna and dish array. This is thrilling action only for aging computer geeks, who are, of course, the target audience here.

There is a surprising amount of online literature breaking down the various media formats used in the Star Wars films, including this scathing report on the flaws in the Empire’s digital preservation policies as revealed in Rogue One. But this long-read from Jalopnik has got to be the best: “Are there any words that get people more excited than large-scale, long-term data storage? I fucking doubt it.” They explain why the Empire holds on to seemingly antiquated analog media like magnetic tape,  which essentially comes down to rigorously maintaining galaxy-wide data compatibility standards. It is not necessarily science-fiction, either, as the US Army still runs its nuclear arsenal on cyberattack-proof floppy disk-based software, and for long-term storage of data, it is still hard to beat tape.

Rogue One: Search for the Missing Adapter (source)

Believe it or not, there are lessons for archaeologists here, in that it forces us to re-examine our oddly unquestioned attachment to planned obsolescence, and the archiving issues that it is already causing us. In a time when magnetic media are slowly being killed off, tapes and physical media like vinyl continue to come back in fashion. The satisfying clunk of loading a heavy cartridge like the Death Star plans into a tape deck and the whirr of the reels as the data comes to life are small pleasures lost to us today which can only be experienced vicariously in sci-fi fantasy such as this. Recreating 1970s artefacts such as these are a way of exploring past futures and questioning the present, the mission not just of media and contemporary archaeology, but arguably archaeology as a whole.

Conclusion

This deep dive into the archaeological record of the Star Wars universe as depicted in Rogue One reveals that the Galactic Civil War had one pernicious side effect: fighters on both sides neglected their cultural heritage in the name of military expediency. Of all the dark goings-on under the Empire, this is one of the most upsetting in the long term. In just a single generation, the shining temples and cities of the prequel trilogy have given way to the ruinscapes of Rogue One, a situation that has not much improved by the time of Force Awakens. And as that film shows, the old Imperial ideology survives like a weed, sprouting back up in the fertile soil of a pastless society.

It also shows that we can assess pop culture as archaeology, through the way in which the material culture of previous films is reused, reconstructed, cited and remixed by later generations. The fastidious attention to continuity taken by the designers as revealed by the Ultimate Visual Guide and Art of Rogue One companion volumes shows that authenticity is expressed through fidelity to tangible objects, sets and settings. There are plenty of lessons in here for archaeologists trying to understand the public appetite for heritage and a sense of connection to a deeper past.

And this may well be why Rogue One is so much more archaeological than the previous Star Wars films. Like The Hobbit trilogy before it, it is simultaneously trying to construct an ancient fictional past, call up memories of films which take place in its future, and provide exegetical commentary on the now-sacred original text in our timeline. Grafting entirely new characters and landscapes and onto a literally canonised set of scriptures can be perilous. In order to justify these inauthentic appendages, it grounds the story in the perceived authenticity of material culture. These new artefacts are retconned into the original narrative in order to create a more ‘realistic’ universe, similar to what Tom Shippey famously called the ‘asterisk history’ of Tolkien’s legendarium. It shows our generation’s need to plug the gaps and make legit mythology out of what others see as fairy-stories. It is nothing less than the archaeology in, of and through popular culture, and I am quite clearly obsessed.

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Reporting Archaeology in the Post-truth Era

By Adrián Maldonado

Did you know that the majority of people now get their news through social media? This means that we can safely assume that Facebook and Twitter are now also the primary outlets for archaeology news. Hope your research lends itself to clickbaity headlines.

That’s why when I was invited to submit a Digital Review for the SAA’s Advances in Archaeological Practice, I chose archaeonews as the subject. In a short piece entitled ‘The Serialized Past’, I proposed that we should start thinking about online archaeology news as a separate genre of archaeological writing, and we should get better at it. You can read it free here.

But here’s the thing. I wrote the article this summer, in the last days of the pre-Trump era. Since then, the news itself has rather become the news. One big issue that’s emerged is the spread of fake news and the implications for fans of accuracy in the post-truth era. Of course, the epithet ‘fake news’ covers a spectrum of troubling practices emergent from the cacophonous internet. These range from deliberate lies propagated via clickbait mills, to misinformation gone viral, to just bad reporting, which has existed as long as there has been reporting.

Archaeology: you’re doing it wrong (source)

While there’s plenty of bad archaeology out there online, it seems to be more of the ancient aliens variety than an existential threat to democracy. Not to downplay the problem of news-faking more widely (witness the very real-world effect of fake news in the recent ‘Pizzagate’ case) but when it comes to archaeology, the bigger issue is shitty journalism spread by uncritical sharing (and the common practice of sharing a headline without reading the article).

The spread of bad archaeology online is not fuelled by conspiracy theorists or Macedonian teenagers out to make a buck. It is fuelled by fans – people who are hungry to read about new discoveries and scientific techniques, but are fed an anaemic diet of superlatives about the first or oldest or most valuable gold treasure found in this or that place.

Many commentators are now talking about the silos of opinion that we build for ourselves online, but archaeology (and science reporting in general) builds its own echo chamber, one that privileges a few distinct shades of the past. These include the famous (Richard III is the gold standard here), the shiny (any hoard of silver or gold) and the mysterious (‘vampire burials’ are a perennial favourite).

Not the Mona Lisa

In the post-truth era, publication by press release is becoming much more common. There’s effectively no filter between good and bad archaeology in the mainstream press, as there are few, if any, reporters on the archaeology beat. I was tickled to find that the skeleton of the real Mona Lisa has been ‘discovered’ several times in Florence over the last few years. The issue is much bigger than science reporting, of course - as this Guardian piece puts it: “the new measure of value for too many news organisations is virality rather than truth or quality.” If it gets clicks, there’s little incentive for the newspapers not to post a story.

That the Mona Lisa could be ‘found’ in 2011, 2012 and 2015, by the same project no less, is pretty funny. Less funny is the fact that in late 2016, 27 out of the 30 top results for the Google search ‘mona lisa archaeology’ were still newspapers and blogs reporting the ‘discovery’, with only one prominent archaeologist calling the project out for what it was: a publicity stunt, not science - thank the archaeology gods for Kristina Killgrove.

And so we get to the real issue. In her work on digital archaeology, Lorna Richardson has identified the problem of the ‘long tail’ of archaeology news online. While news reports of fieldwork in progress are seen as ephemeral and not definitive accounts, they will always turn up higher than academic publications on a Google search, potentially for years after the story was dashed off to a tight deadline. Of course, not every archaeological discovery, no matter how newsworthy, always makes it to full publication, thereby making these articles the effective record on the matter. Just ask Wikipedia: the entry for Lisa del Giocondo currently has a single sentence on the Mona Lisa’s death, and it cites a Telegraph article on the 2015 excavations.

***

2016 was an epic year for failures of archaeology. This was the year of the ‘Nazi gold train’, the ‘Mayan city’ discovered by a kid using Google Earth, whatever the fuck Semir Osmanagić said about a stone sphere, and ‘Nefertiti’s Tomb’, more on which presently. Thankfully we have people like Killgrove out there calling out some of the worst offenders. But the problem is not that we don’t have enough fact-checkers; as the editor of Politico put it with regards to the US election: “The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.”

Actual dailymail.co.uk screengrab #nofilter

My favourite example of this is the week-long saga of ‘Aristotle’s Tomb’, which was briefly found in May (6000 shares on Daily Mail) before it was unfound in June (only 53 shares on the Daily Mail). But of course, you scoff, that’s the Daily Fail we’re talking about. Fine. Let’s turn to the Guardian, UK paper of record, where the same story got over 7000 shares (even quoting the archaeologist as saying “I have no hard proof”), and didn’t bother with a follow-up. Sometimes it’s like the media are actively trolling us.

But of course, I have only cited stories that are patently ridiculous. For an example of post-truth archaeology that played out over an entire year we need look no further than the saga of Nefertiti’s Tomb. In the summer of July 2015, British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves of the University of Arizona self-published a research paper entitled ‘The Burial of Nefertiti?’ and uploaded it to his academia.edu page. From here, it begins to make its way through the social media circuit. The mainstream newspapers dined out on it for the next year. It is instructive to compare both the Mail and Guardian coverage in detail here to see how the same misleading headlines were recycled for the same story by both a tabloid and a broadsheet, and both raked in the clicks.

August: the story breaks on the major UK papers

Daily Mail: “Has Queen Nefertiti been found behind King Tut's tomb?” 18k shares

Guardian: “Tomb of Nefertiti, Egypt's mysterious ancient queen, may have been found” 44k shares

August-October: Reeves becomes the story

Guardian: “Nefertiti archaeologist invited to Egypt over theory of hidden tomb” 2k shares

Guardian: “Archaeologist aims to prove Nefertiti is buried in Tutankhamun's tomb” 2k shares

Guardian: “Radar use approved to search Tutankhamun’s tomb for hidden room” 892 shares

November: testing begins

Daily Mail: “Scientists on the verge of finding Queen Nefertiti's secret tomb” 6.5k shares

Guardian: “Is Egypt closer to unlocking the mystery of Queen Nefertiti in King Tut's tomb?” 6k shares

Guardian: “Egypt '90% sure' there are hidden chambers in King Tut's tomb” 13.5k shares

Guardian: “Tomb raiders: what treasures could lurk inside Egypt's lost chambers?” 367 shares

Actual Mirror.co.uk screengrab #nofilter

March: first cautious results

Daily Mail: “Has the final resting place of Queen Nefertiti been found?” 2.3k shares

Guardian: “Tutankhamun's secret? Experts hope new chambers could contain tomb of Nefertiti” 6k shares

Daily Mail: “Does King Tutankhamun's tomb hold Queen Nefertiti's remains?” 94 shares

Guardian: “Tutankhamun tomb: further analysis needed to find hidden chambers” 160 shares

Daily Mail: “Egyptians take 'most detailed scans yet' of secret rooms behind Tutankhamun's tomb - but still can't say if they show Queen Nefertiti's remains” 244 shares

May: the party ends

Daily Mail: “Egyptologists clash over claims of hidden chambers in Tutankhamun's tomb” 99 shares

Daily Mail: “New scans of King Tut’s tomb show NO hidden chambers” 138 shares

Guardian: “Egypt 'suppressing truth' over hidden chambers in Tutankhamun’s tomb” 5.7k shares

It turns out the whole spectacle was a publicity stunt engineered in large part by former Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty, who was replaced in March by Khaled al-Anani, and backed by National Geographic who filmed the work for a documentary. Tourism to Egypt has faltered since the revolution in 2011 and discoveries like these are heavily touted by the government to the world media. Millions of page views later, archaeology suffers another blow to its credibility, but the newspapers sure did well. Who do we blame for this – Reeves? The Egyptian government? The newspapers? Or all of us for sharing these stories in a frenzy for an entire year?

***

Now, I am painfully aware of the limitations of this kind of approach. Counting views and shares tells you very little these days. But there are new approaches out there, such as sentiment analysis, which use data-mining to find out how people engaged – did thousands of people share an article because they believed it was a scientific breakthrough, or to show their friends what absolute bollocks is going on in the name of archaeology?

So can we do anything about it? Again, bad reporting will always be part of the daily 24-hour news cycle. But more than ever, I’m convinced that we need to work within the system rather than against it. We can, at the very least, aim to talk to the media more often, and build the kinds of relationship with reporters that lead to some kind of mutual understanding. We can train students to write archaeology press releases as a form of short-form science communication, or perhaps just train them to decipher credible sources online. We need to apply the kinds of data-mining methodologies that can ask questions of how people engage with archaeology news online that I don’t even know to ask yet.

Overall, we can now consider online archaeonews the primary form of pop culture archaeology, with a wider reach than TV and print media ever offered. As such, we need to take archaeonews seriously as our collective public face, which archaeology fans are engaging with in their thousands, every single day.

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Thanks to Sara Perry and the Society for American Archaeology for inviting me to contribute the Digital Review on which this work is based, which you can download free online here.