Temple to progress
By Mark Vernon on Sunday, August 14 2011, 11:55 - Personal observations - Permalink
Before we were so rudely interrupted by riots, I had the French Musée national de Préhistoire on my mind, in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. If you're in the Dordogne, it's a must visit. And don't mind crowds: when we were there a couple of weeks back it was half empty.
Set in the cliffs above the Vézère valley, there are so many caves round about that you feel sure another major archeological discovery can only be a stone's throw away. The artefacts are laid out chronologically, in smart glass cases that take you back half a million years and bring you to the bronze age. You can walk over entire dig sites, protected under glass, and peer at the contents of graves displaying very beautiful 'hand art' depictions of bison and deer. For a Time Team fan, it's very satisfying. But it set me thinking too, not just about the ancestors but about the museum and the nature of the culture that has produced that 'artefact'.
The chronological layout is informative, except that when you go into deep prehistory, nothing much happens for tens of thousands of years - nothing much if flint and bone technology is your main interest. And technology is the main interest of the museum: archeology is a material science, and worked flints and bones comprise the bulk of what survives. But it poses a problem: what to do about the long, slow periods? The solution the curators deploy is to compress the 'empty' millennia and give more space to periods of speedier advance.
I suppose it's inevitable. You've got to keep historians and visitors alike interested. But the net result is that this is the history of humankind very clearly told from the perspective of modernity - a blip of time in the grand scheme of things. It's the story of Baconian progress, the struggle to control and exploit the environment.
As was pointed out to me the other day, Bacon's philosophy is the most successful of all time. Is there a single state on the planet today that is not organised according to its principles? But deployed in a museum, it offers a view of history that conceals as much as it reveals. Have most humans, for most of history, thought of the goal of life like that at all? Is the fact that technology remained static for tens of thousands of years a reflection not of inefficiency or near-failure, but simply of a different philosophy of life? What would that be?
That struck me as a fascinating question, and I wondered what a museum of prehistory that tried to portray the stone age from the perspective of the stone age would be like. Anyone know one?
Comments
I don't think there will be any positive responses to your final question, for two different but related reasons. Both are to do with the problems of understanding other minds.
1) When we seek to understand another culture "from the inside", we often rely on checking our insights against the feedback from those who are currently living that culture; I suppose this is how anthropologists often work. In the case of the stone age, all we have is the artefacts. What they meant to those who created them is anybody's guess. Usually, the guess of the most persuasive academic or team is the one which prevails. I am often surprised, for example, by how far the theories run ahead of the evidence in popularised TV accounts of archaeology. A few mounds and some graves, and some bright young academic is talking about worldviews and gods and the afterlife, as if these were inescapable conclusions....
2) Even if we could come up with a cogent argument for understanding the worldview of a stone age culture, a museum (of the form we are used to) would be a very poor setting for its explication. This would require a more narrative or discursive form: a book or video, for example. It could be that museums themselves are a "Baconian" artefact - a tool for monitoring older tools.
I can't think of any way in which we could ever know with any degree of certainty whether one suggested worldview is more "correct" than another. Or indeed whether we can set aside our deep cultural conditioning to the extent that we could even formulate another view. The Barfield stuff certainly encourages a relativistic and questioning approach to the "reality" we currently experience, but I'm not sure whether it enables us to differentiate between alternatives. I guess I ought to read him first rather than relying on Wikipedia and potted versions on the web!
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