3rd February 2012, 10:12 PM
The complaint about the sterility of reports and the absence of anecdotes is nothing new. I am quite fond of this quote, which I found in the preface of a 1931 excavation report.
"This work is nothing more than a Report on certain excavations, and as such follows the modern fashion of being as colourless as possible. In the last century a similar work would have included musings on the brevity of life, scraps of poetry and various other frills. Now archaeology has become so stern a study that I have not even dared to describe our feelings when a skull at Holywell Row began to walk away with a young rabbit inside it or to record the innumerable droll remarks of onlookers. These invariably opened their conversation with "They didn't bury them very deep in those days, did they!". Most readers would surely prefer the older method."
(TC Lethbridge, 1931, Recent excavations in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk)
"This work is nothing more than a Report on certain excavations, and as such follows the modern fashion of being as colourless as possible. In the last century a similar work would have included musings on the brevity of life, scraps of poetry and various other frills. Now archaeology has become so stern a study that I have not even dared to describe our feelings when a skull at Holywell Row began to walk away with a young rabbit inside it or to record the innumerable droll remarks of onlookers. These invariably opened their conversation with "They didn't bury them very deep in those days, did they!". Most readers would surely prefer the older method."
(TC Lethbridge, 1931, Recent excavations in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in Cambridgeshire and Suffolk)
"Hidden wisdom and buried treasure, what use is there in either?" (Ecclesiasticus ch20 v30)