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Archaeology is a Brand. The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture - Cornelius Holtorf (illustrations by Quentin Drew)
Archaeopress - 2007. 184pp, 200 b/w illus. Paperback £14.99.
From Eden to Exile. Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible - Eric Cline
National Geographic Society - 2007. 256pp, 60 b/w illus. Hardback, $26.
The Lost Ark of the Covenant - Tudor Parfitt
Harper Element - 2008. 400pp. Hardback, £18.99.
Flights Into Biblical Archaeology - Duby Tal, Moni Haramati & Shimon Gibson
Albatross - 2007. 256pp, over 200 colour illus. Hardback, $38.
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Archaeology Is A Brand
by Cornelius Holtorf |
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Know Your Archaeologist
– Quentin Drew |
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| Baghdad Museum – Quentin Drew |
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| Baghdad Museum – Quentin Drew |
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| From Eden To Exile by Eric Cline |
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Lost Ark of the Covenant
by Tudor Parfitt |
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| Flights Into Biblical Archaeology |
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In the course of a 1997 episode of the hit series The Simpsons, Principal Skinner announces over the intercom, ‘Attention, all honour students will be rewarded with a trip to an archaeological dig’. Cheers erupt across the school. ‘Conversely’, continues the headmaster, ‘all detention students will be punished with a trip to an archaeological dig’. The detention students jeer. As the litmus test for modern fame and public adoration, you know that a subject has profoundly penetrated the minds, hearts, and funny bones of the social conscience when it makes it onto The Simpsons to share an illustrious stage with other luminaries of this fine ‘alma mater’ – Tony Blair, Stephen Hawking, Rupert Murdoch, Placido Domingo, Gore Vidal, and J.K. Rowling.
Archaeologists tend not to be especially gifted at soul searching why the past matters to entertainment and education, but this squirmish topic is tackled head on in the most revealing piece of literary dirty linen of recent years. Cornelius Holtorf’s Archaeology is a Brand. The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture (Archaeopress, Oxford, 2007) presents the results of the author’s two-year investigation into the meaning and portrayal of archaeology in contemporary culture, sponsored by the Swedish National Heritage Board.
Love it or loath it, archaeology is a global business today, from university courses to museums, publishing houses, films, and television shows launching the next real-life Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. Dr Holtorf’s microscopic view of the industry, though, is not what it externally seems. Smartly published using a comic font and cartoons produced by the hilarious hand of Quentin Drew of Lampeter University, Wales, Archaeology Is A Brand superficially resembles a light-hearted romp through the past in the present. But do not be hoodwinked by the author’s cunning intelligence: this is a very serious reflection that ‘typologises’ archaeologists – turning the tables on our artefact-cataloguing obsession – to predict future trends.
The lure of all things ancient in the modern media arguably began with Heinrich Schliemann (1822-90), who created the template of the lonely hero on a long odyssey searching out the truth. Though more scientific in their discipline, Howard Carter and Leonard Woolley walked the same line. When Woolley excavated flood deposits of c. 3500 BC at the homeland of the Patriarch Abraham, Ur, from 1922-34 and identified this Iraqi site as containing the true physical remains of the deluge of Genesis, his Ur of the Chaldees (1929) became a bestseller, allegedly the most widely read book on archaeology ever printed. By 1949, C.W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars, which told the stories of great archaeological adventures and discoveries, sold five million copies worldwide and would be translated into 30 languages. In the years 1954 and 1955 respectively, Mortimer Wheeler and Glyn Daniel were voted TV personalities of the year in the UK for their appearances on Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? By the late 1950s the two most popular subjects screened on the BBC were archaeology and show-jumping.
And so archaeology became the new rock and roll for the visually sparkling medium of television and film. The 1993 Star Trek episode ‘Q-less’ featured the rogue archaeologist Vash, who had been expelled from the federation’s Archaeology Council for selling illicit artefacts, only to resume her bad habits. The omnipotent alien Q informed the bridge crew of the space station Deep Space Nine that Vash was ‘setting Federation ethics back two hundred years. Believe me, gang, she is far more dangerous to you than I am’. Meanwhile, the 1997 TV series Ice Mummies reached 5 million viewers in the UK alone. In 2001 and 2002, two Indiana Jones films each attracted audiences of more than 10 million people in Britain. The five terrestrial British TV channels alone broadcast 31 series and 19 single documentaries on archaeological subjects in 2001.
By 2003 Time Team was attracting 3.4 million viewers per episode and capturing an impressive 15-20% of the total market share in the UK. By comparison, in May 2004 Big Brother attracted 3.3 million viewers on the back of the promise of real sex on camera – archaeology was outselling sex. Not to be outdone, Playboy announced ‘No one’s got balls like Indiana Jones’ when he reached number seven among ‘The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time’, ranked in Premiere Magazine in April 2004.
But what is this enduring love affair with a selective past truly grounded on – fact or fancy? According to Danish marketing consultant Rolf Jensen’s The Dream Society (1999), reality has little to do with our desires. In perhaps the most telling section of his book, Dr Holtorf draws on the American marketing guru Faith Popcorn and The Popcorn Report (1992) in which ‘fantasy adventure’, defined by her as ‘a momentary, wild-and-crazy retreat from the world into an exotic flavour’, was predicted to be one of ten most important trends for the future. To Popcorn, product appeal will increasingly result from positioning the safe and familiar alongside adventures, exotic, or sensual twists. ‘What could be more safe and familiar yet at the same time adventurous, exotic and sensual’, agrees Holtorf, ‘than a visit to an archaeological excavation site or museum near your own home, where archaeologists, the “cowboys of science”, tell you about peoples’ lives in the past?’
The oddest peculiarity about the public’s passion for the past, however, is that it is not sculpted by the people who actually design our understanding of ancient landscapes – archaeologists’ foresight and planning – but is predominantly guided by media manipulation. Holtorf is on the button when he defines the ingredients needed to publicise archaeological fieldwork: journalists are impressed by any reference to themes involving mysteries, sensational discoveries, or urgent rescue. He distinguishes three principal models for relations between science and society: the Education Model (gaining of reliable knowledge by an elite of scientists); the Public Relations Model (to improve public image of science); the Democratic Model (emphasises scientific responsibility and sustainable development). Within this realm, the archaeologist assumes various identifiable mantles: as a professional detective of the past, the producer of profound revelations, and as Heritage Police of ancient sites and finds.
As entertaining as the romantic side of archaeology is, its core objectives matter hugely. A 2000 survey polled by English Heritage concluded that in the future people will increasingly look to the heritage sector ‘to help provide continuity, relevance, and meaning in their everyday lives’. How well equipped are we to serve in the same capacity as the well-edited heroes of the big screen? According to Nick Merriman, archaeologists have largely been ‘communicating blindly to an audience they do not understand and [that] it is no wonder that so many attempts at communicating archaeology result in boredom or incomprehension’. A 2002 US survey reveals the warts-and-all truth about where public understanding of the past comes from: 56% of adult Americans learn from TV, followed by magazines (33%), books (33%), and newspapers (24%).
Today the structure of archaeology’s impact on society is topsy-turvy. Where inspiration once came from thousands of painstaking hours of work in the field, today the public’s image of the past is largely manipulated by film studios and publishing houses. We inhabit a world of tightly framed popular clichés. Again Dr Holtorf accurately declares that ‘It has become normal to expect from archaeologists new revelations whenever they present their work to large audiences… The archaeologist thus often comes across as a potential saviour, sometimes resembling a seer or messiah, whose revelations enlighten our ordinary lives and may even be able to save us from imminent doom’.
There can be little doubt where the promise of eternal truths was born: look no further than Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark is linked to the supernatural and control of the future. Have we reached saturation point? Does the public care at all about truth or does the dream society simply wish to float away on a breezy cloud of fantastic wanderlust, its own escapist flying carpet?
Professor Eric Cline of the Department of Classical and Semitic Languages and Literatures at George Washington University in Washington for one has had enough. Whilst researching From Eden to Exile. Unraveling Mysteries of the Bible (National Geographic, 2007) he was appalled by the sheer volume of pseudo-scientific nonsense published in his area of specialisation. The use and abuse of biblical archaeology intrigues Cline, but he remains incensed by the high visibility of junk science in the media. Frustratingly, he is right in fearing that ‘when it comes right down to it, it seems that a good but erroneous story trumps good but boring data every time’.
Professor Cline sounds both a word of warning and a call to arms in the belief that the general public deserves better. Holding no punches, he argues that ‘It is high time that professional archaeologists, ancient historians, and mainstream biblical scholars take back their fields from the amateur enthusiasts, pseudoscientists, uninformed documentary filmmakers, and overzealous biblical maximalists and minimalists who have had, for the most part, free rein to do what they wish, without any regard to scientific method or an unbiased investigation for the truth’.
If you want a hand on the heart honest review of what is scientifically known about the greatest mysteries of the Bible, then the handy and accessible From Eden to Exile is for you. True to his promise, Cline methodically and objectively pursues trails of evidence, not pre-conceived ‘unique selling points’ geared to maximising an advance. Alternatively placed in Iran, Mongolia, South America, and even Jackson County, Missouri, the first disappointment for defenders of the faith is the improbability of the Garden of Eden ever turning up in the pre-literary era outside the pages of the Bible. The soundest evidence points to Mesopotamia, possibly Querna near the head of the Persian Gulf.
The same honest treatment, fusing texts with the latest archaeological discoveries, is provided for Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the Exodus, and Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. In confronting the ‘Ten Lost Tribes of Israel’ and Neo-Assyrian aggression towards Israel, the complexity of the Bible as a source becomes obvious. Even though II Kings blames Tiglath-pileser III (r. 744-727 BC) and Shalmaneser V (r. 727-722 BC) for the Assyrian conquest of Judah and infamous exile of its people, Cline stresses that the most reliable primary data for this sad episode actually comes from the palace of King Sargon II at Khorsabad in Iraq, where eight separate inscriptions immortalise the warmonger’s invasion of 720 BC and his conquest of Samaria that resulted in 27,280 people being carried off to exile in Assyria. Notably, the name of Sargon II is completely absent in the Bible. Whether we care to hear it or not, much of the Old Testament contains inaccurate blame and assertions that telescope different historical events.
In total, 40,000 Israelites were taken captive in 733 and 720 BC, and excavations across Israel at Beth Shean, Ein Gev, and Khirbet Marjameh have exposed related destruction levels. But what happened to the ten lost tribes of Israel? The Bible confirms that the exiles settled between Syria (possibly Tell Halaf) and Halah, a suburb of Nineveh. According to archaeological models, however, the population of the northern kingdom of Israel at the time was probably close to 350,000 people. In truth, only 10-20% maximum of the population was forced east. Concludes Cline, ‘the Ten Tribes were never lost; we know exactly where they went’.
Much of the myth of a displaced people was written centuries later for the biblical Apocrypha between 225 BC and the late 1st century AD, which mysteriously and loosely claims that the deported tribes planned to escape captivity and ‘formed this plan for themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the nations and go to a more distant region, where no human beings had ever lived, so that at least they might keep their statues that they had not kept in their own land’. Such rhetoric smacks not of Assyrian reality but of the apocalyptic cloud that envelloped Israel with the rise of Rome and the First Jewish Revolt. The state of Israel was falling, and the High Priests blamed the start of the rot on the Assyrian Diaspora.
Where it is the job of the movies to transport us into a magical world of make believe, learning about the true course of history and archaeology has long been the domain of books like Professor Cline’s. Yet since the 1990s an absurd game has rotated full circle. Films used to borrow their inspiration from non-fiction books; now the written word is stealing plots from the movies. When it comes to big cross-over books on the Bible, what publishers perceive to be treatments based on academic truths are actually mirror images of the art of celluloid.
In the realm of biblical archaeology, the authors of books on Noah’s Ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Exodus, and the life and death of Jesus have all received life-changing advances. In 2006 Simon & Schuster spent $275,000 on a US author tour alone promoting The Expected One, in which Kathleen McGowan claimed to be the direct descendent of Mary Magdalene. Yet all of these works are utter fantasy. The mother of all intrigue, however, is naturally reserved for the Ark of the Covenant, whose discovery would restore to the world a biblical icon of untold riches and a weapon of unimaginable divine power and mass destruction, or so publicists will tell you.
The latest reflection of how history now apes the big screen is Tudor Parfitt’s The Lost Ark of the Covenant (Harper Element, 2008). The author inevitably styles himself as the real-life Indiana Jones and takes the reader on a heady journey across the Middle East and Africa between 1987 and 2007. Parfitt embraces the rabbinical ideology of a lost ten tribes of Israel, and it is while studying the Lemba of central Zimbabwe, who claim an ancient Israelite origin, that he buys into the chief’s claim that his people travelled to Africa with sacred biblical objects by way of a mysterious lost city called Senna. The most prized relic to accompany them was the ngoma, a tribal drum from the Temple of Jerusalem, which Parfitt believes the form of the Ark really took. Based on little factual reality, the author explains how ‘It suddenly occurred to me that in form, size and function the ngoma lungundu was similar to the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, the famous lost Ark which had been sought without success throughout the ages’.
‘Indiana’ Parfitt – the raider of the lost drum – pursues his treasure from Egypt to Ethiopia, before identifying the ancient city of Senna in ‘Sayuna’ (Zion) on the east coast of Africa near the modern town of Beira on the coast of Mozambique, where the Lemba arrived during the 10th or 11th century. Finally, the tribe headed inland into Zimbabwe. After finding three Ark-drums in a hut at Tshiendeulu in the Soutpansberg Mountains between South Africa and Zimbabwe, Parfitt finally traces the holy weapon to the Museum of Human Sciences in Harare, where a colleague’s hand mysteriously starts to bleed when he touches it. At the end of his raiding, Parfitt is convinced that ‘There can be little doubt that what I found in Harare is the last thing on earth in direct descent from the Ark of Moses’.
There is much stimulating matter in The Lost Ark of the Covenant, not least the DNA profiles of various African tribes. For instance Trefor Jenkins’ research published in The American Journal of Human Genetics (1996) proved that 50% of Lemba Y chromosomes are Semitic in origin. Parfitt claims ‘a significant similarity of markers’ for 120 samples he collected in 1997 with geneticist Neil Bradman from Senna/ Seiyun in Mozambique. Some geneticists propose that over 50% of Jewish priests from the Temple of Jerusalem had one specific constellation of Y-chromosome markers (the Cohen Modal Haplotype, CMH) that can be traced back to a single common male ancestor who lived 3000 years ago, allegedly Aaron, the brother of Moses.
In Zimbabwe, Parfitt’s DNA work reveals that ‘Almost exactly the same proportion of Lemba males carried CMH as did the overall Jewish population. But even more extraordinary was the fact that CMH was found in more than 50 per cent of the Buba clan, the Lemba priests, the guardians of the ngoma lungunda’. To Parfitt, this means that the Buba clan were in direct line of descent from priests who once served in Jerusalem.
The central thesis of this book gravitates around DNA science and a single passage in 2 Maccabees, where the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave in the vicinity of Mount Nebo in Jordan and sealed up the entrance at the time of the Israelite exile to Babylon in 586 BC. From there the Ark was spirited into Africa via a lengthy Diaspora in Parfitt’s world. Unfortunately, there are more holes in this theory than in a truck-load of Swiss cheese. The DNA analysis, for instance, is a mirage of science. Amidst a myriad of complicated issues is the reality that King Herod annulled the ancestral line of priests and brought in his favoured lackeys instead; this, after all, was the incentive behind the First Jewish Revolt. Secondly, the battered and burnt drum found in Harare has been radio-carbon dated in Oxford to c. AD 1350, over 1800 years later than the date when the Ark graced the Temple.
To his credit Parfitt, admits that his evidence is flimsy. Regarding the ‘discovery’ of Senna on the Zambesi River from where the Lemba crossed to Africa, the author writes that ‘I knew that there was no real, absolute proof of the identification, but the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit together incredibly well. My evidence was circumstantial but I thought it was pretty damned convincing nonetheless’. Yet as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the author is teasing his audience: he knows perfectly well that his quest is all about story telling, and this he achieves excellently. Parfitt’s great success is in padding a humdinger of a travel book to resemble a historical work of non-fiction.
The Lost Ark of the Covenant takes in larger than life characters like Reuven ben Arieh, a financier, diamond merchant, and orthodox Jew, who offers Parfitt ‘three very plump diamonds’ as a war chest to find the Ark, whilst pleading ‘Don’t you understand that if I can find the Ark I can bring peace and redemption to this part of the world’. Colourful, full of lively dialogue, yet fundamentally historically flawed, this book contains the kind of indiscrete verve and characterisation that film-goers and novel readers adore. In a very obvious imitation of Indiana Jones, we are confronted by countless bars, bottles of wine, venomous snakes, and evil caves, while Parfitt ends up in Papua New Guinea at one stage being proclaimed the Messiah and hunting for the Ark in a reed-filled lagoon – all because the local Gogodala tribe tell him it is there!
The truth behind the fate of the Ark of the Covenant is disclosed concisely and authoritatively by Eric Cline in From Eden to Exile. Of the numerous plausible theories about its destiny, the Africa dimension does not get a look in. In truth, no reliable reference to the survival of the Ark post-dates the sack of Israel by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon in 586 BC. The treasure is not cited in the Bible as returned to the Temple by Cyrus the Great. Confirms Cline, ‘Since no one has seen the ark since at least Josiah’s time, I would venture to say that it is no longer in existence. In fact, if I had to really guess, I would argue that it was melted down or otherwise destroyed, certainly by the time of Nebuchadnezzar, if not long before’.
Oddly, Parfitt fails to draw on the most scholarly treatment of the fate of the Ark, Dr John Day of Oxford University’s ‘Whatever Happened to the Ark of the Covenant? (in J. Day, ed., Temple and Worship in Biblical Israel; T. & T. Clark, London, 2005). Dr Day dismisses the notion that Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave near Mount Nebo as having ‘no scholarly following nowadays, and is clearly a later pious fabrication: it is hardly likely that Jeremiah would have hidden the ark, bearing in mind that he was not a member of the Temple staff but rather one who over many years had predicted disaster for the Temple and nation as the just judgment of God’. Because no Ark stood in the Second Temple and because the sources prove it was not taken into captivity to Babylon, the most important tool of First Temple-period Israelite worship was probably destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar. ‘The view that the Ark was destroyed in 586 BCE certainly seems the most rational explanation’, concludes Dr Day, before explaining that ‘Even Ezekiel 40-48’s vision of the future restored Temple has no ark within it, a vision presumably dating from sometime during the exile. All this suggests that by the time of the exile the ark had disappeared and there appeared to be no prospect of its return, a prospect which there surely would have been if it had been known still to exist’. There are very good reasons why no professional archaeologists has ever sought out the lost Ark of the Covenant – it is fool’s gold.
Albert Einstein once wrote that ‘imagination is more important than knowledge’, and perhaps in the overall human masterplan of survival and daily happiness this is so. The public, however, has a right to pick and choose for themselves between fact and fiction. With Dan Brown’s mischievous marketing brilliance of claiming that his Da Vinci Code was based on fact, publishers have lost their guage on reality. Where does the bar of truth really lie? When scholars like Tudor Parfitt peddle a heroic story as fact, the confusion of the media is complete.
I agree with Dr Cline, it is time for scholars to reclaim the high ground but, as Dr Holtorf’s outstanding work expounds, the archaeologist needs to reach out to the public in a sympathetic language. Simultaneously, publishing houses and their editors have an enormous responsibility to find a way of making the truth marketable. The public will read what the publisher chooses to make available; it is all a question of publicity and product placement.
At present, the decades of serious work by scholars who have crossed over to the popular realm is treated as product rather than a creative endeavour. As Rolf Jensen admitted in The Dream Society (1991), ‘Humans have always craved adventures. The difference now is that stories and adventures are demanded and supplied like products themselves – in various sizes too’. Peering into the mists of the future, The Popcorn Report (1992) predicted that in 2010 ‘Culture is back in the hands of the people. Creative talent is flourishing. We’ve reconciled business with civilization… Values have done a turnaround’.
For now we continue to drift away from this ideal, even though environmental, social, political, and historical accountability now permeate big business. Let’s hope Popcorn proves prophetic. Otherwise, perhaps as in the film The Mummy, where the past takes its revenge after certain thresholds of revealing secrets are overstepped, the media may have to beware the curse of the archaeologist in the near future.
For a stunning illustration of how biblical archaeology really does not need exaggerated publicity, Flights Into Biblical Archaeology by Duby Tal, Moni Haramati, and Shimon Gibson (Albatross, 2007) is a tour de force. A combination of site-specific, exquisite aerial photos and excavated finds blended with brief summaries of archaeological histories, this book ranges from prehistory to Ottoman times, with special sections examining ‘Emergence of the Israelites’, ‘Impact of the Greek and Roman Worlds’, ‘The Holy Land: Judaism and Christianity’, Islam and the Crusaders’, and ‘Towards Modern Times’.
The uniqueness of Flights Into Biblical Archaeology are the breathtaking aerial shots taken by Duby Tal, a master of his art and romantic of the skies, who describes how ‘Whispering tales of early man emerge from the rolling hills and deep valleys, and sandy coasts of the land which we all know and love...’ Shimon Gibson is the ‘biographer’ of these photographic masterpieces, weaving together stories about the discoveries of Jericho, Gezer, Timna, Samaria, Jerusalem, Maresha, Caesarea, Banias, Nessana, Ramla, Belvoir, the Horns of Hattin, and much more, with seamless charm and elegance.
This is an exclusive realm, where a unique view over antiquity will soften even the most knowledgeable eyes. Curiously though, as Professor Gibson eloquently surmises, ‘Human beings have always yearned to grasp things visual, whether of buildings or houses, monuments, landscapes, manifestations of nature... But, at the same time, the internet and television are drowning us in pictorial imagery and we can get whatever we want, all the time. As a result, we look around ourselves and see things, and yet we do not really see the things we want to, our eyes glossing over everyday imagery, and perhaps this is because our brains are over-compensating and extrapolating’. This book will please all purveyors of antiquity with its rare view of the past, at the same time reminding us how much original subject matter the Holy Land and biblical archaeology have to offer without reverting to mimicking what’s hot on the television. Historical entertainment should follow art every time.
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