Methods & Aims in Archaeology

by W. M. Flinders Petrie

But still there continues the plundering of sites in the interest of show museums, where display is thought of before knowledge, as is unhappily the case in many national collections. To secure an attractive specimen, a tomb will be wrecked, a wall destroyed, a temple dragged to pieces and its history lost, a cemetery cleared out with no record of its burials. And when carefully authenticated and recorded specimens reach museums, their fate is not yet a safe one, especially in local museums. Stones will be built into walls, and ruined by the damp bringing salt out; objects are left to drop to pieces from lack of chemical knowledge, or from the official dread of the responsibility of doing right instead of allowing wrong. Information is deliberately destroyed; labels are thrown away or heaped together out of the way in a glass case where the objects are artistically displayed, with no more history than if they had come from a dealer. Groups of things, whose whole value consists in their collocation as they were found, are scattered up and down a museum as if they had no meaning. Or priceless antiquities will be left out for years of exposure to weather, as certain sculptures were in London, until at last they received worthy safeguarding in defiance of the Treasury. Unhappily far too many of those who are responsible for keeping the things which have at last reached a haven, need educating in the elements of their profession.

Restoration.

This leads to another difficult question, that of restoration. The horrible destruction which has gone on under that term is now somewhat recognised, after much, or most, of the original buildings of our ancestors have disappeared beneath scraping and recutting, so that we only possess a copy of what has been. And in museums till within the last few years, statues were so elaborately built up out of what was—or was not—to be had, that it is often a difficult preliminary study to set aside the shams. In the Louvre there is the honesty of stating how much has been added to the original; and the list is sometimes so long that it is hard to make out what gave the first idea to the restorer for building up his work. Yet in many cases some mere supports are needful, and the best museums now make such helps as distinct as possible from the original. The only full solution of the matter is the great extension of the use of casts; and the ideal museum of sculpture would have the originals untouched on one side of a gallery, and the full restoration of casts of the same things on the other side.

Sacrifices.

When we stand face to face with a problem like that, of the Forum at Rome there rise a multitude of questions which have intricate and far-reaching solutions. The removal of the latest of the pavements of the Forum has been bitterly resented. The Sacred Way is gone, and what is there for sentiment to dwell on! Yet who would reasonably prefer the Lower Empire to the Twelve Caesars? And then is not the Republic still more interesting and less known? And then the Kings hold a prerogative of glamour to every schoolboy; and what was Rome before the Kings? We see the inevitable result of such a crowd of interests, in the honeycomb of pits and planks and tunnels and iron girders which now bewilder the visitor, where formerly he walked down the Sacred Way and blessed his soul in romantic peace.

Now this elaborate treatment is most desirable, but is scarcely attainable unless there is a strong public interest, and a government willing to carry out proper conservation. Let us turn to a different set of conditions, as at the temple of Osiris at Abydos. There were more than a dozen different levels of building; all the lower ones only of mud brick; the whole of the lower levels under the high Nile, and certain to be a mud swamp so soon as the Nile rose next summer. To treat such a place like the Forum would have involved enormous iron substructure layer under layer, and a wide drying area for hundreds of yards around, at a cost of certainly five figures. No one would be likely to give a hundredth of the cost to attain that end. If any part were left without clearing to the bottom, the next high Nile would make entire pudding of it. And so the permanent preservation of such a site was impossible. All that could be done whenever it was begun, was to dig it in as dry a season as possible, when the water was at its lowest; to clear it entirely to water level; and to make plans, levelling, and records, of every wall and every detail, removing everything that stood in the way of going lower. Henceforward that temple site, instead of existing in unseen layers of solid earth, exists only on paper.

Responsibility.

Now here is a great responsibility. Whatever is not done in such an excavation can never be done. The site is gone for ever; and who knows what further interests and new points of research may be thought of in future, which ought to have received attention. Are we justified morally in thus destroying a temple site, a cemetery, a town, while we may feel certain that others would see more in it in future? If a site would continue untouched, and always equally open to research, it would be wrong to exhaust such places. But what are the conditions? In Egypt sites are continually passing under cultivation, and once cultivated no one would ever know more about them. They are being continually dug away for earth to spread on the fields, and all that lies in them is scattered and lost. The stonework is continually the prey of engineers and lime-burners. The Nile is always rising, so that every few centuries makes ground inaccessible that was previously out of water. And the probable movement of invention and appliances will most likely bring under cultivation in future most of the cemetery sites which are now bare desert. In the last few years most of the cemetery and temple sites of Nubia have been blotted out by the new lake for irrigation. Further, on any site of cemetery, temple, or town which is known to contain anything, the native will dig by night if he cannot do so by day, and will leave nothing but a wreck behind. It is sadly unlikely that there will be anything left to excavate in Egypt a century hence; all the known sites will be exhausted in twenty years more at the present rate. A thousand years hence—a trifle in the history of Egypt—people will look back on these present generations as the golden days when discoveries came thickly year by year, and when there was always something to be found. And therefore the best thing that can be done under all these conditions is to work with the fullest care and detail in recording, to publish everything fully, and to then trust the history of Egypt to a few hundred copies of books instead of to solid walls and hidden cemeteries. The destruction which is needful to attain knowledge is justified if the fullest knowledge is obtained by it, and if that is so safely recorded that it will not again be lost. The only test of right is the procuring the greatest amount of knowledge now and in future.

Rights of the future.

Here we are landed in a question on which very different positions are taken. What are the rights of the future? Why should we limit our action, or our immediate benefit or interest, for the sake of the future? If ever this question comes into practical dealings, it does so in historical work. Any one who is above the immediate consideration of food and starvation, does consider the future. Our public buildings are preserved for the use of coming generations; our libraries and museums are largely for the benefit of those yet unborn. Was not the future of England the great charge, the inspiring aim of Alfred, of Edward I, of William III? Do we not even now spend ungrudgingly for the great future of our colonies? In every direction we unquestioningly assume that the future has its rights; that distant generations of our own flesh and blood are far more to us than present millions of other races; that the knowledge, the possessions, the aims, that we have inherited are but a trust to be passed on to the nation yet to be.