The Story of Archaeology
THE sub-title of this book is the story of archaeology." The story which archaeology has taught us in the last hundred to hundred and fifty years is twofold. First it has told us of the existence of the great protohistoric and prehistoric civilisations of the Aegean, south-west Asia, Egypt, Iran, India, China and America that lay behind and alongside the known historic civilisations of Greece, Rome, Egypt and Assyria. Secondly it has taught us the immense antiquity of man, and unfolded the dramatic story of man's long struggle, from his first efforts at tool-making through nearly three-quarters of a million years to the dawn of urban, literate life. Ceram's book does not intend to be a history of archaeology; as he says in his preface, it was written "without ,scholarly pretensions," and his aim was "to portray the dramatic qualities of archaeology, its human side." To do this he has had to be selective with his material, but it is difficult to understand why his selection has com- pletely excluded the second main element in the story of archaeology —the story of the discovery of prehistory. This story is full of the personal incident which is grist to Ceram's mill—the Marquis of Sautuola's daughter at Altamira, for example, or the little dog Robot at Lascatix. Nowhere in this long book do we read of the years of excitement and scholarship that have revealed the life of the bar- barians living in Europe when the Egyptian and Minoan-Mycenean civilisations were flourishing. Stonehenge only appears because Petrie once'wrote a book about it, and as far as our author is con- cerned the heroes of the story of European archwolcgy—men like C. J. Thomsen, Lord Avebury, Boucher de Perthes, Oscar Montelius and General Pitt-Rivers for example—might never have existed.
Ceram, then, has confined himself to half the story of archaeology, and even here he has been selective. He writes only of the dis- covery of Graeco-Roman antiquity, of Egypt, of Mesopotamia and of Middle America. The great Indus civilisation is dismissed in a few lines, the Hittites in fewer; it is as though no one had ever excavated Zimbabwe or Anau, and as though Sir Aurel Stein had never been. "We know a great deal about the history of Chinese culture," says Ceram, but "our knowledge derives hardly at all from excavation." Yet from Sinanthropus to Anyang the history of excavation in China in the last fifty years is one of the most exciting stories of archaeology. The author has selected his field, and in it has concentrated delib- erately on personalities. We move through animated accounts of Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae, Arthur Evans in Crete, Cham- pollion wrestling with hieroglyphs, Flinders Petrie in Egypt, Howard Carter breaking in to the tomb of Tutankhamon, Botta at Nineveh, Woolley in the Royal Tombs at Ur, Stephens and Catherwood at Copan, and E. H. Thompson diving into the Sacred Well at Chichen- Itza. The personal element in the adventures of these and other archaeological pioneers is perhaps emphasised at the cost of their scientific endeavours and achievements, but this is Ceram's purpose, and it makes his narrative more exciting and more readable. - This book was originally published in Germany in 1949, and its German sales have been very large. It has nowbeen translated into a dozen other languages. Its sales in England will be large because it is written in an interesting way and it is concerned with an exciting and little-known story. Sometimes the style is jerky and savours of newspaper sensationalism, but there are chapters so absorbing that it is impossible to put the book down. - Ceram has failed to convey to his readers the magnificent march of prehistoric events which excavation and research have revealed. He has omitted much that properly belongs to "the story of archaeology,' but he has given us part of that story in a book full of exciting anecdote and enthralling personalities that cannot fail to show the reader the romance of
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