We've touched on this in different threads, and it always seems to come back to archaeologists working with ever depleting financial resources who, in an effort to generate public interest in their particular projects and hopefully on that basis secure more funding to continue them, have employed increasing exaggeration and dumbed-down terminology in their press releases and interviews when publicising recent discoveries.

The latest victim of this ultimately mendacious treatment is a sixth century grave inhabitant, the discovery of whom has been relayed via press release to today's UK media, the instance below lifted from the Guardian website:

Archaeologists unearth remains believed to be of Anglo-Saxon warlord



Within the release the very real significance of a grave from that period in that precise location is correctly communicated. And at one time this alone would have been sufficient to grab the attention of both an interested public and academia alike, presumably with someone within the latter then motivated to extend further resources within their faculty to ensure that the essential contextual research, along with a possibility of further significant finds in the area, could be undertaken.

However in these straitened times, and in an academic environment that even before times became so straitened had been "reconfigured" as commercial units requiring as much to fund themselves and make a profit as to actually - well- research, educate and add to our reservoir of knowledge, no such recourse to such resources can be taken for granted. In fact the presumption lies in the opposite direction.

And so we end up with the above. A "warrior" who was "butch" and "macho" from a "tribe" (of the Anglo-Saxon period?) in a "buffer zone" between "kingdoms". Leaving aside the fact that the sixth century in particular in southern Britain is a period and place replete with some of the most fascinating mysteries regarding society's make-up, the nature of transition within its cultural and political hegemony, and the extent to which the notion of "king" could ever even apply within what little we do know about this period, and even given that the burial's alignment and location may indeed infer what the archaeologist claims regarding "watching over" the Thames valley beneath him, has the man whose skeleton provides the focus of the excavation been well served (or maybe even less than condescendingly presented) as a "butch" individual from a "macho" time?

A few years ago I would have deplored this dumbed-down treatment by Francis Prior (he would have said necessarily so) of the same historical period as presented in a Channel 4 documentary that was presumably hoping to reach as many potential viewers as possible. In light of today's even lower standards however as evidenced by today's press release amongst countless other unfortunate examples lately, Prior actually comes across as the peerless and incredibly astute academic he has always believed himself to be (his manner as much as his confusion of averral with fact has always let him down in my humble opinion). However the contrast is certainly worth noting even for all its obviousness, and in particular how Prior is led to the conclusion that contemporary treatment of the fifth and sixth centuries does Britain's actual heritage as a repository and source of European learning a huge disservice.



Place the "warrior" and his location as reported this morning within that particular context and one ends up with a far more complex individual in a far more complex milieu than the plainly stupid description of a "butch" man in "macho" times could ever convey.

nordmann,

I read with interest your message and learned from it.

I wanted to remark that this search by modern marketing methods by even honest academici to raise funds or to start attention to their research is not limited to history writing alone, but also to other fields of science as medicine.

But while perhaps some will accuse me of again derailing a thread, I prefer to start a new thread. Even better if you could do it   ...with your broader knowledge and your superb grasp of the English language...then I can comment with my humble points of view.

Thank you for posting the episode of the Timeline series too. I watched it without pushing the cursor and I think to see now what you meant.
But again that period is for me of great interest, as I did not specifically for England, but more for continental Western Europe that much research for French history fora about the Merovingian period nearly immediately following the so-called end of the Western Roman Empire. And also overhere I did some attempts to comment this period.
But here is it out of subject too, but perhaps we can start a thread about the time immediately after the occupation of Rome in the fifth century in Western Europe, because there seems to be more and more new research and revelations about it, which alter the former historical views.

Kind regards, Paul.

Yes to your point about the documentary. If I have a criticism of Pryor not mentioned already above it is his frequent failure when discussing British archaeology, both from pre-history and on to late Iron Age/Roman/post-Roman, to properly frame it in a European context. I agree with the stress he places on ensuring we recognise that the so-called "Dark Ages" in Britain were in fact a time when the withdrawal of Roman administration created quite a few vacuums in the areas of culture and learning as much as in power structures etc, and that this vacuum was filled in quite innovative ways. But he and his interviewee neglected to reflect upon the fact that it cannot be mere coincidence that a revolution in what we would now call "academia" was happening also in Ireland and the western European hinterlands of what had been Roman hegemony at exactly the same time, and in fact much of the "innovation" to which the documentary referred was as much imported from these sources as it was then refined and exported from within the post-Roman British lands.

But that's just Pryor. Other historians are less chauvinistic in that respect. Robin Fleming's "Britain After Rome" book is a good example of an historian who makes a serious attempt to shed modern notions of "British" or "English" and try to work out exactly how the indigenous people self-identified after Roman administrative and military withdrawal. It was a society - or even a collection of societies - that was very much still enmeshed in a wider European network in part inherited from Roman times, but also being rapidly expanded to include and integrate cultures that had been peripheral to or even excluded from the older Roman hegemony.

So in a way, Pryor's documentary could also be classed as yet another "how not to report archaeology" example in its own right. But his crime, if that's not too strong a term, is one of interpretation only, which is of far less consequence than the rather more devious and knowingly mendacious misrepresentation of new finds by those responsible for initial translation of this new data into the public domain. I understand why they're doing it, but that doesn't make it any less wrong.

Can we be sure that the emphases in the original article are actually those of the authors of the initial press release? The Grauniad is better than most, but they still need eye-catching headlines to generate clicks onto their database.

nordmann, thank you very much for your further explanation of the Pryor documentary. Now I understand even better what you meant.

Kind regards, Paul.

Green George wrote:

Can we be sure that the emphases in the original article are actually those of the authors of the initial press release? The Grauniad is better than most, but they still need eye-catching headlines to generate clicks onto their database.

These days it's easy enough to google such things and immediately see when a newspaper (is that word now terminally doomed I wonder?) has lazily presented a bureau's content verbatim, or close to verbatim. This one seems to follow that trend too, or at least via Associated Press (AP) a very similar version of this release has ended up verbatim in several other news publications on the same day, with only slight variations in the headline - though the "warlord" word still crops up with depressing regularity in the attached headlines even when the sub-editors seemingly had freedom to express themselves (or maybe because they had - which is even worse), and even when the actual content of the press release carries a note of caution from one archaeologist that the presence of weapons in a grave from that period may not necessarily infer that the inhabitant was military at all.

Stunning dark ages mosaic found at Roman villa in Cotswolds

And just for comparison's sake and to remind us all of how it used to be done; the above article from today's Guardian concerns a sub-Roman mosaic found in the already partially excavated Chedworth Roman Villa which must surely rank as one of the most important archaeological finds in Britain in recent years.

In this instance the archaeologists responsible for the press release might in fact have been justified in using hyperbolic terms such as "globally important" or even "world beating" (as much overused in Britain these days as it is becoming increasingly mendacious an adjective). However they have settled for adjectives such as "significant", "exciting", and one interested party rather quaintly proclaiming that he was "reeling from the shock".

The significance of the find is in fact understated, if anything - the mosaic, a "stunning" artefact (the Guardian's adjective of choice) in its own right based on its aesthetics alone, is one of only very few extant evidences for a continuation of Roman culture in some parts of Britain many decades after the Romans had "left", just as it is for the continuation also of some kind of economy, agrarian sustainability and trade infrastructure which was still at least comparable to the old "empire" days if not even thriving in its absence.

This in turn then sheds some light on that other thorny issue regarding this period with regard to Saxon incursion, the establishment of Saxon hegemony and power throughout Britain, and how the indigenous people were faring in the face of this shift in the political paradigm in real terms. In Chedworth at least it appears that things were going very well, Saxons or no Saxons (the latter is the more probable), thank you very much.

Dating of the mosaic may be questioned - though I would imagine no self-respecting excavator would dare "over interpret" scant data when such an important issue is at stake, and if they were then I think we would be equally likely to lapse into unjustified superlatives in their announcements too, which we are notably spared in this case.



Of course the archaeologists in this case are contracted to the National Trust, which may explain their reluctance to join the hyperbolic herd this time round. Unlike others in their field the NT has not as yet had to fling itself into the harsh commercial realities of research funding provision, though watch this space based on today's further slide into economic suicide on the part of Britain. Actually, had the family and their friends who once chatted over a nice Saturnalia dinner in this dining room, and whose beautiful floor is now being exposed after 1600 years, also been able somehow to peer into the future and read the news from this bleak "festive" winter season in 2020 I wonder what they would actually have thought about their descendants' rather incomprehensible impersonation of apocryphal lemmings today? They may never have understood the lemming analogy, of course, since it was still a Disney-free world, but it still makes one wonder if bad language was allowed in sub-Roman etiquette at the dinner table all the same!