"The War of Science and Religion," 2012 vs 1860

Last Thursday’s debate[1] in Oxford between the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and Professor Richard Dawkins has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1860 debate between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley. Boxing metaphors were used in both cases to draw attention to the clash between religious and scientific values: the botanist, Joseph Hooker, claimed, in 1860, to have “...smacked [Wilberforce] amid rounds of applause...hit him in the wind at the first shot in ten...,” whilst Sean Coughlan, reporting for the BBC (www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17140107), describes last week’s debate as beginning “...with the air of an upmarket version of boxing in the Royal Albert Hall.” Coughlan concluded that “...no real knockout punches were delivered” in the most recent debate, a judgement echoed by The Guardian’s Andrew Brown (www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/23/richard-dawkins-rowan-williams-bout).

The Wilberforce-Huxley encounter has become one of the most picked-over quarrels in the history of science: I made my own contribution to the discussion in my biography of Sir John Lubbock[2], who spoke on the evolutionist side. There never was a “debate,” however, between Wilberforce and Huxley in the sense that there was a debate last week between Williams and Dawkins. The man easily forgotten in the context of the 1860 deliberations is John William Draper, of New York University: it was his paper on “The Darwin Hypothesis” that people came to listen to in 1860, the comments by Wilberforce, Huxley and Hooker being incidental to this (Huxley had not even intended to be present).

The audience at last week’s debate politely acceded to the request from the chairman (the philosopher, Sir Anthony Kenny) not to applaud until the very end. The 1860 audience could hardly have been more different. The various contemporary accounts may not agree on much, but they do concur around the fact that some audience members cheered loudly for Wilberforce, and others for Huxley and Hooker. It is suggested that some students in the audience were chanting “Monkey! Monkey!” at one point in the proceedings; that a woman fainted and had to be carried out; and that Darwin’s one-time Captain (by this time, Admiral), Robert Fitzroy, wielded “an immense bible” in anger. At some point the Bishop, attempting, one suspects, to inject some humour into the stifling atmosphere of a hot and crowded room, turned to Huxley and asked whether it was on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that he wished to claim descent from an ape. Huxley retorted that he would rather be descended from an ape than from a man such as the Bishop and, at that point, the history and the mythology of the event become difficult to disentangle.

Nobody suggested in 1860, as Sean Coughlan maintained of last week’s debate, that supporters of God and atheism left “with honours even and without tempers being frayed,” but the outcomes of the two discussions may not have been so very different. Coughlan’s anonymous professional antecedent, writing in The Athenaeum, concluded that the protagonists on each side “...made their charges and countercharges very much to their own satisfaction and the delight of their respective friends.”  

So what, if anything, has changed. Well, for one thing, the only joke that Archbishop Williams made was at his own expense (concerning his lack of familiarity with razors), and at no time did he, or anyone else, deny the non-human origins of our species. Audiences and protagonists alike seem to have become more polite. It seems as natural, in our 21^st Century world, for bishops to respect the point of view of atheists, as it does for Christians, Jews and Muslims to respect one another. That, in itself, is surely no bad thing, but it can lend a certain sterility to debates such as this. Last Thursday’s debate may well have been more edifying, but one has to suspect that the debate of 1860 may well have been more fun.

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[1] A recording of the debate can be viewed at www.archbishopofcanterbury.org

[2] M. Patton 2007, Science, Politics and Business in the Work of Sir John Lubbock: A Man of Universal Mind. Ashgate.

Bronze Age boat to be reconstructed in Cornwall

Archaeologists at the University of Exeter recently announced a project to recreate one the earliest boats ever found in western Europe, dating to around 2000 BC (www.exeter.ac.uk/research/news/title_174558_en.html). The boat will be built using authentic tools, and will form part of the exhibition, 2012 BC: Cornwall and the Sea in the Bronze Age, at the National Maritime Museum, Cornwall. It will be made from oak planks, sewn together with yew fibres and caulked with moss. The exhibition itself will run from April to August and the team, led by Professor Robert Van de Noort, will then experiment with the performance of the vessel in open water.

That our prehistoric ancestors engaged in overseas trade has been known for decades. From jadeite axes, imported to Britain from the Italian Alps more than five thousand years ago, to jewellery made of gold sourced chemically to Central Europe, buried with the dead of four thousand years ago, UK museum collections are full of exotic objects, but it has often been difficult to imagine the details of the journeys that people made to bring those objects to our shores.

J.S. Dunn, in her recent novel, Bending the Boyne,[1] set in Ireland in around 2400 BC, has his protaganist, Cian, travelling from Co. Meath as far south as the Basque country, but she does not describe the voyages themselves, or the craft in which they are undertaken, in any great detail. In my own short story, The Thread that Binds (http://www.etherbooks.com/), set partly in around 3800 BC, I have characters travelling in a skin-covered boat, much like an Irish currach. Such vessels are easy to describe – I can’t claim to have been in a currach, but I have examined them at close quarters in Co. Donegal, and listened to the tales of men who once fished regularly in them.

The archaeological evidence from England, however, suggests that prehistoric communities here may have used a different type of vessel. When the first sewn-plank boats were discovered, at Brigg in Lincolnshire, and North Ferriby in Yorkshire, it was assumed that they were inland vessels for use on rivers and fens. More recent discoveries, for example at Dover, have led to suggestions that they may, in fact, have been seagoing vessels[2]. The reconstruction of an essentially similar, but much later boat from Hjortspring, Denmark, shows that vessels of this type would be perfectly capable of sea voyages (http://www.hjortspring.dk/). The Exeter project and exhibition now provides an opportunity, for the first time, to see the construction, and then the use, of what may have been a distinctly British form of wooden boat of the 2^nd Millennium BC.

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[1] 2011, Seriously Good Books.

[2] R. Van de Noort 2006 “Argonauts of the North Sea: A Social Maritime Archaeology for the 2^nd Millennium BC. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 72, 267-287.

Islands and the Historical Imagination

Having grown up on a small island (Jersey), and lived there for almost half of my life, I have often had occasion to pause and reflect on what it is that makes island life “special” and “different,” what it is that gives islands a particular character. My book. Islands in Time (www.mark-patton.co.uk/id1.html) was an attempt to explore these questions through archaeological evidence. The book focussed on a range of issues including the development of human communities in island ecosystems; the establishment of exchange networks linking islands with one another, and with adjacent mainlands; and the flourishing of unique monumental traditions in isolated communities. It was a fascinating exercise, but it always seemed to me that something was missing. That something, I now realise, was the emotional dimension of island life.

With the Autumn Term now finished, I have started on my holiday reading, discovering, in the process, three works of fiction which illuminate this dimension of island societies, rather as Italo Calvino shone a light on urban cultures with Invisible Cities.

From the Mouth of the Whale, by the Icelandic writer, Sjon (Telegram, 2011) is a work of “pure” historical fiction, set in 17^th Century Iceland. Accused of sorcery and necromancy, the poet, naturalist and healer, Jónas Palmason, is exiled to the remote Gullbjorn’s Island. Ancient myths mingle with beautifully observed evocations of the natural world as Jónas struggles to save his family, dreams of leaving his island prison, and finally takes solace in nature as he comes to see the solitary life of the sandpiper as a metaphor for his own predicament.

Darrell Kastin’s The Undiscovered Island (University of Massachussetts Dartmouth, 2009) is set in the Azores, and begins with a mystery set in the present day. Julia Castro, a naturalised American, returns to the islands in search of her father, a local historian who has disappeared without trace. She is soon caught up in a surreal kaleidoscope of past and present; myth and reality; with tales of an enchanted island that appears periodically from the depths of the sea; ghostly sirens emerging from the mist; talking skulls; and threads of ancestry and tradition that bind the people of the present to the murderous intrigues of the royal courts of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries.

Hy Brasil, by Margaret Elphinstone (Canongate, 2002) is set entirely in the present, and on an imaginary mid-Atlantic island. Sidony Redruth, a young Englishwoman, has been commissioned to write a tourist guide to the island. Her researches uncover a number of mysteries, behind which lie dark truths about the island’s recent past and the 20^th Century revolution in which the island won its independence. Elphinstone has the political and social intrigues of a small island community spot-on (uncannily so for this reader) but she also draws on the connections between the present and the past, with modern institutions rooted in the Age of Piracy and the island’s identity forged in relation to its ever-shifting volcanic landscape.

The themes that unite these three books all relate to the nature of human communities in environments that are geographically (and perhaps also genetically) circumscribed: the ways in which this “boundedness” draws people into a closer relationship with the rocks, plants and animals that make up their miniature universe; and draws the present into a more intimate relationship with both the recent and the more distant past. Myth, likewise, enters into a more enduring compact with reality in a setting with fixed and tightly drawn boundaries.

We are the resurrectionists!

Last week’s conference at the Institute of Historical Research explored the links between academic history and historical fiction, in the light of the fact that a significant number of people who have written academic history have gone on to turn their minds to fiction (Alison Weir, Ian Mortimer and Rebecca Stott, who were present at the conference; Harry Sidebottom and Hallie Rubenhold, who were not).

As someone embarked on this path (though starting out as an archaeologist rather than a historian), this held a natural fascination for me. Rebecca Stott (who I hadn’t met, but whose path must have crossed mine on many occasions when she was researching Charles Darwin and I was researching his friend and neighbour, John Lubbock) spoke of the historian “coming to the end of the archive, the limits of what is footnote-able.” This is what led her to write her fascinating novels, Ghostwalk and The Coral Thief (www.rebeccastott.co.uk), and it is what has led me to my interest in writing fiction. Certainly in relation to the Neolithic of the Channel Islands (on which I have published one coffee-table book, three academic monographs and 29 journal articles) I felt that I had reached that point, the point at which, in Stott’s words, “you know something to be true, but cannot prove it.”

So what is missing? In a word, people. Real people who had names and emotions, and faced moral dilemmas. Archaeology can’t give you that, yet these are the people who built the monuments and made the pots and the stone tools that I have spent three decades studying. The search for these people, the desire to conjure them out of the past, is not new: the American archaeologist, Robert Braidwood, was engaged in a search to find “the Indian behind the artefact” long before I was born, but it is perhaps only in fiction that this desire can be fully realised. As Hilary Mantel said on Friday evening, our vocation is as “resurrectionists”!   

Hilary Mantel on History and Fiction

To my mind, Hilary Mantel is one of the finest living writers of historical fiction, combining an exhilarating sense of immediacy with a remarkable fidelity to the reality of history. I have just had the pleasure of hearing her speak on her published novels, A Place of Greater Safety (set during the French Revolution) and Wolf Hall (set in the court of Henry VIII), and its forthcoming sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. She described “the alchemical process through which fact metamorphoses into fiction.”

“I will make up the content of a man’s heart,” she told us, “but I will not make up the colour of his drawing room wall – I would rather move the discussion to his study, where I do know the colour of the wall.”

She went on to talk about the ways in which the novelist, unlike the historian, can explore those conversations that happened “on the back stair,” the conversations which, for very good reasons, were never recorded. Historical novelists, she insisted, are “allowed to be partial.” Wolf Hall is narrated from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, and the picture it paints, for example, of Thomas More, is not intended to be an objective depiction of the historical figure, but rather an imaginative reconstruction of the way he might have seemed to Cromwell. This, I think, takes us a little further than Marguerite Yourcenar’s attempt to develop a historical voice. It certainly inspired me.

This is part of a conference at the Institute of Historical Research, which continues tomorrow (and I will doubtless have more to say about it). The conference is fully booked, but has a virtual component, accessible at http://www.ihrconference.wordpress.com/. It would be great if you could join me there!

Two Little Ducks From Stonehenge (well, almost...)

The Mail Online (www.bit.ly/pWFjd6) today ran a headline “How two little ducks could transform our understanding of Stonehenge.”

Gavin Allen’s article refers to discoveries made by my Open University colleague, David Jacques, at a site near Stonehenge (actually closer to the Iron Age hillfort known as Vespasian’s Camp – not “Vesper’s Camp” as stated in the article). I would have been delighted if the two stone figures dated to the same period as Stonehenge, since it would fit uncannily well with the plot of my short story, “The Raft and the Waterfall,” available from Ether Books (http://www.etherbooks.com/). The ducks appear, however, to be around 1700 years later than the first stone circle at Stonehenge.

The article goes on to talk about animal bones from the same site, which go back to the Mesolithic period (c6250 BC, around 3850 years before Stonehenge). Since Jacques’s previous finds from the site include Roman artefacts, this suggests activity on the site over a period of at least 6500 years.

The site itself is centred on the bed of a spring in which objects were formally, perhaps ritually, deposited. There is nothing new in the idea that prehistoric people in Britain deposited objects in this way (Richard Bradley and Francis Pryor, to name but two, have written extensively on the subject), nor even in the suggestion that such practices persisted over a very long time period (Bradley points to the tradition of Excalibur being returned to the Lady of the Lake as evidence that they may have survived into post-Roman times), but there are very few individual sites that provide such clear evidence for continuity down the millennia as this one appears to do.

The two little ducks, therefore, may not transform our understanding of Stonehenge, but they do form part of a bigger story which may transform our understanding of the complex ways in which prehistoric communities, over long time periods, established symbolic links between the present and the past, and between themselves and the landscapes they inhabited.

Of Druids, Bones and Historical Fiction

The High Court today rejected the demand from druid, King Arthur Pendragon, for the immediate reburial of human remains excavated at Stonehenge in 2008 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14629536). That they will, eventually, have to be reburied strikes me as a massive and unacceptable blow against science (I remember writing my PhD more than 20 years ago, bemoaning the fact that a Victorian excavator had reburied human remains that could have informed the chapter that I never got to write), but at least they will first be thoroughly studied.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts said in a BBC interview this afternoon that such study makes it possible to “recreate and retell” the stories of these people who lived 4400 years ago, “to bring them into the present,” and thereby "show them respect."

Of these particular people, as yet we know little. That’s why it’s so important that archaeologists have the chance to complete their research. But Pendragon has been arguing for years that other remains should be reburied. The “Amesbury Archer” is a case in point. We know rather more about him: that he lived around 2400 BC (broadly speaking, the period during which the bluestone circle at Stonehenge was built) and was an immigrant from central Europe; that he was one of the first users of copper and gold in Britain; and that he was sufficiently important to merit one of the most elaborate burials of his age.

Coincidentally, I am just reading J.S. Dunn’s debut novel, Bending the Boyne (Seriously Good Books, 2011), in which he features. A character based loosely on him features, also, as a character in my short story, “The Raft and the Waterfall,” available from Ether Books (http://www.etherbooks.com/). I say “based loosely on” because I think that for a writer to tie him/herself to the specific details of the archaeological record would make it hard to write good fiction. My character gets to live rather longer than the real “archer” did, for example, because this suits my narrative purpose. I wouldn’t do this, of course, with a fully historical figure, such as Julius Caesar or Henry V, but somehow it seems more acceptable to do so in the case of a man whose name and full life-story we can never know, to use him as the inspiration for a character rather than turning him directly into one.

In doing so, I hope to recreate, on an imaginary plane, a society and a way of life which the real man would recognise, a world in which people did travel between central Europe and southern England, pioneer the use of technologies that we now take for granted and build some of our most iconic monuments. And yes, in doing so, I believe that I show more respect than disrespect for our distant ancestors, none of which would be possible if we found excuses to discard their remains.

The remains of the “Amesbury Archer,” together with the objects buried with him, are displayed in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum. The photograph is reproduced courtesy of Wessex Archaeology.