Long Barrows and Jedi

"Future archaeologists will perhaps excavate the ruined factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the radiation effects of Atom bombs have died away" he wrote in his 1953 book, Archaeology in the Field.


On my other blog...they are well into a fierce debate on religion:

Of course, to some Jedi is also a religion.

Does this mean that anyone writing a bad review of Star Wars is also guilty of anti-religious hate crime?



Just thinking about my A-level Archaeology coursework....back in 1983 all I wanted to do was be an archaeologist back then...well I lie I wanted to be an archaeologist and get stuck into some serious green politics giving the obvious unsustainability of global capitalism....in fact the archaeology had got me into the ecology party partly but that is a story for another day....

Cambridge board A-level Archaeology was pretty hot with essay questions like 'Archaeology is the study of rubbish?'.

Life was not too bad in the sixth form of Corsham comprehensive....and I went to study at the Institute of Archaeology, London...which was the place to go...now part of UCL.

Coursework was a little study of the Long Barrows of North West Wiltshire...Lanhil, Lugbury, Giants Caves...beautiful all three...in fact that little spur of the Cotswolds in Wiltshire is a gem...do visit but don't disturb the locals.

So glancing at the Observer I saw this great review of a biog of OGS Crawford, I think I heard that he was a pacifist so didn't fight in WWII but looked at archeaology instead as part of the Quaker lefty milleau....not sure no doubt the biog 'Bloody Old Britain' will tell me...as you know I am all for fighting the fasc and the oligarchy...anyway he did some work on the Long Barrows I researched and the biog looks great fun.

Britain in the neolithic 5,000 - 3,000 ish BC...was an out there place, the whole island very manicured by the first farmers looked like some giant ritual landscape, with bizare religious cults in charge...if only we could taste what went on...that is the fascination of archaeology.

In one of the Indiana Jones films...there is nice episode of Indiana giving an archaeology lecture...with neatly drawn chalk plans of various long barrows on his black board for his undergrads to copy down.

Here is the publisher's puff for the Crawford book....looks really fun...it would make a great film



O.G.S. Crawford (1886-1957) was a man who thought history held the answers to everything, and that to study it was to know humanity's glorious future. At first a field archaeologist, digging with his young fellow Edwardians into the mysterious mounds and ditches of rural England, he became a photographer/observer flying over the Western Front during the First World War - an experience that taught him the new skills of interpreting the earth from above and made him a pioneer of aerial archaeology. Then he fell in love with Marxism, was befriended by H.G. Wells, and travelled to the Soviet Union as one of its disciples.In the 1930s, it seemed to him that contemporary Britain would soon disappear, conquered by history's inevitable march to world socialism, and he made a photographic study of everyday things - churches and advertising hoardings - as future evidence of how unenlightened British society had once been in its worship of God and the motor car. Later there came angry disillusionment and a book, too bitter to be published, called "Bloody Old Britain".

In recounting Crawford's extraordinary story, Kitty Hauser uses many of his photographs and penetrates neglected but fascinating aspects of British life and belief that have themselves become history.