“A bunch of beardies rooting around with trowels. On the lookout for shinbones and such. It’ll be knockout.” There will have been naysayers at the meeting when they first pitched the idea for a series about archaeology and yet nearly 20 years on Time Team is still with us. It seems the viewing public’s appetite for digging is not restricted to Titchmarsh. Mirabile dictu, as the Romans no doubt said when they dug up three wooden crosses under a temple of Venus in Jerusalem, thus inventing archaeology.
Hence what might be considered overdue: a telly history of archaeology. This being telly history, it is naturally called Archaeology: A Secret History. In which “secret” seems to mean “not a lot of people know this”. It’s on BBC Four, about which in one's contemptible folly one tends to nourish consoling preconceptions. Last bastion of intelligent non-condescending dissemination of info, for example. Lowest common denominators avoided and so forth. Andrew Graham Dixon etc. It seems possible Dr Richard Miles didn’t get the memo. He wandered into a German museum to have a look at the first Neanderthal man. “So excited to see this!” he hyperventilated, putting on a so-excited face. Welcome to Reithianism, school-trip style.
Call me a desiccated fossil but I quite like it when presenters don’t work on the assumption that I’m 10. Or wander around places which are intensely important to the secret history of archaeology and don’t tell you where they are. Halfway into this first ep we were quite clearly having a gander at Avebury Ring but not so you’d know it. Go easy with the facts is the diktat from BBC Factual. Don’t frighten the horses with TMI. Otherwise they’ll have nosebleeds or tantrums or switch over to Farts: A Secret History.
So yeah, this should have been on BBC One. Only they don’t put archaeologists on BBC One, even plausible ones without beards. Even ones who say “this is absolutely incredible!” all the time. You knew you were probably not going to be overloaded with information when Dr Richard Miles dropped in on Siena. Siena, it turns out, has sweet FA to tell us about archaeology, but it’s a lot nicer to wander through than Ancona, the total hole where the father of Renaissance archaeology inconveniently comes from. Next stop: Ancona - where we were shown a marble relief of Ciriaco de’ Pizzacolli - excellent nose (pictured above right) - though not subsequently told a jot about the actual digging he did all over the Med.
The story of this opener was all about how archaeology – with a bit of help from the likes of Copernicus and Newton – established that Earth is a lot older than the Bible and a certifiable Creationist rump say it is. Archaeologists digging up fossils of fish and flint axes were the ones who proved mankind has been knocking around since somewhat before the Book of Genesis. Did Rome not like that.
On we sped through the centuries, finding out about chaps who liked digging, while Dr Richard Miles treated us to the manic rictus common among youngish telly academics on a mission to entertain as they explain. (To explertain? To enterplain? To get on your tits?) At one venue in Suffolk he visited a cabinet of curiosities including an important bit of old bronze. The curator revealed that it had been found in an attic and Dr Richard Miles chuckled and rolled his eyes, twice. Crazy stuff. The early centuries of archaeology remain shrouded in secrecy.