To live in central Edinburgh is to continually walk through history. This thought is especially pertinent when listening to Professor Richard Morris speak about his own encounters with the past.
A comparatively late entrant to the field, Morris’ career began with archaeological work at York Minster, moving on the become Churches Officer for the British Council for Archaeology, involved in a project to map the archaeology of British churches.
His interests are far wider than the ecclesiastical, however, and in ‘Time’s Anvil’ he has sought to indicate the scope and breadth of the discipline in the 21st century.
This includes the traces of a child’s footprints in the mud of the Severn Estuary made some seven thousand years ago, the timbers of the Rose Theatre at Bankside to the remains of coastal defences built a mere sixty years ago.
From basic beginnings barely two centuries previously, archaeology has developed to produce a flood tide of artefacts and evidence from the past. Morris‘ response is to offer a series of snapshot views of the work of the profession as he has encountered it, resulting in a work that is both explanation and meditation.
Ranging over the destruction of the European Forest, the heavy incidence of deserted medieval villages, the excavation of the Rose Theatre, the horizon of personal memories and the importance of useable wood and metal, Morris sought to impart to his audience something of the centrality of archaeology to historical understanding and his own sense of place in time.
The question session that followed raised a number of interesting topics, including whether archaeologists find what they want to. Professor Morris’ response was that archaeologists seek to confirm the existing record (although, of course, they may not be able to do so). He went on to suggest that finds prompt the process of interrogation – how, for instance, was a particular flint made, for what purpose, why was it found where it was?
Although perhaps not every Book Festival attendees tasse du the, for this reviewer it proved a stimulating and thought-provoking hour.
Richard Morris Time's Anvil, England, Archaeology and the Imagination, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson £20