Yet, Frederick said, if you judge a society by harmony, responsibility towards its members, and lack of aggression towards neighbours it was a society on a high level indeed. And and this was the place where Frederick was hit it was a society more integrated with Nature than any he could remember, and for Africa that is saying a great deal. Not only did this tribes life centre on the flooding and subsidence of the river, but it was very highly ritualised around the seasons, the winds, the sun, the moon, the earth. But in conventional anthropology it is tantamount to saying that a society is barbaric, backward, to say that it is animistic, or bound with nature.
Frederick left this place deeply perturbed. Visiting this tribe, and the thoughts he had had as a result, struck at his confidence as an archeologist that was how he experienced it. That he had the equivalent of a religious persons doubts, and it was necessary to dismiss them before going on. The chief thought was that our society was dominated by things, artefacts, possessions, machines, objects, and that we judged previous societies by artefacts things. There was no way of knowing an ancient societys ideas except through the barrier of our own.
This experiences effect on him he decided was unhealthy and morbid.
I am sure you will have gathered by now that Frederick is and always was a man of great vitality, assurance, and has never been one to be afraid to voice opinions, take sides assert himself.
If he had been less self-confident, probably the effect of that visit in Africa would have been much less.
However, he overcame his temporary loss of spirits, and started his lectures on Greece, which he had to abandon because of his first attack of stammering.
To come to the period just before he and I met outside the gates of London University.
There was a small, apparently minor incident he was visiting an old colleague, who was engaged in an excavation in Wiltshire. He had stayed the night in a local inn, and had walked over next morning to visit his old friend. It was mid-morning and the work was in full swing. The professor himself, half a dozen amateurs there for the love of it, and two archeological students. A trench loosely filled with rubble had been exposed. The professor was unaware that Frederick was there. He was saying that the type of trench indicated that the foundations were for a stone building the stones that had been keyed in to the stony rubble having been taken away for other later building. At which one of the students timidly piped up that he had recently been in Africa and had observed that in a village he was visiting, the people were making a hut of poles, mud plaster and thatch. The first stage of this was to dig a trench, the second being to stand the poles of the future walls in the trench, the third being to pack stony rubble around the poles. The professor did not comment on this. He walked away and Frederick followed him and announced himself. The professor took Frederick around the site and when he came to the trench filled with the rubble he said: In my opinion this is the foundation of a wood and not a stone building, after all, certain primitive people did start wood huts by and etc. and so on. But if there had been no student back from a jaunt to Africa, the professorial voice would have announced with total authority that this building must have been of stone. And this was how the emphatic pronouncements of archeology are arrived at. It was this minor incident that made Frederick remember certain disquiets he had suffered last summer in Turkey. If disquiet is the right word for it.
All through the summer in Turkey he was thinking of his visit to the river-dominated society in Africa more than ten years before. He could not shake off the memory of it, although the two places had so little in common, one being under water for months of the year, the other being so high, dry and exposed. He could not shake off thoughts about the bases of modern archeology, which usually he just accepts as not more than nuisances no one can do anything about. Particularly about finance that the financing of an excavation was always the key to it, and particularly whether it took place at all. Certain people got money easier than others. Some people couldnt get money at all, or only with great difficulty. Some countries were easy money-extractors, others not. Countries had runs of popularity, were in vogue for a while, then went out, like styles in dress. He, Frederick, had been working on that particular site and not one he wanted to work on, because he had been able to get money for that site from an American source a museum short of a certain kind of artefact which was known to be freely available on that site.
Certain ideas were accepted, sometimes for decades or centuries, dominating archeology; suddenly they were doubted. That Greece was the mother of Western civilization and Rome its daddy directed archeology and excavation for a long time yet he, Frederick, would be able to make out a case that the Arabs, Moors and Saracens were parents to Western civilisation, sources of its ideas, its literature, its science, a case based on the same kind of evidence that made us legitimate heirs to Greece and Rome this case wouldnt necessarily be more true, but its bases would be as powerful.
Throughout the summer he amused himself by concocting, one after another, papers describing the civilisation he was unearthing from the point of view of civilisations not ours Roman, Greek, Aztec, etc., and so on. With his tongue in his cheek he framed various versions of the paper that he would probably publish about his work of the summer.
This paper would begin, or end, with the ritual sentence that of course the conclusions drawn were tentative due to lack of knowledge, lack of money, lack of time, and because only a fraction of this level of the site had been excavated, let alone all the levels beneath. But this bone having been tossed to the dogs of doubt, all else would be assertion and statement. The paper would draw the fire of opposing professors schools and theories. Textbooks for universities and schools would result. These would contain statements like: Writing was not discovered in the Middle East until 2,000 B.C. The Sumerians believed so and so. The astronomers of the Akkadians believed such and such. The Egyptians mummified their priest-kings because they wanted the corpses to last a long time. The world was created by God 4000 years ago. That African civilisations prior to the coming of the white man were nonexistent/barbaric/plentiful/backward/sparse/or whatever was the current notion. And so on. Frederick left Turkey in a disturbed frame of mind which he associated with his previous state of mind after his African visit. It so happened that he chanced on a book describing a Victorian clergymans crisis of Doubt over the existence of God. The clergymans character struck Frederick as being similar to his own: energetic, and confident. The man had been upset by Doubts about the exact date of the creation of the world by God. His state of mind was very like Fredericks as he read. He was on the point of deciding that it was his moral duty to leave the Church, as he could not with honesty remain in it, when his tenth child, a girl, became engaged to a clergyman. This was a very good and by then despaired-of match, as the girl was an old maid, being nearly thirty. The father knew the girl would not keep this man, if he, the father, aired his Doubts and left the Church. For if he left the Church there would be a family-engulfing scandal and the daughters fiancé was a conventional man with a future to guard. The fathers crisis now became a nice exercise in balancing responsibilities: his conscience, or his daughters future. With much anguish, he put off his leaving the Church until his daughter was wed. This meant he had to go through marrying (personally officiating) his daughter to the clergyman son-in-law with his mind full of Doubts. But when he examined his conscience after the ceremony he found his Doubts much less. As if the act of going through the ceremony had relieved them. It was my love for my poor Daughter; my fears for her comfortless future; my anguish of mind that my own misery and confusion should poison Others it was these that had caused me to act, as I then believed, Dishonestly. Thanks be to God in His Great Mercy that he led me, through my Valley of the Shadow, back to Himself
In short, that Victorian crisis was over. Frederick was left with two thoughts. One, that this frightful, painful, and very real conflict had taken place about a hundred years ago, which was nothing at all, even in human time. It had been a very common conflict indeed. Some of the best Victorian minds had suffered torment, even collapse. Careers had been ruined, families destroyed, lives laid waste. But by even a few decades later these Doubts looked ludicrous. (In religious terms, Doubts looked ludicrous, for in our time Crises of Doubt are experienced most noticeably in the political context.) The second thought was that his state of mind after the African visit, his state of mind due to visiting the Turkey site, were identical with that of the Victorian clergyman in his religious conflict. But the Victorian had not had the benefit of modern psychology. (Though he could have remembered that the hand of the dyer is subdued to his craft.) There was, however, no excuse at all for him, Frederick, not to take a cool look at what was bothering him, which was nothing less, unfortunately, than Profound Doubts about what was going on in Archeology, Doubts about its bases, premises, methods and above all, its unconscious biases.
If he were to do what that poor Victorian had done, he should accept the job in the Sudan, on the grounds that if he did not, his wife would have to go without a pleasure cruise to Madeira, on which she had set her heart, and it was not fair to make her suffer for his crisis of confidence. But if he did this, since the Mind of the Worker is conditioned by his Work, he would have soon forgotten all about his Doubts, which would begin to look silly and unhealthy. Luckily Fredericks wife is a sensible woman whose attitude towards archeology has always tended to be that it made for attractive holidays for herself and the children, and all she said to Frederick was that she could hardly complain about not going to Madeira when she had been able to get about so much. She went off to stay with a friend in Spain who has a villa, leaving Frederick in London.