The Modern Antiquarian: A Premillennial Odyssey through Megalithic Britain.

Darvill, Timothy

JULIAN COPE. 438 pages, 600+ colour illustrations. 1998. London: Thorsons; 0-7225-3599-6 hardback [pounds]29.99.

Rock music and archaeology make strange bedfellows, although it is surprising how often they are found together. From the psychedelic metal of Ten Years After (1968) to the soulful blues of Van Morrison (1998), and almost every genre in between, images of ancient monuments have been used as motifs to adorn album covers and provide themes for the creation of music. Julian Cope has now gone one stage further by indulging his interest in archaeology through writing The modern antiquarian. Cope, one-time lead singer with The Teardrop Explodes, is no stranger to archaeology. His album Jehovahkill (1992) features Callanish on its cover and within the accompanying booklet, while the more recent Autogeddon (1994) was, according to the sleeve notes, partly recorded inside the chamber of the West Kennett Long Barrow in Wiltshire. Superficially The modern antiquarian looks like just another piece of fringe archaeology of the sort that sells well in Glastonbury and through shops with names like 'Enigma' or 'Astral Traveller'. But to assign it straightway to that category is to misjudge it, to miss its message and, it will be argued here, to bury our heads in the sand.

The modern antiquarian is two books in one. The first part is a series of essays about Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments and their place in the prehistory of the British Isles. The second part is a guide to more than 300 sites. The whole volume is dedicated to 'the culturally dispossessed of Britain, be they white, black or green; Welsh or English or Inbetween' (p. ix). A leitmotif in Cope's work is that British history has for too long been dominated by the Romans and the Christian Era. Here he tries to redress the balance, to 'reacquaint the British with their most ancient sacred sites at this juncture in modern linear time' (p. ix).

Lavish in its production, colour printed on every page, with more than 600 colour photographs (the majority taken by the author), this book embraces a design that in the first part at least mimics something of those antiquarian tomes by Stukeley and his contemporaries. As an artefact, the book is pleasing, if a little bright, with an orange-coloured box and lots of silver and metallic blue in evidence on the cover. It stands out, shouting loud at a bookbuying public to attract attention. The guide is divided into five sections and is printed on rainbow-coloured papers for easy use. Its production budget and design are of the magnitude that archaeologists usually only dream of.

But what is its content? A quick dip into the text will probably upset most archaeologists pretty quickly, or at least prompt peals of laughter and cries of derision. This is not a book written by an archaeologist, even though the author has made a serious study of his subject. In an interview with Max Bell for the London Evening Standard Cope admitted that 'dealing with 5000 years of history in less than a decade is like trying to learn reggae in a weekend' (Bell 1998).

Cope focuses on two key themes, cleverly linking them by the notion of the ancient past as something tremendously relevant to the present. His first theme is the idea of the relationship between monuments and landscape: 'for it is here in the landscape that we can examine our most ancient beginnings in order to reconcile where we are Right Now' (p. ix). This view follows upon and develops some of Cope's earlier writing about the subject of ancient landscapes and their meanings to us (Cope 1995). Although the language is very different, the basic ideas presented here harmonize with much postprocessual thinking about the landscape as a socially constructed reality (e.g. Tilley 1994). The second theme is that of a great earth mother or female deity that structured behaviour and monument-building tradition. Again, there are serious academic writings by reputable scholars, amongst them O.G.S. Crawford (1957) and Marija Gimbutas (1990) that present much the same overall picture but cast in different words. Cope uses these two themes to explore his subject. Although there is talk of alignment, intervisibility and the occasional use of computers to enhance and re-colour photographs to suggest significance and linkages, this does not extend into the fantasy world of ley-lines and earth magic. Rather he is trying to create a context for the monuments he describes - an image of interpretation and understanding - that is accessible to a wide and general public. He is concerned, too, about the damage to monuments, their curation and care: one section he rather wittily entitles 'Mammy, they JCB'd the Cnoc an Tursa'.

Cope uses an holistic, humanistic, polymathic approach. In true post-modernist tradition he believes that specialists are not the sole custodians of knowledge, and at one point he launches into an attack on archaeologist Patrick Ashmore for his involvement in work at Callanish (p. 70) (see this issue, pp. 124-30). But Cope is by no means alone in taking a more holistic view and taking issue with the view that only professional archaeologists have the right to put forward new ideas about the past. The magazine The 3rd Stone follows much the same path, and has a rapidly increasing subscription base and considerable public following. It carries articles by a wide range of authors and gives each equal weight.

The second part of Cope's book, the guide, develops the themes and approaches set out in the first part. He has visited all the sites listed, and for each gives a short account of how to get there, what there is to see, snippets of folklore and tradition, and a few words of explanation. He also includes a boxed section containing his own personal thoughts and experiences, written mainly in the first person actually at the monument. Some of these musings take the form of poems. Very few archaeologists would be brave enough to commit their thinking and emotions to paper, although again it is squarely within the realm of post-modernist perspectives and can already be found within the texts of recently published excavation and survey reports (Bender et al. 1997) even if many earlier investigators confined such things to their site notebooks. The photographs, too, buck the archaeological norm: here we find people in most of the views, mainly Cope himself, or his wife Dorian, both in a bewildering range of clothes and various states of undress.

The publicity machine promoting this book is already in overdrive. Advertisements and promotional reviews have appeared in a wide range of papers and magazines from Q to the Sunday Times. It will probably sell more copies than all the conventional archaeological books published in last decade put together; more people will read it than have ever studied an excavation report. So what does this book do for archaeology ? And what are its implications for our discipline?

Key to answering these points is the recognition of a shared deficiency. Cope has put a lot of time and trouble and money into researching his book. Just visiting the sites is a major achievement, even if he did arrange some of his tours to make sure he got to every corner of the UK. He has read widely too, but can be criticized for not going far enough, not walking the last mile to tease out the best information. To take Stonehenge as an example, he considers Aubrey Burl's recent writings on possible Breton links suggested by certain features of the monument (Buri 1997), but has missed Chris Scarre's commentary on Burl's paper (Scarre 1997) and, worse still, does not seem to be aware of the 1996 publication of the 20th-century excavations of the Stonehenge and the revised dating and phasing contained therein (Cleal et al. 1995). Cope is keen and able to set out debates and alternative interpretations in his book, yet does not seem to have found some of the main components to lay before his readers. Why is this, we might ask? The reason is plain to see: we as archaeologists have also let ourselves down by not going that final mile - we have not taken our work out into the wider world and a public hungry for our thoughts. Cope is interested in just the sorts of things that Barbara Bender, Ian Hodder, Julian Thomas, Colin Richards, Chris Tilley and many others too have written about and drawn to the attention of academics and professionals through lectures and research. Yet, sadly, we find no reference to these works in Cope's book even though, for example, Cope has a section entitled 'Stonehenge as a political monument' (p. 5). If Cope can be regarded as a barometer of the wider expectations of what archaeology should be doing, and I believe he should, then we must sit up and take note of the implications of this book and others like it. We need, at the very least, to realign our public outputs - to listen up and get real in what we present to the wider world. We need to move away from descriptions and stories of who did what, when and where. Instead we can focus on engagement, relationships, meaning, perspective and understanding. In Britain the Time Team have given the public a broad appreciation of the methodologies and practical business of archaeological investigation to the point where the word 'geophys' must be a candidate for the next edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Now we need to interest the public in what we can really say about the past. Much of the raw material is already within the discipline; it is time to get it out and show it off: bring on the Interpretation Squad!

TIMOTHY DARVILL School of Conservation Sciences Bournemouth University tdarvill@bournemouth.ac.uk

Note: Prof. Darvill is also publishing a version of this review with the Institute of Field Archaeologists.

References

BELL, M. 1998. A hero in solid rock, London Evening Standard 20 October: 29.

BENDER, B., S. HAMILTON & C. TILLEY. 1997. Leskernick: Stone worlds; alternative narratives; nested landscapes, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63: 147-78.

BURL, A. 1997. The sarsen horseshoe inside Stonehenge: a rider, Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine 90: 1-12.

CLEAL, R., K.E. WALKER & R. MONTAGUE. 1995. Stonehenge in its landscape. Twentieth century excavations. London: English Heritage. (English Heritage Archaeological Reports 10).

COPE, J. 1992. Jehovahkill. London: Island Records. (CD) MCD 189-514052-4.

1994. Autogeddon. London: Island Records. (CD) ECHCD1.

1995. The hills are alive.... Q 108 (September): 32-5.

CRAWFORD, O.G.S. 1957. The eye goddess. London: Phoenix House

GIMBUTAS, M. 1990. The language of the goddess. London: Thames & Hudson.

MORRISON, V. 1998. The philosopher's stone. London: Polydor. (CD) 531-789-2.

SCARRE, C. 1997. Misleading images: Stonehenge and Brittany, Antiquity 71: 1016-20.

TEN YEARS AFTER. 1968. Stonedhenge. London: Decca. (Released 1997 BGO Records (CD) BGOCD356.)

TILLEY, C, 1994. The phenomenology of landscape. Oxford: Berg.