Wessex Chronicle (Blog)

This review originally appeared in Wessex Chronicle volume 16, issue 3 (Autumn 2015)

In part, this book is the autobiography of an English archæologist.  In part, it’s a history of English archæology, in which yesterday’s certainties dissolve into today’s more sober reassessments, even as a cult of touchy-feely ignorance disparages the very idea of objective knowledge.  In part, it’s a meditation on the nature of time itself and how we perceive its passing.  As a whole, all three are woven together into 466 very readable pages.  

As we might expect, Wessex plays a big role.  For earlier generations of archæologists, Wessex was where prehistory mostly happened.  It’s a view now recognised as an overstatement, caused by the better survival of material remains on the chalk downlands, or more accurately of readily visible material remains not masked by vegetation.

Morris points out the dangers of situational bias: “The idea that Wessex was an early settled cultural core rested on a belief that its free-draining soils and semi-open chalkland were attractive to ill-equipped early farmers.  To a degree it also reflected the whereabouts of the archæologists themselves.”  Yet he also acknowledges the advantages that geographical context can bring.  Why was Wessex, a region not rich in natural resources, at certain times so affluent and politically pre-eminent?  One answer is that Wessex lay at the heart of a network of wealth-bringing connections: south to northern France and Brittany, west to Wales and southern Ireland, north to the Irish Sea and the Western Isles.  Prehistoric Britain’s trade routes were not just the trackways but also the rivers and it oscillated between favouring those of the Atlantic arc and those of the North Sea rim.  Subsequent centuries were no different: hence the rise and fall of Winchester as a political rival to London in the Anglo-Saxon period (and of Southampton as London’s maritime rival in the later middle ages). The most sensitively treated themes in the book concern not material remains at all but cultural ones, the archæology of the intangible essential to proper interpretation of things found.  For Morris, the great break in history comes not with the Romans leaving or the Normans arriving but with the Reformation.  He demonstrates the continuity of locally sacred sites and landscapes back into the prehistoric, a continuity shattered with the stripping of the altars and the triumph of a standard, printed religion.  “This attack on the cult of the dead was ‘an act of exorcism, to limit the claims of the past, and the people of the past, on the people of the present’.  And as the exorcism took effect, the study of time through antiquities and historical topography began to accelerate.”  Traditions like morris dancing – in which Morris naturally takes an interest – are fragments of that lost world.  It survives too in the works of playwrights and poets and Morris intersperses his prose with verses that serve to illustrate a point.  His career has made him acutely aware that archæology is about observation, that what you see is what you expect to see, and that theories influence “facts” as much as the other way round.  His approach to the subject, as critical of perceptions as of evidence, is as thought-provoking as it is scholarly