"Writing Archaeology for the General Public"

   Here are three more in the continuing flood of books on archaeology and prehistory. They are listed in order of merit. Each has its bibliography and index, but they are of quite different character. The Emery volume was published in England two years ago in an unrevised version under the title "Egypt in Nubia."

   Walter Emery, professor of Egyptology at the University of London, is well known in America from his lectures for the Archaeological Institute of America and his excellent Penguin volume on the earliest Egyptian dynasties. He has been excavating in Egypt and the Sudan for 40 years. This book, like all his writings, shows his personal knowledge, sound judgment, and attractive style.

   The ancient land of Nubia, on the boundary of modern Egypt and the Sudan, would probably still be unexplored archaeological territory, despite its intrinsic significance as the corridor between ancient Egypt and black Africa, had it not been for the irrigation projects of the present century in the Aswan region, which, by threatening to flood the Sudan, made it necessary to complete the archaeological exploration of the area before the successive inundations took place. These studies were made by the First and Second Archaeological Surveys of 1907-1911 and 1929-1934 and the UNESCO-sponsored efforts in process since 1960. Emery was director of the second survey and has been a chief figure in all subsequent work in the area.

   In the first half of his book Emery gives a history of these excavations, while in the second half (pages 169-312), he gives an outline of Nubian history, based on these materials, in the period 3100 B.C. to A.D. 550. Much of the interest of the first portion results from the author's descriptions of his own work, especially his discovery of the tombs of the kings of the so-called "X Group" found at Ballana and Qustol, and his study of the ruins of the great Egyptian fortress at Buhen (in use about 1900-1675 and 1475-1100 B.C.). The latter revealed the use in Egypt of defense features which military historians had believed were invented in medieval Europe 2,500 or more years later.

Workers in the Field

   McDonald, who is professor of classics at Minnesota, has organized his book on the same pattern as the earlier portion of Emery's, except that the author played no personal role in the archaeological excavating he describes. He has, however, obtained the same note of personal experience by organizing his story about the lives of three enthusiastic workers in the field of Aegean archaeology: Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941, and Carl W. Blegen (1887-) Since these three do not quite cover the field completely, McDonald has added accounts of other workers, especially in chapters 7 and 8, which give good narratives of the events (and controversies) of Mycenaean studies from 1919 to 1965.

   Originally archaeological writings were organized about the objects found, detached from their context, and regarded as either treasure or art objects. Later the emphasis was on the historical reconstruction of the cultures and history of which they were the chief evidence.

   The growing tendency to write archaeology for the general public in terms of the excavation effort itself and the personalities of the men engaged in it is probably a good one, although it places a heavier burden on both reader and writer. The reader will not really grasp the significance of the work being done, during a sequence of digging seasons in which evidence is produced in a sequence chronologically reversed from the order in which it happened, unless he has already some idea of the history of the culture being studied. If the writer tries to provide this history as he goes along in his story of the excavations, he may confuse his readers. One solution would be to keep the two separate, as Emery has done, but this may leave some readers in doubt about the significance or value of the excavations he describes in the first part of his volume. The other, and more difficult, way is that done very successfully by McDonald, to provide enough of the historical reconstruction as the excavation narration goes along so that the significance of the latter becomes evident even to those who started with little knowledge of the society which left the ruins.

   The weakness of any historical reconstruction based on archaeological evidence is that it becomes outdated very rapidly, especially today when new discoveries are so frequent. Any story of how these discoveries were made has much more value, while a successful combination of both excavation narration with historical reconstruction, by allowing the reader to see what alternative interpretations are possible or how interpretative errors were made in the past, is most valuable of all.

   The third book listed above is of quite different character from the other two. It aims to examine the claim that a Welsh prince, Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, discovered America in 1170. Although the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a monument to Madoc's achievement at his presumed landing place in Mobile Bay, Ala., Richard Deacon's uncritical use of unreliable evidence is not likely to convince a skeptical reader.

--CARROLL QUIGLEY.