An awful lot of archaeology is rooted in Victorian and Edwardian ideas of “primitive man” - and as the core of the literature is what all else is built upon, th

An awful lot of archaeology is rooted in Victorian and Edwardian ideas of “primitive man” - and as the core of the literature is what all else is built upon, there is a tendency towards orthodoxy and conservatism in the field. If it doesn’t fit, it’s ritual. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not talking ancient aliens or whatever - rather that people several thousand years ago are our contemporaries, and are more or less just like us, but for whatever acculturation is going on this century. We vastly underestimate them based on what little survives of them, and due to a paucity of documentary evidence of any value. We talk of iron and bronze ages, when the reality was that it was all the wood age, in which we still largely reside, and yet we define them by the artefacts which most commonly survive.