"SPEECH INAUDIBLE" "'Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the greatest archaeologist of our time." "'Now aged 84, he lives an active and hospitable retirement 'close to London's Trafalgar Square and his beloved British Academy." "'He's been a star in everything he's ever set his hand to." "'Now he has time to look back with wit and affection 'on the great men and events he's known or admired.'" "Are you a student of Benjamin Disraeli?" "No." "You're not." "I am." "I find that Benjamin Disraeli on my table by my bedside, it lightens my day for me, or my night for me." "He...he produces exactly the things I've been trying to say myself for so long." "And lately, I've picked up his, I think it's his last novel." "A novel of his old age" " Lothair." "And there I opened the book at a page which has a direct bearing on what you've just been saying." "On this page he is talking about a little man called Pinto," "Portuguese of some sort." "But a pet of society in the period he's writing off." "And he... ..gives an idea of the sort of conversation that he imagines, or had heard, taking place in his time." "After all, nearly everything that he wrote in his novels is, for us, an inheritance from the age of conversation." "And in this particular book, his hero, I think, his hidden hero is a little man called Pinto." "And Pinto he describes in what I think is a perfectly delightful and eloquent manner." ""He was not of intellectual Croesus" ""but his pockets were full of sixpences."" "And he gives one or two of the sixpences as examples." "And one of them is this," ""He would sometimes remark, when a man fell into his anecdotage," ""it was a sign for him to retire from the world."" "'Well, in spite of his professed aversion to anecdotage," "'Sir Mortimer himself is a marvellous storyteller." "'He relishes the quality of greatness in others 'and not least the faults that he believes 'that no genius worthy of the name can ever be without.'" "So, the genius can still make an infinite number of mistakes and still be a genius?" "Well, yes, well, look at Churchill." "There's a whole book about his mistakes " "Churchill:" "A Study In Failure." "It's a sensible book too, a sensible book." "But of course, it leaves out all that matters about Churchill." "What matters is what happens in between his failures." "And his failures themselves were stimulating." "It's rather a curious story." "If...if it bores you just put a finger up and I'll stop." "Perhaps." "It happened this way - in the year 1938..." "..I received a formidable document from the University of Bristol... ..inviting me to accept an honorary doctorate, you see." "The first time it had happened to me." "Of course, as you get older and go down the slope these things happen as a matter of course and they just happen." "But this was the first." "And it...it so happened that Winston Churchill was, at that time, the Chancellor of Bristol University." "He had been for some years." "And if he took on a job of that sort he always did it." "He would always turn up at the great ceremonial occasions." "And so, when in due course I appeared in the Great Hall, in the line of the stalls, you know, sitting in between..." "This made me laugh internally, I can tell you." "Sitting between a future Prime Minister and our greatest living poet." "And here was little me in between." "Why?" "Why on earth?" "That was between Churchill and who?" "No, no." "That was between, um, Anthony..." "Anthony Eden." "Anthony Eden." "Between Anthony Eden, who hadn't been then Prime Minister, he was going to be eventually, and with T.S. Eliot." "There were other...a few other people to make the row up." "And there was I but I couldn't make out why on Earth they'd picked on me, little me." "I was a very shy..." "I am by nature a very shy man, as you may have discovered." "HE LAUGHS" "Up on the dais sat the Chancellor, in his Chancellor's robes." "And the one thing of course that Churchill loved above all else was dressing up." "And in due course, we walked up the little stairs and knelt on a cushion and the Chancellor threw out our hood and he set it on your shoulders and you made an honest man." "Well, it came to my turn." "I went up and knelt on the cushion." "And I imagine that the Chancellor was intended to say something like," ""Bristol expects that every man will do his duty,"" "or something of that sort." "Instead he said, "I want to see you." "Meet me afterwards in the anteroom."" "This was in a hoarse whisper while the hood settled on my shoulders." "And I went down." "Well afterwards I appeared in the anteroom." ""Ah, you're going back to town, yes?" "Yes," I said." ""Would you come with me?"" ""Yes." HE MURMURS QUIETLY" ""Well, OK, I've had enough of this, let's get in the car" ""and go to the station."" "And outside there was a Daimler car as long as a train you know, waiting for him." "We got in." "When we got to the station, this was 1938, before the war." "There was a great crowd." "Churchill always magnetised a great crowd in some sort of mysterious way." "And there was the Chief Constable and all the rest of it." "The station platform was cleared." "We walked across it and we got into a carriage, a whole carriage, not a compartment but a carriage marked - "the Right Honourable Winston Churchill"." "I didn't, I still didn't know, I hadn't a clue what was happening, what it was all about." "We sat down opposite each other as I'm sitting down opposite you." "And he produced from his pocket... ..a pair of eye shades with elastic." "And he proceeded to drape it round his massive forehead." ""When I travel by train, I always sleep for half an hour."" "You see he was building up a little bit of reserve, there." "And he put it round his head and left it up there." "And then he leaned over to me and said, "Now I'm going to tell you." ""I'm writing a history of the English speaking people." ""I've got the Danes," ""very difficult people the Danes." ""Let us talk about the Danes."" "Well then, of course, the whole thing was, it was clear to me that he had given me a degree because I was the only archaeologist he'd heard of" "And he wanted a bit of help." "Well, that was all right I could... fair enough." "Well, we talked about the Danes and then we passed on to other... to prehistoric Britain and so on." "And the eye shades never came down." "But we met the following day and behind him is a shadow, very extraordinary this shadow," "Lindemann who afterwards became Lord Cherwell." "I never heard, at that time," "I never heard Lindemann, or Cherwell, say anything." "Later, he..." "We met on various occasions and we talked but he was the shadow which gave Churchill a peace of mind." "Churchill had somebody to lean on in some curious, psychological way." "Anyway, we talked together, we talked on other occasions." "And I remember one of the questions which Churchill asked me on one occasion was," ""Tell me, who was the first Englishman?"" "Well, that's a bit of a question to have fired at you." "And of course, in the Churchillian sense, knowing what he wanted," "I said, "Oh, the Piltdown Man."" "It's a curious, monkey-like skull which had been found, not very long previously, in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex." "And this was regarded by many people at the time as a very primitive type of sub-man." "And he made a mental note and then after all these conversations said," ""Would you write it down and send it to me?"" "So I wrote these things down and sent them to him." "And of course, he took them and he put the Churchill into it." "He put the headlines into the whole thing." "He brought it alive." "I simply just..." "I simply gave him a little fuel and he lit the fire." "Now, I'm now going to pass on." "There came the war, as you will very well remember." "Just before the...on the eve of war, the proof of the first volume arrived and I saw it and corrected it and sent it back." "Then the war." "And at various levels, well, he and I were occupied for the following 10...15 years." "I remember very vividly the next occasion upon which this question arose, the question of the history of the English speaking people arose." "It was on a day in August in 1954 and I was sitting in my office and a letter came to me from Churchill's editor." "Churchill by that time was still - he was Prime Minister." "He was a sick man really." "I rather think he'd had a stroke but I'm not sure." "Anyway, he was a burdened man with no time to look at the niceties of a proof and he'd handed the whole thing over for final correction to his principal subeditor." "And he, not knowing that I had actually drafted the original, sent it to me and asked whether I would be good enough to read it through and comment on it." "I did and opened it at the page, almost, where the Piltdown Man appeared as the first Englishman, with Churchillian decoration." "Well, since 1938, or '39, when I had written the draft, things had happened to the Piltdown Man." "In 1949, and again in 1953, new chemical methods had discovered, determined, that Piltdown Man was a forgery, a complete forgery." "Well of course this had passed over, or passed by, the mind of the busy Prime Minister, the ailing Prime Minister who was the author of it in its final shape." "And I spent that August day, I remember, with a sort of fretsaw carving out all references to Piltdown Man." "You won't find a single reference to Piltdown Man now in Volume One." "But by God if it had got through!" "The whole of that bestselling history, those four volumes, would have rested upon a forgery." "It was a near miss!" "This afternoon before you came in," "I'd been taking one of those nostalgic walks which I occasionally, I'm afraid, indulge in." "And this one is my favourite one." "It takes me down by the Embankment by the Thames opposite that extraordinary building, the National Liberal Club, then I walk along from that point towards Westminster." "And as I approach Westminster, on my right, there is a very remarkable building indeed." "And with that building, I have all sorts of affinity." "I tell you - first of all, biological affinity." "That building was being built at the time that I was born." "It was being built here and I was born in place called Glasgow." "You know Glasgow?" "Indeed." "Well, I was being born in Glasgow when that building was being born here in London." "New Scotland Yard." "New Scotland Yard." "That building has two great round towers, one at each corner, facing upon the river and in one of those towers it so happens - and this is a matter of purely personal interest - that I spent my first hours and days and weeks as" "a professional archaeologist." "At that time, in spite of the fact that most of the building was occupied by the Metropolitan police force, somehow or other, by some contrivance over there, this tower had been partially allotted to an obscure Royal Commission " "the Royal Commission On Historical Monuments for England." "They allotted me to the editorial staff and the editorial staff of those days were one man" " Alfred Clapham - later on SIR Alfred Clapham, who immediately became my closest friend and remained my closest friend until he died 20 years ago." "Well, I remember on one occasion," "Clapham - we always called each other by our surnames to the end of our days - he died with my surname on his lips and we used to have this little conversation for ten minutes, ten minutes precisely, about some irrelevant subject." "On one occasion he, a Yorkshireman, told me about a very remarkable ancient monument, a series, enormous series, miles long, of earthworks in northern Yorkshire at a place called Stanwick." "Our conversation was interrupted, I remember, by the fact that across the adjacent Westminster Bridge past the statue of Boadicea, there was marching a battalion of infantrymen in khaki - it was just two days before the opening" "of the First World War and the troops were assembling." "And we looked at that and forgot Stanwick." "And then, my mind is a blank in this respect, for, say, nearly 40 years, and then nearly 40 years later, after two world wars and all sorts of minor sub-adventures or non-adventures in peace time," "I found myself back in London, sitting in my room at the University Of London, where apparently I was some sort of professor, one of those things and my door opened and in came a man whom I recognised as the Chief Inspector Of Ancient Monuments," "the man in charge of all the ancient buildings in the country." "And he said he'd come..." "I said, "Do you represent the King?"" "He looked rather like it." "And he said, "No, not exactly, but I represent the Ministry Of Works." ""And I've come to you with a petition." And the petition was this." "In the following year - it was 1950 - but in the following year, 1951, it had been intended, it WAS intended, to hold a Festival Of Britain." "A sort of centenary of the great exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851, and the site chosen was precisely opposite the..." "New Scotland Yard, on the other side of the Thames." "And it may be that there was a remote association in my mind between the two, but anyway, his petition was this." ""The Ministry Of Works, representing the government, offer you" ""the excavation, the means to excavate, any site you like," ""in England, provided it's available, at any cost that you like to name."" "Well, of course, this sort of thing happens to you in a dream and here it was - the world on a plate." "And he said, he went on to say, "Don't hurry with your answer." ""It's a big question." "Take your time."" "And I said, "I'll tell you now."" "My mind went back over those 40 years in that flash of an instant to our little conversation all those years ago in the turret, in the tower, corner tower of New Scotland Yard, and I said," ""I'll do the earthworks at Stanwick." Then I added," ""I've never been there, I've never seen them," ""but if they are what I think they are said to be," ""well, they're a alleged to be, then I can't do them" ""unless I have the whole finances of what is left of the British Empire" ""to work upon." ""But since you offer me those finances, I'm prepared to say yes." ""What about going up there and having a look at the place next week?"" "Next week we went." "Northern Yorkshire, five miles from Darlington." "The rain's streaming down like an oriental monsoon." "We were in gumboots and Macintoshes and things and we climbed for mile after mile after mile across walls, through hedges, over earthworks which seemed interminable." "Banks and ramparts, ditches of various kinds, an integral work of defence of some kind or other." "Who built it?" "No-one knew." "No-one knew what it contained, although of course, as one began to think over it, one came to certain provisional conclusions." "Which you're obviously not going to tell me right now." "Er, no." "It wouldn't be artistic to tell you at this stage but the..." "When we got down to work, one had to ask that question, now where in six miles are you going to dig in the hope of finding anything?" "You don't just dig in the blue, you take a place where there is an entrance, an entrance, through which traffic must have converged." "It's at the entrance that in ancient times the passers-by, or the people coming in, would throw away their cigarette packets and so on." "You can imagine them throwing away their rubbish or sticking up things that they wanted to attract the attention of others." "I put my principal diggers on to the entrance." "We carved into it" " I shall never forget this - it was a deep, great, deep ditch ending at a causeway, ending abruptly at a causeway." "It was carved past the...in the rock." "It had been filled since ancient times by marsh, by liquid mud, a pool." "And I shan't forget sitting there and watching my foreman, an expert foreman of mine who'd been with me for many years in this country, digging there, and suddenly stopping with his pick in midair." "He was about to bring it down and he stopped." "And looking over his shoulder, there was a sword, a full-length sword in its scabbard, lying in the mud, intact." "A Celtic sword in a sheath - not of metal as they ordinarily are, but in a sheath of wood." "And when you say Celtic sword, Celtic to me suggests wild Scotsman with kilts and hairy knees coming tearing down from the Highlands and invading England." "Celtic is a word, now, which suggests northern, but how are you using the term?" "I'm using it in a wider sense." "Are you a Celt?" "No, I'm an Icelander, sir." "Icelander." "We have 40% Celtic blood in us." "Yes." "I knew you were tainted." "Well, immediately I did two things." "I sent for my assistant director, and got her to go to the village to instruct the local carpenter to make an oblong box, a sort of little coffin box, which would take the sword when I lifted it." "Secondly, I made a tracing of the outline of the sword in case anything should happen to it, while it still lay in the mud before we touched it." "And then finally, the little box arrived in about half an hour, done very quickly." "The village carpenter brought the box along, and the foreman and I lifted, very carefully, this wooden sword scabbard, containing the iron sword, up in our hands and laid it gently, very gently indeed, into the box," "still covered with its mud and bolstered with wet moss and so on to keep it wet in transit." "I rang up the British Museum laboratory in London and said, asked the chief man there, Dr Plenderleith, very skilful chemist, to be good enough to wait until my messenger had arrived." "I sent my assistant up with this box, wrapped up exactly as it was found in the next train." "She arrived that evening with the box and as the chemist, Dr Plenderleith, told me afterwards, and actually he has written, the preservation of this remarkable relic was due entirely to the fact, of course, that we took those precautions, that we" "had prevented the wood from drying and splitting as it would have done." "Now why did you find this sword so remarkable?" "It's in the British Museum now." "It has a pride of place there, but there are surely lots of swords 2,000 years old and older than 2,000 years." "Why were you so excited when you found it?" "I'll tell you." "For two reasons." "First..." "Excited is not the word I use." "Why not?" "I'm never excited." "I don't believe..." "No scientist is ever excited." "Don't use the word." "It's a terrible word..." "Mag!" "But the point is that it was of interest for two reasons." "First of all, so far as I know, it's the only wooden scabbard of its kind found in this country, or found, so far as I know, anywhere else, too." "Wood doesn't last in most European soils." "This had been preserved by the accident of its having fallen originally, or been thrown originally, into this great heap of wet mud which had kept it airtight for 19 centuries." "Secondly, I'll tell you." "Close alongside this scabbard, there lay a human skull, which had been severed from the body - the body was not there, there were no signs of the body - about the third or fourth cervical vertebra." "And prior to that, the owner of the skull had been killed by being struck violently with a sword or an axe, probably a sword, three times upon his skull, across the eyes and the forehead and a slice off the top of his skull." "He'd been executed and beheaded and his head had been strung up there on a pole at the gate in accordance with ancient Celtic custom." "Many tribes, many ancient tribes used to do that sort of thing to their foes or to their victims." "Well, it went on here in London till the 18th century when heads were exposed on Temple Bar." "Same sort of thing." "Another, an older and a more brutal age." "Well, there it was." "We had a picture of the whole thing." "This post, standing up beside the gate when everybody could see it with the skull of the executed man on the top of it and the sword hanging down from it in token of the dead man's rank" "And origin." "It's a remarkable thing." "There it is in the British Museum." "You can go and see it." "MAGNUS MAGNUSSON:" "Sir Mortimer Wheeler endowed the huge Iron Age hill fort of Stanwick in northern Yorkshire in 1951 as his contribution to the Festival of Britain." "As it turned out, it was his last major excavation in Britain, but he brought to it the same originality that had marked all his digs, the same unerring gift for making the past come alive." "They...the people we dug up were living at the beginning of the... what we call the Roman period, at, say...in the years immediately following the Roman invasion of this country in 43 AD." "We know that from the pieces of pottery we began to find in our digging already, quite early on." "We knew, also, that involved in this affair were the local natives - we call them Celts." "But they were the local natives, to one of whom, to one of the chieftains amongst whom, this sword I've told you of must have belonged." "But these were in fact the British?" "They were British." "The Brigantes were the Yorkshiremen of the period, roughly speaking - the great tribe which stretched from sea to sea across what is now roughly Yorkshire and Lancashire, cutting the whole island into half." "The Brigantes occupied that area, the area in the midst of which we were digging." "It was a pastoral society." "It lived not on corn but on beef and milk and things of that sort." "Secondly, by way of contrast to this, the southern part of the island was agricultural." "It had an agricultural south and a pastoral north." "The island was divided roughly into two, and all this happened in the pastoral north amongst the Brigantes." "The first thing they did on arriving here in 43 AD, the Romans, was to, er...develop, exploit the south, where the corn grew." "You see, Roman soldiers in those days didn't eat much meat, they ate gruel and oats and barley and so on." "They were vegetarians very largely, and they wanted to develop the vegetarian area of England at first." "They did - places like Maiden Castle and so on." "Meanwhile, in order to keep the rest of the island quiet they came to some sort of an agreement with the Brigantes in the north whereby the Brigantes held their fire." "I remember Tacitus said somewhere that the Romans thought that the men of Kent were the only civilised people that they knew - presumably because they ate porridge!" "Partly that and partly also, of course, they were nearer to the" "Roman world." "They'd been in contact with the Roman world up to a point." "They'd traded with Gaul, which was already Roman, and so they had a better opportunity of advancement than the people in the far north in the hills and moors of the north." "The uncouth Yorkshiremen." "The uncouth Yorkshiremen." "I won't go further north than that at the moment." "These Brigantes, were they the sort of equivalent of the kind of partisans that you've got in the Second World War?" "They were guerrillas who took to the mountains and carried on attacking the invaders from these mountain fastnesses?" "It's more this way, I think, Mag - that having made this compact with the Romans, they proceeded, at the first opportunity, to break it." "When the Romans began to march across Wales with their eyes on Ireland - the Romans never got to Ireland, but they obviously intended to at one time, they were marching towards Anglesey and Ireland - and when they got far enough away from the main part of England," "what is now England, the Brigantes, this northern tribe, rose behind them." "They had to therefore turn round and go back, and bring them to heel again, bring them to heel, and this state of affairs of, er... come and go, as it were, continued for the next generation." "The Brigantes had a royal house with a King Venutius and Queen Cartimandua." "Queen Cartimandua had handed over Caratacus to the Romans when he took refuge with her." "Is this the Caractacus of the pop song?" "It's Caract..." "Caractacus to the..." "so vulgar!" "MAGNUS LAUGHS" "But again, Caratacus...after all, if you can say Boudica," "I can say Caratacus." "Now, they..." "She" " Cartimandua, the Queen - became pro-Roman." "She was a quisling." "The King - this is around about the middle of the first century, the King was anti-Roman and with him went the major part of his tribe." "His little original hill fort was enlarged, first of all by the addition of 130 acres of new ground, which included a stream, now known as the Mary Wild Beck " "I don't know who Mary Wild was, nobody could tell me - but a large part of her stream was included in the new defences, so that his allies, whom he began to call in to his aid," "could bring their flocks and herds with them." "And then later, round about, shall we say, oh, 69-70 AD, so we're getting on gradually into the century, Venutius further enlarged this great place by the addition of 400 acres more...600 acres more." "Why?" "Because he was calling in more tribesmen." "He called in the neighbouring tribes to his aid." "They all flocked in to his colours, as it were, bringing their food with them, bringing their flocks and herds and their families with them - in that order - and they wanted space." "They wanted more and more of this stream to water their flocks at and for their own purposes." "And so the place grew to the enormous size that it is today." "But we found in digging the...this final enlargement that the work had never been finished." "It was stopped in the middle." "The great entrance at the south which I thought might produce more swords and more relics was found never to have been used." "The rocks were lying loose - the great rocks which they chiselled away in making their rock-cut ditch there were still lying loose where the builders had left them." "So, in fact, the Romans had cottoned on to what Venutius was doing and attacked before he'd time to get it all ready." "Yes, but this time, the Romans had an advanced legion at York, their Ninth Legion, the famous Ninth Legion." "The Ninth Legion always lost its battles except the last one." "And the last one is the one I'm just coming to, when, about 70 AD, just after 70, the Brigantes rose for the last time under their king." "The Queen had fled to the Romans for safety." "But the Brigantes rose under their king and you can almost hear the Ninth Legion tramping up the road, when you look at this unfinished entrance with the rocks still standing there as the builders had left them." "It's very vivid." "Very vivid indeed." "Now there was another bit that you yourself added to the report of this excavation." "I remember reading in one of the footnotes, and in that you describe a little bit what you thought about Queen Cartimandua." "You said that you thought in fact that she was a southern princess, who had been living in a land of wine and honey, and then she'd been married off to some uncouth cattle rancher from the north, from Yorkshire, and that she resented this the whole time " "they were a totally incompatible couple and that this, perhaps, is why they fell out." "That's it, you've got it well." "And she couldn't take these..." "these ranchers of the north." "I think you're perfectly right." "I was perfectly right, too, when I wrote that footnote, I think, that Cartimandua almost certainly was a member of Cymbeline's or Cunobelin's family, came from the neighbourhood of Colchester, the most civilised part of pre-Roman Britain," "and that she became a quisling - for that reason that her sympathies were with her relations in the south and she couldn't stand this hairy, this hairy..." "Husband?" "Well, husband is..." "Yes, or...this hairy husband..." "This, what shall I say, pastoral... pastoral shep...this shepherd, this great shepherd in the north." "He's more than a shepherd because we know that he had not only sheep and goats, but he had masses of cattle." "We've found their remains, the remains of their dinners, and the dinners of his fellow tribesmen." "We found them all there." "We've got the whole evidence." "Now you call her a quisling queen but presumably there wasn't the same kind of sense of nationalism during the Roman invasion that you had, for instance, in the Second World War, because after all, it wasn't a nation, it was just" "a series of scattered tribes that occupied large areas of England." "I think it's perfectly clear from one's reading of what is left of Tacitus, that the anti-Roman feeling and the patriotic local, tribal anti-Roman feeling were very strongly marked." "I've always been fascinated by the way in which during your excavations you've come across the spoor of great men of the past - men like Caesar, Vespasian and his attack on Maiden Castle, and in Pakistan, Alexander the Great at Charsadda." "What do you feel about these people whom you're helping to dig up?" "Well, you can't dig for them unless you begin to know them." "You can't follow them unless you have a sort of idea of what they're going after themselves." "No, but the point is this - I have a bias." "We all have a bias in one direction or another but my bias is in favour of the individual." "I like to know the individual." "There are those - and they're very good archaeologists - who are content to know all that there is to know about a collection of flint implements." "Anonymous flint implements - very important." "Gives you some idea of SOCIAL values at a certain period or at a conjectural period, if you like, sometimes." "But I've always had - and this probably goes back to my classical beginnings, when, after all, you were dealing with individual writers, individual poets, Horace and Livy and Tacitus and so on - they were all individuals and as writers, they were" "individuals and they were themselves interested in individuals and that's probably why I have this little bias in myself for what is called history and protohistory." "There's phases of man and man's story, man's history, when you can pick out here and there a few odd individuals who have contributed, more than others, perhaps, into progress, what we call progress, or what they may have called progress, and so on." "Well, more recently, I've... in a small way, been treading in the footsteps of Alexander at Charsadda in the north or North-West Frontier." "You go up to the North-West Frontier today, you know, it's... there is in the atmosphere of the North-West Frontier a certain sense of open air - things may happen, an army may go by..." "..almost invisibly, but you can sense it." "You find the actual landscapes through which" "Alexander, in his various moods, galloped, was wounded, conquered and never quite failed - very nearly, once or twice, but never quite failed." "He's a success story but a success which he deserves and to follow a man of that kind, of that calibre, through the landscape which we know he penetrated, to dig up an ancient city like Pushkalavati, Lotus City," "which we know that he conquered himself with enormous force, where he himself went to receive the surrender of the inhabitants, and where he put his own garrison in and so on." "A success story, but a success story on an immense field." "So you don't get lost in the personality." "The personality was always a figure in a wider landscape." "That's me." "..Oh, yes." "Now, you haven't done any formal archaeological excavation for some time now." "You haven't been out with your bucket and spade." "Do you miss the business of excavation?" "No." "No." "I did my last bucket and spade excavation in 1958." "I don't know how many years ago that is, but I knew at the time that it was going to be my last ever." "Not only my last in India or Pakistan, but the last in my life." "And so it was." "And looking back, do you know, you must forgive this, to my reasonable satisfaction, I think it was quite a successful goodbye." "I'll tell you about it briefly." "Let me take you first of all back to the beginning of the century, to 1902, when I was a small boy who hadn't even a dream." "In that year, Lord Curzon was still the Viceroy of India." "He decided, in 1902, to revive the archaeological survey of India, which had...had a tentative existence on a number of occasions but had never really come to fruition." "He sent word back to the India Office in London," ""Send me out, send me out, a suitable archaeologist to take" ""charge of this revived archaeological survey."" "Well, that query, that inquiry, naturally, went in those days straight to the British Museum." "It was the only place to send it to." "There were no archaeological departments in universities and so on to approach." "And in the museum, the director of the period, his name doesn't matter..." "What are they called?" "..Trawled, for a candidate." "That is to say, he sent round circular letters to all his departments saying, "Have you got anybody whom you can" ""spare to go to India as director-general of Archaeology?"" "And somebody, one of the departments," "I have a pretty good idea which, it's a long time ago, sent in the name of a man called Marshall." "Now, the Marshall that they had in mind, and I can say this, after this long interval, with the proper, reasonable respect, the Marshall they had in mind was a junior member of the staff" "of one of the archaeological departments in the museum." "He was competent and undistinguished." "But they thought they could spare him." "So, they sent his name up to the director." "The director said, "Send Marshall to me."" "Shortly afterwards, the director was called away from his room for some purpose elsewhere in the museum, and there entered upon the scene a young man with an attractive, intelligent face, called Marshall, John Marshall, who came" "from the British School of Athens, he was a Cambridge man originally..." "And who wanted to confer with the Director of the British Museum with a view to his future career." "Back came the director to his room, presented..." "This young Marshall was presented to him, the director naturally thought it was the Marshall he expected to see from his own staff, and..." "He said, "Well, now, look here." ""They want a man in India to look after the archaeological" ""survey there." "How soon can you go?"" ""Well," said young Marshall, "I want to get married."" ""How long will that take you?"" "He said, "I could go in six weeks, would that be all right?"" ""All right, I'll send word to the Viceroy that you will be" ""in Delhi as soon as possible after the next six weeks."" "So, after the next six weeks, there arrived in Delhi, young John Marshall, of whom nobody ever heard, he was a student, accompanied by his young bride." "I knew them both." "And..." "Curzon took to him at once, he was an attractive young man, intelligent young man." "Took to him." "In fact, every Wednesday, I was told this by Marshall himself, every Wednesday, the Viceroy would have Marshall in his office with him so that he could hear how a subcontinent should be conducted." "What did Marshall do?" "You were going to ask me, weren't you?" "When he got out there." "I'll tell you." "He did what any new director-general..." "What I did myself when I was a new director-general in India." "He went round India to meet his staff and to see what India looked like." "And he began, as I later on began, up in the north-west corner, of what was then India, which is now India and Pakistan, which was the natural entry into India from the rest of Asia by land." "Surrounded by the mountains which are generally hidden in mist." "The most romantic part of the area, if you use the word romantic, which I don't." "There he found a series of mounds, one of them a very high one, 60 or 70 feet high, still there, part of it, which represented the predecessor of the present Peshawar, the old capital of the frontier," "which was known as Pushkalavati, in other words, Lotus City." "And, coming as he did from Greece, with the Acropolis very much in his mind, he thought, "Here's another Acropolis." ""I'll dig it up, we'll find perhaps another Parthenon on top of it."" "So, in 1903, he carried out the first excavations in modern times, but not by modern methods, I may say." "Modern methods in 1903 were hard to come by." "They hadn't been invented." "But he carried out excavations there and..." "To be quite frank, he made an awful mess of the job." "It was to be expected." "A young man with no training, and no training to match up to." "Well, years later, it was 1944, which is, I suppose 42 years later, another" "English director-general began his tour in the same sort of way." "He went up to the frontier and he went out into the great open plain which was covered with sugar cane, great waving masses of green sugar cane waving like a sea, and rising out of these waves," "rather like a battleship at anchor, was this great mound which represented the old capital city, Pushkalavati." "MAGNUS MAGNUSSON:" "Sir Mortimer Wheeler had himself been appointed director-general of the Archaeological Survey for India in 1944." "But he had to wait 14 years before he could excavate the ancient city of Pushkalavati." "The chance came in 1958, when he was invited back to the frontier by the government of Pakistan." "I dug there." "But before doing so, living as I was in 1958 and not in 1902, 1903," "I had made arrangements beforehand with the Pakistan Air Force to have an air photograph taken of the area I was going to deal with, to see what that would show up." "I didn't think at the time, I'll be perfectly frank about it, that much would happen." "But what did happen was this." "On the second day, my second day out there on the plain... ..I was standing by the tents which we had there for workshops and so on, when a jet fighter swooped down over my head," "almost took my hat off." "And it swung round and then almost poised like a dragonfly in the air." "I discovered afterwards, upon inquiry, that what was happening was that the poor pilot had been told, having been instructed in Peshawar, to go and photograph the old city near Charsadda." "When he got there, of course, there was no city, he didn't realise that these mounds were intended." "And he didn't know what to do." "So, he received instructions on the telephone to photograph the area for half a mile or so around my tents." "Which they did." "Which he did." "He took about a quarter of an hour, swooping about there, and I thought, "My God, nothing will come out of this." After all, he's going too fast to begin with to get a decent photograph." "But, but..." "Next morning, a messenger came from Peshawar, from the Air Force, with a bunch of photographs." "As I turned them over with my colleagues, two young men from Cambridge, and other men from various parts of Pakistan, we looked through them." "And they shrugged their shoulders." "And I said, "Well, what do you make of it?"" "They said, "Well, it all looks rather..." ""Looks very nice, but rather muddled."" "I said, "What do you make of that one?"" "I held out one of them to him." "They looked again." "They were not used to this sort of thing, this sort of quiz." "So I said, "This is the greatest discovery" ""made in the frontier of Pakistan for perhaps 100 years."" "And then I explained." "What I saw on this air photograph was the plan of a large part of a Greek town, a Greek city." "The lines of the streets were there, the lines of the house walls were there at right angles to the streets in parallel to the streets, and there in the midst was the circular shape of a Buddhist shrine." "The whole thing was there." "Nobody had ever heard of it before!" "That afternoon, we went over to Shaikhan, which is the name of this mound, it was about three furlongs from where our tents were, and there it looked like a tumult, rather like a cross-channel sea on a rough day." "But from the air, from 1,000 feet up, looking down as the camera had looked down, the whole thing fell into place and what had happened was quite simple." "The local farmers had found that there were the brick walls of an ancient city there." "They dug lines along..." "Trenches along the lines of the walls, pulled out the bricks, and, of course, their trenches were no wider than the walls, otherwise they would have wasted their efforts." "And so, what they'd left for me, and for the air photograph, was a city in negative." "A city in negative, with hollow lines where the walls had been." "Well, thereafter, all of this was verified." "Two years later, two years after I'd left, it was verified by Professor Darney, a local professor of archaeology at Peshawar University, who had been a pupil of mine." "A very good fellow, a very fine fellow indeed." "You see, as one gets older, one boasts of one's pupils, no doubt, maybe, in time to come, I shall be boasting of YOU, Mag!" "But never mind that for the moment." "He dug there, he found the walls where I had found the hollows in the ground where the walls had been partially dug up, and he found these coins of Menander, right at the bottom of the whole thing, many feet down, showing" "that this was in fact a Graeco-Indian, or Indo-Greek, creation of approximately the middle of the 2nd century BC." "In the Greek tradition, following the pattern set by... ..by Alexander The Great, when he came there at the end of the 4th century." "The place was captured by... ..Charsadda, or rather Pushkalavati, was captured by Alexander's troops in the year 327 BC." "And, as a bonne bouche," "I decided to find the defences of the city at that time because the fact that it took a trained division, or corps, of Alexander's troops" "30 days to capture it implied that it was fortified." "I wouldn't have told you that story if I hadn't actually found the defences in question." "It was up to me to find them, and I did." "Do you have any heroes?" "Great men that you admire, this side of idolatry?" "I don't believe in heroes." "I don't know." "It's rather a feminine term, I would suggest, Mag, heroes." "I can imagine a woman having a hero, but I can't imagine a man having a hero." "There's something almost indecent about it." "All right." "Tell me about the...men of greatness in any field that you particularly admire." "Well, I've had four, four in the whole of my life, four." "I've thought of this, actually, and have come to the conclusion that of all the people I have known..." "..many have been able people, some less able, but only four of them could classify as geniuses." "If you ask me to define the word genius, I'm not going to attempt it." "No, but tell me who the four are." "The four are, well, the late Winston Churchill, with whom I worked for a year." "Who else?" "The painter, Augustus John, whom I knew well." "Sir Flinders Petrie, the Egyptologist, whom I've known on and off all my life." "I went to see him on his deathbed in Jerusalem." "And fourthly, Sir Arthur Evans, the discoverer of the first civilisation in Europe." "Those four, I think those four," "I can't think of anybody else in the same class." "They were all geniuses." "They were all almost superhuman people." "They all had something that nobody else that I can think of had." "And if you want heroes, if you want to call them hero, a beastly word, you can apply it to them." "But I should begin immediately to find faults in all of them." "Which wouldn't be difficult." "Well, Flinders Petrie, for instance, do you find fault with him?" "Anybody can find fault with Sir Flinders Petrie." "I tell you, he was a man who focused his mind on whatever he was thinking about at the time to the exclusion of everything else." "For instance, one of the first things he did when he went to Egypt was to make a minutely accurate plan of the great pyramids, which nobody had done before." "Down to the fraction of a millimetre." "That kind of thing." "He..." "But he..." "When he got an idea in his head, that idea was there." "And the curious thing about the old man was this." "I knew him well in the latter years." "That, for instance, he had his own ideas about the chronology of Egypt, of the timetable of the Pharaohs and so on." "And his chronology differed by 15 centuries or more, it varied, from any other chronology in any university in Europe." "He was almost a laughing stock." "If he had been a lesser man, he would have been laughed out, laughed off the stage." "But no." "To his dying day, he was at least 15 centuries out." "And he was so absolutely devoted to his subject, right or wrong, that you felt, here is a devotee..." "..a man who in some mysterious way belongs to his subject." "He began in Egypt at a time when Egyptology was in a very poor way." "It was really he who started the modern science of Egyptology at a time when it hadn't even become the beginnings of a science." "He had a methodical mind, however wrong his conclusions might be, he threw off a whole number of ideas which themselves produced other ideas." "He pointed to the methods." "And it was for others to shape the method and to make it logical and productive." "It was 1925, I remember vividly, that I first really got to know him and his wife, Hilda." "We had been in contact with one another." "He was back from the East." "He wanted a holiday." "He hadn't the faintest notion of what the word holiday meant." "I don't know much about that." "But he and Hilda wanted to come into the Welsh countryside." "I was then, at the time I think I was a thing called" "Director of the Welsh National Museum, something of that sort, and as a sideline" "I was digging up a Roman fort near Brecon in South Wales." "Before the end of the same week, he and Hilda had arrived at my farmhouse and they'd dug themselves in." "Day by day, they went out into the countryside." "He'd set himself a holiday task, he always had a task." "His task was the task of recording stone circles and stone cairns." "I said to him, "What instruments have you got?"" ""Ah-ha," he looked at me with a smile of ineffable cunning." "He produced a pea-stick, a bamboo pea-stick, to hang peas on to, I suppose..." "..with one hand and a visiting card from his pocket with the other." ""They are my instruments." ""I put the pea-stick in the ground to show me where I'm going, and" ""I use the two sides of the visiting card to give me a right angle." ""That's how I work."" "And bless my soul, at the end of the day, he came in with a notebook full of figures." "After dinner, in this farmhouse, with its oil lamps, he sat by an oil lamp, produced the figures and a logarithm table and worked it at all out in a mysterious fashion known to himself." "His was that kind of mind." "A mind full of the most intricate and difficult solutions to the most simple problems, and a simple mind when the problems became really complicated." "It was very interesting." "Interesting psychology." "Well, we were together then." "And later on when I was establishing a, an Institute of Archaeology at the University of London, he handed over to me a sum, a considerable sum " "£10,000, it was, which was a lot in those days " "Which had been given to him for this sort of purpose, just handed it over to me." "He said, "I'm going to Palestine, to Jerusalem." ""I can't pay your damn taxes any longer." ""I'm going to live in Jerusalem."" "And he went out to Jerusalem." ""You might as well take this before I go,"" "and he handed me £10,000." "That showed that we had got a rapport with one another." "And from that point onwards, I went ahead and founded this institute." "And he went on to Jerusalem." "I must tell you one little incident that happened which rather showed that aspect of his mind when he was staying with me in that farmhouse in Brecon, in Wales." "One morning, before he went out for his day's tramp over the hills, he said, "I found a curious cairn yesterday." Heap of stones, you see." ""There's something about it I don't understand." ""Would you lend me a couple of your men and we'll have a look at it?"" "I said, "Yes, of course, take them."" "So, he went off into the blue with a couple of my workmen... ..and for an hour or two, all went quietly and well." "And then one of these men came running back with his eyes starting out. "Oh, sir, oh, sir!" "Come with me, come with me!" ""There's a bull chasing the gentleman," ""a bull chasing the gentleman."" "And so I picked up a surveying pole, which was the only thing accessible in the form of a weapon, and traipsed a mile across the countryside behind this excited Welsh farm labourer." "When I got to the scene of operations, there was a sloping hill, with fields stretching down it and two fields in particular with a hedge between them which had been carved off at the lower end so there was a way through from one field to the other, you see?" "At the bottom of that hedge, there was a flaming bull, almost visibly flaming." "With its four legs stretched out and flames, if you will, a very close approximation to flames, coming out of its nostrils." "And looking up the hedge, there on one side was Flinders Petrie's magnificent grey beard sticking out of the hedge." "And on the other side was Hilda's bottom, covered with thick riding cloth, as she used to wear." "I took a little step forward, timidly, and then another step timidly forward..." "..and when I got within about ten feet of the bull, 12 feet of the bull, it actually drew back one of its four feet, and then the other one, and the battle was over." "Over his shoulder I saw the farmer coming in, rather irately into the field with a pitchfork over his shoulder." "He drove the bull off." "Down came, from the heights, came the beard and Hilda, down the two sides of the hedge." "And they, the farmer went up to Petrie and said," ""You ought not to be here, sir!" ""You ought not to be here!" ""This bull is dangerous."" "We'd gathered that." "He drove the bull away with a pitchfork." "I tried to calm the farmer by telling him that this was a very famous professor who knew all about pyramids, he thought this might be a pyramid and he wanted to look at it and so on." "However..." "Eventually, the Petries went off on the rest of their day's walk, or day's exploration, and the bull went, or was driven back through the gate, and I got back." "But the point was this." "This was characteristic of the old gentleman." "He never referred to the bull incident again in his life." "He was hardly conscious of this little interruption in what he was doing." "His mind was focused entirely upon this heap of stones, simply a heap of stones thrown there by the farmer." "And... ..neither at dinner that night, nor ever again, was the incident referred to." "He..." "In fact, it had gone from his mind." "His mind was perennially focused on whatever he was doing." "On the one subject, and nothing else mattered." "The last time I saw the old boy was on his deathbed in Jerusalem in the first months of 1942." "I happened at the time to be doing some fieldwork of a non-archaeological kind in Egypt and heard by the grapevine that the old boy was dying, so I took 24 hours of leave, drove across Sinai, in the course of which my old staff car shed its track-rod" "and turned upside down." "However, crawled out again and got in somebody else's car, went on and got to Jerusalem, to the hospital there." "It was a haven of rest, of peace and quiet." "And in the little room, lying on the bed outstretched, was the form that I knew so well of dear old Petrie." "With his magnificent profile and around his head a sort of turban of white linen." "It looked to me exactly what my picture is of a Biblical patriarch." "Well..." "He looked at me and smiled." "And then he began talking, talking at a great rate, as though he had a great deal to say before, before the end came." "He talked about bronze implements in Mesopotamia, about the incidence of the malarial mosquito in Gaza and so forth." "His mind never rested, never rested until the very last moment." "Now, these aerial photographs that led to your last great discovery in Pakistan, this is part of the new technology that arose in archaeology this century, which didn't exist when you started off as an archaeologist." "None of these existed at the turn of the century." "Does this mean that archaeology today is a vastly different kind of thing than it was when you were starting out?" "No, it doesn't mean, of course, that archaeology has altered at heart." "It's the same purpose." "You said, I think, when you were talking to me once, that I wrote about men, it being about men, not about things." "Well, that was always the case." "But it is interesting that you could almost put your finger on an absolute date, at which everything changed in archaeology." "Everything technologically changed." "When was that?" "I'll tell you, I'll tell you." "It happened in 1949." "I'd just come back from the East and for some reason or other" "I found myself having dinner in hall at Christchurch in Oxford and with me was a man called OGS Crawford, very well known in his day." "A man of high intelligence and knowledge." "And we sat there and afterwards went into the common room." "And there looking around, at a corner was a man whose face I knew." "Finally I discovered who he was." "He was a man who had been called Lindemann, a Professor of Physics at Oxford, and had been made a peer by Churchill and was now Lord Cherwell." "There he was sitting quietly at the corner." "Well, I'd met him before." "I knew him in the old days a bit." "I went up and sat down beside him, and we talked." "He'd just come back from America, from Chicago, in particular." "And he'd just heard of some of the details, or many of the details, of a new method called radiocarbon analysis, which would enable archaeologists with scientific aid, in future, to date... more or less date events in human history" "back all 50,000 years or more." "And he told me about it, he gave me a very good idea." "He might have been taking a little domestic tutorial." "And as we walked back across Oxford, Crawford and I, to the college we were staying that night, he turned to me and said, "What a scoop!" "What a scoop!"" "And it was a scoop." "It came out in the next number of a quarterly publication called Antiquity, which was edited by Crawford." "And for the first time, in this country, in the West," "Western Europe, something was known about this revolutionary new method that's being called the radiocarbon revolution." "1949." "One great advantage of this, from the point of view of the layman, quite apart from the archaeologist, was that the layman could begin to see pre-history in terms of, more or less, absolute calendar years." "Not "This was late Stone Age or Bronze Age or Iron Age"." "You were able to say, "This was 2500 BC,"" "and people find it far more easy to put things into a perspective if they have calendar dates." "Oh, yes, it enables you, not only to put a local series of events into perspective, the history of England and so on, but it enables you to compare the history of one country with another." "Because the Bronze Age changed as it went around the world." "Yes, exactly." "Well, does all this mean that archaeology today has become much more scientific?" "It's put on a white coat and it's in the laboratory and it's all sterile now, there isn't room for the same kind of creative flights of imagination of the past." "I wouldn't say that a white coat is necessarily sterile." "Sterilised." "I don't quite see the connection." "Anyway, it has to a certain extent, I suppose." "In the sense in which you're using the term." "It's become more and more technological, more scientific, with advantages and disadvantages." "These newer technologies, not merely the one I've been referring to, radiocarbon, but other parallel disciplines, scientific disciplines." "They've all combined to give a new sort of precision to events and cultures and ages, which previously were a matter of guesswork." "What are the disadvantages, then?" "The disadvantages are these." "I've seen a good many young generations grow up in the course of my time." "But..." "In particular, what I call this post-scientific generation, the generation since 1949, the last quarter of a century, roughly." "The study of man has become more and more tied to technologies." "Technologies are easier by and large to acquire a knowledge of, an experience of, than the old-fashioned disciplines, the old-fashioned humanities." "And the result is that the old-fashioned humanities are getting thinner and thinner, the technology's getting thicker and thicker and is overlying the old humanities to a very remarkable degree." "And we're getting now a new generation of students of man and mankind in perspective..." "..which sometimes, to my thinking forgets the man, again." "When one looks back to the origins of archaeology, you realise just what a very young subject it is." "It's only just about 100 years ago since the great Heinrich Schliemann was finishing his excavations of Troy." "Which, you might say, was the start of major archaeology." "And that, presumably, was the first really big excavation to seize public attention." "Now, it's not possible to have digs like this any more and I for one regret this." "I'm not quite sure that I agree with you that it's not possible." "In 1923, or thereabouts, that man who wrote romantic stories and became Governor General of Canada..." "Oh, John Buchan." "John Buchan, wrote a book, The End of Discovery, or some title of that kind." "He thought that in 1923 - if that is the exact date, about then - that the Age of Discovery was past." "Well, now, we're in 1973 or more and we're still discovering and we're going on discovering." "We're just opening up new ways of discovery, new methods of discovery." "Yes, but compared with the archaeologists of today," "Schliemann does seem to have been much larger than life, somehow." "He was, he was larger than life." "And people today think that publicity in science, or particularly in archaeology, perhaps, is a modern invention." "It is a by-product, to a large extent, of things like television and broadcasting and so on." "Of course, it owes an enormous amount to television and broadcasting, an enormous amount." "There are new means, new methods, new channels." "But if you look back to the literature the day in which Schliemann worked, way back, as I think I said, in 1873, when he finished Troy, he was welcomed abroad, including this country, like royalty." "He and his wife, his beautiful Greek wife, arrayed very often in Trojan jewellery, which she borrowed for the purpose." "They were received over here and I have some of the contemporary accounts here in which a crowd in..." "I remember the date, in 8th June 1877, a crowd assembled." "And everybody - it gives a list of those who were present, including, of course, Mr Gladstone, that well-known Homeric student." "Who sat in the front row." "And they all welcomed, in particular, Mrs Schliemann, who was to give them an address upon the importance of Greece and of Greek things." "And there were replies or additions by Schliemann himself and then there was a little passage of arms between Schliemann and Gladstone." "Do you mind if I tell you about it?" "Go ahead, I don't know this story." "I've got here the contemporary records." "I won't burden you with the whole lot, but they are interesting." "What happened was that after Mrs Schliemann had been welcomed," "Dr Schliemann got up and said that the Greeks owed a great deal of their appreciation of the human form to the fact that they went about without any clothes on." "Owing largely to the excellent climate, civilized climate, shall we say." "Well, while this was going on, this conversation, or this dialogue was going on, it was observed that Mr Gladstone in the front row was getting more and more uneasy." "The points of his famous collar began to project further and further towards the enemy." "And finally, he leapt up to his feet and said that he protested against his attribution of the skill of the Greek artists to the fact that nudity was prevalent in Ancient Greece." "He was perfectly certain that the Ancient Greeks were modest people, that they were properly clad, and so on." "Well, this went on, and there were the brewings of a little storm." "A little more or less academic storm." "But Mr Gladstone took that kind of thing extremely seriously and he said what he had to say." "Well, it boiled down to this - that in Greek times, the women went about naked, or were shown as going about naked by the sculptors and the painters." "Men were probably clothed, of course, the men were, but the women were not." "A regrettable circumstance." "Well, now, of course they were both utterly wrong." "They were both going up their own little tracks, you know." "Gladstone along the path of Puritanism and Schliemann along the path of liberty, exposure and so on." "It's rather nice to know that great men like Schliemann and Gladstone could make great mistakes." "Oh, yes." "They took it all very seriously." "Very seriously." "And nowadays we take serious things lightly." "They took light things seriously." "It's very curious, that difference in outlook and temperament." "But my point, my starting point was this." "That in the time of Schliemann, way back in the '70s of the 19th century, publicity had already been attracted, deliberately attracted to archaeological discoveries." "And Schliemann's discoveries at Troy were heard about all over the world in regular press communicae, which he distributed for the purpose." "And later on again, go 50 years later, Tutankhamen..." "Same thing." "Tutankhamen was made known to the millions by the press." "There was no television in those days, in 1922." "Well, you yourself were a dab hand at harnessing the media for archaeological purposes." "I did it deliberately, just as Schliemann did it deliberately." "He had to create his public." "I had to create my public, perhaps from different motives from his." "Because it was the way of attracting interest or attracting funds for research." "And the way in which in the '20s and the '30s I attracted funds, and very considerable funds, for research for St Albans or Verulamium or Maiden Castle or what have you, was by popularising it." "By making people interested." "By attracting people to visit these places, talking to them on the site in language that they would understand." "So that the local charwoman understood what she was looking at." "And if you can interest the local charwoman, two things follow." "First of all, the local charwoman tells her friends, very volubly." "Secondly, it means that you express yourself articulately, which is the beginning of the whole business, really." "You express yourself articulately, in language which the general public can understand." "I'm a great admirer of the general public, a great worshiper of the general public." "I depend upon the general public." "The general public today, although it doesn't know it, provides practically all the funds which are expended all over the country, day by day, on archaeology." "Give the poor fellow who's paying his taxes a little bit for his money."