Sutton Hoo and the Dig

It's a fact little known beyond my family that I used to want to become an archaeologist. After reading about it intermittently for years as a child, and starting to read The Greek Stones Speak in my gap year, I attended a Classical Archaeology lecture at UBC and wanted to take courses at the Freie Universität here in Berlin. But I wasn't permitted to sign up for the tutorials officially because the schedule was full.

So in the end I attended a semester's worth of introductory lectures to Ancient History largely in the Middle East, and then did a kind of work-study thing, at the Freie Uni, but only for two days because I felt too impostor-syndrome-y.

Older students who had been at an excavation of prehistoric material elsewhere in Germany over the summer sat indoors, alongside the professor. They took a ziplock plastic baggie at a time with groups of excavated materials in them, and cleaned the bones, stones, pottery etc. with water, toothbrushes, and wooden picks. Even toothbrushes were considered a bit too abrasive, though, so we mostly had to content ourselves with the picks. Their finds were not hugely exciting and they grumbled a bit about it, joking that this or that pebble was the Philosopher's Stone. They also gossiped about all sorts of other things — for example, how one of their professors had been appalled when, in an English-language paper, a student had referred to an archaeological 'dig' instead of an 'excavation.' Or about the headache it was as a parent to wait for a bus, if one bus after another is crowded and there is no room for a child's buggy.

I spent hours on an animal bone that had over an inch of hard dry mud packed into the central cavity, and waited for the soil to soften a little from the water, a process which was barely more exciting than watching paint dry. But to be honest I still didn't finish cleaning it out before I pretty heinously put it back where I'd gotten it from, and hoped no one would notice, à la Mr. Bean. A few fragments of pale honeycombed bone also crumbled in my hand as I worked it, and so I thought I'd done enough damage.

We put the cleaned items onto wooden frames, with metal grids across them, on top of newspaper, to let them dry.

When the artifacts etc. were clean and dry, we put a swipe of transparent glue onto each one. Then, in old-fashioned ink, we wrote the numerical code that was on the plastic baggie onto each glue swipe once it had dried. (It was indeed a good surface to write on.) The professor warned us not to put on a thick layer of glue. I ignored this for an unbaked brick-red pottery sherd, only to see grains of pottery — which had survived thousands of years until I got my graceless philistine paws on it — peel off with the glue. The professor had kindly said that the codes that I'd written on a few items in my tiny script (the despair of school teachers when they had to read my homework) were "sehr akkurat"; so I hadn't messed up everything. But along with the disintegrating bone, the crumbling pottery taught me a lesson that perhaps I wasn't ready to be entrusted with handling the history of mankind yet.

I also realized a little of the gate-keeping that exists in the archaeological world. There are of course many reasons, from grave-robbery to the damage of amateur work like mine. Also, naturally, funding is hard to come by.

And that was perhaps the end of my obsession ... until I discovered the British archaeological series Time Team on YouTube a year or two ago, and bored my long-suffering but polite colleagues with my enthusiasm.

***

This afternoon T. visited as I was making three rounds of cookies. As the supply of hot, chocolatey baked goods vanished, she advised watching a TV series or a film. In the end we watched The Dig, the drama based on the 1930s excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship, in southeastern England.

Ralph Fiennes enters the scene as a gruff, laconic Briton who — from one of his earliest moments in the film, knocking at the front door to the disapproval of a butler, then standing by awkwardly — is conscious of his low social status in the stratified English society of the late 1930s. Self-taught, Basil Brown works as an excavator for archaeological digs, Roman and otherwise.

A rich widow with a wavy 1930s bob, an Agatha Christie-esque mansion that is all bay windows and wisteria, and clothing that alternates between flapper chic and cardigan respectability, Edith Pretty, has invited him to explore a series of earth mounds in a field on her estate.

She tells Brown, during the first discussion, that she 'has a feeling' about the largest earth mound. (Believing that the shape of the mound shows that its contents had already been looted, Brown declines to take her suggestion at first. But of course that's where the ship is buried.) The film draws heavy-handed parallels between the establishment's refusal to take Brown seriously because he is an untrained amateur from the lower classes, and Pretty's marginalization because she is a woman.

After a while the cast of archaeologist characters expands. I liked the character etc. acting in the film in general. I'm not sure if Ralph Fiennes was also aiming for an Academy Award nomination but his accent, posture, etc. were all conscientiously fitted to the role and consistently kept, and he does stand out.

As for the archaeology, I was a little appalled that the dig excavation wasn't marked off into neat squares and measured, so that each find could be photographed and recorded in context. But I'm not an expert on the evolution of historical methods of archaeology. All I know is that the method of digging a deep trench (and, apparently, neglecting to sift through the soil that's removed from an archaeological site in search of small finds that might be overlooked) is the typical magisterial methodology that was used by many early archaeologists. So the film may have gotten that right, even if a professional nowadays would shake his or her head.

What I did rightly question was that an untried young woman would be taken on at an archaeological excavation by seasoned professionals just because she was literally a lightweight. In real life Peggy Piggott already had experience when she worked at Sutton Hoo; and she went on to have an eminent, decades-long career in archaeology. Instead, Lily James is forced to play a ditsy role as the neglected young wife of a gay man who's the actual respected professional.

Also when a romantic tension is brewed between Basil Brown (who is married) and Edith Pretty just because they're of the opposite gender and inhabit the same movie plot, I wanted to hit my head on my desk. With the romance subplots I altogether had the uncomfortable feeling of prying into private business that I hate. Although the scene where a husband barges in on a bathroom only to see his own wife in the bathtub, and retreats in horror at the impropriety, is pretty funny and almost redeems it.

I felt that the tension of Edith Pretty's fear of dying and leaving her son to fend for himself, just as she and her son had already been left alone, and her son's fear and determination to find closure for her and for himself, were more absorbing subjects than the cringeworthy writerly matchmaking. The idea that a child might have wise ideas about life and death was gratifying, although of course there was a faint hint of kitsch and implausibility.

Carey Mulligan's approach to her character in general also lent interest and tension. She played her as a bit spoiled in her role as a queen of local society, posh in her diction and upbringing. At the same time, she was physically fragile and she also had an entirely different role in her private life: she was also motherly. Through it all she was aware of her vulnerable position as a woman whose father and husband had died, leaving her to represent her own interests in a world that ran roughshod over women or (in the case of the archaeological world) outsiders.

But she was let down a little by the screenwriting. The tinge of widow's desperation to find another man, leaving her to stare at her shattered dreams in a mirror when it didn't work out, seemed like a cheap stereotype. And I also felt that her love advice to Lily James's character was a little out of character.

The film did a fine job (as far as I know without having been there) of capturing the malaise of Britain when grim memories of World War I began to collide with the reality of preparations for a new war — signaled by the radio news, groups of recruits in khaki being ferried around in canvas-roofed automobiles for their training, and hordes of fighter jets flying in formation overhead — just before Hitler invaded Poland. The events end in around 1942, and the reality of air raids is signaled when Pretty is on a visit to a doctor in London.

As far as the cinematography goes, I didn't always find it appropriate. For example, the swooping camera view as Ralph Fiennes pedals his bicycle toward the mansion felt artificial; and then the handheld camera work with the haphazardly composed field of view when Brown first visits the Pretty mansion and the butler opens the door was a little meh. And I thought it was too unsubtle to mirror shots like Pretty's lonely walk down a sunken path to her husband's grave, with her walk down the trench into an Anglo-Saxon noble's grave — a meditation on death and grief across the ages, etc. Not to mention when Brown is curled in the fetal position and Pretty is also curled in the fetal position ... But the landscape looked luminous, warm fields and mists and raindrops on reeds and leafy trees ranged along the fields and meadows. And I appreciated that the flyovers of military aircraft did not look CGI'd.

The props, the farmyard where the Browns live, etc., were also pretty great. I liked the touches like Edith Pretty pouring water into an urn on her husband's grave before sticking in the roses and clearing up the petals that had fallen onto the grass — the everyday details of what people would be doing while talking, moving around, or thinking were well thought through. Although, shockingly, Robert Pretty never seems to go to school.

But I had doubts about the musical score. I found it invariably generic and too pompous: growing dramatic at the smallest touch of a shovel to the soil of Surrey, and not paying much homage to the time, place, or the subject at hand.

Anyway, after the film, I instantly Wikipedia-searched any biographical information I could lay my hands on. Perhaps due to the film and someone's resulting intention of accommodating the viewership with extra material, there's tons of gratifying detail to complete the picture.