The Virtual Rambler

Number thirty eight: 21^st July 2013

Ancient History

The early hominid world left very few relics for us to pour over. A skull fragment here , some microlithic scrapings there , a fossilised trail of ancient footprints here and there. So little is available that prehistorians are left with only a few miniscule pieces of an unknown jigsaw and are thus reduced to conjecture. “It is generally believed that ….” , “these may have been intended ….” , “and are thought to symbolise ….” Pre-literate societies bequeathed no remnants of ancient script to assist our understanding of them. Should we be offered an opportunity to ponder some prehistoric remnants , we should avoid those in the grip of Heritage and Preservation Management and opt instead for those deemed not to be worth the bother. Stroll down some unfrequented path in a featureless acreage of Mediterranean scrub to confront a square of chainlink fencing around a jumble of large stones. It seems to the untutored eye much like an abandoned adventure playground , a province of weeds and neglect hardly distinguishable from its surroundings. Let me show you Time in a handful of dust. This is antiquity as it ought to be – as it remains when History has moved on and the 'experts' have gone home. A parched blue sky overhead , ruins left to their own devices. No tour buses , brochures or spouting guides , no restorations or poetic intimations of the lost wisdom of old. Just a sparse prose of the over and done with , an arena of long-forgotten lives , misbegotten superstitions and spurious hopes. The dried-up drizzle of toil and stress that outlasts every human endeavour to build for the future. “The development of such symbolic monuments may have derived from the need to assert collective identities”. Maybe. The art of long-windedly saying next to nothing has itself assumed monumental proportions in literature devoted to The Ancient World.

Time scales go from some 500,000 years ago , when early homo sapiens appeared on the Eurasian scene , to three million years ago , when “its thought that” the earliest primeval humans evolved in East Africa from ancestral australopithecines. Thence to our old friend homo erectus , who “is said to” have migrated out of Africa about one million years later. Some have challenged such extrapolations from fossil evidence on the grounds of its 'white male supremacist ideology'. But we digress. Let’s get back to the Ancients themselves. Did they know some things that we don't ? For old hippie diehards , ancient stone structures have come to stand (metaphorically) for an arcane wisdom that unlocked the doors of spiritual perception , doors which swung firmly shut when a materialistic world-order succeeded them. It only requires a sideward glance at the modern world and its political leaders to decide whether humanity has moved morally forwards or backwards since emerging out of Africa. The concentric circles and spirals in much ancient ‘rock-art’ have provoked conjectural labyrinths of possible significance. Oneiric imagery , an axis mundi , an alignment with heavenly bodies. Its all just a brand of art-exhibition-speak that abounds among the groping divagations of modern sensibility into The Ways of the Ancients.

There is a rich cast of extinct species littering the “rise of mankind” , during which we gradually forgot our quadripedal past. Even tabloids take a passing interest in discoveries of hominid fossils. NEW FIND RE-WRITES GENESIS. As for those investigating our few extant bones from prehistoric times , drilling down as they must into the start of play , what have they delivered ? Have they retrofitted the issues surrounding our palaeolithic stakeholders ? What were their key competencies ? They domesticated fire and developed a diverse range of stone , bone and wooden utensils - needles , harpoons , spear-throwers. Whenever figurative images emerge after millenia of oblivion , as on the megaliths unearthed at Gobekli Tepe , a cascade of frothing vocabulary is released by academic ‘specialists’ – the dialectic of the image , a shamanic topography and our other old pal the numinous space. The deliverables matrix of archaeological research takes on all the vapid quality of another branch of “management science” and leaves us in similar measure none the wiser. We have been returned to the conditions of tohu wa-bohu.

Wig

Archive

Virtual rambler #1 – Posturing, 9^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #2 – Managerialism, 17^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #3 – Nostalgia, 27^th March 2010
Virtual rambler #4 – The Alpha Male, 13^th April 2010
Virtual rambler #5 – General Elections, 3^rd May 2010
Virtual rambler #6 – The Leisure Industry, 15^th May 2010
Virtual rambler #7 – Guide to The World Cup, 15^th June 2010
Virtual rambler #8 – Human Nature, 12^th July 2010
Virtual rambler #9 – Communities, 13^th August 2010
Virtual rambler #10 – Worlds Apart, 6^th October 2010
Virtual rambler #11 – Dawdling, 22^nd November 2010
Virtual rambler #12 – ELVIS, 24^th December 2010
Virtual rambler #13 – Transience, 4^th February 2011
Virtual rambler #14 – Regional Accents, 15^th April 2011
Virtual rambler #15 – The Afterlife, 21^st July 2011
Virtual rambler #16 – Bizspeak, 27^th August 2011
Virtual rambler #17 – Night Walks, 3^rd October 2011
Virtual rambler #18 – Bob Dylan and Charles Dickens, 8^th November 2011
Virtual rambler #19 – Another Nutty Professor, 16^th December 2011
Virtual rambler #20 – Customer Choice, 16^th January 2012
Virtual rambler #21 – Wearing Shorts, 18^th February 2012
Virtual rambler #22 – A Brief History of Progress, 17^th March 2012
Virtual rambler #23 – The Myth of Sisyphus, 16^th April 2012
Virtual rambler #24 – Natural History, 20^th May 2012
Virtual rambler #25 – European Self Importance, 26^th June 2012
Virtual rambler #26 – Sweet Dreams, 25^th July 2012
Virtual rambler #27 – Excess, 17^th August 2012
Virtual rambler #28 – In Denial, 20^th September 2012
Virtual rambler #29 – The Way, 21^st October 2012
Virtual rambler #30 – On Rambling, 14^th November 2012
Virtual rambler #31 – Gazing Into The Abyss, 18^th December 2012
Virtual rambler #32 – Intellectual Gloom, 25^th January 2013
Virtual rambler #33 – Great Human Achievements, 20^th February 2013
Virtual rambler #34 – Autobiography, 20^th March 2013
Virtual rambler #35 – Your Good Health, 21^st April 2013
Virtual rambler #36 – Deconstruction, 20^th May 2013
Virtual rambler #37 – My Home Town, 19^th June 2013
Virtual rambler #38 – Ancient History, 21^st July 2013
Virtual rambler #39 – Possessions, 20^th August 2013
Virtual rambler #40 – Sporting Stoics, 20^th September 2013
Virtual rambler #41 – Free Time, 20^th October 2013
Virtual rambler #42 – Ewan Don't Allow, 20^th November 2013
Virtual rambler #43 – A Literary Nexus, 20^th December 2013
Virtual rambler #44 – Taking Liberties, 16^th January 2014
Virtual rambler #45 – More or Less, 20^th February 2014
Virtual rambler #46 – Under Control, 20^th March 2014
Virtual rambler #47 – Waiting, 20^th April 2014
Virtual rambler #48 – They Rose Without Trace, 20^th May 2014
Virtual rambler #49 – Bigger Impression , Smaller Footprint, 20^th June 2014
Virtual rambler #50 – Terpsichorean Instrumentations, 18^th July 2014
Virtual rambler #51 – Socially Mediated, 19^th August 2014
Virtual rambler #52 – Rambling Into The Sunset, 20^th September 2014