26 Jul 2013 01:21:15
Remembering our history, however, is not an innocent act. Often, the past we choose to see is the one we want to see. Desire can easily cloud the eyes, especially when (as with Roman Britain) there is so much room for interpretation. Higgins tells of the Bodleian librarian Edward Nicholson, who in 1904 transcribed a curse inscribed on a lead tablet, providing sensational evidence for the early presence of Christian theological debate in Roman Britain. Ancient Britain was no backwater: they were even debating the Arian controversy here!
Unfortunately, he was holding the tablet upside down; the inscription is just a curse levelled at a thief. "He conjured up visions," Higgins writes, "visions that were only reflections of himself. His Roman Britain was the purest, most perfect fantasy."
The temptation to retool our Roman heritage so that it looks the way we want it to can be overpowering. The amazing Crosby Garrett helmet – more a mask, really, of a pensive young boy wearing a tall Phrygian cap – was hurriedly polished up for auction in 2010, the broken bits reattached and the cracks sealed, and its missing curls restored with resin casts. A private buyer was impressed enough to pay £2m for it. Should we be primping the past in this way, to appeal to new commercial markets? Or is the more interesting point that its mangling took place in antiquity, and surely deliberately. Why? Was it ritual? Magic? Vengeance? We shall never know for sure; the one certainty is that the reconstructed mask is not how its previous owner wanted it left.
Commercial considerations of a different kind come into play at Hadrian's Wall. Higgins details the collapse of local farming in the wake of foot and mouth; the wall, and the many tourists it brings (1 million a year, with over 200,000 walking at least part of the route), are now at the centre of the local economy. Again there is talk of rebuilding, to allow visitors to experience the fortifications in all their imposing grandeur. In this case, perhaps, the venture is justified. One of the lessons learned from the extraordinary cache of tablets discovered at Vindolanda (near the village of Bardon Mill) is that the wall was designed primarily for its visual impact rather than military capability: there were no hordes of feral Caledonians to keep out of Britain, and in any case there were too few soldiers stationed in the forts to resist them.
For all this reconstructive fervour, however, the remote past slips from our tightening grip. For a start, physical remains are fragile, even the recalcitrant, mossy stones of which most of our Roman British remains consist. The saddest tale in the book is of Arthur's O'on ("Oven"), a monumental beehive-shaped building with a circular aperture at the top, which once stood just north of Falkirk. Higgins notes that it is "the only Romano-British monument to have a football team named after it", namely Stenhousemuir. But the "stone house" was brutally demolished for its stone in 1745, meaning that we shall probably never know what its purpose was. There are similar tales of fine mosaics, a speciality of Roman country villas, churned up by stomping horses or simply decayed by the elements.
A more significant reason why Roman Britain will remain elusive, however, is its strangeness. This was a distant corner of the Roman empire, positioned precariously on the edge of the world. Here, multiple cultural currents swirled and eddied, without ever fully coming together. British aristocrats were influenced by Roman tastes long before the Romans arrived; yet when they did arrive, traditional British culture and religion persisted stubbornly, as is shown by the roundhouses that mess with the Roman grid-planning in a town such as Silchester – round pegs in square holes – and the resolutely un-Roman god names on dedicatory inscriptions (Antenociticus, Matunus, Nodens). And despite the best efforts of Edward Nicholson to prove the contrary, it seems that Christianisation was patchy and imperfect until the early medieval period.
Much about this bizarre world remains mysterious. Whose was the face on the Crosby Garrett helmet? Why was Hadrian's Wall built? What was the point of Arthur's O'on? Higgins writes of "the capacity of the sleeping earth to throw up anomalies", and nowhere is this anomalousness more visible than in Roman Britain. Despite the efforts of moderns to sanitise, reconstruct, theorise, this particular corner of the sleeping earth seems to exult in perplexing us.
Even in those cases where we can interpret ancient data, what does it imply for us now? One of the most controversial discoveries of recent years is the "ivory bangle woman" from York. Her grave was found and excavated in 1901, but the skeleton was only recently analysed scientifically. What the conclusions suggest is that her family background may have been north African, and her upbringing Mediterranean. She was buried with artefacts from Africa, Germany and (less exotically) Whitby. That Roman conquest brought visitors (mostly soldiers and their families) from all over the empire is in itself no great revelation. Higgins's report of some reactions to the news, however, is sobering: it was immediately taken as a sleight-of-hand pulled by agenda-led liberals wanting to show that Britain has always been "multicultural" – a brisk reminder that the stories we tell about our pasts are not just complex and elusive, they are also political.
Much of Higgins's sophisticated and passionate book, however, is more distinctive than this. She personalises the story in a diaristic, almost poetic tone. Ancient sites are opportunities for reflection, for time out with her thoughts. She writes, for example, of Swaffham church, its ceiling "carved with phalanxes of angels, wings outspread. I lay on a pew and gazed up at them, soaring with them." Though the genres are very different, her prose reminds me at times of WG Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, another travelogue intercut with memories and reveries, and similarly haunted by a sense of a past slipping away.
Again like Sebald, Higgins inhabits the personalities of the characters whose stories she tells. One engaging couple are the philandering Mortimer Wheeler and his wife and archaeological ally Tessa, who died young and broke his heart. In Wheeler's mind – or is it in Higgins's? – the horrors of the battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Tessa's death in 1936, and his report (dedicated to Tessa's memory) on the war cemetery at Maiden Castle in Dorset were all part of a continuum of tragedy.
