Keeping History Simple.

I do wish TV documentaries didn’t feel such a need to present speculation as established fact. I just watched a few minutes of an old series on the ancient Britons. This was an excellent series, and its presenter, Neil Oliver, is one of my favourites.

So, I came in just at the point where he’s standing in the chamber of a long barrow explaining that the bones of the dead weren’t deposited as complete skeletons, but as piles of like components. There’s a pile of skulls here, a pile of rib bones there, a pile of long bones over there… This, he tells us, was done so that the dead would no longer be seen as individuals and ex-members of the community, but would become subsumed in the collective presence of the ancestors.

Hang on a minute, Neil. It might be reasonable to propose that such an arrangement would have had that effect, but there’s no way anybody can know that it was the reason why they did it. The effect might have been unwitting; the ancient Britons might simply have had a large dose of obsessive/compulsive in their natures and liked to see piles of similar shapes kept separate. Just because a theory is consistent with the evidence and you can’t come up with a better one doesn’t make it proven.