“We matter, don’t we?” is how Peter Ross finished his talk with David Clarke, Doctor of Archaeology at Sheffield Hallam. The hour Ross spent discussing his new book, Upon a White Horse: Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland, was both poignant and inspiring, connecting the majesty of our past to the often overlooked heart of our present and future. With an eloquent and poetic style of phrase, Ross took us through ancient monuments all over the country, from the Uffington White Horse to Stonehenge and beyond.
Recalling holding a 4,500 year old molar tooth in the palm of his hand as a child, Ross first took us through his first forays into archaeology, volunteering in local archaeological digs with his grandparents, including a bronze age burial pit discovered by a quarry-man. He reflected on his grandfather’s first introduction to archaeology too: as he washed in an ancient Roman bathhouse before a WWII parade. These moments of the past shining in the present had an effect on both his grandfather and him in turn, and also inspire much of the sentiment behind his book.
This theme was remarkably highlighted when he read a section of the book, about encountering teens smoking weed on the Uffington White Horse. They were shocked to discover its long history – “centuries before the Romans, the horse was here”, when all they knew it as was a “place to chill”. He expanded on the role of the present in keeping alive the past by describing the process done every year, of weeding and hammering new chalk in, that must be done to keep the Uffington White Horse alive. Ross also described a ritual he witnessed in Scotland: every summer a local community come to take a group of stone figurines out of a little stone house, and every October they return to put them inside for the winter. For both of these monuments, they require yearly human intervention to keep them going; human intervention that has been happening for thousands of years without fail.
However, human intervention has not always been positive. When describing the ritual with the figurines, Ross emphasised his refusal to explain its location. Sightseeing and vandalism can cause catastrophic damage to the terrain and monuments themselves, and even famous monuments like Stonehenge are guarded by fences and volunteers in an attempt to stop people doing irreparable damage. Ross highlighted this cruelty, but encouraged us not to think of violence as a modern invention: “the past isn’t a time of innocence”. He described the chopping down of trees, the slaughter of animals and the enormous scale of building that these people were doing: “it got bigger and bigger, and then there was some sort of collapse” – perhaps they no longer had the resources to sustain their way of life. This idea of an ever-expanding society straining more and more under its own weight is not an idea unfamiliar to us, and this centuries-old story starts to seem more like a parable.
Ending his talk, Clarke asked Ross what connection he felt we had with our ancestors. Ross first said that “our consciousness must be very different from theirs”, due to the huge development and scale that we have experienced now, compared to our bronze-age ancestors. He described it like the difference between “an acorn and an oak tree”: fundamentally the same, but at different points in development. “Our palms will never touch again”, he said, poignantly illustrating the deep and rich connection we have with those who came before us, but the impossibility of true understanding. All throughout history we have attempted to create things that last, to show our future selves that we were here – and more often than not, we do succeed.
