TWO LADS WANDER THE COUNTRYSIDE COLLECTING, NOTING AND SKETCHING
The biffing out before the shift continues – and deeper strata from my life have been uncovered revealing my very early interest in Prehistory.
Sometime around 1954, I must have badgered my mother to spend an extra shilling to buy me a copy of ‘Beyond the Bounds of History’ by Henri Breuil. The book had been printed in 1949 and sold for 3s 6d at the local W.H. Smith’s branch in Nantwich Square, Cheshire. This is where I used to hang around on our Thursday afternoon market day visits from the farm, eying up the printed treasures that I could buy for my half a crown pocket money.
The book is remarkable as a milestone in the evolution of our understanding of prehistory.
Abbé Breuil who was born in 1877, grew up in era when fossils were ‘dated from the time of the Flood’ and the polished stone axes found in his grandparent’s property in the Soissonais country were accounted ‘Celtic or Gaulish’. By the time he died in 1961, prehistory and anthropology had become exacting, well-established and exciting sciences.
And even though there is only a decade or so of overlap in our lives, I identify deeply with his nerdy, self-absorbed wanderings in the neighbourhood of his aunt’s farm in Picardy, collecting and sketching items of interest from natural and human history.
I too was an observer and collector on my 'expotitions' across the damp pastures of South Cheshire with my faithful sheepdog - but sadly my sketch books, rock samples and the biscuit tin of fossils from a later more formal expedition in the Weald are no more.
As a Catholic priest,archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist, the Abbé went on explore and popularize the cave art of the Somme and Dordogne valleys, and later to conduct expeditions in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China (with Teilhard de Chardin), Ethiopia, British Somaliland, and especially Southern Africa.
His delightful naïf drawings of prehistoric settings and events have a haunting and very personal quality and I have pasted in a selection.
But the Abbé was also a clear thinker about the requirements for good social science.
It is worth quoting his prescription:
1. The first essential is the ‘spirit of curiosity’ – that is we must look beyond our material life and ‘concern ourselves with what does not otherwise concern us’
2. The second is the recognition of the ‘spirit of limitations’ – that is that ‘it is better to dig a few deep furrows than scratch a wide surface’
3. But limitations must be balanced by broad interests in wider human culture – where an exposure to variety freshens the mind
4. A ‘spirit of analysis’ must be cultivated – not only looking at objects steadily but touching them with your fingers
5. This must be matched by a ‘spirit of tenacity', involving obstinate effort and an untiring patience that is never beaten or satisfied
6. Only an ‘unprejudiced spirit’ is capable of enlightenment through failure and the development of ‘synthetic explanation from which the mind starts off to plunge ahead’
7. To make progress in developing new concepts, a ‘spirit of meditation’ is also essential because ‘chewing the cud’ can concentrate thought
8. Finally, one needs to ‘let yourself think’ freely by throwing forward ‘the reins of nature’ and spending time in the garden, fishing, shooting etc.
Leafing through the book once more, I am struck by both the array of knowledge that has become validated - and the areas where new avenues of understanding have been developed and errors have been corrected over the last 70 years. In the latter case, and perhaps most glaringly, the Abbé was still unaware in 1949 of the ‘Piltdown Man’ hoax.
For all that, he would have readily considered and embraced new thinking:
‘Do not bemoan differences of opinion. Criticism, even if unjust, spurs on to more perfect work he who does not lose time in disputing with vain words. All personal controversy is a waste of time and strength, except when the scientific world must be enlightened about spurious work and the truth vindicated. The searcher has better use to make of the limited time he is given’.
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