Bulletin

Issue: September/October 2007

News

Stories of the deep past

People have a thirst for knowledge about how they fit in the grand scheme of human history, says La Trobe archaeologist Tim Murray.

A painting of a grizzly bear about to bite the head off a man dressed in skins has the Chair of Archaeology in an ebullient mood. The painting is among the first known illustrations of human life in prehistoric times and it is in Professor Murray’s hands. He cannot wait to begin spinning stories about its significance. Story-telling is at the heart of the archaeologist’s role in society.

He or she collects artefacts from the field then reconstructs a picture of life before the written record. These narratives then go on to help people shape identities about themselves and places.

Professor Murray is lyrical about the importance of his profession. He has a label for people frightened of stretching their imaginations back into the distant past. He calls the affliction ‘chronophobia’, a fear of vast stretches of time.

‘People started evolving four million years ago. If we only try and understand the period when they are writing, we are chopping off ninety-nine per cent of human history.’

That’s what makes the painting so significant. Until it was commissioned by a banker called Sir John Lubbock (later Lord Avebury) in 1865, the existence of a deep prehistoric past was not widely accepted. Most people believed the world was created 4,004 years BC, as stated in the King James Bible.

‘The painting is incredibly important,’ Professor Murray says. ‘Lubbock was one of the founders of prehistoric archaeology. He invented the terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic. His main interest was the evolution of human culture.’

The story goes that Lubbock commissioned eighteen works by the French painter, Ernest Griset, to augment the display of ethnographic and prehistoric artefacts in his home. The paintings were never documented, eventually being passed down to the local museum at Orpington, on the edge of London.

Professor Murray discovered their existence while researching a book on the history of British prehistoric archaeology. One fell into the hands of the sister of the current Lord Avebury and ended up in Australia. It is now owned by a psychiatrist in Sydney who has loaned the painting to La Trobe for close examination.

The first thing Professor Murray has to say about the picture is that there is a sense in the work that prehistoric life was a struggle. An axe and spear are no match for the might of an angry bear. Secondly, the men look like North American Indians, caricatures that probably reflect the ethnographic images circulating at the time. Other paintings in the series conjure up famous archaeological sites and scenes of men making boats, catching fish, spearing animals and attacking mastodons.
‘You learn about Victorian attitudes to so-called primitive peoples from these works,’ Professor Murray says.

‘Prehistoric life was seen as nasty, tough and a real struggle. The Noble Savage was dead and buried by the time you get to Lubbock. There is one image of a poor individual being chased by wolves. It suited the times to think that life was pretty bloody tough. The British Empire was at the height of its dominion.’

Lubbock was a friend of Darwin’s and both worked to make the past intelligible to Victorian society. Professor Murray tells the story of Darwin’s ill-fated attempt to find a way of illustrating the passage of time. He had the idea that evolution was a slow and steady process and needed to demonstrate this in The Origin of Species.

To illustrate prehistoric timescales, Darwin chose the rate at which the Weald of Sussex
– a prominent geological feature famous for its dinosaur fossils – had eroded. He arrived at the figure of 306,662,400 years. Stories of the deep past This caused a sensation. The number was so vast as to be inconceivable and Darwin was roundly attacked. By the third edition of The Origin Darwin had withdrawn the Wealden calculation.

The argument that convinced Darwin came from James Croll who used the following analogy: Hang a narrow strip of paper 83 feet 4 inches long around a large room. The full length of the tape would represent a million years, while 100 years – the limit of time he felt could actually be conceived of in human experience
– would be represented by a mark only 1/10th of an inch from the end.

Darwin remarked to Croll: ‘I have never, I think, in my life been so deeply interested by any geological discussion. I now begin to see what a million means, and I feel quite ashamed of myself at the silly way in which I have spoken of millions of years.’ We now estimate the age of the earth at four billion years. Such is the power of stories that stretch the imagination.

First publication

Professor Murray is now working with the current Lord Avebury and the curator of the Orpington Museum to publish all eighteen paintings for the first time.

This research will also become a case study in a more general work on the history of antiquarianism which is being written by Murray and three other members of a team (drawn from Australia, the USA and France) recently awarded US$160,000 by the Getty Foundation of California.

‘Our goal is to produce a comprehensive history of a muchneglected system of knowledge about the human past, as well as to publish a significant corpus of original antiquarian texts drawn from the past 500 years. It would be marvellous to make other discoveries as significant as the Griset illustrations’.