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Dark Lord Walks into a Tavern... - Ep 14
209 Plays9 months ago
Ouch! In episode 14, Tilly and Ash confront the Magisterium of Malintent, the Grand Council of Dark Lords to talk about their power dynamics and how the archaeological record isn’t always as clear cut when it comes to understanding hierarchy and power.
Links
- DNA Study of female warrior grave (Birka)
- Elven Quest
- "Dark Lord" in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (eds. John Clute & John Grant: First St. Martin's Griffin ed.: 1999), p. 262
- Edward James (1988) ‘The Franks Before Clovis’, in The Franks: Blackwell. pg. 58-64
- Madgwick R, Mulville J. (2015) Feasting on fore-limbs: conspicuous consumption and identity in later prehistoric Britain. Antiquity;89(345):629-644. doi:10.15184/aqy.2015.24)
Contact
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @and.my.trowel
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/trowel/14
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 14
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my trowel. Hi, you're listening to episode 14 of And My Trowel, where we look at the fantastic side of archaeology and the archaeological side of fantasy. I'm Ash. And I'm Tilly. And today, we're going to be talking about... Oh, wait. I don't think we should speak of it. The dark.
00:00:30
Speaker
Let's see, nothing happened today, we're fine. Okay. Okay, so you may have heard of the Dark Lord. Do you, by the way, mean Sauron? No. Oh, Dracula? No. Wait, oh, I know Darth Vader. Oh my god, all of the above. Okay, there's so many.
00:00:52
Speaker
But really, the Dark Lord, and I'm going to keep doing that every single time I say it, is an archetype.
The Quest to Name the Dark Lord
00:00:59
Speaker
He is the antagonist for most fantasy fiction. They can be many things, many faces, sometimes genders, people, races, and even objects in some cases. Oh, I did. I just... Oh my God. You're a poet. You don't even know it. I didn't even know it.
00:01:16
Speaker
But they are always seen as the epitome of Emperor-like power, darkness and even death. And so to our quest, Tilly.
00:01:26
Speaker
We're going to face some extremely tough questions this week. Did you, by chance, see that raven that arrived at the office this morning? Oh god, yeah, the one with the smoky tendrils coming off it. Yeah, oh man, that bloody thing tried to bite me as I was boiling the kettle. Oh, right. Well, it arrived the quest tucked into its bitey little beak from the Magisterium of Malintent, the ground council of the Dark Lords.
00:01:52
Speaker
Wait, weren't they what's called the convocation of infernal evil and malignant affairs? Yeah, there's a bit of, been a bit of a change of power going on there, which is why I think they've come to us. Turns out there's been a bit of a brewing argument going on, similar to our wizards and a vie for power between the Dark Lords. They simply just can't decide who should be the arch overlord of the Dark Lords. So the usual tactics aren't working, you know, pillaging, burning, all that kind of stuff.
00:02:21
Speaker
So they've come to us requesting that we look at the archaeological record and tell them how to name their overlord. OK, so we look at the archaeological record, see how people in the past have displayed power and hierarchy before, and then send that to the Dark Lords for judgment. Yes, exactly. Got it. OK.
00:02:42
Speaker
Okay, today, so you've named at least three different Dark Lords within popular fiction there, but can you think of any other fantasy books or any type of media really that features the Dark Lord archetype? God, I mean pretty much all of them, like actually, thinking of it. I mean, yeah, there's actually...
00:03:05
Speaker
as soon as you started saying Dark Lord, it reminded me. It's not a fictional book, but it's this fantasy radio series. I think it was on Radio 4 in the UK. It stars Stephen Mangan, who's a British comedian, and it's called Elven Quest. I don't know. Have you heard it?
00:03:22
Speaker
I haven't, but I really need to. You have to listen to it. It is so hilarious. It's basically like a complete piss-take of all sort of fantasy things. It's this guy from the modern world and a bunch of like fantasy people come into our world and then they say, we need to bring the chosen one back to our world, you know, do it. And he's going, no, no, I'm not the chosen one. And they're saying, no, not you, your dog. And so the dog gets taken through, but then he goes with it. And then it turns out the dog turns into like a
00:03:49
Speaker
And then there's this whole, it's like a massive whole thing and they have to recall the sword of, what's it called, I can't remember, the sword of Aznagar, that's the one. Because whoever wields the sword shall rule lower earth and so they need
Historical and Political Parallels
00:04:02
Speaker
the chosen one and to help them find it. But then there's a Dark Lord who's trying to find it as well. And I can't remember now who plays the Dark Lord. And let me just see if I can quickly, Lord Darkness is his name and it's Alistair McGowan who's the,
00:04:17
Speaker
Oh my god, Arson McGowan's great, yeah. Oh my gosh, and he is so good. And yeah, so he's, you know, Lord of Evil, you know, Lord Darkness, dominating lower earth. And he keeps having all these evil plans, but then inevitably, the like, group of Questers always outwit him, because he has like, his minions, but they're all extremely stupid. And so you have like, Creech, who's his right hand, but he's, you know, also quite an idiot. And so basically, the Dark Lord is like the only intelligent one and he's there going like,
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, that's quite, that's part of the archetype, isn't it? Like it's always fighting evil and there's always, there's the power balance. So there's the Dark Lord and then there's the hero that comes along and saves them, the chosen one. And if you think about the Dark Lord, there's loads of different characters of Dark Lords. I mean, sometimes there's a, I got lost in a bit of the research and there's many arguments about even if like, even if Sauron's the Dark Lord or like, or Moragoth. I mean, that is the ultimate Dark Lord.
00:05:08
Speaker
for God's sake.
00:05:17
Speaker
Yeah, it was like, are they actually a Dark Lord? So if you think about all the different kind of fiction that we read in fantasy, there's obviously Voldemort, there's Sauron, there's so many that I can't actually think of how many there are.
00:05:35
Speaker
But indeed, I love that they're always, I mean, so you have like this album quest, I've just remembered another one in the Jasper Ford series, Thursday Next series, which is a kind of fantasy series about literary detectives. So so they have to go into the books and basically so like in the first one, the air affair, Jane Eyre gets kidnapped, that's kind of
00:05:54
Speaker
Oh, I've heard these. Yes, yes, yes. It's not really a spoiler because it's kind of obvious in the book. But yeah, and one of the agents is this Dark Lord character. And there's, I remember there's some like scene where he wants to get his contract updated. So he says, no, I want at least a 400 word introduction to a chapter. And they're like, okay, fine. And then like halfway through the book, there's this random paragraph at the beginning of a chapter, which is like the Dark Lord strides into the thing with his cloak billowing behind him. So I feel like
00:06:21
Speaker
A lot of the time, there's two sides of it, right? There's the almost slightly comedic, oh, he's the Dark Lord, but he keeps getting thwarted and it's made ridiculous looking almost. And then there's the Dark Lord like Sauron, who is quite scary.
00:06:40
Speaker
So there's a bit of a phenomena around the Dark Lord, right? So according to the Encyclopedia of Fantasy by John Grant and John Clute, they describe the Dark Lord as a character that often operates under the constraints or prohibitions, and thus is often vulnerable to quibbles, that he or they are often or has been a malignant sleeper who has been awoken by the investigations of unwary curiosity.
00:07:06
Speaker
He is often, or has been, the former servant of an even greater Dark Lord, and has often been already defeated but not destroyed eons beforehand. That's like Sauron as well, right? I haven't, I admit, I haven't gotten through the Silmarillion, but I feel like from what I've read from that, that's what he is basically, right? He was the main servant of, I can't remember the name, Morgoth.
00:07:33
Speaker
Yeah, okay. Yeah, so that's kind of a key point. And the thing is Tolkien sort of makes the archetype. A lot of the fantasy books and series that we read afterwards, or we watch, they use Tolkien's archetype of Sauron to model their Dark Lords.
00:07:50
Speaker
So, there is this kind of idea that there's a very pure Dark Lord, which is terrifying. So, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, they also say that the Dark Lord is frequently rooted in whatever political or religious figures happen to be worrying readers at the time.
00:08:07
Speaker
So, yeah. So if you look at Sauron, he combines totalitarian rule, and when is Tolkien writing? He's writing during a time where dictatorship is on the rise, and you've got these kind of prolific characters that are coming up and really ruining the landscape and ruining people's lives. Which makes sense, right then, because you want to do something that will indeed strike terror into the heart of the reader.
00:08:35
Speaker
you want to use something that is relatable in terms of that fear. Yeah, exactly. And if you think about the Dark Lord and how we see it now, and it's quite satirical, and he's seen as a bit of a comedy kind of easy leg to pull sort of thing, then that's kind of reflective of our political leaders and how we react to them. We see them. Yeah.
00:08:58
Speaker
So we often, you know, you think of like Trump, he is a very terrifying man in the fact that he has so much, or he had so much power. But he's, but everyone made a joke of him because I mean, that's how we react in our modern society. So when you're looking at like the kind of silly Dark Lord, that is relatable to you. But have you ever read like the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind?
00:09:23
Speaker
I don't think so. You might remember them from a TV show called The Legend of the Seeker series that was based on the books, but was in the early 2000s. I do not know it, but I'm going to look it up. Yeah, well, I remember this when I was doing the research for this, and the Dark Lord in that is called Darken Raal, which just sounds like a very Dark Lord name, doesn't it? And he's sort of meant to strike fear into you. In the books, he's quite terrifying, right?
00:09:52
Speaker
He combines that totalitarian rule again, but he also combines the superficial reasonableness of the cult leaders that were around in the media in the 70s and into the 90s. So if you think about
00:10:08
Speaker
any type of cult leader in the media and that kind of satanic panic, that's a representative of him. But in the TV show, he's very, he wears the long robes. He has very nice hair, long dark hair. He's actually more attractive than he should be in the books. In the books, he's like severely disfigured and like got graying skin. But in the TV show, he's charismatic. And I remember watching it like, oh, this is probably where all the problems started. But, you know,
00:10:38
Speaker
So there's a different kind of dark lord for each society, but they're always extremely powerful. And even in the modern sense, so they hold sway over lands, they're often titled like the lady from Glenn Cook's Black Company books, or the dark one from the Wheel of Time series, that they control armies and even magic itself. But they are stupid.
00:11:04
Speaker
surprisingly so. Yeah, they're stupid and I guess they're stupid in a way that they don't realise why their plans can't be like, yeah, I know what you mean. Like, usually the hero or of course, the hero always has to overcome them, right? Like they? Yeah, they have to. That's the whole the point of the Dark Lord is that they will never triumph. And they always underestimate good. And they always think that they know good more.
00:11:32
Speaker
than good itself. But then in Indeed, most of the time, they just don't understand.
Failures of Dark Lords
00:11:37
Speaker
It's almost just because they don't understand the concept of good. So they don't really like I'm trying to think, I think it's in Harry Potter, where the whole thing about love, right? And so it's love is the one thing that can banish.
00:11:50
Speaker
the Dark Lord in that one because he just doesn't understand it and it's not something that he has any power against and all of that kind of thing so it's sort of yeah the good things and I do like that indeed it's always dark like it's dark versus light also in like star wars right it's the empire they're always dark and then the people in the rebellion are always wearing like white clothes and
00:12:10
Speaker
Well, yeah, exactly. And I mean, Star Wars is basically space Nazis, isn't it? Like, that's what it is. It's meant to be showing you what could have happened and kind of unpacking all that kind of generational trauma from previous generation and as they're growing up. So yeah, they're always fighting the light and they're always the dark. And that's why they're called the Dark Lord.
00:12:34
Speaker
You know, they personify darkness, they personify death. Magic, they're often connected to magic and like they wield magic, like no other magician or sorcerer or even wizard. They're often on par with the highest wizard in their series as well. But for some reason, they don't ever quite use that power to the fullest advantage. And it's always some scrawny kid with a sword and a magical artifact that comes along and is like, ah.
00:13:03
Speaker
But again, it's that whole thing if they just don't, I guess, yeah, they would only see, so for example, in Lord of the Rings, you know, Sauron sees Gandalf and he's like, yes, this is my, you know, thwarting enemy or whatever. But then he's like, oh, that hobbit, that hobbit, wait, what's the hobbit? Hang on, what? In a second, a hobbit? She's really going to be my downfall? It's kind of like, this isn't really an analogy, but so I played water polo or I played water polo.
00:13:26
Speaker
And generally, as in a lot of sports, there's a certain time where the strength of male players does make a difference if you're playing against male players or female players. So I usually played in female only teams, but in Germany they're mixed. And most of the time that was then kind of sucked for me because there's only so
00:13:46
Speaker
much I can do if the person that I'm playing against is twice as strong as me. And so one thing, though, that was quite useful was that my shots on goal weren't quite as fast as the male shots on goal, just because of the strength in my arm. But that meant that actually I got it in as long as my aim was good, which wasn't always the case. I could quite often get it in because the goalie would be more expecting the male shots so they'd move too fast. So they'd move so that their hand would be in a particular place
00:14:16
Speaker
like when the male ball would be there, but my ball would get there like half a second later. So they'd be like pushing themselves out of the water, but then they'd already be down a little bit by the time my ball got there. So actually got it. And it's kind of an analogy for this because it's that assumption that like, ah, but only the greatest power and the greatest magic could thwart me. But actually in the end, it turns out to be something that they didn't even consider would be a thing. Like it's, you know what I mean?
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, no, exactly. It's that kind of David and Goliath-esque
Power in Archaeology
00:14:45
Speaker
story, isn't it? Where there is always someone who's super OP and everyone is terrified of them because clearly, for the Dark Lord, they always rule over their lands with a terrifying fist and they have armies at their leisure that they sometimes birth from weird scenarios.
00:15:05
Speaker
or a Kai or whatever, you know, it's the same sort of stuff. And then there's just ragtag, a bunch of kids that come along and they're like, got a little sword and they've got a little stone and they're like, they somehow defeat this evil ancient darkness. And I suppose that's an epitome of like,
00:15:23
Speaker
how you feel when you're reading these books as a kid. There is sometimes an overarching narrative of something you have to overcome, or maybe a parent or something like that, that you're kind of scared of. And that's the Dark Lord. They have all this authority, but they never fully wield it. And they overestimate themselves and they underestimate everybody else in the book, especially those they perceive as weak.
00:15:48
Speaker
which isn't that a quote from Lord of the Rings? Something about even the smallest person can change the course of history or something like that. I guess that whole thing, right, of trying to show kids or those who are maybe not so strong as the Dark Lord that you can still do it, you're the one.
00:16:03
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And you've got to think Tolkien, he was in, was it World War I Tolkien was in? And he's seeing young lads like himself go to fight in the trenches to overcome this enemy that has been, you know, kind of propagandized in the media around them. So yeah, he's seeing young boys fighting. And so that's
00:16:27
Speaker
pretty evident when you're looking at Lord the Rings and Sauron and kind of looking at the kind of real life situation around it and why you'd be inspired to write something like that. But hang on, I think I've left the cauldron boiling. I thought I heard something bubbling. Yeah, just let me check that out and we'll be back with you soon.
00:16:49
Speaker
Welcome back. So Ash went off to check the bubbling cauldron, but I thought, oh right, we should probably relate this back to the archaeology and the sort of quests that we've been given. So I consulted our scrolls, and I think actually there's a lot of varying approaches to finding archaeological remains of this kind of power that we've been talking about with the Dark Lord. Ah, here comes Ash back. Was the cauldron okay?
00:17:11
Speaker
Yes, it was okay. I think that that next batch of polyjuice potions is going to be fine. Oh, good. Okay. Wait, are you a Dark Lord? Um, maybe. You don't know. Watch out Ian Hodder.
00:17:29
Speaker
But no, so what did you come up with? Did you think about different types of power and how you can see it? Well, I guess one of the things, and this relates a little bit to what we were talking about last episode actually, is how power has been interpreted. Note my use of the word interpret rather than identify because it's inherently biased, but in the archaeological record, if there's one thing that our listeners are going to get out of listening to this series, it's to not use those words synonymously in archaeological discussion.
00:17:57
Speaker
I have to damn it. Because there was this assumption when looking at burials from the Bronze Age, and I think it was, I wouldn't necessarily say it was a processual approach, but it was this
00:18:12
Speaker
this very kind of traditional approach to looking at burials. And basically it was, okay, jewels, horses, fancy things in a burial equals power. Like that person must have been powerful. Generally, it was assumed they were a man. And though there's been some very interesting recent studies done that have been kind of re researching excavations that were done previously, re analyzing the osteological material, so the skeletons and doing DNA analysis. And it turns out that actually quite a few of them were women.
00:18:41
Speaker
which is very interesting. I'll see if I can find the studies that I'm talking about, and I'll link them in the show notes. But at the time, it was this idea of then this community or this network of chieftains throughout the whole of Europe. This was a very Europe-focused approach, I should say.
00:18:58
Speaker
And in the Bronze Age, you had this interlinking network linked by trade of these great chiefdom states. And it was very much focused on this idea of power and this idea that we're finding all of these big burials with lots of powerful things in it. These are clearly powerful men in these burials. So the power of the people was directly linked to the grave goods that were found.
00:19:21
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's that kind of conspicuous consumption of stuff and stuff and landscape. And that's a very traditional kind of view of an interpretation of the past and how we associate it. So one of the examples that I found, and I remember doing this at university, was King Childrich's grave, the Frankish king in fifth century Gaul. And I don't believe
00:19:50
Speaker
it was ever actually related to king and children. They just thought it was him, simply because of the things that they found there. It must be him. Yes, it must be. There's this ring. So basically, when they excavated it, they found loads of stuff. Think Sutton Hoo, but France, right? It's extra. It's more. So he had stuff like
00:20:12
Speaker
golden buckles and gold coins, a gold bull's head, Frankish throwing axes and swords, 300 golden bees. What? Yeah. Gone at incense and basically placed underneath this cloak he was wearing, which happened to be a Roman style. Interesting. He also had, I'm saying he, by the way, I don't actually know. They, they, they, they had a Roman style fibular brooch.
00:20:42
Speaker
And interestingly enough, they had Childric's seal ring, which told us something. So it meant that this was very Roman-esque in a way. So it had the Frankish kind of burial grave goods, but it also handled this kind of weird harking back to the Rome. And so they implied with the sealed ring that they were writing documents. So writing in itself showed power.
00:21:07
Speaker
He had the ability to write, he had the ability to collect information, which meant that he might have kind of had so much power over a landscape and over people. And so it's kind of this idea of conspicuous consumption and ownership. But then there's even more stuff going on in this area. So it actually turns out later excavations in the 80s found out that this whole area of Merovingian power was actually a cemetery.
00:21:35
Speaker
And that more people were buried there. But there was also three pits associated, they think, possibly with children's grave. Because they're sort of interlapping with other burials, so it's quite difficult context-wise. And they don't know, they radiocarbonated it to around the same time that they think that the guy died. And they had 30, so in each pit, there was 30 sacrificed horses.
00:22:07
Speaker
So, yeah. And I mean, there's, I guess this is a thing, right? There's certain things where you think, okay, this was a big deal. And this, something was obviously happening here to make it necessary to, I mean, that's also, I guess, like, you know, the pyramids. You're like, right, this wasn't just like an everyday worker being buried here. Like this, there's clearly
00:22:30
Speaker
some sort of importance associated with it. I guess the interesting thing, one of my favourite, I guess you must have done it as well, the Mike Piper Pearson book about the death in archaeology or archaeology of death. I can't remember that. One of the big questions he asks is who buries the dead? Because I think that's something as well that you're taught quite early on in archaeology, but it's that a lot of people don't really think about necessarily is that
00:22:56
Speaker
the dead don't bury themselves. It's other people who are doing it. And for example, I always try to give the example of when you're being buried, will you be buried in your hoodie and favourite pyjama bottoms that you probably spent most of your life in? And you got home and you do these things? Or would you probably put in your thing, oh, I want to be buried in my fancy suit, or my wedding dress, or I don't know, something nice? And quite often,
00:23:23
Speaker
people are presented and almost kind of, yeah, presented, I guess is the best way of putting it in a certain way to reflect how the others see them that they wouldn't necessarily have been seeing that way themselves. So for example, if a Dark Lord
00:23:38
Speaker
were being buried, although I guess you could probably have some sort of hold of fear over their minions, even in death, that, you know, if they say, bury me like this, make me look grand, make me look big, then the minions would be like, okay, and even when he dies, they're like, right, we better still do it.
00:23:54
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And that's the kind of thing when you look at burials, you think, yeah, who is burying them and what do they have to prove? And that was one of the most common interpretations of burials in the landscape was that it was someone that came after them. So with, like, Childrich's grave, it was Clovis I. And Clovis I is one of the best kings of the Mervinjian period. And that's his son. And so he's
00:24:20
Speaker
The interpretation is that he's making a very big song and dance of his father and the Roman connections to the land, to the landscape, to say, look, OK, yeah, here I am. You don't forget me and you don't forget who comes after me. So he he kind of takes on that landscape and is, you know.
00:24:42
Speaker
It is conspicuous. You mean everyone would have been gathered, technically, if you think about it, to watch all these horses be sacrificed. And horses are very rare. You don't just have 90 horses running around. So it's that wealth and that showmanship and that power that they are able to use these resources for whatever they
Reconceptualizing Power Dynamics
00:25:03
Speaker
want.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, which fits with the sort of thing of the Dark Lord that you were mentioning earlier in terms of they usually the servant or the, you know, the underling of some previous Dark Lord. So I guess they would also do a big sort of show and dance of if the if the earlier more powerful Dark Lord fell, you know, and then they would make a massive burial and a massive deal about it, do a whole big ceremony slaughtering all the horses and everything to be like, look, I can, you know, afford to do this for my predecessor. And now I am taking on that.
00:25:33
Speaker
that mantle or that, yeah, that status. Yeah, exactly. It's taking on that status that the previous person had and continuing it. Because if you don't, then you, especially when you're talking about chieftains and kings, which... Chieftains and kings, always chieftains and kings, no one thinks of anyone else. But when you're looking at, Kevin, more historical context like this, like, yeah, he needs that. Otherwise it's in stable reign from the get-go.
00:26:03
Speaker
You've got to have it based on something. Yeah, I think one of my professors in history, when we were talking about the Norman Conquest, was this kind of slash and burn theory where it's like a new king comes along or a new queen. They have to make an example of someone. So they picked the first rebellion.
00:26:23
Speaker
And they go all out. They kill the person, they kill everyone they know. And they go, look at this. I'm going to do this. Yeah. I'm going to let you like do this, like be a rebel, but I'm going to kill you in a most horrific fashion. And then afterwards they're kind of like, it's okay. If you want to rebel, it's fine, but I've shown you my power and what I can do. So yeah. And you tend to see that a lot of times in kingship, in the historical record anyway.
00:26:52
Speaker
Although, indeed, so far we've been talking about history and things, but as you very rightly mentioned with the Dark Lords, quite a lot of the time the way that they're depicted in fiction is a direct reflection of the modern society, and so what modern people would think of as a Dark Lord, that's then reflected in how they're depicted within the fictional space, like you were talking about.
00:27:12
Speaker
I guess it's a similar thing, right? I mean, in history, it's slightly different because we have the written records to kind of consolidate it and you know a little bit more about what's happening, even though of course, historic records are also open to interpretation. But in somewhere like prehistory, I mean, that's even further back. And I mean, what is power? Like, actually, do you have a definition of power?
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, I do. So the general archaeological discourse tells us that as modern humans, we perceive power primarily as a quality of an individual, usually of the male variety, and primarily founded upon control over means of violence, like coercive power or dominance.
00:27:54
Speaker
But that's been critiqued. It's simply because it's a kind of flawed fixation on this idea of chieftains and the elite that control like societal agencies, material culture, their mutual interactions. But, you know, in prehistory,
00:28:13
Speaker
specifically in prehistory, we can see that maybe there's more of a focus on the collective embedded power instead of a monopoly of violence by the elite few like Archieftains and Kings and Dark Lords. So ultimately we look at power
00:28:31
Speaker
through a modern lens and how we would gain power. So we are connected to things. We gain power through capitalism because we collect things. The more things you have, the more powerful you are. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the motivations behind different burials, if we're looking at burials like Clovis and Childric or even in prehistory, doesn't mean that that's the same.
00:29:00
Speaker
Yeah. We need to sort of step away from our own bias, like we talked about previously in our Wizards episode, and we need to look really at what the archaeological evidence is telling us is happening, rather than assuming. So a lot of the times in burials, we've talked about this before, we gender burials by the grave goods. Yeah.
00:29:22
Speaker
Okay, so big sword, big man, you know, a spindle wall woman. But that is proven time and time again, especially now with different technology and DNA studies and, you know, just even looking at, you know, looking at the skeleton, oddly enough. Weird, right? Who knew that they could actually tell us something? It's like weird. So weird, like, osteologies of
00:29:47
Speaker
thing. You know, we can see that that power does not translate from man to man. It translates differently and because power is perceived differently.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And so also who knows what I mean, there's so many things that we don't know how they would have perceived things in prehistory. There's so many, for want of a better word, weird things happening. So many other aspects of prehistoric life that we see. So who's to say that our idea of power and hierarchical structures would have necessarily been kind of what they would have been perceiving as well.
00:30:21
Speaker
Yeah, there's this kind of false, it's a fallacy really that there is just loads of chieftains and kings running around, especially in prehistory, because you see actually even up into the Iron Age, there's quite a lot of collective groups. And if you think about it, it makes sense because they're walking around and moving around in groups, aren't they? They're traversing this landscape as a community. They have to. They can't just work, they can't not work together. Otherwise it all falls apart.
00:30:48
Speaker
So if you look, there's some really cool evidence about power and kind of hierarchy as well in feasting in the Iron Age. So there's a particular site in South Wales called Shill and Miles, and it's where basically a large midden was found. And it kind of looked at the eating habits of early Iron Age elite. I didn't do that in quotation marks. And ritual. And ritual.
00:31:18
Speaker
And there was this, you know, this kind of settlement site with this big midden in it. And what they found is they found loads of specifically right fallims of pigs in there. So everyone was like, oh my God, it has to be that these elite people are only eating the right fallim.
00:31:36
Speaker
big for like a ritual purpose. But actually they think, well, they thought that, you know, as conspicuous consumption, look, I can only choose to eat this right for them. But then actually the, as they kind of looked at it further and further and further, there was more evidence of like kind of flora and fauna and microbiology and kind of botanical stuff going on in the mid-end. They realized that actually it's more community focused and that this event
00:32:03
Speaker
that would have happened in because it is all in one context, interestingly enough. And just these these pig bones. Interesting. Yeah. Just one big feast. Just one big feast. Yeah. Bolsters like the social relationships within that group and during that time. So it means that exchange networks are trying to be rebuilding because during this period in the Iron Age, especially in Wales, you actually have the collapse and the breakdown of the bronze trade.
00:32:31
Speaker
So power is shifting and moving. And so what they're trying to, they think anyway, is happening is that people are trying to find new ways of dealing with power and control. Yeah. So based on all of this, then what are we going to say to the Dark Lords? I'm a bit scared about going to them and being like, well, actually your perception of power is completely based on your modern misconception.
00:32:58
Speaker
Yeah, I'm scared too, but I think that's the best way of doing it and being like, maybe there's a different type of power you could look at. Maybe you don't need a centralised power. They didn't have it in prehistory perhaps, so why don't you just
00:33:14
Speaker
change your conceptualisation of power as domination, maybe it's unhelpful and pretty reductionist, so maybe we can look at how power worked in other societies.
Conclusion and Credits
00:33:27
Speaker
So instead of throwing things at each other and threatening to take over one's army of undead, then I think
00:33:37
Speaker
Maybe look at how people in the Iron Age, in Wales, sat down together and had a nice meal. Okay, why don't you go tell them that? I'll stay here and tidy up a little bit. I think I'll send the raven back. That's a good idea. Yeah.
00:33:57
Speaker
I'm glad that that's sorted. And so that's about it for this episode of And My Trial. We hope you enjoyed this quest. It was a difficult one. If there's any suggestions that people have for an episode that they've gotten from a fantasy book, or they have an archaeological concept that they don't really understand, that we might be able to explain through fantasy or something in a book that they want to find out.
00:34:23
Speaker
more about from an archaeological viewpoint do please get in contact via email or social media. All contact information as well as references and further reading for all points we've discussed today can be found in the show notes. Oh so sorry while you were saying that I was just looking through all of these boxes look what I found here. Do you know what it is?
00:34:45
Speaker
No, what is it? It's, well, hang on, I think let's get a friend in to help and we can maybe talk about it a little bit more in the next episode. Sounds good.
00:34:58
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Rachel Rodin. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.