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Mezolith - Episode 18
140 Plays7 years ago
Mezolith is a graphic novel set loosely in the Mesolithic period (with shades of the Palaeolithic) somewhere in northern Europe. Written by Ben Haggarty, a storyteller steeped in legends of many cultures, which all come through in the book, and drawn by Adam Brockbank, an artist who has worked on X-Men and the Harry Potter films, it packs a punch stylistically but does the content match? Guests helping us decide this are Matt Ritchie from the Forestry Commission Scotland, John Swogger, archaeological comic artist and Erin Kavanagh, geomythologist and poet.
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Transcript
Introduction to Pre-Histories Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
You are listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pre-Histories. My name is Kim Bedoff and I'm fascinated by how we tell stories to each other all the time and I'm especially fascinated because of my background about how we tell stories about prehistory. Today we're discussing a graphic novel called Mesolith that imagines the Mesolithic world of Northwest Europe and tells lots of stories about that.
Meet the Guests: Exploring 'Mesolith'
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm talking to today Matt Ritchie and the archaeologist of the Forestry Commission Scotland. Hello Matt. Hello. I'm also talking to John Swager who we talked to on the last episode. He's an archaeological comic writer and illustrator himself. Hello John. Hello. Hello and those dedicated listeners of mine will also remember Erin Kavanagh who is a geomythologist. Hello Erin.
00:01:01
Speaker
Hello. Hi. Thank you so much, Erin. I know that you've got a little bit of a cough, so we will try and help you through this. I hope you've got something to drink whilst you're talking to us tonight. And sadly, Katie Whittaker, who is also a comic writer, couldn't join us tonight, which is a bit of a shame. But we'll have fun anyway, won't we? Yes.
00:01:30
Speaker
So I wanted to ask John, were you a bit put out when Ben Haggerty and Adam Brockbank published this graphic novel? Yes, I was. I really was. I was because it was my idea first.
00:01:47
Speaker
No, I think it's one of those ideas that was sort of kicking around at the back of my head when I first discovered that comics could do archaeology. And you think, yeah, you know, we could do this great mythological thing and set in prehistory and so on. And of course, I think the thing that Mieslith really shows you is that there's a certain level of skill, both in drawing and storytelling, that you need in order to produce something like this. So although, yeah, I'm
00:02:15
Speaker
that I would be able to produce something like this, which is why it's so wonderful to see it. It is. I mean, the biographies of the author and illustrator are pretty impressive, aren't they? Yes. With Ben Haggity being a performance storyteller and he tells lots of stories about lots of traditional folk tales, which I guess many of them are familiar to you, Erin. Some of them are, yes.
00:02:40
Speaker
I hope you ain't been spotting them. Oh yes. Oh what's that? I'm struggling to remember what they are. I think that's always a good one. It is. It's quite good fun actually spotting all the evidence in here and the stories. And Adam Brockbank who is the illustrator of this has worked on lots of, he's usually a storyboard artist with films working on
00:03:03
Speaker
Star Wars and X-Men and Harry Potter and amazing things like that. So it is a pretty good looking book, isn't it?
Storytelling and Art in 'Mesolith'
00:03:12
Speaker
It's good looking and the really nice thing about it is to see people at that level wanting to put their skills in service of an archaeological story, which actually doesn't happen very often.
00:03:24
Speaker
I think Age of Bronze is the other one that immediately springs to mind where somebody is prepared to put a huge amount of time and effort and real skill into something that essentially is relatively obscure.
00:03:39
Speaker
It is, isn't it? Although, you know, it seems to be the Mesolithic of Northwest Europe does kind of capture people's imagination. I mean, Matt, you obviously worked quite closely with Using Wolf Brother, which is a book that we talked about before, isn't it, by Michelle Paver.
00:03:56
Speaker
which is set in basically the same era in the same place, making and bringing out some of the ideas in that for teachers. Do you think you do the same thing for Mezleth? Does it do something different? I think it does something really different. It is, as John says, graphic novel storytelling of the absolute highest caliber. So Ben Haggerty is, and I'm reading off the back,
00:04:24
Speaker
of the big biographies here is an honorary professor of storytelling at the Arts University of Berlin and Adam Brockbank has worked on all the Harry Potter films. These guys are grade A graphic novel storytellers and the quality shines through
00:04:42
Speaker
So I'm not sure it's the Mesolithic setting that makes the book. It's actually the quality of the storytelling. The Mesolithic is just the set. And it's quite a simple, quite an easily accessible set. Do you think so? But it is just the set. Yeah, it's the storytelling, whether it be from Eastern European myth, whether it be just from Ben's imagination, it's the stories themselves.
00:05:10
Speaker
that shine through in this. Yeah, because the Mesolithic, you're right, the Mesolithic is kind of a set. But do you think, Erin, do you think there's something special about that era that kind of captures our imagination? Or could it be set anywhere and weave all of these stories into it? Or any time? I think the matter. I'm not sure how much it conveys Mesolithic
00:05:40
Speaker
information. I'm not saying it doesn't. But I, again, I agree that it's the quality of the storytelling that captivates a reader more than the detail of the data, which is possibly the point. I think it sneaks in through the back door.
00:06:03
Speaker
Yes, yeah, I mean, obviously, I think the most successful books that I've talked about that are set in prehistory and not driven by the evidence, they're driven by the story. And that is the way it just has to be. Now I should say, so let's talk, yeah.
00:06:25
Speaker
I'm gonna just kind of set the scene a bit more with the book and where it's set. It's supposed to be set in 10,000 years ago in Britain and yet there are some interesting points in the story where things have been brought from basically all over Europe. It's centred around a boy called Poika, that's how I'm gonna pronounce it anyway, who's a bit of a risk taker and he causes lots of problems and then kind of tries to get out of them as well.
00:06:55
Speaker
So he gets gored by a bull at one point, which is obviously pretty serious in the Mesolithic. It gets taken by a rival tribe and then there are stories that other people tell him.
00:07:11
Speaker
if you think it could be set anywhere. I think there is quite a lot of the Mesolithic but there's really small details like there's a lovely dugout boat for instance, there's a fishing spear,
00:07:28
Speaker
which has we've just kind of that's just been found complete with the bone prongs and the flint in the middle that it kind of looks like a trident really I suppose. That features in there. There's Starcar Antler frontlets obviously and they're part of the of the of the hunting ceremony. I mean did anyone else see anything that I mean what
00:07:57
Speaker
What's the Mesolithic? What was the Mesolithic actually like, Matt? I think it is, as depicted within Wolf Brother, within Mesolith and within books like The Gathering Knight by Margaret Elphiston, it's very much a tales of survival on the coastal fringe or maybe in the
00:08:26
Speaker
in the wild woods are indeed up in the uplands as well. And I think it's a set that lends itself to storytelling because it's so simple. It's almost like a desert island. It's something that people can pretty quickly grasp. And what's interesting about Meslo is it started kind of slow with a hunting scene.
00:08:52
Speaker
and then starts to ramp up the cosmology of what these people might have believed. I think where the archaeology comes in, there are some really good parallels or anecdotes that they've brought in from real archaeological discoveries.
00:09:15
Speaker
I think they sometimes drift a little, so there's a little bit of Paleolithic stuff in there, like the cave art. Yes. But I don't really mind that. And as long as you're not being overly worried about this being interpretation, about being factual, and you're quite happy with it being fictional, then the atmosphere that it gives of the Mesolithic, of what it must have been like
00:09:45
Speaker
to live in these small, tight family groups and to be continuously on the move and always thinking seasonally and about what you were going to be doing next month, whether you're doing that as a family group or whether you're meeting up as a tribal group.
Portrayal of Women in 'Mesolith': A Critique
00:10:01
Speaker
It's a really good insight into what it must have been like in Mesolithic Europe.
00:10:07
Speaker
I mean, I didn't get the sense that they moved around that much, actually. And obviously, we have got more evidence recently that people were staying still for maybe 100 years in the same spot, or at least some people staying there, like at Starcar or at Howick, where we've got houses that stand for a very long time. So I mean, I don't get the sense when I look at the evidence of the Mesolithic that's coming out that it actually was a period of
00:10:35
Speaker
just surviving. And as you say, as it comes out of the book, you do get out of Mesolith, you get a sense of that wider cosmology, particularly. I mean,
00:10:46
Speaker
One thing that really worried me was about how women are portrayed in this. And I know you're worried about that as well, Erin. And the Gathering Knight was much, much better in terms of the representation of women's roles. What was it that, I mean, if you can describe, Erin, how it looks in this book to be a woman in the Mesolithic? Oh, it's the Kardashian's in it.
00:11:15
Speaker
It's a little clearer, isn't it? It's women in bikinis making themselves beautiful, looking for husbands, learning certain skills at home such as sewing, but they're not authentic. For me, it spoils us.
00:11:43
Speaker
I think it's such a small thing that could have been done just slightly differently. It could have completely changed the way it feels to read. It's the one story in the book. I think the one you're talking about is when they find star husbands that it goes beyond the realm of the Mesolithic set and it turns into complete fantasy fiction.
00:12:11
Speaker
and it really jars, it sticks in the throat, that one story. I really don't like it. Yeah, but I agree with you. It's a- It does. The inclusion of the Star Wolf and the Star Fox is a stroke of genius because you've got the Star Fox as a constellation in the northern hemisphere and you've got the constellation of the southern hemisphere
00:12:40
Speaker
So that's a fantastic way of geographically situating where the story is being told. Which I think is absolutely brilliant. And we've got mythological references to the shape shifting. We don't know if they're brothers or if they're... So there's a whole pantheon worldwide of mythologies that we encapsulate in that one story, which is
00:13:08
Speaker
fantastic. Just that's on its own is the story. But the application for the women in there is beautiful. And yes, it's jarring. And that for me, doesn't, that little bit doesn't work. This backstory I've written in another book. Do you know what I'm, I just... In this context, no.
00:13:32
Speaker
I don't think that's in my version. Is that in Mezalith 2? Because there is a sequel to it now. Ah, there you go. I need to get hold of that. But I think what's interesting in the first Mezalith as well, what I got from it was that women are basically, they're either maidens, they're mothers or they're crones, which is, I mean, I don't know if they went for that specifically to make an archetype, to go for those archetypes, or whether it was just a slip again, because
00:14:01
Speaker
It does seem like a very limited range of things.
00:14:06
Speaker
Well, and also it sounds quite interesting contrast to the three main men, you know, the boy, the man and his father and the, I guess it's a grandfather there, because certainly at the beginning of the second book, they are portrayed as being outcast, not outcasts, but being all broken and, you know, not, not perfect and very different from the rest of the tribe. How do they refer to themselves? Like Hook Hand, Limpy and something
Balancing Creativity and Accuracy in Archaeological Narratives
00:14:35
Speaker
or other.
00:14:36
Speaker
They depict themselves very much as anti-heroes and it was nice to see that so that they weren't all sort of prehistoric superheroes. And it's just funny that they didn't do the same with the female characters as well. I'm just trying to find... To catch you up... I completely agree with John. Catch you up with two of them. Yeah, well, they're women. The females. Oh, hooky, limpy and baldy. How is it? That's it.
00:15:06
Speaker
Um, the female story in Mesooth 2 is much stronger, um, but it's no less disconcerting. So there's a great ritual where the girls become winning and paint themselves in. It's called red fat, and you see it's basically over there. Yeah. Um, and it's all about getting a husband. Right. And they dress themselves up to be beautiful, to get husbands. And the star, or star box story that
00:15:36
Speaker
have too beautiful to walk and so therefore they're going to have a story. Wow. So they have a story husband, you see. Right. And then when that doesn't work, we realise they sort of do them to the world. Now as an explanation for the constellation, it works beautifully. And when they're there, they meet a
00:16:04
Speaker
the US for the ring essentially, a huge woman who is breastfeeding on a pair of male twins with giants. So you've got all these methodological and confirmation related references in the story, which is great, apart from the fact that story is situated in an overriding narrative where women are as soon as they become mature, married off, and their focus
00:16:33
Speaker
is to be married off. Yeah. And that's it. That's what we're going to do. That's all they do. But in The Star Story, in The Star Story, that's what they do. But Star Story talks about them needing to be able to prepare a caucus. Have you ever tried preparing a caucus with a flint? It's really hard work, incredibly physically arduous.
00:17:03
Speaker
But these women aren't considered strong enough to be hunting. Now, I'm five foot two and I can hunt. I can shoot a bow and I can force fear. Yeah. I can hunt. Yeah, absolutely. I know I can't shoot the carpets at the flint because I've tried it. But it's a big challenge in the book.
00:17:24
Speaker
That's a bit problematic. So it does seem a shame because I think, you know, from ethnographic parallels, it looks like in the hunter-gatherer period of the Mesolithic and earlier, there wasn't quite so much of this whole, you know, the women are only around to make babies and, you know, do the stuff at home. It was slightly more equal and it would be nice to, I mean, I'm not,
00:17:51
Speaker
I do sometimes have a problem when books about prehistory make it all too nice and everything's so good and all these women have power and there's nothing wrong going on because clearly women were treated differently in the past and that's what we're struggling against.
00:18:13
Speaker
when you go into a period like the Mesolithic where it's possible that they were treated or did have some more power and more respect and did lots and lots of work. It does seem a shame to to get rid of that. Anyway, anyway.
00:18:31
Speaker
So I really need to get hold of that mesolith too. I think the first one as well does have notes of these kind of European folk tales embedded in it. Like the I mean the swan woman who is buried actually at Ved bake cemetery in Denmark
00:18:55
Speaker
makes an appearance and that was it was lovely to see her but again her story is a little I suppose at least she does something she is she is the shaman where she goes and gets eaten by fishes doesn't she as she in the
Interweaving Tradition and Archaeology in 'Mesolith'
00:19:10
Speaker
story and then she comes back to life which is kind of a nice shamanic thing to be doing so she has a little bit of power but then she becomes kind of the little wife who dies at childbirth so
00:19:24
Speaker
To be fair, I think they pack so much into the first book in terms of quality storytelling that I certainly didn't notice any gender inequalities. It is really just about Poika and what he gets up to, and it's about the stories that are told around him, whether it be about the horror of the big blue baby, the man-eating Erga,
00:19:53
Speaker
Um, or the, the, the Swan Lord and his captive daughters or the, the, the, the, the old, the old woman, the Raven woman who has elements of the, of Baba Yaga and Eastern European myths. They, they pack so much into that first book. Um, you know, it's just swept away, uh, in, in, in, in the storytelling, whereas, you know, book two has its moments. Um, I'm not sure they're ever going to get around to a book three.
00:20:23
Speaker
I hope they do, but Book One stands on its own as one of the greatest pieces of creative, archaeological, narrative reconstruction that I've ever read. I think it really is fantastic, and I certainly wouldn't want to worry too much about the archaeology of it or the social aspects of it, because it's just a great piece of storytelling.
00:20:51
Speaker
Well I'd like to beg to differ but we're going to take a little break right now and then when we come back we'll argue a little bit more about this.
00:21:07
Speaker
Telling a different story to the traditional lines of archaeology, the Anarchiologists podcast seeks the stories and ideas that are often overlooked or not considered real archaeology. Video games, anarchism, and archaeology in the middle of hostile areas. Post Tristan doesn't search under the rocks. He destroys them. Available on iTunes every fortnight.
00:21:33
Speaker
Hello and welcome back. Now it's getting a little bit heated so maybe we should move on to not talking about the representation of women but I just want to say right at the beginning of Metalith 1 Poika says I don't want to stay behind whilst you go hunting. Stay behind with the women and the weak. So there you go. Anyway, I rest my case.
00:21:55
Speaker
Now, John, Matt has mentioned that quite a lot of the imagery in this is kind of from horror films and that seems to be a thing in a lot of graphic novels. Is that necessary, do you think, in this? I mean, I'm not saying I don't like it, but what do you think? Well, it's fun to draw, I suppose.
00:22:16
Speaker
I think what is interesting about Meselith is that I think in a lot of archaeological contexts, people try and keep the real and the supernatural separate in terms of stylistic approach.
00:22:30
Speaker
And it's interesting that both in Mesolith and in Age of Bronze, both the writers and the artists have taken a completely opposite approach, which is to make the supernatural and the real in the same style. So you're never really certain whether what you're seeing is real or supernatural. And it's an interesting, it's a very kind of anti-archaeological approach where we're very careful
00:22:53
Speaker
to separate out things which are, you know, more plausible from things that are less plausible in our interpretations. And I think that's what makes measles feel so different from most archaeological texts. But also is it that I mean, we're always saying that people in the past wouldn't have separated out the the real and the metaphysical quite so much as we do. And is it possibly a need to kind of show that
00:23:24
Speaker
Well, yes, I
Symbolic Metaphors in 'Mesolith'
00:23:25
Speaker
suppose so. But then if you think about it, neither do we. If all the blights go out, if the power goes and you're stuck in a building that you don't know, you imagine all sorts of things. It's not just imagine them. You genuinely see them. You genuinely think that somebody is 10 feet away from you coming to get you or whatever.
00:23:42
Speaker
So I think it's a necessary way to show that kind of feeling, which we generally don't talk about, we generally don't acknowledge, and we do put it in our horror films and so on. But as you were saying, there's a lot of horror film or horror genre imagery in the books. And I think that's their way of telling us this is that kind of moment.
00:24:08
Speaker
Because a big blue baby that turns into a flesh-eating monster is pretty disturbing. I wonder, does anybody have any knowledge of any traditional tales that tell about flesh-eating demon babies? Does anyone know, Erin? I did ask my wife. Not as I found yet.
00:24:31
Speaker
So I wondered, because I mean, some of them are clearly going to be from traditional tales, like the Swan Woman, but some of them I wasn't so sure. OK, Miesleth II has two giant babies in it, Ken. Doesn't it really? So if they do a third one, we're going to be in the triplet range.
00:24:53
Speaker
the folk stories that they've included run between Ireland and Russia and there's this fantastic mix of Irish and Russian tales with a bit of Flemish and a bit of Dutch and a bit of Danish thrown in there and quite a lot of Japanese actually with the swan archetype even the way she's drawn
00:25:16
Speaker
and the tales that are told within that. But she is, I mean that's also... But as for the giant baby, it's the eternally hungry baby. It's almost for me a metaphor of what having a baby in this space is like, in that they're a darn sight bigger than they physically are and they are perpetually hungry. So it's back to that physical metaphysical
00:25:43
Speaker
reality twist where the two sides blur and what appears to be is not tangible. That's how I've taken it. I don't know about everybody else. Going back to what John said, I thought how the blue baby is then repeated throughout the books because that
00:26:08
Speaker
that tail has clearly sunk into Poika's head. And he starts thinking, he sees a blue baby when he's in the cave, when he's at the cliff looking at the cloud. That blue baby has really made an impression, made an impression on me as well. Yeah, it's pretty scary thing. I mean, I also thought that it was a metaphor for the kind of the germs inside him that the infection inside him that he has to then beat when he's when he's lying, recovering from his wound.
00:26:39
Speaker
I mean one of the, so the Swan Woman that we mentioned, we've talked about her quite a lot, I mean that's also the Wayland, the Smith's tale isn't it? So there's completely bound in and what's interesting is that that
00:26:55
Speaker
That burial is a real burial with a young woman and a little baby that clearly died in childbirth being buried on a swan's wing. So could it be? There was some interesting historical linguistic research recently, wasn't there, that some of our fairy tales might go back all the way to the Bronze Age and even earlier. And do you think this kind of is an example of one of those?
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's clearly the idea, isn't it? It's clearly the idea that as a storyteller, you want to make those kind of connections, you want to try and explore those kind of connections. And again, that's something we we tend not to do in formal archaeological texts. It just seems all too, you know, subjective. But it's really nice to see somebody doing it. I think when I when I commission a reconstruction drawing,
00:27:51
Speaker
I always think of there's two different ways about going about doing it. You can do the traditional archaeological reconstruction drawing, which is always based on archaeological evidence. It's demonstrating things like how people dressed. It's demonstrating the construction of buildings. It's an overview of a settlement. It's maybe how you used an artifact. And that's quite a traditional way of looking at it. But you can also have the creative narrative reconstruction.
00:28:16
Speaker
which looks at exploring place or myth or the concept of prehistory, but in a more creative way, but that's not necessarily reconstruction. And I think as a discipline, we're now more happy with the idea that you can have both that interpretative, archeological, very much demonstrating the science
00:28:42
Speaker
And you can have that interpreted creative narrative where you're actually trying to tell a story. And what Mesolith is to me is just a really, really high quality example of that creative narrative reconstruction where you've said, yeah, look, it's based in archaeology. It's based in prehistory, what we know or what we think of the Mesolithic. But actually, we've just let the storytellers go wild.
00:29:12
Speaker
And as long as you know that, then it's certainly something I would put into kids' hands and go, look, read that. If you want to know more, then go and read a book about the Mesolithic. But it is what it is. It's just a really.
00:29:26
Speaker
And that is actually that part of the problem there is that the first kind of reconstruction you're talking about, you know, the very specific one is the one that archaeologists use. They want to know how the Jews were made or whatever. But it's the second kind that non archaeologists are interested in.
00:29:42
Speaker
I hope to think that we're moving beyond just that. Yes, yes, I would be very nice. But I think it's, it's, I think archaeology as a discipline still doesn't know how to make best use of those second kinds. Yes, they might, you know, we might like them as individuals. And yes, certain directors or project managers will commission them for whatever reason. But it's, it's
00:30:09
Speaker
How do you use that? How do you actually use that in archaeology that I think that question still hasn't really been fully answered properly to the point where people will produce that second kind instinctively?
Challenges of Accuracy in Archaeological Storytelling
00:30:22
Speaker
I know that all three of you are really working on that second kind of archaeological interpretation, either through comics or commissioning or through your work, Erin, in poetry and storytelling.
00:30:36
Speaker
and the geomythology. But how widespread actually is it? I think that's, you know, it would be lovely if, as you say, it becomes more instinctual. But are people still afraid of commissioning and doing this kind of work?
00:30:53
Speaker
I could, can I jump in there? It's done. And John mentioned it earlier, it's down to money. It's mezzolan is, is properly high caliber stuff. And to do that, you have to get the best storytellers, the best graphic novels. And to do that, you then have to lose a bit of the control that most archaeologists would want in the interpretation of their site, you actually have to hand it over to the artists and just say, look, you know, get on with it. That's that, you know, that we do have to
00:31:24
Speaker
We have to be honest with ourselves and say that there's interpretation, there's factual interpretation, and then there's letting the creatives get on with it. And I think a lot more of that would be done if we could come up. Could I come in there? Go on, Erin.
00:31:47
Speaker
Sorry, facts are still facts and fiction is still fiction. For me, where there is factual data, I like to see a story stick to it because there are enough gaps in between the facts for the fiction to run wild. So
00:32:08
Speaker
where there are details that can be anchored down into data as known at the time of creation of a piece of work, I do think that should be accurately represented. And I'm a little wary with Mesolith 2, with aspects of that, particularly in relation to the hunting of horses, which is a very contestable
00:32:35
Speaker
topic and the way they've shown it. I can't fit any archaeological data to match the way they've shown it. And that for me is problematic. I'm very, very happy to have the blurring that fact fiction blurring in the representation. Does that make sense? I totally agree with you. I think if when we're looking at trying to
00:32:59
Speaker
to be more creative with archeology and with the sites or places or artifacts that we're trying to explain, we need to be very clear about including the methodology. If you're doing archeological reconstruction or archeological narrative or indeed archeological visualization, then you have to base it in the science and have an element of the science and the methodology within that. Otherwise, you're just going into the complete way
00:33:29
Speaker
creative narrative stuff, which is great. We all love it. And there's an element of projects or commissioning projects or running projects that we should think about doing that because it's what the outreach and what people really like. But I think that there's this there's a kind of blurred zone in between.
00:33:51
Speaker
I think if we were clever about it, a bit canny about it, we could get some really good work done creatively, but based on the archaeology. Yes. John, you were trying to say something earlier. Is that a good point? Yes. And Maisel if II doesn't do that for me. No, no. Maisel if II doesn't do that for me. Sorry, John.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, no, I completely agree with all this. And I think one of the things that archaeology and archaeological visualizers of all kinds need to work on is a way of doing that, is a way of signaling in a work what evidence is used for what elements of it and what elements of it are based on this degree of speculation and so on, which in itself is quite a difficult thing to do. It is. How would you approach it, John?
00:34:45
Speaker
And this is one of the things that we tried to do out at Chantelier when I was illustrated there is exactly that, come up with a way of doing it. And the best way we could do it, the best idea I suppose we had at the time was to try and incorporate all kinds of, you know, hovers and hyperlinks and stuff that would, you know, in the digital image would allow you to sort of pop windows out, the kind of primitive form of GIS.
00:35:09
Speaker
But I found that problematic because you could still extract the image away from all that information. And that was one of the reasons why I ended up with comics because it was much more difficult to extract the text and the sort of explanatory part of the information away from the image. So I'm still thinking that that is the direction that I would head to do that kind of signposting. I'm not sure how you do it in other kinds of media or in other ways.
00:35:39
Speaker
Yeah, because I've seen it in other picture books for younger children, because Mezleth, I wouldn't give to an age seven-year-old who are the people studying the Stone Age in England anyway, is to have information at the back of the book saying, oh look, this is the real object and this is where it came from.
00:36:02
Speaker
And that's quite nice, but it does bring it back to that whole factual thing away from the story. But then how else do you do it? Do you have footnotes or something? That would really ruin it, wouldn't it? Can I jump in? There are lessons, I think, in the Japanese approach. Everybody wanted to jump in on that one. Matt, we haven't heard... Yeah. The best archaeological, creative,
00:36:32
Speaker
narrative and reconstruction that I have ever seen, right? And you need a drum roll at this point. But it's a Steven Beasley, who's a really good graphic designer or illustrator. And it was way back when I was a kid, and they were the timelines of time travels with us born time travels with the Vikings in particular, where the kid put on
00:36:59
Speaker
a kind of time-traveling helmet, and would then go and float, to all extent and purposes, over a scene from the Viking age. And they were creative in that there was lots going on, there's lots of people in there, whether it be attacking a monastery or building a Viking boat,
00:37:22
Speaker
but they were informative because there's lots of little, you know, captions, like John says, you can't, you actually can't disentangle the information from the narrative. It's all in there. You have to see the whole, and as you look at it. And I thought that, well, I always say that the Stephen Beasley Osborns were brilliant. Sorry, Erin, you wanted to say something. I think, Maisolee,
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think Maiselith does this very well, actually, as John had said before about the way it interweaves the metaphysical with the physical and the data with the mythological. My quibble is that the data isn't always accurate data, and so then you
00:38:16
Speaker
where the information is coming from. That I do find problematic. And I have just remembered actually in relation to your earlier question about the blue baby in that the color blue is generically taken to mean creation. So it's often used within creation myths to indicate the other. So Kali, Krishna, et cetera.
00:38:42
Speaker
that colour of indigo. So maybe there's an element of that going in with the blue babies. Oh, that's interesting. Well, right now we have to take a quick break. I know it's getting really interesting. We'll be back in a couple of minutes.
00:39:08
Speaker
Did aliens build Stonehenge? Did the Easter Island statues walk? Did the Vikings colonize Midwest America? What does mainstream archaeology have to say about all of this? Listen to the Archaeological Fantasies podcast and learn about popular archaeological mysteries. Hoax or fact? Learn to tell the difference with Dr. Kenneth Fader and co-host Sarah of the Archaeophantasies blog.
00:39:29
Speaker
Check out the show on iTunes and Stitcher Radio, and at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com, forward slash, Arkey Fantasies, and get ready to think critically.
Funding Challenges in Archaeological Narratives
00:39:40
Speaker
Let's get back to the show.
00:39:50
Speaker
Hi, and we're back again. So we're having quite a lot of discussion over this Mesolith book, which may or may not be set in the Mesolithic with the use of its
00:40:06
Speaker
evidence from all over the place or lack of evidence where it's created the ideas. Now, we were talking about whether or not these books need to be grounded more in evidence, where the evidence exists. But part of what I like about Mezlith, and I think you mentioned it before, Matt, about how he ends up, it's supposed to be set in Britain, but he ends up in Lasko for some reason, and then possibly Chauvet,
00:40:35
Speaker
cave as well in the south of France, where there's all the handprints or at least the hand negatives on the wall. There are other caves that have those handprints, not so much in Lascaux, I don't think. And obviously you've got the dade-ish stuff coming in and Erin, you've talked about all the different myths coming from all over the place.
00:40:59
Speaker
And, Matt, you did say you'd be happy to give this to a child and say, read that and then find out something else, you know, read something, a proper book. Well, you didn't, no, I'm putting words into your mouth, you didn't say a proper book about the Mesolithic. I think that these are really, really interesting books, because of what they say about
00:41:27
Speaker
us as archaeologists. We can't tell Ben Haggerty and Adam Brockbank how to display the mesolithic. They're telling stories, using the mesolithic as a set, and they're doing a really good job of it. What we lack, what we're not very good at as a discipline, is picking up on that kind of
00:41:47
Speaker
creative angle and actually funding it properly to deliver our own aims. So we wait for TV to turn up and film our sites and then moment they're not doing it properly. We wait for the press, maybe we put a press release about something and we won't let the press don't cover it properly. If we want to do it properly, we have to put in money and time and investment in terms of resources, in terms of
00:42:16
Speaker
using similar high quality visuals, similar high quality stories that speak to a wider range of people than maybe just the archaeological enthusiast and delivers more than just the interpretation panel on site, which is always the lowest common denominator. And that's what really gets me. We can tell a tale when it's delivered in three small paragraphs
00:42:45
Speaker
that get progressively more detailed because we know that most people just stop reading after the first paragraph and look at the picture. I think we have to take the challenge that's been thrown down by something like Mesolith and say that this is a great way of delivering archaeological methodology and information as well as the story that comes out of it in terms of prehistory.
00:43:11
Speaker
But to do that and to retain control when I do, I'm sorry, I'm beginning to rant. We have to try and do it. Yeah. And I know you're very committed to commissioning this kind of work. And you've produced the lovely stuff. Sorry, Erin.
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, some of us are doing this. There's no shortage of people capable of doing it. The problem, as you were stressing, is funding. And that the funding consistently comes from the science side. And I mean, I get up as a matter of course, but
00:43:50
Speaker
People look horrified when they realise they've got to pay for poetry, they've got to pay for artwork, they've got to pay for cartoons, they've got to pay for theatre, they've got to pay for film. They're quite happy to pay me to go and put in a borehole.
00:44:06
Speaker
or take people on the science walk. And that's a cultural issue to do with finance and where we place importance. It's not a lack of skill set within the discipline. I agree. There is some amazingly creative people out there. Yeah, I think the discipline actually
00:44:25
Speaker
has got these skills. Yeah, I mean, definitely all the people, most of the people. We're just not funded. Most of the people I've talked to on this podcast and many people have met elsewhere in archaeology have got so many amazing skills and doing some brilliant stuff. Like you, Erin, for instance, the team Build and Burn, Kenneth Brophy and Gavin McKenzie doing their
00:44:51
Speaker
brilliant events where they build something and then burn it massive event is absolutely great and your comics John and Katie Whitaker we talked to and Hannah Sackett doing some lovely comic illustrations as well
00:45:08
Speaker
And I take my hat after all illustrators actually, I just think you tell a story in so many brilliant ways. But John, there is this issue, isn't there, where artists are supposed to give their work for free for some reason.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yes. Yes. I think particularly where the sciences are involved, as you know, where the second rung on the ladder or the second tier or whatever, there's always this sense that it's not quite as important as the science as I was saying. And it's yeah, it puts a lot of people off and it puts a lot of people within the discipline taking those skills that they have or those ideas that they have any further than just, you know, a particular
Valuing Artistic Contributions in Archaeology
00:45:58
Speaker
level. And that's why I think
00:46:00
Speaker
Internally, archaeology will always struggle to produce something like measles. Just as I think, unfortunately, archaeology struggles to produce really good quality 3D computer graphics for the same reason, that it's just not seen as important enough for people to get the funding and the training and the opportunities to move beyond a certain level.
00:46:23
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I work with the public all the time and with children. We have to eat. Yeah, absolutely. Just a little. And, you know, a bit of bread and water. But you know, you have amazing skills and which you've spent years and years developing and honing and
00:46:47
Speaker
It's an amazing thing that needs to be well rewarded. When I talk to children and other people, families, that's my main audience when I'm not on the podcast going out and actually talking to people. It's this kind of stuff that they really engage with and really want because you're not going to
00:47:12
Speaker
nobody's going to go out there and read an archaeological report and I read the reports and I make them interesting to people when I meet them and pick out the really cool stuff and I wish that it was more possible to, as you say, to put more money into 3D reconstructions and comics and great
00:47:34
Speaker
TV shows and things like that. How do we go forward with this? Can we put something together to some kind of funding bid for something or other? Come on. I think it really has to start from the ground up, from the grocery top. It's not even... Sorry, go on, John.
00:47:59
Speaker
Oh, at TAG this year, we had the citations cafe and people were showing all really interesting visualization projects they were working on. There was this general agreement in the discussion that one of the things that is lacking in archaeology is not, one of the problems that has happened in archaeology is not de-skilling in terms of visualization, which is sort of a buzz phrase or an idea that's been kicking around for about 15 years, but a general lack of visual awareness
00:48:27
Speaker
It doesn't even go as far as the skills. It stops at awareness. And it feels like too many people within archaeology don't treat visualization as important for anything. So that's why you have these dreadful PowerPoint lectures where, you know, people just read from slides or that's why if you're working as an art editor in a journal, you get maps that you can't read. I mean, I think it's less the skills and more just the appreciation that visualization is important. Erin, you were going to say something.
00:48:58
Speaker
Yeah, can I come in there? I completely and utterly agree with John, but yes. But then from working outside of the academy, it's getting the tourist groups, the councils, the galleries, etc.
00:49:20
Speaker
to work with experts to check the data that they're using, because money is being put into iBeacons. It's being put into reconstructions. It's just they're not being fact checked. So you computer graphics and you look at them and you go, but the C wasn't there. Why is the C there? Nobody's thought to consult an archeologist.
00:49:46
Speaker
And I see this again and again and again. And even when we go to the meetings and say, we will do this for free, they still don't use us. And so the problem is more than just within the profession of archaeology. It's outside of it and the view that archaeology, the way people view archaeology,
00:50:13
Speaker
from the outside. That's really interesting. It isn't given the level of respect because they'll get a mathematician to check something. They'll get a historian sometimes to check things, but they don't listen to the archaeologists.
00:50:35
Speaker
How do we change that? I mean, really, that's the opposite of what we're talking about, isn't it? It's almost like there's two problems in that the archaeologists are not engaging with visualisation very well, and different ways of showing their evidence, but also the people who are doing that are not talking to the archaeologists. So we really need to form some kind of forum where we can all get together and chat.
00:51:01
Speaker
Can I just give an example of the only example I know, actually, of where that boundary was really successfully crossed?
Conclusion: Visualization and Storytelling in Archaeology
00:51:10
Speaker
There's a classicist at Nottingham called Stephen Hodkinson, and he was called in as the advisor on a graphic novel called 300, which was about Spartans, sorry, not 300, three, which was a graphic novel sort of to counter the over-the-topness of 300.
00:51:29
Speaker
And he so much enjoyed his experience working as an as an advisor to a top level writer and artist team that he decided to start to start creating his own graphic novel or his own graphic informational material about Sparta. But he is very much and I'm sure wouldn't mind me describing him. So he's very much an old school classicist.
00:51:55
Speaker
you know, he looks like an old-school classicist, he dresses like an old-school classicist, he has the eye and the mind for detail of an old-school classicist. But at the same time, he also somehow understands that it is important for him to communicate well with an audience outside academia. And he's doing a fantastic job. I mean, he does a lot of public lectures, and now he's interested in comics. So I think it is possible, and I think people like him
00:52:20
Speaker
need to be brought into the fold to ask, what made you jump across the line? What made you cross that boundary? What made you see this kind of art-based outreach as important? Just as an example. Yeah. What would you say, John, to people who are wanting to actually get into comic? Yeah, I mean, it is, of course. Sorry, Erin. To get into comic creation, what would you say
00:52:48
Speaker
Any advice?
00:52:51
Speaker
read a lot of comics. I think the first thing to do is to make yourself familiar with the medium. So yeah, reading a lot of comics is important. But also, as we've been talking about, think about how your data can be translated into a story without leaving any of that data behind. I think it's possible. But I don't think you necessarily need to go to the scale that Mieslitt does. Actually, it's quite interesting that Mieslitt is written in a series of chapters, each one as a sort of standalone story.
00:53:21
Speaker
If you have a particularly interesting burial or a particularly interesting artifact or a particularly interesting sequence of events in a trench, you can turn that into a story without necessarily having to have, you know, a beginning, middle and end from the Neolithic all the way up until the Industrial Revolution. You know, it's not necessary to do that kind of grand narrative. You can make these little snapshot portrait sort of postcards. Erin, sorry, I interrupted you.
00:53:47
Speaker
I think I forgot what I was going to say. I completely agree with John and actually you saying that a tag was a boon to me because it made me realise I didn't have to bring and writing an entire novel. I could think about drawing and writing individual stories.
00:54:08
Speaker
And that made the whole concept suddenly so much more attainable. But there are lots of people who are availing themselves off in tourist boards and TV groups and schools, etc., in this advisory capacity.
00:54:28
Speaker
But what I keep experiencing is that we're there, we go to the meetings, we give the information, we offer the advice, but then we get overruled on the, oh, but this looks pretty good.
00:54:42
Speaker
And then, oh, well, we were following the story. Yes, but you're now giving the wrong information. And I think that did certainly happen to Stephen, and he gave a very interesting presentation about it. And I think that's what then made him realize that if he wanted to have less of those kind of moments, he had to take charge of the whole process himself. So he went out and found an artist. Yeah. Absolutely. So, Matt, we have to put ourselves out there. We have to do it.
00:55:11
Speaker
If you want to do it properly, you've got to do it yourself. But the problem is, is that to get the quality of somebody like Meselith, Ben Haggerty, Adam Brockman, even 300, which I would stand by as an exceptionally great piece of storytelling in terms of Bronze Age Greece.
00:55:38
Speaker
It's impossible. It's impossible for us to do it, but we can aim high, but we have to do it ourselves. So it's not about offering ourselves up to others to help advise or to... It is about making sure that the importance of visualization within archaeology is always front and center within any project or any booklet, in any interpretation,
00:56:08
Speaker
It's the images that count. And it's the storytelling behind the images. And it's the information that backs up that storytelling. And it's about that conscious decision about whether you want to do it creatively, and you want to make it very clear that this is imagination, this fiction, or you're doing it, trying to be more factual about it. And you're trying to be more or construction based on evidence
00:56:36
Speaker
in which case it's all about the caption. But going back to what folk have said earlier on, visualization is absolutely key to archaeology and to in terms of to talking about archaeology, what we think about what we found. We can do it textually. We were just talking to ourselves. We do it by illustration, by visualization,
00:57:01
Speaker
we're bringing in the wider audience. And we have to put in money. You have to put in resource, time and effort. And it's shocking if, as a discipline, we've all lost that. Because we used to have it. It used to be front and center of many archaeological publications. It was that plan, the beautiful plan right at the start, or the reconstruction drawing at the end. And yeah,
00:57:31
Speaker
visualization is key and we have to keep pushing that. Yeah and with Mesolith I think that because of the beautiful visualization and the format of the book and the quality of it, it's really kind of bringing that archaeology to new audiences that will not necessarily have thought about that period or archaeology or prehistory or any of that at all.
00:57:55
Speaker
Now, sadly, we've got to bring this podcast to an end. It's gone so quickly because we've been just constant back and forth. It's been brilliant talking to you and arguing with you. Thank you very much, everybody. I knew that you would be a great set of guests. So can I say thank you very much to Erin for soldiering through. You didn't cough once, Erin.
00:58:18
Speaker
Meeting the mic is a wonderful thing. Well done, thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you, and thank you very much, John. It's been brilliant to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. You did rant a little bit, but we love that. Absolutely love that.
00:58:40
Speaker
No, don't apologize. Now, I think that we all know how to contact all of you, and I will put links to your Twitter or websites in the show notes if people want to contact you and ask you to do some work, or maybe in Matt's case, ask you for money. So that would, that'd be really good, thank you. And what,
00:59:11
Speaker
It's now the time I should say it's the age of austerity. Well, maybe not after June the 8th, who knows, but let's not get political or any more political. So thank you so much. It's been really good fun.
00:59:29
Speaker
I'll tune into the next episode of pre-histories where I'm going to be talking to Jane Brain and Andrew Fitzpatrick about a new book that Jane has both drawn and written because it is a graphic novel really. Yes, it is. And it's about the Amesbury Archer. She was the first person to ever draw the Amesbury Archer and now she's drawn his life. So that should be a really, really interesting one as well.
00:59:59
Speaker
So, I hope that you tune in for that one and thank you very much for listening today.
01:00:15
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com