Bring out your dead: people, pots and politics

Extract

When Davis and Thurman produced in 1865 their massive volume on aspects of the ancient skeletons excavated from British tombs and cemeteries, they had no interest in Victorian colonialism or establishing which early population was the most ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ or ‘inferior’, although they did recognise differences in cultural dynamics (with the Romans getting top marks). The term “race” was used for long barrow people, Romans, Saxons and others, simply to refer to populations in a time and cultural frame. I say this to dispatch the idea, common in archaeology and the media, that these early scholars were only interested in establishing hierarchies of inferiority by reference to skeletal material. If anything, Victorian science was disadvantaged by the ever present class consciousness of the times, but these early scientists did try to avoid such influences.