A Matter of Stratification

Extract

Did Sir Arthur Evans find Linear B tablets on or underneath the floor of the Room of the Stirrup Jars? Do they belong to about 1400 b.c., as he maintained, or to 1200 b.c.? These may seem recondite questions, but when Professor L. R. Palmer raised them in the Observer last summer he stirred up a hornets' nest. After finding that his text had been cut, his title changed, and a reference to the Piltdown Man fraud gratuitously thrown in by the newspaper, he may have felt ruefully that he should have used a longer spoon; but his challenge to the authority of The Palace of Minos was real enough. Not unnaturally the archaeologists bristled at an intrusion by a philologist, however distinguished, into their territory, and deplored this questioning of their masterful hero, this use of the vulgar arts of publicity to advance a scholarly argument. Charges and rejoinders flew briskly to and fro; there were reproaches of sensationalism and vilification, of putting discredited technical arguments before lay readers to blind them with science. For a while an old-fashioned whiff of odium philologicum hung in the air, until the two parties agreed to await the full publication of the disputed facts, and hostilities were followed by an uneasy truce.