its departure from tradition, but the award had evidently increased Claudia’s reputation yet further. In 1963, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, in 1965, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She gave a series of radio broadcasts on her work in the Orkneys in 1968 and, in the early 1970s, she was the chief commentator for a long-running BBC Two television programme entitled Digging up Britain’s Past . Her fame seemed to have reached its apogee at this point. She was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge, the first British university to offer archaeology as a degree, and also accepted one from Cardiff University. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours list in 1975. Thereafter, mention of her and her publications and appearances began to drop off.
There was something missing from this glittering roll-call of achievements, Juliet realised. Aside from the honorary degree from Cambridge, which had been presented by a Vice-Chancellor who dabbled in archaeology, there were no accolades from the chief luminaries of the discipline of archaeology itself. Juliet did not know who they were, but was correct in her assumption that they would be easy enough to find. Further Google searches revealed that eminent archaeologists usually belonged to, and were accorded honours by, at least one of three august and long-established organisations: the Society of Antiquaries, the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Institute of Archaeology. A painstaking trawl of their past and present members and of the honorary memberships that they had conferred yielded no mention of Dame Claudia’s name. Juliet reflected that Claudia had been active in her field a long time ago and such organisations did not necessarily post records of all their past members. Nevertheless, the absence of any mention on their websites of such a seminal twentieth-century archaeologist was strange. Juliet recalled Oliver Sparham’s comment, as reported by Tim, that Claudia and organised societies did not mix. Apparently, she had briefly been an honorary member of the Spalding Archaeological Society, but was now estranged from that, too. Juliet sensed that if she could find out why Claudia had not been honoured by her chosen profession it might shed some light on the mystery of her disappearance.
A first step would be to find out what kind of messages Claudia had been promoting to her vast and ever-growing popular audiences between the end of the war and the mid-seventies. An initial search brought up more journal articles, for some of which only the abstracts were available to non-subscribers. However, some were also reproduced online in full. Juliet skimmed two or three of these and discovered that the hypotheses that they were presenting were identical to those of the immediate pre- and post-war articles that she had already found; some were even couched in exactly the same language. She knew that this was odd; her experience of academic didacticism was limited to what she had read during the course of her own reasonably conscientious undergraduate career, but even this cursory acquaintance with the workings of erudition had demonstrated to her that academic theories rarely stood still. Most academics modified and embellished their theories and hypotheses over time, or were constrained to do so by the publication of the counter-theories of their peers. In contrast, what Claudia had divined from the discovery of the McRae Stone and her interpretation of its writings had been frozen in time. In 1978, her conclusions, and even the way in which she expressed them, were almost exactly the same as they had been in 1938. Although quite intricately argued (but with what Juliet considered to be a flawed logic), they could be summarised in a single sentence: that several languages had developed alongside each other in prehistoric Northern Europe, one of which was far
There was something missing from this glittering roll-call of achievements, Juliet realised. Aside from the honorary degree from Cambridge, which had been presented by a Vice-Chancellor who dabbled in archaeology, there were no accolades from the chief luminaries of the discipline of archaeology itself. Juliet did not know who they were, but was correct in her assumption that they would be easy enough to find. Further Google searches revealed that eminent archaeologists usually belonged to, and were accorded honours by, at least one of three august and long-established organisations: the Society of Antiquaries, the British Archaeological Association and the Royal Institute of Archaeology. A painstaking trawl of their past and present members and of the honorary memberships that they had conferred yielded no mention of Dame Claudia’s name. Juliet reflected that Claudia had been active in her field a long time ago and such organisations did not necessarily post records of all their past members. Nevertheless, the absence of any mention on their websites of such a seminal twentieth-century archaeologist was strange. Juliet recalled Oliver Sparham’s comment, as reported by Tim, that Claudia and organised societies did not mix. Apparently, she had briefly been an honorary member of the Spalding Archaeological Society, but was now estranged from that, too. Juliet sensed that if she could find out why Claudia had not been honoured by her chosen profession it might shed some light on the mystery of her disappearance.
A first step would be to find out what kind of messages Claudia had been promoting to her vast and ever-growing popular audiences between the end of the war and the mid-seventies. An initial search brought up more journal articles, for some of which only the abstracts were available to non-subscribers. However, some were also reproduced online in full. Juliet skimmed two or three of these and discovered that the hypotheses that they were presenting were identical to those of the immediate pre- and post-war articles that she had already found; some were even couched in exactly the same language. She knew that this was odd; her experience of academic didacticism was limited to what she had read during the course of her own reasonably conscientious undergraduate career, but even this cursory acquaintance with the workings of erudition had demonstrated to her that academic theories rarely stood still. Most academics modified and embellished their theories and hypotheses over time, or were constrained to do so by the publication of the counter-theories of their peers. In contrast, what Claudia had divined from the discovery of the McRae Stone and her interpretation of its writings had been frozen in time. In 1978, her conclusions, and even the way in which she expressed them, were almost exactly the same as they had been in 1938. Although quite intricately argued (but with what Juliet considered to be a flawed logic), they could be summarised in a single sentence: that several languages had developed alongside each other in prehistoric Northern Europe, one of which was far
Similar Books
