Making It Up by Penelope Lively Page A

for the last week of the vacation. So they nurse a pint and a packet of crisps for the entire evening, having eaten as much breakfast as they can and made their sandwiches last all day. Luke is worse than skint, according to him; the bank is getting nasty about his overdraft and he owes his mother and his aunt and the college buttery and Heffers. Not that that stops him making a good evening of it in the pub, or running that beat-up old MG that sits outside the primary school attracting much interest from the village. Eva is worried about whether or not she is going to get a grant to do her M.A. Laura has well-upholstered parents and doesn’t have to worry about grants, but she wants to go to Spain with her boyfriend and the parents are getting tight-lipped about providing the funds for this; she is on the dig to demonstrate to them how industrious and committed she can be. She phones the boyfriend from the pub each evening to complain.
    Alice herself has no surplus funds, but neither is she in debt and she knows that she can get by on her allowance because she is careful and provident. But in this climate of financial crisis that is clearly a rather boring thing to do—more boring than to be obsessed about money. So she bows to the prevailing culture and trades horror stories of indigence.
    Money is in the air, up here on the hill. Not as such—nobody needs ready cash and it is seldom seen; you would hardly know that this group was part of a cash economy. Indeed, exchange and barter seem more likely; there is a good deal of give-and-take, over the sandwiches and apples and soft drinks, during the midday break. But money strums away there in the background, lest anyone forget where and when they are. They may be up on a hillside with their hands in the detritus of the Iron Age, but it is still 1973, with all that that implies.
    How did money rate up here on the hill two thousand years ago? Was their world all about money? It was certainly about survival—about enough to eat, about cattle and crops and power, and that’s money in another form, thinks Alice.
    Occasionally, they dig up money. There are two Celtic coins and several Roman ones in the trays back at the school, neatly packaged and labeled along with all the other finds—the shards, the bones (ox, pig, sheep, human), the spindle whorls, the needles, the inscrutable lumps of metal which are in fact belt buckles or harness fittings or hilt segments or cuirass hinges or awls or gouges or pins. Artifacts. The position of each artifact has been planned—the place where it lay until one of them loosened the dirt around it with a trowel. This is the static record, and it is not the past at all but the present, since these artifacts exist today. Alice managed enough of Professor Sampson’s book, with its indigestible diagrams and graphs, to learn that the task of archaeology is to ask questions about the past of this material which is no longer in the past but very much present. The archaeologist is interested in the dynamics of past society; the challenge is to find links between statics and dynamics, to make assumptions about the middle range, which is the space between the two. These assumptions guide the archaeologist from observation of the static artifacts existing in the present to general theories about the dynamics of the past.
    But actually, thinks Alice, it is the other way round. Sorry, Professor Sampson. The dynamic is what is going on now, here, today, during these weeks that we are fossicking away up here. It is whatever happened back then that is static, unchangeable, finished with—whereas we are in this interesting capricious dynamic in which the story has yet to unfold. Luke is trying to get off with Laura. Mike Chambers fancies Laura, too, but he thinks no one has noticed. There is definitely bad blood between Professor Sampson and Mike Chambers—words in the trench yesterday that stopped just short of a full-scale