The ultimate post-excavation experience: fictionalising La Hougue Bie
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 16/05/2016

Not many archaeologists have gone on to write novels, and those who have (e.g. Francis Pryor’s The Lifers’ Club, Glyn Daniel’s The Cambridge Murders) have more often set their novels in the contemporary world of their own professional lives than in the past worlds that they have spent their lives studying. My own project, as an archaeologist turned novelist, is a different one. I have now published three historical novels, all of which draw directly on the archaeological record, as well as on historical sources, basing my settings on excavated sites; and my characters, in some cases on historically documented people, and in other cases on archaeologically recorded burials. Both my first novel, Undreamed Shores, and my third, Omphalos, draw directly on my own published archaeological research. Crafting them was, self-consciously, a literary, rather than an archaeological, undertaking, but I was also conscious of building on my earlier
archaeological work and, in doing so, of posing questions, the answers to which were largely, or entirely inaccessible, to the archaeologist I had previously been. Some of these questions are posed by Margaret Elphinstone and Caroline Wickham-Jones (2012), in their exploration of “the blank spaces” and “forgotten stories” that lie between the “words of archaeological narrative.” What were people called? What did they eat for breakfast? What
were their creation myths? Others suggested themselves as the stories unfolded. How might time have been divided up? How did prehistoric “exchange” actually function, on the level of conversations and relationships between individuals? What was the emotional landscape of people in the remote past? In Omphalos, I returned to a specific archaeological site, La Hougue Bie, on the island of Jersey, which I had excavated and published as an archaeological monograph twenty years previously, in part to see what new questions might be posed, and what new insights might be gained by trying to tell the stories of individual people whose lives intersected at the site at various periods in time, from the 1940s back to the Early Neolithic. In this paper, I will explore the questions I was provoked to ask, and the ways in which I answered them, with reference both to the archaeological record which was changing, even as I was editing the novel) and to ethnographic analogy. If there is a sense that academic archaeologists working within “post-processual” and
“phenomenological” traditions have taken the process of archaeological inference to its natural limits (and, perhaps further), there may also be a willingness to explore, more overtly, those aspects of the human past that are currently inaccessible to purely scientific inference. Mark Edmonds, for example, in his Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic, includes fictional vignettes in what is otherwise a straightforward archaeological monograph; whilst Francis Pryor, in Home: a Time-traveller’s Tales from British Prehistory, remains on the ground of non-fiction, but delves into areas (e.g. the prehistory of the family) rarely reached by a “scientific” approach. This may be an appropriate moment at which to review the ways in which different modes of imagining and writing about the past (scientific and imaginative, fictional and nonfictional) might develop in tandem, and in conversation with one another.

Mark PATTON (The Open University)