Andrew Hook
In the blink of an eye
'A History of the World in 100 Objects' on BBC Radio 4 has been trumpeted to us as a major cultural event. Fronted and largely narrated by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, the programme was heralded by an hour-long special on BBC2's 'Culture Show' on 18 January. This we are assured is no less than 'a landmark project', Radio 4 at its best, and both radio and television continue to bombard us with previews of the unmissable next 15-minute episode. Critical comment has been unanimous in its praise, and I have no doubt at all that the programme will not lack acclaim over coming weeks and months.
Facing all this positive enthusiasm, one hesitates to ask even the mildest of questions about the intellectual viability of such a hugely hyped programme. But however far out on a limb I may be, I'd like to make two comments on the episodes so far broadcast: one general, one specific.
First, what kind of history of the world can be produced on the basis of 100 objects? Not, I'd suggest, history as it is normally understood: history based on documentary evidence, on records and written sources. Rather what we have here is history as speculation. The single object exists, but what the prehistorian makes of it is largely speculative. There is no other evidence. Archaeologists and prehistorians find and detail tiny fragments of human activity that may date from the remotest of pasts; but the conclusions they come to about the people or society that used them are not, in my view at least, strictly historical. Not historical at least in the sense that the work of historians of the French Revolution or the American Civil War is historical.
Admittedly the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, seeking to understand how human society developed and progressed, invented what they called 'conjectural history' – conceding by the term that hard historical evidence in support of their theories was difficult to come by. Before speculating about the emergence of a sense of beauty in prehistoric man – on the basis of the Olduvai Handaxe and its appearance – Neil MacGregor and the participants in his programme should have made a similar concession.
The handaxe is also relevant to my second comment. Episodes two and three of the programme focused on the Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool and the Olduvai Handaxe, both found in the Rift Valley in Africa. The handaxe, we were told, is 1.4 million years old. The object focused on in episode four was the carving of the Swimming Reindeer, dated at 13,000 years BC. Self-evidently the consequences for human development of the creation of tools, on the one hand, and of a work of art, on the other, are immense. But I am hugely puzzled by the time scale. Compared with the eternities of time between 1.4 million years ago and 13,000 BC, all the other 90 odd objects that define the history of the world have been produced in the blink of an eye. What happened in the enormous black hole between episodes three and four? What about evolution? Should not such questions have been addressed?
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