Archaeology is a bizarre pastime — it aims to reconstruct the past, to bring it back to life, by studying the objects and traces that have managed to survive years, centuries or millennia of decay or disturbance. Yet in the nineteenth century and the early part of our own, the picture of the past was carefully sanitised. There were endless learned books and papers devoted to the classification of objects, to the deeds and monuments of rulers, and to burials and treasures, but there was scant mention of a mass of equally fascinating aspects of ancient life, which would have served to flesh out the picture, made it more vivid and struck a chord with ordinary folk — the humorous, the scatological, and the sexual. Most of the silliness and bawdiness that helps make life worthwhile and which is such a vital part of being human was deliberately concealed or destroyed. Why?
In large measure this was due to prudishness and snobbery. It must have seemed beneath the dignity of learned scholars in the booklined groves of Academe to deal with such trivia — most of them were writing for their peers, after all, not for the great unwashed, and prudery was very much the norm through Victorian times and beyond. It resulted not only in cosmetic solutions such as the fig leaves placed over naughty bits of Classical statues, but also, at times, in outright obstruction. For example, ‘cultured persons’ are known to have destroyed many specimens of prehistoric Moche pottery from Peru depicting bestiality (primarily involving men and llamas) — which we know from sixteenth-century chroniclers was a widespread habit in highland Peru — out of misguided patriotism, in an effort to erase evidence of an abominable practice, and not wishing people to ‘get the wrong idea’ about their ancestors!
Other items are still being kept hidden — for example, the ‘Turin Papyrus’, a rare piece of sexually explicit imagery from ancient Egypt, is the most famous object in Turin’s magnificent Museum of Egyptology, yet it is not on display — allegedly to prevent ‘bambini’ from seeing it — nor is any copy of it available at the museum in book, slide or postcard!
In general today the pendulum has swung the other way, and as archaeology becomes ever more popular the public is increasingly being given a picture of the past with ‘warts and all’. Children, especially, love the scatological aspects of the past — such as multi-seated Roman toilets, or preserved turds — and it is no accident that the ‘man using the cesspit’ is the most popular bit of the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, as witnessed by the sale of its ‘scratch and sniff’ postcard .…
In putting this book together, therefore, we have unashamedly sought to put the spotlight on the more scurrilous or even shocking aspects of the past, the kind of material which would had Victorians reaching for the smelling salts or which would, until fairly recently, been published in passages of Latin or Greek to avoid shocking the uneducated!
Our brief was that we could be as obscene or politically incorrect as we wished, provided that everything we included was ‘true’. Well, we cannot guarantee that it is all true, but we can assure readers that we have not made up anything at all — you could not make up things like this! Absolutely everything in this book has been published or recorded somewhere. Our title may lead some readers to imagine that we have drawn only on what many consider to be the main focus of archaeology, that is, the artifacts and ruins that have come down to us from the past. We have certainly done this where possible but, had we limited ourselves to such sources, the book would have been far slimmer and much more speculative as we tried to guess the uses of particular objects or rooms. But since, in fact, archaeology simply means the study of ancient things, or of the material traces of the human past, it follows that the invaluable writings that have survived from our ancestors, and especially those from the Classical world, can justifiably be included here — and we have drawn on them heavily for the unique insights they provide into aspects of their societies which otherwise would be lost for ever, or which would forever remain tantalisingly ambiguous in artistic depictions.
Archaeology is a vast, multi-faceted subject, with many roles to play, but one of its major functions, as the late Glyn Daniel often emphasised, is that of providing pleasure, whether through the simple joy of learning and discovery, the contemplation of beautiful images or objects, or the sheer fun of finding out that our ancestors were not always serious, downtrodden, spiritual and fearful creatures. They had a sense of humour, they were human beings like ourselves, and it diminishes their humanity to hide the kind of material presented here. Although it is all perfectly genuine, little of it has ever found its way into popular books before. It’s time to pull off the fig leaves and take a long hard look at the real past.
Some may find this lowbrow little tome offensive. In reply, one can do no better than quote Captain John G. Bourke, the nineteenth-century American scholar whose amazing work of compilation was an invaluable source in preparing our book: ‘As a physician, to be skilful, must study his patients both in sickness and in health, so the anthropologist must study man, not alone wherein he reflects the grandeur of his Maker, but likewise in his grosser and more animal propensities’. Or, to put it another way, one may cite a brief text that appeared in several early seventeenth-century books in Tuscany: ‘Reader, if you find something that offends you in this most modest little book, don’t be surprised. Because Divine, not human, is that which hath no blemish’.
On the other hand, to those readers who are not offended by this book’s contents, may we make a plea for more material? We are sure that we have barely scratched the surface of this subject, and would greatly welcome suggestions for inclusion in future volumes .…
Paul Bahn