Vivifying the Dust
MacKendrick, Paul
Vivifying the Dust The Pleasures of Archaeology, by Karl E. Meyer. Atheneum. 304 pp. Illustrated. $12.95. Reviewed by Paul MacKendrick "Deing a professor nowadays is not quite so pleasant as it...
...When Karl Meyer was my freshman advisee at the University of Wisconsin in 1947, he came to me with a sheet of paper closely filled on both sides: a list of the courses he wanted to take...
...He was formerly The Washington Post's man in London...
...it is therefore a particular joy to be able to greet enthusiastically a good book by a former student, literate, witty, profoundly aware that the past can be an antidote to hysteria...
...Andre Malraux in the Resistance, sheltering in the Lascaux cave...
...He is unhackneyed on the Dead Sea scrolls, and on Petra, the "rose-red city half as old as time...
...His chapter, "Into the Ice Age," expresses satisfaction that Neanderthal man was not so apelike after all, and that the Lascaux cave artists, twelve millennia ago, were painting like angels...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle together at Stonehenge...
...As this book proves, the years have not blunted the edge of his intellectual curiosity...
...deals with Peru's Inca Empire, "consecrated to that contemporary ideal, law and order...
...Momus, goddess of novelty, boasts that, through her, "striplings spend their judgment, as they do their estates, before it comes into their hands...
...He finds therapy in archaeology's message about man's variety and originality...
...the Long Island paper manufacturer Leon Pom-erance underwriting the rich dig at Kato Zakro in Crete...
...he sees Hadrian's Wall as "a parable of power with an ambiguous moral...
...he finds parable in the past, and rejoices in voyages to the sites, by jet and by armchair...
...Archaeology is not about things but people, including idiosyncratic expert and lay archaeologists themselves: the King of Sweden excavating in Tuscany...
...As a reporter, Meyer finds ancient news fresher, less contrived, and more full of surprises than is modern news...
...Meyer knows that what the striplings need is what archeaology, vivifying the dust it unsettles, can give them: "a maturer sense of the past, . . . a new identity, as members of the same extended family...
...The final chapter, "Utopia Lost...
...Archaeologists' search for Camelot fascinates him...
...Meyer thinks the Jewish insurgents at Masada, who committed suicide rather than fall into Roman hands, have much in common with modern Palestinian guerrillas...
...The Book of the Dead" offers a refreshing view of Pharaonic Egypt...
...He finds Winchester, with that wonderful fake, King Arthur's Round Table, good for decelerating after metropolitan bustle...
...These vignettes enhance the urbanity of Meyer's book, as does his choice of photographs, and his discriminatingly annotated bibliography...
...The book ends with a marvelously apt quotation from Swift's Battle of the Books...
...God's Country" is about Israel...
...the Israeli General Yadin laying aside his rifle to excavate Masada...
...the engineer Lerici using his expertise in exploring Etruscan tombs...
...Meyer reflects that Che Guevara, that zealous idealist who equated Utopia with socialist planning, was murdered because of the fatalistic servility of Bolivian Indians whose spirit was crushed under the Inca Empire...
...James Boswell talking Latin in the Roman Forum...
...Miss Havigham's House" is ancient Britain, a fascinating Old Curiosity Shop which Meyer particularly loves...
...Reviewed by Paul MacKendrick "Deing a professor nowadays is not quite so pleasant as it used to be...
...For Meyer, museums are not "ghastly charnel houses of murdered evidence" but places where a thoughtful man can reflect on Ramses II manipulating the Big Lie, or on the reformer Ikhnaton, "aside from Nasser, the most controversial of all Egyptians...
Vol. 34 • December 1970 • No. 12
