Secondary and subsidiary purpose

This then accounts for the primary theme of

the book. However, it has a secondary and subsidiary purpose, which I am also

most anxious to make effective. For, in the category already mentioned, of

handbooks dealing with the subject of archaeological method and sometimes with

the history of its evolution.

Due to the writers’ efforts to draw an

effective contrast between the orderly progress of efficiency in Europe and the

misguided vandalism in the past of untrained diggers in other parts of the

world, less than justice has been done to some of the great figures in Near

Eastern archaeology during our own time.

A secondary purpose of the book then, is to

recall that, in the Near East also, there have been great and methodically

brilliant archaeologists since the time of General Pitt Rivers. 

Mound Formation and Excavation

In the Near East, even a peasant mentality

sees in the familiar aspect of its mounds some dim relationship to the

elementary principles of life and death. Alternatively, their summits may accommodate

the activities of village life or provide dignified isolation for a graveyard.

For more sophisticated western travelers on

the other hand, their silhouettes become the emblems of prolonged human

survival. If their character is to be properly understood, it will be necessary

first to consider how they come to exist at all; and secondly why they are to

be found only in this particular part of the world. For this purpose it is

momentarily essential to adapt one’s mind to the peculiar conditions of life in

these antique lands.

It is of course in the nature of human

habitations that their prolonged occupation results in the accumulation of

debris, and that, particularly if they are repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, an

elevation is gradually created which did not previously exist.

However, the speed and degree of this

process seems to be governed by two regionally distinctive factors. One is the

habits and traditions of the inhabitants and the other the form of building

material which they habitually employ.

Here in England for instance, many dwelling

houses have been occupied without interruption for a score or so of

generations. A large part of my own home was built of stone in the fourteenth

century and remained unchanged for more than four hundred years. But when, in

about eighteen hundred, it was added to and largely rebuilt, as much care was

taken to remove the resulting debris as has been taken ever since to dispose of

domestic refuse.