A View of Ancient History

As an undergraduate, I supplemented the usual prescribed reading for my archaeology course with whatever volumes of Stephen Jay Gould’s “Reflections in Natural History” I could lay my hands on. For anyone who doesn’t know, Gould was, by trade, an evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist, but he became best-known for his essays in Natural History magazine from 1973 until 2000, which were periodically gathered into paperback editions.

Popular science?

Gould was hailed as a great exponent of “popular science”. He himself preferred to think in terms of “writing science for general consumption”, or producing “accessible writing for nonscientists” (as explained in the preface to his penultimate collection, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, published in 2000). And he clearly succeeded.

I was reminded of all of this while perusing the German Wikipedia entry on the Ninth Legion. My recent book, The Fate of the Ninth, is listed there as “populärwissenschaftlich”, or “popular science”. I’m not sure of the term’s nuanced meaning in German, but it made me smile, as two of the other works listed there – Frere’s Britannia and Todd’s Roman Britain – were quite definitely intended for a wide non-academic readership. So why had the Wikipedia author singled me out as populärwissenschaftlich?

I don’t know the answer to this question. It can’t be a footnote issue, as The Fate of the Ninth is fully annotated (though footnote-averse readers are encouraged to ignore all 324 of them). And in case you’re interested, Frere (the third edition, published in 1987) has about 500 end-notes, and Todd (I only have the original 1981 paperback on my shelf) has 149 end-notes. Nor can it be an issue of “dumbing down”, as there’s no simplification of intellectual content. If you read my book, you will find a closely argued, meticulously documented study of how and why scholars and researchers ever assumed that the Ninth Legion had been destroyed in Britain, with an accurate and reliable account of why this was — and remains — an unlikely conclusion to draw from the available evidence. And along the way, you’ll meet an interesting cast of characters, many of whom don’t often get mentioned in Anglophone histories.

Whatever the reason for the German Wikipedia verdict on The Fate of the Ninth, I am rather pleased to be included (even if mistakenly) in the same category as Stephen Jay Gould. For the last 20 or so years, I have consciously attempted to follow my “historical-archaeological” version of Gould’s “scientific” philosophy, which I paraphrase from the preface to The Lying Stones of Marrakech: that, as the evidence speaks directly to unprejudiced observers, accessible writing for non-academics therefore simply requires clarity, suppression of professional jargon, and a desire to convey the excitement of fascinating facts and interesting theories. I’m gratified to learn, from the comments posted by four or five readers, that I seem to have succeeded in my own small way.