The Arthur Evans analogy

There’s a modern analogy coming here, but first some history…

When we were in Crete recently we visited the ancient site of Knossos. Dating back to around 1850BC it is a Minoan palace, which was largely excavated by Arthur Evans at the start of the 20th century. Evans, in typical Victorian imperialist mode, simply bought the site so he could oversee the dig. To give credit to Evans, he pursued the dig in a time of upheaval and was successful in unearthing many valuable finds, including the Linear B tablets, which revealed the presence of a written script in Europe long before many had believed. And it is possible that he had not undertaken this work and fought so hard to preserve much of it, then it may well have been lost.

Before we visited I was aware that Evans was a controversial character and had engaged in rather free interpretation and reconstruction. But I was unprepared for the scale of this until I saw the large brutalist concrete buildings and painted frescos. Evans was well informed and some of his reconstructions may well be accurate, but the overall effect is entirely disorientating. You no longer know what is authentic and what is reconstructed and fabricated. And worse, you soon begin not to care either. I experienced a new emotion on our visit – archeology rage. This felt more like colonial vandalism than respectful archeology. I ought to add here that some people like this approach as it helps them to imagine it in its full glory, but I was distinctly unimpressed.

By contrast we visited the Malia Palace a few days later. This has been carefully and respectfully excavated (at least to my amateur eyes). Walking through the old buildings and knowing that everything here was authentic was a much more moving and interesting experience than the fantasy land version at Knossos. This excavation was undertaken by a Cretan, Joseph Hazzidakis, and then at various stages by teams from the French School of Athens.

As well as making the site itself different in nature, the danger of Evans approach is that it then makes it difficult for future generations of archeologists to undo his interpretations. It is problematic to extract the original material mixed with concrete, and to separate out the mixing of eras that he engaged in, or to rectify his sometimes incorrect interpretation of a building.

(Here comes the analogy). We can view an archeological site as essentially an information source – telling us how people lived in the past. Knossos and Malia are information sites. We have two approaches to this information represented by these sites. In Knossos we see the rich owner, who owns and ultimately controls everything that happens on the site. This includes his preferred methods and interpretations. At Malia we have a more collaborative, academic approach, conducted slowly and with reference to accepted methods and interpretations. This applies to the knowledge derived from the sites also – Evans wanted to decrypt the Linear B tablets and only released a small quantity of them. His approach was stymied by his own beliefs here, that Minoan culture was superior, which meant that the eventual decryption (that it was a form of Greek) was one he would not entertain. Only the release of the tablets provided the decryption community with sufficient information to finally crack the language in 1952.

Now let’s consider these approaches to modern information sites. Hmm. We have information sites such as X and Facebook, controlled and owned by one individual, who impose their beliefs about the mode of operation and the information that is foregrounded. Then we have more communal sites, Wikipedia, being an obvious example, but really any community that operates whether it be through blogs or forums. These have broadly agreed upon methods and community norms.

As well as the nature of what is presented as valid interpretation of evidence in these two models, there is also the future history aspect. If we add AI into the mix then we get the Evans problem where it becomes difficult to extract different elements and to reinterpret the past. A version gets imposed that cannot be unpicked. This, I would suggest, is the point for the rich, to construct and solidify the version of history they prefer. But the Malia model shows that ultimately that is the method that best serves ourselves and our future.