Quoting from a recent Guardian article, “Silbury Hill is as ancient and enigmatic as Stonehenge. David Attenborough tells Jonathan Jones why he set out to crack it.”*
Crack it? An unfortunate use of the word ‘crack’ in this context (though perhaps an unwittingly accurate one). And as much as I like and respect David Attenborough, the 1960s tunnel into Silbury should categorically never have been dug; it contravenes just about every conservation (and possibly archaeological) rule in the book. The 'dig' was a shambles from start to finish, with little respect for the integrity (archaeological, structural or otherwise) of the monument. The televised dig was a 1960s archaeological equivalent of Big Brother voyeurism, only in this case it was Silbury that was in the firing line and about to suffer the worst attack on its structural integrity in over 4,000 years.
Has anyone asked, for example, where all the 1960’s spoil from the Atkinson/BBC tunnel (an intrinsic part of the structure itself) was dumped? It’s gone, vanished, along with any archaeological evidence it may have contained. If stones from the Great Pyramid had been dug out and discarded in this way there would have been an international outcry. But not here. Silbury might not be as high, nor as old as the Pyramids, but treating it as it was treated by Atkinson and the BBC was cultural vandalism. Vandalism touched with egotism, and akin to scraping off a 13th century church mural in order to find out what a 12th century mural under it might look like. But that’s only part of the story; when Atkinson and the BBC crew left Silbury at the end of the 60s the tunnel was not even backfilled. Metal tunnel struts were never removed, just allowed to corrode, and all kinds of junk, including old car tyres, ended up in the monument’s interior. The whole project (if it can be called that) is hardly different to the barrow and tomb wreckers of slightly earlier centuries who had little more in mind than the possibility of finding buried treasure and didn’t care a jot for the structures they were damaging or, in some cases, totally destroying.
For David Attenborough to argue that, ‘far from failing, TV's first live dig triggered an unlikely chain of events that recently led to the tunnel being reopened and re-examined, using modern techniques’ is surprisingly naive for a man of such distinction. Silbury very nearly collapsed at the beginning of this century; that collapse was partly due to rain seeping into the structure from the vertical shaft and weakening further the Atkinson/BBC tunnel. It’s a miracle the structure did survive (and is perhaps testimony to the genius of its builders that it did) but it now contains dozens of metal struts from the 1960’s ‘dig’ and hundreds of plastic sacks from English Heritage’s most recent ‘conservation’ project.
In the 18th century William Stukeley witnessed the almost complete destruction of many of the stones that went up to make the nearby Avebury Henge; he writes of that destruction, “And this stupendous fabric, which for some thousands of years, had brav'd the continual assaults of weather, and by the nature of it, when left to itself, like the pyramids of Egypt, would have lasted as long as the globe, hath fallen a sacrifice to the wretched ignorance and avarice of a little village unluckily plac'd within it.”
Likewise, if Silbury had been ‘left to itself’ it would not have come so perilously close to collapse, would not now be so riddled with hastily backfilled tunnels, a shaft and the detritus of recent ‘investigations’. And, if left to itself, it would, in time, undoubtedly have benefited from scientific and archaeological advances – advances which would almost certainly have given us an insight into its construction, use and meaning - without, it should be said, the use of the destructive and invasive ‘techniques’ which almost destroyed it.
*
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/oct/25/david-attenborough-silbury-hill-bbc
