Walk into a well-stuffed academic library and take a stroll along the archaeological shelves. Yes, they are still there: real books made from paper and ink, gathered over decades or even centuries. Many tomes still exist only in printed form, holding information and thoughts that are carefully collected, curated, analysed, and edited, yet out of bounds from today’s digital universe.
Few are concerned with the ancient riddles and mysteries that populate social media’s imaginings of archaeology. In fact, what accounts for the weight on the shelves are mostly brick-sized or larger volumes (for some, a pavement-slab would be a more fitting image) bearing exotic names: Tell Asmar and Khafaje: the first season’s work; Die Ausgrabungen in Manching; The Kaupang Excavation Project; Gerasa: city of the Decapolis; or the publications from The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes 1932-1939.
Books and publications like these may fascinate fewer people than the ancient remains themselves, but for students and researchers they are the bricks and mortar (or pavement slabs) for the edifice of archaeological knowledge – the source of findable, accessible, intelligible, real data, obtained from years of work and analysis. Considering the abstruse nature of the content, you may be surprised to find that some volumes are worn and torn like holy scriptures, as generations of students have scrutinised them for thesis work and dissertations.
War Classics – The Guns of August