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Men have always imagined their past: in myth, in tribal legend, in the multiple re-creations we name history. Among these the archaeological imagination can seem a latecomer: the first full instances of it I know in fiction are Flaubert's Salammb?(1862) and Trois Contes (1877). But in the century since it has proved remarkably, and variously, fruitful. Kipling in the passage quoted gives us some of its key elements: a context of the primitive and the mysterious (here touched with the jokey); a matching context of the practical, of work but work touched with the magic of art; a focusing on artefacts; the past as buried, to be reached by digging; the past as at once remote, indeed alien, and immediate (the deepest mud yielded us a perfectly polished Neolithic axe-head with but one chip on its still venomous edge').
This is a past not heard but seen; a past fragmented, tactile, mute, on whose excavated fragments a re-creating imagination must play. Focal for that play is the encounter of the remote and the alien with the immediate. At its most intense the archaeological imagination can fuse, as no written or oral history does, a sense of the past as unbridgeably other with a sense of the past, in its silent immediacy, challenging or teasing us into the re-creating response that is, in a complex of senses, reading. John Keats prefigures the polarity involved in such reading in the "Ode to a Grecian Urn", which moves from the wreathing of imagination in the first stanza:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities, or mortals, or of both?
- around the still unravished bride of quietness' to the contemplation of it in the last stanza as artefact and enigma:
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity'.
Such an encounter can exercise a gorgon fascination, as it sometimes does in Seamus Heaney's North, where the girl whose severed head has been exhumed from the peat bog is apostrophized as:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.
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