Production of knowledge: the research landscape

Data gathered from the WoS database gives a number of key insights into the nature and focus of present-day archaeological research in the UK (Table 1). When the temporal context around which research was based was analysed, it revealed that scholars are currently pursuing and publishing on a wide range of historical periods, with a total of sixteen distinct contexts identified. Of these, the most popular was the Neolithic, with 103 publications, or around sixteen per cent of the total sample. The next most popular period was the pre-colonial period in the global South, with 100 publications (also around sixteen per cent). This is followed by the medieval period (eighty papers), multiple contexts (sixty-three), the Classical period (fifty-six), the Palaeolithic (fifty-one), the Bronze Age (thirty-two), the Iron Age (thirty-one), recent or contemporary periods (twenty-six), the ‘urban revolutions’ period (twenty-four, marked ‘Civilizations’ in Table 1), the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (twenty-two), the early modern period (twelve), the Chalcolithic (eleven), the Holocene (eleven), the archaeology of colonialism (nine), and the Mesolithic (six). Accordingly, not only are researchers working with a highly diverse set of historical contexts but are also increasingly eschewing well-studied areas (such as the Classical period, or the Iron and Bronze Ages), in favour of less historically discussed themes, in particular the pre-colonial global South.

Table 1. Temporal and geographical contexts of REF and WoS data.

Analysing the mean number of citations of papers concerning each temporal context reveals a broadly flat distribution, indicating that, for the most part, no topic in particular receives radically more or fewer citations than any other. The mean number of citations logged by the WoS database across the sample was 15.7 and, with the exception of papers on the Mesolithic (of which there are few, with extremely high levels of scholarly impact), and those on post-medieval Europe (with far lower levels of impact), the majority of themes boast an average number of references within a range of ±6 from this average.

This broad diversity is also reflected in the geographical contexts underpinning research publications. As Figure 1 shows, the most common context for British archaeologists to conduct research is continental Europe, with nearly a third of publications drawing on data from the area. Far fewer papers use exclusively British data; their frequency is actually far more comparable to the number of papers drawing on data from an Asian, Middle Eastern, or African context. Interestingly, a much more modest number of studies use data from a specifically Egyptian context, given the historical association between British universities and Egyptology.

Figure 1. Geographical contexts of WoS publications.

Assessing the number of citations across geographical contexts reveals an even flatter distribution than that seen in the temporal context. Only the limited, extremely high-impact ‘worldwide’ studies (average: 37.18), and research using data from Oceania (average: 8.35), stray beyond ±6 from the average of 15.64 citations. It is also notable that research drawing exclusively on data from the UK scores below the average number of citations, with 10.72. Research with a European or African scope score slightly higher than the average, with 15.85 and 15.89, respectively. Research on the Middle East and Asia scores significantly higher than the average, with 18.93 and 20.97 citations on average, respectively. Interestingly again, research on Egyptian contexts also scores among the lowest in terms of citations, with an average of 9.27.

As I will show below, the larger number, and higher impact, of culturally, geographically, and temporally diverse archaeological narratives demonstrated in the contemporary research landscape stands at odds with discussions of the archaeological past in popular culture, outside ‘the academy’. This is particularly notable when considering the lower number and impact of studies concerning the Classical world and Ancient Egypt, which, although no longer a top priority for researchers, remains a core focus elsewhere.

This diversity is not, however, generally represented in studies submitted as impact case studies for the REF in either 2014 or 2021. As Table 1 shows, there are significant differences in the number and variety of both temporal and geographical contexts of archaeological research submitted to the REF impact assessment. Classical themes are represented at the REF at twice the rate they appear in actual academic publications, whilst expansive comparative projects are over three times as likely to appear in the REF assessment. When geographical contexts are considered, these discrepancies become even more marked. Even though research in an African context made up ten per cent of the total WoS sample, only a little over three per cent of studies submitted to the REF used African data. The picture is the same throughout the global South, and even research from continental Europe is severely underrepresented in the REF sample compared with the WoS data. By contrast, studies drawing on exclusively British data make up over fifty-six per cent of the REF sample, compared with a little over eighteen per cent of the total WoS population. This over-representation of Classical themes and exclusively British archaeology, coupled with the under-representation of more diverse global archaeologies, including those of the pre-colonial global South, indicates that the sample of studies submitted as impact case studies for the REF are fundamentally misrepresentative of British archaeological research more broadly. There are, however, broad similarities between the foci of REF impact case studies and ‘popular culture’ depictions of historical narratives, as discussed below.

Dissemination of knowledge: the media landscape

Archaeological narratives have been a prominent feature of the British non-fictional broadcasting cycle since the 1950s, catalysed by the runaway success of Mortimer Wheeler’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? (1952–1959). Similarly, fictionalized period pieces were enormously popular throughout the 1950s and 1960s, with films such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963) commanding huge budgets and impressive box-office returns. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main foci of media content during the mid-twentieth century tended to be either pre-Roman northern Europe or the Classical period. As the data shown below illustrates, not much has changed in the twenty-first millennium.

Inductive coding of the sample revealed forty-six distinct themes into which content could be sorted. These results (Figure 2) demonstrate a heavy weighting towards a small number of broadly Eurocentric contexts, largely in the twentieth century. There is a similar emphasis on popular culture programming (featuring, for example, biographies of notable entertainers or artists), ‘general’ histories (focusing on the broad history of a specific phenomenon, often taking a quasi-global perspective, e.g. How the Earth Works, 2013, Pioneer Productions, UK; Epic Warrior Women, 2018, Urban Canyons, UK), along with true crime and entertainment (e.g. Brainiac: History Abuse, 2005, Granada Productions, UK). Beyond this, a significant proportion of content targets earlier European history, including the medieval, early modern, and Roman periods. Conversely, the least frequently explored areas include the histories of minoritized communities, with only one programme apiece exploring pre-colonial African histories and Jewish history beyond the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In total, historical explorations of the global South comprise sixty-eight titles, or just under six per cent of the whole sample, standing in direct contrast to the broadly diverse scope of contemporary academic research, detailed above.

Figure 2. Themes in screen media from IMDb sample.

These quantitative issues aside, the summaries of content concerning the global South also demonstrate a reliance on regressive, damaging tropes in the representation of these communities on screen. As shown in Figure 2, over half the explorations of the African past in the sample are rooted in recent, post-colonial histories. The narratives espoused in these productions tend to emphasize the instability of the post-colonial African state, characterized by famine, genocide, corruption, and violence (see Table 2 for summaries of these titles).

Table 2. Summaries of ‘post-colonial Africa’ historical films.

With limited or no discussion of Africa’s pre-colonial past, the emphasis placed on contemporary ‘instability’ risks that these ideas become dominant, with audiences left to ‘fill in’ significant gaps in their historical knowledge through reference to the only content available to them. This pattern is repeated across discussions of the global South with, for example, limited discussions of the Islamic Golden Age (eighth to thirteenth centuries) in south-western Asia and far more emphasis placed on recent instability and the spectre of ‘Islamic terrorism’—underlining ideas around the fundamental ‘violence’ of the region and the Muslim world more broadly—whilst an emphasis on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with little other discussion risks essentializing Jewish histories within this specific context.

These issues are further demonstrated when the above themes are condensed into broader geographical or temporal families (Table 3). There is a degree of plurality in the temporal contexts around which content is based. Whilst over half is concerned with events later than 1850, there is a reasonable spread of content relating to earlier periods, although this is not nearly as diverse as contemporary research, outlined above. Looking at the geographical contexts of historical programming, there is a very clear bias towards Eurocentric themes, with nearly four out of every five programmes or films concerning European and/or European-North American societies, or their supposed antecedents in Classical Antiquity. Once again, this is wholly out-of-step with the current research landscape in British universities; it could foster broadly Eurocentric perceptions of world history among those consuming this knowledge, i.e. the British public.

Table 3. Temporal and geographical contexts of IMDb data.

Dissemination of knowledge: school curriculum content

Qualitative and quantitative issues with the representation of societies in the global South are also reflected in the resources available to secondary school history pupils in England. The textbooks reviewed here (Table 4) were all designed for Key Stage 3 pupils, aged 11–14, who are the oldest cohort before some pupils drop history and specialize in other subjects for their General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualification. Accordingly, the knowledge presented to this cohort could be said to represent a ‘baseline’ in British society, which does little to prepare pupils to challenge the reductive and simplistic historical content available in the media.

Table 4. Textbook sample.

Discussions of pre-colonial histories are barely represented in the sample. Although there is a brief discussion on Mughal India in KS3 History Book II (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015a) and Exploring History Student Book II (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Nuttall and Tomlin2018), and Exploring History Student Book I (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Nuttall and Tomlin2017) also features the Islamic Golden Age, only one book (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Nuttall and Tomlin2017) includes any positive discussion on pre-colonial Africa. With the exception of this, the only discussions of African history before formal colonization after the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 are through the lens of the slave trade, featured in KS3 History Book III (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015b), Early Modern Britain (Peal, Reference Peal2016b), Exploring History Student Book II (Rees et al., Reference Rees, Nuttall and Tomlin2018), and Understanding History (Riley et al., Reference Riley, Ford, Goudie, Kennett and Snelson2019). Indeed, even in the latter book, the fundamentally positive discussion on Iron Age West Africa features immediately before a more detailed discussion of the slave trade. Here and across the sample, the over-reliance on the slave trade as an item for discussion risks entrenching ideas of African servility and victimhood, with missed opportunities across the board to engage meaningfully in less negative histories. The populations of the global South are similarly presented through a reductive lens, particularly in the context of the Americas and Oceania. In Early Modern Britain, for example, the Taino are described as ‘a peaceful native people, who did not wear clothes’, the Aztec as ‘a Stone Age civilization’, and Australian First Islanders as ‘a nomadic hunter-gatherer people’ (Peal, Reference Peal2016b: 25, 26, and 9, respectively). Problematic descriptions of First Islanders in particular are even more prominent in Understanding History, where the population are said to be a ‘very spiritual people …[who] did not wear clothes and never washed … [and] spent their lives covered in a mixture of animal fat, sand, dust, and sweat … they had no need for farming, permanent houses, or money’ (Riley et al., Reference Riley, Ford, Goudie, Kennett and Snelson2019: 164). Given the dearth of meaningful engagement with the pre-colonial global South in British screen media, it may be that these highly problematic representations of the world beyond Europe are the only knowledge many Britons have of diverse global histories. Discussions of colonialism in general do little to address this deficit.

As textbook authors fail to highlight the extent of development in the global South before colonialism, so too do they fail to interrogate the fundamentally destructive role of European empires in social, political, and technological contexts across the world. Instead, they attempt to present a ‘balanced’ perspective, with violence minimized, and a sense of developmental paternalism emphasized. This is exemplified in discussions of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, with one author highlighting that ‘terrible atrocities [were committed] on both sides’ (my emphasis; Riley et al., Reference Riley, Ford, Goudie, Kennett and Snelson2019: 181), whilst Wilkes (Reference Wilkes2015a: 118) simplifies the causes of the conflict, citing short-term factors and ignoring the broader patterns of subjugation by the East India Company on the subcontinent. Similarly, genocides in the Americas are ignored in all books that discuss the region, with the exception of Peal (Reference Peal2017: 25), whilst British complicity in the Tasmanian genocide is disregarded, with Riley et al. (Reference Riley, Ford, Goudie, Kennett and Snelson2019: 165) describing a ‘brutal war’, implying legitimate conflict rather than de facto ethnic cleansing. Many books include a section inviting students to weigh up the positives and negatives of empire. However, the reluctance of authors to discuss the fundamental violence of European colonialism leaves this exercise functionally redundant. Whilst Riley et al. (Reference Riley, Ford, Goudie, Kennett and Snelson2019: 182) and Wilkes (Reference Wilkes2015b: 134) do note that India, for example, was economically exploited, they also highlight that ‘Queen Victoria herself said that Britain’s role was to “protect the poor natives and advance civilization”’ (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015b: 139), and that the empire was ‘[building] post offices … hospitals and schools … increasing India’s life expectancy by 11 years’ (Peal. Reference Peal2016b: 68), and ‘improving the lives of Indians through justice, education, and irrigation schemes’ (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015b: 139). This minimizes the extent to which the empire was actively engaged in precipitating socio-cultural regression, whilst implying that any ‘development’ in the global South was the ultimate responsibility of European actors.

Finally, discussions of post-colonial histories echo the reductive tropes used to present post-colonial Africa in the media sample discussed above. Only Wilkes (Reference Wilkes2015b) discusses the nature of post-colonial states in the global South, in Indian and African contexts. For the former, the author focuses primarily on partition, and emphasizes violence between Indian actors, neglecting to discuss the British diplomatic failures that led to this violence (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015b: 140–41). Wilkes’ discussion of Africa is more contentious still. Here, students are first presented with a discussion of ‘Africa today’, and informed that the continent includes ‘some of the world’s poorest countries’. The textbook then presents a table entitled ‘the price of freedom’—where a number of African nations are presented, alongside instances of war, famine, political instability, and other ills that have afflicted them since the end of empire. Accordingly, students could be forgiven for thinking that this chronic instability is an invariable consequence of leaving European empires, rather than a partial consequence of underdevelopment and neocolonial forces associated with European empires, particularly when the author adds that ‘despite offers of loans and aid from richer countries, the problems of poverty and long-term debt remain’ (Wilkes, Reference Wilkes2015b: 141).

The narrative being presented through current textbooks could be summarized thus: ‘Nothing of note happened before colonialism, with the possible exception of the slave trade. Colonialism saw a degree of material exploitation, but in return colonialists oversaw the development of significant social, cultural, legal, and technological infrastructure. Following the end of Empire, this infrastructure was broadly dismantled, leading to the stagnation and/or decay of societies in the global South.’ This, broadly, reflects the wholly unrepresentative presentations of the past in the media sample outlined above, particularly when compared to the contemporary research landscape, and raises important questions as to the precise function of formal historical education; should this not be to equip learners to challenge biased or otherwise improper discussions of the past in alternative media? It also raises questions about the extent to which the broad Eurocentric bias of both formal and informal historical media has affected Britons’ cognition of past narratives, the subject of the next section.

Consumption of knowledge: adults and KS3 pupils

When faced with media and curriculum content that reflects contemporary research trends so poorly, the key question concerns the degree to which this disjuncture has shaped the perceptions of past narratives across the British population.

The self-declared knowledge of diverse historical communities in the adults’ questionnaire (Questionnaire 1) could suggest that popular knowledge of global histories does not accurately reflect contemporary scholarship. Participants were presented with a matrix of historical cultures, and asked to score their familiarity on an annotated scale: ‘1’ being ‘I have never heard of them’; ‘2’ ‘I have heard of them’; ‘3’ ‘I know roughly when and where they existed’; ‘4’ ‘I know roughly when and where they existed, alongside some of their key achievements’; and ‘5’ for ‘I know roughly when and where they existed, their key achievements, alongside details about their social, political, or religious systems’. These results were then averaged by mean and mode (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Knowledge of historical cultures from Questionnaire 1.

It is notable that the only societies scoring 5 modally are Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Greece, given the ubiquity of these themes in British media presentations of early phases in history, and the extent to which these themes have been drawn into the European developmental narrative. This is especially interesting given that current scholarship has largely pivoted away from these themes, with discussions of the Classical period, for example, only comprising around eight per cent of the papers surveyed above. By contrast, those with a modal score of 1—indicating that most participants had not heard of the historical culture—include every African society presented to participants, including the Mali Empire, the Kingdom of Kush, Great Zimbabwe, the Ghana Empire, and the Swahili Coast Civilization. The only exception was Ancient Egypt. This trend is not, however, surprising, given the general paucity of pre-colonial African history in both school curricula and media presentations.

The quiz section in Questionnaire 2 was designed to test the participants’ knowledge and perceptions of the past. Given that Year 9 pupils cannot, given the curriculum content discussed above, be expected to have an intimate knowledge of global prehistory, more interesting were the ways in which participants addressed historical ‘unknowns’ in the multiple-choice survey. As I discuss, many chose to assume the primacy and pre-eminence of actors in the Western tradition, as opposed to those from societies in the global South.

The first question concerned early literacy—‘which ancient society are thought to have “invented” writing?’—and saw the ‘correct’ (if contentious) answer (the Sumerians) selected by only seven per cent of participants. By contrast, over seventy per cent chose ‘the Ancient Greeks’, and an additional sixteen per cent ‘the Roman Empire’. The participants’ knowledge of Classical themes is demonstrated in the next two questions, with the vast majority selecting the correct responses to ‘which empire conquered England in the first century ad?’ and ‘which city is said to be the “birthplace” of democracy?’ (‘the Romans’ and ‘Athens’, eighty and ninety per cent, respectively). Knowledge of Ancient Egyptian society was not as widespread, which is interesting considering the results from the adults’ Questionnaire 1 where Egypt had a modal score of 5. When the school-age participants were asked ‘which ancient society built the Valley of the Kings’, more selected ‘the Byzantine Empire’ (forty per cent) than the correct response, ‘Ancient Egypt’ (thirty per cent). Similarly, when asked ‘in which region have the earliest stone tools been found?’, the majority of participants (thirty-five per cent) selected ‘Central Asia’, rather than the correct response (‘East Africa’, twenty-five per cent). This may reveal the extent to which negative framing of the African continent throughout the media and curricula have fostered associations of Africa with underdevelopment. This is strengthened by the next set of responses, where pupils were asked to designate a country that had never been colonized: only twenty per cent of pupils selected the correct response, Ethiopia, with the majority choosing China (thirty-five per cent), or England (twenty-five per cent), which may again speak to entrenched narratives of African submission and servility throughout the textbook sample. These broad narratives of Western superiority are also arguably represented in responses to the question ‘which of the following regions is referred to as the “cradle of civilization”?’, with nearly fifty-five per cent selecting ‘Western Europe’, almost three times as many as those who gave the correct response, ‘Western Asia’. This could also point to the negative framing of discussions of the region in the textbook and media samples discussed above, and public discourse more broadly. The final two questions elicited similar responses, with the majority of participants selecting ‘The Roman Empire’ (sixty per cent) as the longest-lasting empire, compared to only seven per cent choosing the ‘correct’ response, ‘The Kingdom of Kush (modern-day Sudan)’; and seventy per cent of participants cited ‘modern-day Greece’ as the place where the earliest cities have been found by archaeologists, compared to only ten per cent opting for ‘modern-day Iraq’.

This combination of poor knowledge of diverse histories, and a tendency to ‘fill in’ historical unknowns with reference to notions of European superiority, arguably underpin results from the final research instruments in both questionnaires, concerning the participants’ perspectives on Eurocentric archaeologies.

There are some causes for optimism in Questionnaire 1. The first statement—‘historically, European societies have always been the most developed’—showed that eighty-six per cent of participants either ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘completely disagree’, implying that the sample broadly reject overt notions of complete Western historical primacy. Similarly, nearly ninety-five per cent of participants either selected ‘somewhat disagree’ or ‘completely disagree’ in response to the statement, ‘most African societies did not develop “civilization” prior to colonialism’. Participants were also in broad agreement on the subjectivity of the historical record, with ninety-six per cent of the sample agreeing that ‘our understandings of world history are fundamentally affected by our own cultural context’. On the monumentalism of early archaeologies, around fifty-three per cent of participants agreed that ‘building cities and developing complex economies are not a valid measure for the “success” of any particular society’. Finally, nearly eighty-five per cent of participants disagreed with the idea that ‘it is fair to rank societies according to their similarity and difference to our own’.

These open-minded responses, however, run contrary to results from other statements during this exercise. Participants were in broad agreement that the Graeco-Roman tradition is an element of the Western patrimony, with around fifty-seven per cent agreeing that ‘it is fair to describe Roman archaeology in North Africa and the Middle East as elements of Western heritage’, and nearly sixty per cent agreeing that ‘Ancient Greece and Rome can be considered Britain and the West’s closest cultural ancestors’. Participants were also more invested in ideas around the Orientalist ‘clash of civilizations’, with fifty-six per cent disagreeing with the idea that ‘there are no insurmountable differences dividing Europe and the Middle East’. Over thirty-seven per cent agreed with the statement, ‘European empires succeeded in spreading the idea of “civilization” across the globe’; this is particularly interesting, given the same participants’ reluctance to decry specific locales (Africa) for a lack of civilization, but when presented with the same sentiment in a more abstract sense were more inclined to agree with it. Most concerningly, almost ten per cent of participants disagreed with the final statement: ‘no specific “race” or ethnic group is inherently more intelligent, able, or industrious than any other’, and an additional ten per cent selected ‘somewhat agree’.

The results of the comparable exercise in Questionnaire 2 are arguably more concerning. Far more pupils agreed with the idea that ‘historically, Europeans have always been far more developed than any other group on Earth’, with fifty-five per cent selecting ‘somewhat agree’ (interestingly, no participants selected ‘completely agree’). The next statement, ‘it is not fair to compare different societies from different time periods or areas, or to rank them according to how “advanced” they are’, saw results comparable to those of the Questionnaire 1 sample, with sixty-seven per cent agreeing that universal metrics for social classification are not fair. The pupils were more definitive than their adult counterparts when it came to Graeco-Roman patrimony, with seventy-five per cent agreeing with the statement that ‘the modern West inherited most of our cultural characteristics from Ancient Greece and Rome’. And forty-five per cent of the sample disagreed with the final statement: ‘prior to colonization, groups in Africa had developed “civilizations” to rival those in Europe’, a far greater proportion than the adult participants.

In order to gauge the extent of Eurocentric sentiment demonstrated by participants during the final research task, and to compare between populations, responses were coded on a scale of -2 to 2. Responses that completely agreed with the Eurocentric position were scored -2; somewhat agreed, -1; somewhat disagreed, 1; and completely disagreed, 2. The average score for Eurocentric sentiment (EC score) across the sample population for Questionnaire 1 is 0.77 (Figure 4). This indicates that the adult participants are slightly more ‘against’ Eurocentric narratives than ‘for’, but there is still considerable sympathy with these sentiments.

Figure 4. EC score distribution from Questionnaire 1.

Comparative scores from the Questionnaire 2 participants are far lower, with an average of -0.16 (Figure 5). This indicates that the pupil participants are marginally more in favour of Eurocentric narratives then opposed to them, as demonstrated by their responses to the final research instrument.

Figure 5. EC score distribution from Questionnaire 2.

The stark disparity between the adult and KS3 sample in terms of broad prescription to Eurocentric historiographies raises important questions around the efficacy of current school curricula, particularly as a means to develop critical thinking among pupils. I turn to these issues next, in the context of the findings outlined above.