The British Museum and a ‘forgotten continent’

The British Museum richly deserves the recent donation of 25 million from Lord Sainsbury.  Over the last few years it has been playing at the top of its game, with some breath-taking exhibitions and intelligent curatorship.  In Neil MacGregor it has a capable and charismatic Director, whose series A History of the World in 100 Objects, now just drawing to a close, has been one of the broadcasting successes of the decade.

But – and it is a very big but – there is one stain on an otherwise exemplary stewardship.  Look around the Museum and the visitor will quickly notice that an entire continent has been side-lined, excluded from what claims to be a ‘world museum’.  All the ancient civilisations have a gallery devoted to their achievements except one:  South America.

It is as if the achievements of the Incas and their extraordinary pre-Columbian forbears had never happened:  the wonders of Machu Picchu;  the gold tombs and masks of the Moche, often compared to Tutankhamen;  the Nasca culture who produced the famous lines;  or the many other intriguing pre-Columbian cultures of the Amazon and of Peru.

There are a few objects scattered around amidst other wider collections – but no permanent and focussed gallery;  nor has there been any exhibition about the Incas or South America for many decades; nor is the Museum planning to hold one, though it is perfectly possible– as Paris and New York do frequently – or to get long-term loans for a gallery. It is just that there is no particular will to do so. The Museum actually has plenty of holdings on South America shut up in the basement, left over from the old and now closed Museum of Mankind.

The centenary of the discovery of Machu Picchu falls next year, for instance, an event that the rest of the world is already celebrating – Paris has an exhibition right now – and which we are doing absolutely nothing about. 

The last time that the Museum was given money and Andeanists expected a long-standing wrong finally to be put right, the new gallery unveiled was… a Watch Gallery. Perhaps this time around the money should be used to represent a forgotten continent.

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Walking with ghosts

 

Reading Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful letters recently – see my review for the Independent – I came across a detail that brought me up short:  that Chatwin, while a mature student  at Edinburgh, used to go to Glen, the country house of the Tennant family near Innerleithen. He writes to the deeply eccentric recluse Stephen Tennant about it. 

So what?  Well I went there myself a great deal as a teenager, as the son of the household, Henry Tennant, was my closest friend.  It was a special place for me, about the only place I knew in Scotland, with its crazy Victorian Gothic castle and romantic glen leading up to a loch and trout stream where we used, ineffectually, to fish.

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So the discovery that Chatwin used to go there as well had a special resonance.  Not least because the place has been in my thoughts as its then owner, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), another eccentric member of the family, has just died – see Phillip Hoare’s obituary.  As a teenage boy, I found him a frightening but fascinating mixture of playboy charm and occasional irrascability;  he was a nightmare to partner at tennis.

It was not a happy time for Chatwin – he found academic archaeology stultifying, as I often do – and he left a cold Edinburgh flat prematurely, with little money left.  Glen was clearly a place of refuge for him; as it was for me.

Why do we like to think of our heroes as having trodden the same ground as we have?  Do they leave some footfall that we can pick up?  Walking with ghosts is something I increasingly find I do on my travels.

I sometimes go back to Glen as I know the current chatelaine, Tessa Tennant;  and the next time I do, I will be thinking of Chatwin as I walk up to the loch and the glen.

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More Tales from the Amazon

The night before I flew down to the rainforest, I stayed at a hotel in Cuzco.  There was a startling and curious mural stretching the length of the dining room which showed a Body Shop fantasy of an Amazonian paradise:   bare-breasted maidens bathing in idyllic pools surrounded by luxuriant greenery and compliant jungle animals;  the only thing most were wearing was a pendant of vaguely Incaic design.  Pass the jojoba shampoo.

I was not quite sure what I expected from the Amazon.  It’s become such a romanticised  ecological symbol – a flagship of all we stand to lose – that it’s become hard to see the trees for the wood.   Which is why I wanted to spend some time in one small patch of land, a reserve near the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado,  close to the border with Bolivia and Brazil. …

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More Tales from the Amazon Read More »

Down the Amazon, no direction home

The recent news that ex British Army captain Ed Stafford has completed his 859 day walk along the Amazon from its source to the sea deserves comment – and praise. It’s an epic achievement and one never achieved before.  Previous attempts  have always been made partly by boat, and for good reason:  some areas of the Amazon, like the Solimoes in Brazil,  flood for hundreds of kilometers each year and there are no roads along the main river, so to walk the entire length is daunting.

I also like his candour.  He told the wire-press agency AP that he was “no eco-warrior” and that while, like all of us, he deplored the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, his own expedition was at its heart simply a grand expedition of endurance:  “The crux of it is, if this wasn’t a selfish, boy’s-own adventure, I don’t think it would have worked.  I am simply doing it because no-one has done it before.”

In these days when every expedition has to have its ‘eco-message’ , however admirable (like the Plastiki, which has just sailed the Pacific on a raft made from recycled plastic bottles that unfortunately proved very difficult to stop drifting sideways), I find this quite refreshing.  The elemental urge ‘to be the first to do something’ has always been an immensely productive one. …

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Down the Amazon, no direction home Read More »

Stonehenge – a national disgrace

Stonehenge was given to the nation in 1918.  So far, almost a century later, the nation has done a remarkably bad job at looking after it. 

The situation at the site is currently, as its custodians English Heritage put it, ‘severely compromised’ and as others like leading archaeologist Mike Pitts would say, ‘ an embarrassing, abominable, inexcusable mess’. For decades, plans have been put forward to improve the site and then postponed.

Two main roads not only thunder past but divide the circle of stones from the Avenue that should lead to it.  The findings from Stonehenge are scattered piecemeal between some sixteen different museums and private holdings around the country.  For the almost one million annual visitors drawn there, it can be a dispiriting experience, with the stones themselves fenced off and the current ‘visitor centre’ resembling a British Rail station built in the 1970s.  Overall, it can be a bit like having a picnic in a car park.

Just last week the Government announced that it would no longer help finance the proposed new landscaping and visitor centre which Labour had announced last October. 

On the face of it, this might seem perfectly reasonable.  A saving of £10 million would result.  We all know that cuts have to be made;  the Government claims that Labour committed to projects that were never affordable. …

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Stonehenge – a national disgrace Read More »

Lidar ranging

There’s nothing as seductive as new technology, particularly in the world of archaeology.   Some years ago I co-led an expedition that expended an inordinate amount of energy using a thermal imaging camera.  We flew over the cloud forest near Machu Picchu to determine the full extent of the nearby site of Llactapata, at a cost of $1000 per hour for the plane, let alone for the camera.  Its infra-red vision was supposed to be able to detect the difference in temperature between stone buildings which retain heat, and vegetation which does not.  By using it, we hoped to  be able to see through the cloud-forest to any ruins below the canopy  – the archaeological equivalent of those X-Ray specs sold in schoolboys’ comics to look through women’s skirts, and in the event about as successful.

We ended up going into the forest on foot and looking in the more traditional manner, with machetes, frustration and a great deal of sweat.  (The full story is told in Cochineal Red for those interested.)

But an even newer technology has come along that sounds rather more effective:  lidar (‘light detection and ranging’).  Gamers have used it to create virtual reality sites for some time.   Now the husband-and-wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase have adapted  it at Caracol in Belize to penetrate the jungle cover and create 3-D images of one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.

In the process they’ve established that the site was far more extensive than had ever been expected:  the city sprawled over some 70 square miles.

Diane Chase was quoted as being  ‘blown away’ by the new technology:   ‘We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.’

Apparently, however,  they also emphasized that ‘it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.” ’  What a terrific phrase – ‘ground truth’.  Now that’s something I’ve been searching for my whole life…..

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Mine’s a michelada

Once Acapulco was a remote and glamorous resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast.  Mass tourism from abroad and from within the country has changed all that.

Now it should be enjoyed more for the vitality and vulgarity of a latin Blackpool or Coney Island: plates of fried bananas and whelks;  rubber rings and trinkets in brash colours;  kids dashing under the waves or burying themselves under the brownish sand (no one can claim Acapulco has the purest water in the Pacific – a million people live there).  Along the central drag is a large, kitsch statue of a plump Diana firing her arrow directly at a gigantic inflated bottle of Corona.   Overhead, frigate birds try to mob the boobies and the gulls to get them to disgorge their fish.

I like best the old working fishermen’s beach at the north end of the shore, near the fort once used to keep the area free from English pirates like El Drago (Drake).  There the pelicans cluster round the catches, hopping from foot to foot like embarrassed teenagers at a ball waiting to be asked to dance.  These are not the picturesque Disney white pelicans of further north and California, but the brown ones of the Latin American seaport, with their ponderous heavy-jowled flight. 

The drink of choice for the locals is not tequila – that’s for the norteños or the American college kids who come here for their ‘Spring Break’ to party hard in the surf.  No the drink here is the michelada, a light beer with salt and lime on the rim of the glass, and a dusting of chilli powder to give more power to your elbow.  The more of it you  drink, the more of it you need to drink. 

I have one on the old fishing pier, watching the pelicans clustering together on a buoy and looking down the strip towards the gleaming high-rise hotels at the south end of the shore, now half empty with all the talk of Mexican drug crime (20 were killed in a nearby Acapulco suburb recently).  And then I have another.

Postscript:  and for those doubting that Acapulco has been infected by Mexican drug crime, see this more recent report

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The White Stuff: How bird-shit can change your life

I’m coming into port at Pisco, past the Paracas Peninsula. It’s  home to a culture who created some of the finest of all pre-Columbian weavings, but I’m more interested in the bird-shit: in the guano islands that are dotted over the sea as one approaches, with frigate-birds and pelicans flying between them, over a fishing ground that even now, after the depredations of Chinese fishing tankers, is still one of the richest in the world.

It was the Incas who introduced the world to the idea of guano as a fertiliser – ‘guano’ is a Quechua word.  By the 19th century it had become a huge industry, with fortunes being made;  the Gibbs family of Tyntesfield being the most famous British example.  As with any commodity in the New World, the rights of natives were trampled in the rush to lay hands on the money.  At one point, the entire population of Easter Island was transplanted by force to work the guano fields.

Over time, the use of guano came to be replaced by the nitrates mined in neighbouring Chile – a new trade the British supported, backing Chile in the ” War of the Pacific” against Peru and Bolivia to secure their interest in the nitrate holdings.

But it is now enjoying a revival, as an organically approved fertiliser.  Every six or seven years, depending on the frequency of el Niño, the locals “harvest” their crop on three islands off the Paracas Coast, La Chincha, Ballestas and Isla Blanca, and get some 40,000 tonnes of the white stuff.  It sells at two dollars a kilo, a good commodity price, although the work needed to extract it is backbreaking and often dangerous, with ‘guano-slides’ when stacks collapse;  they bring tough miners down from the mountains to help.

It’s the guano that helps make the Pisco valley so green:  as I leave the boat and drive into the desert, an oasis appears of cotton and maize fields, with orange groves and palms dotted throughout — a vision of what organic farming can achieve.  There’s a satisfaction in feeling that something so intrinsically useless as bird-shit should yet be so useful.

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In Chile after the Earthquake

I flew into Santiago airport with some trepidation – arriving just days after one of the world’s largest recorded earthquakes, at 8.8 – but it takes a while to spot any sign of damage at all.  Given that most taxi drivers can never resist a moan, mine was more concerned that the 2005 Skoda he’d just acquired had been installed with a tape rather than cd player.  ‘What is the point of that,’ he complained and apologised.  He’d wanted to play me some Iron Maiden to celebrate my common British heritage with the group.

Heading into town, we cross a few bridge-sections of road which have had to be plated together, but Santiago itself seems unmarked.  The Zócalo, the central square, is the usual picture of shoe-shine boys, old men sitting on benches and a religious nut preaching the end of the world to a disinterested audience.

In the shopping streets nearby, the atmosphere is rather as if a fire alarm had gone off in John Lewis and now everyone was back in the building and shopping.  But then the Chileans are different from the rest of South America.  As one tells me:     ‘Everyone here is middle-class –  except for the new president, Pinero, and his friends, who are filthy rich!’  Many of the more menial jobs – the maids, the cleaners, the security guards – are taken by Peruvian and Bolivian immigrants these days.

The rest of the continent make jokes about the Chileans being a nation of bland shop-keepers, from their less spicy food to the mild, more temperate climate they enjoy.  I was impressed by the resilience and pragmatism they showed in the face of the earthquake – and by the foresight with which buildings had been constructed, in the main, to withstand such huge force.  But then they have had a long time to get used to such attacks.  175 years ago, almost exactly, Charles Darwin witnessed the Chilean town of Concepción, then, as now damaged by a ferocious earthquake:  ‘the most awful yet interesting spectacle I ever beheld.’

Eating a caldillo of conger eel in the Central Market, a magnificent iron-framed building erected by British investors in the past, I found the food was not so much bland as a balance of interesting flavours – perhaps why the Chileans have always been such natural and loyal allies of the British, from the 19th century War in the Pacific to that other 20th century War in the Atlantic, the Falklands.  We too have been accused of being a nation of shopkeepers;  though quite how we’d deal with a 8.8 earthquake, given our incapacity to handle a few wet leaves on a railway track, I’m not so sure.

written March 8 (posted late due to technical issues in posting from Pacific, as several of following posts will be as well!)

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My worst journeys from hell?

 

[A shorter version of this piece was published in the Times]

My worst journeys from hell?  Waiting days for a series of cancelled boats in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal, at 100° in the shade — 6/10.  A bus trip across the Peruvian desert that lasted 24 hours –  8/10.  Taking a train from Birmingham to Edinburgh – 10/10 and not just because it was the last one I did.  Or because it cost hundreds of pounds more for the pleasure that the other ones.  But because you know it could so easily be improved.

Take a much cheaper coach from Birmingham to Edinburgh and you need a numbered ticket with a designated seat to travel.  Just as you do with a plane.  So why is it that British train companies get away with crowding as many people as they possibly can onto a train before shutting the doors?  This particular journey saw passengers crammed solid down the aisles and in the doorways, with luggage spilled in every direction and children crying:  it looked like a train load of refugees after a catastrophe event.  If the train company could have got away with putting passengers on the roof, they would have.  And this was not for a couple of tube stops or a suburban commute, but a five-hour journey. 

…

My worst journeys from hell?Read More »

My worst journeys from hell? Read More »

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