The Nomadic Alternative – Page 143

The documentation of prehistoric archaeology comes, by and

large, from the homes of the settled. And like the daily newspapers,

it catalogues, and arranges onto a time scale, disasters, wars,

triumphs, inventions, hoards of surplus, sacrifices, burials, monu-

ments and heaps of refuse. Such are the sins of, and compensations

for, settlement. But if settlement itself is a perversion, the

catalogue will necessarily be a catalogue of perversions. One

would, of course, overstretch the point by taking a Buddhist attitude

to the evidence and assume it to be an illusion. Nevertheless pre-

historic archaeology is hopelessly biased in favour of the wrong

sort of savage. It tells us what we do not want to know. For we are

interested in the wanderers, who walk about in small bands, not in

seething hordes. Those who tread lightly on the earth are the

happiest and most coordinated people but they are usually below the

threshhold of archaeological visibility. We cannot excavate the wind.

Of necessity we are forced to rely on the reports, the legends,

of those travellers, ancient and modern, who used their own eyes.

And we shall place their evidence above that dug from the ground.

IV

Perpetual motion is a motionless cause. The more mobile a

society, the less it admits the value of change. Unseen change

affects every culture as it affects every living organism, but the

wandering hunters fail to make an issue out of it. The future cannot

disappoint them, for in their eyes the future will be exactly the

same as the present and the past. Without knowing it, they are in

practice always changing and adapting themselves to new conditions,

altering their equipment and developing new patterns of subsistence.

But they believe their environment to be static, their technology

adequate and incapable of improvement. They themselves are the

moveable factor.