Digging for Troy

Archaeologists are proud to call a spade a spade (and not a hand-operated, steel tipped, wooden handled soil interface device) and covert those hand-operated, steel tipped, wooden handled soil interface devices that slice well, slice deep into the earth, never giving them up to the inexperienced practitioner.

One such digging tool has just sold for a quite incredible $6,250 in the USA, not because of its excellent soil-slicing properties (although I'm sure it has those in...ahem...spades) but because of its erstwhile literary connections. 

The spade was once briefly owned by playwright George Bernard Shaw, who used it to plant a mulberry tree on his 80th birthday in 1936.

 

 

 

 

Later it was presented to the author Ray Bradbury as a Christmas gift.

 

 

Bradbury, a huge fan of Shaw, was apparently so delighted in taking possession of the artefact, that he wrote a poem to commemorate the event. As so few poems are ever written about the act of digging (and as the Press, in their wisdom, published only a few lines), it is perhaps worth setting it down in full:

 

I hold the dear spade in my hands,
Its vibrant lightnings strike and move along my arms,
The ghost of Shaw climbs up through me
I feel a fiery brambling of chin
I feel my spine
Stand straight as if a lightning bolt had struck
His old voice whispers in my ear, dear boy
Find Troy, go on, dig deep, find Troy, find Troy!

But where, I cry, but where, but where?

Why there, good lad, there there, ah, there

Electric goes his fingers. I quake, start

The old man's ghost is pointing at my heart

Can that be true, how deep, how long the digging, can it be true?

Good grief, shut up, says Shaw, grab hold, fall to!

He steps back in the dust, down in the shade,

And I stand, Christmas morn, with ancient spade,

Great Shaw the First is gone, is dead?

His son stands here, Excalibured,

And crowned my head.

 

I love the enthusiasm with which Bradbury eulogises both playwright and spade, as if the power of the former fully inhabitants the garden implement. I can understand his feelings. Many years ago I came in possession of a small set of digging equipment previously owned, and used, by Eric Holden and John Pull, pioneering Sussex amateur archaeologists and I well recall the tingling sense that, in holding the pick, shovel and spades, I was in some way connecting directly with both the personalities of the fieldworkers and the sites they had investigated.

 

 

I also love Bradbury's sense of emulating Heinrich Scliemann in attempting to find Troy. Recalling the epic trenches cut by hand at the direction of that great German antiquarian explorer in the early 1870s through the Turkish site of Hissarlik, in which over 250,000 cubic meters of soil was displaced by 200 workmen using horse carts, wheel barrows and a small rail track over a 3 year period, I expect that it would have taken the author quite some time to replicate Schliemann's efforts.

Still I admire his courage and, thinking about it, 'Go on, dig deep, find Troy, find Troy' sounds like it may well become the site motto for next year's summer fieldwork project.

 

Although finding an ancient Trojan city in the middle of the Dorset countryside may prove quite a task.