Oh, the Humanities...

So last night, Isabel and I were watching a PBS documentary about the "bog bodies" that keep cropping up in Ireland and Europe. Essentially, they are mummified remains of Celtic people left in bogs where the composition of the soil ends up preserving the corpses in remarkably good shape for thousands of years.

Anyway, Isabel and myself found it amusing when they cut from the researchers who were actually researching the corpses themselves to other experts in the field of Iron Age civilizations. One scholar in particular, and I'm going to guess she must have been from the humanities, made the following brilliant statement (and I paraphrase): "We don't really know what the Celts were actually like because much of what we know about the ancient Celts comes from Christian monks who wanted to portray pagan society as brutal and savage and therefore an inferior choice." That might not be exactly what she said, but the general thrust of her argument was that our views of ancient pagan savagery is really just propaganda. The narrator also suggested that Julius Caesar (also a pagan) may have also been engaging in similar distortion of the truth when he wrote about the barbarity of the Celts.

Then, of course, the documentary cuts back to the research lab, where forensic pathologists and the narrator are saying things like: "Yes, it looks like he was on his knees when they smashed his face in with a sharp tool" and "This is evidence that he was ritualistically strangled, and then his throat was cut so deep that he was practically decapitated" and "We have one example of a mummy whose guts were ripped out, possibly in a human sacrifice."

Maybe those spin-doctoring Christian monks were also ritualistically mutilating victims and burying them in bogs so that 1600 years later people would dig them up and think that the pagans did it.

Comments

[Al T]

Isn't great how pretty much anything can be considered evidence so long as it doesn't portray the Church in a positive light? The annoying thing is the tone you've described is considered the normal objective view that all the documentaries use.

[PeterTerp]

And, of course, there is nothing hypocritical about portraying another group as inferior because it portrayed another group as inferior.

[Al T]

HA! I didn't even notice that at first glance.

[Kevin Jones]

"We don't really know what the Celts were actually like because much of what we know about the ancient Celts comes from Christian monks who wanted to portray pagan society as brutal and savage and therefore an inferior choice."

Having skimmed an Irish epic or two in translation, this is a very odd statement to make. The Irish bards often put the thinnest of Christian glosses on pagan works, and continued on with the same material. The Irish Monks recorded such works with accuracy, though they would sometimes append derisive comments on the objects of their work--"jugglery of demons," "fables," etc.