Cleopatra - Does digging for the "truth" diminish us?

Times Online (Giles Coren)

She'll just be a skull, for God's sake. We won't be able to speculate on the length of her nose from that. Her nose will have no cartilage or structure, it'll just be two holes in the front of her face. The artist's impression will look like Danniella Westbrook.

Nor are we likely to learn much about whether the two were buried together, or how great their love was. If they manage to prove the woman they dig up is indeed Cleopatra (“Look, look, definite asp bites on the breast!”) then they won't be able to prove the man next to her, if there is a man next to her, is Mark Antony. He's going to look more like Yorick, frankly, than Richard Burton. And even if they are buried next to each other, how in the world do they hope to prove the intensity of their love from that? Even if the two skeletons are discovered “spooning”, it could just be that he was up for it, but she wanted to carry on reading.

The great passion of the love affair is overplayed by Enobarbus for political reasons in Shakespeare's play. And, anyway, the Bard always went over the top with these things (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Ophelia, Othello and Desdemona) because he realised that stories about couples who love each other only in the normal measure simply don't put bums on seats.

Why is it that archaeologists are always trying to “prove” things from the age of myth? If they're not digging up Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat they are uncovering the site of Troy, paddling around the remains of the true Atlantis or, by great good fortune, coming upon Camelot in a car park in Dudley.

That was a naive question. Archaeologists tell the world that they are digging for the tomb of Boadicea, the Garden of Eden, Serendip, Erewhon and Narnia because you don't get government funding if you just say you want to poke about a bit under the new football stadium and see what you find. But I think the impulse to apply science to mythology in the search for “proof” is a vain and rather tragic one.

See the above page for the full story. There aren't many comments on the above page yet (the Saturday edition of The Times newspaper online), but I would not be surprised if this sparks quite a sprited discussion. I think that the first comment by a lady called Kate will turn out to be fairly typical, reflecting a general sense of excitement about the possibility of the discovery of the remains of a past which sits between history and legend. Still, there's an awful lot in what Coren says. Most of our knowledge of the past comes from the vast body of archaeological work which is lucky to find its way into the pages of a local free news sheet. Having done my fair share of scrambling around on my knees in some very unglamorous excavations, and really loving the archaeology of the every day, I still enjoy the excitement of the spectacular.