Russell Chamberlain

I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive: no inscription, no painting, simply a small piece of light-coloured stone, evidently broken from a larger mass. But it had solved a centuries’ old mystery, for it told us where Alfred had finally been buried. Alfred died in 899 and was buried, together with his wife and son, in the Old Minster in the heart of Winchester.

Some years ago, just before the Shah went into exile, I was touring the archaeological sites of Iran as a guest of the then Imperial Ministry of Culture. I wanted to see the extent to which archaeology was now acting as a means of establishing national identities. Near Hamadan there was a modern bridge over a ravine, whose sole purpose was to bring the visitor to two large cuneiform inscriptions in which Darius and his son Xerxes rather touchingly gave thanks to God for his gift to them of the land of Iran. With Iran’s chaotic history over the past two millennia in mind, I turned to my guide, a young graduate of Tehran University. ‘Do you regard these people as your ancestors — your father’s father’s father’s people?’ ‘Yes,’ she said.

Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds could have furnished their homes for a pittance from what, in Britain, were known as ‘junk shops’ — if they could face the embarrassment of living with somebody else’s grandmother’s chaise-longue or somebody else’s grandfather’s armchair. Horse and cart gave way to the internal-combustion engine. Children’s table games gathered dust as the family clustered round the television screen.