Waking the Dead - Richard Butt has a Howard Carter moment!

‘Bloody grave robbers’ my friend, a well known Peel character since sadly gone to his own grave’ averred. We were many years ago studying - with the aid of a few pints - some archeological students who at the the time were excavating Peel Castle. You could say it was - on our part - an anthropological study aided by various local beverages of ‘Univeritystudentexciticas’ who had obviously had a good day at the dig and were chilling out by themselves imbibing.

I thought about our foray all those years ago into the pros and cons of disturbing the dead when I read an article on IOMTODAY about the last archeological escapades in Mann. Apparently all kinds of exciting bits of pottery and human teeth are being discovered. However you wonder is it all worth it because this generations batch of academics in this field will probably have there work trashed by the next lot who come along.

These days of course it's all very serious stuff but back in Victorian times when the real grave wrecking was in full swing it was more a hobby. These days it's probably a hobby that pays handsomely for some.

I wouldn’t mind if academics, historians and archaeologists could give us a straight answer but they can’t. Even the venue where ‘The Chronicles’ were penned is disputed. Some say Rushen Abbey others say: ‘No! They used the 13th century version of the Internet and compiled them elsewhere’. The next generation will probably conclude they were a fake anyway like ‘the Hitler Diaries’. Let's face it they even found a scriptorium at Rushen Abbey but that cut no ice because there wasn’t a toilet in which a 13th medieval wit called Kilroy had scrawled on the wall ‘the Chronicles was here’!

Link: IOM Today going all Howard Carter on us!

http://www.iomtoday.co.im/article.cfm?id=41937&headline=Bringing%20histo...

Pic: One of a series in the IOM Newspaper article - Ok it's not Tutankhamun's tomb but what do you expect for 90p

Bernard Moffatt