Invented and Manufactured History

Invented and Manufactured History Raymond H. Thompson In 1138, at the height of the Mediaeval period and less than seventy-five years after William the Conqueror led his Norman barons into Britain, an imaginative Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth, completed a detailed account (in Latin, of course) entitled The History of the Kings of Britain. In it he gave the British people an apocryphal, proud, and noble Trojan ancestor, Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas. With this fine pedigree rooted in the ancient and classical civilizations, he dispelled any thoughts that the ancient British might have been rude barbarians beyond the reach of the Graeco-Roman world. He was most resourceful in applying his rich imagination to filling in the many gaps in early British history. He successfully pandered to the sensibilities of his Norman patrons. He related stirring accounts of heroic times, such as the story of King Lear, ready for Shakespeare to exploit centuries later. He created the channel through which the enduring Arthurian legend is transmitted to an appreciative audience year after year. But more than anything else, Geoffrey of Monmouth started a grand tradition of invented history. Earlier British writers had also invented parts of their historical accounts, but Geoffrey’s rousing good stories immediately became popular throughout Europe and remained so well into the eighteenth century. That great tradition of invented history continues its powerful influence into the present day, as the persistent efforts of some Scottish nationalists attest. The English-speaking world is replete with attempts to use classical, biblical, folkloric, invented, and imagined sources for personal, monetary, ethnic, religious, political, and national aggrandizement through the vehicle of invented history. The documentation of sources has long been a problem for the inventors of history. For example, Geoffrey claimed that he had obtained many details from a vetustissimus liber, a very ancient book in the British (that is, Welsh) language that has never materialized. When British antiquarians in Raymond H. Thompson is Director Emeritus, Arizona State Museum, and editorial advisor for Journal of the Southwest. Journal of the Southwest 51, 1 (Spring 2009) : 1–2 2  ✜  Journal of the Southwest the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries discovered artifacts in archaeological contexts and began to recognize those objects as products of human activity, they opened up new opportunities for bolstering invented history. Because real artifacts found on the surface and in archaeological sites were often inadequate and not fully convincing documentation for the fanciful historical accounts, objects specifically crafted to support particular fantasies began to appear and to be found in falsified archaeological circumstances. By the nineteenth century there was an outpouring of forged artifacts tailor-made for specific invented histories and planted in suggestive archaeological contexts. The rise of empirical science in the late eighteenth century probably increased the pressure on the inventors of history to provide tangible evidence for their fantasies and to manufacture it if necessary. This kind of invented history backed up by forged material evidence may be thought of as manufactured history. It was in the New World, and especially in the United States, that manufactured history really blossomed. The situation here is complicated by the diversity of the U.S. population. On the one hand, there are the American Indians, who stimulated many questions about where they came from and how they are related to the people of classical and especially biblical times. On the other hand, there are the many different groups from other lands with a multitude of fraternal, religious, ethnic, and national affiliations and goals. As a result, there is an extensive scholarly literature on manufactured history in this country, as well as an enormous outpouring of commentary in the popular press. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s grand tradition of invented and manufactured history is alive and well in America today. The Southwest, with its rich archaeological resources and many Indian communities, has been the source of a large body of invented history with tales galore of buried treasure, off-course Phoenician seafarers, wandering Welshspeaking “white” Indians, and even extraterrestrial invaders. Arizona’s most famous manufactured history is represented by the Tucson lead artifacts that seem to describe in Latin the exploits of a group of Jewish refugees of Carolingian times...