It all sounds jolly exciting, but I suspect that for every man who finds gold at the end of his garden there are about a million who devote their lives to the search for buried treasure and end up with a collection of old Coke cans and the gearbox from a 1957 Massey Ferguson.
That’d be like devoting your whole life to DIY and never once erecting a single usable shelf.
Nevertheless, last week I joined an archeological search party on the Makgadikgadi saltpans in Botswana. And guess what? Within just four hours we’d unearthed an early Iron Age burial ground. That’s like taking up alchemy and making gold on your first attempt.
Our guide, quivery with excitement, stepped from his quad bike and told us in a hushed whisper, as though he might disturb the scene with sound waves, that we must go lightly in case we trod on what might turn out to be an important artefact.
Pretty soon he was on his hands and knees piecing together what had plainly been a rather badly made bushman vase, and my children were bringing him beads fashioned from bits of ostrich shell.
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“Oh my God,” he wailed. “Do you know what these are? These beads! They’re the dawn of art. They’re the first example anywhere of early hominids decorating themselves. You can draw a direct line from these beads to the Renaissance.”
Well, I looked at one as hard as I could, but so far as I could tell it was a small piece of ostrich shell with a hole in the middle. Not exactly Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I’ve seen better in Ratners.
Then he found some fossilised wood and I honestly thought he was going to burst.
“Do you know what this is?” he wailed excitedly. “It’s only the third piece of fossilised wood ever found out here!” Well, I examined all the angles and couldn’t seen why this was important in any way. If it was just a piece of wood, then so what? This tells us that many years ago there were trees. I sort of knew that. And if it had once been part of, say, a chair, then what does that tell us? That Iron Age man had a grasp of carpentry? Well he would.
I should explain at this point that many years ago some archeologists dug a huge hole in my school’s grounds, claiming they’d discovered the most important Viking site ever. Every day they went in there with their toothbrushes and their nail files, and every night I’d leap in there in my cowboy boots, because the whole site was strictly out of bounds. This meant it was a tremendous place to have an undisturbed cigarette. Archeology, then, has never really floated my boat.
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And what’s more it turns out I’m not very good at it. I wandered about with my hands in my pockets failing to see anything even remotely man-made. Perhaps, being tall, my eyes are too far from the ground, but whatever, in the whole day I didn’t unearth a damn thing.
My seven-year-old daughter, on the other hand, turned out to be quite an expert. Having found several beads and some potted shrapnel, she uncovered what turned out to be a human leg bone. Quite how our guide worked this one out I have no idea, because to me it just looked like a long thin stone.
And quite why it mattered I don’t know either. Over the years many people have died, so it stands to reason that there are many bones out there. Finding one in the ground is like finding a star in the night sky or an idiot in local politics.
It’s the same deal with pots. People have always made them. And people have always dropped them on the floor. So finding the pieces today is of no moment.
I watch Time Team on television occasionally and every time one of those earnest young men pops out of his hole with a bit of crockery I just want to say: “Oh, why don’t you just go to the pub.” Archeology, as we all know, is simply a tool that enables very stupid people to get into university. Fuse it with media studies and you end up with Tony Robinson.
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Desperate to enliven my morning of walking around with my hands in my pockets, I planted my iPod under the crust of the salt and then called over my family to show them what I’d found.
“Look,” I exclaimed to the assembled group. “These Iron Age Johnnies were more advanced than we thought.”
It fell rather flat, if I’m honest. The rest of my family were genuinely captivated by our find and the history it represented.
They didn’t think it even slightly odd that our guide logged the location on his portable GPS system, saying he’d return as soon as possible with a team of experts from America.
Can you believe that? That people are prepared to fly halfway round the world to poke about in the ground looking for pots, for no financial gain.
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No, really. They will simply donate their find to a museum so they can be looked at by daytrippers who are only in there because outside it’s raining.