Bill Jay: Artists: Rebels Without a Cause

I am fascinated by those archeological documentaries on television. You know the ones I mean: close-up of a hand brushing away at a piece of dirt and, then, voila, a tiny shard of pottery is miraculously uncovered...

How do they do that? How did they know that a shard will materialize in the exact spot on which the camera was trained? How many times did they go through this process -- sweep, sweep, sweep, nothing -- until they got the right place?

...then the shard is reverently held up to the camera until it fills the frame while the narrator sonorously deduces from this itty-bitty piece of trash that the makers were the meso-cryptonites who lived in the lower Wahili three thousand years ago, buried sacred pigs with their dead, invented forks, married their sisters, constructed bamboo geodesic domes, worshipped nautilus shells, wove clothing from billberry bark, believed their ancestors came from the stars (Alpha Centauri to be exact), laid the foundations for Greek philosophy, and suffered population depletion by hunting rhinocerii with sling-shots.

Well, excuse my skepticism but perhaps there is a slight credibility gap here between the actual historical truth and the ravings of an academic who has been on his knees too long in a hot desert without a sun hat.