IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 222

In 1840 Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, governed from London, and it was among the poorest regions of western Europe. The census of 1841 recorded a population of just over eight million, most of whom lived in the countryside. Many families occupied smallholdings, paid rent to landlords who lived elsewhere, and depended for almost everything on a single crop. That crop was the potato.

The potato had been grown in Ireland since the sixteenth century, but it became the foundation of rural life in the following two hundred years. It produced more food per acre than grain, it grew well even in poor, wet soil, and it could be cooked over a simple fire. Estimates made at the time suggested that some three million people relied on the potato for most of their diet, and perhaps a third of the population depended on it almost exclusively. Dependence of this kind was dangerous, because a single disease could destroy the whole crop, and in the 1840s such a disease arrived.

The cause was a fungus-like organism, now called Phytophthora infestans, which attacks the leaves and tubers of the potato plant and spreads fast in mild, damp weather. The summer of 1845 was unusually warm and wet. Reports of a mysterious blight reached Ireland in September, and within weeks the crop in many districts had rotted in the ground, while potatoes stored in pits were blackened and unfit to eat. Something between a third and a half of the harvest was lost. Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, arranged for Indian corn, or maize, to be bought in America and shipped to Ireland. Fearing that news would raise prices, the government kept the purchase secret, and the grain, which had to be ground and cooked in particular ways, became known as Peel's brimstone.

The relief of 1845 was cautious and brief. Peel's government also repealed the Corn Laws, the tariffs on imported grain, but the decision split his party and in June 1846 he resigned. The administration that followed, led by Lord John Russell, believed that the Irish should be helped to help themselves, and its chosen instrument was employment rather than free food. Men were set to work on roads, harbours and walls, paid according to the amount of labour they completed. The schemes were administered by the Board of Works, and in the autumn of 1846 they were overwhelmed by the numbers who applied.

The second failure was far worse. Blight returned in 1846 and destroyed almost the entire crop, and the winter that followed was severe. In the early months of 1847, a period remembered as Black '47, people died in great numbers. The public works were badly suited to a catastrophe of this scale: wages were too low to buy food, the work was often pointless, and men weakened by hunger could not finish the tasks on which their pay depended. Roads were built that led nowhere, and walls went up around fields that nobody cultivated. Typhus and relapsing fever, diseases associated with malnutrition and crowded housing, spread through the countryside, and those who fled to the towns carried infection with them.

In 1847 the government changed course. A new law allowed relief committees to open soup kitchens, and by the summer several million people were receiving free cooked food each day. The kitchens depended heavily on volunteers, above all on the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, who raised money and distributed food with a speed the state had not shown. The kitchens were expensive, however, and in the autumn of 1847 they were closed. Responsibility for the destitute returned to the workhouses, which were funded by local rates and could hold only a fraction of those in need; a rule denying relief to anyone still occupying more than a quarter of an acre of land pushed many families off their holdings.

The blight returned in 1848, when no large-scale relief was offered, and again in 1849 and 1850, though less severely. In 1849 an epidemic of cholera added to the deaths caused by fever and hunger. By then the poorest had eaten their seed potatoes, sold their tools and, in many cases, gone.

Emigration reached a scale that nobody had foreseen. During the famine years more than a million people left Ireland, most of them for Britain, Canada or the United States. Passage to Canada was the cheapest, and thousands travelled in ships so crowded and poorly supplied that many died on board or soon after landing; the quarantine station at Grosse Isle, near Quebec, received more sick passengers than it could hold. Survivors often sent money home, allowing relatives to follow, and emigration became a permanent feature of Irish life rather than a temporary response to hunger.

The census of 1851 showed that the population had fallen to about six and a half million, and it continued to fall for decades. The famine reshaped the country's language, landholding and politics. Historians still disagree about how far the disaster was made by nature and how far by policy. Some emphasise the beliefs of officials in London, above all Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury, who saw relief as a dangerous interference with the market; others point to the difficulty of moving food into remote districts, and note that exports of grain from Ireland continued while people starved. Few, however, deny that the state's response was inadequate to the need.

For the ancient Egyptians, death was not the end of existence but a transition to another form of life. The body was thought to be needed in the afterlife, and the preservation of the corpse became a religious duty. Mummification, the deliberate treatment of a body to prevent decay, was practised in Egypt for more than three thousand years. It was not restricted to human beings: millions of animals, among them cats, ibises and crocodiles, were mummified and presented as offerings.

The practice appears to have begun by accident. In the Predynastic period, before about 3100 BC, the dead were buried in shallow pits in desert sand, and the hot, dry conditions often preserved the body naturally. When tombs became deeper and bodies were placed in coffins, they decayed, and Egyptians began to imitate the effects of the sand. The earliest evidence of deliberate mummification is disputed: researchers have reported traces of resin and linen on a body buried at Hierakonpolis around 3600 BC, but the technique was fully established only in the Old Kingdom, when royal bodies were wrapped in linen and sometimes coated with resin.

The fullest ancient description comes from Herodotus, a Greek writer who visited Egypt in the fifth century BC. In the second book of his Histories he distinguished three grades of embalming, according to what the family could pay. In the most expensive, the brain was drawn out through the nostrils with a hooked instrument and the organs were removed through a cut in the left side of the body. The cavity was cleaned with palm wine and spices, filled with fragrant substances, and the body was covered with natron for seventy days before being wrapped in linen. Cheaper methods were less thorough, and the simplest appears to have consisted of little more than purging the intestines and drying the body. His account has been tested against surviving bodies, and much of it has been confirmed, although he never claimed to have watched the process himself.

Modern knowledge confirms much of this, but shows that methods varied enormously over time. Natron, a natural mixture of sodium salts found in the desert, was the essential agent: by covering the body in it, or perhaps in some cases by immersing the body in a solution of it, embalmers drew out moisture and fat and halted decay. Scholars dispute which method was more common. After about forty days of drying, the body was washed, anointed with oils and resins, sometimes padded to restore its shape, and wrapped in many layers of linen. Amulets were placed between the layers, and in some periods the finished mummy was coated with resin, which darkened the cloth and gave the body a blackened appearance.

The internal organs were treated separately. The lungs, liver, stomach and intestines might be dried and stored in four vessels known as canopic jars, each under the protection of one of the four sons of Horus. The heart, by contrast, was left inside the body, because it would be weighed against the feather of truth, maat, at the judgement of the dead. A spell from the Book of the Dead, often inscribed on a stone scarab placed on the chest, was intended to prevent the heart from testifying against its owner. In later periods the jars were sometimes replaced by a single chest, and the organs were returned to the body.

Texts are only one source of evidence. Excavations have revealed embalming workshops, stores of natron and resin, and caches of material left over from funerals, including linen, pots and palm-fibre pads. The bandages themselves are informative: many were made from old household linen, and some still carry the marks of their former owners. Records from the village of Deir el-Medina, home to the workmen who cut royal tombs, list deliveries of oil and cloth. Chemical analysis of residues has identified conifer resin, beeswax, pistacia and other substances, several of which must have been imported from the eastern Mediterranean or beyond.

For most of the twentieth century, the study of mummies depended on unwrapping them, a destructive practice that destroyed the evidence it revealed. Radiography changed this. Within a few years of the discovery of X-rays in 1895, researchers were taking images of wrapped bodies, and computed tomography, which produces detailed three-dimensional pictures, has been used since the 1970s. Scans have revealed arthritis and hardened arteries in bodies thousands of years old, conditions that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Endoscopes allow samples to be taken from inside a body through a small opening, and genetic studies have been attempted, although DNA survives poorly in hot, damp conditions and contamination is difficult to exclude.

The evidence still leaves much uncertain. Herodotus's account cannot be treated as a description of Egyptian practice in every period, and different bodies show markedly different treatment: some have no incision at all, while others have been eviscerated through the anus. Nor is it clear how much of the ritual described in texts was performed at the graveside. The public display of human remains in museums is now debated in its own right, and some archaeologists argue that the dead should be studied in ways that respect the beliefs of the people who prepared them.

Archaeology is the only science that destroys its own evidence. A trench removes the layers it records, and although a site can be drawn, photographed and sampled, it cannot be put back. This uncomfortable fact has produced a long-running argument about pace. Should archaeologists excavate as much as possible, as quickly as possible, before sites are lost to roads, ploughs and rising seas? Or should they leave material in the ground, on the grounds that techniques improve and that the questions asked by the next generation will differ from ours? The dispute is often presented as a clash between rescue and restraint. In practice it is a question of priorities, and of what counts as a record.

The case for digging is easily stated. Sites are disappearing faster than they can be studied. Coastal erosion and rising groundwater are eating into deposits that have been stable for millennia; deep ploughing disturbs buried layers every year; looters dig for objects to sell; and construction removes whole landscapes. Where a site faces such a threat, the choice is not between excavation and preservation but between excavation and loss. In such circumstances a delay of ten years may mean the loss of the site altogether. Some of the most important discoveries of the past half-century have come from such rescue work, and they would not exist if the archaeologists had decided to wait.

Against this, the argument for restraint rests on the speed at which methods change. A bone excavated in 1960 was recorded in a notebook; the same bone today can yield a genome, a measure of diet from its stable isotopes and a date from a few milligrams of collagen. Collections from old excavations are now being studied with techniques that their excavators could not have imagined. If a site is destroyed, that potential disappears with it, whereas a site left in the ground keeps it. On this view the ground is the best archive we have, and an archive should not be emptied for the sake of a temporary question.

Yet the idea that the ground preserves is a comfortable illusion. Buried material is not inert. Water moves through the soil, oxygen and micro-organisms attack organic remains, and chemical conditions change when land is drained or fertilised. Nor can a site always be left alone: a field cannot be taken out of cultivation simply because it contains a Roman villa, and planning law cannot protect every buried site from every threat. What can be done is to look without digging.

Aerial photography, geophysical survey and, increasingly, remote sensing from satellites allow whole landscapes to be mapped in extraordinary detail at a fraction of the cost of excavation. The results are often surprising: settlements have been traced without a single object being lifted from the soil. Survey cannot answer every question, and it cannot recover objects, but it can tell us where the most significant deposits lie and which of them are most at risk. Decisions about what to dig can then be based on knowledge rather than chance.

Behind the technical argument lies a question about who has the right to decide. Archaeology has a history of taking material from people who were not consulted, and in many parts of the world research on human remains is now negotiated with descendant communities, whose views may not be those of academic archaeologists. There is also a question of whose future is being protected. It is often assumed that future archaeologists will be better equipped versions of ourselves, yet that assumption looks less secure in an era of shrinking university departments and unstable funding.

A sensible policy follows from all this. Survey should come before excavation, so that we know what exists and can protect the most important sites by leaving them alone. Excavation should be reserved for sites that are threatened or that can answer well-defined questions, and the material recovered should be recorded, published and stored to standards that will make it usable in fifty years' time. Too often none of this happens: excavations are never published, finds sit in boxes, and archives are dispersed when the archaeologist retires.

My own view is that the choice between now and later is a false one. Excavation should be treated as a last resort, but not as a sin, and the case for restraint is strongest where a site is stable and the questions can wait. Where a site is being destroyed by natural processes or by development, delay is simply destruction at a slower pace. The greater scandal, in my view, is not that archaeologists dig, but that so much of what they dig is never properly analysed, published or looked after. A discipline that cannot care for the material it already holds has little right to lecture others about the future.