IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 267

On a sandy ridge above the River Deben in Suffolk, in eastern England, lies a group of about eighteen grassy mounds. They are the burial place of people who lived in the kingdom of East Anglia during the sixth and seventh centuries, and for generations they were simply part of the landscape of a large private estate. In the nineteenth century one of the mounds was opened and a few objects were removed, but the work was poorly recorded and attracted little scholarly attention. It is thought that the mounds were deliberately sited where they could be seen from the river by passing travellers. Only on the eve of the Second World War did the site reveal what lay concealed beneath its surface.

The estate belonged to Edith Pretty, a widow with a strong interest in history and archaeology. In 1938 she invited a local man, Basil Brown, to investigate the larger mounds. Brown was entirely self-taught: he had left school in his early teens, had learned his techniques by excavating Roman sites in the neighbourhood, and earned part of his living from work for the museum in Ipswich. Mrs Pretty paid his wages and followed his progress closely. That summer he opened one of the bigger mounds and found iron rivets, fragments of a wooden vessel and clear signs that the grave had been disturbed and robbed long before.

In May 1939 Brown began to cut into the largest mound. He worked cautiously, with a small team of assistants, removing the earth in thin horizontal layers and recording everything he observed. A few days into the work he uncovered a single iron rivet; then more rivets, arranged in orderly lines, and eventually the shadow of a great vessel pressed into the sand. The oak planks themselves had rotted away completely, but the rivets that had held them together remained in position, and the sand had preserved the outline of the hull. The ship was approximately 27 metres long, built in the clinker tradition with overlapping planks, and it appears to have been rowed rather than sailed.

Amidships, Brown uncovered a burial chamber which had collapsed under the enormous weight of the mound above it. Its contents lay in a confused jumble, but they were extraordinary: a great silver dish, several bowls, a hanging bowl with enamelled mounts, a shield, a sword in its scabbard, and a small purse filled with gold coins. Nothing comparable had ever been excavated in England, and it soon became clear that the chamber had belonged to a person of exceptional wealth and status.

The most celebrated object was a helmet. It had been crushed almost flat, but its decoration survived: thin panels of copper alloy stamped with dancing warriors and animals, a face mask with eyebrows and a moustache, and a crest running over the top. Other finds pointed in the same direction. There were gold shoulder clasps inlaid with garnets, and a large whetstone mounted in a metal fitting, which may have been carried as a sceptre, a visible symbol of royal authority. The combination of military equipment and regalia suggested a leader who united the roles of warrior and ruler.

The purse contained 37 small gold coins and three blanks. The coins had been minted in Francia, the territory of the Franks, rather than in England, and the latest of them can be dated to about 620. That has given the burial a date in the 620s, and it indicates contacts across the North Sea and far beyond: the silver of the great dish appears to come from the eastern Mediterranean. Objects gathered from such distances were the substance of royal gift-giving in the early seventh century.

No human body survived. The acidic sand of the mound had dissolved any remains, and this has left one of the central questions permanently open. Some archaeologists have argued that the ship was a cenotaph, a memorial for a king buried elsewhere; others believe that a body was placed in the chamber and has simply vanished. The most widely favoured candidate is Rædwald, king of the East Angles, who died in about 624. According to the historian Bede, he had accepted Christianity but continued to maintain a shrine to the old gods.

In July 1939 Charles Phillips of the University of Cambridge took charge of the work, and the chamber was emptied within weeks. When war broke out in September, the objects were packed and sent to London for safekeeping. After taking legal advice, Mrs Pretty gave the entire collection to the nation, and it passed to the British Museum. She died in 1942, before the war had ended and before the finds were placed on public display.

In the decades since, Sutton Hoo has been studied and reinterpreted many times. The impression of the ship in the sand was reburied to protect it from erosion, and fresh excavation in the 1960s recovered further information about the mound and its chamber. The crushed helmet was painstakingly reconstructed in the 1940s and again in the 1970s, and it has become one of the best known objects in the British Museum. The estate is now in the care of the National Trust, and a raised walkway and a viewing tower allow visitors to look out across the mounds towards the river.

Among the objects that Spanish officials sent home from the Andes in the sixteenth century were bundles of knotted cords. The Quechua word for them was khipu, usually written quipu in Spanish, and to the Spaniards who handled them they were both useful and puzzling. A quipu consists of a thick cord, called the primary cord, from which hang a number of thinner cords, known as pendant cords. These may themselves carry subsidiary cords. The cords are made of cotton or of the hair of llamas and alpacas, spun and twisted, and they were dyed in a wide range of colours. Roughly a thousand examples survive in museums and private collections. Many were recovered from dry coastal valleys where the conditions preserved them, and a few from graves in which they had been buried with their owners.

The first serious attempts to understand quipus were made not by historians but by mathematicians. In the 1970s and 1980s Marcia and Robert Ascher examined hundreds of examples and showed that the great majority are numerical records. The system is decimal. A knot near the bottom of a cord stands for the units, a knot above it for the tens, and so on up the cord, so that a single cord can carry a number of several digits. The kind of knot matters as well as its position: a single knot may stand for one, while a long knot with several turns records a higher digit. Zero is shown by the absence of a knot in a position where a value would be expected. Once this structure was recognised, scholars could read the numbers on a quipu with some confidence, even though they still could not say what the numbers counted.

Other features of the cords appear to carry information of a different kind. Colours were clearly significant, although the same colour may have meant different things in different quipus. The direction in which a cord was twisted, and the way it was attached to the primary cord, also vary systematically. Sixteenth-century Spanish writers described officials known as quipucamayocs, who kept the state's records and who were later questioned by colonial administrators about the accounts in their charge. Those accounts covered tribute, the contents of storehouses, the number of households in a province and the movement of labour. It has also been argued that some quipus served as calendars, keeping track of ceremonies and of the agricultural year. Whether colour and twist encoded words, or merely categories of goods and owners, remains disputed. Colonial sources also indicate that quipus travelled with the relay messengers who carried messages across the empire, which suggests that the cords could be read quickly by those trained to use them.

Reading a quipu was a skill, and it was almost lost. Churchmen regarded the cords with suspicion, as objects that preserved beliefs they wished to eradicate. In 1583 a council of the Church in Lima ordered that quipus should be collected and destroyed, and many were burned. The ban was never complete: colonial officials went on relying on quipus for accounting, and missionaries themselves used cords to record confessions. But the trained keepers died out, and with them went the conventions that made the cords readable. Some quipus were hidden by families, and others may have been made after the conquest, when the system was adapting to new purposes. That loss, more than the destruction of the objects, is the central difficulty facing anyone who tries to interpret them today. A few surviving examples are accompanied by colonial documents that may describe their contents, and these are especially valuable.

Modern research has concentrated on recording what survives. From the early 2000s an anthropologist at Harvard, Gary Urton, has directed a project that has photographed and catalogued quipus in collections around the world. Their structures have been entered into a database, so that thousands of cords can now be compared by colour, twist, knot type and attachment. This has made patterns visible that no individual scholar could have seen. One finding is that quipus seem to come in distinct kinds: some are clearly numerical and repetitive, consistent with accounting, while others are more varied and irregular. The database has also allowed researchers to test earlier claims against a much larger body of material. Several hundred quipus have now been recorded in this way, and photographs of many are available online. Because the photographs are shared, a specialist in one country can check claims made about a quipu held in another.

The most persuasive evidence for narrative quipus would come from outside the museum. Some scholars have argued that certain quipus encode words, with each knot offering one of two alternatives in the manner of a binary code. Few specialists accept this, because no one has produced a reading that others can check. The Inca writer Garcilaso de la Vega, son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman, maintained in the early seventeenth century that quipus recorded the deeds of kings and the poems of the court. Historians long dismissed this as invention. More recently, researchers have worked with highland communities that have kept quipus for generations. Local specialists there are said to read the cords by touch and colour as much as by sight, and certain cords in local keeping are said to record a sequence of events rather than amounts. Such testimony is valuable but hard to verify.

The word appears everywhere: in the titles of bestselling histories, in museum galleries, in school syllabuses and in political speeches. It is also, at the moment, unusually contentious. Some archaeologists and curators avoid it, preferring to speak of complex societies or simply of states. Others regard the avoidance as a fashion that deprives us of a useful word. My own view is that the term can be kept, but that it has to be used in a specific way.

The word is a product of the European Enlightenment. It entered the languages of Europe in the eighteenth century, when thinkers were beginning to describe human history as a story of improvement, in which manners, laws and the arts advanced together. In that setting, civilisation named both a process and its result: a society was civilised to the degree that it had moved away from rudeness and violence. It was a short step to the view that some societies had travelled further along this road than others.

In the nineteenth century that step was taken, and taken confidently. Civilisation was set against barbarism, and the pair was used to explain and to justify the expansion of European empires. Officials who described themselves as carrying civilisation to other continents were not being hypocritical in their own terms: they believed that law, schooling and medicine were gifts. But the same vocabulary made it possible to treat the destruction of other ways of living as progress, and to deny that the peoples being governed had a history of their own.

The critique gathered force in the twentieth century. Anthropologists trained in the tradition of Franz Boas insisted that each society had to be understood in its own terms. The task of the discipline, they argued, was not to arrange peoples on a ladder but to describe how they lived. From this perspective the word smuggles in a hierarchy: to call a society civilised is, in ordinary usage, to praise it. If some societies are civilised, others are not, and the question of who decides is answered by whoever holds the power to write the labels. The vocabulary of civilisation, on this account, is not a description that happens to be flattering but a judgement disguised as a description.

Critics have also attacked the criteria by which civilisations are recognised. The conventional list, which includes cities, writing, monumental architecture and a state with taxes and officials, was drawn up by archaeologists working on the ancient Near East, and it describes what those sites happened to preserve. Societies without writing, such as the Inca state in the Andes, fail the test even though they governed millions of people. Treating such a list as a measure of achievement puts the cart before the horse.

Defenders of the word reply that we still need vocabulary for the largest units of historical comparison. Culture will not do: it is used for everything from opera to the way a village buries its dead, and in its anthropological sense it usually refers to something smaller and more local. Society is better, but it rarely stretches to cover a whole interconnected world of cities, trade routes and shared styles. Complex society is accurate but clumsy, and complex carries a valuation of its own, since nobody describes their own community as simple.

There is, moreover, a use of the word that makes no claim about superiority. When an art historian writes of Egyptian civilisation, or a philologist of Mesopotamian civilisation, the reference is to a bundle of practices, institutions and styles that persisted over a very long period. Nobody who writes in this way is suggesting that Egyptians were better than anyone else; the comparison implied is with other periods and regions, not with other kinds of people.

Yet the container is not neutral. To define a civilisation is always to select: the objects that survive, the buildings that impress, the texts written by a small literate elite. A word that gathers up pyramids and law codes will say little about how most people lived, what they ate, how children were raised or how land was worked. Even in its descriptive sense, then, the word quietly tells us what to find interesting.

The political use of the word shows the danger most clearly. When civilisations are treated as bounded and enduring actors, with purposes of their own, analysis gives way to caricature. The most discussed example is the argument, advanced by the political scientist Samuel Huntington in the 1990s, that the world after the Cold War would be shaped by conflicts between major civilisations. Historians pointed out in reply that such entities are porous and divided, that they borrow from one another constantly, and that the people inside them disagree about what they share. The word civilisation in such arguments does less work than it appears to, since the blocs it describes are defined largely by religion and geography rather than by shared institutions.

My conclusion is not that the word should be abandoned but that it should be defined whenever it is used, always used in the plural, and never as a compliment. Historians who give it up do not make the ranking disappear; they merely leave the word to those who use it most carelessly. Used with care, civilisation is not a ladder but a map: a way of marking out a very large area of human experience.