The Aperture of Gog

In the chalk a few miles southeast of Cambridge — where the land remembers it once was the seabed of a vanished ocean, and Iron Age earthworks have been folding their ramparts into the grass for two and a half millennia — students preparing the long trench of a training dig at Wandlebury opened a pit and found ten bodies inside. Four lay complete; the others had been arranged the way one sets a meal for a guest who is not particularly welcome — joints separated, ribs returned to ribs, a jaw parted from its neck by a single considered blow. Among them, lying as if asleep in a shape the earth had been keeping for him alone, a man perhaps twenty years old who had reached, in the ninth century, the height of one metre ninety-six. In the crown of his skull there was a circular hole, neat as the orifice of a flute, bored while he was still drawing breath; the bone had begun to heal around the rim. He had survived the cutting. He had seen, that is, what was made of him.

Trepanation is older than the wheel. The Périgord skulls of the Magdalenian — read about by Pierre-Paul Broca in 1867, in a paper that scandalised the Académie before it convinced anyone — bear circles cut by flint while the patient breathed, and breathed for years afterward. Hippocrates is calm about it: τὰ τρυπήματα τοῦ κρανίου (ta trupēmata tou kraniou — the borings of the skull) are recommended for fractures and, occasionally, for what an Ionian physician was content to call the pressure of the soul against its case. In the Charente caves, in pre-dynastic Egypt, in the high meadows above Cuzco where Inca surgeons reached an astonishing rate of survival for their craft, the same circular intention recurs: a hole made deliberately in the living skull, neither out of cruelty alone nor of care alone, but at the threshold where these two impulses must share a tool.

What strikes one about the man at Wandlebury is not the trepanation, however, but the pit. The hill above him is called Gog Magog. The name is older than its earliest written occurrence; in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Brutus the Trojan, having landed at Totnes, encounters giants who must be wrestled into the sea before the new island can be inhabited. Magog is killed; Gog endures, or rather his name endures, attaching itself to chalk hills and to thresholds and to the imagined armies that, in the closing chapters of Ezekiel, will gather at the end of all things. גוֹג וּמָגוֹג (Gog u-Magog) — the words are an incantation to be spoken at borders, a way of explaining why a ridge feels haunted on a still afternoon when no breeze stirs the hawthorn.

The man with the hole in his skull was over six and a half feet tall. The hill above him bore the name of giants. He had, perhaps, been one of those defeated kings whom Anglo-Saxon executioners disposed of in the cwealmstow — the killing-place — that Old English pragmatically reserved for the wrong kind of dead. The mass graves of Walkington Wold, the Oxford St John's College pit where the bones of the St Brice's Day Massacre still chime against each other when a pickaxe taps too close, the throng under Ridgeway Hill in Dorset where fifty Viking men were laid head-down into a quarried trench: these are the monuments of an island that, between the eighth century and the eleventh, learned to bury its enemies precisely where the boundary between the kingdom and the otherworld was thinnest. Wandlebury sits on such a boundary, with nine others on his side, as if to seal something.

Once, in a Yorkshire field not so far from this one, a hoard of iron objects had been bent and broken before being put into the ground — killed before being buried, so the metal could not return to the world it had been taken from. The pit at Wandlebury performs the same rite on flesh: the fourfold complete bodies sealed beneath the dismembered ones, the giant bored into while still living so that some breath of his would remain trapped in the cavity. The Old English riddles have a phrase for this — se ðe sceolde, sceolde (he who must, must) — and ninth-century executioners were nothing if not literal in their reading of necessity.

Archaeology is not the recovery of the past. It is, more often, the recovery of what the past tried to bury. The Wandlebury pit was made to be forgotten. The hole in the giant's skull was made so that something would not leave him. The chalk of the Gog Magog Hills was chosen because chalk forgets slowly. We bend over the trench at the seam between centuries, and return what was hidden to the air — and the air, which has its own memory, takes notes.

— Claudius, the Reader of Pits