I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman's blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces--aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group Meetings (Columbia and Stanford) and at the recent CHAT in Oxford--for forthcoming publications. What appears here is an extremely condensed version of a chapter for Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney's CHAT proceedings volume.
Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.
“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.
‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).
Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2006, 2008). The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.(1)
This ruin-landscape is the topic of the current research project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages and war remains in Norway, Russia, Iceland and Spain we want to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Our research will cover three main themes: the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things. Through these themes we want to develop theoretical arguments that help to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance.
For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have lingered over fragments from ancient times, evoking feelings of wonder, irony, and loss. Archaeological research has helped to fill the perceived ‘black hole’ that exists between the past and the present (Rathje, La Motta, Longacre 2001) and has served nationalism and modernity by informing individual and collective identities. But what happens when we choose to remove this sense of distance and nostalgia for the past from our work and acknowledge the ‘loss of antiquity’ (Hicks 2003)? If we eschew the idea that archaeology exists to connect the present to distant pasts and re-position our discipline to focus upon ‘the interaction between material culture and human behaviour, regardless of time of space’ (Rathje 1979, 2) then we free ourselves from temporal parameters and any material may be subject to archaeological inquiry (Buchli & Lucas 2001, 3-18).
As Hedley Swain pointed out in his keynote address to the 2009 CHAT conference in Oxford, the craft of archaeology employs a standard range of techniques. Archaeologists are very good at observing physical relationships and placing them in a chronological sequence. We also routinely identify patterns of human action through their material residues, and are adept at describing objects in accurate and close detail to determine their composition and possible uses. If we turn our to attention to the contemporary world we are able to use these techniques to observe physical relationships and detect patterns of human behaviour in material things.
photo of over-painted road markings
The scenario: a team of specialists are discovering artifacts from the past and attempting to establish their mode of origin. Tool-marks and other traces of human action come into view. Artificial patterns emerge and take shape from the material field that has just been worked, standing out as figures against a natural background. With experience it becomes possible to tell artifacts apart from similar-looking natural objects or features. A skilled practitioner can work out what kind of past human action gave rise to them and what sort of tools were being used at the time.
Is this a description of archaeological excavation?
No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.
Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).
From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and contemporary world.” Both participants and subjects of discussion were wide ranging. While many came from all over the UK and Ireland, others contributed points of view from the US, Continental Europe, Africa, and even Taiwan. These papers engaged with “modern materials” from treadmills and theatres to workshops and the bricks they may have been built from, and even extended analysis to the “modern materials” produced in archaeological recording, such as photographs.
Of particular interest were several papers which came from outside the disciple of archaeology or anthropology altogether, such as Pearson’s consideration of the role of the theatre building itself in a performance event, and Fisher’s of the “flow” of modern packaging through homes from a design standpoint. Coupled with Harrison’s inside-the-discipline discussion of amusement parks and the social shifts towards an “experience economy” these papers suggest how direct consideration of material culture produces insights even into the contemporary. This point is reinforced by Ouzman’s consideration of graffiti through an archaeological lens, considering its role in “politically-engaged place-ma(r)king.”
Featuring approximately forty papers by an international group of scholars, the symposium promises to be the most extensive review of the archaeology of Tara undertaken to date. It focuses on the data from recently published excavation volumes, but it extends to a wider consideration of research undertaken at Tara over the past twenty years. Themes include:
-The archaeology of Tara
-Tara in its local and regional setting
-Comparative perspectives on Tara
-The significance of Tara through time
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Conference Live Web Stream
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The symposium will be streamed live via the web and facilities are available to overseas listeners to ask question via the symposium email address tara.symposium@ucd.ie. As the programme is compact, only a small proportion of questions will be relayed to the symposium auditorium.
Archaeology, Science and Technology Studies, University of Oxford
In 1922 the Mexican scholar Arreola published a study of maps and images which he had recovered from archives in Mexico City. Much of the material that he presented had not been studied before. Much of it was quite old, some of it dating to the initial conquest and consolidation of Mexico by the Spanish. One of these images was very old, even for being a copy of a lost original. It was called the ‘Mazapan Map’ and the original was estimated to have been rendered around 1560. It was part of 16th century records of farmlands and land ownership. The use of Nahuatl glyphs, the pictographic-ideographic language of the Aztecs, designating holdings and landowners, suggests it was most likely commissioned by the Spanish as part of reconnoitering their newly expanded empire.
'Mazapan Map'
The ruins of Teotihuacan cover the bottom portion of the ‘map’. The Pyramid of the Moon is at bottom left and the Pyramid of the Sun is at the bottom center. To the bottom right, the large, open rectangular shape of the ciudadela (1).
A ‘map’ complementary to the Mazapan was published two decades later in 1580. It was part of the relación geográfica de San Juan Teotihuacán. This map, rather than landholdings, emphasizes imperial infrastructure: the Spanish grafted over the Aztec. The road network emanates from the Aztec (and later Spanish) administrative center (Tenochtítlan) to the regions on the north of the Valley of Mexico. Like the Mazapan map, it also orients north to the left for the map-reader. Tenochtítlan can be seen at the crossroads (center right). The ruins of Teotihuacan are shown (highlighted in box) near the center, approximating the correct geographical relationship to the administrative capital, with the distinctive layout of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the avenida de los muertos (avenue of the dead) outlined by smaller structures.
'Map' from the relación geográfica de San Juan Teotihuacán
Rather than Nahuatl glyphs, the map’s labels are presented entirely in Spanish. A testament to the rapid changes in the intervening twenty years of Spanish domination of the region. The ruins of Teotihuacan are labeled Moctezuma’s oracle, which the accompanying text of the relación explains is a place of pilgrimage for the Aztec ruler and his priests. A place to offer sacrifices. The Aztec oracle is mentioned in other post-Conquest texts, and this map suggests that Teotihuacan was the place of the imperial prognosticator (2).
Now, fascinating as both of these maps may be, contemporary archaeologists at the site do not unfurl them when they lay out new excavation trenches. Nor would they use them for navigating the complex and monumental ruins. Indeed, art historians show more interest in them than site archaeologists. Simply put, they are not good maps.
In this short paper I want to pursue why they are not considered proper maps. This could take us down the road of theories of correspondence, art historical analyses of single-point perspective, the development of the astrolabe and other instruments or even information design - all great pursuits. I want to lodge their consideration, however, with why quotation marks bookend these maps: epistemology. To do this I am going to unpack several closely related propositions.
PROPOSITIONS
1) Epistemology has been wrongly scapegoated.
2) An archaeological commitment to things, to ontology, resuscitates its alter ego as ‘epistemography’.
3) Knowing the past is assembling past.
4) Epistemography is the past made durable.
To unpack this series of propositions I will come back to these proto-historic, historic and contemporary maps of Teotihuacan. These media cascades aid in manifesting the practice of archaeological assembling and the principle of ‘epistemography’.
An Archaeology of Identity: Soldiers & Society in Late Roman Britain by Andrew Gardner (2007) is a work that strives to push forward the current understanding of the Roman Empire, accepting the challenge of incorporating social theory into Roman army studies (James 2002) and contextualizing the milites (soldiers) as social agents, continuing the trend over the past decade of perceiving the Roman army as a social group and not faceless cogs of an imperial military machine (eg Goldsworthy and Haynes 1998; James 2001).
The origins of the book are in AG’s (2001) PhD thesis in Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College of London, but incorporates further developments post-dating the submission of the PhD. The book is separated into six chapters. Chapter 1 (Introduction: the Roman Empire in the 21st century) sets the agenda for the volume, indicating that the soldiers of late Roman Britain serve as a case study for an exploration of much broader issues in archaeology, namely the exploration of the concept of identity and advancing its study in a more theoretically informed fashion. Chapter 2 (The practice of identity) explores the theory behind identity and argues that Gidden’s (1979; 1984; 1993) theory of structuration transcends the duality of (individual) agency and the larger structure(s of society). From this theory, AG distills three themes by which to assess changing identity in late Roman Britain: materiality, temporality, and sociality. The following three chapters explore each of these themes in turn (Chapter 3: The material dimensions of 4th century life: objects and spaces; Chapter 4: The temporal dimensions of 4th century life: traditions and change; and Chapter 5: The social dimensions of 4th century life: interactions and identities). The final chapter, Chapter 6 (Conclusion: Roman Britain in the 4th century) brings the thematic case studies of the previous chapters together to provide an interpretive overview of change through 4th century Britain, drawing on the detailed assessments of military sites and assemblages discussed throughout the work.
Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history.
A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better economic opportunities.
There are countless logs stuck in the flat, siliceous beaches of Mandji—plastic-tagged and iron-chained trunks that fell from the ships transporting tropical wood to Europe.
There are plastic sandals that somebody lost in Libreville and half-carved canoes where white crabs climb.
I recently attended a conference in Greece that was put together with the admirable goal of creating a dialogue between a local community and academic archaeologists working in the area. Topics to be addressed were past and present archaeological fieldwork, public involvement with, and awareness of, the area’s rich archaeological heritage, and future directions for scholarship and cultural resource management more generally. This sort of integration of the broader public in archaeological work not only adheres to the sometimes glossed-over ethical obligation toward public education and outreach (see footnote 1 below), but also has great potential for the preservation of the archaeological record in a particular area; if, that is, such an agenda is carried out in the right way. With such potential in mind, this conference fell depressingly short of the mark, and served rather to illustrate some of the problems and politics in which archaeology is inextricably enmeshed. This is not to say that conferences like this cannot be seen-through to their full promise, and, indeed, there have been many such examples from Greece and elsewhere that have proved to be enormously successful. Moreover, there is a growing interest in “community archaeology” (Marshall 2002). So while this posting is meant to be critical and draw out very real concerns with how we go about making archaeology public, I also hope to highlight the promise these types of endeavors hold, and their necessity in the preservation of the archaeological record. The names of the conference and its participants will not be mentioned as they are not necessary for the broader message I am trying to convey, which I think is relevant to archaeologists working anywhere there is a local community with a stake in their activities.
There are many pertinent directions this discussion could take, both critical and optimistic, and here I have chosen to focus broadly on the theme of community engagement. This aspect of archaeology directly affects a variety of stakeholders, academic or local, and can be examined critically from multiple perspectives. And while the ethical codes or guidelines of numerous organizations for professional archaeologists lay much emphasis on the consideration of local stakeholders, it seems more common to prioritize avoiding violation of these codes, rather than any proactive engagement in efforts that embrace the spirit of them. For example, while directors of field projects would certainly not do anything to harm the local communities in which they work, it is less common for projects go out of their way to involve the community in their activities, beyond employing a few people or businesses, or providing an occasional public lecture. No doubt, these are positive things and do involve community members, but it is in the best interests of both archaeologists and the community if local involvement expands to place greater emphasis on education, sustainability and the long-term.
The street art stencils for The Home Project were completed this week on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin. Activating heritage, community, identity and public space, the powerwasher stencils will be in situ until the foot traffic of Clanbrassil Street erases them through the accumulation of new residues and traces. Why not have a walk down Clanbrassil Street and help build new relations as the work deteriorates.
The Home Project explores the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the Clanbrassil Street area. The words for this project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Ursula Rani Sarma with 10-12 year old students living in the Clanbrassil Street area.
In 2009, curator Ian Russell worked with Ursula to create a public art installation using extracts of the students writings about 'home'. A postcard was designed in collaboration with Zero-G (which can be seen here) and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July 2009, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street using a powerwasher and a lot of friendly help and support. See the final product here.
'Na Fáná Fuachtmhar' was inspired by the incised chevron motifs found inside the Megalithic Passage Tomb at Fourknocks, Co. Meath. The chevron motif, a symbol common to many cultures throughout the world dating from the Neolithic period, is suggestive of the W-shaped constellation, Cassiopeia, which would have been visible through the passage tomb between 3000BC and 2500BC. Na Fáná Fuachtmhar incorporates this ancient symbol into a series of strong architectural forms as a contemporary play on the great standing stones found in Neolithic settlements throughout Europe. The sculpture celebrates the interrelationship between art and archaeology explored during the Sixth World Archaeology Conference at University College Dublin in 2008.
Components for wind turbines at port in Nafplion, Greece.
Last Wednesday I attended a workshop at MIT entitled “Relocating innovation: Places and material practices of future making”. Convened by Lucy Suchman (in residence with the Department of Anthropology at MIT for the Spring of 2009), Endre Dányi and Laura Watts, all of the Centre for Science Studies at the University of Lancaster (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/centres/css/), the workshop sought to critically engage with discourses of ‘innovation’ through the comparative juxtaposition of “three different sites of social, technological, and political future making”: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Orkney, Scotland and the Hungarian Parliament. A basic premise of the workshop was that futures, or more precisely ‘future(s) making’, are located.
It helps to situate this premise—futures are located—by thinking about it historically. Thales in the shadow of the Great Pyramid, al-Haytham at Dar Al-Hekma, Edison in his laboratory Menlo Park, President Obama in the Oval Office; with each figure and site one encounters scenarios where horizons for substantial potentiality were designed. Whether we speak of geometry, optics, electricity or efficiency targets for the American Auto Industry, the practices undertaken with each site translated into futures that were made. (Of course, none of these futures were inevitable. The clinamen, Lucretius’ indeterminate swerve, is always a possibility.)
By centering our account upon these key figures, it is perhaps easy to see why popular culture persistently regards innovation as the province of the lone genius. However, Suchman, Dányi and Watts are much more cautious. Future(s) making, as the workshop sought to probe in more depth, is shaped by heterogeneous network of entities, contestations, utterly specific qualities of place and culturally oriented material practices. With each site of future(s) making one also encounters innovation at work.
The first time I TAed an archaeology class, we began by having our students draw a picture of an archaeologist. The result was predictable: a pile of comically bad drawings of Indiana Jones, leavened with a few nerdy-looking academic characters. That semester, we went on a mission to wipe this image out of our students’ minds, and replace it with the silhouettes of Lewis Binford and Ian Hodder.
The ghost of Indy is hard to stamp out. Everywhere archaeologists gather, we complain about how archaeology is portrayed in pop culture: it’s sensationalistic, cheesy, misleading, schlocky! It gives people the wrong impression of what archaeology is.
This last existential verb is the source of our trouble. We archaeologists know what archaeology is, and refuse to let anyone define it except us. But the cat has always been out of the bag: archaeology has cast a giant shadow on the public imagination from the moment it first emerged as a profession. And the nature of shadows is to distort, and shift, and show us what we want to see. On that note, I offer you two propositions about the discipline.
1) In the popular imagination, archaeology is a form of science fiction.
2) Archaeologists should embrace this, and start writing science fiction that promotes their vision of the past and agenda for the present.
You heard that right: for most people, archaeology is just a flavor of science fiction. And that’s not a bad thing. If this has made your head start rotating and shooting deadly laser beams, take a deep breath before reading further.
