Archaeolog

I was moved by a scene in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat” (2002). One of the main characters, a young Canadian of Armenian descent, goes back to Turkey to see the land that witnessed one of the most horrendous genocides of the twentieth century. He contemplates the landscape and films it in video. His gaze is unable to read any signs in the landscape that may recall the horror. The still and bright images, without sound, are, however, disturbingly uncanny. You don’t need ruins to feel the trauma. Unlike other famous genocides, there are very few records of this one (www.armenian-genocide.org). With the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese army (1937) or the German slaughter of Hereros in Namibia (1904), it belongs to the wide category of dreadful events that have never captured international attention or, worse, whose existence has been emphatically denied.

The Spanish Civil War did attract the attention of the world between 1936 and 1939. It was seen as the scenario of a fight between freedom and fascism and later, as the preface to the Second World War. However, there are some resemblances between the Spanish War and less publicized massacres, such as the Armenian genocide. On the one hand, the landscape now hardly shows any hint of the terrible drama that shook the country only seventy years ago, at least for the untrained eye. On the other hand, half of the story has been buried deep under the soil and denied or played down, first by the dictator that won the war and later by several democratic governments. The extreme-right that defeated the Republicans took good care of its fallen and erased the memory of its enemies (including 100,000 people executed with or without trial). The oblivion of the vanquished has persisted until very recently, although some private initiatives are now trying to locate hidden graves and commemorate the people assassinated by the fascists.

My archaeological fascination for the Spanish Civil War comes from a triple astonishment: that such horrible, archaic events could take place so recently where I used to live (that evil was here, as Susan Sontag has put it); that the memory of those who fought for freedom and democracy has been forgotten so easily (no monuments, no tombs) and that the war’s material traces are, apparently, so inconspicuous – unlike many musealized battlefields of the Second World War, the Spanish battlefields seem to be known only by war amateurs and historians. In a sense, all my astonishment can be related to the disturbing banality of evil and to the nature of the archaeological record.

I got my PhD in what once was the most famous battlefield in the world: the university campus of Madrid. As a symbol in the 1930s, it could be compared to Sarajevo in the 1990s. If Sarajevo stood as a symbol of multiculturalism and resistance against the worst sort of ethnic nationalism, Madrid became the symbol of the struggle against fascism (No pasarán, “They won’t pass” – but they did). The university campus was the front-line during the three years that lasted the war. Thousands of people died there – including Italians, Russians, Germans, British and American soldiers. The campus was completely reconstructed after the conflict. What is left today? A colossal triumphal arch that commemorates the victory of fascism over democracy and the university’s logo – a swan that was the emblem of the fascist students in the 1930s. Not a trace or memento of the battle against totalitarianism. Trauma has been wiped out, sanitized from the urban landscape. Even for an archaeologist it is difficult to track down the remains of the war on the surface. Sometimes, when a new block is built or a ditch is dug things come to light: usually tons of debris (bricks, concrete, rusted steel) from the flattening of the old battlefield – the past percolating.

The Civil War also took place beyond the frontline in the form of mass executions, tortures to political enemies, reprisals, vendettas. Trenches and bunkers can still be located in the landscape by means of archaeological surveys and aerial photographs; they can be excavated and mapped. How can one excavate the road curb where the corpses of those killed by the fascist militias were thrown? Or the tree were a Republican hung himself just after the war, unable to bear the insults and harassment of the local fascists? Or the house of a torturer, whose children still live under the same roof? What is the nature of this archaeological evidence? You can touch the road, smell the tree or see the house and feel the horror unfolding if you know about the events.

Yet we need another sort of archaeological documentation. I think we always need another way of engaging with the recent past: by treating it like any other period in history (making inventories, restoring the archaeological remains, displaying ruins and artefacts with didactic panels) we are losing something of the troubled nature of this past – we are killing its aura. While archaeologists are missing the point, others are engaging in creative ways with the contemporary past: photographers and artists (Joel Sternfeld, Manfred Hamm, Mikael Levin, Camilo José Vergara) are turning their gaze to places where something happened. They are disclosing the trauma and violence inherent to things and places in ways archaeologists are barely starting to explore. Dealing with the remains of the Spanish Civil War by means of the usual archaeological procedures is an important step forward to bring them back from oblivion. But if we do not want to neutralize and make banal the materiality of this dark past, we have to look for other modes of engagement.

A very powerful piece of writing. Without in any way wanting to take away from your argument in relation to the Spanish Civil War, which is compelling, I would argue that sometimes the ‘blandness’ of archaeological documentation is just as inappropriate to events that occured in the much more distant past.

Taking an example from my own experience, I was recently involved in excavations of the castle near the centre of my home town of Bedford, UK. When the castle was captured and destroyed in the early 13th century, a total of 80 men from the defending garrison were executed by hanging in a single day. Although not on the scale of some of the massacres and war crimes you mention, as a local event it must have severely traumatized the community of the town at the time. Its just so easy, in writing today about a past event like this, to glamourize it while at the same time glossing over the sheer horror of it. I’ve done it myself in my own writing. Yet the sanitizing effect of ‘blandness’ - embodied in standard archaeological styles of reporting of violence long ago - must influence and be connected to our perceptions of violence in the present and more recent past.

Because of its ability to uncover and make directly accessible the material traces of violent acts, archaeology really does have the power to materialize or ‘bring to light’ the dark pasts that you speak of – but only if blandness is not deployed. This surely applies as much to distant events like the hangings at Bedford Castle as it does to more recent conflicts and atrocities.

Could it simply be that blandness does an injustice to the human past, no matter how recent or distant?

I gave a lecture for Michael Shank's Ten things class yesterday. I laid out a road map for taking a thing and unpacking it.

I offered examples from my own work with maps. But in the lecture I worked closely with Bruno Latour’s excellent thesis (which pulls together work by S. Alpers, E. Eisenstein and W.M. Ivins) from his 1986 article "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with the eyes and the hands," in H. Kuklick and E. Long (eds) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present Volume 6, London.

Begin notes...

A map.

Where do we begin with something so practical, so ubiquitous, so mundane? Where do we begin with something so utterly defined and black boxed that we tend to forget the complexities entangled within it? The aim with Michael Shanks' course Ten things - science, technology and society is to understand how things work to hold society together.

Lets begin with the most basic questions.

For me these usually have to do with the key ingredients of the world—space, time, materiality/matter and action/force (I said “agency” in class but it too has its black box in anthropology and material culture studies).

These may seem like strange ingredients to start with but they will help us begin to unpack something as incredibly complex as a map.

Thanks to Ruth Tringham, Tim Webmoor and I had the opportunity to have lunch and coffee yesterday with Tim Ingold, a Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Department at the University of Aberdeen. Ingold is well known as a creative thinker across both anthropology and archaeology. Much of his work is on human perception of the environment in the vein of what he regards as an ecological perspective.

Over lunch and coffee we casually discussed common affinities between his work and our own in terms of a symmetrical archaeology. Conversation centered upon the notion of materiality as it is currently utilized in both anthropology and archaeology at large. We have a common frustration.

Paradoxically, the fashionable notion of materiality seems to have moved us further way from reality—the material world (Ingold would say the environment) populated by things, animals, etc. Materiality, it seems, has become the sole dominion of human subjectivity. For Ingold, materiality, in a sense, has been dematerialized.

Here Ingold’s concern echoes Bjørnar Olsen’s call for material cultural studies to move on from ‘the familiar story of how the subject, the social, the episteme, created the object; the story that everything is language, action, mind and human bodies’ (Olsen 2003, 100). Materiality has been over-dramatized to the wrong end, or at least a bit too far to one side of a divide which is of our own making!

Symmetrical archaeology excavates underneath the distanced, detached, and distinct view of the world and articulates the entanglement of humans and things. Indeed, our concern lies with the action and qualities of things in the context of these entangled sets of relations with humans.

But there is more to this. Materiality is too vague, too messy, too ambiguous a term for Ingold. Rather he seeks classification, precision, and order. Ingold is after more exacting categories that will aid anthropologists and archaeologists alike in a “sensible inquiry” into the material world. And, indeed, for this to occur we should not deal with the materiality of objects but with materials and their properties.

The properties of materials provide standards to power observations for overcoming the ambiguity of materiality. Things are gatherings, but not just of different materials. Things also gather together the people/material relations with different materials. With a new set of finer grained, classificatory schema we can build knowledge.

But, wait. Hold on. We need to slow down a bit, because I believe we have witnessed a similar pendulum swing before: from the complex and multiple to the concrete and exact and, after a generation or so, back again.

This is not a swing of the pendulum as if there was a choice between the ambiguity of materiality and the concreteness of material categories; rather this is a series of shifts along a passage between two simultaneous situations (the material world and properties of materials) with multiple intermediaries.

While I share Ingold’s frustration and find common ground with much of his work, my concern is that the powers of multiplicity, which the term ‘materiality’ holds on to, should not be forgotten in this passage. To be sure, multiplicity, raw complexity, ambiguity and materiality hold profound possibility (Serres 1995; also Witmore 2004a). They should neither be regarded as against categories of classification nor always completely subsumed to them. It is worth repeating over and over again—there is more to understanding than meaning.

I believe that we must understand materiality and properties of materials not as antithetical but as two circulating states of relations on either end of a process of acquiring definition. The movement from one state to the other is always a simultaneous process of reduction and amplification (Latour 1999; Witmore 2004b). Some people sample the world for properties of materials, but not everyone engages with things in the same way. As an archaeologist, the documentation of the material past requires various modes of engagement. This documentation requires rich mixtures of media.

Materiality should always be situated outside of the black box. It is never simply reducible to the social. It has never been solely of the material. It is the realm of the chaotic imbroglio. We must seek to understand it symmetrically.

References
Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review 36(2), 87-104.
Latour, B., 1999: Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Serres, M., 1995: Genesis, (tr. G. James and J. Nielson), Ann Arbor.
Witmore, C.L., 2004a: ‘Four Archaeological Engagements with Place: Mediating Bodily Experience through Peripatetic Video’, Visual Anthropology Review 20(2), 57-71.
Witmore, C.L., 2004b: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’, Archaeological Dialogues 11(2), 133-164.