Archaeolog

Fig. 1 Grand-St-Bernard Pass: Roman rock-cut road (Survey crew: Brian Daniels, Mike Smith and E. Wang)

Fig. 1 & Fig 2 Grand St. Bernard Pass, Plan de Jupiter: Roman rock cut road, summit (Italy, 8200', 2460 m)

In 1994 the Stanford Alpine Archaeology Project began research to examine Alpine Roman Roads in the Grand-St-Bernard pass between Aosta, Italy and Martigny, Switzerland. This research is directed by Dr. Patrick Hunt, Classics Dept. Stanford University and has been conducted under the auspices of Stanford and the Office du Recherche Archeologique, Valais, Switzerland, and the Soprintendenza for Archaeology of the Valle da Aosta, Italy. There is an international collaborative effort at present between Italian and Swiss archaeological authorities to bring together years of research in the Great St Bernard Pass. For over 30 years Francois Wiblé has undertaken magisterial archaeological research in Martigny and is the undisputed authority of Roman presence in Valais. Italian archaeologists have also conducted much archaeological research in the Plan de Jupiter - recently under Cinzia Joris - and this ongoing Italian-Swiss archaeological work will present the most complete picture to date when published. This brief article on Roman Alpine Roads does not cover the same research agenda as the above-mentioned international collaboration.

Because many of the prior studies on Roman roads in the Alps and this pass in the Pennine Alps in particular have already been published in Italian, French and German, the Stanford research noted here is much indebted to these foundational studies. The Stanford study of the Roman road in the Pennine Alps (Via per Alpis Poenina) is original in part, and while pioneering research findings are briefly summarized here, the Stanford project also seeks to make available the existing literature to an English-speaking audience. Some of the prior literature includes articles or monographs by Blondel (1962), Walser (1984), Wiblé (1975-2006), Planta (1979), Mollo Mazzena (1991) and many others, including the seminal work in English by W.W. Hyde, Roman Alpine Roads (1935), excellent but now outdated in many parts. The new and original research of the Stanford group is also summarized here, and published elsewhere in part, for example, in the Journal of Roman Archaeology XI (1998) by this author. This brief summary is also not offered as comprehensive about all Roman roads in the Alps, but mostly considers one region of the Pennine Alps.

As I have published elsewhere (Journal of Roman Archaeology XI 1998, Vallesia LXIV 1999, and most recently in a new book, Alpine Archaeology 2007, Roman roads in the Alps offer a special case for road construction where normal methods apply in general but also where added features distinguish these high montane routes from lowland routes over relatively flat ground. One of my new discoveries published in the 2007 book is the point that the angles of 105 degrees at the rock-cut road adjacent to the Plan de Jupiter in the Grand-St-Bernard Pass appears to necessitate a pivoting front axle, and if this rock cut road is from the early Flavian period, it antedates the previously-suggested date for pivoting front axles by at least 30 years.

TO READ MORE, SEE PATRICK HUNT'S NEW ALPINE ARCHAEOLOGY BOOK (2007)

Stanford University

copyright © 2006
Dr. Patrick Hunt

phunt@stanford.edu
http://www.patrickhunt.net

Over the last few weeks I have been causally reading through the various chapters in a recent book edited by Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden and Colin Renfrew entitled Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (2004). The book, the material product of a symposium with the same title held in March 2003 at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge, is a rich collection of 23 essays and one introduction which attends to what the editors describe as ‘current thinking about materiality in world archaeology’ (2004, 1). While there is a diversity of issues raised in the book, my concern here is with the nature of human and material relations specifically characterized in terms of a ‘dialectic,’ which was put forth and promoted by a number of the contributing authors.

Here is a list of select quotes:

• “I believe agency must be conceptualized in terms of a dialectic relationship with structure, or, in simpler terms, with reference to the ‘rules of the game’” (DeMarrais 12).

• “The affordances of the wheel-throwing technique need to be discovered each time, in real time and space within the totality of the interactive parameters. The cognitive dialectic is in a constant state of becoming through the process of ‘accommodation and resistance’” (Malafouris 59).

• “Once culture is externalized as material things which exist objectively in inter-subjective zones and which channel future actions, the result is a dialectic played out between kinds of agency” (Robb 137).

• “Studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects but must engage in the dialectic of people and things” (Meskell 249).

While each of these authors has a different agenda, all evoke the term ‘dialectic’ as a means of understanding the relationship between two poles of a bifurcation (DeMarrais and Robb), a duality (Meskell), or a separation within a set of relations (Malafouris) which they wish to ‘overcome.’ All of these archaeologists, along with others in the volume, are weary of what we might characterize as modernist dichotomies (subject / object, mind / body) in understanding how human beings relate to the material world (though they use the sufficiently all encompassing and ambiguous term of materiality; refer to my entry from February 24, 2006).

The enchantment of the 'social' has, as it has in the other social sciences, achieved orthodoxy in archaeology. To play on the revered title of Alfred Gell's piece, 'the enchantment of the social, the social of enchantment' envelops itself so that 'the social' seems to both enchant archaeologists and archaeologists 'enchant' the 'social'. That is, 'the social' seems to become both the explanandum and the explanan for archaeological inquiry. This indeed appears to be a puzzling spell. How can we explain the phenomena of the archaeological past (or present) by attributing a Durkheimian 'force' behind the scenes which directs and compels events but which nonetheless is not itself explained? In stating that social processes, or social meanings, or (social) discourse accounts for the events of the past, we seem to be stating very little. Indeed, there is a tautology at work here. Or more precisely, there is simply tautology as 'the social' is not doing any work. It comes as a stand-in, a modifier or catch-all prefix; and it attaches itself first to domains of study: 'social lives', 'social meaning', 'social body', 'social structure', 'social environment'; then it goes on to define the very fields undertaking research into these domains: 'social archaeology'. What does that mean? Much like Ian Hacking's edification through tongue-in-cheek (or getting to laugh at our pretensions once in a while), do we need to attach 'social..." to everything. Does it clarify? Does it do anything other than assert the hard-fought battle of academic underdogs (sociology and its closest allies) to partition 'reality' into nature versus society, so that in this partitive scheme there was incontrovertible ownership of the 'social territory' and the blitzkrieging advances of the natural sciences could be contained? Is it simply entrepreneurial brandnaming in the academic free market?

As individuals in the science wars have told the story, such as Latour in his Reassembling the Social (2005), this is part of the story. But there is more, both internal to archaeology and in the wider arena of academia. No, the rise of 'social explanation' is not simply due to the 'social context' of disciplinary wrangling. Without the above qualifier, the issue goes to the heart of explanation in archaeology.

Earlier this month, I went to a fascinating, interdisciplinary conference on "Collective memory and the uses of the past", organised by a team around Andy Wood at the School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. The full programme is available here (text file).

I was one of only a handful of archaeologists there. No single discipline dominated, in fact everybody seemed to enjoy genuinely the encounter with representatives of other disciplines: historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, politologists, representatives of literary studies, area studies, etc.

The international conference illustrated to what extent the themes of "collective memory" and "the uses of the past" have been en vogue in a wide range of social sciences and humanities for some time. For the papers assembled in Norwich were, on the whole, not unpolished explorations of a new subject entering academia but instead mature discussions of case-studies in an already well-established field.

My full report has been published on the blog of the European Journal of Archaeology available here.

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