Archaeolog

An enquiry into the multiplicity of relations with an “emblem of imperial Rome”

Cecelia Feldman Weiss

(Google earth image)

Where is the Colosseum?

The answer to this question seems obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable icon for the “Roman past-as-glorious,” for “Roman present-as-tourist destination,” the Colosseum is a prominent feature both on the Roman cityscape and in the contemporary collective imagination. Given the attention lavished on this structure in both academic scholarship and popular media, it might seem trite or indulgent to ask a question as simple as where it is located.

But indulge briefly: since its construction, the Colosseum has been translated in to numerous media (books, photographs, video games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena, as mere representations of an “original.” However, another argument treats media as modes which translate something of the material world, the Colosseum, and thereby are able to circulate it at a distance (Law 2002, Witmore 2006). If we extend this understanding of the Colosseum as distributed through media then the prospect of identifying any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more complicated. It would be more appropriate to recognize the Colosseum as always occupying many places in the plural.

Christa M. Beranek (Boston University, Journal of Field Archaeology)

Recently, archaeologists have been incorporating fictional narratives into their scholarly texts or even writing stand-alone fictional pieces (see Joyce 2006; Wilkie 2003 for reviews of works in this form). Archaeologists use fictional or narrative writing for a number of reasons—as an alternative to/ critique of traditional academic forms of presenting knowledge (Spector 1991), as a mechanism for engaging the public, and as a form of self-reflexivity (Wilkie 2003). As a teacher, I initially envisioned these narratives as texts that would prove more accessible to students with no background in archaeology. Unexpectedly, the narratives have been useful not only because they provide understandable material for non-specialists, but maybe more significantly because they provide an entrée into the world of scholarly interpretation in ways that I had not expected, but desperately needed. In this regard, these narratives fill their proposed function as critiques of “the presentation of archaeological knowledge” (Spector 1991: 390) in ways that I certainly could not have anticipated.

In the fall of 2006, I began teaching in a university writing program, instructing mostly first year students in the basics of college level reading and writing. I was filling in, at almost the last minute, for a course in which the students had expected to read immigrant literature, and here I was with a full syllabus of readings in historical archaeology. To ease the transition (and keep the students from dropping out), I gave a strong archaeology sales pitch in the first class, discussing the ways in which artifacts and historical archaeology could give another perspective on the lives of immigrants to America and others who did not write traditional histories. Archaeology could provide the opportunity to present narratives from the inside out, or the bottom up. This will be even better than immigrant literature, I promised them.

Fig. 1 N. C. Wyeth, "Sword Excalibur Rises From the Lake" (c. early 20th c.)

Malory tells in his Morte d’Arthur epic (c. 1450) that just before the mortally-wounded Arthur passes from this world to Avalon, Arthur instructs Sir Bedivere (Bedwyr) to throw his sword Excalibur into the nearby water. Bedivere does not wish to lose such a precious sword, so he returns to Arthur twice having put the sword away out of sight. Each time Arthur asks what Bedivere saw when he threw the sword into the water. Bedivere lies twice and said the water merely moved. Nearly cursing him, the dying Arthur commands one last time. This time Bedivere obeys and throws the sword as far as he can over the water:

“and there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished it, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.” (1)

Arthur is then taken away to Avalon through the mist by the beautiful women in black on the barges. Their mourning belies Arthur’s last words that he will go to Avalon to be healed and return if possible.

Fig. 2 Aubrey Beardsley, Bedivere casts Excalibur into the Water, 1894.

One aspect of this story in the Arthurian saga is singled out here because it seems to preserve a fairly well known Celtic custom of metal deposits in lakes and marshes if such interpretation of these finds is accurate. In the Celtic world, springs, lakes and marshes are liminal sacred places that are intermediary loci between, among others, the living and the dead. When Arthur’s legendary and to some extent magical sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake, this is most likely an excerpted old echo of a longstanding Celtic votive ritual.