Archaeolog

This paper starts with the question: can rivers usefully be studied as artifacts?

The question may raise an eyebrow or two. For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape. Even in the midst of towns – bordered by buildings on both sides – rivers are often taken to represent ‘the natural’ or ‘the wild’ or ‘the environmental’. They tend to fall within the subject domain of the hydrologist or sedimentologist. In archaeology, rivers and palaeo-channels (traces of former river courses) are susceptible to a barrage of scientific techniques, not so much to the cultural theories applied to other more conventional kinds of artifact.

Xurxo Ayán Vila (Spanish Higher Council of Scientific Research)
David Blanco Míguez (University of A Coruña)

The Internet must be seen as a social phenomenon and its spatial properties should be critically interrogated... Our cultural archaeological production is today implicated in the discourses and contestations of identity, social roles and representations, in new ways, through new media and within new spatial configurations. If archaeologists are to play an active role in the process, and thereby come closer to disciplinary maturity, then we have to understand these processes and their position in the new cyber-order.
(Hamilakis, 2000: 257)

Since 2003 a team composed of a variety of professionals connected with the Landscape Archaeology Laboratory of the Padre Sarmiento Institute for Galician Studies (CSIC-Xuga) in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) have been working on the archaeological site of Castros de Neixón - two hillforts located in a small peninsula in one of the Galician rias. In step with this project, an international work camp for young people aged 18 to 30 has been set up. The project has several broad aims: the recovery of the cultural heritage of this area; the design of and display of cultural materials in the Archaeology Center of Barbanza (open to the public since 2002); the promotion of the archaeological area of Neixón as a tourist attraction, and the communication of the scientific knowledge produced by our research to both local communities and society at large.

The project's logo ("Neixón" in Galician is pronounced like "nation" in English)

Scientific interdisciplinarity, work by volunteers in the international work camp, and local involvement constitute the three main pillars of the Arqueoneixón project (Ayán et al. 2007). These mainstays provide the basis for a scientific project that, despite having been designed in an academic context, seeks to permeate the social, economic, cultural and symbolic fabrics of the archaeological area of Neixón.

Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA
Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University

The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a "space" or "extent of existence" and "the interval between two successive events or acts." Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing time's passage, they assign social meaning as "history." When we come across one in a book, exhibit, or presentation, we comprehend its string of dated moments and selective illustrations. Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption. Even when authorship is unclear, authority is implicit and strong. Imagining the between spaces, the elided events and edited convolutions, takes some effort. Or an intervention.

A timeline of city history is part of the décor of my home subway station, Davis Square on the Red Line in Somerville, Massachusetts. The station was completed in 1984, and most of its interior dates from that time. Structural elements are raw concrete, sheet aluminum, and dark purple-brown brick. The public art program at the station is conspicuously disjointed. Drawings by elementary school children have been transformed into ceramic wall tiles. Casabianca by Elizabeth Bishop is carved discreetly into the bricks of the platform floor. A collection of giant geometric shapes, splashed in now-murky primary colors, stretches above the inbound platform. The collage may or may not spell out "Davis."

Thomas M. Urban

In summer of 2006 I left my job working for Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to participate in a project in Iraq investigating mass graves for the Iraqi High Tribunal. My primary duty was analyzing "cultural objects" found in the graves of genocide victims. These objects included ballistic evidence, personal effects, and clothing. Clothing offered a particularly interesting window into the lives of the victims, revealing ethnic identity, gender, manner of death and more. Collectively and individually, clothing made a compelling line of evidence for telling the story of crimes against humanity.

Bogolan (mud cloth): This bogolanfini wrapper, formerly on display at a Haffenreffer Museum textiles exhibit, was produced in Mali by Kouraba Diarra and Field Collected by Claire Grace. Photo Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Bogolan

I never had much interest in textiles as a category of material culture. Despite this, I found myself learning quite a bit about them. I had enrolled in a graduate seminar on museum studies during my senior year at Brown University. The course focused on developing an exhibit to be displayed in a new satellite gallery of Brown's anthropology museum. Much to my dismay, the course instructors had already decided that the exhibit would focus primarily on textiles. I wanted to gain some museum experience, so decided to continue with the course despite of my lack of interest in textiles. Ultimately, my contribution to the exhibit focused on pre-Columbian textiles from Peru and Bolivia. I considered myself to be more of an archaeologist than an ethnographer, so working with ancient textiles held more interest for me than working with some of the contemporary pieces in the museum’s collection. This was my way around the textile dilemma. After all, my curatorial contribution to the exhibit was archaeological: no touchy-feely interpretations of contemporary clothing here. I worked hard on my contribution to the exhibit, then washed my hands of the whole business of textiles, vowing never to turn back.

Yannis Hamilakis

An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99).

During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often drawn on the most iconic specimen of Greek national imagination, the Athenian Acropolis. I thus soon became aware of two facts: the first is that most tourist guides and official presentations to the site still present to the nearly 2 million visitors per year a sanitized image, a partial, monumentalized façade of only one aspect of the rich social biography of the monument: a version of its classic life, broadly defined. The site was important before classical times, and it continued to be important subsequently, up to the present. Yet, very little of that richness reaches the visitors. Moreover, the site continues to be projected exclusively as a sight, a staged authenticity that is offered to the visitors for almost exclusively visual consumption and admiration. I have elsewhere explored this phenomenon by pointing to this ocularcentric monumentalisation as the outcome of the combined efforts of the photographic and the archaeological (Hamilakis 2001, 2008).

Bradley M. Sekedat
Brown University

A growing number of recent studies seek new ways to engage with landscapes (see references). The Carrlands Project (www.carrlands.org.uk) fits aptly into this category as it explores the complexity of the Carrs in southeastern England through the combination of music, dialogue, and composed sound recordings. The format of this presentation is a website that hosts a series of 12 recordings divided among three specific portions of the Carrlands: Snitterby Carrs, Hibaldstow Carrs and Horkstow Carrs. Each recording is approximately 15 minutes long, treating the ‘historical,’ ‘cultural’ and ‘physical’ variations that make up this diverse region. The creators (Mike P. Pearson, John Hardy and Hugh Fowler) encourage users either to bring the recordings with them to the Carrs to enhance the interactivity of their engagement, or to listen to the audio clips at a distance, embracing the message of complexity inherent within them. This reviewer listened from his office in Providence, Rhode Island. I paid particular attention to the dominant themes that arise out of the scripted narrations and musical compositions that accompany the journey through the flat, marshy, industrial and agricultural terrain.