Archaeolog

Archaeology through the Lens of Sherlock Holmes

2013-04-23T00:00:59Z

There is always something to learn from Sherlock Holmes. It is a good sign that an archaeologist has been often identified with the private detective:

The Sherlock Holmes type detective has become a common association with archaeology. Although the detective has been associated with other disciplines too […], the link with archaeology is nevertheless extremely close. As has often been pointed out […], both archaeology and (forensic) criminology draw, in parts, on seemingly incontrovertible material evidence, which is carefully documented and taken to provide significant clues as that what really had happened at the site under investigation (Holtorf 2007: 75-76).

Figure 1. Bredarör on Kivik around 1760 (Drawing by Beckanstedt, ATA/Stockholm) (after Goldhahn 2012).

One of the archaeologists who looks closer at Sherlock Holmes’ logic and its usefulness in archaeology is Michael Shanks (1996: 37-41). The British archaeologist uses as a starting point of his discussion about Sherlock a quote from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Golden Pince-Nez. It is rather a typical story how Sherlock Holmes by approaching details unseen to the others discovers the truth at the end. What is worth mentioning is the fact that Sherlock’s impressive logic is at work in the very first story about the great detective who lived at 221B Baker Street, A Study in Scarlet (Conan Doyle 2003). The reader is already shocked in the first chapter where Sherlock, only by a quick glance at John Watson, knows that he is a doctor of medicine, who was in Afghanistan, and was injured there, etc. John Watson explains in the next chapter how Sherlock was able to do it only by scrutinising details. This aspect of a Sherlockian thinking is emphasised by Shanks. The British archaeologist (Shanks 1996: 38) describes it in the following way:

Sherlock Holmes, whose method is exemplified in the passage above [a fragment from The Golden Pince-Nez – D.K.] trifling details lead to deep insight. It is not that Holmes is a methodical scientist who calculates all possibilities, never guessing until the truth is clear. Sherlock Holmes in fact depends on inspired guesswork, and this is what makes him so fascinating: he observes, makes a guess on the basis of what he thinks is likely, then tests out the guess.

The above quote should be read as a symptom, that something is wrong in this very reasoning about Sherlock. In other words, when such sophisticated theoretician like Shanks repeats social clichés about Sherlock (trifling details lead to deep insight), then there has to be something fundamentally wrong about it .

]]> One of the crucial novels about Sherlock which helps to understand his logic of thinking is The Boscombe Valley Mystery (Conan Doyle 2008). On a first approach the plot is very banal: there is murder of local landlord in Boscombe Valley in Herefordshire. Inspector Lestrade asks Sherlock for help. They all, including Dr. Watson, go to Boscombe Valley. The private detective looks for details trying to find the murderer. This procedure is pinpointed by Shanks. However, there is wonderful dialogue which presents a key aspect of Sherlock’s reasoning (Conan Doyle 2008: 73):

- “Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,” answered Holmes thoughtfully. “It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. It must be confessed, however, that the case looks exceedingly grave against the young man, and it is very possible that he is indeed the culprit. There are several people in the neighbourhood, however, and among them Miss Turner, the daughter of the neighbouring landowner, who believes in his innocence, and who have retained Lestrade, whom you may recollect in connection with the Study in Scarlet, to work out the case in his interest. Lestrade, being rather puzzled, has referred the case to me, and hence it is that two middle-aged gentlemen are flying westward at fifty miles an hour instead of quietly digesting their breakfasts at home.”

- “I am afraid,” said I, “that the facts are so obvious that you will find little credit to be gained out of this case.”

- “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,” he answered, laughing.

In short, Sherlock’s way of thinking is not so much based on gathering clues which are unseen for Dr. Watson and the police. This, let me call it, ‘zero level’ of a Sherlockian logic relies rather on assumption according to which non-problems are very problematic, so to speak. It is not that Sherlock gathers clues to let them speak for themselves and then all of a sudden the truth appears. On the contrary, when everything is clear and obvious, when facts speak for themselves it means one thing for Sherlock: that one cannot pose the correct question and the investigation begins (see also Kobiałka in press). Sherlock is in a way very superficial (Kobiałka 2013). He does not want to understand things too deeply. Here should be located the starting point of Sherlock’s reasoning.

As an archaeological example of the previous remarks can be mentioned Joakim Goldhahn’s research on the famous Bronze Age cairn Bredarör on Kivik (Sweden) and its interpretation history (e.g. Goldhahn 2009). The cairn on Kivik is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Scandinavia. Since its looting in 1748, it has become a constant point of reference in archaeological research on the Bronze Age in Scandinavia. Its impressive decorated slabs have been under special scrutiny. Relying on them and bronze artefacts found in the grave some archaeologists dated the cairn to the Early Bronze Age, others to the Middle Bronze Age, or the Late Bronze Age. What has not been call into question was the assumption that a special person (chief, shaman, etc.) was buried there. So, different archaeologists like Oscar Montelius, Sven Nilsson, Kristian Kristiansen up to and including Christopher Tilley has been following this assumption.

What Goldhanh’s research showed is the fact that a problem is usually a part of its own solution. Archaeologists had problems with precise dating of the grave because, as the Swedish archaeologist claims, the decorated cist in the cairn was used for at least 600 years. The decorated slabs were indeed from the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age. In this case, it was not only the desire to go deeper into things, but the obsession of archaeologists with unilinear historicist times, that finds difficult to admit multitemporality (Hamilakis 2011). That is why the problem with previous interpretations of the cairn is not that they were not deep and precise enough, on the contrary, they were too deep.

Last but not least, also the second point of Goldhahn’s research seems to be very Sherlockian. What Goldhahn challenged is already mentioned assumption according to which a special person was buried there. Some archaeologists even compare the person buried in the grave to Ulysses (Goldhahn 2009: 363). An analysis of the bones found in the grave shows that many people were buried there and most of them were teenagers. When the (arte)facts (seem to) speak for themselves, it means that we are in trouble – this is a lesson also of Goldhahn’s analysis.

To summarise, it is good to think of archaeology through the lens of Sherlock Holmes. However, what we can learn from Sherlock is not how to gather clues (artefacts) to analyse the past but rather to call into question our own most elementary presuppositions. There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.

Notes

1) It needs nonetheless to be clearly pointed out that Shanks sees Sherlock in more sophisticated way than many others (e.g. Adams 1973; Hunter 1996).

Acknowledgements

This publication is part of my research work at Linnaeus University, thanks to a Swedish Institute scholarship.

References

Adams, W. 1973. ‘The archaeologist as detective’. In Variation in anthropology, edited by D. Lathrap and J. Douglas. Urbana: Illinois Archaeological Survey, 17-29.

Conan Doyle, A. 2003. ‘A study in Scarlet’. In The complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 1. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 3-96.

Conan Doyle, A. 2008. ‘The Boscombe Valley mystery’. In The adventures of Sherlock Holmes. London: Forgotten Books, 70-95.

Goldhanh, J. 2009. ‘Bredarör on Kivik: a monumental cairn and the history of its interpretation’, Antiquity 83, 359-371.

Goldhanh, J. 2012. ‘In the wake of a voyager. Feet, boats and death rituals in the North European Bronze Age’. In Image, memory and monumentality: archaeological engagements with the material world. A celebration of the academic achievements of Professor Richard Bradley, edited by A. M. Jones, J. Pollard, M. J. Allen and J. Gardiner. London: Prehistoric Society’s Research Paper 5, 218-232.

Hamilakis, Y. 2011. ‘Archaeological ethnography: a multitemporal meeting ground for archaeology and anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 399-414.

Holtorf, C. 2007. Archeology is a brand! The meaning of archeology in contepmorary popular culture. Walnut Creek: Archaepress.

Hunder, J. 1996. ‘A background to forensic archaeology’. In Studies in crime: An introdution to forensic archaeology, edited by J. Hunter, C. Roberts and A. Martin. London: Batsford, 7-23.

Kobiałka, D. 2013. ‘Against Gandalf the Grey: an archaeology of the surface’. Archaeolog:
http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2013/02/against_gandalf_the_grey_an_ar.html, accessed at 23 February 2013.

Kobiałka, D. in press. ‘On (very) new and (extremly) crtical archaeologies, or, why one may remain forever eighteen years behind the truly new’, Forum Kritische Archäologie 3.

Shanks, M. 1996. Classical archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the discipline. London-New York: Routledge.

Archaeological Description and Doubt

2013-03-31T21:29:14Z

I wrote this paper for a session at the 2011 Meeting of the American Association of Anthropology in Montreal called Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology: What is the status of our descriptions?

It is about time I posted it here. (Note 1)

Archaeological description is rather peculiar. As we work at describing old things it is often the case that we simultaneously participate in their utter oblivion. Excavation, in particular, has often been taken, not only as synonymous with destruction, but also as a kind of unrepeatable experiment, if experiment is even the right metaphor. One can never return to those deposits and cuts that have been removed. One can never engage those features and things in the way that they were prior to an intervention by archaeologists. We accept these losses as a trade off for those gains made in the descriptive process. But what happens if a description becomes suspect?

This paper shares some preliminary considerations that focus on the relationship between archaeological description and doubt. It takes as its ground a series of examples from the 2011 excavations of the erstwhile Roman fort at Binchester, UK –these are divided into three sections: 1) accuracy; 2) association; and 3) definition. More specifically, this paper seeks to understand what the question of doubt reveals about the adequacy of an archaeological description. Even more perplexing is the impossibility of full verification under the weight of scrutiny. Against a standard notion that once skepticism sets in the validity of the statements are called into question or the data become irrevocably suspect, I wish to suggest that the status of archaeological descriptions should always be approached with a spirit of caution, rooted in a deep awareness of just how risky and tentative is the act of reaching an adequate archaeological description.

]]> Accuracy

Let us begin with an excerpt from Jack’s notebook, a student excavator whose real name has been omitted, from the 2011 excavation season.

July 27, 2011: “ Today we finished up clearing the cobbles in 415 (Note 2) and afterwards Natalie and I began to plan. I’ve been interested in doing this since day one – I was actually the project cartographer in Belize. Here, they do things very differently [from Belize]. That is to be expected since we work in huge trenches [at Binchester]. Planning goes a lot faster, but there are countless cobbles to draw. Using a 1x1 meter grid [a planning square or frame with taunt strings crossing every ten centimeters to form a grid] allows the cartographer to work by themselves. I found that particularly useful. The map is made much quicker, but it felt less precise. I mapped 17 squares, a feat that would not have been possible in one day without the grid. Mapping this way was a valuable experience.”

July 28, 2011: “Today I continued working on my plan. Work went by a little slower today because I was moving into an area with a much higher frequency of cobbles. After lunch, a student from ‘University X’ began to map the region adjacent to mine. She seemed a nice girl until I noticed that her grid was off by several centimeters. I commented on it, suggesting that she fix her grid. She just said “oh well” and continued drawing. It shouldn’t have bothered me, but it really did. Archaeology is a destructive science and the maps we make can sometimes be the only evidence we have of the ephemeral materials encountered in excavation. I couldn’t believe someone with such a disgustingly sloppy work ethic had not only been accepted to ‘University X’ but also to this excavation . . .”

Jack’s notebook speaks of a hard lesson that every archaeologist, aspiring or otherwise, must face – namely, not everyone holds to the same standards in the descriptive process. Jack’s dilemma centers on the question of ‘accuracy’ in planning, which in this case means fidelity to the things shown as they appear to an observer hunched over a gridded-meter frame. Precision is of great importance to Jack. First, the planning frame, which speeds up the process, seems less exact than the cartographic methods used in Belize. (Note 3) Second, the insincerity on the part of Jack’s colleague means that from now on, anything that she does will be suspect as far as Jack is concerned. Credibility and trust are found lacking and, for Jack, both planning frame and commitment on the part of the student from University X are roots of doubt. (Note 4)

Questions of a faithful portrayal count all the way down to decisions made in the course of drawing a cobbled surface. Fortunately a few centimeters are not always such a critical issue on a context extending over an area of 50 square meters or more. This is not to wish away the dilemma as Jack sees it. To the contrary, it is a constant worry on a training excavation like Binchester, which is full of such differences of care and commitment (for those sticklers among us, the inconsistency was picked up during the verification process where student from University X’s plan did not match up to the grid for the larger plan).

As a teaching excavation, these worries are encompassed in its design. (Note 5) Rather than being backed into the corner of establishing criteria for faithful witnessing and judgment, these issues have relied more on a combination of developing trust and a loose set of guidelines as to immanent discrimination in the description process. As we delve further into these checks and balances, let us also cover some basics regarding the descriptive process.

Association

July 11, 2011, 10:07 am: Joseph and Jamie are having a conversation concerning the phasing of a series of contexts on the north edge of Trench 2, which is a c. 43 x 20 m area encompassing Dere Street and the vicus (an ad hoc civilian settlement adjacent to a Roman military fortification) immediately to the east of the former entrance of the fort. The discussion centers on the proper phasing of some discrete areas of rubble, a potential wall line, and a couple of fill layers. Because of subsequent changes in soil and their supposed relationship to the lines of stone at the edge of a possible pit, they have to adjust the phasing order present on their context sheets. 5172 is replaced by 5146 as being below 5181.

The single context system requires one to excavate in phase – one does not put off the question of what something is or how it relates to other features around it. The sequencing must be worked out during excavation. Phase translates into what archaeologists call a ‘relative temporality’. In the context sheet seen here, for example, 5184 is above 5147 and below 5074. This translates into 5184 being earlier that 5074 but later than 5147.

Centered on the sequence of statigraphic relations between different contexts, Binchester, like many British archaeological projects, enrolls the single context system. Contexts are instantiations of events – what remains of past events – that can be differentiated from other events on the basis of various observable “traits”. Contexts are manifest either as “cuts” or “deposits” and traits vary with the object observed. Jamie, for example, guides Joseph on through the descriptive procedure required by the pro-forma context sheet describing context 5184 which is interpreted as a “cluster of tightly packed stones.”

The “traits” of the context are to be specified within a series of boxes. Is the context wet or dry (weather impacts one’s ability to trace a surface, wet surfaces reveal changes in soil better than dry)? What is its texture (e.g. “sticky”, “smooth”, “slightly gritty” etc)? Compaction (e.g. “cemented”, “loose”, “firm”, “solid”, “friable” etc)? What is its composition and color? Does it have inclusions? Is it truncated horizontally (cut by plowing)? Have animals disturbed the context; or is it waterlogged?

Through the pro-forma sheet, the deposit is translated as a sketch map, a diagrammatic sequence of contexts (Harris matrices), narrative and boxes pertaining to the descriptive details that Joseph seeks to understand. A guarantor of dutifully followed protocols, the context sheet fulfills the simultaneous role of reference grid by providing continuity to other contexts, features, finds, media (Black &White, Color Slide and digital photo, video, plans), interlocutors (Joseph as the excavator, Jamie as the supervisor, JCB, mattock, trowels and so on) and other sundry details of the excavation process (whether the context was dug well, with sufficient time and in what weather conditions, and whether the supervisor is confident about the diagrammatic relation in the matrix).

The context sheets are designed to not only accommodate necessary standards (with an aim towards compatibility) and protocols, but also to avoid pre-determinations of terminology/classification to the extent that it is possible. Cognizant of the dangers that one’s actions are constrained to the observation of ordered, information sets as specified on the context sheet, supervisors like Jamie take a much more open and pragmatic line on excavation as an on-going and developing. Hence, with Jamie and Joseph we see the modification of record in response to further trowel work tracing differences between various contexts. This redefinition is part of a larger process of “coming into existence” that needs to be further scrutinized – not because of any destabilizing effects that opening these things up to questioning would have, but precisely because this instability is key to their realization as contexts.

Verification

July 5, 2011, 2:48 pm: Peter, Jamie and David discuss the next steps in excavating a “robber trench” which was cut along the middle section of the eastern wall line of a 4 x 12 m rectangular foundation for a building in Trench 2 (here I speak with a certainty that they still lack at this point). The three of them stand atop the southern wall line while they survey the robber trench along the western wall to the north.

Peter: It is not very deep is it?

Jamie: That is the problem that I’ve got with it. I don’t know that we have bottomed it . . . because of the fact that if you look at the end of the wall exposed in the section (of a later ditch running east/west that cuts through the whole building) it has two courses below the level of the bottom of the trench. And it is not there . . . I do believe it is a robber trench . . .

Peter: I don’t know about the back half of it; I didn’t look at it. But I did check the front half while they excavated it and it was a really nice smooth bottom [the terminus of the cut], which is very good. (Peter pauses)

Is this building too small to have a big foundation at either end and just a small . . .

Jamie: . . . er rubbish course of stonework in the middle . . . I don’t know.

Peter: Like isle buildings would have.

David: That wall on the other side looks like it has a single course through the middle. (David, points at the middle of the western wall line.)

Jamie: It does, doesn’t it. (Peter, Jamie and David move over to the opposite side of the far wall to have a better look at the course.)

There are at least two courses here, because you have one course and another sitting on top of it where Chris’ foot was. (They nod in agreement with David’s observation.)

Peter: So maybe they took all the walling out. (Peter points back along the robber trench.) I tell you what . . . the back end of that edge is rubbish as well because it looks as if they left some clumps in.

I will get Kat or Janet to have one more look at it as well [meaning inspection by trowel], just to make sure that it is finished as it is. (They all move on to discuss the sequencing of other contexts to the east).

How a context or feature comes to be defined is a disjointed process. Peter and his colleagues have returned to an area excavated during the previous season in order to verify the definition (and, hence, description) of a cut as a robber trench. Agreements need to established before the descriptive process can move on and here we encounter this critical moment. Excavation cannot continue until they are confident about their description and there is no returning to this moment once they continue digging in phase. Why is the trench so shallow? Has it been bottomed? If doubt is present then the decision making process expands to consider other material. The line of a wall and missing courses, grey-matter recall and changes in the traits of soils, experience and the foundations of other ruined buildings, into the situation follows other entities and their rapports.

Working through the description of any context requires this space for hesitation. Either the trench is not ‘bottomed’ or the wall courses do not extend beyond a single course with respect to what remains; those present side with the latter. Everyone leaves this exchange modified – Peter, David, Jamie, the remnants of building walls, and the robber trench. And even at this point, another competent excavator will be called in to inspect by trowel.

Deviate from this path slightly and the description will be in doubt. If Peter passes judgment on the basis of an a priori story into which he fits the site rather than remaining open; if an excavator appeals to hierarchy as a basis for a decision rather than listening to the arguments of others, other possibilities will be missed. If an excavator describes a feature out of prejudice then his competency will always be suspect. Trust will be lacking among his colleagues and skepticism will haunt everything he or she publishes.

Description and doubt

Archaeology, like other sciences, is a delicate business, whose truth and objectivity lies in the piecemeal transformation of the material past into descriptions. If truth and certainty are performances, then so are both falsity and doubt. All are modified as new information comes on the scene – leading to an increasing confidence or an increasing lack thereof.

Truth, according to William James, “is simply a collective name for verification processes” (1978, 104). Truth is a condition of the passage between what precedes and what follows our descriptions. In pedology one can return to the original area in the Amazon forest in which a sample was taken. In biology one can track down other examples of Dendrolagus pulcherrimus in the montane forests of northern New Guinea. In chemistry one can replicate a new antibacterial chemical compound. In anthropology one can often reestablish contact with an informant. (Note 6) But the possibility of verifiability through a return to a precedent situation is absent for entities encountered in the course of excavation. The material past is held in place but for an instant, a transient moment, only to fall back into oblivion, but this time for good! (Note 7) Archaeologists cannot return to a cobbled surface, the relations between contexts, or the cut of a robber trench as they were. The path of verifiability thus lacks a critical gap necessary for ‘direct’ or ‘actual’ verification. In retracing our chains of transformations archaeologists smack up against the wall of media. The sum of these descriptive media add up to more than the sum of their parts, but equally, they also count for less than that which they translate.

What then is the status of archaeological descriptions?

For the old things described here, plans, context sheets, and video diaries are all that remain of them. Even so, perpetual doubt is not our lot. It is here that we may situate doubt as a spirit of caution that is not quite the steadfast skepticism and distrust characteristic of the ordinary empiricism. Rife with indeterminacy, archaeological work doesn’t fail by proposing a possible description for archaeological materials; it fails by insisting on a necessary one.

While there are many nuances that remain ambiguous in this short paper, archaeology’s peculiar situation with respect to the possibility of retroactive verification and thus truth requires a very different approach with respect to the question of adequate description. In closing I underline several key propositions: 1) the burden of proof demands we open up every step of this process to the possibility of public scrutiny; 2) manifesting material entities requires a dual path towards translating the local into easily transferrable (“global”) terms and simultaneously articulating something of locality, specificity and the ineffable qualities of things; 3) the verification and thus truth of a description should, as Whitehead suggests, be sought “in its general success and not in the peculiar certainty, or initial clarity, of its first principles” (P&R, 8); 4) the grounds for an archaeological proposition should not be that of certainty, but rather that of openness both in approach and articulation. Archaeologists may say something is viable, plausible, possible, likely or even probable, and while all of these are just short of certain, they nonetheless are more faithful to the realities of those things that play a role in the production of the past.

Notes

1) Thanks to Tim Webmoor, Helene Ratner and Malte Ziewitz for the kind invitation to take part in the session.

2 415 refers to a layer of soil and small stones covering a stone and cobble surface to the east of the remnants of a rectangular in Trench 1, a c. 37m by 26m area. and located in the north‐east corner of the fort.

3) Here Jack is referring to the potential for corruption in copying a scene by eye while leaning over in a ten-by-ten grid of ten-by-ten centimeter squares versus direct measurement of a point with triangulation and tapes in a trench.

4) Jack’s entry also speaks to issues of morality and commitment, accountability and authority (Jack’s identity is tied to is experience in cartography).

5) The project provided training in archaeological fieldwork techniques to students from Durham, Stanford and Texas Tech Universities and to members of the Architectural and Archaeological Society of Durham and Northumberland.

6) It would, I hasten to add, be impossible to ever return to any original situation – no one can account for every variable, however the differences between pedology, biology, and chemistry on the one hand and archaeology on the other are striking.

7) As an archaeologist, I do not ‘discover’ of the past, as it is often held. Rather, I work with what becomes of what was, which is coextensive with me and such work requires great care and creativity. In the end, archaeologists never find the past as it was; they, as a matter of fact, are caught up in the articulation of something entirely novel.

8) But we may note that they strength of a description increases when weighed in light of the chain of labor, associations, and other interlocutors that lie behind this work.

References

James, W. [1907] 1978: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Whitehead, A.N. [1929] 1978: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.

Double Vision: Imagines, Simulacra, Replicas

2013-02-22T22:20:23Z

A session at the US TAG 2013, Chicago
Co-organizers: Alicia Jiménez (alicia.jimenez(at)stanford.edu) and Alfredo
González-Ruibal (alfredo.gonzalez-ruibal(at)incipit.csic.es)

Archaeology leans heavily on typologies and similarities. Narratives about cultural change, the spreading of ideas and diasporas are often linked to things that look alike but belong to different chronological or geographical frames. Material connections between “centers” and “peripheries” are commonly traced by looking at provincial copies of models irradiated from the metropolis. And yet, despite the longstanding tradition of typological studies and analysis of the meaning of style variation (Wiessner, Sackett, Conkey & Hastorf), the role of imagines, simulacra and replicas in the transmission of culture is still relatively ill-defined from a theoretical point of view in archaeological research.

The papers in this session will explore theoretical approaches to an archaeology of the double and ask questions that help us to go beyond the original model/fake copy dilemma. By interrogating the materiality of the replica we hope to be able to analyze the vision/double as essence and not only as a vacuous instance of representation.

Session format: Series of papers followed by Q&A and final comments by a
discussant.

We particularly welcome papers focusing on:
• The politics of double vision: vision as power / the anti-authoritarian gaze.
• The double as translation and interpretation.
• The double as a purposely inaccurate copy, a partial representation (pars pro toto) or as means of taking the alien within.
• The double as failure and the impossibility of an exact replica.
• The influence of the double or the consequences of “double vision” for the “model”.
• Replicas that make possible the vision of something that is immaterial or
absent.
• The role of the double in our understanding of things by means of visualization.
• The importance of replication in constructing pasts (ancestor representation) and futures (material projections of visions).
• The relationship between cloning and social reproduction as well as the
relationship between homogeneous material culture and individuation.

To submit a paper abstract (max 300 words) please email the session organizers by March 10. Session organizers are responsible for selecting papers, and for sending the complete session roster along with all paper abstracts and titles to the TAG-Chicago committee by March 15, 2013.

Website: http://tag2013.uchicago.edu/program.html

Contact:
Alicia Jimenez
alicia.jimenez@stanford.edu

Against Gandalf the Grey: an Archaeology of the Surface

2013-02-12T20:06:49Z

Archaeology has been for many years identified with its own method, that of excavation. It is the way the public sees archaeology and many archaeologists think of themselves too (e.g. Holtorf 2007). However, Rodney Harrison recently pointed out the crucial role of the surface in archaeological thinking (Harrison 2011, in press).

Metaphors are never just metaphors, so to speak. They shape and drive our thinking. A metaphor of archaeology-as-excavation is one of such tropes. It presupposes the idea of a distant and buried in the soil past (e.g. Thomas 2004). Harrison claims that there are different ways of thinking of archaeology. The Australian archaeologist proposes as an alternative a metaphor of archaeology-as-surface-survey. This allows the so-called an archaeology of the contemporary past (e.g. Buchi, Lucas 2001) to become a creative engagement with the present and only subsequently as a consideration of the intervention of traces of the past within it (Harrison 2011, 141).

I am totally for the archaeology in and of the present proposed by Harrison. This is the reason why I would like to add in this place some examples of such archaeological focus on the surface, what I call surface investigations (Kobiałka in press).

Figure 1: Surface investigations

]]> What does it mean when one says, especially to a young student, that your reading and work are superficial? It is basically pejorative phrase describing that a work does not follow scientific rigorous (e.g. Binford 2009, XV-XVI). It can be said that it is the basic presupposition of scientific critique as such. Critique as deep reading, deeper understanding is, as it were, a procedure of excavation, of discovering hidden contradictions, presuppositions, etc., of an analysed text.

Of course, there are situations where deep reading is needed. Nonetheless, it is not a solution to every problem with which one is confronted in archaeology and science in general. That is why a bit of the good old superficial reading is sometimes required. Understanding does not always demand contextual analysis (but see Hodder 1986). There are situations where the only way to grasp the problem is to be ahistorical and acontextual. That is why, the so-called superficial reading, and what archaeologists call surface investigations, should be rehabilitated. In what follows, I will discuss three examples of such attention to the surface.

There is the well-known joke about a worker suspected of stealing things from a factory. When labour time was over, he rolled every time a wheelbarrow in front of him. The wheelbarrow was always meticulously checked and nothing was found inside it. Finally guards got the point. It was the wheelbarrows themselves which were taken away by the worker, not any deeply hidden things.

No less importantly, the same paradox is operative in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the rings: The fellowship of the ring (2001). Recall the moment when Frodo and his friends have to withdraw from the plan to pass the mountains of Caradhras. Then they decided to go through the mines of Moria. There is a crucial scene when the fellowship stands in front of the wall to the mines and tries to open the magic door:

Gimli: The walls... of Moria. Dwarf doors are invisible when closed.

Gandalf: Yes, Gimli, their own masters cannot find them if their secrets are forgotten.

Legolas: Why doesn't that surprise me?

Gandalf: Well, let's see. Ithildin. It mirrors only starlight and moonlight. It reads, "The Doors of Durin, Lord of Moria. - Speak, friend, and enter."

Merry: What do you suppose that means?

Gandalf: It's simple. If you are a friend, you speak the password and the doors will open.

Then Gandalf tries for a while to open the door, at it is known, without success. He even desperately complains about the inefficiency of his long studies of the ancient scrolls: I once knew every spell in all the tongues of Elves...Men and Orcs.

The last fragment of the scene is especially important and thought-provoking:

Gandalf: Oh, it's useless.

Frodo: It's a riddle. "Speak 'friend' and enter." What's the Elvish word for "friend"?

Gandalf: Mellon.

And the door opens itself.

Gandalf who stands for embodiment of knowledge, wisdom, critical thinking, which he possessed due to the long years of studies of the ancient secret scrolls, is useless. He tried to understand things too deeply. It was Frodo who got the point: it was enough to say a word ‘friend’ in the Elvish and the door will be opened. To put it poetically, being superficial sometimes means to be truly a deep thinker. Is this scene not a perfect analogy of archaeology? For example, the subject of the history of archaeology is usually left to the older, more experienced archaeologists who simply know more, and more deeply about the history of their own discipline, they are like Gandalf the Grey. However, what they miss is precisely the position of young, uneducated Frodo: sometimes the very visibility and simplicity of a truth is the reason why one misses the point (see note 1 below). The lesson of it is the following: let us (sometimes) not be too deep thinkers.

Last but not least, in a homologues way one should read detectives stories. It was Edgar Allan Poe who in his fascinating stories about C. Auguste Dupin most clearly pointed out this paradox. For instance, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue Dupin has to discover who murdered two ladies: Madame L’Espanaye and her daughter. The case seems very complicated and Dupin offers his help to a local police. As always in such stories, the private detective is a metaphor of rational, scientific reasoning. It is worth quoting in detail how Dupin compares the police’s (common sense) thinking with his own (Poe 2004, 12):

Vidocq [a typical policeman – D. K.], for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in doing so he lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus, there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that it is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek for it, and not upon the mountain-tops where it is found.

In other words, those who are too deep, contextual in their reasoning fail to grasp the point. Very often the very visibility of a truth is the cause of why it is so hard to conceptualise. Deep thinking, deeper understanding (e.g. Shanks 1996, 5), it may be claimed, is (sometimes) the domain of common sense, not truly scientific (private detective’s) discourse. Accordingly, the time has come to think of archaeology not only as excavations, but also as surface investigations.

Notes

1) Worth highlighting apropos Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is that typical pseudo-intellectual clichés do not work here. It has been often claimed that Hollywood vulgarises great books, etc. This time the film is in some interpretations better then the original book. One of them is the scene in front of the wall to Moria. In John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s book (2005) it is still Gandalf, the educated wizard, who after some failed attempts gets the point of a riddle. In Jackson’s screening of the book, it is uneducated young hobbit who is smarter than the wizard. Of course, Jackson’s vision is much more subversive and interesting from a theoretical point of view

References

Binford, L. 2009. Debating archaeology. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Buchli, V. and G. Lucas 2001 (eds.). Archaeologies of the contemporary past. London: Routledge.

Harrison, R. 2011. ‘Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present,’ Archaeological Dialogues 18(2), 141-161.

Harrison, R. in press: ‘Scratching the surface: Reassembling an archaeology in and of the present.’ In Reclaiming archaeology: Beyond the tropes of modernity, edited by A. González-Ruibal. London: Routledge.

Hodder, I. 1986. Reading the past. Current approaches to interpretation in archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holtorf, C. 2007. Archeology is a brand! The meaning of archeology in contepmorary popular culture. Walnut Creek: Archaepress.

Kobiałka, D. in press: ‘From excavation to archaeological X-Files.’ In Reclaiming archaeology: beyond the tropes of modernity, edited by A. González-Ruibal. London: Routledge.

Poe, E. A. 2004. The murders in the Rue Morgue. In The collected tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Wordsworth: Hertfordshire, 2-25.

Shanks, M. 1996. Classical archaeology of Greece. Experience of the discipline. London-New York: Routledge.

Thomas, J. 2004. Archaeology and modernity. London: Routledge.

Tolkien, J. R. R. 2005. The lord of the rings. London: Mariner Books.

Archaeological Orientations: A new series

2013-01-29T21:00:39Z

With the impending publication of an excellent new book, Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity, edited by Alfredo González-Ruibal (2013), Gavin Lucas and I have decided that we are somewhat overdue in announcing the book series with Routledge for which this volume breaks the ice – Archaeological Orientations.

Here is our mission:

An interdisciplinary series that engages our on-going, yet ever-changing, fascination with the archaeological, archaeological orientations investigates the myriad ways material pasts are entangled with communities, animals, ecologies and technologies, past, present or future. From urgent contemporary concerns, including politics, violence, sustainability, ecology, and technology, to long-standing topics of interest, including time, space, materiality, memory and agency, archaeological orientations promotes bold thinking and the taking of risks in pressing trans-disciplinary matters of concern.

Providing the comprehensive coverage expected of a companion or handbook, Archaeological Orientations aims to generate passionate, lively and engaged conversation around topics of common interest without laying claim to new thematic territories. Archaeological Orientations asks contributors and readers alike to take two steps back, to cautiously and carefully consider issues from unforeseen, even surprising, angles. Archaeological Orientations embraces theoretical provocation, cross-disciplinary debate and open discussion.

With a host of outstanding contributions that take up the provocation to reclaim archaeology, not as a secondary science that elucidates the past with a borrowed palette of colors taken from other forerunner disciplines, but as an original and creative ecology of practices that adds depth and nuance, diversity and alternative to pressing issues of the present and future, Alfredo’s book exemplifies this mission and sets a wonderful tone for the series.

And Reclaiming Archaeology will be closely followed by another superb contribution: Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. Edited by Bjørnar Olsen and Þóra Péturdóttir, Ruin Memories draws together the fruits of the ground-breaking Ruin Memories Project, a multi-year, international collaboration that investigates the detritus of modernity.

Proposals for other exciting volumes are in the works, and so more still to announce soon.

In the meantime, please consider this an invitation for any archaeologist willing to connect their work in the trenches with those pressing issues that affect us all.

Each volume typically consists of 25-35 contributions from scholars from around the world, with approximately 90 illustrations and total 260-300,000 words. The volumes should be topically structured to aid comprehension by students and interested readers.

Feel free to send proposals (7 to 10 pages) to either Gavin Lucas or Christopher Witmore.

Ruins and Memory: Cormac McCarthy's Archaeological Imagination

2012-12-28T19:47:57Z

Cormac McCarthy is a writer whose novels are haunted by ruins, whether the remains of an old inn in his first novel, or the recent ruins of a destroyed world in his last. His characters find petroglyphs, mummies, and ruined villages strewn along their path. He never gives any kind of exact detail about their histories or how they came to be in the place where they are found. Instead, the things stand for themselves, open to the reader’s observation and interpretation. McCarthy’s archaeological imagination lies in that ability to let the things that are left behind by humans, and other forms of life, to be things with a life of their own and, even more, to be things that resist the imagination and the attempt to translate them into something meaningful for the present. Instead, he is willing to allow for the “diverse lives of things” (Witmore 2009, 516). There are many, many instances, but for the current meditation, I will focus on Blood Meridian and The Road.

]]> These two novels are more particularly concerned with ruins than his others, because they each take place at the end of something. For Blood Meridian, the end is the end of the Mexican War and the destruction of humans and things in its aftermath, when the US-Mexican border was redefined. The role of Judge Holden, a monstrously scientific and rational man, who keeps a journal of his discoveries, allows the reader to see a point of view that considers the discoveries to be his and his alone and to seek to control their communications through archival methods that both destroy what is in place (leaving nothing for future studies) and also limits the access that others have to the knowledge gathered and the development of meaning. In The Road, the world is at its end and the main characters, a father and son, must deal with ruins from both the recent and the more distant past, without referents or archives to tell them how to respond, or what these things mean. There is an intriguing difference between them, because the man is caught up in mourning what used to be his life, and the boy has no referents for what any of these things mean. Without the lived experience of these things, they are simply legends and stories that his father tells and have no link to his present existence, nor does his father have any way to give them meaning without the archives and histories that he himself so took for granted. These two novels both encapsulate the tensions inherent in archaeological practice and echoes Christopher Witmore’s questions about open pasts; “What qualities of the material past, what properties of things, and what aspects of our engagements with them, are actually articulated” (2009, 516)? The answer for Judge Holden is not the same as the answer for the father.

Archaeological imagination, as usually conceived, is intimately linked with archaeological practices and approaches. However, as Michael Shanks points out, archaeological imagination and sensibility concern “Questions of tradition and legacy, of heritage, of roots, memories and remains, of entropy and loss, the material transformation of decay and ruin, connections between the past, its contemporary reception, and its future prospect, the place of the past in a modern society, ethical and indeed political issues regarding respect for the past and conservation of its remains, agency and the shape of history, but also judgment of responsibility in assessing what to do with what is left of the past” (2012a, 24) and so they are not confined to the discipline of archaeology, but are matters of concern for society and individuals. The past, and what it means, as well as what to preserve from the past and pass on to the future are the forms which shape identity for human societies, whether as small as a family or as large as a civilization. For archaeologists, themselves, there is a constant translation between the ruins that they observe and experience and the narrative composed as they catalog, photograph, document, and archive the objects that comprise their work. Their work with the material world of objects “involves a concurrent process of transformation and transportation” (Witmore 2009, 515). As Michael Shanks points out the imaginative work of this enterprise is “working on remains to translate, to turn them into something sensible - inventory, account, narrative, explanation, whatever” (2012b). However, the archaeological imagination, as Shanks conceives it, goes beyond that narrative. Archaeology is not a history but a discovery of the material objects of the past, as they are. They cannot be fully translated because understanding objects, like understanding language, is highly contingent upon time, space, and shared context. The archaeological ruins that populate McCarthy’s texts are much like the archaeological ruins that occupy our own spaces, things “shorn of referent” (McCarthy 2007 [2006], 88) that can never be put back in their original context, and yet, in themselves, they evoke the ‘diverse lives of things.’

Although all of his novels have things scattered throughout, these two are the ones most concerned with history and with ruins. Blood Meridian’s setting is at the Mexican/American borderlands shortly after the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican war and acquired vast new tracts of land for the United States. The characters wander over abandoned villages, old rock formations with ancient petroglyphs, and territories once full of Native Americans, but now emptied by war and buffalo extinction. Judge Holden, who is the “suzerain of the earth” (1992, 198) and nothing can exist without his permission and his archival interpretation. The judge, a monstrous representation of ‘civilized’ man, is educated, multilingual and cultured. He is a scientist, constantly collecting samples and adding them to his archive of the country through which they travel. His concern is with the organizing aspect of the archaeological enterprise, as he examines remains in order to catalog and order them. He notes that “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (1992, 198) and his purpose is to be the dominant source of information about the place through which he travels. As he finds things, like a “footpiece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before” (1992, 140). He sketches such things into his book and then destroys the artifact, leaving only his archive and thus his interpretation. His examinations depend upon his own skilled archaeological eye, which is capable of looking at hundreds of petroglyphs and to go “among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required” (1992, 173) for his interpretation of the historical narrative. When he is done he scrapes those designs away “leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been” (1992, 173). His work of translation and transformation is profoundly controlled by his already preconceived ideas of history and his place in the world.

Judge Holden, a character in a story about the mid-nineteenth century, and an American in a time of American Manifest Destiny and expansionism exhibits a great confidence in Western science and history. He is absolutely certain of both his ability and his right to control the translation and transformation of material things into the archive. He, in fact, values the archive and the things he places within it more than the objects themselves and certainly more than the objects in situ. He anticipates the archaeological imagination of Heinrich Schliemann, who resisted photography of his excavation of Troy because “time spent cleaning and photographing structures of the five settlements successive to the second burnt city” (Witmore 2009, 512) was time wasted on things that had no relevance to Schliemann’s interest in the site’s epic history. The judge, like the ‘discoverer of Troy’ is more interested in the narrative presented than in the things themselves (Olivier 2011).

The Road is set in an uncertain area of the United States after an apocalypse. There is nothing left except ruins, “a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion” (McCarthy 2007 [2006], 88). Those things are part of a world “shorn of its referents and so of its reality” (Ibid. 89). The things left behind that Michael Shanks mentions are also shorn of referents, speaking only for themselves and in conjunction with the place where they are found and any information that can be drawn from them. However, they are also a form of Derridean envois that resists translation; “[y]ou might consider them . . . as the remainders of a recently destroyed correspondence. Destroyed by fire or that which figuratively takes its place, more certain of leaving nothing out of the reach of what I like to call the tongue of fire” (Derrida 1987, 3). The world in this case has literally been destroyed by fire and only ruins remain to be translated, along with the grief and fear that they produce. They “cannot be made right again” (McCarthy 2007 [2006], 307) because the only tool of mediation, that of narrative, has either been destroyed (in its written form) or is blocked by the father’s grief and the lack of shared referents between him and the boy.

Translation and mediation are always vexed processes because As Gayatri Spivak says in the journal parallax, “[i]n every possible sense translation is necessary but impossible” (2000, 13). The “tongue of fire” destroying the original postcard is translation itself. This is true within archaeology as well as language translation. The Road is full of things living their diverse lives even as the human beings slowly die away. The few humans that remain translate artifacts through their own expectations and hopes, just as Schliemann did. The father, in particular, has depended upon historical and philosophical narratives that are now challenged and damaged by the reality of things. He remembers that “years ago he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where upturned books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row” (McCarthy 2007[2006], 187). He realizes that “the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation (McCarthy 2007[2006], 187) of a future that is now destroyed. When the volumes in the library, an assurance of past knowledge secured for the future, are left to rot, “It is not just that the past (in the present) is threatened; senses of personal and community identity are threatened, when the continuity of the past is the source of such identity (Shanks 2012a, 36). The father’s security is shaken as he realizes that the books are lies, not because of their content, but because of their presence. As Witmore writes, the problem “is one of memory or, more precisely, memory practices” (2009, 514). The problem also confronts the father as he tries to mediate the movement between material things and the narratives about them. His own choice of narrative reveals the problem when he tells his son that they carry the fire, a Promethean reference weighted with humanist values that are vexed by the very real and destructive role of fire around them.

In addition, the father finds his ability to communicate about the things around them limited by his own memories, as well as by the sheer abundance of ruins. The ruins haunt the father with memories that persist even as the life that gave rise to them fades away. As Elin Andreassen, Hein B. Bjerk, and Bjørnar Olsen have written, “ruins…have their own historical mission: they rescue a forgotten past, not as a heritage…but as a kind of involuntary memory” (2010, 152). They “stubbornly carries the means to trigger the involuntary memories of its untimely past” (Ibid.). The father has memories of his wife, his childhood, fishing, and his son’s birth. All of those memories cause him great pain that he cannot share with the boy. The lack of a shared past is particularly poignant when the father shares what would be a normal rite in most children’s lives, visiting the father’s childhood home. The father talks of his childhood, of “me and my sisters, doing our homework” (McCarthy 2007[2006], 26), but the house is just another dangerous place to the child. The father tells his son which room was his, but cannot express “the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child’s imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be” (McCarthy 2007[2006], 27), especially since his son’s worst imaginings are already a part of his life, not just in his imagination.

When the father and son find a good place to hide for a few days, a bunker left behind by people who planned for a different sort of disaster, the difference in their experiences becomes much starker. In this happy place where the father knows how to cook things and how to make use of all the supplies, “he understood that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed” (McCarthy 2007[2006], 153). His memories and history have no reference that his son would understand, and he finds that “each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins…What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy 2007[2006], 131). All the objects around him, in their diverse lives and existence elude and resist mediation and translation, just as archaeological objects retain within themselves memories that cannot be shared.

References

Andreassen, Elin, Hein B. Bjerk, and Bjørnar Olsen. 2010: Persistent Memories. Trondheim, Norway: Tapir Academic Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1987: The Post Card. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

McCarthy, Cormac. 1992: Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. First Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage Books.

McCarthy, Cormac. 2007[2006]: The Road. New York: Vintage-Random.

Olivier, Laurent. 2011: The Dark Abyss of Time: archaeology and memory. Lanham, Md: AltaMira Press.

Shanks, Michael. 2012a. The Archaeological Imagination. Walnut Creek, Calif: Left Coast Press.

Shanks, Michael. 2012b: “The Archaeological Imagination.” Stanford University. Oct. 16, 2012. Web. Oct. 29, 2012.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2000: Translation as Culture. parallax 6, 13-24.

Witmore, Christopher. 2009: Prologomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices. Archaeologies: A Journal of the World Archaeological Congress. 5(3) 511-545..

Launch of Journal of Contemporary Archaeology and Call for Papers

2012-11-30T21:16:01Z

The editors and Equinox Publishing are pleased to announce the launch of a new journal devoted to the study of contemporary archaeology and invite submissions for publication, commencing with the first issue in Spring 2014.

Journal of Contemporary Archaeology is the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to explore archaeology’s specific contribution to understanding the present and recent past. It is concerned both with archaeologies of the contemporary world, defined temporally as belonging to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as well as with reflections on the socio-political implications of doing archaeology in the contemporary world. In addition to its focus on archaeology, JCA encourages articles from a range of adjacent disciplines which consider recent and contemporary material-cultural entanglements, including anthropology, cultural studies, design studies, history, human geography, media studies, museology, psychology, science and technology studies and sociology. Acknowledging the key place which photography and digital media have come to occupy within this emerging subfield, JCA includes a regular Photo Essay feature and provides space for the publication of interactive, web-only content on its website.

Call for Papers

Journal of Contemporary Archaeology will publish articles in a number of different formats, ranging from in-depth Discussion Articles, to be accompanied by comments from relevant researchers and an author’s reply; regular Research Articles which are generally shorter and more case-driven; Interviews comprising occasional, edited discussions between researchers and individuals whose academic or creative work makes a contribution to understanding the archaeology and materiality of the contemporary world; Forums, a series of short responses to previously circulated questions; and, as noted above, Photo Essays. Potential contributors should consult the Journal's Guidelines which can be found on the journal's website | link/JCA.

General Editor
Rodney Harrison, University College London

Co-Editors
Laurie Wilkie, University of California, Berkeley (North America)
Alfredo González-Ruibal, Spanish National Research Council (Continental Europe)

Associate Editor
Cornelius Holtorf, Linnaeus University

Symmetry, STS, Archaeology (Part 2)

2012-10-31T21:58:37Z

. . .continued from Part 1 of 2.
Temporality

The ethnographic examination of archaeological practice has become an established sub-domain (Edgeworth 2006, 2010; Yarrow 2003), although this reflexive platform has not developed in explicit contact with STS ethnographies of science (Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1985). The characterization of scientific activity as craft work (Amann and Knorr-Cetina 1990; Revetz 1971; Shanks and McGuire 1996) has been influential; affirming the skill and material integument bound together in practical activities brings the acknowledgement that archaeologists do not discover the past. Like the accounts of scientific settings in STS that followed the collective effort of rendering textual and media outputs from laboratories, it is a position that undercuts the romantic idea of a neutral “opening up” of (a past) reality.

Such ethnographic and craft oriented appraisals of archaeology merge with more focused studies of the representational forms of the discipline (Shanks 1997; Webmoor 2005; Shanks and Webmoor 2012). Refracting STS lessons through archaeological examples offers a radical break with the inherited view of representing the past in the present.

Archaeology, through unpacking its practices and descriptive work, has bound itself to STS lines of research. This is a point of contact where archaeology’s unique temporality places friction on this line of STS inquiry. And there is much to be gained from knotting these insights. For instance, the descriptions of coordination work in scientific and other settings are often a retroactive activity. Consider, for instance, Latour’s (1988) unfolding of how Pasteur successfully mobilized a vast network in order to establish, through trials of strength, the reality of microbes. Or Law’s (1986) discussion of the feat of heterogeneous engineering that allowed Portuguese sailing vessels to tread vast oceanic distances to trade. We are not presented with the microbes or Portuguese sailing vessels per se. An odd swapping of disciplinary expectations occurs. STS becomes archaeological in the conventional sense. These sociomaterial assemblages leave distributed traces that STSers must gather with their descriptive narratives and recording instruments to offer an account that registers a definite presence of what was otherwise too ephemeral, far flung or unapparent to connect together. It takes keen observation, a willingness to look beyond the apparent, good recording devices and reliable media. Textual records, photographs of configurations of material objects (laboratories or equipment), accepted entities (like microbes), or skeumorphs are critical points of these STS exhibitions. The activity is not dissimilar to long-established archaeological practice.

]]> However, unlike most STS descriptive accounts, archaeological mobilizations of the past are simultaneously retroactive and proactive. This is “the isotopy of the past(s)” (Webmoor 2012). Like unstable, isotopic elements, archaeological materials may be obdurate, but their former networks, their relations with other objects, tend toward “radioactive” dispersion. So archaeologists stabilize certain configurations of materials in the present in designing for the future. Even in a more “representationalist” register, most archaeologists would not disavow the basic premise of the conservation ethic (Lipe 1984). There may be no claim to objectively representing the “past as it was”. Yet in its most elemental form, whether contemporary archaeology or prehistory, the endeavor attempts to say: “this happened here”.

There is more. Merging the recognition that archaeological work, like STS descriptions, actively stabilises certain configurations of sociomaterial in the present, archaeologists nonetheless design for future engagement with an interested public (see Olsen et al. 2012: chapters 6, 8; Webmoor 2012). There is a temporal continuity or flow through the archaeological process: retroactive descriptions that anticipate future engagements. In the practical arrangement and stabilization of materials of the past within the present there is a temporal pleat that makes all archaeology “archaeology of the contemporary past” (Olsen et al. 2012: chapter 7; also Olivier this volume).

In stark contrast to this applied design of archaeology, there is worry of wider relevance amongst STS practitioners (Collins and Evans 2002; Lynch and Cole 2005; Woolgar 2004; Woolgar et al. 2009). I would argue that it is an absence of an extended temporality passing from past events and objects to future configurations that in the first place reduces relevance of STS accounts. While most archaeologists are aware of the temporality of their activities, creating productive tension in the lines of object inquiries, STSers have yet to grapple empirically with these temporal issues. In part this detracts from its direct engagement with public concerns that are future oriented. As a result we often encounter a temporal inversion to descriptive work in archaeology and STS. There is discussion of the cross-over between academic STS and the private industry, especially with respect to User-centered or User-generated Design. Yet these “applied” examples do not deploy the full armature of STS practice and theorization, but rather focus upon ethnographic inquiry. A result is that published examples of this type of work more closely resemble commercial sociocultural anthropology than STS (e.g. Wilkie and Michael 2009; though see Marres 2009).

More recent ethnographies of archaeology draw explicitly upon the work of STSers (Garrow and Yarrow 2010; Harrison 2011; Harrison et al. 2012). While many of these archaeologists offer archaeological expertise as reciprocal contribution (e.g. Edgeworth 2010; Gosden 2010), there is scant friction along these ethnographic lines of investigation. A point of contact is anthropologist Charles Goodwin’s (1984) influential description of the disciplining of skill in particular fields. He detailed the archaeological excavations at Arroyo Secco, and his example of “professional vision” is widely deployed in both archaeology and STS. The study, as Edgeworth (2010) notes, contributes reflexive insight into archaeology’s material practices and development of Goodwin’s anthropological theory of language and visualization (see also Gero 1996). Notwithstanding the apparent richness and potential of archaeological examples of practice, it has remained by and large archaeologists themselves who have developed them.

Even the few examples of direct referencing or engagement (Lynch 1985; Latour and Lemonnier 1994; Latour 1996; Lemonnier 1993) spend scant effort in illuminating issues by working through archaeological case studies (though see Ratto 2006; Watts 2005). It is as if the unalloyed insights of STS can illuminate archaeological problems without archaeologists or archaeological materials. Consequently the situation is redolent of the “philosophical importation debates” of the 1970’s in archaeology (Flannery 1982; Schiffer 1981). Indeed, STS is beginning to worry that importation into many disciplines may dilute its provocative influence unless there is renewed radicalism (Woolgar et al. 2009).

Representationalism/Performativity

Let's take an example. I would argue that engagement with archaeological case studies might usefully disrupt what is somewhat of a stale standstill in STS between what can be glossed as “representationalism” and “performative” camps (see Law and Singleton 2000; Madsen 2012). These positions place different emphasis upon the role of the STSer when s/he documents practices. Some STSers insist that there is no neutral, external vantage point from which to make descriptions. That we are always already inside the “belly of the machine” (Haraway 1999). Our own descriptions are not only situated and local, but additionally are caught up in the very sociomaterial network or set of relations that they (partially) describe. As material-semiotic inscriptions, they also perform action and have consequences. This camp of STSers (e.g. Haraway 1999; Lynch and Singleton 2000; Star 1991; in philosophy of science see Barad 2007), argue that politics are built-in to our work as scholars. Indeed, that STS work is “ontological politics” (Law 2004b, 2009; Mol and Law 2002). Situated, political and performative, many such scholars attempt to “intervene” with their own descriptions in particular gendered, class-based, military or governmental materializing agendas. This is the sense of "intervention" that has of recent gained so much cachet in certain social sciences and humanities.

While the representationalism camp cannot be grafted onto Actor-Network Theory (ANT), it is most directly associated with early studies undertaken by the developers of ANT (e.g. Callon 1986; Latour 1987, 1993b; Law 1986). This camp does not disavow such connections between STS descriptions and phenomena under study. To be sure, ANT typically presents rich empirical examples to demonstrate the extensiveness of networks and the ontological proximity amongst entities. Yet, as other STS scholars have pointed out, ANT lacks an explicit politics (Law 2009; Star 1991). John Law with his more recent work provides an interesting exception (Law and Mol 2004; and see Law 2009; Law and Singleton 2000). Furthermore, the role of description, the work of the scholar her/himself does not figure prominently in representationalism accounts. Without an apparent rear view mirror, accounts offered by this camp of STSers may come off as objective, authoritative and further from the objects than they appear. As if they perform Haraway’s (1999:176) “god-trick” and remove themselves from local settings when they undertake descriptions.

Scale

This tension within STS over the effects of and goals for representational work relates to another slippage between STS and archaeological descriptions. It is a scalar issue. A good STS description must make apparent what is beyond the scale of immediate recognition. Consider again the example of Portuguese sailing vessels; assembling good descriptions of these ‘objects’ is not to present boats, but to make evident the vast ocean of mobilized ingredients behind and beyond these more readily discernible things. If objects are more readily recognized, then the onus upon STS description is to make apparent the linkages, the relations that bind together these things. Yet this leads to an overemphasis upon relations, so that in focusing upon the network that things take part of, objects themselves drop out of view and descriptions pass quickly to the “higher order” scale.

Is it intellectually blasé or even disreputable to describe objects themselves? Does this scale seem too inconsequential? As archaeologists such as Gosden (2010) and Olsen (2010) remind us, the discipline is good at “thick descriptions” of things. That part of the care for things is an obligation to attend to the mundane and minute details of humble objects (Olsen et al. 2012; Webmoor 2012). Yet this tendency to scale-down does not inhibit archeologists from producing scenarios of tidal movements at the scale of regions and world history. Scalar effects seem to be well handled by archaeologists (see Edgeworth this volume). There is a demonstrated capacity to integrate object-intensive material science descriptions within larger scale sociomaterial networks. The shifting of analytic scale from supposed objects qua objects to objects in association with other humans, nonhumans and materials as networks is anchored in the principle of symmetry.

Symmetry

More recently, there has been sustained focus upon the principle of symmetry as developed by ANT and its archaeological implications (González-Ruibal et al. 2010; Olsen this volume; Olsen et al. 2012; Shanks 2007; Webmoor and Witmore 2005, 2008; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007; Knappett and Malafouris 2008). This “radical symmetry”, or the type of symmetry that has merged with archaeological thinking to amalgamate into the discipline’s so-called ontological turn, was, however, first formulated by sociologists and amphibious philosophers of science (Callon 1986; Callon and Law 1997; Latour 1986, 1987). This type of symmetry advocates an analytic agnosticism with respect to who or what the “players” are in any sociotechnical account. Developed from a “sociology of translations” (Callon and Latour 1981) and a “sociology of associations” (Latour 1986), it has become recognized as the analytic attitude of ANT (Latour 2005; Law and Hassard 1990; Yaneva this volume). It has proven to be both influential and controversial, particularity in granting the real possibility of non-anthropocentric agency in sociomaterial accomplishments (see Finlayson this volume; Collins and Yearley 1992; Callon and Latour 1992).

If calling out humanity’s vanity has raised the ire of some in STS and archaeology (see Webmoor and Witmore 2008 on “social” archaeology), then this issue is a ripple on the pond of metaphysics (see Webmoor 2012). With symmetry follows the issue of essentialism. If all action is fundamentally collective, with humans only some actants working with other materials and companion species as networks, then where do we ascribe qualities such as agency, identity, intentionality, causality? As we considered with scalar issues, ANT places emphasis upon the larger network. Indeed, single and isolated humans, objects and other entities are incapable of much effect on their own. So in terms of qualities, the “glue” or relations holding the network together becomes paramount. For without these relations holding, however provisionally, a network together, then little action could be accomplished. There would be no microbes and “Pasteur”, no Portuguese sailing vessels. It seems with actualism that the capacity to act eclipses any notion of non-relational, non-contextual identity. Is there any abiding solidity or substance to things themselves? Or, to put it differently, what is the “object” that has been “symmetrized”?

For Graham Harman (2009a, 2011) these two tendencies amount to age-old philosophical predilections to see things themselves as too unimportant to be invested with inherent qualities, or too profound for their real qualities to be known. In spite of, or rather because of, ANT’s success in “following the actors”, they and many of their colleagues in STS have “left the objects” (see Costall and Richards this volume). Instead it is primarily archaeologists and rogue philosophers who are tackling these matters of concern (Harman 2005, 2009b, 2011; Olsen et al. 2012; Webmoor 2012; Witmore 2012). While a phenomenological penchant urges this questioning for many of the emerging group of “speculative realists”, archaeologists perform double vision in exhaustively describing objects themselves, manifesting them in their accounts, while considering the larger sweep of events that they are enrolled in. Perhaps more importantly, the simultaneity of scales involved in archaeological accounts discourages any lapse back into the fetishization of objects; to simply retreat from relations into stand alone objects. We want to avoid such a dialectical gesture amongst object-orientations. The paradox of symmetry is that it must be continually performed. Otherwise, archaeology may assume objects to be the sole locus where qualities of interest inhere. Symmetry is attained in descriptive work through letting it go like the truth-bearing paradox of a Zen kōan.

Disciplinary Agency and Load Failure

While there is the perpetual risk of performative contradiction with the symmetrical attitude, it has been an ambassador of sorts for ANT and STS more generally. Yet to discuss archaeology and STS in terms of disciplinary agency, or impact upon theoretical precepts, research practices and overall intellectual currents, STS would overshadow “the discipline of things”. As it is, if we looked to established metrics for ”impact”, archaeology would seem to be in the shadows of interdisciplinary research; conspicuously absent in citation practices and literature connected to the academy’s ontological turn. For instance, if we examine at a recent overview (Trentmann 2009), we have an inventory presented that inscribes anthropology, STS, material culture studies, human geography, even literary studies as the progenitors of object-oriented approaches. From STS practitioners themselves we have voluminous attempts at Making Things Public, enlisting the efforts of just about every discipline in the social sciences and humanities, from art history to political theorists, but not archaeology. Not a single archaeologist is asked about objects! How can this be for a discipline which boasts a panoply of sophisticated approaches to documenting the "entanglement" of people and things over the long-term (see Hodder 2011 for a review; Olsen et al. 2012).

While STS has certainly been influential in shifting academic concerns to the ontological register, the slippages in the seeming knot of STS and archaeology’s engagement endanger both to load failure. For STS there slips away a set of empirics and unique practices that offer the potential to rekindle its intellectual radicality through pushing the issues of temporality, representationalism/performativity, scale and symmetry. For archaeology, without symmetrical binding of the Fisherman’s knot, it’s liable to slip free and miss contributing to the timely considerations of things that transverse the disciplines.

Figure 2: “Critical failure” of Fisherman’s Knot

Conclusion: Metrology Matters

So how to knot the insights of archaeology and STS? Let us return to the knot as a useful heuristic tool. If we place ourselves in those moments when knots are doing work, we are not concerned with the usual preoccupations of modernist thought. With mereological pursuits of parsing out ontological parts, reducing out irrelevant entities and qualities, adding up the resultant components to make a supposed whole explanation. Instead, grappling with gravity shocks us out of such disinterested and passive intellectual tendencies of oscillating between simplification and complexification. Discernment of ontological distinctions and categorization into human, materials, and nonhumans is less important. These are, of course, all blended in the activity at hand. But there is no value given to knowing these in the moment. Metrology rather than mereology suggests itself when we approach the bewilderingly rich variety of mixtures of the world through engagement and wonder. At the end of our (double Fisherman’s knotted) rope, woven concerns such as elemental durability, extension, weightiness, and compositional stability come to the fore. Either everything is holding, fulfilling the activity, or it is not. These are the matters of concern when engaged with knots.

As a waypoint to begin knotting STS and archaeology I would propose a statement: practice does not exhaust a thing. Archaeologists ought to ask with STSers: what are the archaeological practices that enable objects to enter relations? This has been a valuable insight of STS. To reciprocate, however, we refract STS practices through archaeology's object-orientation: what does the resistance of objects and their “thingliness” tell us about the presumptive centrality and presumptive agency of practice in STS accounts? As a habit of mereological thought, we should remind ourselves to avoid a redux of social constructivism in the guise of "practice".

In the collegial mode we can look at the amalgamation of objects, humans, nonhumans, relations and practices. What are the ratios of agency and causality? Or the ratios of qualities with relations in the ontology of things? Do we, for instance, ascribe too much to practices in STS accounts of phenomena? What about things themselves? What stake do they have in entering into relations and stabilising certain constellations of reality? It is too easy to fall back upon the middling position of affordances (cf. Costall and Richards this volume). Instead, I suggest archaeology, through its practical engagement with temporality, performative representation, scale and symmetry, has a more nuanced metrology for appreciating why and how certain realities of the past(s) endure. It is a knot knowing.

References
See Part 1

Symmetry, STS, Archaeology (Part 1 of 2)

2012-09-30T15:02:13Z

Territorial wrangling is a good indicator that there is something emergent which is coveted amongst disciplines. The principle of symmetry, while a topic no longer generating any sustained discussion in its home setting of Science and Technology Studies (STS), is a case in point. Given recent disciplinary exchange involving symmetry, it seems appropriate to post the following piece, a version of which is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. It discusses disciplinary agency in terms of Temporality, Representationalism/Performativity, Scale, and Symmetry. It also considers the broader issues of rhetoric and disciplinary politics, and the political economy of academic exchange and scholarship. These come under the banner of mereology, a modernist metaphysics with which the principle of symmetry is caught up.

Introduction

In the world of knot making, there is a particular arrangement of two ropes that doubles the reach of either singly. It is not an especially complex knot, but it is incredibly useful, even lifesaving, when it is relied upon in circumstances such as Alpine mountaineering. Ropework is an ancient craft and the origins of particular knots are obscure (Hoste 2005). As a matter of course they derive, however, from mundane and practical pursuits. Only later did they re-emerge as integral to the success of rather more lofty pursuits. Though humbly deployed and, when capably acting, receding from immediate attention, we may nonetheless acknowledge their integral, if inconspicuous, role in a multitude of mundane activities and adrenaline-charged courses-of-action. There is all the same a remarkable sophistication to knot-theory and an irreducible elegance in the performance of a finely made knot.

Figure 1: Double Fisherman’s Knot

In sketching the cross-disciplinary setting involving Science and Technology Studies (STS) and archaeology, two fields in which I have held posts, practice as a “boundary scholar” and serve (however loosely) as a knot, I am going to suggest that knots themselves offer a rich heuristic for understanding their relations. I do not want to push the knot metaphor so far that it slips from rhetorical purchase. Yet I am sympathetic with Ingold’s (2000, 2007, 2010) “organic scholarship” with its attempt to forefront craft metaphors and everyday tools for thought. More importantly, these (sometimes) literal conceptual tools such as knots draw attention to ontological relations as opposed to the predominance of epistemological metaphors that figure prominently as guides for modernist thought (e.g. Peirce 1955; Putnam 1981; Rorty 1979). Contrary to these, knots urge “actualism” (Harman 2005, 2009b:291-3); they focus knowing upon the effect, outcome or action accomplished by objects, humans and nonhumans. Most importantly, I find that the topology of a knot aptly describes cross-disciplinary collaboration. Especially as the topology of knots urges our attention along the lines of engagement to discern the crucial distinctions that make a difference: when knots are actually unknots.

The Fisherman’s knot is a symmetrical knot that is itself composed of a series of overhand knots. Symmetry is critical for the overall ‘knot-strength’ of the Fisherman’s, and hence for its reliability in critical situations. To hold, the strands must enfold themselves in such a manner that they “strangle” one another. That way, an increase in the load weight lends greater friction between the ropes—pull harder, add more weight (to a point of course!) and the symmetry of the Fisherman’s folds only tighten together.

Tracing the topology of STS and archaeology under “load”, when they grapple with intellectual problems, it becomes apparent that they are entangled. However, when the weave of these intellectual fields is detailed we find asymmetric tension, but little friction. While the two “lines” of empirical investigation both contribute object-centred inquiries and seem capable, in concert, to extend our understanding of how we are ourselves knotted in the material world, their engagement with one another is passing and not binding in a productive sense. The weave is not a knot.

In this post I will first briefly consider the collegial ideal of disciplinary cooperation. I then move to the points of contact between STS and archaeology, exploring whether there is friction or slippage between the two disciplines. Here symmetry, not just as metaphor of parity but in the specific analytic form of generalised or “radical” symmetry is unpacked as one point of contact between the fields. After the currents of thought in the fields are followed, I conclude by suggesting waypoints for orienting around what I feel to be eddies in the disciplines’ respective radical currents, to offer a knot in the future of object-centred inquiries.

]]> The Mereology of Inter-Disciplinary Dogma

Before moving on to describe the disciplines’ literary networks, I want to push a bit on the academic politics of interdisciplinarity (see Garrow and Yarrow 2010; Jensen and Rödje 2009). Equally, I feel provocation may be beneficial, especially when it comes in the form of questioning assumptions and operating principles. I am going to make the perhaps unpopular suggestion that discussions of collaboration across fields of practice are overly saccharine (Barry et al. 2009).

This is because such ideals of partnering across differences of background knowledge, working assumptions, practical skill, research goals and so forth predominately operate according to mereological reasoning; this is, following Strathern, the guiding framework for scholarship that believes that partial perspectives sum up to a more complete understanding of a whole (1991, 2010:368). Mereology suffuses modernist thought. To be sure, there is debate within STS over how prevalent the modernist mode of being actually is (compare Latour 1993a; Law 1994). And whether there are properly two competing sets of sensibilities or logics in operation through modernity (on the “Baroque” and the “Romantic” see Kwa 2002; Mol and Law 2002).

Mereology, nonetheless, stands out as a materializing logic of modernity when contrasted with metaphysics that place emphasis upon differing principles, such as alterity, complexity, contingency or incomprehensibility. While these metaphysics have been exhibited within Euro-American logic, with some in STS urging complexity and irreducible mess as the norm of modern sociotechnical systems (Law 2004a), mereology seems to best stand in relief when contrasted with non-Western examples (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 1996). Nature stands monolithic behind the vagaries of perspective upon a singular reality. However, other metaphysics do not experience contradiction in, or the impossibility of, allowing multiple cultures and multiple natures, questioning our more familiar scenario of multi-culturalism set against mono-naturalism. Such symmetry between epistemic and ontological pluralism opens vast venues to be negotiated. In considering collaboration, however, the significance of mereology is how it justifies the possibility of complete knowledge through a unified ontology (Nature) which serves to arbitrate the many partial, incomplete, situated or even erroneous “voices”.

Stengers (2010, 2011) draws our attention to the manifestation of mereology in a myriad of scientific procedures. This is especially so in the correlative species of mereology: reductionism (see Latour 1993b). Mol and Law (2002:5-8) argue that the “power of reductionism in the modern world” forms part of an oscillation to and from simplicity and complexity. It is an urge to simplify going back to the Enlightenment that they suggest may be expressive of dynamics of the human psyche. Reducing and simplifying is an integral gesture of mereological thought.

For if parts may be added to understand a singular whole, then the reliability of knowledge acquisition begins with breaking complex wholes into assimilable constituents. Let us consider, on the material register, the manner in which archaeologists routinely split “wholes” apart in excavation so that artifacts, features, and various media may be reassembled as a whole, as an archive of a (transformed) site (see Lucas 2001a, 2001b, 2012; Olsen, et al. 2012). Or consider the assembly of “outputs” of investigations in archaeology or STS, whether textual, laboratory analyses, or visual media (in archaeology see Shanks and Webmoor 2012; Witmore 2004; in STS see Ashmore 1989; Woolgar 1988).

Reaching far beyond mereological reasoning, these operational procedures and organizational devices partially fix how collaborative research is performed. While the earliest pre-modern experimental laboratories operated with a division of labor along class lines (Shapin 1988:395, 1989; Shapin and Schaffer 1988), separated tasks led to collective work of ostensibly more equal scholars. We might also look to the disciplining of antiquarian practice into what was to emerge as archaeology (Schnapp 1996; Schlanger and Nordbladh 2008; Olsen et al. 2012: chapter 3). Both reflexive archaeologists (e.g. Berggren and Hodder 2003) and STS ethnographers (e.g. Latour and Woolgar 1986; Mol 2002, 2008; Mol et al. 2010) draw attention to the organizational practices, hierarchies and relations of accountability that federate individual efforts. “Audit culture” and “audit society” in the contemporary academy bureaucratize the sociomaterial arrangement of interdisciplinary collaboration (Power 1997; Strathern 2000). But it is constraining, even counterproductive, to require collaboration in terms of measurable outputs and “impact” factors. Moreover, I would add that it further normalizes mereology by dissimulating its peculiar rationale behind everyday operations.

We might also ask, aside from requirements to do so, what really motivates researchers to form partnerships? Is this how the process of thinking and working together really happens? To the contrary, studies of interdisciplinary practices from the history of science and STS suggest that the notion of piecing partial contributions together is both more complex and more contentious than is suggested by the mereology of interdisciplinary partnerships. Such undertakings often work only by constituting a new hybrid output. Rather than intercalating research products into a predetermined “deliverable”, the process and temporary outcomes are both more uncertain and risky. Mol (2002, 2008) presents, in detail, how sociomaterial “coordination work” may stabilise “boundary objects” (Star and Griesmar 1989) in order that knowledge may be attached to them through shared “language” and exchangeable media (also Galison 1997).

Against mereology, Strathern argues that “disparate viewpoints can never add up” (2010:175). Social multiplicity is not vouchsafed by the singular ontology of a “Nature” and partial descriptions of an object or sociotechnical process do not add up to a complete description. Nor could they ever. We can only describe what is partially always in flux. A consequence is that, with Stengers (2011), we may spend more effort “wondering about materiality” then explaining it. Such a position of humility resonates with recent calls within archaeology and anthropology to (re)affirm radical, unknowable alterity (Alberti and Bray 2009; and Garrow and Yarrow 2010), and STS scholars remind us that such a non-mereological mode of being opens up alterity within our own sociotechnical processes and collective selves. “Bad” matter, unruly ruins, awkward or abject things have too readily been excised away from the “us” of humanity (Webmoor and Witmore 2008).

The consequences, then, of mereological reasoning extend to material practices of the scientific endeavor, the possibilities of knowing and to our ontological make-up. We must question the starting assumption of interdisciplinary collaboration as a concept and goal and unpack how it prefigures relations between practitioners.

Let’s return to the topology of the knot. If partnering through disciplines works, then we ought to look to the boundary objects, the mongrel materials that are composed to do work. A knot requires the type of “coordination work” that Mol (2002; also Mol et al. 2010) has sketched in complex medical settings. As a boundary object, a knot, exemplifies non-mereological symmetry in partnerships. Under load, it moves attention to how it performs, rather than to its static composition. When working properly, the knot is a mixture, “more than one but less than many” (Mol and Law 2002:11; also Harman 2009b, 2011). To continue with the suggestion that ontological composition is a paradox, too fluid to be rendered satisfactorily in mereological reasoning, I would urge letting go the interdisciplinary goal in the manner of a Zen kōan: loosen hold of the goal in order to attain it. It is to affirm that we can be collegial without being interdisciplinary.

Knot Knowing

Shed of the idea(l) of synergy, how do we describe the relations between STS and Archaeology? Like our climber on the cliff setting up a rescue abseil, ensuring that what is in the hands is not an unknot requires understanding whether the topology will “bind” when under load. I look at two primary sets of literature where disciplinary interests connect: ethnographies of practice; discussions of descriptive work. Sketching these literary networks I identify four points of slippage between archaeology and STS: temporality; representationalism/performativity; scale; symmetry.

. . . continued in Part 2 of 2.

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Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1996 Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo amerindio. Mana 2(2):115–144.

Watts, Laura 2005 Towards an Archaeology of the Future. Paper presented at the Society for the Social Study of Science (4S), Pasadena.

Webmoor, Timothy 2005 Mediational Techniques and Conceptual Frameworks in Archaeology: A Model in 'Mapwork' at Teotihuacan, Mexico. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):52-84.

Webmoor, Timothy 2007 What About ‘One More Turn After the Social’ in Archaeological Reasoning? Taking Things Seriously. World Archaeology 39(4):563-578.

Webmoor, Timothy 2012 An Archaeological Metaphysics of Care. On Heritage Ecologies, Epistemography and the Isotopy of the past(s). In Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory, edited by Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney, pp. 13-23. British Archaeological Reports, Oxbow, Oxford.

Webmoor, Timothy, and Christopher L. Witmore 2005 Symmetrical Archaeology Collaboratory. Electronic document, humanitieslab.stanford.edu/symmetry, accessed October 1, 2011.

Webmoor, Timothy, and Christopher L. Witmore 2008 Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations Under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology. Norwegian Archaeology Review 41(1):53-70.

Wikie, Alex, and Mike Michaels 2009 Expectation and Mobilisation: Enacting Future Users. Science, Technology and Human Values 34(4):502-522.

Witmore, Christopher L. 2004 On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece. Archaeological Dialogues 11:133-164.

Witmore, Christopher L. 2007 Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts from a Manifesto. World Archaeology, 39(4):546-62.

Woolgar, Steve 1988 Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge. Sage Publications, London.

Woolgar, Steve 2004 What Happened to Provocation in Science and Technology Studies? History and Technology 20(4):339-439.

Woolgar, Steve, Catelijne Coopmans, and Daniel Neyland 2009 Does STS Mean Business? Organization 16(1):5-30.

Yarrow, Thomas 2003 Artefactual Persons: The Relational Capacities of Persons and Things in the Practice of Excavation. Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(1):65-73.

The principle of symmetry according to Tim Ingold: An occasion for more clarification

2012-08-27T17:01:06Z

When deployed in the context of metaphysics, symmetry is an awkward, even unsightly, term. Those of us who have enrolled this principle have been the first to admit this. We have also been the first to state that we are more than happy to take leave of symmetry. But such vocabulary works because it is not meant to carry any empirical weight, but to aid us in taking fresh angles on our matters of concern.

This has all been stated before, so why do so again?

My return to this issue was prompted by a recent article written by Tim Ingold (2012) who takes issue with symmetrical archaeology, under the rubric of material culture studies, on the grounds that it operates with “a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms.”

Here is what he had to say.

In their efforts to bring things back in, theorists have proposed a symmetrical approach, in which nonhumans of all sorts are allowed to play a role, alongside human beings, in the conduct and continuation of social life (Olsen 2003, 2007, 2010, p. 9; Webmoor 2007; Witmore 2007). With its geometrical connotations, the concept of symmetry is less that apposite, since precisely what is not implied is a relation between terms that are equal and opposite. On the contrary, the approach seeks a way of talking about persons and things that both allows for heterogeneity and is nonoppositional (Latour 2005, p. 76). Humans and nonhumans are different, but they are not to be regarded as ontologically distinct (Witmore 2007, p. 546). What is most remarkable about this principle of symmetry, however, is that it rests on a claim to human exceptionalism, along with a vision of progress from the animal to the human and from the hunting and gathering of our earliest ancestors to modern industrial society, which could have come straight out of the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, an approach that deontologizes the division between the human and the nonhuman and that establishes in its place a level playing field is justified on the grounds that in the manner of their engagement with material things and in the progressive history of this engagement human beings are fundamentally different from all other living kinds. Hardly could a symmetrical approach rest on a more asymmetrical foundation! (2012).

Ingold is correct that mountains and arroyos are things. Ingold is correct about the involvement of things in animal life. And Ingold is correct about being inclusive with respect to animals and plants, air and soil, weather and sun. We couldn’t agree more – this is in fact the whole point – to be open to any entities that may participate in a given situation. Symmetrical archaeology hasn’t forgotten animals – far from it. Just because Bjørnar Olsen doesn’t always mention reindeer, brown bears, minke whales, lynx, or lemmings by name at every turn doesn’t lead to the denunciation that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for them. They are all things, both in Olsen’s vocabulary and in symmetrical archaeology more generally (see Olsen’s discussion of reindeer, for example, 2010, 86-87).

]]> One could turn Ingold’s argument around upon his own program by claiming that his ecological anthropology is not inclusive enough – where are the microbes, for example? What about the symbiotic rapports between nitrogen-fixing bacteria and clovers or mycorrhizae and maple trees? Or what about the complex microbial ecosystem that comprises a human being? The genes of friendly bacteria that are on or inside my body outnumber the number of genes that I inherited from my parents (Ackerman 2012) - and that's after my morning shower! Why not begin with symbiosis, following Lynn Margulis (1999)? Or even dare to address Gaia?

Touché Ingold? Of course not.

This kind of scholarship is expedient and unfair. One sets up a piece of work as a foil for another to make a point. One chides others for making no room for X or Y, which leads to denunciation. And yet, these supposedly missing masses are the grounds for the critic’s argument and not a factor of the conditions under which an achievement was realized. It is easy to take labor out of context and paint an author as foolish for having missed something. What is more, it is unfair to the conditions under which a body of work arose – symmetrical archaeology is faithful to issues that run to the heart of archaeology, not anthropology (Olsen et al. 2012). Such fallacious distortion lends itself to the proverbial straw person, to be sure.

In all fairness, Ingold wrote “Toward an Ecology of Materials” in order to seek a substantive engagement and I very much agree with the spirit of the piece in this regard, even if he begins with the assumption that the character of that engagement is one of rapprochement. (This is a bit strange given Ingold’s tremendous impact upon Symmetrical Archaeology). My point is that such diplomacy rests on shaky grounds if we ignore the purposes for which these studies were undertaken and deny our colleagues trust in their ability to undertake the empirical and pragmatic adventure that is their field of concern, which, in this case, is archaeology.

But that is not enough. Ingold misrepresents the notion of symmetry. The whole point of symmetry is to help us remember not to impose a priori filters on a given situation (see these archaeolog entries here and here).

Here is my definition of symmetry:

“. . . the notion or principle of symmetry is meant to remind us not to decide in advance what role various entities play in a given situation by imposing arbitrary hierarchies of value or preformed dogmas concerning the nature of the real. Symmetrical archaeology is agnostic. I don’t mean this in the smug sense of the skeptical critic who remains aloof from the seemingly wayward beliefs of others. No, I take this in a very analytical sense, in that symmetrical archaeology refuses to delimit a given situation by imposing any predetermined schemes. Rather it strives to allow entities to define, to frame, themselves. Symmetrical archaeology grants dignity to all participants in a given situation and it does so by placing them on the same footing at the start.” (Witmore 2011, 13).

As archaeologists the entities that have defined themselves happen to be things and we follow them where they lead. Of course, we do not foreclose on the impact of animals (or microbes for that matter!) – all are assemblages and, again, all are things. Still, the kind of memory that things hold in dealing with what has become of what was, often tells us little of whether materials strewn across an abandonment level resulted from the reuse of a structure as a sheepfold, children playing a game in a ruin, a series of exceptional snow storms, or the collapse of roof made of olive wood after many years of exposure to the weather (rapports between microbes, fungi, water and wood).

What of Ingold’s point concerning human exceptionalism?

If we add the qualifying statement to the point regarding the ontological distinction of humans and nonhumans it reads: “human and non-humans should not be regarded as ontologically distinct, as detached and separated entities, a priori” (Witmore 2007, 546). Again, symmetrical archaeology is a serious attempt to understand those entities encountered in the course of archaeological practice without recourse to a vulgar ontological exceptionalism. Pause and do not assume the roles or relations between entities to be asymmetrical from the start. Do not use a different rulebook for humans operating in the world. Do not look for the “Indian behind the artifact” (Olsen 2012; Olsen et al. 2012) – begin in medias res, with the richness of things themselves - try to follow them and see what stories unfold. This need not always lead to mixtures – a point over emphasized in my paper cited by Ingold – goats, WWII screw pickets, and former Classical watchtowers can exist in isolation from certain species of contact.

Olsen’s point about the trajectory from Olgvi Gorge to Post Modernia is not one of 19th century progress! That passé gloss is supplied by Ingold who misses Olsen’s point concerning the increasing delegation of tasks to nonhumans, including horses and oxen, carts and roads, plows and iteratively selected plant seed, water wheels and channelized streams of water. Indeed, Ingold fails to mention Olsen’s qualification that there are different involvements with different groups – movement from assemblages to assemblages – and that there are both gains and losses in these transformations. But to claim, as Ingold does in the article, that Olsen’s renders society and history “as exclusively human achievements, brought about by way of the enrollment of objects and things” is to completely misrepresent symmetrical archaeology.

Moreover, this is not to claim that progress, which has become a proverbial whipping boy, doesn’t exist – it does. Otherwise, my internal combustion engine would still be getting 10 to 12 miles per gallon and generating 22-horse power (not bad for a model T). Progress is not some external measure of life, rather it is movement generated within the ontogenesis of the engine, which involves a kind of “internal necessity”, to use the words of Simondon, where the engine self-realizes (Olsen et al. 2012). (Incidentally, I was happy to see Ingold discuss the work of Gilbert Simondon in the text of this new article, especially given the fact that in past work he completely ignored Simondon, who puts forward one of the most significant and sustained critiques of hylomorphism – have a look at Ingold’s 2011 article entitled “The Textility of Making”, for example. Simondon, however, does find mention in a redux version of the same article in Ingold’s excellent new book: Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 2012).

Olsen’s point about the trajectory from Olgvi Gorge to Post Modernia concerns movement, yes movement, and ever increasing and weighty interactions free of human-to-human and even human-to-nonhuman contact. Through delegation we begin to see more nonhuman-to-nonhuman (which should not be erroneously equated to “made objects” as Ingold does in his definition of terms in this article) contacts and such trajectories are part of the big stories we associate with the archaeological.

But there are also small stories. And here again there is more misrepresentation when Ingold quotes Olsen in what he characterizes as a “simple statement of fact” (Ingold 2012): “Things are more persistent than thought. They evidently last longer than speech or gestures. Things are concrete and offer stability.”(Olsen 2010,p. 158). Ingold fails to include the end to this sentence: "although to a varying degree" (Ibid.). Of course, this slight-of-hand gesture on the part of Ingold avoids what are the key issues for archaeologists – where are the Neolithic expressions of love for parents, stories concerning the cycles of the moon, or gestures for the proper burial of an adolescent? On this wonderful symbiotic planet bacteria insure that leaves do not sustain themselves for very long, but consider polished stone axes. Olsen seeks to understand these differences in light of the kinds of pasts archaeology realizes. So what does Ingold get out of such wanton perversion?

A sham device of academic rhetoric, perhaps, but not much substantive engagement.

These clarifications are not retroactive attempts to duct-tape together tired, anachronistic ideas, despite Ingold’s efforts to frame it this way. In this enterprise, Ingold missed another key thing about symmetrical archaeology, its implicit expiration date. As I pointed out right from the start, all of us recognize the need to dump the adjective, and we admitted that up front. When? Well that is not up to us. It remains a challenge for archaeology when it fully recognizes that we begin, not with a detached past, not with bits of pots that act as intermediaries to artisans, but with what becomes of what was. With things and, as mediators, these work to co-realize the past and hold memories of their contact with soil, aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and fungi, moisture, roots, burrowing animals, and other entities associated with their erstwhile existence.

Finally, I too would be remiss if I were not true to the point of Ingold’s review, which is namely to bring things, materials back in. Perhaps if Ingold resisted the lure of denunciation through rhetorical positioning he might capture the matters of care and concern that we all share and to which we too have been laboring to return.

References

Ackerman, J. 2012: The Ultimate Social Network. Scientific American, June 2012, 36-43.

Ingold, T. 2012: Toward an Ecology of Materials. Annual Review of Anthropology 2012, 41, 427-42.

Latour, B. 2005: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Margulis, L. 1999: Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books.
Olsen, B. 2003: Material Culture after Text: Re-Membering Things. Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(2): 87–104.

Olsen, B. 2007: Keeping Things at Arm’s Length. A Genealogy of Asymmetry. World Archaeology 39(4): 579–88.

Olsen, B. 2010: In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

Olsen, B. 2012: Symmetrical Archaeology. In Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Olsen, B, M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore, 2012: Archaeology: The Discipline of Things. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Webmoor, T. 2007: What About “One More Turn After the Social” in Archaeological Reasoning? Taking Things Seriously. World Archaeology 39(4): 547–62.

Witmore, C. 2007: Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts from a Manifesto. World Archaeology 39(4): 546–62.

Witmore, C. 2011: Interview: Jonas Žakaitis talks with Christopher Witmore. The Federal. Issue #2, October 2011, 11-20.

Chorography - then and now

2012-07-11T19:00:40Z

Chorography - a workshop at Durham University July 10 2012 - [Link]

Summer fieldwork. I am less focused on the excavations at Binchester this year [Link]. I am pulling together my long-running research into the region - the English Scottish borders.

How do you tell of such a place? All that is there, and has been?

For me this is a question of representation that takes me back to the eighteenth century and earlier. To the genre of chorography

writing on the land

- a key component of antiquarian engagements with the history, geography, genealogy, anthropology and archaeology of region, site and collection from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Mike Pearson and I call this chorographic effort, among other things, deep mapping - [Link]:

"Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …"

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65. There's more in my new book The Archaeological Imagination - [Link] and [Link]

We anticipate a continuing resurgence of transdiciplinary practices that deal with site and region, already so evident in human/cultural geography. To this end Darrell Rohl organized this workshop at Durham. With David Petts, Chris Witmore, Richard Hingley, and myself.

Darrell connected chorography with different kinds of archaeology of place:

regional archaeological research programs, starting in the nineteenth century, gaining new energy with social and anthropological archaeology developing in the Americas from the 1950s (I think of Gordon Willey's pioneering work in Peru)

landscape studies, typically rooted in historical geography

spatial science

geographic information systems for managing spatially tagged information

humanistic approaches to the experience of place and typified in archaeology by the influence of phenomenology, including also Richard Bradley's archaeology of natural places

public archaeology and community involvement

Chorography, given that it doesn't exist as an institutional form, genre or medium any more, is none of these, while also, ironically, encompassing all of their standpoints and agendas, and more. This is precisely due to the genealogy of relationships with place - chorography is the main ancestor of contemporary disciplinary approaches; its genetic imprint is very much with us in modernity.

Darrell's tag cloud for chorography

To this menu David added

psychogeography - the psychology of space, senses of place

He made an inspired connection between chorography and the dérive of the situationists (Guy Debord and after) - the perambulatory, performative engagement with the city, to radical critical and political ends [Link].

]]> Darrell shared with us his work in Scotland, Chris his own chorographic work in Greece, and Richard his research into the reception of that great border monument, Hadrian's Wall.

I presented a version of my recent talks in Göteborg [Link] and my Reinwardt Memorial Lecture in Amsterdam [Link] - arguing that the key question is one of political engagement with locality and community - the matter of political representation.

Here in Durham, and in the wake of my recent return to thinking about theatre/archaeology, my project with Mike Pearson, the figure on my mind was

Brecht

There was much discussion about how to do chorography today - the methods and media, forms and structures, methodologies and publication, about mimesis (whether the aim is some kind of faithful account that somehow mirrors a place, or whether our discursive efforts are better less concerned with naturalistic rendition, and more with pragmatic purpose).

I have sketched how Scott et al provided pragmatic authenticity, one rooted in living and interacting with people and place. Just as Brecht offered definitive tactics of subverting illusions of authenticity by interrupting any illusion of complicity between medium and reality in performance.

Place is a verb. Chorography, in its most radical implication, is not a new archaeology of place. It offers tactics of intervention in the way we (understand how we) live.

The stables at Seaton Delaval (Vanbrugh 1718) - unused since the early nineteenth century

William Rathje (July 1, 1945 - May 24, 2012)

2012-06-08T07:16:32Z

(Image by Louis Psihoyos)

Bill Rathje passed away on May 24th – just over a month shy of his 67th birthday.

Everyone who knew Bill well loved him. And there was a lot to love about him. A kind and gentle man, Bill had a laugh that shook the room. This laugh was matched by his sense of humor. Bill never missed an opportunity to make a joke or to enter one into his talks. Garbage was an easy target, and Bill did it with style.

Bill was generous. He provided graduate student with incredible opportunities, which were more than a boon to their professional formation. And at a time when I was without a steady income, he was there to help.

Bill would regularly take graduate students out to lunch and in Palo Alto there was a dozen places where Bill knew all the staff by name; and he knew the names of everyone in their families too. And of course they knew Bill and what he liked.

An innovator in the field of Modern Material Culture Studies, Bill never lost his sense of connection to being a Mayanist and he frequently reflected on this area of archaeological interest. And though retired, of late, he was keen on pushing back on what has come to be known as the archaeology of the present. He was in the midst of writing a piece for a volume edited by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal.

Since Stanford, Bill and I had regular phone conversations, which became more frequent over the last couple of years because of a project that we were working on with Michael Shanks. Our last conversation was just before I left for fieldwork at the beginning of May. He was on the good side of a bad week, or at least that was how he put it to me. Most of our talk was about how he was doing. Some was about the project. But he never failed to ask about Liz and our two sons, Eli and Liam.

Bill is missed both personally and professionally. To borrow one of his signature statements: “Ding Hoy Buckaroo!”

On objects and habits

2012-05-31T14:03:11Z

blog

Abandoned writing implements in an abandoned small house in Southern Finland. Marko Marila, 2009.

There are, I think, two types of philosophies that have set the agenda for archaeological theory after the linguistic turn, namely contemporary continental realism and classic American pragmatism. Both traditions are ample in their supply of realist and materialist thinkers (such as Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson or Charles Peirce and William James) that suit the needs of a contemporary archaeologist interested in things after the ‘material turn’. Current scholars in the field of continental philosophy include for example Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, who have been very influential also in archaeology.

]]> Such archaeologists as Johan Normark (see his Archaeological Haecceities blog), Bjørnar Olsen (2010; 2012), Matt Edgeworth (2012) and Christopher Witmore (2012) have been influenced by speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy in particular. (For previous Archaeolog entries on speculative realism and archaeology see posts by Witmore and Webmoor).

While there are many philosophers who continue the tradition of American pragmatism, relatively few archaeologists have been inspired by classic pragmatism. There is, however, a growing number of authors working on pragmatism in archaeology, perhaps the most well known example being Robert Preucel’s (2006) pragmatist take on social archaeology. Webmoor and Witmore (2008) provide a take on social archaeology and thing-human relations that combines elements of continental philosophy and pragmatism. Furthermore, Timothy Webmoor (e.g. 2007) has written extensively on pragmatism and archaeology. In his 2007 article he argues for a pragmatic (Jamesian) epistemology of archaeology in hope for a ‘mediating archaeology’. Thus Webmoor astutely identifies the possibilities of a pragmatic approach in rendering archaeology a unifying enterprise between sciences and humanities, as well as archaeologists and non-archaeologists. Christopher Witmore (2012) provides an example of a somewhat pragmatist approach with symmetrical archaeology's notion of pragmatology, the idea that things, events and circumstances are real and have real effects on each other and as such provide the starting point as well as the grounds for speculation for what possible course action could take, what could happen at any given instance or what possible relevance a thing could have on another thing. He does not, however, explicitly refer to any particular pragmatist philosopher. In fact the notion of pragmatology was born out of the discussion revolving around symmetrical archaeology. The idea of pragmatology nonetheless adopts the speculative attitude that is vital for any realist archaeology. For a Peircean approach to material agency, see Watts (2008). Also of interest to the reader may be the papers given at the 2010 TAG seminar session on pragmatism (http://proteus.brown.edu/tag2010/8045). The above is by no means a complete listing of pragmatic approaches in archaeology, but a collection of some writings where a pragmatic approach has been adopted in regard to studying the nature of things in particular.

Objects always act

As I wrote above, Witmore’s conception of objects is mostly based on the writings of such philosophers as Graham Harman and Levi Bryant. The core tenet of object-oriented philosophy is that what ultimately exist, are objects. Objects can be said to share various relationships with each other. Levi Bryant (2011, 26) for example does not follow the modernist schema of relationism in which objects are thought to be defined by their relations with each other. He follows Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and maintains that objects are always withdrawn from relations (Bryant 2011, 26), i.e. ‘that objects have no direct access to one another and that each object translates other objects with which it enters into non-relational relations’. Nor are all objects thought to be in relation (or non-relational relation) with each other (Bryant 2011, 68). Not everything that happens affects all objects. In this sense Bryant (2011, 68) makes a distinction between objects and their relations and maintains that the universe is not a closed system where everything affects everything. In fact, he points out that if this were the case; if objects were only constituted by their relations with each other, everything would be frozen, nothing would move (Bryant 2011, 68). Bryant (2011, 69) then goes on to explicate his philosophy of objects by stating that ‘we must not say that an object has its qualities or that qualities inhere in an object, nor above all that objects are their qualities, but [...] we must say that qualities are something an object does’. This is an essentially pragmatistic view of objects and one of the many points of connection that speculative realism has with classical American pragmatism. The pragmatic maxim tells us to ‘[c]onsider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’ (CP 5.402).

In addition to being shared by both speculative realists and pragmatists, the idea of an object being defined by its potential effects can also be seen in the writings of some current archaeologists. Bjørnar Olsen (2012, 212), for example, writes that a thing can not be substituted by any other thing since things have their unique competence or affordances. Olsen seems to be supporting the view that the meaning of an object is in the possible effects it is capable of producing. This is an essentially realist definition for a thing: things, as far as they are active by their virtue of being able to act, are general. In order for us to study the possible meanings of things in the past, a certain degree of generality is needed. Particular things of the past become general by their similar affordances, or the habits of acting they involve, to use a more pragmatistic vocabulary. Certain slow-changing and all-encompassing habits, like the laws of physics, provide a common ground also for the study of the past.

Past is real

In Process and Reality, Whitehead (1978, 214) writes that the past is a nexus of actualities while the future is real without being actual. The present for Whitehead (1978, 214) is ‘the immediacy of teleological process whereby reality becomes actual’. Peirce’s (CP 2.148) view was somewhat similar:

Whatever is truly general refers to the indefinite future; for the past contains only a certain collection of such cases that have occurred. The past is actual fact. But a general (fact) cannot be fully realized. It is a potentiality; and its mode of being is esse in futuro. The future is potential, not actual.

Potentialities bring objects together and make them real. So while Whitehead states that the present is what includes the past and the future, Peirce maintains that the future is what connects the past and the present in any meaningful fashion. Things, as well as humans, are teleologically oriented. The basis of action is in the anticipated outcomes of that action; the fact that things have happened according to certain habits (i.e. habits have become general laws and providers of generalities) results in their potentiality in following that general law of action (CP 2.148). The hard part in the study of meanings is to study what possibilities were involved in the experiences of past people, or other objects for that matter. The notion of meanings of things acquires a new meaning as the object of archaeological study. Recall for example what Christopher Hawkes (1954) wrote about the four levels of inference. Technologies, as evidence of praxis (their esse in futuro owing to action targeted at producing something), are fairly easy to study, whereas the meaning of a more abstract type of action that has not left behind direct material evidence should be the hardest to reconstruct.

If, as Peirce wrote in How to make our ideas clear (CP 5.400), the meaning of a thing is equal to the habits it involves, and, furthermore, if the nature of those habits is being in futuro, how does one begin to reconstruct past experiences the meanings of which were in futuro? John Dewey (1895, 32) refers to these non-referential or unconscious references as Gefühlston:

Gefühlston represents the complete consolidation of a large number of achieved ends into the organic habit or co-ordination. It is interest read backwards. That represents the complete identification of the habits with a certain end or aim.

The experiences of past people are embodied in us as a result of their actions that aimed at certain outcomes of that action. No one person can remember all past experiences (not even their own), yet they have an impact on our experience as formed habits of action. Experiences are therefore not something belonging to the purely psychological individual but are bodily and evolutionary as well. People today, as well as in the past, produce things and act in order to achieve something. That is the basis of all action and thought. What is created in the process is a complex assemblage of meanings. The meaning of a thing in the past may be different from its meaning for me but nevertheless my knowledge of the past meanings have an affect on the meaning of the thing for me. My assumed meanings of the thing in the past affect its meaning in the present. Similarly, a thing in the present may have many meanings. A thing can be put in a museum and treated as an exhibit piece, or it can be studied in a lab. Its meanings may be very different to different people. Furthermore, a thing could have meant different things to different people in the past.

Archaeologists are in the end not left with things that have nothing to do with their own time but with things that are part of a chain of semiosis that connects the past and the present and all thought in its mode of being in futuro. The fact that things are in continuity makes action (as well as studying the past) meaningful. Stating that past meanings were something purely cognitive and therefore are solely in futuro would render past meanings completely unreachable today. The good thing is that past action (however teleological) produced material parts. And since archaeologists are ultimately dependent on those material parts, it is worth keeping in mind Peirce’s statement that ‘[w]hatever is continuous has material parts’ (CP 6.174). The trick is to find the material parts that are continuous.

Works cited

Bryant, L. 2011. The democracy of objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press.

CP (followed by number of volume and paragraph) refers to the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 volumes, 1931-1958. (Vols. 1-6, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss, eds., vols. 7-8, A. W. Burks, ed.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dewey, J. 1895. ‘The theory of emotions,’ Psychological Review, 2, 13-32.

Edgeworth, M. 2012. ‘Follow the cut, follow the rhythm, follow the material,’ Norwegian Archaeological Review, 45(1), 76-92.

Hawkes, C. 1954. ‘Archaeological theory and method: Some suggestions from the old world,’ American Anthropologist 56, 155-168.

Olsen, B. 2010. In defense of things: Archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham: AltaMira Press.

Olsen, B. 2012. ‘Symmetrical archaeology.’ In Archaeological Theory Today. Second Edition, edited by I. Hodder, Cambridge: Polity Press, 208-228.

Preucel, R. 2006. Archaeological semiotics. Malden: Blackwell.

Watts, C. M. 2008. 'On mediation and material agency in the Peircean semeiotic.' In Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, edited by C. Knappett and L. Malafouris, New York: Springer, 187-207.

Webmoor, T. 2007. 'The dilemma of contact: Archaeology’s ethics-epistemology crisis and the recovery of the pragmatic sensibility,' Stanford Journal of Archaeology 5, 224-246.

Webmoor, T. and Witmore, C. 2008. 'Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a 'social' archaeology,' Norwegian Archaeological Review 41(1), 53-70.

Whitehead, A. N. 1978. Process and reality. New York: The Free Press.

Witmore, C. 2012. The realities of the past: Archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology. Modern materials: The proceedings of CHAT Oxford, 2009. (B. R. Fortenberry, L. McAtackney, eds.). Oxford: Archaeopress, 25-36.

Arthur’s O’on: A Lost ‘Wonder’ of Britain, Part 1

2012-03-21T16:32:20Z

Darrell J. Rohl (d.j.rohl@durham.ac.uk)
Department of Archaeology
Durham University

Near the end of the twelfth century Ralph de Diceto, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, transcribed a tract entitled De Mirabilibus Britanniae, ‘On the Wonders of Britain,’ describing in variable detail 35 extraordinary natural and man-made features across England, Scotland and Wales (British Library Cotton MS. Faustina A.viii, ff. 107–109; Stubbs 1876, I.11–15). Midway through the list that includes barnacles, Cheddar Gorge, Stonehenge, and the hot springs at Bath, a single-sentence entry proclaims:

furnus Arturi, qui factus ad modum thalami rotundi, sine tegmine, et tamen nunquam intus pluvial cadit, nec nix, nec grando, plusquam bene tectus esset. (Stubbs 1876, I.13)

Arthur’s Oven, having been built in the manner of a round chamber, without a covering, and still never falling by rain, nor snow, nor hail; how much better was it protected.

The monument described here is never geographically located by Diceto, nor does it feature in the alternative and better-known ‘Wonders of Britain’ sometimes appended to manuscript copies of the Historia Brittonum and traditionally attributed to Nennius (e.g. BL Cotton MS. Vespasian D.xxi, ff. 1–17; BL Harleian MS. 3859, f. 135). Other documents from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, suggest that the ‘Oven’ was an ancient corbel-domed structure that stood on the north bank of the River Carron in central Scotland until its tragic destruction in 1742/3. From the twelfth century onwards, this monument was a perennial favorite of chroniclers, historians and antiquarians, with a colorful and contentious discursive history. This paper, deriving from a recent M.A. dissertation (Rohl 2009) and related ongoing Ph.D. research, is presented in two parts. Part 1 provides a summarized introduction to the monument including a general description, presentation of its various names and interpretations over the centuries, and a discussion of contemporary and later reactions to its untimely demise. Part 2 (forthcoming) will consider possible avenues of inquiry that may help to answer lingering questions about the monument, as well as a series of reflections on some of the lessons and challenges the monument’s story provides for current archaeological research in general. For reasons that will become obvious, Part 1 relies on an unusually large number of pre-twentieth-century sources, including several medieval and early modern Latin manuscripts.

]]> The Monument

Arthur’s O’on (=‘Oven’) was a circular stone structure located on the northern bank of the River Carron in the present town of Stenhousemuir near Falkirk; this structure was the ‘stone house’ from which the village has taken its name. The most detailed descriptions of the monument are provided by the antiquarians William Stukeley (1720) and Alexander Gordon (1726, 24–32), who both offer detailed drawings (Figs. 1 and 2) and their own interpretations of the monument’s dating and purpose. While these accounts differ in certain details, their respective measurements and drawings are markedly similar (Steer 1960 provides a useful comparative measurements table). From these accounts we can be fairly certain that, as of the 1720s, the monument stood to a height of 22 feet with an open aperture at the top of the dome, an open east-facing doorway with a height of at least nine feet and external width of about five feet, and an open window of trapezoidal shape located directly above the door and near the aperture. The monument’s internal diameter was about 19.5 feet, with walls about four feet thick at the base reducing to about 2.5 feet at the top. The structure was of ashlar masonry, in at least 23 corbeled courses with lewis holes and no sign of mortar, set atop a ‘basement’ of about 4.5 feet in depth.

Fig. 1: William Stukeley’s (1720) drawings of Arthur’s O’on

The O’on also had several functional or decorative features. While almost all accounts note the monument’s aperture, Stukeley adds that this included an ‘Iron hoop or Kirb…and a Grate,’ while the main doorway featured an ‘Iron Door’ (Stukeley 1720, 14, 18). The monument’s interior featured a stone paved floor, a large stone that may have been used as an altar or statue base, and two protruding string-courses at heights of four and about six feet respectively (Steer 1960); while it may be attractive to consider these latter as possible interior shelves, most accounts describe them with a sloping upper surface. In addition, several observers noted possible sculptured stones—possibly featuring engraved eagles, winged Victories, spears and javelins, or a shield of Arms and St. George’s cross—and a possible inscription reading I.A.M.P.M.P.T. (most of these accounts are summarized by Steer 1960). At some point in the years preceding 1723, the local land-owner is said to have discovered a bronze finger within a crevice of the monument’s stonework (Mitchell 1906, 330), a fact that increased suggestions that the O’on served the function of a temple or shrine.

Fig. 2: Alexander Gordon’s (1726) drawings of Arthur’s O’on

Despite the growing interest in Arthur’s O’on—fueled largely by Stukeley and Gordon—during the early eighteenth century, the monument was tragically destroyed in the early 1740s; precise dating of the O’on’s demolition is uncertain, but both 1742 and 1743 (as well as the demonstrably erroneous 1749 (Maitland 1757, 439)) are given. Contemporary notice of the monument’s destruction is found in correspondence between some of the period’s antiquaries (Clerk 1790a; 1790b; Stukeley 1790), and the immediate and long-term reaction to this event will be discussed below. For now, it is sufficient to say that the O’on was demolished on the orders of the local property owner, Sir Michael Bruce of Stenhouse, whose home sat nearby and which undoubtedly received its own name from the ‘stone house’ of Arthur’s O’on. According to one contemporary account, the demolition was so complete that even ‘the very foundation-stones were raised’ (Clerk 1790b). These dismantled stones were used in the construction of a mill-dam located a short distance to the south, on the grounds now occupied by the Carron Iron Works; while it is sometimes said that the mill-dam was part of the Carron Company works (e.g. Breeze 2006, 176), the Carron Company was not established until late in 1759 and the first blast furnace did not enter operation until 1760 at the earliest (Watters 1998; 2010), by which time the dam had been washed away in a deluge—possibly less than a year after its construction (Stukeley 1757, 137–38; Pennant 1771, 212). In 1950, in what was the first and only attempt to use modern archaeological field methods to locate physical evidence for the O’on, Kenneth Steer and colleagues excavated several small trenches across its likely—and long-identified—location (Steer 1960). These excavations failed to uncover any archaeological remains, leaving Steer to conclude that all traces of the monument were removed during its eighteenth-century destruction (Steer 1960, 100). The site now stands within the back gardens of a housing estate, which was developed soon after the demolition of Sir Michael Bruce’s own Stenhouse Castle in the 1960s (http://canmore.rcahms.gov.uk/en/site/46930/).

Arthur’s O’on, once counted among Britain’s most important ‘wonders’ and considered ‘the best and most entire old building in Britain’ (Clerk 1790b) and ‘the grandest Roman monument in Brittain’ (Stukeley 1757, 138) has, therefore, been the victim of a double destruction. The first was at the hands of Sir Michael Bruce, and the second of nature herself. Most tragically, this second destruction appears to have been total, as the monument’s very fabric (i.e. the building stones) was washed down the Carron and never retrieved from the riverbed. It is, thus, highly improbable that any physical evidence will ever be made available for modern analysis. Fortunately, the detailed studies of Gordon (1726) and Stukeley (1720), as well as several additional eyewitness accounts (e.g. Anonymous 1893; Sibbald 1707, 42–46) remain for consideration. Perhaps most providentially, a near-contemporary full-scale replica was constructed atop the stable blocks of Penicuik House, Midlothian; this was commissioned by Sir James Clerk (son of the prominent antiquarian and Baron of the Exchequer Sir John Clerk) in 1767 and was primarily based on Gordon’s account. Functionally, this reconstruction was used as a dovecote (a dove- and/or pigeon-house—a very common feature in Scotland from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries), and remains in generally excellent condition today (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Photo of Arthur’s O’on replica at Penicuik House

The early eighteenth century marked the high point of Arthur’s O’on scholarship, with Stukeley and Gordon leading the way and providing the most influential accounts. While Stukeley appears to have never visited the monument himself, he nevertheless is responsible for the first rigorously-detailed architectural survey, for which he personally commissioned ‘Mr. Andrews Jelfe’ (Stukeley 1720, 1); Stukeley’s paper is thus a presentation of these findings with his own analysis, drawings based on those provided to him by Jelfe, and speculative interpretation. It was this very paper that the Scotsman Alexander Gordon (1726, 7) credits as the key inspiration for his own investigation of Scotland’s ancient monuments and landscape; while Arthur’s O’on plays only a small role in this sweeping chorographic treatment (receiving only nine pages of concerted attention), it may be argued that it was central to Gordon’s Itinerarium Septentrionale, which is arguably the most important—and certainly the earliest wide-ranging and methodologically rigorous—Scottish antiquarian work.

Names and Interpretations

Throughout its lifetime the O’on bore many names and was variously assigned to different periods, builders, and purposes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the allusion to Arthur appears to gain steam only after the c. 1136 completion of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (e.g. BL Harleian MS 6358, ff. 2–58), which popularized the Arthur myth. It is possible, however, that the monument’s Arthurian connection pre-dated Monmouth, as Lambert of Saint-Omer’s c. 1120 Liber Floridus (Ghent University Library MS 92) appears to describe the O’on under the name ‘Arthur’s Palace’ (Dumville 1976; Padel 1994, 6). The first documented use of the name ‘Arthur’s Oven,’ on the other hand, is undoubtedly in reference to a different monument: in Hermann of Tournai’s De Miraculis Sanctae Marie Laudunensis, French priests from Laon travel through Cornwall and Devon in 1113, where they are shown both Arthur’s Chair and Oven (Chambers 1927, 194; Lacy et al 1997, 26; Padel 1994, 5–6), the latter of which was later renamed furnum regis, ‘the king’s oven,’ a well-known prehistoric monument on Dartmoor. While the events of this story are supposed to have taken place two decades before the completion of Monmouth’s work, it is important to realize that Tournai’s manuscript was likely completed around 1140, raising the possibility that Monmouth’s pseudo-history provided some influence. Whatever influence Monmouth may have been, the name ‘Arthur’s Oven’ for the monument at Stenhousemuir appears to have been well-entrenched by the late thirteenth century, when a charter of 1293 grants lands at ‘Stanhus, which is near furnum Arthuri,’ to the Cistercian monks of Neubotle Abbey (Chalmers 1887, 245; Innes 1849, no. 219). It is interesting to note that in this charter the ‘furnum Arthuri’ is primarily used as a landmark to clarify the location of ‘Stanhus,’ suggesting that the monument was more widely known than the area in which it stood.

Besides ‘Arthur’s Oven,’ the O’on has been known by the names Julius’ Hoif/Huiff/Hoffe (i.e. ‘house’ or ‘hall’) (Boece 1527; Camden 1586, 481; Baxter 1719, 226), Templum Termini (Buchanan 1582; Clerk 1790c), Sacellum of Mars Signifer or Mars Ultor (Gordon 1726, 30–31), and almost certainly the Stanhus or ‘stone house’ that has given its name to the general locality. In addition to these several names, the monument has had various interpretations. As has already been mentioned, the early Arthurian names suggest a functional interpretation as an oven or palace of the legendary Arthur. Two competing later interpretations associate the monument with Julius Caesar, as either a type of victory monument or as the hastily-left-behind sleeping chamber of Caesar, who outrageously had his men carry the stones on the march and reconstruct the structure as needed so that the general would not need to sleep in a tent (Hearnius 1722, 92–93; Skene 1872, 46)! In a probably late twelfth-century (James 1912, 317) Nennian rescension manuscript copy of the Historia Brittonum (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 139, f. 169 v), a second-hand marginal gloss appears to describe the O’on as a ‘round house [built] of smooth/polished stones,’ and credits its construction to the late third-century usurper Carausius (for more on Carausius, see Casey 1995); according to this medieval gloss, the River Carron was named for Carausius as a result of his activities in the area.

From the fourteenth century onward, the monument has been almost universally accepted as a Roman structure, though specific interpretations of date and function have ranged from—among several suggestions—a monument of Caesar’s military prowess (proposed by John of Fordun c. 1360, see Hearnius 1722, 92–93; Skene 1872, 46) to a Vespasianic temple of Claudius and Victory (Boece 1527), a temple of the god Terminus (Buchanan 1582), an Agricolan replica of the Pantheon at Rome that may have been a temple of Romulus (Stukeley 1720), a shrine that housed Roman military standards or a mausoleum built under Agricola (Gordon 1726), to the now largely-accepted tropaeum (i.e. victory monument) associated with the nearby Antonine Wall (Steer 1960; Breeze 2006). Despite this long-standing—and almost-certainly correct, at least in terms of general period—Roman identification, the old Arthurian connections continue to resonate, particularly within the alternative discourse of popular accounts (e.g. Lang 1910, 40; Hale 1989, 21–22; McKerracher 1989; Hennig 2008, 202–4).

Today, there is some confusion around the proper pronunciation of the term ‘O’on.’ While some have emphasized the presumed ‘oven’ meaning, opting for a pronunciation that maintains the original two-syllable form but leaves the missing ‘v’ unvoiced, similar to the forename ‘Owen’ (Michael Shanks pers. comm.), most Scottish archaeologists and historians who have been consulted on the matter (e.g. Hugh Cheape and Domhnall Stiùbhart pers. comm.) prefer to simply ignore the apostrophe and pronounce the word in one syllable, as ‘oon.’ The former may arguably be closer to the original pronunciation of the monument’s common name, but the latter is now reasonably entrenched; this may possibly be traceable to Gordon’s contemporary and influential rival John Horsley (1732, 174–75), who consistently omitted the apostrophe.

Reactions to the Monument’s Destruction

The destruction of Arthur’s O’on ‘has come to be regarded as the greatest antiquarian scandal of the eighteenth century’ (Brown 1974, 284), and Iain G. Brown (1974) has provided an excellent discussion of the antiquarian reactions during the years following the monument’s demise. In short, the antiquarians of both Scotland and England were furious, and their fury was aimed squarely at the perpetrator, Sir Michael Bruce. In the first-known communication of the event, Sir James Clerk writes to Roger Gale that ‘he has pulled it down…this Gothic knight…we all curse him with bell, book, and candle’ (Clerk 1790a). When Gale relayed this news to Stukeley, he remarked that ‘if there is a pitt deeper than ordinary destined for the reception of such villains and sordid rascals, condemn him to the bottome of it’ (Lukis 1885, 428–29). For his part, Stukeley responded with what he thought would be a fitting punishment for Bruce:

In order to make his name execrable to all posterity, that he should have an iron collar put about his neck, like a yoke; at each extremity a stone of Arthur’s Oon to be suspended by the lewis in the hole of them; thus accoutred, let him wander on the banks of Styx, perpetually agitated by angry demons with oxgoads; ‘Sir Michael Bruce,’ wrote on his back in large letters of burning phosphorus. (Stukeley 1790)

Accompanying this correspondence, Stukeley appended a rather gruesome drawing of the imagined scene (Fig. 4). The monument’s destruction, and the tenor of the antiquarian discourse centered on the tragedy, would later enter a more popular arena through the historical fiction of the novelist Sir Walter Scott (1814, 32; 1819, 21–32).

Fig. 4: ‘Sir Michael Bruce, Stonekiller,’ by William Stukeley
(Grose 1780; also re-published in Brown 1974)

Part 2: A Preview

Thus far, this paper has attempted to cover a lot of ground to establish the basic facts and key elements of the Arthur’s O’on story. Despite this density, the account provided here has been selective and incomplete. It is hoped, however, that the presentation of this story has raised an interest in this fascinating monument, as well as consideration of how it may inform current approaches in archaeology. The next installment of this paper will consider some of these issues. This will begin with ideas for how we may pursue new research toward answering the lingering question of Arthur’s O’on’s original purpose. It will also reflect on issues of broader applicability to the theory and practice of archaeology, including the nature of time and how it is experienced at particular places like the site of Arthur’s O’on, how archaeologists deal—or ought to deal—with mythic landscapes and alternative views of the past, and the difficult issue of monument destruction and the inconsistent ways in which both the archaeological community and broader public react to specific instances.

References

Manuscripts

British Library Cotton MS. Vespasian D.xxi. London.

British Library Cotton MS. Faustina A.viii. London.

British Library Harleian MS. 3859. London.

British Library Harleian MS. 6358. London.

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 139. Cambridge.

Ghent University Library MS. 92. Ghent. Available at: http://www.liberfloridus.be (accessed September 2011).

Modern and Printed Sources

Anonymous. 1893. ‘Account of Travels on the Roman Wall in 1697.’ In The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey, London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 54–57.

Baxter, W. 1719. Glossarium antiquitatum Britannicarum, sive syllabus etymologicus antiquitatum veteris Britanniae atque Iberniae temporibus Romanorum. London: W. Bowyer.

Boece, H. 1527. Scotorum historiae a prima gentis origine. Paris.

Breeze, D.J. 2006. The Antonine Wall. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

Brown, I.G. 1974. ‘“Gothicism, ignorance and a bad taste”: the destruction of Arthur’s O’on,’ Antiquity, 48, 283–88.

Buchanan, G. 1582. Rerum Scoticarum Historia. Edinburgh.

Camden, W. 1586. Britannia siue Florentissimporum regnorum, Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, et insularum adiacentium ex intima antiquitate chorographica descriptio. London: Radulphum Newbery.

Casey, P.J. 1995. Carausius and Allectus: The British Usurpers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Chalmers, G. 1887. Caledonia: or, a Historical and Topographical Account of North Britain from the Most Ancient to the Present Times, Vol. 1. Paisley: Alexander Gardner.

Chambers, E.K. 1927. Arthur of Britain. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.

Clerk, J. 1790a. ‘CXXIII. Letter of Sir John Clerk to Mr. Roger Gale, on the demolishing of Arthur’s Oon, near Falkirk, by Sir Michael Bruce, dated June 22, 1743.’ In Bibliotheca topographica Britannica, edited by J. Nichols, London: John Nichols, 385–86.

Clerk, J. 1790b. ‘CXXIV. Letter of Sir John Clerk to Mr. Roger Gale, on the demolishing of Arthur’s Oon, dated August 5, 1743.’ In Bibliotheca topographica Britannica, edited by J. Nichols, London: John Nichols, 386.

Clerk, J. 1790c. ‘LXX. Letter of Sir John Clerk to Mr. Roger Gale, with an account of an ancient Boat or Canoe found in the banks of the river Caron in Scotland, dated June 11, 1726.’ In Bibliotheca topographica Britannica, edited by J. Nichols, London: John Nichols, 241–42.

Dumville, D.N. 1976. ‘The Liber Floridus of Lambert of Saint-Omer and the Historia Brittonum,’ Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 26, 103–22.

Gordon, A. 1726. Itinerarium Septentrionale: or, a Journey Thro’ Most of the Counties of Scotland and Those in the North of England. London.

Grose, F. (ed) 1780. The Antiquarian Repertory, Vol. 3. London.

Hale, R.B. 1989. The Beloved St. Mungo, Founder of Glasgow. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Hearnius, T. (ed) 1722. Johannis de Fordun Scotichronicon genuinum, Vol. 1. Oxford.

Hennig, K.D. 2008. King Arthur: Lord of the Grail. Friday Harbor, WA: DesignMagic Publishing.

Horsley, J. 1732. Britannia Romana: or the Roman Antiquities of Britain. London: John Osborn and Thomas Longman.

Innes, C. (ed) 1849. Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle. Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club.

James, M.R. 1912. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College Cambridge, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lacy, N.J., Ashe, G., and Mancoff, D.N. 1997. The Arthurian Handbook, second edition. London: Routledge.

Lang, J. 1910. A Land of Romance: The Border, its History and Legend. London: T.C. and E.C. Jack.

Lukis, W.C. (ed) 1885. The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley etc., Vol. 3. Durham: Surtees Society.

Maitland, W.1757. The History and Antiquities of Scotland, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Death of James the First, Anno 1437. London: A. Millar.

McKerracher, A. 1989. ‘The Round Table was at Stenhousemuir,’ The Scots Magazine, 131, 505–13.

Mitchell, A. (ed) 1906. Geographical Collections Relating to Scotland made by Walter Macfarlane, Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society.

Padel, O.J. 1994. ‘The Nature of Arthur,’ Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 27, 1–31.

Pennant, T. 1771. A Tour in Scotland, MDCCLXIX. Chester: John Monk.

Rohl, D.J. 2009. ‘Arthur’s O’on: The Arch(a)eology of a Lost Monument.’ M.A. diss., Durham University.

Scott, W. 1814. Waverley:, or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Edinburgh.

Scott, W. 1819. Ivanhoe. Edinburgh.

Sibbald, R. 1707. Historical Inquiries, Concerning the Roman Monuments and Antiquities in the North-Part of Britain called Scotland. Edinburgh: James Watson.

Skene, W.F. 1872. John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.

Smellie, W. 1782. Account of the Institution and Progress of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland. Edinburgh.

Steer, K.A. 1960. ‘Arthur’s O’on: A Lost Shrine of Roman Britain,’ The Archaeological Journal, 115, 99–110.

Stubbs, W. (ed) 1876. Radulfi de Diceto Decani Lundoniensis Opera Historica: The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London. 2 Vols. Rolls Series. London: Public Record Office.

Stukeley, W. 1720. An Account of a Roman Temple and Other Antiquities Near Graham’s Dike in Scotland. London.

Stukeley, W. 1757. The Medallic History of Marcvs Avrelivs Valerivs Caravsivs, Emperor in Brittain, Vol. 1. London: Charles Corbet.

Stukeley, W. 1790. ‘CXXV. Letter of Dr. William Stukeley to Mr. Roger Gale, on the demolishing of Arthur’s Oon and other subjects, dated September 24, 1743.’ In Bibliotheca topographica Britannica, edited by J. Nichols, London: John Nichols, 387–88.

Watters, B. 1998. Where Iron Runs Like Water! A New History of the Carron Iron Works, 1759–1982. Edinburgh: John Donald.

Watters, B. 2010. Carron Where Iron Runs Like Water. Falkirk: Falkirk Local History Society.

Archaeology of a fugitive: the cave of “El Castrin”, a deserter who became an outlaw

2012-01-31T16:57:19Z

Luca Pisoni PhD
pisoni.gaetano@gmail.com

Introduction

The use of different sources in the archaeology of the contemporary past allows us to obtain interdisciplinary perspectives on similar issues and to verify hypotheses by comparing different kinds of evidence; thus, helping us to discover conflicts between data (Rathje 1992; Buchli and Lucas 2001; Harrison and Schofield 2010). The aim of this entry is to connect the historical-biographical reconstruction of an Italian bandit, Abramo Zeni (better known as "El Castrin"), with related archaeological evidence, which was uncovered in the cave where he hid during World War II (fig. 1; fig. 3; fig. 4).

Fig.1. Southern Trentino (Italy) and some of the places frequented by Abramo Zeni

]]> The research

This research rests upon three lines of inquiry: 1) archival work focused upon news related to the bandit in newspapers of the period; 2) ethnographic interviews with witnesses regarding the life of the bandit; and 3) an archaeological-stratigraphical survey of the cave where he lived.

1) Born in 1912, Abramo Zeni described himself as a peaceful man in two interviews (18/07/1973) that he gave to the local newspapers "L'Adige" and "L'Alto Adige" (fig. 2). He added that, before going to prison (he was sentenced to 29 years for desertion and theft), he sustained himself with different jobs, most notably as a shoe mender. He said that he deserted for the first time in 1939 and the second time from 1941 to 1944. The latter occurred after a violent quarrel, which resulted in his admittance to the hospital of Arco (Trento, northern Italy). There, he was arrested by the Nazis.

Fig.2. On the right Abramo (Gino Zeni), welcomed back by the Major and his fellows countrymen when he was released from jail; on the left, Zeni with a friend in the village bar (“L’Adige, July, the 18th, 1973).

During his desertion years, which he spent in his birthplace (Cavedine and Sarca Valleys), he confessed to have stolen food, which he hid in what he simply referred to as “a refuge". He often shared the food with his impoverished fellow countrymen.

2) Between 2004 and 2009, I conducted together with Ivan Montagni 15 interviews, focusing on information about Zeni’s "refuge" and on the objects found there (Pisoni 2012, in press). An informer (RC) led us near the place known today as "Bus del Castrin" (Castrin’s Hole), a hanging cave on the road to Le Sarche (Trento), in the north of Riva del Garda. The informer told us that as a child (in the early 1940s), when he took the sheep out to pasture, he would pass under the cave reluctantly and with fear. He would quicken his steps, sensing the presence of someone and even seeing the barrel of a rifle sticking out from the cave. According to RC, the entrance to the cave was from the top, by means of a wooden step ladder (not found) at the peak of the cliff. The informant told us that, after the capture of El Castrin, the refuge was stripped bare of the wooden boards that lined the inside of the cave. This fact was also confirmed by another informant (LP), who said that during the 1950s he found the remains of a badly damaged wooden structure in the cave. Last but not least, RC told us about a big theft of leather in Le Sarche, which was attributed to Castrin by the people of the village. From other interviews, it emerged how “el Castrin” was not actively looked for, even though many knew where he was hiding. This was both because of the fear he inspired in them (and in the local police) and because of the "social approach" that characterized his actions, by which he gained respect. Many informants testify that he gave food to poor families.

Fig.3. The gorge made by the river Sarca and the Bus del Castrin. Inset above: one of the two entrances, which is located above the street (Photo: L. Pisoni).

3) The archaeological survey in the cave, which I undertook on the 11 May 2009 in accordance with Soprintendenza ai Beni Librari e Archeologici di Trento, has allowed me to single out (fig. 3; fig. 4) the remains of a shelter built with wooden beams, metal sheets, glass, tiles and tar; not far from the shelter it is possible to distinguish two hearths constructed with a few stones. The discovery of dishes (fig. 5, 1), a knife (fig. 5, 4), a ‘pitar’ (used for keeping food; fig. 5, 3), and a small food box (fig. 5, 2), indicates that the cave was regularly inhabited.

Fig.4. The inside of the Bus del Castrin (Photo: L. Pisoni)

The main points of interest were the discovery of a leather cutting (which can be related with Castrin’s trade as a shoe mender and the subsequent theft that took place in the town of Le Sarche; fig. 5, 7) and the finding of a small bottle of French perfume “Grenoville” (fig. 5, 6). According to the studies of the Museo del Profumo (Milan), this particular perfume was produced between the 1920s and 1940s and almost certainly contained the lotion “Oeillet Fané.” It was most likely a gift from one of the bandit’s lovers, as it is known that he had many. The presence of the heel of a shoe of the “ARBITER” brand (fig. 5, 9), produced since 1954 (http://www.calzaturificioarbiter.it/home.asp), indicates that the cave was visited, although infrequently, in subsequent decades.

Fig.5. The objects found in the Bus del Castrin (Photo: L. Pisoni).

Conclusion

The inaccessibility of the cave and the elements that show the convergence between the historical-biographical reconstruction and the archaeological research (the wooden shelter, the perfume bottle and the leather cutting) suggest that these findings are evidence of the presence of the bandit El Castrin. The heel from an “ARBITER” shoe indicates that there were later “visits” to the cave, although sporadic. The most interesting result is perhaps of a methodological nature, as the study makes evident how microhistory (Ginzburg 1980; Muir and Ruggiero 1991) and archaeology can work together towards the reconstruction of the life of a single person. Archaeology, through the study of material culture, can offer relevant data, which are often inaccessible to other disciplines.

References

Buchli, B., Lucas G. (eds) 2001, Archaeologies of the contemporary past, London and New York: Routledge.

Ginzburg, C. (eds) 1980, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Harrison, R., Schofield, J. (eds) 2010, After Modernity: Archaeological Approaches to the Contemporary Past, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Muir E. and Ruggiero, G. (eds) 1991, Microhistory and the Lost People of Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Pisoni, L. 2012 (in Press). Places and exploits of the bandit “Castrin”: material results, events perception and memory building. Proceedings of the 5th Convegno

Internazionale di Etnoarcheologia, Roma 2010, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports
Rathje, W. and Murphy, C. 1992, Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage New York: HarperCollins.