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Posted by Christina J. Hodge
Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA
Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University
The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a "space" or "extent of existence" and "the interval between two successive events or acts." Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing time's passage, they assign social meaning as "history." When we come across one in a book, exhibit, or presentation, we comprehend its string of dated moments and selective illustrations. Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption. Even when authorship is unclear, authority is implicit and strong. Imagining the between spaces, the elided events and edited convolutions, takes some effort. Or an intervention.
A timeline of city history is part of the décor of my home subway station, Davis Square on the Red Line in Somerville, Massachusetts. The station was completed in 1984, and most of its interior dates from that time. Structural elements are raw concrete, sheet aluminum, and dark purple-brown brick. The public art program at the station is conspicuously disjointed. Drawings by elementary school children have been transformed into ceramic wall tiles. Casabianca by Elizabeth Bishop is carved discreetly into the bricks of the platform floor. A collection of giant geometric shapes, splashed in now-murky primary colors, stretches above the inbound platform. The collage may or may not spell out "Davis."
Figure 1. Interior of Davis Square Station, photograph by the author.
Continue reading "History on the Line, Davis Square" »
Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal
A session organized by Alfredo González-Ruibal (Complutense University of Madrid) and Ashish Chadha (Yale University).
The relationship between archaeology and modernity is a growing concern for archaeologists. On the one hand, archaeologists ask how the discipline is involved in the construction of modern categories of thought, knowledge and society? Can modernist divides and prejudices be bypassed or, even as many hope, overcome? What is the role of archaeology in processes of totalitarianism, nationalism, colonialism, or racism? On the other hand, historical archaeologists have been exploring the origins and expansion of modern societies since the late 15th century through their material remains. In so doing, they are helping to build a different image of the modern world, one that pays more attention to everyday practices, long-term processes, subaltern groups, and the local appropriations of global products.
The aim of this session is to study the dark side of late modernity (or supermodernity) by probing the negative outcomes of modern categories of thought and action through the archaeological traces they leave behind. We would like to focus on the contemporary past (20th-21st centuries) and high-modernist ideologies (sensu James Scott), because the failures of modernity have been greater and more tragic during the last hundred years—from totalitarian regimes and genocides to ecological disasters. Indeed, such failures became a matter of deep public concern at the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, we will consider papers dealing with other modern periods whose topic is strongly related to the issues discussed in the session. With an archaeological gaze, we will address the material remains of failed and destructive modernities: concentration camps, prisons, battlefields, nuclear testing grounds, new killing technologies, projects of social engineering (model farms, resettlement schemes, modernist cities), totalitarian architecture, ghettos, colonial settlements, industrial failures, mass graves, human-driven ecological disasters, etc.
This session will provide occasion to debate some key questions: What is the role of a critical archaeology that faces the abuses of modernity? Can we use our discipline to raise public awareness on the failures and crimes of high modernism? What should be the terms of our political involvement? How should we carry out this sort of archaeology? How is the negative or ambivalent heritage of late modernity to be managed? We welcome papers which address particular case studies, propose methodologies for studying the traces of destructive modernities, or offer new theoretical insights.
If you want to participate in this session, please send an email to Ashish Chada or Alfredo González-Ruibal no later than February 14th.
For more information on the conference:
WAC-6 2008 Dublin
Posted by John F. Cherry
A recent Archaeolog posting drew attention to the Graffiti Archaeology Project of Cassidy Curtis and his team, documenting accretional changes to graffiti walls in a number of urban locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Such a project has become possible only by the development of software for the manipulation of digital imagery and of new photo-sharing websites such as Flickr. The interest it has attracted is palpable – as indexed not only by the thousands of members of Curtis’s on-line group for “graffiti archaeology” and a good deal of buzz in the blogosphere, but by stories appearing in the mainstream media and, most recently, a full-length article by Samir Patel in Archaeology magazine (readership: roughly half a million). Patel’s subtitle says it all: “The Graffiti Archaeology Project challenges the definition of archaeology.” In what sense can the documentation of graffiti, whose physical persistence is in most cases ephemeral and extremely short-lived, have relevance to archaeology (whose very etymology invokes a discourse on things ancient and primitive)?
In fact, archaeology as a discipline has been pushing against this boundary for some time. The initial impetus, perhaps, could be seen in the intense interest in ethnoarchaeology as a subfield that developed within the New Archaeology of the 1960s and 70s, leading on inexorably to manifestos on “the archaeology of us” (Gould and Schiffer 1981) and “archaeologies of the contemporary past” (Buchli and Lucas 2001), alongside other detailed archaeological studies of modern material culture, such as Bill Rathje’s Garbage Project (Rathje and Murphy 1992) or Michael Schiffer’s (1991) study of portable radios. Work in this vein presupposes a view of archaeology defined not simply as a field uniquely positioned to inform us about the material remains of the deep past, but also (in Christopher Witmore’s words, quoted in Patel’s article) in terms of “a wider sensibility about how humans live with their material environments.” In this reading, archaeology is all around us, ever in a state of becoming: the objects, structures, landscapes, images created by human action provide the stage for change, negotiation, resistance, destruction. The material world pushes back, and objects in that sense have agency too. The material present becomes the material past as soon as it comes into being. And one of archaeology’s distinctive roles is to try to understand humans’ complex relationships with things -- whether past or present. Graffiti art (“graf art”) is no different from material culture in general, except that is has an unusually short shelf-life, whether because of “tagging” by other graffiti writers, “buffing” (painting over) by anti-vandalism municipal authorities, or natural processes of decay. Curtis’s project is in this way, to some extent, salvage archaeology: an attempt to capture something of the culture and dynamics of a material world changing at lightning speed.
Continue reading "Has Anyone Seen Banksy?" »
Posted by Krysta Ryzewski
The Greene Farm Archaeology Project (GFAP), in Warwick, Rhode Island, began in 2004 as a transdisciplinary and long-term project designed to facilitate research among a broad range of scholars and volunteers, using established and experimental archaeological methods. The central focus of the project is on researching 400 years of cultural and natural landscape transformations on one of the few remaining Providence Plantations (see project wiki http://proteus.brown.edu/greenefarm/Home).
Greene Farm landscape (2004).
In 2005, artist Lee Fearnside approached GFAP interested in filming a documentary called Telling Stories, focusing on how archaeologists create knowledge through discovering history. As archaeologists and historians having little knowledge or experience with filmmaking, we permitted Fearnside access to the project without considering how her work might affect our practices directly and indirectly. We were especially interested to see how Fearnside would translate and represent archaeology in her art, as she had no archaeological background except for having read Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten. Over the course of two years, Fearnside filmed the field crew during excavations and in the laboratories. Though still a work in progress, I recently screened a rough cut of the film for the members of the Greene Farm field crew and gathered their response through a detailed survey and several discussions.
As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, I am particularly interested in examining the reception of the film by those whose work, voices, images, and interpretations appear in it. The field crew’s feedback and reactions are especially valuable in thinking about the many implications for relationships between artistic film/creative documentation and archaeology projects, and more importantly, the implications for how digital media affects archaeological practice. The following commentary focuses on an experiment stemming from the crews’ mixed reactions to the film. This is not an attempt to discuss the quality of the film (which is remarkable) or whether the filmmaker successfully captures the “creation of knowledge”. Instead, the purpose is to explore some of the questions and observations resulting from the intersection of the creative documentation and archaeological projects, as initially raised through the voices of the crew.
Continue reading "Creative Documentation and Archaeological Practice: Surveying Archaeologists on Film" »
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
A group of photographers and artists are documenting the accretion of the 'underground' urban landscape through graffiti art. Based in San Francisco, but also looking at graffiti in Los Angeles and New York, Cassidy Curtis and his team at Graffiti Archaeology document the changes through time of graffiti art at several tagging locations. All of the photographs are then 'photoshopped' together, placed in sequence, and made freely available via a custom flash program on the web. Arresting our web-enhanced gaze, it is a visual record manifesting what is routine and intimate, yet often simply hurried by.
Continue reading "Graffiti Archaeology" »
Posted by Alfredo González-Ruibal & Almudena Hernando
There exists a widely-shared opinion among anthropologists today that globalization is first and foremost a creative process that allows new cultural forms to emerge through cultural contact, hybridization, diasporas, transnational networks, travel and so on (Inda and Rosaldo 2002). Many ethnographies emphasize the fact that the so-called traditional communities are negotiating, challenging, appropriating and contesting Western cultural products in diverse and meaningful ways (such as Aboriginal peoples watching Hollywood videos). At the same time, it is argued that non-Western societies are establishing new links and connections that skip the West altogether (such as Indian movies consumed in Nigeria). Instead of a gloomy picture of homogenization, culture loss and Euro-American hegemony, sociologists, anthropologists and material culture specialists insist in the bright side of globalism and argue that there is nothing to be worried about in the encounters propitiated by the new means of communication and transportation. After all, cultural contact has been around for a few millennia already and cultures have always been changing under different pressures, influences and sources of inspiration. In the case of material culture studies, the prevailing paradigm has it that there is large room for negotiating and reinscribing in manifold ways apparently homogeneous industrial products (i.e. Coke), as opposed to the dark perspective on modern technology defended by late 19th and early 20th century philosophers – both to the right (Heidegger) and to the left (Benjamin) of the political spectrum (Miller 1987).
With other critics (Graeber 2002), we argue that this is a sanction of neo-liberalism and late capitalism – the forces under globalization. With LiPuma (2002), we think that it is still the West that is imposing itself everywhere and not the other way round (Hernando 2006; González-Ruibal 2006). That under the misguiding appearances of creativity and cultural negotiation, there is a very real process of destruction fostered by the Western world. Neocolonialism (we call it for what it is, rather than superficially ameliorating past transgressions with the prefix ‘post’) is not more natural, creative or acceptable than colonialism. Many anthropologists, sociologists and material culture specialists that have chosen to understand globalization from a cultural point of view seem to have forgotten macro-politics and long-term processes. Archaeology, in our opinion, can offer an alternative view – but also from within, starting from details and fragments. Archaeology focuses on ruin, the abandoned, the decaying, the abject. It exposes genealogies, it is concerned with ‘origins,’ accentuates links, flushes out processes. It excavates beyond the surface, both metaphorically and literally.
In what follows, we study a well-known fact – how consumption in the West translates into a destructive bane in the Third World – from an archaeological perspective. By tracing the genealogies of a piece of furniture or a building material, we uncover the violence that lurks behind everyday, seemingly mundane ‘objects,’ “creatively” consumed by the privileged citizens of the (first) world.
Continue reading "Archaeologists as witnesses. Genealogies of destruction in the Amazon forest" »
Posted by John Schofield, Greg Bailey, Cassie Newland and Anna Nilsson
Figure 1 - The van during excavation
Figure 2 – Evidence of a well-maintained vehicle
In late July 2006, archaeologists from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol with involvement also from Atkins Heritage, embarked on a contemporary archaeology project with a difference. They have been ‘excavating’ an old Ford Transit van, used for field archaeology projects for some years (1991-c.1999) prior to its new life in works and maintenance (c.1999-2005). The object: to see what can be learnt about a very particular and characteristic type of contemporary place, and to establish what archaeologists and archaeology can contribute to understanding the way we (society) and specifically we (as archaeologists) use these places. Archaeologists John Schofield, Cassie Newland and Anna Nilsson, and filmmaker and archaeology and screen media student Greg Bailey have provided the following report:
Continue reading "THE VAN – Archaeology in transition" »
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