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Posted by James Symonds
James Symonds (University of Oulu, Finland)
For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have lingered over fragments from ancient times, evoking feelings of wonder, irony, and loss. Archaeological research has helped to fill the perceived ‘black hole’ that exists between the past and the present (Rathje, La Motta, Longacre 2001) and has served nationalism and modernity by informing individual and collective identities. But what happens when we choose to remove this sense of distance and nostalgia for the past from our work and acknowledge the ‘loss of antiquity’ (Hicks 2003)? If we eschew the idea that archaeology exists to connect the present to distant pasts and re-position our discipline to focus upon ‘the interaction between material culture and human behaviour, regardless of time of space’ (Rathje 1979, 2) then we free ourselves from temporal parameters and any material may be subject to archaeological inquiry (Buchli & Lucas 2001, 3-18).
As Hedley Swain pointed out in his keynote address to the 2009 CHAT conference in Oxford, the craft of archaeology employs a standard range of techniques. Archaeologists are very good at observing physical relationships and placing them in a chronological sequence. We also routinely identify patterns of human action through their material residues, and are adept at describing objects in accurate and close detail to determine their composition and possible uses. If we turn our to attention to the contemporary world we are able to use these techniques to observe physical relationships and detect patterns of human behaviour in material things.
photo of over-painted road markings
Continue reading "Yes we can! But so what? Some observations on contemporary archaeology" »
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
The scenario: a team of specialists are discovering artifacts from the past and attempting to establish their mode of origin. Tool-marks and other traces of human action come into view. Artificial patterns emerge and take shape from the material field that has just been worked, standing out as figures against a natural background. With experience it becomes possible to tell artifacts apart from similar-looking natural objects or features. A skilled practitioner can work out what kind of past human action gave rise to them and what sort of tools were being used at the time.
Is this a description of archaeological excavation?
No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.
Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).
Continue reading "Fields of artifacts: archaeology of contemporary scientific discovery" »
Posted by John M. Chenoweth
John M. Chenoweth (UC Berkeley)
From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and contemporary world.” Both participants and subjects of discussion were wide ranging. While many came from all over the UK and Ireland, others contributed points of view from the US, Continental Europe, Africa, and even Taiwan. These papers engaged with “modern materials” from treadmills and theatres to workshops and the bricks they may have been built from, and even extended analysis to the “modern materials” produced in archaeological recording, such as photographs.
Of particular interest were several papers which came from outside the disciple of archaeology or anthropology altogether, such as Pearson’s consideration of the role of the theatre building itself in a performance event, and Fisher’s of the “flow” of modern packaging through homes from a design standpoint. Coupled with Harrison’s inside-the-discipline discussion of amusement parks and the social shifts towards an “experience economy” these papers suggest how direct consideration of material culture produces insights even into the contemporary. This point is reinforced by Ouzman’s consideration of graffiti through an archaeological lens, considering its role in “politically-engaged place-ma(r)king.”
Continue reading "Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory Conference 2009" »
Posted by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal
Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history.
A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better economic opportunities.
There are countless logs stuck in the flat, siliceous beaches of Mandji—plastic-tagged and iron-chained trunks that fell from the ships transporting tropical wood to Europe.
There are plastic sandals that somebody lost in Libreville and half-carved canoes where white crabs climb.
Continue reading "Island of Abandonment" »
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
A review of 'The Earth after us: what legacy will humans leave in the rocks?' by Jan Zalasiewicz. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2008.
The view of the Earth from the Moon on the front of the book seems both familiar and strange at the same time. The blue jewel of a planet is recognisably ‘home’, only a few decades since space travel first made such a perspective possible. But look again and an important difference is noticed. The continents are the wrong shape, and in the wrong configuration. Is this a view of our planet in the distant past? No, this is the Earth as it is imagined to be 100 million years into the future.
Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz invites the reader to take a step in the scientific imagination far greater than that involved in looking at the Earth from the Moon. For the challenge taken up by the book is to look back at human civilization from a vantage point in time long after the human species itself has disappeared, through observations made by alien beings visiting the planet for the first time. Seeking to understand the geological strata encountered, the alien scientists soon realise that something significant happened 100 million years ago, comparable to the meteorite strike that wiped out the dinosaurs even further back in the Earth’s past. Even before they discover it, they deduce the existence of an event horizon, separating two major geological epochs – an event that triggered massive climate change and extinctions of species evident in strata from later periods. Following a trail of clues, they discover the Human Event Stratum.
The Human Event Stratum may vary from a thin sliver to several metres in thickness, sandwiched between layers of sandstone and shale. Parts of it will have been destroyed by erosion or other geological processes. It is mostly buried, hundreds of metres under the ground, but in places it has been pushed up or exposed by geological forces to outbreak on the surface. Ever wondered what will survive, millions of years hence, of our railway networks, skyscrapers, motorways and rubbish dumps? What about trains and cars, or smaller artefacts like mobile phones and ballpoint pens? Such are the questions which the book poses. In this review I consider briefly some of the implications this book has for contemporary archaeology.
Continue reading "The Earth After Us" »
Posted by Ian Straughn
Ian Straughn (Brown University)
I. Foreclosure Alley and the trash stream
Familiar are the images of the victims from hurricanes, earthquakes, fires and other natural and man-made disasters salvaging what they can from the ruins of their houses. Those items, whether sentimental mementos or the practical things of every day use, constitute the starting point, resources from which to build again and reverse the processes of destruction that have unwittingly taken hold. What happens when the decision is not to resist ruin whether by conscious decision or the force of circumstances? Is this the point where the archaeological record takes hold; is this the moment of its beginning?
Late this September as the current financial crisis was beginning to fully unravel correspondent Lisa Ling of SoCal Connected aired a story entitled “Foreclosure Alley” which describes some of the messy details of the collapsing housing bubble gripping much of California’s “inland empire” along interstate 15. The report documented the work of a crew hired by the bank to prepare a recently foreclosed property for a short sale in an effort to staunch the bleeding that these profligate lenders have come to experience. We watch as four men engage in what they call a “trash out” in which all manner of material culture is removed from the abandoned property for disposal in the nearest landfill. Such a clean-up would seem hardly the stuff of investigative journalism and attention grabbing web-TV were it not for the fact that the particular house being “trashed-out” is hardly filled with garbage; instead it still houses all manner of good quality consumer goods that appear well maintained. Big-screen tvs, computers, furniture, family photos, personal documents, cabinets filled-with food not yet starting to molder, are all part of a well decorated vision of suburban middle-class America frozen in its Pompeiian moment. The crew chief speculates that whoever owned these items probably could not find the money for a truck and storage unit. Our correspondent opines about the many families facing foreclosure who find themselves in spirals of depression that may cloud their judgment and ability to rationally handle the situation. This is echoed in the reflections of Paul Reyes, who comments in a recent article for Harper’s about his experience working the crew of his father’s junk removal business. He writes: “each excavation [is] a peek into a state of mind, like dismantling some diorama of dejection” (Reyes 2008).
Continue reading "“Trashed Out”: An archaeological reading of the foreclosure mess" »
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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