Proviso: For most archaeolog readers this entry is an example of preaching to the converted. What follows is a response I pinned to a Wall Street Journal article back in April. It is for a different crowd, by which I mean a very general crowd. After being horded by the editorial staff of a couple of newspapers for all of May and part of June it was returned to me with no takers.
It seems the lesson never sinks in, and many mistakes are doomed to be repeated. In the least, without recourse elsewhere, such concerns, even if they are delayed concerns, may be aired here.
A recent sound bite run by the Wall Street Journal (later picked up as a feature story by Yahoo News), entitled “Load up the Pantry” points out that buying in bulk and storing up food makes good financial sense. Given the current rise in food prices the short article suggests that maybe it is time for Americans to start stockpiling food goods. The reasoning goes as follows.
Foodstuffs, readers are reminded, are tied to a global market. If the price of rice inches up in Cairo, Bangkok or Manila, then it will follow suite in Chicago, Boston or Miami. Moreover, high rice prices will spill over into other goods. Cereal, milk, cheese, bananas, ground beef, chicken; the article emphasized how food inflation is higher than the returns on your money market fund. So, why not take this occasion of rising food prices to explore different investment opportunities? Why not indeed?
On the surface “load up the pantry” seems like a sensible recommendation. However, before everyone piles up their grocery carts, buys a new deep freeze for the pantry or crams rice into the hidden recesses of their closets, there is another side of the story which we must consider. As an archaeologist, I would like to share a scenario about the potential consequences of hoarding food during episodes of ‘scarcity.’
The lesson is one offered by archaeology, well to be more precise, garbology.
From 1973 to 2005 William Rathje ran the Garbage Project out of the University of Arizona where he was a Professor of archaeology. The Garbage Project took a very different approach to the study of consumption. Faithful to a maxim of our current era, ‘what we say we do rarely matches up to what we do,’ the project focused on discard patterns in garbage. You claim to drink only 4 beers a week? You laud your efforts at recycling? Well your trash says otherwise.
Between Media Archaeology and Memory Practices: Two Recent Excavations
Posted by Christopher Witmore
The recent opening of Paul Clancy’s “The Search for the Soul of a Building” in Providence, RI provided occasion for me to resurrect a languishing Archaeolog entry I had started back in the late spring and which has been annoyingly stapled to may desktop every since.
Regarding the exhibition, Clancy’s subtext is what drew my interest: “A Photo-Archaeologist Dig”. Clancy documents transformations in the urban fabric of cities like Boston and Providence. For Clancy, his photographs of derelict structures or buildings in the process of being torn down become “markers of time and place.” His ‘dig’ consisted of, among other matters, scenes of the former police and fire headquarters of Providence in various states of demolition. Clancy’s photographs experiment with the effects of age: the patina of old film stock, the worn surface of metal plate photos such as daguerreotypes. Scratched, exposed, and degraded surfaces in his photography speak to the textures of ruins, of perpetual perishing, of entropy. The works were all set in frames upon the white walls of a gallery at 17 Peck (http://www.17peck.com/). All these works are for sale.
Back in the spring we had a couple of MA students conduct ‘excavations’ of photographic materials here at Brown University. As with Clancy’s exhibition, these projects take photographs seriously as ‘markers’ of transformation, as articulations of arrested moments, as memories. This work falls under the rubric of media archaeology.
Open-source Archaeology? Taking 'Yahoo!s' seriously at Teotihuacan, Mexico
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
A World Heritage site always attracts a lot of attention. Such archaeological sites are viewed to materially represent irreplaceable ‘heritage’ on a global scale and are defined and protected through the United Nations’ UNESCO declarations (eg. UNESCO 1988). Teotihuacan, Mexico is no exception.
Replete with two monumental pyramids (the Pyramid of the Sun being the 3rd largest Pyramidal structure in the world) set amidst the ruins of a once densely populated, urbanized city (the first of its kind in Mesoamerica), “Teotihuacan”, or the “city of the gods” as the Aztec later identified it in Nahuatl, has attracted, both historically and contemporaneously, a broad range of interests. As most of us may personally attest to in visiting these world monuments, such interests run the gamut from the archaeological
to new age spiritualism.
Working at Teotihuacan, I often heard the phrase ‘yahoos’ being used to refer to the unsanctioned, occult practitioners who regularly gather at the site for their rituals.
Enter , the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet.
This media-bundling was then digitized and beamed into space via laser a few months ago on October 25th. Following in the original steps of the affable ‘yahoo’ Carl Sagan, this digital ‘time capsule’ was made in hopes of communicating to digitally attuned extraterrestrials the diversity of life and culture on Earth. As a spokesperson for Yahoo! stated: the purpose was to join the "past and present with the universe's potential future by sharing today's culture on Earth with other life that may exist light years away" (Subzeroblue 2006).
A ‘hard copy’ of the time capsule will be buried on the Sunnyvale grounds of the corporate offices. But, in keeping with the ethos of ‘digital democracy’ inherent in the conception and content of the Time Capsule Project, the company wanted to laser the digitized information in real-time at a prominent locale. You guessed it. This Yahoo! chose the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan.
Reflexive Representations: The Partibility of Archaeology
Posted by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell
An artistic exploration of archaeological theory
Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University) Ian Russell (Trinity College, Dublin)
The pieces in this exhibition seek to contest traditional mechanisms for representation and spectatorship by questioning the status that visual images occupy in archaeological discourse. Photomosaics of iconic archaeologists and archaeological objects are constructed through the manufacture of archives and archaeological records of public images available over internet search engines. This digital ‘excavation’ of what is traditionally an unarchived public space marks the beginnings of a digital archaeological practice.
Inspired by Joan Foncuberta's series of Googlegrams (2005), we call into question the ways in which archaeologists position themselves and their work within contemporary society. By juxtaposing the figures of archaeologists or archaeological artefacts with a collage of public images, the pieces reveal the manufacture of representations of archaeological identities (of archaeologists) and that of the artefacts and monuments with which they work. In addition, through the use of the world wide web and freeware, they also challenge the role that digital media are playing in the fabrication of collective archaeological visual memory, interpretation, and mediated information. Rather than merely engaging in the pasts as archaeology has previously presented them to us, views are disrupted, interrupted and displaced.
During digital ‘excavation’ records are kept of the location, context, and dimensions of each available image in order to produce an ‘archaeological record’ detailing the point in time when the search occurred. This seeks to enhance archaeological practice to confront a world which is rapidly becoming saturated by fluid and transient systems of information. In these works, Google Image searches are utilised to amass libraries of images by employing generalised search terms with no artistic intervention. These libraries are then fed through Easy Mosaic 2005 v1.2 to produce a pixel system which manufactures the original images of archaeologists and objects.
Each (in)dividual piece subverts and parodies notions of 'truth' in archaeology and the veracity of dominant images in the construction of the past and present, memory, identity, gender, emotion and agency. Such a reflexive approach generates connections between unfamiliar essences, resulting in ruptured and fragmented yet dynamic archaeologies, histories and representations.
This exhibition will be composed of between three to five 1m x 1.5m mounted images with accompanying titles cards and a separate poster introducing the exhibition.
Confirmed exhibitions include:
♦ EAA 2006. 19th - 24th September. IAE, Cracow, Poland
♦ CHAT 2006. 10th - 12th November. Bristol University
♦ TAG 2006. 15th - 17th December. University of Exeter
♦ Resisting Archaeology 2007. 17th -20th May. Uppsala University, Sweden
♦ WAC 2007. 20th -27th May. University of the West Indies, Jamaica
Full text version forthcoming with the Cambridge Archaeology Journal February 2007.
While browsing the discount shelves at a bookstore in downtown, or rather ‘downcity’ (as the locals call it), Providence yesterday and I came across a peculiarly shaped book stamped:
BEIJING 10/2003
AI WEIWEI
Hard bound, covered in a grey paper, imprinted with a weave texture to give the appearance of cloth, the book has the dimensions of a brick, 11.1cm X 24.3cm X 5.9cm.
The first page along with each and every one of the next 862 pages contain two images side by side. Following these images are 2 pages containing 12 lines of Chinese followed by 2 pages containing 14 lines of English text, Arial Font. The text is white printed on a black background. The remainder of the work contains a map of Beijing which is then subdivided into a series of 16 maps by day over the following pages. It ends with the publisher’s credits: timezone 8.
Earlier this month, I went to a fascinating, interdisciplinary conference on "Collective memory and the uses of the past", organised by a team around Andy Wood at the School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. The full programme is available here (text file).
I was one of only a handful of archaeologists there. No single discipline dominated, in fact everybody seemed to enjoy genuinely the encounter with representatives of other disciplines: historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, politologists, representatives of literary studies, area studies, etc.
The international conference illustrated to what extent the themes of "collective memory" and "the uses of the past" have been en vogue in a wide range of social sciences and humanities for some time. For the papers assembled in Norwich were, on the whole, not unpolished explorations of a new subject entering academia but instead mature discussions of case-studies in an already well-established field.
My full report has been published on the blog of the European Journal of Archaeology available here.
In a hill over the border town of Gubba, very close to Sudan, stand the remains of a small palace. Its owner, Hamdan Abu Shok, was an infamous slave trader in the late 19th and early 20th century. The surviving brick arcades are redolent of Islamic architecture elsewhere. The ruins look vaguely medieval and out of place – too ancient and too modern at the same time. When the palace was constructed, it was the only permanent building in the region of Gubba.
The place is linked to slavery from another point of view. In the 17th and 18th c. the Sinashas, an isolated Omotic group, found refuge from slave raiders in the rock shelters dotting the steep mountains around the palace.
Hill and palace were occupied by Mussolini’s army between 1936 and 1941. British Blenheim bombers razed the place in October 1940. In and around the bomb craters we found porcelain from Abu Shok’s service, stucco from the walls, a copper shower head, an Italian bayonet scabbard, food cans stamped “Roma” and “Eritrea”, an 8 mm shell casing from a Breda machine gun, indigenous hand-made pottery. A few paces away, a rusty and hollowed Ford 1927 Model A, probably used by the Italian officers commanding the base – 60 years afterwards, cars are still something futuristic in Gubba.
Not far from the hills, close to a centuries-old baobab, two ruined brick structures: the remains of a school built by the British after the invasion of Ethiopia in 1941, when they thought they could annex the Ethiopian borderland to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
Feudal monarchy/Marxism/Post-industrial energy crisis: The road between Gubba and Gilgel Beles.
A dirt road, the main route through Metekel. It is probably not different to that used by 19th century travellers and elephant hunters, by slave raiders and gold traders well before (the Axumites came to this area for gold in the 6th AD) and by the King of Kings Haile Selassie in January 1941.
Not far from Gubba, four shattered trucks and a Soviet ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft gun, all torn apart by several RPGs and landmines. The red star on the ammunition box. Many 23 mm shell casings on both sides of the road. An ambush on a government convoy in the late 1980s. All the grasses and bushes around are burnt by swidden cultivators.
The local inhabitants are the Gumuz, a Nilo-Saharan group. Men walk around with bows and arrows, women with carrying sticks, transporting calabashes and plastic jerrycans. Amidst the dense savannah forest a few bamboo huts and mud-covered granaries appear here and there. Most villages are located far from the road to avoid slave raids – that only ended in the 1940s.
A savannah woodland of 85,000 Ha, formerly belonging to the Dach’igra clan, has been deforested by a European multinational for producing biodiesel.
The textures of daily life/The Fall of Berlin: A Gumuz village near Gilgel Beles.
An inventory of artefacts inside a Gumuz house:
-5 Pots for making and storing sorghum beer (tich’a).
-1 Pot for storing water (kula).
-1 Beer filter (dinga).
-4 Pots for making and serving porridge (antersa, mashiakwa).
-12 Calabashes for storing things and drinking (nekwa, baggha).
-1 stick for removing the stew (yinge).
-2 baskets for sieving grain (kakea).
-3 storing baskets (dikufa).
-2 beds – Sudanese style (intertwinned leather strings).
-1 wooden stool (dugu).
-2 plastic jerrycans.
-6 plastic and aluminium glasses.
-1 electric torch.
-2 grinding stones (gisha).
-2 hoes (t’äba).
-1 digging stick (gombe).
-1 axe (dela).
-2 bamboo carrying sticks (ndigha).
-1 net for fishing made with vegetable fibers (igha).
-2 bamboo bows (yedegwa) and seven arrows.
-1 PPS 43 Soviet sub-machine gun (Pistolet-Pulemet Sudaeva), dated 1944.
A comment on "An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War"
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
A very powerful piece of writing. Without in any way wanting to take away from your argument in relation to the Spanish Civil War, which is compelling, I would argue that sometimes the ‘blandness’ of archaeological documentation is just as inappropriate to events that occured in the much more distant past.
Taking an example from my own experience, I was recently involved in excavations of the castle near the centre of my home town of Bedford, UK. When the castle was captured and destroyed in the early 13th century, a total of 80 men from the defending garrison were executed by hanging in a single day. Although not on the scale of some of the massacres and war crimes you mention, as a local event it must have severely traumatized the community of the town at the time. Its just so easy, in writing today about a past event like this, to glamourize it while at the same time glossing over the sheer horror of it. I’ve done it myself in my own writing. Yet the sanitizing effect of ‘blandness’ - embodied in standard archaeological styles of reporting of violence long ago - must influence and be connected to our perceptions of violence in the present and more recent past.
Because of its ability to uncover and make directly accessible the material traces of violent acts, archaeology really does have the power to materialize or ‘bring to light’ the dark pasts that you speak of – but only if blandness is not deployed. This surely applies as much to distant events like the hangings at Bedford Castle as it does to more recent conflicts and atrocities.
Could it simply be that blandness does an injustice to the human past, no matter how recent or distant?
I was moved by a scene in Atom Egoyan’s film “Ararat” (2002). One of the main characters, a young Canadian of Armenian descent, goes back to Turkey to see the land that witnessed one of the most horrendous genocides of the twentieth century. He contemplates the landscape and films it in video. His gaze is unable to read any signs in the landscape that may recall the horror. The still and bright images, without sound, are, however, disturbingly uncanny. You don’t need ruins to feel the trauma. Unlike other famous genocides, there are very few records of this one (www.armenian-genocide.org). With the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese army (1937) or the German slaughter of Hereros in Namibia (1904), it belongs to the wide category of dreadful events that have never captured international attention or, worse, whose existence has been emphatically denied.
The Spanish Civil War did attract the attention of the world between 1936 and 1939. It was seen as the scenario of a fight between freedom and fascism and later, as the preface to the Second World War. However, there are some resemblances between the Spanish War and less publicized massacres, such as the Armenian genocide. On the one hand, the landscape now hardly shows any hint of the terrible drama that shook the country only seventy years ago, at least for the untrained eye. On the other hand, half of the story has been buried deep under the soil and denied or played down, first by the dictator that won the war and later by several democratic governments. The extreme-right that defeated the Republicans took good care of its fallen and erased the memory of its enemies (including 100,000 people executed with or without trial). The oblivion of the vanquished has persisted until very recently, although some private initiatives are now trying to locate hidden graves and commemorate the people assassinated by the fascists.
My archaeological fascination for the Spanish Civil War comes from a triple astonishment: that such horrible, archaic events could take place so recently where I used to live (that evil was here, as Susan Sontag has put it); that the memory of those who fought for freedom and democracy has been forgotten so easily (no monuments, no tombs) and that the war’s material traces are, apparently, so inconspicuous – unlike many musealized battlefields of the Second World War, the Spanish battlefields seem to be known only by war amateurs and historians. In a sense, all my astonishment can be related to the disturbing banality of evil and to the nature of the archaeological record.
I got my PhD in what once was the most famous battlefield in the world: the university campus of Madrid. As a symbol in the 1930s, it could be compared to Sarajevo in the 1990s. If Sarajevo stood as a symbol of multiculturalism and resistance against the worst sort of ethnic nationalism, Madrid became the symbol of the struggle against fascism (No pasarán, “They won’t pass” – but they did). The university campus was the front-line during the three years that lasted the war. Thousands of people died there – including Italians, Russians, Germans, British and American soldiers. The campus was completely reconstructed after the conflict. What is left today? A colossal triumphal arch that commemorates the victory of fascism over democracy and the university’s logo – a swan that was the emblem of the fascist students in the 1930s. Not a trace or memento of the battle against totalitarianism. Trauma has been wiped out, sanitized from the urban landscape. Even for an archaeologist it is difficult to track down the remains of the war on the surface. Sometimes, when a new block is built or a ditch is dug things come to light: usually tons of debris (bricks, concrete, rusted steel) from the flattening of the old battlefield – the past percolating.
The Civil War also took place beyond the frontline in the form of mass executions, tortures to political enemies, reprisals, vendettas. Trenches and bunkers can still be located in the landscape by means of archaeological surveys and aerial photographs; they can be excavated and mapped. How can one excavate the road curb where the corpses of those killed by the fascist militias were thrown? Or the tree were a Republican hung himself just after the war, unable to bear the insults and harassment of the local fascists? Or the house of a torturer, whose children still live under the same roof? What is the nature of this archaeological evidence? You can touch the road, smell the tree or see the house and feel the horror unfolding if you know about the events.
Yet we need another sort of archaeological documentation. I think we always need another way of engaging with the recent past: by treating it like any other period in history (making inventories, restoring the archaeological remains, displaying ruins and artefacts with didactic panels) we are losing something of the troubled nature of this past – we are killing its aura. While archaeologists are missing the point, others are engaging in creative ways with the contemporary past: photographers and artists (Joel Sternfeld, Manfred Hamm, Mikael Levin, Camilo José Vergara) are turning their gaze to places where something happened. They are disclosing the trauma and violence inherent to things and places in ways archaeologists are barely starting to explore. Dealing with the remains of the Spanish Civil War by means of the usual archaeological procedures is an important step forward to bring them back from oblivion. But if we do not want to neutralize and make banal the materiality of this dark past, we have to look for other modes of engagement.
, the billion dollar, international internet company based in the Silicon Valley of California. To celebrate the media giant’s 15th anniversary, Yahoo! announced that it would create a ‘time capsule’ to gather together a snap shot of contemporary human life. Beginning this past October 10th, the search firm began collecting text, audio-visual and video contributions from any and all interested parties worldwide – estimated in analog terms to represent about 5 million books worth of data (OCRegister 2006). These would be uploaded via the internet. 
