Check out the complete slideshow at http://metamedia.stanford.edu/archaeography-gallery/slideshow.html.

Background

The so-called sandstone boneyard for Stanford University lies about a mile south of the main campus. Acting as a sort of open-air repository for the all the building materials of the school, past and present, few people have even heard of it, let alone seen it. The site itself used to be an old quarry. The jagged rock walls surrounding the bone yard are a rich red, with chunks of crumbly stone occasionally breaking off and tumbling down the steep walls. Nondescript shrubs line the cliffs, broken by an occasional tree; in the springtime, low-lying grass sprouts up across the surrounding plains and in the crooks and crannies of the rocks. The moderately level surface upon which the bone yard sits is carved out of the hillside. The floor is a mixture of stone and mud, with loose stone from the cliffs gathering in piles at the corners. On a late afternoon in March, the sun sheds a warm, earthy light on the site as it comes over the hill. Shadows lengthen between the rows of stone, and the colors intensify. Far from a washed out, dull archaeological site, the boneyard becomes a place of simultaneous antiquity and rebirth as the stones create a world all their own.

The sandstone boneyard encompasses a lot more than its name would suggest. A large component of the considerable collection is indeed old sandstone, either brought down by the 1906 earthquake or subsequently removed by the University Architects for safety reasons. As the original quarry from which the sandstone came in the late1800s is now gone, the school holds on to all the old columns and rubble in case anyone needs to make anything from them – a small commemorative piece or engraving, usually. But the sandstone boneyard also contains other antiquated building materials. Crates of red roof tiles, massive granite steps, marble left over from the remodeling of Wallenberg hall, and massive yellow urns that used to top balustrades are also a sizable component of the boneyard’s material. Add to these identifiable objects ornate carvings that despite their lack of clear origin and purpose, are still breathtaking to behold. All these pieces, along with old blocks of sandstone, are strapped to wooden platforms with rusted metal strips and placed in semi-organized rows along the muddy ground. The final component of the boneyard is the extensive collection of unused building materials left over from modern projects. Like the sandstone, these reserves are occasionally called into action when a new building requires repair, but for the most part they simply sit around in unopened boxes with the rest of the stone. Altogether, despite its penetrating warmth in the afternoon sun, the boneyard is a very isolated setting – hardly anyone ever goes there, and the collection sits in its open-air solitude year in and year out. Aside from the occasional tumbling rock from the surrounding cliffs or the call of a cyclist on the nearby trail, the silence is complete.

Despite its haphazard appearance, the layout of the boneyard does maintain some degree of organization. To start with the least assembled, piles of rubble line the periphery of the site, especially concentrated in the westernmost corner – these comprise of old sandstone pieces, mostly relics of the 1906 earthquake. Though they may look like trash, the pieces are occasionally surveyed, and marked for reuse with little tabs of blue tape. To the right of the most prominent pile of rubble are multiple stacks of moss-covered columns, partially hidden by a graffiti covered shed. Not as old as most of the other rubble, they were taken from the University later in the century and replaced with concrete replicas, to prevent further decay-related damage. The belly of the site is a mixture of sandstone blocks and marble, stacked together in a melee of whites, grays, and browns. This is where most of the ornate sandstone carvings reside, as well as the majority of the marble and granite. Near the entrance, or in the easternmost corner, crates of vibrant red roofing tiles are kept, in three, semi-organized varieties: flat, barrel, and S-shaped. Prominently standing in the middle of the site is the former sandstone base to one of Rodin’s sculptures, relatively polished and unaffected by the elements. A large engraved stone bearing the year “1900” is buried at the back of the site, only visible from the cliff wall. The rest forms an indistinguishable mess of rock. Beyond these basic groupings, order is a weak illusion. After all, the boneyard isn’t a museum or display – it’s just a compilation of all the stuff the University needed to get rid of. In a reflection of this, the base of a marble staircase lies strapped to a platform along with the heads of sandstone columns, while its matching stairs lie 100 feet away. Taken in one glance, the site is a hodge-podge of pieces and textures, individually unrelated, yet all thrown together by their mutual associations with the structure of Stanford University.

I first learned of the boneyard’s existence through Chris Witmore, an archaeologist at Stanford. Intrigued by the idea of discarded stone, I was finally able to gain access to the site with the help of Michael Shanks, and ultimately Ruth Todd, one of the University Architects. The appeal of the project for me was relatively simple; like much of the world, I have a fascination with ruin – the processes of nature that take over our structures and objects once we have left them leave utterly dynamic imprints that I love to explore. Visiting and photographing the boneyard provided me with a medium to explore these ideas and specifically adapt them to the old building materials of Stanford.

Analysis

As I like to think about it, a crack or worn edge is not simply the result of an earthquake or storm; it is the manifest presence of time itself, immortalized in a human medium. Beyond the given temporality of our own existence, ruin reveals to us the materiality of the abstract. Like anything else, time can be captured and catalogued, and its effects made visible to all. As an open site exposed to the elements, the boneyard is a prime example of this concept – and in shooting it, I sought to add another level of materiality to this notion – that time cannot only be captured and made visible by stone, but that the stone itself, and the marks of time made upon it, can be recaptured and photographed. As the stone is to time, the photo is to the stone. For me, these notions of materiality and presence became key in doing this project. Nowhere are abstract concepts more tangible then when they are immortalized in something otherwise constant, and both the stones themselves and my photographs of them were the ideal medium to capitalize on this theme.

Apart from shedding light on the relationship between materiality and the abstract, my goal in photographing the sandstone boneyard was to explore its subjective implications, and give it an established place in the world of archaeology and ruin. As I shot the project however, I realized that I was having trouble classifying the site in my mind – beyond the most basic objective observations, I got lost in every attempt to put the site in a contextual setting of any kind. When viewed objectively, all I saw in photographing the blocks of sandstone and marble were the stones themselves, and the simple truth of their existence; but when I tried to integrate their remarkable history as part of Stanford, and their general place in the world of archaeological remains, I hit a dead end. Why? For some reason, an integrated understanding of the stones was entirely beyond my grasp, and proved equally elusive as I thought about it afterwards. Thus, one of my most important revelations in doing this project was that the boneyard is relatively ambiguous with respect to context, archaeological status, and human imprint. As a medium, photography allowed me to first realize these ideas, and them later clarify them as themes and effectively represent them in a concrete form. The boneyard’s first degree of ambiguity lies in temporal context. Stylistic and technological points aside, how can we tell when a picture of stone was taken? You would need to see the surroundings of the stone – the setting it’s in, or the people around it. But what if all you could see was the stone itself? Technology aside, an isolated image of a piece of sandstone from the Stanford boneyard could have been taken 100 years ago, today, or in 2300. Without the appropriate temporal clues, shots of the boneyard become ageless; they are indefinable with respect to time not only because of the nature of the stone itself, but because of nature of photograph. Isolated from nature, the stone is unchanging, yes – but so is its picture. These parallel truths make any temporal contextualization of the boneyard impossible, and its rocks and their pictures remain ambiguous in the spectrum of time.

A parallel extension of this contextual ambiguity relates to the state of a stone – whether it stands alone, makes up a part of a building, or lies at the bottom of a rubble pile. When a photograph ignores the spatial context of a stone, it looses another aspect of its subjective value in the mind of the viewer. Instead of understanding the stone in a greater context – whether as a smaller part of an intricate structure, or a lone rock strapped to a wooden platform – all we know are its textures. The rest is left to our imagination. Like its age, the architectural status of a particular stone is key is our subjective understanding of it. A lone rock takes on much more perceptual value and individual identity than a section of a building, or a piece of sandstone among hundreds in a pile of rubble. When set apart and isolated from the group, the nondescript becomes descript – the center of its own individual universe. Yet without the appropriate contextual information, none of this is possible. If a photograph neglects the surroundings of a particular stone, we cannot tell if we should neglect it as an unremarkable part of a greater structure, or endow it with special value as an individual object. Even if spatial context is presented, the degree to which the photograph provides it remains the dominant factor in our subjective perceptions. Though a photo may show a few stones around a piece of tile, does it show the whole boneyard? Or the prestigious school, a mile away, from which it came? Thus, the first dimension of the boneyard’s ambiguity is contextual in terms of both time and space, for without the appropriate surrounding information, the stones of the boneyard are utterly self-sustaining, and independent of the temporal and special spectrums we usually employ in our perceptions of the world. Ambiguity arises from our inability to assertively place the stone as portrayed in its photograph in any known context of time or place.

Another layer of the boneyard’s ambiguity resides in its status as an archaeological ruin of sorts. I say “of sorts” because the sandstone bone yard certainly isn’t a ruin in the classical sense. To begin with, it’s in northern California, not Greece or Italy – and it didn’t begin as a single, unified structure. Its components come from different times, and to this day, the boneyard is still changing as new pieces come in and old pieces go out. But I am almost equally convinced that the boneyard isn’t a modern ruin either. Though most of its materials come from 1906 or later, certainly a modern time frame, it is entirely different from the abandoned farmhouses and barns that I think of in connection with modernity. There is something profoundly ancient about the boneyard; its broken columns and marble steps speak of an age long before the 20th century and the ruins of the now. So in classifying the boneyard as an archaeological site, it falls somewhere in between antiquity and modernity. But exactly where is this? Because the boneyard has visible, not to mention symbolic components of each, it can’t even occupy the middle ground; its direct linkages to both modernity and antiquity dictate that it simultaneously belong to both camps. So what does that make it? Apparently, at least in my mind, the sandstone boneyard eludes classification as a site of ruin – and it doesn’t even seem right to call it a ruin because it contains unused pieces that haven’t even come out of their boxes! Undeniably indefinable in this sense too then, the sandstone boneyard is ambiguous in archaeological status. It exists in its own exclusive world of multi-lateral classification that can’t serve as a form of classification itself.

The final dimension of the boneyard’s ambiguity, that of human imprint, comes from the merging of old stone and new. Not only does the boneyard contain stones and granite from different times in the University’s history, but since the space itself is an old quarry, the untempered rock of the cliff walls merges with the shaped stone, now decaying in response to time and the elements. Symbolically, stone returns to stone, and the processes of nature work upon them both equally; rain falls, mud shifts, sun bleaches. There is no distinction between sculpted surface and crumbling cliff wall. The only thing separating the two sides of this dualism – human intervention in the form of sculpting and shaping – becomes obsolete. Aside from temporary gratification in the form of structure, is there any point to all this work and alteration of nature? The eventual end-point of all our buildings is ruin and decay, and through entropy, everything we do will eventually return to its natural state of disorder. Unlike the ever-changing influences of time, our marks upon the stone will eventually disappear. The linear continuum that we imagine is connected with progress and development becomes circular as its two extremes merge; the beginning and the end are the same, and the entirety of the intervening time and work we invested ultimately take the stone right back where it started. But does that mean it never happened? Of course not. As discussed before, the marks of both time and human influence are immortalized in the stone (as long as the elements allow it to remain) as materializations of the abstract. So this is where the ambiguity arises; though we can tell that we were here, our own past work suddenly appears obsolete as sculpted pieces return to the place of origin. Indeed, this theme is paradoxical as well as ambiguous; though we suspected that everything we did would eventually become undone, we did it anyway, fully aware of the fact that our labors and efforts would ultimately have zero result. Not so much depressing, I found this final layer of ambiguity more of a testament to the integrity of the stone itself – it finds a way a to remain constant despite all our attempts to change it and mold it to our own purposes.

Given all of this subjective ambiguity with respect to perception and classification, objective observations are the only things guaranteed in looking at the boneyard. No one can dispute or wonder that moss is growing on that piece of granite, or that that block of sandstone has a jagged crack running down the middle. Looking at the site in this manner, you become lost in textures and contrasts. Minute details consume the entirety of your mental capacity; when exploring the sandstone boneyard, your entire world can consist of a shadow, a shade of gray, or a layer of dust lying along a crevice. You forget the objectivity of the stone itself: whether it’s a large rock, or a small rock, whether it stands alone, or whether its strapped to a piece of a marble staircase. Because you mostly have no idea what structure a particular piece was once a part of, you don’t think about it. Instead you lose yourself in the scoring marks along its edge, or in the intricacy of a flower carved along its southernmost face. The only truth in the sandstone boneyard is what is perceived through instantaneous perception, and the substantial void left by subjective ambiguity is filled by objective thought.

Collectively then, the boneyard is an entirely different sort of archaeological experience. Because its subjective ambiguity puts it beyond the realm of normal classification, it comes to posses a penetrating nature all its own. It presents an entirely unique perspective on perception. It is familiar, but not; the uncanny leaps out at you as you step over the molding column that you walked by three hours before, on you way to class. The boneyard is an architectural Frankenstein – the entirety of the Stanford campus blown up and haphazardly reassembled. Taken in small fragments, it can appear both grandiose and decrepit – and the same is true of the site as whole. Its very dirtiness lends the boneyard ruggedness and power, elevating it beyond the flimsy structures of modernity. Even its cracks appear more permanent and enduring than anything we might hope to build today. When you enter the boneyard, you enter a parallel universe where ambiguity is the key to perception – for it is only after the subconscious buzz of discourse has been swept away that you can see the stones for what they truly are. If my photographs are able to convey even a glimmer of this perceptual experience, you’ll see I’m talking about. To visit the boneyard is to enter a world of shapes, textures, and simple objective truths, and to photograph such a remarkable archaeological site has been a privilege.

Special thanks to Chris Witmore, Michael Shanks, and Ruth Todd.