Archaeology
Sicily: an argument
It began with the edge of a trowel. I learned to use one over twenty years
ago. A drop-forged mason’s trowel, four inch blade. A British make, WHS,
are the best -- though the company has been bought up by one of the international
conglomerates. In the United States trust is put in the Marshaltown brand;
you can order yours on-line, complete with leather holster (some archaeologists
do see themselves as the cowboys of science!); for me the shape is wrong.
It has to be drop-forged; any other manufacturing technique just isn’t
strong enough -- the leverage exerted in taking up a cobble surface or working
through a hard clay floor is enough to snap it. Like many professionals I
have a set, for me of five -- ranging from a fresh new blade through to one
barely an inch long, worn down by use. With these you can, with sufficient
experience and expertise, pick up the slightest of distinctions between archaeological
deposits, even those invisible to the eye. And this is what I had learned
to rely upon. To be understood, what is found by the archaeologist must be
connected with its context, whether fine layers of ash deposited over the
years of use of a hearth, building rubble left by masons, the accumulated
deposits of a town garbage heap. Stratigraphy is a foundation of archaeological
analysis and interpretation.
But here in Sicily they were using picks, albeit little ones, and the edges
of the trench they were digging were loose and ragged -- how could they be
understanding the layering, how could they look to the profile of their excavation
and see what they had dug through? It was explained that they thought my experience
in the north of Europe was less relevant to sites like this. ‘No stratigraphy
-- only floors and walls’, I was told. No need to bother with the subtleties
of archaeological contexts. The task for them was to dig down to floors and
follow the walls to identify buildings. To me this was like saying that the
laws of physics didn’t apply in this part of the universe!
apologia
I could give conventional descriptions and conceptions of archaeology, focus
on field and laboratory techniques, perhaps provide a short history of archaeological
thought. For many, archaeology is a set of techniques aimed at recovering
the past; archaeologists dig up the past. Archaeological thought thus, following
from this, deals with what happened in the past, and what archaeologists have
said of this. Just look at the many textbooks and popular works on archaeology.
There may be and have been different theories of what happened in the archaeological
past, but ultimately, orthodoxy holds, these theories must defer to the remains
of the past. As I indicated in the Introduction, critical reflexivity has
come to feature significantly in archaeology especially since the 1960s, as
well as in cognate disciplines; this is an extension of theorising to include
methodology, philosophy and the practices of archaeology. Here an old debate
continues about the extent to which archaeology is a field science, social
science, or a branch of the humanities.
There are several good introductions to archaeology which deal with all this,
and I do not wish to duplicate them (Renfrew and Bahn 1996, Thomas 1998 are
my favourites). And anyway I wish to challenge some of the basic premises
upon which they base their definition of archaeology. For me archaeology is
the strangest of cultural spaces. Here I want to delve deeper and set the
scene with a sketch of the political ecology of archaeology, how it works
as a project focused upon the cultural inhabitation of varied locales, from
deepest prehistory to the present. The next sections deal with some of the
practices and experiences which lie at the heart of the archaeological project.
an archaeological project in Sicily
To the north is a much-visited and quite spectacular ancient site. Segesta
-- indigeneous settlement contemporary with Greeks and Phoenicians arriving
in the 600s BC and after. To the west a fascinating Phoenician island outpost
-- Mozia. To the south a rich ancient Greek colony -- Selinous. But here it
was piece of a perfume jar found broken on an ancient floor that attracted
me to the project. Made in Korinth in Greece the pot was of very distinctive
style. I had been studying them for several years. They are treated as art
objects and are found in museums the world over. I was keen to move beyond
art history to understand their production, distribution and consumption.
Yet of the ninety odd sites I had researched and where have been found these
pots, and in spite of two centuries of study, none had the sort of information
I really needed to move beyond simple admiration and cataloguing. I wanted
to investigate their design and manufacture in Greece. I wanted to understand
how they travelled to places like Sicily. I wanted to know where in a house
they might belong, with what other articles of daily life, how they ended
as dedications to deities, where and in precisely what deposits, where in
a settlement they were used and discarded. I also wanted to ask why they have
come to be seen as works of art.
And so I joined a large international project excavating a hilltop settlement
in Sicily and surveying its region . Several universities, government organisations,
groups and individuals are involved from northern Europe, the United States,
Sicily itself. This is typical of large archaeological projects. There is
a broad research design and an aspiration to employ the latest in field techniques.
Individual areas of interest, in addition to mine in material culture, include
regional economic organisation, and the different cultural groups interacting
in the mid first millennium BC. We rely on different sources of funding to
enable the project to happen. Sometimes the different interests work together
efficiently, sometimes not, as we debate method, management structures, our
different agendas. Is a traditional archaeological approach to culture history
really compatible with the aims of others to study the negotiation of cultural
identity under a postcolonial agenda? Is an excavation procedure based upon
tight control of stratigraphy always to be preferred to a classical archaeological
focus upon finds and structures? As will be clear from my discussion here,
I am interested in how we mount archaeological expeditions, how the discipline
of archaeology operates, the nature of its disciplinary and cultural politics.
I want to get into the detective work that is archaeology, and to look at
ourselves as archaeologists. Is such an ethnography of the project, locating
its interests in a broader intellectual community and landscape, to be pursued,
or should the site and the past be the focus? Many feel much more comfortable
with the latter and feel threatened by the former.
The acquisition and creation of knowledges of the past: issues of research
design and project management, even cultural differences between those educated
under different intellectual traditions -- the rigors of British field science,
the pragmatism and finds orientation of Mediterranean archaeology, the scientific
methodology of an American tradition, the humanistic focus of a more theoretically
aware archaeology. Debates pervade the project. Mention has been made of the
use of trowels and picks (the trowel -- the favourite tool of the stratigraphic
afficionado). One team is beta-testing a new computer-based surveying and
recording environment, a Geographic Information System tied to electronic
surveying instruments; others see this as an ideal, perhaps unattainable,
which needs to be supported by conventional systems of planning and record.
Terminologies are debated -- should the standard orthodox Greek terms for
Mediterranean finds be used (storage jar as a pithos; the highest point of
a site as the acropolis), terms having dubious association with prehistoric
Sicily? Or should more neutral and scientific descriptions be found? Rights
of access -- who can have access to material and information? Issues at the
local superintendency of antiquities -- conservation of the finds, permissions,
negotiations with the forestry commission over the use of earth moving machinery.
Arrivals at the local airport -- organising transport and workforce. Photography
-- digital and conventional, of what and of whom -- are the diggers themselves
legitimate subjects for record? Recording systems -- the design of a database
which could encompass different approaches to the site and its finds. Phone
lines -- ISDN lines and portable cellular phones offering remote access. Water
at the dig house -- for diggers as well as lab and flotation equipment (to
extract botanical remains from the soil). Getting liquid cash to Sicily. Convincing
the local commune that we they are onto something good -- providing a narrative
with which they might identify. Cultural differences between some of the locals
and some of the excavation team -- where to eat and drink and with whom in
the local town? The intellectual boundaries of the project – how far
should our critical self consciousness go? Lines of authority and management
-- who, ultimately, is to reconcile different interests?
An archaeological project? Where is the archaeology? At what is it directed?
Of what does it consist? Do science and archaeology refer tightly to the work
on site, scrutinising stratigraphy, bagging materials, processing them in
a lab and on computer screen? And, if so, what of the rest? Are the permissions
to gain access and excavate separate, potentially distracting issues? Is the
ethnography of a project, studying its participants and accounting for their
interests not part of archaeology, something to do with the context of the
archaeological study of the past? Is the task of organising efficient earth
moving simply the context of doing the science of discovery? What of the experiences
and practices which are hereby seen not to belong to science, but which are
nevertheless part of the project? So much of that mentioned just above.
Relevant here is an orthodox and basic insistence on the distinction between
science and its context. It is a fundamental distinction between archaeological
science focused upon the past, and management and administration focused upon
the present. And involving politics: for our project is highly political,
dealing with the articulation of very different interest groups, and with
a contemporary search by some for the prehistoric, pre-Greek and pre-Roman
origins of Sicily -- identities are at stake. I am so used to archaeology
being carefully demarcated. This is politics -- the permissions, the interest
of the local minister of culture, the different and competing interest groups.
This is heritage and identity -- people claiming their ancestry to lie in
a conventional designation of culture historical archaeology, the Elimi culture
of the mid first millennium BC, held to be living in our site at Monte Polizzo.
This is entertainment -- the party thrown in our honour by the mayor of the
local commune. This is interpretation for the community -- a display at the
local museum. These are archaeological subjects -- GIS recording systems,
intra-site spatial analysis. These are the objects of archaeological inquiry
-- structures and finds upon a hilltop.
Instead, I see connections. I wish to take issue with these distinctions,
with this sort of insistence upon distinguishing the scientific from the spiritual
from the political from the personal. It is, I believe, part of a desire to
keep science and society or politics apart, this notion of archaeology and
its context. And with this desire I connect a radical separation of the technical
and the social, the professional from the political, theory from practice,
the past from the present. Also indeed, as will be argued, the non-human from
the human in that the tools and materials of the project are usually conceived
as means to an end, media, implements in the hands of archaeology’s agents
or practitioners.
These distinctions are about value, it might be noted (Shanks 1992: 99--101).
A potsherd may invoke an academic interest in ceramic design which is considered
quite separate from the value the piece may have to the art market, or to
a local antiquarian in a town in Sicily, or to a school child interested in
its images of waterbirds. But the different interests are not commensurable,
for archaeologists alone are held to speak for the remains of the past, representing
them to the present’s (epistemological) interest in gaining reliable
knowledge of the past.
And the introduction here of value reminds us that these distinctions are
often about separating archaeology’s proper practice from distractions
or irrelevant matters. What really matters to some of my colleagues, under
this view, is that the project pulled through the summer, in spite of the
political/cultural/ logistical/practical difficulties. I do not see these
as trivial interests or values, irrelevancies and difficulties distracting
us from the real past, from archaeological methods, ideas and narratives.
Instead, I insist that without what is normally kept separate from the field
science there could be no field science. Workers need to be transported and
fed. Permissions are needed. And, as is commonplace to any researcher, research
simply would not happen without the grant applications and awards. All this
experience that is a field project is the concrete life of science. Agendas
and enfoldings. And it is this ecology that I call archaeology.
We need to go back to some experiences which constitute (literally, as we
shall see) the archaeological. The next two sections deal with two of archaeology’s
cultural locales and two of its constituting practices. The first is about
the museum, collecting and gathering cultural artefacts. The second is about
walking the land, travelling and encountering other cultures. In the first
the concept of culture will be a pivot; in the second it is landscape.
material culture: people and things
Citing philosopher Krzysztof Pomian (1987), archaeologist and historian Alain
Schnapp (1996: 11) associates archaeology with collecting. ‘The vital
link between the two is the status accorded to an object which has been isolated,
conserved, displayed, associated with or distinguished from others as a result
of certain traits’ (ibid: 12). Treated as significant and signifying,
any object may be collected and subjected to various processes, of which archaeological
inquiry is only one. But the association of archaeologist with the collector
has been denied since at least the nineteenth century -- archaeologists don’t
want to be seen as successors to tomb robbers of antiquity, medieval traders
in religious relics, part of the renaissance wunderkammer mentality. Most
wish to oppose the commercial values of our contemporary art and antiques
market -- in this they would rather be taken for policemen. Nevertheless,
they do deal in collections of things, their distinction being they are usually
more meticulous, and they are accountable, to state and public institutions.
This continuity from (antiquarian) collector to archaeologist is dealt with
rather well by Susan Pearce in several books (1992, 1997). She covers the
relation of collection to personal identity (ref), but her primary interest
is in the connection between collection and museums. For the museum is one
of the primary cultural locales of archaeology.
Most of us will have made a visit to one of the great international museums.
Somewhere like the Louvre in Paris. Its galleries display artefacts, mostly
old, and many from archaeological sites. They are on display because, by some
at least, they are considered worthy of attention. They have exhibition value.
Why? It is impossible to dissociate the museum from Art, from artefacts held
to represent aesthetic and cultural achievement (Shanks and Tilley 1992, Chapter
4). The finest examples of their kind. Paradigms. For people everywhere to
admire, wonder at. And here in an old royal palace in Paris, Walter Benjamin’s
capital of the nineteenth century.
The Venus de Milo stands ritually encircled by visitors, solitary, punctuating
the pattern in the marble floor of the gallery. It was acquired after a scramble
on the part of several aristocrats to grab it after it first turned up on
a beach of a Greek island. It was an adventure story rivalling those of Indiana
Jones (Shanks 1996: 150). Winckelmann, eighteenth century aesthete and art
historian, loved sculpture like this, though he didn’t know the piece,
and was more interested in Roman copies of Greek sculpture. But he epitomises
that romantic shift to a new way of looking and appreciating art, especially
the Greek (Shanks 1996: 56--8). In a fundamental reevaluation of art history
and the cultural significance of art works, he reenergised the classical tradition.
In a lyrical prose he celebrated the aesthetic wonders of fragments left in
the Vatican collection. His archaeology was simultaneously historical and
transcendent. With Winckelmann we look back to the Greeks and their works,
or what is left of them, to experience those human cultural values which escape
time itself. We still live with the remains of this cultural ideology of hellenism
(Morris 1994).
And the tension between historical provenance and universal value is there
also in works from times other than ancient Greece. Islamic and Chinese ceramics
may fill galleries too, on the basis of their attestation to the same transcendent
cultural values.
Places then of cultural pilgrimage, these museums in the capital cities of
the modern nation state (Horne 1984). Cultural treasure houses built upon
the desire to collect and own a transnational heritage, the right to which
modern imperial states considered theirs by virtue of global reach and power.
So often this heritage has been seen as Graeco-Roman. The nineteenth century
European states competed to acquire the best; their museums are less able
to do so now, but the art market remains a determining force in the field
of cultural value, dominated by corporate and institutional capital, such
as the immense resources of the Getty Foundation.
The art object is one material interface of archaeology and culture. But another
romantic, Herder, and again at the end of the eighteenth century, complained
of this association of cultivation with universal human value or progress
and western culture, writing instead of cultures plural, in an appreciation
of the works and values of other societies. This anticipates an anthropological
sense of culture as way of life, a definition formalised by Kroeber and Kluckhohn
(1952) and probably originating in Tylor’s book Primitive Culture of
1870, though there it was tied to evolutionary models of human development
-- from primitive to civilised.
Ethnic or national identity is also found on display in the museum, signified
by archaeological artefacts. The Venus de Milo is simultaneously for all humankind,
and (ancient) Greek. We find galleries in the Louvre of Roman, Egyptian, Celtic,
Assyrian works (of art), alongside French, Italian, British painting and sculpture.
Behind the classification and ordering is the equation of cultural work and
some essential quality of identity.
Not in the Louvre, but in many other museums, we may be able to look upon
the works of peoples categorised according to a more specialised and archaeological
meaning of culture. Gordon Childe is associated with this sense of culture
as recurring sets of associated artefacts or traits held to represent a people
or society (discussed by Renfrew and Bahn, 1996: 443--5). It emphasises the
expressive or stylistic components of identity over issues of value. In prehistoric
archaeology and in the absence of written sources, these cultures may be named
after ‘type’ sites, regions or artefacts -- the Mousterian culture
of the middle palaeolithic period (after the site of le Moustier); the bronze
age Beaker folk (after a type of ceramic vessel); the TRB (Trichterbecker)
culture group (another class of ceramic); the Wessex culture (a region of
southern England). That such ‘culture historical’ interpretation
is now academically discredited has not been fully accepted. Many archaeologists
still orient their work around this concept of culture. Culture historical
classification of archaeological remains, particularly prehistoric, is still
the norm.
Archaeology may make references to art and humanity. It has had, conventionally,
an interest in classical civilised culture, primitive other or older cultures.
The discipline has developed its own culture concept uniting material relics
with peoples of the past. It has contributed to anthropological notions of
culture. Archaeology has thus been an important part of the interplay and
evolution of the references and meanings of the culture concept. More generally,
it is clear that archaeology and anthropology were central to the cultural
development of the advanced capitalist nation states of the nineteenth century.
Political revolution (Britain in the seventeenth century, France and the United
States at the end of the eighteenth) and its threat accompanied the forging
of a new form of political unity through the industrial nation state (Hobsbawm
1990). From the beginning nation states have been founded upon a fundamental
tension. On the one hand they have invoked, as unifying force and legitimation,
enlightenment ideas of popular will and sovereignty, universal human rights.
And the form of the nation state itself has been exported globally from its
origins in early modern Europe. On the other hand they are all locally circumscribed,
each independent of similar polities on the basis of regional, ethnic, linguistic,
and/or national identity and history (Turner 1990). Archaeology and anthropology,
disciplines formalised at the beginning of the nineteenth century, offered
powerful ways of working on these new cultural issues.
A crucial factor in ideas of national identity was the imperialist and colonial
experience of travel and other cultures (Pratt 1992). Johannes Fabian (1983)
has convincingly clarified the dependence of anthropological knowledge upon
travel and encounters with other cultures in other lands. This confrontation
between western enlightenment reason and a cultural (and colonial) other was
transposed upon time and history -- those cultures that help us understand
who we are live over there and back then, while we are here and now. Archaeology
was another powerful medium in these cultural geographies of the imagination.
While ethnography confronted the industrial west with its alternate and provided
a foil, difference, against which western nations might understand themselves,
archaeology provided material evidence of folk roots of the new state polities,
while also attaching the imperial states to the cultural peaks of history
measured by artistic values and encapsulated in objects acquired, often from
abroad, for the museums. This has been one of the main cultural successes
of archaeology – to provide the new nation states of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries with histories and origin stories rooted in the material
remains of the past (Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996). Myths of ancestry
were articulated in new national narratives, stories of belonging and common
(civilised) community (the latter particularly identified with Graeco-Roman
culture). Both archaeology and anthropology provided specific symbols and
evidences used to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of identity
rooted in national traditions, conceptions of race, ethnicity and language.
Moreover archaeology provided an extraordinary immediacy apparently accessible
without academic training -- finds which could be displayed to speak for themselves
in the new museums, the cultural treasure houses of imperial power, repositories
of ancestral remains. Many archaeologies around the world continue to perform
this role of providing material correlates for stories and myths of identity
and belonging (Trigger 1984, Kohl and Fawcett 1995, see also Olivier and Coudart
1995).
Conceptions of modern identity are still dependent upon the idea of the nation
state and upon the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century. But
recent history shows clearly their instability. They often have no obvious
cultural justification in geography, history, race, or ethnicity. Nation states
are social constructions (Anderson 1991; Bhabha 1990). Growing out of the
demise of old empires, nation states have frequently been connected with enlightenment
notions of human rights and rational government (democracy and representation),
relying on these to unify people around a common story of their national identity.
Such unified history and culture has always failed to cope with diversity.
The distinction between nation and nation state has frequently collapsed into
contention, with ideas of self determination and freedom, identity and unity
colliding with the suppression of diversity, domination and exclusion that
overrides a genuine egalitarian pluralism (Chatterjee 1993).
The tension between universal political and cultural forms and values, and
local cultural textures has shifted emphasis in recent decades. Nations states
now have less power and agency, which is in stark contrast to the ever-increasing
influence of structures and movements of corporate and transnational capital.
In a period of rapid decolonisation after the second world war this globalisation
is about the transformation of imperial power into supra-national operations
of capital, communications and culture. This postcolonial world is one of
societies, including new nation states, that have escaped the control of the
empires and ideological blocs of western and eastern Europe. An ideological
unity is engineered through the culture industry, the mass media, and mass
consumption -- a predominantly American culture. And the integrated resources
of the global economy lie behind this (Curti and Chambers 1996; Featherstone,
Lash and Robertson 1995; Featherstone 1990; Spybey 1996).
But with international capital, global telecommunications and world military
order, the nation state continues to be a major structural feature of this
postmodern scene. It remains a major focus of regional cultural identity.
The postcolonial state is heavily and ironically dependent upon notions of
the state and nation developed in Europe, and so too it is dependent upon
the same sorts of ideological constructions of national identity developed
through history, archaeology and anthropology (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).
Hence a key tension or contradiction in globalisation involves the fluid free
market between nations, epitomised in multinational and corporate capital
and based upon ideologies of the free individual operating beyond boundaries
of any one polity, and ideologies of difference, ideologies of local identity.
Here the nation, nation state and nationalism remain potent.
And here archaeology remains a vital cultural factor, in the context too of
ideas of heritage. For the crucial cultural issue is the ways local communities
engage with these processes of globalisation. And the ways they do compare
with the ways colonised communities dealt with imperial colonial powers; the
interpenetration of local and global cultural forces is a feature of modernity
since at least the nineteenth century. It is not simply a one-way process
of influence, control, dissemination and hegemony, with an American western
homogenised culture taking over and supplanting local identity. It is not
just top down dominance, but a complex interplay of hegemony, domination and
empowerment. The key question or issue is the way external and internal forces
interact to produce, reproduce and disseminate global culture within local
communities. To be asked is to what extent the global is being transformed
by peripheral communities; to what extent, by appropriating strategies of
representation, organisation and social change through access to global systems,
are local communities and interest groups empowering themselves and influencing
global systems.
Here then is a broad context for the interface of archaeology and culture.
There is the part archaeology plays in the construction of national and cultural
identities (Rowlands 1994). A key is an encounter with materiality and regional
focus, the ruins of a local past, setting the homogenisation of processes
like nationalism, colonisation and imperialism against the peculiarities of
history and geography. This is about the relation between local pasts and
those global methods, frameworks and master narratives which may suppress,
under a disciplinary and cultural uniformity, the rich pluralism and multicultural
tapestry of peoples and histories. Questions are raised of whether genuine
local pasts (Shanks 1992: 109), implicit in local and distinct identities,
are possible, or whether they are always to be understood in relation to abstract
categories and the standardised processes of an archaeological science. Archaeology’s
focus on obdurate remains suggests the possibility of a material resistance
to the ideologies of a homogeneous world uniform in its accommodation to the
commodity form and principles of the global market.
And all this may happen in the museum – in encounters with collections
of things.
site and locale: walking landscape
The equation between people, their culture and the land they inhabit is central
to the time-space systematics of the discipline of archaeology, as just outlined
-- ‘these people were then’. It is an equation crucial to the coherence
of the new nation states of modern Europe. It is encapsulated in the cultural
attachment to land so characteristic of romantic nationalism. For archaeologists
it is not enough that their collections of artefacts make cultural sense,
whether it is in terms of artistic value or marker of identity; they must
also be linked to a place, a setting. A key term here has become landscape
-- that distinctive, and aesthetic, set of relationships with the land.
Archaeologists walk the land, observing, recording, drawing, telling. I wish
to argue that, in our understanding of archaeology, primacy should be given
to this general attention to land. It comes before, and subsumes, interventions
in the land -- excavations, so often considered the defining archaeological
activity. To think of archaeology as being about digging up the past is a
subtle and ideological distraction. First then let us remember the historical
roots of this relationship. We need to recall some antiquaries. (The following
section draws upon Schnapp 1996: 139--219.)
In 1586 was published William Camden’s Britannia, an historical and geographical
description of British Isles. He had been visiting different parts of Britain
from 1575, producing local histories. In this work he set a paradigm for future
historical cartography. With a precise eye and attention to date and place,
he combined literary information with descriptions of landscapes, with topographic
and toponymic studies. Ultimately in a classical tradition set by Roman travel
writer Pausanias, Camden established the antiquarian value of travel and peregrination,
an intimate relationship with land and its cultural and historical features.
So too in the early seventeenth century Ole Worm and Johan Bure in Scandinavia,
Nicolaus Marschalk in Germany were walking in the field. For the first two
history located in the land was central to the definition of the two double
monarchies of Denmark-Norway and Sweden-Finland. For Marschalk the interest
was more in excavation. Antiquaries were leaving their libraries just as the
scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and botanists too went out to observe
earth and sky. Historian and archaeologist Stuart Piggott (1976: 111) links
antiquarianism to the rural world, connecting surveying, precise observation
and record in the field, with the culture of landed gentlemen who received
their training at the Inns of Court, the English Law schools. He quotes Robert
Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy: ‘What more pleasing studies can
there be than the Mathematicks, Theorick or Practick parts? As to survey land,
make mapps, models, dials etc, with which I have ever much delighted myself’
(ibid). The earth was coming to reveal its secrets, as peregrination, collection,
survey and interpretation were united in the pleasures of education and inquiry.
Ole Worm, a Dane, worked in a Baconian and empirical tradition. Rather than
defer to ancient texts and tradition, he started with the remains of monuments,
exploration of the land and earth, and only after related them to tradition.
He saw no need of Latin or Greek sources, just an inquiring mind, a sharp
eye and a taste for drawing. He explicitly asserted local Nordic history over
Graeco-Roman tradition, adopting a cross cultural classification of monuments,
setting out clear descriptive methods and relating monuments to the historical
record. Worm was reading the landscape and deciphering the signs and inscriptions
seen there. The importance of system was foremost -- these were not disconnected
disparate ciphers in the landscape but pieces of an historical jigsaw.
John Aubrey in Britain, associate of Hobbes and Harvey, colleague of Newton
and Locke, brought together philological precision in the interpretation of
historical sources with the description and interpretation of landscape (Monumenta
Britannica, published posthumously). His attitude was one of sensitivity to
past in the present: ‘that antiquaries are so taken with the sight of
old things, not as doting upon the bare forme or matter (though both oftentimes
be very notable in old things) but because these visible superviving evidences
of Antiquity represent unto their minds former times, with as strong an impression,
as if they were actually present, and in sight, as it were’ (quoted Hunter
1975: 171). In Scandinavia Olof Rudbeck walked and viewed the landscape with
the eye of an anatomist, dissecting the earth in stratigraphical order, producing
diagrams, aerial views, plans.
In the eighteenth century Stukeley presented an extension and completion of
this paradigm, and again from Britain. Touring and observing ancient sites,
gardens, architectures, relying on direct experience, he displayed acute observation
and knowledge of landscape in a vision of the earth as a repository of interpretable
traces. His pioneering researches on Stonehenge and Avebury, published in
1740 and 1743, are remembered for their field observation and illustration
combined with what are now sometimes seen as fantastical ideas about ancient
British Druidical religion.
These antiquaries interested in regional archaeology are to be contrasted
with those taking in the grand tour of, by the end of the eighteenth century,
the Graece-Roman Mediterranean (Constantine 1984, Stoneman 1987). A whole
culture industry of painters serviced the aristocratic tourists (Tsigakou
1981, Stoneman 1998). In sumptuous publication there was often displayed a
passion for the picturesque ruin in the landscape – the folios of Choisseul
Gouffier and Edward Dodwell, the visionary ruins of David LeRoy. Stuart and
Revett famously maintained scrupulous accuracy in their Mediterranean travelogue
and studies of Greek architecture (The Antiquities of Athens published from
1761). The topographical tradition established by Aubrey and Stukeley continued
in Greece with the remarkable work of William Martin Leake, who, from 1805
to 1810 intensively surveyed the Greek countryside to establish the sites
of virtually all settlements mentioned in the ancient historians.
So by the nineteenth century I see established a paradigmatic archaeological
activity or attitude -- intensive attention to traces in the land and earth,
the complex articulations of history and place, the milieu of human inhabitation.
Walking, observing, scraping, digging, noting, mapping. And much of this has
become associated with the concept of landscape.
Landscape is a nexus of inhabitation, place and value. It is a term as complex
and ideologically charged as culture. It should not be forgotten that the
roots of the term still lie in the notion of an aesthetic cultivation of the
view or aspect; a reflexive awareness of the historical roots of the concept
itself is important. Landscape painting and architecture improves upon nature
according to particular aesthetic or cultural values. This submission of place
to reason and imagination imbricates time and history. The landscape genre
in the hands of Claude Lorrain and Poussin, the myriad of landscape painters
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, landscape architects like Repton,
Uvedale Price and Capability Brown, was always explicitly or implicitly a
relationship to history and sensibility to be found in land itself (Andrews
1999; cf Smiles 1994 for Britain; for literature Williams 1973). History --
ancient monuments and ruins, classical, medieval, prehistoric. Sensibility
-- attitudes to the land which refer back, ultimately, to ideologies of the
Roman campagna and classical pastoral. History and sensibility -- a celebration
of the rural, often over the urban and industrial, those scarring features
of modernity.
Stephen Daniels (1993), and among others, has shown how the aesthetic of landscape
has been central to the construction of national identity in Britain and the
United States. Powerfully affective, it provides a deep cultural milieu, mapping
out values and attachments. Landscape has provided a basis for locating new
communities of nationhood in a kind of collective cultural memory of belonging.
Monuments and landforms have come to be seen to give history and shape to
human communities, nations included. Consider, for example, the legacy of
this concept of landscape in Britain. The English countryside is one of interwoven
traces and layers of previous inhabitation, punctuated by monuments and the
relics of times gone by; a particular cultural ecology of narratives, plants
and creatures, geology, language, music, customs, architectures, traces, archaeological
sites and finds. It is where the English may be held to belong and find their
roots, though others may appreciate its beauties. And note here the articulation
of archaeology and natural history, an association embodied in the numerous
local Natural History societies founded across Britain in the nineteenth century.
Those tensions noted in the concept of culture, between universal human values,
the qualities of particular cultures, and the aspiration to cultivated intellectual
or artistic activity, are here present also in landscape, and notions of site
or monument. So many images of land the world over, photographs and paintings,
are now generated from the same aesthetic and pictorial models established
by a select elite and culminating at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet
narratives of local identity may be considered to lie in the land itself,
in an attachment of land, language, culture and people. In spite of social
mobility and diaspora, land may still provide a basis for belonging, and the
notion of aboriginal folk culture, deeply rooted in place, remains potent.
There is now of a sub-discipline of landscape archaeology (for prehistoric
archaeology: Wagstaff 1987, Bender 1993, Tilley 1994, Ucko and Layton 1999).
There are several defining features.
A regional focus is one. Sites and finds are considered in the context of
settlement patterns and environments. Mention is frequently made of the early
work of Gordon Willey in the 1940s and 50s in Peru; he considered soiopolitical
organisation in the Viru valley through its settlement patterns (Willey 1953).
One background, from the 1920s, is aerial photography; another is the distribution
map, developed as a summary graphical and interpretive tool only in the 1930s:
both are tied to particular ways of seeing the land – distanced and encompassing,
detached from walking the earth itself. More recently the analysis of regional
settlement patterns has been considerably affected by spatial science which
grew out of new archaeology in the 1960s (Clarke 1968 is an early exponent;
also Hodder and Orton 1976, Hodder 1978, Clarke 1977). A range of statistical
techniques can be used to analyse, essentially, points in a two or three dimensional
geometric space, the relationships then used in the inference of cultural
and social phenomena. Geographical Information Systems, spatially referenced
databases, are the latest in this line of tools for spatial analysis. They
allow the control of large amounts of data, facilitate statistical analysis,
and offer quick and easy ways of displaying information as maps. As well as
control and summary visualisation, these systems of regional focus are based
upon coordinates in a geometric and mathematically defined space.
Landscape archaeology has also been associated with the development of non-invasive
survey, that is survey which does not give primacy to excavation. There are
many techniques now available, from surface collection of material found in
field walking, through geophysical prospection -- ways of seeing into the
soil, to remote sensing -- the analysis and interpretation of the likes of
satellite imagery (Scollar et al 1990; Lillesand and Kiefer 1994). Of particular
note is that much landscape archaeology questions the notion of ‘site’
as a basic unit of study, often more interested in the likes of field systems
and ancient agriculture. Landscape archaeology is often off-site archaeology.
These features connect with that old topographical interest in close observation,
local knowledge, and empirical description. Leslie Grinsell (1936) walked
the fields of England making a comprehensive inventory of prehistoric monuments,
every trace, and all measured in Grinsell paces -- by the length of his stride
The reconstruction of ancient environments is undoubtedly another background
to landscape archaeology, often connected with a focus upon the way people
in the past fed themselves (subsistence strategies, in the jargon) -- an interest
here in plants and animals, climate and physical geography. Palaeoeconomists
in the 1970s and 80s walked the territories around many ancient settlements,
aiming to establish, in this site catchment analysis, what it was like in
the past, what natural resources there would have been for people to exploit
(Higgs 1975 and 1977, Jarman, Bailey and Jarman 1982).
The idea of landscape has always been resistant to notions of environmental
determinism. After Carl Sauer (Leighly 1963) many have explored the history
of human interventions in nature (now Redman 1999), looking at domestication,
fire ecology, hydrological engineering, modes of cultivation and agricultural
engineering, industry, mineral extraction. The concept of landscape refers
to both natural environment and elements of human agency, with environment
seen as socially constructed, culturally constituted.
Above all landscape archaeology is centred upon a concept which seems to offer
a unifying perspective, cross-cutting culture and nature, like the concept
of ‘the body’. It cuts across both time and space too, with continuities
and breaks in a temporal line from past to present, in the traces of past
in the present, in the geographical shape of lives around us.
We will return again to the idea of landscape, particularly to note its historical
tensions. I end the discussion here with the connection I have made between
the concept and activities in the land, of looking, walking, digging. The
basic point is to recognise that landscape is best conceived as a process
and a set of relationships at the heart of the present’s historical relationship
with the past; and this is how it might help guide our archaeological practice.