I wound up a fine conference at Stanford today - Seeing the Past - Building knowledge of the past through acts of seeing. Congratulations to the organizers - Stacey Camp, Sarah Levin-Richardson and Lela Urquhart.

All the papers are on line and available for comment - [Link]. It is a high quality collection and worth a look - not least for what it shows of some cutting edge thought in academic archaeology.

There were papers that explored visual culture in the past - Celtic coins, sex scenes at Pompeii, the Mausoleam of the emperor Augustus, Greek drinking parties. Criticism of the distorting uses of imagery in archaeology, how ways of seeing direct attention to certain aspects of the past rather than others - aerial photography, for example, or simply a predisposition to look rather than use all available senses in exploring the past (Ruth Tringham was at her best on an immersive exploration of that amazing early farming settlement at Catal Hoyuk in Turkey).

My points?

Work on the irony at the heart of our seeing the past. That we can never see what happened - it is gone. Yet it is all round us to see - in its remains and in what it has become for us now. This is a classic “undecidable”, in Derrida’s sense - [Link]

So put to one side the usual distinction between the real past and its representation, the authentic past and its secondary representation. This is not the way I see images of the past at all.

Photos, drawings and diagrams aren’t so much representations of our archaeological data - pots, sites, any other kind of facts - so much as acts of inscription - ways we deal with the past. The are part of the way we engage with the past and others who have an interest - colleagues, or anyone else with an interest in the archaeological past.

Key term - intermedia - this referes to the fungibility that we are so familiar with now as one traditional medium merges into another - because a medium is no longer to be defined by its material or substance - paint, film, magnetic tape. My iPod deals in sound, radio programs, voice memos, snapshots, lecture presentations, calendar items, my address book. All can be interchanged and combined because of digital computation.

Key term - mixed realities. Rather than separate reality and representation, think of how we live in a world of subtle gradations from the hard reality of mortality through to wild unrealized utopias - and there are all sorts of inscriptions along the way.

Working on the fungibility of image and text - here an experiment in layout and typography dealing with the deep mapping of three archaeological encounters in Wales UK, Sicily and California - a Visual Primer for the Three Landscapes Project (Stanford 2001 -).

Key term - sensorium. By this I mean that we should treat sight as part of a particular array of all the senses (this is what I mean by sensorium). A way of seeing is connected with ways of hearing, touching, feeling. Nowadays we tend to value rich photographic verisimilitude and are less attuned to the subtle difference of feel of material surfaces, for example. What then of past soundscapes ( a new area of interest and research in archaeology)? Or the smell of the past? - archaeologists have researched the olfactory cityscape of Novgorod (tanning factories within the city walls stinking out the whole place). Chris Witmore did a great presentation on ancient and modern Greek soundscapes.

Key term - manifestation. It’s not just cause and effect or making sense of an ancient temple that matter. Simply manifesting the past to people is a good thing - letting them experience what is left of the past in all its richness.

An exhortation. Too many talk about what’s wrong with imagery and representation in archaeology. Cut down on talking about seeing and get on with the looking and imaging. Practice as the best form of critique.

An example of good practice - architects like Daniel Libeskind who have pioneered new ways of seeing building, embodied in the way they draw and plan as well as the buildings themselves. Architectural drawing here not as a “representation” but as a crucial part of architectural practice - from visionary beginnings though concept definition, persuasion of client, through engineering calculation to the logistics of building. None of these plans, diagrams, renderings are simply “representation”.

A few traditional aphorisms and gestures.

Adorno - the best magnifying glass is a splinter in the eye. [Link]

Bertold Brecht’s gesture of verfremdung - interrupting the illusion of a theatrical performance - stopping the flow of “representation” and the storyline with comments directly engaging the audience.

Walter Benjamin reflecting on the Nazi expertise in new mass media - political progress is now intimately and inextricably intertwined with technical facility. If we want to reach out to people with enlightening stories of the archaeological past we have to go one better than Disney. [Link]

Seeing the past? I want archaeologists to help us all to see it freshly. Not as another hackneyed image.

And I think these are some ways of achieving that goal.

Archaeography - the new archaeology photoblog from Metamedia at Stanford - is up and running.

[Link]

This is how we describe the project

Archaeography is a photoblog that explores the connections between photography and archaeology.

This is not some quirky juxtaposition - we are convinced that photography is profoundly archaeological, and that archaeography is about a hybrid experience at the heart of contemporary culture. Archaeography faces a challenge of how to work with the chaos of fragmented traces, remains and documents of the past that forms the substance of so much of everyday life today.

Proposition. We are all archaeologists, even if we don’t realize it. An archaeological sensibility - working on what is left of the past, heritage, museums, collecting culture, antiques, retro styling, family genealogy, local history, tourists visiting the past - is a vital part of the contemporary zeitgeist.

Proposition. Photography is profoundly archaeological. Photographs are like archaeological traces of the moments they capture. Photowork raises a question faced by all archaeologists - how do we document events? But neither photowork nor archaeology create transparent windows on the past, though many think they do.

Proposition. Media are material matters. The materialities of media and instruments need to be essential concerns of both photography and archaeology - photographers and archaeologists need to deal with the way their tools and instruments affect what it is they are looking at. Cameras are clocks for making images that are traces of the past. The photograph itself, computer screen, negative, paper or transparency, is an integral and material part of engaging with what is pictured. The archaeological trowel, spade and surveying instrument sculpt the past into different documentary forms we can comprehend.

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Chris (Witmore) has sent me some comments about his fascinating research into early photography and archaeology -

Conze at Samothrace

Although photography had been used in the context of archaeological practice for some time, it was only with the Samothrace excavation volumes that photographs were placed directly into the publication (Conze, Hauser and Niemann 1875 and Conze, Hauser and Benndorf 1880). The incorporation of the actual photographic print into the final publication of archaeological sites was significant. First, the intermediate step of transforming the photograph through copper engraving or lithography had been removed. Second, and most importantly, an unparalleled degree of detail was maintained in the final publication. With the removal of the intermediary step of transformation involved with engraving photographs, publishers took out any direct human transformation of image (besides that of selection on location) and brought mechanical reproduction directly into the documentation of the field. This created an immediacy and intimacy, which was to have ramifications in terms of perceptions of photographs as objective and transparent media. In this the detail captured in the emulsion could not be replicated through engravings. This detail was only limited by the quality of the silver bromide or silver halide emulsion utilized. Archaeological contexts could be transmitted visually. This would have ramifications for field practice that were medium driven. For example, Cookson in “Photography for Archaeologists” (1954) regarded cleanliness as a virtue to be held above all others. He continues:

“no matter how correct the exposure and the development of the negative,
no matter how carefully a print is made, a wall with mud still clinging to
it, a floor poorly brushed, a pavement insufficiently washed, the badly-
trimmed edge of a cut can completely ruin the finest of photographs from
an archaeological standpoint. From experience, I know how heart-breaking
it can be to scrape a stone floor hour after hour, or to wash the
metalling of a Roman road pebble by pebble until I hoped that every stone
would come loose and there would be an end to any photograph ? but I know
the pleasure the ultimate result has brought when the photograph of the
finished work is seen. Some of the words on cleanliness will appear again;
they cannot be over-emphasized. ALWAYS KEEP THE SITE CLEAN! Cleaned stone
and caulk glisten in the light their shapes sharp and clean when the earth
on which they lie is undercut and they are well brushed.” (13-14).

Curtius at Olympia

Cleanliness for the sake of the medium.

On the subject of rural relationships [Link] [Link], Tim Dilworth, freelancing for National Geographic TV, contacted me last week about crop circles around Stonehenge - and we are definitely in the season for this kind of thing …

Here are some extracts from our conversation.

TD There are a couple of points I’d really like to get into the film. First, the almost magical quality of wheat and that crop circles can be seen as an echo of ancient rites. Second, that people today really believe there’s something magical about this place (Wiltshire) and they point to all the prehistoric sites to say that even the ancients felt the same way. Whether or not it’s true, they believe it.

MS I think your instincts here are spot on - an echo maybe - certainly there is a recurrent theme of the aura of prehistoric monuments and senses of place.

A crucial contemporary attitude too is that of the perceived loss of an intimate relationship with the countryside (this is big news in the UK at the moment) - old ideas of the separation of city and country.

TD Is there a good (layman’s) overview of the Wiltshire’s history and religions?

MS English Heritage has a series of attractive guides - you have probably come across them - they include a series by the publishers Batsford. The one by Mike Parker Pearson on the Bronze Age is excellent.

A more academic (but good) read on prehistoric relationships with the land is Richard Bradley’s book on prehistoric monuments [Link]

Christopher Chippindale’s “Stonehenge Complete” is in a new edition - this is one of the best perhaps for you - it deals with how people have thought of the monuments and the land since they were built.

Then there is Barbara Bender on the meaning of Stonehenge - and she deals with New Age views very well - academic but chatty - “Stonehenge: Making Space”

TD Is there evidence that pre-Christians used bonfires as part of their worship or rituals? Or that bonfires carried on even into modern times? (I’m looking for an excuse to have a huge bonfire).

MS On prehistoric religion it is better to think less in terms of religious rites and institutions separate from everyday life, and more in terms of ways of life - ritual and belief, cosmology coterminous with everyday life. And everyday life back then was very strange.

TD What were some of their other planting and harvest-time rituals - any that involved practices we would find unusual today?

MS The calendar was clearly marked and understood - there is plenty of evidence for astronomical alignment and observation, knowledge too. There were two other cosmological ordering principles:
Land, place and the building of monuments - prehistoric northern Europe was ordered around a built environment - it may not look like an urban environment, but it was equally saturated in meanings, stories, histories, significances.
Relationships with the dead and with other species - very peculiar goings on in chambered and earthen monuments, fiddling with bones and much much more.

TD When and why were the barrows created?

MS There are different kinds and they date from the time of the first farmers through to the iron age in the early first millennium BC.

TD When and why were the original white horses created and what is their significance?

MS See all this as expression of the significance of location - place matters to these people.

TD Same with the stone formations?

MS Same with Silbury Hill.

TD How would I find out what iron age Britains wore?

MS There is a lot of information about bronze age and iron age dress in northern Europe - we have complete cloth outfits and much metal armor and the like. The English Heritage/Batsford series deals with it. See also bog bodies - many web sites.

TD And as a real leap into the New Age, what are leylines and is there anything to them?

MS Yes and no.

Prehistoric people in northern Europe were very sensitive to place - this is what we pick up on in their great stone and earthen sculptures. And not just the sites themselves, but the relationships between places. So archaeologists have become very sensitive to how sites and monuments connect together in a region like Wessex or Wiltshire, how they form what I just called a built environment.

So yes - there are prehistoric alignments. And they were/are charged with cultural meaning/significance/power.

But this is not what most people understand by ley lines. These are alignments of sites across many historic periods, and they don’t sustain scrutiny. It is a statistical commonplace that there will be several alignments in any random scatter of points. And supposing that the lines are tapping into some lost/unknown/secret knowledge of earth powers is amusing but a little silly.

You are tuning into a network of histories, beliefs, projections that include Druidism, neo-paganism, and the Celtic revival.

One of my favorite ruminations on all this is the movie Wicker Man [Link to a blog entry of mine] [Another link] I am convinced this is one of the sources for California’s Burning Man festival (just ended this weekend in Black Rock City) [Link to Patrick Roddie’s superb Burning Man photography - somatic materialities!]

Stukeley’s Wicker Man

A supposed rite of pagan human and animal sacrifice to ensure the fertility of the harvest.

The evidence for the Wicker Man is minimal, but for an antiquarian, William Stukeley in the 17th century, and some very brief mentions in Roman author(s) writing about the Druids. The Celtic connection with all this goes back again to the 17th and particularly 18th centuries and the reinvention of Celtic identity in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France …

All this is actually nicely dealt with in the movie!

And bonfires are nevertheless well attested rites going way back - plenty of archaeological remains of roast dinners at the entrance to chambered monuments.

Jack (Mitchell) in my Classics Department here at Stanford came out with a great point about all the imagery of abuse coming out of Iraq. [Link]

The digital image has a material force - the image itself, maybe borrowing its authority from the materiality of analogue photography, affects.

The image is pre-discursive - that is, it appeals through something other than explanation and gloss. It simply is and attests.

And the image is not worth a thousand words - of Rumsfeld’s or anyone else’s rationalizations - quite the reverse. It is. Faith and trust.

Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography - The Book of Probes and Trek.

Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution - abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in there (ghost images and the uncanny), traces, echoes, nuances, shadows, objective correlatives of dim memories (the beach last summer). He uses recombinant graphics, plays on switching and manipulating figure and ground. Many photos use disconnected bits of graphics, logos, fonts.

© David Carson

There is artifice, but not photographic - none of the photos pay attention to usual paradigms (color balance, framing, composition, or indeed genre).

Trek is explicit about Carson’s purpose - a visual archaeology, one that deals in a rag and bone shop, with fragments, remnants of signs, layers of cultural accretion. Border zones - slippage between between matter, text and image, between past and present and future.

Some media themes

Carson works on media matter. Media are clearly the message. Probes is a work on McLuhan. A probe is an instrument of testing where the content of the image is less important than its provocation, its prompt of the question - what is this about? The point of the probe is its effect, its investigation here into ways of seeing. Probes are visual primers.

Barthes’s punctum comes to mind. And Adorno - the best magnifying galss is a splinter in the eye.

Media are often conceived as as secondary acts of reproduction. The original is often preferred. Live performance is preferred over some kind of record. But the proliferation of recorded media makes the viewer/listener much more of a participant (and threat, of course), because they can choose, select, edit, experience pieces of the work in new contexts. And share stuff with friends, breaking copyright. They can manipulate photos to political ends (see the Salon.com comment on Thursday [Link]). But remember - Glenn Gould abandoned live performance.

The picture or recording placed in context of the viewer’s or listener’s choice takes us into the ambient and the everyday, away from the sacred and protected spaces of art - worlds of images and sounds, rather than museum and art gallery. John Cage’s remediated music as sound.

Text and media are as much (ambient) material matter, freed from semantics - Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Like so much archaeological work, the resource worked upon is broken, half-destroyed, half decayed matter. Seeking some kind of pattern and significance in the mess and chaos. Terribly imperfect, incomplete, impermanent. (is this not an aesthetic of wabi sabi? - see my wiki Traumwerk)

It is quite a week for archaeological photography. [Link] [Link]

The latest issue of Aperture [Spring 2004] has three photographers who work with remediated, digitally reworked imagery. Bringing together past and present with all sorts of tensions and layerings.

Loretta Lux does spooky portraits, very mannered, in an old painterly style of portraiture. Like John Currin’s paintings. Dare I say uncanny!

Hidden rooms 1 © Loretta Lux

Paul Thorel created a series of massive abstracted images of human forms in the manner of ancient Greek kouroi and korai - for the Naples archaeology museum.

Yassaman Ameri’s photographs are photocollages (created in Photoshop) that mix old paintings, text, studio-style portraits of Iranian women, and other graphical elements - “a history of forgotten women, anonymous photographers, rootless exiles, and the most profound connection: across the sea, across cultures, through revolution and war, through an age.”

Sam has put me on to a Salon.com article - A picture is no longer worth a thousand words.

“Which photograph of Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux and two boys in the desert is the real thing? No one knows for sure, in the age of Photoshop.”

Salon journalist Farhad Manjoo picks up the familiar argument that we can’t trust photos anymore. So now, he says, it comes down to who you trust - the Lance Cpl. who says the picture is faked, the list subscriber who sent one picture to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), or the source of another photo with the positive message of the board.

From the beginning photographs were manipulated. The difference is now that it is easy to do so, and to leave no trace of the edit. Then there is all the selection and manipulation that accomapanies framing, choice of viewpoint and the moment of taking the photograph. Photos were never innocent.

Think of the archaeology of photography. It is a material trace; we trust a photograph largely because of this materiality - the notion that it was made there, in the moment when what is depicted happened. And now it is in front of us, bearing witness. This is an archaeological authenticity. The photograph bears material witness to a past event.

It also references an archaeological temporality - actuality - the conjunction of two present moments.

This case of the archaeology of photography brings out the political relationships at the heart of knowing.

If you reject faith and internally secured knowledge (mathematical, logical, apodeictic, that makes no necessary reference to experience of reality), if you believe in evidence and testing out your ideas against experience, on what grounds do you assess an account of something that happened?

I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center today - electrons and positrons shot down two miles of copper tubing to explore the nature of matter and energy. It takes an array of detectors three stories high to produce any significant trace of the particle collisions. And you never see the particles directly, of course. But we trust the accounts given of the interactions of what we will never experience directly, enough to justify the enormous sums of money spent on such big science.

We trust the scientists because their community, we are told, is honorable. OK some scientists make things up and bear false witness, but their community will not tolerate this. So, on the whole, we trust scientific research. Yes science acieves a great deal of practical impact - it is applied in technology; this means they must be getting something right. But many non-scientific fields have impact - faith can move mountains, terrorists driven by political ideology can shake the world. What really matters is trust.

It is quite clear that the invention of the experimental method in the seventeenth century by gentlemen members of the Royal Society accompanied a redefintion of the security of witnessing and representation. You may never enter a laboratory, may never yourself witness an experiment, but you trust the gentlemen of science to represent scientific knowledge and tell you all about it, because they are honorable. This is a political act of representation - scientists represent the reality of the world revealed in experiment to us. They are honorable in the same way as democratic representation depends upon relationships of trust between representative and constituency. However frail and fallible that relationship may be, it is the basis of democratic constitutions.

On what grounds do you trust someone? A witness can be put to question. But inquiry is time consuming. Most of the time we simply trust on the grounds of rhetorical pleas. Common pleas include - “you know me”, “look at my record”, “look at my friends and family”. Photography has had quite an impressive rhetoric of “being there” and witnessing. “Trust me - I was there.” This is an archaeological plea.

Archaeological - because we think that archaeologists have a direct material relationship with the past, unsullied by words and representations that might be falsified. Well, archaeologists may grub around in the past’s garbage, but they do not discover the past.

There is never any unquestionable witness. Things happen and may deeply affect you. But reality never simply manifests itself in its essence. Accounts and representations, often involving elaborate metaphors, arguments and qualifications, are always needed. And so we need to know when to be sceptical. Nothing has changed about photography, only our assumed innocence.

On trust and digital photography - Sam put it this way - and very effectively -

Yes, but I think this is the central point of all this - that sometimes, a big enough quantitative change in the ease of doing something makes a qualitative impact on some social action. I think you see this pattern over and over. I think it’s very interesting because it’s going to shortly happen with human biology - so working out some of these problems now in easier terrain seems useful.

English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link]

This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long as I can remember - I grew up in this part of the world, and the place just keeps opening up to me in different ways.

The diary tries a little too hard to appeal - it wants to be a combo web version of the cultural task forces of TV’s Time Team, Ground Force and Changing Rooms (the last two very familiar to those who watch BBC America). It doesn’t need to - the story it tells is subtle and wonderfully faceted.

So a team arrived last November (2003) to look at the castle and its setting with the eye of the landscape archaeologist. They brought the usual GPS and other hightech devices, but what clearly matters is a questioning eye. (And this is just the approach taken by the two classic figures of British landscape archaeology - my friends at Lampeter David Austin and Andrew Fleming - I recall wonderful afternoons walking the Welsh uplands with them tracing the ever-so-slight undulations that betrayed an old track, leat, earthwork.)

For some time it has been clear that the great medieval fortresses of feudal Europe are not simply functional military architecture. A trend has been to see them primarily as symbols of power. (More on this in a moment.)

The team at Dunstanburgh asked why the place was built on this remote headland. Spectacular and forbidding yes, but way off any strategic route in this most disputed of lands between England and Scotland. It was built by Thomas of Lancaster and inherited by John of Gaunt, two regal aristocrats in the forteenth century. Then the border was very much threatened, but the place saw little action. So what new did the survey team find? Traces of a landscape of ponds, meres, roads and a harbor that complements the tremendous effect of a superbly crafted gatehouse, curtain wall and watch tower atop a coastal cliff. Dunstanburgh was a showpiece castle. The way a castle should be, reflected in the meres dug round the great rock of a headland on which the fine masonry was laid.

There is even a nice connection with Arthurian romance (beloved of John of Gaunt). It is the legend of Sir Guy the Seeker. Stranded in a storm, he found, with Merlin’s help, a lady spellbound in a crystal casket in a chamber beneath the ruins of Dunstanburgh. But he lost her, because he made the wrong choice between a horn and sword presented to him by a ghost.

“Now shame on the coward who sounded a horn,
When he might have unsheathed a sword.”

And not just the castle - the survey looked at second world war military emplacements, including a top-secret radar station and camp for Italian prisoners of war, a shipwreck from the 1950s (a Polish trawler deliberately wrecked so the men could claim asylum), a bronze age cairn, the famous painting by Turner of another storm and wreck, traces of farming going back millennia.

Double red towers = Earl Thomas’ great gatehouse, built 1313
Single red tower = the beautiful Lilburn Tower
Green line = timber palisade of the outer perimeter
Yellow towers = probable sites of outer gatehouses
Big blue lakes = ornamental ‘meres’, constructed 1313
Small blue rectangles = fishponds, for breeding fish to release into the meres
Blue lines = channels for managing the water supply
Orange dots = settlements probably dating to around 1750
Green dot = the medieval fishtrap and the Polish trawler wrecked in August 1958

This is all so gratifying because the team were open enough to simply attend to what they were finding in a very intellectually honest way (the W.G. Hoskins way of Fleming and Austin). But they also did what I would have loved to have done - find the traces of the meres, of the harbor jetty, then piecing it together with local experience and recent history, and all while staying at the Cottage Inn, the local pub where we have lunch when we are lucky enough to visit this wonderful corner of England. This is Michel Serres’s temporal chiffonage. Time, not linear, from then to now and no way back, but percolating around us.

But I have to admit that there is a good deal of gratification in this survey and diary because I anticipated it in a piece I wrote in my book Experiencing the Past, in 1990.

Back then it was the early days of the phenomenological project in archaeology - foregrounding the experience of place (see my blog comments on the politically dubious neo-romanticism of all this - [Link]) I was more interested in the kind of focus on techniques of the body often associated with Norbert Elias - so I wrote about the way the feudal lord would ride out over a designed landscape, and how such experiences constitute the site of power. I took photos and made drawings to try to capture this, and above all I tried to find a way of writing about it - the book Experiencing the Past.

So the castle is all about landscape - designed spaces. (See Matthew Johnson’s superb book Behind the castle gate.) But this is not to say that it is a symbol of power. That is too passive a view of architecture. These settings are frames within which late feudal England was constantly recreated. Politics is always an aesthetics. And the power of the feudal lord is embedded in the management of people and land, in marking, mapping, looking over, within the gates of the residence, and without.

We (Haun Saussy and Tim Lenoir) have just taken up these themes in our freshman course at Stanford - Bodies in Place [another link to the course]. We read Richard II Shakespeare’s stunningly intelligent treatment of the sovereign’s two bodies. Of course, John of Gaunt is a major character in the drama and embodies the aristocracy’s attachment to property. I lectured on this theme of land and identity, picking up what I had been following when trying to understand this tremendous building that is Dunstanburgh. I also juxtaposed Leni Riefenstahl’s movie of the fascist Nuremberg Rally in 1934 and Martin Parr’s photography - well this is a course that has outraged the Wall Street Journal (and they only let subscribers look at the article)!

Last summer Molly and I explored what was left of the jetty of the old medieval harbor identified by the team. We knew it was something - an alignment of stone and the great castle gate looks right on it … thanks to the English Heritage Team for making sense of it all for us!

Updates links - February 2006

English Heritage survey (Nov 2003) - [Link - 24 hour museum] | [Link to the survey diary]