notes for a seminar and lecture in Thessaloniki, February 2006

Four components of archaeological sensibility

1. this happened here - engagement and relationship
2. at a scene of crime anything could be relevant - signal-noise, figure-ground relationships
3. what becomes of what was - entropy and metamorphosis
4. is this us? - genealogy

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Main points of argument

for the seminar on Chorography:

• landscape is far from being a neutral concept refering to something like human inhabitation of landforms

• landscape is deeply rooted in a performative and ideological mode of engagement with site

• this should be connected with an archaeological sensibility at the heart of modernism/modernity

• many, if not most, archaeological approaches to landscape fail to realise this genealogy of their practices

• a critique of landscape through an heretical empirics of site specific engagement will be presented through a number of projects run by Brith Gof and Metamedia at Stanford

• these substantive critiques are - Tri Bywyd, The three landscapes project, Three Rooms, Sicily - 33 archaeological moments

• this critical practice is summarised in the concepts of chorography and topology

• these concepts and this critical poetics offer heterogeneous engagements with site and deny the primacy of date and coordinate in defining site - they offer engaged praxis that denies the usual separation of theory and practice

for the lecture on Archaeography:

• archaeology has come to be part of a particular modernist sensibility

• this sensibility is to do with certain engagements with site, collection, and metamorphic processes of entropy, decay, ruin

• there is a strong association of this sensibility with photography - archaeology and photography are cognate aspects of modernism/modernity

• we can identify emergent archaeological practices that offer rich engagements with site and place that do not fall into an ideology of "landscape"

• instead they offer vital re-connections of past and present, through engagements with site/place that creatively reflect upon and rework this modernist sensibility

• and a critique of archaeological photography is prompted - concerning framing, narrative, evidence

• these points will be illustrated though the collective photoblog http://archaeography.com

• the purpose being to enrichen our engagement with the (material) past

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Resources

William Wordsworth and J.M.W. Turner - performances that help us see how landscape has been constituted since the eighteenth century

Some notes on landscape and the picturesque as a theatrical genre - the relationship of landscape to theatre, scenography, dramaturgy

Some notes on archaeology's romantic landscape aesthetic - how contemporary (phenomenological) landscape archaeology is deeply informed by this ideology of landscape

The figure in a landscape - Johnes of Hafod and sublime landscapes of improvement in the eighteenth century

Critical romanticism on a visit to the past - an extended critical discussion of some of these themes of romantic landscape, tied to contemporary notions of heritage

The pastoral - a deep genealogical strain running through landscape

Forensics - scene of crime as site of performance and experience - another modernist sensibility at the heart of archaeological experience and the history of the discipline

Performance, place and the past - a class of mine dealing in some of these themes and exploring other critical practices

Modernity's archaeological sensibility - a glossary of the archaeological

Archaeography - an experimental photoblog exploring the deep association of archaeology and photography through the material mediation and metamorphic processes of site and artifact

The three landscapes project - a critique of landscape and a project of deep mapping

Three rooms - an heretical empirics, a topological documentation of three sites

Deep mapping - a term coined by Shanks, Pearson and McLucas to refer to the documentation of site, engagement with place that denies the primacy of date and spatial coordinates - temporal topography

Sicily - 33 archaeological moments - a temporal topography/deep map

a map on a wall - a deep map of California's San Andreas fault, constructed as part of The three landscapes project

a book in a room - a different kind of mode of engagement with place/site

Performance as the core of scientific knowledge of place - some notes on how fieldwork is about particular performative relationships with site - close connections here with the science studies of the likes of Bruno Latour (see his "Pandora's box")

Tri Bywyd - a work of site specific theater - think "place-event"

brainstorming site - overview - some notes on alternatives to landscape as the determining concept for archaeological approaches to site - part of a class exploring the collaborative "site report"

Heretical empirics - notes on new strategies of data management, empirical method and historiography