En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho logos

“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” John 1:1

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

“He picked up a raven rattle, brought it over to me and asked, ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, and went back to my typewriter. He then asked, ‘But how do you read it?’ Impatiently I said, ‘Shit, Wilson, I don’t read those things, I shake them.’”

Gloria Cranmer Webster to Wilson Duff, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, early 1970s

(Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth Philips. In press [2005]. Sensible objects: museums, colonialism and the senses. Oxford: Berg)

Words - felt, heard, seen and spoken - are powerful mediums for understanding past, present and future. Post-structural hermeneutic archaeological thinking has cast material culture `as text’. But this casting weakens the connections between materiality, our sensory apprehension of materiality, and over determines materiality - meaning linkage. More fundamentally, `material culture as text’ suggests that what other people did, in other places, and at other times is knowable via the present. I analyse this logo-centricity by comparing rock art - a visual and theoretically informed artefact - with `graffiti’ - a consummate embodiment of material culture as text. The powerful but partial perspectives of archaeology – a discipline that uses surveillance techniques like isometric mapping and infiltrative, participant observation – become apparent when applied also to ourselves and the material cultures we produce and represent. Similarly, a `box of tricks’ comprising simple sensory exercises would materially confirm vision as culturally and neurologically-bound. For example, polarised light masks or reveals stratigraphy, while visual hallucinations as encountered in Southern African San and other rock arts only marginally involve optic nerves and co-occur with other somatic sensations to make for radically different ways of `seeing’. Connecting these past sensory percepts with the present - where people are variably skilled at aurally, haptically, kinetically, olfactorally, orally and visually understanding different scales of `the past’ - are physical contexts. These contexts include centralised and site museums, galleries and neighbourhoods. I argue for multi-sensorially animating these places with embedded artefacts and their biographies to foster a less hierarchical envisioning origins and subsequent beings-in-the-world. Archaeology has the material and competence to `see’ beyond mc @ txt by producing metaphors and perceptual strategies that engage with temporal and material flow.

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