Draft for Seeing the Past Conference--Do not cite without the author's permission

Christopher Witmore

Introduction

In the articulation of knowledge concerned with the material past archaeology has to show things. It is not enough to talk about the material world (Olsen forthcoming; Witmore 2004). In the transformation and mobilization of archaeological materials, whether they be a series of 19th century agricultural terraces in Kea, a iron age barrow in the Teleorman Valley of Romania, or a bedroom floor from a freshly abandoned council house in the UK, text, map, plan, diagram, illustration, and photograph work in combination. To be sure, it is the exchange between these diverse yet juxtaposed media that transforms something of the complexity of material presence (Witmore 2004). Mobile and immutable archaeological media translate aspects of the corporeality, specificity, multiplicity, etc. of archaeological materials into compatible and standardized modes of documentation (Latour 1999; Witmore 2004).

While our media are overwhelmingly rooted in forms of visualization it would be of little profit to enter into the further critique of their ocular centrism (however refer to: Jay 1988 and 1993). To do so would be to miss the subtly of their (very) action. The basis of archaeological documentation, indeed, the very basis for the so-called “scientific revolution,” rests upon a fundamental shift in visual perspective and the ability to maintain optical consistency through media: it was a revolution “of the sight” (Latour 1986, 7; emphasis in original). My purpose in this paper is to raise a series of questions in relation to the articulation of other sensorial qualities of the archaeological—specifically I attend to the example of sound. Indeed, while the aural is a fundamental quality of material presence, archaeology has taken little if any interest in the issue of sound. Why?

The approach to addressing this question is more complex and convoluted that any single article can hope to navigate. Admittedly, my treatment of it here is executed all too hastily and clumsily. Reservations aside, in what follows I argue that this acoustic oversight on the part of the ‘discipline of things’ (Olsen 2003) is partly tied to its instruments and media. Moreover, while it is important for archaeology to deal with other sensorial qualities of material presence, this rationale alone does not go far enough towards presenting a sound justification for what we can actually gain from attending to the aural. I contend that the problem of understanding the potential for listening in archaeology also lies in a thoroughly modernist temporality, one that the discipline continues to embrace (Olivier 2004). In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities and events quite distant in linear time are proximate through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation (which I argue contrary to Thomas (2004) to be fundamentally archaeological) I suggest we might learn what we can know from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. But this will require a reconsideration of how our instruments and media affect sensation. It will require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time.

The necessary ocular centrism of archaeological media

Contemporary archaeological practice relies heavily upon linear visual perspective (Piggott 1965; Shanks 1997; also refer to Ivins 1973). “In a linear perspective, no matter from what distance and angle an object is seen, it is always possible to transfer it—to translate it—and to obtain the same object at a different size as seen from another perspective” (Latour 1986, 7). Linear perspective combined with the ability to maintain a high level of optical consistency and standardization in map and plan allows us to present and mobilize the foundations of a Bronze Age structure from Crete, or the stratigraphic profile of a neolithic causewayed enclosure and thereby transport such sites anywhere while maintaining something of their reality on a two-dimensional surface. Of course, theodolites, tapes, pencils, rulers, paper, graven images and the printing press have a stake in this too (Witmore 2004). If we were to take away the ability to translate things without corruption there would be no archaeology, no science.

It was this capacity to mobilize landscape and things through a unique visual language based upon standardized and repeatable practice that intimately connects archaeological practice today to changes in military skills, knowledge, and instruments that were occurring in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Witmore 2004). For example, in the case of Greece one of the first scholars to utilize two-dimensional plans and maps in combination with text was the military geographer and Classical topographer William Martin Leake (1777-1860). Leake’s ability to mobilize ancient sites within the Greek landscape rested upon his links with military institutions and infrastructures, and a collective of survey instruments, media and ancient texts. This unique network in combination with the optical consistency that was maintained in the translation of an ancient site through a two-dimensional plan or map rather than a picturesque view insures the process of verifiable and repeatable practice. Once a standardized baseline for documenting archaeological sites was set, future topographers and archaeologists could continue to build upon Leake’s work through further innovation (e.g. the introduction of the actual photographic print in Alexander Conze’s 1875 and 1880 publication volumes from the excavations of Samothrace (Conze, Hauser and Niemann 1875 and Conze, Hauser and Benndorf 1880) or Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s celebrated section through the strong-room of the Roman fort at Segontium in North Wales (Lucas 2001, 37; Piggot 1965, 175; Wheeler 1958, 60)) and refinement (Witmore 2004).

So archaeology needs to accumulate and circulate things and places distant in time and space. Moreover, this visual perspective facilitates a new way of dealing with space because things once transformed without corruption can be moved, combined and refined (Latour 1986). Knowing what to observe and thereby translate is made all the more straightforward with aid of new instruments and the associated media, and knowledge. Standardized means provide the confidence we need in order to mobilize something so complex and multifaceted as the material world (Witmore 2004). Whether archaeologists are approaching a Bronze Age settlement in Crete or the monumental structures of Teotihuacán, Mexico we employ similar practices with the aid of similar instruments to produce similar ends. But our media are both the means and the end (Witmore and Shanks 2004). Without the aid of our visual media we would not see anything. Yet we cannot close ourselves off from the other properties of the material world either and be satisfied with continually refining ways of transforming space through new remediated visual forms such as GIS or VR (refer to Webmoor 2005).

As the ‘discipline of things’ archaeology should not and cannot be exclusively beholden to their visualization. To be sure, we have text and text allows us to accomplish a great deal in addressing the complexity of things (Joyce et al. 2002; Shanks 2004). Nonetheless, in dealing with the material world text alone only takes us so far (Latour 1986; Olsen forthcoming). While our visual and textual media allow us to pull together materials and places distant in time and space they also transform and reduce the world in which we are immersed and with which we are entangled. They are implicated within a whole process of mobilization—from field walking or exposing a pit, to plotting, note taking and drawing sections, to analysis of organic traces, to the final stages of synthesis and articulation (Witmore 2004). There is more to the material complexity of, for example, a series of terraces on the side of a mountain in on the Greek island of Kea than can be transformed through the highly refined combination of text, map, plan or photograph upon which archaeology relies. What of the other qualities of corporeal experience? What about the rich sensorial textures of the world that resist inscription—the ineffable qualities of material presence left behind?

A modernist sensibility and temporality—passing sounds

Indeed, of all the sensory properties of the material world we can, thanks to many innovations (tied to, among other things, many visual schematics), easily, reliably and relatively inexpensively mobilize sound. And yet we don’t—well, at least the overwhelming majority of archaeologists do not. This is all the more interesting given there now exists a basis of measurement and standards—a metrology—for attending to the acoustic qualities of place (refer to Watson and Keating 1999).

In archaeological practice (with the help of the brigades of visual media, instruments, and our knowledge of the visual perspective) sound is often relegated to the chaotic background agitation of the material world. The background noise, too chaotic, too confusing, too multiple, too messy is temporally situated. Whether the tick of the clock, sound of the bell, the steady rhythm of Stiletto heels across the pavement of the Via Sacra running through the Roman forum or a bee passing one’s head or a clash of thunder, sound is momentary and fleeting.

Philosophy, to be sure, has a long history of separating the visual and the aural (cf. Crary 1988; Ingold 2000; 243-287; Jay 1988; Levin 1993; Welsch 1997). Indeed, it is trivial to note the association of vision to the spatial and hearing to the temporal within the “Western” tradition. As Wolfgang Welsch remarks:

"The mode of being of the visible and audible is fundamentally different. The visible persists in time, the audible, however vanishes in time. Vision is concerned with the constant, enduring being, audition, on the other hand, with the fleeting, the transient, the event-like" (1997, 157).

Our archaeological tradition is attune to the more enduring traces of the past and not as a rule to those qualities which are considered to have long since disappeared. We can see the traces of a potential feasting event from Iron Age Sicily, but, of course, why should we have any concern with the noise, which dissipated over two and a half millennia ago?

As I discussed in the previous section archaeology has to mobilize the spatial, but why should we have any concern with the more transient and fleeting aspects of the material world that are considered to be no longer with us? Why sound? Indeed, what is at stake here is not simply an issue of learning to hear. It is an issue of learning what we can know from learning to hear.

Auditory archaeology? or the belles noiseuses

In recent years a burgeoning interest has immerged in the field of acoustics in archaeology. The majority of this research deals with the sounds created by things such as musical instruments or hammer stones in producing rock engravings, and the acoustic properties of place ranging from early modern London to megalithic monuments and caves to different areas of landscape (Lund 1981; Mills 2001 and forthcoming; Ouzman 2001; Reznikoff and Dayton 1989; Smith 1999; Watson and Keating 1999). While many of the research agendas are connected to a critical awareness of the dominance of vision in most archaeological practice, the rational for this research often comes down to a practical need to address the acoustic traces of the material past that would have been implicated in peoples’ lives.

Some of this research attempts to address the sounds of daily life in the past. In the context of landscape, for example, Steve Mills (2001; forthcoming) has begun to develop what he calls auditory archaeology on the basis of research in the Teleorman River Valley of southern Romania. In his doctoral dissertation, “The Significance of Sound in the Fifth Millennium cal. BC Southern Romania: Auditory Archaeology in the Teleorman River Valley,” Mills identified auditory character areas, such as woodland, river bottoms, grasslands, etc. (2001). The sounds generated in these areas were treated as properties of the corporeal environments of people’s everyday lives. Mills argued that sound was an integral component in generating social relationships in the past.

Such studies challenge archaeologists take sound seriously. In this regard we may consider, along with what can and cannot be seen from particular places in a site or landscape, what can and cannot be heard from the same locales. Considerations of the acoustic qualities of various locales in the ancient Athenian Agora, for example, might be regarded as of immediate relevance for understanding site-specific issues of performance in Ancient Greece (speech, oral poetics, drama). But such issues are not so easily addressed. The architectural fabric of the agora has transformed substantially. Sounds heard today would give us no indication whatsoever of how sounds reverberated off various structures. The continuous and relentless background noises of life in the city of Athens —the lorries, buses, cars, mopeds, and foot traffic—have replaced others. Even at sites such as the Ancient Greek theater of Epidauros or the monumental city of Teotihuacán in Mexico the materialities have been transformed in ways that are difficult to completely account for. How can we be certain we can ever ear the same sounds as the ones that were implicated in past lives?

To be sure, noise connects us to deeper textures of the material world and qualities of corporeal experience. To hear noise is to hear things (Heidegger 1971, 26; Ingold 2000, 244-250). Indeed some background noise is resistant to the flow of time. Sea noise “never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging” (Serres 1995, 13). Proteus’ (the sea god who stands at the beginning) ever-present murmur outlasts that of even the most seemingly permanent landforms (Serres 1995, 14). There is also the ceaseless chatter of the wind in the trees, the fall of rain upon the pavement of the Via Sacra in Rome, the agitation of the cicada in the olive groves of the Mediterranean; all are transient and yet recurrent. These are philosopher Michel Serres’ belles noiseuses (Serres 1995). These background noises are the first to be filtered out in archaeological practice and yet they are fundamental, not simply to our experiences of place, they are fundamental to our very being (Serres 1995, 15; also Witmore 2004(in press)).

The belles noiseuses of The Harvesters

In discussing the issue of belles noiseuses and time, I would briefly like to revisit Tim Ingold’s well-known discussion of the temporality of landscape through Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1993). Painted in 1565 The Harvesters portrays field hands reaping corn in the countryside in the month of August. For Ingold, the painting “vividly captures a sense of the temporality of landscape” (1993, 164). In this regard, Ingold invites the reader to imagine himself or herself as a spectator within the scene depicted in The Harvesters. He focuses on six aspects of the landscape scene that unfolds before the reader’s eyes, “the hills and valley, the paths and tracks, the tree, the corn, the church, and the people” (1993, 166). Each of these elements has a different temporal rhythm; each has a different pace within the flow of time.

The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Aware that in dealing with a landscape scene one is accustomed to looking, Ingold reminds the reader to listen as well. However, in following Ingold’s discussion of the temporal diversity of landscape we as readers only begin to listen, ever so briefly, when we arrive at the final element of the scene, which attends to the activities of the people. Instead of simply looking around then listening while we revisit The Harvesters, let us look and listen.

Following Ingold we are to imagine ourselves a little off to the right of the group gathered underneath the tree. Taking a break from a morning of hard work people eat, drink, a woman cuts a loaf of bread. The murmur of conversation is broken by roaring and hearty laughter. A light wind rustles the leaves of the tree. The temporal presence of the tree, Ingold reminds us, extends over several human generations. Providing shade for grandparents, parents, siblings, and future off spring for years to come its presence resonates to a different timescale. We have to move closer in order to better hear.

Over our left shoulder some birds take flight scared up by people carrying bundles of corn on the path. As we walk to the left, we tune into the crackling of the dry stalks, as they are stacked into orderly piles to be bound into sheaves. The scythe slices easily through the dry corn with an even ring. A soft breeze plays upon the field of corn whose timescale matches the rhythm of the changing seasons. The chatter of the dry stalks has grown raspier in the late days of summer. The farther man’s scythe must be dull for he has to take several swings to cut through the handful of stalks. To our right the snoring man pauses as he rolls in a midday slumber.

More laughter amid the clang of spoons on wooden bowls. We hear a bundle of corn react to the shifting weight of a woman who sits upon it. We move toward the path ahead. As we proceed the pile of stalks beneath our feet objects with a crunching, cracking noise. The men with the scythes do not note out presence, but we take care to step between the piles anyway.

A bell tolls in the church to our right. The church like the tree spans a number of human generations, but must be “sustained within the current of human activity” (Ingold 1993, 169). A few seconds later the clangs of its bell are joined by a faint series of rings in the direction of the distant village by the sea. More wind upon the stalks of corn as we pass by the heavily breathing field hand carrying jugs of sloshing water. A few hundred meters down the path, a donkey bellows in the distance. Then another, to be challenged by the bark of a dog somewhere in the vicinity of the thatched roof cottages in the distance.

A few hundred meters more and we reach the edge of the fields. Just in time to witness the last of the sheaves of grain stacked upon a waiting cart. An old mare wheels it away at the insistence of a small boy. The squeal of axles in need of grease falls in with the steady thud of the mare’s hooves upon the dry and compacted path. More wind. This time we note the trees marking the edge of the field.

Soon all the background noise fades and we are left with the sound of our feet as they meet the dirt path. These paths and tracks comprise a network of the sedimented activities “of an entire communities, over many generations” (Ingold 1993, 167). A great distance remains over seemingly permanent, but ever changing, hills before we will be able to detect the continuous noise of our destination; the noise, whose temporal range is greater than any other feature of the Bruegel’s landscape pace Ingold, of the sea.

The Harvesters provides a case study for recognizing diverse elements of landscape as having different temporal rhythms. Time passes, but Ingold reminds us that it does so on various temporal scales. For Ingold, this temporality is what forms the subject matter of archaeological inquiry. What of the noise?

In this brief imaginary foray into countryside of Bruegel’s painting with the aid of text, we have encountered the potential belles noiseuses of humans and things. Add force to things and we gain sound. These sounds, these belles noiseuses, are temporally situated and yet many of these sounds are potentially recurrent so long as we recombine the same things. Like the hills and the valleys and the trees some noise persists. But alias this example can’t take us very far except into the realm of the imagination because we are left only with the reality of oil on wood. The sixteenth century countryside of The Harvesters was mobilized with the aid of paint, palette, brush and so on. Bruegel, the master painter, did not mobilize the noise.

Our ability to manifest aspects of the multiplicity of the material world depends on our instruments and media (Witmore 2004). I could have as easily chosen a richly evocative poem or a musical composition that related the sound of a storm. But such transformations filter out the noise of things and other companion species (Haraway 2003a and 2003b). I suggest that sound is not solely temporal so long as the things remain. Moreover, sound isn’t simply like the material; it constitutes a form of material action. Yet the chatter of things is often all too easily overlooked.

Belles noiseuses—the chatter of things (and other companion species)

Let us take as an example, the discussion of maps, wayfinding and navigation in Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment (2000). Ingold contrasts two different modes of moving about a particular place; navigation and wayfinding. Navigation, for Ingold, is a mode of movement, which involves the intermediary of the map. With the additional means of a topographical map, in moving from one location to another a person situates themselves on the ground through a comparison to a “location in space, as defined by particular map coordinates” (Ingold 2000, 237). This activity is divorced from any historical narrative of a place that might have arisen through one’s dwelling over time. In navigation there are basically places and non-places. With navigation, Ingold states, “it is possible to specify where one is – one’s current location – without regard to where one has been, or where one is going” (Ingold 2000, 237). Like connecting the dots, navigation allows a person to move from place to place, translated as grid coordinate to grid coordinate with the aid of a flat projection of the region.

Wayfinding, in contrast, “depends on the attunement of the traveller’s movements in response to the movements, in his or her surroundings of other people, animals, the wind, celestial bodies, and so on” (Ingold 2000, 242). This ambulatory knowing, for Ingold, cannot be accommodated by a conventional dichotomy between mapmaking (cartography) and map-using (navigation). This is because the wayfinder’s understanding of the location of place unfolds overtime through experience. The wayfinder situates a location in relation to memories of previous journeys and engagement. “Every place holds with it memories of previous arrivals and departures, as well as expectations of how one may reach it, or reach other places from it” (Ingold 2000, 237). The wayfinder’s necessary sensory immersion in the material world brings about a richer and more varied understanding of a region.

For the wayfinder, we might say that sound is part of the action of things. Sound takes over outside our visual field. As we walk below a sheer cliff face we can hear the approaching rock fall over our right shoulder and turn to bring it within our visual field. While hearing aids in our movement through environments it also connects us to the action of other entities while we move through a given environment. Examples might include the sound of rushing water in the stream at the bottom of the valley, the gust and feel of the wind indicating a coming storm, not to mention the sounds of our companion species, seagulls, bleating goats (or indeed, bells placed around their necks) and so on. We may even follow their paths through an otherwise impenetrable stand of trees or down an excessively steep slope.

My description of Ingold’s distinction between navigation and wayfinding may come across as overly rigid given the complexity of human movement on the ground nevertheless it is useful for emphasizing the action of our instruments and media. In each example we are dealing with different collectives of people and things. The cartographer, along with theodolites, tapes, chronometers, and so on has delegated allot of time consuming work finding one’s way to a two-dimensional, combinable and standardized transformation of the surrounding landscape that is now part of the collective that makes up a navigator. The medium of the map facilitates a different mode of engagement with place (cf. Webmoor 2005(in press)). Without the map human beings tune into other qualities of the material world. Without the map we have to be more aware of the belles noiseuses. With the aid of this flat projection these are simply background noises. Indeed, we may recall in the discussion of archaeological media from earlier in this paper that without our media we would not see anything. This is because we have delegated so much of the time and energy consuming sensory immersion necessary to get about to a thing to a thing. The navigator can now roam freely about the world, but through the map we see and only see.

In both examples things have a stake. But we cannot forget what it is like to be immersed in the world without the aid of immutable mobiles such as the map or scopic instruments such as the theodolite. Without these media and their associated instruments sounds become more important as qualities of corporeal experience and how people get on in the world. To argue for their consideration this is not to say that all that passes is to be preserved. As a quality of the material world yes, of course, sound is fundamental but this is not all. We can do even more.

Folded time, chiasmus, percolation

Modernist thought asserts a radical gap between past and present. Time is cleaved apart at revolutions. We are separated from our pre-modern predecessors by “Copernican revolutions, epistemological breaks, epistemic ruptures so radical that nothing of the past survives in them – nothing of that past ought to survive in them” (Latour 1993, 68). The unambiguous arrow of time points in one direction only. However, the notion of linear flow as Michel Serres reminds us is not time itself but a particular temporality. Time is much more complex. Time is much more chaotic.

Let us return to the issue of medium and consider the example of an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of flat paper with a timeline representing the history of the Argolid, Greece. The Neolithic spans over 3 millennia from approximately 6850 to 3600 BC, the “Bronze” age fills in the years between 3600 and 1000 BC, the early “Iron” age stretches up to the Archaic period at 700 BC, the Classical begins at 480 BC and so on. History sorts out the chaos of time through imposing linearity. The timeline is the modernists' image of time par excellence. The present, locus of the modern, is always poised upon the end, beyond everything that has come before. As good moderns, archaeologists have been in service to this image of time from the inception of the discipline. After all how else could it be?

The measurement of time should not be mistaken for time. I now have a tightly crumpled ball of paper in my hand. No longer planar, the 8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet inscription is now folded, twisted and turned into itself. Points in time once separated by great distances now touch one another. Likewise things, which are proximate in linear time, actually may be quite distant (all one need do is tear the line at certain points). This folded, nonlinear, temporal net is representative of archaeological time. Archaeological time is the entanglement, intermingling, the chiasmus of pasts and presents. Why must we work out the creases and folds?

Time here is related as the solid, the material, as the folded and crumpled inscription—an immutable mobile that visualizes time as a linear and laminar sequence of events, much like a clip from a film reel made up of a number of frames (Olivier 2003). But this exercise is only a small step toward understanding something of the chaos and turbulence of time. If we follow Bergson and Serres by increasing the heat and adding disorder to the order, time is better understood as fluid (Serres 1995, 108). But like the hottest of liquids, time doesn’t simply pass it percolates (refer to Serres 1995; Serres and Latour 1995). In its continual outpouring time, for Serres, passes and it turns back upon itself. The flow of time is full of eddies, counter currents and whirlpools (Serres and Latour 1995, 58-59). At times turbulent and at times calm, time is a mixture of order and chaos. It is as the weather. Le temps in French. O kairos in Greek. Weather and time are of the same word (Serres and Latour 1995, 60). In English we can do no better than the tempest in its proximity to temporality. In time’s percolation material traces of the past are still with us. The past that is possible is here. The past that is possible is now. Entangled within our daily activities, this past has action. This past may still even be heard.

Laurent Olivier has recently argued against a laminar form of historicism where periods of time are bounded between frames—chopped up into homogeneous sequences (2003, 208; also refer to Bergson 1998; De Landa 2000). For Olivier, “time is emptied of its substance, of its possibility to act, by this quaintly old-fashioned perception of the past, which sees history as the succession of scenes of contexts” (2003, 208). In contrast, Olivier highlights the entanglement of the past and present through memory as manifest in the material past, as materialized through various media. The present is always an aggregate mix of multiple times which are not necessarily linear in association. The line of the Roman decumanus still directs the flow of peoples lives today in the layout of a boulevard in Paris. Olivier reminds us that its past has not passed but still has action today. The fabric of the Roman road and the contemporary infrastructure of Paris are proximate.

This form of folded, chiasmic and entangled past is profoundly archaeological. Archaeologists regularly make distant time proximate irrespective of what came in between. In leaping temporal distances we transform the material presence of the past, which is intermittent, random and messy into immutable, mobile, legible, fungible, verifiable inscriptions (Witmore 2004; pace Latour 1999). The sounds, which are filtered out in this process, have the potential to trigger memories, connections and associations (Olivier 2003; Serematakis 1994).

What may still be heard from the countryside of The Harvesters? Landscape, is not solely comprised of various passing timescales (Ingold 1993). Landscape is multitemporal. Its reality is not the result of passing time but of its percolation. The old bell could still ring. The noise of the wind could still play upon the corn. But, of course, the old church could be in ruin. The bell could have been removed. The genetic makeup of the corn could have changed or the fields could be no more. Indeed, noise can return and reestablish itself within Bruegel’s landscape. The old bell could be rehung. The fields could be resown with a similar strain of corn. A cart could be remobilized in a festival for harvest. Thatch roofs could be rebuilt upon the old cottages. The tempest of landscape “is multitemporal, simultaneously drawing from the obsolete, the contemporary and the futuristic” (Serres and Latour 1995, 60).

The chatter of things is the belles noiseuse of the past. Noise is temporary and yet it is recurrent. Here we may highlight the importance of the “re” in recurrent. While the past percolates through its material traces and memory it can also do so through the liveness of performance and physical re-enactment (Pearson and Shanks 2001). Such events throw up legitimate linkage and connections to the past. Indeed this is what we do in excavation or survey when we transform the material past. This mobilization requires a rich diversity of modes. Our awareness of the acoustic action of things mush be matched by our recognition of the action of our media and instruments in these transformations. In returning to the issue of seeing and earring the past we have to be symmetrical (refer to Symmetrical Archaeology).

Relearning to both see and hear—mediation

The common association of the modern and vision has brought about a counter monopoly of the ear among some “postmodern” thinkers (pace Erlmann 2004, 4; as exemplified by Levin 1993, 3-4; also refer to Jay 1993). In Undoing Aesthetics, Welsch in amplifying the weight of western philosophy against the centrality of the visual in modern culture argues that we are currently undergoing an auditive turn. For Welsh, embracing this auditive turn is a necessary step toward righting the wrongs that arose under the ocular tyranny of the West. Why?

"Both hearing and vision are long-range senses, but vision is the sense which actually forms distance. Vision sets things at a distance and holds them fixed in their place. It is the objectivizing sense through and through, In vision the world congeals into objects. Every glance has something of the look of Medusa: it causes objects to solidify, petrifies them. – It is completely different with hearing, which does not reduce the world to distance, but rather accommodates it. Whereas vision is a distancing sense, hearing is one of alliance" (Welsch 1997, 158).

As a distancing and objectifying sense, vision is seen as at the heart the exploitative and dominating tendencies of the West. Hearing on the other hand brings in the world. It connects people. The turn to the ear counters the tyranny of ocular centrism.

To situate vision and sound in this way creates a problematic binary and seeks to create an equivalency through a shift in the balance of power between two qualities of the material world which were not at odds the first place. Welsch’s turn to the aural is a symptom of a deeper underlying illness that any supposed ocular centrism. This is not an issue of human-consciousness, rather it is an issue of human | nonhuman collectives (cf. Latour 1999). Welsch ignores the rich acoustic history of modernism separated off through the media and instrumentalities of the telephone, gramophone, and radio. Such denial of the action of things contributes to further asymmetry.

Returning to the issue of auditory archaeology Steve Mills maintains that we need to think in multi-sensory terms. I agree. Still this cannot occur so long as we continue to hear and only hear, see and only see.

Since the early 17th century as Foucault reminded us in The Order of Things, the eye “was destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear” (1994, 43). The revolution of sight cleaved apart the ears. The geographer, the surveyor, approaches the coastline not as a lone human, but as a collective of optical instruments and visual media. All together he mobilizes the coastline, but the transformation is solely a visual one. The transformative process behind the flat projection leaves sound behind, indeed it never even listened to it. Auditory archaeologists, in contrast, approach monuments with a brigade of sonic instruments, whether a simple mini disc recorder with omni-directional microphone or a DAT recorder with binaural recording. All together they record what they hear only later to reduce this rich archive of noise and transform their findings into visual media because this is the basis of dissemination (Slide…) (e.g. Watson and Keating 1999). “We are chained to scenographies” (Serres 1995, 19) so long as we are solely beholden to our most necessary paper work.

Digital technologies have placed the possibility of doing more at our fingertips. But the solution is not so simple as learning how to use such sonic instruments and mobilize sound with the aid of acoustic software. We first have to recognize how the action of our media and instrumentalities in producing particular forms of knowledge based upon standardized and repeatable practices directs our senses. Standard visualization practices are cleaved from those of standard sonic transformation. We may recall that the scientific revolution was one of the sight (Latour 1986; also refer to Crary 1988). Thus we face an issue of not only learning how to hear, but of relearning how to see and hear at the same time.

New media facilitates the possibility of reintegrating the eye and hear. Mixed media templates and collaborative software allow for the integration traditional modes of documentation such as text, map, diagram, photograph with video or audio footage (Witmore and Adler 2004). This recombination of sound with various media maintains something of the complexity of the material world (Witmore 2004(in press)). Such reintegration can now be accomplished through modes of articulation and engagement that accelerate displacement without the reductive transformation that occurs with traditional modes of documentation (Witmore and Shanks 2004).

These modes of articulation and engagement can take the form of what Pearson and Shanks call “deep maps” after author William Least Heat-Moon. Deep maps are rich collations and juxtapositions of the past and “the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the factual and the fictional, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might want to say about a place” (Pearson and Shanks 2001, 64-65).

These modes can be forms of “located media” designed to site-specifically overlay presentation and live experience such as situated or peripatetic video (Witmore 2004(in press); Witmore and Shanks 2004). Located media are designed for a particular location or context such as an excavation trench or in relation to a archaeological feature such as a megalithic tomb (situated) or in the course of prescribed movement through a locale (peripatetic). These modes need not so much mobilize noise as draw attention to it.

These modes can be “pervasive” or “ubiquitous media” where intermediaries such as a chip, digital tag, or code can be placed upon any thing in any environment and through the interface of a Palm Pilot or cell phone provide text-messages, images, sounds, or indeed video clips (e.g. http://www.YellowArrow.org).

These modes of articulation and engagement can be the social software forums this paper is currently mobilized on for this conference. With social software or wiki databases all these modes can be brought together via hypertext in an open, immediately accessible, continually expanding, and collaborative forum.

Within the series of transformations that makes up the archaeological process we reduce too much. Sound is a quality of things, it is an aspect of the material past, and it is fundamental to our experiences and understandings of the world. In reconsidering the action of our instruments and media we understand that it should not be severed from other modes of articulation and documentation. Sound, vision, all five senses are entangled with our being. As our being is entangled with the things of world we must seek to manifest something of this richness and complexity in order to achieve a more symmetrical understanding of the past/present world with which we live.

Conclusions

Interest in action of our instruments and media, combined with a different notion of time, combined with the ability to mobilize noise through lesser steps and with greater ease might altogether warrant a re-consideration of noise. But this should not be sound for the sake of sound. Rather the complex entanglement of past and present, materials and ideas, sights and sounds, that is the material world requires modes of engagement and articulation that can maintain something of the complexity, multidimensionality and multitemporality of the material world. Through symmetrical forms of mediation we attend to an imbalance, which forms as we sieve out the belles noiseuses, the chaos and turbulence of the material world and only bring forth meaning and order. This denies reality. This severs us from the matter we claim to know best, things, the material past. The commotion of this material past is not merely to be seen. It is not only to be heard. The commotion, the tempest, the belles noiseuses of the material past percolate in step with our very being.

References

Bergson, H., 1998: Creative evolution, New York, Dover.

Bolter, D.J., and R. Grusin, 1999: Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Conze, A., Hauser, A. and Niemann, G. 1875. Archäologische Untersuchungen auf Samothrake. Wien: Druck und Verlag von Carl Gerold’s Sohn.

Conze, A., Hauser, A., and Benndorf, O. 1880. Neue Untersuchungen auf Samothrake. Wien: Druck und Verlag von Carl Gerold’s Sohn.

Crary, J., 1993: Modernizing vision, in Vision and visuality, H. Foster (ed.), Seatle: Bay Press, 29-44.

De Landa, M., 2000: A thousand years of nonlinear history, New York: Swerve.

Erlmann, V. 2004: But what of the ethnographic ear? Anthropology, sound and the senses, in Hearing cultures: Essays on sound, listening and modernity, V. Erlmann (ed.), Oxford: Berg, 1-20.

Foucault, M., 1994: The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences, New York: Vintage.

Haraway, D., 2003a: The companion species manifesto; Dogs, people, and significant otherness, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway, D., 2003b: Cyborgs to companion species: Reconfiguring kinship in technoscience, in Chasing technoscience: Matrix for materiality, D. Idhe and E. Selinger (eds), Bloomington: IUP, 58-82.

Heidegger, M., 1971: Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter (trans.) New York: Harper & Row Publishers.

Ingold, T. 1993: The temporality of landscape, World archaeology 25(2), 152-174.

Ingold, T., 2000: The perception of the environment: Essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill, London: Routledge.

Ivins, W.M., 1973: On the rationalization of sight, New York: Plenem Press.

Jay, M., 1988: Scopic regimes of modernity, in Vision and visuality, H. Foster (ed.), Seatle: Bay Press, 3-28.

Jay, M., 1993: Downcast eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: UCP.

Joyce, R.A., with R.W. Preucel and J. Lopiparo, 2002: The languages of archaeology: Dialogue, narrative and writing, Oxford: Blackwell.

Latour, B., 1986: Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands, in H. Kuklick, and Long, E. (eds), Knowledge and society. Studies in the sociology of culture past and present, 6, 1-40.

Latour, B., 1993: We have never been modern, C. Porter (trans.), Cambridge.

Latour, B., 1999: Pandora’s hope. Essays on the reality of science studies, Cambridge.

Levin, D.M., 1993: Introduction, in Modernity and the hegemony of vision, D.M. Levin (ed.), Berkeley: UCP, 1-29.

Lucas, G., 2001: Critical approaches to fieldwork. Contemporary and historical archaeological practice, London: Routledge.

Lund, C., 1981: The archaeomusicology of Scandinavia, World Archaeology 12, 246-265.

Mills, S., 2001: The Significance of Sound in the Fifth Millennium cal. BC Southern Romania: Auditory Archaeology in the Teleorman River Valley. Ph.D. dissertation, Archaeology, University of Wales, Cardiff.

Mills, S., Forthcoming: Sensing the place: Sounds and landscape perception.

Olivier, L., 2003: The past of the present. Archaeological memory and time, Archaeological Dialogues 10(2), 204-213.

Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(2), 87-104.

Olsen, B., (forthcoming) Scenes from a troubled engagement: Post-structuralism and material culture studies, in C. Tilley (ed.) …

Ouzman, S., 2001: Seeing is deceiving: Rock art and the non-visual, World archaeology 33(2), 237-256.

Pearson, M. and M. Shanks, 2001: 'Theatre/archaeology, London.

Piggott, S., 1965: Archaeological draughtsmanship: Principles and practice. Part I: principles and retrospect, Antiquity 39, 165-178.

Reznikoff, I., and M. Dauvois, 1988: La dimension sonore des grottes ornées, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française 85, 238-246.

Serres, M., 1995: Genesis, G. James and J. Nielson (trans.), Ann Arbor. UMP.

Serres M., and B. Latour, 1995: Conversations on science, culture, and time, R. Lapidus (trans.), Ann Arbor. UMP.

Shanks, M. 1997: Photography and archaeology, in B.L. Molyneaux (ed.), The cultural life of images. Visual representation in archaeology, London, 73-107.

Shanks, M., 2004: Three rooms: Archaeology and performance, Journal of Social Archaeology 4(2), 147-180.

Smith, B.R., 1999: The acoustic world of early modern England: Attending to the o-factor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Thomas, J., 2004: Archaeology and modernity, London: Routledge.

Watson, A., and D. Keating, 1999: Architecture and sound: An acoustic analysis of megalithic monuments in prehistoric Britain, Antiquity 73, 325-336.

Webmoor, T., 2005(in press): Mediational techniques and conceptual frameworks. A model in mapwork at Teotihuacan, Mexico, Journal of Social Archaeology.

Welsch, W., 1997: Undoing aesthetics, London; Sage.

Wheeler, R.E.M., 1958: Still Digging, London: Pan Books.

Witmore, C.L., 2004(in press): Four archaeological engagements with place. Mediating bodily experience through peripatetic video, Visual Anthropology Review.

Witmore, C.L., 2004: On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: Two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece, Archaeological Dialogues, 11(2), 133-164.

Witmore, C.L. and J. Adler, 2004: New media transect: A peripatetic engagement with the past, Stanford, MetaMedia, http://metamedia.stanford.edu/argolid/

Witmore, C.L. and M. Shanks, 2004: Media | Archaeology and the post-interpretive turn: To the life of things, paper presented at the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference, University of Glasgow, Scotland.

Return to Conference Participants

Return to Seeing the Past Home