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Michael ASHLEY

Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

“In the mansion called literature, I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.” - Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (Tanizaki 1977)

Imagine you are in a room of a prehistoric house. Close your eyes and imagine this room at night, firelight provided from a hearth, perhaps a few stone lamps or even torches. The light is alive as are the shadows. As time passes, your eyes adjust to the light, your night vision comes in after about twenty minutes and details that were lost in the shadows begin to reveal themselves. Within forty minutes the entire room is visible, the darkest shadows now less so. The color of the firelight brightens reds and mutes blues, bringing to life red wall paintings and casting any bluish object further into darkness, appearing almost black, but a deep, rich black. The smoke from the hearth and the lamps fills the room with a gentle haze, thickest near the roof portal where the smoke exhausts. Light seems to hang in midair, appearing to lighten the entire room.

I am in a room of a prehistoric house. It is July 2001, a beautiful morning after a rare, soft rain. I have escaped the lab and am sitting in the BACH excavation tent at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Turkey. It is about 75 degrees and breezy, the entire team is up and furiously working, good music is playing and mostly smiles all around. The tent, a white, plastic house-shaped canopy, provides shelter from the burning hot sun and afternoon windstorms. It creates its own light, low contrast and shadowless, slightly yellow from the buildup of dust, especially in morning when the east-facing wall is fully lit as it is right now. I have lived in this house every summer for four years. While I never tire looking at it, photographing it, envisioning it 8500 years ago when it was a living dwelling, I long to ‘have the eaves deep and the walls dark’, to see it as it was, under hearth light and lamp light, instead of this omnipresent flat and shadowless tent light. Is it possible that this tent, built to preserve the archaeology and shelter the archaeologists who work here, is providing a disservice as well by creating an environment where the light never changes, blinding us to our own visual imaginations and perhaps even making it more difficult to excavate than it need be?

Introduction to an Archaeology of Vision

You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision. (Faithless 1997)

ar•chae•o•lo•gy or ar•che•o•lo•gy n.

The scientific study of ancient cultures through the examination of their material remains, for example, buildings, graves, tools, and other artifacts usually dug up from the ground. (Corporation 1999)

I prefer an anthropological definition, the study of what it means to be human. Our focus in archaeology on the material makes it difficult to see the immaterial, the ephemeral and the invisible. It seems to me pure folly to try and reconstitute the past by studying physical remains that are out of the context of time and place without giving equal consideration to what is not left behind, namely the people and the environmental conditions in which they lived and interacted.

Archaeology is a ‘sensual’ field practice, employing the senses of sight, touch and hearing - sometimes smell and taste - to bear on the problem at hand, be it excavation, survey or lab research. The visual archaeological environment is a place caught between present and past, experienced in the real by the archaeologist who is investigating it, an ever-changing viewscape. What comprises this visual environment and what factors are important to an archaeology of vision? What aspects of this environment actually hinder our ability to do archaeology or understand vision in prehistory? Are there ways of augmenting or changing the visual environment in order to make it more conducive to archaeological fieldwork?

Even were all the physical bits still in place, perfectly preserved (Pompeii, but more so), would we be able to get any closer to what it means to be human? Take, for example, the Human Genome Project. We have mapped every gene, allele, protein that constitutes a human, a remarkable feat with incredible potential for medical and nutritional research. Yet this map alone will not help us understand why he likes rap music and she prefers classical. Nor can it explain why over 90% of Diabetes Type 2 cases occur since they are non-congenital – diet or environmentally related (Flato 2003). To ascertain causation, we must look at behavior, both individual and social. In other words, our mapping must extend in many dimensions, for like archaeological places, humans are more than the sum of their parts.

‘But the physical materials are all that are left behind. That is why they are called remains,’ an archaeologist might complain. We know this is not the case, for humans leave fingerprints, traces of activity, craft and process throughout the archaeological scene. Moreover, the built environment (and the non-built, for that matter) provides substantive constraints on what the subjects of our study, past humans, were able to do and where they could move within their surroundings. Corporeality is a potent vector when trying to envisage a past place, for our subjects were people with bodies and not ghosts, although, like us, they came in all shapes and sizes.

One could argue that like the genomic map, to atomize our study of past humans into the constituents of remains and non-remains is to provide merely an inventory of materiality. We can count, map, draw and categorize the objects left behind, speculate on what is missing, make charts and graphs and look for statistically significant trends in our data. As we try and make sense of the things, we cannot get closer to their meaning without situating them in the context of people and places any easier than we can understand a painting by studying the oils and canvas with which it was painted. Without painter and audience, there is no meaning.

In his work on single brain cell recording, Neurologist Semir Zeki demonstrates the causal relationship between art and the brain. Art is not the product of neural firings, he argues, rather, the creation of a Mondrian would not be possible in their absence. The structure of the human brain makes art possible, the artist brings it into being. Similarly, neurological processes are traceable in the observer of the art and we can witness excitation in this part of the brain or that, these cells tagged for orientation, color, motion, size (Zeki 1999). These processes and their mappings lead us toward function but nowhere near meaning. Two hundred years of vision science has led us to the conclusion that there is a line that cannot be crossed when it comes to understanding vision. This subjectivity barrier is the waterline of an iceberg of consciousness; we may never know what is underneath the surface through neuro-physiology, vision science, psychophysics, or even spirituality. It is the difference between them and us, you and me. It is the complex interactions of human experience, environment and genetics that have given you a preference for Monet and me for Magritte.

‘Seeing is already a creative operation, one that demands an effort,’ exclaimed artist Henri Matisse, and so would any modern neurologist or vision scientist. Seeing happens not in the eye but in the brain of the observer. Vision is defined in terms of a relationship between the observer, an object and a viewing environment – people in places, looking at things. Without these components, there is no vision. In other words, one cannot study human vision by studying human anatomy and physiology alone. Without light and objects to bounce the light off of, there simply is nothing to study. This is not to say that anatomy, physiology, optics, physics and psychology are not virtuous pursuits. It is just that to study vision is to study the relationship between viewer, viewed and viewing environment. This is relationship is indivisible; there is no way to factor out subject, object, light and still be discussing vision.

I see an interesting parallel between vision and archaeology, for core to both is what it means to be human. In the past six years of fieldwork at Çatalhöyük, I have observed firsthand our fascination with the physical world of material remains in archaeology, only to conclude that the remains are but a meaningless factor in the absence of people and place. The more we focus on them, the more we are blinded to the relationship that they had in their original context, for it is through the relationship of things to people in a particular place and time that meaning is made.

An archaeology of vision calls for a focus shift, a restructuring of the visual and invisible in order to make it meaningful. A clear definition of the relationship between viewer, viewed and viewing environment is needed, what I call the ‘viewing triangle.’ By keeping this relationship multi-dimensional, it we see that a study of vision in archaeology requires us to define what exactly we are looking at and for. Namely, who is doing the looking, what are they looking at, under what viewing conditions? What becomes quickly apparent is that it is us who are doing the looking at present remains under a very different visual situation than originally experienced by the observers in the past.

Myopia ~ Focusing on Sight at a Site

“…If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes” – (Batty to Hannibal Chew in Bladerunner) (Fancher 1981)

The real challenge I see for studying vision in archaeology comes in our connection of the present viewing triangle with the past. Consider our present viewing triangle as it articulates to the past viewing triangle, an hourglass in which the apex forms the focal point of discussion. If we are vigilant in our awareness that we are looking at present viewed objects under current conditions that are likely much different from those our subjects (past viewers) viewed them under, it becomes clear that to take on the past viewed triangle in its entirety, no matter how desirous, is folly. In archaeological research, we tend to take on one corner at a time, studying the paleo-environment (viewing), or the figurine found on the plaster floor (viewed), or the flexed juvenile burial wrapped with rope across arms and feet (viewer). We emphasize the material preferentially over the ephemeral, in part because the evidence is more secure, in part because at the end of the day, archaeology is the study of past materiality. What is called for to study vision is a shift from a material-centered focus to a viewer-centered one, where we work to articulate present and past viewers, turn archaeological objects into subjects and environments into places.

Present Viewing Triangle:

We cannot escape the present moment. We must accept the fact that beyond the physical interaction of photons entering our eyes and causing cascades of activities in our retinas and brains, vision is memory. Vision is personal, subjective and, ultimately, the private act of each of us. What we share in common as human viewers is our ability to communicate, to the best of our knowledge, what it is we think we are seeing right now and what we think we saw just a moment ago, last week, last year.

Past Viewing Triangle:

While the viewing triangle may be well understood and definable, the triangle collapses rapidly if we dig too deeply beneath the surface of the observer. Vision is not just about the possibilities of what light may reach the eye, but what one chooses to see, either consciously or unconsciously. So much of visual processing occurs in the mind’s eye and has little if nothing to do with the visual organ. Once the signals are pushed up the optic nerve, the human mind must decide how to articulate this information with what it knows about the visual world from memory and experience. As we decide unconsciously what to see, we are also choosing what to ignore. We may also consciously decide to ignore the scene completely by closing our eyes, averting our gaze or staring into space. The point here is that it is not enough to define the viewing triangle if we want to have a meaningful discussion of human vision, we must peer into the minds of the viewers and ask what they might be looking at and why. What they may be choosing NOT to see.

Hourglass:

As we look closely at the relationships between persons, places and things archaeologically, it becomes clear that we are actually interacting with two different sets of visual situations - the present and the past, the now and the archaeological. In each case, there is a viewer, something to be viewed and the environment in which the viewing occurs. An archaeology of vision must find a set of approaches to accommodate the complex relationship between these two seemingly isolated worlds.

I prefer to think of the relationship between these two visual worlds as occurring at the apex of an hourglass, where the alignment of viewing maintains the multi-dimensionality of the past and present viewing situations. For example, when the present day archaeologist is excavating, she/he is actively engaging with the materials of the past in an environment that is completely alien to its original viewing context, the present day. The focus of the investigation is present/viewer-past/viewed, the environment and the viewer in the past are secondary to the task at hand - articulating the object.

How one defines the viewing relationship between present and past clarifies and personalizes the constituents in the scene and yields a starting point where meaningful dialog can occur. For example, from the perspective of a Present Viewer, I may look at an object sitting on the floor of the excavated trench and attempt to puzzle out its reason for being there before lifting, bagging and tagging it. The role of the object in this context is past viewed, for, through archaeological inquiry, I am trying to articulate its situation in the past, in its original context. I must look beyond the present archaeological one in which the object now rests.

Articulating the Hourglass

Rotating either the Present or Past Viewed triangles, we can articulate nine contexts, each with a particular focus. Combined, they form the four dimensional hourglass that embodies an archaeology of vision. The articulations provide us with a metaphor in which to think about our relationship to the Past Viewed Triangle in its entirety, as an object of investigation that maintains its complexity. It clarifies what exactly we are looking at and is a useful model for digging under the iceberg of subjectivity without pretending to replace the Present Viewed set with the past. After three years of thinking about it, I still feel as if I am only beginning to see possibilities, so what I offer here are some initial thoughts on what I believe is becoming a lifelong pursuit.

The examples I use come from you. I have attempted to contextualize the conference contributions in terms of these articulations. I apologize in advance.

Present Viewer / Past Viewed ~ Archaeological Fieldwork

Archaeology is an attempt to understand situations in the past by studying material objects in their present archaeological context. There is no direct connection between the Past Viewed objects and the objects we find in the ground. The Past Viewed objects ceased to exist when they became archaeological, falling out of memory for the Past Viewers. As we dig out the object from the earth, we attempt to define it not as a Present Viewed object, but as a Past Viewed thing. We do this by carefully thinking about the context in which it is found, by investigating its surrounding soil matrix and reconstructing the archaeological and natural processes that have brought it to this moment, perhaps thousands of years after it was last seen by human eyes. This is the moment that is so exciting for many archaeologists, the moment of ‘discovery’, or at least, of unveiling.

Present Viewed / Past Viewed ~ Archaeological Imagination

Viewing a Past Viewed object as it was but in the present requires interpretation. Reconstruction, augmentation, illustration or modeling, we imagine the object as it was, tacking between the archaeological (Present Viewed) and some ideal. In our hands or on the table is a Present Viewed object, but the job of the illustrator or interpreter is to provide us with a view of the object as it was, in the context of the Past Viewing Triangle. Often this is done without attempting to reconstruct the Past Viewed environment or in consideration of the Past Viewer. Put the object on a black background and look at it as it was. Put back on the head that is missing from the figurine, the color that is missing from the wall, the flesh that is missing from the burial. All of these processes require imagination. We feed our imagination with the evidence of archaeology, ethnography, history and human experience.

Present Viewing / Past Viewed ~ Archaeological Context

If we turn our attention to our current viewing situation in the field, we can look at the Past Viewed objects in terms of the present archaeological situation. We may consider issues of conservation for the materials and ergonomics for the field researchers. What is the Present Viewing environment, how does it affect our potential for envisioning the past? We stand in a shelter in the year 2004 and look down at a Neolithic platform and see the object for what it is, a Past Viewed thing in a Present Viewing environment. The shelter provides protection from the sun but does little for helping us to see the object or the house as it may have been viewed in the past. To do this, we need to work on bridging the gap between the Present and Past Viewing conditions.

Present Viewer / Past Viewer ~ Who is the Past Viewer?

Who is the Past Viewer? Where are they? Could they have been standing where you are, in the same spot, looking northwest at the corner of Building 3? How tall are they, how old are they, woman or man or child, color blind, blind, nearsighted, hyperopic? What would they see if they stood where you stand, what are they really looking at? Would they give such careful scrutiny to the individual layers of red and white painted plaster as you are? Would they see a forest or a tree? The hourglass of archaeological vision prevents us from ignoring the past viewer, but I will not advocate a phenomenological exercise of putting ourselves into the mind’s eye of Past Viewers. Instead, I think it is useful to enter into conversations with our proposed Past Viewers in much the same way we enter into discussions with our friends and colleagues in the present. Ask this person, what are you looking at? What do you see, what is important to you about this room, the lighting, how do you feel as a Viewer? I cannot know what you see unless you tell me. Archaeologically, we are at a loss when it comes to the Past Viewer, for they are dead, de-fleshed and in the case of the Neolithic at Çatalhöyük, they have left us few clues to work with about who they were as Viewers.

Present Viewed / Past Viewer ~ What is the Viewer Looking At?

Where do we go for lines of evidence or sources for our archaeological imagination when it comes to the broken relationship between the Present Viewed situation and the Past Viewer? We seek guidance from analogy and ethnoarchaeology. We invite guests to our site and hope they will tell us what we should look at, what the Past Viewer would choose to see. They look past the archaeological and see the scene as it was, or at least, as they envision it might have been. We take careful notes or listen thoughtfully, hanging on each word in hope that some spark will kindle in us a new way of seeing the past. We must always remember that the Past Viewer does not exist except in memory, even if the witness is alive, for the Present Viewed is not the Past. Present Viewers look at the Present Viewed and try to remember it as it was, but their envisioning is agglutinated, a hybrid of their new observations and their past remembrances.

Archaeological excavations begin with the situation as it is, then as time goes forward, we dig up the past and try to bring the material world into focus as it was. In other words, the more we excavate, the more the arrow of time proceeds, the closer we are getting to seeing the Present Viewed through the filter of the Past Viewer. This remains for me one of the most profound realities of archaeological fieldwork. Through this curtain, we look forward to the past.

Present Viewing / Past Viewer ~ Where is the Viewer?

J.J. Gibson’s theory of ecological optics defines the “informational basis of visual perception (as) the dynamic structure of ambient light that is reflected into the eye from surfaces as an active organism explores its environment”(Palmer 1999b). Working backward from the Dynamic Ambient Optical Array, one theoretically can locate the observer by following the structures to their ultimate positions. Many assumptions about the viewer have to be made – position (standing, kneeling, sitting, slouching, leaning), size (grown adult, child), visual function (healthy binocular vision or defective) to name a few. By envisioning the Past Viewer moving through the present archaeological context, we can constrain the possibilities of what might have been possible to see. The Present Viewing Environment reminds us that we are corporeal, that the Past Viewers were people with bodies and eyes and did not have x-ray vision and were not that different from us. By studying the Present Viewing Environment from the perspective of a Past Viewer, we can start to look at the archaeological context as a place bound by physical walls and space. We see that there are spots in the room where the light from a fire installation cannot reach, dark corners or brightly lit platforms. The material remains of the Present Viewing Environment are a guide to thinking about the past as a real place.

Present Viewer / Past Viewing ~ What was the Viewing Environment?

Before we can envision what was seeable in the past, we need to conceptualize what the Past Viewing environment was like. On the exterior, what was the paleo-ecology? Using viewshed analysis and making assumptions about the topography as it was, we can begin to construct the viewing conditions on a macro-scale. Moving inside the dwellings, we need to re-construct the visual environment as fully as possible – light sources, wall heights and colors, reflective or dull surfaces, seasonality, day vs. night, glare and blind spots. Once the built environment is in place in our imagination, we can move through this world and envision what Past Viewed objects may have looked like… to us.

There is a reason why archaeological reconstructions are not compelling to me, no matter how realistic they may be drawn or animated. There is no way to escape the fact that we are Present Viewers looking at the Past Viewing Environment in the now. The focus on reconstituting a Past Viewing Environment moves us no closer to empathizing with the people who populated the world we reconstruct. We need to be vigilant that what we are creating when we envision the Past Viewing Environment is only one corner of the triangle. We need to remind our audiences of this fact, especially as our technologies move us to the hyper-realism of Hollywood.

Present Viewed / Past Viewing ~ Environmental Context

Take the perspective of objects in their archaeological context, as we found them. Build up the past environment and you have a museum, a diorama, a juxtaposition of past and present. This is a valuable view, for it provides a framework for the archaeological imagination without filling in the picture entirely. The objects are viewed as they are, our imaginations visualize them as they might have been. Leaving the bits and heads and skin off of the things we find gives the audience a chance to push their own perspectives of the past into center stage. We provide them and ourselves the opportunity to engage with Past Viewers in conversation about what the object might have looked like in this place, a Past Viewing Environment. Practically speaking, there are many ways to attempt this, from experimental archaeological reconstruction to simple lighting tricks and photography. I find the possibilities of creating Past Viewing Environments far more interesting than trying to reconstruct Past Viewed objects in the Present Viewed world of black velvet or museum boxes.

Present Viewing / Past Viewing ~ Augmented and Virtual Reality

In many ways, the great lesson for all of us is the stark difference between present and past viewing environments. Why we do little to augment the Present Viewing situation of archaeological fieldwork, if for nothing less than ergonomic or health and safety reasons is hard to fathom. We do it for the tourists but we seldom do it for ourselves. Remaining vigilant about the disparities of these two worlds is crucial if we want to get any closer to understanding vision in the past.

The Holy Grail of computer reconstruction is akin to the Halo-Deck of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The attempt is to make a place so real that when we step into it, we are transported into another world, be it the Present Viewed world of the Serengeti or a Past Viewed place like Çatalhöyük. But real to whom, us or idealized Past Viewers? Better to be honest with ourselves and our audiences and accept our fate. While it is fun to dream about the world as it was when, I think it is dangerous and dishonest to try to approach visualizing the past from the perspective that the more realistic you make it look, the closer we get to actually reconstructing the Past Viewing Environment in the present. However, I think that there is merit in experimenting with augmenting our Present Viewing Environment with conjectured Past Viewing Environments. The juxtaposition of present and past can feed our archaeological imaginations viscerally in ways that reconstructing Past Viewed objects or dabbling in Paleo-psychology cannot. I long for a day when a visitor can come to Çatalhöyük, walk into the South shelter and participate in a thought experiment with other Present Viewers as we blot out the Anatolian sun, darken the shelter walls, relight the fire installations in Building 17 and imagine what this place might have looked like 9,000 years ago.

In(conclusions) Articulations ~ Constructing a Meaningful Relationship

What is the present? What is vision? Seven years of looking at the hourglass has led me to few conclusions about what can be said of vision in the past except that perhaps it isn’t conclusions we should be looking for. I gracefully embrace the ambiguity that conceiving an archaeology of vision requires, but I have become much more conservative of what simulacra I will accept, especially if the representations are created without considering the Past Viewing Triangle. For the rest of my existence, I shall always frame questions of the visual in terms of people, places and things. I will challenge illustrators and interpreters of the past to stretch their own preconceived ideas of how this object or room might have looked like to consider who is doing the viewing, under what conditions and when.

Far from pessimistic, I have a newfound exuberance for an archaeology of vision, or more specifically, for a Viewer-Centered archaeology. I do not consider the hourglass metaphor for vision to be novel, new or innovative. On the contrary, I see it as a tool for structuring archaeological research that is already implicit in what we do. By unfolding our thinking from the myopic, point specific and materially driven, object-oriented way we normally conduct business to a viewer-centered sensibility, I envision an archaeology that is not only more human, but is more interesting. A Viewer-Centered archaeology is one where we can never lose sight of the fact that while archaeology may be the “scientific study of ancient cultures through the examination of their material remains,” it is indeed our most vital way of looking at past viewers and what it means to be human.

My study of an archaeology of vision has led me to consider not only past actors, the subject of our gaze, but present archaeologists ~ us ~ as we ponder the perplexities of a past viewed world. For it is we, the viewers in a present viewed world, that must accept that fact that we cannot turn back the turn over the hourglass and return to how things might have been or peer into the minds of people long since lost. Accepting this, we begin to see how an archaeology of vision is possible. We see that the subject of our gaze should be ourselves as we struggle to comprehend not the past viewed world, but our understanding of what this world may have looked like through our own eyes, the only eyes we have to see with. I wish my work presented a more poignant perspective of what may be possible when considering vision in the past. The solace I offer is that human vision is indeed a miracle. Accept the wonder that is its sense and look into a world where present and past meet and teach us what it means to be human.

Corporation, M. 1999 Encarta World English Dictionary. vol. 2004. Microsoft Corporation.

Faithless 1997 Reverence, London.

Fancher, H. 1981 Blade Runner, edited by R. Scott. Warner Brothers

Palmer, S. E. 1999 Color, consciousness, and the isomorphism constraint. In Behavioral and Brain Sciences, pp. 923. vol. 22.

Palmer, S. E. 1999 Reversing the Rainbow: Reflections on Color and Consciousness. in progress.

Palmer, S.E. 1999 Vision Science : photons to phenomenology. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Tanizaki, J. 1977 In praise of shadows. Leete's Island Books, New Haven, Conn.

Zeki, S. 1993 A vision of the brain. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford ; Boston.

Zeki, S. 1998 Art and the brain. Daedalus 127(2):71-103.

Zeki, S. 1999 Inner vision : an exploration of art and the brain. Oxford University Press, Oxford ; New York.

Excerpted from the dissertation bearing the same name, submitted August 2004.

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