Symmetrical Archaeology: Conversation Two: Archaeology is a verb

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Posted at Dec 09/2004 05:22 PM:
Chris Witmore: Archaeology is a verb. It is an event made up of multiple fields which span a series of transformations that occur between the material world and our final modes of documentation. To be sure, what was an event should always remain an event. However, this is not the way in which we legislate our relations to the world. Here, as a thoroughly modernist discipline, we separate the material past off and treat it as a resource. With this antiquarian history we close off the past, display it behind the glass of the cabinet, and seek to prevent the inevitable change that is its reality.

Certainly, this criticism is nothing new and many are aware of the drawbacks of this modernist treatment of the material past. Still, it is time to suspend our interest in modernist epistemology and focus on how we relate to the diverse entities of the material past ontologically; that is, how we relate to the material world in real-time practice (Witmore 2004(in press)).

In this conversation I hope for us to take issue with one of the greatest modernist cruxes of the discipline, the notion of "material past as resource," its preservation, and "the rhetoric of destruction" (Lucas 2001a). How do we attend to a symmetrical treament of the world as place/event? How might we treat the remains of the archaeological past as active entities? What would a symmetrical alternative to modernist treatments of the material past entail? How will we enact such a symmetrical alternative within legislative systems fueled by modernist understandings of the world?

Posted at Dec 20/2004 03:45 AM:
Gavin Lucas: How much of this is a problem of a tension between performance and inscription?

Archaeology is a verb – for sure; and even when we separate off the material past, characterise it as a resource, we remain ‘verbal’; but you are right Chris, in the process, the material remains are separated from our discourse about them, so archaeology-as-a-verb is reduced to an epistemological matter. It seems to me, we need to examine this process more closely, and find those moments when this separation emerges. To me, this really hinges on the issue of inscription.

In the field, people and things are symmetrical - artefacts, soil, stones, etc. are very active. It feels like that to me. I feel like a mediator, a negotiator, a translator, working with many different materialities to maintain a coherent dialogue. But inscription – and the manner in which is it is done, changes all this. One response would simply be to stop recording. Of course, this would conflict with the legislative and academic requirements of archaeological practice, and for that reason is not viable. But it is also not viable for another reason, namely that inscription as a performance, actually enhances our engagement with material remains. The problem lies not with inscription in itself, but its performance. In particular perhaps, in treating inscription as a thing rather than an event.

I don’t think we can ever avoid the re-location of the archaeological that takes place through inscription, the movement from the material world of an archaeological site or collection of artefacts to the material world of texts and images. The question to me, seems to be how does this relocation occur, and how can we keep it visible, rather than concealed?

Posted at Jan 03/2005 01:20 PM:
Chris Witmore: Sir Flinders Petrie regarded recording in ‘the field’ as “the absolute dividing line between plundering and scientific work, between a dealer and a scholar” (1904, 48). In his view archaeology does not exist without the record, or more symmetrically without the inscription. The notion of inscription is more appropriate here because it used by Latour as a hybrid term holding both the materiality of text, plan, map, or whatever and the ideas which are transposed as entangled (Latour 1986). As a symmetrical activity I would hold both performance and the process of inscription as one and the same (likewise the inscription, as the medium, as the thing has an active role in this process). This connects with your question of how to keep the process of inscription visible.

One means of keeping inscription/performance visible (as well as aural and tactile on a bodily level) might be through the notion of mediation. Mediation, in one sense, is about manifesting something of the material world and our engagements with it, which are otherwise left behind through normal modes of documentation; indeed, through the very process of inscription. Here I would argue that we must attend to both the effable (attained through inscription) and ineffable (what is filtered or sieved out in the process of inscription; the belles noiseuses). This necessitates a reconfiguration of the ways we relate to our media, both traditional ‘’inscriptions,’’ in the form of plans, maps, diagrams, text and so on, and new (i.e. digital), as with video, sound record, and other forms of computer based articulation. Examples of this include located media and what Timothy Webmoor has described as mapwork.

Perhaps most importantly the key is to materialize, manifest, or mediate our practice in as many different forms as possible. This insures, not only the mediation of the process of inscription, but also the possibility of, as you have argued, reiterative practice (Lucas 2001b; in symmetrical archaeology refer to multiple fields and circulating reference). This is one means of insuring what was an event—whether excavation, survey, or some other form of archaeological engagement—once inscribed and mediated will remain an event.

To be sure, there remains, as you point out Gavin, the issue of visiblity relating to the inscription as the thing; inscriptions in the form of archive. We hope to make a case for the type of collaborative archive that Traumwerk facilitates. This forum allows for the immediate visibilty and decimination of archaeological media. Still, this needs to be demonstrated as we hope to do with two archaeological projects in Romania SRAP and TRAP.

All this brings us around to the issue of non-modernist relationships to the material past. How can the material past and its archived inscriptions reestablish themselves in relation to managerial schemes, which have to do with their delineation, protection, and perpetuation as aesthetic objects of a culture industry, and subjects of law?

Posted at Jan 14/2005 09:58 AM:

Gavin Lucas: To comment on some of your first points; I agree, an archaeological intervention is inseparable from its mode of inscription – even if the actual act of inscription were not to take place, the intervention would still be archaeological (i.e. distinct from Flinders Petrie’s plundering), because the nature of the intervention is pre-determined by – even anticipates the act of inscription. And yes, to keep inscription visible necessitates a reconfiguration of the ways in which we relate to our media; but I don’t think the answer is to simply multiply the forms of materialization. It seems to me this only leads to an endlessly proliferating archive, a cacophony of materialization. Of course experimenting with new media is necessary, but one also needs some selectivity – if only because we want to know why we are doing this in the first place. Is not the pivotal issue about how the media of inscription or materialization relate to the intentions of the archaeologist? Does not inscription relate to communication or iteration – what is it we want to repeat about the experience, once the fieldwork is done?

But to come to the issue in hand about non-modernist relations to the material past. You ask the most difficult question of all. Truthfully, I have no simple answers. But it clearly requires altering society’s understanding of what archaeology is, and while simply doing and publicizing ‘different archaeologies’ can partly achieve this, a key part is surely changing the discourse of heritage management. To do this, is also very difficult, but perhaps as a first move, one could adopt a strategy of ‘the negative’ to highlight the problems in the current schemes. For example, archaeological sites that are currently described as protected or preserved might rather be described perhaps as quarantined. This brings to the fore a sublimated issue: we are too scared to touch it for fear our intervention will contaminate/destroy it. This re-phrasing both articulates the fact that the material past is not inseparable from our intervention, while also forcing us to re-consider our relations to that past. Ideally – and perhaps idealistically – this negativization of current heritage discourse will eventually force us to reconfigure the whole in more positive terms. Very Hegelian I know.

Posted at Feb 14/2005 10:41 AM:
Chris Witmore: I apologize about the long delay in our conversation. I can seem a bit overzealous about using multiple modes of documentation. When I discuss traditional media I want to emphasize their importance and not simply critique them for not attending to x, y, or z. Multiple forms are complimentary. I agree we cannot keep proliferating various media. However, this is not a simple issue of proliferating them for their own sake. While selectivity and reduction are a must, I do not believe this is antithetical to the issue of attending to something of the complexity and multiplicity of the material world. There is more to understanding than meaning. So much is filtered out. The point is that we reduce too much.

Moreover from a symmetrical perspective the issue of intentionality is extremely human centered. If the pivotal issue was one of how the media of inscription or materialization relate to the intentions of the archaeologist then we would loose the subtle action of things. Things change the paths of intent on regular bases within the excavation process. These shifts in the orientation of goals are the result of articulations between humans and the materials we excavate. Such articulations are what our media manifest. As things have a stake in our knowledge construction, our reflexivity must incorporate them. Tall order, yes, but necessary if we are to reconfigure our relationships to the material world outside of the modernist predicament.

Gavin, I really like your notion of quarantining archaeological sites. The notion of the ‘quarantine’ treats a site as animate. In swapping terminology it reminds us that to hurt an archaeological site is to harm ourselves. But I wouldn’t necessarily call this a negativization of current heritage discourse, rather I would say that we are re-characterizing what we have been always been doing ontologically. From a symmetrical angle our emphasis is in suspending an interest in modernist epistemologies and not situating our program as a polar opposite…

Posted at Feb 15/2005 11:10 AM:
Gavin Lucas: As you say, the issue with documentation is about reduction - and I agree entirely that new media can offer ways of including 'more' than traditional media, but I also think that traditional media can be reconfigured to include 'more' too. But I think we probably agree on this point, it is perhaps just a question of where we each put the emphasis. However, one thing troubles me a little with this characterization. To say that our documentation is often too reductive does expose itself to the critique of retaining modernist attitudes to knowledge. That is, it seems to imply that documentation can somehow be fuller and more adequate with respect to 'reality', and that by altering the modes and media of documentation, we can somehow get a better or more accurate take on reality. How would you respond to this?

On the second point regarding intentionality - this is quite critical. You suggest intentionality is very human centred, but does this mean objects cannot display intentionality? I think they can. But the point I would make is that even while I agree with you that objects act as much as people, and that we need to be aware of this in our fieldwork, I don't see how we can deny existential positionality - that is, that we are not simply looking at how various entities interact, we are one of those entities. We cannot exclude our own positionality within this matrix. And I am not sure how a Latourian approach would deal with this.

Posted at Feb 15/2005 09:08 AM:
Chris Witmore: I do not wish to imply that the issue of reduction is solely a problem with our modes of documentation per se, but rather it is a problem of epistemology. So long as we partition the world into either/or dualistic structures we reduce too much. To be sure, the basis of mediation is one of simultaneous reduction and amplification. While in the process of articulation we loose qualities of materiality, multiplicity, presence, and so on, we gain comparability, standardization, mobility of knowledge, etc. This is Latour’s notion of circulating reference. Now while we manifest some qualities of the material world (and we do a good job of this) we leave much behind. Other media (understood as modes of engagement) can manifest different qualities of an archaeological site, but not the same ones as text (not to mention map, plan, diagram, etc.). Now you are entirely correct to raise the caution flag in that this seems like some kind of resurgence of a neo-positivism and we are very aware of the negative (not to mention potentially dangerous) side of that school of thought. This is why critical sensibilities are so important. Honestly, I think of this more in terms of dealing with something of the complexity, presence, multiplicity and the turbulence of the material world. Artists regularly do this in very interesting ways, but it is not an issue of accuracy or correspondence in the traditional sense. We always transform, but this is not to say that our transformations cannot be rich ones. In my work I am very aware of our need to bypass treating materiality as text and this requires not only a new look at the materiality of old media, but also experimentation with the new. Combine that with our mutual interest in working against some of the classic rifts such as those between the arts or humanities and sciences, as well as the dualisms between humans and things or even sound and vision and this is what we are trying to work toward.

With regards to the issue of positionality, Latour’s response is one of shifting the human being from a position of over and against things to one in the middle of a folded collectivity of “humans and non-humans”. This requires allot more time and energy in order to detail how we as human beings are wrapped up in these complex sociotechnical assemblages and networks. There is allot of work to be done here.

Posted at Feb 16/2005 04:09 AM:
Gavin Lucas: Chris, I think I was being rather cheeky with that question of reduction. But seriously, there is a point here which does interest me. I agree entirely with your Latourian characterisation of the process of mediation and transformation. But to express the issue in Latourian terms - how do we conceptualize the gap between materiality and articulation? You talk in terms of reduction and amplification, but I wonder if there are not other ways to express it? The problem is perhaps, that any way of expressing it will be in danger of negating it, because in the very act of trying to express this 'gap' we transcend it.

There is another issue with this process of mediation or translation, and again, I think I wasn't being clear enough when I was mentioning positionality. I guess what I was trying to ask was, how is the direction and process of mediation controlled? Who or what controls it? Of course it is fair to say that the whole process incorporates a collectivity of humans and non-humans, and my point is not to re-centre the human. But rather to ask can we forgo any sense of a centre whatsoever (hence the reference to positionality) when talking about the process of mediation from say fieldwork to publication? This is not to argue for any absolute centre, nor to deny the multiplicity of fields - centredness or positionality is contextual and contingent, but it is still there. How do we articulate this notion of positionality without slipping back into the modernist dualism of human/non-human? There is indeed a lot more work to be done here.

Posted at Feb 16/2005 12:40 PM:
Chris Witmore: On this issue, Latour is like Odysseus with his many twists and turns. He has to be. For Latour the prime mover of an action in the course of the excavation process is a “distributed and nested series of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants in the series” (Latour 1999, 181). Latour’s notion of mediation refers to the multiple ways humans and non-humans swap properties in the process of moving toward a goal, a possibility, an outcome—say excavating densely packed wall collapse to get to a floor level. In this process, an archaeologist with a pick is different from an archaeologist without a pick, just as the pick is different within the hands of an archaeologist. The outcome of their combined action is different from the possible outcome of an archaeologist-without-a-pick and a pick-without-an-archaeologist. A shift has occurred in what would have been their independent goals and an entirely different outcome occurs through the action of a sociotechnical collective—archaeologist and pick. This collective shift is a form of what Latour calls mediation. Where in this is the center?

In a way, the center is not with the pick or indeed with the archaeologist, but with the archaeologist-with-a-pick. It is not that some free-standing human archaeologist excavates, but the distributed collective archaeologist-with-a pick excavates. But this gets us only partly the way in addressing the issue of centeredness/positionality.

Throughout the excavation process the sociotechnical collective is in a constant state of flux. In a very fluid sense we might think of liquid positionalities. We (being the sociotechical collective of the archaeologist) are constantly shifting our goals depending on the allies we mobilize to attain a particular end. To be sure, this end shifts depending on the properties of that ally or actant. Wall collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-pick is different from wall collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-trowel. Follow this symmetry and we will not slip back into the duality of the human-in-itself or the nonhuman-in-itself.

This brings us back to the issue of the inscription and media. The archaeologist-with-a-plan deals with the material world differently than a human-without-a-plan. As a collective with our media (not to mention the tape, string, line-level, drawing board, etc.) we have more confidence in articulating a stratigraphic sequence. We know what to manifest based upon cascades of other inscriptions that connect us to other excavators distant in time and space who were faced with a similar situation (we often thank Wheeler for that act of delegation). So much comes together in the constituting moment between materiality and articulation. And because of our most necessary scenographies we filter out a great deal of the complexity right there in that moment. But because of our paper work we also know what needs to be done. To question who controls this small jump between the material world and our inscriptions is to grapple with a tremendous heterogeneous network of other sociotechnical collectives (the discipline of archaeology).

So you are spot on in your question of where is the center, because heterogeneous networks work differently in the chain of transformations that constitutes the archaeological process. It is not so much a question of centeredness or positionality as to what allies are mobilized to a particular end? How are we folded into these allies at each gap and how do we together articulate knowledge? This is a trick question because we are always already collectives. But this can't be an issue of "it is business as usual" and science studies will therefore continue to re-characterize our work. How do we maintain an awareness of this complex re-characterization of our practice and get on with it at the same time?

Posted at Feb 17/2005 01:54 AM:
Gavin Lucas: There is a trick question here. As you say, there is a difference between an archaeologist-with-a-pick and an archaeologist-with-a-trowel, and the prime mover in an action such as excavating a wall is indeed this collectivity of archaeologist+tool (etc.). But how is this collectivity formed in the first place? How is it, that it is the archaeologist-with-pick rather than the archaeologist-with-trowel who operates at any particular moment? A naive answer would be, it is ultimately the archaeologist who decides on the shape of the collective - she is the one after all who picks up the trowel or pick sitting in the site hut, not the other way around. But of course it is not that simple. As you said, we are always already collectives - the archaeologist selects the pick because of being part of other collectives, including a book by Wheeler. But this raises the question of how to conceive the temporality and boundedness of collectives. It is easy to point to a specific place and time and say this is one collective - e.g. archaeologist-pick-wall. But the question is, as you so rightly point out at the end, how does this collective come to be mobilized in the first place? There is a problem of time here, because the danger of constituting it solely in terms of 'always already' is that it lends an air of inevitability. I find this an interesting issue, because it also connects to general issues in understanding agency and history. This is a bit of a digress so I won't go into this, but I find the concept of chance, the 'aleatory', of some potential here.

How do we maintain an awareness of this complexity and still get on and dig? I cannot help feeling the two issues are related - understanding the nature of the process of fieldwork, actually is pivotal to interpreting what is being excavated. After all, if we can understand the technology of fieldwork in terms of collectivities, then why not the 'past' in the same way? Indeed, as with the hermeneutic 'fusion of horizons', there is a sense in which the collectivities which constituted the past overlap with the collectivities in the present through shared entities (i.e. walls, potsherds, bones). I know I am potentially opening this up to critiques of past/present dichotomies and essentialism of entities, but there may be ways round this.

Posted at Feb 17/2005 04:23 PM:
Chris Witmore: There is a great deal of material here for thought and we have trudged over allot of ground. I haven’t as of yet had the opportunity to read your new book The Archaeology of Time (still awaiting its shipment), but I would like to pursue the issue of time with you in more detail from the symmetrical angle once I have read your book. I believe that in this there lies the key to an archaeology that fights under its on colors; not anthropology, not history.

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