Ashish Chadha (Stanford University)

Abstract

This paper will investigate the genealogy of one of the most traditional media used in archaeological excavations - practices based upon the concept of stratigraphy. These are representational strategies that have a considerable amount of conceptual valence in contemporary archaeological theory of practice. Stratigraphy is still considered the most important form of mediational framework through which the temporality of a site is mapped. In order to investigate the ideological and methodological salience of stratigraphy to the archaeological project, I will focus on the archive of one of its key proponents - Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and especially his work in South Asia. This paper will analyze Wheeler’s attempt at transforming stratigraphy as a fringe archaeological strategy into a core mediational practice to represent chronology - a form of temporal cartography.

Paper

Introduction

The methodological practice of archaeology traverses between both the temporal and spatial dimensions, and the knowledge about past that its disciplinarian processes produce are confined by their limitations. Visual representation in archaeology has struggled to escape this limitation and attempted to collapse the duality of the two dimensions into objective diagram by articulating itself within the discursive territory of the discipline. The archaeological process of knowledge production is constructed through methods that are instruments of negotiation capable of manufacturing facts about past, explicating its nature, its expanse and its chronology. The archaeological method is a product of socialization of the discipline in the larger discursive terrain of knowledge production through invocation, appropriation and usage of scientific methods, and is intricately connected with the genealogy of the scientific project.

The concern of this paper is one such method- stratigraphy as it was applied in the works of Sir Mortimer Wheeler- its emergence in the process of making the archaeology an empirical practice, allowing for the excavated “nature to speak for itself” (Daston & Gallison 1992:81). In its evolution as a scientific practice we see various scientists, geologists and archaeologists, struggle to push it as a valid methodological practice into the discursive space of the discipline. This process was symptomatic of the seventeenth century moralistic drive towards truthful observance of the natural and physical world and they attempted to enforce this morality of accuracy in describing and explaining the material culture.

The method, having its origin in the antiquarian phase of the discipline’s trajectory, has gained widespread currency and has become an intimate part of the archaeological methods of the twentieth century. It is a conceptual apparatus, which negotiates with the spatial dimension of the archaeological project to produce objective knowledge about the temporal dimension. This is initiated through a complex codification process of the spatial dimensions of the archaeological site. By negotiating through the distribution of the key units of the spatial dimension- site, artifacts, natural, physical and archaeological deposits a cartographical map of the temporality of the site is constructed.

By engaging with the cartographical objectivity that describes the spatial taxonomy of the site a chronological narrative of temporality is produced. In this paper I am interested in examining the visual representation of the stratigraphy as cartographical practice, especially in relation to the nature of archaeological objectivity it produces about past. As these diagrammatic representation are a reflection of what objectivity meant to a generations of practitioner who attempted to produce it which as Daston and Galison puts it had the semblance of “ everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment” (Ibid:82).

Definitions

I locate the usage of startigraphy in the conceptual interplay between the ideas of ‘taxonomic classification’, ‘cryptography’ and ‘topographic cartography’ as well as their historical unity is at the core of stratigraphy as a conceptual technique. By taxonomic classification I imply to the mission in natural science of the sixteenth and seventeenth century of classifying and arranging the botanical and zoological specimens in an orthodox nomenclatures. By cryptography, I allude to the philological project of studying, encoding and deciphering of ancient texts that were pursued by scholars during the medieval and renaissance era. And lastly by the term topographic cartography, I mean the project of making atlases, maps and plans of known world- representational strategies through which the known universe was objectified suggesting to an impartial, dispassionate and unprejudiced vision. All these conceptual tools were portrayed as markers of truth that signified objectivity, by their creators, but were devised by individual, who attempted to impose, through these influential beliefs their own subjective ideologies on the natural, physical and material world. These methodological tools were conceptual ideologies pregnant with doctrinal belief of truth and objectivity that have had considerable consequences of the disciplinarian trajectory of archaeology.It is this theoretical context I would like to examine the work of Sir Mortimeer Wheeler with respect to his archaeological interventions in India between 1944- 48.

WHEELER

I have argued elsewhere that:

The Wheeler’s archive of visual representation is an inter textual site to examine the historical role played by the methods and practice he introduced in archaeology and the great impact it has had in South Asia and the Eurasian world where his method still has wide currency. Here the visions of the multiple gazes work as techniques of power and surveillance operating in the discursive territory of the scientific project to constitute the ‘other’ Through the application of the apparatuses of mechanical reproduction, a cartographic project is set forth to the control the colonized space by appropriating Cartesian perspectivalism. Wheeler’s visual representation are an explicit example of such a scopic regime which is situated in the legacy of the “exploratory gaze” – an epistemological strategy embedded in the imperial enterprise that transforms the subjugated space into the universal, quantifiable and divisible body that can only be comprehended in a Cartesian universe. His role at the helm of the ASI in completely restructuring Indian archaeology, and the enormity of his contribution towards disciplining Indian archaeology in four years (1944-48) has been described as a series of developments that would have taken the erstwhile bureaucracy forty years. Greatly influenced by the work of General Pitt Rivers (Lucas 2001:36), who at the turn of the 19th century, had advocated the need for excavating ancient sites in a scientific manner, Wheeler transformed the archaeological endeavor into a militaristic exercise. He is credited with giving the concept of stratigraphy an important space in the archaeological project by transforming it into a methodological tool.

“in one vital respect at least there is an analogy between archaeological and military field-work that is recurrent and illuminating. The analogy rests - strangely enough as between the dead and the deadly - in the under-lying humanity of both the disciplines. The soldier, for his part, is fighting not against a block of colored squares on a war-map; he is fighting against a fellow being, with different but discoverable idiosyncrasies which must be understood and allowed for in every reaction and maneuver. Equally, the archaeological excavator is not digging up things, he is digging up people”

Mortimer Wheeler and Stratigraphy as temporal cartography

There were two central objectives that framed the intervention of Sir Mortimer Wheeler when he arrived in India in 1944 as the new Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). The first and the obvious goal was to rectify the ills of the ASI that were reported by Sir Leonard Woolley in his report on the state of Indian archaeology in 1939 (Woolley 1993 [1939]). This goal had a disciplinarian impetus and was largely aimed at restructuring the institutional apparatus of the ASI (Chadha 2002). The second objective of Wheeler's intervention had an intellectual thrust. It was chronological in intent and aimed at solving the temporal dysfunction of Indian past, both in the Northern plains where the Indo-Gangetic civilization thrived and in the Southern plateau and the coast where multiple kingdoms rose and fell. In both cases, Wheeler's intellectual intention was driven by a desire to uncover a chronological absence that marked the archaeology of these regions. The problems in the north according to Wheeler were much simpler and involved just uncovering a temporal hiatus between the Indus Civilization (third millennium BCE) and the North western kingdoms of the sixth century BCE. The dates of both the periods were archaeologically available through comparative and analogical dating with the Western world- Indus civilization to the Mesopotamian and the later settlements with the Achaemenid Empire. For the south, the problem according to Wheeler was far greater, because unlike the north, the settlements of south India did not have any comparative, temporal, analogical relationship with the western world (Wheeler 1955:188). As Wheeler puts it: "In the south of India the archaeological problem is, in a sense, vaster still. There we have no dated contact with ancient Mesopotamia, no intrusive Persian Empire…(f)or earlier periods, material is abundant, its inter-relationship unknown. It is a jumble of words with no consecutive meaning. But here again, planned work can gradually bring order and significance into chaos" (Wheeler 1955: 188). The importance of correlating Indian sites with Greco-Roman artifacts became one of the most important agenda for Wheeler. He notes in one of his texts that in order to deal "with the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Vedic period, the first requirement was to determine its delimiting phases with all possible exactitude’ (Wheeler 1949: 5). So in effect the scholarly focus of all the excavations that Wheeler undertook in India (Taxila, Arikemedu, Bhramagiri and Harappa) during the four-year tenure as the Director General of ASI were aimed at solving this dysfunctional temporality of Indian archaeology.

It is in the south that Wheeler's fetish for fixating the chronology of the Indian past brings into clear focus the colonial subtext of his scholarly enterprise and the ideological subtext of stratigraphy as Wheeler used it. Like in the north where the chronology of Indian archaeology was fixed by correlating the artifacts and sites on the basis of the known contact with the west, Wheeler desired to establish similar datum-line, for the South. This was to be provided by the Roman trade contacts in coastal India. His search took him to the coastal site Arikamedu in the French colony of Pondicherry, where along with the known horde of Roman coins, Wheeler discovered Roman ceramics. Sharing his discovery in a note to M.V. Taylor, Vice President, Society President, Society of Antiquaries of London, Wheeler's excitement is noticeable:

‘Today you will be faintly entertained to hear that we have found the first Arrentine pottery stamp known, so far as I am aware, from India (Pause for drums and trumpets). The place being Arikamedu or Virapatnam, two miles south of Pondicherry. But seriously, it is slightly romantic to find out here under the coconut palms the identical stuff that you or I are used to in other climes. The beauty of it is of course, that we are getting hitherto wholly undated Indian culture in association with it, together with substantial brick buildings which are just beginning to make their appearances’ (AACD, File No. 19/14/44; 1944. Dated 7th April 1945).

Explaining the importance of the find to Lt. Col. Stuart Piggot, Air Command, South East Asia, New Delhi:

‘The place (Arikamedu) clearly contained a Roman colony in the first half of the 1st century A.D., in connection with semi-precious stone trade. The beauty of it, of course, is that here we shall get at last our synchronism with native Indian stuff, and a firm chronological datum line for south east India within a margin of 50 years. As I said before, don’t laugh’ (AACD, File No. 19/14/44; 1944 D.O. No. 517/C. Dated 9th July, 1944).

It is in this context that Wheeler's idea of stratigraphy becomes profoundly important for this work in India. It is through excavations that were marked by methodological emphasis on stratigraphical chronology that Wheeler is able to provide south India with 'concrete' dates. “Without any depreciation of the high value of the archaeological fieldwork carried out in India by past generations of scholars, Indian and European, the time has come to recognize bluntly, but in a properly constructive sprit, certain shortcomings for which remedy is overdue. Of these, the most important is the omission to appreciate adequately the signification of stratification, which is fundamental to the science of archaeology as it is to the parent discipline of geology.”

He undertook two excavations in Southern India - the Roman trading station in Arikemedu and the megalithic site of Bhramagiri. At both the sites Wheeler produced extensive stratigraphic diagrams to represent the chronological history of the site. But it is the site of Arikemedu that provides an extraordinary example of how colonial archaeology worked. The intellectual ideology of ASI could only conceptualize an archaeological site in India within a chronological framework of a European temporality. This notion of the European time in archaeology has been largely defined and constructed by Western fixation with classical archaeology and antiquity. In India, right from the moment of the discovery of it's past, colonial scholars and antiquarians have attempted to frame India within the confines of European cartographical and chronological imagination (Raman 2002). The incipient beginnings of the ASI, were also driven by a dual necessity of cartographically map India and to chronologically date Indian monuments and sites, through its contact with the West. Alexander Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, conducted archaeological survey of most of India, depending upon the travel accounts of the 5th-9th century CE Chinese travelers. He located the contemporary provenance of ancient Buddhist sites by comparing them with Chinese accounts. He then proceeded to strip the Stupa, or drill holes to the bottom of the site to locate the relics casket where as he correctly assumed, he found Indo Greek coins, which were useful in dating.

For Wheeler, and most of his earlier colonial predecessors, ancient India lacked historical imagination in the linear European sense. Thus it was necessary to create a chronology of ancient India through its contact with the West. In the process, the Indian past was subsumed within the temporal dimensions of European time. By the early twentieth century, scientific archaeology had laid its roots in India, and the earlier antiquarian impetus of the ASI was given way to seriously attempt to excavate ancient Indian site attempt to create a chronological sequence. This temporal progression was charted primarily by relative dating using numismatic, epigraphic and material culture evidence. Though the idea of stratigraphy was known in India by the time Wheeler came he provide an objectivistic and scientific agency to it in the Indian context. For Wheeler it was only through planned and disciplined excavations, with an emphasis on three dimensional recording that a proper startigraphic sequence of the site can be created that functioned more like a cartographic exercise with an capability to map time.

Below is a case study to explicate the practice through which Wheeler effectively utilized stratigraphic sequences to narrate the chronology of the site. In this context the best example especially comes from the excavation of Arikamedu in southern India. The excavation there was directed as mentioned above to produce a temporal framework, which according to Wheeler was missing. Wheeler conceptualized the significance of Arikamedu to the chronology of South India within a cryptographic metaphor. For him the site was a 'bilingual' one where "the unknown local culture is dated from the known foreign culture, just as Egyptian hieroglyphs were partly deciphered from the parallel Greek version on Rosetta stone, or Kharoshthi from the bilingual inscriptions on the IndoBactrian coins" (Wheeler 1946: 1). The subtext of the cryptographic metaphor is situated within the confines of the colonial ideology of taming the unknown. The archaeological site is framed within a colonial narrative of discovery where the only process through which the unknown landscape, both native and past can only be domesticated by subsuming it within the ideological constructs of the western classical world. This process of framing and structuring the Indian archaeological past within the metanarrative of the Western civilization can been seen by an the subtext of the innocuous remake that Wheeler makes about the Arikemdu excavations: "the erratic cuttings of our French predecessors on the scene were methodically superseded and extended by school-trained grids and graduated stratigraphy in the busy hands of students already trained to anticipate this sort of things – the emergence of familiar western products in the meaningful association with the still unknown and variable output of the east" (Wheeler 1976). Thus, Arikamedu as an archaeological site is not conceptualized by Wheeler in its own indigenous terms or within a southern Indian temporality but it has to be historically situated within the confines of the metanarrative of Western history. In this hegemonic imagination, Arikamedu is relegated into the fringe of classical historiography, and at best named as a trading port beyond the frontiers of the Empire. By negating the indigenous temporality, Arikemedu's past is just seen as playing a peripheral role in the larger expansionist progression of the classical world. In this particular case it is benign trade and commerce unlike north India, which is largely framed within the invasion narratives of the west.

In Wheeler's stratigraphic imagination the Roman Arretine ware and amphorae from Mediterranean were central to delineating the chronology of Arikamedu. These two types of material culture were utilized to the provided a datum line not just to the site but also to whole of south India, "as upon the imported Mediterranean wares the whole chronology of the site, and its special importance therefore to Indian archaeology depend(ed)" (Wheeler 1946c). Wheeler uses these two ceramic types as a form of control mechanism, to discipline the atemporal artifacts of the native site: "subsequent to our date A.D. 50 there were, in the Southern Sector, several successive stages of construction and reconstruction, accompanied by some modification of the associated Indian pottery. These developments were controlled by two unifying factors: a general continuity in the main units of the plan, and the occurrence in all strata of shreds of Mediterranean amphora" (Wheeler 1946c: 24). Thus stratigraphy under Wheeler transforms into an ideological representation of the past, which is framed typically as a scientific practice but is mediated through imposing narratives of the Western classical antiquity. This can be more acutely seen when on the basis of the stratigraphical occurrence of Roman material culture Wheeler not only demarcates Arikamedu's functional character as a peripheral trading post of the classical world but transforms it into the colony of the Roman empire. He claims that "the historical indications are that the consolidation and development of Roman trade with the east as a product of the unification of the western world under Augustus (23 B.C.- A.D. 14)…therefore, the Roman occupation of this site is unlikely to antedate the principate of Augustus" (Wheeler 1946c: 22).

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