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. For Petrie, the record is necessary for capturing that singular moment when a fact is before the eye of an observer. This moment should be arrested with clarity, certainty, detail, and exactitude. ‘Bare of all the facts of grouping, locality, and dating which would give them historical life and value’ (Petrie 1904, 48) we are but left with murdered evidence to be placed in the ‘ghastly charnel-house’ of the museum. The record serves as the vessel of the ‘facts’ of excavation for later archaeologists to further explore. Indeed, media—the inscriptions comprised of text, plans, maps, photographs, and so on—help facilitate the series of transformations and therefore, as Petrie emphasized, separate archaeological practice from that of others, in his case the looters of antiquities. And it is precisely here that I wish to pick up on the relationship between vessel and fact in regards to ‘record’ or what I would, with a little refashioning of my own, redeploy as the ‘medium.’

As Petrie’s ‘vessel of facts’ the record falls into the old bifurcated schema associated with representation (here refer to Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 12-16). The record serves as a means to an end; the end being one of conveying content, meaning or ‘the facts’ out there to subsequent scholars elsewhere. Meaning or the message communicated by the sign, the text, the image, etc. is what is foregrounded. Meaning comes first; means comes second. In this sense, the medium is a conduit through which meaning is transmitted from an originary moment, experience, or engagement associated with excavation.

This scheme, I would argue, is the modernist treatment of the medium and its dualistic dance can be traced in contemporary conceptual frameworks of archaeological practice. For example, in the linear conception of survey where in the collection of artifacts from field-walking to materials processing to synthesis to analysis/interpretation and finally publication, the facts and meanings are situated at the beginning, in the site or landscape, in the modernist ‘field’. The medium whether ruled notepaper, blue ink, No 2 pencil, or a black and white photographic negative simply helps convey the meanings encountered by the archaeologist on the ground through the process of writing, photographing, transmitting, interpreting and finally publishing. Consider the following example from Barker’s Techniques of Archaeological Excavation:

All aspects of the site recording system – visual, in the form of drawings, sections, contour surveys, together with photographs, vertical and oblique, in colour and black and white; or written, in the form of record cards, notebooks, punched cards, or tape – should be devised so that they make interpretation, publication and storage as easy as possible. It is not simply a question of data retrieval, but of producing from the data interpretive drawings of the site’s phases and periods, buildings and structures; of wresting meaning from thousands of contexts, hundredweights of pottery and bone, and hundreds of finds, photographs and drawings (Barker 1993, 162; emphasis added).

Barker draws a distinction between the interpretations and meanings obtained from objective data and the various forms of documentation, whether photographs or drawing, through which we mobilize archaeological materials. Here, as with Petrie, the form, the medium, is separate and secondary and as a vessel it has no influence over the content, meaning or interpretation given. Recent archaeological thinking, partly connected with poststructualist concerns with materiality as text (Olsen forthcoming), has taken an interest in the issue of representation and documentation in archaeology (Hodder 1989, Shanks 1992, Tilley 1989b, Pluciennik 1999, Tringham 2000, to name but a few) though little has been said of the issue of media (exceptions surface when discussing New Media, Tringham 2000). For example, Ian Hodder, in his work at Çatalhöyük has taken a keen interest in the issue of excavation and record. For Hodder:

The digging is done in order to record or represent. It is structured in such a way as to produce sections, profiles and plans that can be recorded and written down. We dig towards taking a photograph or completing a phase plan. We sculpt the earth in order to fulfil the demands of representation (2000, 15; emphasis added).

But how does the interpretation relate to the medium which facilitates it? Hodder suggests that the demands of representation drive our practice. He maintains, ‘a separation occurs between the interpretive moment and the record which is written for later ‘writing up’’ (Hodder 2000, 15). Here Hodder is at pains to describe a split between two different forms of engagement. One is a bodily engagement with the archaeological context in which a person is excavating. The other is an engagement with the modes of representation. Focusing upon the latter involves a turning away from the former resulting in a split between material and record. In turning toward the context sheet ‘it tells us what to record’ (Hodder 2000, 15). For Hodder, the demands of the inscription process itself drive both our thinking and our practice while excavating. In this way, the context sheet, the two-dimensional plan, the photograph of a particular layer, etc., literally structure the way in which the bodily engagement with the material world unfolds.

This understanding of the medium as a prime mover effecting change connects to poststructualist thought (Olsen 2005). Through the work of thinkers such as Deleuze (1994), Derrida (1976) and McLuhan (1994) the medium has undergone a reversal. In this ‘mystifying flip’ the medium is no longer treated as a secondary entity, as the means to an end, but rather it is taken as primary; as an end in itself. This resonates in the McLuhan dictum ‘the medium is the message.’ In place of any originary ‘medium-free’ meaning in the material world, the medium in these works has a role in shaping our thought and practice (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 169-170). Interpretation does not unfold in absence of the medium it is related to. Our media have a part to play in shaping our thoughts and interpretations. Therefore, the two-dimensionality of measured grid squares situated on a flat paper surface, for example, structure the layout of trenches and the way we proceed, think and engage within the excavation of a site or the survey of a landscape. Without the flat paper or other surface the 2-dimesionality of the Cartesian grid would not exist as such. The flat paper surface affects the development of grid cartography.

But this mystifying and bewildering reversal of the medium is also an asymmetrical embrace of the opposite pole in a bifurcated notion of medium. Dichotomies between medium and message, means and end or ideas and the thing, along with Hodder’s discussion of the record and poststructualist thought brings us back to the problem of the world centered upon human consciousness. In this dissertation I want to reconfigure the notion of medium. I want to fuse together the divided infrastructure associated with medium as material (ink, 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, canvas, text) or indeed institution (TV, broadcast news), medium as situated in polar opposition to representation or ideas, and situate it where it belongs: in the middle of a complex entanglement.

The record is an intermediary in every sense of the word. Indeed, the immutability and mobility of writing media transcends deep time and distant spaces (also refer to Latour 1986). Media expand and extend the spacio-temporal range of humanity (cf. McLuhan 1994). This is their action. Media as, for example, excavation context sheets or pages of text from the day notebook are imbroglios, entanglements of ideas and things. Following Latour, all things (‘non-humans’) are potential media. As such, media exist along a spectrum ranging from ambiguity to legible specificity—from unedited digital video to comparable, verifiable and repeatable context sheets; from stone tools to Pausanias’ Periegesis. I regard media as the modes of articulation, not through which or by which, but as which ideas are manifested, materialized, and mediated (also refer to Lucas 2001, 211-214 for a discussion of media as the materializations of archaeological excavation). Therefore, I maintain that media should be understood as modes of transaction and engagement.

Media can be blank paper pages (which began as raw timber), unexposed film or empty digital screens. However, through a series of transformations they acquire a new status in their encounters with other entities. Media are not limited to the blank slate. Instead they are complicated all the more along the chain. A fresh page in the Blue Team notebook on July 16, 1981, becomes a narrative of the day’s events on the 17th, which is then marked by a further referent to the measurement of a mortarium on the 19th in the margins. Media are iterative in their negotiations with other entities. It is because of this transformative aspect that we have to understand media not so much as the material thing, but as processes situated along the series of translations, which they not only help to facilitate, but go through themselves.

In treating media as modes of engagement we transcend how they are normally understood, in the discipline of archaeology, for example, as passive tools—as simply means for conveying ideas. Media are both the means and the end. As modes of engagement we recognize their action. As modes of engagement we treat media as dynamic entities, as actants within our collective practice. We recognize the complex transaction that takes place between the material world and our documentation of it.

Given its complexity, archaeological interventions into the material world require multiple forms of mediation—traditional forms of inscription (text, plans, diagrams, maps and so on), video, and new (i.e. digital) media. This statement is the fundamental premise of media/archaeology. But why should this be so? Has not archaeology developed one of the most refined methodologies for translating the world of things? And do these translations not come in multiple forms? To paraphrase Latour: yes, archaeological knowledge is constructed but ‘it cannot be reduced to the social dimension because this dimension is populated’ by brigades of material actors mobilized to construct it (1993, 6). Any separation between material medium and representation or ideas simply will not suffice.

To hold media (along with other material entities) in symmetry is to reconfigure our relationships with the material worlds outside of the classic human-centered approaches of hermeneutics and phenomenology (Latour 1999, 9; although refer to Idhe 2003). Therefore, I reiterate that I suspend my interest in interpretation and in turn articulate a more general process of mediation. However, prior to addressing this notion of mediation I will return to two central questions to be addressed by this dissertation; how we are to move around the dualist paradigms of the modernist settlement and what suite of concepts will take its place? It is to these two questions that I now turn.

Return to Media and Materiality

Forward to modernist divides and hermeneutics: bypassing interpretation for mediation

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