In recent years a growing interest has emerged in the field of acoustics in archaeology (as a number of the 2004 sessions from the Theoretical Archaeology Group in Glasgow demonstrate [link]). The majority of this research deals with the sounds created by things such as musical instruments or hammer stones in producing rock engravings, and with 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 researchers’ agendas are connected to a critical awareness of the dominance of vision in most archaeological practice, the rationale for this research often comes down to a practical need to address the acoustic traces of the material past that would have been implicit 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 argues that sound was an integral component in generating social relationships in the past.

Such studies challenge archaeologists to 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 in 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 in the 5th century BC. The continuous and relentless background noises of life in the city of Athens—the lorries, buses, cars, mopeds, and pedestrian foot traffic—have replaced others. Even at sites like the Ancient Greek theater of Epidauros or the Palamidi fortress above Nafplion, materialities have been transformed in ways that are difficult to completely account for in questioning their acoustic characteristics in the past. How can we be certain we can ever hear the same sounds as the ones that were implicated in past lives? Moreover, there remains the tough question of what the focus on sound will do for a discipline whose entire analytical apparatus is visually based?

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. The sea noise present along the length of the Bisti in the village of Ermioni ‘never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging’ (Serres 1995, 13). The ever-present murmur of Proteus (the sea god who stands at the beginning) 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 seats of the theatron at Epidaurous, 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).

But to argue that sound is a quality of things, other species and areas of landscape does not go far enough, for it fails to deal with the problem of modernist temporality and its relationship to sound. Sound, within a modernist perspective of linear time, is considered to be momentary and fleeting in nature. Sound is transient.

Modernist thought asserts a radical gap between past and present effectively cleaving time apart at revolutions (Latour 1993, 63). We ‘moderns’ 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, as Michel Serres reminds us, the measurement of time should not be mistaken for time. For Serres, the notion of linear flow does not describe the nature of time itself; it is rather only one form of temporality. Time itself is much more complex. Time is much more chaotic.

In its continual outpouring, time, for Serres, both passes and turns back upon itself. The flow of time is full of eddies, counter currents and whirlpools (Serres with Latour 1995, 58-59). At times turbulent and at times calm, time is a mixture of order and chaos. Time doesn’t simply pass; time percolates. It resembles the weather: le temps in French; o kairos in Greek, weather and time are of the same word in many languages (Serres with Latour 1995, 60). In English we can do no better than ‘tempest,’ with its proximity to temporality. In time’s percolation, the (surviving) materialities of the past are still with us. The past that is possible is here, and it is now. Entangled in our daily activities, these accreted pasts have action; the commotion and ruckus (connotations of the French ‘noiseuses’) of this past may still even be heard.

Laurent Olivier has recently argued against a laminar form of historicism whereby 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 materials of the 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 people’s 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, to be sure, regularly make distant times proximate without regard to what transpired in the interim in recirculating things of the past. Like gourmet chefs we continue to mix things from distant times into the soup of the contemporary. And like experimental DJ’s we continue to remix sounds because they are fundamental aspects of things. Pound a Neolithic hand-axe into a tree, knock on a Bronze-Age pithos, walk barefoot across a second century C.E. mosaic floor in the basement of a house in Ermioni (the modern town of ancient Hermion) and we fold time. We experience the recurrence of noise. We hear the past.

Such belles noiseuses are also to be found as fundamental qualities of the things located in the countryside of the Southern Argolid. During my fieldwork in 2003 and 2004 I took sound footage with a Lectrosonics omnidirectional microphone connected to a Sony PC 120 digital video camera at various locales within the course of revisiting the sites and landscapes of the AEP. While not 3-dimensional, which may be acoustically suggested through a method known as binaural recording, these samples provide acoustic indices to different areas of the landscape. This sound footage is incorporated into the social software portion of the dissertation and hypertexted within my day notebooks from the summers of 2003 and 2004. In this way, the acoustic qualities of things are manifested within the digital archive.

Potentially such footage this will give me some indication of how sound traveled and was heard at different places in a given landscape in the past. Other sound footage deals more directly with the qualities of things such as ceramic tile fragments or the crunch of freshly harrowed soil on the acropolis of Halieis. But such sounds are only a portion of the material qualities of place experienced on the ground. We can also fold our media and our material contexts in upon one another for a fuller sensory experience on a bodily level.

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