Key Pages
Christopher Witmore |Changes [Feb 26, 2007]
Archivesocial software version
PhD awarded September 2005
This dissertation attends to the articulation of landscape in Greece and the Peloponnesus in particular. Its aim is two-fold. First, it sketches a general model of archaeological practice which accounts for the complex ways in which practitioners of surface survey are entangled with what they would otherwise treat as either detached ‘objects’ of study or reflections of social relations today. Second, it offers a set of new articulations that are designed to enrich our understanding of landscape in Greece. To this end, this dissertation builds on the contexts, materials and practices of the Argolid Exploration Project.
In working toward these aims an argument is made for understanding archaeology as more than a social process. Specifically, human beings, practitioners in the discipline, are characterized as distributed ‘collectives’ or mixtures of both the social and the material. Therefore things, whether maps, the text of Pausanias’ Periegesis, theodolites or Protogeometric pottery, as entities within the collective, as archaeological ‘fields,’ are argued to have a stake in archaeological practice. In this way the material past is accorded presence and action in what archaeologists actually do. In articulating the ‘multiple fields’ of archaeological practice several empirical case studies are deployed which work with two ways of presenting the pasts of the southern Argolid as blended into the present.
First, a number of genealogical case studies are offered. These studies track the historical shifts behind the modes of engagement characteristic of our disciplinary articulation of landscape today. Second, a ‘topology’ is proposed as a complimentary synthesis for attending to the multitemporal ensemble of the southern Argolid landscape. Rather than arrange the development of landscape in separate chronological frames, it plots the points where various pasts percolate throughout the southern Argolid today.
In all it is held that there is more to understanding the material world than simply making sense of its ensemble. In grappling with the multiplicity of landscape a variety of new media experiments are offered as ways forward in attending to the complexity, corporeality and presence of the material past in Greece which our traditional modes of documentation tend to often sieve away.
This is the phase two database for Multiple field approaches in the Mediterranean: Revisiting the Argolid Exploration Project.
Phase one of the dissertation wiki was begun in the summer of 2003 and is available here: [link]
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike 2.5 License
Bernhard Schneider, Austrian Excavation (LF University of Innsbruck) at Aramus near Jerevan, Armenia. csaf2556@uibk.ac.at
