The face of pre-history - Routin Lin, Northumberland UK
To imagine the world behind the ruin in the land,
behind the sherd of antique pottery.
This is the work of the archaeological imagination.
Since before my book Experiencing the past (1992) I have been concerned with what makes archaeology so fascinating to so many.
What is archaeology?
Archaeology is what archaeologists do. This answer is not a tautology. It refers us to the practices of archaeology. And to the conditions under which archaeologists work - the institutions and infrastructures, the politics and pragmatics of getting archaeological work done.
Archaeologists work on what is left of the past. Archaeology is about relationships - between past and present, between archaeologist and traces and remains. Archaeology is a set of mediating practices - working on remains to translate, to turn them into something sensible - inventory, account, narrative, explanation, whatever.
Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking - about what is left of the past, about the temporality of remainder, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience.
"Archaeological Sensibility" and "Archaeological Imagination" are terms to summarize components of these mediating and transformative practices. Sensibility refers us to the perceptual components of how we engage with the remains of the past. Imagination refers us to the creative component - to the transforming work that is done on what is left over.
Archaeologists are particularly interested in sites and things. They conduct fieldwork, collect and categorize things as evidence.
Here then are the main components of an archaeological mode of engaging with and working upon the past - sensibility and imagination.
- a "sense of place" - this includes the topological folding of time inherent in our perception of site or place, as old things mingle with new, and also the idea of "landscape" as a way of looking and arranging things in place
- a fascination with the connection between place and event - "this happened here"
- a particular forensic and suspicious attitude towards place - "at a scene of crime anything might be relevant"
- this forensic connection between place and event involves a task of distinguishing and sorting evidence from irrelevancy, what is significant from what is noise, "figure from ground"
- this includes a documentary interest in "what comes after the event"
- which also connects with entropy, ruin, decay - "what becomes of what was" - metamorphic processes
- and it includes a question of "how to document materiality" - site, practice and thing
- "uncanny non-absence" - archaeology works through remains or vestiges; bits remaining of the past. It deals in a past which is not so much over and done, no longer present, as uncannily not-absent - present in the remains
- as well as remains, archaeology deals in traces or tracks, impressions and footprints, impacts and imprints that witness the non-presence of the past, and that require an "ichnography" - a science of traces
- archaeology thus deals in "displacement" as a fundamental feature of representation - the shift from past to present, the circulation of text and image beyond the findspot, beyond the site whence the photo was "taken", the re-location, citation, quotation of the image, document and account
- "is this the way we were?" - there is a crucial component of identity and identification, of recognition in archaeology - "these are our ancestral traces?"
- archaeology establishes relationships - "modes of engagement" with the remains of the past
- "mise-en-scène" - the arrangement of things in place to fit the interest of inspection is a key component of archaeological work, whether it be the trench section cleaned for scrutiny or a reconstruction of a building
- "sorting things out" - archaeologists are often concerned with classification, choosing what goes with what, in sorting finds, in making a significant collection
- "a love of technique" - archaeology has long included a technical fascination with recovery and reconstruction, with the technology of reproduction/documentation - the magic of past reappearing in the present
- a crucial aspect of archaeology's temporality is "the decisive moment" of discovery - when the treasure of the past is recovered, when the pieces of the puzzle come together
The archaeological imagination - the class - [link]
Archaeological imagination - concept map
Figure and ground - a glossary
Figure and ground - a photoblog
Figure-ground relationships and the archaeological imagination - a talk
The archaeological matrix, sometimes called the archaeological record, is considered as an amalgam of layers. The concept of stratigraphy is used to decode this amalgam.
In this decoding, the archaeologist digs down to find meaning. But digging stratigraphically is impossible without the concept of horizontal surface interface - edges, moments of discontinuity when one layer becomes another. The establishment of such surface discontinuity is the focus of much archaeological excavation. And, of course, it involves sideways movement across a surface, planning features such as walls and pits, as one goes.
This is not simply to map the spatial coordinates of a 3-D matrix - the phases perhaps of a ruined building. There is no comprehensible past down there to be discovered in some kind of 3-D form - for archaeology depends upon tying layers to date (there is no innate chronology to sediment), choices of what to distinguish, upon defining the interfaces between and across layers. The concept of interface is thus a supplement to the stratigraphy - an immaterial concept external to layering, but essential to it.
Applies systems of knowledge, and builds synthetic arrangements recounting the past as narrative, as causal chain, system, whatever.
Much archaeology is a quest for contemporary origins (this is where and when we come from) and is thus premised upon a continuity between past and present.
Of course there is a particular and material continuity that lends extraordinary force to notions of geneaological continuity - the materiality of the past has survived, ruined and decayed, but nevertheless present to the archaeologist.
The materiality of loss, however, the experience that so much is gone, that so little remains as inheritance, is simultaneously the ground for radical discontinuity. The implications are threefold. First: The waste and loss that may be the real story of history means that ideas of sociocultural continuity (of community, identity, technology, progress) may be quite literally groundless. Second: The fragments of history attest to massive lacunae, and assembling the pieces as a narrative can only occur locally, if at all. Third: Radical historical discontinuity throws suspicion on accounts and narratives that depend upon notions of sociocultural and biological similarity that transcend history (notions, for example, of universal human values). Radical discontinuity may thus mean a shock of radical difference.
Evolutionary schemes play upon a past that is different from the present in being at an earlier, more primitive stage. Here discontinuity is explicitly and intimately tied to grand metanarratives of historical contintuity.
Depth and origin are often equated with authenticity.
An authentic artifact find may be considered to possess aura. And aura, of course, may involve a sense of distance and difference.
The grounds for authenticity and aura are material - the piece of the past has survived and its materiality is witness to this survival, its metonymical bridging of time and making good of loss.
the amateur (archaeologist/antiquarian)
Hooked on the aura of the past.
Recycling bits of the past otherwise discarded, making them live again, finding value where there was none perceived.
The material past is encountered unspoken, and is ultimately ineffable (but see mute-ability). Here is a profound question that can only be resolved as fatally flawed translation - how are we to document the past on the basis of its fragmentary material remains? We can only interminably scribble on the ruins which always hold back more than ever could be said or pictured.
Encountering the archaeological past is distinctively sensory?embodied. Just like memory, we feel as much as rationally decode the past. This is associated with its ineffability - it is often only felt. Reactions may range from fascination through disgust to veneration of the sacred.
Engages with archaeological places, and decontextualizes site and artifact, rips them from their setting, for there are only ever fragments, and choices must be made, of what elicits attention, of what to record, of what to conserve.
Ruins in the land - this is one of the sites of archaeology. It may be conceived as ìthe fieldî.
Sites may be represented as coordinates - spatial grid reference. They may be described topographically. More accurately, and with Michel Serres, their representation requires a topology that can deal with the palimpsest that is landscape - the percolating time that folds together the many fragmentary traces of pasts present in any one place.
Four archaeological temporalities:
*The moment (for example, of origin, or of discovery) arrested/captured. *Date - the application of chronometry. *Ruin and decay - a continuity from past through present. *Actuality - a return of what is no longer the same. The nonarbitrary conjunction of presents: the past's present, the instant of archaeological excavation or discovery, and the time of viewing, reading, recollection.
The archaeologist faces a mound of debris. One way of making good the loss inherent in the fragment is to define categories and classify. Writing catalogs.
Or, in choosing a systematics that eschews the construction of a coherent historical narrative (inadequately based upon scattered archaeological fragments), archaeologists may instead approximate an artifactual cladistics.
Managing the archives. May be a scribe, writing inventories and catalogs.
Archaeologists may think they can read the traces of the past - the mute stones speaking through the work of the archaeologist.
This translation or representation is one of many metamorphic processes that are the subject of archaeological interest. Rot and decay. Restoration. And also everyday discard turned into history.
Managing the inventories, site access, access to the archives.
The loss that is at the heart of the archaeological project - history as ruin - is a precisely modernist experience of the twentieth century. How can we hold on to the mass of information and detail, the lives descending into chaos?
There is horror not only in the metamorphic processes of decay that apply to our own materiality. But also in the entropy that is history - the tendency to misunderstand (so much is missing), the drift into formlessness. Then there is the sickening loss that is the horror of history - the wasted lives. So much thrown away.
A forensic horror too, as at the scene of a crime- the chance find of a finger bone or tooth (or, so often now, the mass grave of anonymous victims) attesting to . . .
At a scene of crime anything might be relevant. The archaeological site is cognate with the crime scene. The tiny fragment may be significant and provide a clue to some deeper meaning or knowledge. The fragment or trace is here conceived as a kind of clue or symptom.
In a symptomatic logic superficial and isolated finds, events and observations are linked to underlying process. A symptom may lead to medical diagnosis. An archaeological find may track the migration of an ethnic group.
The desire is for some kind of control over the incidental details, a system that might lead to identification. Just as Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, and a nineteenth-century will to knowledge, codified and cataloged fingerprints and ears, the shape of eyebrows in a forensic anthropology, a physiognomic science of character, race and conformity, so too did, do, archaeologists collect skulls and flint tools, measuring and comparing in a systematization of ancient race and cultural industry.
Their esoteric knowledge is based upon tying apparently incidental detail to the authority of the catalog. In such attribution of item to class the connoisseur judges quality and value.
Recontextualizing fragments. The collection is always more than an account of the past and more than the sum of its parts. It is rooted in heterogeneous association. The collector is fascinated by the life of an artifact - its journey through making, use, discard, recovery, re-collection.
It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection - the reinsertion of pieces of the past into a form that carries significance in the present, carried forward from the past. As in memory, the (archaeological) traces of the past do not constitute a timeline or linear account. They resonate with a present experienced moment; this is what precipitates their reemergence, their recollection. This is actuality.
It is not that the archaeological past is absent. It is more precisely not present. Or, we might say the trace means the past is absent in its presence. Archaeology is a dynamic of presence and absence.
In this dynamic, all historical culture is residual. There is a negativity represented by the loss of the past, its absence. This negativity is the only condition for knowledge of the past - waste and garbage are the condition of historical insight and knowledge.
What is the distinction between the history of human agents and the history of material traces? Between people and tools? People and artifacts have, we may say, been intertwined for as long as there have been modern humans. We have always been cyborgs, material agents, embodied agents, materially located agents, people conceivable as things, artifacts playing active roles in society and history.
Material culture, the subject of archaeology and a new interdisciplinary field (material culture studies) that also includes anthropology, sociology, economics, design, and art history, is thus something of a tautology - because human history (of culture) has always been material, in the social fabric, in the materiality of human agents.
Archaeology thus, potentially, merges with natural history, as it did in its antiquarian beginnings, as chorography mingled topography with writing on nature, with speculation on field monuments, with philological focus upon place names, with an interest in old things found, in the animal and plant species of a landscape.
To what extent is the individual agent lost in the tide of history? Is archaeology best understood as the evolution of species of tools? Are overarching structures (social, cultural, biological) the real subject of deep human time?
Policing the past - determining what should be kept and protected.
I should add the uncanny, monument, cyborg, trauma, framing, ichnography, abjection
The photoblog archaeography deals with a particular manifestation of the archaeological imagination - through the convergence of archaeology and photography.
Here are its themes:
abjection
an ambiguous state of being neither this nor that, preformed, pre-categorized - neither here nor there, neither past nor present - as in the vestigial remains of the past
absence
Though the past is absent, because it is over and gone, there are memories and remains. The archaeological past is, in this way, not so much absent or withheld as not-present.
actuality
A return of what is no longer the same. A conjunction of present moments: the past’s present, the instant of (archaeological) excavation or discovery, and the time of viewing, reading, recollection. Actuality is a kind of photographic time.
anthropometrics
Archaeologists measure the remains of people and their works. The desire is for some kind of control over the incidental details, a system that might lead to identification of what went on when and who and what was involved. Anthropometrics can include the forensic anthropology of fingerprints and DNA typing, measuring skulls in a nineteenth century physiognomic science of criminality, race and character, as well as biological informatics.
archive
A depository and register of remains, needing management and maintenance.
aura
An uncanny impression of unique presence possessed by archaeological objects, often associated with their authenticity and witnessing of times and events now gone.
authenticity
The real thing, the genuine article, often guaranteed by evidence of origin and ownership.
collection
Archaeologists make collections. Because the collected items owe their association to the interest of the collector, a collection is always more than an account of the past and more than the sum of its parts. The collector is fascinated by the life of an artifact - its journey through making, use, discard, recovery, and re-collection.
connoisseurship
Possessing an esoteric knowledge of incidental details of things unnoticed by most people, the connoisseur attributes an item to a class and so judges quality and value.
depths
Archaeologists may dig deep to find meaning.
documents
How are we to document the past on the basis of its fragmentary material remains? Any attempt can only be provisional because the remains are broken material and always withhold more than ever could be said or pictured.
entropy
Archaeology's entropy is the drift into formlessness as more and more of the past is lost and decays away.
fieldwork
Getting out to engage with (archaeological) sites and finds.
forensics
At a scene of crime anything might be relevant. An archaeological site is like a crime scene because a tiny fragment may be significant and provide a clue to some deeper meaning or knowledge.
garbology
A systematic interest in garbage, rubbish, trash, detritus—the ultimate substance of history.
memory
Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection - the reinsertion of pieces of the past into a form that carries significance in the present, carried forward from the past. As in memory, the (archaeological) traces of the past do not constitute a timeline or linear account. They percolate and resonate with a present experienced moment; this is what precipitates their reemergence, their recollection.
museology
The science of archive management. Museology often involves scribes, writing inventories and catalogs.
monument
Monuments, big or small, are a favorite interest of archaeologists. They mark out historical territory and remind us of the past.
mute-ability
Processes of metamorphosis lie at the heart of archaeology. Things rot and decay. Everyday garbage becomes history. Remains are restored. Material remains are turned into stories. Archaeologists may think they can translate the traces of the past - the mute stones speaking through the work of the archaeologist.
objective objects
Sometimes archaeologists just focus on things themselves, as data, as fetishes, or because they are the only place to begin, or because what people make and do reveals more than they say.
origins
Archaeologists often seek the beginnings of things (the origins of agriculture, of cities, of Greek culture …) and are particularly interested in the origins of the present, asking - What has brought us to where we are now?
ruins
Sites of archaeological interest.
scavenging
Recycling bits of the past otherwise discarded, making them live again, finding value where none was perceived.
surfaces Though we may wish to dig deep in search of authentic meaning, it doesn’t appear to us in any great clarity. The depths need decoding with the concept of horizontal surface interface - edges, moments of discontinuity when one layer becomes another. Establishing such surface discontinuities is the focus of much archaeological effort. And, of course, it involves sideways movement across a surface, planning features such as walls and pits, as one goes.
symptomatics
The remains of the past may be considered as traces, clues or symptoms. In symptomatic logic superficial and isolated finds, events and observations are linked to underlying causes or events. A symptom may lead to medical diagnosis. An archaeological find may be taken as a sign of culture change or trading relationship.
systematics
The archaeologist faces a mound of debris – the past shattered into pieces. One way of making good the loss inherent in the fragments is to create a system that can encompass the debris – to define categories, classify, and write catalogs.
topography
A classic archaeological interest – the historical lie of the land and sense of historical place.
topology
The percolating time that folds together the many fragmentary traces of pasts present in any one place.
trauma
The shock that the real story of history is one of loss and discontinuity, because there are so few archaeological remains from which a coherent story may be made.
the uncanny
A return of the repressed. The experience of something strange but hauntingly familiar, reminiscent. The sublime horror of meeting one’s double. The uncanny is disruptive of time. It is a fracturing, splitting, or doubling of subjectivity. It is a disturbing repetition-with-a-difference.
Forthcoming: Archaeopaedia - a glossary of the archaeological imagination - http://archaeopaedia.com
