Three Rooms began as an academic paper. It is published in the Journal of Social Archaeology.

Actually, there is a story of academic intrigue|a book about the archaeology of performance about how it came to be in this journal.

Here is what I wrote as an introduction.

This paper has two origins. The first is a project to understand the early Greek city state. In several works (most notably Art and the Early Greek State (1999), I attempted an archaeological interpretation that began with ceramic design, production and consumption. Outwardly this took the form of a study of artifact lifecycles. Close up the study was a contextual archaeology in the sense of a spiral of associations tracked through archaeological material and all sorts of contexts - empirical, spatial, conceptual, metaphorical.

Traditional categories of rank and social class, resources, trade, state formation, urbanization, and manufacture I found too connected with long-standing tendencies to emplot archaeological material in standardized metanarratives (here of the expansion of the city state as a component of ancient imperialisms, as well as the cultural florescence of ancient Greece). My interpretive and analytical categories were just too blunt (on this see Shanks and Tilley Reconstructing Archaeology 1987). My work suggested that a revitalized archaeology of Graeco-Roman antiquity requires an approach that challenges many of these components of conventional narratives (economy, trade, colonization, acculturation, stylistic expression of ethnic and political identities), and indeed the narratives themselves.

In its early stages the project worked with a relatively familiar historiography of the early Greek city state (expansion of the polity form explained through structures and discourses related to class cultures), and I presented a systemic model of artifact design. But the material led me into a quite different cultural field of faces, animals and monstrosity, corporeality, potters wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sovereignty, violence, alterity, gender, ships, armor and clothing, and much more. Here, arguably, I came up against the limits of any interpretive project - too much is ultimately not open to interpretation, or at least overflows an analytical or interpretive project. Interpretation always risks overly reducing the richness of historical and archaeological detail to structure, plot, account, cause, effect.

Social archaeology is often considered as modeling the past. Some social or cultural process or logic is held to account for, to explain what is observed in the archaeological record. Interpretation, as another mode of social archaeology, may be conceived as reading though archaeological traces to perceive some deeper understanding of what was going on in the past. Social archaeology may present a model of an ancient economy, or an interpretation of a prehistoric ideology: in both, the empirical traces of the past are, necessarily and indeed appropriately, reduced to a process, subsumed within the model, or seen through, treated as symptoms of some underlying reality. This reduction can be part of what I have called the fallacy of representation or expression (Shanks 1999, Chapter 2). In my work on the Greek city I added to analysis, explanation and interpretation manifestation - letting the material display itself (though this heretical empirics is not merely descriptive - see particularly Shanks 1999, Chapter 3).

This paper continues such an exercise in empirics. Along the lines of the historiography of Benjamin (1999) or of Gumbrecht (1997), it attempts to compound its sources, layering them in the presentation rather than redescribing them as a working model, or seeing through them to what may be conceived as really going on. I want to try to hold on to the empirical texture of our archaeological sources. A broad context is therefore the search for a method that is specific to its object (see Shanks and Tilley Reconstructing Archaeology 1987, page 47-49, on this argument in Critical Theory). More generally, I am drawing on an old classical, indeed philological, tradition of source commentary and critique (see Shanks 1996 Classical Archaeology of Greece, Chapter 4).

The second origin of this paper is a collaboration, now over ten years old, with an arts company, Brith Gof, that produces site specific performances. It began with the realization that archaeology and performance share a common problem of documentation - what comes after the event (of performance or of social practice), what is left behind, and how this constitutes (or not) a record of the event. Among other things, our collaboration has focused on the character of performance, as part of the recent growth of the disciplinary field of performance studies (Pearson and Shanks Theatre/Archaeology 2001). Performance, ceremony and ritual have, of course, come under close scrutiny in much recent postprocessual or interpretive archaeology, and tied to issues of signification, of the embodiment and corporeality of social actors, agency and the constitution of social structure and social norms (consider Barrett 1994 as an early example). This is a paper about how we might work with notions of the performative character of social practice.

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