Archaeolog

I largely agree with Sekedat’s thoughtful review of Pearson’s Carrlands digital media project, although I maintain some reservations. Pearson’s apparent goal is to make the undeniable depth of meaning and experience in the north Lincolnshire landscape accessible to the public. Initially this would seem laudable; public outreach, and indeed the preservation of whole landscapes for the appreciation of the non-specialist, seems to dominate current debates in CRM and heritage scholarship. More specifically, the general school of British landscape archaeology within which this project’s structuring principles can be contextualized has often maintained an approach which is vigorously accessible to the non-specialist, through placing emphasis on the experiential (e.g. Edmonds 1999; although Pearson would presumably reject such categorization as an unnecessary generalization, and in some respects he may be right).

However, the notion of ‘making accessible’ itself demands further evaluation. Pearson invites us to engage with the landscape in a more meaningful way by listening to a series of audio files. This could arguably be seen to carry the perhaps unsettling implication that the listener may have been unable to fully appreciate her surroundings without a specialist (Pearson) assisting in her interpretation of it. The voices and sounds, potentially arranged, we must remember, according to an agenda, become vehicles for interpretation. A reticulate and multi-variant approach to landscape could be seen to be rejected in favor of a single trajectory of experience. There is no a priori reason for preferring one approach or the other, and again, I am sure that the Carrlands team would reject this assertion of their work as delineating an unavoidable path of interpretation. Yet the insistence on the importance of multivocality and of interweaving of narratives jars when considered alongside the somewhat parochial tendency to suppress the listener’s voice, narrative, individual story, call it what you will.

Continue reading "Comments on the Carrlands Project " »

Posted by Thomas Leppard at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bradley M. Sekedat
Brown University

A growing number of recent studies seek new ways to engage with landscapes (see references). The Carrlands Project (www.carrlands.org.uk) fits aptly into this category as it explores the complexity of the Carrs in southeastern England through the combination of music, dialogue, and composed sound recordings. The format of this presentation is a website that hosts a series of 12 recordings divided among three specific portions of the Carrlands: Snitterby Carrs, Hibaldstow Carrs and Horkstow Carrs. Each recording is approximately 15 minutes long, treating the ‘historical,’ ‘cultural’ and ‘physical’ variations that make up this diverse region. The creators (Mike P. Pearson, John Hardy and Hugh Fowler) encourage users either to bring the recordings with them to the Carrs to enhance the interactivity of their engagement, or to listen to the audio clips at a distance, embracing the message of complexity inherent within them. This reviewer listened from his office in Providence, Rhode Island. I paid particular attention to the dominant themes that arise out of the scripted narrations and musical compositions that accompany the journey through the flat, marshy, industrial and agricultural terrain.

Continue reading "Landscape Complexity and New Media: a review of the Carrlands Project Website (Mike Pearson)." »

Posted by Bradley Sekedat at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yannis Hamilakis

An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99).

During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often drawn on the most iconic specimen of Greek national imagination, the Athenian Acropolis. I thus soon became aware of two facts: the first is that most tourist guides and official presentations to the site still present to the nearly 2 million visitors per year a sanitized image, a partial, monumentalized façade of only one aspect of the rich social biography of the monument: a version of its classic life, broadly defined. The site was important before classical times, and it continued to be important subsequently, up to the present. Yet, very little of that richness reaches the visitors. Moreover, the site continues to be projected exclusively as a sight, a staged authenticity that is offered to the visitors for almost exclusively visual consumption and admiration. I have elsewhere explored this phenomenon by pointing to this ocularcentric monumentalisation as the outcome of the combined efforts of the photographic and the archaeological (Hamilakis 2001, 2008).

Continue reading "The Other Acropolis Project" »

Posted by Yannis Hamilakis at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thomas M. Urban

In summer of 2006 I left my job working for Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to participate in a project in Iraq investigating mass graves for the Iraqi High Tribunal. My primary duty was analyzing "cultural objects" found in the graves of genocide victims. These objects included ballistic evidence, personal effects, and clothing. Clothing offered a particularly interesting window into the lives of the victims, revealing ethnic identity, gender, manner of death and more. Collectively and individually, clothing made a compelling line of evidence for telling the story of crimes against humanity.

Bogolan (mud cloth): This bogolanfini wrapper, formerly on display at a Haffenreffer Museum textiles exhibit, was produced in Mali by Kouraba Diarra and Field Collected by Claire Grace. Photo Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.

Bogolan

I never had much interest in textiles as a category of material culture. Despite this, I found myself learning quite a bit about them. I had enrolled in a graduate seminar on museum studies during my senior year at Brown University. The course focused on developing an exhibit to be displayed in a new satellite gallery of Brown's anthropology museum. Much to my dismay, the course instructors had already decided that the exhibit would focus primarily on textiles. I wanted to gain some museum experience, so decided to continue with the course despite of my lack of interest in textiles. Ultimately, my contribution to the exhibit focused on pre-Columbian textiles from Peru and Bolivia. I considered myself to be more of an archaeologist than an ethnographer, so working with ancient textiles held more interest for me than working with some of the contemporary pieces in the museum’s collection. This was my way around the textile dilemma. After all, my curatorial contribution to the exhibit was archaeological: no touchy-feely interpretations of contemporary clothing here. I worked hard on my contribution to the exhibit, then washed my hands of the whole business of textiles, vowing never to turn back.

Continue reading "Bogolan to Baghdad: Textiles Tell the Story of Genocide in Iraq" »

Posted by Thomas M. Urban at 4:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA
Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University

The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a "space" or "extent of existence" and "the interval between two successive events or acts." Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing time's passage, they assign social meaning as "history." When we come across one in a book, exhibit, or presentation, we comprehend its string of dated moments and selective illustrations. Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption. Even when authorship is unclear, authority is implicit and strong. Imagining the between spaces, the elided events and edited convolutions, takes some effort. Or an intervention.

A timeline of city history is part of the décor of my home subway station, Davis Square on the Red Line in Somerville, Massachusetts. The station was completed in 1984, and most of its interior dates from that time. Structural elements are raw concrete, sheet aluminum, and dark purple-brown brick. The public art program at the station is conspicuously disjointed. Drawings by elementary school children have been transformed into ceramic wall tiles. Casabianca by Elizabeth Bishop is carved discreetly into the bricks of the platform floor. A collection of giant geometric shapes, splashed in now-murky primary colors, stretches above the inbound platform. The collage may or may not spell out "Davis."

Continue reading "History on the Line, Davis Square" »

Posted by Christina J. Hodge at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Xurxo Ayán Vila (Spanish Higher Council of Scientific Research)
David Blanco Míguez (University of A Coruña)

The Internet must be seen as a social phenomenon and its spatial properties should be critically interrogated... Our cultural archaeological production is today implicated in the discourses and contestations of identity, social roles and representations, in new ways, through new media and within new spatial configurations. If archaeologists are to play an active role in the process, and thereby come closer to disciplinary maturity, then we have to understand these processes and their position in the new cyber-order.
(Hamilakis, 2000: 257)

Since 2003 a team composed of a variety of professionals connected with the Landscape Archaeology Laboratory of the Padre Sarmiento Institute for Galician Studies (CSIC-Xuga) in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) have been working on the archaeological site of Castros de Neixón - two hillforts located in a small peninsula in one of the Galician rias. In step with this project, an international work camp for young people aged 18 to 30 has been set up. The project has several broad aims: the recovery of the cultural heritage of this area; the design of and display of cultural materials in the Archaeology Center of Barbanza (open to the public since 2002); the promotion of the archaeological area of Neixón as a tourist attraction, and the communication of the scientific knowledge produced by our research to both local communities and society at large.

The project's logo ("Neixón" in Galician is pronounced like "nation" in English)

Scientific interdisciplinarity, work by volunteers in the international work camp, and local involvement constitute the three main pillars of the Arqueoneixón project (Ayán et al. 2007). These mainstays provide the basis for a scientific project that, despite having been designed in an academic context, seeks to permeate the social, economic, cultural and symbolic fabrics of the archaeological area of Neixón.

Continue reading "Presentation of the creative, relativist and multicultural blog of the Neixón hillforts archaeological project (Galicia, Spain)" »

Posted by Xurxo M. Ayán Vila at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This paper starts with the question: can rivers usefully be studied as artifacts?

The question may raise an eyebrow or two. For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape. Even in the midst of towns – bordered by buildings on both sides – rivers are often taken to represent ‘the natural’ or ‘the wild’ or ‘the environmental’. They tend to fall within the subject domain of the hydrologist or sedimentologist. In archaeology, rivers and palaeo-channels (traces of former river courses) are susceptible to a barrage of scientific techniques, not so much to the cultural theories applied to other more conventional kinds of artifact.

Continue reading "Rivers as artifacts" »

Posted by Matt Edgeworth at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

All three previous movies about Indiana Jones have become quintessential adventure films, together grossing more than $1 billion at the box office alone, not counting associated merchandise and spin-off products like computer games, novels and a TV series. The films were inspired by King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and Secret of the Incas (1954) but created something of their own genre. In recent rankings – two decades after the height of the cinematic Indiana Jones fever – the character still made no. 4 and 7 respectively among ”The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time” (see also here). On May 22, Indy will be back!

Continue reading "Hero! Real archaeology and ”Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystall Skull”" »

Posted by Cornelius Holtorf at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a Chasidic teaching about the Mezuzah, a small container which encloses a parchment upon which several passages of the Torah are written. The Mezuzah is placed on the door posts of houses and gates. The teaching expands on the placement of the Mezuzah, a place between the inside and the outside. There is a moment when you are no longer inside, but not yet outside. In this in between state, you are gathered up into the G-d Head, the Ain Sof, and made anew. The philosophers in the mystical tradition explore this notion, and consider similar moments, such as when an egg contains a being that is no longer an egg and not yet a chicken. Here again, the Rabbis suggest that this is the moment that the being is brought into the Ain Sof, the Source of Undifferentiated Being, and reformed. According to this teaching, this gathering up may occur at the threshold between any set of polarities, any set of dualities (Omer-man, 2002).

Between the moment an idea for a new invention is conceived and the moment a manufactured product comes off the production line, all work done in design engineering is done through the agency of representation. Representation in the field of engineering design encompasses a broad range of media, including rough sketches, physical prototypes, photographs, engineering drawings, stories, lists, charts, descriptions, and numeric digital files. Given representations central role in design, it would seem that successful development of an engineered product may be largely due dependent on the careful management of the “media cascades” which drive the design process. What does a media cascade look like? What are the characteristics of an effective media cascade? What work, so to speak, does a media cascade do for a design engineer?

The work of the design engineer is to bring concepts into being. A design engineer begins with a notion of something with the potential of existing, and reaches a point when the thing actually exists. Thus, the design engineer plays between the poles of the potential and the actual. Contemporary design theory offers a useful analysis of making representations of the potential and the actual in the design process.

C.K. Theory (Hatchuel and Weil 2002) posits a set of dualities, Concepts and Knowledge in an attempt to fashion a unified Design theory, based on Set Theory. A “Concept” is defined as, “a notion or proposition without logical status”. A piece of “Knowledge” is “a proposition with a logical status for the designer of the person receiving the design.” By logical status, the authors mean something that exists.

Furthermore, Hatchuel and Weil posit a fundamental proposition “design reasoning must always make a distinction between two related spaces: the space of concepts and the space of knowledge.” These spaces are made in relation to one another; K is the precondition of C, and the contents of C can expand the set of K.

How does a design engineer cross the space in between C and K? What happens in the moments when the designer traverses the threshold between Concept space and Knowledge space?

The road to understanding what occurs in this space has several markers. The first I will consider is to be found in the science studies of Bruno Latour. In his seminal “We Have Never Been Modern”, Latour suggests that the quest of Modernism is the distillation of phenomena into dualities, the paradigm of which is seen in Kant’s model of the gulf between “things in themselves” and the “transcendental ego”. Language and objects are likewise separated by an un-bridgeable chasm, which keeps knowing and the objects of knowing at bay. Latour explains that we have never been modern, because we are actually in the work of making “hybrids”, entities which lay between the poles of duality. Our problem, Latour suggests, is that we either fool ourselves into thinking hybrids don’t exist, or we are seduced into believing our real work is the work of purification, that is to say making dualities (Latour, 1993).

(Circulating Reference cf. Latour 1999:73)

Continue reading "Between C and K: Archaeological Practices of Mediation in Engineering Design" »

Posted by Jonathan Edelman at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The 1970 UNESCO ‘Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property’ addressed the issue of “the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property”. This was followed by the 1973 Archaeological Institute of America declaration

“The Archaeological Institute of America believes that Museums can henceforth best implement such cooperation by refusing to acquire through purchase, gift, or bequest cultural property exported subsequent to December 30, 1973, in violation of the laws obtaining in the countries of origin.”

Yet distinguished North American Museums kept acquiring.

And then came the raid on the Geneva Freeport and the seizure of Polaroids showing antiquities that had passed through the hands of the tombaroli.

So what are some of the lessons?

Continue reading "Returning Antiquities: Some Lessons" »

Posted by David Gill at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Neal (The University of Sheffield)

This photo essay was presented at the Association of Social Anthropologist’s conference in London in 2007. It was part of a panel organised around the theme of “Modernising archaeological tourism: from image conflict to archaeological expressionism” convened by Ian Russell and Andrew Cochrane. Taking up the theme of mentality/materiality, this paper suggests that such duality can dissolve through archaeological/heritage tourism. However the normative impulse that informs the latter cannot be maintained where this non-dualist perspective is to flourish.

This paper has been difficult to dislodge from my mind and onto paper. Something about the subject of the session it was prepared for rather than just my own approach. Materialities and mentalities as a subject spoke directly to me because it finds itself at the interface between archaeology and anthropology, material being in a sense the matter of archaeology while mentalities suggest an anthropological domain. Also perhaps, this is a didactic issue that I am raising: how to teach, or facilitate learning, without simply effacing other teachings or learning?

When I sent through my abstract Ian suggested that I might like to offer a substantive example to illustrate my paper. I replied that I would try to do this while in France researching where to carry out my fieldwork for a PhD.

This is the story of that attempt to illustrate.

I was visiting the department of the Ariege in the Pyrennees. My PhD research is based around an extended period of participant observation in a French commune with a significant proportion of resident and partially resident British migrants. My interest in this was initially prompted by a concern to explore the way in which British migration was activated by a British sensibility towards aspects of European cultural heritage such as Romanesque architecture, deserted uplands and surviving ‘peasant’ traditions. I decided to visit the cave of Niaux in the foothills of the Pyrennees. This cave, much like similar caves in the Dordogne where I had been a guide, was decorated in the late upper Palaeolithic some 14,000 years ago, with friezes of bison, horses and more abstract designs. I duly phoned the cave and booked myself for the 3.30 visit.

As I drove over the mountains to the cave I listened to the radio in the car. I tuned into the French culture programme to which I listened hoping to improve my ‘cultural’ French. The programme was about the destruction of aboriginal rock art by mining interests in Australia and consisted of the witness of various French anthropologists to the effects of mining and the unthinkable demolition of a possible 40,000 year tradition of decorative art. As one of the commentators said:

“Would we, the French, allow Lascaux to be destroyed by such actions? These paintings are at least as valuable”.

Continue reading "Once upon a time: Truth as an Expression" »

Posted by Tim Neal at 5:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fig. 1 N. C. Wyeth, "Sword Excalibur Rises From the Lake" (c. early 20th c.)

Malory tells in his Morte d’Arthur epic (c. 1450) that just before the mortally-wounded Arthur passes from this world to Avalon, Arthur instructs Sir Bedivere (Bedwyr) to throw his sword Excalibur into the nearby water. Bedivere does not wish to lose such a precious sword, so he returns to Arthur twice having put the sword away out of sight. Each time Arthur asks what Bedivere saw when he threw the sword into the water. Bedivere lies twice and said the water merely moved. Nearly cursing him, the dying Arthur commands one last time. This time Bedivere obeys and throws the sword as far as he can over the water:

“and there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished it, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.” (1)

Arthur is then taken away to Avalon through the mist by the beautiful women in black on the barges. Their mourning belies Arthur’s last words that he will go to Avalon to be healed and return if possible.

Fig. 2 Aubrey Beardsley, Bedivere casts Excalibur into the Water, 1894.

One aspect of this story in the Arthurian saga is singled out here because it seems to preserve a fairly well known Celtic custom of metal deposits in lakes and marshes if such interpretation of these finds is accurate. In the Celtic world, springs, lakes and marshes are liminal sacred places that are intermediary loci between, among others, the living and the dead. When Arthur’s legendary and to some extent magical sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake, this is most likely an excerpted old echo of a longstanding Celtic votive ritual.

Continue reading "Celtic Iron Age Sword Deposits and Arthur's Lady of the Lake" »

Posted by Patrick Hunt at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Christa M. Beranek (Boston University, Journal of Field Archaeology)

Recently, archaeologists have been incorporating fictional narratives into their scholarly texts or even writing stand-alone fictional pieces (see Joyce 2006; Wilkie 2003 for reviews of works in this form). Archaeologists use fictional or narrative writing for a number of reasons—as an alternative to/ critique of traditional academic forms of presenting knowledge (Spector 1991), as a mechanism for engaging the public, and as a form of self-reflexivity (Wilkie 2003). As a teacher, I initially envisioned these narratives as texts that would prove more accessible to students with no background in archaeology. Unexpectedly, the narratives have been useful not only because they provide understandable material for non-specialists, but maybe more significantly because they provide an entrée into the world of scholarly interpretation in ways that I had not expected, but desperately needed. In this regard, these narratives fill their proposed function as critiques of “the presentation of archaeological knowledge” (Spector 1991: 390) in ways that I certainly could not have anticipated.

In the fall of 2006, I began teaching in a university writing program, instructing mostly first year students in the basics of college level reading and writing. I was filling in, at almost the last minute, for a course in which the students had expected to read immigrant literature, and here I was with a full syllabus of readings in historical archaeology. To ease the transition (and keep the students from dropping out), I gave a strong archaeology sales pitch in the first class, discussing the ways in which artifacts and historical archaeology could give another perspective on the lives of immigrants to America and others who did not write traditional histories. Archaeology could provide the opportunity to present narratives from the inside out, or the bottom up. This will be even better than immigrant literature, I promised them.

Continue reading "Imagination to Interpretation" »

Posted by Christa M. Beranek at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An enquiry into the multiplicity of relations with an “emblem of imperial Rome”

Cecelia Feldman Weiss

(Google earth image)

Where is the Colosseum?

The answer to this question seems obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable icon for the “Roman past-as-glorious,” for “Roman present-as-tourist destination,” the Colosseum is a prominent feature both on the Roman cityscape and in the contemporary collective imagination. Given the attention lavished on this structure in both academic scholarship and popular media, it might seem trite or indulgent to ask a question as simple as where it is located.

But indulge briefly: since its construction, the Colosseum has been translated in to numerous media (books, photographs, video games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena, as mere representations of an “original.” However, another argument treats media as modes which translate something of the material world, the Colosseum, and thereby are able to circulate it at a distance (Law 2002, Witmore 2006). If we extend this understanding of the Colosseum as distributed through media then the prospect of identifying any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more complicated. It would be more appropriate to recognize the Colosseum as always occupying many places in the plural.

Continue reading "Dov’e il Colosseo? (Where is the Colosseum?)" »

Posted by Cecelia Feldman Weiss at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Brent Fortenberry, Boston University

Travis Parno, Boston University

This year’s meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Albuquerque, New Mexico examined the interface between the archaeological community and the various publics with whom we interact. Papers explored the logistics, methodologies, and theories behind public archaeologies, a subject which has recently gained much attention.

While a majority of the authors broached these issues, some particularly evoked discussion and meditation regarding creative approaches understanding the nature of public archaeology.

E. Thomson Shields, Charles Ewen, and Donna Kain tackled the challenges resulting from perceptions of archaeology that are generated by popular media outlets such as television and film. While shows such as ‘Digging for the Truth’ bring some form of archaeology into the public sphere, the over-sensationalized nature of these programs misconstrues archaeological ethics and methodologies. Using a video podcast of excavations at the Saint Thomas Church in North Carolina as a case study, Shields, Ewen, and Kain argued that professional archaeology needs to take steps to integrate its data into new multimedia paradigms, thus resulting in a wider engagement with archaeologically-generated knowledge.

Echoing these concerns over accessibility and archaeological data, Mark Freeman and Barbara Heath presented the Poplar Forest: Retreat Home of Thomas Jefferson website as an illustration of the unique ways that archaeological datasets and narratives can be experienced in cyberspace. Its non-linear format allows the user to navigate the intersections between “Place,” “Period,” and “Perspective.” Within this negotiation, the user has control over the order and types of information that they can explore, and in many ways this methodology allows the visitor to be actively involved in the processes of discovery and mediation.

Flordeliz Bugarin and Margaret Wood’s presentation of their work at the Nicodemus National Historic Site highlighted some of the logistical challenges associated with public outreach efforts. During the excavation of this former black community, project coordinators were faced with issues of public apathy, even among the descendent community. To combat these concerns, they moved beyond the tradition archaeologist/public divide and initiated a plan to train interested individuals in the methods of archaeology, thus actively involving the community in the creation and interpretation of their history. The Kansas Archaeology Training Program (KATP) will promote a departure from connoisseurship and give birth to future networks of experienced local archaeologists.

Continue reading "Reflections on the 2008 SHA Conference" »

Posted by Brent Fortenberry at 7:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)