Fluid interdependence

“While the body moves, movement is not only in the body, but in the world around ...” (Posted by Oscar on Oct 15/2009 04:17AM)

Fluid interdependence as a concern emerges by attaching significance to things not as closed systems that are separate and self-contained, but as highly connected. This is not, however, the ‘becoming’ of distinct entities or distinct sets of relations; rather, it is about the in-between (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 223; Ingold 2010: 96). This is an argument against separate and distinct realms of people and places, instead arguing for a complex relationality of people and places that are performed and worked on within common ontological grounds. This addresses the problem of dealing with single entities that are always complex intersections. For example, landscapes are ‘endless regimes of flows’ that move at ‘different speeds, scales and viscosities’ (Sheller & Urry 2006: 213). Fluid interdependence is also the ‘complex’ or milieu in which connectivities are situated, and consequently, we can read and summarise the other concerns taken up in our series of pieces on movement within this final category. Thus, dwelling in movement provides an ever-changing (and thus fluid) set of relations. A flat ontology attempts to treat the things in places as they are together – not separated or layered, but interdependent. A place, then, is not an accretion of things over time, but rather a complex series of spatial relationships in a temporal setting derived from the flows that move through them, the former definition neglecting the rhythmic movement that accompanies accretion.

Archaeology, as David Clarke (1973) tells us, is what archaeologists do. And archaeologists work on what is left behind. But rather than considering this due to the slowness and gradual inertia of material practices, we need to consider that residual objects have archaeological importance precisely because they have survived and have been resilient to the opposing forces of entropy and dispersion, and accretion and deposition (Olivier 2008: 274; Lucas 2008; Aldred & Lucas 2010). The tension between these forces has kept a balance in the material world. Thus, we can forensically follow movement in the hope of not only materialising past material practices, such as movement, but understanding the forces which produce these practices and keep things residual and resilient to transformation. In practice, even the fluid and emergent world we have been presenting needs to ‘stick’ around. In some sense, things do this only because they are useful beyond their intended uses. Making things useful concerns a form of bricolage whereby the practice of archaeology and all of its movements are aligned to the objects it creates. For example, the paths along which movement occurs during surveying archaeology are acts of incorporating by retracing the paths and monuments made in the past. Consequently, the material markers of movement become useful because they structure how a surveyor moves in a landscape. This initial field perspective is often superseded by the interpretative use that these material remains have in accounting for the movements that took place in the past. But if we retain these initial observations, movement as material ‘culture’ is fluid and open to the differing negotiations that emerge as objects. By examining how entities become useful is to follow their transformations.

A Möbius strip: a reaffirming paradox (David Benbennick)

Gathering objects

An important force in the transformation of archaeological materials is brought about as objects are gathered together. Þing in Icelandic translates into English as ‘assembly’, a gathering of people to decide on community and national issues: the etymology of the word thing. So a thing is a gathering, an assembling of objects (Witmore http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2010/02/the_realities_of_the_past_arch.html). Shanks has related this idea to the notion of cyborg (http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/107/3382), and Olsen has discussed this in reference to removing the object:subject relationality that is based on the a priori assumption of a dichotomy (2003, 2010). How we want to think about thing as a gathering is in reference to movement. This is not a gathering towards, but a gathering along in making the thing; it forefronts the very activeness of making and the movement involved in the gathering process. In other words, a gathering as movement goes along. The process of gathering is itself a form of movement, and it is one that does not stop, but continues to gather, moving on to another assemblage in the process of making new connectivities/assemblies/assemblages/things. Heidegger’s usage of thing is a movement towards, rather than along – a suturing by building a bridge in the making of place as objects gather around its foundations (2008 [1968]). If we turn this around, then gathering as movement changes a thing from something stable and fixed to something mobile that is always transforming into something else – think of the Zeno’s flight of the arrow and its temporal paradox. As Whitehead intimates, we can relate this proposition of movement to those things that appear to be solid, but are actually rather ephemeral (1979). And as Bergson suggests further, the solidity of change is “infinitely superior to that of fixity which is only an ephemeral arrangement between mobilities” (Bergson [1946] 2007: 125 (our italics)). It is not so much the material culture of movement that is the only matter of concern for archaeology, but also the practices used to make these objects, both in the sense of how they were made in the past and how they have been used after this process, including how we ascribe meaning. Consequently, archaeologists should be developing appropriate ways to intervene in the present in representing the past by considering the notion that the material world is always emerging and becoming. Change, not continuity, is the force of the material world.

By way of an end, we would like to highlight the necessity of thinking about residuality in terms of the transformations that occur in movement from the materialised traces, to materialising practices, and the usefulness of material in structuring movements in aligning objects through a kind of bricolage (all above discussed). And, so in ending, we would like to draw your attention to two important themes: rhythm and speed.

Rhythm and speed

Lefebvre offers some key ideas with which to think about rhythm and speed in the concrete mobilities of social time (1991, 2004), which are inextricably linked to the everyday. He suggests that life is built upon the temporal episodes of the everyday: it is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between production, consumption, circulation and habitat. These acquired and created rhythms are simultaneously externalised and internalised as well as social: ‘in one day in the modern world, everybody does more or less the same thing at more or less the same times, but each person is really alone in doing it’ (2004: 75). The importance of rhythm and speed are then critical to understanding the relationships that come together in an archaeology of movement, in both the way in which archaeologists study materialised patterns of movement and the materialising tempos of movements; space – time – movement characterise this concern with the rhythms and speed of the everyday and those ‘past’ days obsessively studied by archaeologists.

Converging fluid rhythms in Arica, Chile - a racer rides his motorcycle during the sixth stage of the 2011 Argentina-Chile Dakar rally (Natacha Pisarenko)

The two concepts of rhythm for Lefebvre are ‘cyclical’ and ‘linear’. Cyclical processes and movement are innumerable: undulations, vibrations, returns and rotations. ‘Linear’ designates any series of identical facts separated by long or short periods of time. Between them there is an antagonistic unity in which cyclical and linear penetrate one another in an ‘interminable struggle’, but there is also an indissoluble unity in the repetitive tick-tock and the cycle of days and nights. Other categories of time, besides cyclical and linear, are ‘appropriated’ time: a time that forgets time, during which time no longer counts (and consequently is no longer counted). This type of time, Lefebvre argues, is in harmony with itself such that other things no longer matter: as he puts it, ‘time is in time; it is time, but no longer reflects it’ (2004: 77).

For there to be rhythm there must be repetition in movement. Not just any movement, but one that can be defined in terms of its speed (quick or slow, weak or strong) and that returns according to regular and irregular iterations. This brings a differentiated time, a qualified duration; and the same can be said of repetitions, ruptures and resumptions. A rhythm then presupposes its temporal element by being thoroughly marked, accentuated, contrasted. An overall movement occurs within all of these elements and it is a kind of dance: a waltz, which is fast or slow (Lefebvre 2004: 79). However, rhythm is contrasted with its arrhythmia. These are not opposites in the strictest sense of being opposed to one another, but they are different entities – opposites only in language: to understand one we need to understand the other in a rhythm project. In order to study rhythms one must be placed outside of them; to be in them is not to sense them (Lefebvre 2004: 27ff); there needs to be a process of movement. For instance, the rhythms that are produced while moving in a landscape by surveying its archaeology are often not included in archaeological narratives. We are too close to them, or rather they are not sensed. Giving some distance to the ‘choreographies’ of practice not only gives a space for reflection but also a way in which to enfold the exterior space in as if was a dance:

“the imbrications of sign and context, body and consciousness, prepare the construction of a plane of immanence or consistency in movements. It is by virtue of the inherence of the agent of construction (movement) in the materiality of the plane (movement) that dance, more so than any other art, makes itself a plane of immanence directly, in the very act of dancing. To dance is to flow in immanence” (Gil 2004: 126-7).

With this double aspect, field survey as dance rhythm enters into a general relational construction that circulates between space, time, and movement in their becomings, in the way that co-presence, observation, convergence and fluidity coalesce. These conditions are associated with the rhythms and speed of the body, but also those taking place in the wider landscape. What is sensed from this is the formation of multiple kinds of bodies where intensities of speeds and rhythms flow. This has some resonances with those discussed/imagined by Deleuze and Guattari. In particular, where intensities flow in moving bodies where their interior spaces are emptied out. This folding out and in of the space around a body has been discussed in relation to dance by Gil (2006) as body-space by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s space of the body (2002 [1968]). The surface of the body-space first extends out folding the space around it, and then falls back to skin. In this way, the skin is impregnated with the expurgated interior space. What this means is that the body has no separation between the space outside of it or between its inside space; body is mind and vice versa, and there is only immanence; no traces of material, only trance and allure, like a Möbious body (rather than strip): desire desires to assemble an immanence and to flow (Gil 2006: 31ff). This may be difficult to relate to an archaeology of movement, but it is compelling to consider that the separations such as those that we often focus on archaeologically (such as between past movement and those that we conduct in the present) are rather like the body-spaces that lie outside and inside. But as soon as movement occurs through survey/dance these no longer apply as distinct body-spaces but are one space operating in tandem with the speeds and rhythms of actualised movement as an imminent force of mobility that has no temporality other than the one we make.

In performing movement through each of the presented papers, all the speakers, in some way, moved closer to these kinds of body-spaces where actualised movement was occurring. John wrote of moving bodies, stairs and slopes, all embroiled in the experience of Roman villas. Noach, presented a similar perspective in moving through Cretan palaces. Sarah articulated the feeling/sensing body and the need to discern types of travel and the rates of travel in order to discern its significance. Christine discussed movement and production in a location, happening alongside movement between locations. Oscar teased out the differences and difficulties of representation and experience, considering their rhythms and how they accomplish different connotations in practice. Finally, Brad documented the way a multiplicity of movement coheres in Attic silver mines. These are all beginnings, not an end to our story.

The desire for mobility: A finale and A beginning

Mobility, for us, is about incorporating our concerns of movement into a broader discourse, archaeological and otherwise, but also in focusing on how what actually moving and conducting archaeology can tells us about how people in the past moved and understood their material worlds. Movement is not about getting somewhere, but holding relevance in a number of arenas. It is not a matter of understanding what societal mechanisms facilitated the distribution of goods from one place to another, but understanding how getting from one place to another influences societal mechanisms. Mobility is about landscapes that are in motion, that house bodies and things in motion, and that do so with simultaneous rhythms. In fact landscape is movement, place, dwelling, experience or otherwise. Above all, the concept of mobility offers an opportunity to assess how archaeology, cultural geography, anthropology, etc. intersect to create substantive accounts of past and present. Always-in-motion creates a set of problems for the notions of representation and narrative that our disciplines encounter daily but often fail to resolve. Mobility is about questioning stability, whether of borders, places or substances, and suggesting an alternative ‘standpoint’ that is not person specific, but context specific in the sense that the moment, the speed, the things, the location, the directionality, and so on, all matter to our accounts of the world. Movement, in this way, is more than the comparison of social perspectives and structures, but the recognition of fluid, interconnected, and distributed happenstances.

References
Aldred, O. and Lucas, G. 2010. Events, Temporalities, and Landscapes in Iceland, in Bolender, D. (ed.) Eventful Archaeologies New Approaches to Social Transformation in the Archaeological Record. New York: SUNY Press. Pp. 189-98
Bergson, H. 2007 [1946]. The creative mind: an introduction to metaphysics. New York: Dover.
Clarke, D. 1973. Archaeology: the loss of innocence, Antiquity 47 185: 6-18.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2004. A thousand plateaus. London: Continuum.
Gil, J. 2006. Paradoxical body, The Dance Review 50:4 (T192): 21-35.
Heidegger, M. 2008 [1968]. Building, dwelling, thinking, in Krell, D. F. (ed.) Basic writings. Martin Heidegger. New York: HarperPerennial Row. Pp. 347-63.
Ingold, T. 2010. The Textility of Making, Cambridge Journal of Economics 34.1: 91-102.
Lefebvre, H. 1991. The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, H. 2004 [1992]. Rhythmanalysis. Space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum.
Lucas, G. 2008. Time and archaeological event, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18.1: 59-65.
Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002 [1968]. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.
Olivier, L. C. 2008. Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.
Olsen, B. 2003. Material culture after text: re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological Review, 36.2: 87–104.
Olsen, B. 2010. In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press.
Shanks, M. http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/107/3382
Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2006. The new mobilities paradigm, Environment and Planning A 38: 207-26.
Whitehead, A. 1979. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Witmore, C., 2010. http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2010/02/the_realities_of_the_past_arch.html

IN-BETWEENESS and CHIASMA
“... it is an aspect of time (as you say), but also boundaries and definitions - things don’t end where we delimit them” (Posted by Brad on Oct 13/2009 11:14AM)

“ .. Movement is critical as the glue in connecting ... ” (Posted by Oscar on Oct 15/2009 04:17AM)

In Part 2 (Observation), we suggested that archaeological documentation favors movement between sites and rest at sites (for the purposes of documentation). We also noted in Part 1 that archaeological traces are accretions of movement. The tension between these two observations serves as a jumping off point for Part 3. On the one hand we have the ontological understanding of place as one of continual accretion and movement. On the other, archaeological practice has, to this point, tended to focus on the documentation of sites, creating movements that are stops and starts in relation to place. Thus, place, in-betweeness and chiasma (defined below) are all outcomes of movement. Here, in emphasizing ontology, we outline how movement forces us to blur existing boundaries. We replace the sharpness of boundaries with the notions of transition and transcience. Our emphasis is on how places and the in-between come to be, not with what a place is or is not. We begin with in-betweeness.

Place:non-place (the problem of dichotomies, yet again)
From a literal perspective, in-betweeness is the ‘space’ between places. But in the sense being used here, in-betweeness is productive only while moving. It is concerned with the work of transformation that occurs in passing from one place to another – the intermizzio. To deal with in-betweeness is to deal with conceptions of place, an admittedly large topic. In this piece we want to address one conception in particular, because the notion of movement bears strongly upon it: the binary of place and non-place. Augé (1995) argues for locations with decidedly ‘non-place’ character: they are real and physical, but lie outside of the everyday and routinized places, only becoming apparent through flow and transience. Gonzalez-Ruibal (2008) picks up on this definition, drawing attention to places of destruction and forgetting brought about by supermodernity (Auge’s term). Non-places are (by necessity) either areas that defy a sense of locatedness or a sense of attachment. The non-place status of airports, for example, as given by Augé (1995) and Sheller and Urry (2006), prescribes an individual’s interaction with their environment by channelling you through security checkpoints. It is this movement and transitory nature that facilitates the passage of travellers to other locations that further instils other movements. Foucault’s prison as heterotopias (1986) similarly displaces the individual, prescribing movement and interaction in a controlled cycle of power dynamics. In this sense, place is awarded positive connotations while non-place is decidedly negative.

(Photo by Oscar Aldred)

There is, however, an opportunity to think about the in-betweeness of transience, which is not about dwelling as in place (through all the types of investments that pertain to this) but rather a dwelling in movement (a different conception of Heidegger’s gathering cf part 4). Consequently, rather than ‘place’ being formed already or becoming entirely stable or restful, it is always in the making: in becoming. So, too, must the in-between be in a process of becoming. As Ingold puts it, whenever we encounter matter it is in movement, in flux, in variation (after Deleuze & Guattari 2004; Ingold 2010: 94). The constitution of place therefore emerges from a project that involves the movement of life/dwelling in which convergence and chiasma, or the crossing between diffuse boundaries, are generative, that are always on the balls of the feet, so to speak (Merleau-Ponty 2002 [1968]; Deleuze 1993; Shanks 1992; Witmore 2006; http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/23/105). Chiasma is a critical metaphor here because it draws attention to the tenuous nature of boundaries and convergences. With each intersection, something new arises. New boundaries, new places and new in-betweens. Critical, though, is that this depends on active movement. Non-places therefore do not so much occupy the space where places are not, so much as they, following Augé, extend over the area in-between. Place and the in-between depend on ever-shifting engagements with a shifting world that is comprised of movement. For archaeology, it is incumbent upon us to account for this transitory nature, both in the past and in the generation of our own research.

(Photo by Oscar Aldred)

If, as we suggest, movement is a necessary element of an ontology of place, then a definition of place becomes less cognitive and less dependent on boundaries. Principally, movement suggests a continual process of becoming. Simply put, places are not so much defined by their solidity and concretization, but through the flows and convergences that occur in and through them. This is gathering that is continuously on the move. Many scholars have put forward this notion in other contexts (for example, Hamilton & Whitehouse 2008 and the discussion of megalithic quarries on Rapa Nui, and Latour & Yaneva 2008 in discussing architecture), but we expand this ontology also to place. They are not locations per se, but the becoming of located practices brought together through movement. It is thus spatial and temporal, but also situational. Everywhere is potentially a place, and movement (of people, materials, etc.) articulates when there is a where. The dichotomy is, in a sense, not a given, but one that emerges: as does location and meaning. Rather than concerning ourselves with the boundaries and limits of places and non-places, we might better express this as a concern with how movement coalesces in locations and what senses of place arise as a result (in an ongoing process). We might also recall Marilyn Strathern (1996) who asked, if a network is always in process at what point does it become solid enough to be examined?

Expressions (of immaterial in material)
It is important to express and give an archaeological perspective on place and on the in-between. Doing this though, depends to some degree on inferring the immaterial through the material we encounter. In particular there is a concern to address the issue that things moved between (they produce the in-between while simultaneously breaking down the boundaries of place). We can therefore begin by understanding the material matrix we encounter in terms of how a place is comprised through movement. By this it is meant that we can ascertain what has moved in order to constitute a place. In our session, examples of this were brought forth in several of the papers. Christine Reiser’s paper discussed the necessary movement of groups, ideas and materials between small communities in Connecticut. Bradley Sekedat’s paper highlighted the diverse origins of technologies that enable mining in Attica. The developing picture is that locations are materially interconnected to broader landscapes, that places are comprised of concurrent material presences, and that places originate in the flows of movement – even as they defy definition through movement’s very constancy.

(Photo from: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ruta_Nacional_A006_(Argentina)_-_edit_4.jpg)

Flows (flows of place and places as flows)
Movement is continuously generative, and if we want to understand it archaeologically, we need to develop approaches that can cope with the fluid conditions of generative practices. Materials and bodies flow between places and within places – movement is a necessary condition for places to exist in both respects. Thus, how we attend to location is important, and we should see it as the intermixture of people and things that are present together. However, locations themselves are also in motion because places are so often defined with respect to what goes on at them; we may take an example to illustrate this point. Mining, for instance, requires multiple different steps or stages of activity, all interdependent, and all requiring movement across a landscape that is itself moving (cf. Massey 2005; Bender 1992, 1998, 2001, 2002). Communities move between locations as well – workers walk from homes in towns to fields and mines, as an example. In general, and in brief, movement is, as Oscar Aldred noted, the glue that bonds the place world. Behind the sense of location, connected with place, task, landscape, trade, economy, etc., lies movement. Movement serves to connect landscapes and disparate places, while simultaneously creating fluid borders and boundaries to those very integrated places. Movement activates the in-between by showing that it is itself connected to other places, while simultaneously redefining place all the time. Movement therefore creates new juxtapositions that highlight the active nature in the constitution of landscapes and the importance of understanding these processes for archaeology. The fluid boundaries of place and the notion of dwelling in movement feed into our concluding section: Fluid Interdependence.

References
Augé, M. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by J. Howe. London; New York: Verso.

Bender, B. 1992. Theorising landscapes, and the prehistoric landscapes of Stonehenge. Man 27: 735-755.

Bender, B. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg.

Bender, B. 2001. Landscapes on the move, Journal of social archaeology 1(1): 75-89.

Bender, B. 2002. Time and landscape, Current anthropology 43: S103-S112.

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. T. Conley (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. 2004. A thousand plateaus. London: Continuum.

Foucault, M. 1986. Of other spaces. Diacritics 6: 22-7.

González-Ruibal, A. 2008. Time to destroy: an archaeology of supermodernity. Current Anthropology 49 (2): 247-279.

Hamilton, S. and Whitehouse, R. 2006. Phenomenology in Practice: Towards a methodology for a “subjective” approach. European Journal of Archaeology 9(1): 37-71.

Ingold, T. 2010. The Textility of Making. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34(1): 91-102.

Latour, B. and Yaneva, A. 2008. ‘Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move’: An ANT’s view of architecture in Networks? In Geiser, R. (ed.) Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. 80-89.

Massey, D. 2005. For Space. Los Angeles; London: Sage.

Merleau-Ponty, M. 2002 [1968]. Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge.

Shanks, M. 1992. Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Sheller, M. and Urry, J. 2006. The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38: 207-26.

Strathern, M. 1996. Cutting the network. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517-535.

Witmore, C. 2006. "Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical approaches to the mediation of the material world"Journal of Material Culture 11(3), 267-292.

OBSERVATION

“How does this [materialisation of movement] work for us and contend with moving projects in the way that Latour and Yaneva think about it in ‘Give me a gun and I will make a building move: An ANTs view of architecture’ [(2008)] and Tschumi in Architecture and disjunction [(1996)]: namely something seemingly so unmoveable that on closer inspection movement infiltrates every nook and cranny” (Posted by Oscar on Oct13/2009 03:22AM)

“As archaeologists we are necessarily interested in recovering the material traces of past movements, but these traces can't be disentangled from the time/space in which they occur” (Posted by Keffie on Oct 13/2009 09:14PM)

Many of the issues addressed in Part One on co-presence extend also to Part 2 on observation. Observation raises questions relating to how we contend with material remains of usually immaterial practices. What we mean is that observation brings a two pronged way to consider both more of the completeness of movement by recognising the fact that it is still materialising. We cannot, as is obvious, see movement unless we ‘capture’ it like Muybrudge or Marey did in the late-nineteenth century. Therefore, we look for its indices in material remains. Observing is not just ‘looking’, it is also about intervening and meddling the material by ‘twisting the lion’s tail’ (after Francis Bacon, and Hacking 1983), which is to say, by moving. Furthermore, material traces imply an expression of the immaterial in the material; we cannot see the immaterial, it has to be felt, expressed or re-materialised. Oscar Aldred’s TAG paper asked a pertinent question about observation: how do we articulate this through our representational media? This is a question that lies at the core of the Symmetrical attitude (cf. Witmore 2004; Shanks & Webmoor 2010) and it is one that we hope to add to here.

Annihilating time and space
Archaeology once measured movement so as to articulate it at the exclusion of observational experiences, but more recent approaches put them at the heart of their articulation; such as the phenomenology of Tilley, the work of Thomas, and the performance related work of Pearson. The conventions in phenomenology, on which many of these archaeological approaches draw upon, tend to relate the ‘human only’ perspective of movement. But there are other more substantial ways to relate these. So, rather than simply expressing movement’s measurement or articulating just human mobility, our approach to an archaeology of movement also reflects the mobility in the world around. An interesting proposition to examine is the idea that in articulating movement as measurement, time and space are annihilated, or are rather expressed differently to the way in which they are actually experienced. As Rebecca Solnit, in her River of shadows. Edweard Muybridge and the technological wild west (2004) suggests, the motion photography of Muybridge, from 1872 and onwards, epitomises this transition from lived time to representational or abstract time. And this was a general transition that was occurring in North America and North-western Europe during the late-nineteenth century. Along with the introduction of the railroad, and the widespread use of electricity and magnetism, motion photography removed both the mystery and innocence of movement by literally stopping it dead in its tracks. However, motion capture photography continues to be a pivot between two worlds: the humdrum of going along, and the exotic new world of imaging speed. In this context, the innocence that David Clarke (1973) referred to was primarily about method and technique, but did not extend to the connection that archaeology has had to the articulation of its co-present material world. In one way or another archaeology has always been connected to it, but in terms of how movement has been measured or captured in past and contemporary archaeology there remains a certain innocence. While archaeology is quite similar to motion capture photography in its potential role as a pivot between two worlds, its focus tends to reside on trying to capture movement rather than letting it be articulated as active observation within the material world: it tries to capture previous movements of one sort or another rather than attending to the ones being made in conjunction with contemporary movements (cf. Olivier 2008).

While motion photography captures stages of movement in a forward progression of time, archaeology attends to movement in two simultaneous directions. Archaeological documentation progresses forward similarly to motion photography, yet the act of excavating a pit, deconstructing a boundary or walking a beaten path reveal the shared ‘space’ between past and present (cf. Lucas 2001: 202-4). These practices allow movement to have both a presence in an already materialised form, but also to be situated in the generation of its own movements while attending to the material. Therefore, observing movement requires taking part by aligning the traces that we encounter archaeologically in materialised movement with the movements we engage in during our survey practices (those materialising). Thus, in this way the wrappings that constrain giving a fuller account of past movement are undone while it movements are materialising.

The Horse in Motion, by Muybridge. Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878.

Giving archaeology back its movement
There are at least two ways to do this. We can change what we mean by movement archaeologically, or we can reduce or even remove the separation between materialised and materialising movement in creating an alternative ontology of movement. The first was discussed in several of the papers in the session. This is best explained as moving from simply recording or mapping of movement in terms of function and purpose, alignment and direction, or simply as points (i.e. the mechanics of locomotion), towards the performance of movement and its embodied knowledge/cognition. The second was also discussed as ensuring that the paths along which movement takes place in archaeological practice have an important structuring contribution to making archaeological narratives; a point raised by Julian Thomas in connection with time geography in an article on Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson 1994). By aligning the objects of movement with the encounters that take place, moving along a path of observation is also a path that uses the traces and markings of movement as a way to structure those observations. These observations are made from the perspectives of looking (representing) and manipulating (intervening). In which case, the path of observation is retreading along these markers as it becomes a path of significance; in a sense re-embodying the walking dead (after Gavin Lucas pers com.).

In both of these ways, we arrive at a closer approximation (that is all it can be!) of Bergson’s real movement, in having cause in a force of motion (2004: 246-91; 2007: 107-32). But while the actuality of movement is lost, what remains are the materialised objects resulting from it and ourselves. In one sense, we are trying to give movement back to archaeology by making movement both much more diverse in terms of its accountability in archaeological narratives because of its heterogeneous and divisible nature, and in making it more homogeneous than it currently is because we recognise its usefulness in all kinds of archaeologies. The tensions between these two also add further import to its productive and generative forces as they propel and give ‘body’ to ‘archaeological’ movements. However, examining movement’s heterogeneity over homogeneity is unnecessarily reductive. We aim to give our concern with movement more symmetry to our own practices, so that it looks and feels something similar to de Certeau’s montage as ‘efficacious meanderings’ (1984: xvii).

Cross town traffic by tschnitzlein (2006).

A montage of movements
Movement in archaeology is associated both with rest and with passage. In thinking about movement in this way, there is a certain programmatic effect that movement conjures up with respect to archaeological practice. We might think of this as being the movement between one site and another for the purpose of recording and documenting sites. This stop and start effect is a movement which is defined as much by surveying and the intrinsic rhythmic immobilities of getting to a site, as it is by its mobilities; rest on the one hand, and passage on the other. The space between place is a locus of movement, but it is defined by the places to which one moves, and thus, we need to consider the mobilities also associated with place. The question remains, how do we present this? Accounting for movement in our archaeology requires a blurring process, and an image that combines at least two kinds of mobilities: that of past movements that are materialised, in the concretisation of movement in place, relating to the rest and the recording; and to movements that are materialising in the eventfulness of moving from one place to another and, like movement, the flows of movement at places that are always in a process of materialising (see the Part 3). What comes with this is also the altering of speed of movement and its routine while getting to place and once at place. Referring back to motion capture photography, what we have are durational effects, such as a long exposure of a static camera while at the same time the world around it is in motion. The affect is an image that disrupts our sensibilities concerning movement because it shows blurred streams of movement – take any long exposure image of cars moving at dusk or night. However, what we are used to in archaeology are sharp clear images. Points and lines on maps of once moving bodies deposited in the ground, or, for example, ash cast bodies arrested in mid-flow in the volcanically buried Pompeii and their artifacts and moments frozen in time. But movement is a montage in play; ambiguous as well as purposeful: a combination and convergence of different exposures and circulating durations of movements that create a blurring of space and time. Thus, archaeology needs to become more accepting of these kinds blurred images rather than demanding sharp enhanced ones if it is to attend to movement in a full way. Movement is perpetual, not finite.

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Whitehead’s notion of society as an assemblage within a field of potentialities, or actualizations, is concerned with the kinds of mobilities we are suggesting here: that its entities are constantly in a process of becoming (Whitehead 2004, 1978). And Lucas’ pertinent commentary on the notion of assemblage in archaeology, drawing specifically on Whitehead, alongside Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. 2004), DeLanda (e.g. 2006) and Latour (e.g. 2004), also offers some possible paths through the difficult terrain of an ontology that navigates between the virtual and real. What this suggests for our notion of observation and movement, tacking along similar lines, is that movement is both virtual, but also real, transformed as it happens. Thus, movement, just like temporality within this ontological scheme, forms a tension in which the division between virtual and real, representation and intervention, is not so much to do with the activeness or stasis of the events connected with the material, but to do with where we locate/recognise/observe the interstices of transformation between objects and events. In this way, movement and place, spatiality and temporality are sutured together as it were. But instead of time providing the tension as in Lucas’ commentary, it is mobility we turn to. The objects connected with movement are useful and eventful as well as enduring (Whitehead) and perpetually perishing (Latour). And it is the concreteness of these ideas that are peppered in the third part of our extended conversation: in-betweeness and chiasma.

References
Bergson, H 2004 [1912] Matter and memory. New York: Dover.
Barad, K 2007 Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bergson, H 2007 [1946] The creative mind: an introduction to metaphysics. New York: Dover.
Clarke, D 1973 Archaeology: the loss of innocence, Antiquity 47 185: 6-18.
de Certeau, M 1984 The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press.
Delanda, M 2006 A new philosophy of society. Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 2004 A thousand plateaus. London: Continuum.
Hacking, I 1983 Representing and intervening. Introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hodder, I 1991 Post-modernism, post-structuralism and post-processual archaeology, in Hodder, I (ed.) The meanings of things: material culture and symbolic expression. One world archaeology 6. Oxford: HarperCollins. Pp. 64-78.
Latour, B & Yaneva, A 2008 ‘Give me a gun and I will make all buildings move’: An ANT’s view of architecture in Networks?, in Geiser, R (ed.) Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research. Basel: Birkhäuser. Pp. 80-89.
Latour, B 2004 The politics of nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lucas, G 2001 Critical approaches to fieldwork. Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. London: Routledge.
McHugh, K 2009 Movement, Memory, Landscape: An Excursion in Non-Representational Thought, GeoJournal 74.3: 209-18.
Olivier, L C 2008 Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.
Pearson, M (with Julian Thomas) 1994. ‘Theatre/Archaeology’, The Drama Review 38.4: 133–6.
Shanks, M & Webmoor, T 2010 A Political Economy of Visual Media in Archaeology, in Bonde, S & Houston, S (eds.) Re-presenting the Past: archaeology through image and text. Providence: Brown University Press. Pp. 87-110.
Solnit, R 2004 River of shadows. Eadweard Muybridge and the technological wild west. London: Penguin.
Tschumi, B 1996 Architecture and disjunction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Whitehead, A 1978 Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Whitehead, A 2004 [1920] The concept of nature. New York: Dover.
Witmore, C 2004 On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: Two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece, Archaeological Dialogues 11.2: 133-64.

During the last decade, three books have appeared that mark a turning point in the way archaeology is both thought and practiced. These three books are Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson and Shanks 2001), The Dark Abyss of Time (Olivier 2008) and the one reviewed here. I think that we can talk now of a real loss of innocence in the discipline, because what these authors do is ask social theory not what it can do for archaeology, but ask archaeology what it can do for social theory (to start with, changing the very concept of what “society” is). This is an important breakthrough: so far, archaeologists generally sought to turn their discipline into something else (archaeology as anthropology, archaeology as cultural history) or overcome the limitations of their profession through the theoretical approaches of other social sciences. This desire has proved crucial in providing the thrust necessary for moving away from the sterile territories of purely descriptive culture-historical archaeology and entering the terrains of theory. However, the time is ripe now to go a step further. The three works mentioned coincide in looking for the strengths of archaeology vis-à-vis other disciplines, not its limitations. Their common project is not about borrowing, but about sharing, and maybe even lending.

This reflexive strategy can be seen in Olsen’s commentary on post-structuralism (chapter 3). The author proves that the archaeology of the last three decades has been frequently constructed on misunderstandings and faulty or hasty readings of theoretical sources: this is particularly obvious in the relationship between post-processualism and post-structuralism. According to the author, there is hardly anything that can be properly called post-structuralist archaeology (p. 46). The idea that material culture has a final meaning that can be disclosed through interpretation is not post-structuralist, but rather early hermeneutics. If anything, post-structuralism emphasizes the irrelevance of context: there is nothing out of context (il-n’y a pas de hors-texte), everything is intersected by multiple meanings. The emphasis on meaning would make post-structuralism a candidate to become the arch-enemy of thing theory. Yet Olsen does not discard post-structuralism as a whole either: there are some ideas that can help us understand the being of things. For example, Barthes distinction between ‘writerly’ and ‘readerly’ texts. None of them are completely open to endless interpretations, there is a resistance in both, but the writerly text opposes more resistance and “insists on being more than a medium for communicating a preconceived meaning” (p. 51). In that, it acts very much like things. The point, then, is perhaps to reverse the analogy—the text as thing—rather than discard it altogether.

If archaeologists did not get it right with post-structuralism, the imprecision is even more blatant with phenomenology (chapter 4), because, after all, phenomenology is about things—things-in-themselves, to be more precise. Phenomenology, as it has been popularized in archaeology, is a way of dealing with how people experience landscape and particularly through visuality. For Tilley’s successors—rather than for Tilley himself—landscapes, “open, multi-vocal and ever-changing” are conceived as something that exist by “virtue of its being perceived” (p. 29). However, Olsen demonstrates that phenomenology is exactly the opposite: it is a radical challenge to the notion of perception based on human relevance (p. 65). The challenge is especially evident in Heidegger’s writing, and particularly the early Heidegger of Being and Time that is given precedence over the late Heidegger. For the philosopher, things that are ready-to-hand (zuhanden) are not seen by us, rather, we are “practically and skillfully involved” with them (p. 69). We live in a state of immersion (“thrownness”) in the totality of the world (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit) and, in this state, the things of which we are aware are a minority, an accident, the “tip of the iceberg” as Olsen eloquently puts it, that conceals a majority of things about which we do not think—except when they fail, for example. Instead, phenomenological archaeologists have been more concerned with the tip of the iceberg, the things that are “selected for special care” (p. 74), mostly monuments, rather than with the mass of anonymous objects that make up the world. This implies an important critique of the post-processual concept of human agency, with its focus on people that “consciously and carefully manipulate material symbols” as Hodder (1982: 121) put it. The real return to the things in themselves that is proposed in the book is a humbling retreat from the spectacular achievements of interpretive archaeology, Olsen admits. It means paying more attention to the thingly qualities of things and less to their supposed multifarious social meanings and cosmological ramifications.

In chapter 5, the author explores in more detail why things have been forgotten. The critique of modern technology and the rise of social anthropology are described as two of the forces behind the oblivion of (and contempt for) materiality. Another interesting explanation proposed by the author is that things were not easy to categorize within modern divides: neither unadulterated nature nor pure culture, they became an “excluded middle” (p. 103), an abject reality, between the “me” and the “not-me”. From this point of view, there is a problem with the limits of the concept of thing in the book: Olsen mentions in several places the reindeer as a thing. We can doubt whether animals can be comfortably included in such a category. This is paradoxically a modernist insight: the animal as an instrument, commodity or a resource, typical of capitalism, versus the animal as kin and partner, typical of many nonmodern societies (Descola 2005). A relevant point in this chapter is that things have not been totally forgotten in academia: the “singularized artifact”, the one that is “emancipated from the networks of everyday trivia, dirt, and work” (p. 105) has easily found a place in scientific discourses. This can be applied to the field of material culture studies, too: even if the range of artifacts that is taken into account is greater than in art history or anthropology, they still focus too much on singular objects. The task, now, is to reclaim the rest: archaeology, which its indiscriminate concern for everything material (from tiny pottery sherds to roads and cathedrals) is in a good position to undertake this work.

Reclaiming materiality means also reclaiming another sort of temporality: the memory of things (chapter 6). The oblivion of the time of things is related again to anthropocentric perspectives: once the human subject disappears from history, the past vanishes as well (p. 112). With other authors, Olsen defends that the past lives in the present, and it does so through things (cf. Olivier 2008). But the way this past exists in the present is not always controlled by humans (as museums, archives or monuments are): it sediments in unpredictable ways and brings about involuntary and abject memories. Olsen resorts to the concept of “habit memory” defined by Henri Bergson to make sense of the temporality of things, which is characterized both by its unconscious and repetitious nature and by its particular duration. The concept of habit memory has been explored before by philosophers and sociologists, but those who have been influenced by the Bergsonian perspective have tended to forget things and deposit habit memory on the body alone—consider Merleau-Ponty or Paul Connerton. This is a mistake for two reasons: habitual action is hardly possible without artifacts and, as opposed to performance or speech, things last (p. 121) and, therefore, are tremendously effective in reproducing memory. The kind of duration encapsulated in things, then, is different to that of bodies, performances or speech acts. Olsen complains that, despite attempts such as Connerton’s to vindicate its relevance, “habit memory has formed the neglected story” (p. 124): what has prevailed is a focus on conscious recollection. This is quite obvious in the books about memory in the past, which have abounded in recent years (e.g. Alcock and Van Dyke 2003). I would argue that the problem has to be related to the wider oblivion of the unconscious in post-processual archaeology. It is the conscious, active individual that manipulates things and negotiates with other human actors in the social arena that has been the focus of post-processual research. A focus on things, then, should also imply a turn from the realm of the conscious to that of the unconscious.

This turn to the unconscious is implicit also in the ontological perspective that sees humans and things as inextricably entangled (chapter 7). Our interactions with things, precisely because they are constitutive of our very being, pass in most cases unnoticed. Living with things, as Heidegger notes, is living without realizing that we live with them. The role of the archaeologists is then to make this networks of humans and non-humans visible: “Instead of any central hero subjects—human, worldview, mind—we should envisage a brigade of actors: plates, forks, gravestones, humans, garbage pits, houses, food, chamber pots, law books, musical instruments, and so on acting together” (p. 145). In a sense, what Actor-Network-Theory proposes is something that archaeologists have been doing for decades without fully realizing it and often openly denying it, as if ashamed that the collectives they study are formed by pots, pits and bones, and not by humans-among-themselves.

In the book’s final chapter the author makes a call to take into account the qualities of things by preserving the autonomy of the object—as opposed to contextual theories that emphasize the relations between things. Although Olsen explicitly notes that this does not imply rejecting relational theories altogether, I find that this call is somewhat problematic. The qualities of objects are often inseparable from the relations these objects have with other objects and with people, and if things help to stabilize our world is not only because of their individual solidity and permanence, but also because of their sheer, undifferentiated mass (as Olsen himself notes: p. 158). On the other hand, delving into the qualities of things is easier said than done: how can we do that without falling into the arid descriptiveness of traditional folklore studies or German-style ethnography? One possible solution is given in another book by the author, where he and his collaborators have managed to translate the silent language of things (as found in an abandoned Soviet mining town) into a powerful account of materiality, time and decay (Andreassen et al. 2010). Both Persistent Memories and In Defense of Things have extraordinary photographs (many by Bjonar Olsen himself) that convey the qualities of things in eloquent ways. This does not mean that visuality is the only form of expressing thingliness. “Although words and things are different, writes Olsen (p. 17), this is not to say that they are separated by a yawning abyss” writes the author. Things “may also be transformed (and translated) into discursive knowledge” (p. 61). In a time in which new media experiments (sometimes trivial) seem to be the only way of manifesting materiality, this call for writing can almost be regarded as a gesture of resistance. In fact, I would contend that there is something akin in writing and materiality: their capacity for stabilizing relationships and slowing down time—as opposed to the virtual and the audiovisual. Both writing and things resist the ephemeral, the fluid and the plastic.

The idea that things slow time and change, which appears in several parts of the book, that things leave “a thick and sticky heritage” (p. 162), is a relevant argument which goes against some of the widely held tenets of postmodern thought (routes against roots). Olsen reminds us the importance of roots: probably not the same kind James Clifford and others had in mind, but they have the same capacity for slowing time, fixing people to the ground, and stabilizing society. Besides, as Jonathan Friedman (2002) has argued, these fluid and ever-changing world of routes imagined by anthropologists and cultural critics is the privilege of a fraction of humanity. Most people keep living purely rooted, material lives—actually, even those who celebrate ephemerality live less virtual lives than they think. What Olsen’s critique opens is the possibility of conceiving of an archaeology of that which does not change. An anti-archaeology for that matter, since the discipline has been always more interested in documenting change rather than in recording its resistances (Hernando 2008).

This is not to say that things do not change. The author argues that there is always a latent criticism involved in habitual living: in our practical involvement with objects, we see failures that we try to amend or things we try to improve. In this way, things change and people change, but always keeping a preserve of the past. This is also the case in the late modern world, where things seem to be superseded so rapidly—we have to remember that the airplanes in which we fly, the quintessence of technological progress, have not substantially changed since 1958. Obviously not all of the past is preserved in the present. The things that are not preserved do not disappear, though, or not always. As ruins and garbage, they become “the material antonyms to the habitually useful” (p. 169). As such, they are not just redundant: they can also trigger involuntary memory and become agents of disruption. They challenge visions of history as progress and continuous narrative.

To conclude, In Defense of Things is both an unequivocal sign of paradigm change and of the maturity achieved by archaeological thinking. As one of the three most important books in archaeology over the last decade, it deserves to become the reference book of archaeological theory for the next two, at least. Moreover, it places archaeology on an equal footing with other social sciences: this, in itself, is a profound contribution.

References

Alcock, S. and Van Dyke, S. 2003. The Archaeology of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell.

Andreassen, E., Bjerck, H., Olsen, B. 2010. Persistent Memories. Pyramiden – A Soviet mining town in the High Arctic. Trondheim: Tapir.

Descola, P. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.

Friedman, J. 2002. From roots to routes. Tropes for trippers. Anthropological Theory 2(1): 21–36.

Hernando, A. 2008. Why has history not appreciated maintenance activities? In Engendering Social Dynamics: The Archaeology of Maintenance Activities. (S. Montón-Subías and M.
Sánchez-Romero, eds.). BAR International Series 1862. Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 9-16.

Hodder, I., 1982. Symbols in action: ethnoarchaeological studies in material culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Olivier, L. 2008. Le sombre abîme du temps. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen, B. 2003. 2003. Material culture after text: re-membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review 36(2), 87-104.

Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. 2001. Theatre/Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Since this is Christmas Eve, it might do well to try following a Christmas tradition. Or perhaps its intriguing antithesis in this brief speculation. Giordano Bruno said, “To think is to speculate with images.” Of course Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 in Rome, and one might as well roast for something so speculative about 'sacred' images than for more trivial reasons. This briefest of musings is not meant to be Grinch-like or tread precariously into faith or belief but merely to think (à la Bruno?) about visual representation. The question here is where did Santa Claus acquire his visual persona? Big stout man, full white beard, red cap? Judging by Orthodox imagery (see below), this probably isn’t the way images started for Nicholas, the 4th century Bishop of Myra known for his anonymous charity and as a champion of Christianity.

Since this spoof of a speculation has to start somewhere, might it be from the same place in the sequence of changing authority when tracking one synchronous Christian image of 'God the Father'? The mutable sequence of iconography might go something like the following.

In the decaying Roman Empire, the image of authority had to change. As so-called barbarians waxed stronger on all sides, Roman imperium waned. Where an emperor like Justinian was among the last the last to invoke Christ in visual self-representation in the 6th century at Ravenna's San Vitale, an emperor-as-Christ, conversely a British 4th century mosaic from Hinton-St. Mary shows the earlier 'mirror' image, a Christ-as-emperor with the Chi-Rho behind and framed by pomegranates, possibly one of the earliest Christ proto-images anywhere.

Mosaic of Christ at Hinton-St-Mary, 4th c. (courtesy of British Museum and BBC)

But the new identity symbol of power as Rome declined could have possibly been a so-called barbarian chieftain, more likely a mature and stout, full-bearded German or Goth. Note (below) the late Roman c. 251 ‘Ludovisi’ sarcophagus with bearded, bare-chested Germanic warriors at the bottom center and right of the frieze being mostly crushed by the troops of the emperor (possibly Hostilian). This was soon wishful thinking. Too quickly in the centuries thereafter, especially the fifth century, the invading hordes became too much for a collapsing Rome.

'Ludovisi' Sarcophagus, c. 251 CE, 1.5 m height, Palazzo Altemps, Rome (public domain)

Detail of Ludovisi Sarcophagus. German in battle with Romans (courtesy of Fred Kleiner,http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Religion402/Topic%20One%20Early%20Church/
LectureOne/RomansBarbarians/LudovisiSarcophagusDet4.jpg)

Why now continue visually representing divine authority with a weak, obsolete Roman power? In parallel, the imaging of God as the ‘Ancient of Days’ (eternal?) may be traced to the Hebrew prophets in the book of Daniel 7:13 and, when borrowed into Christianity, may refer to either ‘God the Father’ as in Western Christianity or Christ in Eastern Orthodoxy. Blake’s 1794 painting of the ‘Ancient of Days’ is as visionary as any other image, maybe more so, although Michelangelo's face of God from the Sistine Chapel may be more of a authority figure.

William Bake, 'Ancient of Days', 1794 (courtesy of British Museum)

one of Michelangelo's faces of God, Sistine Chapel, 1511 (public domain)

The early anti-iconic tradition inferred from Exodus 20:4 (an injunction against the futility of trying to depict a spiritual God in a physical form; sorry, a Golden Calf just wouldn't do) placed alongside a paucity of Paleo-Christian art, due to its illicit nature and poverty of the early Church, would suddenly change when Constantine began supporting state-funded art in the 4th century. Since the kenotic Christ has long been perceived as human as well as divine, it was more acceptable to use visual imagery for him than for the more mysterious 'God the Father'.

The Magi Mosaic at Sant'Apollinare, Classe-Ravenna, 6th c. (public domain)

The red Phrygian cap is earlier associated with Mithraism, an Eastern religious mystery cult later strongly dispersed with observant Roman legions judging by excavated mithraea and their artifacts. Something similar to this cap is also seen on the Magi in the 6th century mosaic at Sant’Apollinare, Classe-Ravenna, which makes perfect sense if they were star-gazers: these star-following Magi (μαγοι, magoi in Greek) from Matthew 2 in earliest legends seem to have been astrologer Mithraists or depicted to reference them. Isaac Newton wasn’t the only one to notice the late Roman Christian appropriation of the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, re-birthday of the sun three days after the winter solstice – bruma to the old Romans, when it could be shown to the ancient mind the sun was again growing stronger. This conflating act shows syncretic logic (sort of a “if you can’t beat them, join them” conflation). Since St. Nicholas (4th century) was from Myra (modern Demre) in Lycia, Southern Turkey, it would only be natural and appropriate to thus portray an Eastern saint in a red cap from Turkey (often called Phrygian from a northwestern Turkish region, and the Phrygian cap is one likely precursor of the Santa Claus cap judging by the Ravenna magi mosaic. Early on looking from archetype to archetype, from Phrygian caps at Ravenna to Northern European traditions, distinguishing Magi and Odin Longbeard to Sinterklaas and St. Nikolaus may be visually and philosophically challenging.

Sinterklaas (courtesy of ABC Australia)

But can we ultimately have both a ‘God the Father’ and Santa Claus looking like stout, full-bearded, very mature and venerable Germanic chieftains, the latter the more jovial of the two? Some Spinozan might even say - for good or ill - in an increasingly secular milieu that for many Santa Claus has superseded 'God the Father' as uber-benevolent being. Ultimately this [a]musing bit of spoof is just a Christmas teaser, nothing to be burned up about if all this is perhaps ambiguous like a provocatively thoughtful Philip Pullman thesis. Although if this speculator only receives a chunk of coal in his stocking, that's still better than being one. Of course, Giordano Bruno’s fateful speculations aside, this may also just be pure holiday humbug. If all this speculation is tiresome, sit by the fire - not too close - and have a think while warming yourself with Giordano Bruno!