Within archaeology cultural heritage managers are keenly aware of the rich compositions of the pasts at archaeological sites. Or, as I term them, of the many heritage ecologies anchored to these ‘habitats’ of the archaeological imaginary. These sites showcase a bewildering diversity of pasts articulated together. Some of these pasts persist, becoming ensconced in official literature, institutional governance, tourist agendas, or economic markets. Others are only encountered for brief moments at heritage sites, are not sustained and cease to be actors within these ‘ecosystems’.

While most attention is directed to enduring pasts, the World Heritage Site of Teotihuacan, Mexico presents many ‘failed’ pasts. For example, the top of the Pyramid of the Sun forms an important part of many relations with the archeological site. New agers from Mexico come every Sunday to climb its flanks and collect the energy thought to condense at its apex (Figure 1). Groups of Gaia worshipers from North America and Europe leave offerings on top of the pyramid to honor the Great Goddess whom the Teotihuacanos reputedly worshipped. Though they often run into scuffles with the site archaeologists and guards when they attempt to affix crystals to the stones on top, as they did when I met a group in September of 2005. And in October of 2006 the new media mogul Yahoo!, despite all of its preparations, planning and a permit from the Mexican government, had to cancel the lasering of its digital time capsule from the top of the pyramid just two weeks before the international event. Other relations with the Pyramid of the Sun that perhaps should have failed are (for now) sustained. Such as the view from the summit of the Wal-Mart opened in November 2005 and built just 2km away within the site’s protected perimeter (see Webmoor 2008 for a description of the Yahoo! and Wal-Mart relations with Teotihuacan).

Figure 1

There is certainly a multiplicity of pasts gathered with Teotihuacan. Yet not all of these past are equal. That is, like memories, not all pasts persist equally. Indeed, the isotopy of the pasts means they, like memories, are not inherently durable but must be made so. As archaeologists, however, our mandate is to care for these pasts. An obligation to assess, manage and sustain them. In particular, archaeologists and their media are, amongst others, responsible for making certain pasts endure while others perish. Our collective actions with media fix certain orientations to things, make certain relations linger. Epistemography traces the chains of associations that hold, however provisionally, the various pasts together. It explores how certain pasts, how particular sets of relation with things, are made more durable. Implicated in sustaining certain pasts, epistemography reveals the many other pasts that might be sustained as part of diverse heritage ecologies. In doing so, the discipline contributes to the pressing issues of our time by developing an archaeological metaphysics of care. A concern that does not recognize the disassembly between past and present, nature and culture, self and other.

It is now widely acknowledged that the archaeological record is not waiting for us to come along and passively impress it as upon the proverbial wax tablet for safe keeping in an analog archive or as digital heritage. Representing is transitive translation. Akin to a material engineering whereby we tinker the ‘codes’ of media with those of archaeological material, we achieve the past by actively working on it (González-Ruibal 2006; Shanks and Webmoor in press; Witmore 2006; for an early thesis of scientific activity as labour, see Amann and Knorr Cetina 1990). On the representational side, a code typified by the naturalism developed using single point perspective and Euclidean coordinates (Edgerton 1975; Ivins 1973). This side of the story is fairly well rehearsed. We have many great histories of the development of conventions for representing the world.(1) As visual and textual conventions have changed, so too have our engagements with the past. We also appreciate how mercurial media are. This seems especially so with the ever faster technological turnovers. These upgrades to representational techniques issue different possible pasts (Shanks 2007).

An awareness of representational effects is good as far as it goes. This is where, however, critical appraisals of representation in archaeology tend to stall. We have the usual suspects. Representations rooted in cultural and technological practices balanced against a single and invariant nature. Or multiple cultures set against singular nature. Considered in terms of knowledge practices, it is the moon on the water. A supposed ontological unity reflected over turbulent and capricious representational variety. Without a successor to 'nature' as an organizing category, a concern with archaeological representation holds onto an orthodox asymmetry: an overemphasis upon the powers of representation at the expense of remembering that things are involved too (Olsen 2003, 2010). These type of 'crisis of representation' studies seemed content to complexify the epistemological side of the question without venturing much over the equals sign (which would be, as Wylie 2006, 15 remarks, a “radical departure”).

Epistemography

What if we were to explore representation ontologically? To consider the multiplicity underneath both sides of the balance sheet; representational heterogeneity in contact with, as James (1909/1996) called it, a ‘pluralistic universe’ or a ‘pluriverse’. To shift consideration of representing and the action of media to the register of ontology? Is there enough elbow-room in archaeology’s post-normal questioning to do so?(2)

Again, I find the symmetry principle useful as a starting point for analysis. To begin from the flat ontology that does not arbitrarily split nature off from culture. Without this splintering at the root of much modernist thought there is an appreciation of the integral relations that bind not only our media and ourselves together as we collectively assemble the past, but also ourselves with the reality of the past. To create ourselves as we create the past; a relational existentialism encompassing nonhumans.

I want to develop what the Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Peter Dear (2001) has labeled “epistemography.”(3) To follow the relations that emerge between archaeological materials, archaeologists, stakeholders, instruments and media; documenting the material engineering that involves all of these things in making certain pasts endure. It is part of a symmetrical leveling that does not distinguish knowing from becoming (Jensen and Rödje 2010, 8 for a Deleuzian perspective).

To begin with, representational transformation goes both ways. And it is the other side of this material-media continuum which has not received much attention until lately (though see Lucas 2004; Webmoor 2005; Witmore 2006; outside of archaeology see Lynch 1990). Considering our facility with squaring excavation trench walls, cleaning features for photography, or digging a chequered set of statistically located test pits, this is a slight surprise. Such a continuum from media to material is made more apparent, however, when we work with sites and materials that undergo restoration or ‘reverse engineering’ (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Not far from our multiply composed Pyramid of the Sun is the plaza of the Pyramid of the Moon. It and the surrounding temples platforms were cleared in the initial years of the 20th century by Leopoldo Batres. While spared from the dynamite that was used to clear its larger neighbor of overgrowth (Ruiz 1997, 343), the plaza and its temples were later ‘restored’ in conjunction with the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP) of the 1960s. An example of the Mexican National Institute of History and Anthropology’s (INAH) policy of reconstruction over preservation policies (García Robles 1996), the platforms mounds were squared, edges defined by questionable extrapolation, and rubble stabilized to uniform heights. Or, at least, such was the case with the facades of the platforms. And gone is the imposing statue of the ‘Water Deity’ that stood at the base of these temple platforms (Ruiz 1997, 279). These sculpting efforts continued at Teotihuacan for the next several years as part of the Proyecto Teotihuacan. Between 1962-1964 this INAH project excavated and restored the major temple platforms along the Avenue of the Dead as well as the Pyramid of the Moon and its plaza (Bernal 1965; Ruiz 1997). There is now a much more apparent isomorphism between the material features over the 20 square km of the Mesoamerican metropolis and the map. Thus, one confronts an effective merging of material and medium on a scale unprecedented at the time in archaeology (Figure 3).

Certainly, neither the site nor future engagements with objects of the site were the same after 1964. The work of the map and reconstruction stabilized a certain set of relations with the site. This orientation might be glossed as archaeological or heritage management. Most importantly, this merging of the map with the material encouraged the impression of widespread architectural complexity. Similar to everyday street maps of present day urban centers, the discreet boundaries of structures denoted by the clean lines of the TMP map made visibly apparent the metropolis quality of Teotihuacan. The project’s leader was quite candid in acknowledging the interpolative basis of these lines for the overwhelming majority of structures on the map (Millon 1973, 26-33). Similarly to our temple platform, after roughly 1,200 years since the site was abandoned most of the features encountered during the survey were mounds consisting of a mixture of soil and the typical teotihuacano building materials of stone with cascajo (crushed volcanic scoria) and tepetate (indurated subsoil).

Figure 3

This idea of an archaeological intervention into Teotihuacan’s morphology, of archaeologists shaping the material they work upon, is an important but shallow recognition of our imbrication with media and materials. Despite many efforts to work against the splitting of the human agent from the nonhuman stuff of the past, there is still the deeply ingrained tendency to hold on to substantive distinctions between the archaeologist and the archaeological (however see Knappett and Malafouris 2009; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). A splitting of the human agent from the nonhuman stuff of the past. An attitude owing to, what ‘deep ecologists’ have struggled against, the inevitability of anthropocentrism. With this lens, the events of 1962-64 appear to us as archaeologists imposing order upon the entropic decay of Teotihuacan; a part of the everyday activities in cultural resource management (CRM) and museology. The reconstruction crews, cement, shovels, wheelbarrows and the TMP survey personnel and their drafting instruments and context sheets, collectively ordering the derelict ruins of Teotihuacan. Aligning material of the site in order to transform it into media that can travel back to the INAH offices and the University of Rochester. Thereupon integrated with other compatible media: maps, photographs, frequency distributions of pottery types, and stratigraphic profiles from test pits.

The ‘deeper’ exchange has been ontological. A fastening of a certain past that the features of Teotihuacan and the archaeological teams and equipment all comprise. The site’s platform temples and the TMP map emerged together. Neither the archaeological site nor potential relations with the temple platforms will be the same.

The visible complexity emergent from linking map and ground encourages different sets of relation with Teotihuacan. Who may engage with what of the site and how is no longer flexibly negotiable. Gone are the alfalfa and maze fields, shabby huts and grazing sheep that wandered over the rubble and amongst the giant maguey orchards of the Pyramid of the Moon’s plaza. Landholdings and property boundaries, along with the landowners and their families, are removed and expropriated in tandem with the TMP survey project (Delgado 2005). Early renderings of the site, such as the Mazapan Map from around 1560, the relación geográfica from 1580 or even much later 19th century drawings by Mayer, Charnay or Almaraz noted the presence of all of these other relations with Teotihuacan.

In contrast to these depictions, the surveyors and context sheets did not translate these objects into media. Engaged as they were with prehispanic artifact scatters and feature dimensions, the resulting TMP map sediments this particular orientation to objects. An orientation stabilized further as the material on the ground continues to be merged with the map. The periférico, a road circumscribing the central or ceremonial zone, was completed in 1964 while the surveyors were still working. And though efforts at fencing off this central area had been undertaken since the earliest archaeological work in the 1920s (Gamio 1922), a permanent security fence was now erected along the inside of the periférico. Within this fence, ‘Perimeter A’, the ‘Central Area of Monuments’ covers around 263 hectares. And INAH controls admittance to the zone through five gates.

Within this perimeter work continues to mirror the map. Ground cover continues to be cleared, restoration work proceeds intermittently but steadily and plaza floors are leveled and covered with gravel. Archaeologically, future exchanges have been oriented toward chronological fine-tuning through controlled excavations and investigations of socio-spatial patterning. Media resulting from research projects are ‘infrastructured’ to be fungible with the TMP map; now more metadata than cartographic data (see Bowker 2000 on information design). As more and more layers of detail are hung onto this media architecture the feedback cycle continues and increasing efforts on the ground ensure a physique that complements such archaeological endeavors. Other engagements are to a great degree restricted or monitored. Even guards are posted at observational posts on top of the pyramids and patrol the perimeter by day and night.

Outside of the fence the types of exchanges with material from the site are more difficult to monitor. Yet even here the action of the TMP map continues to guide engagement. It acts at-a-distance through a different set of networks (Latour 1986, 219-32). If more diffuse, it has, in fact, wider agency. As a stipulation of Teotihuacan’s listing as a World Heritage Site in 1987, UNESCO required that there be a perimeter management plan to conserve the entire area surveyed and mapped by the TMP (UNESCO 1988). The creation of a series of additional perimeter zones extended management oversight from the central, ceremonial zone to cover more than 1,730 hectares (Marini Flores 2000, 167). Now, international UNESCO officers and publications, local municipal leaders and civic revenues, regional salvage archaeological crews and equipment, Mexico City INAH officials and regulatory reports as well as valley residents and building materials have all become part of the map’s network. And the range of influence of this expanded network of actors is as contentious as it is geographically far flung. New age literature in LA, mother goddess worshippers from Western Europe, Wal-Mart growth charts in Arkansas, high-tech companies in Silicon Valley, resource managers in Paris and pueblos in New Mexico are all acted upon by the map of Teotihuacan (Webmoor 2008).

Widened Identification, Narrowed Ego: Heritage Ecologies

The collective action of this network, with Teotihuacan and the map now nodes in a far flung empire of action, affords certain sets of relation with Teotihuacan. While other relations are no longer possible. Even on the backside of our temple platform (Figure 2) we are no longer going to find shepherds, their property boundaries and alfalfa fields. Nevertheless, the range of exchanges that occur with the material of Teotihuacan remains bewilderingly complex. They are the sort of which cultural heritage managers at urban or touristed archaeological sites are unavoidably aware. At Teotihuacan, the archaeological zone anchors an ecology of interdependent associations (Webmoor 2007). They involve heterogeneous groups of individuals and materials in a series of overlapping exchanges that can be labeled spiritual, economic, political or diversionary.

For instance, let’s return to the plazas at the base of Teotihuacan’s pyramids (Figure 4). Aztec dance troops come regularly to Teotihuacan to perform. One such event on 25 September 2005 was accompanied by offerings, the burning of copal for purification, and occasional pauses in the unremitting drumming to give prayer. The event was to re-consecrate Teotihuacan as the location where the gods came into being and the current cycle of existence began (Sahagún 1953-1982[1547-1577], book 3, 1).

Figure 4

Now the day’s events were certainly unique. The dance ritual drew upon a different network of people and things: shell beads, gourds, feathers, obsidian and drums adorning ‘new age’ spiritualists from (primarily) Mexico City. It was not the past as it was. Despite the best efforts of accurate reconstruction by the archaeologists with their published research, equipment and map, the plaza was not the same as during the Tzacualli phase of the 1st and 2nd centuries CE. And while the sights, sounds and smells of 25 September were the dancers’ deliberate attempt at re-creating the human spectacles of two millennia ago, the event was of a new and different age. Different pasts emerge as new and different relations are performed with the ‘same’ plaza.

Nonetheless, the event of the plaza’s mapping and reconstruction forty years before continues to have action. The shifting and creative composition of the days’ dance took up the events of 1962-64. The leveled plaza for dancing, raised platforms for sitting and burning copal, and stabilized partitions that enclose the plaza for acoustics. Of course, the dancers had been granted permission to perform by INAH personnel at the entrance gates. Were it not for the earlier archaeological intervention, the exchange on 25 September would not have been as it was. ‘Alternative’ and diverse as the many heritage ecologies at Teotihuacan are, their orientation is partially fixed to the archaeological.

Alfred North Whitehead (1920) discussed such relational ontologies. Indeed, some of his examples were archaeologically germane. Like our Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and platform temples at Teotihuacan, he asks us to contemplate the apparent intransigency of pyramids and obelisks. Cleopatra’s needle in London, for instance, seems solid enough. Yet every encounter with the needle produces novelty. None of the entities related from moment to moment are ever exactly the same. The obelisk is one object, one component of a shifting network of other objects. Traffic, cyclists and tourists, the water level of the Thames, and passing boats all partake in and alter the composition of this network. If we focus upon the needle, standing resolutely amidst the tide of changing variables, it is never exactly the same from moment to moment. No hidden and unalterable essence grants the needle an enduring identity. Instead, we have a gathering of relations in every moment which confer a “concrete togetherness” of the material (Whitehead 1929/1978, 21). Transitory and real, the obelisk is an “event” (ibid, 161). “The name ‘event’ given to such a unity, draws attention to the inherent transitoriness, combined with the actual unity” (1925/1967, 93). A continual (re)creation of the obelisk.

The Isotopy of the Pasts and an Archaeological Metaphysics of Care

The past is surely isotopic. The plaza at Teotihuacan or Cleopatra’s Needle shedding relations while forever forming new bonds; continually reorganizing their composition. The events, in Whitehead’s sense, of the plaza at Teotihuacan of five, forty or two thousand years ago were composed of varying networks. Differing in object-orientations with the plaza (Harman 2009), the teotihuacano, archaeological or new age networks held varying relations with the plaza. Different pasts emerged. These were unstable, constantly in flux, yet never perishing completely.

Indeed, despite the elemental instability, certain pasts endure. Yet these realities, like memories recorded on celluloid or in bytes, must be maintained to be real (Latour 1991, 118). An orientation fixed. The merging of Teotihuacan with the map stabilizes an orientation which threads through these multiple and different events. While the other heritage ecologies of Teotihuacan are held (more loosely) together by new age literature, political pamphlets or commercial licenses issued to peddle pottery at the site, the archaeological orientation is made more durable by the extensive network of the TMP map.

So connecting up disconnected, discarded or forgotten stuff, the archaeologist makes the pasts more durable. Indeed, this is archaeology’s long-standing fight with decay and ruination. We do this not as outside observers, dutifully and in a neutral manner inscribing a ‘record’ of what transpired. There is no, as Haraway (1999, 176) describes it, “god-trick.” No holy view from outside the messiness of mundane matters. We are one object or actor amongst many others that are becoming associated together. The archaeologist is a node in connecting up stuff of the past that otherwise goes about its forgotten way. Documenting these relations between objects holds them, however provisionally, together in a network.

This activity of epistemography extends our consideration from the dynamic and relational process of ‘representing’, understood as an exchange that begins to complicate our traditional categories of material/nature and cultural/human, to a consideration of ontology. To shift the register from understanding that representing is active intervening (Hacking 1983), that there are no views from nowhere – the “observer effect” in physics. To a consideration that as we deploy media, instruments and tools to do work upon and affect the objects of the past, the stuff of the past effects us—we co-emerge in those moments in the exchange.

What are our responsibilities with this new ontological turn? Do we simply celebrate the Heraclitean flux of pasts emerging and perishing? To facilitate stochastic change? Or, being part of the existential chain running through representation to reality, do we account for the orientations that are made to last a little longer? Decide which relations are actively maintained?

Archaeology’s mandate is to care for the past. Implicated as we are in these relations that are the pasts, we ought to develop an archaeological agnosticism with respect to the discriminations of ontology and epistemology. Understand them as outcomes rather than predetermined categories. Break from the gravitational hold of anthropocentrism and develop an archaeological holism. Understand that a care for things is a care for our collective selves. Perhaps then, along with cognate fields like Deep Ecology (de Jonge 2004) and ecophilosophy (Bennet 2010), we can make contributions to what the metaphysician van Inwagen (1998) has characterized as the perennial problems of humanity and the defining questions of being: to develop an archaeological metaphysics.

Notes

(1) Specific to disciplinary analysis is Rudwick’s (1976) early and influential study of geography. Within archaeology is the tradition of scholarship into visual representation developed by Moser and others (see Clack and Britain 2007; Molyneaux 1997, Moser 1998; Smiles and Moser 2005). Examinations of textual tropes and narrative styles for ‘writing the past’ figured more prominently during archaeology’s ‘linguistic turn’ (eg Hodder 1989; Tilley 1989).

(2) A contention of this paper is that a ‘post-normal archaeology’ is developing in the wake of the many ‘post’ prefixes having been attached to ‘normal’ theory and practice. Greatest ballast for such post-normal archaeology comes, however, from the discipline’s development of responses to the policy issues of risk and environmentalism facing society. I discuss the requisite speculation in terms of a metaphysics uniquely developing within the discipline. The concept is developed from Jerry Ravetz’s ‘post-normal science’ (see Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993).

(3) There are well-known variations on the ‘symmetry principle’ that have emerged from what can loosely be referred to as Science and Technology Studies (STS). I am not concerned to refine, define or defend one articulation over another, but rather to use the term as it has become a heuristic tool within archaeology to move beyond anthropocentric categories of thought (see Symmetrical Archaeology). For other insightful analyses of archaeology’s anthropocentricism, see Normark (2010).

(4) See Alberti and Bray’s 2009 Introduction to a special issue on animism and archaeological research. The authors and contributors to the session were interested in the possibilities of using ethnographic analogies to cast artifact assemblages in terms of non-Western practices which hold continuities ('relations') rather than distinctions between people, things and companion species. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (eg 2004) has been an anthropological source of inspiration for these type of arguments. Rather than subsume archaeology within the (four-field) fold of anthropology, I want to underscore its unique experiences as alternatively sufficient to reconfigure how we think about deeper issues.

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Archaeolog: what are the pressing issues facing archaeology in Tunisia today?

Ben Lazreg: First of all, conservation. Rapid economic development has occurred over the last 30 years. The quality of live is changing. People are building more and more houses in step with the state investing in agriculture, amenities, highways, dams, airports, hotels; infrastructure.

After centuries of sleep, Tunisia has finally woken up: families now want their own house, rather than living with the extended family; traditional shallow plow agriculture with cattle has transformed into modern agriculture with deep plows pulled by tractors; hotels are developing along the eastern coast; industry is now ubiquitous. Any Tunisian city occupies the same strategic place as that of early cities and this has implications as to infrastructural development. Whereas early cities were small, modern cities extend. All this has archaeological consequences.

Accompanying these changes comes looting, moreover. And, of course, collectors, antiquaries, and some museums commission this. Punic lamps are highly priced, for example.

Now for an emerging country Tunisia is one of the archaeologically richest in the Mediterranean; this is exemplified by the density of archaeological sites. With my period, the Roman, alone, there are just over 22,000 sites in northern and central Tunisia—an area of about 600 kilometers north south, by 200 kilometers east west at the maximum. Out of the 22,000 plus sites there were 200 hundred big cities. Some cities are covered by medieval or modern towns. Others, such the coastal town of Hadrumetum and many others are still in the wilds. Some of these won’t wait long. They are either next to large towns or near the beach and there is a great deal of pressure to expand.

In Tunisia everything underground is state property. Diamond mines, oil, archaeology; all belong to the state. As most of the sites are on private property, in terms of archaeology, this is a good thing—this is an inherited law from the French, so most people don’t dare to dig by themselves and sale.

However, at the end of the day the government cannot buy all of these fields. This it has to do in order to undertake full site preservation. The 1994 Tunisian heritage code tries to protect monuments and sites, but it still has many faults; faults that can be exploited by good lawyers. A site can be protected only if can be classified and this, in a sense, freezes it so as not to be built on in any way.

In the midst of all this development we cannot catch up.

Ben Lazreg. This depends on what you consider to be an archaeologist. There are maybe 40 field archaeologists at most—maybe. This number excludes many museum curators. Even if we put all the non-field researchers in the field, that wouldn’t add but a few to this number.

We use local workmen and students, but you need specialists for bone, stucco, construction material, pottery, etc. for both the dig and the after dig. The after dig includes the study of materials, preservation, and publication. Survey before the dig never tells you what you will find. You think you are digging a bath and you hit tombs, so it is extremely difficult to anticipate for what you will find. Excavation, restoration, and survey are all supported by public funds and this problem of anticipation extends to project budgeting. This is also a problem of need: we need both the requisite skilled personnel and we need flexible finances. Both are lacking.

Archaeolog: can you give us a specific example of these constraints?

Ben Lazreg: Excavations often have very pour budgets and short deadlines. So one has to move very quickly. Sometimes you can freeze a project for future work. However, far more often one cannot.

Consider the case of excavating stuccos. Stucco often adheres to chunks of rubble. I have encountered cases where one did not know that they were moving through rubble with stuccos. It was only by cleaning them that we found frescos. It is surely the case that many of these have been missed by moving quick through the rubble.
There is a difference between hospital surgery and military surgery in the field. When you are by yourself in the trench in the midst of battle one cannot afford to do careful surgery. We have to do war surgery. This is all the more pressing in our country where we have difficulty finding solutions for the living much less the dead.

Archaeolog: what do you see as the solutions to these problems you mention?

Ben Lazreg: There are many. Our current policy is to train students and now there is university training, but there is not an established tradition of this. Archaeology is a very new topic of concern in our university system. It has been around 6 or 10 years at most. Indeed, my training is in Classics, in Latin. My archaeological training came by working in the summers.

We have a collaborative tradition among historical disciplines dating back to the 60s or 70s where many professors from Tunisian universities, historians, for example, lend a hand in studying the past. Historians pitch in. However, we are not accustomed to the kinds of multi-disciplinary collaboration one finds between different universities and departments in other parts of the worlds. Those that study bird bones, for example, have their own problems and limited budgets.

This is slowly changing and there is a change with, for example, scholars who interested in studying the Phoenician diet. So the first solution is to expand collaboration between different disciplines. We need to show how this is both good for our studies and good for other researchers to have the results.

The second has to do with the issue of technique. We lack specialists who work on stuccos, for example. We lack training in field archaeology, training laboratory techniques in the universities. We need different teams of trained professionals with synergistic skill sets.

The third solution has to do with preventive interventions. Preventative means we do not wait for the discovery to happen. We need to work with planners ahead of time and we need to send teams out to survey and dig ahead of any construction work. This is again a problem of numbers. More personnel are needed on the ground.
This brings us to the fourth solution: to intensify the corporation with foreign institutions. We learn and they learn. This exchange is very important on all sides. Techniques for how to dig, how to plan, how to publish can be exchanged. A good example here was the UNESCO campaign at Cartage 1974 – 1983: a collaboration between the German Institute at Rome, the French school at Rome, two Canadian Universities, Michigan, and Oxford. These institutes and universities not only dug separately, but they had seminars and they exchanged a lot. In the process, we Tunisians learned a great deal; we became more aware of how to exploit the data scientifically.

We simply lack the manpower and knowhow to confront these challenges. Plant seeds, pollen data, archaeometry, remote sensing; these things don’t exist in Tunisia. We don’t have the equipment. We don’t’ have the knowhow. And yet, these techniques would help us in our collaboration, in the questions we can address, in the detail of the information we produce, and in our preventative measures, to be sure.

Archaeolog: so you can involve foreign universities in preventive archaeology . . .

Ben Lazreg: Yes. We are open to this. We are open to a mutual agreement where foreigners work with us. Of course, we have to follow legal procedures, such as specifying where to excavate, the duration of the project, requisite work for preservation, and final publications. We are open to collaboration with anybody, that is, unless someone has a bad reputation.

In the past we have found archaeologists from the outside digging in locations for which they did not have permission. Or claiming discoveries on their own without giving due credit to local collaborators. This relationship must be based upon mutual respect and trust.

There is so very much to be done. We have recently set up a project with Oxford University under the direction of Andrew Wilson. This will involve a join team to work in Utica. The English can bring anyone one they want in the team: diverse makeup is all the better. Of course, these must be institutional agreements as individuals can move on.

Utica was a Phonecian then Roman harbor. However, it is now 10 kilometers inland and we don’t know where the harbors are. So the project will involve survey and carottage. In this, Oxford will work with Spanish and Italian teams already there. And, of course, they will involve Tunisians. We are open for any proposal, museum work, fieldwork, planning, survey, so long as we all come to an agreement over priorities.
Similarly, we have to consider cultural heritage differently. We can’t just dig. We have to consider economic and social issues involved. We have to use archaeology as a social and economic motor. We have to invest in local communities to develop heritage as a cultural and tourist draw. We have to consider the economic outcomes along with the intellectual ones. We put a great deal of money into sites without returns, we need more income generating sites to help with work elsewhere.

We have to think economically and we have to have a strategy to create new sites. We have to consider cultural heritage as a source of income. We need people to market this. We don’t have the people to do this. Digital media, workshops who produce replicas, we are still in 19th century. We have to involve the private sector more in generating responsible and careful solutions that can be put out there and be shown to actually work.

Archaeologies of Placemaking contains an introduction and eight case studies written by different contributors. Overall, these nine chapters share a concern with the authenticity of place histories, with a deeper focus on memory-work, and its material manifestation in monuments. The concept of place that the authors present is one of diverse meanings, which are ascribed by different communities, and manifested in practices of remembrance and materialisation. The European-American voice, which tends to envelop place, has emerged out of a broader discussion that is colonial in character. While in some cases these narratives have negatively portrayed Native American places, others have identified the significance of place in terms of the symbolic and ritual associated with Native American culture and history. This volume largely takes issue with the dominant European-American voice in site-specific cases that detail the ways that these places have been created, reified and communicated the Native American voices. As the contributors illustrate, the meaning of place has several interpretations; these multiple, and often conflicting interpretations create tensions between those communities with a vested interest in a place. One of the volume’s intentions is to resolve these tensions. Rather than hold them as a productive force, the discussions aim to create a balance or harmony between the different associations that Native Americans and European-Americans have with the same places.

Part I

Archaeologies of Placemaking will be of great interest to historic preservationists and heritage managers, as well as to archaeologists who are interested in following the way in which multiple interpretations of places have been documented. However, the specific North American histories and geographies of the case studies, as well as their theoretical position, make the volume quite specific in outlook and scope.

The volume opens with an introduction (Chapter One), and follows with four sections that compose its structure: senses of place, senses of history (Chapters Two and Three); placemaking and reinvented pasts (Chapters Four and Five); colonial monuments, indigenous memory keeping (Six and Seven); monuments, public celebrations, and community engagement (Eight and Nine). The geographic spread of the eight case studies are confined to North America, ranging from California to Virginia and from the Southwest to New England and the Canadian Maritimes. As the editor, Rubertone, notes, these chapters “raise critical questions about the very complicated and uncertain intersections of history and memory, place and displacement, public spectacle and private engagement, and reconciliation and reappropriation that resonate loudly all across the Indigenous world” (p. 16).

Chapter Two concerns the efforts to protect and present places associated with Mi’Kmaw identity in Debery and Belmont, Novia Scotia, Canada. The authors, Julien, Bernard, and Rosenmeier, highlight the difficulties in separating the past from the present as are often constructed in the linear temporalities (from 11,000 years ago according to c14 dating) that archaeologists write in their narratives. These, they argue, are devoid of the important emotional and spiritual connections that exist to a place regardless of their antiquity. This is highlighted by the title of the paper Paleo is not our word.

In Chapter Three, Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Ferguson, and Anyon discuss the Reeve Ruin and Davis sites in San Pedro Valley, Arizona and community identities over 13,000 years associated with the Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni, Western Apache and Tohono O’odham. It is argued that by appreciating the complexity of their contested histories it is possible to create an archaeologically-sensitive narrative that accommodates the senses of belonging that groups have to particular places. This is connected to a temporality which considers the ways in which these attachments might endure in an archaeology that does not arrest it diachronically.

Chapter Four examines the way in which Edgar Lee Hewett combined archaeological research with historic preservation in creating a distinctive New Mexican identity. Investigating the issue of invention, Preucel and Matero, suggest that the Coronado State Monument resolves the tensions and contradictions between the Pueblo people, the historical event of the Coronado entrada and its status as a monument. Highlighting the selective qualities of presenting history to reinforce the emerging political and cultural ‘hegemonies’ of the present day, the authors suggest that Hewett, in the early twentieth century, inadvertently produced an example of Foucault’s heterotopia (1986): a place containing simultaneous ironies in ‘represented, contested and inverted’ histories. Another, but not final irony also exists: while the site was reconstructed on a site without archaeological evidence, the importance of the place and its reconstruction serves as both an authentic and a contrived memory for the Pueblo and New Mexican identities. This nonetheless maintains its cultural and historical significance by being subject to further interpretations, one of which is presented in this book.

Chapter Five follows the sequences of meanings embedded at Fort Apache in terms of its life history or biography. Welch follows the life history process of Fort Apache (from 1870) from its Apache name Tl’óghagaii (before 1870) to its sedimentation as the White Mountain Apache tribe cultural center and historic park. The chapter goes on to examine the ways in which tensions, as well as their resolutions, interact with one another in the remembrance of the cultures involved in their production.

In Chapter Six, White attends to the Timbisha Shoshone presence in Death Valley and their history, which involved disputes over land ownership from the late nineteenth century to their forced relocation by European Americans in 1933. Rather than looking at the places of commemoration, this chapter focuses on the visible sites of resistance, as a way in which the Timbisha Shoshone have been remembered.

In Chapter Seven, Handsman examines the ‘monumented’ landscape in the Wampanoag Indian Country of southeastern Massachusetts, not from a perspective of specific places, but rather from its locales (sites of activity) where quotidian tasks were performed. As a consequence of this orientation, place is not presented as such. Rather, the ways in which colonial histories were and are entangled with Native American histories made conspicuous by archaeology (itself a result of quotidian tasks - to add as Ingold suggests, ‘the practice of archaeology is itself a form of dwelling’ (1993: 152)), and by written accounts of the Pilgrims’ experiences in the seventeenth century are emphasized.

Chapter Eight presents the history of two memorials raised by European Americans to the memory of the Narragansetts following their detribalization: Memorial Rock and the Canonicus Monument. Here, Rubertone elaborates further on the complex histories associated with community survival, cultural persistence and change, and resistant accommodations. Rubertone also raises an interesting paradox concerning the Narrangansett people, and presumably other extant indigenous communities, who continue to “struggle with the memorialisation of their own extinction” (p. 212-4). Such a paradox leads one to question the underlying authenticity concerning the sense of place one often associates with memorial sites of living populations.

Finally, in Chapter Nine, Hantman focuses on the Jamestown and the understanding of its 400th anniversary, which was embroiled in the Nationalistic narratives which enshroud it, but often contradicted by archaeological and environmental evidence. The chapter details the way in which Jamestown has been ‘sanctified, simply noted (designated), or obliterated’ in comparing the 1907 with the 2007 commemorations.

Part II

I am not a specialist in Native North American archaeology. Therefore it is not my intention to comment at length on the individual case studies within this volume. My own archaeology is focused on the research and theoretical focus related to landscape and placemaking in Iceland, particularly concerning the colonization of a landscape in the ninth century AD devoid of any previous cultural history. From here, I am concerned with the way by which societal structures are gradually formed and developed over time. I am also interested in an archaeology of movement (from place to place) and the way in which residual forms continue to structure and anchor movement over time. I use this second part of the review to address what I believe are some fundamental theoretical flaws in the volume. The fact that they are present from the onset of Archaeologies of Placemaking, undermines the value and overall impact that this study has on the archaeology of place. The volume misses an orienting theoretical discussion on the following important and foundational questions:

* What constitutes place’s involvement in archaeology?

* What are the varying responses of the ‘other’ multiple and less dominant voices; is this a ‘universal’ voice?

* Why is place portrayed as creating a distance between past and present? Would a closer temporal resolution of place challenge this assertion?

First, a general point. There are already several books on the topic of place: among them we may list Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s (eds.) Senses of place (1996), Edward Casey’s Getting back into place (1993) and The fate of place (1998), Tim Creswell’s Place. A short introduction (2004), and Yi-Fi Tuan’s Space and place: the perspectives of experience (1977). One could argue that the debates on place in Archaeologies of Placemaking are already well-situated, and therefore do not need further discussion at this level. Unfortunately place is one of those slippery and ambiguous terms which needs clarification by being situated within its specific discourse, or, in this instance, sets of case studies (cf. Tilley 2004: 24-6). While there is a certain amount of ambiguity as to what is meant by ‘place’, which reveals a greater openness and fluidity than is often present in other books — I am unsure if this was fully intended. Whatever the reason, the fact that the concept of place is thoroughly under-theorized leaves some serious gaps. Furthermore, it is hard to give credence to a position and a theoretical argument which seeks a dialectical ‘middle’ position (Olsen 2003; 2007). What follows is a short commentary on some aspects that I think would have benefited the book: an alternative concept of place; the relationalities and multiplicities of place; a critique on the value of ‘middle ground’; and the use of time and memory.

Contrary to overall current of the book, place is not a bounded and fixed entity in either space or time. Place, to the contrary, exists in a continual state of alteration and perpetual transformation (Massey 1993). One could say that it is in a constant state of becoming. Place is a bundle of relations, locales or sites where – metaphorically – things become sticky, slow down and become stuck. These relations are not fixed; they are decidedly slower in the movements that pass through them. Places are paradoxically hyperactive while being materially located. Part of its character is because place is recursively constituted – or made by people – who perform and engage with the physicality and material presence of place, giving it its identity, and, in the process, becoming also identified by it. As Casey reminds us, place is the same as self: there is no place without self; and there is no self with place (2001: 206). Places not only are, they happen and are as mutable as the people who make them.

What I mean is that the ‘real’ character of place is not seen or experienced from the outside, as many of the case studies have emphasized in their tendency to define place from privileged positions. Place is constituted through the involvement and engagements that take place on the inside; definition of exterior and interior is relative, but in the sense of Casey’s suggestion, place is part of the self identity in such a way that it cannot be separated, or perhaps even established in the first instance, unless one already has the sense of attachment. In this way, the book focuses on presenting the external and internal relations to place as a divided notion, each making its investment towards a single proposition of the place, pitted one against the other. This is not to say that one can have a single proposition or perspective on place, but only that ‘real’ places need to be experienced, but that also one needs to be ready to become involved: as Basso reminds us in this sense that he was not ready to visit particular sites as one had to wise to them, expressing the sense of ‘wisdom sits in places’ (1996).

In this book, place should have retained more of its experienced qualities that engagement with any kind of people and their things provides. This arguably would have retained the multiple tensions that go hand in hand with the many collisions which are all in constant motion in providing unique perspectives of place. All of the bodies or participants involved in placemaking bring with them particular causes and means that articulate their own attachments and meanings in places’ construction and in the construction of themselves. In this respect, much more emphasis to the actual voices could have been given to the Native American communities involved, for example. To be fair, a few chapters do present this sense, such as Chapter Four and Chapter Eight, but the majority fall short. The inclusion of a broader scope of Native American voices alone would have given more emphasis to the idea that places resonate to the condition and fabric brought by the individuals and collectives that contextualize them.

Place is also used in many different ways in the book, and comes across as something that can denote a monument, a landscape, space, or locale. This elasticity to the notion of place reduces the specificity of what place is. It can mean all of these things, but it needs clarification and more argument, and most importantly consistency in the way that it is used. Part of this meandering arises because there is more of a focus in some chapters on the history of place rather than its archaeology per se. This results in the archaeologies of placemaking being lost to its histories (e.g. Chapter Six). What appears in the book is a rather more universal and holistic usage of place that both disrupts and unites it with space and landscape (Cresswell 2004: 10). An archaeology of placemaking, rather than establishing itself in terms of the history of things done at a place, should perhaps have considered place as a result of its relational qualities; in effect to decenter it and instead focus on the relations that circulate, rather than on the place, or thing, itself. These are places revealed through practices and meanings, which is a reminder of the activities that occurred (c.f. Thomas 2001: 172-4). As a result, issues of residuality, resilience and endurance relating to place establish a coherent archaeological framework on which to hang other concerns (Lucas 2008).

This brings me to my third point concerning the issue of ‘middle ground’. Place, it is stated in the opening chapter, is personal and political, and does not necessarily require special skills in its making (p. 13). This is a fair statement, which is further elaborated by the suggestion that places lurk everywhere and are produced by everyone, and in their making are never made by simple processes. But … if they are created by everyone, which is a perspective I agree with and would have liked to have see more of in the book, how is a ‘middle ground’ maintained or even produced without it being contrived? I find this usage / juxtaposition more than a little inconsistent and flawed.

While the meanings of place are always in some way negotiated (both at a personal and collective level) there is a problem in creating single propositions. For example, the introduction argues that the idea of ‘middle ground’ does not involve a notion of compromise (p. 16). I find this position to be a bit naïve (p. 16), particularly because place is constituted by the violence involved in its production, which is always, to some degree, contested (González-Ruibal 2006). Not acknowledging the conflict by suggesting the proposition of a middle ground elides the important activities involved in negotiating ‘place’. I am of the opinion that archaeologists should express these complexities and sites of attachment, rather than sealing them in a fate of complicity, so that the acknowledgement of what lies behind multiple meanings can be critically assessed and presented. In doing so, one not only ensures the transparency in the meanings that are produced, but they are left open to further negotiation, adding, in theory, to the mobility of places as gatherings, or things, not as fixed, immobile entities. Places flow. Creating place as a ‘be all and end all’ is problematic. This is an act that seems to me to be more like evading an important and fundamental issue: the multiplicities inherent in place and the problems that this brings.

One important concern, that in many ways is present in the book but not explicitly, is about the situatedness of place in terms of its temporality – as an issue concerned with the affects that time and its gathering bring to place (Lucas 2005; 2008; Witmore 2007). Temporality is discussed only in a few chapters, and for such a fundamental issue concerning place, it is woefully underrepresented in the book as a whole. Where it is considered, there is a view of time in a segmented fashion, in which layers accumulate, like a palimpsest. But time and place intersect in a wholly relational way that endures (cf Chapter Three). This occurs not in segmented units that lie somehow outside of place – the stop and start of place histories – but in the connections that flow and eddy (Serres and Latour 1995) through the practices and engagements that are irrational and irregular, transformative, as well as paradoxical in the material disclosures of presence and absence. And related to this issue of duration, is the fallibility of memory in the lost and occasionally renegotiated memories in the memorialization of place.

As the book rightly suggests, how memory makes place is an important issue but this unfortunately is a little too vaguely presented. Personal memory, as Walter Benjamin (1999) and Marcel Proust (1925) eloquently remind us, can be triggered by the sensual experience of mnemonics (memories embedded in things), of events and objects that may have been forgotten. But what of collective memory, the subject matter of this book? As Paul Connerton (1989) suggests, collective memory is activated through practical engagement. So far, fine, as these are present in the book. However, the processes of performance through bodily practices, either in habit or commemoration, and through the inscription or incorporation of practices that embed memory into memorials or specific locales, are only rarely explored (cf. Pearson and Shanks 2001; Pearson and Thomas 1994).

Furthermore, as the book acknowledges and tries to develop, memory is intertwined with two types of places: with places of memorial, such as a pilgrimage or a place-name, and at the locus of memory, such as a house or a street (Connerton 2009; and 1989). While the book is concerned with both of these ‘sites of memory’ it fails to consider the different memory processes that occur at each (the locale or activity area, and the monument). The difference is clearly more than simply building to commemorate at a locale, or establishing a locale in the creation of a monument through habitual practices that are in the future commemorated. The book discusses more examples of events of remembrance rather than the ways in which memory is actively made through practices of construction and through performance. Although there is great diversity in the ways in which places are actively remembered and represented, it is suggested that ‘middle ground’ provides “a useful concept for thinking about monuments in relation to ideas of shared versus segregated or mutually exclusive” histories (p. 28). This presents a problem, insofar as there will always be multiple meanings concerning place, and various senses of attachment, which will invariably both compete and complement. The point being made, is that there should not be a reliance on a single dominant discourse of place, that it should rather be an evaluation of place meanings (as many as is feasible). But I fear that the using ‘middle ground’ elides something of the uniqueness of these meanings by reducing the diversity that constitutes place as place. Rather than being reduced and fragmented, places should be represented in a way that maintains and holds onto their multiplicities.

We must also remember that the material presence of place cannot be substituted only by its meaning as well as how this is represented: The meaning of place stands in for, rather than stands for, material processes and forms (Witmore forthcoming). This perspective acknowledges that the one place can have many different meanings, any of which is an authentic portrayal. This occurs individually as well as collectively, and although the experiences will differ between individuals and groups, the contact with the same physical environment produces a shared sense of place. To further labor the point, which is missing in most of the papers, place then becomes a hub, or a gathering, in which sets of material entanglements and relations between different people, or between cosmologies, become clearer and dramatized.

A fundamental issue of placemaking and its meaning is not so much based on whether or not interpretations disagree or complement, or the way in which they are in a compromise, but rather understanding the way in which a placemaking is derived from multiple sources; demonstrating how place is an entangled mess and a sticky bundle of relations. As a result of this messiness, the processes of representation and the malleability of interpretations in creating authentic pasts would retain a much more critical appraisal than is expressed in this book, particularly one taking on board the slippery and ambiguous terms such as place, or landscape.

Important in this appraisal, contrary to the introduction, is the politics of place. While several of the papers explicitly point towards the political contexts of the placemaking process (e.g. Chapter Four), many do not. And this again seems to be fundamental but is not explicitly illustrated: The very fact that these texts have been written in a particular way, as a volume in the WAC One World Archaeology Series, and presented thematically as a study on Native American archaeology, suggests to me, at the very least, a specific status and authority a.k.a. politics. While simply resigning to an argument that politics is a reduction of a place’s specific complexity by suggesting that it creates only misinterpretations and misunderstandings is, again, a little naive. To be aware of the politics involved in both meanings and interpretations and to present them allows critical assessment, even though the experiences and presentations of place may radically differ. Place is negotiated through participation and experience which spreads itself differentially between individuals and groups. “Bridging the middle ground of monuments” (p. 31) does not hold promise to my mind but results in further misinterpretation and misrepresentation more than an approach which attempts to hold them productively simply because place is never a stable entity; it is constantly mutable, and depends on the sets of relations that come into contact with it. What emerges is different each time it is negotiated; just as would this book if it were written again in 50 years time.

References

Benjamin, W. 1999 The storyteller, in Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Pp. 83-107.

Casey, E. 1993 Getting back into Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. 1997 The fate of place. A philosophical history. Berkley: University of California Press.

Casey, E. 2001 Body, self and landscape, in P. C. Adams, S.Hodscher and K. E. Till (eds.) Textures of place: exploring humanist geographies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 403-25.

Connerton, P. 1989 How society remembers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Connerton, P. 2009 How Modernity forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Creswell, T. 2004 Place. A short introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Feld, S. and Basso, K. (eds.) 1996 Senses of place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Foucault, M. 1986 Of other spaces, Diacritics 16: 22-7.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006 An Archaeology of the Spanish Civil War, Archaeolog [http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2006/02/an_archaeology_of_the_spanish.html]

Ingold, T. 1993 The temporality of the landscape, World archaeology 25.2: 152-174.

Lucas, G. 2005 An archaeology of time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. 2008 Time and archaeological event, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18.1, 59-65.

Massey, D. 1993 Power geometry and progressive sense of place, in J. Bird (ed.) Mapping the futures: local cultures, global change. London: Routledge.

Olsen, B. 2003 Material culture after text: re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological Review 36.2: 87–104.

Olsen, B. 2007 Keeping things at arm’s length: a genealogy of asymmetry. World Archaeology 39.4, 579-588.

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

Pearson, M. and Thomas, J. 1994 Theatre/Archaeology, The Drama Review 38.4: 133-161.

Proust M. 1925 Remembrance of Things Past. Volume 1: Swann's Way: Within a Budding Grove. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage.

Serres, M. and Latour B. 1995 Conversations on science, culture, and time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Thomas, J. 2001 Archaeologies of place and landscape, in Hodder, I. (ed.) Archaeological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pp. 165-186

Tilley, C. 2004 The materiality of stone. Explorations in landscape phenomenology. Oxford: Berg.

Tuan, Yi-Fi 1977 Space and place: the perspectives of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Witmore, C. forthcoming A politics of the past present: four quandaries for archaeology, in J. Dixon (ed.) Fragmenting Archaeology, or Taking a Leaf Out of Shanks and Tilley’s Book. British Archaeological Reports.

Witmore, C. 2007 Landscape, time, topology: an archaeological account of the Southern Argolid, Greece, in D. Hicks, L. McAtackney, and G. Fairclough (eds.) Envisioning landscapes. Situations and standpoints in archaeology and heritage. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Pp. 194-225.

Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.

“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.

‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).

The past is both precedent and product. The past as precedent has always already perished. In this, the past that perishes is actualized in ever-burgeoning legions of material entities (Edensor 2005; Olivier 2008; Olsen 2003), but the past that perishes looses its immediacy in the lived moment. No one can encounter the same occasion twice. “A perished occasion subsists only as a “datum”: a sort of raw material, which any subsequent occasion may take up in its own turn, in order to transform it in a new process of self-creation” (Shaviro 2009, 18). The past as product is that which archaeologists and historians co-produce (co, as many other entities play a role in this) and that with which they co-emerge (for other angles on this process see Lucas 2001; for the past as an outcome of archaeological practices see, for example, González-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2004). Marble torsos, display pedestals, Francesco Morosini (the Venetian commander who fired his cannons upon the “beautiful temple” in 1687), long chains of negotiation, selection, transportation, controversy and acquisition; all contribute to the co-emergence of the Parthenon Sculptures—architectural sculptures become art works which become world heritage for some, objects of cultural patrimony for others. Working for these pasts is a perpetual and most necessary struggle.

Controversies revolve around things. An object-orientation suggests a particular angle of association with respect to the matter at hand (Harman 2002 and 2009). Here, the word ‘object’ is not to be construed in opposition to the word of ‘subject’. With an awareness of the shortcomings of the term (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), objects also participate in a given controversy, but the nature of that participation will vary depending on the associations it gathers. A particular object-orientation will always be one of many (Latour 2005). In this way, an object is not so much a substance as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44; Webmoor and Witmore 2008 have discussed this as mixture). Because objects, as actual entities or occasions, become something entirely novel with every new relation—even if what they transform into bears a striking resemblance to their former selves—their nature is highly variegated and uncertain. Put another way, “there is no difference which does not make a difference” (Bryant 2009).

Consider a section of stonewall in Nafplion, Greece. Running at an oblique angle along the rear of two former residences at 24 and 26 Zygomala Street is a large, polygonal wall of grey limestone.

It stretches 19.5 meters from a short segment of rubble wall, which forms the southeast corner of 26 to the edge of Zygomala street. At this junction, the wall abruptly turns a few meters shy of the street into an adjacent building. Resting directly upon bedrock, segments of this wall stand as high as 3 meters. Sections are still covered in wall plaster of various colors: red ochre, teal green, and white. This wall is not merely a static, impassive object across which historical events have washed—the most recent being its incorporation into the fabric of two former houses, the decay of these structures or the subsequent clearing of the debris. What is a relic wall for some is a matter of contention for others. A point of orientation for property boundaries, the rear support for a structural wall, a plastered interior edifice, the external defenses of an ancient citadel: the polygonal wall is all these things; which occasion we encounter is matter of orientation and gathering. We can no longer be indifferent to all these realities. Any thing held to be of the past by archaeologists or historians, under different fields of relation is something entirely novel, which may have nothing to do with a past orientation.

Thus far, it is fair to say archaeologists have missed this ontological multiplicity (although see Knappett and Malaforis 2009; Lucas 2009; Olsen 2003; Witmore 2009). Whether we are dealing with indigenous (Watkins 2000), interpretive (Hodder 1999), social (Meskell and Preucel 2004) or even processual archaeologies rooted in solid ‘fact’ (Binford 1972), diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations, beliefs and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a durable substance or a singular natural world (also see Latour 2003; from a yet another archaeological angle, see papers in Alberti and Bray 2009). In this, ‘data’, ‘heritage’, ‘evidence of a definitive past’ are prematurely conflated with reality and utilized as the final arbiter of disagreement. Phenomenological archaeologies have faired no better. With the latter, privilege is granted to human access to the world with relations between nonhumans consigned to the sciences (Brück 2005; Tilley 2004; for more of how phenomenology brackets the world as presented to human consciousness see Harman 2009, 78; and 2010). Understanding the lively, variegated nature of things poses a challenge to any bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the other. Arguing for multiplicities of meaning, interpretation, belief, has left intact a determinative substance, a definitive core, which assumes one reality at the expense of others. Marbles in London and Greece, a wall in Nafplion, a humble relic from our childhoods; all these things must be understood in the plural (Latour 2005, 116).

While things are clearly much more interesting than archaeologists have previously allowed, our freedom as archaeologists to follow things, formerly considered to be of the past, wherever they may go will run up against a snag contained within the very etymology of archaeology—the study of ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’. So long as archaeology holds fast to the cares specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta archaia’—there is nothing wrong with this commitment. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand beyond this remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations. In other words, while marbles, monuments, walls may be ‘ta archaia’, they are also a lot of other things in addition. We can no longer assume that that materials we archaeologists engage are of the past, in advance.

If to be of the past is now an orientation among many, then perhaps it is time for we archaeologists concerned with concurrent relations with things to consider a new banner under which the range of motion required to do such concerns justice could be granted—might it be labeled pragmatology? Pragmatology is a reversal of what was taken for granted under a modernist empiricism. Pragmata are starting points, ontological grounds, for archaia, but in this the importance of archaia is not subverted. Archaeology continues to encompass that creative action for linking fragments to build temporally framed accounts. Pragmatology might provide a surrogate umbrella under which archaeologists who are concerned with stakeholder associations, questions of heritage, contemporary archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and reflexive method might operate.

References

Alberti, B. and T.L. Bray (ed.) 2009: Animating Archaeology: of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies, A Special Section for Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 19(3), 337-441.

Auslander, L., A. Bentley, L. Halevi, H.O. Sibum, and C. Witmore 2009: AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture. American Historical Review, 114(5), 1354-1404.

Binford, L. R. 1972: An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Brück, J. 2005: Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1), 45-72.

Bryant, L. 2009: The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of Any Future Object-Oriented Philosophy. Larval Subjects. Available at: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/the-ontic-principle-the-fundamental-principle-of-any-future-object-oriented-philosophy/

DeSilvey, C. 2006: Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318-38.

Edensor, T. 2005: Industrial Ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006: The past is tomorrow: Towards an archaeology of the vanishing present. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 39(2), 110-25.

Hamilakis, Y. 2008: The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harman, G. 2002: Tool-Being. Chicago: Open Court.

Harman, G. 2009: Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Harman, G. 2010: Technology, objects and things in Heidegger. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 17-25.

Hitchens, C. 1997: The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece? London: Verso.

Hodder, I. 1999: The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Holtorf, C. and A. Picinni (eds) 2009: Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Hutchins, E. 1995: Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jones, A. 2007: Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: CUP.

Kaldellis, A. 2009: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: CUP.

Knappett, C. and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Lucas, G., 2001: Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. Routledge: London.

Lucas, G. 2005: The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. forthcoming, Dead Things Walking. Journal of Science Technology and Human Values.

Malafouris, L. 2008: At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In C. Knappett and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, pp. 19-36.

Meskell, L., and R. Preucel (eds) 2004. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.

Olivier, L. 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.

Schlanger, N. 2004: The Past Is in the Present: On the History and Archives of Archaeology. Modernism / Modernity 11(1), 165-67.

Shaviro, S. 2009: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shanks, M. 2007: Digital Media, Agile Design, and the Politics of Archaeological Authorship. In T. Clack and M. Brittain (ed.) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 273-89.

Tilley, C. 2004: The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: BERG.

Webmoor, T. and C.L. Witmore, 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeology Review, 41(1), 53-70.

Whitehead, A.N. [1929] 1978: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.

Watkins, J. 2000: Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Witmore, C.L. 2004: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’. Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64.

Witmore, C.L. 2009: Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices. In K. Ryzewski (ed.) Archaeology, Experience, Modes of Engagement, Archaeology, a special issue of Archaeologies 5(3), 511-45.

Yalouri, E. 2001: The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford: Berg.

Is this a description of archaeological excavation?

No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.

Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).

First, some background. Back in the mid 1970s there were three important ethnographic studies of the scientific lab, which radically changed our view of scientific work.

One of these was an ethnography of a protein chemistry lab reported in The Manufacture of Knowledge by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981). It contained a vision of the laboratory as a highly artificial environment, full of the apparatus and instruments of scientific work but little if any contact with any raw material or nature. As a result of that disconnection from the material, she tended to characterise scientific knowledge as a social construction, somewhat unconstrained by any external material reality.

Another was Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979). The authors noted the sheer ubiquity of texts and inscriptive devices in the lab, seeing even large items of equipment like mass spectrometers as inscriptive devices for making figures or graphs or other kinds of readings. Texts to them were the principal kinds of artifacts constructed in the lab. Again, the focus is on the social construction of knowledge, through acts of inscription. Not so much on the material itself.

The third and perhaps the least known of those early ethnographies of the lab was Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science by Michael Lynch (1985). His study of a neuroscience lab is especially relevant to issues today, now that archaeology has gone through its constructivist phase and is looking more at how humans and materials interact with each other. What is very important about Lynch’s approach is that he directed his study at the interactions between scientists and the materials under investigation (as well as social interactions between scientists themselves). Conversations recorded pointed to actions being undertaken at the time and the materials being acted upon, including such things as lab rats and specimens of brain tissue that scientists were studying under electron beam microscopes.

Most interesting from our point of view is that Lynch explicitly used a range of archaeological perspectives in his ethnography of scientific work. The reason why Lynch found archaeological ideas so relevant was because scientists were themselves preoccupied to some extent, in their analyses of human tissue, with sorting out what was real from what was artificial; the identification of scientific artifacts was central to everyday lab procedures. The term ‘artifact’ (as used by scientists) refers to those aspects of evidence that were the product of scientific process.

Artifacts

In order to see what an archaeology of contemporary scientific discovery might look like, let’s see some actual examples of scientific artifacts - encountered in this case through an electron beam microscope. The following picture (not from Lynch’s study) shows a thin section of human muscle, which for the sake of this example we can call ‘natural’.

Field of evidence
http://moon.ouhsc.edu/kfung/IACP-OLP/APAQ-Text/W0-MS-01M.htm
Thanks to the IACP Anatomic Pathology website for permission to reproduce the image.

But not all the patterns visible here are natural. One can look at this thin section as we might do an archaeological surface or site. For standing out from the natural background are several artificial features or artifacts. Importantly, the arrows are not mine and the artifacts in question were not identified by me, but rather by the lab scientists themselves – the photo being used as a teaching aid so that students might recognise similar artifacts if encountered in their laboratory work.

1) Vertical bands of light and dark, forming a corrugated effect, caused by high frequency vibration of the knife or cutting block on which the thin section of muscle was sliced.

2) The horizontal white line (shown by the white arrows) is a mark left by the knife itself – in effect, a ‘cut’.

3) The undulating mark (shown by the red arrow) is a water mark caused by staining or dyeing, with the area above the mark stained darker than the area below. The line is wavy because it follows the corrugated shape of the thin section caused by the vibration already mentioned.

These explanations of the origins of artifacts are paraphrased from the more detailed accounts on the teaching website, which has many other photos of thin sections with examples of different sorts of artifacts frequently encountered in histology or pathology labs. In addition to the artifacts listed here, we also have to bear in mind of course that the thin section is itself an artefact, as is the blue colour or dye which helps to show the grain of the muscle so clearly, and so on. All these refer us back to the various processes of scientific work involved in the preparation of specimens prior to observation under the microscope, such as embedding, staining or cutting.

Recognition of artifacts is clearly useful to scientists; it is crucial that material traces of scientific process are not mistaken for non-artifactual or natural patterns. A kind of archaeology, bringing artifacts to light, is routinely practised. Discovery of artifacts in scientific work is not specific to the use of electron beam microscopes in biomedical laboratories. Scientists working with radio telescopes, deep sea cameras, particle accelerators, or any kind of scientific instrument, inevitably have to disentangle the readings of the material or phenomena investigated from those aspects of readings which are artifacts of the act of investigation itself.

What Lynch noted is that lab workers do not experience artifacts positively like archaeologists do – for example when we find pottery vessels, flint arrowheads or other artifacts from the distant past - but negatively as ‘intrusions’ or ‘distortions’ in the data (as ‘trouble’ rather than cause for celebration). To an ethnographer of science, though, discovered artifacts are valuable because they disclose the process of scientific work. The times when artifacts come to light - the moments of discovery as it were - are crucial moments in that they precipitate discussion and argument amongst scientists about what is real and what is not, what is natural and what is artificial, how the artifacts got to be there, how to interpret them, and what to do about them. All this is part of the practical process of making sense of evidence.

As archaeologists we deal with traces of past human activity, but we too leave our own traces on the material evidence we discover. Trowel-marks, boot-prints, knee-prints – such traces of our embodied presence, tools and actions tend to be swept away in the very process of bringing material evidence to light. That is part of the skill of archaeological fieldwork. Of course, all worked surfaces on an archaeological site (trowelled areas, half-sections, box- sections, bases of spits, trench edges, etc) are artifacts of the process of archaeology itself. But it would be a great mistake to take the presence of such artifacts to mean that knowledge thus produced is a social construction.

Look closely at any photo of an archaeological section and you will see that in addition to the ancient stratigraphy revealed there are also other marks - traces of the archaeologists’ own activity in bringing about the emergence of evidence. These might include:

1) machine marks, formed by the dragging motion of the blade of a JCB or other earthmoving machine during the removal of subsoil.

2) trowel scrape marks formed by repeated working of the section with the edge of the blade of a trowel.

3) incision-marks, made with the point of the trowel in order to delineate soil boundaries otherwise difficult to see.

4) surfaces so well cut and precisely vertical that all of the above traces have been removed.

Such material traces refer back to the various processes involved in the preparation of sections, prior to recording. Paradoxically, the more the section is worked, the less evidence there will be of that work (which erases most of its own traces as it goes), and the more the objective material patterns relating to human activity in the distant past will show through. The vertical surface of earth has been broken with the edge of the trowel in such a way as to allow configurations and sequences of layers inherent in the archaeological feature itself to be clearly discernible, while at the same time smoothing out marks left by the process of excavation.

Section through Iron Age pit, Heathrow
(Photo by Wessex Archaeology. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/322086296/in/photostream/)

Here is the point. The cutting of the section (an artifact of archaeological process), is precisely what facilitates the emergence and visibility of evidence about past events and processes. There is construction, in the sense of shaping and sculpting evidence, but there is also emergence of something that is not constructed by those practices. The same applies to thin sections of muscle or brain viewed under a microscope. As Lynch puts it, such artifacts are disclosures not only of the process of scientific work but also of the material or reality that is being investigated through that work. Without the artifact there would be no such disclosure, no discovery. This is knowledge, not just as social construction, but as the outcome of practical interactions between persons and materials.

References

Knorr-Cetina, K. 1981.The manufacture of knowledge - an essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981.

Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. 1979. Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Lynch, M. 1985. Art and artifact in laboratory science: a study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.

From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and contemporary world.” Both participants and subjects of discussion were wide ranging. While many came from all over the UK and Ireland, others contributed points of view from the US, Continental Europe, Africa, and even Taiwan. These papers engaged with “modern materials” from treadmills and theatres to workshops and the bricks they may have been built from, and even extended analysis to the “modern materials” produced in archaeological recording, such as photographs.

Of particular interest were several papers which came from outside the disciple of archaeology or anthropology altogether, such as Pearson’s consideration of the role of the theatre building itself in a performance event, and Fisher’s of the “flow” of modern packaging through homes from a design standpoint. Coupled with Harrison’s inside-the-discipline discussion of amusement parks and the social shifts towards an “experience economy” these papers suggest how direct consideration of material culture produces insights even into the contemporary. This point is reinforced by Ouzman’s consideration of graffiti through an archaeological lens, considering its role in “politically-engaged place-ma(r)king.”

The Saturday afternoon sessions engendered the most energetic debate, focused on “Archaeological Practices and Archaeological Knowledge.” Several papers made efforts to recast archaeology and its field more broadly, such as Webmoor’s call to engage in “epistemography” by studying both the things of the past and the way they are given meaning in the present, and Witmore’s observation that even “ta archaia” or “old things”—the traditional province of archaeology—are implicated in “webs of concurrent relations” and this requires an expansion into “pragmotology” to do them justice. In the course of these discussions, a tension was also revealed in the conference abstract’s question, “what is the distinctive contribution of archaeology” to the study of these recent periods. This raised the issue of whether. and in what sense, archaeological analysis of recent and contemporary material culture needs to justify itself to the—or a particular—public, or make a case for its contribution.

The keynote by Nick Shepherd provided perspective on the more inside-the-field debates explored in the conference. Expanding on views of archaeology as a product and producer of modernity, he argued that it also shares the same relationship with colonialism. In reviewing some episodes from the history of archaeology in South Africa and the field’s relationship with its supposed subjects (intentional and unintended), he laid out a case for a deep connection between an archaeological view and colonialism, and interrogated the possibilities for decolonizing archaeological practice.

Obviously, calls for an archaeology of the contemporary raise questions over the contribution, motivation, materials, and responsibilities of such study that have yet to be settled. In concluding the conference, Hedley Swain, who echoed calls to be mindful of relevance to the field’s publics, also voiced concerns that the debate remains “westocentric” and has not yet fully engaged with the “truly exceptional” aspects of material culture. Several noted that by expanding our purview from the things of the past to those of the present (a necessary move, many agreed, since archaeology has never truly been only “about” the past but fully and politically in the present as well) we must confront new issues and new stakeholders.
However, the offerings, arguments, and “musings” about how this can be done and why it matters fostered both lively and important discussion among participants, moving the discussion of archaeology’s place in the modern forward in several directions. This conversation is sure to continue when participants meet for CHAT 2010 in Aberdeen.