Last month archaeolog.org turned six years old. And in the blogging world this ripe old age is quite an accomplishment – a veritable geezer. But this birthday passed unacknowledged and in the midst of one of the longest dry spells in archaeolog.org’s history. Since 2005 we have been silent for longer than a month on only three occasions. And there is a reason for this.

Archaeolog.org was fashioned in the creative crucible of the Metamedia Lab at Stanford University; a hub where energies run high and ideas are always effervescent. In October of 2005 Michael Shanks was already a familiar presence in the blogging world with archaeolog.com (thus, we retain the .org domain here). Still, there was a need for an outlet that was community driven; one that captured the spirit and ethos of the lab; an outlet where thoughtful, candid, and substantive exchange merged with inclusivity and a spirit of openness. All archaeologists deserved an channel to say whatever needed to be said. And to state it in whatever way they felt best. No matter what the piece, this was clearly not another blog with off-the-cuff reflections on burnt toast in the morning or the latest episode of X (although it could have been). From the beginning it attempted to provide voice to archaeology’s rich diversity and fill a gap between journals and assemblies for immediate debate with the speed that is indicative of this fast medium.

There was also a need for a forum that recognized that the best way to establish a foothold and set an agenda was to make it visible; to say what needed to be said in public. And to allow for on-going peer-review and appraisal; a key feature of the political ecology of digital media. Archaeolog.org was an answer – one of many co-produced by the Metamedia Lab.

Map of part of the Lower Mississippi meander belt (Fisk 1944, United States Army Corps of Engineers)

Flowing water, like air, tends to be regarded as immaterial. Anything that is fluid, anything that flows, is not usually counted as material culture, no matter how culturally shaped and manipulated it might be. Once accepted as archaeological matter in its own right, however – once incorporated into the archaeologist’s way of seeing – flowing water and other kinds of material flow can radically transform the perception of past landscapes, adding another dimension to archaeological interpretation.

The following manifesto for archaeology of flow is an extract from a new book on the archaeology of rivers and other flows of materials. It argues that rivers - the 'dark matter' of landscape archaeology - are just as susceptible to archaeological and historical analysis as more solid parts of landscapes are.

Three cities, three walks.

During the Binchester excavations, I took three walks that purposefully mirrored Michael Shanks' archaeological study of 'Three Rooms,' situation, power, and knowledge production (2004) and the 'Three Landscapes' Metamedia project at Stanford. The purpose of these walks was explicitly psychogeographical. As an archaeologist, I meant to attempt the dérive in three cities related to the landscape of the Roman Frontier: Durham, Nijmegen, and Edinburgh, and produce primary sensory data of the performative, documentary, and narrative turns that characterize an embodied cultural production of a landscape (Campbell and Ulin 2004). The study of these particular cities potentially add to the thematic study of Roman Frontiers and urbanism occurring at Binchester by nature of their historical situation, but at present they do more to consider, from a contemporary position, how a body might come to understand a landscape based on the principles of urban design. The experimental walks expose the ways in which the built environment regulates bodies, specifically by placing in their paths objects and spaces (stairs, passages, gateways, signs, structures, etc.) that come with variable social codes (where to walk, when to walk, who can center, what to do and not do, etc.). Thus, the desired result of the dérive experiment is to align present and past politics and extend the notions of 'embodiment' in archaeology by focusing on the organization of cities.

The following sections present excerpts of process and data simultaneously through media and narrative. I followed the landscape without prior viewing of a map, without ever having been in the cities prior to experience their topographies. I attempted the mental map and the archaeological deep map by collecting and organizing information I gathered along my paths from buildings, street names, placements of objects, memorials, and open spaces, vistas, smells, the occasional local book, the intonations of conversations, and so forth. By reproducing the experience through narrative, digital video, photographs, audio recordings, and drawings, I paid most attention to non-material trace through the material world, and sensory, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic details of landscape.

"The goal of descriptive adequacy is unattainable but continually haunts the endeavor, lying alongside, but in another time, and speaking back, like the immaterial ghosts of prophecy or the value of a currency." (Maurer 2005, p. 54)

What is it to describe? What ambitions and hopes do we attach to our descriptions? How do we make them "work" for us as policy advisers, spokespeople, critics and ethnographers? While the goal of adequate representation has been disputed for a long time, the status, construction and performativity of our descriptions remain an open question. In Mutual Life, Limited (2005), Bill Maurer notes that despite consensus on the impossibility of accurate and adequate descriptions, it continues to haunt "the [ethnographic] endeavor". Hereby he points to an aesthetics of ethnography which, despite claims to relativism, in many cases still makes use of the persuasive rhetoric of "being there" (see also Strathern, 2004, p. 10). Roland Barthes (1982) has similarly argued that the prose of a plethora of details and descriptions characterizing ethnography is to create the "effect of the real", which is part of constructing the ethnographic authority (Barthes in Knuuttila 2002).

With the "crisis of representation" of the 1980s comfortably behind us, we now see different questions about description, reflexivity and modes of writing emerging. The anthropological style and prose of "being there" with its representational effects is still deployed widely, leaving behind reflexivity debates as an issue of past concerns. Others add a few extra voices and confessions as a placeholder for epistemological self-awareness. A third position, lateral ethnography, uses empirical descriptions to question the very practices of anthropological ways of knowing. How can we understand these divisions in styles of ethnographic description? What are their implications? In this session, we explore how Science and Technology Studies (STS) can offer alternative understandings for how descriptions come to matter. Those working in the field of STS have long studied how different representations are achieved, in production, assembly, and circulation. Applying a sensitivity to the various ways in which the distinctions between fact and fiction, culture and nature, are enacted, it offers a vocabulary for exploring different modes of describing and writing. Taking our own descriptions as a starting point, we discuss how various reflexive and post-reflexive moves can inform the manner in which our ethnographic descriptions are deployed.

At the upcoming American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Montreal, Canada, a collaboration amongst anthropologists, archaeologists and STSers will convene to delve deeper into these questions. In the session, the following papers will be presented:

Graham Harman recently visited Oxford for a week as part of a Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar. The organisers, archaeologist Chris Gosden and geographer Sarah Whatmore, both of the University of Oxford, put together an innovative format whereby scholars who think and write about the supposed 'ontological turn' were gathered together with objects at the fantastically eclectic Pitt Rivers Museum. Immersed in musty stuff, the scholars were to think freshly about the interdiscplinary importance of things by talking through objects in-the-hands. Perhaps at home with the Heideggerian 'throwness' of the event, Harman contributed to the discussions through his advocacy of Object-oriented Philosophy. A theme which emerged at the event, particularly at the more conventional series of presentations held mid-week, was whether a turn to ontology could ever possibly 'take things seriously' on their own. Or whether a consideration of objects, devices, instruments and other missing masses - the under-labourers of a host of heterogeneous practices in science and society - must necessarily 'shift out' to a more holistic consideration of the relations that stuff enter into. A lesson of STS has of course been not to a priori bracket off what ingredients are engaged in what we are describing. This analytic agnosticism leads researchers to acknowledge many untoward connections that might have been passed over in 'conventional' studies. So often how we relate to things is through relations.

But do we lose the trees for the forest?

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.

In the video clip, a team examines an underground structure somewhere in Brazil. The team is preparing for excavation. Bert Hölldobler and his crew are about to examine the abandoned ruins of a colony of Atta laevigata; leaf cutter ants (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009, 460). As Bruno Latour writes, “An ant writing for other ants, this fits my project very well!” (Latour 2005, 9). The fact that the colony under investigation was inhabited by ants, and that they have accomplished such a complex, ‘urban’ structure with roads, air exchange systems, chimneys, refuse heaps and even a form of agriculture (fungus gardens), makes it an ideal site for a thought experiment concerning Actor-Network-Theory, uncertainty, possibility, and the archaeological imagination.

Actor Network Theory, as laid out by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005), posits five uncertainties that should be taken into account when tracing a network of actors:

Ian Kirkpatrick (University of Southampton) iankirkpatrick@shaw.ca

OUTPOST
Curators: Ian Kirkpatrick & Sara Perry

University of Southampton
18-19 April 2011

Deadline for proposals: 23 March 2011

Poster presentations have become ubiquitous features of archaeological conferences, acting simultaneously as informational, decorative, architectural, and ritual devices. In their supposed succinctness they can persuade, deceive and mystify - whilst employing image and text to compress vast quantities of data into highly conventionalized fields of vision. As archaeological tools they can stand unaccompanied by their author as the sole representative of an idea or body of research, or can be used in tandem with performance as a form of prop or mobile stage-set.

OUTPOST examines the possibilities of this genre as an intermediary between information and art, monument and meaning. It seeks innovative and creative interpretations of the archaeological poster presentation which push the boundaries of this format, both physically and conceptually.

We invite artists and academics to respond to this call for posters/artworks as a means to invite discussion and debate about the form, function and future of this frequently overlooked sub-genre of the archaeological intellectual toolkit.

Please send a 50-200 word artistic statement for the creation of an A0 or other-sized/shaped poster presentation and CV, to Ian Kirkpatrick or Sara Perry by 23 March 2011.

Final decisions will be made by 25 March 2011.

http://www.viarch.org.uk/2011-outpost.asp

Patrick Hadley (Enkyad Heritage Media) patrick@enkyadheritagemedia.co.uk

This archaeolog reviews the session ‘An Artful Integration: Possible Futures for Archaeology and Creative Work’ which took place at TAG Bristol on December 17th 2010 and brought together archaeologists, artists, performers, composers and digital media creatives. The formal session summary further details available below:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/tag/tag2010/panels.php5?PanelID=832
http://www.enkyadheritagemedia.co.uk/session-summary/
Here, in three parts, the aims of the session, a summary of the main themes presented, and directions for future interrogation will be briefly introduced. Feedback and comments on where we should go from here are actively invited.

Aims:

We (Hadley and Maxwell) seek positive ways of integrating and recognising the value of creative work into the archaeological discourse.
We designed the session as a mixture of contributions; those that showcase the benefits of creative work for archaeological practice, the presentation of the past and archaeological thinking (Bosch, Evans, Pascoe, Watson and Crewsden) and more reflexive engagements with the ideas that connect and divide archaeology from creative work (Cope, Dixon, Hadley, Maxwell).

It was hoped that further discussion would help the participants identify some of the issues that still make many archaeologists suspicious of creative work, in practice, the session developed in somewhat different, but positive, directions.

The session was a space for exhibition and criticism of artful integrations with archaeology and aimed overall to examine what steps may be necessary to recognise the value and utility of creative work for, and in, archaeology.

The four main issues raised were:

1. Archaeology is Art: Are there underplayed creative elements in accepted archaeological practice? Or ways in which archaeology can contribute to creative endeavour?

2. Transparent reasoning and rigour: The strength of formal text is its transparency of reasoning. Do creative works necessarily obscure reasoning?

3. Invisible humanity: What are the risks in portraying elements of the past invisible to archaeology?

4. Skills for creativity: How can archaeologists learn to interact with and interrogate creative work as a valued contribution to the field?

To mark the first Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) conference to take place outside of the British Isles, the 2011 conference theme will explore people and things in motion in both the historical and contemporary pasts. From the movement of billions of peoples and things across the world’s oceans to the proliferation of multi-national corporations and brands, the last five hundred years have brought about the birth of a truly globalized world. We expect that some presenters will emphasize what they see as the positive aspects of global movements, e.g., the emergence of new social groups, materials, and technologies, while others will examine the negative effects of globalization, such as the destruction of cultures and heritages, exploitation of resources, and slavery and forced migration.

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.

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.

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.

In a recent article entitled “The Textility of Making,” Tim Ingold deconstructs what he describes as the hylomorphic model of creation (2010). This model views the material world according to conceptions of matter and form and tends to perceive material as static, finished products of preconceived human thought. In response to this ontological view of the material world, he proposes an alternative perspective, which he calls the “textility of making.” Textility, by emphasizing materials and forces, centers on the movement and processes of negotiation between material and human action. Elegantly integrating aspects of embodiment, material properties, knowledge vs. know-how, and agency, Ingold’s contribution offers an exciting perspective to archaeological and anthropological material studies.

In reaction to the work of Ingold, this essay explores the concept of textility in relation to archaeological studies of material culture by considering the dominance of the hylomorphic model of creation within disciplinary methodologies. It goes on to advocate for the study of locations of production in order to better understand complex processes of making. These issues are examined in reference to the archaeological case study of Sagalassos (SW Turkey). In the Eastern Suburbium of the Roman city of Sagalassos are the remains of a once vibrant, ceramic table ware industry, currently under investigation by an international archaeological project based at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). Excavations and material analyses offer useful grounds for a discussion concerning textility.

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.