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Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached such questions – viral phenomena, beyond the biological.

This is such a refreshing and vital perspective for those interested in the future of the (academic) Humanities, when a growing crisis about their scope and character is centered precisely upon how we conceive of human being and its study – see my recent entry on declining numbers of students in the Humanities – [Link] also, more generally – [Link]. Too many want to retrench the Humanities in letters and the arts, in (high) culture, emphasizing the old distinctions between the Humanities and Sciences, worlds of people versus nature, culture versus technology. Repeated is the old and simple exhortation: read books, because they delve the depths of the human condition. OK, but so limiting.

This year I finished, with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, our book Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California Press), and my own The Archaeological Imagination (Left Coast Press). Both follow Ben’s suspicion of Cartesian dualisms and treat human being as distributed through rich and indeterminate networks of people-and-things. This doesn’t square with our current disciplines and questions the very validity of the Humanities, but in a positive way – because a new Humanities focused upon hybrid human being will be central to any address to real-world issues that includes people, which means just about any issue that matters. I have commented much about human-centered design thinking, as practiced in our d.school, as a manifestation of such a new Humanities [Link]. Ironically perhaps, and as we point out in our book, the corollary of human-centered engineering is thing-centered Humanities that understands our materiality.

The Archaeological Imagination explores the world of eighteenth-century antiquarians in the Borders between England and Scotland before radical distinctions set in between disciplines in the Humanities and Sciences – mélanges of memories and material remains, human landscapes and physical geologies, natural histories of local plants and animals, family genealogies, collections of manuscripts and artifacts, itineraries through pasts-in-presents. Even in what became something of homage to Walter Scott, the antiquarian inventor of the historical novel, I couldn’t help but think of Ben, and the book is dedicated to him.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. First Edition, 1765. Ex Libris Michael Shanks.

The title page: “the work of poets endures”. It is, ironically, the voice and music’s notes that carry history; buildings fall into ruin and our writings disperse on the wind. And when the poet is vates, prophet and visionary, reading signs, past and present, of what is to come.

A great antiquarian debate in the eighteenth century concerned the essential role of poetic conjecture in what we now call scientific modeling – and this included historical reconstruction.

Visiting with Bianca (Carpeneti).

As pure a contrast between the Classical and Gothic Romantic as can be imagined.

Here is something I have written to appear in my forthcoming book “The Archaeological Imagination” – to my embarrassment and frustration still in (final) revision.

Sir Charles Monck decided not to restore his family castle of Belsay in the south east of Northumberland. This very fine fourteenth century tower was extended with a Jacobean wing after the union of the crowns in the early seventeenth century and was the home of the Middleton family. Monck inherited in 1795 together with another estate from his maternal grandfather (which prompted his change of name from Middleton to Monck). In 1804 he set off on a two year honeymoon that included a tour through Germany and a long stay in Greece. He had had a traditional classical education at Rugby school and clearly got caught up in the current enthusiasm for all things ancient and Greek: his sketched various new neo-Classical buildings in Germany, and in Athens fell in with William Gell at the time of his publication of his Topography of Troy and when he was working on what was to be his Itinerary of Greece. The experience was revelatory: on his return to Belsay Monck set about designing a new house inspired by his first hand experience of Classical Greek architecture. Ten years of building produced one of the most consistent applications of contemporary understanding of the geometry of ancient Greek architecture to a modern residence.

The two hundred and more drawings for the project that still remain — the plans and ideas that lay behind the house — show that this was very much a personal project. One architectural drawing for the hall was by Gell, though Monck’s zeal for accuracy led to something quite different to the optical consistency I have discussed in Gell’s topography. The theme is the Doric order, very much interpreted in what is almost a meditation on proportion and geometry. The house is exactly one hundred feet square. Exactly — Monck insisted that the proportional ratios of the design were calculated to three decimal places, forcing masons to abandon their conventional measurements in eighths of an inch.There are few direct quotations from the original Greek, though the Tower of the Winds appears at Belsay as the octagonal lantern on the stables. This is more a rationalist reworking of what people like Monck and Gell (and William Wilkins, another antiquary and architect friend) thought that Greek architecture represented. The fronts of the house are exceptionally severe, wholly plain apart from the fluted Doric columns at the entrance and the pilasters: the emphasis is simply on proportion, line and surface; the roof was low-pitched so as to be invisible from ground level, kept from intruding upon the rectangular geometry. There is even evidence that the library bookcases echo the proportions of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, as measured by Monck.

The nearby village was demolished and the site turned over to being a quarry for building stone; the locals were rehoused in a model village on the main road between Newcastle and Jedburgh. Monck abandoned the castle and old house, turning them into a ruin. The quarry was then converted into a garden, connecting the new house with the ruin: it looks like a painting by Salvator Rosa, on the wild side of the picturesque, tumble-down grottoes, seating niches by springs in the rock faces, and a look of natural abandon in the ferns and undergrowth. Formal gardens immediately around the house become parkland in the manner of Capability Brown and Repton, as at Alnwick, with much use of ha-has that open up views across the estate, and to the hillside opposite, forested with exotic conifers, Scot’s Pine and native hardwoods. Monck’s variation on the Theseion in Athens, his temple to rational system, is a focus of human order in a landscape that was less cultivated and more suggestive of chaos and decay the further it was from the house, just as the modern finds new life in the ancient, and the ruin of history becomes a charming after-dinner walk through the picturesque.

The theme in the archaeological imagination given different inflection in these building projects is one of the possibility, feasibility and, crucially, the desirability of rebuilding the past, making good the loss of time and ruin. A key archaeological task is to sort through the debris of history. And then what? To witness the loss by consolidating ruins as just that, ruins in a new landscape. To rebuild and restore, to fill in the gaps. To replicate exactly. Or to build again, incorporating the past into the present. Does authenticity lie in the original fragment, the broken stone statue itself, or in the principles of proportion and order of an ancient culture? Or even in a sentiment such as baronial splendor?

The walk through the quarry garden

Original painted plaster in the great hall of the medieval tower

I am at the Getty Center today at a symposium organized by Alain Schnapp. Some very distinguished experts brought together to discuss antiquarians.

Antiquarians?

Those fascinated, often passionate, about the collection, description, classification of the remains of the past. Artifacts and monuments, landscapes even, as evidence connecting us with the past.

Antiquarianism sounds arcane. It is. Not least because it got such a bad press. By the nineteenth century, calling someone an antiquarian was an insult, inferring they were an amateurish scholar at best, bookish, myopic, neurotically obsessed with dry and dusty relics of no interest to anyone else.

But a major reevaluation is taking place. This symposium is part of a deep rethinking of the history of antiquarian thought. The topic is nothing less than people’s attitudes towards the past, and particularly the presence of the past with us here now, and how we might deal with the remains. There’ll be a book later, backed by the Getty, a comparative history, comparing and contrasting antiquarians across different cultures.

Broadly we are dealing with people’s attachment to things and places, relationships with the life of things. It’s about memory, personal and collective, the way things make us who we are, traces and vestiges of times gone past, ruin and decay, entropy and mortality. Sarah Morris identified three key components: relics, reverence, revival. Collecting, organizing, caring for things, restoring and reviving. Major matters of common human concern.

My contribution is called “An antiquarian and his dog: Walter Scott in Pompeii”, looking at how all this was worked out in the Scottish borders at the end of the eighteenth century.

Here’s how I started:

Pompeii, February 16 1832.

Walter Scott, poet, literary antiquarian, magistrate, collector, best-selling inventor of the historical novel, was visiting the excavations in the company of William Gell, antiquarian, topographer, and representative of the Society of Dilettanti of London. Gell was in pain with his gout. Scott was dying and had to pushed around the ruins in a wheelchair.

Gell’s diary (reported by Lockhart, Scott’s biographer) contains the following entry:

“… I was sometimes enabled to call his attention to such objects as were the most worthy of remark. To these
observations, however, he seemed generally nearly insensible, viewing the whole and not the parts, with the eye, not of an antiquary, but a poet, and exclaiming frequently—” The City of the Dead,” without any other remark.”

Pompeii was, of course, newly excavated: the spectacular, tangible and evocative remains of catastrophe, trauma, and aftermath.

Scott talked more about Gell’s dog – it reminded him of his own back at Abbotsford on the Tweed in Scotland.

Why was it simply the city of the dead to Scott?

Rather than pursue any interest in Roman antiquities, Scott, again according to Lockhart and his own diary, feverishly collected local manuscripts and started writing a novel about bandits!

Why was Scott, whose antiquarian imagination fired up a generation of readers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not interested in the most spectacular of archaeological ruins?

You can find my answer here –

For me antiquarian thought is distinctively contemporary. We can see this argument made so well by Walter Benjamin, his take on the figure of the collector, the ruin of history in modernity, his great final project, the Passagenwerk, to create an (antiquarian) history of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, composed as an archival commentary on a cultural miscellany.

I came to work on antiquaries because of my fieldwork in the borders, centered on our new excavations of the Roman town of Binchester (VINOVIVM.org). Put to one side the caricatures and, in antiquarianism, you find the most intelligent and creative of approaches to studying a region – addressing questions of how you represent a region, handling sources, remains, texts, memories, echoes, mortality, people’s impacts on the land and on history, stories and narratives.

Peter Miller (see his superb study of Peiresc) summed up with a very astute point that the academic marginalization of antiquarian study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is precisely that, a particular partisan exclusion from the academy of certain interests, attitudes and practices. Antiquarianism didn’t go away. It wasn’t a pre-modern and inferior precursor to archaeology, geography and cultural studies. Antiquarianism is more alive than ever. Just we don’t call it antiquarianism.

Actually, I think I’m a neo-antiquarian.

Paris, across from the Institut nationale de l’histoire de l’art (INHA), with Alain Schnapp, discussing our project on antiquarians – Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria