I am heading the faculty effort with Cliff Nass and Chris Gerdes.

Here is a press report from Andrew Myers in Stanford Engineering.

Anyone who knows my work will recognize that we are launching here an archaeology of the contemporary past with an exploration of the life of an artifact, in this case a remarkable Bentley raced by Eddie Hall in the 1930s and then again in 1950.

In The Great Gatsby, it was a murder weapon. In The Graduate, it was a symbol of youthful rebellion. In countless songs it has served as a metaphor for everything from sexuality to social status. It has shaped our cities and morphed our history. It has expanded our horizons and determined our politics.

It is the automobile.

No other invention has defined (and redefined) the past century more fully or more profoundly than the automobile, but there is a dearth of scholarly work focused on the car.

“The automobile is surprisingly under-studied by scholars,” said Professor Clifford Nass, a director of the Revs Program at Stanford, a new multidisciplinary center dedicated solely to the study of cars.

“But this cultural icon is worthy of – and overdue for – deep understanding on every front.”

As Michael Shanks, a Stanford professor of archaeology, puts it: “With the automobile, everyone has a story that deserves to be told.”

The kick-off event

On April 7, during an all-day event called “Celebrating the Automobile,” devotees, experts, collectors, archaeologists, social scientists, engineers, designers, humanists, legal scholars and race-car drivers will gather as Stanford launches the Revs Program to secure a place for the automobile in a broader cultural, historical and technological context.

“Our primary goal for the Revs Program at Stanford is to create a vital and much-deserved intellectual community around the car as technological and aesthetic artifact and cultural symbol,” said Nass.

Stanford was the logical home for the Revs Program, according to Sven Beiker, its executive director and a lecturer at Stanford’s School of Engineering. “Over the last few decades, as our cars have grown more complex, more computerized and more connected, Silicon Valley has become increasingly important for automotive innovation,” he said.

Stanford is involved in a range of automotive research, from autonomous cars to driver psychology to design, history and culture, he said.

An “auto” biography

The centerpiece of the April 7 kick-off event will be a 1933 Bentley, a sports racer that belonged to English sporting legend Eddie Ramsden Hall. The car is a 4.25-liter, boat-tailed beauty in British racing green that is the envy of car collectors the world over.

Experts in automotive history have been busy tracing its remarkable history to the last detail – part of the process known at the Revs Program as an “auto-biography,” which explores archaeology, psychology, engineering and design.

“These cars are works of art as well as marvelous and influential machines: they should be examined with the care of any great historical artifact – with exacting attention to detail and thorough documentation,” Nass said. “There is no center, anywhere, doing this breadth and depth of work.”

A hive of activity

The Revs Program will be a hive of interdisciplinary activity for studying every aspect of the automobile, including the seemingly endless stream of literature, film and song.

“Our challenge is to dive deep into a human-centered understanding of the design of the car – an understanding that gives priority to the experiences of people who engineer and drive them, love them and hate them,” Shanks said.

Added Nass: “The automobile is machine and metaphor. It is art. It is at the core of understanding the 20th century and the 21st. The Revs Program at Stanford is inspired by these challenges.”

Gary Devore and Michael Shanks

Binchester Barrack block turned abattoir – the late cattle ranch in the corner of the fort. The town extended beyond over much of the terrace above the River Wear (courtesy Michael Shanks)

The new excavations of Binchester Roman town in the north of England, running since 2009, are seeking new answers to old questions about the Roman empire and its administration, about the character of military occupation, the life and experiences of locals and the soldiers drawn from the far reaches of the Roman world, about the towns and military outposts built into ancient rural landscapes.

The borders between England and Scotland, the “debatable lands”, were once the northern edge of the Roman Empire. In the second century CE the emperor Hadrian had the frontier marked with a wall some 70 miles long, and the garrisons, totaling up to 15,000 troops, controlled a broad military zone organized around forts and a system of roads. To the west of the Pennine Mountains, a road linked Carlisle (Luguvalium) with Manchester (Mamucium) to the south. Forts along its route were spaced about a day’s ride apart and funneled provisions and traffic to and from the frontier. On the eastern side of the Pennines was Dere Street, which began at the legionary headquarters of Eboracum (York) and ran north through the supply-depot town of Coria (Corbridge), at one time extending well into Scotland. The site of Vinovium or Vinovia lay on Dere Street, about 30 miles south of the Wall, guarding a crossing of the River Wear. Its name means “on the wine road” and suggests an important link with the sort of Roman imports valued along the frontier! Vinovium is now known as “Binchester”, “binns” – cattle mangers (Old English) in the ruined remains of the fort – “ceaster”.

Binchester has always been known as the site of a Roman fort; the remains of the distinctive fortifications are still visible in the fields of pasture, even when landscaped and incorporated into the grounds of the nearby 18th century manor house. Roman finds, including carved altars and especially coins (locals called them “Binchester pennies”), have frequently been found in the area from at least the 16th century.

Binchester 2010 season – a small bronze sculpted head (courtesy Michael Shanks)

In 1815, a horse drawn cart heading out of the manor’s Home Farm fell into a hole that had opened up by the track. The raised hypocaust floor of the fort’s buried bath suite had collapsed. Instead of filling in the void, the squire built a subterranean brick vault over the Roman remains. Visitors could descend some stairs and see the bath’s impressive heating system, crawling around the brick pillars of the hypocaust floor that had not yet collapsed. Soon afterward, the manor house changed hands and the new owner had little interest in antiquities. The stone altars that had been collected from the fields were repurposed as props to support shaft and tunnels in one of the many local coal mines. In 1836, the Church of England purchased the estate, halting further destruction to the ruins and artifacts. Forty years later, the first small-scale antiquarian excavations were started in order to trace the extent of the fort’s defenses and its adjacent civilian settlement (vicus).

Renewed interest in the 1960s and 1980s brought excavations that uncovered most of the bath suite, one of the most impressive remaining in the northern empire, as well as the adjacent commandant’s house (praetorium). Improved archaeological techniques were able to identify several phases of occupation, although still not much of anything that pre-dated the Romans’ arrival. Probably built originally as part of the famous general Agricola’s march north from York in 79 CE, Binchester seems to have been incorporated into the supply route for Hadrian’s re-worked frontier, then possibly briefly abandoned when Antonius Pius established his Antonine frontier by the 150s up in the land of the Picts. It was back in service by the campaigns of Marcus Aurelius, possibly to police the valuable mines in the area. After the unrest of the third century, Binchester and other forts in Britain underwent a major change in their command structure, visible in the architecture. A long-standing timber praetorium was demolished and replaced with a much grander stone building that resembled a Mediterranean courtyard house with smart opus signinum floors, bathing chambers, and rooms heated from below via a hypocaust. Perhaps Binchester was now the prevue of a regional commander, newly appointed to restore order to an area of Britain that had participated significantly in the chaos of the third century. Over the next fifty years, the elaborate private bath suite (the one found by the horse drawn cart) was also added onto the praetorium as a separate structure: a facility suitable for entertaining quite a house party!

Binchester – the hypocaust heating in one of the caldaria (hot rooms) of the Commanding Officer’s Bath House (courtesy Michael Shanks)

Eventually, as Roman influence in the area began to wane throughout the fourth century, another change in the command structure seems visible in the ruins. The praetorium was divided into smaller apartments, and the bath building was made more public, servicing more than just the commander, his family and guests. Maybe the regional commander, important at the end of the third century, was transferred to a central post elsewhere, and the garrisoned fort split up what had previously been the property of the elite. By the time Roman control of the province unraveled in the early fifth century, Binchester was in a sorry state. Soldiers, abandoned without pay, became local petty warlords or were absorbed into neighboring communities trying to resist attacks from Saxon pirates and other enemies. The once grand rooms of the praetorium were turned over to blacksmithing and the butchery of cattle. The bath building’s pipes and hypocaust system were hopelessly clogged with ash and garbage, and part of the walls had collapsed. By the sixth century, occupation of the central portions of the military site had all but come to an end, evidenced by the burial of a young Saxon woman inside the rubble of the collapsed furnace room of the baths.

Binchester in the online world Second Life, the plan of the current excavation trench bottom right (courtesy Gary Devore))

Although this rough sequence of events is informed by the excavation of the praetorium and baths building, details are in short supply at Binchester. The site, a prominent hill and terrace controlling an important crossing the River Wear, suggests there should be some Iron Age or earlier occupation, but excavations have been too small in scope or have not been able to go deep enough to discover any trace of pre-Roman activity. The late third and fourth century praetorium and bath building are well studied, but they represent only two of the many buildings that would have serviced a substantial garrison for over four centuries. Apart from some antiquarian trenching, the extensive vicus, the town outside the fort, has been ignored, although some finds show that it may have been occupied well past the fifth century. Televised excavations in 2007 by the Time Team (Channel 4 UK) even found tantalizing glimpses of a monumental cemetery at the edge of the vicus – a street of mausolea. In order to uncover more of the site, to seek answers about the entire area over a long duration, and to plug all findings into a larger regional survey, a team of archaeologists from Stanford University in the US and Durham University in the UK joined forces with the support of the local Durham County Council. The project is run from Stanford by Melissa Chatfield, Gary Devore, David Platt, and Michael Shanks, and in Durham by Peter Carne, Richard Hingley, David Mason, and David Petts.

Teddy Bowers (Stanford) cleans a cattle skull (courtesy of Michael Shanks)

July 2010 was the first full archaeological field season for this Binchester Project. Two main trenches were opened, one inside the fort and one outside, in order to coordinate findings and explore any distinctions between military and civilian on this northern frontier. In the fort, the trench occupies the north-eastern corner immediately inside the defenses where geophysical survey suggested at least one barracks building and various intramural defensive towers. Immediately under the topsoil, the team found great spreads of cobble stones, puzzling rubble-filled depressions, a substantial drain, areas where the defensive rampart of the fort had been remodeled, and spreads of cattle bones everywhere. Painstaking, detailed work on the remains has revealed that in the post Roman period this area of the fort was taken up by a busy abattoir. The workers, be they native Britons, disenfranchised former soldiers, or a mix of the two, had taken over the crumbling remains of a stone barracks block. The building was subdivided and Roman building stone was used to construct a smaller utilitarian building set into the ramparts. (Reused stone was also taken across the river in the 630s to build the still-standing Saxon church at Escomb.) A few wooden pens held cattle until they were led into the former barracks to be slaughtered. This was the source of the plentiful cattle bone uncovered by our excavators. Its discovery has given us the opportunity to pay careful attention to a phase that often gets disregarded on Roman fort sites: the transitional early Medieval period. Life in Britain after the Romans left was substantially different to what had come before. The loss of Roman goods means that today there is much less to find archaeologically from that period. Most buildings would have been of timber, which is harder to identify and understand than stone. Dating is also difficult because Roman coins, a chief tool of dating, stopped being imported. The story now emerging is not a simple one of abandonment brought on by the collapse of imperial authority and the apparatus of the state. In fact, it seems that there was a deliberate attempt to try and keep Binchester going as a settlement after it stopped being garrisoned, perhaps even by former soldiers that had once been employed by Rome.

For most of its history, Binchester seems to have been as much a town as a military outpost. Geophysical survey, using ground penetrating radar and other techniques to see beneath the surface, has already revealed the extent and density of building far beyond the fort. To investigate this, the team opened a second trench this year in the vicus, the “civilian” settlement, just where the main road, Dere Street, left the fort and headed off south to Eboracum. In the latest, uppermost layers we have found substantial stone buildings fronting that road, as well as more cow bones. As we analyze the material, we will eventually be able to investigate the differences in the standard of living between the military and civilian sectors of Binchester.

This opens up a wide research agenda covering the character of urban and rural settlement in this imperial colony, the way administrative control manifested itself in daily life, trends and changes over several hundred years and more of pre-colonial settlement, invasion, occupation and aftermath.

There are some evocative hints of later phases of English history. The main road running through the vicus was resurfaced perhaps after the end of Roman rule. It would certainly have still been a main thoroughfare in the sixth century and later. This was the route taken in about 600 by the army of the Gododdin, a British people of the Hen Ogledd or “Old North”, on their way to face the army of the invader Angles from northern Germany. The two forces met at the stronghold of Catraeth, modern day Catterick in North Yorkshire, just to the south of Binchester. According to the ancient Welsh poet Aneirin, the British Gododdin were massacred to a man.

Debatable Lands – Hadrian’s Wall at Walltown Crags, looking east (courtesy Michel Shanks)

Archaeological sites such as Binchester fascinate with the intellectual puzzles they pose, and this attracts a large and diverse community of students, scholars, specialists, and enthusiasts. This past summer, nearly 400 people were involved in different ways with the project. As well as students, most of whom spent four weeks on site, there were shorter term visits from neighboring communities, including elementary school parties and local history society members. A class run by Stanford Continuing Studies, 28 strong, came over for a week of touring the region and working on site. A group of students from a Palo Alto high school came over as well. In another kind of experiment we have even begun the digital rebuilding and reconstruction of Vinovium inside the online world Second Life (http://rebuiltromans.blogspot.com/).

Binchester is in the heart of a post-industrial landscape that has seen better days; this was once a heartland of the industrial revolution in England. The project is committed to the complete integration of its work within the local community, whether that be through sharing the labor, in the stories and accounts we fashion, or in the interpretation center we plan eventually to build.

The Binchester project will be excavating the site for at least another four seasons, continuing to unite international scholars and students, and to give them an opportunity to excavate in a rich historical landscape. Follow the story on our web site at http://vinovium.org; photo galleries can be found at http://archaeographer.com.

We are starting to plan for our excavations next summer of Binchester Roman town in the north of England.

Here is a short news item about this last summer, released yesterday.

July 2010 was the second archaeological field season for the Binchester Project. We are exploring the borderlands between England and Scotland, once the northern edge of the Roman Empire, excavating a key fort and town in the frontier system that included Hadrian’s Wall. Our excavation team of 46, drawn from Stanford’s Department of Classics, Stanford Archaeology Center, and 27 other academic institutions around the world, joined colleagues and friends from Durham University, the local County Council, and over 150 community volunteers in our ongoing exploration of Vinovium (the name used by the ancient Roman geographer Ptolemy). The project is run from Stanford by Melissa Chatfield, Gary Devore, David Platt, and Michael Shanks, and from Durham by Peter Carne, Richard Hingley, David Mason, and David Petts.

Last year, 2009, the first season, was very much a trial and reconnaissance. We had opened up a trench in the corner of the military base, immediately coming down onto what was left of the late Roman barrack blocks (300s and 400s CE), and also onto tantalizing remains of some later rebuilding – after the links with Rome had been cut. One of our interests is in what happened at the end of the empire, so this year we continued to worry at the great spreads of cobble stones, the puzzling rubble-filled depressions, a substantial drain, the remodeled rampart, and cattle bones everywhere.

A Roman site like this always offers substantial remains. The house of the commanding officer has already been excavated; the suite of baths, getting on for 500 square meters and with two heating furnaces, is the best preserved in northern Europe. It is not difficult, troweling and shoveling in a trench, to see the remains of walls of buildings around you, and to appreciate that you really are in what is left of a bustling settlement. Bones and pottery are plentiful; there’s a sprinkling too of bronze and iron artifacts. This year, like last, lots of coins turned up: over three hundred in just one week. (The site has long been known as a place to find ancient coins: they are locally called “Binchester pennies”.) We had significant finds of jewelry made from jet, a mineral that polishes up to an attractive black luster; Whitby to the south was the source. And there are signs of industry and manufacture: some of the jet is unworked, and we are finding bits of melted glass.

It is much more difficult after the Romans. There’s just less to find. And timber building is harder to identify and understand. Dating is difficult. But we work closely with Durham University’s archaeology unit, a company of superb professionals. Without them we most likely would have missed much of the story now emerging of what happened when the supply of imperial gold ceased to arrive from Rome and Emperor Honorius sent his famous missive telling the people of Britannia to see to their own defense. Like other sites, Binchester is already showing that it was not a simple story of abandonment of the Roman facilities accompanying the collapse of imperial authority and the apparatus of the state. We seem to have something like a cattle ranch at Binchester – a new building and a remodeled barrack block fronting onto a cobbled yard sheltering behind the old rampart.

Vinovium was as much a town as a military outpost. Geophysical survey, using ground penetrating radar and the patterning in electrical resistance and magnetism to see beneath the surface, has already revealed the extent and density of building far beyond the fort. A second trench was opened this year in the vicus, the civilian settlement, just where the main road, Dere Street, leaves the fort and heads off south to Eboracum, York. Again there are substantial stone buildings fronting the road, and stacks of cow bone. We are investigating differences in ways of living through the town and across military and civilian sectors.

The road was resurfaced perhaps after the end of empire; it would certainly have been a main thoroughfare in the sixth century and later. This was the route taken in about 600 by the army of the Gododdin, a British people of the Hen Ogledd or “Old North”, on their way to face the army of the invader Angles from north Germany. They met at the stronghold of Catraeth, modern day Catterick in North Yorkshire, just to the south of Binchester. According to the ancient Welsh poet Aneirin, the Gododdin were massacred to a man.

An archaeological excavation always involves connections like this with the history and archaeology of the region surrounding the site. And this is one of the richest archaeological landscapes in the world. To the north is Hadrian’s Wall, the largest work of engineering and frontier defense in the empire; its design and functioning still puzzles. Roman remains continue into Scotland alongside many prehistoric sites that take us back before the earliest farming communities. The medieval archaeology is no less rich, with over 500 fortified sites in an area little bigger than Santa Clara County here in California. Our team is taking up with gusto the challenge of using the excavations of Binchester to help develop understanding of the region. We have groups, drawing on undergraduate talent, tackling questions about the relations between towns and the countryside, the workings of the Roman economy, the character and diversity of the population changing through time. One of our Stanford special projects is concerned with the traditional craft of potting. With support from the Presidential Fund for Innovation in the Humanities and a private donor, we are actually building a replica Romano-British kiln on campus – experimental archaeology!

This fascination with the intellectual puzzles posed by an archaeological site like Binchester is the glue that holds together our community. This year nearly 400 were involved in different ways with the project. As well as students, most of whom spent four weeks on site, we had shorter term visits from the local community, elementary school parties to local history society members. A class run by Stanford Continuing Studies, 28 strong, came over for a week of touring the region and working on site. A group of students from a Palo Alto high school came over too. With Durham University Department of Archaeology we presented a seminar about Roman frontiers. In another kind of experiment we have begun the digital rebuilding and reconstruction of Vinovium inside the online world Second Life. Ancient remains revived by the latest of digital design. [Link]

site – VINOVIVM.org

blog – [Link]

Barrack blocks turned into cattle farm? The corner of Binchester Roman fort, view out over the vicus/town

The excavations of Binchester – Vinovium – continue this month as the international team arrive from Stanford, Texas Tech and a host of other universities. Community involvement is substantial this year too, with 20 people a week joining the project.

website – Vinovium.org

website – dur.ac.uk/binchester.fort

blog – binchester.blogspot.com/

The report took an appropriately student-centered focus. And we certainly had a wonderful team last year.

Project site – VINOVIVM.ORG

Metamedia – because there can be no archaeology without media(tion) – the past is turned into something else – that we may attempt understanding. As archaeologists we displace the remains of the past, translate, write, draw, photograph …

A lab – devoted to collaborative experiment.

[Link]

All the papers are on line and available for comment – [Link]. It is a high quality collection and worth a look – not least for what it shows of some cutting edge thought in academic archaeology.

There were papers that explored visual culture in the past – Celtic coins, sex scenes at Pompeii, the Mausoleam of the emperor Augustus, Greek drinking parties. Criticism of the distorting uses of imagery in archaeology, how ways of seeing direct attention to certain aspects of the past rather than others – aerial photography, for example, or simply a predisposition to look rather than use all available senses in exploring the past (Ruth Tringham was at her best on an immersive exploration of that amazing early farming settlement at Catal Hoyuk in Turkey).

My points?

Work on the irony at the heart of our seeing the past. That we can never see what happened – it is gone. Yet it is all round us to see – in its remains and in what it has become for us now. This is a classic “undecidable”, in Derrida’s sense – [Link]

So put to one side the usual distinction between the real past and its representation, the authentic past and its secondary representation. This is not the way I see images of the past at all.

Photos, drawings and diagrams aren’t so much representations of our archaeological data – pots, sites, any other kind of facts – so much as acts of inscription – ways we deal with the past. The are part of the way we engage with the past and others who have an interest – colleagues, or anyone else with an interest in the archaeological past.

Key term – intermedia – this referes to the fungibility that we are so familiar with now as one traditional medium merges into another – because a medium is no longer to be defined by its material or substance – paint, film, magnetic tape. My iPod deals in sound, radio programs, voice memos, snapshots, lecture presentations, calendar items, my address book. All can be interchanged and combined because of digital computation.

Key term – mixed realities. Rather than separate reality and representation, think of how we live in a world of subtle gradations from the hard reality of mortality through to wild unrealized utopias – and there are all sorts of inscriptions along the way.

Working on the fungibility of image and text – here an experiment in layout and typography dealing with the deep mapping of three archaeological encounters in Wales UK, Sicily and California – a Visual Primer for the Three Landscapes Project (Stanford 2001 -).

Key term – sensorium. By this I mean that we should treat sight as part of a particular array of all the senses (this is what I mean by sensorium). A way of seeing is connected with ways of hearing, touching, feeling. Nowadays we tend to value rich photographic verisimilitude and are less attuned to the subtle difference of feel of material surfaces, for example. What then of past soundscapes ( a new area of interest and research in archaeology)? Or the smell of the past? – archaeologists have researched the olfactory cityscape of Novgorod (tanning factories within the city walls stinking out the whole place). Chris Witmore did a great presentation on ancient and modern Greek soundscapes.

Key term – manifestation. It’s not just cause and effect or making sense of an ancient temple that matter. Simply manifesting the past to people is a good thing – letting them experience what is left of the past in all its richness.

An exhortation. Too many talk about what’s wrong with imagery and representation in archaeology. Cut down on talking about seeing and get on with the looking and imaging. Practice as the best form of critique.

An example of good practice – architects like Daniel Libeskind who have pioneered new ways of seeing building, embodied in the way they draw and plan as well as the buildings themselves. Architectural drawing here not as a “representation” but as a crucial part of architectural practice – from visionary beginnings though concept definition, persuasion of client, through engineering calculation to the logistics of building. None of these plans, diagrams, renderings are simply “representation”.

A few traditional aphorisms and gestures.

Adorno – the best magnifying glass is a splinter in the eye. [Link]

Bertold Brecht’s gesture of verfremdung – interrupting the illusion of a theatrical performance – stopping the flow of “representation” and the storyline with comments directly engaging the audience.

Walter Benjamin reflecting on the Nazi expertise in new mass media - political progress is now intimately and inextricably intertwined with technical facility. If we want to reach out to people with enlightening stories of the archaeological past we have to go one better than Disney. [Link]

Seeing the past? I want archaeologists to help us all to see it freshly. Not as another hackneyed image.

And I think these are some ways of achieving that goal.

Hundreds of biblical artefacts in museums all over the world could be fakes, it has emerged after Israeli investigators uncovered what they claim is a sophisticated forgery ring.

Four men have been charged with the faking of some of the most important biblical discoveries in recent years.

The artefacts in question include an ossuary which was believed to contain the bones of James, the brother of Jesus, and a tablet with a written inscription by a Jewish king in the ninth century before Christ.

The indictment against the men in Jerusalem says: “During the last 20 years many archaeological items were sold, or an attempt was made to sell them, in Israel and in the world, that were not actually antiques. These items, many of them of great scientific, religious, sentimental, political and economic value, were created specifically with intent to defraud.”

The forgers not only conned buyers out of of millions of dollars, said officials of the Israel Antiquities Authority, but also damaged the science of archaeology, casting doubt on the authenticity of every artefact not uncovered in an authorised dig.

…

Shuka Dorfman, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the forgery ring had been operating for more than 20 years and had been “trying to change history”. Scholars said the forgers were exploiting the deep emotional need of Jews and Christians to find physical evidence to reinforce their faith.

“This does not discredit the profession. It discredits unscrupulous dealers and collectors,” said Eric Myers, an archaeology professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

Other forgeries included an ivory pomegranate which scholars believed was the only remaining artefact from King Solomon’s Temple. The James ossuary, with the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”, was thought to be the only physical link in existence today to the life of Jesus 2000 years ago.

Here forgers were adding inscriptions to genuine artifacts to make them part of a biblical story. To make them decidable, in Derrida’s sense [Link]

It points to the overwhelming importance for ALL archaeology of meta-narrative – the essential grounding – emotional, intellectual, cultural – supplied by narrative.

As I keep saying -

It is the stories that matter!

A few years ago now I left I field project in Sicily after just two seasons.

I was very angry because I felt I had been forced out by people who didn’t want to listen to my concerns. Angry at my wasted effort, because I had put two years of preparation into the project.

But this is just what sometimes happens with academics who get very committed to their ideas and are not the disinterested intellectuals we might imagine.

I was particularly concerned about the way some of my colleagues were prejudging the site we were excavating. They knew what they were going to find before they even began. They would tell visitors the story of the site on a hill top in the west of the island and contemporary with Greek and Phoenician cities before any serious analysis had been done.

I came to see their so-called field science as a sham.

Cliff (McLucas) and I even made a satirical video diary about it all (letting off steam).

Monte Polizzo – video diary – June 1999

I urged, insisted that we be more neutral, more scientific. What came to be very tense argument centered upon the way we were categorizing what we were finding. Never mind the way I was trying to organize the way we were thinking of the artifatcts we were finding – keeping it open and provisional until we could be more certain of what was going on. Some of it was as simple as the words they used to describe what was turning up.

Excavation began with what was clearly an incomplete structure – much had been destroyed by the forestry authorities opening up tracks over the site. But the structure was designated “House 1″, from the beginning. I said that we didn’t know it was a house, and that the term carried too many assumptions of function and meaning (the home, the domestic etc). We didn’t at the beginning even know which was the inside and which the outside. I was told that the name didn’t mean anything. Not even when our excavation manager announced to a meeting of townspeople the next year that we had found a “villa”. This was just to please the locals I was told – you have to hype it up, you know.

They were calling pottery fine and coarse, when I was pointing out that some of the so-called coarse pottery was technically more sophisticated than the fine imported wares.

They were using Greek terms for pottery and areas of the settlement when the site wasn’t Greek and we didn’t know anything about the layout.

They were calling the people who lived at Monte Polizzo Elimians, because a Greek historian mentioned such a people, and even when we are actively debating the meaning of such ethnic and cultural naming.

They told me that this was all just convention and we should stick to disciplinary conventions. Well yes, I had spent twenty years finding fault with such conventions and assumptions.

Because such conventions can blind us to what we are finding.

Here in Glasgow I have just listened to a paper about Monte Polizzo.

This is how the author presents it in the synopsis.

This paper aims at exploring ways of investigating the relationship between humans and animals in the household context. Humans and animals are perceived as living in a shared embeddedness, inhabiting a shared life-space. The proximity and relatedness between humans and animals is articulated through the material culture, which is laden with a biographical significance stemming from the intertwined human-animal practice. The flow of the household is a spatial concept …

Yes – the paper was about House 1, now fixed as a household, with bits of animals all over the place. This is argued to mean that animals were intimate with people – in the domestic household.

This is exactly what I was warning against. Predetermining what we are interested in and then having to explain what is actually of our own making. I am a little ashamed to say that hearing this brought back a lot of that old anger. Not least because serious researchers are devoting themselves to this falsehood.

I want to put aside the anger. But it does reemphasize what I was saying about teaching archaeology.

I believe we have to equip our graduates with the skills to spot this sham science.

For hundreds of years, Caligula’s handsome, marble face has stared out at a fascinated world. Now situated at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen, the celebrated first-century bust of this cruel young Roman emperor is made repellent, yet intriguing, not so much by his petulantly downturned mouth as by the blank, staring eyes chiselled from marble by an unknown sculptor.

It comes as a shock to be confronted with an exact replica with unthreatening hazel eyes. Add garish pink skin and glossy brown hair, and the new painted version of Caligula’s bust looks as if it might once have been used to model hats in thewindow of a men’s outfitters.

It is always worth reminding ourselves that the pale marble image of the ancient world is entirely false and comes from the kind of Classical aestheticism we find in the likes of Winckelmann’s art criticism (or rather adulation of Greek form). And it is still rife.

Robert Cook’s painted plaster cast of the Peplos Kore (Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge)

Robert Sarmast has modelled underwater topographic data and sees the remains of a city.

Sarmast’s Atlantis

This underwater geology has been well researched and is understood as volcanic activity ([Link] [Link]).

But the pictures have far more rhetorical force.

As does Sarmast’s own story of the rogue amateur who refuses to accept conventional wisdom, risks reputation and livelihood to pusue his enlightened dream of solving one of the supposed great mysteries of myth and history. It is Schliemann again. Down to the dependence upon private wealth (not Sarmast’s own it would seem) in the pursuit of the dream – the individual against state and academe.

[Link - Robert Sarmast Biography]

Bulgaria’s ancient Thracian heritage has been thrust into the spotlight this year with a number of key archaeological discoveries in the so-called “Valley of the Thracian Kings”.

The golden treasures are attracting international attention and there is a push to make the Thracian heritage Bulgaria’s trademark abroad in a bid to boost tourism in one of the poorer East European countries.

Even the local people cannot believe that Bulgaria, with an income per capita reaching less than a third of the EU average, has managed to unearth kilos of pure gold worth millions of dollars.

But, for many, there is more interest in a tapping a richer vein as property sales to foreign buyers are going through the roof.

[Link]

The aritcle pressing all the popular archaeological buttons. Golden treasures of a lost past, comparisons with Schliemann’s discovery of heroic prehistory and Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.

Thracian gold – a people described by Herodotus as “savage, bloodthirsty warriors”

Many British and German buyers are being drawn to Bulgaria, attracted by lower property prices, a longer summer, beautiful countryside, cheap natural food and a generally easier living for people with Western pensions in a country with a much lower cost of living.

The trend is welcomed by local people who can otherwise barely subsist on their own modest pensions.

Gossip between neighbours over the fence as to who sold what for how much to a foreigner has become a common subject for conversation – an interest the Thracian gold is yet to arise even in the hearts of Bulgarians themselves.

It reminds me of the lovely movie Local Hero (Bill Forsyth 1983) [Link to IMDb]

Whisky, a fairisle pullover and the local pub – matters of cultural value in “Local Hero”

An oil company executive arrives in the Scottish Highlands to begin buying up land for a vast oil refinery that will devastate the landscape. Far from mounting any opposition, the locals immediately begin scheming to get as much as they can out of the deal. While they seem ready to sell their souls as well as any property they own, the Americans are seduced by the local life and cancel their plans, as the CEO (Burt Lancaster) flies in to watch the aurora borealis.

Very smart.

Steeple Jack turned uncanny acolyte of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he knocked down chimney remnants of Victorian industrial England with a style and passion matched only by his love of steam engines. Now industrial archaeology is dogged by rather geekinsh character types who love brass fittings and steel pistons, or even just the hum of a diesel electric engine, over life itself. (I still have a small manual entitled “British Motive Power” that I found in one of my archaeological trenches at the castle in Newcastle UK. The top of the still-standing keep overlooking the Central Station is a favorite vantage point for train spotters. The manual listed the serial numbers of all engines run by British Rail. Well over half of the thousands of numbers were lovingly struck out by a finely ruled line of a ball-point pen.) Fred was not of this type. He managed to communicate the very aura of industrial steam power and engineering – something that is at the root of a fascination for industrial archaeology. The matter and materiality of a bygone Victorian hey-day. He made great TV.

In recent years he had clashed somewhat with his neighbors in Bolton, Lancashire. Not content with a steam traction engine, he had begun sinking a mine shaft in his back garden!

Jan Assmann tonight

I am particularly interested in the early genealogy of religion, part of my Origins project.

What I came away with was Jan’s distinction between universalist and globalist monotheisms. The first centers upon an inherent deity and universal truth that is fundamentally exclusive. It is distinctively unheimlich – uncanny in its distance from the everyday and in its strangeness – the holy ghost in the machine, as it were. We are familiar with such a universalizing tendency in many exclusive and fundamentalist theologies and religions, even secular movements such as the scientific enlightenment and its legacy of one universal principle of reason.

The origins of ancient Near Eastern monotheism, in contrast, seem much more associated with a search to find a god that transcends local difference. Hence it was “globalist”, in contrast to universalist.

There are many Near Eastern diplomatic documents that translate local deities, one into the other, and ultimately according to a single principle of deity. The purpose is to establish legal force through the validity of oaths sworn by god(s) with different names. There is a clear association of divinity, of course, also with monarchy. It is there in the difficult relations between temple, monarchy and state in the early city states of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.

With the divine cosmos intimately associated with political power, the most powerful is that which is uncreated, or rather causa sui, independent, not subject to another. Its geneaology runs from the god-king through the paradox of the king’s two bodies to the still-current association of state and church. Monotheism allows the ultimate global translation. Its roots are regional diversity, socio-political extension, international relations and sovereignty.

Some crucial matters here for our current fundamentalist clash of civilizations. Monotheism began as a transcendance of local difference, translating through a deity removed from the everyday.

How would the new species be treated? If it is such a close relative, would we give these people the vote?

The discovery of homo floresiensis reiterates what anthropologists have been saying for a long while – that we are not unique as humans.

All living creatures may have a soul, but to what extent are we different? What is the character of humanity?

We are certainly a biological species. So is it that humans are conscious of their world? Many animals are clearly conscious and communicate their awareness. Maybe we have a higher order of self-awareness above this primary consciousness? Or maybe we are intentional beings. Again, many animals display what can be interpreted as intentional behavior.

How about this as a way to think of these questions -

The notion of species is too centered upon the characteristics of the individual biolgical organism.

Australopithecus Afarensis – reconstruction from Johanson and Edgar From Lucy to Language

What makes a species is also its ecology. And modern humans have a peculiarly cultural ecology (for at least 35 thousand years). This makes our identity and self awareness distributed phenomena – to be found outside the individual in cultural networks.

Don’t look for the soul inside the human being but outside.

An argument from my new book project.

Why didn’t I believe it until I read the original report in Nature?

And I am still skeptical.

Too fantastic?

Did I need the sober language and measurements? Lots of graeco-latin biologisms?

Description of Homo floresiensis (MS – not the homo floresensis of many google searches)
Order Primates Linnaeus, 1758
Suborder Anthropoidea Mivart, 1864
Superfamily Hominoidea Gray, 1825
Family Hominidae Gray, 1825
Tribe Hominini Gray, 1825
Genus Homo Linnaeus, 1758
Homo floresiensis sp. nov.

Etymology. Recognizing that this species has only been identified on the island of Flores, and a prolonged period of isolation may have resulted in the evolution of an island endemic form.

Holotype. LB1 partial adult skeleton excavated in September 2003. Recovered skeletal elements include the cranium and mandible, femora, tibiae, fibulae and patellae, partial pelvis, incomplete hands and feet, and fragments of vertebrae, sacrum, ribs, scapulae and clavicles. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Referred material. LB2 isolated left mandibular P3. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Localities. Liang Bua is a limestone cave on Flores, in eastern Indonesia. The cave is located 14 km north of Ruteng, the provincial capital of Manggarai Province, at an altitude of 500 m above sea level and 25 km from the north coast. It occurs at the base of a limestone hill, on the southern edge of the Wae Racang river valley. The type locality is at 08° 31? 50.4? south latitude 120° 26? 36.9? east longitude.

Horizon. The type specimen LB1 was found at a depth of 5.9 m in Sector VII of the excavation at Liang Bua. It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 4 kyr and 14 2 kyr. The referred isolated left P3 (LB2) was recovered just below a discomformity at 4.7 m in Sector IV, and bracketed by a U-series date of 37.7 0.2 kyr on flowstone, and 20 cm above an electron-spin resonance (ESR)/U-series date of 74 – 12 + 14 kyr on a Stegodon molar.

Diagnosis. Small-bodied bipedal hominin with endocranial volume and stature (body height) similar to, or smaller than, Australopithecus afarensis. Lacks masticatory adaptations present in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, with substantially reduced facial height and prognathism, smaller postcanine teeth, and posteriorly orientated infraorbital region. Cranial base flexed. Prominent maxillary canine juga form prominent pillars, laterally separated from nasal aperture. Petrous pyramid smooth, tubular and with low relief, styloid process absent, and without vaginal crest. Superior cranial vault bone thicker than Australopithecus and similar to H. erectus and H. sapiens. Supraorbital torus arches over each orbit and does not form a flat bar as in Javan H. erectus. Mandibular P3 with relatively large occlusal surface area, with prominent protoconid and broad talonid, and either bifurcated roots or a mesiodistally compressed Tomes root. Mandibular P4 also with Tomes root. First and second molar teeth of similar size. Mandibular coronoid process higher than condyle, and the ramus has a posterior orientation. Mandibular symphysis without chin and with a posterior inclination of the symphysial axis. Posteriorly inclined alveolar planum with superior and inferior transverse tori. Ilium with marked lateral flare. Femur neck long relative to head diameter, the shaft circular and without pilaster, and there is a high bicondylar angle. Long axis of tibia curved and the midshaft has an oval cross-section.

Many of the reports claim that the finds prompt a rewrite of human evolution. Well no – it has been clear for some time that there is no single evolutionary line that leads to modern humans and that for most of human history there have been more than one contemporary species of homo and australopithecine precursors.

Homo floresiensis in Nature, photo by Peter Brown

The fascination for me is the remote island setting and story. Homo floresiensis – remnants of homo erectus maybe, dwarfed by an island isolation and the forces of evolutionary selection. Not enough to eat? Wiped out by a volcano?

The island is home to the giant Komodo dragon lizards.

It is Conan Doyle’s “Lost World”

Eaten by dragons?

It was in Stanford Church – first time I had attended any kind of event there. A good turn out.

There were some very nice anecdotes told by friends and colleagues. He was not at all self-promoting, and many of us had little idea what a talent he was, because we didn’t cross paths much.

Mike was a pioneer in social and economic history, interested in ancient agriculture, slavery and sacrifice long before it was mainstream. And regional archaeological survey – again, leading the way in classical archaeology in the Argolid (and Chris Witmore is picking the project up and taking it forward). I like to think that this pioneering spirit is what Stanford Archaeology should be all about.

He was also a fan of British comedy – the Goons and after!

You don’t realize the loss until they’re gone – he was very welcoming when we were deciding to come to Stanford, but I never really got to talk to him once we got here.

He had a wonderfully open mind.

Some tributes – from Jim and Christina Dengate and Tom Boyd

New York Times

Those from the service will be available soon – [Link]

He posted a comment explaining that, as we might have guessed, the story was the result of the (Greek) press picking up on a superlative (the biggest stone sarcophagi …).

I thanked him for this and he amplified with a fascinating glimpse of what new is actually happening in the excavations of Corinth:

What we are actually doing at Corinth is trying to turn a curve by implementing methodologies now standard in non-classical lands. We have been introducing an electronic archive for current and future finds in the hope that we can find the funds to retro-convert. We have started transcribing old notebooks into electronic form with the idea that several can be posted on the web with illustrative material. We have a growing digital plan of the village and the entire Corinthia incorporating topographic maps, air photos, GIS data and excavation plans. We have replaced baulk-debris with open-area, single-context excavation with excellent results that are helping us to identify gaps in our knowledge and to address old assertions and assumptions. I hope this work will make for a mine of potential new work on old Corinthian material. For the first time we have excavated methodically a section of the village c. 1830 to 1858 overlying 18th century pits. We have an Ottoman cemetery c. 1600-1660 with mixed Moslem and Christian burial styles and, I believe, Catholic vs Orthodox burials as well. The pathologies are interesting. There is a disproportion between females (older) and males (younger) and several individuals buried after rigor mortis had set in – a couple of these individuals were executed, one by hanging and one using an iron spike in the neck. This is a period when the village is known to be small and we seem to have a very representative sample of the total population. We have Late Antique phases and remote sensing data that have caused us to redraft the history and archaeology of Corinth c. 400 to 700; a much smaller city enceinte to east of the ancient city showing that burials in Forum were outside the city wall, new much later pottery chronologies that show no barbarian and earthquake demise, much slower and later introduction of Xtianity with very late expression of faith in the form of monumental buildings and burials and extension of material remains, including imports, into the “dark age”. We also have Hellenistic deposits that show we have to reconsider everything written to date on Hellenistic Corinth. Although the evidence is patchy, maintenance of the Geometric graves seems to have continued well into the 4th century when attitudes changed and perhaps the city centralized the annual mnemosia rites. The pattern emerging is that the whole huge area in and around the later forum was burial related memorial liturgy until c. 300 BC. Similarly it seems that from the Demeter sanctuary down to Hadji Mustapha was an enormous field of dining rooms, far more extensive than previously thought. This invites the questions if the dining area was for D and K alone or for other Hellenic deities as well and who built and maintained the dining rooms. With the intramural cemeteries, I get the impression that much of the walled city was devoted to very extensive areas of special use and wonder where on earth the population actually lived.

Corinth – remains of the 1940s excavations

This is his report on a conference at Aarhus he attended – Excavating the Mind

The Department of Prehistoric Archaeology in cooperation with the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Aarhus recently hosted a conference entitled “Excavating the Mind,” which dealt with the crossovers between cognition, material culture, and social practice. Practitioners from a number of dissciplines came together to deliver papers on topics including semiotics, embodiment theory, material engagement theory, technology and material action, agency, distributed cognition, the origins of the human mind, human sensation. The organizers should be commended on what was a well-connected and organized conference.

Archaeologists continue to struggle with the modernist predicament found in the separation of ideas and things, minds and bodies, agencies and structures. And they continue to do so with an awareness of what is going on around them in other disciplines. The climate of exchange between the papers at the conference spawned some interesting discussions around archaeology’s unique perspective on the material world in addressing the burdens of modernism. Archaeology has never been more relevant. There was even some critical engagement with terms such as embodiment and agency, which are weighed down by the very conceptual problems they are intended to transcend. These are all good things.

There were synergies between many of the concerns discussed in the papers and what we are doing here in our Metamedia Lab and with Symmetrical Archaeology – Renfrew’s articulation of mixtures between mind/matter; issues of distributed cognition and moving beyond representation in Lambros Malafouris’s work; Janet Keller’s work with writing media in a community from the southwest Pacific; Chris Gosden’s attention to sensorial emotion and aesthetics. But the conference did lack a few things that can be extended to the discipline as a whole.

First, where was the concern for epistemology? – constructing secure knowledge that runs against the grain of most conventional understanding of the way society and culture works. How do issues of material action play out through the instrumentalities and media involved in our own processes of knowledge construction? And second, if we are to transcend the problems of modernism then we must not only say we are doing it but, do it!

(Although a notable exception was Terje Gansum’s excellent work coming out of his apprenticeship with a blacksmith [check out: 2004. “Role the bones - from iron to steel” Norwegian Archaeological Review. 37(1) 41-58]).

If we are to move beyond issues of representation, for example, then we must begin to do so in our own modes of articulation. Only in this way, will we be able to avoid the revolving doors and move around the burdens of modernism.

I asked Chris to say what some of the topics were.

Lambros Malafouris dealt with Mycenaean Linear B.. John Robb claims that he uses a hybrid concept of agency in close reading of decorative styles in Southern Italian Neolithic pottery. Preucel developed a Piercian semiotic line on Peublo Revolt architecture. Some papers were very good in their focus on the materials such as the Mads Holst piece on the early bronze age barrows of southern Scandinavia, but there was no engagement with the mind/matter issue. Renfrew freely admits he is looking for a methodology to develop his theory of material engagement.

…

Early days still for these archaeologists. I didn’t get the sense that anyone except for Tim Ingold and maybe Gosden was concerned with the eventual outcome of this move beyond mind/matter… I mean what are the wider ramifications of the “Death of Man” and the simultaneous “Birth of Nature”?

It all sounds very abstract and specialized, and it is. There is also that infuriating tendency of academic papers to fail to come clean with a clear point or argument – they set up great questions and topics (“we are here to reconcile mind and matter in an archaeology of the distibuted mind, explored through … ) and then when you get to hear or read the piece, well yes they talk about reconciling mind and matter in an archaeology of the distributed mind … .

Nevertheless I do think that this development of an archaeology of mind is most important. I commented on Colin Renfrew’s fascinating new explorations earlier this year – [Link] I am convinced that an archaeology of mind that brings together cultural anthropology, cognitive science and design studies will be the basis of the first reevaluation of our overall understanding of prehistory since new archaeology revitalized cultural evolution in the 1960s.

Well ok I would say this – my next book is precisely an archaeology of mind that aims to rewrite 50 thousand years of prehistory – but really, all credit to this conference and its participants for pursuing the future of archaeological thought.