Steam punk bar furniture in The Chop Bar [Link]

Last week the BBC reported a new fund raising campaign to rebuild Babbage’s Analytical Engine – his steam powered programmable computer the size of a house – [BBC Link] – Wikipedia on Babbage – [Link]

Model of the never-built Analytical Engine in the Science Museum London

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 annual celebration of a great industry and labor movement, once a living force, now a memory, nostalgically inspiring at best, after Thatcher’s neo-liberal ideology and political spite closed all the coal mines in the UK and devastated the pit villages.

More photos – [Link]

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

Brussels.

Here to explore European initiatives in cultural heritage policy – [Link].

The central (medieval) square – destroyed by French bombardment in 1695, rebuilt by 1699, sacked by revolutionaries in the late 1700s, heavily restored in the late nineteenth century.

Considered something of a fake by the natives of Brugge and Antwerp, with their “authentic” medieval squares.

An undecidable – fitting neither side of an opposition such as authentic | fake.

[Link - the Hill of Tara]

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

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

Westmalle Tripel – the classic.

Attending the International Advisory Board for the Mayor of Rotterdam – Link

Prime Minister’s Question Time and a debate calling for a judicial inquiry into the Iraq war.

The look and feel of the corridors and chambers together with the look of the inmates (MPs, visitors and staff) are so familiar. Not because we have all seen it on TV (low resolution video), but because it is all so reminiscent of my old school (very traditional English grammar school) and college (old and at Cambridge) – rich sensory memories. The old oak paneling, framed prints and oils, the style and decor yes, but also its patina, and then the dress, gestures, bearing and comportment of the people.

This is the physiognomy of a building, an institution, a (sub)culture.

Physiognomy is to read character from surface features.

It is much discredited of course (bushy eyebrows too close together do not signify criminal disposition). But this early and dubious science is the ancestor of contemporary biometrics and anthropometrics.

The broad principle surely holds – that someone’s life history leaves traces in their surface features – the look of someone has a particular genealogy. That the surface look of a building reveals much about its character and use. This is a kind of archaeological thinking.

So what is the physiognomy of a building and its occupants? – materialities revealing their genealogy, symptom like.

James Street Cardiff

Looking for a house on Princelet Street.

Alessandra Lopez Y Royo puts it all this way – archaeology is a way of thinking.

This is how we begin with the World Trade Center

There is something profoundly archaeological about the experience of 9/11 and its aftermath. Less than a month after the attack a meeting of representatives of thirty-three museums, headed by the Smithsonian and New York’s City Museum, considered how they might document the event, asking what things should be collected and preserved for display and for posterity.

A year later an exhibition opened at the Smithsonian; it continues its tour into 2004. “Bearing Witness to History” displays artifacts and associated stories, photographs and documents from the events of 9/11: a battered wallet, a melted computer screen from the Pentagon, torn clothing, a structural joint from the World Trade Center, a window washer?s squeegee handle, a stairwell sign, as well as artifacts associated with the aftermath (commemorative coins, artwork, patriotic ribbons, rescue equipment). Other exhibitions have run at the Museum of the City of New York and the New York State Museum in Albany.

The project was explicitly one of documenting history in the making. Some of this was done with the notion of finding evidence. Actually, and more accurately, the museum curators and archaeologists sought material icons. Each of the artifacts displayed in the Smithsonian exhibition has a story attached, one that ties it to an individual or event that bears significance and pathos. And they certainly evoke. Their aura is very apparent. Each acts as a touchstone; not so much illuminating the topics of political and forensic interest, the exhibits are material correlates for the intimate personal experiences, the individual stories. This is what we mean when we call the things iconic.

Briefcase recovered from the World Trade Center.

Description: A briefcase recovered from the World Trade Center wreckage that belonged to Lisa Lefler, an Aon Risk Services employee.

Context: World Trade Center workers had varied experiences on September 11. While about 2,200 office workers were killed, over 20,000 managed to escape the Twin Towers.

When the first plane struck the north tower, Lisa Lefler, an Aon Risk Services executive, immediately evacuated her 103rd-floor office in the south tower. In her haste she left her briefcase behind. Seventeen minutes after the north tower was hit the south tower was struck, cutting off the escape path above the 78th floor. Fifty-six minutes later, the entire building collapsed, killing 175 of Lefler’s fellow Aon employees.

Several days later, Boyd Harden, a rescue worker at Ground Zero, found the briefcase in the debris and returned it to Lefler.

Here are some associated materials on the exhibition web site:

Partial view of resume found inside briefcase.

As the writing on the clear plastic cover indicates, Boyd Harden found this resume inside Lisa Leffler’s [sic] briefcase, and it allowed Mr. Harden to identify and locate Ms. Leffler [sic]. The resume was tattered but entire. This view has been altered to protect . . .

Notes from the curator?s files about the route of Lisa Lefler?s briefcase and its discovery. Transcript: found 12-13 Sep by EMT Boyd Harden @ Greenwich St. near O’Hara’s Pub on the street (Albany St.) Bag identified as Lefler’s by resume in bag, found . . .

Photograph: Aon Risk Services employee Lisa Lefler.

Statement from Lisa Lefler:

September 11, 2001. My Recollection. The morning of September 11 started out like any other morning. The train was on time, the path train was crowded. It was a beautiful, sunny fall day. I went to the deli across the street for a bagel before going . . .

Statement from Boyd Harden:

Briefcase Found At WTC On September 13, 2001 The Events Surrounding Lisa Lefler’s Briefcase That I Found At The WTC by Boyd E. Harden At approximately 9:00 AM on September 11, 2001, my wife, who works in New York City (NYC), called me at our apartment . . .

Statement from David Shayt (September 11 Collecting Curator, Museum Specialist, Division of Cultural History):

. . . not the sort of thing we would collect unless it had some extraordinary, iridescent story.

There is an intimacy here in the material artifact and its testimony to an everyday event (going to work at the World Trade Center) that became historical. The quotidian becomes the materialization of a historical moment. This is a process of archaeological metamorphosis: mundane things come to carry the baggage of history; they become allegorical. There is also an elision in this process: conventional historiography (of chains of causation, socio-political analysis, telling of the unfolding of events on a political stage) slips away, is irrelevant in the confrontation between the banality of everyday life, sentimental association and the apocalyptic (confrontations with horror, death, the clash of civilizations).

The question of what stuff to keep is one of conservation, of value and choice: it is profoundly archaeological, relating to the systems of classification at the core of museology. But the archaeological component of 9/11 is more than just artifacts. The photographs in the New York Times and elsewhere of neighboring apartments abandoned and covered in thick layers of dust as the towers came down are archaeological moments frozen in time just like Pompeii, abandoned to its own disaster.

The twin towers site itself became an icon of ruin: photographs of the remains of the building’s steel framework silhouetted against the lights illuminating the search, the clearing operation, the excavation are classic compositions borrowing the aesthetic of a backlit Greek temple colonnade.

All the proposals for rebuilding the site included museums of some kind. The final choice of architect is very telling. Daniel Libeskind is the designer of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, a remarkable memorial to twentieth-century Jewish experience, a building marked by a historiographical component – the past, the old street plan around the museum, and many other features of the architecture of community and holocaust are built into the design of the museum.

Many of the objects in Bearing Witness to History are responses to 9/11: commemorative pins and medals, picks and hard hats from the rescue operation, photographs. The exhibition looks back at the debris of history, but its collection of the memorable is future-oriented: the purpose is to preserve for future generations. There has been great concern that the replacement for the World Trade Center should be a monument of hope and confidence in the future, as well as a commemoration of its origins and the site’s past. This again is a characteristic of archaeology. Since at least the late nineteenth century the field has been intimately associated with conservation policy aimed at preserving heritage and material history for the future. This is, for most cultural resource managers, as the professionals are now termed, the primary archaeological project – less the interpretation of the past (that can wait), and more a project to ensure that the remains of the past will endure, in themselves or as some kind of formal and sanctioned record, particularly under the pressure of urban and rural development. This conservation ethic (loss and destruction of the material past is unacceptable) goes unquestioned in the academy and the profession. The Soviet occupation chose to obliterate traces of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin in 1945; this kind of destruction of history would be unthinkable now and is even a difficult comparison to make with 9/11, yet both the bunker and the remains of the World Trade Center are evidence of outrageous and violent aspiration. The difference is, of course, related to different notions of historicity – the perceived place in history of Americans today and Soviets in the 1940s.

Many of the objects preserved by the Smithsonian and other museums came from the evidence recovery operation at the Staten Island Landfill site, commonly known as Fresh Kills. Here we approach the irony at the heart of the archaeological project. The twin towers site was designated a scene of crime and the debris was removed to the newly reopened landfill site on Staten Island to be carefully sifted for evidence, personal remains and effects, and memorabilia. So, choices having been made and the valuable retrieved, the debris has been consigned to the biggest garbage tip in the world. It is certainly the most prominent human artifact visible from space (the Great Wall of China is quite invisible). Where else could over a million tons of building rubble be put, it might be argued. Our point is rather that the destination of the debris is neither incidental nor an embarrassment. Put aside choice of what to keep: this is the real stuff of archaeology and history – what gets thrown away – garbage.

While a common perception may be that archaeology is a set of techniques aimed at the recovery of remains of the past, we want to claim these components of the experience of 9/11 for archaeology – that is, we describe them as archaeological. To recap: the archaeological refers to ruin and responses to it, to the mundane and quotidian articulated with grand historical scenarios, to materializations of the experience of history, material aura, senses of place and history, choices of what to keep and what to let go (remember/forget), the material artifact as allegorical, collections and their systems, the city and its material cultural capitalizations (investments in pasts and futures), the intimate connection between all this and a utopian frame of mind (archaeology is not just about the past, but about desired futures too). And the stuff of it all is garbage.

So – archaeologists deal in garbage, though this is often denied. We make two broad points

Barn Again @ The Biscuit Factory

Cultural heritage gone mad

I have held back on this one a while – not wanting to hammer the NE of England too much. But here goes anyway.

An ART warehouse, brand new interior, in an old food factory in Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK. Urban regeneration meets (aspiring) European city of culture.

“30,000 square feet on two floors … Britain’s biggest original art store … It?s a fun, relaxed place to buy original contemporary art in the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne. Entrance is free.”

Great. Well, maybe – some of the stuff on sale was shockingly bad (clichéed). But it IS good to have challenging art available, accessible.

The warehouse has a restaurant – relocated, once called “The Barn”, and now “The Barn Again“.

We went for lunch, on a personal recommendation from a friend (and hence my reluctance to speak out) – this is, apparently, one of the places to eat in Newcastle.

The food was mediocre. Not my interest here.

No. Imagine this, instead. Old biscuit factory turned into gallery. Now has a mezzanine, is open plan, halogen spot lights everywhere.

Behind a hessian curtain – the restaurant. Decor (deco?) – contemporary gallery fittings; 50s and 60s retro features (tat – I remember the dreadful table lamps); yellow pine tables and chairs, from when yellow pine meant KNOTTY and YELLOW (here rustic, I guess); references to a wild west theme (cattle, horses, barn dances etc). But outrageously ill-fitting. Beyond kitsch. Retro – fusion – hybrid – and no design sense. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I can’t take this anymore. Maybe it is just SO sophisticated.

Then – the proprietor (well he is definitely the one in charge) is pacing up and down. It is London docklands, about 1988. As if fresh from commodity dealing, he wears a dark, buttoned up, pinstripe suit. And he has the attitude of Grant or Phil from Eastenders. In front of diners and with an outrageously affected local accent he tears a strip off a miserable waiter for being late. Boasts of telling a diner the night before – “you don’t like the food? – stick to your crappy business and I’ll stick to mine”.

Basil Fawlty turned Geordie entrepreneur.

Dinner last night with Peter and Sue MacDonald; Helen of course too. The restaurant is at the top of the old flour mill on the quayside, though it looks like a grain silo. It’s now an arts center, 46 million quids worth. Lots of other development here too – smart new apartments, a new concert hall. The Boat, the night club Tuxedo Princess (designed by our old friend Mike Plews) is still nearby.

Great views of the Tyne and Newcastle, particularly from the ladies bathrooms. Trendy place to eat – reservations hard to come by, they say. Food – not so good – trying too hard.

A room with a view.

Anyway, on the skyline is Gateshead’s multistorey car park. It kind of symbolizes the irony of the NE of England’s great effort at redevelopment in the 60s. It never really made it – I never knew it in full use. Its own restaurant at the top was never occupied. Peter tells me that the plan to demolish it (due late 2002) has been abandoned. Because of its associations. The car park now has its own web site – it has become an icon. Michael Caine, in Mike Hodges movie Get Carter, threw Brian Mosley off the top (later star of UK soap Coronation Street, Cliff Brumby in the original movie, same character palyed by Caine in the dreadful remake with Sylvester Stallone). (He fell on a car in the movie, and Helen’s cousin Annie Dunn, now herself in the movie industry, insists she was an extra, a little girl dragged from the wreck of the car).

I used to do Get Carter tours when I was an archaeologist in Newcastle in the early 80s – touring the locations. I even use the movie in a course I teach here at Stanford about landscape and place. There is now a superbly researched web site, with then and now photos of the locations.

New kinds of urban myths, built on fragments of media.

Here in California natural wonders like the coast of Big Sur are not enough, it would seem, in themselves. You find a media mythology, meaning generated through association with media stars – Henry Miller lived here, Orson Welles bought Rita Hayworth a log cabin here etc etc. The same with Steinbeck and Monterey.

I have no trouble finding web sites about all this!

Peter reckons they should install colored lighting – a different color for each level.