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

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

Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link]

This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is recreating the oldest extant play in western drama: Aeschylus’s The Persians. The combination of the story and the setting ,with the sun slowly disappearing over the hills, is overwhelming.
The Persians

The play itself is extraordinary. Produced in 472BC, only eight years after the Persians had been routed at Salamis, it is the only Greek tragedy to be drawn from recent history rather than from legend. Obviously Aeschylus was celebrating Athenian victory. But what is astonishing is his sympathy for the vanquished. Atossa, mother of the defeated Xerxes, views the wreckage of her country with mounting horror. The ghost of Darius, her husband, rises from the grave to announce that grief is man’s lot and must be borne. Even “war-lusting” Xerxes himself, guilty of impetuously taking his country to war, is finally seen as an abject object of pity.

What is impressive about Mike Pearson’s production, however, is the totality of the experience. We assemble in a square in this deserted military village where the four-strong male chorus is rejoicing in war and announcing “no one can withstand this tsunami of the Persians in full rage.” We then march up a hill to sit in front of a four-storey house with the front cut away; and there we see, both in live action and on video, the tragedy enacted. There’s a wonderful moment when Atossa arrives in a white car to a blaze of trumpets. But, once she is in the house, a hand-held camera moves in close to watch the distintegration of her hopes as the news from Salamis arrives. And, with typical Pearson invention, that news is conveyed direct by video satellite.

Pearson puts the piece in contemporary clothes but makes no attempt to relate it directly to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead he and the translator, Kaite O’Reilly, focus on how war destroys the very fabric of people’s identity. At the beginning, the chorus praise Xerxes as “fierce as a dragon scaled in gold”; by the end, they are threatening to beat him to death with a hammer. Even Darius, ritually raised from the dead, starts out in Paul Rhys’s performance as a gently melancholy ghost, only to turn into a wrathful figure who talks of Xerxes as “a mortal playing God to gods”.

Sian Thomas, left, also puts in a tremendous performance as the queen, a woman of fiery splendour reduced to ululating agony as the disasters mount and she cries “this is the peak of my misery”. And the four strong chorus, in its turn, descends from arrogant state apparatchiks to figures writhing in torment.

This superb production, with atmospheric music by John Hardy, literally takes one on a journey. And, as one went back down the hill after, strange lamentations emerged from the deserted houses. Shivering slightly, one moved on, still hearing the aftermath of war in one’s ears.

Michael Billington

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph [Link]

This is extraordinary, one of the most imaginative, powerful and haunting theatrical events of the year … This rarely performed masterpiece, which taps so powerfully into our present concerns about the West’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be an event however it was staged.

But the director of this National Theatre of Wales production, Mike Pearson, has achieved an extraordinary coup by staging it in the military village of Cilieni, from which civilians are usually barred. Built during the Cold War, and perched high in the Brecon Beacons, it has a church, houses, a village square. From a distance it looks idyllic. But the breezeblock buildings have never been homes, and there are burnt out tanks in the deserted streets. This deeply creepy place is used to teach troops how to fight in built-up areas, which gives Cilieni its alternative, acronymic name of FIBUA.

Another Guardian review from Charlotte Higgins – [Link]

Kate Bassett in The Independent – [Link]

Video from the Guardian – music by John Hardy – [Link] -

I talked about the implementation of broad principles and policies in heritage management, represented in the likes of the convention, at the fabulous new Gallo-Romeins Museum at Tongeren (the size and splendor of the museum a testament to the significance of the past and of “heritage” in this town of but 30,000 people) – [Link]

Binchester – VINOVIVM.org

I presented a pragmatics for running field projects. I explained the idea of such a pragmatics in my commentary on our team taught class in the d.school [Link]

My argument is that archaeology is a creative field, working on what remains of the past – designing the past. The convention supplies a framework, an attitude  towards participatory heritage, one that, albeit implicitly, recognizes the multivalency of the concept. It is a kind of design brief. Archaeological field projects are not only about researching the past. They are typically connected with much broader agendas relating to regional development, conservation, legislative instruments that protect the past, aspirations, stands taken in a cultural politics, like the Faro Convention, to recognize the importance of the past to the present and future, to enrichen, and to open it up to people.

Scientific methodology isn’t therefore enough. Archaeological project design is always located, “actualistic”, dealing with specific conjunctures between past and present. It needs to be iterative and adaptive, a flexible process.

Here is a synopsis of the pragmatics I presented for our Binchester field project, the imagery and a copy of the Faro Convention – [Link].

>> Go to her diary – an archaeologist in Rome.

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)

Michael Herzfeld was talking today about ethnography, about the centrality of comparison. His latest work is to compare Greece with Italy with Thailand.

Michael Herzfeld at Stanford today

Many anthropologists have become anxious about the comparative method, because comparing one society with another with the aim of understanding each through general properties of society and culture has usually involved judgement – setting one over another – more and less advanced, whatever. The old opposition between a nomothetic and idiographic social science (anthropology versus history, for example) is between one that sets up laws (generalizations) and the other that writes about individual cases. The legal reference in the etymology is appropriate – judgement of truth, worth, and value is involved.

Michael’s “Anthropology through the Looking Glass” had greatly interested me when I was writing my book about Classical Archaeology. My focus was on how Classical archaeologists of Graeco-Roman antiquity operated in their excavations, surveys, travels, writing. It explains a lot about the stories they tell. His book compared the discipline of anthropology with the modern Greek state. Both were nineteenth century inventions and both were designed to deal with the boundaries between the western European nation states and other cultures – primitive and other compared with the European imperial powers, antecedent in the case of classical Greece, awkward Balkan hybrid of east and west in the case of the newly reconstructed Greek state. For me this was a very interesting way of thinking – setting a discipline alongside a state – because they both dealt with borders. My own point – what a refreshing way to think about ancient Greece – not so much an historical reality as something classicists have invented to deal with their own border issues.

While anthropological comparison may involve the old colonial obsession with us and them, comparison is clearly also a necessity – an epistemological necessity. You can’t just immerse yourself in another culture, efface yourself and get to know it in its own terms. Just as archaeologists cannot simply bury themselves in the past. There is always the anthropologist, having arrived from somewhere else, struggling to adapt and understand, translating – comparing. This was the essence of Michael’s point about ethnography. The anthropologist was there and can report and claim insight and knowledge, at least ask to be heard.

Though he didn’t put it this way, Michael was making an argument for the performative chracter of fieldwork – knowledge building through the body, communication, translation and expression of the anthropologist (see me just the other day on Mike Pearson – [Link]). The anthropologist owes it to the community being studied to stand up for them. Michael wants anthropologists to stand up for the weak against the strong.

I would add that it is the act of witnessing that implies an ethical responsibility to the people the anthropologist gets to know. An obligation to keep the record straight, especially as anthropologists and archaeologists do work at the margins, on the borders, where things can be awkward and unclear, where identities are often in doubt, negotiations occur, where conspiracies are made.

The BBC is airing some views about the causes of war and policy in the Middle East. UK | Magazine | Do democracies fight each other?

When outlining his vision for peace in the Middle East, President George Bush said “democracies don’t go to war with each other”. Is it true?

The president’s comments echoed those made in the 1994 State of the Union address by his predecessor Bill Clinton.

They share a belief that the solution to ending war is the spread of democracy.

But does history support them?

Rudolf Rummel was interviewed for Peace Magazine in 1999 [Link]. He is a political scientist who has done a great deal of comparative and statistical analysis into was and insitutional violence – his book Power kills: democracy as a method of nonviolence (1997) argues this point that democracies don’t fight each other.

Now, some statistics. If one defines an international war as any military engagements in which 1,000 or more were killed, then 353 pairs of nations (e.g., Germany vs. USSR) engaged in such wars between 1816-1991. None were between two democracies, 155 pairs involved a democracy and a nondemocrcy, and 198 involved two nondemocracies fighting each other. The average length of war between states was 35 months, average battle deaths was 15,069.

For the years 1946-1986, when there were the most democracies and thus the hardest test of the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, there were over this period 45 states that had a democratic regime; 109 that did not. There were thus 6,876 state dyads (e.g., Bolivia-Chile), of which 990 were democratic-democratic dyads, none of which fought each other. Thirty-two nondemocratic dyads engaged in war. Thus the probability of any dyad engaging in war between 1946 and 1986 was 32/6876 = .0047; of not engaging in war is .9953. Now, what is the probability of the 990 dyads not engaging in war during this period? Using the binomial theorem, it is .9953 to the 990th power = .0099, or rounded off .01. This is highly significant. The odds of this lack of war between democracies being by chance is virtually 100 to 1.

From – America, Pakistan, and the limits of militarism Steve Coll Asma Jahangir – openDemocracy

Thomas Schwartz and Kiron Skinner of Stanford’s Hoover Institution begged to differ in an article in the Hoover Digest [Link]

It is dogma too in the corridors of power, where it drives the Clinton Doctrine of peace and security through a crusade for democracy. “The best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace,” the president has said, “is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other.”

The idea, “democratic pacifism”, is not new. Its academic champions venerate a two-hundred-year-old essay, “Perpetual Peace”, by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Enthusiasm grew in the 1980s, in part from some brilliant Kant-revival pieces by geopolitical theorist Michael Doyle, more from the worldwide outbreak of democracy.

Criticism of democratic pacifism is not new either. In Federalist 6, Alexander Hamilton attacked “the paradox of perpetual peace” as wrong and dangerous – wrong because it is naive about popular passions, dangerous because quack nostrums steal attention from real remedies. In a “republic”, Kant thought, a majority would refuse to bear the cost of aggressive war. Hamilton saw, on the contrary, that majorities can be as belligerent as monarchs, clamoring for war not forced by foes.

I agree.

War, the body politic and democracy featured in my latest lecture in the Origins series tonight. I am spending 10 evenings this term tracing the genealogy of modernity back through the last 45,000 years.

This is what I have to offer on the origins of war.

War arrives in the late third meillenium in the Near East and then in Europe when a new and gendered Bronze Age class ideology of the warrior (brilliantly dealt with in Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas Larsson’s forthcoming book “The Long Journey: Symbolic Transmission and Social Transformation in Bronze Age Europe”) is combined with monarchic sovereignty, and the administrative and management technologies of Mumford’s megamachine (a key factor also in Michael Mann’s historical sociology of power).

It became quite clear to me when I was researching the early Greek city states – they could not be explianed by some historical quirk of ancient Greek genius that managed to invent western urbanism and civilization. What I found happening in the likes of the precocious state of Corinth was a reconfiguration of the experiences and pleasures of different male subcultures in new architectures and urban spaces, new lifestyles – displays of new material wealth and political extension out from the local polity (traded goods and connection abroad). The invention of the ancient Greek body politic (and later democracy) was about the way different groups of men defined themselves through the way they ate, walked down the street, fought together on a field outside the city on a summer afternoon, talked in political assembly. And yes, this was about class, property, law, sovereignty – and war.

Pericles of Athens – champion of democracy in the Athenian Empire of the 5th Century BCE

Back then to democracy. It is, as ever, a matter of definitions and categories. What constitutes a democracy? It is a form of the body politic deeply indebted to the bronze age legacy of the warrior elite. Athenian democracy of the fifth century has so often been held up as a paradigm of direct and egalitarian democracy – direct rule of the demos, the people. But, of course, the demos were only a minority of male adult citizens, a propertied citizen militia, an extended oligarchy. The Athenian Empire, extension of a league of independent city states opposed to an eastern Perisan threat, instituted democracy wherever it could, with brutal efficacy, not hesitating to apply ruthless rationality in justifying the massacre of whole populations for the sake of the democratic state. They also used the profit of imperial democracy to build the Acropolis and invent western culture – a heroic cultural achievement.

Genealogically war and the democratic body politic have the same origins. Which is not to say that it always has to be so. We do, after all, learn from history – nothing has to continue to happen as it always has. Why? Precisely because it has already happened before.

This is the irony of counterfactual history. [Link].

Very smart.

“Mirrors to the Past: Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America” is at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, 111 Amsterdam Avenue, at 65th Street, Lincoln Center, (212) 870-1630, through Jan. 8. The Hellenic Festival, presented by the library in collaboration with the Queens Library, offers various public programs and performances; information: (212) 642-0142.

Edward Rothstein reviews it in the New York Times – How the Ancients Became Trendy: The Road From Euripides to Revolution

Chris (Witmore) takes issue with Rothstein:

Review:

If someday, ages hence, archaeologists were to come upon the objects now on display in the Vincent Astor Gallery of the New York public Library for the Performing Arts, what would they make of them all? The items in the exhibition “Mirrors to the Past” all refer in one way or another to ancient Greece. A pomegranate-colored gauze wrap is meant to be a reconstruction of Greek fashion. A dancer in a white tunic is shown dreamily posing at the Parthenon in erotic reverie. A director broods in Greek peasant dress as if straining to hear the chords of the Delphic oracle. Posters and photographs show Trojan women, the citizens of Colonus, Antigone and Medea variously reincarnated as European exiles, gospel singers and earnest political rebels.

Judging from much of the material, an archaeologist might conclude that ancient Greece was a civilization of sensuous narcissists, antiwar activists and ardent feminists that had little patience for convention and little taste for bourgeois life. It was a culture, in other words, that closely resembled some avant-garde movements in the 20th-century United States, for that is the real focus of this exhibition, which bears the subtitle “Ancient Greece and Avant-Garde America”.

CW

This “what if … ?” motif often comes up in popular understanding of archaeology. It has archaeologists in the future digging up contemporary society only to come up with wild images of what we might have been like. It assumes that as the world changes archaeologists will always be getting on with business as usual. This public image of archaeologists as arbiters of the distant and disconnected past has changed little since the professionalization of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Sure we have interrogated such divides within the discipline, but these ideas have hardly filtered into the public imagination. Would Mr.
Rothstein be shocked to find out that archaeologist deal in the contemporary past? That our mobilizations, our manifestations of the material past form are chasmatic because they intertwine with aspects of the present? This “what if” scenario may seem a harmless literary trope for writers who have difficulty coming up with a more original beginning for a story, but it perpetuates a radical divide between past and present and makes archaeologists out to be complacent in the maintenance of this divide.

I do hope Cornelius’s new book on popular culture and archaeology will be part of a wider debate about these matters.

Nevertheless, the exhibition itself precisely foregrounds the intermingling of classical past and present. Of late ancient Greece seems mostly to be again the reference point for rather conservative political opinion. It is good to be reminded that radical counterculture has also taken ancient Greece as a founding moment. Throughout the 20th century, for example, Greek plays were increasingly seen as celebrations of internationalism, pacifism, dissent and women’s rights. Such ideas inspired the productions whose programs, posters and images make up the largest section of the exhibition. Rothstein criticizes the exhibition for not questioning more deeply the reasons for the different attitudes to classical Greece. I wholeheartedly agree with Rothstein – what is really needed is a reexamination of ancient Greece itself in the light of contemporary interest and desire to find ourselves in such pasts. This would indeed be a chiasmus or intermingling of pasts and presents.

Emma Hamilton as three muses – eighteenth-century classical avant-garde?

I had a good deal of contact with him in the early 90s when he taught at Cardiff Art College. I was researching ancient Corinthian ceramics, was keen to get expert opinion on pottery manufacture and had heard about his interest in the history of ceramics from Helen, my wife, also a studio potter, whom he taught. We met several times when we discussed archaeology and pottery at length from his perspective and with his vast experience of all kinds of pottery making – industrial, studio, ethnographic. I particularly recall a lunch at St David’s Hall in Cardiff when I showed him several seventh century BC Corinthian aryballoi that Anthony Snodgrass at Cambridge had generously let me borrow from the university’s collection. He loved them. Key issues for Mick: the brushes for painting these exquisite miniatures – they must have been so refined; the clear evidence for using apprentices on the best wares – poorly applied handles; the trickiness of applying slip on slip – some of the perfume jars are multicolored; the clay – needing considerable preparation; and the speed with which they could have been made – a skilled thrower could run one off in 45 seconds or less. I incorporated this and more from him in my book on archaic Greek art.

photo – UK Potters

He was such an inexhaustible energy and a delight to talk with. A delight. He had an expert interest in everything to do with ceramics, craft, art history. And he could engage you because he listened. He crossed borders.

And sure enough – his salt-glazed stoneware shows his interest in Mycenaean pots. Simple beautiful things.

What a loss.

[Link] [Link]

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

I ask myself why Guy Sanders, director of the American School in Athens excavations at Corinth, made such a press release. After all, they were building massive cyclopean walls and tombs in Greece centuries before this.

And then I ask – What lies behind this press release? – Why put technology at the core of the story?

Now this is something I feel qualified to comment upon – since 1988 I have worked on the archaeology of ancient Corinth, investigating the archaeology of this most prominent of early cities in the Mediterranean. It is one of my special interests.

Corinth 1903

For this period, 900 through 700 BCE, the main story, for most people, is about the foundation of the city, its early shape, what was going on – because Corinth, Athens and the rest of the Greek city states became so prominent later, not least in our cultural imagination. Is Sanders saying that technology is an unappreciated key factor in this story?

“Either they had 40 or 50 people at the end of a rope or they had some kind of mechanical fashion of lowering it in a gradual control drop. For that you need some kind of primitive or basic gearing system”, Mr. Sanders said.

(The Rogueclassicism blog sarcastically asks whether Sanders has thought that they might have used oxen!)

What I do know is that as Corinth grows into a city the cemeteries change markedly. People’s attitudes towards their dead change as their community turns into a city. The obvious change is that they come to bury the dead in distinctive areas, rather than inter them among their houses. I would like to know how these massive sarcophagi fit in with this. It is a story of the cultural perceptions at the heart of urban life as it was invented in ancient Greece. I think that such changes in the way people think of themselves are what explain cities.

Why doesn’t Sanders make this his story?

I am convinced the answer is that many archaeologists like him think that people cannot comprehend such accounts of social change. Saunders thinks it must be presented as a story of technology – a simple story that resonates with our contemporary experience.

I suggest that the likes of Guy Saunders are terribly wrong and they should be prompting people to think differently about such archaeological pasts.

(Best bit of the story is the reminder about the word sarcophagus – flesh-eating.)

Yesterday and today the New York Times has been pressing for interviews and comment – Is this censorship? What does the decision say about Stanford’s commitment to the arts? How does the art collection at Stanford work? How was the decision reached? Does the decision say something about the role of religious feeling in an America after 9/11?

I have also been asked several times – What is a Professor of Classics and Anthropology doing chairing the committee that advises Stanford’s President on the University’s collection of outdoor art?

Quite simply, the outdoor collection at Stanford is a community resource and I serve on a committee as a representative of that community, not as an archaeologist or classicist or anthropologist.

But there is more to it.

Back in 1780 the question would make no sense – all art history was the history of Graeco-Roman art, and all contemporary art was classicist – working on antique Roman and, lately, Greek classical principles, subject matter and ideals. there was plenty of dispute about relationships with Graeco-Roman models, but no doubt that classical antiquity was point of reference.

Jacques Louis David and the French Republic as heir to Rome

I have also long been correcting the idea that archaeology is all about digging up the past. No – archaeologists deal in things and materialities in every sense and reference (or they should, if they don’t). Archaeologists are, potentially, the definitive historians of deisgn – with their two million year perspective on the human making of things. Contemporary art and digital technology are mere footnotes in this big history, or they are diagnostic symptoms of a new epoch, depending on the argument …

What is most significant for me, in this question of the connection between archaeology and the arts, is that I am more and more convinced that we are indeed moving into a distinctively archaeological zeitgiest – so many of our cultural reference points are archaeological – the material presence of the past, obsessions with heritage, nostalgia and retro culture, the construction of new historical reference points (material and archaeological) in a secular and commodified world, a fascination with morbidity (even in its denial) – [Link]

A point to which I constantly return in this blog is that the contemporary arts are tuning in to this new archaeological sensibility and driving it on. The contemporary arts are a reserach program exploring the archaeological character of life today.

Damien Hirst – Resurrection

(See my comment in February on the Metropolitan in New York and some major collections of Graeco-Roman art – [Link])

CLEVELAND (AP) – Some archeologists say the Cleveland Museum of Art may encourage smuggling and the looting of ancient sites by acquiring a bronze Apollo sculpture with large gaps in its ownership history.

The museum proudly announced the purchase in June, saying the statue might be the only one among about 20 large bronzes in the world that can be linked to the ancient Greek masters.

Now some prominent archaeologists and other critics say the museum should not have bought the work because of the questionable history.

“The root cause of looting is collecting. It’s supply and demand,” Ricardo Elia, an associate professor of archaeology at Boston University, told The Plain Dealer for a story Sunday.

The museum’s director disagreed, saying sharing the work with the public was important and the sale was fair.

Malcolm Bell, University of Virginia art history professor and vice president of the Archaeological Institute of America, questioned the museum’s account that the artwork was discovered by a retired German lawyer on his family’s estate in the 1990s.

“It sounds like the kind of fabrication that is made frequently in the market,” he said.

Ernst-Ulrich Walter, the lawyer, declined through an interpreter to be interviewed by the newspaper.

Phoenix Ancient Art, the dealership that sold the Apollo to the museum, has run afoul of the law before, said Elia, Bell and others … [Link]

When you see the details of the piece you can understand the attraction to the art market – it has been attributed to Praxiteles and is claimed to be the statue mentioned by the Roman Pliny – it’s not just an anonymous bronze but can be associated with a legendary artist of antiquity – just what the market values most.

And it is rather beautiful!

(Have a look at the 2002 meetings of the Association of American Geographers – [Link] [Link] [Link])

The notion of an archaeological imagination has become well established – a hard fought success for us. It appears as a main theme in Clive Gamble’s excellent book from Routledge - Archaeology: The Basics.

So what is the archaeological imagination?

The point is a simple one – archaeology is not just an academic discipline producing knowledge of the past. Archaeology is part of a range of values, aspirations, desires, dreams, attitudes, stories that share an archaeological character. Ideas that digging deeply into something establishes authenticity; a fascination with ruin and morbidity; locating senses of identity in remains of the past; connecting collection with place in the pursuit of historical meaning; notions of the sacred aura of the artifact; attitudes towards garbage and leftovers; the uncanny sense of presence found in material remains; stories of deep origin, and the cyclical rise and fall of cultures.

The archaeological imagination takes us into the heart of the modern condition and its relationship with the past.

From Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past

David Lowenthal had gathered a fascinating compendium in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country.

Julian has done a great job of exploring some of the philosphical aspects of the archaeological imagination, particularly in his studies of Heidegger [Link], and now in his new and first rate book on archaeology and modernity – [Link] Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Chris Tilley have explored the archaeological imagination wonderfully in their excavations at Leskernick. There is much more – Ruth Tringham’s work out of Berkeley, Carmel Schrire in her research in South Africa. Gavin Lucas is pursuing the archaeological imagination in his fieldwork, and Ian Hodder here at Stanford has always been a great and active supporter of projects that pursue the edges of the archaeological. Cornelius Holtorf, another great colleague of mine at Lampeter, now in Sweden, is about to round off so much of this work with his fabulous forthcoming book on archaeology and popular culture.

And me? Well, since ReConstructing Archaeology, written with Chris Tilley back in the 80s, I have been plotting my own track through matters archaeological. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s ruined histories, Benjamin’s fragmented re-collections, to recent explorations at Stanford with Bill Rathje and David Platt [Link] I have always thought that my 1991 Experiencing the Past, seen by many as a heinous attack on the foundations of archaeological knowledge, was actually a useful summary of the archaeological imagination. Mike Pearson clarified a lot of my thinking on what we saw as a critical romanticism and poetics at the heart of the archaeological project in our Theatre/Archaeology [Link] [Link]. The remains of all this interest are scattered through this blog and my website, never mind numerous articles, books and conference sessions.

I am sounding defensive. Feeling a need to set the record straight. Why?

I got sent an invitation to a book launch in London for Jennifer Wallace’s recently published Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. The book is not yet out in the US. I ordered a copy from the UK and read it this evening.

It is a good read. Covers the themes I have just outlined in a lively way with lots of references to literature and some history of archaeology. She has clearly come across our work – Hodder, Rathje, Tilley and myself get mention in the section on further reading, and sometimes in the main text. One side of me is delighted that our work has reached beyond archaeology.

But for the most part Jennifer has chosen to ignore twenty years of analysis of the archaeological imagination, the archaeological condition.

I wonder why.

Maybe because her book is a literary reading of “the archaeological imagination”. Yet she liberally discusses archaeological history (totally omitting Alain Schnapp’s marvellous and standard book Discovery of the Past), excavations, and what she sees as current trends in the discipline.

Maybe she just hasn’t done her homework, reading what has come before her.

Maybe her publisher, Duckworth, didn’t want footnotes or bibliography – they often look to a cross-over market between academic research and broader interest.

Maybe it doesn’t matter – it’s only the ideas that count. Cornelius is always telling me to lighten up.

Am I getting to be an old reactionary shouting out the standards of scholarship? That you should always recognize the work of others. Perhaps I would simply have celebrated the book’s effort to cross disciplines – a very difficult task – if it wasn’t for an email sent round my department by Maud Gleason recently. She was calling for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false citation – saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from. The matter is really not one of standards for the sake of standards. Maud got me thinking about academic community.

Shoddy research and scholarship often hides behind the publisher’s desire to have a clean read without all the distraction of saying where your ideas come from. The pressure upon academics to deliver publication is considerable and I am suspicious that a lot of what Jennifer discusses is too familiar to be the result of convergent thinking – her coming from literary studies and the reception of classical heritage. And it does look good to appear to be the one with the insight to pull together the big picture.

There is a profound danger in the celebration of the individual that this sloppy work represents. This is what bothers me. The intellectual freedoms of academia depend upon us being a group of colleagues with standards, and principally standards that refuse to have our efforts divided. Say where your ideas come from because linking them with others makes them stronger and lends them impact. Plagiarism is a threat becasue it divides; it hides the connections between people and their ideas. (Though I am not accusing Jennifer of plagiarism.) All too many people want to promote division and dissent because it weakens the power of ideas to change – ideas become simply the possession or opinion of one detached academic.

Jennifer Wallace – you should have connected your work with the efforts of others that you clearly know of. Because these are not just entertaining stories. They go to the heart of the contemporary world’s sense of history, of identity, of direction. They matter.

The power of independent research and criticism lies not in the abilities of an individual, but in the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship that alone can give force.

How about that for an enlightenment ideal!

The past is manipulated by people who come after. Memories and re-collections – traces of the past – help make us what we are.

The importance of the past is so clear in the spate of books and articles about the ancient Olympics and their relation to the gathering this month in Athens. A major component of Greek ideology of identity – what is it to be Greek? – hinges on ideas that Greeks today are heirs of the achivements of ancient Greeks who, some say, invented democracy, science, literature, drama, and … amateur athletics.

Are we to believe this? I referred last week to an intelligent piece in the NYT that made a case for the ancient Greek Olympics being fundamentally different to those reinvented at the end of the nineteenth century. This mirrors what some Classicists are arguing and holds enormous implication. There is no fundamental continuity with Graeco-Roman antiquity in the sense of ethnic, national or cultural identity. We are not heirs to any kind of Graeco-Roman achievement by virtue of our identity, however conceived.

What are we to do about such social memory and manipulation?

Often it doesn’t matter much – falsification, selective and biased recollection are everyday matters of memory. We prop up our senses of self worth with all kinds of rationalization. And what is wrong with Greek pride? Nothing.

But it is surely appropriate to realize that the case for continuity of identity is an absurd one.

A satirical antidote to the Olympics from FontShop.com – [Link]

These perhaps unexceptional insights are taking hold in archaeology. First. The archaeological past is as much about invented tradition as what happened in the past. Second. People have always fiddled with their pasts. I have worked hard in my own writing to emphasize that these are at the heart of history and archaeology. And with the Greek Olympics in mind I have had a look again at some recent books on my shelves.

In a critical academic line Keith Brown and Yannis Hamilakis, old collegues of mine at University Wales Lampeter, have edited (2003) a rather esoteric collection called The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories. – the case for contemporary and contested identities shaping the past. [Link] It is excellent and represents a healthy critical trend, though an unpopular one – people don’t like their sense of self being questioned and detached from pasts held so dear.

There is another trend to comment on how Greeks and Romans similarly manipulalted their own pasts. Ancestors mattered back then too. Hardly surprising perhaps, but some societies do pay little attention to their history or past, and the form that the relationship takes can vary considerably. It is an old theme – archaeologists and art historians have long been fascinated with cultural traditions. But the trendy intellectual vogue of the last ten years has been the connection between “social memory” and “identity”.

John Boardman, one of the grand old men of classical art history, who specialized in churing out turgid but cheap and accurate guides to all aspects of Greek art, has topped his career with a fine book called The Archaeology of Nostalgia: How the Greeks Re-Created their Mythical Past.

[Link]

And then there is Sue Alcock’s Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories. [Link]

She does a great job of connecting memory with material traces, with monuments and “landscapes” (a heavily charged and ideological concept). Presents case studies from Graeco-Roman antiquity – the Greeks and Romans did indeed manipulate the past for political and ideological ends. She looks at early Roman Greece, the land of the Messenians (where Sparta’s slave helots came from) and Crete (after the Minoan bronze age).

But in spite of her introduction which outlines a comprehensive case for scrutinizing past-present relationships, she confines her thoughts to antiquity. While she argues that archaeology can shed light on ancient attitudes towards the past she does not seem to appreciate that this demands we scrutinize our own archaeological relationship with the past – if only for the sake of intellectual coherence.

She does not treat archaeology symmetrically – archaeology is something we practice now as part of our relationship with the past, as well as being about the traces of past societies.

This is disappointing. For I only see two respectable attitudes to the archaeology of the ancient Greek past. One that questions the continuity and stresses difference. The second that uses the past ironically, symmetrically, as a mirror, to help us see ourselves for what we are – manipulating, for good or bad, what is left of the past, even if we think it is archaeological or historical science telling us that the ancient Greeks invented amateur athletics.

And this is the only respectable future for Classics. Not a celebration of how we are heirs to the amazing ancient Greeks and Romans. But a reflection upon how our relationship with Graeco-Roman antiquity has been so important to us, and often quite blind.

(Thanks to Jody Maxmin for putting me on to this.)

Main point – the Greeks were very different to how most people imagine them to be. There is no direct line of cultural continuity from antiquity to the present – that was all a blatant fallacy propagated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

And so, whereas today’s Olympic committee prefers to ”celebrate humanity” (an official slogan of contemporary Olympiads), the Greek athlete wanted only to be celebrated himself; it was his one ticket to immortality. It is difficult for us today to conceive of the extent to which a ferocious competitiveness fueled so much of Greek culture, virtually no aspect of which was not somehow organized into a competition; for the inhabitants of a city-state like Athens, civic life was an endless stream of athletic contests, poetry contests, drama contests, beauty contests. For the Greeks, whatever was worth doing was worth competing for — and winning at. It’s no accident that three out of the four Games on the ancient circuit were established early in the sixth century B.C. — precisely the historical moment that a new kind of warfare, which required an extraordinary degree of cooperation among infantrymen, was beginning to predominate in Greece, replacing old-style battle with its displays of individual heroism. It’s as if, lacking a military outlet for their competitive energies, the Greeks inevitably poured them into these new athletic events. But the desperate rawness of the battlefield — and its stark, all-or-nothing logic — was never very far beneath the surface.

Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.

I commented on the cultural and academic hype around the Olympics back in March [Link]. Cornelius (Holtorf) objected then that the propaganda is harmless

Why take all this kind of propaganda so seriously? Why not enjoy that the past is taken up for something we like rather than something we dislike? Why not revel in the wonders of actualistic journalism and desperate commentary? I sense a certain desperateness in standing up for a past that is long gone, and an uneasiness with popular discourses.

I see it instead as a duty to stand up, not for some image of a past eternal, but one that is part of an edifying relationship between past and present. The relationship is all too often an abusive one that works in favor of interests no one should find tolerable.

Louise, Mike, and Andy decide to attend the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting at the Renaissance hotel in Chicago, April 29-30, 2004.

Heritage is the biggest free-market think tank – in fact the biggest think tank period – in Washington. It has a budget of $25 million and provides “talking points” to conservative Congressmen who don’t have time to do their own research. Heritage is a kind of “grey eminence” behind Congress, and very actively helps direct U.S. politics.

And what a bunch of radicals these folks are! Like the rare ultra-anarchist, they basically want to “smash the state” – but unlike such anarchists, they’re rich, not so rare, and succeeding.

Heritage is very up-front about these goals. Paul Krugman and others have pointed out that the goal of the Bush administration seems to be to bankrupt the federal government; the Heritage Foundation indeed announces this vision up front: “Too many conservatives lose hope,” writes Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner. “They doubt that the liberal welfare state can be brought to collapse…. In short, they doubt that The Heritage Foundation’s Vision for America can be achieved.” (By “liberal welfare state” he means Social Security, the Dept. of Education, and so on.)

Thursday, April 29

In order to register (free) for the Heritage conference , we’ve formed a right-wing think tank ($12 for the domain name). We’ve also registered for (free) table space, so when we arrive at the hotel we immediately go looking for an open table to display our wares: a foot-long Roman warship ($30) and some insane “position papers.” We eventually find an empty spot, next to the Cato Institute and not far from a table featuring books like Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death and How Union Bosses Have Hijacked Our Government.

The event teems with 650 smiling, friendly and blandly-dressed people hired by well-endowed think tanks fighting “socialistic” ideas: the Jesse Helms Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Atlas Foundation (based on the books of Ayn Rand), the Society for the Economic Study of Religion (which, a young representative tells us, has determined that Pentecostalism is the best religion for a free market, and so sends missionaries to Africa), and so on.