Flickr galleries – [Link] [Link]

Here are some notes accompanying the fascinating and sometimes wonderful pictures.

Nostalgic, Personal, Neglected, Treasured, Rejected: The Other Photography in Archaeology
Colleen Morgan, University of California, Berkeley, clmorgan@berkeley.edu
Our record of archaeological uncertainty is becoming dazzlingly clear; professional-quality digital SLR cameras producing high-dynamic range imaging are becoming the norm on archaeological projects and our photographic archives, once highly-curated collections of “scientific,” carefully set-up shots, have exploded in size and diversified in content accordingly. Along with this extraordinary, high-tech verisimilitude runs a counter-narrative—photography on sites performed by students, workmen, professionals, and tourists using their cellphones. In a session focused on exploring the work that archaeological photography does, I will investigate the hazy, inaccurate, personal, and extra-archival qualities of the archaeological snapshot.

Tintype Portraits – Objects of Self-Imagination
Heather Law, University of California, Berkeley, heather.law@berkeley.edu
For this session I’ll be presenting an assemblage of late 19th and early 20th century tintypes in order to initiate a discussion of the role of portraits as both objects employed in the construction of self, and as artifacts that might contribute to conversations of materiality and personhood in archaeological contexts. The tintype, as the first affordable form of portraiture available to middle class Americans, has the potential to illustrate diverse processes of self imagination made possible by the novelty of photographs as objects of self representation.

Topographic – Photographic: Dialogues with the Recent Past
Thóra Pétursdóttir, University of Tromsoe, thora.petursdottir@uit.no
Photography’s contribution to archaeology is unquestioned. However, its importance in terms of both documentation and representation notwithstanding , it largely holds a secondary value in archaeological discourses. The role of images is to be subservient to the text, to “illustrate” and support, and more active, experimental and “artistic” uses are often dismissed as subjective and unscientific. Using examples from my research on modern Icelandic ruins, I will challenge this hierarchy and show how photography enables alternative and genuine statements about the past and provides a means to make manifest the heterogeneous and ineffable that often is left out of scientific prose.

History Making and Memory Keeping: Photographs as Artifacts of Black Family History
Annelise Morris, University of California, Berkeley, aemorris@berkeley.edu
Founded in the late 18th century by free black pioneers and occupied continuously ever since, my family’s ancestral homestead is also the archaeological site I will begin excavating for my dissertation. With generations of family portraits and photographs available, I’m interested in exploring how photographs are used to create site histories and, similarly, their role in the memorialization of the black experience. For this session, I’ll present a sample of these photographic artifacts discussing their unique visual access to lived experiences of an archaeological site, as well as their ability to represent changing articulations of the self and the family.

More recognition that archaeology is always of the present – because we work not upon the past, but upon what remains.

See also – archaeography.com and archaeographer.com

Seed magazine brings together a unique gathering of prominent scientists, artists, novelists, philosophers + other thinkers who are tearing down the wall between science + culture.

We are on the cusp of a twenty-first-century scientific renaissance. Science is driving our culture and conversation unlike ever before, transforming the social, political, economic, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of our time. Today, science is culture. As global issues—like energy and health—become increasingly interconnected, and as our curiosities—like how the mind works or why the universe is expanding—become more complex, we need a new way of looking at the world that blurs the lines between scientific disciplines and the borders between the sciences and the arts and humanities. In this spirit, the award-winning science magazine Seed has paired scientists with nonscientists to explore ideas of common interest to us all. This book is the result of these illuminating Seed Salon conversations, edited and with an introduction by Seed founder and editor in chief Adam Bly.

[Link - Amazon]

[Link - my site]

[Link - Seed Magazine Issue 12 - with video]

Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with ethnicity, classifying fingerprints to aid forensic detection.

Today Nicole (Coleman) sent me news of the reopening of the Museo Cesare Lombardo in Turin.

Here’s how Nautilus describes it:

The Museum of Criminal Anthropology, dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, has reopened after years of restoration and access to specialist researchers only. The institution was founded by Lombroso in 1898 under the name “the Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology”, documenting his beliefs and research into detecting criminality through physiognomy.

The 400 skulls in his collection, including one belonging to the brigand Giuseppe Villella, were used by Lombroso to develop his theory of the “median occipital fossa”, a cranial anomaly that he believed contributed to deviant behaviour.

On show are drawings, photos, criminal evidence, anatomical sections of “madmen and criminals” and work produced by criminals in the last century. The exhibits also include the Gallows of Turin, which were in use until the city’s final hanging in 1865 and the possessions of a man known as White Stag, a renowned impostor who convinced Europe he was a great Native American chief. “But it is not a museum of horrors,” insisted Giacomo Giacobini, coordinator of the “Museum of Man” project that the Lombroso collection will be part of. Rather, the museum is intended to recall positivistic era in science, in which Turin played a key role, starting with Cesare Lombroso’s work.

Deathmask

The creation of the museum collections involved extensive interdisciplinary research by Lombroso in the fields of criminology, anatomy, psychiatry,psychology, sociology, ethnology, anthropology,linguistics, law, fine arts and medicine.

Lombroso’s own head is also on display, a century down the line, perfectly preserved in a glass chamber.

[Link: the official museum website]

[Link: Wikipedia on Anthropometrics]

From Alphonse Bertillon’s Identification Anthropométrique (1893)

Nicole picked this up from a fascinating site – Morbid Anatomy – its topics include medical museums, anatomical art, collectors and collecting, cabinets of curiosity, the history of medicine, death and mortality, memorial practice, art and natural history, arcane media … . Wonderful!

Tracking Sarah Jacob – Three Rooms

The BBC is reporting what looks like another publicity scam

Fascination with the Holy Grail has lasted for centuries, and now the Bletchley Park code-breakers have joined the hunt. But what is it that’s made the grail the definition of something humans are always searching for but never actually finding?

Could an obscure inscription on a 250-year-old monument in a Staffordshire garden point the way to the Holy Grail – the jewelled chalice reportedly used by Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper?

That is one theory entertained by Richard Kemp, the general manager of Lord Lichfield’s Shugborough estate in Staffs.

Kemp has called in world-renowned code-breakers to try to decipher a cryptic message carved into the Shepherd’s Monument on the Lichfield estate.

The monument, built around 1748, features an image of one of Nicholas Poussin’s paintings, and beneath it the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.

[Link]

As Brendan O’Neill puts it

The Grail – because it is mysterious and has always belonged in the realms of the imagination – is a marvellous focus for the new genre of ‘imagined history’, the idea that all history as taught and recorded is a vast cover-up. Once this kind of idea becomes current, particularly with the internet, it acquires a life of its own – regardless of whether it has any basis in reality.

Again we have here a classic and modernist narrative of overlooked clues, microfragments to be decoded by an inspired forensic imagination in pursuit of the truth that is out there but has been covered up by the state, the church, or ignorance, or by superstition. And at the heart – the artifact, mysterious and possessed of aura, veritable witness of history itself.

It is Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code.

I like the association with the internet’s new media – microfragments in a sea of noise and triviality – and all with lives of their own as we track them down in pursuit of ourselves.

All in all – profoundly archaeological.

My angle – some notions of authentic reality and truth can be quite mischievous and misleading! And lying can be liberating!

It started in the Washington Post – Sure, It’s Real! Real Fake – a report about a Museum of Fakes, an adjunct of the University of Salerno in Italy and its Center for the Study of Forgery.

“It’s not that Italy produces more fakes than other countries,” Museum Director Salvatore Casillo says. “It’s just that we have a deep and old culture and have built up skills in creating originals and skills in making copies. We’re good at both.”

This summer, Italians were twice spectacularly reminded of these venerable skills. In August, a blitz of raids on warehouses, galleries and clandestine printing shops in many parts of the country netted more than 4,000 lithographs, silkscreens, drawings and other reproductions that police say were destined for the modern-art market. It was the Italian police’s largest haul of fakes ever. Investigators in the southern town of Cosenza, where most of the forgeries were collected, promised to donate the haul to the Museum of Fakes.

During the same month, a museum in Siena hosted an exhibition of 19th- and 20th-century works by master counterfeiters. They produced replicas of Renaissance paintings, frescoes, statues and bas reliefs that are astoundingly close to the originals. Carefully copied cracks, grime and missing pieces provided a patina of old age. “In Italy, if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show,” says Casillo.

Precisely – making and copying go together. Just what is the problem with copies/fakes/counterfeits? Only that they threaten the values accorded to notions of individual genius and intellectual/cultural property.

Then Philip (@ philosophistry) put me onto a piece on Boing Boing: PK Dick on reality, Disneyland, and authentic humans – link to the original essay. Like many others I have always found fascinating the way Philip K Dick dealt with the paradoxes of human reality in his science fiction, and particularly their translation into movies.

Here is a taste (that garbologists like Bill Rathje will like)

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly — and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical — given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story… which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

Dick gets into gnosticism, dreams, solipsism and coincidence, but his underlying point, if there is one, and as he puts it, is that

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — you can have all of them, but none is true.

When we first visited Eurodisney (as it was then in 1992) we expected the place to be an inauthentic fake, flimsy. ephemeral, insubstantial. It wasn’t. Toad Hall, presented as an “English” fish and chip shop/public house, was more authentic than many English pubs I know. In the lobby was a fine oil portrait of Toad, a cut above any decorative reproduction. In the bookcase was a genuine first edition of Pope’s Iliad!

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds!

Real antiquarian volumes in Toad Hall. Real? Authentic? Historical fakery?

Jean Luc Picard Fark.com

They talk gobbledygook on Star Trek, but beautifully delivered with conviction. So much of our experience now of performance (including our own) is one of authentic felt fakery.

I have already commented recently on an historical interest in counterfactuals and the value of imagining “what if …?” [Link]

What if Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940? I like this way of thinking about the past because I connect asking the question “what if … ?” with the power of the imagination to change things. Imagining alternatives does actually help make the world the way it is. This is the power of the constitutive imagination. At the heart of our realities are real dreams. (Here I disagree with Dick.)

Cliff McLucas and I once built a positive theory of fakery and lying on this very foundation. Lies are often held to be deceiving and wrong, like fakes. But they can also be quite liberating, as in thinking about counterfactuals and multiple historical possibilities. All you have to do is, ironically, be honest!

“This is a lie: in 1940 the German armed forces invaded Britain.”

Confessing the lie deprives it of its deception and turns it into, here, a counterfactual. Admit to the fakery and the lie (now a decoy) takes you into a world of creative possibility.

[Link - the man who never was]

So why are archaeologists so hung up on rooting out fakery? I think it comes down to notions of property and ownership. Fakes are a problem to archaeologists because they challenge notions of authenticity. And authenticity is so often connected with aura – a religious sense of soul and identity lying within a person or thing – something I would call the uncanny ghost in the machine. I think it is about time we put aside such metaphysical notions and started lying a bit more!

Machines can then take on life, just as people can be fashioned as artifacts. Just look around – the old distinctions are beginning to dissolve with the sci-fi prospects of AI and genetic engineering, as well as the archaeological evidence for us being intimately united with our worlds of manufactured and crafted goods for millennia – we have always been cyborgs!