Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

(This is the report on our previously noted visit – [Link])

Bianca Carpeneti and Michael Shanks visiting Alan Campbell MP at the House of Commons

Our current work on the archaeological project at Binchester UK includes a major focus on cultural resource management (CRM), as it gets called in the US. We’ve spent a great deal of time visiting people and sites around the Northeast in an effort to get a sense of the region and how it handles a landscape that is so saturated with historical and cultural sites. We welcome local volunteers (our key partner, Durham County Council, receives a grant for this from English Heritage). Our project is also somewhat unusual in that it is a research excavation (rather than prompted by real estate development), and serves as a summer school, while also explicitly aiming to develop cultural facilities (visitor access to the Roman past) in an economically depressed region. We are particularly interested in how an area — be it town, county, or region — incorporates stakeholder communities into this management process. We’re very much aware of recent moves in the world of heritage management, such as the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2005) (see the entries last year in this blog [Link] and [Link]), that are shifting attention to sharing and disseminating cultural assets, as much as protecting and preserving tangible and intangible heritage. We want to explore how these changing attitudes play out in practice.

In pursuit of that, we went to London to meet with Alan Campbell MP for lunch in the House of Commons. As a member of the last Labour UK Government, a leading political representative in the north east of England, and a historian, Alan offered a valuable perspective on our research. Our discussion focused on local and regional identity, culture and economic development in the region. In particular, we were concerned with how these topics inform our excavation at Binchester and our archaeological survey of the Roman borders.

As we see it, CRM is fundamentally about the relation of economic interest to personal experience – the shape of people’s experiences, stories of people’s lives, how and what sources and records are acquired, what is made of these records. We believe these things direct an individual’s cultural values. Ultimately, we must ask: where are these different cultural values taking us?

We took up the topic of cultural value and put it to Campbell – what role for history and archaeology in regional development, in a region like the north east of England? To frame our discussion, it is worth highlighting several of the notable movements in the world of CRM, especially in the Northeast.

The likes of John Schofield, our colleague at the University of York and latterly with English Heritage, the government agency responsible for archaeology in the UK, have stressed the connections between heritage and tourism. Tourism is a service sector that contributes about £7.5 billion to the UK’s GDP (contrast the motor industry – £5.5 billion). Heritage is here quite an asset. We might aim to make Binchester a tourist honey-pot, along the lines, perhaps, of Vindolanda to the north. John also points to a more dynamic notion of heritage that we very much support.

The Faro Convention places a premium on heritage as cultural action, that is, how heritage is best utilized in a variety of contexts, from vocational training to local planning and sustainable management of the environment. Moreover, cultural enrichment is proposed to go hand in hand with economic development. This notion and its implications should not be overlooked; cultural enrichment is not an incidental by-product but a catalyst for economic progress. That said, we must also be realistic about the challenges facing such proposals. Below, we outline some of the most pressing ones.

We discussed two major impediments to the UK even signing the convention, never mind implementing its recommendations. The first is the significant opposition, particularly on the political right, to seeing the UK as part of a European cultural landscape in the first place; and notions of UK national sovereignty and identity are invoked against policies coming from European agencies.

One of the most significant challenges to initiatives like Faro, though, is the current economic downturn that so many institutions (public and private) are struggling with. When push comes to shove, it is much easier to cut spending for a visitor center than a nursery school. As a result, regional development agencies are being abolished and instead regional development in the UK is now being focused on public-business partnerships. This throws into sharper focus the choice: just who is going to pay for a new story of the Roman north? Different values indeed.

Alan particularly raised the question of how regions are changing in the UK as well as in Europe (typically taken as a continent of regions that don’t neatly fit into nation states). The Northeast is one of the few distinctive regions left in the UK, given social mobility, a post-industrial economy centered on financial services in the south east of England, and globalization. But just what is an authentic north east regional identity? Is it knowing the song “The Blaydon Races”, or cherishing stories of Roman frontiers, border reivers, and latter-day north eastern industrialists like the Stevensons and Armstrong? Alan rightly, in our view, questions aspects of “Geordie” identity, many of which can be argued as being quite artificial eighteenth and nineteenth century inventions (Hobsbawn and Ranger’s classic work “The Invention of Tradition” is very pertinent here [Link]), or connected with broader global historical trends, particularly industrialization. He is much more concerned to look beyond regionality to more fluid articulations that lie at the heart of identity politics. We like this.

Alan pointed to the crucial changes in class culture over the last 40 years that informed, for example, the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. The occupational class communities that lay behind the political parties of most of the twentieth century have dissipated. New Labour shifted attention from old and static notions of identity (shipbuilding = industrial working class = Labour) to aspiration – you could still be Labour while aspiring to achieve what were traditionally seen as middle class and even conservative ambitions and values. The promise was to give people the space to shape their own identities, freeing values from inherited ideologies, looking forwards not backwards, harnessing identity (class membership, political affiliation) to hope and improvement.

Crucial changes might well be echoed in areas besides class culture. The old extractive and manufacturing industries of the north east, which gave the region so much of its character, have gone. Alan’s constituency is North Shields, home to some of the great shipyards of the River Tyne. Shouldn’t a government contract for a new Royal Navy carrier come to the Tyne? But we live in a post-industrial world of a knowledge and experience economy. Ships are not just welded steel and great engines. It would make more economic sense to build the actual hull somewhere cheaper and instead have the IT systems, that are now the core of the military, designed and built in the UK. This requires fostering links between knowledge institutions like universities with business corporations as well as government agencies. A knowledge economy begs the question of the role of knowledge/research institutions and suggests attention to the transfer of knowledge.

Is there any room in this scenario for archaeological and historical heritage? Not as long as we continue to design and think of cultural projects in subject specific terms. Instead, we need to re-think the way that CRM happens and design projects that are more intimately tied to such broader trends, as Faro actually suggests.

A successful knowledge economy is tied to innovation and creativity. The related shift to delivering not products but experiences, in what Joe Pine first called our experience economy [Link], throws emphasis upon how people desire rich cultural experiences and will choose one product over another on that basis. Innovation, creativity, rich human experiences are rooted in certain kinds of environments or, more accurately, cultural ecologies. Some cities, for example, have long offered such a cosmopolitan milieu that fosters innovation through vivid cultural experiences and opportunities.

Creating such rich environments is the work of the urban planner and designer (see the recent entry on the City and Port of Rotterdam – [Link]). History and heritage, as well as research and educational institutions, are crucial components, as is widely acknowledged. Introduce a dynamic notion of identity, such as we have sketched, and there emerge some fresh suggestions for archaeological projects such as ours.

Let’s work through an example.

We give support at Binchester to a very active reenactment community – enthusiasts who, on their weekends, dress and act like Romans. Most are very concerned about accuracy and authenticity: they have just the right gear. The narrative frame for their performance is typically the old one of empire and military occupation – Roman soldiers and attendant communities at the frontier. In spite of the authenticity of the reenactment (accurate details of dress and accoutrement), what we often witness is, arguably, a misinterpretation of life in the Roman north, a misunderstanding of the military in antiquity. Certainly the likes of Richard Hingley (one of our Principal Investigators at Binchester) and David Mattingley are questioning the nature of the Roman empire. Richard has headed a project, Tales of the Frontier [Link], that explicitly aimed to share this reevaluation. Michael is writing a text book with Gary (Devore, another Binchester PI), presenting a new model of the ancient political community. We see Binchester as part of such a reevaluation.

We really need to ask – What has any story of Roman times got to do with (regional) identity in the Northeast? This question opens up many possible avenues, given that people construct identity within such a wide and varied network of encounters: as they actually experience themselves, their memories and identities, their commitment to local life, their sense of prosperity, or not. How do such stories enrich the local cultural ecology, in the sense above?

Icons of identity? Romans in the north (?) and the Durham Miners’ Gala (2010) – [Link]

Bianca is suspicious of focusing our heritage work on the presentation of collections of artifacts, with attendant stock narratives, shoehorning people into stories of “the way things were”, as authorized by academic authorities. If we connect identity to aspiration, and not “the way things were”, we should establish what people’s aspirations are and offer history and archaeology that informs and enriches the future. Telling the story of Binchester begins and ends with contemporary people.

This is precisely a political process of representing a constituency. Listening – so that our academic expertise in working on the evidence of past lives speaks to people now. More than listening – we are putting the case for deep ethnography of an archaeological project, locating it within its contemporary cultural landscape. And acting – delivering cultural goods fitted to enrich people’s experiences.

This is just that kind of process of human-centered design promoted by this blog [Link - see the category design matters]. We suggest that seeing archaeological heritage management as a design process gives actionable form to the growing acknowledgement that community involvement and the consultation of stakeholder interests are central to heritage management.

The past is only vital when future oriented. And, symmetrically, the past is the basis of vital innovation, creativity and cultural prosperity. We should see archaeological sites and collections less as objects of stewardship, subject to protection and conservation, and more as cultural infrastructures – places, resources, facilities that foster creativity and innovation, because they help orient our aspirations and hopes for the future.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was established to inspire industrial design. In our Revs Program at Stanford [Link] and [Link] we aim, within the context of our engineering and design schools, to create a car museum that is simultaneously a design studio. This is how disciplines like history and archaeology can connect with a knowledge and experience economy – the academy as a studio for human centered design, and where the human necessarily involves the academic Humanities and Arts.

Textures of everyday life? An interior at Beamish Museum of the Living North [Link] [Link]

Thus far, our exploration of the northeast continues to affirm the idea that it is the “human-centered”-ness, the humanity of the past that makes it resonate today. The reenacting Romans we met this year at Binchester were actually more interested in the textures of everyday life than in an historical narrative of conquest and occupation. They were humorous and very human, rather than historical, in their performances. At Beamish, the Living Museum of the North [Link], there is little reference to chronology or historical drama in a visit to its reconstructed farms and town from the last couple of centuries; instead there is a very poignant and human experience of lifeways and quotidian texture now lost and gone. Andrew Birley, heading the excavations at Vindolanda [Link], has focused the new site museum less on the history of the Romans in the north, and more on just these kinds of texture. Because this is the humanity of the past that connects and enriches our appreciation of what we have, what we have lost, and what we stand to gain.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it well in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), their diatribe against the rationalizations of modernity and the coming horrors of European world war:

What is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of past hopes.

A panel discussion with Marisa Gallagher of CNN. The topic was the future of journalism and the place of narrative. Mobile Media Design – Is the Medium Still the Message?.

The contemporary crisis in journalism is simple. With everyone able to witness and publish their experiences of newsworthy events, what role is there for the skilled, and expensive, journalist who is likely not present at the event?

Marisa showed us CNN’s superb new project – Open Stories – where anyone can make their own (online digital) contribution to an ongoing news event. [Link]

The role of the (CNN) journalist is here to

curate content.

I reiterated my now well-worn distinction between narrative and storytelling,
where narrative is the structure or grammar of character, plot and event, and

storytelling is the performance of narrative.

Storytelling – the articulation of performer/storyteller, place/event, audience/commentators, where narrative structure is (potentially) adapted to suit the particular performance. Storytelling can accommodate deep critique of the familiar formulaic frames that we all know so well and which shut down our appreciation of the unique human experience of place and event.

The (future) journalist – enabling, curating such performative events.

So reminiscent of my childhood in a shipbuilding port in the north east of England. My history and childhood seems to be black and white and written now in silver crystals.

The text is nearly 500 pages long and full of detail, backed by a long guide to further reading. The story is indeed all-too-familiar and rather melodramatic: powerful rulers lording their way through history, plotting and scheming, indulging their whims and desires, against a background of threat, oppression and poverty.

Amenhotep III wearing the khepresh, or Blue Crown, New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty 1391-1353 BCE

This last weekend I posted a comment on the exhibition of Olmec art at the de Young in San Francisco – [Link] In contrast to the extraordinary things on display, I find fault with their presentation as “ART”, when that notion is embedded in a very elitist set of practices and institutions that serve the interests not of humanity in general, but of commodified contemporary cultural property in the hands of a few. I am disappointed when I witness academic colleagues acting as gatekeepers to this world of ART, offering what seems like transparent description and account, in labels and catalogues, when actually that very language is shutting down options, telling you what you are seeing, indicating how authorities write about the past and other societies, about creativity and making, and therefore how the educated, but non-expert, viewer should see and talk. My point, one that I feel the need to regularly reassert, is that we may miss the opportunity to learn about ourselves and others, when the story of history is presented as basically already known, only requiring repetition and transmission to new generations by knowledgeable experts.

In the de Young exhibition the story was that of the artistic creativity of an ancient civilization – a universal story of rare human talent. Nevertheless, much on show was quite strange, and witnessed a very fragmentary record of Olmec times. In spite of my criticism of the simple frame applied to Olmec art in the exhibition, the things broke that frame – there was a tension between the familiarity of the human and animal physiognomy of the figurative art, the expressions, the postures, the props and accoutrement of power and divinity, and the sense that there was a lot more going on that we had little access to (and, not least, because the archaeologists and art historians were reluctant to take us there.)

Let me say a little more about this tension.

Tomb of Khnemomosi, Eighteenth Dynasty, c1370 BCE

Toby Wilkinson’s account of three thousand years of ancient Egypt is a universal story of the rise and fall of infamy, power and aggrandized kings.

Ancient Egypt has too often been portrayed as exotic, a distant and strange world obsessed with opulence and death. Toby Wilkinson would have us believe that it was far more familiar, and in a rather wearisome way – his imbroglio of political struggles that reads like a political history of the last hundred years, where the rule of the notorious and “heretical” pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten, can be likened to that of North Korea today. I can find no strangeness in his story at all.

The clear scholarly language of the Olmec exhibition catalogue and labels is quite precise and descriptive, but stops short of a strong narrative frame, other than that of archaeologists discovering stuff in Mexico and arguing about it. Wilkinson’s formulaic narrative is delivered, very successfully, in chatty and journalistic prose, definitive (“this is the way it happened”), few ifs or buts. It is in that style so familiar from the narrative non-fiction of the contemporary book trade and media industries today. This is no doubt because his editor at Random House has an eye on the market.

I think we are here looking at a failure of the archaeological imagination

It is, I believe, a failure of scholarship to impose the present on the past, to find our own reflection in the rich experiences of others living in different societies. Yes, we do have to translate ancient worlds into terms we understand, but that also forces us to question our own terms of understanding. This is the actuality of archaeology – the way that both past and present change when they are brought together in something like an archaeological encounter. The best accounts are those that let both past and present be what they are as they also offer new insights into the past and into the way we look at our own potential and future.

This also involves witnessing loss, that the past is left in pieces (was it ever a coherent whole?) by refusing a definitive account. The challenge is to weave together loss and reparation, fragments and filling the gaps with account and narrative – exploring the constant tensions between the familiar and the strange.

It is not really appropriate for me to compare Toby Wilkinson’s book with Jan Assmann’s cultural history The Mind of Egypt. Assmann’s book is an academic monograph, though it has appealed to a wider audience. But it does interweave the familiar and strange in the way I have described, avoiding easy formulae and stock narrative, offering a translation of the remains of a lost world, its metamorphosis under the never-ending challenge we all face to watch and listen carefully, as we make sense of the rich and different human experiences of others.

Extraordinary pieces. Extraordinary presence.

It was the first time we had come across them first hand. Here the monumental heads, zoomorphic basalt thrones, engobe ceramics, jadeite celts, are gently spotlit in that subdued ambient lighting and minimalist staging typical of the art museum.

So what are they about? This is the pressing question that comes out of encountering these manifestations of a largely forgotten Mesoamerican society that starts contemporary with New Kingdom Egypt and lasts through to Classical Athens and Republican Rome a thousand years later. The exhibition doesn’t try hard to give an answer. The organizing principle is “discovery”: there are evocative photographs of archaeologists standing by colossal statues lying in the mud. A few information panels tell you that this was a hierarchical society with deep religious beliefs and a divine cosmology, as if it wasn’t obvious. The descriptions of the artifacts are similarly in that curiously tautological prose of the connoisseur, describing precisely what you are looking at:

The crouching figure with his hands resting on his knee is has the cleft head, almond-shaped eyes, and snarling mouth that define both monumental and small-scale composite creatures in Olmec art. Flanking the face are the pleated ear ornament’s that Coe and Peter Joralemon associate with the Olmec water deity. Ann Cyphers suggests, however, that the figure’s features, which are both human and zoomorphic, imply it is undergoing transformation. The headdress is marked with a pair of the scalloped designs also seen on the Cleveland Museum of Art axe, and the figure wears a pendant with the X motif. The back of the monument is hollowed out into a U shape, similar to one of the trough stones of the drain line …

So much for iconography. The catalogue, from which this description is taken, adds an account of the provenience of the piece, San Lorenzo, and possible connections with the water management of the site (what was quite clearly a fabulous system of drains!). This does not appear in the exhibition which stops short of offering anything in the way of a narrative or explanatory account of what these artifacts historically witness. We are simply confronted with the artifacts themselves and their considerable power.

Of course this is the purpose of the Art Museum – to display art objects – “masterworks” of human creativity. The context is that of the scholarship of the art connoisseur and a story of human achievement.

I have criticized many times before this transformation of manufacture and making into aesthetic value, this displacement of the work of makers millennia old into a one-dimensional story-for-all-time (great artists have produced great works of expression since time immemorial).

EG – [Link] – here I argue that this turns art into cultural property.
EG – [Link] [Link] – here against the way that this notion of art fuels a certain kind of art market.

But both Helen and I left with something more positive than this disappointment that the curators had failed to take us into the world of the Olmec, preferring instead their own scholasticism. It was that a lot of this was indeed familiar. We have seen before those polished greenstone celts in the villages of early European farmers (the exhibition calls them axes, but I’m not convinced). We know well the wide currency of slip-coated pottery with this kind of incised decoration. We know these sneering lips and thick necks.

No – we’re not about to propose that Egyptians brought their pyramid building to the Americas across the Atlantic in reed boats. But there are patterns in prehistory – wide-ranging and long-term connections and processes. Alois Riegl dealt, in his nineteenth-century way, with the migration of decorative forms – arabesque, lotus and palmette, across vast distances and time, from ancient tomb painting to medieval carpet (I am fascinated with his book Stillfragen, 1893). City life, including that of the Olmec, has really only a short history of five thousand years. Is it surprising to see similar cultural forms that connect with similar experiences of the appropriation and control of surplus goods, similar techniques of power, ascendency and subjugation, similar experiences of everyday life and subsistence?

The exhibition catalogue does offer a richer picture than the exhibition. But I cannot help feel that the project of this archaeology is indeed a universal art history devoid of local context: the catalogue, very scholarly in its way, can’t even get the broad chronology right and states that the Olmec were contemporary with Middle Kingdom Egypt!

The discovery of the past

David Petts has posted an x-ray made by Jenny Jones of one of the artifacts found this summer – [Link]

It didn’t look like much when it was found. It turns out to be a stylus – for writing on wax tablets.

Evidence for literacy in the last days of empire. A personal item, likely as not. To convey the mark of the writer. Another of those silent witnesses in our contemporary archaeological sensibility, attuned to traces and vestiges, memory fragments asking for reconstitution.

I find this kind of thing so evocative.

Some summary points from my keynote.

How could I not respond to Kenya Hara’s wonderful opening keynote and his emphasis on the dialectic of making and its deep connection with human being? [Link]

The range of research techniques and methods that I have seen gathered under the headings of design thinking, design research, design anthropology, ethnography in industry and similar terms is truly impressive (a neat introduction is the IDEO method cards – [Link] available as an iPhone App – [Link]). The expertise of so many practitioners is exemplary. Academic anthropology can look very narrow and complacent in comparison.

I followed Kenya in focusing less on these processes of research and more on the object of ethnographic research – people, things, places. After all, a most significant drive to research is to improve human-centered design.

I have set myself something of a mission over the last year or so to raise questions about just what the human in human-centered design is. And I suggest that there’s no better place to start than with the Humanities, that treasure house of study of human qualities, experiences and cultural achievement. Questions then of ontology – of human being.

Corinthian aryballos (7th century BCE) – a total social fact – the distribution of human being through things

Archaeology encompasses the Arts and Humanities, the Social, Human and Natural Sciences, and offers a long term perspective. I told a few archaeological stories about things like this little perfume jar (to be found also on my wiki web site – [Link])

Message – think of things as assemblages, bundles of materials, features, potentials, affordances, values, even different times – think of how they gather and connect people and possibility.

Message – think of the human as being distributed through these assemblies and gatherings.

(This is why it is so right to hold that better design will come from an emphasis not so much on a particular product as on what it may offer – focus more on experience, interaction, service, platform – the assemblages.)

A word that means “thing” and captures all this is the Latin RES.

And it is entirely right to think in a collective way – RES PUBLICA is the commonwealth, the state, the assembly of the people and their goods, cultural and political ecologies. Keep in mind the missing masses in these assemblies that are our human being – not just things, but other species too, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses.

Have a look at the range of meanings and usage of RES – [Link]

In such an ontology of distributed human being, the apparent substantiality of a person or artifact is simultaneously vacancy, emptiness, openness perhaps; and the past haunts, present in its absence. We are no longer faced with the problem of connecting, for example, tangible and intangible, materials and immaterial values, pasts and presents, functions and emotions, people and their goods: these are already connected. The task is to discover how.

Under such an ontology, how do we perform research? What is the way, the DŌ of ethnography, in the terms of the conference theme?

• look to the qualities of human being – the quiddities and haecceities, the qualities of sustainable human living, and tell their story, lest we forget

• methodology – don’t look for tight systematics – plunge IN MEDIAS RES, into the imbroglios – be pragmatic and opportunistic

• the challenge is one of re-presentation (in the political sense too), of giving voice, speaking-for, witnessing

• consider research (ethnographic, design, contextual, whatever) as intervention in the RES PUBLICA

• intervention in cycles of ideation/design/manufacture | exchange and distribution | consumption | reuse | discard – a political economy

I ended with an exhortation to keep in focus the human in human-centered design – a purpose, a care to enrich human being.

Vesalius (16th century) – inhabitation – dissection reveals the architecture of human life, set in the ruins of the past

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] -

A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center.

It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact.

Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality.

Goethe among the ruins of humanity’s childhood

I was tempted to synthesize, from this mélange, some elements of a theory of ruin.

Vectors

Articulation Between past and present; flows and continuities, also interruptions. Actuality, as the conjunction of past/present. Temporal topology, the non-linear folding of pasts and presents. Presences, and absences, voids.

Materialization Artifacts and architectures as the metonymic and metaphoric materialization of past in the present.

Inscription Epigraphy, engraving, iconography as a particular presence of the past. Token or icon? Textual sources as ruins. The contrast between inscription and mute relics.

Categorization Catalogs of things. Attributions to date, place, to the makers in systems of order that make sense of entropic ruins and fragments.

Quantification Just how much remains? Can there be too much memory? Ruin and letting go of the past.

Collection Gatherings of ruins and fragments. The collection as microcosm.

Authentication Is the relic genuine, or a fake? What is such authenticity?

Historicity The power to preserve, to commit to memory, to narrative; active processes of recovery, conservation and destruction or elimination. Historicity as our sense of place in historical narrative. The role of hindsight. Agency – the ability to articulate past and present, to (re)construct, to repair the ruin.

Reflection Self consciousness of time and entropy. The ruin as memento mori.

Theatre/archaeology – the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real-time event – from Brith Gof Theatre – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995 – [Link]

[Link] - The Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria – my project with Alain and colleagues.

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

Tim Brown has commented on the design of the exobiology in James Cameron’s much-touted movie “Avatar” – [Link]

I took Molly and Ben to see it again this weekend.

There is certainly something captivating about the creatures and environment of planet Pandora. Tim talks about the plausibility of the design work that makes it easier to grasp the idea of designers creating new life forms, as well as technology and gadgets. Spot on. I would take that further and say “lifeworlds”. Design operates with processes and systems, not on discrete artifacts. And things can take on life themselves. I am particularly reminded of Stephen Jay Gould’s celebration of the creativity of natural selection in his book about the extraordinary prehistoric creatures of the Burgess Shale – “Wonderful Life” – palaeobiology as strange as this exobiology.

Karen Carr’s reconstruction of the Burgess Shale Cambrian fossil world for the The Field Museum

More exobiology

Here again we see that intimate connection between science fiction and archaeology. Both often model lifeworlds and work to bring them alive, here and then, there and in the future. [Link - Tolkein and archaeology][another link]

The plot of Avatar is basically an otherworldly “Dances with Wolves” – when army Lieutenant Kevin Costner joined a native American community in the face of an expanding modern state. The theme is the recognition of the value of ways of life that are threatened or incompatible with an aggressively consuming modernity. A couple of the comments on Tim’s blog make this point.

There’s another archaeological point to be made here. Pandora is a fabulous Utopia. As an archaeologist, I am all too aware that actually very few human societies have lived anything like the Navi – “in harmony with nature”. When we have enough information to judge, it is clear that every human society has had a damaging effect on the environment. The challenge to live sustainably is going to require deep questioning of this feature of human behavior. [Link - Charles Redman on Human Impacts]

The old apple tree today. Last year – [Link] Also – [Link]

More – archaeographer.com

And he has made me think again about our world today, about the big picture.

I wouldn’t have looked at the book if I hadn’t met Mike in Holland (we are connected with the Economic Development Board of Rotterdam [Link]). Mike joined the WTO when its critics were most violently arguing against its corporatist and pro-capitalist market-centered ideologies; he led the talks from Seattle to the Doha Development Round and along the way his effigy was burned several times.

I have a great deal of sympathy with the argument that neoliberalism, after Thatcher and Reagan, is a great scourge of our times (see David Harvey’s excellent “Brief History of Neoliberalism”. I have even covered the debilitating impact of this ideology on archaeology and cultural resource management [Link]

But my experiences of new labour in the UK, the necessity of working on changing ideas in changing times, warn me that we should beware of easy judgment. It’s too easy to label and libel.

The title of his book is “Saving globalization: why globalization and democracy off the best hope for progress, peace an development”. Mike argues for the virtues of choice in an open society with open government, and, yes, for an open and liberal market in a world focused on growth that should celebrate the achievements of globalization.

It’s not that I agree with everything that Mike says. Far from it, actually. He does show a vital commitment to what can only be called fundamental human values, with an infectious, even optimistic outlook. He also reminds us of the vital power of an internationalist outlook such as that which energized the labour movement from its inception in the ninettenth century.

In Stanford Strategy Studio for the last 18 months Doug Carmichael (Stanford MediaX) and I have been chairing seminars, conversations that address current matters of common and pressing human concern, such as regional and global development and environmental change. We are not seeking to share an expert diagnosis of the ills of our times, plotting lines of remedial action, forecasting and strategizing. We are working with a process that allows contemporary concerns to be reframed, to be located in a broad view of humanity and human history that nevertheless allows a place for the individual and the local. As an archaeologist and anthropologist trained in Classical scholarship I believe in the importance of taking a long term view on how we got to be where we are now, tracking trends back deep into antiquity and prehistory. Globalization in the European bronze age. Not because there we will find an answer, but because such a frame prompts a far more creative outlook.

Mike takes just such a long-term view. He plots the genealogy of what he calls the “big ideas of history” – democracy, independent courts, the separation of church and state, property rights, a professional civil service, civil society. Through our conversations with so many concerned people, Doug and I, appropriately both humanities trained, think that it is crucial to ground debate and policy in an explicit address to human values and the qualities of rich and rewarding human living.

With such a perspective we don’t have to agree with Mike. It’s not about being right or wrong. It’s about living with, cherishing difference. Democratic thought and practice, after all, is little about consensus. It’s about listening to others and continuing to debate different views of common matters of human concern while being prepared to change even the most dearly held faiths.

Up from Boonville. An old apple tree. Few are now left. The valley is turning from fruit trees and sheep farming to Pinot Noir. We heard that our friends at Lazy Creek Vineyards, an idyllic spot near Philo, have just been bought by a large Nevada-based corporation.

See also a gallery of images at – archaeographer.com

In the tracks of northern antiquaries, summer 2007

Abbotsford, Scottish borders, home of Walter Scott: armor from the field of Waterloo (1815); the skull of Robert the Bruce (cast, 1734).

Davis Monthan Airforce Base – the boneyard of mothballed aircraft.

The BBC have picked up on his argument about neanderthals, language and symbolic behavior [Link]

Prof Mithen thinks the cave- dwellers would have enjoyed the rhythms and sounds made by rap artists.

He said: “People often portray Neanderthals as dull and grumpy but they had a strong sense of music.”

Their songs would have covered emotions such as embarrassment and happiness.

More than words

Prof Mithen told the BBC News website: “All people are musical in the sense that they appreciate it in some way. We all respond to it.

“Music and language developed together. The Neanderthals would have had set songs and phrases, which could not be broken down like modern language.

“They would have used singing, clapping and dancing to communicate their state of mind. They didn’t have words.

“In a sense they were more musical than we are.”

Neanderthals would have sounded rather “nasal” in their singing because of their larger noses, Prof Mithen said.

Their get-togethers in caves helped group bonding.

Prof Mithen said: “There would have been a lot of singing together. Music is still used for a bonding groups today. Just look at football crowds, church choirs or kids in the playground.

I love the picture of the neanderthal (looks as if he’s wearing a denim shirt though) :

Neanderthals – they sang their way through history (photo BBC)

Contrast my comment of another account of dumb neanderthals and this fascinating topic of the coevolution of biology and culture – [Link]

I came to the book because of the upcoming exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, of the photographs of Edward Burtynsky – they foreground massive environmental impacts. [Link]

We need a long term view to fully understand the growing environmental crisis. This requires an archaeological perspective. And the message the book delivers fully justifies a reliance on long-term large-scale archaeological evidence to get the right message about the shape of recent relationships with the environment.

Here are Redman’s main points:

Rousseau’s noble savage is truly a myth. And the modern world is not a radical break with history. This is a modernist myth of our contemporary uniqueness.

Jared Diamond has covered some of the same arguments in his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – Viking, 2004.

But I find Diamond’s archaeology is weak and he relies heavily on contemporary ethnographic and historical examples. Chuck Redman is far more convincing. But look at what Jared Diamond said to the Sierra Club (May/June issue 2005 page 45) (Thanks to Jonathan Greenberg for the reference):

Pat Joseph: Sierra Club Magazine – In “Collapse” you write that the world now finds itself in an “exponentially accelerating horse race” between environmental damage and environmental countermeasures. What gives you the hope that the race may turn out well?

Jared Diamond – Well, the main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia.

Also, we’ve got archaeologists. The Maya didn’t have archaeologists. We have at least the potential to learn from past societies. No other society in the world’s history has had that opportunity.