Housed in a remarkable new building (architect – Michael Graves) in Den Haag, Netherlands.

So much more than an archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes was a fascinating latter-day antiquarian. This is why her academic archaeological colleagues tried so hard to make her marginal.

Hawkes was notorious when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. I was quite taken by the range and scope of her writing – archaeology correspondent for the Sunday Times in London, she produced academic papers, children’s books, guidebooks, monographic theses on ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean, lavishly illustrated commemorative volumes, poetry, plays, a script (for a wonderful movie about Barbara Hepworth), and a novel. To me she was the archetypical representative of establishment high-cultural sentiments and aspiration, socializing with the well-to-do literary and art world. Coming from the post-industrial working class wastelands of NE England, I was suspicious of how she clearly belonged to the class that considered the past their own, and it wasn’t mine.

Her 1968 essay in the journal Antiquity, “The proper study of mankind”, was something of a touchstone in the science wars in archaeology that Chris Tilley and I discussed in our book Reconstructing Archaeology (1987). Like us, she was strongly critical of scientism – the faith in the universal application of an absolute scientific and technical reason that was popular in the social sciences in the 1960s and 70s. Like us, but in a very different way, she was concerned with the way New Archaeology was diminishing a human understanding of the archaeological past and present. This is all still very relevant in the ongoing crisis in the Humanities [Link] [Link].

Christine has been arguing for a long while now that Jacquetta did more than popularise archaeology. I agree.

I see her as an antiquarian

- held by no disciplinary ties, free to range through all kinds of learning and expression in dealing with the past-in-the-present, with the folding of times past and present in our senses of place, with the complex negotiation of contemporary human identity through material trace and ruin.

Hers was a sensuous engagement with the past in the present. She was an exponent of the archaeological imagination. With a very distinctive voice, she offered a paradigm of creative engagement.

In this she cast a shadow over those who laid claim to an engagment with the archaeological past that would see behind the artifacts to the people of the past. I recall well the small-minded arrogance of some of her contemporary archaeologists – the likes of Glyn Daniel, Stuart Piggott and Christopher Hawkes, the grim negativity that lay behind their superficial humanism, behind their claim that they breathed life into the relics of the past. Daniel may have celebrated the delights of the cuisine of Britanny; Stuart Piggott may have entertained the notion of a social history of prehistoric Europe; Christopher Hawkes offered magisterial synthesis, but all exuded a deathly dullness that alienated so many of us.

A new edition of her fabulous book A Land, a prose poem about England, Britain, or rather Albion, appears in the Collins Nature Library – superbly reviewed last week by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian – [Link]

… Her book is filled with strange rhymes, recapitulations and elective affinities: she explains how “Jurassic water snails” helped “medieval Christians to praise their God”, how ammonites influenced the plate-armour of 15th-century knights, and – who would have thought it? – why the hypertrophied nose antler of an early species of deer supplies a precise analogy for mid 20th-century western European consciousness. Hawkes possessed the synecdochic imagination of the gifted archaeologist, able to reconstruct whole beings from relic parts, and the near-mystical vision of the crime-scene investigator, able to attribute complex cause to simple sign. …

Jacquetta Hawkes and Robert Graves in Mallorca, 1950, no doubt discussing his work “The White Goddess”

Bradford University’s Hawkes archive – [Link]

Talking heritage with Rob van der Laase [Link] – the way the past is cleaned up, filtered, extraneous matter removed – that we might more appreciate a clear narrative – that this did indeed happen here.

Here – a remarkable untouched remnant of a meeting place, famously associated with Dutch journalists. And far removed from the picturesque old houses by the canals.

- a catch phrase from our work in theatre/archaeology, explored in Experiencing the Past (1992) and featuring now in my new book “The Archaeological Imagination”, out this coming week – [Link]

In this light, Ewa (Domanska) has referred me to a fascinating, an intriguing new project at Goldsmiths London:

Forensic Architecture.

Here is how it is described:

Existing at the intersection of architecture, history, and the laws of war, Forensic Architecture refers to an analytical method for reconstructing scenes of violence as they are inscribed within spatial artefacts and in built environments.

It employs new modes of technical visualisation to generate complex knowledge about the spaces and histories of violence; transforming mute architectural products into active material witnesses that can be interrogated within public and legal forums.

As derived from its Latin source, forensics is the art of the forum; the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering.

Forensics includes not only the speech acts of humans, but also the interpreted speech of things, mediated by an expert or a set of technologies. The art of forensics thus includes both field-work and forum-work. Although forensics is generally understood as the application of science in service to the law, that is to say, as an investigative tool within the field, forensics is also a tool of persuasion that uses science rhetorically to speak within public and legal forums.

The project of Forensic Architecture brings different modes of technical modelling and analysis to bear upon violations of human rights and the laws of war as they are registered in and by space. We go on field studies to examine architectural, urban or infrastructure damage, but we also examine the remnants of violence as captured by different media – satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies, GPS mapping, photography, activist and media footage, ground penetrating radar, mobile phone videos, CCTV footage, maps, and eyewitness reports.

There is little yet to show, but there are glimpses of what this research team may get up to – “Living Death Camps is a project that seeks to investigate the multiple relations between two concentration/death camps located in the former Yugoslavia and the problems associated with commemorating their histories …”

It’s actually too literal for me. Too superficial, to use the project’s own metaphor set. Another new book, due out over the coming summer and written with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor, and Chris Witmore, Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (University of California Press) completely unpacks the innocence that the Forensic Architecture team seem to accord their visual science, their technical modeling and analysis, the remnants of violence captured by different media – and in spite of their recognition of the rhetorical, persuasive function of forensics. (And our critique is far from a rejection of the potential of new hybrid digital media.)

The conceptual toolkit, the Lexicon of Forensic Architecture, is drawn from what typically gets called postmodern cultural theory. The familiar Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Serres are present, with forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, media theorist Laura U Marks, members of the project. Really quite interesting. Definitely a project to watch.

So why am I not particularly enthusiastic?

Here is how the project proclaims the value of the concept of Fetish:

Fetish | Godofredo Nobre

The idea of the fetish refers to fabricated material objects of composite nature that negotiate heterogeneous cultural territories. I’m currently writing an extensive piece on it, but I’m not appropriating the term for myself (structurally following Pietz), as I prefer to construct the savage object to allow the fetish to travel into non-human ecologies. But depending on how you are constructing the lexicon, the previous definition can be enlarged to emphasize the main thing, that the fetish is not as relevant to speak of objects, as it is of cultural negotiations where objects take a primordial role.

The work of William Pietz on 16th and 17th century Portuguese colonial encounters is so provocative, especially given my predisposition towards Marxian notions of commodity fetishism and alienation. But this definition, this gloss, this gesture towards a notion (is it any of these?) says nothing to me, and particularly when I am thinking of material witnesses and international injustice. This is academic vacuity, with a touch of self indulgence thrown in. And alongside remote sensing and GIS? Theory is my passion. We need it. This is just too poor. It does damage to theory. They even cite Deleuze on an archaeology of the present; this is as superficial as its stratigraphic metaphor. The thinking behind the project is either opaque or just doesn’t measure up to the challenge set to represent injustice. I hope this changes.

James Street Cardiff UK -site of the murder of Lynette White, St Valentine’s Day 1988 – [Link]

Anyway, here is a taster from my new book (and at least I explore there the genealogy of this field of forensic architecture, its roots back in the eighteenth century and earlier).

Let me return again to place/event, the engagement with a site focused upon the question: this happened here; or did it, could it have? The pursuit of such a question comes to involve a forensic attitude at the heart of the archaeological imagination. I have already mentioned the notion of the archaeologist as metaphysical detective. The associated forensic attitude is an attitude toward location. It can be summarized as follows: at a scene of crime anything could be relevant. And anywhere could be a scene of crime. Faced with a scene of crime, the task for the detective is to identify, gather, and analyze evidence on the basis of which may be established a forensic case. But it is by no means obvious, often, what is evidence. Anything, potentially, could be evidence. … Anything could matter. It could be that the key to a case is an overlooked fragment or trace, a hair that could be analyzed for DNA, scratches by the door made by a unique pattern of nails upon the criminal’s boots. Nothing is totally uninteresting to the detective. Then there is always doubt whether there is enough evidence to warrant the reconstructed sequence of events and attribution of motivation. Evidence won’t speak for itself; it needs mobilizing in a case, and this requires the detective to document the evidence.

Photography is the medium most perfectly suited to this forensic project. Let me introduce Walter Benjamin’s comments on photography and the antiquarian imagination (in his Little History of Photography (1931), and see Carlo Salzani’s very astute study, The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective, New German Critique, 2007). Eugène Atget photographed the streets and buildings of Paris in the late 19th and early 20th century. In his essentially documentary project he collected series of views based on themes such as the ornamental features of seventeenth and eighteenth-century buildings, signage of bars and cabarets, apartment interiors, street views. They take a documentary stance; Atget emphasizes content over his own presence to the act of photography. His photographs were intended for the use of painters, illustrators, decorators, set designers, and members of the building trades. Most of Atget’s scenes are curiously empty of people, communicating an ironic stillness at the heart of urban life. You find yourself asking — why was this photo taken?

The Marxian critic and scholar of the Kabbala, Walter Benjamin, discovered Atget’s photographs in the 1930s, along with the French surrealists. With others he thought that Atget photographed the streets of Paris as if they were scenes of crime. A scene of a crime, too, is deserted, as in Atget; a scene of crime is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With the likes of Atget, photographs become a paradigm of evidence for occurrences. They are a paradigm, a method, or a standard, because, of course, nothing may have happened in the photographed scene to actually prompt the photograph. The potential of these spaces is enough to justify their photographic capture and documentation. They are a species of space where we ask — what happened here? As much as a focus on a past happening, this attitude towards place is about potentiality. We ask — what could have happened here? We imagine and look forward — what could happen here? In the future. Risk. Danger. Prospect. Far from being empty spaces, these are place/events, with a history and a future.

Benjamin described this potentiality as a hidden political significance. This species of space demands a specific kind of approach. Free-floating contemplation, an appreciation of the aesthetics, the balance of composition, as in a classic picturesque landscape, is not appropriate to such places. There is nothing to recommend them. But they do stir the viewer; we feel challenged by them, in a negative sense. Effort is needed to bridge the voids opened in this kind of space. The photographs beg for captions; Atget usually supplies them, and often they document the later demolition of a building.

Consider what happens when you don’t add captions to such photographs. Evidence (1977) presents a project pursued by Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan. They gathered a collection of photographs from archives that document scientific and industrial research and development. They refused the obligation to supply subject matter, to complement the images with identifying captions. The photographs in their book are completely mysterious and quite surreal, often threatening and disturbing, as you ask — “Just what exactly was going on in these experiments?”. They are like stills from the X Files.

The water at the local restaurant in Palo Alto – imported from Wales, bottled in the squire’s house, Llanllyr, in the village of Talsarn, where we once lived (next to the house where Dylan Thomas wrote “Under Milk Wood”), before we moved to California.

Here is what the company web site says about the madness of shipping bottled water from Wales to California [Link]:

We take our responsibilities to the environment, society and the community very seriously. In fact Llanllyr Water Company mirrors the ethical aspirations of the Llanllyr Farm over the generations. The farm has been accredited organic by the Soil Association for many years, but more than that it has never been farmed any other way.

Our sources are entirely sustainable. We have Organic Farmers and Growers accreditation for both our line and processes and have established programmes to maximize the use of recycled materials including now over 25% of the glass we use. We are UN Global Compact signatures.

We play an active role in regional activities and have won its Exporter of the Year Award for the last 2 years and were judged its Business of the Year in 2007.

Much is made of history and tradition -

We bottled our first water only a few years ago in 1999, but behind our highly contemporary product there’s a truly fascinating story that begins literally centuries ago!

We know the same sources have been providing drinking water for over 800 years because a Cistercian nunnery was established on the site in 1180 and it survived for over 400 years, The history of the site goes back much further than that though.

Saint Madomonoc is said to have established a hermitage on the site in the 6th century and indeed evidence remains there to this day which is a magnet for historians from all over the world.

Untainted, organic, remarkable in its global reach, pure, the result of local entrepreneurial acumen, rooted in deep history; and the bottle itself – contemporary:

The original SOURCE bottle won the industry’s worldwide award for the Best Concept in Glass in Milan in 2002 and recognition at design awards in London, New York and Dubai followed.

And then the look improved. Source was probably the first brand to popularise the now well known and user friendly ‘wine style’ bottle. The stunning and easily recognizable black (still) and silver (sparkling) label combined with it to win Class Magazine’s 2007 Best Soft Drink design award. And our pioneering use of black and silver for still and sparkling respectively is being copied so often it might soon be an industry norm!

So people lived here in the past and had enough water! OK they were nuns and maybe a saint hung out here promoting Celtic Christianity (on the rise again today). Sustainable? Well there’s certainly a lot of water in Wales. Our garden up the road had eight springs. Contemporary design? A nicely styled label indeed.

It comes to mind that this compression of time and space is part of what Tony Giddens called

time-space distanciation

- a major feature of cultural experience.

There’s something of a history to selling Welsh water worldwide under a “designer” rhetoric. Ty Nant, bottled at Bethania, not far from Llanllyr, also travels everywhere because of it its rather distinctive blue glass bottle.

Here’s another perspective on this appropriation of water – the compulsory state purchase, evacuation, and drowning of the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley – a gross act of colonialism to make way for a reservoir to provide water for Liverpool in England (Brith Gof, the performance company I served with, produced a TV work about this – Y Pen Bas | Y Pen Dwfn [Link])

This global reach, rhetoric of quality and distinction, appropriation of resources, references to achievement and social standing, is age old. After my recent visit to Sweden [Link] I can’t help but think of an earlier prehistoric global age – the bronze age of the second and early first millennium BCE. The key components of the ideological world of the warrior retinues that traveled over Europe in search of metals, adventure, achievement, is encapsulated in the ships, armor, weaponry, musical instruments, mythology, ritual, iconography common across Europe, and so evocative in the rock art of Bohuslän in western Sweden.

Cosmo-political coding

as Johan Ling calls this -

where cosmos, the arrangement and order of the cultural imaginary, meets poltical economy.

Boat, warrior, sword, shield, lur (the curved horn), sacred animal

We held the presentations on Monday. Today we shared feedback – it amounts to a great concise commentary on the strengths of the d.school process and design thinking, and more generally on studio-based/project-based interdisciplinary learning.

What we like:

• listening to others, leaving oneself behind, getting out of the classroom on field research and ethnography
• teamwork where everyone has something to offer, because everyone is an expert in some way
• sharing – where the social skills of getting on with others are as important as technical expertise and domain-based knowledge
• copying good ideas rather than being anxious about ownership and proprietary knowledge
• empathy – experiencing someone else’s world
• the challenge of documenting and representing someone else’s world – the importance of visualization, of using media well
• getting on with things – building prototypes, with less emphasis on anticipation and preliminary analysis designed to get things right first time
• being open to change and modification, getting things wrong as well as right, learning from failures
• embracing the flow of process as much as end product
• process as improvisation
• collaborative critique – regularly sharing progress with other teams and teaching teams

Presentations of the team projects – covering recycling, sleep management, making friends, interdiscipinary learning K-12, energy efficiency, digital privacy, personal tutoring, personal finances.

Communication skills are crucial – sharing ideas with team members, listening to people in this human-centered design process.

Effective use of media – we held a session last week on designing great presentations – [Link] – graphic design is not just about making it look good.

I always connect this with the politics of media – communication here is about representation – the fair representation of other people’s views, beliefs, needs, desires.

I made this point, though rather weakly, in my entry on cultural property for The Oxford Companion to Law (2008)

Cultural Property

refers to artifacts considered to be of significant cultural or historical value. Typically these are monuments, archives, archaeological finds and sites, works of art and craft, and items of ethnological interest. Their value is related to claims that they have a special connection with a community, such as a nation or ethnic group, that they are integral to the identity of such a group, and that they provide significant information about a group or about humanity. ‘Cultural heritage’, and its close cognate ‘patrimony’, are collective terms for such objects and sites. For example, an ancient Mayan sculpture may variously be valued as cultural property because Mayan civilization is claimed as ancestral precursor to some contemporary communities in central America, because it is part of a history of human artistic achievement and can thereby command a significant price in the art market, because academics study the artifact as evidence of the history and workings of Mayan society, or because such items are collected by museums.

There is disagreement over how old objects and sites need to be to qualify as cultural property. The terms ‘cultural property’ and ‘cultural heritage’ also include and frequently refer to intangible artifacts such as historical events and narratives, myths and legends. Nor is the definition of what particularly constitutes cultural property at all static; the field of cultural heritage is characteristically one of competing claims to significance, value and ownership. For example, a Mayan sculpture legally acquired by a European museum and held in their collections may become subject to a claim of ownership by a community or state in central America, with demands for the repatriation of the work to its claimed place origin or indigenous home.

The most significant recent international instruments dealing with cultural property are the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which has 100 signatory nations, and the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

Pressing issues regarding cultural property include:
• the loss of ancient sites because of development or deliberate destruction;
• the looting of ancient sites and the associated illicit trade in antiquities;
• repatriation claims for cultural property to be returned to its place or people of origin;
• protective and regulatory legislation dealing with imports and exports of cultural property.

There is considerable disagreement around some key questions such as:
• ownership of cultural property — can anyone own the past?
• sovereignty — is there a place for state involvement and ownership?
• is collective ownership of cultural property defensible?
• stakeholder interests — who can claim ownership and on what grounds?
• cultural identity — how is identity connected with cultural property?
• (professional) ethics and responsibilities — how should museums deal with claims for repatriation or with the art market?

In competing claims to access and ownership, five arguments are used to justify the possession of an item of cultural property:
• identity — where the property is claimed to be part of cultural, religious or other identity.
• origin — the item is argued to belong where it was made or comes from.
• ownership — the item is claimed as legal property.
• curation — in the absence of any other care, possession is claimed by those who have looked after an item.
• academic expertise — a party may claim an item on the basis that they can make the most of its educational value to inform people of their heritage.

These various arguments are based on different views about the rights and responsibilities of interested parties and imply different regulatory mechanisms. Such views include:
• that collectors have a right to own pieces of the past;
• that the past should be in the care of officially sanctioned stewards or custodians (not private individuals);
• that people generally should have a protected right to preserve, foster and enrich those aspects of culture that represent their identity;
• that it is right and responsible to maximize the retention and transmission of information about the past and about culture.

The difficulty in achieving settlement of competing claims to cultural property on the basis of clear definition and regulation of such rights, responsibilities, interests and arguments has led to the treatment of cultural property in terms of conflict resolution, with a focus not upon a specific kind of artifact or property but upon diverse local relationships with the remains of the past that beg negotiation around shared human values, such as the significance of the past for the present.

- I end by directing attention to the active process of connecting past and present, and the conflicts and negotiation this always invloves.

Ian Hodder has recently been connecting the critique that heritage is about property, ownership and descent (inheriting what is yours), with an emphasis that a right to heritage is about rights to participate:

This focus on the ownership of the past perhaps derives from the longer assumption that nation states have sovereign control of the heritage within their own borders. The discourse is so pervasive that we have perhaps turned a blind eye to the uncomfortable evidence from anthropology and history about the difficulties of making links between cultures and people. Culture is now seen as hybrid, flexible, in process, contextually changing, and transforming.

…

So the question is not about descent, but about the extent to which people participate in heritage, or rather, how much they have the capability to participate in it (in terms of access, education, performance, appreciation, religious experience, employment, and so on). And it is a question of recognizing that others have capabilities that may require access to the same monuments. I have tried to set cultural heritage in the frame of our rights and duties towards each other. I have tried to move away from the notion that it is the care for the object that is the duty, and to say that the duty is towards other participants.

In turning cultural heritage towards well-being, the capability and functioning approach to human rights as advocated by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen is of value. In their approach to comparing the wellbeing of people and nations, the focus is not on how many resources people have or on how satisfied they feel, but on what they are actually able to do

So Ian emphasizes that

Everyone has a right to participate in and benefit from cultural heritage that is of consequence to their well-being.

An easily accessible version of this case is – Cultural Heritage Rights: From Ownership and Descent to Justice and Well-being in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 861–882 – [Link]

I suggest that

seeing heritage as design, as cultural labor, enables us to address coherently and practically how we deal with pasts that are active in the present

Lindisfarne Castle, 2008 – Tudor Fort turned into weekend home