Proviso: For most archaeolog readers this entry is an example of preaching to the converted. What follows is a response I pinned to a Wall Street Journal article back in April. It is for a different crowd, by which I mean a very general crowd. After being horded by the editorial staff of a couple of newspapers for all of May and part of June it was returned to me with no takers.
It seems the lesson never sinks in, and many mistakes are doomed to be repeated. In the least, without recourse elsewhere, such concerns, even if they are delayed concerns, may be aired here.
A recent sound bite run by the Wall Street Journal (later picked up as a feature story by Yahoo News), entitled “Load up the Pantry” points out that buying in bulk and storing up food makes good financial sense. Given the current rise in food prices the short article suggests that maybe it is time for Americans to start stockpiling food goods. The reasoning goes as follows.
Foodstuffs, readers are reminded, are tied to a global market. If the price of rice inches up in Cairo, Bangkok or Manila, then it will follow suite in Chicago, Boston or Miami. Moreover, high rice prices will spill over into other goods. Cereal, milk, cheese, bananas, ground beef, chicken; the article emphasized how food inflation is higher than the returns on your money market fund. So, why not take this occasion of rising food prices to explore different investment opportunities? Why not indeed?
On the surface “load up the pantry” seems like a sensible recommendation. However, before everyone piles up their grocery carts, buys a new deep freeze for the pantry or crams rice into the hidden recesses of their closets, there is another side of the story which we must consider. As an archaeologist, I would like to share a scenario about the potential consequences of hoarding food during episodes of ‘scarcity.’
The lesson is one offered by archaeology, well to be more precise, garbology.
From 1973 to 2005 William Rathje ran the Garbage Project out of the University of Arizona where he was a Professor of archaeology. The Garbage Project took a very different approach to the study of consumption. Faithful to a maxim of our current era, ‘what we say we do rarely matches up to what we do,’ the project focused on discard patterns in garbage. You claim to drink only 4 beers a week? You laud your efforts at recycling? Well your trash says otherwise.
As non-destructive geophysical methods become an increasingly popular tool for archaeological investigations for reasons of economy and site preservation, educational programs struggle to incorporate these methods into the standard archaeological curriculum. A large part of this struggle stems from the fact that geophysics is an entirely separate discipline that, like most professions, requires years of training and experience to master. What then should the typical archeologist (who cannot necessarily devote years of additional specialized study) know about geophysics? In the interest of addressing this question, the Brown University Environmental Geophysics Group in cooperation with the Artemis A.W. and Martha Sharpe Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, also at Brown, has been working for the past two years to incorporate near surface geophysics into the archaeological curriculum at the university. The developing pedagogical model presented here as a result of this cooperative effort, focuses not on turning budding archaeologists into budding geophysicists, but on training future archaeologist to collaborate more effectively with geophysicists, paving the way for better interdisciplinary research and cultural resource planning. This collaborative teaching effort began with undergraduate students, but is now filtering into the graduate program through a newly developed workshop series.
The joint endeavor began in 2006, when Professor Susan Alcock, Director of the Joukowsky Institute, invited geophysicists from Brown's Department of Geological Sciences to conduct a non-invasive survey for an undergraduate archaeological field methods course. Dr. Robert Jacob and I conducted the survey early in the fall semester of 2006-07, using two-loop electromagnetic induction and ground penetrating radar methods. We later returned to the field site to conduct a demonstration for the students. Finally, we produced a report that was incorporated into the general site report compiled by the students and course instructors. While we enjoyed the collaboration, and the students seemed interested in our activities, we questioned how much the students actually took away from this type of interaction. Our research group decided that if invited back the following year, an effort would be made to engage students more fully in the process geophysical site assessment.
Philosophers of Technology are not a well established bunch. While they form even less of a ‘tradition’ of study in Europe, they do take their earliest progenitor to be the Continental thinker Martin Heidegger (Achterhuis 2001; Ihde 1983, 2005). It seems strange that thinking carefully about what stake technologies have in society should not have found earlier impetus. After all, tool-making has up until recently been synonymous with being human (classic summary in Mumford 1967). And as early as Plato, technological devices figured prominently in lessons on the ‘good life’, involving the role of techne (esp. in the Republic VII). The major reason appears to be that philosophy, no less than science, has on the whole been swept up with the instrumentalist rendering of technology; as the application side of scientific R and D (Scharff and Dusek 2003:3-6). The predominance of an analytic tradition in the UK and North America meant that technology fell through the cracks between epistemology and ethics, between how knowledge is obtained and how it should be used. Even the Continental tradition remained cast in Comte’s persuasive model of technology as applied science; though many had turned sour on Comte’s optimistic technoutopianism (Comte 1988).
This is why, in his characteristic irreverence, Heidegger bypasses well worn metaphysical trails and goes straight for the essence of technology (Harman 2007). (Well, ‘straight’ is definitely a matter of opinion given Heidegger’s abstruse writing.) He prompted us with the question of what is it to be in the midst of all of our technological doings (Heidegger 1977). Similar to Marx putting technology at center stage, yet developing neither a strong technological determinism nor a societal determination of technology, Heidegger’s character of technology is ambivalent. There is a mix of optimism and pessimism. There is the contrast between craftwork and modern, technologically assisted labour. In this romantic view, ‘traditional’ crafts gather together humans and nonhumans into meaningful activities. Borgman (1984:196) aptly terms these ‘events’ of craftwork focal things. Heidegger’s early discussion in Being and Time doesn’t, however, give us much to extrapolate from to our own modern, technologically immersed environments; who even has a jug laying about? When he expands his consideration of technological things in his later, famous essay, he does provide more contemporary examples of how modern technology turns everything to stone, so to speak (1977). Technology serves a cultural way of being that wills humans and things to be ‘standing reserves’, or causes, for manipulable ends (Feenberg 1999:183-4). This is technology as enframing, and contrary to craftwork this type of being with technology closes-down our insight into, or awareness of, the world around us. We will degenerate through this relation with technology into narcissistic controllers, hung up on the power of our subjectivity. I think there are interesting implications in Heidegger’s pessimistic depiction of technology which could usefully be expanded to the reign of ‘social' constructivism in the academy (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), as well as to pressing environmental and economic problems (these latter courses have, in fact, been suggestively pursued by ‘Deep Ecologists’ and ‘Buddhist Economists’; Naess 1973, Schumacher 1989).
I want to keep with thinking about technology, though, in view of our own dealings with new technology, and, specifically, the emergent role of new media for archaeologists. In fact, in view of what’s before your ‘window’ right now. Archaeolog has reached the milestone post of 100 contributions. This seems to be a most opportune time to reflect a bit on what sort of technology archaeolog is as a form of e-publication. Like Heidegger’s successors in the Philosophy of Technology, emergent digital media in archaeology is a relatively new phenomenon; its practitioners and ideas concerning its roles unconsolidated. It is an exciting time. Yet it is important to anticipate where mediǟrchaeology will go. We certainly have valuable signposts from both Heideggerian and reflexive archaeologists to encourage trailblazing these questions. So, do the mantras of ‘user generated’ and ‘user customization’ associated with new media really limn the narcissistic degeneration and auto-absorption that Heidegger pessimistically ascribed to modern technologies? Does it enframe in ‘Microsoft windows’ our relations with each other?; will we be left with virtual ‘de-worlds’? Or should we look to Heidegger’s later thought (1966) where he suggests that through a passive revolution we can attain a more positive, ‘free relation’ to technology? A relationship of distance which “will become wonderfully simple and relaxed” (1966:54). Later work in the Philosophy of Technology, especially that focused upon computing and internet technologies (Dreyfus 1979, 1999; Heim 1997; McCluhan 1966), seems to have incorporated Heidegger’s mixed message and oriented for a destination off-the-map combining ancient skepticism, Enlightenment optimism, and Romantic uneasiness (Mitcham 1990:32-33). E-publication in archaeology, and blogging more generally, has received just such a sort of mixed assessments.
A conversation at the Metamedia Lab with Torin Golding (avatar), the creator of ROMA, the largest archaeological site in SecondLife.
Digital technologies are changing the nature of scholarship. Far from an exception, archaeology too is changing. It may be that archaeology is traditionally thought of as a 'down and dirty' profession, done 'out there' in the field, the popular/public image of an archaeologist-at-work - we even like this conception of the 'rude scholar', equally at home before a bookshelf or a mountain. At the same time it is a discipline with a particular history of technophilia. For a set of closely related reasons (epistemological and ontological), it is especially beholden to technological desires. Why? By some accounts bridging the gap of 'record' to generalization, technology, specifically the tried-and-true instruments of technoscience, were to assure the objectivity of 'second order observations'. The complex - 'polysemous' and rich - quality of archaeological materials could be transformed through instruments' reproducible procedures into 'data'. They were neutral devices. We can count with/on them. Most often this technology visualizes the results of such algorithmic alchemy.
Indeed, archaeology has also been one of the leading fields in conveying the 'stuff' of the archaeological site and landscape in visual form. More than most disciplines, archaeologists have been at the forefront of developing and strategically deploying and thinking about visual media. For the discipline, visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. From GIS maps and query databases to stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches to obsidian hydration composition graphs to photogrammetry, site and feature photographs and theodolite maps, little of archaeology can be conveyed or argued without visual media. This is particularly so with a discipline that records as it irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remains at hand are our visual media. These become the guarantors of what was once 'out there'; the anchors to what we say. Unfortunately, archaeologists too often restrict their usage and familiarization with visualization to GIS or 3-D 'fly-throughs'.
This legacy, perhaps more prominent in North America and the U.K., brings us to the current 'new' technologies of digital media. Some Archaeology and Media type readers are becoming available to archaeologists. Most of these books on media tend to have anachronistic arguments. Perhaps for reasons of 'viability' in the publishing world, or because of the still strong influence in Britain and the States of viewing media not in its technical capacities but as a powerful mechanism of the culture industry's status quo. Asked about media and quite a few colleagues would talk about popular reception in mainstream media, the role of television and radio(?!). Some are still stubbornly instrumentalist, especially in their view of GIS, AutoCAD and VR applications.
This is not (yet) a media manifesto for the discipline.
We do believe that the digital turn in both society and the discipline holds promises for increased public interest and engagement. Not simply through the limited (old Web 1.0) idea of internet 'access', but through the emergent Web >2.0 platform enabled actions of: user-generated content, mixing, mashups, database proliferation, etc. Yet it also may threaten the 'boundaries' of the discipline through the dispersion of archaeological information across vast networks not beholden to peer-review or other established measures of quality and accuracy.
More conference proceedings - particularly at WACs and TAGs and CHATs - cull papers on new media and other internet based technologies. There is the estimate that a new blog is born every 1/2 second on the internet; a good number (see Witmore's March 1, 2006 entry) dedicated to archaeology. No project has yet been entirely devoted to the issue of the increasing ubiquity and convergence of digital media in society and its demonstrable impact upon archaeology. So in the setting of an on-line journal dedicated to archaeology, it seems an appropriate time to look at some of these new media in detail - with the features and interactivity that only a blog such as Archaeolog can provide. So in this initial installment, we are going to hold a discussion about SecondLife.
Interest and use of this on-line gaming-cum-social-network phenomenon in archaeology is emerging. Some of this interest has been shared already on Archaeolog (see Tringham's November 19, 2007 entry). Metamedia and Stanford Humanities Lab also collaborated early on with new media artist Lynn Hershmann to explore how to animate archives - link. Not just a game for an isolated group of bug-eyed, monitor masochistic techies, SecondLife brings up many salient issues for archaeology: what is the nature of representation; what is accuracy versus imaginative dissonance; how do we get people to commit to visualized information; is the partially immersive the way forward for World Wide Web 3.0; how do we engage differently with digital heritage; what is remixing and co-creation of the past? To illumine many of these concerns for the future of the past, we sat down with Torin Golding, the avatar of the creator and manager of one of the earliest and largest archaeological sites in SecondLife (SL). In the first part of this discussion we will simply highlight some of the parameters for understanding the buzz around SL; present some demographics and other facts. To really get the detail, an ethnography of digital culture would be requisite (for a partial account see Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by T. Boellstorf). For now we will give SL in broad-strokes and hope that most users of Archaeolog are somewhat familiar with the avatar world. For those unfamiliar or who have just wandered aimlessly a bit, Torin Golding's experience of getting started will provide a field guide of sorts. The next part (1.2) of the discussion will get at the practicalities of running an archaeological island in SL, as well as frame the pressing issues relating to the digital futures of the past.
A growing number of recent studies seek new ways to engage with landscapes (see references). The Carrlands Project (www.carrlands.org.uk) fits aptly into this category as it explores the complexity of the Carrs in southeastern England through the combination of music, dialogue, and composed sound recordings. The format of this presentation is a website that hosts a series of 12 recordings divided among three specific portions of the Carrlands: Snitterby Carrs, Hibaldstow Carrs and Horkstow Carrs. Each recording is approximately 15 minutes long, treating the ‘historical,’ ‘cultural’ and ‘physical’ variations that make up this diverse region. The creators (Mike P. Pearson, John Hardy and Hugh Fowler) encourage users either to bring the recordings with them to the Carrs to enhance the interactivity of their engagement, or to listen to the audio clips at a distance, embracing the message of complexity inherent within them. This reviewer listened from his office in Providence, Rhode Island. I paid particular attention to the dominant themes that arise out of the scripted narrations and musical compositions that accompany the journey through the flat, marshy, industrial and agricultural terrain.
An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99).
During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often drawn on the most iconic specimen of Greek national imagination, the Athenian Acropolis. I thus soon became aware of two facts: the first is that most tourist guides and official presentations to the site still present to the nearly 2 million visitors per year a sanitized image, a partial, monumentalized façade of only one aspect of the rich social biography of the monument: a version of its classic life, broadly defined. The site was important before classical times, and it continued to be important subsequently, up to the present. Yet, very little of that richness reaches the visitors. Moreover, the site continues to be projected exclusively as a sight, a staged authenticity that is offered to the visitors for almost exclusively visual consumption and admiration. I have elsewhere explored this phenomenon by pointing to this ocularcentric monumentalisation as the outcome of the combined efforts of the photographic and the archaeological (Hamilakis 2001, 2008).
In summer of 2006 I left my job working for Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology to participate in a project in Iraq investigating mass graves for the Iraqi High Tribunal. My primary duty was analyzing "cultural objects" found in the graves of genocide victims. These objects included ballistic evidence, personal effects, and clothing. Clothing offered a particularly interesting window into the lives of the victims, revealing ethnic identity, gender, manner of death and more. Collectively and individually, clothing made a compelling line of evidence for telling the story of crimes against humanity.
Bogolan (mud cloth): This bogolanfini wrapper, formerly on display at a Haffenreffer Museum textiles exhibit, was produced in Mali by Kouraba Diarra and Field Collected by Claire Grace. Photo Courtesy of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University.
Bogolan
I never had much interest in textiles as a category of material culture. Despite this, I found myself learning quite a bit about them. I had enrolled in a graduate seminar on museum studies during my senior year at Brown University. The course focused on developing an exhibit to be displayed in a new satellite gallery of Brown's anthropology museum. Much to my dismay, the course instructors had already decided that the exhibit would focus primarily on textiles. I wanted to gain some museum experience, so decided to continue with the course despite of my lack of interest in textiles. Ultimately, my contribution to the exhibit focused on pre-Columbian textiles from Peru and Bolivia. I considered myself to be more of an archaeologist than an ethnographer, so working with ancient textiles held more interest for me than working with some of the contemporary pieces in the museum’s collection. This was my way around the textile dilemma. After all, my curatorial contribution to the exhibit was archaeological: no touchy-feely interpretations of contemporary clothing here. I worked hard on my contribution to the exhibit, then washed my hands of the whole business of textiles, vowing never to turn back.
Christina J. Hodge, MA, PhD, RPA
Senior Curatorial Assistant, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, Boston University
The Oxford English Dictionary (2008) defines time as a "space" or "extent of existence" and "the interval between two successive events or acts." Timelines exemplify this definition. Entrenched methods of representing time's passage, they assign social meaning as "history." When we come across one in a book, exhibit, or presentation, we comprehend its string of dated moments and selective illustrations. Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption. Even when authorship is unclear, authority is implicit and strong. Imagining the between spaces, the elided events and edited convolutions, takes some effort. Or an intervention.
A timeline of city history is part of the décor of my home subway station, Davis Square on the Red Line in Somerville, Massachusetts. The station was completed in 1984, and most of its interior dates from that time. Structural elements are raw concrete, sheet aluminum, and dark purple-brown brick. The public art program at the station is conspicuously disjointed. Drawings by elementary school children have been transformed into ceramic wall tiles. Casabianca by Elizabeth Bishop is carved discreetly into the bricks of the platform floor. A collection of giant geometric shapes, splashed in now-murky primary colors, stretches above the inbound platform. The collage may or may not spell out "Davis."
Figure 1. Interior of Davis Square Station, photograph by the author.
Xurxo Ayán Vila (Spanish Higher Council of Scientific Research)
David Blanco Míguez (University of A Coruña)
The Internet must be seen as a social phenomenon and its spatial properties should be critically interrogated... Our cultural archaeological production is today implicated in the discourses and contestations of identity, social roles and representations, in new ways, through new media and within new spatial configurations. If archaeologists are to play an active role in the process, and thereby come closer to disciplinary maturity, then we have to understand these processes and their position in the new cyber-order.
(Hamilakis, 2000: 257)
Since 2003 a team composed of a variety of professionals connected with the Landscape Archaeology Laboratory of the Padre Sarmiento Institute for Galician Studies (CSIC-Xuga) in Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain) have been working on the archaeological site of Castros de Neixón - two hillforts located in a small peninsula in one of the Galician rias. In step with this project, an international work camp for young people aged 18 to 30 has been set up. The project has several broad aims: the recovery of the cultural heritage of this area; the design of and display of cultural materials in the Archaeology Center of Barbanza (open to the public since 2002); the promotion of the archaeological area of Neixón as a tourist attraction, and the communication of the scientific knowledge produced by our research to both local communities and society at large.
The project's logo ("Neixón" in Galician is pronounced like "nation" in English)
Scientific interdisciplinarity, work by volunteers in the international work camp, and local involvement constitute the three main pillars of the Arqueoneixón project (Ayán et al. 2007). These mainstays provide the basis for a scientific project that, despite having been designed in an academic context, seeks to permeate the social, economic, cultural and symbolic fabrics of the archaeological area of Neixón.
This paper starts with the question: can rivers usefully be studied as artifacts?
The question may raise an eyebrow or two. For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape. Even in the midst of towns – bordered by buildings on both sides – rivers are often taken to represent ‘the natural’ or ‘the wild’ or ‘the environmental’. They tend to fall within the subject domain of the hydrologist or sedimentologist. In archaeology, rivers and palaeo-channels (traces of former river courses) are susceptible to a barrage of scientific techniques, not so much to the cultural theories applied to other more conventional kinds of artifact.
All three previous movies about Indiana Jones have become quintessential adventure films, together grossing more than $1 billion at the box office alone, not counting associated merchandise and spin-off products like computer games, novels and a TV series. The films were inspired by King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and Secret of the Incas (1954) but created something of their own genre. In recent rankings – two decades after the height of the cinematic Indiana Jones fever – the character still made no. 4 and 7 respectively among ”The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time” (see also here). On May 22, Indy will be back!
There is a Chasidic teaching about the Mezuzah, a small container which encloses a parchment upon which several passages of the Torah are written. The Mezuzah is placed on the door posts of houses and gates. The teaching expands on the placement of the Mezuzah, a place between the inside and the outside. There is a moment when you are no longer inside, but not yet outside. In this in between state, you are gathered up into the G-d Head, the Ain Sof, and made anew. The philosophers in the mystical tradition explore this notion, and consider similar moments, such as when an egg contains a being that is no longer an egg and not yet a chicken. Here again, the Rabbis suggest that this is the moment that the being is brought into the Ain Sof, the Source of Undifferentiated Being, and reformed. According to this teaching, this gathering up may occur at the threshold between any set of polarities, any set of dualities (Omer-man, 2002).
Between the moment an idea for a new invention is conceived and the moment a manufactured product comes off the production line, all work done in design engineering is done through the agency of representation. Representation in the field of engineering design encompasses a broad range of media, including rough sketches, physical prototypes, photographs, engineering drawings, stories, lists, charts, descriptions, and numeric digital files. Given representations central role in design, it would seem that successful development of an engineered product may be largely due dependent on the careful management of the “media cascades” which drive the design process. What does a media cascade look like? What are the characteristics of an effective media cascade? What work, so to speak, does a media cascade do for a design engineer?
The work of the design engineer is to bring concepts into being. A design engineer begins with a notion of something with the potential of existing, and reaches a point when the thing actually exists. Thus, the design engineer plays between the poles of the potential and the actual. Contemporary design theory offers a useful analysis of making representations of the potential and the actual in the design process.
C.K. Theory (Hatchuel and Weil 2002) posits a set of dualities, Concepts and Knowledge in an attempt to fashion a unified Design theory, based on Set Theory. A “Concept” is defined as, “a notion or proposition without logical status”. A piece of “Knowledge” is “a proposition with a logical status for the designer of the person receiving the design.” By logical status, the authors mean something that exists.
Furthermore, Hatchuel and Weil posit a fundamental proposition “design reasoning must always make a distinction between two related spaces: the space of concepts and the space of knowledge.” These spaces are made in relation to one another; K is the precondition of C, and the contents of C can expand the set of K.
How does a design engineer cross the space in between C and K? What happens in the moments when the designer traverses the threshold between Concept space and Knowledge space?
The road to understanding what occurs in this space has several markers. The first I will consider is to be found in the science studies of Bruno Latour. In his seminal “We Have Never Been Modern”, Latour suggests that the quest of Modernism is the distillation of phenomena into dualities, the paradigm of which is seen in Kant’s model of the gulf between “things in themselves” and the “transcendental ego”. Language and objects are likewise separated by an un-bridgeable chasm, which keeps knowing and the objects of knowing at bay. Latour explains that we have never been modern, because we are actually in the work of making “hybrids”, entities which lay between the poles of duality. Our problem, Latour suggests, is that we either fool ourselves into thinking hybrids don’t exist, or we are seduced into believing our real work is the work of purification, that is to say making dualities (Latour, 1993).
“The Archaeological Institute of America believes that Museums can henceforth best implement such cooperation by refusing to acquire through purchase, gift, or bequest cultural property exported subsequent to December 30, 1973, in violation of the laws obtaining in the countries of origin.”
Yet distinguished North American Museums kept acquiring.
And then came the raid on the Geneva Freeport and the seizure of Polaroids showing antiquities that had passed through the hands of the tombaroli.
This photo essay was presented at the Association of Social Anthropologist’s conference in London in 2007. It was part of a panel organised around the theme of “Modernising archaeological tourism: from image conflict to archaeological expressionism” convened by Ian Russell and Andrew Cochrane. Taking up the theme of mentality/materiality, this paper suggests that such duality can dissolve through archaeological/heritage tourism. However the normative impulse that informs the latter cannot be maintained where this non-dualist perspective is to flourish.
This paper has been difficult to dislodge from my mind and onto paper. Something about the subject of the session it was prepared for rather than just my own approach. Materialities and mentalities as a subject spoke directly to me because it finds itself at the interface between archaeology and anthropology, material being in a sense the matter of archaeology while mentalities suggest an anthropological domain. Also perhaps, this is a didactic issue that I am raising: how to teach, or facilitate learning, without simply effacing other teachings or learning?
When I sent through my abstract Ian suggested that I might like to offer a substantive example to illustrate my paper. I replied that I would try to do this while in France researching where to carry out my fieldwork for a PhD.
This is the story of that attempt to illustrate.
I was visiting the department of the Ariege in the Pyrennees. My PhD research is based around an extended period of participant observation in a French commune with a significant proportion of resident and partially resident British migrants. My interest in this was initially prompted by a concern to explore the way in which British migration was activated by a British sensibility towards aspects of European cultural heritage such as Romanesque architecture, deserted uplands and surviving ‘peasant’ traditions. I decided to visit the cave of Niaux in the foothills of the Pyrennees. This cave, much like similar caves in the Dordogne where I had been a guide, was decorated in the late upper Palaeolithic some 14,000 years ago, with friezes of bison, horses and more abstract designs. I duly phoned the cave and booked myself for the 3.30 visit.
As I drove over the mountains to the cave I listened to the radio in the car. I tuned into the French culture programme to which I listened hoping to improve my ‘cultural’ French. The programme was about the destruction of aboriginal rock art by mining interests in Australia and consisted of the witness of various French anthropologists to the effects of mining and the unthinkable demolition of a possible 40,000 year tradition of decorative art. As one of the commentators said:
“Would we, the French, allow Lascaux to be destroyed by such actions? These paintings are at least as valuable”.
Fig. 1 N. C. Wyeth, "Sword Excalibur Rises From the Lake" (c. early 20th c.)
Malory tells in his Morte d’Arthur epic (c. 1450) that just before the mortally-wounded Arthur passes from this world to Avalon, Arthur instructs Sir Bedivere (Bedwyr) to throw his sword Excalibur into the nearby water. Bedivere does not wish to lose such a precious sword, so he returns to Arthur twice having put the sword away out of sight. Each time Arthur asks what Bedivere saw when he threw the sword into the water. Bedivere lies twice and said the water merely moved. Nearly cursing him, the dying Arthur commands one last time. This time Bedivere obeys and throws the sword as far as he can over the water:
“and there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished it, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.” (1)
Arthur is then taken away to Avalon through the mist by the beautiful women in black on the barges. Their mourning belies Arthur’s last words that he will go to Avalon to be healed and return if possible.
Fig. 2 Aubrey Beardsley, Bedivere casts Excalibur into the Water, 1894.
One aspect of this story in the Arthurian saga is singled out here because it seems to preserve a fairly well known Celtic custom of metal deposits in lakes and marshes if such interpretation of these finds is accurate. In the Celtic world, springs, lakes and marshes are liminal sacred places that are intermediary loci between, among others, the living and the dead. When Arthur’s legendary and to some extent magical sword Excalibur is returned to the Lady of the Lake, this is most likely an excerpted old echo of a longstanding Celtic votive ritual.
