Fig 1. A surgeon treating a thigh wound. From the original fresco found at Pompeii. Wellcome Images Collection number M0008724. Wellcome Library, London, Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK: England & Wales
In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (25. 85) stated that the Cantabri, an indigenous group of people who lived in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis, devised an elixir consisting of one-hundred herbs that they drank to maintain their health. Pliny’s story is one of a rare few comments in ancient literature that refers to localised traditions of medical practices in the Roman provinces. His statement was the initiating factor in undertaking a pilot study that asked how the native populations of the three provinces of Roman Spain responded to the introduction of Graeco-Roman medical philosophies and practices in contrast to their own healing traditions after the incorporation of Hispania into the empire (1st century BC). This paper gives a short overview of my preliminary findings and explains why it is necessary to consider provincial medical practices in historical examinations of Roman medicine from an archaeological perspective.
unearthed, a major new exhibition featuring prehistoric figurines from Japan, Romania, Macedonia, Albania, and the UK, opens at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich, on Tuesday 22 June and runs until Sunday 29 August 2010.
The exhibition has been developed by the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures and is supported by The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), The Henry Moore Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the British Academy and the Duke of Omnium Fund.
The theoretical positioning for the exhibition combines the collaborative efforts of Douglass Bailey, Simon Kaner and Andrew Cochrane. Ideas are expressed via an exhibition in order to move beyond text and thereby create new opportunities for thought and consideration.
Figure 1. ‘Metropolis Globe New York’ by Werner Kunz, distributed under a Creative Commons licence from http://www.flickr.com/photos/werkunz/3545012600/
This paper briefly summarises recent discussions of the anthropocene by geologists, biochemists, climatologists, and other scientists. It goes on to argue that archaeologists should engage with these issues too.
(Photo by alcomm, 2006. Creative Commons License. http://www.flickr.com/photos/alcomm/217097889/)
Since March 2006 the online-journal Frankfurter elektronische Rundschau zur Altertumskunde (Frankfurt electronic Review of Antiquity) or FeRA has been accessible here. Now in its tenth issue and fourth year, the time seems right for the editors to summarize their experiences on publishing an online journal in Classical Studies (philology, history, archaeology) in order to contribute to general observations on electronic publication in the humanities (Leiß 2006; Koch et al. 2009).
A discussion yesterday with Bruno Latour, after his presentation "Manifesto for Compositionalism" at Oxford, hinged upon how we go about composing our collective world now that 'nature' is no longer an organizing category. The difficulty for analyses is that the modernist notion of nature supplied a related host of distinctions which we routinely call upon in our descriptions. While the discussion and his talk raised various engaging issues for the discipline of archaeology, I want to pick up on his advocacy of abandoning anthropocentricism, and weave a contribution together with the recent threads here on Archaeolog regarding the symmetry principle. The following is a reworking of presentations at TAG-Stanford and CHAT-Oxford, and is prepared for the forthcoming proceedings of CHAT 2009, edited by Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney.
Within archaeology cultural heritage managers are keenly aware of the rich compositions of the pasts at archaeological sites. Or, as I term them, of the many heritage ecologies anchored to these ‘habitats’ of the archaeological imaginary. These sites showcase a bewildering diversity of pasts articulated together. Some of these pasts persist, becoming ensconced in official literature, institutional governance, tourist agendas, or economic markets. Others are only encountered for brief moments at heritage sites, are not sustained and cease to be actors within these ‘ecosystems’.
While most attention is directed to enduring pasts, the World Heritage Site of Teotihuacan, Mexico presents many ‘failed’ pasts. For example, the top of the Pyramid of the Sun forms an important part of many relations with the archeological site. New agers from Mexico come every Sunday to climb its flanks and collect the energy thought to condense at its apex (Figure 1). Groups of Gaia worshipers from North America and Europe leave offerings on top of the pyramid to honor the Great Goddess whom the Teotihuacanos reputedly worshipped. Though they often run into scuffles with the site archaeologists and guards when they attempt to affix crystals to the stones on top, as they did when I met a group in September of 2005. And in October of 2006 the new media mogul Yahoo!, despite all of its preparations, planning and a permit from the Mexican government, had to cancel the lasering of its digital time capsule from the top of the pyramid just two weeks before the international event. Other relations with the Pyramid of the Sun that perhaps should have failed are (for now) sustained. Such as the view from the summit of the Wal-Mart opened in November 2005 and built just 2km away within the site’s protected perimeter (see Webmoor 2008 for a description of the Yahoo! and Wal-Mart relations with Teotihuacan).
Figure 1
There is certainly a multiplicity of pasts gathered with Teotihuacan. Yet not all of these past are equal. That is, like memories, not all pasts persist equally. Indeed, the isotopy of the pasts means they, like memories, are not inherently durable but must be made so. As archaeologists, however, our mandate is to care for these pasts. An obligation to assess, manage and sustain them. In particular, archaeologists and their media are, amongst others, responsible for making certain pasts endure while others perish. Our collective actions with media fix certain orientations to things, make certain relations linger. Epistemography traces the chains of associations that hold, however provisionally, the various pasts together. It explores how certain pasts, how particular sets of relation with things, are made more durable. Implicated in sustaining certain pasts, epistemography reveals the many other pasts that might be sustained as part of diverse heritage ecologies. In doing so, the discipline contributes to the pressing issues of our time by developing an archaeological metaphysics of care. A concern that does not recognize the disassembly between past and present, nature and culture, self and other.
Here is the Prezi presentation for the paper I gave in Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall's excellent "Worlds Otherwise" session during this weekend's TAG at Brown University (click on the image above).
I left this year's Theoretical Archaeology Group with a profound sense of enthusiasm and excitement for the work being presented in that venue. It is clear that many archaeologists are now pushing the envelope of some trans-disciplinary agendas (clear also from the steady numbers of non-archaeologists taking an interest in TAG).
This year there was more emphasis on discussion-oriented sessions. There was more of a willingness to press awkward questions and take risks. There were many exhibitions set up in the stunning new Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. And, do correct me if I am wrong, but this was the first time there has ever been an open bar for all participants at TAG (Michael Shanks did have an open bar at the Metamedia open house last year at TAG Stanford, with Doug Bailey making martinis). In many ways TAG 2010 was one of the best Theoretical Archaeology Groups yet.
Nejib Ben Lazreg, Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunisia
Archaeolog: what are the pressing issues facing archaeology in Tunisia today?
Ben Lazreg: First of all, conservation. Rapid economic development has occurred over the last 30 years. The quality of live is changing. People are building more and more houses in step with the state investing in agriculture, amenities, highways, dams, airports, hotels; infrastructure.
After centuries of sleep, Tunisia has finally woken up: families now want their own house, rather than living with the extended family; traditional shallow plow agriculture with cattle has transformed into modern agriculture with deep plows pulled by tractors; hotels are developing along the eastern coast; industry is now ubiquitous. Any Tunisian city occupies the same strategic place as that of early cities and this has implications as to infrastructural development. Whereas early cities were small, modern cities extend. All this has archaeological consequences.
Accompanying these changes comes looting, moreover. And, of course, collectors, antiquaries, and some museums commission this. Punic lamps are highly priced, for example.
Now for an emerging country Tunisia is one of the archaeologically richest in the Mediterranean; this is exemplified by the density of archaeological sites. With my period, the Roman, alone, there are just over 22,000 sites in northern and central Tunisia—an area of about 600 kilometers north south, by 200 kilometers east west at the maximum. Out of the 22,000 plus sites there were 200 hundred big cities. Some cities are covered by medieval or modern towns. Others, such the coastal town of Hadrumetum and many others are still in the wilds. Some of these won’t wait long. They are either next to large towns or near the beach and there is a great deal of pressure to expand.
In Tunisia everything underground is state property. Diamond mines, oil, archaeology; all belong to the state. As most of the sites are on private property, in terms of archaeology, this is a good thing—this is an inherited law from the French, so most people don’t dare to dig by themselves and sale.
However, at the end of the day the government cannot buy all of these fields. This it has to do in order to undertake full site preservation. The 1994 Tunisian heritage code tries to protect monuments and sites, but it still has many faults; faults that can be exploited by good lawyers. A site can be protected only if can be classified and this, in a sense, freezes it so as not to be built on in any way.
In the midst of all this development we cannot catch up.
A Review of: Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, memories and engagement in Native North America. Edited by Patricia Rubertone, One World Archaeology Series 59. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009.
Archaeologies of Placemaking is the outcome of a WAC-5 session at Washington, D.C. in 2003. The following review of this volume is divided into two parts. The first part provides a summary of the nine chapters, and the second offers critical commentary on its content.
Archaeologies of Placemaking contains an introduction and eight case studies written by different contributors. Overall, these nine chapters share a concern with the authenticity of place histories, with a deeper focus on memory-work, and its material manifestation in monuments. The concept of place that the authors present is one of diverse meanings, which are ascribed by different communities, and manifested in practices of remembrance and materialisation. The European-American voice, which tends to envelop place, has emerged out of a broader discussion that is colonial in character. While in some cases these narratives have negatively portrayed Native American places, others have identified the significance of place in terms of the symbolic and ritual associated with Native American culture and history. This volume largely takes issue with the dominant European-American voice in site-specific cases that detail the ways that these places have been created, reified and communicated the Native American voices. As the contributors illustrate, the meaning of place has several interpretations; these multiple, and often conflicting interpretations create tensions between those communities with a vested interest in a place. One of the volume’s intentions is to resolve these tensions. Rather than hold them as a productive force, the discussions aim to create a balance or harmony between the different associations that Native Americans and European-Americans have with the same places.
I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman's blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces--aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group Meetings (Columbia and Stanford) and at the recent CHAT in Oxford--for forthcoming publications. What appears here is an extremely condensed version of a chapter for Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney's CHAT proceedings volume.
Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.
“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.
‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).
Numerous studies have focused on modernity’s destructive effect on traditional life- worlds, the desertion of villages and the ruination of rural areas. However, the fact that the modern condition also produces its own ruined materialities, its own marginalized pasts, is less spoken about. Since the 19th century, mass-production, consumerism and thus cycles of material replacement have accelerated; increasingly larger amounts of things are increasingly rapidly victimized and made redundant. At the same time processes of destruction have immensely intensified, although largely overlooked when compared to the research and social significance devoted to consumption and production (González-Ruibal 2006, 2008). The outcome is a ruined landscape of derelict factories, closed shopping malls, overgrown bunkers and redundant mining towns; a ghostly world of decaying modern debris normally left out of academic concerns and conventional histories.(1)
This ruin-landscape is the topic of the current research project. Based on selected case studies of industrial ruins, abandoned fishing villages and war remains in Norway, Russia, Iceland and Spain we want to explore how the ruins of modernity are conceived and assigned cultural value in contemporary academic and public discourses. Our research will cover three main themes: the aesthetics of waste and heritage, the materiality of memory, and the significance of things. Through these themes we want to develop theoretical arguments that help to understand why the derelict materiality of the modern to such an extent has been devalued and marginalized, but also to suggest possible means for reaffirming its cultural and historic significance.
For more than 150 years archaeology has had a clear purpose, to sketch out the topography of the past from the pinnacle of the present. Like the traveller’s gaze in Shelley’s Ozymandius, archaeologists have lingered over fragments from ancient times, evoking feelings of wonder, irony, and loss. Archaeological research has helped to fill the perceived ‘black hole’ that exists between the past and the present (Rathje, La Motta, Longacre 2001) and has served nationalism and modernity by informing individual and collective identities. But what happens when we choose to remove this sense of distance and nostalgia for the past from our work and acknowledge the ‘loss of antiquity’ (Hicks 2003)? If we eschew the idea that archaeology exists to connect the present to distant pasts and re-position our discipline to focus upon ‘the interaction between material culture and human behaviour, regardless of time of space’ (Rathje 1979, 2) then we free ourselves from temporal parameters and any material may be subject to archaeological inquiry (Buchli & Lucas 2001, 3-18).
As Hedley Swain pointed out in his keynote address to the 2009 CHAT conference in Oxford, the craft of archaeology employs a standard range of techniques. Archaeologists are very good at observing physical relationships and placing them in a chronological sequence. We also routinely identify patterns of human action through their material residues, and are adept at describing objects in accurate and close detail to determine their composition and possible uses. If we turn our to attention to the contemporary world we are able to use these techniques to observe physical relationships and detect patterns of human behaviour in material things.
photo of over-painted road markings
The scenario: a team of specialists are discovering artifacts from the past and attempting to establish their mode of origin. Tool-marks and other traces of human action come into view. Artificial patterns emerge and take shape from the material field that has just been worked, standing out as figures against a natural background. With experience it becomes possible to tell artifacts apart from similar-looking natural objects or features. A skilled practitioner can work out what kind of past human action gave rise to them and what sort of tools were being used at the time.
Is this a description of archaeological excavation?
No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.
Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).
From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and contemporary world.” Both participants and subjects of discussion were wide ranging. While many came from all over the UK and Ireland, others contributed points of view from the US, Continental Europe, Africa, and even Taiwan. These papers engaged with “modern materials” from treadmills and theatres to workshops and the bricks they may have been built from, and even extended analysis to the “modern materials” produced in archaeological recording, such as photographs.
Of particular interest were several papers which came from outside the disciple of archaeology or anthropology altogether, such as Pearson’s consideration of the role of the theatre building itself in a performance event, and Fisher’s of the “flow” of modern packaging through homes from a design standpoint. Coupled with Harrison’s inside-the-discipline discussion of amusement parks and the social shifts towards an “experience economy” these papers suggest how direct consideration of material culture produces insights even into the contemporary. This point is reinforced by Ouzman’s consideration of graffiti through an archaeological lens, considering its role in “politically-engaged place-ma(r)king.”
Featuring approximately forty papers by an international group of scholars, the symposium promises to be the most extensive review of the archaeology of Tara undertaken to date. It focuses on the data from recently published excavation volumes, but it extends to a wider consideration of research undertaken at Tara over the past twenty years. Themes include:
-The archaeology of Tara
-Tara in its local and regional setting
-Comparative perspectives on Tara
-The significance of Tara through time
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Conference Live Web Stream
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The symposium will be streamed live via the web and facilities are available to overseas listeners to ask question via the symposium email address tara.symposium@ucd.ie. As the programme is compact, only a small proportion of questions will be relayed to the symposium auditorium.
