Re-Mapping Archaeology

Critical Perspectives, Alternative Mappings

Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Gary Lock, Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Gary Lock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351267700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Maps have always been a fundamental tool in archaeological practice, and their prominence and variety have increased along with a growing range of digital technologies used to collect, visualise, query and analyse spatial data. However, unlike in other disciplines, the development of archaeological cartographical critique has been surprisingly slow; a missed opportunity given that archaeology, with its vast and multifaceted experience with space and maps, can significantly contribute to the field of critical mapping.

Re-mapping Archaeology thinks through cartographic challenges in archaeology and critiques the existing mapping traditions used in the social sciences and humanities, especially since the 1990s. It provides a unique archaeological perspective on cartographic theory and innovatively pulls together a wide range of mapping practices applicable to archaeology and other disciplines.

This volume will be suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as for established researchers in archaeology, geography, anthropology, history, landscape studies, ethnology and sociology.

1
On maps and mapping

Mark Gillings, Piraye Hacıgüzeller and Gary Lock

Introduction

“It is remarkable, given the necessity of maps for the work of archaeology, that so little has been written on what it is they actually do in the context of archaeological knowledge production.”

(Witmore 2013, 128; emphasis in original)

“In what ways and with what effects have projection as a form of representation, accuracy as a measure of value, and correspondence as a yardstick of truth, come into being?”

(Pickles 2004, 13)

This is a book about how archaeologists map, what they map and why they seek to map it. It is about the theoretical frameworks and craft traditions that underpin our established cartographic practices and the emergent assemblages of technologies, performances, desires and ways-of-doing that are giving rise to wholly new modes of mapping. From the very beginning of archaeological practice, maps (and plans) have been one of the discipline’s most fundamental tools. The number, variety and prominence of maps in archaeology have been increasing further since the beginning of the 1990s due to the availability of a growing range of digital technologies used to collect, visualise, query, manipulate and analyse spatial data. This book was prompted by a nagging sense that despite such a fundamental reliance upon various forms of maps and mapping, and enthusiastic reception of ongoing digital transitions in cartographic practice, Archaeology has tended to feed off broader disciplinary critiques instead of helping to shape them. It has certainly taken a back seat in recent developments that have occurred within the Humanities and Social Sciences which, since the late 1980s, have prompted the emergence of an explicitly critical cartography within many disciplines, in particular Geography (cf. Crampton & Krygier 2006; Kitchin et al. 2009, 2011; Wood & Krygier 2009). Whilst much earlier critiques of mapping undoubtedly exist (Dodge et al. 2011, 2–7; Wood & Krygier 2009), “critical cartography” (or “critical mapping”) distinguishes itself from these earlier approaches through its concentrated and ‘self-conscious engagement with the fundamentals of cartographic thinking and behaviour’ (Wood & Krygier 2009, 340), as well as the critical reception of maps themselves.

Among the major research interests that have shaped the multi-disciplinary field of critical mapping are cognitive mapping and cartographic aesthetics (e.g. Brewer et al. 1997; Lloyd 2000; Monmonier 1990; Nivala et al. 2008), the profound effects of new digital media and technologies on cartographic practices (e.g. Jensen and Cowen 1999; Pickles 1995a; Silver & Balmori 2003) and, perhaps most fundamentally, investigations into maps and power. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, studies within the last of these themes – which might be termed the “power of maps critique” – attempted to deconstruct Western mapping and lay bare its assumptions (e.g. Harley 1988, 1989, 1991; Wood 1992; Wood & Fels 1986). Later, this line of critique expanded in order to examine Western cartography’s historical role in advancing colonialist, nationalist, militaristic and capitalist interests (e.g. Bassett 1994; Biggs 1999; Ramaswamy 2001; Winichakul 1994). Preoccupation with maps’ power has also recently given way to practice-based re-conceptualisations of maps, referred to as “post-representational cartography” (cf. Caquard 2015; Kitchin 2010; 2014; Kitchin et al. 2009, 10–23; Rossetto 2015), and, more particularly, “performative and embodied mapping” (cf. Crampton 2009, 840–842; della Dora 2009; Perkins 2009).

Within archaeology, the power of maps critique and more particularly examinations of the political agency of Western mapping seem to have been highly influential, taking place most clearly in the 1990s as part of a broader critique of the political tenets of modernity. To name but a few of their more overt failings as powerful media, in these debates maps (and mapping) were seen as tainted by surveillance and voyeurism; inherently objectivist and unashamedly Cartesian; ocular-centric technologies of representation; specular, detached and analytical; irrevocably gendered and tied to militaristic and colonial undertakings (Thomas 2004; cf. Wheatley 2014, 118–121). Although often emerging from critiques that were themselves strongly anti-essentialist, it was as if modernity itself had a tenacious essence that was indelibly bound into the fabric of the map. With maps positioned as modernity’s fifth column, it became straightforward to extend the critique to any approaches that foregrounded mapping and the handling and interpretation of cartographic data. This became most obvious in the case of technologies such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Similar concerns in Geography gave rise to the ‘GIS and Society’ debate which addressed “a deep concern for the impacts of unmediated technical practices on the discipline of geography and other arenas of social life” (Pickles 1995b, x; cf. Harvey et al. 2005; O’Sullivan, 2006; Sheppard 2005). Echoing this criticism, in archaeology GIS was branded one of the worst media to engage with in order to create knowledge about past human experiences (Tilley 2004, 218). A key consequence of this tendency to argue that the perceived failings of the map were even more concentrated and apparent in digital formats was that archaeological theorists largely excused themselves from key debates regarding digital cartography and the theoretical and practice-based consequences of the digital transition that were taking place elsewhere.

There was, however, an inherent tension in much of this power critique in archaeology, insofar as the most vocal proponents still found themselves relying extensively upon maps (e.g. Tilley 1994; Thomas 1996). Whilst this was evidently recognised and acknowledged (see for example Thomas 1994, 27, and the caption to his Figure 1.1), maps proved stubbornly difficult to excise. A further layer of complexity was introduced by the implicit suggestion that some forms of mapping were (again, in essence) more acceptable than others, such as counter-mapping (Brody 1981; Byrne 2008). This was presumably a consequence of the degree to which the concerns of modernity had been seen to shape them. Unfortunately, these broad generalisations about archaeological maps, so bent on rejecting them on the basis of their perceived oppressive power and relation to modernity, missed the point that maps are artefacts and as such have agential qualities that emerge only through contextual relations (Wood 2010a). Arguably, there is nothing inherently modernist about maps: maps are rendered as tools of modernity through their contingent entanglements with other things in particular contexts. Developing this further, maps, constituted as modern tools through a set of discursive practices, can also be constituted differently through alternative cartographic practices and emerging relations (Wood 2010a; see Butler 1988, 520). It may be argued that few disciplines other than archaeology could have made this point about context more strongly within critical cartography, given archaeology’s vast and multifaceted experience with the enactments of artefacts. That has served as a key prompt for the current volume, which aims to rectify this situation by finally placing archaeology where it should have been for a very long time: right at the centre of the lively debates on the agency of maps and alternative mappings across the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Rethinking the archaeological map

“maps come to life when people start using them in a particular setting for a particular purpose … maps are not considered as ever finished, but as ‘continually re-made every time someone engages with them’”

(Caquard 2015, 229)

“as things, maps gather”

(Witmore 2013, 131)

It is important to stress that whilst the stridency of much of the negative reception sketched above silenced any sustained critical reflection on mapping, some archaeologists did begin to actively engage, with key themes and currents emerging from the developing critical and post-representational cartographic movements. Take, for example, their focus on practice and performance, and the ontological shift away from an unquestioned assumption of the map-as-spatial-truth to focus instead upon the map-as-process (cf. Crampton 2009; Caquard 2015; Kitchin & Dodge 2007; Perkins 2009). Drawing upon Latourian notions of the immutable mobile (Latour 1987, 223–227), much of this work has taken as its point of departure a concern not with what maps depict but instead what maps do in the context of knowledge production. For example, Witmore has argued that we need to see the map less as a representation and more as a thing, bound in a network of relations; a heterogeneous assemblage (Witmore 2013, 126–127). Proposing use of the term mapwork as a creative weaving together of the abstraction of the map with subject-centred perception, Webmoor has highlighted the way that maps have traditionally served as a powerful (and authoritative) medium through which an inevitably limited range of interpretations are negotiated. Instead, he proposes that we unsettle their assumed stability by treating them not as authoritative representations but instead as mediations (Webmoor 2005, 77). Building upon this notion of mediation, Lucas has stressed the value of treating maps first and foremost as “mediating devices” for bringing together and revealing assemblages that would be otherwise invisible to us (2012, 202). Shanks and Webmoor have gone on to stress the hybrid, prosthetic qualities of the map. Through the notion of a cyborg-ontology, they have drawn critical attention to the way that the map and map-user become woven together (and inseparable from one another) in the practices of navigation and way-finding (Shanks & Webmoor 2013, 104). Wickstead (2009), in turn, has examined how powerful political cartographic performances can take place within archaeological contexts, recounting how artist Janet Hodgson mapped the bodies of four male archaeologists leading a project at Stonehenge in order to create a hybrid monster using their virtual body parts. She named the monster Uber Archaeologist in a film based on the plot of the Curse of Frankenstein. The artist’s creation and interactions with the Uber Archaeologist, a map of body parts, served to critically perform meanings in an archaeological context that in turn highlighted and laid bare the prevailing gender-related power relations in the discipline.

A second strand of cartographic research in archaeology has turned to the notion of the deep map (Heat Moon 1991), an engagement with place that draws simultaneously, and productively, upon the chorographic traditions of the 16th and 17th centuries (Mendyk 1986, 1989). A deep map is inherently post-representational insofar as it seeks to capture the essence of a place through what might best be thought of as a conversation or dialogue, and stands in stark opposition to the static representation of a traditional thin map (Harris 2015). Deep maps are creative and fluid, weaving together past and present, imagined and experienced, provocative and comforting, complementary and tensioned. “Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place” (Pearson & Shanks 2001, 64–65). With its emphasis on unearthing and revealing unforeseen linkages between gobbets of information in order to weave together unexpected stories and spatial narratives, deep mapping is often associated with emergent multimedia developments in the digital humanities and GIScience (Bodenhamer et al. 2015; Roberts 2016; see below). That a technological basis for deep mapping is not essential, however, has been demonstrated by Pearson (2006), who has used performance to draw out the multi-scalar connections that exist between the scales of village, neighbour-hood and region. His very title, In Comes I, trumpets the situated subjectivity of his approach rather than the detached objectivism of academia – “taking up the challenge to develop a non-representational style, in which there is no last word… meandering through time and across land, drawn to particular historical moments and topographic details as much by personal proclivity as academic obligation” (Pearson, 2006, 16).

A final, and more recent, strand takes the form of vigorous experimentation with the basic form of the map itself, allied to the first hints of a renewed theoretical dialogue with digital technologies, such as GIS. Take, for example, the important work of Fowler (2013) in seeking to develop wholly new ways of mapping complex relational assemblages (e.g. 2013, Figure 2.2). In a more playful, yet undeniably effective mode, Cooper has re-rendered historical maps of the Nile and its Delta using the design language of Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map in order to frame an investigation into t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 On maps and mapping
• PART 1 Where do maps come from and what do they do?
• PART 2 Practices of mapping
• PART 3 Experimental mappings and cartographic provocations
• PART 4 Digital transformations
• PART 5 When all is said and done
• Index