Making Archaeology Happen

Design versus Dogma

Martin Oswald Hugh Carver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315425030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

'Archaeology is for people' is the theme of this book. Split between the academic and commercial sectors, archaeological investigation is also deeply embedded in the needs of local communities, making it simultaneously an art, science and social science. Such a multi-disciplinary discipline needs special methods and creative freedom, not repetitive responses. Carver argues that commercial procedures and academic theory are both suffocating creativity in fieldwork. He'd like to see us bring much more diversity and technical ingenuity to every opportunity, and maintains this is more a matter of getting ourselves free of dogma than needing more time and money. This has many implications for the way archaeology is designed and procured – moving archaeologists up the professional ladder from builder to architect, with contracts based on quality of design, not the price.

CHAPTER 1

A VISIT TO THE ANCESTORS

I began my Rhind Lectures with a song, partly because it reminded me of life on archaeological excavations, where I have spent some of my happiest hours, and partly to generate an insouciant mood on a daunting occasion. The audience shifted in its chairs, refrained from humming along, and located itself somewhere between respectful, embarrassed, and baffled. Belted out to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the song begins: “He dug a hole a mile deep without a context plan” (three times)—“and he ain’t going to dig no more,” followed by the chorus “Archaeology is an art—it’s not a science” (three times). The misdemeanors of this villain are recounted in numerous verses—for example: “He drank a bottle of whisky and interpreted the site”; and the words “art” and science” in the chorus are swapped around each time with increasing force, culminating in a joyous shouting match in which little can be distinguished.

Dating back many decades, and probably originating in the back of a minibus on the way to some campsite, these sentiments were meant to signal a new generation of professional practice and practitioners. The old ways, with their air-headed volunteers and self-serving professors, were gone forever; there was to be a new dawn for historical science spearheaded by the strati-graphic unit. As with all revolutions, something got lost….“Archaeology is an art—it’s not a science” (or the other way round) epitomizes a trowel-eye view of the indoor hand-wringing of archaeological theory, the choice between storytelling and understanding, intuition and analysis, insight and proof. It has been with us for some time, so our first duty is to pay a visit to the ancestors and see what they made of the conundrum. Here is Alfred Kidder (1885–1963):

The details of archaeology are in themselves so interesting that it is fatally easy to become completely absorbed in them, and there is always the excuse that without close and accurate work one cannot arrive at trustworthy conclusions.… The result is that too often one arrives at no conclusions at all. It is quite as fatally easy to ignore detail (with the plausible excuse that the close worker cannot see the forest for the trees) and strike out blithely on the primrose path of speculation. (Kidder 1924, 137–138)

Overall this is good advice: doing archaeology demands both art and science—so deal with it: a scientific adventure in pursuit of a story, observation in harness with imagination, precision in record, persuasion in prose. As we will see, since Kidder’s day archaeological investigation has become embedded in the society where it is practiced, so it is a now a social science as well. The task of the fieldworker is to reconcile these aspects, the factual, the imaginative, and the social, and because of them, or in spite of them, to make archaeology happen.

British archaeologists pay homage to A. L. F. Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900) as their first ancestor, and the father of archaeological science. Pitt-Rivers, not without a little whitewashing, claimed empirical purity: “Every detail should be recorded in the manner most conducive of reference. …it ought to be the chief object of an excavator to reduce his personal equation to a minimum” (Pitt-Rivers 1887, xvii). But his younger contemporary Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) quickly showed this to be impossible: “The old saying that a man finds what he looks for… is too true; it is at least true that he does not find anything that he does not look for. …To state every fact about everything found would be useless. It would be like a detective who would photograph and measure every man on London Bridge to search for a criminal” (Petrie 1904, 1, 49). The modern police force, aided by large computers and an indoor workforce, might find this a fairly normal approach—but one knows what he means.

Comparing these last two maxims, one can’t help noticing that for us, it is Petrie that comes across as the modernist, aware that the personal equation is part of what drives the inquiry—eliminate it (or pretend to) and you can eliminate the business of archaeology altogether. Mortimer Wheeler praised Pitt-Rivers and installed him as a role model, but was hostile and dismissive about Petrie. Why was this? Petrie was a cultured person and intellectually close to Wheeler, in that he was driven by a historical agenda (predynastic Egypt). Although not a military man, he was a heroic fieldworker, just as much at home in the desert as any veteran of El Alamein. Pitt-Rivers was not especially cultured or even greatly interested in history or prehistory. He treated his excavations like agricultural projects with sermons thrown in. He was just as much an absentee director as Petrie, but it was Petrie that Wheeler picked on.

I met Wheeler only once—not long enough to have an argument with, but we were both born in Glasgow and had both served in the army, and so I feel the argument would have been a good one. Wheeler is associated with a number of strong opinions. He admired Pitt-Rivers, but perhaps this was because, as an exgeneral, Pitt-Rivers outranked him. He denigrated Petrie, describing his brilliant Methods and Aims of 50 years earlier as “quirky” and took him to task for delegating his supervision of excavations, claiming that “my pen melts” as he thought of Petries absenting himself from the site (1954, 15); but at least Petrie was away engaged in fieldwork. Wheeler’s lofty posture can be modified by what he practiced, as opposed to what he preached. Here is Noel Myres’ recollection of Wheeler at Brecon Gaer in 1924: “Rik himself treated the excavation as the agreeable background to a fishing holiday. He would begin the day by directing Christopher [Hawkes] and myself of what we were to find, and then disappear in the direction of the river. In the evening he would return, not always overburdened with the trophies of the chase, listen to what we told him of the day’s work on the dig and explain to us what he thought it meant” (Hawkes 1982, 90). Unabashed by his own cavalier approach, Wheeler went on to paint Petrie as part of a whole Near Eastern catastrophe, which had somehow evaded his own organizing baton. We shall have to take a look at this particular prejudice.

Wheeler advocated a box method of excavation—and adroitly managed to promote his system as the option of the open-minded. At the start of his Rhind Lectures, he famously said: “There is no right way of digging, but there are many wrong ways” (1954, 1). I have often heard archaeologists repeating this dictum to each other with evident satisfaction. It was a saying typical of a man regularly intoxicated by his own rhetoric, but unfortunately it means very little. If there are no right ways and many wrong ways, then the ones that aren’t wrong aren’t right either, leaving us where we were. Clearly, what he actually intended to say was: “There are many wrong ways of digging, some of them truly ghastly, especially Petrie’s, and only one right way—mine. Now: read, mark, learn and inwardly digest.” His conviction about his own methods was unwavering. In his attack on Ian Richmond in Antiquity, he took a swipe at “the drawings of the sections, [which] in spite of their delicate limning, fail singularly to conform to modern standards. They are of the obsolete ‘Bersu’ type in which pictorial smudgery was substituted for hard-headed analysis …” (Wheeler 1968; Hawkes 1982, 354). Here is naked dogma of the kind which archaeology apparently craves—the “right way” and the “obsolete way” are paraded with approval and disdain, respectively. Wheeler, like many who admired him, prized authority over creativity. Perhaps this was prompted by his military rather than his archaeological experience, but, having shared both, i would say that in neither field does the authoritarian have an advantage over the ingenious. I would, however, agree that those were other days, in which strutting intolerance habitually attracted a large following. But why do we still value it now?

When his ego allowed him, Wheeler brought good things to archaeology, perhaps most importantly, in the present context, his emphasis on neatness—which was right on the button. It is undeniable that some excavations in western Asia, including Petrie’s and Woolley’s, had an air of chaos, with hundreds of workers moving in contrary directions across a wrecked mud-brick ruin and down into life-threatening chasms. In a famous propaganda picture in Archaeology from the Earth, Wheeler contrasted the good order and military discipline of his parade-ground boxes with this Middle Eastern mayhem. However, equally horrible is the groping jagged trench perpetrated at caerleon by Victor Nash-Williams, whom Wheeler described in Still Digging as one of his outstanding pupils (1956, 68, 71; Carver 2009, fig. 2.1b).

Untidiness rightly makes excavators vulnerable to the criticism of others and is often the starting point (and sometimes the only point) of public disagreement on method. Most practitioners are aware of its importance: without meticulous standards of neatness, excavation is not only pointless, but misleading. Petrie believed this too, and said on page 2 of his 1904 book: “Spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it.” But strangely, things have, if anything, got worse: the images we carry away from a visit to a commercial site, or a university research project today, from TV programs or from exposures on YouTube, are far from flattering; the site looks more like a quarry than a laboratory. We see rows of disheveled trenches framed by sprawling upcast, or bleak expanses of gravel with a few professionals hurrying earth into a bucket, or a Roman ruin populated by shouting students, surrounded by collapsed fencing. Weekly on television, we see gushing presenters posed before sites to make you blush. Wheeler was spared seeing the messy digs on the popular British TV series Time Team, which began in 1994, eighteen years after his death at the age of 86.

Digging neatly is not simply an aesthetic matter. Özti, the ice man, was discovered by chance in the high Alps and excavated with ski sticks, before he was taken belatedly and slowly into a more carefully managed investigation. He emerged from his first analysis as a player in a Bronze Age drama: a mountaineer, fleeing his enemies, shot down and left to freeze to death. He did seem to be carrying an enormous amount of kit, but no-one wanted to ruin the story, until this year at least, when a group of Italian scholars suggested that Özti could be interpreted as a furnished inhumation burial—with very different implications for the occupation of the Bronze Age Alps (Vanzetti et al. 2010). In retrospect, we can imagine a completely different archaeological project, consequent on the first glimpse of the corpse: a tent, lighting, heating, the gentle extrication of the materials, the micro-topographical mapping, and the detailed survey of the immediate area, all of which turned out to be crucial to the interpretation.

What actually makes the difference between a good excavation and a bad one—or is everything relative? If there is to be no quality control in our profession, then it doesn’t matter much what we do, and archaeology is a private indulgence, tolerated briefly by those with money to make and a vague environmental or humanist conscience. But no-one who cares about human experience on the planet believes that what we do has no serious purpose. So it will be constructive to look analytically at “good” and “bad” fieldwork and ask a few hard questions about circumstances, money, and response. What makes a successful inquiry? Is it luck, a good organizer with a military moustache, a gifted team, or a way with words? Or are there other factors at work, factors we can control or adapt or enhance to raise our game in our own estimation and that of the public we serve?

METHOD AND SENTIMENT IN MESOPOTAMIA

As a first step on the quest, it might be worth paying a brief visit to the “land of archaeological sin,” as Wheeler dubbed the Middle East, just to see whether there is something inherently culpable in the region. Of course, there are plenty of examples of extravagant grubbing out of antiquities—but this is not unique to that region; and where tombs are large and rich, there will be robbing on a scale to match.

On the positive side, let’s remember Claudius Rich, diplomat and flute player, intelligently exploring the desert cultures at the beginning of the 19th century. Long before Layard pillaged Nineveh, or what he thought was Nineveh, or Schliemann trenched Troy, or what he thought was Troy, Rich visited Babylon and carried out the first evaluation—using a surface survey and the sections of old quarry pits to inspect strata (Rich 1816). Exceptionally, he stole nothing but concentrated on making a topographical model of the buried town. Babylon attracted pioneers: at the same place at the end of the same century, Robert Koldewey was carrying out well-organized area excavations on a huge scale for the Berlin Museum, managing his excavators in a troweling line (Koldewey 1914).

Contrary to today’s popular axiom of the pillaging colonial, the principal objective of most 19th- and early 20th-century excavators was not the acquisition of antiquities, or even the exposure of a great monument, but understanding the historical sequence from its earliest years. These sequences, lest we forget, created most of prehistory before radiocarbon dating; it was a tremendous achievement, laboriously sequencing pottery and palaces, temples and towns—work that remains of permanent value, however much later corrected in detail. It also developed a rich web of collaborative method which may escape the sympathy of the skeptical modern student. Naturally, this kind of digging required deep and narrow areas and the carrying of much spoil many meters upward. The workforce was generally marshaled and ranked, divided into small team-like platoons, each led by a pickman, assisted by a spade man, and served by basket boys, carrying away the baskets of earth, otherwise zembiles. The procedure was determined by the stuff; it was hard, full of mud bricks, some broken, some still in situ. A pick was needed, but an intelligent pick, using accurate force. In 2009, these tools are still needed and still in use, as are the “basket” record sheets (Bowkett et al. 2009, figs. 5.4, 6.4). Clearly there are responses here, to do with the type of strata, that have remained valid.

In colonial times, the workforce was predominantly local and the directors predominantly imperial: British, French, German, italian, or American. But cool operators like Leonard Woolley prized their local foremen—and encouraged the upwardly mobile through a graded pay structure (1920, 96–145). In fact, it is arguable that the workforce at Ur was less prone to complaint than the 21st-century British contract staff we en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Visit to the Ancestors
• Chapter 2: Mega, Macro, Micro, Nano: Dialogues With Terrain
• Chapter 3: On the Streets: Archaeologists and Society
• Chapter 4: Design On Tour
• Chapter 5: From Procurement to Product: Aroad Map
• Chapter 6: Making Archaeology Happen
• References
• Index
• About The Author