The Archaeological Imagination

Michael Shanks

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315419152
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Archeologia

Archaeology is a way of acting and thinking—about what is left of the past, about the temporality of what remains, about material and temporal processes to which people and their goods are subject, about the processes of order and entropy, of making, consuming and discarding at the heart of human experience. These elements, and the practices that archaeologists follow to uncover them, is the essence of the archaeological imagination. In this extended essay, renowned archaeological theorist Michael Shanks offers his colleagues and students a window on this imaginative world of past and present and the creative role archaeology can play in uncovering it, analyzing it, and interpreting it.

1.
We Are All Archaeologists Now

1.1 Sensibility and Imagination

This is a book about the fascination of archaeology, about archaeological ways of looking and thinking about things.

I take a broad view of archaeology, and include not only the academic discipline, a field of university and museum-based research and teaching centered upon material remains, but also cultural resource management, the management of sites and artifacts according to what is now a global system of legal instruments and agreements designed to protect the past, and the heritage industry of museums and protected sites that figure, for example, so prominently in tourism. Then there are the intangible aspects of archaeology: the evocation of ruin, authenticity achieved through digging deep.

The topic, as I aim to show, is the reception of the past in all its manifestations, though archaeology is not inappropriately taken as dealing with material remains. Archaeology, as an academic discipline, involves issues of scholarship and rigor in managing the archaeological process, which I summarize simply as working on what is left of the past. Archaeology, as well as a way of thinking about the past (in the present), is work that requires resources, and this implies what might be called a political economy, ways of organizing and managing the means of pursuing archaeological interests—institutions such as universities and museums, systems of authority, command and control, funding mechanisms that put people and their tools and instruments in the field to dig, survey, record, remove.

Mention of political economy, institutions, authority and control may seem to signal a dry approach to the topic of the fascination of archaeology. It is, and I will not be tackling these matters directly, but they really are vital and engaging. Gaining access to the past, finding the means to tell one’s own story of origin and belonging can be a contentious matter in what Robert Hewison, back in 1987, termed the heritage industry. This is part, in turn, of that phenomenon that saw considerable growth through the twentieth century, the culture industry, offering goods and experiences for entertainment, edification, and profit. Archaeology as a discipline emerged as part of old European and indeed Asian traditions of antiquarian interests and pursuits: collecting old and valued artifacts, and producing regional accounts of a community’s character and history through its monuments, landscapes, family genealogies, geography. Collection, documentation, and identity remain key components of an archaeological aspect of the heritage industry. A visited site may be said to offer direct access to a particular archaeological history of a people or community: their own heritage. The archaeological process in a general sense, focused on material traces, has long proved evocative, lending itself to many fertile associations and metaphors: the archaeologist as detective, fieldwork and discovery, digging deep to find what may provide a key to contemporary concerns.

A focus on archaeological process is not meant to detract from the object of archaeology: to gain knowledge through ruins and remains of societies and cultures similar and different to our own; to build models and narratives of how they lived; to investigate the great changes in human history—community, civilization, empire; to determine the shape of human evolution, assessing the forces that drive history and structure our lives, delving into the very character of human being.

Means and methods of accessing people’s pasts, understanding where we have come from and how. This is quite an intoxicating prospect!

Rather than continue with this conventional introduction of archaeological process and object, let me begin again in what may appear to be a more oblique way, as a means of introducing the notion of the archaeological imagination.

Anselm Kiefer is a contemporary artist. His work is, I suggest, a profound application of an archaeological sensibility. Die Ordnung der Engel (The Hierarchy of Angels) (1985 to 1987) is a massive wallsized canvas of thick layers of paint, shellac, chalk, and cardboard. A large airplane propeller, worn, broken, made from sheets of lead, sits on a dark, blasted, eroded, and barren landscape, from which hang nine rocks. In a text of the fifth century entitled The Celestial Hierarchy, attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, angels were divided into nine categories or choirs, grouped into three hierarchies, navigating the twisting space between heaven and earth. The propeller, spiraling through the air, the airpower of Germany’s Third Reich, or any twentieth-century military might, now brought down to burned earth, references Dionysius’s vision of heaven as a vast spiral, a topological folding in which time and space move in all directions. The rocks, as meteorites, as angels, bring heaven to earth, to a wasted utopia in this representation of a different kind of celestial hierarchy.

Since the 1970s Kiefer has dealt in the cultural landscapes of postwar Germany, with mixed media works manifesting the transmutation of materials, through references to burning and devastation, death and decay, erosion and ruin, the metamorphosis of substance, lead into gold, in the celestial models of alchemy. In some of Kiefer’s work grand architectural and public monuments—ancient, Egyptian, classical, industrial—signal imperial ambition, the nation state; other locales remind us of the architectures of the Holocaust. Several series of books, with pages of text often eroded and undecipherable, of faded anonymous photographs, of empty pages, burned books, seem to be a melancholic kind of literary antiquarianism. All his work embodies complex allegories that draw on Jewish mysticism, Christian symbolism, folk legend, and, as in Die Ordnung der Engel, Kiefer displays his fascination with alchemical systems of thought that obsessed so many great minds before the triumph of an enlightenment will to knowledge—worlds of faith, superstition, ritual and hope. In Barjac, France, Kiefer converted an abandoned silk factory and surroundings into a 35 hectare environment, a total art work (Gesamtkunstwerk) of glass buildings, archives, installations, storerooms for materials and paintings, subterranean chambers and corridors.

Kiefer has persistently worked on the legacy, in Germany particularly, of the Second World War, addressing the famous question posed by Theodor Adorno of how can there be poetry after Auschwitz, exploring in his own dark art that interpenetration of reason, hope and horror that was the subject of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, published at the beginning of the Second World War, outlining the failure of reason since antiquity, the consequences of reason, the deep genealogy of modernity’s totalitarian nightmare.

Questions of tradition and legacy, of heritage, of roots, memories and remains, of entropy and loss, the material transformation of decay and ruin, connections between the past, its contemporary reception, and future prospect, the place of the past in a modern society, ethical and indeed political issues regarding respect for the past and the conservation of its remains, agency and the shape of history, but also judgment of responsibility in assessing what to do with what is left of the past: these are all components of an archaeological sensibility at the heart of Kiefer’s art. I hope it is clear that they also have wide valency.

By sensibility I mean ways of perceiving, awareness, cultural and cognitive, across all the senses; an emotional consciousness and recognition of a fact or a condition of things. I have used Kiefer as an example of an archaeological sensibility, because I think some of the richest explorations of the archaeological imagination are to be found in contemporary art, as a kind of barometer of contemporary cultural dispositions. So, in the dark light of Kiefer’s art, and with reference to my opening topics of archaeological process and archaeological object, let me offer a definition of the archaeological imagination:

To recreate the world behind the ruin in the land, to reanimate the people behind the sherd of antique pottery, a fragment of the past: this is the work of the archaeological imagination, a creative impulse and faculty at the heart of archaeology, but also embedded in many cultural dispositions, discourses and institutions commonly associated with modernity. The archaeological imagination is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history.

Where do we typically see this work of the archaeological imagination? In museums; in collections and archives of all kinds; in the application by government and non-government agencies of legislation to protect the archaeological past; in the ways that memory reaches back to connect traces of the past with something in the present that has sparked the effort of re-collection; in efforts to preserve and conserve the past, whether this be a site or an artifact; in reconstructions and reenactments of the past, whether this be in photorealistic virtual reality or in the performances of enthusiasts in medieval costume and character at a Renaissance Fair. A mobile team of metaphors offers articulatory force: digging deep through layers to find an answer, the human mind being organized, according to Freud, a passionate collector of antiquities, in stratified layers, just like an archaeological site; fieldwork as forensic detection; ruin and decay as cultural decline and loss; the remains of the past as a core to one’s identity, personal and cultural.

There is a paradox or tension at the heart of an archaeological sensibility: a fascination with things, with material goods, with collection, accompanies a kind of contempt for their base materiality (see Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor, Witmore 2012). Our modern world abounds in material things, and yet the academic Humanities and Arts, and high culture more generally, consistently privilege immaterial cultural values. In this paradigmatic split, artistic genius, for example, may be seen as manipulating a medium into an artwork that expresses human values, sentiment, experience. Science, math and physics, engineering and materials science seem opposed, with their focus on the natural world, to what is usually held to be the heart of the human condition—such immaterial sentiment. I will be exploring this familiar dualism particularly as it connects with the mortality of human corporeality, with human experiences of time. For while dates of events are clearly important to archaeological and historical accounts, the time of archaeology is distinctively concerned more with what remains, with what becomes of what was, with the way the past hangs on, lingers, is lost, or may be collected and cared for, left as legacy. Such engagements with duration are the kind of relationship between past and present at the heart of heritage.

1.2 The Genealogy of a Sensibility

What has engendered this archaeological sensibility? What supports the work of the archaeological imagination? What are their origins?

One somewhat tautological or circular answer is that the archaeological imagination accompanies those institutions and structures that I listed at the end of the introduction as part of contemporary memory practices: museums and archives, collections, archaeological research, the work of government planning departments and ministries of culture in their work of heritage management. In this answer the archaeological imagination is an emergent feature of a particular ecology of practices. I borrow this term from Isabelle Stengers (2005 and 2010); it refers to a particular community and its unique habitat. It complements the Foucauldian notion of structures of discourse that enable the production of archaeological knowledge (as discussed in Shanks 1992 and 1996). Here I use the term to encompass infrastructures (museum collections, map rooms, spaces of interaction for antiquarians and archaeologists, libraries, laboratories), instruments, vocabulary, media, and other diverse interlocutors, which are gathered around a particular matter of concern, in this case the (material) presence of the past. An ecology of practices is more than descriptive. It intervenes. It aims, as Stengers puts it, “at the construction of new 'practical identities' for practices, that is, new possibilities for them to be present, in other words to connect” (2005, 186). The archaeological imagination, it can be argued, is an emergent property of this project, initiated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to forge new engagements between the past and the present.

I am certainly going to argue that the archaeological imagination is part of our modernity, but I don’t want to treat it as an aspect of something like a contemporary zeitgeist, or spirit of our modern times. Lowenthal (1985), Wallace (2004) and Holtorf (2005, 2007) have written compilations along these lines, more descriptive than analytical, where they give many examples of the reception of the material past and the work of archaeology in popular and high culture. Instead of such static pictures, I want to offer a more dynamic genealogy, tracking connections back to the beginnings of modernity in the seventeenth century and earlier, offering a treatment of the archaeological imagination that explains as well as outlines its origin and the forms it takes (and hence my reference to that notion of an ecology of practices offered by Stengers). Kiefer presents reflections upon the fabric of history, experiences, responsibilities and culpabilities under a longer term view that reaches back to systems of arcane knowledge and cosmogonies, to folk traditions that predate the consolidation of our modern academic disciplines and systems of knowledge. This reaching back and tracking of lines of descent from earlier to later systems of thought and practice counterposes alternatives to the scientific application of reason, so familiar in systems of knowledge since the eighteenth century. I will identify a particular fulcrum of creativity and the imagination—matters of the creation of history, our own history, histories imposed upon us, in the context of loss and ruin, as well as cosmologies and systems of order; the genealogy of the archaeological imagination is about ways that Science and matters usually reserved for the Humanities can be profoundly complementary.

In respect of such deep anxieties as displayed in the work of Kiefer’s archaeological imagination, I want to begin with a particular aspect of this question of the origin of an archaeological sensibility and ask—what has happened to tradition?

I live in Silicon Valley where information and communications technology companies, with their aggressively entrepreneurial startup culture, could hardly be more future-oriented. Venture capital funding hinges on calculating risk and future return. Development and growth are premised upon innovation, shedding the constraints of conventional ways of doing things. Patent also is a distinctively Californian, countercultural, and indeed utopian desire to create a new and better world. The Valley itself has changed enormously in the last forty years, most of the groves of fruit trees gone in urban development that stretches fifty miles and more beyond San Francisco and San José. There is an intense concern with what this means for local community identity. Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, once a part of small-town America, is now a model of a new kind of industrial urbanism at the heart of the new technology and knowledge industries (see Peter Hall’s great account in his Cities in Civilization, 2001). The community embodies these tensions. IT affluence regularly results in older buildings being targeted for teardown; the city is a desirable zip code, but its smaller older houses and properties don’t always appeal to new interests and developer profit-seeking. Nevertheless, stringent building codes prohibit any major and even many minor alterations of properties older than fifty years. Newly-old downtown commercial buildings are protected, even though they are hardly notable as examples of modern or vernacular architecture; eyesores are a key to physiognomic character. IDEO, a large design consultancy, has its Palo Alto studios in several converted light industrial units, including what was Earl Ellison’s Repair and Radiator Company, established in 1929. The building now sports a fine yellow “Ellison’s” sign specially made to replace the one lost when the building was refurbished in 2000, and IDEO had to comply with the tight regulations that aim to conserve the traces of the local past. Across the road is a mundane concrete base of a column that had lain in the undergrowth by the sidewalk until it was “restored” and given pride of place at the entrance to an underpass to the new medical center.

I suggest this articulation of radical development and change with an attention to local history is commonplace. What brings together this cultural neurosis over the loss and preservation of the past with an orientation to the future and a faith in technology and reason? Let me now take up a broad brush and sketch some features of the reconfiguration of historical roots since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the decline and restitution of traditions, combined with radical focus on calculating futures.

Most academic disciplines are deeply divided fields of argument and uncertainty; this can make them quite stimulating—the big interesting questions seem to remain forever unanswered, and very much so in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Archaeologists vigorously debate theory and method, as well as accounts offered of the likes of the origins of agriculture, the origins of civilization and complex society, the role of traded goods in ancient empires, the reasons for collective burial in prehistoric monuments. These arguments are like storms in a teacup compared with a broader sense of crisis facing the archaeological past in the present. There are today unprecedented threats to the material past, enormous challenges of managing the loss, of mitigating the impacts on archaeological sites coming from urban and rural development. Looting and the illicit trade in antiquities destroy whole sites and ancient landscapes. Legal apparatuses are needed to regulate competing claims on historical roots, on past legacies, when history may become conflated with heritage, and even the recent past can take on considerable cultural value, as in my example from Palo Alto. We now have a whole new field focused on the ethics and politics of property-seen-as-heritage, covering matters of rights and responsibilities to the past, the reconciliation of opportunity, threat and stakeholder interests.

This discourse of threat and loss goes back to the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Industrialization and urbanization have brought colossal cultural displacement, creating whole new classes and communities that do not inherit a long-standing or traditional relationship with the past. The modern disciplines of history, archaeology and anthropology have offered means of holding on to what was changing, means of curating the past and connecting with the future, through visions and narratives of progress, of improvement, or of simply understanding where we have come from. In place of traditional accounts, archaeology and historiography provide orientation substantiated by research. This academic and intellectual field is part of a broader modernist sensibility that deals in the decline of tradition, the rise of historical sensibilities attuned to social and cultural change as well as tradition, that appreciate the remains of the past and of other cultures, housed in the new architectures of the...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. We Are All Archaeologists Now
• 2. Debatable Lands
• 3. An Archaeological Narratology
• 4. The Archaeological Imagination
• References
• Index
• About the Author