Multiple fields & archaeological practice: Multiple fields: a brief conclusion

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Mediating Archaeology

There is no direct or transparent representation of the southern Argolid. Likewise, the ensemble of landscape is not restricted to what lies on the ground. The southern Argolid, it has been emphasized, circulates through a variety of media. Each medium comprises a field of articulation, a potential mode of engagement. Each has a stake in the iteration of landscape. Each has a stake in subsequent archaeological practices. Despite a modernist understanding of time, which would posit these iterations as separated by measurable chronological distances, they exist simultaneously.

A serious effort has been made in this chapter to take a wide variety of fields, the things present in the assemblies and gatherings of landscape, on board in its mediation. In so doing I have followed a path of many twists and turns, perhaps worthy of Odysseus himself. In so doing I have attempted to complement and enrich the work of the AEP, not by offering a more nuanced linear historical narrative, but by producing a topology.

I have argued that landscape is an ensemble, an aggregate mix of multiple times, which are not necessarily linear in association. My emphasis has focused on the fragmented, dispersed, and accreted, simultaneously torn, folded and pleated, multiple pasts that are present in the land and have action in peoples’ lives now. Addressing this complexity requires understandings, not oriented around histories of distance and division, which stack time up in a linear tower of discrete blocks, but rather around ontologies of proximity and presence. These understandings are genealogical, as was the focus of Chapter 2 in marking the entry points of various actors. At the same time they are topological, because they are here and now and have action in our present. Here I have stressed both in an effort to account for the complex ways in which the Argolic pasts percolate in the present. Such multitemporal mixtures, I suggest, constitutes the fields with which archaeology works. They come together in what archaeology is and what archaeology does.

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