This dissertation set out to sketch a general model of archaeological practice that accounts for what transpires in the articulation of landscape. It addressed a series of key questions concerning relations between practitioners and their ‘fields’ of study, whether various material things, various material pasts, or various aspects of material presence, through ‘concrete empirical work’ (pace Morris 2000, 309) both on the ground and in the context of various case studies. This empirical inquiry centered upon various genealogical treatments concerning the core modes of engagement involved in contemporary regional survey, the Argolid Exploration Project archives and manifestations of the southern Argolid landscape. In so doing, a number of issues have been raised in relation to some of the most fundamental questions in archaeology concerning agency, materiality, space and time.

In de-centering the human being with regards to agency, this dissertation has accorded action to a host of disparate entities (in step with Olsen 2003; Yarrow 2003). So alongside a military geographer were the Periegesis, maps, optically consistent plans, theodolites, tapes and compasses; along with a Sapper from the Royal Engineers were camera, photographic equipment, chemicals, glass plates and a portable observation stage; in consort with survey archaeologists one finds terrace lines, a well-worn piece of polychrome, ceramic comparanda, map forms, pottery forms and the Red Team notebook from 1981. Transactions between these various entities, it has been argued, play out in the many steps of archaeological practice and the sum total of their relations come together in ‘our’ (referring to such particular collectivities) articulations of the material past. This has major ramifications for our understandings of the archaeological process.

In closely following archaeological survey practice through its various steps a case has been made for many small, iterative steps being present between the material world and discourse (Latour 1999). This take on practice contrasts with the interpretive program implemented at sites such as Çatalhöyük where as much knowledge as possible is brought to the ‘trowels edge’ (refer to Hodder 1997; 1999; 2000). While it is extremely important to have a full brigade of ‘allies’ on the ground, this program is based on a presupposition that the single, most important jump between the material world and what is said about it occurs in the trench. By placing aside an interest in epistemology, whether empiricist/objectivist (to be distinguished from ‘empirical’) or interpretive (refer to Wylie 2002, 57-96; Hodder 1999, 80-104), and focusing in on what occurs in the movements between the Greek countryside and the final publication a different scheme of archaeological practice has been offered (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). This scheme respects the many iterative steps of the AEP survey process (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, 214-59) and recognizes the need for manifesting multiplicities and presences in carrying forth something of that which we may not have the words to comprehend at a particular moment in, for example, a recently plowed field in the Fournoi valley. It has been argued that no matter how much knowledge we bring to the engagement on the ground we always return whether after two weeks, two months, or two years with a different understanding of the material past. As such, our modes of articulation should facilitate the possibility of reiteration.

Here the best course of action was taken through experimentation. Attempts were made at manifesting qualities of the material presence of landscape, whether the multi-sensoria associated locales transected by AEP crews or material features documented in the course of survey. These experiments were materialized as new media templates, video and sound footage, or the general archive of notebooks, photographs, and maps, which were collated into this hypertext wiki that accompanies a paper-based version of this dissertation. Yet beyond the interface of the computer screen an example of located media was also offered as a peripatetic video (Witmore 2004).

This focus on such aspects of the material world necessitated a reconsideration of what is considered to be one of our most basic givens in archaeology—time (on the taken-for-granted nature of time in archaeology refer to Lucas 2005, 1-31; also Olivier 2003). The action of the material past was best demonstrated through the intimacies survey practice. But understanding the past as here and now, as entangled with the world of the present, complicates time’s seemingly unambiguous arrow. The treatment of the past as separated off by scientific ‘revolutions, epistemological breaks, and epistemic ruptures’ was regarded as a particular temporality, as a form of modernist historicism (Latour 1993, 68). Time, it was argued, is more complex and chaotic. Its flow was described as turbulent. Time percolates (after Serres with Latour 1995) and as such various pasts may persist, some may no longer be with us or others may recirculate through the work of archaeologists. Because something of the past is present we may even hear its sounds. While respecting the value and importance of historical narratives through time (Morris 2000, 3-33), we may also document the multitemporal nature of landscape by plotting the points of contact and convergence between various pasts (refer to Shanks 2004 for an narrative which affects such convergences).

While neither prescriptive in its layout, nor exhaustive in its coverage, a suggestive case has been made for how we might tackle the material presence of, and multiple pasts within, the land as it lies and as it circulates. In so doing, this dissertation has situated archaeology alongside other processes of transformation within the stories of landscape. To this end it deployed a topology. This topology followed the creases and folds in time, be they between Classical fortification walls and the alignment of 19th century houses; between Pausanias’ reference to the location of ancient Mases and William Martin Leake detailing its location; be they in the action of Hellenistic farmers dispersing the contents of a kopron and archaeologists collecting ceramic fragments from the surface; or simply fragments of Neolithic construction and portions of Roman ceramic kilns exposed by the agitation of the sea. Within the fields of the southern Akte one encounters aggregates of various pasts. Paleolithic, Iron Age, Roman or Medieval, something of them is simultaneously present in the countryside. Such material pasts are intertwined within a polychronic ensemble of landscape. These multiple pasts percolate through our retelling.

In all, this dissertation has consistently worked to recast the archaeological project of landscape articulation while avoiding the conceptual pitfalls of the ‘modernist thought,’ which is held by some to have brought archaeology about in the first place (e.g. Thomas 2004b). By focusing in on what archaeologists do and how the material past continues to have action in our lives, this thesis has treated the constitution of ideas and things as simultaneous. These transactions are situated within a constellation of other fields and mediated by a multiplicity of other entities whose presences were delegated at various moments throughout the millennia of human existence. As such, the net cast in this study has been very small indeed. The genealogies of field practice are much more complex and stretch over much longer temporal spans than what was detailed in Chapter 2. There are many other possibilities to be explored in the manifestation of material presence with new media. There are also many more proximities to be plotted in a topology of the southern Argolid. Nevertheless, the broader implications of the general model advanced here are far reaching. There remain vast stretches of common ground to be mapped for processualists and interpretive archaeologists alike in what they do. Moreover, such common ground remains to be traced under other terrains of contestation and division (e.g. Berggren and Hodder 2003; Meskell 1998; Sheppard 2003; Watkins 2003). While such broad diplomatic fronts wait to be explored, we have only begun to scratch the surface in articulating these rich aggregate mixtures of people and things, societies and landscapes, pasts and presents. These are but some of the hopes placed upon a symmetrical archaeology.

Return to: Chapter 5--Multiple fields: a brief connclusion

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