A couple in the UK are suing their home’s former owners for not disclosing that the house had been the scene of a murder twenty years ago. [Link]

Dr Samson Perera, a dental biologist at Leeds University UK, murdered his adopted daughter, Nilanthie, in 1985 and buried the dismembered body around the house and garden. Not all the remains have been recovered.

Horror as the underside of everyday life. The secret histories and lives of things and places.

David Lynch has made a career out of this. I think of the opening scenes of his movie Blue Velvet and the severed ear found on a suburban front lawn in small town America.

Fred and Rosemary West in small town England and their serial killings intimately connected with home improvements - a new kitchen floor for the latest victim.

We are often fascinated by the histories of houses and the ghosts, sinister or appealing, of lives passed within, of events witnessed. My good friend David Austin fronted a BBC series called the House Detectives where a team of archaeologists and architectural historians visited houses to unlock their hidden pasts.

Things that were once lost or hidden uncovered. The underside of everyday life. What mundanity can hide or become. Locale as scene of crime. These are archaeological vectors of metamorphosis and disclosure/manifestation.

It was the way the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York described its plans for 57,000 square feet of extended gallery space that caught my eye:

“We have a sacred obligation to put this material on view,” said museum director Philippe de Montebello

[BBC link]

He is talking about 5000 Graeco-Roman artifacts, currently in store at the museum. A sacred duty because these items are seen as artistic treasures?

The gallery is to be named after Shelby White and the late Leon Levy - two of the world’s most voracious of private collectors af antiquities. This is just the latest in a series of links between private collectors, the art market and some major museums. The Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the J. Paul Getty Museum are regularly criticised for continuing to purchase and exhibit unprovenanced antiquities, and for refusing to uphold guidelines and initiatives that would stop their supply - it is clear that looting is almost always the source of antiquities that come with no information about their origin. They have also been the venues for several exhibitions of private collections of antiquities that clearly include looted items. Shelby White and Leon Levy exhibited their collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1990; Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Mailbu and the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1994-5; George Ortiz at the Royal Academy, London in 1994.

The connection between unprovenanced antiquities and looting is not in dispute. These museums are providing a cultural laundering service for the antiquities black market and for the collectors who depend upon it. And both, of course, make a lot of money out of it, while museums can self-righteously claim kudos for displaying art for the benefit of all humankind.

The titles of these exhibitions say a lot: Glories of the Past, A Passion for Antiquities, In Pursuit of the Absolute. Antiquities here belong to the world of the connoisseur who admires the object in itself for its artistic qualities of supposedly universal human value (absolute beauty, whatever). This high cultural value (these are the greatest achievements of civilization) is also, of course, a high monetary value. It is a matter of cultural capital - the high value associated with items of high cultural status.

It is a dangerous commonplace to think that it is good to admire the beauty of ancient works of art in themselves. This separates the artifact, however beautiful it is, from everything that tells us anything more about it. Hence it fuels an art market in looted antiquities because illegally looted antiquities come with little or no information about their origin - for obvious reason.

But these museums and collectors refuse to acknowledge this connection. Shelby White has even been implicated in politcal moves to weaken the agreements and legislation that came after the crucial 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property - see Nancy Wilkie, President of the Archaeological institute of America, on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Archaeology Magazine Nov/Dec 2000. Collectors want to buy and sell whatever they want, without archaeologists interfering. There is a line of argument promoted by Shelby White that collectors truly revere and preserve the past for posterity while archaeologists destroy it. This is what lies behind Philippe de Montebello’s conviction that it is the sacred duty of the Metropolitan Museum to display its antique works of art.

See also UK Parliament Committee considering portable antiquities - April 2000 [link]

See what I was saying about cultural property last month [link]

Just out - Blackwell’s Companion to Archaeology.

An academic guide.

I did the chapter on politics and archaeology. The argument is the one I first made back in the 1980s, when it was deeply unfashionable, that archaeology is a contemporary project, and archaeologists don’t discover the past, they work on what is left.

Here is an earlier and longer version in pdf - [link]

Last month I was thinking about archaeological antecedents for the Tolkein movies. The visualization of the books was very reminiscent, for me at least, of northern European prehistory.

OK so Tolkein was immersed in epic sagas. And the design team clearly complemented the conceptual design with details drawn from archaeological finds, most notably Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon royal burial. Lots of generic Celtic design too.

Both Tolkein and the movie team have in common a project of world building. Tolkein achieves an authenticity through complexity and detail, and through the philological depth (the invented languages). There is also a palpable commitment to his Middle Earth.

The movie’s visualization of Middle Earth also gains authenticity, a sense of presence, from the detail of costume and set, mis en scËne, including the computer graphics.

The familiarity too is a crucial factor in authenticity - the sense of the created world being strange and different, but also just within experience - so we fill in the gaps, are complicit in the world building. The generic plot line is a part of the familiarity - a story of good and evil. And the ‘felt fakery’ of the performers - fantasy and pseudo-archaic dialogue tied to a naturalistic style of acting. The movie makers drew heavily on the work of John Howe and Alan Lee, who have long illustrated Tolkein. The movie sets itself quite consciously into a genre of fantasy and science fiction visualization.

Here is Roger Dean’s album cover for Yes - Relayer, from the 1970s -

Also the work of Rodney Matthews.

I have been wondering about the sources of this. What is the connection with the nineteenth century discovery of prehistory - Cimmerian horsemen, barbarian nomads, early farmers, Celtic tribes?

Stephanie Moser has done some great work on the role of visualization in creating the master narratives of archaeology. Particularly human evolution. Much of the way we visualize early prehistory can be tracked back to the eighteenth century.

Of course. And this got me thinking. Rather than the archaeology of barbarian Europe inspiring fantasy literature, is it not rather that both draw on an older romantic narrative and imagery?

The conceptual design of fantasy art is precisely in an eighteenth century mode of landscape painting - backlit (bright skies), staged (in the use of flat planes running from foreground to backdrop) , linear and atmospheric perspective, and ruins in the land - all very much in a sublime aesthetic. Claude and all the rest of the painters of the picturesque -

Then there is the invention of folk history and tradition in northern Europe that is outside the Graeco-Roman. MacPherson’s Ossian most famously, as a Celtic counterweight to Homer.

All this precedes the invention of modern archaeology; this is the mythology that still informs our archaeological understanding. I think it can even be said that these master narratives and schemes, these worlds of significance are an archaeological mythology that gives individual sites and discoveries their significance. Stories like that of the Amesbury archer that I discussed on 20 February rely of this prior world building to make sense of the past.

And these metanarratives persist independent of scientific or empirical confirmation because they are memes - cultural assemblages with lives of their own.

Joe Moore, retired photographer, is shedding light on California’s contradictory history.

With a 132k dollar grant administered by the state library, Joe, librarians and archivists are gathering letters, family documents, court records, songs and photographs, about 800 documents, for an internet archive about slavery in California - the state that likes to think it entered the union “free” in 1850.

We believe this is one of America’s lost stories,'’ said Guy Washington, regional coordinator for the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom project, who has worked closely with Moore.

It is an archaeological project to manifest the past.

A reburial issue in San Francisco:

SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco has finally found a resting place for the remains of nearly 100 Gold Rush-era residents unearthed three years ago during construction of the Asian Art Museum.

Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma, a small city with 17 cemeteries just south of San Francisco, has offered to take the remains of 97 men, women and children who were originally buried in the city’s first public cemetery — now the site of City Hall, the museum and the new city library. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on the move next week.

Some city leaders are worried that museum visitors, especially those with Buddhist or Taoist beliefs, will stay away when they learn that the deceased still haven’t been properly buried. Over the past three years, the remains — mostly fragments of bones, clothing and jewelry — have been stored in boxes in the basement of the coroner’s office.

“I have never set foot in the museum. I’m uncomfortable because the dead haven’t been taken care of,” said Chinatown activist Rose Pak. “If people were told about it, I’m sure lots of people would have second thoughts about going in.”

The Civic Center area was home to the Yerba Buena Cemetery until the 1870s, when the city disinterred the graves to make room for the original City Hall. All the graves were supposed to be moved to a new cemetery near Twin Peaks, but for unknown reasons many were left behind.

After City Hall was destroyed by a 1906 earthquake and fire, the site became home to the city’s main library until 1999, when construction began on the Asian Art Museum. Museum officials anticipated the discovery of remains, so they hired an archaeologist to remove and document them.

Adorno and Horheimer - what is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of its hopes.

It is all in the relationship.

There is a small exhibition on at the British Museum of a grave dating from the late third millennium/early second.

The grave of a man dating to around 2,300BC was discovered three miles from Stonehenge by Wessex Archaeology staff in May 2002. His grave was the richest from this period (the early Bronze Age) ever found in Britain and contained the country’s first gold objects.

He was found during excavation in advance of a housing development at Amesbury in Wiltshire, and the man was dubbed the “Amesbury Archer” or the “King of Stonehenge” by the media. He has featured on several radio and TV programmes, including the BBC2 Ancestors series.

When I read this website report from Wessex Archaeology, the large non-profit archaeological practice that excavated the burial, I smelled a rat.

This is what they say:

So the story is supposed to run as follows. This burial is of a man who grew up in the Alps and then traveled to the Stonehenge region to settle. Like others, he was associated with trade with central Europe and metalworking, and brought “beaker culture” to Britain. His son, buried nearby, grew up in Britain, so his father may have settled and married locally. The exceptional wealth of the burial indicates that he was possibly Stonehenge’s designer.

A load of tosh.

A picture of the beaker folk.

The evidence for this story is as follows. This is a classic “beaker” burial, albeit with more grave goods than normal, from the early bronze age. Beakers are a distinctive ceramic form found across much of Europe. They are usually found in graves with archers’ accoutrement and copper daggers. What interested me was the use of oxygen isotope analysis of tooth enamel to try to fix the origin of the man. The balance of different oxygen isotopes in the water you drink when young is reflected in tooth enamel. The balance in this man’s tooth enamel is what you find in regions of Europe colder than Britain. The web site shows a map of oxygen isotopes in modern drinking water.

The isotope balance in the buried man is that associated with the blue region on the map.

Now I know that we are only being presented the bare bones of the case. But the blue region extends from Finland through the Baltic and eastern Europe to the Alps. Why was he not from Finland? And who is to say that modern drinking water is a good guide to that in the second millennium BC? Even my rudimentary knowledge of climatic history reminds me that the Atlantic optimum, when Europe was significantly warmer and wetter than today, peaked in the first millennium BC. Did this not affect the character of water available for drinking? Am I just supposed to accept the word of the British Geologial Survey (there is a nice picture of white coated scientist alongside the map)? Well, I know I should go and read the scientific reports. But the map on the web site was not why I was smelling a rat. Though it was making the stink stronger.

I smelled a rat because the story of this supposed designer of Stonehenge coming over from central Europe with his Beakers and knowledge of metalworking was just so familiar to me - and familiar because I had followed how it had been totally discredited in the 1970s. Steve Shennan and others demolished the idea that Beakers were some kind of ethnic cultural marker. There were no “beaker folk” coming over to Britain as Wessex Archaeology claim. There was no distinctive cultural or ethnic group carrying with them secret knowledge of metalworking and how to build stone monuments. And as for the richness of the grave, well, yes, it has more stuff in it than normally found, but why does this indicate status and power associated with Stonehenge? Maybe it does, but equally, maybe not. There is nothing in the web site that makes me confident even in a coincidence of date between the burial and Stonehenge. And Stonehenge was in a constant state of remodelling.

Like I said the other day in this blog, here again we have the old nineteenth century stories being repeated, whatever facts are actually found. This is not science at all. This is tired fantasy, and an insult to those who want to know more of the past.

Archaeology walkabouts - announced last month from ADS in the UK - Archaeology Data Service and University of Leicester.

The “Virtual Walkabout” archives contain a series of still, 2-dimensional photographic images that collectively try to express the experience of walking round an archaeological site or monument. The images are presented in their Virtual order from a given point of departure, and are connected by a series of moves, forwards, backwards, pan left, pan right, step left or step right. The user of a walkabout archive can replicate walking around an archaeological landscape: walking up an avenue, around a carved stone or from one site to another. In this way it is possible to use simple 2 dimensional images to imitate the experience of visiting an archaeological site.

Here is a screen shot of Clive Ruggles’s walk at Avebury.

Sound like a nice idea. Visit an ancient site like Avebury, on screen. But do we ever experience sites like this? In this neutral “this photograph is a record of what you would see” way? My gripe with VR of this kind is that we don’t experience places as photographs.

This walkabout is rooted in that phenomenological movement in archaeology - experiencing ancient monuments - that Chris Tilley made so much of in the 90s. We announced it as a program in our ReConstructing Archaeology. My own book Experiencing the Past emphasized the importance of embodied experience in our archaeological projects - archaeological habitus, to bring in Bourdieu again. But there I was absolutely against the idea that experiencing the past is ever unmediated - we have to foreground and work with the media we adopt - photography, sound, video, whatever. There is no direct representation of a visit to the past. Think less of representation; think instead of evocation.

So Mike Pearson and I tried to explore virtual visiting much more abstractly in a series of performed lectures - not attempting to represent a place, but bringing together materials (narrative, information, imagery, sound, live performance) carefully structured in collage and montage to foreground various kinds of relationship with the place. We visited, for example, the ruined Welsh farm Esgair Fraith at Roda Sten Arts Center (an empty generating station) in Gothenburg in 1995.

What also bothered us was that this interest in walking ancient landscapes is an English neo-romantic experience of the countryside. It depends upon a very particular instance of the figure in the landscape implied in landscape painting, a figure that has been the target of much appropriate criticism. This is from a lecture of mine a while back -

The archaeologist, in small company, maybe alone, walks the byways neglected by Stonehenge’s visitors. Their’s is a mindful rambling. There are the crowds of tourists focused upon the monument. The archaeologist sees in a broad context, and their eye connects intimately with their body of knowledge. They are quietly contemplative, in contrast to the noisy mass. They take their time. In gaining familiarity, or in the painstaking processes of survey and excavation. They can relate the stones to systems of earthmoving, take note of the visibilities, intervisibilities, the framing of vista and perspective, and see in the landscape the processions, carnivals and dances of the folk of long ago.

This could be seen as a variant of an anthropological fascination with exotic cultures, but here they are our own.

I see serious problems with the way landscape, a very particular and ideological way of making aesthetic a certain relationship with land and its inhabitatnts, is understood in this kind of project, phenomenological, whatever. The way landscape is framed. The exclusive character of this framing. Raymond Williams did a great job analysing this in his book The Country and the City.

Paul Brown, Guardian environment correspondent writes of the scale of the heritage industry in the UK.

The National Trust (owner of historic properties - from antiquity to yesterday - and of exceptional landscapes) - 3.3 million members, with new members signing up faster than the birth rate.

12.7 million visitors last year to paying sites - 200 houses and gardens, 49 industrial monuments and mills.
50 million visitors to Trust landscapes like coastlines - 612,000 acres of land, 600 miles of coastline.

It is the biggest organization in Europe.

Total vacation trips taken by UK residents in 2002 - 101.7 million. Of these 75 milion involved culture and heritage - 74%.

Total domestic UK spend in thes trips on heritage and culture in 2002 - 15.74 billion pounds, over 25 billion dollars.

(Source STAR UK)

The BBC call him a cross between James Bond, Graham Greene and Indiana Jones.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, at 89, is now Sir Patrick.

Truly a wonderful writer.

A personal anecdote. Setting - the British School at Athens, 1990. Homebase of the British archaeological community in Greece. I was there to continue my research into the design of ancient Corinthian ceramics.

Subject - archaeological subcultures. There are the lithic cowboys in the American south west - hanging out in the desert, knapping flint. The archaeological unit worker in the UK is familiar from the TV Time Team personality of Mick Aston - muddy boots, Barbour jacket that has seen too much weather, in need of a haircut, dirt under the fingernails. At the British School there is the subcultural legacy of the golden boys of the 20s and 30s. Archaeologists like Humphry Payne and John Pendlebury. Handsome Oxford chaps who lived for the romantic Classical past and loved the Greeks. Payne died tragically young. Pendlebury dug Akhenaten’s fabled city on the Nile, fell in love with Crete, and died fighting the German invasion in 1941.

Patrick Leigh Fermor was there with Special Operations Executive, and, with Stanley Moss, dressed as a German corporal, kidnapped Major General Karl Kreipe, the German commander. If my memory serves me right, the German HQ was Arthur Evans’s old home, the Villa Ariadne, by the prehistoric site of Knossos. Dirk Bogarde played his part in the movie of the book - Ill Met By Moonlight. Last time I visited Heraklion people were complaining at the straightening of the road to Acharnes - the bend where the staff car slowed and allowed the kidnap to take place was being removed. A mistaken act of improvement, they were saying - heritage was being lost.

At the British School that day the archaeologists and Classicists were planning a trip out into “the real Greece”, the one now almost lost to modern development and globalism, though they did not call it that. They decided on the Mani, a still remote part of the south east Peloponnese, to meet the authentic past. The book of Leigh Fermor that I find most compelling is about the Mani.

This is what so many archaeologists want. It is an archaeological desire - to convene with authentic pasts in the face of their decay. And it seems to precisely compliment a life at an edge, of encounter and adventure.