Phil writes

This is an interesting concept - the virtual gift. [Link to slashdot]

Digitus1337 writes “Wired has an article up about a new online service known as ‘FunHi.’ You sign up and join a community, and give your fellows gifts, but as Wired has reported, ‘these are not ordinary gifts. They’re purely digital: little flashing icons of cars, planes, diamond rings and other virtual representations of expensive items included in messages members send each other. And FunHi members don’t seem to care that the real money they’re spending on the gifts, at prices as high as $30 an item, is going straight into the company’s coffers.” This leaves just one question unanswered… why didn’t I think of this?” It sounds like an April Fool’s Joke, but then, so does online trading of Everquest loot.

Marcel Mauss revolutionized our thinking on the general economy with his concept of the gift -

Mauss’s most influential work is his Essay sur le don (1923-24; English translation: The Gift. Forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, 1954), a comparative essay on gift-giving and exchange in “primitive” societies. On the basis of empirical examples from a wide range of societies, Mauss describes the obligations attendent on gift-giving: the obligation to give gifts (by giving, one shows oneself as generous, and thus as deserving of respect), the obligation to receive them (by receiving the gift, one shows respect to the giver, and concommittantly proves one’s own generocity), and the obligation to return the gift (thus demonstrating that one’s honor is - at least - equivalent to that of the original giver). Gift-giving is thus steeped in morality, and by giving, receiving and returning gifts, a moral bond between the persons exchanging gifts. At the same time, Mauss emphasizes the competitive and strategic aspect of gift-giving: by giving more than one’s competitors, one lays claim to greater respect than them, and gift-giving contests (such as the famous North-West Coast Native American potlatch), are thus common in the ethnographic record. In this work, Mauss thus lays the foundation for a theoretical understanding of the nature of social relations.

The objects and services exchanged in “primitive” gift-giving are, as Mauss points out, thus laden with “power” (the Polynesian words mana and hau are used to refer to this “power in the gift”). Though a similar “power” is present to a certain extent in modern gifts as well, Mauss shows that gifts in traditional societies are more complex and multivalent than anything we know from modern society. The gift, as Mauss sees it, is more than a simple commodity or memento changing hands - it is a “total prestation” (prÈstation totale), which metonymically (as part for whole) stands for every aspect of the society it is part of. The gift is economic, political, kinship-oriented, legal, mythological, religious, magical, practical, personal and social. By moving such an object through the social landscape, the gift-giver so to speak rearranges the fabric of sociality - and it is this that forms the basis of the gift’s power.

(I got this from AnthroBase.com.)

When is a gift anything other than virtual? - that is, the gift always invokes obligation, reciprocation, relationship - mingling materiality and immateriality. This is a far better way of thinking about the virtual than through ideas of faithful representation and mimicry/mimesis.

From Phil@philosophistry - ghost town gallery.com - a gazeteer of ghost towns.

You can send virtual postcards through the site.

See also my comments last August on photographs of archaeological ruin.

The Newcastle Journal has run an article about the WWII remains I mentioned in connection with the landscape archaeology around Dunstanburgh Castle in the UK.

The two concrete radar buildings still survive and there is clear evidence of where equipment was sited.

The remains of the Nissen huts behind the radar station, which accommodated the operators, are also still there.

In 1944 after the invasion of Normandy, the radar was dismantled and the site was used to house Italian prisoners of war.

The archaeologists were puzzled to find the remains of stone terraces on the slopes of the ridge behind the site.

“They looked like something you would find in Greece or but then we realised that they were little Italian-style gardens which had been cultivated by the PoWs. What we have uncovered is a fascinating story of what was a fundamental part of the defence of this country. It is quite staggering. But these things quickly get forgotten. We probably know more about the 14th Century Dunstanburgh Castle from documents than we know about the radar station.”

The Maison des Sciences de l’Homme and the French Ministry of Culture sponsored an investigation several months long into the growing interest in this archaeology of the recent past back in 1994. My old friends Laurent Olivier and Alain Schnapp did a great job of convening the meetings and editing the publication (not widely known, but soon to appear in pdf on my web site).

Topics discussed included battlefield archaeology, the investigation of the material traces of famous people from the recent past, the philosophy of material traces. Main finding - archaeology is about contemporary relationships with different manifestations of the past and requires a sensitivity to personal and political investment in these relationships.

English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link]

This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long as I can remember - I grew up in this part of the world, and the place just keeps opening up to me in different ways.

The diary tries a little too hard to appeal - it wants to be a combo web version of the cultural task forces of TV’s Time Team, Ground Force and Changing Rooms (the last two very familiar to those who watch BBC America). It doesn’t need to - the story it tells is subtle and wonderfully faceted.

So a team arrived last November (2003) to look at the castle and its setting with the eye of the landscape archaeologist. They brought the usual GPS and other hightech devices, but what clearly matters is a questioning eye. (And this is just the approach taken by the two classic figures of British landscape archaeology - my friends at Lampeter David Austin and Andrew Fleming - I recall wonderful afternoons walking the Welsh uplands with them tracing the ever-so-slight undulations that betrayed an old track, leat, earthwork.)

For some time it has been clear that the great medieval fortresses of feudal Europe are not simply functional military architecture. A trend has been to see them primarily as symbols of power. (More on this in a moment.)

The team at Dunstanburgh asked why the place was built on this remote headland. Spectacular and forbidding yes, but way off any strategic route in this most disputed of lands between England and Scotland. It was built by Thomas of Lancaster and inherited by John of Gaunt, two regal aristocrats in the forteenth century. Then the border was very much threatened, but the place saw little action. So what new did the survey team find? Traces of a landscape of ponds, meres, roads and a harbor that complements the tremendous effect of a superbly crafted gatehouse, curtain wall and watch tower atop a coastal cliff. Dunstanburgh was a showpiece castle. The way a castle should be, reflected in the meres dug round the great rock of a headland on which the fine masonry was laid.

There is even a nice connection with Arthurian romance (beloved of John of Gaunt). It is the legend of Sir Guy the Seeker. Stranded in a storm, he found, with Merlin’s help, a lady spellbound in a crystal casket in a chamber beneath the ruins of Dunstanburgh. But he lost her, because he made the wrong choice between a horn and sword presented to him by a ghost.

“Now shame on the coward who sounded a horn,
When he might have unsheathed a sword.”

And not just the castle - the survey looked at second world war military emplacements, including a top-secret radar station and camp for Italian prisoners of war, a shipwreck from the 1950s (a Polish trawler deliberately wrecked so the men could claim asylum), a bronze age cairn, the famous painting by Turner of another storm and wreck, traces of farming going back millennia.

Double red towers = Earl Thomas’ great gatehouse, built 1313
Single red tower = the beautiful Lilburn Tower
Green line = timber palisade of the outer perimeter
Yellow towers = probable sites of outer gatehouses
Big blue lakes = ornamental ‘meres’, constructed 1313
Small blue rectangles = fishponds, for breeding fish to release into the meres
Blue lines = channels for managing the water supply
Orange dots = settlements probably dating to around 1750
Green dot = the medieval fishtrap and the Polish trawler wrecked in August 1958

This is all so gratifying because the team were open enough to simply attend to what they were finding in a very intellectually honest way (the W.G. Hoskins way of Fleming and Austin). But they also did what I would have loved to have done - find the traces of the meres, of the harbor jetty, then piecing it together with local experience and recent history, and all while staying at the Cottage Inn, the local pub where we have lunch when we are lucky enough to visit this wonderful corner of England. This is Michel Serres’s temporal chiffonage. Time, not linear, from then to now and no way back, but percolating around us.

But I have to admit that there is a good deal of gratification in this survey and diary because I anticipated it in a piece I wrote in my book Experiencing the Past, in 1990.

Back then it was the early days of the phenomenological project in archaeology - foregrounding the experience of place (see my blog comments on the politically dubious neo-romanticism of all this - [Link]) I was more interested in the kind of focus on techniques of the body often associated with Norbert Elias - so I wrote about the way the feudal lord would ride out over a designed landscape, and how such experiences constitute the site of power. I took photos and made drawings to try to capture this, and above all I tried to find a way of writing about it - the book Experiencing the Past.

So the castle is all about landscape - designed spaces. (See Matthew Johnson’s superb book Behind the castle gate.) But this is not to say that it is a symbol of power. That is too passive a view of architecture. These settings are frames within which late feudal England was constantly recreated. Politics is always an aesthetics. And the power of the feudal lord is embedded in the management of people and land, in marking, mapping, looking over, within the gates of the residence, and without.

We (Haun Saussy and Tim Lenoir) have just taken up these themes in our freshman course at Stanford - Bodies in Place [another link to the course]. We read Richard II Shakespeare’s stunningly intelligent treatment of the sovereign’s two bodies. Of course, John of Gaunt is a major character in the drama and embodies the aristocracy’s attachment to property. I lectured on this theme of land and identity, picking up what I had been following when trying to understand this tremendous building that is Dunstanburgh. I also juxtaposed Leni Riefenstahl’s movie of the fascist Nuremberg Rally in 1934 and Martin Parr’s photography - well this is a course that has outraged the Wall Street Journal (and they only let subscribers look at the article)!

Last summer Molly and I explored what was left of the jetty of the old medieval harbor identified by the team. We knew it was something - an alignment of stone and the great castle gate looks right on it … thanks to the English Heritage Team for making sense of it all for us!

Updates links - February 2006

English Heritage survey (Nov 2003) - [Link - 24 hour museum] | [Link to the survey diary]

16 March - I made a comment about the discovery of the earliest human symbols. My old friend Cornelius Holtorf is surely right to point out that this story of “first occasion” belongs with a metanarrative of “origins”.

The story - this was where things first began to look like they are today.

The problem - viewing history only in terms of a progression towards the present is tremedously distorting and says more about the present than the past. In seeking origins we don’t learn anything new.

“Early human marks are ’symbols’” - a BBC report headline today.

A series of parallel lines engraved in an animal bone between 1.4 and 1.2 million years ago may be the earliest example of human symbolic behaviour.

University of Bordeaux experts say no practical process, such as butchering a carcass, can explain the markings.

But many researchers believe the capacity for true symbolic thinking arose much later with the emergence of modern humans, Homo sapiens.

The 8cm-long bone was unearthed at the Kozarnika cave in north-west Bulgaria.

Another animal bone found at the site is incised with 27 marks along its edge.

So what? There are no comparable cases so early.

Maybe it is a first, but that doesn’t mean anything. You may be able to teach a chimp to use language, and doing so tells us lots about language and behavior, evolution and speciation. But it doesn’t mean that chimps ever used language or will. Predispositions or capacities aren’t necessarily taken up.

I would connect this interest in “firsts” with the master narrative that once something “good” happens it will spread of its own accord. This was at the heart of old diffusionist culture history - agriculture was invented, seen as a good thing, and so spread. Actually, it is clear that history, certainly, doesn’t work like this.

I want to pick up a comment or rather link that Sam left on the Blather site entry - to Eric Benson’s blog.

Archaeological text generation - Markov chains

… The official definition of a markov chain is: A model of sequences of events where the probability of an event occurring depends upon the fact that a preceding event occurred. The way Stephen has implemented it is through a script that takes a collection of text and creates a mapping of words dependant on the relationship each word has to those that precede it. For example, in this sentence, the word “example” is preceded by “for” and “preceded” is preceded by “is” (twice). In this example, it’s only looking one word back, but you can also look multiple words back to see that “sentence” is preceeded by “in this” in the example sentence. Using this information, you can rebuild new sentences. Basically, you just give it a starting word, like “For” and it can look for all words that came after “For” and slowly add on to the sentence in a way that will feel organic. The further you looked back when building the chains, the more natural the sentences will feel because they will be build with blocks that had more context in them. There’s also a greater chance that they will end up building sentences that actually existed in the original text. So you have to find that balance where you’re building new sentences, and they feel natural, and yet they didn’t exist in the original text

Phil and Peter have come across the California coastline site. High resolution aerial images, overlapped so you can travel the length of California’s coast. Tied to a map too. They were commenting on the effect of presence the site and images achieve. Not an effect of “being there” - but being able to see so much. In one shot. They speculate about the “macroscopic sensory”, with high definition sound added to such high res images.

Andreas Gursky’s photos work like this.

© Andreas Gursky - 99 Cent 1999. This is 7 x 11 feet!

Enormous and epic shots that show so much detail.

Manovich has pointed out that the detail of computer graphics gets in the way of their naturalism - they have to be softened or degraded to look “real”.

This has got me thinking (yet again) about my gripe with all this VR in archaeology (reconstructing the past “the way it was”). For me, Phil and Peter’s point about these high resolution (and they are not that high) experiences is that they kind of augment reality. For a long while I have experimented with projected medium format transparencies in lectures. Most of us are used to 35mm slides. They can carry a lot of detail, but nothing like a 6×6cm slide. There seems almost no end to the detail - I have shown them on a 20 foot screen and they still look sharp close up. More than the detail we get in everyday vision. Hence they seem to augment, to add to what we feel we see. Cubic VR is like this too, I think.

This is epic in a Brechtian sense too, of making the viewer very aware of the effect of the medium - interupting the illusion with, here, focus on resolution.

It happens too in big screen cinema - I always sit in about the third row - so that there is just too much to take in.

Note though what Manovich misses - this wonder is not inherent in the image, but in the history of our engagement with such images. It all depends on what we have become familiar with. It is rooted in everyday experience.

In the Three Landscapes Project a couple of years ago Cliff McLucas, Dorian Llywelyn and I worked on that instinct that Phil and Peter had - to add more. We took up a notion of deep mapping that Mike Pearson and I shaped for Theatre/Archaeology. Basically layer anything and everything in a hybrid representation of a place - sound, performance, text (of whatever genre), still and moving imagery, diagrams, maps and installations.

One result was a deep map of California’s San Andreas Fault - 42 feet long and 8 feet high. We used Zoomify’s Flash application to deal with screen resolution - [Link]

We had a company (Brith Gof) project to deep map an island in the Netherlands (Terschelling - Oerol festival 2000 and after) - using aerial photography (video), satellite imagery, and all tagged with recordings of people, still photography, ambient sounds. Cliff mounted an installation at the festival and people loved it. It continues.

I think the notion of deep mapping as this kind of augmentation of our everyday experience is fascinating and powerful. People do love maps. It crucially also gets us away from notions of photographic reality into a realization that many images work like diagrams - adding to, commenting upon, reconfiguring what they re-present.

An aside. A standard line of critique is that cartography is part of an imperilaist project. That the encompassing aerial view is one of a male dominating gaze. Ian Hodder said this to me and Cliff when we talked to him about our project. I think this view is simplistic.

I do like to think of Michel Serres’s notion of the folded toplogy of time - all sorts of temporality percolating in our experiences of place - all sorts of dates and times, experiences and documents present, layered, in the sense of place.

An anecdote. We tried to sell the idea to the BBC (fly around in a helicopter, take aerial shots, look at detailed maps and photographs of neighbourhoods, stop to talk to people). It went to a senior level, but they told us the idea was too expensive to implement. Then they went ahead and used the idea anyway, without us. But they blew the concept and turned it into travelogue/local community TV. They called it “sense of place” - [Link]

There is a sense of the uncanny to the village in Scotland that has been discovered to go back 5,500 years. [Link]

Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856).

The Uncanny?

The return of what is no longer the same.
For Freud, a return of the repressed. [Here is an extract.]

The hauntingly familiar - strange, but reminiscent.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992). Dracula has arrived in London. He contrives a meeting, accidentally in the street, with Mina, having recognised her back home in Transylvania from Harker’s photograph. She hesitates to show him the new science of the cinematograph. Mina to the Count - “Who are you? - I know you”. His reply - ” I have crossed oceans of time to find you”. The recognition, after centuries, and through metempsychosis, that she was once his lover; his loss; and rediscovery.

Sublime horror.

The uncanny is disruption - of time; a fracturing, splitting, or doubling of subjectivity; a deconstructive repetition-with-a-difference.

The images above are from Nigel Kneale’s (Quatermass and The Pit) classic but little known “Stone Tape” (1972, directed Peter Sasdy, now available from the British Film Institute). A team of scientists discover a room in a Gothic mansion that is haunted by the recordings (in the very stone fabric) of events layered back into millennia, back to a prehistoric megalithic and horrific experience.

For Steven King the uncanny is (similarly) haunted real estate.

The unhomelike - Das Unheimliche. Unheimlichkeit, the uncanny, breaks down roughly into “un-home-like-ness.”

The streets of London.

With the archaeological uncanny comes that abhorrence of the positive that I was talking about on Friday. We should think of a negativity that requires a recognition of the discontinuity of the past and the paradox of the double.

Doppelganger. Dorian Gray. How would you recognize your double? Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) - they arrive in San Francisco from outer space. People take the strange new flowers home, and when they sleep alien doubles take their place. Doubles may be zombies. automata or cyborgs. We fear the artificial alter-ego. The Uncanny is at the heart of the ethics of biotechnology and cloning. Never mind AI.

And the double that is the photograph. (But it never really looks like you - or it photogenetically reflects you in better light.) The hyper-realist sculpture. George Segal’s figures. A sense of dÈj‡ vu.

The Uncanny is the simulacrum - an exact copy of an original that never existed. BMW’s new Mini.

Tzvetan Todorov connects the uncanny, the fantastic, and the marvelous. He defines the fantastic as a genre which generates hesitation in the reader’s mind. He asserts the necessity of three conditions for the fantastic: the reader must hesitate between a natural and supernatural interpretation, a character usually represents this hesitation and the reader adopts a nonallegorical reading. We are in liminal spaces. In Coppola’s Dracula, Mina meets the Count at a showing of the new “movies” - uncanny science. She hesitates, but accepts his offer of joining him in the un-dead. Lover and monster. She hesitates in his murder. Recognition, after hesitation, of the double. Precisely.

Giorgio de Chiric worked on the silence, solitude and obscurity of deserted Italian piazze, urban landscapes - a curious amalgam of aesthetic sentiment and psychic distress. He preferred to use the word “presentiment”, but his confusion of animate and inanimate - he described statues in public places as particularly evocative because they seemed to have the potential to rise and enter the world of men, especially at twilight - is precisely what Freud had described as the primary criterion for the generation of the Uncanny.

Never feeling at home in the world - Novalis on philosophy (if my memory serves right). This is archaeology.

Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited village (from Stone Pages).

Further to the matter of continuity -

5 March 2004

Dreghorn in Ayrshire, Scotland, has been revealed as Britain’s oldest continuously inhabited village after the remains of an ancient settlement were uncovered by builders.

North Ayrshire Council granted permission for a development of 53 new houses at Dreghorn on the condition that tests were carried out on land next to Dreghorn cemetery. Developers spotted suspicious-looking lumps and bumps on aerial photographs, and when a 5,500-year-old well was found in November, archaeologists were called in. The team of archaeologists is being led by Tom Wilson.

“This is only one of five to be discovered in Scotland and we think it dates back to around 3500BC” he said. “It would be a farming community with around eight huts taking pride of place in the site. We have also found pits with pottery and a giant fence that must have circled the village. Although other neolithic villages have been found in Scotland, this is the only one I believe has been permanently lived in. We can see where the huts and kiln would have been … ”

Reminds me of Peter Ackroyd’s First Light - a novel of the implications of such temporal continuities.