The BBC have picked up on Stanford’s Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project.
[Link]
[Stanford Report - details]

The Forma Urbis Romae, also known as the Severan Marble Plan, was a giant marble map of ancient Rome that hung on a wall in a building, the Templum Pacis, near the forum. It measured 60 feet wide by 45 feet high and was made in the reign of Septimius Severus (around 200 AD). It was very detailed - planned down to the individual doorway and staircase. Amazing.

Unfortunately, the map is in fragments - 1,186 of them, little more than 10% of the original; and not all the fragments still exist.

Stanford’s project aims to match fragments by using computers running pattern searching software on scans and digital models of the stones - a 3D jigsaw puzzle. An offshoot is a searchable on-line database [Link].

Marc Levoy is the main computer scientist. He and David Koller are in the news announcing new matches at a conference. Jen Trimble in the Classics Department at Stanford is the main archaeologist on the project.

One claim made several times by the news items is that the new matches will change the way we think of the ancient city of Rome. This is what I want to take issue with.

Yet again we have an archaeological news item that foregrounds new discovery as the core of archaeological research. It isn’t. And there are far more interesting things going on in this fine collaborative effort.

The mathematics of the pattern matching is fascinating and has all sorts of possible applications. This, tied to 3D scanning and manipulation, is what particularly attracts the computer scientists. One aspect I find particularly intriguing is the aim to have the software extrapolate and interpolate - to jump across gaps. Marc sees a possibility of borrowing some algorithms from genetic sequencing. I find this impressive.

From an archaeological point of view, the value of the project lies predominantly in making accessible what was difficult of access - the fragments are well published, but in a limited and very expensive edition. The web site and associated database are a sound project in e-publishing. Anyone can look at the marble pieces on their computer and spin them - though the Italian authorities are worried enough (I would say paranoid), about intellectual property to forbid access to the actual digital models. (Like who is going to do anything with them? Even if someone found a way of making money out of them it is hardly going to be a mystery where the scans came from!)

As for the matches that have caught media attention - these are of limited archaeological value. Let’s be honest. The main matches were made long ago. Most of the plan is missing. And just what will a few extended streets add? It is not as if the project is going to redraw the map of ancient Rome.

“Scholars used to write whole articles and gain massive academic points for adding one new [match],” said Elizabeth Fentress, an Oxford-educated archeologist.

[Stanford Review]

What a sad comment on a dessicated, dead archaeology.

As Jen Trimble says, the task still is and always was to interpret the wonderful evidence we have in the plan for urban design and city life. Archaeologists are just now beginning to get round to this effort of explanation and understanding. It is a task that requires some disciplinary cross-fertilization quite beyond this coming together of computer aided visualization and e-publication. An archaeological engagement with new thinking in human and cultural geography is overdue in Classical Archaeology.

This is an expensive project and there is a temptation to justify the expense by saying it will change the way we think of history, by focusing on the appreciative gasps of the audience as a new match between marble plan fragments was revealed, as Marc Levoy put it when talking about his recent conference presentation in Rome. But I am convinced we must not go down this line of emphasizing new finds, focusing attention of the sites and artifacts that archaeologists dig up and deal in. This object centered fetishism is precisely what fuels the collectors market in antiquities as objects of value-in-themselves. It destroys history. This is, ironically, not what archaeology is about. What really matters? The stories the places and things tell. Emplotment. And this requires so much more than the things themselves.

The Forma Urbis Romae project shows that the most valuable possibilities generated by collaboration do not necessarily relate to new knowledge but to other emergent network effects - algorithms that apply to genetic sequencing, a new reason for a renewed interest in ancient urban design, the topic of e-publication in archaeology (what form, for whom, at what cost?). Also collaboration may be quite centifugal - divergent interests running in quite contradictory directions. The pattern matching algorithms beloved of the computer scientists have no direct relation to the archaeological interpretation of street life in ancient Rome. And the main archaeological achievement of the project may be a review of the marble plan of Rome in the light of new thinking about urban life that has nothing to do with 3D scanning.

Lunch with Jonathan Greenberg today - Stanford Law School.

He specializes in conflict resolution and has a particular interest in national partition in the wake of the withdrawal of imperial powers and decolonisation - Korea, India, Palestine, Vietnam, and, of course, Iran and Iraq. He sees partition and the narratives and feelings it generates as trauma of the body politic.

Trauma - wound (here dismemberment), but also in psychoanalysis - psychic injury, esp. one caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioural disorder of organic origin. Also, the state or condition so caused.

More than a metaphor I think. Trauma applies to many different kinds of relationship with the past, not least archaeology. It is now a truism that archaeology is a standard accompaniment of nationalist interest, delivering intense and materially immediate narratives of national origins. Archaeology so often deals with pasts radically separated from the present returning uncannily in the excavation of their ruined remains, and associated with a desire to reunite and make whole the story of a national past to the psychic benefit of contemporary sense of identity.

Modernist myths and emplotment. Archaeology at the heart of many disputes over contemporary identity.

[Link to more discussion of trauma]

Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia

This story has it all.

High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air.

Local officials, urged on by the increasingly militant electorate, are collecting signatures, writing petitions and demanding audiences with regional political leaders.

Their demands are simple and have nothing to do with the inept rule, poverty, corruption and ecological disasters dogging the region.

They want a 2,500-year-old mummy, found by Russian archaeologists 11 years ago and being studied in the Siberian capital of Novosibirsk, to be reinterred without delay.

Egged on by powerful shamans who local people believe act as go-betweens with the heavenly spirits, they say only the mummy’s reburial will put an end to a rash of earthquakes and other problems assailing the region.

The mummy in question is an archaeological jewel. When her ornately tattooed body was found entombed in ice in an ancient burial chamber, the find was acclaimed as one of the most important in Russia’s recent history.

The Ice Maiden, as she was dubbed, had survived almost intact in the permafrost of the southern Siberian mountains, surrounded by a burial sacrifice of six horses in gilt harnesses.

Now the battle lines over her future are being drawn up. The fight pits modern Russian science against the ancient beliefs of the Altai people who lived in the region for centuries before Russian colonisers arrived 300 years ago.

It is also at the heart of strained relations between Moscow, often seen as high-handed and out of touch, and the many indigenous peoples of Russia, growing in self-confidence and demanding ever-greater autonomy even as President Vladimir Putin seeks to rein them in.

The archaeological archetypes - mummies uncannily preserved, primitivist pitted against rationalist attitudes, shamen and ancient curses, intimate past-present relationships, a politically charged material past, senses of contemporary identity - components that give a local dispute global reach. Add to this the issue of ethnographic analogy in academic archaeology - the comparison of cultures past with the contemporary ethnographic record - my colleague Chris Tilley got into Siberian shamen when dealing with nordic bronze age rock art.

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography - The Book of Probes and Trek.

Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution - abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in there (ghost images and the uncanny), traces, echoes, nuances, shadows, objective correlatives of dim memories (the beach last summer). He uses recombinant graphics, plays on switching and manipulating figure and ground. Many photos use disconnected bits of graphics, logos, fonts.

© David Carson

There is artifice, but not photographic - none of the photos pay attention to usual paradigms (color balance, framing, composition, or indeed genre).

Trek is explicit about Carson’s purpose - a visual archaeology, one that deals in a rag and bone shop, with fragments, remnants of signs, layers of cultural accretion. Border zones - slippage between between matter, text and image, between past and present and future.

Some media themes

Carson works on media matter. Media are clearly the message. Probes is a work on McLuhan. A probe is an instrument of testing where the content of the image is less important than its provocation, its prompt of the question - what is this about? The point of the probe is its effect, its investigation here into ways of seeing. Probes are visual primers.

Barthes’s punctum comes to mind. And Adorno - the best magnifying galss is a splinter in the eye.

Media are often conceived as as secondary acts of reproduction. The original is often preferred. Live performance is preferred over some kind of record. But the proliferation of recorded media makes the viewer/listener much more of a participant (and threat, of course), because they can choose, select, edit, experience pieces of the work in new contexts. And share stuff with friends, breaking copyright. They can manipulate photos to political ends (see the Salon.com comment on Thursday [Link]). But remember - Glenn Gould abandoned live performance.

The picture or recording placed in context of the viewer’s or listener’s choice takes us into the ambient and the everyday, away from the sacred and protected spaces of art - worlds of images and sounds, rather than museum and art gallery. John Cage’s remediated music as sound.

Text and media are as much (ambient) material matter, freed from semantics - Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Like so much archaeological work, the resource worked upon is broken, half-destroyed, half decayed matter. Seeking some kind of pattern and significance in the mess and chaos. Terribly imperfect, incomplete, impermanent. (is this not an aesthetic of wabi sabi? - see my wiki Traumwerk)

It is quite a week for archaeological photography. [Link] [Link]

The latest issue of Aperture [Spring 2004] has three photographers who work with remediated, digitally reworked imagery. Bringing together past and present with all sorts of tensions and layerings.

Loretta Lux does spooky portraits, very mannered, in an old painterly style of portraiture. Like John Currin’s paintings. Dare I say uncanny!

Hidden rooms 1 © Loretta Lux

Paul Thorel created a series of massive abstracted images of human forms in the manner of ancient Greek kouroi and korai - for the Naples archaeology museum.

Yassaman Ameri’s photographs are photocollages (created in Photoshop) that mix old paintings, text, studio-style portraits of Iranian women, and other graphical elements - “a history of forgotten women, anonymous photographers, rootless exiles, and the most profound connection: across the sea, across cultures, through revolution and war, through an age.”

Sam has put me on to a Salon.com article - A picture is no longer worth a thousand words.

“Which photograph of Lance Cpl. Ted Boudreaux and two boys in the desert is the real thing? No one knows for sure, in the age of Photoshop.”

Salon journalist Farhad Manjoo picks up the familiar argument that we can’t trust photos anymore. So now, he says, it comes down to who you trust - the Lance Cpl. who says the picture is faked, the list subscriber who sent one picture to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), or the source of another photo with the positive message of the board.

From the beginning photographs were manipulated. The difference is now that it is easy to do so, and to leave no trace of the edit. Then there is all the selection and manipulation that accomapanies framing, choice of viewpoint and the moment of taking the photograph. Photos were never innocent.

Think of the archaeology of photography. It is a material trace; we trust a photograph largely because of this materiality - the notion that it was made there, in the moment when what is depicted happened. And now it is in front of us, bearing witness. This is an archaeological authenticity. The photograph bears material witness to a past event.

It also references an archaeological temporality - actuality - the conjunction of two present moments.

This case of the archaeology of photography brings out the political relationships at the heart of knowing.

If you reject faith and internally secured knowledge (mathematical, logical, apodeictic, that makes no necessary reference to experience of reality), if you believe in evidence and testing out your ideas against experience, on what grounds do you assess an account of something that happened?

I visited the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center today - electrons and positrons shot down two miles of copper tubing to explore the nature of matter and energy. It takes an array of detectors three stories high to produce any significant trace of the particle collisions. And you never see the particles directly, of course. But we trust the accounts given of the interactions of what we will never experience directly, enough to justify the enormous sums of money spent on such big science.

We trust the scientists because their community, we are told, is honorable. OK some scientists make things up and bear false witness, but their community will not tolerate this. So, on the whole, we trust scientific research. Yes science acieves a great deal of practical impact - it is applied in technology; this means they must be getting something right. But many non-scientific fields have impact - faith can move mountains, terrorists driven by political ideology can shake the world. What really matters is trust.

It is quite clear that the invention of the experimental method in the seventeenth century by gentlemen members of the Royal Society accompanied a redefintion of the security of witnessing and representation. You may never enter a laboratory, may never yourself witness an experiment, but you trust the gentlemen of science to represent scientific knowledge and tell you all about it, because they are honorable. This is a political act of representation - scientists represent the reality of the world revealed in experiment to us. They are honorable in the same way as democratic representation depends upon relationships of trust between representative and constituency. However frail and fallible that relationship may be, it is the basis of democratic constitutions.

On what grounds do you trust someone? A witness can be put to question. But inquiry is time consuming. Most of the time we simply trust on the grounds of rhetorical pleas. Common pleas include - “you know me”, “look at my record”, “look at my friends and family”. Photography has had quite an impressive rhetoric of “being there” and witnessing. “Trust me - I was there.” This is an archaeological plea.

Archaeological - because we think that archaeologists have a direct material relationship with the past, unsullied by words and representations that might be falsified. Well, archaeologists may grub around in the past’s garbage, but they do not discover the past.

There is never any unquestionable witness. Things happen and may deeply affect you. But reality never simply manifests itself in its essence. Accounts and representations, often involving elaborate metaphors, arguments and qualifications, are always needed. And so we need to know when to be sceptical. Nothing has changed about photography, only our assumed innocence.

On trust and digital photography - Sam put it this way - and very effectively -

Yes, but I think this is the central point of all this - that sometimes, a big enough quantitative change in the ease of doing something makes a qualitative impact on some social action. I think you see this pattern over and over. I think it’s very interesting because it’s going to shortly happen with human biology - so working out some of these problems now in easier terrain seems useful.

75 000 year old shells claimed as beads - Blombos Cave, South Africa

I was arguing a few days ago on 17 April [Link] that the case for these shells being evidence of a modern human mentality was fragile, to say the least, and that the anthropologist leading the excavation that found them was probably under pressure to find a good story - he certainly has a pet theory that modern behavior started first in South Africa, in places like his own site - “there was a bead tradition in the middle Stone Age”.

A shell claimed to show signs of wear from being strung on a cord - Henshilwood

Here is more discussion, today in the Boston Globe [Link]

First, building the story from the few beads -

Alison Brooks, head of the anthropology department at George Washington University in Washington, said the beads suggest that the people of the time had a social structure, and reason to interact with people they didn’t know.

“You don’t need to symbolize your status if you never meet any strangers in a tiny, restricted social group. Everyone you meet already knows you,” Brooks said. But when your social group is larger, “you need to symbolize to strangers or newcomers that, for example, you are married — with a long string of beads, or special hairstyle — that you are not available, a widow, or an important leader.” In addition, “ornaments also figure prominently as gifts in exchange networks, which are important for hunter-gatherers to maintain against the risk of environmental downturns,” Brooks said.

And now Richard Klein, with a sceptical attitude much more like my own -

Anthropologist Richard G. Klein, who has also worked extensively at excavations in South Africa, said he thinks the shells could be 75,000 years old …

MS - there are some disputes over the dating technique - optically-stimulated luminescence

… but he’s not yet convinced they were beads. The holes might have been an accident of nature, rather than man-made.

“It seems strange that the perforations [in the shells] show no wear or marks from pressing against cord or string,” said Klein, a professor at Stanford University, adding that he wishes Henshilwood had addressed that point in his article.

Klein said he’s also concerned that the finds at Blombos Cave are similar to finds in only two or three African sites …

MS - so much for Henshilwood’s “bead tradition”

… while there are at least 40 other sites of the same age that don’t show similar intellectual development.

The reason bead-making and other symbol-making became commonplace “is probably because the behaviors they reflect greatly enhanced survival and reproduction, and this makes it hard to understand why they would remain rare for so long before 40,000 years ago,” Klein said, adding that art became a universal human experience at that point. “My view is that the occurrences before 40,000 years ago are the kind of noise that is inevitable in the archeological record.”

I like this notion of noise - more on it and Michel Serrres another day …

Warren at Stockstock has pointed me to the great story of how Rick Prelinger came to start building his archive of ephemeral film - the unofficial, the everyday, the ignoble, the detritus, the humble [Link]

Meantime also have a look at some of the movies made at last years Stockstock festival out of old media bits and pieces - [Link]

There has been an increase in the theft of ancient artefacts from Dartmoor, a fabulous ancient landscape in the UK, reports the BBC.

So the Dartmoor National Park Authority have started implanting electronic RFID tags in the stones themselves to mark and track stone crosses and troughs in their jurisdiction.

This time though it is not the black market in antiquities that is fuelling the spate of thefts.
Garden makeover programmes on TV (“Ground Force” and the rest) are being blamed. Local gardeners want a romantic relic in the shrubbery.

photo © Martin Parr