From the Guardian today - Forgers ‘tried to rewrite biblical history’

Hundreds of biblical artefacts in museums all over the world could be fakes, it has emerged after Israeli investigators uncovered what they claim is a sophisticated forgery ring.

Four men have been charged with the faking of some of the most important biblical discoveries in recent years.

The artefacts in question include an ossuary which was believed to contain the bones of James, the brother of Jesus, and a tablet with a written inscription by a Jewish king in the ninth century before Christ.

The indictment against the men in Jerusalem says: “During the last 20 years many archaeological items were sold, or an attempt was made to sell them, in Israel and in the world, that were not actually antiques. These items, many of them of great scientific, religious, sentimental, political and economic value, were created specifically with intent to defraud.”

The forgers not only conned buyers out of of millions of dollars, said officials of the Israel Antiquities Authority, but also damaged the science of archaeology, casting doubt on the authenticity of every artefact not uncovered in an authorised dig.

…

Shuka Dorfman, head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the forgery ring had been operating for more than 20 years and had been “trying to change history”. Scholars said the forgers were exploiting the deep emotional need of Jews and Christians to find physical evidence to reinforce their faith.

“This does not discredit the profession. It discredits unscrupulous dealers and collectors,” said Eric Myers, an archaeology professor at Duke University in North Carolina.

Other forgeries included an ivory pomegranate which scholars believed was the only remaining artefact from King Solomon’s Temple. The James ossuary, with the inscription “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”, was thought to be the only physical link in existence today to the life of Jesus 2000 years ago.

Here forgers were adding inscriptions to genuine artifacts to make them part of a biblical story. To make them decidable, in Derrida’s sense [Link]

It points to the overwhelming importance for ALL archaeology of meta-narrative - the essential grounding - emotional, intellectual, cultural - supplied by narrative.

As I keep saying -

It is the stories that matter!

On the anniversary of the death of Ben Cullen. [Link]

His parents visited us this summer. Richard (Cullen) has taken up archaeology himself. It was a very poignant afternoon - lunch in our garden here in Stanford, talking of Ben in Wales and Australia. Ben would have been forty. Molly (six) and our own Ben (three) were running around in the California sunshine.

Steve Shennan’s book Genes, memes and human history was published this year.

I remember talking to him about Ben Cullen soon after his death. He expressed his interest in taking up some of Ben’s ideas.

But the book is such a disappointment.

Steve has taken a backward step. We need to take seriously the co-evolution of biology and culture. That is, we need to overcome the old separation of culture and biology.

We have to combine the two in our thinking. It seems a no-brainer to me. We are an animal species and indebted to our biology - of course. And we are also cultural beings - we live in worlds of values, traditions, cultural meanings.

But Steve yet again emphaisizes the primacy of biology, perpetuating the same old straw men and false polarization of thinking - biology radically separate from culture. And the foolish common sense that biology must come first - because people have to feed themselves and reproduce. For Steve, so much of what seems important to us in the way of our social experience and cultural values is dismissed as irrelevant to history.

Ben thought differently. His cultural virus theory was meant to reconcile biology and culture, actually bypassing the distinction.

I cannot help but think of Ben’s profound insights into the viral as a paradigm of the undecidable - in Derrida’s sense [Link]. Viruses are not simply biological phenomena.They don’t fit into our easy distinctions.

Hence Ben’s interest.

Whereas Steve, Professor of Theoretical Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London, is reiterating the tired distinctions between culture and nature, rehashing our nineteenth century archaeological inheritance.

We need to move on.

[Link]

In Boing Boing today - found photos from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937 - [Link]

I liked the caption:

In 1975, documentary artist Bruce Jackson found a bunch of old prison photos in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary. The people being photographed have no interest in the photographs being made; the people making the photographs have no interest in the photographs they have made.

9 October

I never got to finish my comment on Derrida who died last week. [BBC Link]

The obituaries were largely stifled by misunderstanding, outrage, horror and incredulity - have a look at the Guradian’s lamentable list - [Link]

Mark Taylor was better in the NYT - [Link]

Jacques Derrida

Flying back to the US today I see that Time Magazine (issue Dec 27 - Jan 3) includes Derrida in its review of the year.

But he does not appear in the on-line issue. Embarrassment? Whatever.

I want to point out how profoundly archaeological is Derrida’s thinking.

Begin with a key point about our (archaeological) understanding of the past - that it has been crippled by a series of radical oppositions in our thinking, our research, values and understanding, and where one pole is privileged over the other

what happened in the past taking precedence over the subsequent traces

the traces taking precedence over our record of them

the life of the past (as we suppose it occured) over its decay and our rediscovery of it

the real past over its retelling.

Presence/absence, materiality/inscription, past/present, those we are interested in/our attempts to understand, what happened/what is left over, life/death, fullness of cultural experience/loss and repetition.

We are meant to think of how absurd it would be to challenge these distinctions - that somehow the traces of the past could hold something the past itself did not possess - that we might suspect the past did not actually happen the way it did, that the past is not internal to itself, but somehow extends beyond its present, genealogically, into its past and into its subsequent history,

But this is just what Derrida does - puts to one side these privileged terms and treats the pairs symmetrically.

With good reason.

For archaeology, and archaeology is the material cornerstone of history and our sense of history, the past is, of course, here with us, living again as we make it our own. And who, arrogantly, will dare to claim they know what really is happening, now or back then? Who will lay claim to the time machine that will reveal the secrets of the past?

We know that all we actually do have are traces, that we only work on flimsy remains, betwen past and present.

Derrida worked on ways of dealing in this undecidability.

The archaeology of zombies.

And this is the first key term - undecidability. Uncertain spaces between. Short circuits. Zombies, vampires - alive AND dead; neither dead nor alive. Secrets we must refuse to believe, even if they are true. Undecidables threaten because they poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. Undecidability - the horror of indeterminacy. The failure of the life/death presemce/absence opposition. And what threatens and transgresses its category fascinates us.

Tactic - don’t decide. Play both sides. Dis-place past and present, original and trace.

The trace - an undecidable, the past displaced into what remains, both present and absent. The undecidable trace is the origin of the meaning of the past - both present to us, but lost too.

Think too of authentic and original against counterfeit, fake. The signature or seal, representing one’s authentic presence and identity, has to be repeatable, iterable. Like the past. It has to be repeated. Otherwise it wouldn’t be recognisable. Faking it is a necessary part of authenticity. And we are fascinated by forgery.

The past keeps returning, but different, in the new associations of the traces and remains, our hindsight. This is the necessary iteration of the past - it will never be pinned down, there is no bottom line on what happened in the past, because the remains are a return of the past, the same but different (this is the distinction between repetition and iteration).

Ironically perhaps the past is constantly deferred into the future - we will never know, though we may work upon the remains. Deferment.

Strategy. Don’t explain the past - unfix it.

I see an essential honesty and humility in all this, and one that is in sharp contrast to those grand designs of so many of my colleagues to organize and control the evidence, to supposedly get to the truth, to find out what supposedly really happened - which is actually only what they want you to think because it suits them to have it so.

This is all at the heart of what we are calling a symmetrical archaeology.

At the National Gallery in London with my sister and nephew.

I always try to make a visit when I pass through the UK.

Today I made a beeline for the Hoogstraten peepshow.

My fascination with realism, perspective, the camera, optical instrumentality and everyday interiors continues.

The peepshow is a box with a painted interior that you view through one of two peepholes to see a remarkable illusion of a room, with a dog.

It involves a quite unrealistic anamorphic distortion that disappears when you look at the room through the peepholes.

You might be in there.

Framing matters.

This is a follow-up on my thoughts about Peter Greenaway’s movies [blog link], and Vermeer - Philip Steadman’s fascinating book about Vermeer’s optics.

Gwen Lorraine in Stanford Humanites Center has made me a room in a cigar box, a reconstruction of a scene from Hemingway, a scene of crime - to appear in archaeography.

Lower Marsh, La Barca Restaurant with Alan Campbell

Media stars all over the walls - agents’ photos. A curious genre.

David Suchet - Hercule Poirot

Black and white, mannerist, smiley faces.

They say “we had dinner here and gave the restaurant our photo”.

But also these photos make me think of claims like “Henry VIII slept in this bed”.

Or, the photos, witnessing a dinner taken by someone in this very room where I too now eat, create a similar effect to the knowledge that something happened here - “a murder occured in this room”.

So these photos are another sort of archaeological media trace.

An example of located media too - a specific association of medium, place and event.

We eat at the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco. Like La Barca, it is around the corner from theatres and concert halls and sports on its walls lots of agents’ photos of minor celebrities.

Alan and I were talking about the routes we have followed in the last twenty years from the North East of England to where we are now, Stanford and Westminster, and reflecting on Arnie in California and successors to Tony Blair in the UK.

Site specifics - it could hardly have been the same conversation in San Francisco, even if the words were the same.

Glasgow TAG

A highlight of the conference, for me, was Layla Renshaw talking about photographs of the excavation of remains of victims of the Spanish civil war.

The context is that of the growing application of forensic archaeology to investigate mass graves in Bosnia, Iraq, Argentine, Spain. To identify. To pursue justice. To achieve some closure for victims’ families.

Layla has been studying the way these investigations are being photographed - new genres, new iconographies of death and memory. A new genre of family protraiture.

A woman sits at a table facing the camera, looking directly at you. She gently touches a photograph with one finger. It is in black and white, of a man, taken in the 1930s. It is at an angle to the viewer and you can’t make out many details. The color of the photograph is raw, oversaturated - newspaper color. She remembers this man. It was her uncle.

When we were in Sicily in 1999, part of the excavations of Monte Polizzo, Cliff (McLucas) and I were fascinated by the images of victims of the 1968 Belice valley earthquake. The cemetery at Gibellina has a number of marble faced mausolea that record a name beneath a photograph. They seem to have been printed on the stone itself and were the most evocative of portraits.

Ruderi di Gibellina - in memory of the earthquake of 1968

Another image from Layla - of an archaeological trench and the excavation of a skeleton, and sitting at the back of the trench, a member of their family today, looking on …

Glasgow TAG conference - the cows come home to Monte Polizzo.

A few years ago now I left I field project in Sicily after just two seasons.

I was very angry because I felt I had been forced out by people who didn’t want to listen to my concerns. Angry at my wasted effort, because I had put two years of preparation into the project.

But this is just what sometimes happens with academics who get very committed to their ideas and are not the disinterested intellectuals we might imagine.

I was particularly concerned about the way some of my colleagues were prejudging the site we were excavating. They knew what they were going to find before they even began. They would tell visitors the story of the site on a hill top in the west of the island and contemporary with Greek and Phoenician cities before any serious analysis had been done.

I came to see their so-called field science as a sham.

Cliff (McLucas) and I even made a satirical video diary about it all (letting off steam).

Monte Polizzo - video diary - June 1999

I urged, insisted that we be more neutral, more scientific. What came to be very tense argument centered upon the way we were categorizing what we were finding. Never mind the way I was trying to organize the way we were thinking of the artifatcts we were finding - keeping it open and provisional until we could be more certain of what was going on. Some of it was as simple as the words they used to describe what was turning up.

Excavation began with what was clearly an incomplete structure - much had been destroyed by the forestry authorities opening up tracks over the site. But the structure was designated “House 1″, from the beginning. I said that we didn’t know it was a house, and that the term carried too many assumptions of function and meaning (the home, the domestic etc). We didn’t at the beginning even know which was the inside and which the outside. I was told that the name didn’t mean anything. Not even when our excavation manager announced to a meeting of townspeople the next year that we had found a “villa”. This was just to please the locals I was told - you have to hype it up, you know.

They were calling pottery fine and coarse, when I was pointing out that some of the so-called coarse pottery was technically more sophisticated than the fine imported wares.

They were using Greek terms for pottery and areas of the settlement when the site wasn’t Greek and we didn’t know anything about the layout.

They were calling the people who lived at Monte Polizzo Elimians, because a Greek historian mentioned such a people, and even when we are actively debating the meaning of such ethnic and cultural naming.

They told me that this was all just convention and we should stick to disciplinary conventions. Well yes, I had spent twenty years finding fault with such conventions and assumptions.

Because such conventions can blind us to what we are finding.

Here in Glasgow I have just listened to a paper about Monte Polizzo.

This is how the author presents it in the synopsis.

This paper aims at exploring ways of investigating the relationship between humans and animals in the household context. Humans and animals are perceived as living in a shared embeddedness, inhabiting a shared life-space. The proximity and relatedness between humans and animals is articulated through the material culture, which is laden with a biographical significance stemming from the intertwined human-animal practice. The flow of the household is a spatial concept …

Yes - the paper was about House 1, now fixed as a household, with bits of animals all over the place. This is argued to mean that animals were intimate with people - in the domestic household.

This is exactly what I was warning against. Predetermining what we are interested in and then having to explain what is actually of our own making. I am a little ashamed to say that hearing this brought back a lot of that old anger. Not least because serious researchers are devoting themselves to this falsehood.

I want to put aside the anger. But it does reemphasize what I was saying about teaching archaeology.

I believe we have to equip our graduates with the skills to spot this sham science.

Mike (Pearson) and I presented a series of performed lectures in the first years of the European Association of Archaeologists annual meetings across Europe - 1991 through 1996.

Performed lectures - raising the level of expressive demands upon presenter and audience with intellectual content uncompromised - intermedia presentation dealing in the textures of archaeology and the past, what meaning cannot convey.

These were where we worked out our ideas for Theatre/Archaeology. We struggled with the irony that not one conference venue could cope with our requests for anything more than a slide projector and screen, even though academic gatherings might be thought to be gatherings of specialists in the arts of communication.

One rather wonderful moment in Riga when we adapted ourselves to a tiny soviet-era projector, a painted wall and no blackout to hide the views out over the city square.

Stanford Cantor Arts Center 2001

In the end I gave up trying to do anything that demanded more than a laptop and video projector (that I usually took with me). And then even abandoned these most of the time - imagery is too low resolution - I now lug around a medium format projector. Unless precise needs can be met. Here in Glasgow I relied upon the conference to meet my modest need of showing some QuickTime movies. Typically, of course, the Wintel machine I was required to use couldn’t deal with them. My fault entirely for expecting anything different. This is what the media industry is all about - forcing your hand.

But it was encouraging to see so many very well prepared and presented papers at TAG. Their average quality far surpassed that of even the better graduate students here in the US - and they can be superb. And they were radically challenging the way we deal with the archaeological past. Truly professional

I say papers - because it is not a surprise that they were all wrapped up in academic language. This is a heartfeld criticism - it was what I was accused of - though I always though it arose through my obsession with precision. It can also easily be part of an aspiration to sound right - and there was a little too much talking the right talk in Glasgow.

And what a depressing venue - a 1960s high rise lecture block. Dank and musty even on a sparkling sharp frosty morning.

Presentation posters and poetry in litter-ridden corridors.

How can anyone be expected to develop a new archaeological poetics in these circumstances? Unless you work with the sad decay of such academic fabric!

Glasgow TAG

Saturday afternoon.

I walked out of the the tedious plenary session. It was a debate about archaeology, the university and training professional archaeologists. Some professional from one of the archaeology units in the UK had published a deliberately hyperbolic comment to the effect that universities are failing the profession - graduates come out with a degree and not able to draw a section, whatever. So the TAG authorities decided to air the matter at the annual meeting.

Aegina 1978

There were various speakers arguing this or that and asking questions like - do you think there should be more practical training in universities? - should there be masters programs in archaeological practice? The audience were answering the questions - electronically, pressing buttons on little machines - with the results displayed on a big screen.

It seemed to me there was little to debate. And the votes usually simply reflected the wording of the questions which were meant to further particular arguments and agendas. Some old codger remembering his days in university when he learned everything from the grand old renaiisance men of archaeology, some radical academic wanting students to see a bigger picture than the bottom of a muddy trench.

Should a BA in archaeology include filling in a context sheet, glueing together a pot or operating a total station?

Undergraduate degrees cannot and should not prepare for a profession, other than developing broad transferable skills. And the most important of these should be BS detection, constructing good arguments (listen to Lew Binford on this), thinking fast in debate and conversation, listening.

And what should we academics be doing for undergrads, apart from setting some standards for all these? Forget about delivering a body of knowledge or a professional skill set. Inspire them to think outside the box.