Press release from the Ministry of Culture in the UK

UK National Museums Get New Powers To Return Human Remains

Nine national UK museums, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, have this week acquired powers to move human remains out of their collections as the Government brought section 47 of the Human Tissue Act 2004 into force.

The nine national museums listed in section 47 now have the power to move out of their collections human remains which are reasonably believed to be under 1,000 years in age. This means that these national museums can respond to claims for the return of human remains by indigenous communities.

Culture Minister David Lammy said:

“This announcement is the right response to the claims of indigenous peoples, particularly in Australia, for the return of ancestral remains. It fulfils the terms of the joint declaration made by Tony Blair and John Howard.

“We have established a fair and equitable framework for the holding of human remains in UK museums, and for museums to consider claims for their repatriation. I hope that this will lead to renewed and mutually beneficial relations between our major institutions and claimant groups.”

The guidelines are sound on ethics and the responsibility owed to human remains.

The 1000 year guideline for when repatriation is supposed to become an issue got me thinking.

Saxon (?) - before the Normans arrived, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11th century

Back at the beginning of my career in 1980 I was an archaeological fieldworker in the NE of England. Our work at the Castle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne revealed for the first time the remains of the Roman fort and a pre-Norman community. I dug, drew and photographed scores of Christian graves. It was a much-used cemetery and many interments had been cut through by later. This was one skull that had lost the rest of its body. The policy was to focus on complete burials, and many fragmentary remains were discarded. I hung on to the remains of the skull and pieced them back together.

The community had been completely lost to history. Though we are very aware of the early medieval north of England, the building of the Norman castle in the wake of conquest had obliterated the earlier community and its church, buried under six feet of clay laid down as foundation.

I have been fascinated by this material trace of someone who was lost to history and has returned to look at us again. I felt I had rescued something, someone who had been lost.

But is it that simple?

In the last twenty years we have become much more sensitive to the associations and connections of human remains and I feel distinctly awkward about having this skull as part of a small teaching collection.

“Part of a collection”, to be taken as a memento of the loss at the heart of history, as a prompt to think of that community wiped away by history; its scientific value as an access to ancient demography, disease, whatever, is minimal. Should I be feeling so guilty about these uses of someone’s mortal remains?

And that it is 1000 years old seems irrelevant.

Rome

Risonanze Oscure
Dark Resonances

We are at the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre - me, Nick (Kaye) and Gabriella (Giannachi). It is 10pm.

Across the street beneath the temple of Venus we have been looking at flickering images of what look to me like archaeological sediments projected into the foundation arches, behind the protective iron grills.

They are part of a new work by Gary Hill, the Seattle/New York based video and performance artist. It is a work of site specific theatre/archaeology. Gary is one of the artists of our new project - “Performing presence: from the live to the simulated”

Here is my archaeological “reading” of the event.

Location

A ruin - spectacular, yes, but the surface of much of the Colosseum has been stripped away over the centuries - all the seating and the floor of the arena - conspicuously revealing the skeletal sub- structure, the labyrinth of passages for managing crowds, gladiators, victims, the underside of the monument. And, of course, the Colosseum is emblem of all the underside of Rome - crowds, mass media, violence as entertainment, bread and circuses, the barbarism at the heart of imperial civilization.

We find the gate, they look for us on “the list” (there are three), and we get into the Colosseum.

Characters

Rome’s media and arts crowd are here as the audience tonight.
There are performers, sounds, projected images, lights, props. Ghosts - Persephone, Pan, the witch Kirke, invoked in the event. And, of course, the audiences, performers and victims from long ago - neither present nor absent - non-absent.

Episodes

One. Interference and resonance.
Within several of the great supporting arches of the Colosseum have been sited speakers and video projectors. Intermittently, randomly (?), they sound out horns across the auditorium filled with tourists as faint images appear projected up within the brickwork. Ghostly images - we spot an “angel” walking back and forth with a great curved brass horn.

Images almost invisible. Echoes across the ruin. Horns announcing what? That the past is still going on?

Two. Surface sediment.
Outside the Colosseum at the Temple of Venus - flickering indistinct images of what look to me like excavated surfaces, with spoken commentary. Shown in arches beneath a monument that now exists only as an indication of where the columns and walls once stood - traces in the thin grass of early summer.

The indeterminacy of the trace of the past.

Our contact with the past is all about translations - mediations, like these videos of surface sediment - passages forced back and forth. Forced, because the material resists - we have to dig away and work on what is left. And it is all so indeterminate - what was and is going on?

Three. A face in the underworld.
The audience stands on the second tier looking down into the depths of the arena, actually at the passages and voids beneath. It is dark but we can make out activity in the shadows. Something is going on. On the temporary stage that replaces part of the missing floor of the arena there is a dimly lit structure. It looks like a face staring upwards.

Four. Clapping/flapping.
It begins with clapping, or is it a flapping of wings, white noise. It grows louder.

Is this an echo of crowds? Clamoring for bread and entertainment. Nourishment and numbing narcotic (pharmakon).

Five. Dreams of escape.
The first of the videos projected onto the monument - within the arena and up the sides of the auditorium. A contraption. A radio mast? It looks more like one of Leonardo’s flying machines - magical inventions that never flew except in the imagination. A dream of an escape.

Video recordings replayed on these ancient walls - reflexive spaces of difference.

Six. Word magic.
Strings of vowels appear projected up above the arena. They are voiced over and over again on the sound system. More clamoring. And resonance. We can detect no message, except in the performed enunciation, like a magical incantation. Mesmerizing magic - disorienting and misdirecting.

A classical location of dark magic is Kirke’s island at the edge of the known world, its name a palindrome of vowels - Aiaia. Where Odysseus’s men were turned to farm beasts, where he countered the witch’s magic with a drug given to him by Hermes, the god of mediation and interpretation, where he found how to travel to the underworld to speak with the seer Teiresias, to find his way home.

The palindrome comes and goes, works, reads, cuts both ways.

Seven. Goat in a field.
Another projected image. Not a lion or exotic beast. The calmness of country life and farming? Where bread comes from. But the Goat is also Pan - not a divinity but a disrupting force, of chaos, from a time even before the gods. Whose shout brings panic.

Eight. The dis-invented wheel.
A carriage crosses the arena in a transect back to the stage. It is a struggle to get it there because the wheels are triangular.

The carriage carries goddess Persephone on her way from sunshine and agricultural fertility (her mother is Demeter, goddess of harvest) to the world of the dead, in her cyclical return to the underworld and Hades.

Time and the past here are not an arrow of no return, but symmetrically cut both ways.

As Odysseus found out in his search for a nostos (homecoming), the trick is not finding Hades, but getting back - that needs magic.

Nine. A lament.
Voiced over the sound system.

A lament of what is missing - what never happened, but should have done.

Ten. Flights of fantasy.
A model aeroplane flies quietly round the auditorium in the dark, lands on the stage, takes off again. It carries little fairy lights. Then model gliders are launched from above and crash into the audience. No escape, again.

Augury - to read the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Here mechanical inventions of our intellect.

Remember , with Herakleitos, that Apollo, the god whose oracle of the future is at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals the truth, but gives a sign.

Eleven. A ghost among us.
Persephone walks among the audience in a circuit around the auditorium, followed by a video cameraman.

Uncanny ghosts - with the uncanny as the return of the repressed, the return of what is no longer the same.

And a deparate attempt to record the unrecordable - how, on earth, is this all to be documented?

These encounters with the past are new to Gary Hill’s work. And though we are in the world of son-et-lumiere, this is no post-modern pastiche, but a circuit around the awkwardness of presence - a present past, more precisely non-absent.

No attempt is made to reconstruct a past - for what would that be other than superficiality of Hollywood CGI with its stock narratives like “Gladiator”, however spectacular.

There is a deep questioning here of the notion that sites like the Colosseum are somehow “sources”, somehow the origin of what is made of them, font of understanding the past. Instead the site, as a collocation of fragments, acts as a frame, parergon, supplement - an exterior that defines, has effect in its non-absence.

The site resists in its materiality and instead we deal in resonances and a geneaology of echoes and Chinese whispers through time.

Theatre/archaeology

PS I wrote this on the flight back home. Here are Gabriella’s outline and Charles Stein’s diary of the work’s creation.

Last Friday Bill Cockayne (Stanford Humanities Lab Assoc. Director) and I (also in my role as co-Director of Stanford Humanities Lab) were at the local office of DaimlerChrysler - RTNA (Research and Technology North America).

In response to their request, we were proposing a project to research the future of car culture, with a focus on a particular interest of RTNA in IT and interiors.

Our pitch was to look at the big picture of contemporary cultural innovation - to draw on ethnography, sociology, material culture studies, design studies, economic forecasting, whatever field necessary. But not to predict. Instead to sketch possible scenarios. Stories of what it might be like in five to ten to fifteen years time to use information technology in a car.

Sam (Schillace) is also part of this - with his expertise in Agile Development - a key to the success of the local software industry here. We were proposing to bring this design methodology to bear on such questions as - what will people want in their cars in ten years time?

Managing complexity.

We were arguing that it is not possible to establish user needs and desires, now and in ten years time, and use this knowledge to deliver a new piece of car interior that answers those needs and desires.

Many, probably most technology projects fail. Most which succeed are rated poorly by the end user. This is largely due to the complexity of technical products. Most companies and projects respond to this complexity by building large processes and teams. But this only makes the situation harder to manage. More people and more milestones means more communication, more complexity, and more distance between the user and the design, making it less likely to succeed.

Some companies approach this problem by having “talented” designers make guesses about what the user might want. In a complex environment, though, these guesses are more likely to be wrong than right. Further, this technique is only likely to refine existing solutions, not to discover new ones.

After-market customer survey is a very blunt tool for understanding what people need and want. People may well not be able to express what they like. Usability studies can focus on people’s interactions with things, and ethnography can help understand the crucial intangible and subjective factors of car culture and experience. But it remains very difficult to make predictions about complex systems.

So don’t try to predict.

Archaeological futures?

Instead Agile Development works on rapid prototypes, tries them out with people, modifies, then modifies again and again - because this is the best way to understand how people might get on with things. You can’t predict. Work through conversation and collaboration.

The importance of iteration.

Instead, research not the local and particular, but the big picture - understand possible trends and use these to put the local more precisely in context. Our take on the very familiar “think global - act local”.

But it also poses the question of just what is the long term and the bigger picture. And here I see a fundamental and unique role for what archaeology and anthropology could become - the only research environments that can deal with people’s relationships with things over the long term. OK I am presuming a lot of both disciplines. Material Culture Studies - as a disciplinary field focused on stuff and goods - is in its infancy and hardly recognized by most of my colleagues in both archaeology and anthropology.

The importance of the long term.

But who else can deliver a big picture of the history of design? Of innovation and social change? Of anything? Only archaeologists. Everyone else is squinting at things through a pinhole.

(This has become my epic project - Origins, my latest book, is a study of more than 45 thousand years of design and innovation.)

Now we were up against frog design and IDEO - two of the 400 pound gorillas of the design world.

They are marvellous at designing lovely boxes. Black boxes of all kinds - whether they call them - services, interactions, emotions, brands, whatever.

Today we found out that DaimlerChrysler are going with frog.

Well, it was quite something to be up against them.

But we are coming across this need to understand the bigger picture more and more. I have commented upon it in my review of the archaeological year 2004 [Link]. And we have had conversations these last few months, coincidentally perhaps not, with both BMW and VW about the same question - what is going on in people’s relationships with things like cars? How do we understand it all? Because these very sophisticated companies don’t get it.

VW are even founding a university to change their company car culture. And more - to rethink our understanding of people and things.

I began my career over 20years ago with a highly controversial argument that it was the politics of the past that really mattered in archaeology, its intersection with contemporary interest. Here is the latest iteration of that idea -

Archaeology is actually one of the keys to getting a hold on the future.

Bill’s great concept to encompass this need for the bigger picture is foresight.

So a spin off of our Humanities Lab is to be an Institute for Foresight.

Archaeology as part of research into the contemporary big picture.

And we already have courses, events and projects running - watch this space.

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.

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!

More media archaeology - not sure why it has taken me so long to come across the Dead Media Project.

This is how Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey put it in their modest proposal

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won’t they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? It ought to.

Speaking of dead media and mono no aware – what about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot- messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night’s erotic tryst? That was a medium. That medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically advanced cultures on earth. And isn’t it dead? What are we doing today that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu, the world’s first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how will we learn from our own?

Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she was one of the 20th century’s great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we’re gonna put brother Man Ray’s knock-you-down-and-stomp-you- gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.

Jacqueline testifies: “After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy…. We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap… As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”

“The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.” Mull that Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites …

One of my interests is the way we use databases to organise and administer the collections that are at the core of our archaeological lives. (And have played a crucial role in state society since ancient Mesopotamia.)

Databases - sounds dull and tedious? Have a look then at a new exhibition at the Banff Center - Database Imaginary - a suite of works exploring the intersection of everyday experience and databases.

Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition - which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area - deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity.

I like “How I Learned”, by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

They asked the question, “what would you know about the world if the only thing you saw were episodes of Kung Fu?”. They exhaustively catalogued all the individual shots from all of the episodes of the 1970s television show Kung Fu and recompiled the shots according to genres (see the arist’s statement for a complete listing - [Link]). The clips are exhibited on over 100 CDs which are colour-coded and from which the viewer can choose to watch lessons about “Nature and Society”, “Religion”, “Capitalism” and “Filmmaking”. Within these groupings, one can select discs with titles such as “How I learned to complain about my job” and “How to walk ceremoniously” among dozens of other categories.

The art of accountancy in ancient Egypt

Mike Pearson, performance artist, was in Stanford this week. We wrote the book Theatre/Archaeology together.

He talked to our New Media Workshop about recent work of his, and then to the Archaeology Center about his research into what really went on in the expeditions to the Antarctic back in the early 1900s.

Both were provocative.

In Carrying Lyn, Mike and John Rowley carried Lyn Levett through the streets of Cardiff. Lyn, who was Dave, is a quadriplegic actress. As Dave she played King Arthur in Brith Gof’s Arturius Rex. Mike and John were dressed in smart dark suits and ties, Lyn similarly formal in dress and heels. Polaroid photographs were taken and video was made of performers and audience/witnesses (who often became co-performers); South Wales Police obliged with footage from their surveillance cameras.

Polis was another urban piece, an exercise in reconstituting experience. Audience and performers were sent out with instructions to visit, witness events indeterminately staged or spontaneous, gather evidence in the form of video, make reports back at the point of origin, where everything was (re)constituted, or rather where sense was sought in the media fragments. Narratives were framed, connections and coincidences noted, some designed, others happenstance.

Both - theater and performance meeting urban experience in a combination of situationist derive, modernist flanerie and the search for a temporary autonomous zone escaping anomie and state supervision, and all under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera overseeing the street that has literally become Benjamin’s scene of crime.

Provocative - Lyn Levett, being carried, being dropped by Mike with a sickening thud as she hit the ground - someone who is “dead” weight because of their quadriplegia. Who were the performers, who the audience? Just what was going on in such a simple walk across a city on a busy weekend afternoon? And the status of the record - the photographs, reports, video. Above all the question is raised of the status of theater itself. We are used now to notions of performance and performativity being used to understand social and cultural experience - we are all performers. The concepts help us make sense of things. And theater has become intimate with the nation and the state, not least in notions of national theater that confirm our relation to where we belong with its sites (theaters and sets), familiar characters and stories. The comforting world of entertainment. But Mike is working in a different historical space, one that asks theater and performance to retain or recover a disruptive role - an ethics of worlds turned upside down.

So too in Polar Theater. An archaeology of science and heroism. Mike has been uncovering the evidence for the daily lives of those on the early expeditions under the likes of Shackelton, Scott and Amundsen that explored Antarctica. The usual story is one of heroism in the face of the forces of nature. All the expeditions had a scientific purpose, supposedly, behind them. Extreme science, at the edge of things. But here they are in the photos Mike has found in Cambridge and New Zealand performing in drag and black-face, with repurposed scenery and costume, and according to scripts later found dog chewed in the ice.

In some ways this is a simple exercise in archaeology. The camps are now designated heritage sites and so much is left perfectly preserved in the polar ice. But how should the huts be reconstructed? As sites of scientific heroism - neatly ordered spaces with desks, instruments and supplies? Or as theaters? - what took up so much of their time. Mike tracked the instrumentality of the expeditions - the way they worked with animals (pets, tools, food), the repurposing of equipment, the improvisations around science, acting the hero, and acting the fool. And the class and cultural relationships of officers and other ranks, in expeditions of Britain’s Royal Navy to the ends of the earth.

At the meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists a couple of years ago in Thessaloniki Doug Baliey and I ran a session on critical heresy in archaeology. Mike presented a video about Polar Theater. The night before the Berkeley team excavating Çatal Höyük had presented their own video on the life of their project; it included their own amateur dramatics in the evenings after the day’s work of painstaking observation and record. The connection was not lost on the audience. And this, of course, is how real science works. It is not some uncanny communion with the mysteries and forces of nature, of evidence, of archaeological sources. Stories of heroic discovery are glosses on the mundanity of even extreme science. What scientists really get up to in their daily lives is often seen as irrelevant to the science, to the great grand story, or as instrumentality, or it is simply overlooked. But the everyday needs to be (archaeologically) uncovered, because it is where science actually occurs.

Mike’s theater archaeology is an ethnography of science. Just as archaeology is the performance of the past.

Fred Dibnah has died [Link] [Picture Link - BBC]

Steeple Jack turned uncanny acolyte of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he knocked down chimney remnants of Victorian industrial England with a style and passion matched only by his love of steam engines. Now industrial archaeology is dogged by rather geekinsh character types who love brass fittings and steel pistons, or even just the hum of a diesel electric engine, over life itself. (I still have a small manual entitled “British Motive Power” that I found in one of my archaeological trenches at the castle in Newcastle UK. The top of the still-standing keep overlooking the Central Station is a favorite vantage point for train spotters. The manual listed the serial numbers of all engines run by British Rail. Well over half of the thousands of numbers were lovingly struck out by a finely ruled line of a ball-point pen.) Fred was not of this type. He managed to communicate the very aura of industrial steam power and engineering - something that is at the root of a fascination for industrial archaeology. The matter and materiality of a bygone Victorian hey-day. He made great TV.

In recent years he had clashed somewhat with his neighbors in Bolton, Lancashire. Not content with a steam traction engine, he had begun sinking a mine shaft in his back garden!