the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter, Paul Cloke and more) and one of their colleagues, Derek Gregory (British Columbia, Vancouver) was publishing his book called Geographical Imaginations. Like some other archaeologists, we saw very strong connections between geography and archaeology. And of course we were all very familiar with Wright Mills’s Sociological Imagination from 1959.
(Have a look at the 2002 meetings of the Association of American Geographers - [Link] [Link] [Link])
The notion of an archaeological imagination has become well established - a hard fought success for us. It appears as a main theme in Clive Gamble’s excellent book from Routledge - Archaeology: The Basics.
So what is the archaeological imagination?
The point is a simple one - archaeology is not just an academic discipline producing knowledge of the past. Archaeology is part of a range of values, aspirations, desires, dreams, attitudes, stories that share an archaeological character. Ideas that digging deeply into something establishes authenticity; a fascination with ruin and morbidity; locating senses of identity in remains of the past; connecting collection with place in the pursuit of historical meaning; notions of the sacred aura of the artifact; attitudes towards garbage and leftovers; the uncanny sense of presence found in material remains; stories of deep origin, and the cyclical rise and fall of cultures.
The archaeological imagination takes us into the heart of the modern condition and its relationship with the past.
From Alain Schnapp’s Discovery of the Past
David Lowenthal had gathered a fascinating compendium in his 1985 book The Past is a Foreign Country.
Julian has done a great job of exploring some of the philosphical aspects of the archaeological imagination, particularly in his studies of Heidegger [Link], and now in his new and first rate book on archaeology and modernity - [Link] Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and Chris Tilley have explored the archaeological imagination wonderfully in their excavations at Leskernick. There is much more - Ruth Tringham’s work out of Berkeley, Carmel Schrire in her research in South Africa. Gavin Lucas is pursuing the archaeological imagination in his fieldwork, and Ian Hodder here at Stanford has always been a great and active supporter of projects that pursue the edges of the archaeological. Cornelius Holtorf, another great colleague of mine at Lampeter, now in Sweden, is about to round off so much of this work with his fabulous forthcoming book on archaeology and popular culture.
And me? Well, since ReConstructing Archaeology, written with Chris Tilley back in the 80s, I have been plotting my own track through matters archaeological. From Adorno and Horkheimer’s ruined histories, Benjamin’s fragmented re-collections, to recent explorations at Stanford with Bill Rathje and David Platt [Link] I have always thought that my 1991 Experiencing the Past, seen by many as a heinous attack on the foundations of archaeological knowledge, was actually a useful summary of the archaeological imagination. Mike Pearson clarified a lot of my thinking on what we saw as a critical romanticism and poetics at the heart of the archaeological project in our Theatre/Archaeology [Link] [Link]. The remains of all this interest are scattered through this blog and my website, never mind numerous articles, books and conference sessions.
I am sounding defensive. Feeling a need to set the record straight. Why?
I got sent an invitation to a book launch in London for Jennifer Wallace’s recently published Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. The book is not yet out in the US. I ordered a copy from the UK and read it this evening.
It is a good read. Covers the themes I have just outlined in a lively way with lots of references to literature and some history of archaeology. She has clearly come across our work - Hodder, Rathje, Tilley and myself get mention in the section on further reading, and sometimes in the main text. One side of me is delighted that our work has reached beyond archaeology.
But for the most part Jennifer has chosen to ignore twenty years of analysis of the archaeological imagination, the archaeological condition.
I wonder why.
Maybe because her book is a literary reading of “the archaeological imagination”. Yet she liberally discusses archaeological history (totally omitting Alain Schnapp’s marvellous and standard book Discovery of the Past), excavations, and what she sees as current trends in the discipline.
Maybe she just hasn’t done her homework, reading what has come before her.
Maybe her publisher, Duckworth, didn’t want footnotes or bibliography - they often look to a cross-over market between academic research and broader interest.
Maybe it doesn’t matter - it’s only the ideas that count. Cornelius is always telling me to lighten up.
Am I getting to be an old reactionary shouting out the standards of scholarship? That you should always recognize the work of others. Perhaps I would simply have celebrated the book’s effort to cross disciplines - a very difficult task - if it wasn’t for an email sent round my department by Maud Gleason recently. She was calling for standards of citation and referencing to be reasserted and upheld in academia, because, like many, she is witnessing a growth in selective, thin and downright false citation - saying (or rather not saying) where your ideas have come from. The matter is really not one of standards for the sake of standards. Maud got me thinking about academic community.
Shoddy research and scholarship often hides behind the publisher’s desire to have a clean read without all the distraction of saying where your ideas come from. The pressure upon academics to deliver publication is considerable and I am suspicious that a lot of what Jennifer discusses is too familiar to be the result of convergent thinking - her coming from literary studies and the reception of classical heritage. And it does look good to appear to be the one with the insight to pull together the big picture.
There is a profound danger in the celebration of the individual that this sloppy work represents. This is what bothers me. The intellectual freedoms of academia depend upon us being a group of colleagues with standards, and principally standards that refuse to have our efforts divided. Say where your ideas come from because linking them with others makes them stronger and lends them impact. Plagiarism is a threat becasue it divides; it hides the connections between people and their ideas. (Though I am not accusing Jennifer of plagiarism.) All too many people want to promote division and dissent because it weakens the power of ideas to change - ideas become simply the possession or opinion of one detached academic.
Jennifer Wallace - you should have connected your work with the efforts of others that you clearly know of. Because these are not just entertaining stories. They go to the heart of the contemporary world’s sense of history, of identity, of direction. They matter.
The power of independent research and criticism lies not in the abilities of an individual, but in the collective effort, collegiality, and democracy, the community of scholarship that alone can give force.
How about that for an enlightenment ideal!
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Perhaps it is time also for a session at a big conference somewhere, entitled Celebrating Lampeter Archaeologies? I think that could be wonderful, in the same way as what the geographers have been doing (see your links above). There certainly was — and is — a special spirit in archaeology at Lampeter too, and maybe this is something worth remembering and celebrating now?
Comment by Cornelius Holtorf — 8/21/2004 @ 1:22 pm
I cannot understand why Duckworth,which published Digging the Dirt did not put Jennifer Wallace in touch with Christine Finn whose ‘Past Poetic’,fully referenced came out a few months earlier,with the same publisher.
Comment by Martin Henig — 8/23/2004 @ 7:14 am
I agree. We should layout the links that make up the collective history, not just of ideas, but also of the author. Michael has laid out an ethics behind the notion of the author as collectivity, as network. Wallace seems to betray an utter lack of reflexivity, and frankly outmoded thinking, in not placing all the cards on the table. Shame.
Comment by Chris Witmore — 8/24/2004 @ 3:57 pm
I think that dialogue across disciplines is much to be welcomed. The work
of the post-processual archaeologists, after all, draws upon developments
in critical theory and literary criticism. In recent years, I have been
urging literary critics in their turn to read the new archaeological theory
for its imaginative approach to material culture and to think about the
implications of this particularly for New Historicist criticism. (See, for
example, my amply footnoted article, “Digging for Homer: Literary
Authenticity and Romantic Archaeology”, Romanticism, 7.1 (2001), pp. 83-5).
But I think that dialogue and debate about these matters should reach not
only between disciplines but also beyond the academy. The kind of issues
that archaeologists and literary critics are concerned about - the place of
memory, the aura of certain sites, the way in which the imagination can
transfigure the bleakly material, our sense of origin, the ethics of
digging up the dead - are ones which matter to the general public too. We
are witnessing, in just this year alone, the debate over how to treat the
site of Ground Zero, the excavation of mass graves in Rwanda, the argument
over the return of the Elgin Marbles and the continuing conflict over
sacred ground in Israel. It is important to show how the theoretical ideas
about “hermeneutics”, “intepretation”, “discourse” etc actually affects the
concrete reality in which we live. Only by telling the stories or by
describing different excavations which have given rise to particular
cultural anxieties can these abstract, theoretical ideas be dramatised.
Then it can be seen that archaeology is not dry or irrelevant to
contemporary life but crucially about ourselves, a form of “self-scrutiny”
[Peter Popham, review of Digging the Dirt, Independent on Sunday, 1st
August 2004] . As Sean Kingsley, who reviewed Digging the Dirt in the
Times Higher Education Supplement put it, “Digging the Dirt is less about
archaeology and more an examination of humanity - an enthralling, clever
and accessible read that would be thought-provoking for the unitiated
public” (THES, August 20 2004).
So when I wrote Digging the Dirt, I made a deliberate policy decision not
to have footnotes but instead to give annotated notes on reading at the
back of the book for those who wanted to follow up some of the ideas
discussed. The works of Hodder, Shanks and Tilley are mentioned regularly
in the reading suggestions and I also refer to their work in the main text.
There is no attempt to deny our common interests. But I wanted to reach
out to readers and not to burden them with an endless list of citations and
references. There is a danger when reading some of the work of the
post-processuals that they are excessively sourced and that almost every
sentence refers one to another book, in an endless Derridean jouissance of
reading. Can one appreciate any one chapter or article without having read
about 20 other ones? Communities of scholars, as Michael Shanks describes
them, sound idyllic but might also seem somewhat impenetrable and exclusive
to outsiders.
The post-processual archaeologists encourage the role of individual
subjectivity in intepreting the past but themselves write in a
depersonalised, objective manner. In contrast, I have written this book in
a highly personal style, in order to indicate why these topics matter to me
and therefore why they might matter to the wider public. There is the grief
of Wordsworth’s archaeological poetics, the fear of the resurrected mummy,
the sexual allure of Pompeii, the despair of Hamlet’s “quintessence of
dust”. As Kingsley puts it in his review, “Digging the Dirt is an
exquisitely written labout of love, part history of archaeological thought
.. and part personal voyage”. I hope that readers of this debate, which
Michael Shanks started, will at least read the book and start on the
voyage, even if they decide, finally, to turn back home.
Comment by Jennifer Wallace — 9/6/2004 @ 1:57 pm
I can’t commment on the particular book under discussion. But I was fascinated to realize that my own experience of being under- (out?) sourced was an archeological metaphor: the sensation of being turned into an artifact and then irretrievably buried– the feeling of walking over one’s own grave.
Comment by maud gleason — 9/8/2004 @ 8:38 pm