remarks on antiquarians in the Scottish borders
Society for the Social Study of Science Meetings Vancouver November 2006
This is a talk about media in archaeology. I will suggest that considering how archaeologists have used and dealt with media prompts a rethink relevant to a broader understanding of media as communicative and representing systems and forms. I suggest we take emphasis off the communicative and representative function of media and focus instead on mediating/translating/transforming affects.
Archaeologists dig, sort and publish relics of the past. Techniques and instruments of visualization, inscription, and documentation define the discipline. Media constitute archaeology, not least because they enable the translation and representation of the remains of the past in the present: in their entropic decay, their irremediable loss through archaeological study.
This topic of mediation in archaeology is almost always treated as one of media technique - capture and delivery, relationships with media industries - working with a TV company, and of publication. Appropriate use of media is a pivotal matter in policing the borders of the profession: media can shift from informing device to engaging and distorting distraction as research and academic debate becomes popular entertainment. Consider to what extent a VR model can be a research tool rather than an offspring of the gaming industry. And archaeologists have long accepted the value of publication. To enable the circulation of sites investigated and things found among scholars. That inventories, a system of account, will facilitate stewardship and management.
New digital information technologies have easily been accommodated within this orthodox discourse. Electronic publishing and databasing have been enthusiastically adopted. More ambitious uses of IT include especially GIS - spatially encoded data, and VR modeling - scan in the past and render it live.
Otherwise, there is a marked silence in archaeology about media and mediation.
Let me take you back to a time before the formalization of standards for archaeological inventory and publication, when archaeologists were antiquarians. The purpose - to explore a pre-disciplinary space as a foil, and as genealogical ancestor to contemporary archaeology.
Walter Scott was a magistrate, antiquarian, musicologist, novelist, essayist, collector, landowner, poet, bestselling author in the book trade of the early nineteenth century. His focus was a borderland between Scotland and England, between past and present. In 1814 was published his "Border Antiquities of England and Scotland". The two volumes, profusely and wonderfully illustrated with engravings, are subtitled Border Antiquities - "Comprising Specimens of Architecture and Sculpture, and other vestiges of former ages, accompanied by descriptions. Together with Illustrations of remarkable incidents in Border History and tradition, and Original Poetry." It is a gazetteer of archaeological interests.
A long introduction takes the reader through an historical narrative of the borders. On pages xviii - xix Scott is dealing with the Roman border and Hadrian's Wall: "The most entire part of this celebrated monument, which is now, owing to the progress of improvement and enclosure, subjected to constant dilapidation, is to be found at a place called Glenwhelt, in the neighbourhood of Gilsland Spaw.*"
He adds a footnote:
"* Its height may be guessed from the following characteristic anecdote of the late Mr. Joseph Ritson, whose zeal for accuracy was so marked a feature in his investigations. That eminent antiquary, upon an excursion to Scotland, favoured the author with a visit. The wall was mentioned; and Mr. Ritson, who had been misinformed by some ignorant person at Hexham, was disposed strongly to dispute that any reliques of it yet remained. The author mentioned the place in the text, and said that there was as much of it standing as would break the neck of Mr. Ritson's informer were he to fall from it. Of this careless and metaphorical expression Mr. Ritson failed not to make a memorandum, and afterwards wrote to the author, that he had visited the place with the express purpose of jumping down from the wall in order to confute what he supposed a hyperbole. But he added, that, though not yet satisfied that it was quite high enough to break a man's neck, it was of elevation sufficient to render the experiment very dangerous."
Was it that Ritson hadn't read the many accounts of the Wall published since the sixteenth century in that fascinating lost genre - chorography? Had he forgotten? Or was it rather, as Scott suggests, that his "zeal for accuracy" meant he had to visit and witness the very structure in order to authenticate the written accounts of the remains? He clearly assumes that there was or had been a Wall: ancient authors and sources document it. What he disputes is that there was anything left. (This tension between text and monument is very characteristic of antiquarian debate.)
Alexander Gordon's Itinerarium Septentrionale was published through private subscription in 1726. It deals with Roman remains in the north. Ritson may not have read it. He may have known it, but still doubted the description of Hadrian's Wall. We may assume that Scott had read it: his copy is still in his library at Abbotsford. Listen to a part of a page from this account of "A Journey thro' most of the Counties of Scotland and those in the North of England."
Reading.
Gordon literally paces out and records every boot-marked trace of the Wall. He might not have jumped off the Wall, but you can almost hear every crunch of his boots.
The book sets the "northern journey" in the context of accounts in ancient texts of the Romans in the north. Gordon knows his classical authors. The engravings are revealing. He illustrates in expensive copper engraving many rectangular monuments in their various relationships with straight Roman roads. The monuments are all unexcavated and comprise simply earthen features - tumbled down overgrown ramparts. Gordon's illustrations mark out nothing except rectangles and lines; though they have, significantly, been paced-out. The engravings of sculpture show only sketched-in figures, focusing instead on the transcription of the inscribed text.
Ancient authors, epigraphy and the antiquarian's boot - authentic witnesses of antiquity and its relics. In ambiguous relationship to voice and text.
Scott's own writing is a cacophony of voices articulating past and present (cacophony? - just read his bibliography):
Scott consistently elides fact and fiction in his examination of traces in the present of the past (archaeological, memory, textual, placenames, landscapes).
We should note here a recurrent theme in literary antiquarianism in the eighteenth century - establishing the authentic voice of the past - from Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" through to Macpherson's Ossian. A related interest is the transition from voice (oral poetry, verbal account, memory) to text (a new version of the old song, the annotated transcription/edition, the historical novel, historical narrative). This is inseparable from address to the transition from the land to the text - how the witnessing pace of the antiquarian, sites and their names, how place-events become itinerary, chorography, cartography, travelogue.
Conventional notions of media (as material modes of communication - print, paint, photography, or as organizational/institutional forms - the media industries) are of limited help in understanding what Scott and his contemporaries were up to in mediating authorial voice and authentic traces of the past. We can consider the rise of cheaper engraved illustration, the popularity of the historical novel in the growth of the publishing industry, developments in cartographic techniques and instruments. But in order to understand how all this and more came to be archaeology - the field, social and laboratory science - we need to rethink the concept of medium.
Scott, Ritson, Gordon and their like are making manifest the past (or, crucially, are aiming to allow the past to manifest itself), in its traces, through practices and performances (writing, corresponding, visiting, touring, mapping, pacing, debating), artifacts (letter, notebook, manuscript, printed book, pamphlet, map, plan, plaster cast, model), instruments (pen, paint brushes, rule, Claude Glass, camera lucida, surveying instruments, boots, wheeled transport, spades, shovels, buckets), systems and standards (taxonomy, itinerary, grid), authorized algorithms (the new philology, legal witnessing), dreams and design (of an old Scotland, of a nation's identity, of personal achievement). Making manifest through manifold articulations. And as a complement to epistemological and ontological interest - getting to know the past “as it was”.
Media, in the conventional sense, are involved - print, engravings, maps - but also much more that challenges the premises of communication and representation underlying the concept of medium. What we are seeing, I suggest, is a reworking of ways of engaging with place, memory (forever lost, still in mind, to be recalled), history and time (historiography, decay, narrative), and artifacts (found and collected) when the author's voice was undergoing question and challenge (who wrote the border ballads? - is this our history?), when ownership of land and property, and the traditional qualities of the land were being altered under rational agricultural improvement, when property was being reinvented as landscape, when the status of manufactured goods was changing rapidly in an industrialized northern Europe. But note, of course, that it is not the Scottish Enlightenment that is generating Scott's historical fiction (what a place - Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth century - with Hume, Smith ... in a community of maybe 70,000!). That dinner with Ritson and the visit to Gilsland are establishing what constitutes an appropriate way of engaging with the past. It is only later on that Scott gets called a historical novelist, Ritson is forgotten and archaeology becomes the rationalized engagement with site and artifact through controlled observation, "fieldwork" and publication in standardized media and genres.
So medium is better thought as mode of engagement - a way of articulating people and artifacts, senses and aspirations, and all the associative chains and genealogical tracks that mistakenly get treated as historical and sociopolitical con-text. Scott presents us with a fascinating laboratory of such modes of engagement, one that runs from field science to romantic fiction through what was to be formalized as altertumswissenschaft by German classical philology.
By the mid nineteenth century the noise of mediating the past had quietened into an orthodoxy of modes of engagement that came with standardization of practice and publication. It is this orthodoxy that still holds today and with which I began.
But it is starting to get noisy again.
The paradigm of the archaeologist as custodian or steward of the past is under serious challenge; it is, at least, undergoing widespread redefinition. This is to do with, again, shifting definitions (legal included) of cultural property. Archaeologists are again having to address the matter of re-presentation - that is, advocacy and witnessing, who is representing (in a constitutional as well as communicative sense) the past, for whom, and on what basis. That the past is there as a datum to be represented is under question; though, of course, the traces remain, conspicuously prompting these questions. What I have called the expressive fallacy (that archaeological texts somehow "express" or represent the past) is being recognized and accepted, as archaeology moves towards a paradigm not of stewardship, but of co-production. We are all archaeologists, working, in different ways, on what is left of the past, sharing a modernist archaeological sensibility attuned to material
The critical reflexivity so apparent even in that anecdote from Scott has been, of course, a feature of theoretically informed disciplines for several decades. The history of archaeology is becoming an extended disciplinary memory that recognizes negotiation and multivocality in situated knowledges.
This is making of archaeology a fascinating field of disciplinary possibility.
Epistemology accepted as discourse means the prospect of archaeological practices that are situated, local and loaded (with affect).
The renewed interest in archaeological ontology entails examination of presence and absence of pasts, properties, ownership, agents, stakeholders and materialities.
Do note though that I am deliberately confusing archaeological practice and its study and reception. On several grounds:
These join in the prospect of practice as research - the deliberate fusing of fields in reflexive projects that combine different modes of engagement and manifestation. This is as described with Scott, though archaeology has never solely been a field of academic research. Scott - as the musicological report becomes romantic ballad. As archaeological field report metamorphoses into experimental video, translates into a collaborative local history authored through participatory digital media. As an artist works with archaeologist on a new kind of archive of their work, simultaneously reflexive research into the reception of different kinds of archival remnants (here I am describing the LifeSquared project and others in our Metamedia Lab at Stanford).
To conceive medium as mode of engagement, tied to this program of archaeological scientist as cultural producer, provides new focus upon the archaeologist as experimenter, making trials of the past. With practice as research, we enter into iterative chains of trials, local and situated articulations or engagements, rather than the publication of finished and secured documents. Read the antiquarian, natural philosopher and founder member of the Royal Society John Aubrey: the exhortation is again to explore sensory engagement and manifestation. And this is where new digital media offer significant challenge and possibility, not just in offering better more efficient ways of organizing and publishing (GIS, ePub and VR), not that they turn analog media on their head, but that they offer the possibility of exploring exactly that diversity of mode of articulation of past and present so richly found in Scott and the border antiquaries of two hundred years ago. And this profoundly challenges the very notion of medium.