Landscape, Archaeology, Chorography:
Encounters in the Scottish Borders
or a brief encounter with some eighteenth century border antiquaries, and an address to the question of where to begin an archaeology of the Roman north
Brown University, December 2006
slides -
Border-archaeology.mov
A field project focused upon a hilltop settlement. The time of the first cities in the Mediterranean.
They knew what they were finding. My colleagues, that is.
(slide - Sicilian landscape)
I was looking after the pottery finds ... my interest was in the pots smashed on floors ... the specifics of consumption and discard. I had spent years research the design of Corinthian ceramics, frustrated by the lack of information about where and how they were used, with what, to what end.
We had many visitors - the local community were very interested, and colleagues took their time to come to this remote part of the Mediterranean to see what we were finding.
But I listened to the stories told to our visitors and became very concerned about ...
Framing devices
(slide - excavation)
It was as if we knew what was heppening even befire we found out. They talked about Greeks, and Phoenicians, and the local Elimi. About this "city" with its streets and houses, necropolis, and acropolis.
The narrative of culture contact was a frame applied even before my colleagues knew what the picture was to be. I stretch the metaphor - the field project was explicitly designed to illustrate a model of colonial expansion, urbanization and culture contact.
In my earlier work I had found this model suspect and had moved to what I felt was a more open research frame. But I am not here to talk about that.
But I am going to deal with framing devices.
Prelude 2 - contemporary performance and site specifics
Site specifics and heretical empirics.
(slide - site specifics)
For some years I had been working with a company of artists who specialize in site specific performance and installation. Site specifics - based upon an intimate connection between location and practice. Where you are matters. And the media you use are similarly located. Site and media change what you do. Cliff McLucas joined me in Sicily in 1999 and 2000. Cliff was artist in residence. The irony was that he was fascinated by what few would talk about - the way archaeologists engaged with what they were interested in - for him this was the site, earth, stones, finds, the local town, the local countryside. The irony - he was more empirical than the archaeologists. Much contemporary art is actually rooted in rigorous research, but it is framed differently - asking different questions and producing very different outcomes. This heretical empirics is quite threatening to some, because it challenges orthodox divisions between the arts and sciences and can be disorienting. I like this and will say more about it today and in my talk tomorrow.
Anyway, to cut a long story short ... I abandoned one bandit country for another.
I set off for the Roman borders - I like frictional edges - interesting things happen there.
Prelude 3 - landscape archaeology
The concept of landscape - another framing device.
slide - bandit country
No encounter with Sicily can forget the frame, supplied since the late eighteenth century, from Salvator Rosa to Francis Ford Coppola, of bandit country. The Sicilian and Italian landscape is at the heart of the genealogy of the sublime, of the awe of land that threatens. There is also its close affiliate - the land of the picturesque. This is, for me, one of the profound affinities between Sicily and the Scottish borders.
So to landscape.
Regional archaeology must surely take account of recent developments in landscape archaeology, in human and historical geography.
A focus upon human experience is a feature of what has come to be called a phenomenological archaeology, the way prehistoric landscapes choreograph, shape movement and visibilities, are rooted in cosmology and symbolism, full of stories now forgotten.
Landscape is treated as saturated with meaning and agency - and contested - far from neutral ground.
In her book Stonehenge: Making Space, and in this liberal and humanist project of landscape archaeology, Barbara Bender coordinates many different voices who have a 'stakeholder' interest in Stonehenge. She sets out her own interests in an animation, literally, of archaeological theory, locates Stonehenge in recent thinking about prehistoric farming, reports the political explosions in the summers of the 1980s over access to the site. She also locates Stonehenge in an intellectual history - an account of antiquarian interest in landscape when land was being improved, when agriculture was being commodified in the eighteenth century, of archaeological interest when public ownership was renegotiated in the nineteenth century and the discipline consolidated in professional interest authorized by the state and the academy.
It is rarely acknowledged that regional archaeology such as this has a long genealogy in particular ways of walking and looking at land. When Bender, Tilley and Sue Hamilton talk of how a bronze age doorway frames a view over downland, when Julian Thomas illustrates how an earthwork manages the procession of people through the land, when John Barrett deals with people's agency in ceremonial landscapes of the neolithic, when Mark Edmonds gives account of prehistoric farming community, they are voicing an engagement with land and place that takes up long standing interests and practices. Barbara explicitly distances archaeology from what, for me, precisely frames the kind of engagement with land represented by such archaeology.
(slide - landscape archaeology - liberal humanism and neo-romanticism)
I think that we have largely forgotten this genealogy.
It applies also to field survey - tracing steps over the land looking carefully (and with whatever technological assistance is deemed fit) for the remains of what was there.
The standard account of antiquarian interest in the land holds that its amateurish and credulous practices were overtaken as archaeology became a discipline in the nineteenth century with an orthodoxy of scientific practice. I argue that this is a seriously misguided caricature.
Back to the Scottish borders
(slide - frontispiece - Itinerarium Septentrionale)
Itinerarium Septentrionale was one of the first systematic accounts of Hadrian's Wall and the Roman north.
Listen.
Reading.
You can almost hear the tread, the crunch of his nailed boots.
(slide - ichnology - footprints - framing devices)
The book sets Gordon's "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, traced out by his boots. The engravings of sculpture show only sketched-in figures, focusing instead on the transcription, the tracing out of the inscribed text.
Ancient authors, epigraphy and the antiquarian's boot - authentic witnesses of antiquity and its relics. Why else, if it is not in pursuit of authenticity, is Gordon marking every pace of his journey. You can follow in his footprints to check. He regularly tells you when other's accounts are mistaken - they cannot have been there.
The itinerary is a familiar framing device. But what actually frames Gordon's encounter with the Roman north is his boot.
Joseph Ritson - doubting antiquary
(slide - Scott: Border Antiquities)
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.
(slide - a zeal for accuracy)
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.)
(slide - path - tracing footsteps, witnessing the physical presence of the past)
Alexander Gordon's Itinerarium Septentrionale was published through private subscription in 1726. Ritson may have known it, but still doubted the description of Hadrian's Wall. He felt he had to go there to retrace steps and take a leap.
Gordon's itinerary, the text and plates, are an ichnography. (Explain the term.) This is why I say that Gordon's framing device is the boot, the footprint. Just as the past leaves its own tracks that we trace out in our archaeology.
Ritson aspires to such a retracing of steps that authentically witnesses what is left of the past. We might call this an ichnology. It includes questionable relationships between text, voice and witnessing the physical presence of the past, its footprints left behind. All these antiquarians are negotiating in these spaces with more or less philological skill and field experience - in the art of source criticism.
Hutchinson and the voice of the past
Scott relied heavily on Hutchinson's View of Northumberland - two volumes 1776.
(slide - frontispiece)
Consider this first publication (page 161, Volume ii) of an ancient border ballad - the Laidley Worm of Spindlestone Heugh.
(slide - page)
The trough, where the knight's kiss released the worm from the witch's spell, is still there - to the delight of my children Molly and Ben when we went looking last year. Hutchinson attests to the antiquity of the ballad (details) giving its provenance as a local Vicar (name) and hill shepherd Gordon Frasier. There is much to indicate that the vicar of Norham wrote it himself.
The context is, of course, that eighteenth century fascination with relics of the medieval minstrelsy. Scott opened up his spectacular writing career with a three volume edition of ancient (and not so ancient) ballads - The Border Minstrelsy. It was a scholarly treatment of epic memory, presenting the traces of a forgotten cultural phenomenon - minstrels singing of great heroic deeds in the borders.
(slide - Percy Reliques - frontispiece)
Scott was following the trail set by Thomas Percy with his Reliques of Ancient British Poetry, 1765. He went on to make a fortune with his own epic ballads (Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion ...). Succeeding where James Macpherson failed in his attempt to pass off his own poetry as that of Ossian, the Homer of the north.
But consider Scott's writing as a whole.
It is a cacophony of voices articulating past and present (cacophony? - just read his bibliography):
- ethnomusicological collection of medieval bardic epic - the border minstrelsy
- his own poetry - Marmion, Lady of the Lake et al
- medieval historical novels (Ivanhoe et al)
- the antiquarian gazetteer
- historical novels dealing with Scottish themes in recent memory and the constitution of historical agency (Waverley, Guy Mannering et al)
- essays and non-fiction in various genres.
Scott consistently elides fact and fiction in his examination of traces in the present of the past (archaeological, memory, textual, placenames, landscapes).
A recurrent theme in this literary antiquarianism in the eighteenth century is establishing the authentic voice of the past - from Thomas Percy's "Reliques" 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) - Hutchinson's Laidley Worm. 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.
Wallis's chorographical topology
The itinerary is the framing device in Wallis's chorography of Northumberland (slide - title - 1769). There is not the somewhat obsessive focus on the authorial boot that we find in IS. Instead Wallis uses the transect (three of them through the border county of Northumberland) as a way of organizing places that are set in a heterogeneity of natural and cultural observation. His work is a wonderful and encyclopaedic mingling of plants, animals, family histories, monuments, rocks, rivers, springs, meteorological phenomena and anything else he thinks fit to include. Wallis's is a deep map of the county.
(slide - reading)
(slide - reading)
(slide - reading)
(slide - title)
I have introduced these writings as part of a responsibility I think we have as archaeologists to respect and understand previous work, to share a subtle disciplinary memory (I have a particular axe to grind over the shorter and shorter bibliographic memories we find so often now in scholarly debate - when five years seems to represent an eternity of thinking in citation and footnotes).
More importantly I have begun with these pre-disciplinary archaeologists because I think they throw an informing light on the interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary agendas that are rightly being explored in the academy. (And archaeology has always been a bridging field).
How are we to research and write about a region? Represent, give account? (And publication has always been so important to archaeology).
(slide - Bamburgh)
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 materialities and temporalities.
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.
We are indeed back with the eighteenth century.
media - between past and present
(slide - media and making manifest)
The likes of Barbara Bender are experimenting with mediating the past. This is one way of looking at these phenomenological archaeologies. Let me use the border antiquaries to reflect further on this.
The question is that of media - the ways we investigate and represent the traces of the past.
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 in those antiquaries, 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, Wallis an antiquarian, Ritson is forgotten and archaeology becomes the rationalized engagement with site and artifact through controlled observation, "fieldwork" and publication in standardized media and genres.
(slide - media - modes of engagement)
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. Gordon, Scott, Wallis, Hutchinson present 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.
Note also that it is such an inquiry into archaeological fieldwork in the borders that prompts a rethinking of medium. This is the kind of disciplinary cross-over that I cherish. It is why I run a research workshop dedicated to new media. New media are offering all sorts of possibilities - when we think of them as modes of engagement.
I will deal more of these cross-overs tomorrow when I will talk about a contemporary archaeological sensibility and the future of the notion of archive.
Though I have presented some such archaeologies elsewhere - I would point particularly to a piece called Three rooms, in JSA. But let me finish with a prospect of a place in the borders.
I am proposing a rigorously empirical engagement with place-event. By place-event (I am borrowing from Bernard Tschumi) I mean the locatedness of event and experience. To engage deeply with this I suggest we should question orthodox framing provided by chronology and spatial coordinate. Not to abandon either (these are not zero-sum options), but to allow more heterogeneous articulations.
(slide - deep mapping the borders)
Let me read from a blog entry I made a couple of years ago.
English Heritage, the government agency responsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. Link
...
The diary tries a little too hard to appeal - it wants to be a combo web version of the cultural task forces of TV’s Time Team, Ground Force and Changing Rooms (the last two very familiar to those who watch BBC America). It doesn’t need to - the story it tells is subtle and wonderfully faceted.
So a team arrived last November (2003) to look at the castle and its setting with the eye of the landscape archaeologist. They brought the usual GPS and other hightech devices, but what clearly matters is a questioning eye. (And this is just the approach taken by the two classic figures of British landscape archaeology - my friends at Lampeter David Austin and Andrew Fleming - I recall wonderful afternoons walking the Welsh uplands with them tracing the ever-so-slight undulations that betrayed an old track, leat, earthwork.)
For some time it has been clear that the great medieval fortresses of feudal Europe are not simply functional military architecture. A trend has been to see them primarily as symbols of power. (More on this in a moment.)
The team at Dunstanburgh asked why the place was built on this remote headland. Spectacular and forbidding yes, but way off any strategic route in this most disputed of lands between England and Scotland. It was built by Thomas of Lancaster and inherited by John of Gaunt, two regal aristocrats in the fourteenth century. Then the border was very much threatened, but the place saw little action. So what new did the survey team find? Traces of a landscape of ponds, meres, roads and a harbor that complements the tremendous effect of a superbly crafted gatehouse, curtain wall and watch tower atop a coastal cliff. Dunstanburgh was a showpiece castle. The way a castle should be, reflected in the meres dug round the great rock of a headland on which the fine masonry was laid.
There is even a nice connection with Arthurian romance (beloved of John of Gaunt). It is the legend of Sir Guy the Seeker. Stranded in a storm, he found, with Merlin’s help, a lady spellbound in a crystal casket in a chamber beneath the ruins of Dunstanburgh. But he lost her, because he made the wrong choice between a horn and sword presented to him by a ghost.
“Now shame on the coward who sounded a horn,
When he might have unsheathed a sword.”
(Two lines from a "rediscovered" medieval ballad.)
And not just the castle - the survey looked at second world war military emplacements, including a top-secret radar station and camp for Italian prisoners of war, a shipwreck from the 1950s (a Polish trawler deliberately wrecked so the men could claim asylum), a bronze age cairn, the famous painting by Turner of another storm and wreck, traces of farming going back millennia.
This is all so gratifying because the team were open enough to simply attend to what they were finding in a very intellectually honest way (the W.G. Hoskins way of Fleming and Austin). But they also did what I would have loved to have done - find the traces of the meres, of the harbor jetty, then piecing it together with local experience and recent history, and all while staying at the Cottage Inn, the local pub where we have lunch when we are lucky enough to visit this wonderful corner of England. This is Michel Serres’s temporal chiffonage. Time, not linear, from then to now and no way back, but percolating around us.
I tried to deal with this in my book Experiencing the Past, in 1990. Back then it was the early days of the phenomenological project in archaeology - foregrounding the experience of place (see my blog comments on the politically dubious neo-romanticism of all this - Link) I was more interested in the kind of focus on techniques of the body often associated with Norbert Elias - so I wrote about the way the feudal lord would ride out over a designed landscape, and how such experiences constitute the site of power. I took photos and made drawings to try to capture this, and above all I tried to find a way of writing about it - the book Experiencing the Past.
So the castle is all about landscape - designed spaces. (See Matthew Johnson’s superb book Behind the castle gate.) But this is not to say that it is a symbol of power. That is too passive a view of architecture. These settings are frames within which late feudal England was constantly recreated. Politics is always an aesthetics. And the power of the feudal lord is embedded in the management of people and land, in marking, mapping, looking over, within the gates of the residence, and without.
... We (with Haun Saussy and Tim Lenoir) have just taken up these themes in our freshman course at Stanford - Bodies in Place another link to the course. We read Richard II Shakespeare’s stunningly intelligent treatment of the sovereign’s two bodies. Of course, John of Gaunt is a major character in the drama and embodies the aristocracy’s attachment to property. This theme of land and identity is very prominent ...
Last summer Molly and I explored what was left of the jetty of the old medieval harbor identified by the team. We knew it was something - rock cutting, an alignment of stone and the great castle gate looks right on it … thanks to the English Heritage Team for making sense of it all for us!
Comment » Like you Mike I’ve been to Dunstanburgh many times over the years, though I’m afraid it’s not my favourite castle. Dunstanburgh is too bleak and fits into a Romantic view too easily. One of the reasons I am really excited about the recent research is that it shows how an apparently Romantic ruin in natural setting actually occupied a carefully composed place in a manipulated landscape — it stands as an exemplar of the discontents of Romanticism. It was interesting for me to see the English Heritage diary of the research. A good example of how theory and practice interact — I doubt the researchers would consciously align themselves with a theorised account of reflexive practice, but the fact remains that they felt it was an appropriate and fruitful way to present their thinking, and further that it would not have been countenanced twenty years ago. So it’s true that theory rarely affects field practice directly, but it’s equally true that in the long run, field practice is profoundly affected by changing theoretical horizons.
I’m off to look at your colleagues’ course on Richard II now. As you know Gaunt was not only involved in Dunstanburgh; he modified much of Kenilworth, and was the local rival to the builder of Bodiam. I often wonder what men Like Gaunt would say if told their buildings were dead ends, soon to be superceded by the Renaissance — an unscientific thought, but an intriguing one nevertheless. Comment by Matthew Johnson — 4/20/2004 @ 4:01 am
There is more.
A favorite of mine - Duns Scotus - reputedly from here - medieval theologian developing, among other things, notions of haecceity (with quiddity - the this-ness and what-ness of materiality) - part of a fascinating northern ecclesiastical and theological genealogy that includes Celtic Christianity and the Prince Bishops of Durham ...
a new chorography - tracing connections
(slide - new chorography)
De-privilege date and coordinate, and instead of places defined by attributes, we encounter vectors - lines of association and connection that make a region what it is - a true regional archaeology.
