Mark Johnson and Michael Shanks University of Wales Lampeter
Talk delivered at WAC Delhi 1994
Here Mark and I were working on what I was calling interpretive method (see Interpreting Archaeology: Finding Meaning in the Past), pushing towards the concept of cultural ecology that I developed much more fully with Mike Pearson and Cliff McLucas in the book Theatre/Archaeology and in The Three Landscapes Project
We wish to consider the character of humanist and interpretive approaches to landscape in archaeology. Through an encounter with carved rock surfaces and other traces of a prehistoric landscape in Sweden, presented are what we consider to be some key concepts and methodologies. The project to be described is ongoing; some ideas are tentatively offered for discussion.
We argue that any adequate account of settlement and environment, artefacts, architectures and space, must consider how these are constituted in social practice, with practice considered multi-dimensionally as embodied, that is rooted in people’s senses and sensibility as well as reasoning. Here is to be stressed the importance of the concept of lifeworld — environments as lived and constituted in terms of five senses, not just a principle of discursive rationality so usually taken to be the basis of understanding. As a means to grappling with embodiment we use visualisation as a research tool rather than an illustrative aid, here through the use of GIS and computer-based landscape rendering applications, as well as various genres of photography.
We hope our talk illustrates again the interpretive importance of context — making sense of things by relating them to different relational contexts. Methodologically this involves following connections through and beyond the material which interests us. We wish to follow the principle, upheld for example by critical theorist Theodor Adorno, that the object of interest should be active in determining method; there is otherwise the danger that method will determine the results of interpretation in advance.
We move to Bronze Age Sweden and the region of Bohuslän (slide 1 — map). Here are to be found many carved rock surfaces (slide 2 — photo) of the second millennium BC. Their subject matter is boats, human figures, deer, cup marks, shoe soles, and some cattle (slide 3 — drawing). There are only sparse and fragmented traces of society in the second millennium, centring for us now on the rock carvings in the land (slide 4 — carving in landscape).
What is to be made of these traces? We ally ourselves with approaches such as the interpretive readings of Chris Tilley and Tim Yates, and the ongoing work of George Nash who have worked with ideas and methodologies adapted from structuralist, post-structuralist and post-positivist philosophies, relating stylistic grammars to generative structures working through social agency, understanding sites through interpretive narratives.
We extend an invitation to follow some connections which may be read through the carvings in the land.
Sea level has dropped since the second millennium BC. (slide 5 — map) The map here indicates the present 20 metre contour as sea level, with the sea coloured blue. This landscape has been reconstructed (slide 6 — wireframe) using, among other applications, KPT Bryce, a landscape rendering application for Apple Macintosh. Some of the images that follow were produced using this software.
The sea is the medium of communication, connecting landforms (slide 7 — photo). Land and sea must be taken together in this way. It is also to be noted that the rock surfaces are frequently sited near the coast, on the coastline, as it was in the second millennium. The landscape is and was one (slide 8 — photo) of exposed outcrops and rocky beaches, and not all surfaces were carved. Certain places were chosen rather than others. (slide 9 — landscape) Concentrations of carvings were made on the right hand side slope along the waterway in the foreground of this slide, and along and beyond that which flows across the middle ground. (slide 10 — landscape) Now a valley, this waterway of the second millennium BC connects various locales marked, we suggest, by carvings, among other cultural traces. There is a major concentration behind the rise on the left.
So, based upon this intimacy of landforms and water, we propose to take the artefacts of boats (so frequently represented) and rock carvings together.
Consider boats and the sea. The sea was almost certainly a major source of food in a mixed economy. That there are few traces of permanent domestic sites points to mobile populations. In such a context the sea is the location of experiences of food gathering. But if we follow the ethnographic observations of Mary Helms in her book Ulysses Sail, boats may be as much about travel and entertainment. We do well to avoid ethnocentric isolation of an economic sphere. In this context boating is most usefully conceived as a total social fact.
What are boats about? They are most often carved full of people. (slide 11 — fishermen in boat) Boats may be seen as the location of experiences of companionship (slide 12 — fishermen together), of encounter with other places, of movement and anchorage (slide 13 — fishing boat) (slide 14 — fishing boat close up). The boat may be conceived as social actor: people turn into boats in the carvings (slide 15 — carving); boats become people. Scrutiny of the different occurrences of so-called boats upon the carvings reveals them less as a simple iconic form “boat’ than an organising principle in the following sense. People are gathered within boats, but much more. The boat can be read as a partable body, to be broken down and recombined with different things, again for example consider people becoming boats. The boat form itself is constituted by human forms joined, the graphical structure of the boat consisting of transformed human appendages — arms, torsos, heads. Only rarely are boat forms self-contained graphical elements: boats stretch into other things. This transformative motion is as much the subject of the carvings as clear and separable iconic elements. And it applies to other iconic forms too: people become animals; animals become boats.
We point out here that the implications for iconographic typologies are, of course, considerable.
To return to boats, and not just their carving: their motion involves the rhythms of rowing and paddling. Referenced are soundscapes of water and its artefacts. The imagery necessarily involves experiences of acts of carving: chipping and scoring. This is so often ignored. We draw an association with another rhythmic act, of making the carvings: echoes of a soundscape.
The images make the rock surface into locations of performances of carving and reading the harmonies of paradigmatic superpositioning and melodies of syntagmatic sequence (narrative perhaps). We will say more about this deliberate musical metaphor in a moment. The restricted range of conventional iconic forms (boats, people, deer, cattle, shoes) is a reiteration in the land of things which obviously (simply through their numbers) meant something to those who were carving.
The rock surfaces themselves may be seen to form landscapes and/or seascapes. (Carved) boats appear on a fluid surface (open to carving and manipulation) or ice-smoothed outcrop, The surface tension of the rock surface is broken by the chipping of the people in boats. Land and water are represented together: there are in the same compositions boats and (migrant) deer, people, and shoe soles as marks of paths and movement (as perhaps in the carved surface in this slide — a cupmark line of passage down the composition). Lichens and mosses grow across the rock (slide 16 — lichen), Water and rain run across rock surface (slide 17 — rock), Low northern light reflects in the water viewed from shallow drafted boats (slide 18 — rendered scene).
Sloping rock surfaces look out across land and sea. There is opportunity here for statistical work (not yet completed) exploring the characteristics of slope, vistas and intervisibility. The distributions of carvings follow the lines of valleys, with rock surfaces anchored to the land and in their distribution marking out the structure of place, just as boats navigate in travel and arrive at anchor.
Apart from carved outcrops there are hill-top cairns, again marking visibility as a factor (slide 19 — landscape). Burnt mounds attest to happenings in the landscape.
So rock and the sea are both, we argue, contexts for performances of carving and paddling, reading and making sense, navigating, making boats, travel and boating wherein are negotiated, we propose, social identities of those who make and view the images, of those who travel and return. These are all sensuous experiences, and, by virtue of the relational assemblage and contexts implied, total social facts.
(slide 20 — rock surface) We should hold in parentheses our distinctions between the sacred and profane as we consider the further associations which may be made between dance, performance and paddling, through their common sensuous experiences. Graphically arms go together: this is clear in some of the boat carvings. They also work together in rhythmic paddling or dragging in a net. Boating is not necessarily a simple functional activity; nor is rock carving. Trade instead provides opportunities for achieving goods, status and renown, for the experience of travel (we refer again to Helms). And with respect to the carvings, there are important evidences for associated activities. Yates, Nash and others have noted that the few excavations around carved rock surfaces have revealed traces of feasting and burning, some with demarcated areas. Carving and reading the images may well have been occasions for ceremony and performance. We should also, from anthropology, note the possible importance of iconography as cosmology, related to ‘ritual’ contexts and those of rites of passage.
We turn to some key concepts and comments upon the methodology we have adopted.
A main point concerns the methodology of an interpretive archaeology. The importance of context has long been recognised, Here interpretation involves following associations, building relational networks through the object of interest and beyond. Elsewhere one of us has termed these cultural assemblages. There are no necessary limits to these networks, and they may be of any character. This means that what may be termed the archaeological imagination is central to all our endeavours: looking, with all our imaginative skills, for dimensions of a data base with which we may make sense. The corollary is that the archaeological data base is a construct of discourse. It is unfortunate that scientific empiricism has narrowed our imaginations, We simply argue for a reawakening of sensitivity to the forms of the empirical, developing a sensitivity to metaphorical and metonymic association. The interpretive networks are, if required, empirically verifiable. They may range across all the senses, transcending distinctions between the fields of the sciences and the humanities: subsistence activities may be related to the experience of navigation, to the experience of chipping rock. The cultural assemblages as definitions of context depend on contemporary interest, what we, as archaeological interpreters, guides to past material lifeworlds, want to achieve for those who share our interests. But cultural assemblages are as much self-defining contexts: method arises out of the object of study, with interpretation involving acts of following connections which hold some claim to significance and validity. Archaeology is, in these ways, mediation: a process making sense of the past in the present which disclaims the epistemological neurosis that the past as it was is the appropriate aim. We will return to this point at the end.
In generating insight and following contexts, visualisation may be an effective research tool. Here is a most important role for Geographic Information Systems and more well-established methods of statistical data exploration. Sociologists and philosophers of science (such as those in the book Representation in Scientific Practice edited by Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar) have noted that graphical representations can be crucial to developing hypotheses in science. Archaeologists have long visualised landscapes, but in their imaginations. It is equally open to explore sensuous landscapes with imagery, and indeed sound: we point forward to multimedia archaeologies and mention the implications for writing archaeologies of the ineffable. With archaeologists dealing with materiality, this must surely be recognised as a significant goal. Geographic Information Systems are in danger of becoming mere technique, another tool of the archaeologist as technician. At the GIS Unit in Lampeter we are searching for creative uses for Geographic Information Systems in interpretive archaeologies.
Our interpretation reveals a need for new informations: for example concerning surface inclination (as related to theatral viewing) as in this slide, also features of the rock outcrops which may be interpreted as landscape/seascape, marks of how the carvings were made or crafted. Methodologies of field recording are shown to be in need of constant redefinition — there is no one efficient way of surveying sites in the land. This again confirms the intimate relationship between the archaeological imagination and the empirical.
The importance of a phenomenological interest is indicated. This is an attention to people’s lived experience, to lifeworld, the environment (‘natural’, artefactual and human) as it is lived by people. It involves thinking rigorously and describing accurately the relations between people, places and artifacts, expanding and deepening an accurate, empirical and concerned contact with what archaeologists are studying. Here is an interest in bodily engagement which aims to expand the visual and abstract focus of many approaches in archaeology by augmenting the empirical, visual and operational with an attention to different ways of knowing.
Such interpretation involves the concept of experience, defined as embodied practice. Our interpretation is considered to further the embodiment of archaeology. Note that the concept of embodiment is not restricted to the individual body, but has various scales. The boat may here be conceived as locale for collective and social embodiment, mediating the individual’s perhaps personal experience. The concept of experience refers to being the subject of a practice, state or condition. Among other things experience is knowledge acquired through trial (trials of seafaring, of walking the land as surveyor, of carving rock). Its parameters are the material, perception and the imagination.
The relation between experience and the sentiments is stressed: this is a concern with the qualities of things, the character of the environment and its perception, the visual (all the effects and play of light), haptics (touch) and the soundscape. Proxemics refers to the spatial interrelations between people, social, physical and emotional proximity and distance.
The environment (contingently natural and cultural) becomes part of the body-image in such humanistic approaches because it directs movement and experiences, imposes vistas upon those who live the environment.
A fundamental part of the lifeworld is architecture and building which give form to lived place (to be contrasted with empty space). Architecture as building is not only restricted to structures: rock surface and cultaural landscape may equally be conceived as architecture
Such interpretive archaeology is an oecology, defined as the discourse (logos, in Greek) of oikos (house, home, dwelling-place). Oecology locates agency and human creativity in their environment or lifeworld.
There are important implications for the cultural politics of archaeological interpretation. Implicit here is a regional focus which considers diversity and identity, situated, for example, in relation to metanarratives of the European Bronze Age or Rock carving as ‘Art’. We wish to deny the hierarchy of rich and monumental bronze age regions over peripheral areas, asserting instead difference and the rich textural character of supposed peripheries. Regional foci such as that presented here deny the curtailing of textured experience and diversity so often found in the constructions of ideology or of power interests.
Throughout this talk the question is raised and addressed— how are landscapes and experiences to be represented? Attention is drawn to the need to address technical matters concerning the production of archaeological knowledges, the forms of writing and illustration and their relation to interests, ideas and materials. These are matters of the technology of archaeological discourse.
We end by returning to interest. In Bohuslän we find fragmented traces of the bronze age. If our aim were to revive the past as it was, we would necessarily be pessimistic and perhaps restrict ourselves to simple inventory, as have so many others. But acceptance that archaeology is always and necessarily mediation of the traces of the past in the present means we should not be negative in the face of supposed scarcity of traces. Those traces still evoke for so many now; they still live. We contend that the archaeologist has an obligation to reconstruct, attending to regional interest now, making sense for people today of past lifeworlds which may enrich the present’s awareness of its cultural environment. And there is nothing more positive than the land which exists as a multitemporal whole. What is needed, even with the most fragmented traces of people left in the land, is to make those traces into human presence for those who live there now, and for those who visit.