creativity, rhetoric and archaeological futures
Michael Shanks
Department of Archaeology
University of Wales Lampeter
in M Kuna and N Venclová (eds) Whither archaeology: archaeology in the end of the millenium Papers dedicated to Evzen Neustupny Prague, 1993
Some of the most significant changes in archaeology from the late 1970s have surely involved the realisation that archaeology is something done in the present (Gero et al 1983, Hodder 1984, Leone 1986, Patterson 1986, Trigger 1981 and 1989, Shanks and Tilley 1987a and 1987b, Baker and Thomas (eds) 1991; for discussion and issues see Green (ed) 1984, Norwegian Archaeological Review 1989 and Preucel (ed) 1991). There is more to archaeology than what is left of the past; archaeology is contemporary social practice. Some archaeological writing has been interpreted as ideological; some museum exhibits too (Meltzer 1981, Leone 1981a and 1981b, Horne 1984, Shanks and Tilley 1987a, chapter 4). Archaeology has been related to nationalist movements, to imperialist aspirations and to the effects of colonialism (Trigger 1984). Local interests in archaeological knowledge, particularly regarding indigenous peoples, are more asserted now (Langford 1983, Olsen 1986, Gathercole and Lowenthal (eds) 1990, Layton (ed) 1989a and 1989b): Native American concern about archaeological treatment of their past is but one prominent example (Trigger 1980, Quick (ed) 1986, Zimmerman 1989a and 1989b, Leone and Preucel 1992). Academic freedom and politics was a major issue in the 1986 World Archaeological Congress at Southampton (Shaw 1986, Hodder 1986b, Ucko 1987). More generally archaeological pasts have become very prominent in conceptions of local and national heritage; the material past is more than ever an explicit and emphasised part of cultural identities.
Several closely connected theoretical principles may be perceived as uniting these developments.
A principle of symmetry: listening to the other
I want to take up these points first by proposing a manifold principle of symmetry (1) in the field we call the archaeological.
This principle holds first that professional archaeologists now and all others interested in the material past (or what we understand by the archaeological) are comparable. They are on a par, are symmetrical. All are people who make something of the remains of what happened in the past. This is a sociological and historiographical point. No longer is the discipline a story of the inexorable progress of (archaeological) reason (a principle detached from history) or of the acquisition of objective knowledge valid for all time (Daniel 1981), nor indeed is it simply the expression of social forces (Trigger 1981 and 1989); there are instead different and commensurable ways of dealing with the archaeological. (For the moment we may stick with the understanding that the archaeological refers to what is left of the past.)
To hold that archaeology is first and foremost a professional 'discipline', a particular set of rational methods and techniques throws immediate suspicion and doubt upon those things and people who are (and were) outside of orthodoxy and do not adhere to those methods and techniques. Let us suppose that current archaeological method is indeed rational and objective, as rational and objective as it can be made. This is surely the way we would wish it. What then of times before the formalisation of such scientific archaeology? Were archaeologists in the 1920s less rational and objective? Well, perhaps they too were working towards rational and objective method, only they weren't as developed as we are; but this can be forgiven because we have built upon their work. But what about attitudes towards the material past before the formalisation of the discipline after the Enlightenment? People then, and in some quarters today, had all sorts of views incompatible with 'rational' and scientific archaeology. Stone tools were celestial phenomena; history was conceived according to religious teaching, there being no room for prehistory with a creation date of 4004 BC.
Native American people may express no desire to have archaeological knowledge of the past because their spiritual traditions give them what they need. Is it to be supposed that these are religious dogma, irrational belief, opposed to rational knowledge? (2) If so a dualism is erected between religion, society, history and belief on one side, and science, nature, rationality and universality on the other. One is conceived contingent and weak, the other objective, strong and necessary. Archaeologists have objectivity on their side; they are clever and professional. What do ley-liners have? Stupidity? This is no way to go about understanding other attitudes towards the archaeological, because those who disagree with orthodox method are taken for irrational or mad fools from the start. It is implied that those who believed (or believe now) in Archbishop Ussher's creation date of 4004 BC have been duped by religion; those who believe in the sanctity of the prehistoric landscape, ley-lines and all, are stupid fools or cranks. Science and pseudo-science are here incommensurable; they cannot be compared This takes us nowhere, and most importantly it makes impossible an historical understanding of scientific controversy. Does the truth always win? What force does it have? How is it that ideas which are now totally discredited, such as the presence of phlogiston in combustible materials, were once held to be objective truths? Were people stupid then, or at least not as critical as later? To answer yes is profoundly arrogant.
Maintaining an absolute objectivity makes it impossible to understand the reasons for there being different versions of the past. A principle of symmetry is part of an open and democratic reason which involves treating, at the outset, objectivity and 'falsity', science and 'pseudo-science' as equal (many scientific ideas began as cranky ideas). Talk to people, understand them, persuade if necessary; instead of patronising them by playing the expert. Maintain an open and reasoned dialogue. But this is not to abandon judgement. Test what holds the respective objectivities together; find out what persuades people that something is objective. I will return to this process of persuading, testing or judging (3).
The politics of cultural practice
This is to propose a materialist understanding of archaeology. Archaeology is not about abstract reason and knowledge, but consists of material practices, concrete sensuous human experiences. What are the particular characteristics of these archaeological practices?
There is a political dimension. If archaeology is a contemporary cultural practice, then concepts such as expert and knowledge are demystified. Archaeology can no longer be a special communion with the past which is only authorised for those with the necessary qualities of expertise and knowledge. There are no special principles of archaeological reason and authenticity. Instead archaeology is embedded in history, in particular societies, class, race and gender structures, in particular languages. As cultural practices, archaeologies have particular modes of production, distribution and consumption; the latter involve different technologies and are related to particular subject-positions of archaeologists. None are separable from the pasts produced. Here are the conditions under which particular archaeological knowledges of the past are made. I will later consider this under the concept discourse.
The question of the politics of cultural practice or production is by who and for whom. It is a question of power and access. Political and ethical responsibility demands a programme of empowerment - enabling more and different groups of people access to the archaeological (see the exemplary work of Leone et al 1991 and 1993).
Archaeology and the archaeological
So what is the archaeological? The concept needs expanding. I have argued elsewhere (Shanks 1992a) that the archaeological can be conceived as a mode or aspect of experience prior to the formalisations of method and technique. Archaeology involves relations with the temporality and character of the material world (Shanks 1992b and 1993a). So it involves understanding material culture, its creation and use, societal relations with material environments, but also what happens to ourselves and goods: the decay of materiality and creation of residues, ruins remains. Archaeology is not first a substantive, the noun 'archaeology', a separable field or discipline. As an adjective, archaeological, all sorts of experiences and practices become comparable. Forensic science, piecing together clues, memorabilia, collections, visits to ruins, energies of discovery and loss of things, decay and preservation, and much more are included. Connections move far beyond that conventionally regarded as archaeology: think only of the metaphor of excavation, its relevance to so many cultural fields, psychotherapy delving into the psyche, genealogists tracing authentic line of lineage (Shanks 1992a, part 2; see Lowenthal 1985 on Freud). By treating archaeology as an aspect of some practices we are able to make connections and locate archaeology firmly in the present.
Implicit in much of what I have written so far is that archaeology is a mode of cultural production, a technology or craft for producing things of the past (McGuire and Shanks 1991). Archaeologists take things left from the past and work on them.
A shift is required from considering that archaeology is about discovery to realising that it is about invention. An inventor may be conceived to have come upon a discovery. Invention is both finding and creative power. I want to relate invention to poetry. And I propose to treat poetry as about making, constructing connections between things, words and perceptions. Elsewhere has been argued this case for an archaeological poetics concerned with the characteristics of archaeological constructions (Shanks and Tilley 1989, p7-10, Shanks 1992a, Tilley 1993).
Archaeology as making. The past is made: it will not excavate itself and does not exist in the form that it was. Excavation sculpts (4) what has become of the past into a form with which archaeologists can deal. Archaeologists make texts, reports, documents of all sorts; and various things such as reconstructions of pots, models, museum displays.
Archaeological making is about work done on the past. The 'objective past' will not present itself. The remains of a prehistoric hut circle will not excavate themselves. A pot will not thin-section itself and appear upon microscope slide beneath the gaze of a cataplectic archaeologist. Work has to be done in the sense that the remains of the past have to be incorporated into projects.
Archaeological projects are about connecting past, present and future; work according to a future-orientated design is carried out on the past. But what empirical or concrete form do they take? An archaeological project involves the mobilisation of many different things or resources. Connections are made. Landowners are approached, funding needs to be found, labour hired, tools and materials convened, skills operated to dig, draw and photograph, computers programed and fed with data, finds washed and bagged, workforce kept happy, wandering cows chased off site. This is a great and rich assemblage of people, things and energies which achieve what are conventionally termed data. An archaeological project is a heterogeneous network (5). A network because different elements are mobilised and connected, but unlike a bounded system there are no necessary or given limits to the network; it is quite possible to follow chains of connection far beyond what are conceived as the conventional limits of archaeology (in pragmatic terms think of the ramifications of funding; in institutional terms the relations with the education system; in affective terms all the associations of 'working in the field' (Shanks 1992a)). These networks are heterogeneous because connected are different (not belonging to a homogeneous category) entities, actors or resources: interests, monies, academics, career trajectories, volunteers, landowners, wheelbarrows, JCB diggers, cornfields, decayed subsurface 'features', laboratories ... .
All these are brought together in an archaeological project which constitutes the reality of the past, makes it what it is. It is within such contingent (there is nothing necessary about them) assemblages that the past comes to be perceived and known.
So the principle of symmetry unites archaeological production and culture generally. Both in the present and the past. People in the past related to the archaeological too (defined above as the temporality and character of materiality); megalithic monuments, for example, may be interpreted as foregrounding the material past in the present (Thomas 1993a and 1993b, Tilley n.d.). Archaeology, following such a principle of symmetry, loses its historical mystery. Where did the discipline come from? It can now be treated as a particular historical formalisation of aspects of sociocultural practice generally. People made things in the past. Archaeology becomes coextensive with the field of design and technology (6): materials are worked upon according to interests and projects to produce something valued. And there is symmetry too between the archaeologist and the object of study, between subject and object of archaeological knowledge. I will argue further and clarify below how both are material and historical.
What are the implications if it is accepted that archaeology is a technology or mode of cultural production? My main point here in this paper is to stress the responsibility archaeologists have to reconstruct. Simple discovery and unmotivated or neutral description of things found is no option. Something must be made of them. This requires an attention to what is desired and needed, to audiences and communities served by archaeologists. The creativity of archaeology needs taking seriously: it is the work of invention and the archaeological imagination (7).
How is the archaeological imagination to be approached? I suggest two concepts: discourse and rhetoric.
Archaeology constructs its object past through the workings of discourse. This is a key concept in directing attention not so much to the content, but to the way something is written or told, and the social and historical conditions surrounding writing and telling (8).
Discourses may vary and clash in close proximity. In a factory the discourse of the workforce may differ considerably from that of the management. Academic archaeology includes several discourses: Near Eastern and classical archaeology being distinct from Anglo-American processual archaeology for example. The discourse of commercial excavation is different again.
In the UK the notion of the English countryside and landscape, its development and relation to national identity could be termed part of a metanarrative. Thomas (1991) has challenged the metanarrative of earlier British prehistory, that it was then just as it always has been - hearty peasants in the English countryside. Other metanarratives include the stories of cultural diffusion from centres of excellence accompanied by conquest and population movement: an explanatory scheme based on nineteenth-century experiences of imperialism. Larsen (1989) has related Near Eastern archaeology to an ideology of orientalism (Said 1978). Evolutionary theories, when treated uncritically, often also form neat formulae for bringing the past to order (Shanks and Tilley 1987b, chapter 6); this too is a function of metanarrative.
All of these aspects of discourse are open to critique, are open to change, under the principle I suggested above of empowerment - enabling as many as possible to engage with archaeological pasts which are meaningful and provide something for them. Self reflection upon archaeological discourse is obligatory if stale, ideological, and politically damaging archaeologies are not to result.
Rhetoric: persuasion and power
Rhetoric is a theory of discourse; it is concerned with the design and production of speech, text and all things that communicate . Rhetoric foregrounds the relation between author and audience: the act, circumstances, technology and techniques of communication. (9) For Aristotle (Rhetoric 1.2.1) rhetoric is the art, skill or faculty of establishing the possible means of persuasion with reference to any subject matter.
Key issues are persuasion and power. Persuasion is arguably ubiquitous; it is an aspect of perhaps every communicative act. Many statements intend to lead the listener or reader somewhere, and even simply accepting a statement as given in order to move on to another is to be persuaded, however temporarily. A blunt statement of fact intends to be accepted, perhaps through its bluntness. Power is involved because an act of communication is intended to get the listener or reader to believe, think, feel or do something, even just to go on listening or reading, or indeed to give up reading (see below).
Another aspect of communicative acts is related to persuasion. This is that much of communication is wholly or partly pre-symbolic; it is gestural (Winterowd 1968, chapter 1). When I say 'how are you?', 'ça va?', the precise meaning of what I ask is less important than the gesture of attempting to (re)establish a relationship. Many of the gestural dimensions of communication are related to persuasion because the aim of both is to establish and maintain relationships of particular sorts. Rhetoric reaches out to people; its aim is consubstantiality.
Rhetoric, being thus about persuasion, includes the construction of arguments and logic and indeed anything else that may persuade: reference may be made to emotion and moral character for example. It is important to recognise the ethical character of rhetoric. In that the intention is to persuade, there is moral reponsibility regarding the direction of persuasion and consequences. This is simply to recognise that all relationships (the subject and aim of rhetoric) are of ethics. As Winterowd puts it: 'rhetoric focuses on language as suasion, as an act and as a moral consequence. The rhetorician knows that we can literally talk ourselves to death' (1968, p14). The main departments of rhetoric are traditionally as follows.
This is the process whereby subject matter for discourse is discovered. Here are included modes of creative generation and originality. In terms of archaeology reference may be made to the history of ideas, historiography, to the sociology of knowledge, and also interdisciplinary connections.
An important subject here is the theory of topoi or staseis. Topoi are the places where can be found material for arguments. They are issues by which a problem may be attacked, and are often questions. In law the topics concern establishment and definition of the matter, comparison and cause. They are: coniectura or stochasmos - did X kill Y?; finis or horos - was it murder? - qualitas or poiotes - was it honourable or expedient?; translatio or metalepsis - was it all Y's fault? These topoi have had a tremendous influence on many other fields of argument. But they are by no means the dominant topoi. Topoi can take any form. They are simply strategies, ways of staking out common ground (topoi also come under the name commonplaces) in the sense of getting your audience to see what you are up to, to have them follow your line of reasoning and sympathise with your purpose. For example there is the topos of 'more and less': such arguments concern degrees - if a thing cannot be found where it is more likely to exist, you will not find it where it is less likely to exist. Medieval rhetoric produced books filled with thousands of such 'commonplaces'.
In science the topoi most often concern observation, prediction, measurement and mathematisation: these are sources for persuading people that your version of reality is the correct one. It will be objected by many that these are not matters of rhetoric, but of theory coming up against the realities of nature. Einstein's theory of general relativity predicted that light would bend in a strong gravitational field. This was confirmed by photographs taken during a solar eclipse. Where is the rhetoric?
But raw facts never point unequivocally in a particular theoretical direction. Stellar positions need to be interpreted in the light of theory. Stellar positions are the facts of science only under certain conditions, described in certain ways. They are at other times the material of stories and myths. That there are facts which support a theory, that contact is made in science at some point between prediction and reality is a rhetorical conviction (Gross 1990, p11-12). People need to be persuaded of the correspondence. I will return to this matter.
Logical and aesthetic links may be considered. For Cicero, the parts of a speech were the opening, narrative outline, statement of case, proof of case, refutation of opposition, epilogue. The legal formula is again clearly one which has had considerable influence upon the sciences. Narrative is an important element which, of course, relates to archaeological and historical materials. But narrative is more than simple descriptive chronicle. There are many factors including plot, agency and viewpoint.
Works constructed under Modernist aesthetics have exhaustively interrogated how media may be manipulated and arranged so as to convey senses of reality: from paintings by Picasso through the writings of Joyce to new wave French cinema. A key method is that of juxtaposition, collage and montage. The technology of cultural production is an essential concern. We are no longer limited to the speech. So film can use close-up, multiple viewpoints, slow motion, montage and cut, and other forms of interruption and juxtaposition. A technology of construction can enable or facilitate views of nature and society which are impossible to realise without that technology. Information technology offers enormous potential, and dangers: digitised databases where everything is interchangeable and can be infinitely montaged in hypermedia (Miller 1992, part 1).
Narrative and juxtaposition: these are central to archaeology, yet there has been little experiment or reflection (10). Conventions are adhered to which are stale and worn out in comparison to cultural production elsewhere (and most of all in heritage).
This may be divided into aptum - appropriateness to subject matter and context (for example is a line drawing appropriate); puritas - correctness of expression (according, or not, to rules of discourse and the discipline); perspicuitas - the comprehensibility of expression (clarity and density); ornatus - the adornment of expression.
Tropes or figures of speech provide a great insight into varieties of text structure within 'elocutio'. Here are included strategies such as antithesis and irony (figures of contrast), metaphor (identity in difference), metonymy. These particularly would seem to be very relevant to archaeology in its translation of material pasts into a different medium, text and image (on metaphor see Shanks 1992a and Tilley 1990b and 1993).
But such matters are rarely considered. The contrast between Aristotle's emphasis upon spare purity of expression and Cicero's florid style embracing all possible tropes has severely hindered considerations of style in those disciplines which see themselves as dealing with fact and reality. As early as 1667 Sprat was proclaiming the importance of lack of adornment in science: its communications must 'return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men delivered so many things in an equal number of words' (Sprat 1667, II, pxx). So science, with some archaeology included, does not condone tropes like irony or hyperbole which mock and draw attention away from the rhetorical object - nature (11). Metaphor and analogy undercut that semantics of identity between word and thing stressed by Sprat and upheld by science, empiricism and positivism. And viewpoint is to be suppressed. 'Regardless of surface features, at its deepest semantic and syntactic levels scientific prose requires an agent passive before the only real agent, nature itself. ... (its) style creates our sense that science is describing a reality independent of its linguistic formulations' (Gross 1990, p17).
Purity of expression and third person report is identified with freedom from emotional appeal, which is considered to undercut the claims of reason. 'But the disciplined denial of emotion in science is only a tribute to our passionate investment in its methods and goals' (ibid, p15). The apparent freedom from emotion is not neutrality but deliberate abstinence, the choice of certain stylistic devices over others. There is also the myth of writing for a universal, non-specific audience. In plain scientific prose is a non-rational appeal to the authority of reason.
Logos and pathos (reason and emotion): these are two grounds on which persuasion may be attempted. Ethos (character) is another. This may include the persuasive effect of authority and it is prevalent in the sciences and most academic disciplines. Academic papers are embedded in networks of authority: journals, grants and funding, institutions, career positions, citation and referencing. These can have a decisive effect. They may be very apparent in styles of writing. The main point here is that persuasion may be legitimately attempted upon any grounds. There is no necessity to style; there is choice, and that is the doorway to creativity.
Archiving is coming to be a major issue in archaeology with the proliferation of information. What is to be available and how? How are ideas to be stored and disseminated?
Included here are the design and delivery of lectures and TV programmes, books and publishing projects, museum displays.
Again there are matters here which are widely recognised but have not been united and have been subject to little reflective critique within archaeology.
Rhetoric is fundamentally about the recruitment and mobilisation of allies for your cause. It is about making friends. Rhetoric is about courtship (Burke 1950). Plato, in the Phaedrus, presents sexual love as an allegory of discourse. Both are acts of relationship with consequences and responsibilities (Weaver 1965).
This is made clear in controversy, when all powers of persuasion are practiced. The literature gets technical and detailed as all sorts of resources are brought in to back up what each side is trying to uphold. Complex arguments are spelled out and references multiplied. Evidence is marshalled and displayed. What is the purpose? It is to isolate the reader who dissents: how can they disagree when presented with all the evidence, the logic, the number of others who agree, attested by references to other writings. 'The power of rhetoric is to make the dissenter feel lonely' (Latour 1987, p44). The lonely dissenter has no friends or allies.
Matters of logic, reason and objectivity are, it is suggested, secondary to these matters of relationship. So the art of persuasion is about providing only one way for the listener or reader to freely proceed. When this happens it is in many circumstances described as logical or reasonable. Logic refers to practical schemes which prevent the reader getting out or escaping the conclusions. Connections are networked around the reader to prevent them straying from the desired path forward.
Another aim may be to appear as a spokesperson for all the 'friends' you have connected together. A common rhetorical strategy is one of demonstration: 'you may disagree, but let me show you'. Demonstration is about audio-visual spectacle and the author takes the position of representative of the facts and issues presented. Depending on the outcome of the persuasive effort objectivity and subjectivity may be decided: spokesmen or women become either objective representatives or subjective individuals. 'Being objective means that no matter how great the effort of the dissenters to sever the links between spokesperson and what they claim to represent, the links resist' (Latour 1987, p78). Subjectivity is when you claim to speak for others but people only think you speak for yourself.
Power here relates to the constituencies claimed to be represented by the author. In connecting arguments, people (via references) and things (objects as evidence) the author spreads themself through time and space; this is one of the premises of power. It is about enroling in a cause and translating. The observation of the position of a star becomes, is translated as a proof of a theory. The design upon a pot is translated into evidence for trade or kinship grouping. And persuasion is to a great extent about translating other people's interests into your own. Translation is a way of making connection. You get things to work for you (12). Rhetoric is about establishing heterogeneous alliances of people and things, arguments and emotions, characters and evidences (13).
The strength of objectivity constructed
It is argued that objectivity is not an absolute or abstract quality towards which we strive. Objectivity is constructed. This is not to deny objectivity, but rather, ironically, to make it more concrete, rooted in practice, event and happening. Begin with the character of an object. How do we know what something is? Objects are shaped by what happens to them under particular circumstances: their character is performative.
Some in fairy tales defeat the ugliest seven-headed dragons, or against all odds they save the king's daughter; others inside laboratories resist precipitation or they triumph over bismuth ... . At first there in no other way to know the essence of the hero. This does no last long however, because each performance presupposes a competence which retrospectively explains why the hero withstood all the ordeals. The hero is no longer a score list of actions; he, she or it is an essence slowly unveiled through each of his, her or its manifestations' (Latour 1987, p89).
To turn now to the quality we call objectivity. Let it be agreed that an objective statement is one which is strong, and that indeed we would wish our interpretations to be full of such strong statements. What makes a statement strong? The conventional answers are that strength comes from logical coherence, or because the statement corresponds with something out there, external to the statement, or because of some inherent quality called objectivity. But who decides on how coherent a statement must be? How exact must correspondence be? It varies. People have to be persuaded that a statement is strong, and rhetoric, as I have outlined it, is a way of establishing strength.
I argue that the archaeological past will not excavate itself but needs to be worked for. (The dead are not safe.) If objectivity is an abstract quality or principal held by reality, how does it argue for itself, how does it display its strength? No, people are needed, their projects. Gravity does not appear to all and everyone on its own. Microbes needed the likes of Pasteur. So a statement about the archaeological past is not strong because it is true or objective. But because it holds together when interrogated it is described as objective. What then does a statement hold on to, whence does it derive strength, if not from objectivity? There is no necessary answer. It can be many things. An objective statement is one that is connected to anything more solid than itself so that if it is challenged all that it is connected to threatens also to fall. This is how rhetoric works.
An archaeological report usually aims to present data as objective as possible - a strong basis for subsequent inference. Its strength comes from all those diagrams and photographs, the many words of detailed description, the references to comparative sites and materials which give further context to the findings. These all attest to the actual happening of the excavation and to the trustworthiness of the excavation team. Where otherwise is the quality of objectivity? Because the report is coherent and reads well (no contradictions betraying lies and artifice), and the photographs witness things actually being found, because its style and rhetoric are found acceptable, because it delivers what is required (from format to types of information), it is described as sound. Objectivity is what is held together. If a report holds together it is considered objective.
Challenge a fact in the report and you have to argue with all of this, with the happening of the excavation, that great heterogeneous assemblage of people, things and energies. Ultimately the only way to shake its strength is to excavate another similar site, mobilising another army of resources and people. The skill of crafting objectivity is heterogeneous networking - tying as many things together as possible.
This means that there is a particular response which is designed into the technical report which answers controversy: it is that it is not meant to be read! (14) Disputes over objectivity lead to the demise of reading. Faced with a dense and technical report most people do not read it; they may or may not believe it but they give up with all the interrelations and networking it presents. Fewer others may go along with the piece and be persuaded. Their interests are translated and they reference or use the work in the future: the report is made more objective and may aspire to being accepted fact; the movement is nevertheless away from reading the report for what it is, a piece of writing. Very few people check up on the report and go through it all, even down to reexcavating. In the first response the text does not count. In the second the text is abridged and reduced almost to reference. In the third attention is shifted from the text to libraries (checking references), museums (objects stored), excavation (reestablish data base), laboratory hardware. The dissenter is faced with establishing a set of connections which counter that of the report; it can be an enormous and expensive effort.
Archaeology makes the past, but it is nevertheless real I contend. So what is the character of this reality? Reality becomes that which resists any attempts to challenge it: it holds out (Latour 1989). Reality is not to be denied, but it should be recognised also that feelings and aspirations, people, their experiences and their practices are as real. My purpose is to assert the symmetry of the subject and object of knowledge: the archaeologist and the object of study. Both are material and historical; they are both made and both change.
Here it is important to distinguish existence from essence. The first is local and historical. The latter is for all time and in all places. I wish to get rid of timeless and abstract essences such as objectivity. A dualism between existence and essence corresponds with the following:
existence essence history and society nature subjectivity objectivity social relationships laws people things perception facts present past.
Deny these two separate realms. Why should the object world be credited with essence while people only have subjectivity and historical existence? Society becomes more than just people, receiving objective materiality, and is no longer opposed to the natural world of things. Nature becomes truly natural history with things having a history which is often tied to that of people. The specific realities of the past are now historically connected with those of archaeologists in particular projects - heterogeneous and historical mixtures of real people and things. But these are specific and historical constructions: there is no necessary monopoly of one particular archaeological mobilisation of people and things which is tied to objectivity. We are hereby more attuned to different archaeological projects. Reburial issues, treasure hunting, landscape art and fringe archaeology become commensurable with professional archaeology: they are but different assemblages of resources (things, practices, people, aspirations, projects ...).
If objectivity is accepted as constructed, an criticism may be voiced that thereby is subjectivity unleashed. This may be countered with the argument that if objectivity is denied as an essence, so too must be subjectivity. The opposition between objectivity sticking to the facts and subjectivity giving way to mystical and personal feelings is a false one. Why deny that it is people who do archaeology, and that people are indeed constituted as subjectivities in historical dealings with others and with things? If objectivity is denied as an essence, subjectivity becomes the form that the object world takes - though the looking, digging, thinking, feeling, the projects, those heterogeneous mobilisations of people.
If it is accepted that archaeology is a technology, a mode of cultural construction of the past, reality, objectivity and the past are not lost. Troublesome essences such as objectivity and reality and dichotomies such as those above are however discarded as products of theology. The solidity, beauty, originality of archaeological facts are still there and may be described with terms of 'fact', 'reality' and 'objectivity'. But present also are archaeologists, volunteers, publishers, film makers, television companies, photographers, feelings and desires, instruments and laboratories which make these facts live and hold together.
On rhetoric and making the past I have said nothing that is not already happening; but it is not often accepted. I suggest this: accept archaeology as mode of production, uniting science and all the rest that comes under the heading of the archaeological. Those persistent and necessary rhetorical appeals to persuasion through reason, argument, character and emotion flesh out archaeological experience into three-dimensional reality. We make the past what it is for us: accept the creativity and the responsibility that goes with this. Rather than hide behind abstracts such as reason, science, and objectivity we should take responsibility for our actions in making the past what it can be. It is only on these grounds that archaeology can be respected by those who are not credited with membership of the discipline.
Responsibility is also to the politics or ethics of those relationships inherent in the rhetoric of the discipline. I have mentioned empowerment: bringing others into the production of the past. Consider the relationships engendered rhetorically. Dialogue and listening to others is surely more reasonable (sic) than a programme of isolating the dissenter through the text that is not to be read. Why not attend to an aim of finding the first person plural - what we have in common and can explore together. Rhetoric can be as much about congruence and consubstantiality. A task is to find new and varied topoi, topics of discourse, fields of common ground with those for whom we produce archaeological knowledges. Attending to discourse and rhetoric under a technological model of archaeology involves a concern with techniques, but not simply in the sense of how to trowel or run a resistivity survey. (Rhetorical) technique is about the creativity of developing heterogeneous networks, forming connections and affiliations which allow the production of the past. I have mentioned the potential, as I see it, of relational databases and hypermedia. Archaeological writing is predominantly narrow and impoverished. Look to style, writing and illustration. Learn from the successes of heritage in its multi-sensory presentations. As Walter Benjamin argued in different circumstances, technical progress is arguably the condition of political progress.
The archaeological imagination is all of this: daring to risk a past alive in the present.
Acknowledgement
This paper owes much, and more than is indicated in the references, to reading and talking with Bruno Latour.
References
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