Christa M. Beranek (Boston University, Journal of Field Archaeology)
<fontcolor=yellow>Recently, archaeologists have been incorporating fictional narratives into their scholarly texts or even writing stand-alone fictional pieces (see Joyce 2006; Wilkie 2003 for reviews of works in this form). Archaeologists use fictional or narrative writing for a number of reasons—as an alternative to/ critique of traditional academic forms of presenting knowledge (Spector 1991), as a mechanism for engaging the public, and as a form of self-reflexivity (Wilkie 2003). As a teacher, I initially envisioned these narratives as texts that would prove more accessible to students with no background in archaeology. Unexpectedly, the narratives have been useful not only because they provide understandable material for non-specialists, but maybe more significantly because they provide an entrée into the world of scholarly interpretation in ways that I had not expected, but desperately needed. In this regard, these narratives fill their proposed function as critiques of “the presentation of archaeological knowledge” (Spector 1991: 390) in ways that I certainly could not have anticipated.

In the fall of 2006, I began teaching in a university writing program, instructing mostly first year students in the basics of college level reading and writing. I was filling in, at almost the last minute, for a course in which the students had expected to read immigrant literature, and here I was with a full syllabus of readings in historical archaeology. To ease the transition (and keep the students from dropping out), I gave a strong archaeology sales pitch in the first class, discussing the ways in which artifacts and historical archaeology could give another perspective on the lives of immigrants to America and others who did not write traditional histories. Archaeology could provide the opportunity to present narratives from the inside out, or the bottom up. This will be even better than immigrant literature, I promised them.

As writing assignments started coming in, I found that I had sold the wonders of archaeology a little too well. Archaeologists were digging up “the truth,” artifacts spoke to them directly, and they were the only authentic spokespeople for persecuted immigrants, slaves, and so on. Somehow, the scholarly accounts that archaeologists wrote were unbiased, objective, and beyond question. This was not what I had intended at all.
I realized later that what I encountered was not so much a result of “overselling” archaeology, but instead the challenge of teaching students to be critical readers and introducing them to the world of academic interpretation. While they were familiar, to some degree, with the idea that a poem could be interpreted differently by literary scholars, they had less familiarity with the idea of interpretation in history and the social sciences. Additionally, because they lacked detailed familiarity with any one period in American history, they had difficulty imagining other points of view than the one that they were currently reading. They tended to read any individual text rather uncritically; it was only when faced with extremely stark contrasts that they began to see differences in bias and approach. These were the same challenges that were raised in a Writing Program seminar (led by historian Allison Blakely) on teaching students in history-based writing seminars. Over the next two semesters, I devised a set of readings and exercises to dramatically illustrate differences in interpretation (and to show the many ways is which writers convey interpretations) though “buried” in “neutral, value-free, objective-sounding language” (Spector 1991: 402). This collection of historical, journalistic, and archaeological readings centered on the Five Points of New York City in the second half of the 19th century (see endnote). The contrasts in genre, interpretations, and approaches to the same subject matter led to productive discussions, mostly student generated, about personal bias and interpretation, word choice, archaeological and historical writing styles, the nature of archaeological data, and self-reflexivity.

We began with two historical pieces, selections from Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (orig. pub. 1890) and Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (orig. pub. 1924). Riis and Asbury make for an interesting comparison; both were New York journalists with an interest in criminal matters (Riis’s early assignments as a reporter were to cover the police news) but widely varying agendas and biases. Students had no trouble spotting both Riis’ interest in housing reform and his ethnic and racial biases. Asbury was more difficult, however, and students initially described Asbury as an “objective” and neutral reporter of the history of New York, despite his abundant, colorful adjectives and highly selective subject matter.
We then moved on to Rebecca Yamin’s recent archaeological articles about the Five Points excavations, one that includes both standard archaeological reporting and fictional narrative vignettes (2001) and the other (1998) that juxtaposes these vignettes against historical passages about the area by writers such as Dickens and Asbury. Yamin’s “homely stories,” as she describes them, focus on women, domestic affairs, personal aspirations, and the maintenance of family tradition, countering the predominantly male-focused “lurid tales” of vice, squalor, disease, and violence. For some commentary and perspective on the narrative approach in archaeological writing, we also read Adrian Praetzellis’s introduction to Archaeologists as Storytellers (1998) in which he discusses the role of narratives in interpretation. I asked the students to link these archaeological works to Asbury, Riis, and Dickens by thinking about the use of imagination in each of the texts and to be prepared to discuss the widely variant pictures of New York’s Five Points painted by all of the authors.
The focus on “imagination” in all of the writings brought the same questions to disparate texts from multiple genres (Dickens’ travel literature, Riis and Asbury’s journalism, and Yamin’s contemporary scholarly texts). Riis, Asbury, and Dickens all use imagination implicitly, taking readers with them into the slums by asking them to imagine themselves there. Dickens famously writes of his progress through a tenement as if the reader were present with him (“grope your way with me into this wolfish den” [1985: 81]), establishing a trope copied by other writers including Riis (1997: 37-38). Yamin’s use of imagination is more explicit; she discusses the need for “literary imagination” to counter the strength of the pervasive myths about New York’s Five Points (Yamin 2001: 154), and then employs it to write her narrative vignettes based on the archaeological data and historical research. As Rosemary Joyce argues, all archaeological writing, both traditional and narrative, is at some level the “juxtaposition of real things and utterances with imagined ones”; all of our archaeological writing is “based in imagination, and simultaneously in real, material facts” (Joyce 2006: 65).

A vessel excavated from Five Points
Because of their form, students easily recognized imagination in Yamin’s fictional narratives. For the most part, they were not troubled by the use of fictional vignettes as a method for historical writing and, as non-specialists themselves, recognized narratives’ value in bringing archaeological results to a wider audience. The strikingly different portraits of life in the Five Points did force them to ask questions about why all of these accounts were so varied, however. Where was the “real” story of the Five Points? It was at this point that the discussion turned from “imagination” to “interpretation.” Some students, in frustration, wished for a text that was “just the data,” leading to an ensuing discussion about what a presentation of strictly “archaeological data” would look like and recognition of the fact that interpretation of the data was a necessary, formative step that begins very early and is influenced by the intellectual climate of the time and personal experiences. In Adrian Praetzellis’s words, there is no “specific story [that] lurks within the soil and artifacts waiting to be freed by the archaeologist” (1998: 1). One student remembered Wilkie’s prologue to The Archaeology of Mothering in which she discusses the ways in which her own interests in and perceptions of the Perryman site (home to an African-America wife, mother, and midwife) changed with her own experiences of motherhood (Wilkie 2003: xviii-xix).
After this encounter with radically different imagined or imaginative narratives of the Five Points, students came to their own realization (and voiced in their own words) that most primary historical (non-fiction) sources were written from individual points of view, and even without an evidence of racial or other bias, were shaped by personal histories and perceptions. The fact that Yamin’s narratives are fiction gave students the sense that they could begin to critique the interpretations of the data that both these fictional and other scholarly “narratives” present. The introduction of fiction as a form of interpretation gave students an entry point to critical reading that I had had trouble conveying using traditionally worded academic articles or even early 20th- century journalism. The students described the scholarly utility of being self-reflexive (without knowing this specific piece of jargon) and expressed a much greater awareness of the role of interpretation in scholarly and historical writing.
Whether these points stayed with the students or not, I do not know, but these fictional, imaginative narratives opened up possibilities for concrete, critical reading in ways that I had been unable to achieve with more traditional texts.
<fontcolor=red>A Note: Developing this group of readings has been very interesting for me, brining together my interests in undergraduate teaching and in archaeological writing. As a relatively novice teacher, I suspect that I am not the first person to use this approach, or even these particular texts. I welcome comments, feedback, and additions.
Endnote: The core readings that I assembled were, in chronological order, Charles Dicken’s account of visiting New York in American Notes (1842), Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives (1890), Rose Gollop’s account of emigrating from Russia to the Five Points as a child in the 1890s (printed in Dublin 1993), Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York (1927), and two pieces by Rebecca Yamin, “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories” (1998) and “Alternative Narratives” (2001). Students also read Praetzellis (1998), Mayne and Murray (2001), and the many definitions of slum in the OED to provide them with some scholarly context for the core readings. I would like to note that the inspiration for this strategy and particular group of readings was Yamin’s “Lurid Tales” where this contrast is already built in between her lurid tales and homely stories.
Works Cited
Asbury, Herbert
1998 [1927] The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Dickens, Charles
1985 [1842] American Notes. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Dublin, Thomas, editor
1993 Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Joyce, Rosemary
2006 “Writing Historical Archaeology,” in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 48-65.
Mayne, Alan, and Tim Murray
2001 “The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: explorations in Slumland,” Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland. Cambridge: Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1-7.
Praetzellis, Adrian
1998 “Introduction: Why Every Archaeologist Should Tell Stories Once in a While,” Historical Archaeology (Archaeologists as Storytellers) 32(1): 1-3.
Riis, Jacob A.
1997 [1890] How the Other Half Lives. New York: Penguin Books
Spector, Janet D.
1991 “What This Awl Means: Towards a Feminist Archaeology,” in Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, eds., Engendering Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell, 388-406.
Wilkie, Laurie A.
2003 The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife’s Tale. New York: Routledge.
Yamin, Rebecca
1998 “Lurid Tales and Homely Stories of New York’s Notorious Five Points,” Historical Archaeology 32(1): 74-85.
2001 “Alternative Narratives: Respectability at New York’s Five Points,” in Alan Mayne and Tin Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 154-170.