Ho-Yeol Ryu. Flughafen (2005).
This is the first of four pieces on movement in archaeology. It part of an extended conversation that circulated around the authors’ co-chaired session on ‘movement’ at the TAG US conference held at Brown University, May 2010, (http://proteus.brown.edu/tag2010/8050). The idea for this Archaeolog piece, that is split into four parts, arose out of recognising a need to continue these conversations, specifically in exploring the relationships between archaeology and movement. Just like movement itself, these conversations mobilised a series of reflections and perceptions, one outcome has coalesced in the form presented here. The conversations are derived from a range of interventions: initial face to face discussions, wiki brain-storming (involving another colleague), the session at TAG, its papers, and the subsequent discussions in person and via email after the event. In fact, the eventful nature of this conversation is in itself an archaeology of movement in the way that is tacked back and forth between ideas and themes, being fluid but at the same time related to a structure, and it is this that we want to partly retain in these archaeological narratives.
In tracing the connections between what emerged and what is still being discussed, we have looked for both consistency and pertinence in what has solidified and held resonance in-between the interventions. This fact alone reinforces both the conversational style of the content but also mirrors the iterative passing back and forth that occurs in discourse, which is characteristic of movement. Quoting from our initial discussions on our wiki and from several rounds of email discussions, what emerges have been several concrete themes which also reflect on another discussion between Mimi Sheller and John Urry, whose paper was an initial inspiration (2006). The themes in this paper that we are using here divide the conversation on movement and archaeology into four separate but related parts: Co-presence; Observation; In-betweeness; Fluid interdependence. While each theme in our conversations is placed into separate parts we want to stress the interconnections between them, which will become apparent as you read each. In fact, each part is precisely that, a part of a whole which collectively forms a singular entity. Nonetheless, each theme touches upon significant aspects of movement, the importance of which, we feel, have not been fully explored in archaeology. Thus, the collective piece is an attempt to give some coherence to our inherently inchoate understandings of movement suggesting why it demands a greater role in contemporary archaeological practice.
CO-PRESENCE
“… we have on the one hand the idea that we want to locate movement in materials and traces, but on the other hand dislocate movement from any single point of reference …” (Posted by Brad on Oct 13/2009 11.14AM).
“… we need to consider movement as discussed in other disciplines, but pull it towards this notion of material traces and so forth. Giddens-esque, for sure, but we don’t necessarily need to come into the session ‘knowing’ how to incorporate movement …” (Posted by Brad on Oct 13/2009 11.14AM).
Co-presence is the patterning, timing and causation of the material in movement. This extends not only to the face-to-face confrontation, but also to the face-to-material and material-to-material co-presence of forms relating to movement. By co-presence we mean the juxtaposition and the contemporaneity of material presences which move together as it were along the same paths. One of the themes that each of the papers in the TAG session highlighted was a kind of multiplicity inherent in co-presence. Presented were instances of materials moving into new positional and relational contexts with other materials, such as the tools and by-products of mining in Classical Greece, or along routes of connection concerning not only the movement of objects, but also ideas and people among Native communities in New England, USA. Additionally, there were instances in which the motion of people along paths in Turkey and Iceland, and through buildings on Crete and in Italy, created new material encounters and new material traces through movement.
However, while we might all recognise in our archaeologies these kinds of movements, how they are treated from the point of recognition remains, for the most part, limited. Often archaeology is mostly concerned with, on the one hand, ‘locating’ movement through these material traces, and this tends to dominate the discussion. But we must also confront and deal with the notion that movement cannot be pinned down because it is liquid – i.e. it has a ‘body’ but it is constantly shaping itself and being fluid, stretching and extending in surprising ways. Consequently, movement as a material practice is locatable but it is unattached from positioning because it is always ever-changing and in a constant state of process – or becoming. The co-presence of movement is literarily perennially on-the-move, creating new connections with its objects into constantly altering material assemblages in moving practices.
Furthermore, the co-presence of movement is not only a spatial project, but it is – at the same time – a temporal one. Thus, when we consider movement in an archaeological context we must avoid tying it down too firmly. For example, what others have called ‘standpoints’ must be carefully shown not to be static, but dynamic. Therefore, movement demands not only representation, but also non-representation. We feel that an emphasis on intervention and how our contemporary disciplinary practices intervene and participate in movement in the present can be aligned with those that have occurred in the past, the ontology of which is flattened. This is similar to Gavin Lucas’ reference to an excavated pit which through the very act of digging establishes a material relationship that joins together two different temporalities (2001). In this way archaeology and its objects begin to merge. Similarly, through the act of following a track or markers in a landscape a material relationship between different temporalities is created in which paths blend and merge together; they have co-presence. Consequently, we ask spatial questions about co-presence such as: where is movement? What indicates it? And are we looking for movement (and what it means) in materials and bodies in perspective and impact, alongside temporal factors such as seasonality and decay? But we also ask in what way archaeology as a project that focuses on movement is actually contributing towards the emergence of its own movement. Importantly, co-presence helps to suture contemporary archaeology’s obsession with dichotomies. This resonates even more when we consider not only movement’s materials, but also the impacts of these traces on other arrays for perception and experience.
Material traces
Movement for archaeology comes in a variety of different material forms. We are chiefly referring here to movements that relate to on-the-ground movements. This takes its cue from embodied perspectives (though not exclusively) of moving in and around the material world, and how movement is dispersed across other entities. Thus, we are also examining movement as something more-than-human, not looking just at the intentionality of our bodies, but also in non-human entities. As such, the material traces of movement are dispersed across many different objects (not defined in opposition to subject!) as indices or markers, as materialised forms of movement; the tense is important. But at the same time we are concerned with the movement as it is revealed or disclosed while moving, in materialising it. The relationship between these tenses of material begets dynamic, not static, understandings of movements, spatially and temporally situated in the past and the present as an ontology of movement. While the relationship between materialised and materialising movement lies at the core of an issue to do with temporality, we also extend its meaning to spatial topographies. Furthermore, the relationship between the active and passive (or towards its dissolution) is also central to the issue of translation as practice (cf. Hacking 1983). Traces therefore coincide archaeologically, for us, because they create a discursive ‘space’ for an archaeology to follow materialised movement but which are materialising through our own movements. This is a concern with intervention in the doing of archaeology.
Narrating the self and landscape: Archaeology and Cultural geography
In conducting an archaeology of movement we felt that there were some commonalities between archaeology and its concern for material traces and issues of co-presence, and cultural geography’s own interests in non-representational theories. Drawing from the discussion generated by our discussant, Kevin McHugh, we felt that the axis along which archaeology and cultural geography are divided is rather opaque and actually quite fluid. The difference between our movement projects depends perhaps on the approach towards/from movement and mobility that our discourses engender. McHugh asked whether archaeologists create narratives, our response is: of course we do, but our narratives are shaped the way they are because of how we attend archaeologically to our material. So in many respects, the way we do archaeology, as Michael Shanks pertinently suggests, is because we work on what is left of the past. Subsequently, what is left for archaeologists and cultural geographers is taken from the same pot, so to speak.
In our session and beyond, there were referrals to examples of non-archaeological narratives, such as John Wylie’s walk along the South Devon Coast path (2005), V. S. Naipal’s The enigma of arrival (1987), or W. G. Seabald’s Rings of Saturn (1998). The archaeological programme tends, on the whole, to exclude the self and many other things, in archaeological narratives, and instead focuses on methods and the results as representation and interpretation. This however, reduces, if not removes, the dynamic qualities that come with co-presence, as well as the incidents of creativity and innovation that are often related to moving through landscapes that might be useful in interpreting movement in the past. In fact, the co-presence of these themes helps to shape pertinent issues relating to movement, and to situate them within their own ‘productive’ context. Subjectivities, or rather modes of reflection about movement tend to be embroiled in programmatic approaches, such as phenomenology (e.g. Tilley 2008). While wanting to create synthesis, such programmes reinforce its placeholders by bifurcating the world between the body/mind, or between the material world and cognitive worlds, or by giving entities a priori status as objects before their synthesis and convergence in their gatherings as things through processes of objectification/externalisation (the subject making its own objects). Instead, we suggest that this approach to movement, just as in the split between archaeology and cultural geography, share neither difference nor similarity because this is an artificial boundary. Instead, what divides is also what unites: movement here is a divider because it fragments the world into parts, but at the same time unites them because it brings the world into view and leaves traces. Controversially, what we need to achieve is not to retain (disciplinary) boundaries, but rather to move on from them. Ironically, in order to make this move we need to attach more emphasis on movement in archaeology because, while it could be seen as a mode to leave things behind, it also brings them together.
Undisciplining disciplinary boundaries
In the US TAG 2010 plenary session, which discussed the location of theory, Homi Bhabha called for more fluidity, emergence and imminence in the object of our knowledge in seeking a paradoxical ‘disposition’ and locality of alterity for theory as a (con)juncture. We also felt that for too long the movement we recognise archaeologically has not had much impact, or rather movement in general has become just another feature or object with which to compare one material or observation with another to arrive at some degree of congruence or incommensurability. Instead, we hoped in our session that in bringing several forces together with a common concern for movement, from archaeology, anthropology and cultural geography, or across different objects and people, and temporalities and spatialities, that we could unburden movement from its contemporary archaeological form and explore other possibilities. In doing so, we revealed the vitality that comes from doing archaeology while thinking about movement and what this brings (after de Certeau 1984). Imagine our surprise and delight when Bhabha called for an undisciplining of disciplinary boundaries, as this was precisely the cause for concern that we were motivated by from the onset. But while we can mingle our shared concerns in the practices of intervening, say between archaeology, anthropology and cultural geography, they do meet head-on. Archaeology’s concern for temporality, and geography’s concern for spatiality, and anthropology’s concern for practice (though these concerns are not mutually exclusive) meet at the edge or a dislocality of alterity, which is, for both, rematerialized in a co-presence of/on/in [add preposition] movement.
Co-presence in an archaeological project that focuses on movement revolves around at least the three focal points that we have mentioned: material traces, narrating the self and landscape, and undisciplining disciplinary boundaries. Though it is perhaps the material that figures most in our archaeological accounts. Co-presence is therefore a way to articulate the interconnections between materialities that are all on-the-move. Whether this is associated with people, which is the conventional approach to movement in archaeology and its focus on migrations or in identity giving cultural groupings; or whether it is to do with objects, which is another convention in the analysis with the way that material culture is distributed and its implications in defining ‘culture’; or whether this is concerned with landscape, which is itself constantly becoming or on-the-move (Bender 2001, 2002; Massey 2005). Wherever way we look we cannot fail to recognise movement in archaeology, but how we attend to it in our interventions is the crucial factor. We opt for a more fluid and dynamic approach to a fluid and dynamic practice and looking beyond the conventional by recognising the co-presence of people, objects and landscapes that move together. Co-presence helps us deal with another tendency: a myopic focus on just one complexity rather than the whole ensemble. Co-presence helps because we begin to recognise the connectivities between material traces, such as the way that people who moved also carried objects, while they shaped and were constituted by the landscape. All of these parts are moving, as if a machine, which reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari’s war machine is also a nomad: fleeing, but while fleeing also looking for a gun! (2004)
In part 2 of this conversation on movement, our theme is Observation. In it we shift towards the way in which movement is captured and dealt with in archaeology by attending to a paradox: archaeologists study a practice like movement, which is fluid and dynamic, by examining the seemingly static material remains that have solidified into materialised forms. Movement, like time, for us moves in two opposite but complimentary directions: towards solidity and towards the fluid. How we deal with this paradox depends very much on how we understand and apply Observation.
References
Bender, B 2001 Landscapes on the move, Journal of social archaeology 1.1: 75-89.
Bender, B 2002 Time and landscape, Current anthropology 43: S103-S112.
de Certeau, M 1984 The practice of everyday life. Berkley: University of California Press.
Deleuze, G & Guattari, F 2004 A thousand plateaus. London: Continuum.
Hacking, I 1983 Representing and intervening. Introductory topics in the philosophy of natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Massey, D 2005 For Space. Los Angeles: Sage.
Naipal, V, S 1987 The enigma of arrival. New York: Viking Press.
Seabald, W, G 1998 Rings of Saturn. London: Vintage.
Sheller, M & Urry, J 2006 The new mobilities paradigm, Environment and Planning A 38: 207-26.
Tilley, C 2008 Body and image. Explorations in landscape phenomenology II. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Wylie, J 2005 A Single day’s walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30.2: 234–47.
