Memory Palaces, Archaeological Sites, and Postex Planning

A plume of dust spread over the tanur I was drawing and my tape measure fell over and shuddered shut with a metallic clang. The wind had been steadily getting worse throughout the day, until it became an unrelenting blast furnace. I sighed and glanced up at the rest of the team. There were four of us on site, and everyone was neatly framed by the measuring tapes wound around grid pegs; five  meter boxes that we were neatly drawing at 1:20 scale on permatrace. I’ve railed against Americanist thinking-in-boxes for so long that it was a bit funny–but these were invisible boundary lines, and the layers were continued on the next piece of permatrace without the messy guessing of baulks.

Regular site work has come to a close; we cleaned up for aerial photography earlier in the week and are now drawing a large multicontext plan of the site before we cover it all up with backfill. I’ve done similar things before, but never a detailed plan over this large of an area–200 square meters. A few of the areas are pock-marked nightmares of postholes and clay-lined firepits–think circles within circles surrounded by circles. Other areas have bits of architecture or large layers of sandy-shelly accumulations.

I’ve worked over roughly the same area over the last five months, following the stratigraphy back and forth across the trench. Large areas can be difficult to excavate and I’d find myself chasing stratigraphic relationships in circles sometimes–not so hard to imagine when you know that the site depositional processes included sandstorms that would periodically blow thick layers of sand across site and we’d have to dig ourselves out time and time again.

While I was drawing I would remember the walls and the layers of sand that I’d taken off, but I’d also remember what the weather was like that day, who was on site with me, whether the general mood was good or bad. I’d remember if I was chatting to my workmen or my fellow archaeologists, or listening to a podcast or music (usually on windy days when I was using my headphones as wind muffles)–I have a very singular association of a midden dump and a low wall made of orangey-crumbly-crystally anhydrite slabs with a discussion of the concept of “the tipping point” courtesy of BBC’s Thinking Allowed. My thoughts wandered farther: what was the “tipping point” of midden accumulation–when was it accepted and acceptable to dump your garbage next to a wall? What started it? One camel bone? A piece of dog shit? Is there a broken window theory of midden dumping? I should look that up.

I recalled all of this as my pencil traced the outlines of layers yet to be removed. Archaeological sites are memory palaces in every sense of the term. We are re-remembering the past shapes and modes of dwelling and adding our own on top. As the site disappears in discreet episodes, paperwork and memories pile up in place of the stones and walls and sand.

I’d like for my future work to be in this arena, with location-based digital annotation, as most instances I’ve seen so far are completely separate from the lived experience of archaeology. Sadly, most avenues for this work immediately separates me from this very thing that I am most interested in–communicating the poetics of place. We’ll see if I can work something out.

Haptics and the Physicality of Archaeology

A gust of wind whipped the context sheet from under my hand, leaving a long, thin, bloody line across the back of my thumb. I sighed, but it only added to the current tally of open wounds on my hands–four. Most are small, little nicks on my knuckles from troweling over rocks and happily there aren’t any opened blisters. I’ve had a particularly stubborn cut on the back of my other thumb that refuses to heal–I cleaned and bandaged it immediately, but it seems like no matter what I do I have a dirty, shredded rag instead of a bandage at the end of the day and a bright red line of infection around the wound.

My knuckles are already thick, but they seize a bit sometimes, especially my right forefinger, my “troweling finger”, which has an awkward bend common to archaeologists. One of my friends here told me that he wakes sometimes with his fingers hooked and has to bend them back into place. My knees creak and pop and I have bruises along my shins from kneeling on rocks–we don’t have desks on site and we often have to crouch on our knees over our paperwork to protected from the wind, or rain, or sun.

Sometimes when I kneel, troweling across the 40/60 salty, silty sand I think I can actually feel the ground leeching the water from my body–the heels of my palms and my fingertips are chafed, dry and callused. Last time I was in Doha I went to a fancy shopping center that carried fine silk and linen dresses–my fingers rasped and caught as I touched them. The haptics of class, I suppose.

Most academic archaeologists have never spent more than a month or two at a time digging, indeed many professional archaeologists are the same–who can pay for long excavation seasons in this economy anyway? We aren’t doing the hardest excavation in archaeology; trowels in sand cannot compare to shovels in clay, even on the windiest of days. Working with your hands is a fairly romantic notion these days, and it’s one of the things I love about archaeology, dirty bandages and all.

But we know we can’t do it forever. The knees go. The back goes. Problems with eyes, hands, even the skin can remove us from our profession. I had a few pre-cancerous lesions burnt off of my face a couple of years ago, accompanied by a stern warning by the dermatologist to stay out of the sun as much as possible. And I’m certainly one of the lucky ones. I know at least a dozen people who have had to change careers after a physical malady.

The visual in archaeology is often emphasized in academic circles, with occasional nods toward the other senses adding to “a sense of place.” We awaken our senses, what does it feel/taste/smell like to be on an archaeological project? How can we share that with others? I’m writing about some of that in my dissertation, but now “being in the field” is becoming so normal that it is hard to remember to share. Sometimes I’d rather deaden my senses, something that can be difficult in a country where alcohol is mostly illegal. I wonder if reflexivity is easier when performing a rarified, vacation-like excavation after a year of teaching. The lived experience of archaeological investigation and engagement with place can be exhausting.

It’s the weekend–I think I’ll go back to bed.

A Moment for Elizabeth Brumfiel

I stepped into the auditorium. The space seemed cavernous–high ceilings, hundreds of white chairs, and a single podium up front, a podium that was not nearly big enough to hide behind. I took a deep breath and stepped inside.

The room was empty, but felt safe. It was my first professional meeting–the Society for American Archaeology in 2004 in Montreal and I was overwhelmed. There were thousands of archaeologists and they all seemed to know each other. I had just been working long days on a big site in Kerrville, Texas, and felt grubby and callused–very removed from the high-falutin’ academic talk that surrounded me.

I walked up to the podium in the empty room and did what my mother told me to do: “get into the room early and practice giving your talk at least twice.” The paper was printed in big font, double spaced, a few corrections here and there. In my own scrawled handwriting across the top–SMILE. I lowered the microphone to my height, wincing at the screeching sounds that it made, and started to speak.

I was about half-way through when the door way at the back of the auditorium cracked open, then closed shut, and then, more slowly, opened again. I couldn’t really see who it was, but that didn’t matter; I didn’t know anyone anyway. As soon as she–I could see that it was an older woman at this point, made it about half-way down the aisle, I apologized and said that I was just practicing. She said it was fine and made her way to the front row. I was nervous, but if I couldn’t give my talk to one woman, how could I give it to a whole audience?

While I droned on, she settled into her seat and pulled out her own sheaf of papers. She was writing rapidly, but not frantically, crossing out some words and re-writing others. I tried to ignore her as I hurried on with my talk.

At some point I noticed her pen stop, then drop, and she looked up from her paper. I was speaking about feminist lineages in archaeology; how as an undergraduate I benefitted from strong female leaders in archaeology and their students becoming teachers of a new generation (and supermajority) of women in the field. And she, this woman in the first row, was listening.

I finished and she stood up and clapped loudly, congratulating me for speaking so clearly and well. We chatted for a little while, about my paper topic, and she gave me further advice about conference presentations and academia. I honestly don’t remember most of the rest of the session–I was still very nervous–but to this day I remember her kindness, her encouragement, and her generosity. She didn’t have to mentor me, she could have kept working on her paper, but she took a moment for a nervous, nobody undergraduate. I glanced at her name tag, but it meant nothing to me at the time…until I googled her later.

Thank you, Elizabeth Brumfiel (1945-2012).

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Please read Rosemary Joyce’s post, which gives you a better perspective on just how amazing Elizabeth Brumfiel was:

Liz Brumfiel will always be remembered

Anthropologies: The Workmen of Mes Aynak

Ryan Anderson’s wonderful Anthropologies project is on its tenth edition:

Beyond Words (the visual issue)

I wrote my contribution in India, in longhand, then typed it out in an internet cafe. First fully analog to digital blog entry for me, check out one of the 4(!)pages:

One of my favorite academics (and people) Dr. Sara Perry also has a contribution to this edition, titled: Fluid Fields: The (Unspoken) Intersections of Visual Anthropology and Archaeology.

Here’s an excerpt of my entry, for the full length click through to Anthropologies.

The Workmen of Mes Aynak

Workmen are a rarely discussed but often present element in large excavations performed outside the United States and the United Kingdom. Their presence evokes the Victorian era of archaeology; large expanses of oddly-dressed men working with picks and shovels, directed by a man in a pith helmet and perfectly clean khakis. While this is becoming rare (indeed this method is heavily critiqued) it is still employed in large excavations. Some governments require foreign excavations to employ local people, and in sites in Greece, workmen are professionals unto themselves, often more familiar with the archaeological remains than their student “supervisors.” In still other excavations, workmen are not allowed to excavate the “real” archaeology, but are employed to move our already-excavated spoil or to lift sandbags. While there is a wide range of experience and interaction between foreign excavations and local people available, archaeologists receive no training in interpersonal management or customs. Yet we form relationships with these workmen and learn from each other. They become our friends and workmates but they still occupy the margins in archaeology–excluded in publications, never cited, and rarely thanked.

(click here for the rest)

Course Description: Materiality and Ethnographic Film

When it comes to UC Berkeley, these days I feel more like a politically-minded voyeur than grad student. I’ve been following the Occupy movements in both Oakland and Berkeley online, but I’m half a world away, working and writing my dissertation out in the desert.

Still, I’m going to be teaching a Reading and Composition course next summer, and I used part of my weekend to come up with a course description:

Materiality and Ethnographic Film

Ethnographic film has a long and ambivalent tradition within anthropology. The theory, technology, and methodology behind making ethnographic films has changed radically during the last century, but often this historic context has been ignored. In this course we will critically examine a wide range of ethnographic films through the lens of materiality. Materiality, or the study of the relationship between people and things, allows us to think about technology and social interactions in new and compelling ways. What were people wearing and using in the film? How was the film made and how does this effect the scenes that were filmed? What can these films tell us as artifacts in themselves? In our “archaeological” examination of ethnographic film, we will read the current interdisciplinary literature regarding materiality and excavate the context of these anthropological artifacts. This course satisfies the second half of the University’s Reading and Composition requirement.

The Reading and Composition requirement is a two-part writing skills class that all undergraduates have to take to graduate. The first class is the basics of writing and the second class, which is what this course description is for, is for intensive reading and writing on a particular topic. The only prerequisite is that the student has taken the first class–no Anthro or Media Studies is required to take the class.

Anyway, it is my first course description and I have no idea if it sounds of any interest at all to undergraduates. Any thoughts? Too boring, complex, or obscure?

Is it all Macabre? Recent Murals from Çatalhöyük

Ian Hodder and Lynn Meskell published a piece titled “A ‘Curious and Sometimes a Trifle Macabre Artistry’: Some Aspects of Symbolism in Neolithic Turkey” in the April 2011 issue of Current Anthropology. It’s paywalled, sadly, but you can read the abstract for free, which I’ll copy here:

Comparison of two Turkish Neolithic sites with rich symbolism, Çatalhöyük and Göbekli, suggests widespread and long-lasting themes in the early settled communities of the region. Three major symbolic themes are identified. The first concerns an overall concern with the penis, human and animal, that allows us to spread of a phallocentrism in contrast to the widely held assumption that the early agriculturalists in the Middle East emphasized the female form, fertility, and fecundity. The second theme concerns wild and dangerous animals, even in sites with domesticated plants and animals, and particularly the hard and pointed parts of wild animals, such as talons, claws, horns, and tusks. We interpret this evidence in relation to providing food for large-scale consumption and the passing down of objects that memorialize such events within specific houses. The third theme is that piercing and manipulating the flesh were associated with obtaining and passing down human and animal skulls. The removal of human heads was also associated with symbolism involving raptors. Overall, we see a set of themes, including maleness, wild and dangerous animals, headlessness, and birds, all linked by history making and the manipulation of the body.

This summer about half of the excavators read the article and it became a hot topic of discussion, discussions that obviously quickly degenerated into “finding cock” on site. I don’t necessarily have a huge problem with the article, but I think it is an interesting example of just how different interpretations can be on site. I don’t have a lot to say about Göbekli, though I’d love to work there, but I find myself mystified at some of the central arguments regarding the Çatalhöyük imagery.

There is little doubt that there are a lot of little penis figurines. They’re really cute, and though they’re not prominently featured, you can check them out here:

http://figurines.stanford.edu/repository/index.php?cat=27

 

There are also a whole lot of cute little fat people. Are they ladies? Are they guys? Does the sex or gender matter? You’d have to ask a figurine expert. I have to say that I generally prefer the little animals:

So cute! There is little doubt that there is a variety of imagery coming from the figurines. To be fair, the Macabre article cited above is also ambiguous about the figurines, though they state that a lot of the zoomorphic figurines are represented by horns which they link to maleness. But female aurochs and sheep/goats had horns too…perhaps that is beside the point. In contrast to the hard things that are emphasized in the article, the horns, claws, beaks, etc, I can’t help but remember the soft curves of the benches, pillar caps, ovens, and the voids of the crawl-holes and niches that are often nearby in the same house.

I should probably just skip to the heart of what is bothering me–the murals. In the 1960s Mellaart’s team excavated a stunning array of murals, a few of which I had the pleasure of seeing up close and personal a couple of days ago in the Museuem of Anatolian Civilizations. A couple of these murals depict hunting scenes and wild animals, but the majority of the murals on site are geometrical patterns, solid blocks of red, or hands, many of them child-sized. These former hunting scenes are what dominate the article, with no mention of the geometric patterns found in a majority of the paintings uncovered.

This year an extraordinary large panel was uncovered (by a fantastically dedicated team of undergraduates and conservators!) in the South shelter area. This painting was similar to a painting that I excavated in building 49 in 2008, with twisting, cellular shapes that look like an M.C. Escher-esque interpretation of a mudbrick village.

Photo by Jason Quinlan, click through to see the detail.

A few days ago ten red hands were discovered in the 4040 area, again by a trusty group of undergraduates who had to pick away at the plaster layer by layer to reveal the paintings. Hands are everywhere on the site–tiny, large, red, orange, white–yet they are only mentioned in reference to their redness, which Hodder and Meskell link to the representation of blood.

So, while I’m not a big fancy famous archaeologist by any means, I am dissatisfied with the picture that Hodder and Meskell paint of the imagery at the site. I have little doubt that blood, sex/penises, and wild animals were very much a part of life in the Neolithic, and I know that Hodder and Meskell were not trying to provide a holistic view of imagery at Çatalhöyük. But I feel like they miss other, perhaps more interesting aspects of the abstract imagery in their focus on the figural/phallic.

What are people doing when they are creating geometric shapes and connecting them in patterns? Even as they were excavating the latest panel, the students were speculating that the patterns were bricks, roads, or…”just doodles.” While the last suggestion is tempting, there was too much preparation involved in priming the surface and mixing the paint. Do they represent weaving, as was speculated by Mellaart, or counting, or even architecture–the cellular forms look like bricks, after all. Just what is the brain doing when it is creating abstract designs? What kinds of synaptic paths are formed? Many of these paintings are overlaid, time and time again, often directly on top of one another. Why? And if there are disruptions in the continuity, can they be linked to other stratigraphic “events”?

I’d also like more a more systematic study of the hand paintings. Where do they occur? How many are created with an actual hand? What sizes/shapes are they? Why are there so many of them? Can they be tied to other archaeological “moments” in the stratigraphy? Do these moments correlate across buildings?

There are seven responses to the Macabre article, and then a response to the criticism from Hodder and Meskell. All of the responding professors are better equipped than I am to provide a larger perspective to the article–I can only mention what I’ve read over the years, what I have uncovered with my hands, and what my fellow excavators have shown me. These moments, by the way, are the best–when the person in the next trench over catches my eye and waves me over. The discussion in low tones over a discovery, sometimes only just beginning to be revealed, before the conservators, the directors, and certainly the news media get to see it. That simple shared wonder over the stuff of the past. To get back to the article, while this sense of discovery does not necessarily privilege my interpretation over that of more experienced archaeologists, I cannot help but feel like this part of the past is erased when omitted from larger narratives constructed about the site.

(edited March 4, 2013, after Stanford decided to break all of my image links.)

Fundraising: The Sound of a Duck’s Feet

Early in my graduate career I received the advice to be like a duck–remain serene on the surface all the while paddling like hell underneath. Serenity has never been a strong point of mine, so I’ve come up with a compromise: swim like an otter–dive underwater, paddle like hell, then come crashing to the surface in a completely different place, lolling on your back like you don’t have a care in the world. I’m hoping that the relative quiet here on this blog feels like that to you, dear reader.

Swimming metaphors aside, I’ve been working pretty hard to get the Maeander Project off of the ground. Between project funding and organization hustle and my dissertation, things have been a little crazy. All that aside, I have an incredible debt to the many people who have donated at Kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/colleenmorgan/the-maeander-project-a-digital-archaeological-land

We have 34 backers and are just shy of our half-way point at $2,257.00 out of $5,000.00.  We may be getting matching funds, so it’s really important that we make that $5,000 mark–we don’t get any money if we don’t raise it all.

I also want to thank the people who have generously re-tweeted our fundraising link, and who have posted on their own blogs, including:

The CRM Field Tech Newsletter 

Sorting out Science, in the #120 edition of Four Stone Hearth

Where in the Hell am I?

If I missed anyone, please let me know! Our fundraising drive ends on July 15th. If you can’t spare a dollar, spare a link?

 

 

 

 

 

Crowdsourcing Archaeology – The Maeander Project Kickstarter Page!

After months of waiting, we received very short notice that we had indeed received a permit to conduct an archaeological survey in southwestern Turkey. Sadly we did not receive all of the funding that we had hoped–it is difficult to fund a project before you have a permit, and to get a permit before you fund a project. The fledgling project had taken flight, the Maeander Project is a go.

Obviously we still had to figure out a way to make up the missing money somehow, or else we would have to miss this valuable opportunity. I’d seen various projects funded by Kickstarter before, and even signed up for it last year, but after the urging of several of my friends I decided to try it out. Kickstarter is primarily for creative projects, but what is my work but creative? I might as well use this aspect of my research in a productive fashion. So, the Kickstarter page:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/colleenmorgan/the-maeander-project-a-digital-archaeological-land

While $5000 does not cover all of our costs, it would help a great deal. Also, if we are unable to raise this amount of money in a month, we do not receive ANY of it!

So please, if you can, throw a couple of dollars our way. If you can’t (and I completely understand!) then please help us by getting the word out about this project.

Archaeology, Anthropology, and Multi-sited Ethnography

Here is my contribution to anthropologies, an excellent online collaborative project featuring short contributions regarding various anthropological topics. This month’s prompt was, “What does an archaeological perspective bring to anthropology?” I’m not sure that I answered the question, but judge for yourself:

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A couple of weeks ago I attended a brown bag lecture given by Barbara Voss (Stanford) titled Sexual Effects: Postcolonial and Queer Perspectives on the Archaeology of Sexuality. It was an excellent overview of her research on China Camp in San Jose, California, a community that was overwhelmingly male. In her talk she discussed what the materiality of homosociality looks like as well as how we can think about gender and sexuality in the past. Barbara Voss is a prominent voice in the field of archaeology, and her work is interdisciplinary to the core. The talk was well attended, but I didn’t recognize any socio-cultural anthropologists in the audience. This was a fairly typical occurrence, sadly. Even at our more formal gatherings, the Monday evening 290 lectures, the socio-cultural professors and students are completely absent at talks that feature archaeologists.

There are a number of ways one could react to this, and I think I’ve run the gamut at this point. Do They (the capitalization as the beginning of an anti-fraternal sentiment) think that the past (Us) is irrelevant? Do they just not understand archaeology? Do they not feel like we have anything to offer them? Or are they just bowing underneath the substantial burden of both a widening of anthropological purview and a narrowing of in-field specialization? In their introduction to the 2009 Annual Review of Anthropology, Don Brenneis and Peter Ellison succinctly address this point, stating that “The expanding universe of knowledge increases the distance between disciplines of inquiry as the techniques and theories that are developed at the advancing edges of fields become ever more remote from their common roots.” The study of human experience has become so broad that the specializations necessary to make meaningful contributions to research, to carve out your own niche, leave no time for holism.

(Read the rest at Anthropologies)

Changing Archaeological Conferences 1/2

Deadeyes and Safety First, painting. Photo by Connor Rowe.

The Theoretical Archaeology Group meeting at UC Berkeley this past weekend assured that I would be screamingly busy. I was an organizer of the conference, participated in a photo session (which I will discuss in a subsequent post), read my friend Shanti’s paper, and organized a session on Graffiti and the Archaeology of the Contemporary.

The session faced issues from the start–a lot of people sent abstracts but ended up canceling, I was so busy with the Blogging and Archaeology session at the SAA that I neglected some finer points of organization, and I almost canceled the whole thing more than once. It was good that I didn’t.

There were four fantastic papers presented by people from four different places–England, Ireland, Australia, and the US. The papers were diverse in their content, but all grappled with the place of graffiti in archaeological research and in wider cultural heritage. The international scope of the research was impressive and the authors of the papers were obviously intensely engaged in the interpretation of graffiti. A traditional discussion session after the papers would have been lively, fun, and satisfying–you can tell by the abstracts that we were doing something right. But we did something different.

Two members of the Black Diamonds Shining Collective, Deadeyes and Safety First came up from Oakland to conduct a live painting session and discussion of the papers. I had given them the choice, they could just talk or just paint or do a mixture of both. The session was a bit chaotic and ran over time, but at the end of the last presentation, we cleared a big space in front and brought in the large, prepared scrap of wood that I salvaged from Berkeley’s art practice department (thanks, Nick!).

Deadeyes and Safety First started painting and the room was absolutely silent. Multinationalism aside, everyone in the room was academic & white, while the graffiti artists were black. Were they just performing? Was it a strange, silent, live, Othering-event? Afterwards, several people confessed their enormous discomfort at this intense scopophilic moment. The presumed silence of our research subject was made real, highlighting the epistemic injustice that underlies academic research.

Deadeyes and Safety First. Their faces have been intentionally omitted. Photo by Connor Rowe.

Deadeyes capped his pen, stood up and turned around. He spoke, outlining his decade-long interest in and documentation of Oakland graffiti art and the intensely personal and political nature of graffiti, emphasizing the sociality in their chosen form of expression.  Suddenly, the focus of the room shifted, and these academic archaeologists had the creator of their studied object pushing back, correcting assumptions, and throwing into question the entire enterprise. Safety First chimed in at times while still working on the painting.

I came away from the session humbled but also re-energized. This, to me, more than studying the ruins of theme parks or dismantling vans, was the archaeology of the contemporary. Having graffiti artists live-paint their reaction to the papers was dangerous–I actually had no idea how dangerous until I was in the room, watching the collision of these spheres. It was endangering our precious research, our preferred notions of how material culture was made, and how conferences should be run.

I still haven’t fully digested the whole experience, and I’ll be following up with the individual session participants and discussants. Changing archaeological conferences is hard, and risky, and most people resist, probably with good reason. That’s why we still sit in rooms, reading page after page, flicking through powerpoints. It’s comfortable. It’s safe. I was deeply relieved to read a paper in such a session the very next day.

Tomorrow I’ll write about another risky and rewarding session I was in, Heather Law’s Opening Dialogs in Archaeological Photography.