Cornelius,
I see the reflection on archaeology as process, but what struck me more
strongly was the implicit questioning of the meaning of the traces of
past; by dressing archaeological conventions in a theatrical idiom both
the conventions and the material traces they are designed to translate
are destabilized, exposed in their arbitrariness. Archaeology is
deprived of its essentialist rationale to be sole legitimate
(scientific) arbitrator of the past (arbiter archaeologiae?); everyone
is invited to enter into dialogue with the traces in the ground, to
discover or create their own meanings. Archaeology then emerges as
merely one mode of communication with the past, and a somewhat lop-sided
circulation of meaning at that. Archaeologists are invited to
re-enchant their work, to refuse the reduction of archaeology to pure
technical practice, a purification imposed by scientific discipline, by
embracing the pre- or non-scientific motivations behind what they do.
Returning something in return for the things removed restores balance to
the transaction with the past, assuages the archaeologist's guilt at
destroying the traces they uncover.
Another echo I heard in the incavation was Michel Serres' notion of time
as a complex, turbulent flow, full of eddies and countercurrents. The
forward, linear flow of time can be agitated, reversed - the present can
be delivered back into the past. At the same time, of course, things
from the remote past can be more real, more present to us than, than the
nominally modern things that surround us. The present world is a
harlequin-like pastiche of things from all times; bodies of ancient
design, techniques and practices and things accumulated over the
entirety of human history, share the world with modern bodies and
techniques and things. Reversing the inexorable sequence of
archaeological research, inserting things in the ground rather than
merely removing them, draws attention to conventional understandings of
time and the equally inexorable accumulation of material traces, points
to archaeology's de facto contribution to the mixing of temporalities by
constantly re-introducing the ancient into the modern, and raises the
possiblity of an alternate temporal consciousness that enters into
active dialogue with other times and places, that celebrates the mixing
of past and present, the heterochronology of the world.
Pete.
--
Peter Whitridge tel: (919) 843-7393
Assistant Professor fax: (919) 962-1613
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115
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