Mike Pitts on the Plinth

[BAJR Host]

hmmm I bow to you packing cases!

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.
Mohandas Gandhi

[diggingthedirt]

quote:Originally posted by srd123
We came for the human interest, we stayed for the archaeology? Well, let's face it, archaeology really has little to do with the past - it's just another way of trying to comprehend the modern worlds around us by bouncing our understandings off of a few scraggy flints and empty holes. :-)

Hi srd123, interesting post - can you expand on this, and how you think it relates to engaging the wider public?

http://www.diggingthedirt.com

[srd123]

I think that I had two points in mind. Firstly, just that people don't always seem overly keen on the past if it's viewed as something that is dead and gone, especially if it is not seen as "their" past (e.g. the under representation of ethnic minorities in British archaeology). However, if you can demonstrate to people that the past can be used to understand the world around them today, i.e. that it has relevance, then they are more likely to be interested in it.

Secondly, that in my view (and YMMV), archaeology, no matter how gifted and dedicated the archaeologists, can never hope to fully explain the past and answer the questions. Indeed, even working out the questions in the first place is often a stumbling block. It can only hope to create stories that use interpretations of the past as their framework but are really metaphors for the present. Thus, returning to the point above.....archaeology probably says more about the world today than it can ever hope to say about the past because what we call the past is only yet another tool that we use to express our understandings of present reality.

So, taking the second point into account...I'd say that to engage the public in the past we can take two further steps. Firstly, we can demonstrate how we have engaged with the process (with a little 'p') of archaeology on personal and social levels as well as formal, and thus demonstrate what a rich 'life-way' it is. And, rather than telling people what happened in the past as a "done deal", we give them a framework to base their own interpretations on, and to place themselves within the ever-evolving pastscape.

I hope that makes sense?

[diggingthedirt]

Epistemology in the site hut! That?s worth breaking off from the cross word for! If anyone doesn?t like theory, tune out now 'cause we?re going? JAZZ!

Thanks srd123, for taking the time to expand on your previous point ? it makes perfect sense ? but I?m afraid I disagree with your premise and because of that, I think your agenda for wider public engagement with archaeology is deeply floored.

quote:Originally posted by srd123

...archaeology, no matter how gifted and dedicated the archaeologists, can never hope to fully explain the past and answer the questions. Indeed, even working out the questions in the first place is often a stumbling block. It can only hope to create stories that use interpretations of the past as their framework but are really metaphors for the present.

Let me say that there is a lot of common ground between us: I too am passionate about engaging the public with the past, and am also a big fan of the Seahenge book. Francis Pryor is an excellent writer, and he has lived through some major changes in British archaeology. His book is democratically accessible to the wider public, but first and foremost it tries to make the evidence credible in terms of the people of the past. It stands apart from the crowd because its not just an archaeology book ? its life writing and it?s a love story. My issue here is because you're advocating something from the other side of the line. I think it's fair to say you are a sceptic, and believe that because statements about the past are uncertain, we can never be sure of what happened. This has led you to a pragmatic solution where the point of archaeology should be to help people deal with present day contemporary issues, rather than establish secure knowledge.

quote:Originally posted by srd123


Thus, returning to the point above.....archaeology probably says more about the world today than it can ever hope to say about the past because what we call the past is only yet another tool that we use to express our understandings of present reality.

Yes, we have a partial grasp of the past, and must often make key assumptions in advance of evidence. We also have a partial grasp of the present too, but that doesn't mean we can't strive for communal understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. That we cannot know anything because, well, we cannot know anything, is a circular argument. Irrespective of the nefarious influence of the present, the findings of archaeology have altered our perception of the world irreversably. Without totally abandoning the scientific method, your idea does not stand up to the evidence from the trenches.

quote:Originally posted by srd123


And, rather than telling people what happened in the past as a "done deal", we give them a framework to base their own interpretations on, and to place themselves within the ever-evolving pastscape.

Janet Spector adopts this position in her book 'What this Awl Means: Feminist Archaeology at a Historic Wahpeton Village', a presentation of results from a research project about a nineteenth-century Dakota village. Taking an inscribed awl handle recovered from the site and re-constructing how the hide working tool was used and displayed in gendered practices, Spector writes an imaginative account of the young girl who originally used and lost the object. Her explicitly feminist archaeology is concerned with the way knowledge claims are embedded within the specific narrative and rhetorical structures she adopts to present the site. As a female practitioner, Spector projects herself onto the past, and her empathic narrative approach is constructed to give credence to contemporary claims and movements for social justice. She embraces multivocality as a distinct solution to the question of what constitutes scientific knowledge, but simultaneously argues that some interpretations are better than others (a feminist reading is better than a reading that marginalises the role of women). This creates a disjunction between notions of truth and politics, and so undermines both the struggle for emancipation in the present and the evidence on which that struggle could be based.

Bruce Trigger is very good at putting these debates in context, and if, as I assume, you are currently studying, I would urge you to read him fully. His final words from his final chapter from his final book, written shortly before he died, are very fitting here:

'In a world that, as a result of increasingly powerful technologies, has become too dangerous and is changing too quickly for humanity to rely to any considerable extent on trial and error, knowledge derived from archaeology may be important for human survival. If archaeology is to serve that purpose, archaeologists must strive against heavy odds to see the past and the human behaviour that produced it as each was, not as they or anyone else for their own reasons wish them to have been.'


http://www.diggingthedirt.com

[vulpes]

hmmmm nice.... Perhaps a new thread here for the pointy beard and beret fraternity?[8D]

[diggingthedirt]

quote:Originally posted by vulpes

hmmmm nice.... Perhaps a new thread here for the pointy beard and beret fraternity?[8D]

*Gallic Shrug*



http://www.diggingthedirt.com

[Paul Belford]

Nice indeed... good to see some nuanced discussion which doesn't degenerate into either Uof1 nonsense or 'us vs them' for once (whoever us and them might be in any particular context). People can hold different views but also share a lot of common ground; and by discussion, move forward.

The awl paper was good at the time (about 1993 or so if I recall), and demonstrated ways in which engagement with the past could move beyond the purely processual - of course similar approaches were also developed in landscape theory (cf. phenomenology). Mark Edmonds' book on the prehistory of the Peak District which came out about 10 years ago was in similar vein, if I recall - chapters of archaeological 'fact' interspersed with narrative fiction.

The problem with this sort of thing is that the gaps can be fudged.

My own specialist field is in historical archaeology. I have just completed a paper for a period journal which has avoided the usual breakdown into 'project background', 'historical background', 'archaeological results', 'discussion', 'conclusion', 'pages of pots', 'pages of metalwork', 'pages of enviro' etc. etc. and tried to blend it all into a seamless narrative. It has been bloody hard work.

However the conventional site archive is there (and grey lit will shortly be on Oasis) if someone else wants to deconstruct my narrative and create one of their own (and good luck to them!).

[BAJR Host]

something I was saying just now in the real world...

A discussion... a debate... a topic I read all the way through and enjoy...!

manifique!

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.
Mohandas Gandhi

[oldgirl]

Did anyone hear the R4 programme last night about how we write and publish history? There was a similar discussion going on at one point about this sort of thing - I'm particularly thinking about a bit which was discussing how history is interpreted and taught.

The example I remember (I was driving and the signal kept fading in and out - so I may not do it justice) was a discussion about the way we look at Henry VIII. That at the moment it tends to be a 'spin doctor' approach, whereas previously it might have been his relationship with Rome. The gentleman speaking was saying that we seem to be falling into the trap of ' How (whatever the current interest is) shaped the modern world' - which therefore did represent how the past influences and helps us understand our present, but also tries to shoehorn it into our current perceptions, and perhaps in doing so distorts it's importance in past society.

I didn't get to hear the whole program, but it seemed quite interesting!

[Sparky]

The fudging of the gaps is indeed a problem and has manifested itself well into the realms of commercial reports where, sometimes, poor field work, poor post-ex and poor management seem to be countered by authentised story telling bearing little relevance to the archaeological facts. I'm not discounting theory but rather the common assumption that everybody's story is valid. I believe this is the result of various over-eager university teachings, or perhaps wrongly taught or percieved teachings. I don't believe that over-zealous flowery stories have a place in commercial archaeology where a someone is paying for a report on the findings of archaelogical works. However, we are ultimate story tellers but there is a limited defined by the parameters of the evidence.

I've lost count of the number of reports I have had to endure which claim great things on gant remains and supporting evidence. However, the Mike Parker-Pearsons of the world nearly make a living out of it and the radio listeners and television viewers apparently like the nice stories. Afterall, we as archaeologists are the experts and could convince most people on that basis. Thus, I feel we should be less dishonest and more respectful to our clients and the public.

I remember an archaeologist finding a piece of unworked, river rolled gravel which look to her as a piece of worked flint; to the rest of us it was spoil fodder. She was adamant it was worked flint and it would remain so because it was her opinion. Post-structuralism eating itself, in my opinion.

I also recall a few landscape archaeology papers where the authors pontificate on the wonders of the changing landscape in the late Neolithic / early Bronze Age based on landscape features, cultural features, fashionable thinking etc, but not once was environmental evidence (or C14) taken into condsideration which might have shown a largely different picture. Funnily enough, when challenged at a conference, one of these authors was quite embarrassed that some of his field work has missed several tricks. The sad part was that a lot of the audience (largely students) didn't seem to think it mattered and it was quite rude to attempt to ruin a good yarn.

Doesn't sound too optimistic for the pragmatic camp...