The unbearable lightness of archaeology

No matter how interesting archaeology is and how intellectually rewarding it can be, sometimes real world seems to catch with it and deem it less worthy when weighted against the events in the real world. Lately, a few discussions I have had over a cup of tea have involved meditations on the situation in Syria and a selection of pretty pessimistic predictions of the possible outcomes. Even if I only ended up working there for one season, I could see how exceptional history the country has and how versatile its communities could be. Now I can watch the TV news only with a deep feeling of sorrow.

When I have discussed with people who have been working in the Middle East for decades and have long working relationships with local archaeologists, museum professionals and workmen, I can only guess how they feel at the moment. If seeing sectarian violence raising its head and another country being ‘iraqified’ is heartbreaking for me, I can only guess how those experienced archaeologists must be feeling. The government in Syria did not bring freedom of speech to the masses or freely elected leaders but it had created a country where the Sunni, the Christians, the Shia, the Jewish and the Alawites were living peacefully in a lay country. No matter how the situation will pan out now, the relationships between different communities will not be trusting or carefree any more. Some groups already have blood in their hands.

The unstable political situations bring stop to foreign expeditions in different volatile countries. Anybody who was as blue-eyed as to have wished that the Bush family’s long-term project in Iraq would open the country’s fabulous archaeology to the scholars could have not been more wrong. The collections were trashed, the sites flamethrewn and different buildings bombed or blown out. Nothing makes an easier target in a dangerous country than a locally well-known and instantly recognizable foreign archaeological team. I have heard of a few teams in different countries who have lied low for some time when drug traffickers or other dangerous groups had visited an area.

In a country such as Syria were a huge amount of sites – including Ugarit, Palmyra, Tell Braq or Crac des Chevaliers among many others – has value for world history any conflict can have far reaching consequences for archaeology and museum collections. Naturally, the discontinuation of research projects is a blow to the individual careers of highly competitive archaeologists. However, ethically, these losses have to be considered, even if enormous in the case of world heritage, to be of lesser importance than a potential loss of human life and the potential tragedy of losing one more country to the dark depths of civil war and carnage. Europe itself has been unable to avoid bloody ethnic wars and atrocities in the 1990s so how could the area as volatile as the Near East.

From the beach

We did work next to a beach site with party boats, countless chalets, a long row of souvenir shops and people happily having their day by the sea. The site was used by local tourists but it may be eerily quiet today. One could see Turkey from the beach, and a number of Christian villages are located in the area. The area is relatively near of some of the northern trouble spots but should be peaceful at the moment. If only the worst could be avoided and not only the archaeology but all the citizens and communities could be safeguarded.

Street parties and feasting

This weekend saw street parties up and down United Kingdom. We attended one in Aylestone and the grey skies over us did not burst to rain – unlike the next day on Sunday. We enjoyed a plentiful potluck lunch with sandwiches, sausage rolls, pizza, crisps, fruit and cakes, flushed down with squash or carbonated drinks. The PA system was blasting music from the yesteryear and the children had a bouncy castle. The street was closed and the bunting suggested the type of the festivity. It was the Jubilee weekend after all.

Aylestone (photo by P. Mills)

I really enjoyed the event although I am from a republic and prefer elected governance through and through. Nevertheless, there is something comfortably traditional and simultaneously unbelievably naff in the remaining royal houses. We do need some froth in our lives and the monarchs have curiosity value if nothing else. During this Diamond jubilee in this particular street party the atmosphere was not brilliant but it was more to do with the grey weather. If the party had taken place the previous hot and sunny weekend the people would have been singing and dancing along the road.

I was left wondering if there will be any archaeological reminders from this street party. Everything was removed from the spot afterwards and the bunting will come down eventually. The modern dumps are not in the back gardens so there will be no feast deposits on the spot or nearby unless people forget the decorations in their gardens. However, in the landfill sites there will probably be a layer of masks with royal faces, bunting with Union Jacks and paper napkins and table cloths. These days there will not be huge piles of bones or pottery shards or oyster shells as there once was.

The papers will feature the Jubilee and leave fleetingly a material memory of the street parties. Most of the memory has moved to the digital domain, though. This blog will live in a virtual landscape and similarly the video films and photographs from this particular party are digital. The garbage archaeologists of the future may find perishable remains from the depths of the landfill sites but even the historical knowledge of the event is moving to the world of the pixels. No glazed beer jugs or painted pottery in structured deposits down the road afterwards. Just structured landfills further afield with plastic blue, red and white party hooters and files saved perhaps fleetingly in the World Wide Web.

Archaeology and text

I managed to visit briefly a three-day conference at the Classics at Cambridge on archaeology and text. The organizers Sara Owen and Henry Hurst had done their utmost to create a friendly atmosphere so that the different parties, the historians, classicists and archaeologists, would not confront each other but discuss with each other. As Sara was commenting, some of the earlier meetings on the matter had been much frostier events.

Sadly, I could not attend on Wednesday when the full day was discussing the theme due to having attending an informal prehistoric Central Mediterranean conference on that day and having to do other things the following day. Luckily, I managed to squeeze two entertaining papers to my Friday schedule. Two female scholars kept me interested in merging textual evidence and material culture studies in their very different papers.

Susan Sherratt from Sheffield had a run through the trade and gift references in the Iliad and Odyssey but then went on to discuss the distribution of Middle Eastern faïence and other early Orientalising exotica in Greece. In the end she also discussed the possibility that the northern Aegean distribution of early wine amphorae with concentric circular decorations and that they presented a sign of early trade in the area. The involvement of the Phoenicians naturally is based on literature and circumstantial evidence.

Lin Foxhall from Leicester presented some ideas from the wider Tracing Networks Project and discussed her own research on the indigenous and Greek loom weights in the Megaponto area. This was interesting both as a critique of maintaining strict disciplinary boundaries in the network research and as a presentation of very interesting case study on cultural interaction and the selection of influences according to one's own cultural preferences. It was puzzling to hear that different scholars in archaeology and ancient history ended up writing two books on network analysis without any connection in their actual material and apparently being totally unaware of each other writing on prehistory (Knappett 2011) on one hand and on ancient history (Malkin 2011) on another

Even if these papers partly discussed more abstract topics, trade and female networks, they still had a landscape dimension. Ancient trade involved large areas across the Mediterranean from its part. Weaving is very localised activity but when the weavers were located in neighbouring communities but presented a distinctive material culture the research has its spatial dimension by default.

Reusing Olympic landscapes

The previous week saw the Olympic flame arriving to England in a golden airplane. The Olympics are one of the events that were recreated in the late 19th century during the aftermath of the Age of Romanticism. The modern Olympics make a full use of the past site of Olympia, the site of the ancient, original Olympics. The Olympic flame is lit in Olympia and a series of modern rituals have been created in order to celebrate the event. We could see a glimpse of these a few weeks back.

The fire was reintroduced as a symbol of the games for the Amsterdam Games in 1928. The torch relay that transports the flame from Greece to the various designated sites of the country where the games take place has no ancient precedent and was introduced at the 1936 Berlin Olympics – a detail nobody probably wants to remember. Nevertheless, there was a religious procession leading to Olympia before the ancient game, so there is a precedent for a preparatory event that passes a landscape related to the Olympics.

The flame is lit using a parabolic mirror from the rays of sun at the temple of Zeus in the holy area of Olympia. The modern reenactment of the events includes not-very-flatterning dresses and frankly bizarre dance routings beamed all over the world from the ancient ruins of Olympia. Considering the amount of good news coming from Greece in the recent times this is currently a rare reminder of the cultural heritage we owe to this country.

Even if there is no continuity between the Games, since these were discontinued as a pagan event by the Christian Roman Empire, the use of the holy area brings the use of this heritage area closer to its earlier function than is normally the case. The Stadium is used as a place to follow the modern presentations and may be for a fleeting moment feel some kind of attachment with the Real Thing in the past.

Free access and paywalls

When the top university in the world starts to complain about something, you have to take it seriously. Harvard has started to complain about the high cost of the subscriptions of scientific journals. They say their library cannot afford these anymore. I did not know that the major scientific publications could cost libraries thousands of pounds. Even if some journals come out monthly, it is still a very high price for an issue. Since most of the work is done by the academics and peer reviewers, the publishing houses probably get their money with less of an effort than is the case with the other types of publishing. When any books are published the publishers have to review and edit them, but this is not true with the established journals.

I am myself an editor-in-chief for an open access peer reviewed online publication, the Monographs of the Archaeological Society of Finland. Since there is no subscription revenue and the Archaeological Society of Finland is not a rich society, this post is honorary and the society pays only any small fees for extra web storage space. However, the peer review guarantees the standard and the open web access guarantees the widest potential audience worldwide. Naturally, not all web users are interested in archaeology or northern areas, but the potential is there. Any reader can access the scientific articles published, in the case of the first volume a selection of highly interesting articles about Mesolithic lithic technologies in the northern Europe.

The free nature of the enterprise means that the workload has to be passed lower down the food chain. This means that the authors have to prepare their manuscripts digitally as far as they can, optimize and set the figures and create print/photoready files. With the modern word processing technology this is not a problem but requires the people preparing the volume to define the look and the settings of their publication at an early stage. If the authors are going to do the work, they have to know the page settings and the styles. This leaves the editors (if not the author of the monograph) with collating the files and checking that they have been created in a correct manner. In the case of edited volumes the editors also have to prepare any material from the less computer skilled academics. The editor-in-chief makes sure that the peer review is organized correctly and in a reasonable time with the help of the editorial board.

This all means that there is a lot of free work done at every level – or work that is covered by grants or salaries from the main job of the editors and authors. Nevertheless, the free access allows everybody, also those without a university affiliation to read high quality research and get up-to-date correct information. Free access means that the research potentially can reach the largest audience possible. Essential in the current academic landscape!

The importance of geology

The mortaria workshop in Lincoln was very interesting and reminded one of a few basic realities in archaeology. First of all, the history of early mortarium production is little known. Mostly because the early production took place in the area were the castle and the cathedral stand and that naturally are off limits of most of invasive archaeology. This is a common problem in archaeology since later Medieval towns often cover the Roman and earlier centres in central and southern Europe.

One of the later kiln sites lie in the area where there were also kilns during the 10th, 12th and 14th century. The reason for this longevity became clear from the presentation of the local geological map where there was a narrow strip of a clay formation poking to the surface by the river valley. This outcrop was used for millennia. This reminds us of longevity of the exploitation sites of key resources. This has its implications on the knowledge of the earlier use since often the signs of earlier exploitation have disappeared or are in danger due to modern extraction.

The geology presentation

The type of clay available at any of the mortaria sources defined the outer appearance of the products of different mortarium workshops. Some of them have orangey tint due to the iron in the clay whereas the white clays that lacked the iron resulted with whitish vessels. This was also the difference between the local deposits at Harthill on one hand and Nene valley and Oxford on the other and helps to recognize the products of these most important workshops.

The later industries, copying the appearance of the Nene valley types can be separated from each others by observing their temper. Some areas are flint-poor whereas some had peat iron ore and this iron production fed to the related pottery production as well. The careful analysis of minerals and rocks used may allow a more detailed characterization and actually outdo the expensive scientific methods that promise much but cost a lot.

Geology defines other productions as well. The stones used to erect Stonehenge have been the object of study for a long time and may continue still even if Dr Bevins, keeper of geology at National Museum Wales, and Dr Rob Ixer of Leicester University, suggested the area in Pembrokeshire as the source of sarsens.

During even earlier times it was the occurrence of flint that was the defining feature. In the areas without flint the lack of the best source material for stone tools often resulted with brisk trade at some point with other regions with this material. Similarly, the circulation of obsidian in the Mediterranean is well-documented.

What a difference 20 years make!

The last time I attended the Nordic TAG was in 1992 in Helsinki when the conference was small and Michael Shanks was giving a key note speech. After the conference the main question in the pub between the organisers was the name of the culprit for the dwindling audience in the conference. If I remember correctly there was a hiatus before the Nordic TAG took off again but I was then off living in Britain and visiting Italy regularly. In any case, I and one of members of the Helsinki NTAG organizing committee had a trip down the memory lane during the conference dinner.

After 20 years and a mandate as the editor-in-chief of a new web based peer reviewed monograph series I headed to the Oulu NTAG where I also hold an honorary post of a docent. I had my joint paper on a memory stick and newly Oulu based relatives to visit so I had plenty to experience and manifold tasks to perform. The spring was late with huge piles of snow laying in the woods next to the University pushed back from the parking lots with weather alternating between glorious sunshine and cold rain on different days. I had arrived to the conference a day late and after travelling over 12 hours. It only takes three hours to Helsinki but it is all connecting travel adds to the travel time.

On arrival I shared my late status with my former student friend who now works for the Forestry governing body and after that we headed to the different session according to our respective preferences. I was going to learn about the dissemination of archaeology – until I entered the lecture theatre and was encountering a session on Things. I had no problem with the change of topic. What followed was both useful and thought provoking about the possibility for Things to have separate rights to be preserved despite of their importance and human-defined value. The session suggested that our approach to archaeology and heritage is very anthropocentric and value-laden. Especially in postmodern thinking Things could not exist without human definition and construction.

The emphasis of this NTAG was on the study of northern areas, Sami, raindeer economy and soundscapes were popular topics and fit for a host city near the Arctic circle. However, there were odd presentations on the Medierranean and even more remote landscapes, such as Iran and central America. I went to hear my friend’s talk about Pompei and heard a well-established argument about the location of high-status residential buildings among the liveliest neighbourhoods in town. Personally, I presented ceramiscene and convinced a colleague to plan to apply the concept to one of his site with pottery kilns. Soon we will be able to have a session of our own!

The audience was much more multinational than 20 years ago. The common language was English, which meant that Swedish and other Scandinavian languages – not to mention Finnish – were not used in academic discourse. In a way this was a pity but on the other hand it guaranteed that the delegates from Russia, Estonia, England, Spain and the States could properly understand the proceedings. The multinationality fits both theoretical and arctic archaeology and the wide breadth of the papers and topic gave something to everyone.