FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGIST

On a walk through a Thames Valley business park, I am drawn to a particular campus of high- tech industry buildings, enclosed by a low earthen bank. The landscaped bank of well-cut grass seems to be a symbolic enclosure, delineating a separation between myself and the cars, buildings, people and property on the other side. Another high-tech industry building is enclosed by a ditch of water on one side, and a railway line on the other. The building itself is located on a slight rise so that as you approach, the glass and silver panels extrude into the sky. In neither case is there a formal wall or fence around the buildings, nothing to prevent a determined intruder, the separation of property (intellectual and material) is maintained through an orchestration of subtle landscape features and effects, not dissimilar in form to a Neolithic henge. The world around these buildings, ditches and embankments also includes traces of these monuments beneath the ground. So, I walk over concrete panels labelled 87; sockets that mark the threads of fibre optics that suture these companies into place, as the stone sockets of the Ring of Brodgar suture that monument into its extraordinary landscape of earth and sky (Richards 1996). The archaeologist, Christine Finn, during her year in Silicon Valley walks and drives through the high-tech world in a similar vein, noting the practices of landscaping in both buildings and digital artefacts (Finn 2001). Her fieldwork includes

landscape photography of monumental buildings, interviews with museum curators of antique computers, and with inhabitants of the orange orchards and social landscapes of San Jose, before it became subsumed as part of Silicon Valley. What kind of archaeology are these fieldwork practices? Are they recognisably archaeological?

Michael Shanks, a key theorist in the disciplinary turn from processualism to post­ structuralism, is adamant that “archaeology is the practice of archaeologists not a

methodology” and that the power to act as an archaeologist, to negotiate and adjudicate the past, derives from being a member of the community of archaeologists (Shanks 1992: 44). The temporality of the data and the peculiarity of the practice is less critical than the politics of disciplinary power. This particular archaeology, known as post-processual archaeology (Hodder 1989), acknowledges the locatedness of archaeological data, that archaeological

knowledge is made in ongoing situated practice: “the past exists as part of the present in terms of the aims, assumptions and conceptual frameworks of the archaeologist” (Shanks 1992: 27). In this sense, and for this reason, I cannot simply call myself an archaeologist for, unlike Finn, I and my practice have not been acknowledged within that disciplinary field. My language, as you have just heard, is suffused with Science and Technology Studies (STS) disciplinary knowledge. I am something else. I am an interference between both these

disciplines, and much more. My location is entirely a matter of an ‘STS-flavoured’ archaeology of the future of the mobile telecoms industry, and to acknowledge that, I bear the label of the

future archaeologist. For there is something undeniably archaeological in my engagement

with the landscapes of the business park, my senses are attuned to an archaeological resonance, a sensitivity that has been developed and finessed through my archaeological experience.

The prehistorian Richard Bradley argues that although excavation is often considered the defining characteristic of archaeological practice, it should always be in dialogue with field survey techniques, extended and prolonged immersion in the landscapes of a site (Bradley 2003). In recent years, landscape archaeology studies have proliferated, developing from an initial phenomenological approach to places (Tilley 1994) into a dissolution of natural-cultural distinctions between monument and landscape, artefact and raw material. For example, one I tantalised you with earlier, Colin Richards transforms the Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle on the islands of Orkney, from a monument rising from the shores of a loch on the banks of an isthmus, into an orchestration of stone, water, earth and sky, all of which together perform the experience of a circular landscape; the Ring of Brodgar is not a monument, but a particular place that performs an experience of a circular world (Richards 1996). Walk away from that place and the experience is lost, the lay of the land has changed, the horizon shifted, the relationships between earth and water different. It is a performance that does not easily transfer into text, but one that is transformative of the senses. I have stood in the Ring of Brodgar and been taught to see archaeologically, to experience that circular world, to experience that giddy moment when the whole world seems to shift, and suddenly I am no longer standing in a heritage site, but standing in awe of the circular symphony of stone and

sky that is happening all around me. Similarly, I have wandered over the boulder-strewn landscapes of Leskernick, on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, with a photocopy of a journal paper on the circular structures in amongst the boulder fields (Bender 1995; Bender, Hamilton et al. 1997). I have been shown rings of stones that the authors photographed wrapped in cling-film and painted white, for they are invisible amongst the sheer mass of granite boulders. I have been shown gaps in these rings where the authors have held a wooden doorframe, to imagine and photograph the view out across the moor. What was a boulder field has been transformed for me into a prehistoric settlement whose circular foundations comprise a mixture of altered and un-altered stones, my senses taught to blur the now meaningless categories of

archaeological and geological; for as much as there are ruined buildings, there are also ruined stones (Bradley 1998).

Charles Goodwin calls it professional vision, a taught, socially-constituted practice of perceiving the world (Goodwin 1994). He follows how an archaeologist on an excavation learns to see soil strata using a colour chart, making what was invisible now visible in the dirt. This is a particular archaeological vision that I do not possess. My training in archaeological perception is, in contrast, entirely landscape related, and entirely located in British prehistory (landscapes of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages predominantly). I have attended only one university undergraduate course in archaeology, and never an excavation. My archaeological perception is almost entirely an effect of dwelling amongst the monuments, of telling the stories of landscapes as I move and engage with the world (Ingold 2000b: 189). Its diversity of teaching locations includes acting as research assistant, with tape measure and microphone in hand, on numerous lengthy archaeo-acoustic projects inside passage grave monuments, learning to hear the sound effects of monuments (Watson and Keating 1998; Watson 2001); several days fieldwalking, learning to see worked flint in the dark, ploughed soils of the Cherhill Downs, near Avebury, becoming sensitive to signs of retouch and the bulb-of- percussion, the signifiers of flint and stone knapped in prehistory; and standing with a camera and tripod for a night-time television reconstruction of ritual activity at Stonehenge, replete with dry-ice and arc lights, learning to see the politics and particularity of contemporary versions of prehistory (Bender 1998).

All of this creates an archaeological perception that has ongoing effects, no matter the age of the landscapes in which I am immersed, as my wanderings through the business park earlier suggest. So, when I see the abstract sculptures of Barbara Hepworth, I also see the cup- marked stones of the Yorkshire Dales and the portal dolmen on Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, Neolithic landscapes and forms that Hepworth herself was deeply immersed in (Gale and Stephens 1999; Bowness 2003).

. ;" v ' ' .j

' Js W ttk k

S 8m .

Trevethy Quoit, prehistoric portel dolmen (Bodmin Moor, Cornwall), and Four-Square

(Walkthrough), Barbara Hepworth (Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives).

For me, a mobile phone antenna standing atop a Bronze Age round barrow is as monumental and as fascinating for its landscape performance, as a stone tor above a (rather similar) Bronze Age cairn. And a mobile phone is a portable artefact as fascinating as a Neolithic polished stone axe, a comparison I will return to later.

Monumental... a mobile phone mast embedded in a Bronze Age round barrow (Dorset Ridgeway, near Maiden Castle).

Monumental...

a granite tor embedded in an Early Bronze Age cairn (Showery Tor, Cornwall).

Archaeological vision is inherently partial, however. It sees potsherds, pieces of charcoal, bone fragments, fallen stones, sea level shifts, eroded rock art, layers of stratigraphy. Traditional processualists would argue for the presence of a past in this partiality, that such parts are always incomplete parts of a whole; that this always partial archaeological evidence can be reconstructed into the-past-as-it-was. Other archaeologists note that structured depositions of fragments of bodies and artefacts, placed with some evident care, are often incomplete, not in the sense of missing pieces but in the sense of being only partially

connected: sometimes they are mixed bones, or bones of several people arranged as though a complete skeleton; sometimes sherds from different pots are placed together, sometimes stone axes were broken before they were placed (Chapman 2000). Fragments of an

assemblage that are parts that are not part of any whole, that cannot be reconstructed into a single thing-as-it-was.138

Archaeology is not a matter of impoverished and incomplete materials, but of the ongoing assembly and re-assembly of fragments, the past as it is made in the present. “There is and can be no monolithic past. Rather, there are multiple and competing pasts constructed in accordance with ethnic, cultural and sexual, social and political values” (Tilley 1989: 114). In the language of STS: the past is always situated; evidence is situated, partial, contested, without certainty; there are more than one and less than many pasts.139 In short, the past is fractal.

Archaeology is therefore not about the past but about the present, and may even be about the future. In archaeologies of the contemporary and recent past the political effect of an

archaeological vision that necessarily presences some materials and absences others becomes central. Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas, key proponents of this approach, argue that

an archaeology of us (Gould and Schiffer 1981) is an archaeology of the future, not in the

sense of premeditation, but “in the sense of creating the future by being actively engaged in the materialisation of the present - as much as designers” (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 8). They suggest that archaeology can therefore make some absences present, through fragments that can be assembled, creatively and with a particular politics, into new discourses, new

accounts, new futures. I would want to add that this is possible and meaningful with prehistoric fragments such as Stonehenge, whose assembly variously includes megaliths, earthern banks, round barrows, an avenue, a barbed-wire fence, twenty-four hour security patrols, painted circles on a car park marking Mesolithic post holes, and the midsummer sunrise, all of which are part of the future and whose assembly is heavily contested, most

138 This phraseology deliberately e v o k e s Marilyn Strathern’s definition and approach to partiality

(Strathern 1991).

1391 am explicitly paraphrasing Annem arie Mol on multiplicity. In her work on ath erosclerosis s h e argu es

that, through multiple practices of different medical practioners, there are m ore than o n e and le s s than

visibly during the ‘Battle of the Beanfield’ in 1985 between ‘free festivalers’ and riot police ringing the monument to ‘protect’ the stones (see Bender 1998); in the famous assertion of Jaquetta Hawkes, “every age has the Stonehenge it deserves - or desires” (quoted in ibid:

114). Spurensicherung artists who work critically with archaeological methods already create radically alternative archaeological stories, explore its socio-material practices, and contest the singular and scientific accounts of its evidence (Holtorf 2005: chapter 4); perhaps the most well-known example being Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig and its subsequent aesthetic

categorisation and display of ‘finds’, from drawers of Nineties phone cards to bags of Victorian porcelain (Coles and Dion 1999). This is the politics of my archaeological vision, my

archaeological practice. I am interested in the absent, untold stories that may be assembled from fragments. My practice is about assembling partial fragments (that are never part of any whole) generatively, creatively, into new accounts of the future - to design a future. The past, for me, is always also contemporary, always part of the future; following Michel Serres, an assemblage of fragments always enfolds past, present and future140. Similarly, my fragments of evidence may be as old as a geologically-weathered stone, as contemporary as an ethnographic notebook, and as futuristic as a science-fiction novel. What matters is how they are assembled, and what future they materialise.

My fieldwork began with an initial experimental foray at an industry exhibition ‘Mobile Commerce World 2003’. But my principal fieldsite, the archaeological landscape where I principally dwelled and gathered my fragments of evidence, was a design studio in the mobile telecoms industry. This was a period of landscape fieldwork conducted over four months during 2004. This was an important site in the industry, a site where (particular) accounts of the future are materialised in design practices and artefacts, and therefore a site with residues of those socio-material fragments involved. These are sites of interference into the future of the mobile telecoms industry:

With my archaeological perceptions I gathered my heterogeneous fragments: fieldnotes, artefacts, photographs, photocopies, maps, electronic files, and drawings. In the manner of a field survey, I created a detailed ‘finds database’ (see below) of 184 items in which I noted how and where fragments were found and their relationship to one another.

Overleaf:

Find ID 031 database entry.

Find ID 031: re-used finds bag containing chalk stone and Intel PXA800F Cellular Processor