Principles of Stratigraphy: Methodology
4. Four Principles of Excavation
The first principle of excavatory poetics hinges on a retrieval of the past from the perspective of the present, and a corollary representation of depth as spatialised-time. Virginia Zimmerman notes that the archaeological imaginary is necessarily founded on a relationship between space and time that is
expressed through the excavator’s assertion of some kind of ‘authority over the past’. Such mastery is necessary to overcome the uneasy disjunction between past and present that is inscribed in the discontinuous layers of the dig.
Zimmerman finds this anxiety over time is most acute not in archaeology but in its antecedent discipline, geology, which sought to define and surmount the gap between ‘an individual life and the immensity of time’ found in the rock strata.133 Tracing this relationship between past and present in archaeology is the
objective of stratigraphic analysis, a method adopted from geology which investigates finds according to their chronological deposition in layers or strata. In terms of the archaeological imaginary, this temporal relationship is often expressed as a spatial one; as Sander’s puts it, the ‘relationship between depth (past) and surface (present)’.134 The problem with Sanders’ abridged version of geological or archaeological method here is that it irons out the complexity of stratigraphic relationships, which do not necessarily conform to such a
chronological ordering. Stratigraphy is in theoretical terms bound by the law of superposition, formulated in the seventeenth century by Nicolaus Steno who established that sedimentary rocks were formed in horizontal strata arranged in
133 Zimmerman, p. 4. 134 Sanders, p. 14.
a temporal sequence, with the oldest layer on the bottom.135 In practice, however, the stratigraphy of many sites violates the principle of superposition, as natural or man-made disturbances of the sedimentary layers alters the chronological order. The equation of depth with past time and surface with present time thus transforms what is a potentially unstable and disjunctive paradigm into a metaphor for temporal, spatial and cultural continuity.
Sanders finds the depth-as-past/surface-as-present model useful in her discussions of cultural responses to bog bodies, even though she argues that such an easy equation is disrupted by the emergence of these preserved
bodies in the historical record. She suggests that ‘bogs’ provide a unique terrain in which the ‘regular historical and chronological layer-upon-layer-ness of time’ is disturbed. Bogs thus have the capacity to ‘subvert the proper archaeological “order of things”’ and ‘disrupt the logic of “normal” historical processes’.136 However, while the preserved and entire state of bog bodies almost certainly disrupts expected temporal processes of decay, and the interpretive act of reconstructing the fragment or shard, it is questionable whether these artefacts challenge the ‘proper archaeological “order of things”’, as this order has never been understood in the discipline of archaeology at least, as so strictly
chronological.137 In the archaeological imaginary, however, the contiguities between different spaces, times, and histories enabled by the depth/surface model continue to resonate in contemporary poetry and criticism. For despite Sanders’ claim it is arguably the reductive metaphor of depth-as-past/surface- as-present that Heaney relies on in his correlation between the sacrificial histories of P. V. Glob’s bog people and the violent political context of Northern Ireland. If Sanders is right that bog bodies should ‘destabilize our sense of natural and historical order’ and even of ‘national space’, they have arguably been deployed to the reverse effect in Heaney’s mythifying poetic.
According to Sasha Colby this concern with time and disjunction shifted from the geological to the archaeological imagination in the nineteenth century when it became a site for conflicting responses to modernity and history. For the modernist inheritors of these discourses, archaeology imagined a ‘science of the future’ enmeshed in the ‘evolutionary ideology of human progress’ and a
135 Edward C. Harris, Principles of Archaeological Stratigraphy (London: Academic Press,
1989), pp. 30–1.
136 Sanders, p. 10.
137 See Michael Shanks, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, and Matthew Tiews, ‘Archaeology, Modernism,
search for ‘origins’ through ‘establishing concrete, material bonds with the distant past’.138 The search for and interpretation of origins, whether expressed as the ‘primary’ rock in geology, or the buried shard in archaeology, is a second important principle of literary excavation that has persisted into contemporary poetics particularly in the work of Heaney. The search for the archē is tied to the relationship between past and present, as it assures a ‘revelation of the self to the self’ and the ‘restoration of the culture to itself’.139 Thus, as McHale
suggests, Heaney’s ‘analogy’ between Iron Age ritual murder and the Troubles is both ‘an expression of the poet’s power […] to forge correspondences’ and a claim for the continuity of ‘mythic or archetypal patterns in contemporary events (on the Freudian model).’140 For Heaney these correspondences and
continuities are immanent not only in ‘archaeological finds’ but also in poems that achieve the status of the ‘buried shard’ with all the ‘aura,’ ‘authenticity’ and sense of cultural ‘continuity’ that this implies. He purposefully mixes metaphors here, to associate archaeological processes with a more productive rooted idea of landscape, so poetry becomes ‘a dig, a dig that ends up bearing plants.’141 The problem with interpreting the shard or fragment as a point of origin in which the present and future is rooted is that it invites us to reconstruct a past in its totality, and on that past build a present that is similarly complete, no longer open to question or undecidability.
While the status of material finds and their interpretation remains contested, the processes of digging or unearthing generally receive less
attention in discussions of the archaeological imaginary. Nevertheless, ‘process’ is an increasingly significant area of investigation in the discipline of
archaeology, where ‘post-processual’ theory has become more concerned with ascribing meaning to the processes of excavation, than the artefacts
themselves. Jennifer Wallace suggests that if ‘excavation’ in post-processual terms is understood as ‘a creative act involving artistic decisions of style and technique, then the process of digging and the archaeological site itself can be
138 Colby, p. 6. The search for origins is also evident in geological discourses of the eighteenth
century, which sought to explain the age of the earth through the correct classification of ‘primary’ or ‘primeval’ rock. Igneous rock such as granite was mistakenly thought to be the oldest rock until James Hutton overturned these ideas. See Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks,
Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 110–117.
139 Heaney, ‘Feeling into Words’, in Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968–1978 (London:
Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 41–60 (p. 41).
140 McHale, p. 248.
interpreted as well as the objects uncovered there.’142 Ironically, the
metaphorical tools of archaeological poetics are often traditional agricultural implements – shovel, spade, plough – not strictly archaeological tools at all. Even the shovel is a limited tool for real fieldwork. The archaeologist employs a variety of survey methods before s/he even begins to dig: reconnaissance walks over wide areas, surface artefact collecting, random sampling, remote sensing, and a range of geophysical and geochemical techniques. All of these processes presuppose the human penetration of the earth’s surface either by physical or visual methods. Yet as the alteration of stratigraphic relationships through natural disturbances of soil, rock and other geomorphological
processes demonstrate, the landscape does not require human intervention in order to continually unearth itself. Indeed, the shaping of the earth’s surface and its depths takes place largely outside of the limited temporality of human
experience, across the vast and deep stretches of geological time.
Anxieties about the disjunction between the time of an individual life, historical time and the immensity of geological time converge in the final
characteristic of literary excavation, a concern with past life, or the ‘traces of the dead’.143 The writers that I examine in this study are less concerned to bury or ‘grave’ the dead than to exhume them, as they attempt to uncover or negotiate the circumstances surrounding the deaths of named and unknown individuals, the larger horrors of genocide, or their debt to literary precursors. Schwyzer suggests that literary exhumation is a kind of ‘necromancy’, a desire to speak with and resurrect the dead. The danger of speaking with the dead is that we are of course speaking for them; in this sense they are no more than ‘mental constructs of the living’.144 Shanks describes archaeological practice in similar terms. ‘Archaeology excavates a hollow’ and leaves ‘emptiness’ in its place: ‘The raw existence of the past is not enough, insufficient in itself. What is needed is our desire to fill the hollow, raise the dead. This is archaeology’s necromancy.’145 In the act of producing space, poetic excavation accordingly re- inscribes and re-inters these bodies in the landscapes of the poem, and the ethics of remembering or speaking with the dead becomes embroiled in aesthetics. Yet this process of engraving is never fully able to fix or embed
142 Wallace, Digging the Dirt, p. 14. 143 Schwyzer, p. 19.
144 Schwyzer, p. 23.
145 Shanks, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (London: Routledge,
these figures. These landscapes contain the dead, and give them up to the poet, but as Angela Leighton has suggested: ‘The question of where the dead are – in the mind, in the past, in the landscape or the grave – leaves them rattling around in the poem’s pod, never quite “subdued”’.146