Behavioral archaeology is not the only theoretical model to find itself in a trap of taphonomy. Indeed, its pitfall — the conception of the archaeological record as a series of discontinuous moments punctuated by periods of distortion — is symptomatic of a rarely considered, yet all-too-often deployed, structuring principle deeply embedded in “Anglo- American archaeology”14
: the notion of the palimpsest.
Most of the surface residues [on the landscape] are palimpsests of several phases of occupation. The continued exposure of landscapes to occupation will result in blurring of spatial patterns and in
accumulation and mixing of chronologically unrelated remains. (Zvelebil, et al. 1992:196-197)
The importance of the palimpsest concept to Anglophone archaeology, like the
interpretive challenges posed by palimpsest landscapes, cannot be overstated (Johnson 2007:58).
Strictly speaking, a palimpsest is a manuscript or inscription that has been written on more than once. The diagnostic feature of a palimpsest — what has made it an
appropriate concept for archaeology — is earlier writing that has been incompletely erased, remaining somewhat legible. The word palimpsest was imported into English from Greek in the mid-17th century. It is a concept that developed significance in philology and Classical studies, where examinations of written artifacts are common.
It is difficult to trace the path that brought the palimpsest concept from philology into landscape studies, and especially into archaeology. No chain of citations leads backward from its contemporary usage to earlier forms. Rather, what can be reconstructed is a patchy history that traces the adoption and distribution of the palimpsest concept in Anglophone archaeology and its sister disciplines.
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In Ideas of Landscape (2007), Matthew Johnson mentions the early use of the palimpsest metaphor in the work of the 19th-century jurist and medieval historian
Frederic William Maitland. Not only was Maitland influential in establishing the field of English legal history, but also in fostering the growing discipline of archaeology.
Presaging — and, in fact, providing a foundation for — O.G.S. Crawford’s later
adaptation of military ordnance surveys to archaeology and history (see below), Maitland famously observed that “two little fragments of the original one-inch Ordnance Survey map will be more eloquent than would be many paragraphs of written discourse” (Maitland 1897:39, cited in Johnson 2007:54). Elsewhere in the same volume, Maitland made almost casual use of the term “palimpsest”:
The ‘vill’ or ‘town’ of the later middle ages was, like the ‘civil parish’ of our own day, a tract of land with some house on it, and this tract was a unit in the national system of police and finance. But we are not entitled to make for ourselves any one typical picture of the English vill. We are learning from the ordnance map (that marvellous [sic] palimpsest, which under Dr Meitzen’s guidance we are beginning to decipher) that in all probability we must keep at least two types before our minds. On the one hand, there is what we might call the true village or the nucleated village…. On the other hand, we may easily find a country in which there are few villages of this character. (Maitland 1897:15)
Maitland here continued an earlier thought. In an 1889 contribution to The
Archaeological Review, Maitland had already discussed the medieval vill, exploring its juridical structure vis-à-vis its existence as a named geographical unit. In that piece, he described the map of England as “that most wonderful of all palimpsests” (Maitland 1911[1889]:87). Given that the notion of the palimpsest is both explicit and implicit throughout Maitland’s writing, it is perhaps not surprising that this concept figures so prominently in English landscape history and archaeology, two pioneers of which —
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O.G.S. Crawford and W.G. Hoskins — were devoted readers of Maitland (Bowden 2001; Johnson 2007).
Yet in tracing a history of the palimpsest concept in archaeology, we should not lose sight of the fact that many of Maitland’s explicit uses of the term (like the two above), refer not to the English landscape as such, but rather to maps of that landscape. In truth, it is not particularly innovative to think of a map as a palimpsest given that many maps, especially national survey maps, are generated over time by different cartographers whose routine practice involves erasing the work of earlier map-makers in order to
inscribe new features. Thus, though Maitland’s use of the term may have been influential, it is not necessarily to Maitland that we should look for the conceptual move that first characterized the landscape itself as a palimpsest.
The notion that what we call “the archaeological record” is composed of material elements that have somehow escaped disaster might be traced to 17th-century English philosophy. In his Advancement of Learning (1900[1605]), Francis Bacon described antiquities as
… history defaced, or remnants that have escaped the shipwreck of time…. Antiquities are the wrecks of history, wherein the memory of things is almost lost. (53)
It appears to have been Maitland’s contemporary, the classical scholar A.M. Bell, who first expressed similar ideas using palimpsest language. An amateur archaeologist, natural historian, and anthropologist, Bell was a fellow of the Geological Society of London. In a November 1893 address to another learned society, this time the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Bell discussed a group of flaked stone tools from Kent. In the transcript of his address is the following:
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I do believe that [these tools] lift the veil for a moment beyond the time when the tools of the river-valley type were in universal use; and that Mr. Harrison, their discoverer, has, to borrow a metaphor from the neighbouring shade of the Bodleian, deciphered from the hard
palimpsest of earth another page in the most interesting of all epics, the story of human life. (Bell 1894:284)
While it is difficult to understand precisely how Bell envisioned his “hard palimpsest of earth,” his usage of the concept seems to have anticipated contemporary archaeological uses.
Twenty years later, British geographer H.O. Beckit used the palimpsest concept in a manner strikingly congruent with our own. Discussing the national parks of the United States, Beckit asked:
What geographer, accustomed to the painful palimpsest of a long- settled country, does not envy his fellow-worker in the newer lands [like the United States]? But even and indeed particularly in them, the processes of settlement and change work swiftly. At any rate for purposes of study, the elimination as far as is practicable of any single disturbing element, like man in his normal activities, must simplify the problem; and when most of a country has been developed by those normal activities, reserved areas where the pre-human stage is still observable throw light on much that lies beyond their boundaries. (Beckit 1913:335-336)
One year later, in a long paper on the glacial geography of eastern Antarctica, geologist Griffith Taylor identified palimpsest landscapes created without direct human intervention:
The ice drainage of this area is extremely complex at first sight. But I think the following explanation is correct. I imagine that we have two types of glacial erosion, one superimposed on the other. The earlier cwm or cirque erosion is to some extent obliterated by the later outlet glacier erosion. The problem reminds one of an old Greek palimpsest. (Taylor 1914:382, emphasis in original)
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Taylor delivered his paper before the Royal Geographic Society (incidentally, the audience for Beckit’s address the year before). In the discussion that followed, critics charged that Taylor had used incomprehensible jargon in his nomenclature. He responded that “there [were] only two excuses for introducing new names.” One excuse involved the lack of useful English words to describe a known phenomenon. The other excuse — “as in the case of the word ‘palimpsest’ — [was] to define a new concept” (Freshfield, et al. 1914:571). The “new” concept defined by Taylor has continued to be deployed in the landscape thinking of various disciplines, but without specific reference to Taylor, Beckit, Bell or anyone else for that matter.
Use of the palimpsest concept was not restricted to the fellows of Britain’s learned societies. Around the same time, it also appeared in the work of American archaeologist Roland B. Dixon:
In comparison with the relative simplicity of the archeological record on the Pacific coast, that of the eastern portion of the continent is complex, and might indeed be best described as a palimpsest. This complexity leads inevitably to the conclusion that here there have been numerous and far-reaching ethnic movements, resulting in a
stratification of cultures, such that later have dispossessed and overlain earlier. (Dixon 1913:559)
By the mid-1920s, the palimpsest concept had made further inroads into
archaeology. In a 1923 address before the Royal Geographic Society, O.G.S. Crawford — who would later go on to found the journal Antiquity — advanced his project of using aerial survey to investigate archaeological phenomena. In his remarks, Crawford
discussed “that palimpsest of British history,” the Salisbury Plain (Crawford 1923:353). He expanded upon this usage in his later writing:
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The surface of England is like a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again; and it is the business of the field archaeologist to decipher it. The features concerned are of course the roads and field boundaries, the woods, the farms and other
habitations, and all the other products of human labour; these are the letters and words inscribed on the land. But it is not easy to read them because, whereas the vellum document was seldom wiped clean more than once or twice, the land has been subjected to continual change throughout the ages. The existing pattern, which is that [sic] we see on the six-inch Ordnance Map, was formed very largely at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, when the medieval field- system was swept away by the enclosures. That system … was
introduced by the Saxons … To revert to the analogy of the palimpsest — the writing was completely erased twice, by the Saxons and by the authors of the enclosures, and there were several alterations of letters, words and whole sentences within those periods. (Crawford 1953:51- 52, cited in Johnson 2007:58-59)
In the same year as Crawford’s earlier use of the term, Esther Boise van Deman wrote about the “structural palimpsest” (van Deman 1923:403) of roads and structures she encountered in her excavations east of the Roman Forum. The first American woman to specialize in Roman archaeology, van Deman’s field methods became standard
practice in Roman urban excavations. That these explicit uses of the palimpsest concept in archaeology should appear in the writing of figures as influential as Crawford and van Deman likely explains the success of the concept. From this point onward, it permeated Anglophone archaeology, finding its way into important foundational works, like those of amateur archaeologist Leslie Grinsell and landscape historian William Hoskins (Stoddart and Zubrow 1999:686).
The archaeological debates of the 1970s and 1980s witnessed the deployment of the palimpsest concept on both sides of the processual / postprocessual divide, as well as on both sides of the Atlantic (see, for example, Bailey 1981; Binford 1978; Foley 1981; Hodder and Millett 1980; Renfrew 1981; Rowntree and Conkey 1980). These uses,
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together with a recognition of the landscape as a category of archaeological analysis in the 1990s (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Bender 1992; Rossignol and Wandsnider 1992), spawned an explosion of palimpsest-related conversation (for an overview of this research since the late 1970s, see Holdaway and Wandsnider 2008a). Near the end of 2011, a Google™ Scholar search of the terms “palimpsest” and “landscape” returned just over 12,000 references, more than 5,500 of which were archaeological; the majority of these references had been published after 2004.
Stoddart and Zubrow note that
a key debate in interpreting palimpsests is how much landscape, at any one moment, is a response to the inertia of prior investment, how much a consequence of intentionality and how much a process of re-
interpretation and reworking of a dynamic landscape. (Stoddart and Zubrow 1999:686)
In identifying this debate, however, they also draw attention to a few weaknesses of the palimpsest concept. In order to better demonstrate these weaknesses, I think it necessary to first explore what the word “landscape” might mean.
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