Feeling Forward into the Past: Depths and Surfaces in Archaeology

Abstract

As novice archaeologists learn to project their attention beyond what is immediately visible on the ground, in the company of experts who support them by drawing their attention through gestures, they develop a capacity to feel forward into the absent properties of the landscape. A multisensory exercise, this capacity constitutes a movement not only to the future but also into a deeply buried past. This experience, common to the practice of excavation, has been recently questioned by the landscape approach and the archaeology of the contemporary past, which have invited practitioners to lift the past up to the surface. Unlike the traditional corporeal tendency to look downward, these approaches have encouraged archaeologists to raise their heads and walk the past, following the image of an unfolding horizon. This contrast suggests continuity between the ecology of movement and time concepts. I argue that concepts of time are not abstract entities, fixedly stored inside the mind, but sentient acts of conceptualization that depend on the dynamic field of forces in which things and people become entangled. As sentient conceptualizations, concepts are neither discovered nor constructed, but grow as archaeologists learn to find their ways through materials in a world in constant formation.

Keywords:

• senses
• gestures
• time concepts
• gravity
• things

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the archaeologists with whom I have worked. Without their support this article would have been impossible. I would also like to thank Tim Ingold, Gordon Noble, Jeff Oliver, Chris Gosden and Marionne Cronin for commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. The article concentrates on how conceptualization relates to archaeological practice in the field. However, research in archaeology does not stop when trowels are put aside or practitioner stop surveying the landscape, which probably contributes in different ways to how archaeologists think about time. Nevertheless, as I have argued elsewhere, similar relationships between practice and conceptualization can be found in other contexts, such as the study of samples under the microscope (see Simonetti 2012).

2. Three absences need to be distinguished here. First, there are all the things that are absent to novices because they do not hold the skill to perceive them, such as the differences in the color of soils. Second, there are all the things one might know but cannot perceive, such as the end point of a familiar road. Third, there are things one has never seen before such as an unknown road. These absences constantly play a role in learning how to follow the hidden traces of the past. However, the last one seems particularly prominent. Often archaeologists have to excavate stuff they have not seen before, which allows things to surprise us! (Edgeworth 2012).

3. The anthropological readership of this paper should not expect a thick ethnographic description of the data introduced. As good examples to think with, ethnographic vignettes are subsidiary to the argument this article attempts to make, which is mainly philosophical, although meant for a wide interdisciplinary audience. Having said this, philosophy is understood here, in a very anthropological sense, as “philosophy with the people in” (Ingold 1992, 696).

4. The verb to find can refer either to ongoing processes, as in “I try to find my keys”, or reached states, as in “I find my keys”. The same goes for the verb “to look” in the difference between “looking for” and “looking at”. In that sense, they are inherently paradoxical terms. In this particular case, these two uses seem to be combined.

5. By bringing examples from different archaeological contexts, my intention is not to erase their differences but point to some common similarities. Studying “your own” or “someone else’s” past certainly leads to different types of archaeology (Trigger 1984). Such differences are beyond the goals of this paper.

6. Sensory explorations can be seen as unfolding in multiple other directions. For example, as archaeologists try not to step on what is being trowelled, they also move backwards. Usually the trowel penetrates the soil away in front of the person and moves towards the body pushing slightly downwards. Ultimately, feeling forward, is not just downward but all aground, involving not just the hand but the entire body which, in theory, would extend to the feet as archaeologists walk the ground to survey the landscape (see Ingold 2011,33).

7. The emotional stances from which archaeologists engage with things vary immensely depending on the circumstances and the history of relations each archaeological community develops with the material culture being uncovered, which could certainly arouse negative feelings. Nonetheless, the general tendency in archaeology is still to look after the past and its preservation.

8. Gestures are crucial for understanding the relationship between time and space. We cannot tell for sure what people mean only by looking at the linguistic content, as it does not index the location of different temporal aspects (McNeil 1996; Núñez and Sweetzer 2006). For example, the word “depth” is used in multiple contexts where “depth” is not necessarily located below the ground as in “depth of field”. Gestures, and other forms of visual representation, allow paying attention to the subtle directionalities of time, which have been overlooked by abstract philosophical dichotomies such as the one between the experience and measurement of time (Gosden 1994). The directionality of both experience and measurement vary depending on how scientists habitually move (Simonetti 2012).

9. Although I agree a focus on surfaces can be fruitful, these cannot be reduced to those available through vision. Modernity not only uses depth to justify occlusion and linearity in history but tends to have a shallow understanding of history. To reconcile surfaces and depth, first we need to acknowledge the difference between surface and superficiality (see Gonzalez-Ruibal 2012).

10. Edgeworth (2012) pushes this critique a bit too far. In trying to avoid the risk of relativism, challenging the literary critique of the production of knowledge in postprocesual archaeology (Schanks and Tilley 1987), Edgeworth suggests a primaveral encounter with raw materials (Lucas 2012).

11. This influential approach in anthropology borrows ideas from Amerindian cosmologies, whose understanding of the relation between nature and culture is supposed to contrast radically with that of western science. Rather than resulting from the development of multiple systems of belief carried by bodies that share a common biology (western multiculturalism), human diversity would result from the development of radically different bodies that share a common soul (Amerindian multinaturalism). Although intellectually sound, this argument provides no future to the mind-body dualism of western science beyond the void produced by what seems like a carefully orchestrated play of alterities that somehow perfectly mirror each other.

12. Unlike Uexküll I do not believe the “worlds” scientists inhabit are independent semiotic systems superimposed upon an inaccessible Nature. Following the sentient aspect of conceptualization, we cannot draw the line that divides our concepts from the habitual ways in which we appropriate different environments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristián Simonetti

Cristián Simonetti is a research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen and a lecturer in Anthropology at the Programa de Antropología, Instituto de Sociología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has conducted fieldwork with land and underwater archaeologists in Chile and Scotland. His research focuses on the perception and communication of knowledge, the role of corporeal movement in processes of enskillment, the use of technology, and the particular contexts of practice in which archaeological knowledge is constituted. It concentrates especially on the relationship between experience and conceptualization, particularly on how archaeologists and other scientists studying the past understand time and space. He is currently working on scientific understandings of time in the interdisciplinary study of climate change.