Interpretative Archaeology [1 ed.] 0854968423, 9780854968428

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Interpretative Archaeology Archaeology, most of us learnt in school, consists in the painstaking d igging up and sifting of relics from extinct cultures; hardly an exciting or indeed interesting activity - for most of us. Archaeologists and anthropologists, professional and otherwise, know better. In the buried structures and detritus of ancient cultures can be found a world of knowledge and insight - empirical and theoretical - into their cultures as well as our own, This fascinating volume brings these worlds to life, by integrating recent developments in anthropological and sociological theory with a series of detailed studies of prehistoric material culture. It is an exploration of the manner in which semiotic, hermeneutic, Marxist, and post-structuralist approaches radically alter our understanding of the past, and provides a series of innovative studies of key areas of interest to archaeologists and anthropologists. Christopher Tilley, Department of Anthropology and Institute of Archaeology, University College London

EXPLORATIONS IN ANTHROPOLOGY A University College London Series Series Editors: Barbara Bender, John Gledhill and Bruce Kapferer

Interpretative Archaeology

Edited by Christopher Tilley

First published 1993 by Berg Publishers Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Christopher Tilley 1993 ·

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Interpretative archaeology I edited by Christopher Tilley.

p.aem. -- (Explorations in anthropology)a Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-85496-842-3 (cloth). -- ISBN 0-85496-850-4 (paper) 1 . Archaeology-Philosophy. 2. Archaeology. I. Tilley. Christopher Y. II. Series. CC72.156 1 993

92-25568

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 13: 978-0-854-96842-8 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-85496-850-3 (pbk)

ToMoa

Contents Preface

ix

Introduction: Interpretation and a Poetics of the Past

Christopher Tilley

1

Part I: Space, Architecture and the Body 1. 2.

3.

4.

Frameworks for an Archaeology of the Body Tim Yates

31

The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space Julian Thomas

73

Interpreting Causewayed Enclosures in the Past and the Present Mark Edmonds

99

Monumental Choreography: Architecture and Spatial Representation in Late Neolithic Orkney Colin Richards

143

Part II: Symbolism, Politics and Power: Alternative Discourses 5.

Space, Subjectivity, Power and Hegemony: Megaliths and Long Mounds in Earlier Neolithic Brittany Trevor Kirk

6. The Axe and the Torso: Symbolic Structures in the Neolithic of Brittany Julian Thomas and Christopher Tilley

181

225

Part III: Archaeology and Capitalism: The Institution and Society 7.

Notes Towards an Archaeology of Capitalism Matthew Johnson

327

viii 8.

9.

Contents Discourse, Totalization and 'The Neolithic' Julian Thomas

357

Prospecting Archaeology Christopher Tilley

395

10. Digging with the Pen: Novel Archaeologies and Literary

Traditions Christopher Evans

417

Notes on the Contributors

449

Index

451

Preface One of a legion of criticisms directed against the recent emergence of a 'post-processual' archaeology has been that theoretical exposition dominates and it lacks many clearly worked-out examples tackling archaeological data. Those given often discuss contemporary rather than prehistoric material culture. The purpose of this book is to address that 'failure' and provide a sense of the excitement of carrying out archaeological research in a new way, inscribing the fragments of the past back into the present through various forms of narrative structures. The studies in it consist of detailed explorations of the past and one of those institutions desiring to document and control it archaeology. It is a theoretical book and the perspectives put forward in it will be of general relevance to archaeological research. The theoretical perspectives used by the contributors draw on hermeneutic, structural-Marxist and post-structuralist discourses. However, the book does not valorize and elevate theory, discussing it in the abstract and putting it on a pedestal. It rather aims to put theory into action to constitute the past and the present in a fresh manner. The book is divided into three parts. The first explores the relationship between the human body and its representation, space and architecture. The issues discussed are fundamental to any consideration of the past: What do representations of the body mean in prehistoric art? What light do they throw on sex/ gender systems? How do architectural forms impact on the body as it moves through space? How does the control. of bodily movement in domestic and funerary architecture relate to patterns of social control and forms of perception of the world? Part II explores the relationship between symbolism in material culture, politics and power, using the specific example of Neolithic Brittany. The two chapters approach the rich archaeological evidence from this region from alternative points of reference to produce a politics of the past for the present and reinscribe mute archaeological materials within textual forms that make them speak in different voices. ix

X

Preface

Part III aims to show self-reflexively the manner in which the discipline of archaeology constitutes both itself and its objects of study as an institution operating within late capitalism. The key issues raised here are: How does capitalism constitute itself through material forms? In what manner does archaeology create its own discursive objects? How does archaeology as an institution represent itself to the public? In what ways are the results of archaeological research reworked within a wider culture? Underlying all the chapters is a realization that the form of textual inscription of archaeological materials is as important as discursive content. Writing the past in a different way is part of the process of producing a different past relevant to the present. The form and nature of interpretations of the past and a desire to explore the possibility of a poetics of the past is taken up in the Introduction, which situates the individual chapters in relation to these issues. Christopher Tilley

Introduction: Interpretation and a Poetics of the Past

Christopher Tilley On Interpretation

'To interpret' is one of those incorrigible and annoying little verbs whose meaning is apparently simple and yet simultaneously remains almost impossible to define. The very existence of this verb and the noun 'interpretation' suggest this to be a special kind of activity and at least relatively distinct from others. But what precisely do we do when we interpret? When does interpre­ tation begin or end, and how do we know when we are interpret­ ing? I count the numbers of words in this book. Having arrived at the end result have I interpreted it in some way? Most people would probably answer no. I note the book is written in English, but does this count as an interpretative judgement? Probably not. I describe the contents of the book. Is this description interpreta­ tion? The terrain is now more blurred. The borderline between these two activities merges because no description of anything can be exhaustive and involves a process of selection of what appears to be important based on prior interpretative judge­ ments. I state that the book is contradictory, stylistically complex, ironic, depressing, rubbisha- this appears immediately as an obvi­ ous interpretative act in the way counting words or pages does not or describing contents may not.

Interpretation and Belief We intuitively know that only some activity can be described as 'interpretative'. Consequently it can be maintained that any prac­ tice of interpretation is dependent on certain prior logical condi­ tions. The interpreter has to be in a special epistemic situation with regard to that which is to be interpreted - the object of 1

2

Interpretative Archaeology

knowledge. We only have to interpret if we are puzzled or igno­ rant about something. Another way of putting this is that we interpret only if things are not obvious to us. If we simply accept something as given: this is a dog, that is a rock carving of a man, we cannot properly be said to be interpreting. If it is obvious to me that an animal lying at my feet is a dog whenever I see this animal at close quarters, I could not truly be said to be interpreting it as a dog. I simply accept the classification without further reflection. However, if I see a dim black and white moving blur on the hori­ zon and maintain that it is a dog rather than a badger, I am inter­ preting through observing behavioural characteristics and colours, among other things. I put what I see in terms of a wider context and come to a judgement about what I believe to be the case. This serves to introduce the point that in any act of interpre­ tation we do something, and that something is to think and reflect on the basis of previous personal experience and the wider cultur­ al (and academic) tradition in which we have been socialized. But while all interpretation must involve thought and reflection, not all thinking may be interpreting. Let us investigate this further. Many technical operations such as counting the numbers of pot sherds on a settlement site do not involve interpretation. But once I start to make statements such as 'the high frequency of sherds is unusual for a site of this type', or classify the sherds according to specific characteristics such as shape, colour, type of temper, type of decoration, etc., I begin interpreting in that decisions have to be constantly made for each sherd in relation to the classification sys­ tem that has been established. Interpretation then involves identi­ fication. It usually involves classification of some kind, and all archaeology is dependent on making classificatory decisions or judgements. Interpretation involves making choices. But not all classification is interpretative work. Classifying that which appears obvious to me or youa- this is a mattock, that is a tranchet axe - is not an interpretative act but rather non-critical belief or acceptance that this is the case. All interpretation is dependent on non-critical belief, on accepting certain things as being the case. When it is obvious to me that the figurine is a frog, I do not inter­ pret it as a frog. Obviousness blocks the very possibility of inter­ pretation which must involve varying degrees of uncertainty. When it seems as if it is a frog, when there is doubt, the statement 'that figurine is a frog' is an interpretative one. What any particu­ lar person thinks is obvious may not, of course, be obvious to

Introduction

3

another. Interpretation is therefore dependent on the subjectivity and background of the interpreter, which will be to varying degrees (in some cases not at all) shared with others. Following Barnes this can be put formally as: 'If it is obvious to a person that x is F, then the person is not interpreting x as F' (Barnes 1988: 12). Interpretation must then involve the possibility of being mistaken and remaining open to counter-possibilities relevant to the case in hand. Virtually all interpretative statements or remarks in the social sciences share this characteristic.

Indeterminacy and Plausibility To interpret, then, has its foundations in (1) necessarily accepting that many things in the world are obvious; (2) being uncertain about specific entities that are encountered requiring interpreta­ tive acts involving classificatory procedures, identification, tak­ ing decisions and making judgements. Interpretations are statements which cannot be simply described in terms of taking on the values true or false. In most cases in the social sciences interpretations are not abandoned because they are falsified but because they are replaced by other interpretations exploiting other possibilities inherent in the same material. Given the poly­ semous nature of social acts and material culture, interpretations always lack finality. The same material is always open to differ­ ent and further interpretations. Interpretation may come to a stop but there is no possibility of its ending or being fixed once and for all. The interpretative encounter is inherently non-completable. Its chief characteristic is one of plausibility. If an interpretation made by one archaeologist is accepted by another, this is not usu­ ally because the reader or commentator believes that which is stated in the text to be true but that it seems likely given the lack of any other relevant counter possibilities at a particular moment in time. When we interpret x as F we are never in a position to know that x is in fact F. It means that given a set of observations and arguments, x can be taken to be or understood in some way as F or as if it were F. To give an interpretation we have to provide reasons and con­ ditions for understanding it as such, to be able, in effect, to expe­ rience it in a particular way. Interpreting material culture in a particular manner involves learning how to experience from a particular perspective. So interpretation involves experiencing as.

4

Interpretative Archaeology

What constitutes a good or competent interpretation? No satis­ factory answer can be given to this question since, as is the case with most things in life, all available guidelines are vague and always involve an appeal to norms such as clarity, coherence, lack of serious contradictions, parsimoniousness, etc., which can scarce­ ly be realistically defined. The title of this book is both ironic and paradoxical. Interpretative archaeology does not exist. If it did, as the title of this book implies, there would have to be such a thing as non-interpretative archaeology. All archaeologies are interpreta­ tive. It is just that some texts appear to claim otherwise . The book's title only may have some signifying force when situated in terms of those archaeological texts written since the 1960s which, by exploit­ ing a common cultural convention, have pretended to be doing something far grander than interpretation by invoking the name of 'science'. For some 'scientific' archaeologists to refer to archaeology as an active interpretative process, lacking in rigid guidelines as to how to proceed, is simply not good enough. They want certainty and revere the pollen curve or Munsell's soil colour chart or animal bones. At heart this archaeology is pervaded by a destructive cyni­ cism which may be defined as 'enlightened false consciousness' (Sloterdijk 1988: 5). World-weary such archaeologists have long given up any attempt to understand the past in social terms, which I take to be the goal of interpretation in archaeology, but they will still carry on: that excavation report diligently recording the num­ ber of bifaces in structure A with soil colour code 28B will be writ­ ten, and we will know how many sheep metatarsals were found and all the snails will be dutifull y recorded. Do acts of interpretation increase our knowledge of the past, or does one simply replace another? Do we move in any sense closer to a goal of a greater understanding of the past? A cynic might view recent 'developments' in some so-called post-processual archaeology as no different from 'traditional' or 'new' forms of archaeological practice. We have no better understanding of the past, just a babble of contradictory voices and a saturation of mean­ ing with an emphasis on material forms as constituting a significa­ tive system dialectically linked with social relations and social structures (Shanks and Tilley 1987; Tilley 1989). The emphasis on polysemy and material culture as a multivo­ cal code breaks down the very possibility of the archaeologist leg­ islating once and for all on the meaning of the past and opens out the possibility for new forms of understanding. The failure of

Introduction

5

'post-processual' archaeology to disclose the meaning of the past is perhaps its strength for there is no one meaning to be disclosed. Rather than seeing a proliferation of interpretations as an obsta­ cle to knowledge, we can use this situation profitably by taking this very development as an object of knowledge. We can ask: How is it that the archaeological record has the meaning it does for its various readers? All archaeology involves the adoption of interpretative procedures that it ought to be possible to identify and describe. Underlying the chapters in this book is a common concern with the semiotics of material culture. The concern is to understand the conventions and operations by means of which material culture, conceived as a significative practice, produces meaning effects in relation to the social. We attempt to identify the effects significative meaning has on its observers and readers, both in the past and the present. To understand these effects in relation to past social actors we create narrative accounts in which the identified effects of signification are embedded through any particular discourse. We complement and complete the material forms we have to hand by weaving a series of recon­ structed events around them. In relation to the contemporary act of archaeology we are interested in the manner in which certain meaning effects of material culture are emphasized by individual authors and woven into interpretative accounts. Why is this meaningful or important to the archaeologist?

Culturally Emergent Properties Material culture may be physically embodied but it is at the same time culturally emergent. Only extensional predicates are needed to write about physical objects so that I may describe a flower or a cultural object while in no sense be interpreting it. Facts of nature lend themselves to taxonomies; facts of culture require discourse. Intentional predicates are also required to provide an interpreta­ tion of material culture because it only exists and can only be iden­ tified as meaningful within a cultural context. Material culture exhibits socially significant properties which cannot be simply ascribed to the physical object embodying them, which is why it can be described as culturally emergent. Precisely because material culture has this property of being culturally emergent there can be no simple or formal demarcation between what is internal to, or is in, and that which is external to, or outside, the object. We can, as

6

Interpretative Archaeology

archaeologists, describe relatively simply the externally visible attributes of material culture by identifying certain traits. This is, at best, low-level interpretative identification of observable features. To make that which is culturally emergent 'visible' requires depth interpretation. This is always a contemporary and subjective act. We impute culturally emergent properties in the artefact; we do not discover them in in the same sense that we may find that a pot sherd has been shell-tempered. That which is culturally emergent in the artefact is appropriated for discourse through the theoretical frames of reference, schemes of imagination and perception, that the archaeologist brings to bear. These structure the manner in which the external world of material culture is understood, and both demand and permit that a variety of possible meanings be imputed as a result of the heterogeneity of social and theoretical contexts in which interpretative acts take place and that on which they set to work. A number of competing and incompatible inter­ pretations may thus be made of the archaeological record. Sometimes we may not be able to choose between them. Each interpretation draws out different aspects of the same material when viewed through a particular theoretical lens. In other cases one interpretation may be judged to be better on the grounds that it makes the most sense of the data, i.e. it draws out its significance for others and is the most interesting. In the process of interpreting we, in effect, remake the world of material culture, reinscribe it in a new frame of reference. We alter the manner in which we perceive and understand a given set of material objects and their relationships. Material culture pattern­ ing is, of course, totally dependent on the manner in which we regard it. The world acts in the way our 'true' descriptions say it does. The way in which we describe the world is dependent on prior schemes of understanding and perception, which make us regard certain properties in the artefact as significant rather than others. Disciplines, and the theoretical paradigms in favour at any one time, always attempt to stabilize the manner in which we view the world. Certain ways of understanding and interpreting mater­ ial culture become entrenched. Consequently, there is always resis­ tance to novel interpretations. But the paradox is that a constant striving for novelty, part of our modern condition, continually demands new interpretations, new ways of seeing. The 'truth' of an interpretation in archaeology, in effect, boils down to its accept­ ability to others because all the statements made are radically

Introduction

7

underdetermined by the evidence in one way or another. What that evidence actually is depends on various technologies and methodological procedures and theoretical constructs.

Interpretative Strategies The traditional way of viewing material culture, and more wide­ ly the archaeological record, is that it is in some way a self-suffi­ cient repository of meaning. The task of the archaeologist is to develop theoretical and methodological tools that will enable the efficient extraction of this meaning. The meaning of material cul­ ture is furthermore regarded as stable and invariant. The alterna­ tive position, taken by the authors in this book, is to regard the archaeological record as the end product of the way in which contemporary individuals experience it. What the archaeological record is, the properties it manifests, is constituted through theo­ retical labour acting on it. No meaning is determined or indelibly privileged by something inherent in the archaeological record itself. The radical effect of this second position is to redirect the way in which we evaluate and understand archaeological accounts of the past. We are no longer obsessed with fidelity to the evidence or the facts erroneously regarded as some kind of solid factual bedrock beyond disputation, but put more emphasis on the manner in which these facts and this evidence are 'read' by the archaeologist or appropriated in her or his discourse . Interpretations of the past report on the physical objects under study but, more crucially, they are dependent on the particular interpretative strategy employed and a wider interpretative com­ munity that validates and gives 'weight' to that strategy - rela­ tions of power. An interpretative strategy determines: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

What kinds of evidence are taken into account. What counts as relevant facts. What counts as relevant counter-evidence. The manner in which the evidence is articulated in discourse. The kinds of conclusions that can be reached or are acceptable.

Material culture can be considered to be a differential network or fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to the social world . Elements of the archaeological record are in a perpetual process of interplay, one on the other. To interpret mate-

8

Interpretative Archaeology

rial culture requires us to move beyond the artefact and its associ­ ations, and attempt to reconstruct a semiotics of meaning. Interpretation projects the continuous onto the discontinuous, fill­ ing in the gaps between the fragments with the cement of dis­ course. This operation requires understanding the modes of signification embodied in material culture and the interpretative operations embodied within contemporary archaeological prac­ tices which are always in dialectical relationship to each other. As the contributors to this book make clear, the archaeological record may actively resist our interpretations, and to understand how this takes place requires an understanding of the relationship between material forms and the past and present sociohistorical relations in which they are created and transformed. What in essence we are dealing with is the way our and other cultures produce and manipulate meaning. In historical perspective any interpretation is bound to be transient. This is not just because new data will be accumulated (old data are often forgotten) but because each era produces its own series of codes for interpretation and determi­ mate forms of interpretative acts. These are the means by which research traditions are constituted and meanings produced.

Interpretations and the Context All interpretation is of necessity a process of contextualization. The interpretative sense of the artefact becomes mobilized or brought to consciousness by being placed in a wider context. Hodder has emphasized this. He defines context as: 'the totality of the relevant dimensions of variation around any one object' (Hodder 1986: 139). 'Relevant' refers to 'significant relationship' and 'significance' refers to a relationship necessary for discerning the object's meaning. But Hodder's text slides into a tissue of qualifications and extensions to this definition until context becomes undefinable. The evident desire for a non-contextual definition of context is a contradiction in terms. Hodder's context takes as its starting point some entity (arte­ fact, room, settlement, culture): 'an object out of context is not read­ able' (ibid : 141 ) . Context is a matter of simple archaeological association: 'in many areas contextual archaeology can hardly begin until more data have been collected' (ibidt: 142). The context here is firmly the past, not the present, and conditions for successful interpretation are embedded in that past. What Hodder forgets here is the context of the interpreting archaeologist. In another chapter of

9

Introduction

Reading the Past this is discussed, but it is interesting to note that

when Hodder writes about interpreting archaeological data this part of the context is ignored. The 'con' in Hodder's context is to talk about a politics of archaeology on the one hand, and an act of contextual archaeological interpretation on the other, but not in the same 'context' in his text. While a dialectic between past and pre­ sent is claimed (ibid.: 1 70) little, in fact, exists. Contexts include both the interpreting archaeologist(s) and the questions asked and entities existing in the archaeological record. These are always sliding and changing, never fixed or given since the context is decided upon by future or prior analytic intention­ al structures. In inserting artefacts into contexts we find ourselves in a hermeneutic circle which can never be completely described. Context is not just a matter of the artefact and its associations on a site, within a region, etc; it is also a matter of history - of inter­ pretative context, of a dialectical relationship between the archae­ ologist and that studied . Archaeological contexts are always changing temporally in accordance with how they are framed by disciplinary codes for producing knowledges. Part of the context of material culture is the contemporary event of its understanding. The contemporary archaeologist is not a tabula rasa on which the context of the archaeological record sim­ ply inscribes itself awaiting its meanings to be captured . This makes nonsense of educating people in archaeology and would make all theory bankrupt. Part of contextual archaeology must involve an understanding of how contexts get defined and recog­ nized. The primary contextualization of the past is its relationship to other contextualized identities: gender, class, ethnicity, educa­ tion, social position. Recent 'post-processual' archaeology, and the kind of interpretative archaeology embodied in this book, is not an attempt to preserve or transmit a canon of thought. Any men­ tion of gays, black and ethnic theorists (this work is a while, male, ethnic British production), feminists, Marxists, Anglo-Saxon liber­ als makes it quite clear that this would be a nonsense.

From Meaning to Sense

- ..... -,·

Throughout the account so far meaning has been stressed - the meaning of material culture, material culture as meaningfully constituted as a significative system having definite series of effects on those who create, use and interpret it. But perhaps this

10

Interpretative Archaeology

term 'meaning' needs to be abandoned. Rather than asking: What is the meaning of this pot design, etc.? we should shift into anoth­ er register and ask : How can sense be made of this pot design? Putting the emphasis on sense rather than meaning resolves the difficulty which inevitably arises from an initial emphasis on meaning inviting the question: Whose meaning? That of the pre­ historic artisan? Or the contemporary archaeologist? Making sense of the archaeological record brings out much better the nature of archaeology as a contemporary practice. That the archaeologist interprets material culture for contemporary others, and that there can be no possibility of attempting to capture a meaning intrinsic to the artefact itself standing apart from the con­ temporary interpretative operations performed on it. If through interpretations we attempt to make sense of the past we are emphasizing the indelible linkage effected between that being interpreted and the process of interpretation that always produces something new in the sense that a meaning an artefact may have had in the past will never be directly reflected through contempo­ rary discourse. Interpretation in archaeology is the business of making sense of material culture, and if something appears to make no sense, to defy understanding, it is the business of the archaeologist to make sense out of it through different forms of interpretative operations. Interpreting material culture is an active and creative act rather than a passive process amenable to formal­ ization in terms of guidelines for research. To inquire about the meaning of the artefact requires the involvement of the sensibili­ ties of the inquirer and the effect it has on him or her. Interpretation involves the response of the archaeologist to that studied. And this is far from implying an advocacy or elevation of a radicalized personal subject as a key term in considering how interpretations take place. Thomas, for example, (chapter 2, this volume), outlines a general hermeneutic perspective for under­ standing space in relation to megalithic monuments. Space is con­ ceived not as an abstract entity, a container for human existence, but as a continuous process of structuration in relation to the social. The key category here is that of experience: the manner in which social actors responded to their social world. Such primor­ dial experiences in prehistory cannot, of course, be lived through by an act of empathy, but a new understanding of a prehistoric sense of place and space can be found through a detailed account of the manner in which built structures affect bodily movement

Introduction

11

through space. Space i s 'read' and experienced through cultural codes. Bodily movement through space is simultaneously action and interpretation and acts as part and parcel of the formation of subjective identities. Different spaces may be linked to the forma­ tion of the self and relations of power.

On Poetics Archaeology has for some time now been in the process of uncov­ ering its unconscious: rhetoric. The discipline is beginning to undertake a 'linguistic turn' through the 'discovery' that material culture has to be written . A focus on the relation between l an­ guage and its referents, the relation between writing and the material traces of the past, is the project entailed by a poetics of the past. It involves a problematization of the entire project of archaeology as traditionally conceived by focusing attention on the forms in which written archaeological texts are constructed and interpreted. Such a 'development' (e.g. Shanks and Tilley 1 987; Hodder 1 989; Bapty and Yates 1 990; Tilley 1 990; 1 991) is hardly novel. It has recently had an enormous impact in anthropology through the work of Boon (1 982); Herzfel d (1 983), Fernandez (1 986), Clifford and Marcus and their collaborators (Clifford and Marcus 1 986; Clifford 1 988); is prominent in sociology (e.g. Brown 1977; Andersen 1978; Atkinson 1990a) with its heartland in literary crit­ icism or critical theory (e.g. Culler 1975; 1981; Belsey 1 980; Lentricchia 1 983; Eagl eton 1 983; Said 1 983) and has a common ground in the post-structuralist and hermeneutic thought of Barthes, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucaul t, Lacan, Gadamer, Ricoeur . . . The list, either by discipline, author or title could fill a book in itself and is best terminated. It constitutes part of the intertext of this chapter and the contributions to this book.

Intertextuality 'Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextual­ ity replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double'. (Kristeva 1986: 37)

12

Interpretative Archaeology

This term, initially coined by Kristeva, and elaborated by others (see Worton and Stilla1 990), draws attention to the fact that the text cannot exist as a hermetic or self-sufficent whole, nor can it function as a closed system. The writer is always a reader of texts before he or she can be a creator of them. It follows that each text is shot through with references, acknowledged or otherwise, to other texts. There can be no original text. Furthermore, the text is only available through a process of reading and what the reader understands or finds in the text is influenced by previous read­ ings, other texts. Texts thus have a double dependence on others in their writing and their reading. Prior texts contribute to a wider code making possible significative effects. Intertextuality does not just refer to prior texts and influences as traditionally conceived within a history of ideas framework but includes anonymous discursive practices whose origins are lost within a discipline and within a culture. The implication of this is that any text's meaning changes historically according to its conditions of reading. Texts are not simply present to us in a fixed form but are continually shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures. They can be said to be in a continual process of structuration which both produces and transforms their mean­ ing. Determinate historical conditions both constrain the text and are preconditions both for its writing and its reception through reading. This notion of the intertext provides a powerful way of understanding both archaeological texts and the non-verbal text of the archaeological record that the archaeologist reads to con­ struct his or her text. To read or to attempt to interpret the archae­ ological record is to read it in relation to an entire set of culturally encoded beliefs, which go to make up our contemporary experi­ ence. The margin, the boundary between written archaeological text and 'written' archaeological reality, is constantly blurred in that the latter is only available to us through a system of repre­ sentations. It is not a final referent but a link in a chain of semio­ sis involving signification through objects and words. The interpretative archaeological text is semiotically mediated not just by the externala'real' to which it refers (which refers to others - artefact to artefact, tradition to tradition) but also by a culture and by the archaeological intertext or the system by archaeologi­ cal works, such as this one, come to be written. Within that sys­ tem certain prior texts become canonized and other texts play off them in a relation of positivity or negativity or simply through

Introduction

13

repetition. For an archaeological text to have any significance it

has to stand in relation to a discourse, a previous body of work,

an enterprise both creating and limiting the possibility for new work. The position I wish to take is far more materialist than tra­ ditional Marxism or the materialism (emphasis on facts) of a tra­ ditional archaeology. To insist that the past is inscribed in discourse is to break from the idealist distinction between the real past and the past as an object of knowledge. It is also materialist in that it insists that archaeology is a result of (specifiable) discur­ sive practices operative in a culture at a time and in a place.

Narrative Narrative is the Other, the alter-ego, of a scientific archaeology. Through narration, like any storyteller the archaeologist pro­ duces rather than reflects a referent in providing an interpretative account, in storytelling. In a traditional fictional story there is a sequence of events which are conceived as independent of their manifestation in a discourse. The narrative accounts of the social sciences involve the active sequencing of events within a particu­ lar discourse involving structured relations of dependency. Narrative both reports events and is itself an event. Reality is never given but situated in the narrative. Narrative structures do not mimetically describe the world but rather redescribe it, a semantic innovation in which something new is inscribed in the world through language (Ricoeur 1 984). There have been claims that narrative accounts are more than rhetorical devices. Narrative actually re-presents the world the way that world is. Narrative makes up an essential ontological essence of human action and experience. We make up narratives; we also live through them in our lives. As a unity of experiences and actions the self is constituted as the subject of a life story (Carr 1986: 128). A lived first-order narrative readily translates into the second­ order discursive narrative. Such a perspective has plausibility if the subject of history is the individual but runs into serious diffi­ culties if extended to encompass plural entities - group strategies and societies. Archaeological narrative embraces all the features of theatrics. The theatre has four main limits or closures: 1 . Outside its walls is the real world of day-to-day practice. 2. Inside the theatre one is in a different physical and social space.

14

Interpretative Archaeology

3. Within this other space there is the limit between stage and audience marking off the space of observation from the space observed. 4. Back stage is the space of theatrical machinery and direction. What is seen by the spectators on the stage is dependent on the complex support from this invisible beyond. In archaeological narrative the outside 'real' world is the evi­ dence, the 'facts' . These are external to the theatrical space of the archaeological narrative which mobilizes the facts. The theatre is the internal world of the archaeological text. On the stage of the book is the narrative unwinding its dramatics. Hidden in the wings is the archaeological author, the narrator, with all the methodological and theoretical machinery at his or her disposal. The spectator is the reader of the text. Traditional realist theatre need not 'translate' into the traditional realist text. Boundaries between performers and audience may be broken down. Similarly the reader can be actively invited to constitute part of the text's meaning through the adoption of fresh narrative styles. Archaeological narratives have often been constituted by grand plots with grander titles: 'The emergence of civilization', 'The domestication of Europe', 'The social foundations of prehis­ toric Britain', 'The food crisis in prehistory', and so on. Instead of these, of traditional historical narrative translated into an archae­ ological form, we could envisage an alternative: narrative as a cloud - settling, dispersing, moving on. Clouds have no fixed form. They change, grow and disperse, are infinitely variable, infinitely interpretable, sometimes dense, at other moments thin. Various papers in this book experiment with narration and its relation to material culture and the archaeologist. Richards (chapter 4, this volume) points out the problem of analysing monuments on the basis of two-dimensional plans. These inevitably tend to be visualized, interpreted and recounted as plans. The architectural plan becomes thoroughly fetishized and assumes a life of its own in which people actually moving through and experiencing space become forgotten. Richard's chapter is an excellent example, to borrow a term from Geertz (1973), of 'thick description' in archaeology, which is essentially evocative in style. Contrasting the sacred architecture of Maes Howe with the domestic space of Barnhouse and the ritual arena of the Stones of Stenness, Richard' s narrative imaginatively

15

Introduction

brings out the effects these monuments would have had on human subjects experiencing them: moving into and out of, between and around them. He contrasts their impact in terms of light and darkness, sound, feeling, physical constriction or a sense of volume, dryness and dampness, hot and cold. In a few pages Richards tells us more about prehistoric Orkney than mul­ tiple volumes of excavation reports have done. Other texts exper­ iment with various forms of textual construction. Tilley (chapter 9, this volume) becomes a schoolboy to analyse the university prospectus. Yates (chapter 1 ) and Kirk (chapter 5) work back and forth between theoretical discussions and archaeological analyses in an attempt to simulate the internal dialectical relationship between theory and practice, avoiding the top-down, 'external' application of theory to practice. Thomas and Tilley (chapter 6) experiment by attempting to write a temporal ethnography of the Breton Neolithic. This text plays off and develops some ideas pre­ sent in other chapters by Thomas (chapter 2), and Kirk (chapter 5), but presents a different form of the articulation of these ideas with the archaeological evidence.

Interpretation and Discourse To undertake the study of material culture it now seems a neces­ sity not just to produce another interpretation of Bronze Age rock carvings or the Neolithic 'revolution', but also to advance an understanding of the conventions and operations of that institu­ tion and discipline whose primary concern is the interpretative study of material formsa- archaeology At present we sadly lack any convincing account of the role and function of archaeology in relation to contemporary society and the way society under­ stands itself. We also have only a fragmentary, primarily anecdo­ tal history of archaeology and we need a fuller understanding of the relationship of the discipline of archaeology to other forms of discourse such as literature, human geography, sociology and history. Tilley's contribution (chapter 9) analyses the petty struc­ tures of power in the archaeological institution through an ironic reading of the primary document by means of which it presents itself to the world and prospective initiates: the university prospectus. The concern is the way the prospectus persuades, validates, valorizes and participates in, rather than challenges, a reactionary conservative ethos. .•

16

Interpretative Archaeology

Archaeology as a discourse is constituted by systems of signi­ fication by which sense is made of material culture, an exertion of a constitutive imagination ordering the traces of the past. The meaning and 'shape' of the past is not in the artefact but in the discursive system that articulates it with others to make meaning. One potentially interesting way of looking at the manner in which archaeological interpretations are made is to analyse them in genealogical succession - approaches to palaeolithic cave art, European megaliths or the Beaker phenomenon and reconstruct the manner in which ladders of inference get built up and replaced over time. Archaeology as a discourse constitutes its own objects of knowledge on which it then sets to work. Thomas (chapter 8) presents a genealogy of a concept looking at the man­ ner in which the 'Neolithic' has radically changed its meaning in archaeological texts since the late nineteenth century. In doing so he problematizes the concept and shows the manner in which its meaning has shifted in relation to an anonymous networking of power in the discipline. Once archaeology has forged its own objects of knowledge such as the Neolithic they rapidly become confused with reality. Indeed, they become the reality which both permits and blocks future discourse. Analysing such concepts as they occur in texts heightens disciplinary awareness and poten­ tially sets us free from their constitutive tyranny.

Writing: Four Master Tropes White (1973; 1978) has emphasized the tropological strategies by means of which historians have constructed their objects of analysis claiming that the dominant trope changes from one peri­ od to the next. He claims a movement from metaphor to metonymy to synecdoche to irony. Each of these represents a dis­ tinct phase in historical interpretation. Metaphoric history involving comparisons and substitutions based on likeness is succeeded by work involving metonymic constitution of the his­ torical object in which meaning and order are introduced into a series of events by positing spatial and temporal series on the basis of contiguity. This is replaced by synecdochic interpretation involving a holistic perspective whereby the discourse infers qualities of the totality from the component part and in turn by an ironic turn in historical interpretation characterized by its self­ consciousness and self-reflexivity. It would be all too easy to

Introduction

17

extend the characterization to archaeology: antiquarianism repre­ senting a metaphorical relationship to the past; traditional archaeology characterized by metonymy; new archaeology with its emphasis on systemness as synecdoche and post-processual archaeology as involving the ironic turn. But the problem with this is that White's four tropes and their order of succession are also those of classical rhetoric. It appears that the model here may be far more powerful than the reality it purports to represent. It can be argued that contemporary interpretations in archaeology, as manifested in this book, put emphasis on and employ all these four tropes simultaneously. At a very basic level, our relationship with the past is always a metaphorical one. The written text purporting to re-present or re­ construct the past stands in a metaphorical relationship to that which is to be understood. Artefacts and their physical associa-. tions are transformed into words and the constructs of a gram­ mar and a language. Linkages are created through the act of writing a text. If metaphor is the 'dreamwork of language' (Davidson 1 979: 29), then archaeology is the dreamwork of the past, a trope based on resemblance, a comparison or substitution based on purported likeness. To claim that society is like a sys­ tem, an organism or a machine as in functionalist archaeology is to employ metaphor. What is peculiar is that such metaphors have been mobilized under the banner of a 'hard' science. The interpretation of the archaeological record relates as much to the interpreter and his or her use of language as to any originary experience (say of a prehistoric artisan) that might be attempted to be captured in a discourse. Metaphor is a way of knowing, of understanding, a mode of establishing associative connections and all language use employs it. All archaeological texts are thus highly contrived, 'artful' products. Metonymical relations are syntagmatic, between members of a particular chain. They involve moving from one thing to another on the basis of contiguity, producing meaning and order by posit­ ing spatial or temporal series. Archaeology is clearly always metonymical in form. Chains of events are used to connect attrib­ utes, artefacts and monuments together. Designs on a pot may be related to each other syntagmatically. They may be related to dif­ ferent designs on other artefacts (e.g. different types of zig-zag lines) associatively. Synecdoche is the act of totalization in which interpretation mobilizes fragments to stand for a wider whole.

18

Interpretative Archaeology

Changes in pot design 'mean' changes in social relations. Systems theory merely represent the apotheosis of a synecdochial process. Irony has come to the forefront in recent years: Who is writing? Who is speaking? What justification? What credentials? What insti­ tutional support? Why this will to truth?Why take it seriously? ...

Tree Writing and Rhizomic Discourse Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 3-25) contrast the tree and the rhi­ zome as two opposed metaphorical ways of thinking about the way in which interpretations take place and become written. The root-tree structure has dominated Western thought from Linnaean taxomonies to Chomskyan sentence structure dia­ grams. The tree becomes the image of the world, the root the image of the world tree. Tree structures are hierarchical and for­ malized .The tree of knowledge is rooted in the ground and branches out. It grows successively, one branch leading to anoth­ er, and so on. Knowledge is anchored by roots, foundations which cannot be questioned or everything would topple. One of these foundations, for example, is empiricism's reliance on senso­ ry perception to provide a guide to the world. The book aims to represent the world mimetically. It is 'realist' imitating the world as some art aims to imitate nature. The book itself is a taproot with pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. The tree view of knowledge and writing is one demanding a hierarchical stratified totality with limited and regularized connections between its ele­ ments. A typical example here would be the Marxist base superstructure model of the social totality with regularized con­ nections between the economic and an environmental field, and a view of the social totality as hierarchically stratified, to be described in terms of relations of dominance and determinancy. Rhizomic discourse sets up a different relationship between interpretation and the world. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish six principles: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Connection Heterogeneity Multiplicity Asignifying rupture Cartography Decalcomania

Introduction

19

By contrast to the tree, with its roots, a rhizome has no definite beginning or end. It is always, as it were, in the middle, between things. While the tree 'imposes the verb "to be" . . . the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and . . . and . . . and" ' (Oeleuze and Guattari 1988: 25). A rhizome needs no ontological grounding or foundational basis. Unlike trees with their roots the rhizome con­ nects any point to any other point. It establishes multiple connec­ tions in any direction rather than a unilineal or multilineal series linking diverse elements. Rhizomes are non-hierarchical horizon­ tal multiplicities whose components form unregulated networks. Rhizomes may be broken or shattered but they will start up again along old or new lines. The important thing is the threads of con­ nections, not the points or nodes between the threads. As multi­ plicities of threads, rhizomes do not respect classical boundaries described in terms of subject-object relations. The rhizome 'per­ tains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight' (ibid . : 2 1 ) . The tree metaphor requires a n absolute grounding for dis­ course in the realm of the non-discursive. It requires links, chains, flows in one direction or the other. It requires hierarchies of con­ cepts and structures, rules and laws for interpretation, proscribed pathways. Rhizomes can shoot up anywhere. Any point can be connected to any other. There is an infinite productivity for creat­ ing unexpected linkages, taking new directions, putting up shoots in new places. Trees aim to mimic the past; rhizomes pro­ duce it, run parallel with it rather than duplicate it. Abandoning the notion of the growing classical tree of knowledge and replac­ ing it with the concept of the rhizome requires that the interpreta­ tive encounter be built not on a priori and prescribed limits but on the possibility of an infinite network of meanings and correla­ tions to be made. To think in terms of the rhizome rather than the tree is to contest traditional ways of understanding and produc­ ing a discourse on material culture. It means questioning the con­ cepts associated with a traditional liberal humanism: autonomy, authority, certainty, totalization, system, centre, totality, hierar­ chy, origin, individualism, human nature . . . and their relationship to experience. It requires questioning grand theory with a place for everything and everything in its place and metanarratives on the past. Rhizomic discourse emphasizes interpretation as fol-

20

Interpretative Archaeology

lowing aleatory networks of pathways like a rabbit warren. We do not ask of a rabbit warren what it means; we are more inter­ ested in where it goes, which tunnel connects with the next, and soaon. To extend the metaphor, perhaps the classical tree-root image of knowledge, pervading archaeological writing, is in the autumn of its days. The leaves are falling, the taproot withering, and spring is unlikely to return. Material culture, as a rhizome, has no privileged entry point, no predetermined unity, no intrinsic hier­ archy of fragments. There is no longer any need to climb up a lad­ der of inference leading from technology to religion. Such categories are interspersed, they may not be conceived as rungs up which one passes. Archaeology itself has a rhizomic connec­ tion with the concerns of the present and its politics: no disinter­ ested stories, no non-mediated 'facts'. The key point is to give up the attempt to mimic the past in discourse but to produce texts that trace multiple connections between fragments of the past as constituted in the present. Rhizomic discourse on the past contin­ ually resituates and rearticulates the fragments weaving together fresh threads of connections rather than being bound by pre­ ordained categories that block thought. It is this kind of rhizomic discourse that Thomas and Tilley (chapter 6) begin to attempt to articulate, connecting together fragments of the past by tracing new rhizomic threads: pots and axes as bodies, colours of raw materials linked to body substances, wet pots and flesh opposed to dry bones, mounds and axes as solids, skulls and chambers as containers, tombs as torsos, torsos as axes. This constitutes a move towards a deterritorialization of the past as traditionally constituted, a fresh opening out of that past to the desiring machine of the present, which cannot bear to leave it alone.

The Politics of Poetics Interpretation rescues the traces of the past from obscurity. It brings them out, foregrounds and highlights them. Without the interpretative work of the archaeologist the past would remain dead and gone. The archaeologist makes the past come to life and have contemporary relevance. The image we have of the past is, after Benjamin, a dialectical one: 'It is not that the past throws its light on the present, or the present its light on the past, but [the dialectical] image is that wherein the past comes together with

Introduction

21

the present in a constellation' (Benjamin, in Buck-Morss 1 989: 291 ) . The past comes into being in the present in a new form, a montage of past images (artefacts) and present concepts and experiences. A focus on the past makes the present a revolution­ ary 'now-time': its vanishing point. Benjamin maintained in his Arcades project that there was more philosophy to be construct­ ed from reflections on the materiality of the Paris Arcades than on making observations on the Being of beings. A revolutionary philosophy would arise from the intervention of the thinking subject in the material structures of the world. This required giv­ ing up a tranquil contemplative and reverential attitude to the historical object and forcing it into a fresh critical constellation. Interpretation is resurrecting the old in the discourse of the new. If, as Marx argues, the ruling ideas have always been those of the ruling classes, the task of a radical interpretative archaeology should be to 'brush history against the grain' (Benjamin, in Buck­ Morss 1 989:288) and create a new manner in which to view the past. Artefacts become no longer treasures to be stored and dis­ played in museums but weapons to be used in interrogating the present and appropriate from them whatever may be of value for socialism and emancipation from structures of exploitation and domination. The material phenomena are to be dismantled, redispersed and rearticulated in a new constellation, which will shatter the cultural dreamwork of the old, a process of becoming, transformation and disappearance.

The interpretations of archaeological evidence put forward in this book are not disinterested accounts of 'how the past really was'. Kirk (chapter 5) and Thomas and Tilley (chapter 6) directly produce a politics of the past, a political reading of their subject matter. To avoid such a reading is to tame and domesticate the past, to understand it as the merely exotic. Johnson (chapter 7) refers to a politics of the becoming of the contemporary social order. Medieval archaeology has remained until recently an entirely unproblematized area of the discipline, basking in the evident 'truth' of historical documents and serving as a supple­ ment to historical accounts (Austin 1 989). Johnson sets out a man­ ifesto which, if carried through, would both revolutionize the field and challenge some deeply engrained origin myths with regard to the development of capitalist social formations in Europe. Archaeological data from medieval Europe do not just add to historical narrative but, through a focus on the materiality

22

Interpretative Archaeology

of the construction of social worlds focusing on the stylistics of food preparation and consumption, vernacular architecture, the commodity form in relation to the establishment and mainte­ nance of social identity, may radically alter our conceptions of the form and nature of social transformations and provide a further political resource for a contemporary critique of relations of dom­ ination and exploitation. Theories of the human subject always tend to be simultaneous­ ly theories of the masculine. But this is not any man but bour­ geois, white, Western, 'individual' 'man'. To question the notion of the subject and inquire into its nature as a signifying field is to begin to force not only a redefinition of the subject but also of the past. I regret that there are no female authors represented in this volume. A number were asked to contribute but declined or could not find the time. It is quite disgraceful that there is only one feminist book in existence in archaeology (Gero and Conkey 1 991 ). But feminism is much more than a matter of women writ­ ing about the past or identifying women in it but must involve a discussion and evaluation of the entire notion of gender. Yates (chapter 1 ) makes a valuable contribution here, problematizing the nature of gender in relation to the Bronze Age rock carvings of BohusHin, western Sweden. A simple binary heterosexual identity to the human figures has always been assumed, 'mar­ riage scenes' identified and so forth. In an unquestioning way archaeologists have simply reproduced a stereotyped contempo­ rary view of gender identity and superimposed it on Bronze Age Sweden. Yates refers to the essential ambiguity of the carvings. There are a minority of bodies with a phallus and a majority of bodies without sexual organs. The absence of sexual organs cer­ tainly cannot be problematically assumed to be a negative female signifier. The rock carvings simply do not fit a simple male-female binary structure. They actively resist such an inter­ pretation and, as Yates argues, lead us to re-think what appears to be natural: an ontological prioritization of sex over gender. Masculinity is not a pre-ordained property of some of the carv­ ings but channelled through signs serving to establish and cultur­ ally guarantee it - to effect a movement from a body without organs. This has direct political implications in terms of how we think and rethink sex and gender today. Past fragments, in their difference, rather than being a source of appeal to naturalize a binary sex-gender division in the present instead provide, when

Introduction

23

theoretically constituted and appropriated in the manner of Yates, a direct challenge to any such notions. Gender identity is culturally established and historically constituted.

Archaeological Text and Literary Form The past is something we all share. Archaeologists and historians try to make it their own, assert closure, persuade each other through textual ploys of the 'truth' of their accounts and take every opportunity to deny lay discourse any validity. One pro­ ductive trend in recent archaeological and historical writing, reflected in this book, is to break down some of the barriers between literature and the study of the past. The archaeological text is a literary form, like it or not. The main way of disguising or suppressing this is the use of third person narrative which removes attention from any grammatical reference to the discur­ sive situation of the utterance (who produces it; who receives it; contemporary context; intent). The attempt is to narrate events in such a way that they appear to narrate themselves. In contesting this, the sure ground dividing archaeology from fiction begins to vanish. The latter has relatively more freedom in that all the facts may be invented. The facts of archaeology are materially con­ strained. Literary historical and archaeological fiction, with its appeal to a larger audience, has far more impact on contempo­ rary cultural consciousness than any archaeological work. As a record of past reality history is generally regarded as radically alien to literature whose way to truth is based on the autonomy of the historical artefact or event. Today we are witnessing a shift from validation to signification, from attempting to secure archaeological statements firmly in the past to the way systems of discourse make sense of the past. This demands a pluralist dis­ course that will be troubling to many: archaeologists constructing different but equally meaningful constructions of past reality through artefacts, monuments and documents. Literary quotation is frequently used in archaeological texts. This may betray a yearning to escape from an unwritten rule out­ lawing emotive and imaginative writing, a lost presence in the degree-zero (Barthes 1984) style of writing valorized in the acad­ emy. It also may function as a form of demonstration of personal­ ized cultural capital. The author is not just a pedant who only reads archaeological texts but a cultured person of letters.

24

Interpretative Archaeology

However, fictional writing has used archaeology to a far greater extent than archaeology has used fiction. The archaeologist has featured as a source of characters for texts from popular fiction (Agatha Christie) to film (Indiana Jones). If the margins between the literary and the archaeological text are to be increasingly blurred, then an examination of literature about the past, written as Evans (chapter 1 0) notes without the constraints of a discipli­ nary code becomes of some considerable interest. Sontag, contrasting an aesthetics of sensory feeling to one founded in an aesthetics of interpretation, argued that 'in a cul­ ture whose classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art' (Sontag 1967: 7). Interpretation is an impoverishment, the continual shadow-play of meaning at the expense of an erotics. Archaeological fiction, subtly reviewed by Evans, can be viewed as the revenge literature takes on the archaeologist for failing to provide a past relevant to the present. This goes far beyond the frequent archaeological destruction of a 'romantic' past or a search for individuala'roots' . The only effec­ tive antidote to the complaint that fiction misrepresents or ignores archaeological facts is for archaeologists themselves to write sourced novels. Literary critics, such as Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton or David Lodge, frequently contribute to their own object of study by writing fiction. Archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel, rather than writing about the past, have curiously preferred to write novels about detectives or accounts of evenings spent in French restaurants (Daniela1963). A serious consideration of archaeological fiction reminds us once more that while events did occur in a real past we constitute those events as relevant facts by their active selection and order­ ing in discourse. Writing displaces the real past. The past is an entity both permitting and demanding the production of mean­ ing. Both a 'real' past described in an archaeological text and a fic­ tional past can only exist by sharing conventions that link them together rather than separate them: ordering; selection; analogy; metaphor; diegesis; temporal placing; emplotment; explanation. They share the same formal techniques of production. The real purpose of distinctions between literature, history, philosophy, sociology etc. is no doubt to permit the trivializing or valorization of certain practices as opposed to others. Literature and poetry are an enormous resource in teaching us about 'reality' . This

Introduction

25

resource, rather than being flatly denied as of any relevance, needs to be articulated with the past. In this regard it is interest­ ing to note Beer's argument that Darwin's The Origin of Species owed a great deal to one of Darwin's favourite authors, Charles Dickens (Beer 1 983: 8).

Conclusion

An examination of the way that the past is written and attempts to write and interpret that past in a fresh manner does not neces­ sarily guarantee either a better archaeology or a more desirable politics. A consciousness of the manner in which we construct and reconstruct the past through text problematizes any notion of a foundation or a series of guarantees that we might wish to cling to. Through problematization, experimentation and multiple voices a poetics of the past should encourage communication and dialogue between persons. Archaeology becomes a medium by which we may alter our understanding of the past and its relation to the lived present. A concern with the past is seen to be what it only can aspire to be: a mapping of conflicting and contemporary social networks of power and desire, an experimentation on the real, that should simultaneously, in a self-reflexive moment, dis­ own a will to power through knowledge. References Andersen, C. (1 987) Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Atkinson, P. (1 990) The Ethnographic Imagination, London: Routledge Austin, D. (1 990) 'The "proper study" of medieval archaeology' in D. Austin and L. Alcock (eds) From the Baltic to the Black Sea: Studies in Medieval Archaeology, London: Unwin-Hyman Bapty, I. and Yates, T. (eds) (1 990) Archaeology After Structuralism, London: Routledge Barnes, A. (1988) On Interpretation, Oxford: Blackwell Barthes, R. (1 984) Writing Degree Zero, London: Jonathan Cape Beer, G. (1 983) Darwin 's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth Century Fiction, London: Routledge Belsey, C. (1 980) Critical Practice, London: Methuen Boon, J. (1 982) Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthroplogy in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

26

Interpretative Archaeology

Brown, R. (1 977) A Poetic for Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Buck-Morss, S. (1 989) The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Massachusetts: The MIT Press Carr, D. (1 986) 'Narrative and the real world: an argument for continu­ ity', History and Theory 25: 1 1 7-31 Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds) (1 986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press Clifford, J. (1 988) The Predicamen t of Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press Culler, J. (1 975) Structuralist Poetics, London: Routledge Culler, J. (1981 ) The Pursuit of Signs, London: Routledge Daniel, G. (1 963) The Hungry Archaeologist in France, London: Faber & Faber Davidson, D. (1 979) 'What metaphors mean', in S. Sacks (ed . ) On Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1 988) A Thousand Plateaus, London: Athlone Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell Fernandez, J. (1 986) Persuasions and Performances. The Play of Tropes in Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Geertz, C. (1 973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books Gero, J. and Conkey, M. (eds) (1991 ) Engendering Archaeology. Women and Prehistory, Oxford: Blackwell Herzfeld, M. (1 983) 'Looking both ways: the ethnographer in the text', Semiotica 46: 151-66 Hodder, I. (1 986) Reading the Past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hodder, I. (1 989) 'This is not an article about material culture as text', Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 8: 250-69 Kristeva, J. (1 986) 'Word, dialogue and novel' in The Kristeva Reader, ed. T. Moi, Oxford: Blackwell Lentricchia, F. (1 983) After the New Criticism, London: Methuen Ricoeur, P. (1 984) Time and Narrative: Volume I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Said, E. (1 983) The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge, Mass . : Harvard University Press Shanks, M. and Tilley, C. (1 987) Social Theory and Archaeology, Cambridge: Polity Press Sloterdijk, P. (1 988) Critique of Cynical Reason, London: Verso Sontag, S. (1 967) Against Interpretation, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode Tilley, C. (1 989) 'Interpreting material culture' , in I. Hodder (ed.) The Meaning of Things. London: UnWin-Hyman Tilley, C. (ed.) (1 990) Reading Material Culture, Oxford: Blackwell Tilley, C. (1991 ) Material Culture and Text. The Art of Ambiguity, London: Routledge

Introduction

27

White, H . (1 973) Metahis tory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press White, H. (1 978) Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press Worton, M. and Still, J. (eds) (1 990) Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Part I Space, Architecture and the Body

Chapter l Frameworks for an Archaeology of the Body

Tim Yates Correct me if you want to but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you have given man a body without organs You will have delivered him from all his automatisms And given him back his true freedom.

Antonin Artaud One of the richest prehistoric resources available to archaeology are the rock carvings of the county of Goteborgs och BohusUin, situated on the west coast of Sweden and extending from the city of Goteborg to the Norwegian border. Although the normal types

of archaeological data for this period and area are present, our principal resource is monumental art, rather than metalwork or graves. Scattered across the county are over 2000 individual 'sites', composed of at least 2500 individual panels. Precise fig­ ures depend largely on the ways in which sites and panels are defined. They consist of a range of designs incised and pecked into the surface of exposed bedrock, mainly granite, which accounts for some 30 per cent of the total area. Most of these designs fall into six major generic categories: cup-marks (simple, round depressions, usually between 4 and 8 em in diameter), ships, human and animal figures, foot marks and circular designs. With the cup-marks not much can be done, and I will not discuss them further here. Of the remaining motifs, which are in some way representational and might be described as 'figure' carvings, ships form the single largest category, and are found at

31

32

Interpretative Archaeology

over twice as many panels as any of the other motif classes, while the footmarks are the least common, and have accordingly a much smaller territorial distribution. Representations of the human figure make up the second most common representational motif found in the rock carvings, and the county has the highest proportion and absolute number of human figures of all areas with prehistoric art in northern Europe. I shall confine myself to the rock carvings of the area north of the town of Munkedal, where most of the carvings are found (Figure 1 .1 ) . Although there are significant concentrations of carvings in Goteborg, and on the islands of Tjorn and Orust, anthropomorphic figures are very rare. The material from the northern part of the county offers the best scope for exploring how sexuality was represented, therefore, in prehistory. Within this area I shall also limit myself to those areas of the county for which modern documentation existsa- the hundreds of Kville (Fredsjo, Nordbladh and Rosvall 1 971 , 1 975, 1 981 ) and Vette (Yates n.d.)a- and will exclude, therefore, the equally rich areas of Tanum, Tossene and Askum, for which no detailed documenta­ tion has taken place in recent years. The patterning in the art with which I shall be concerned can be described as morphological - one which focuses on the varia­ tion manifested in the range of different human figures, and with the connections between these figures and other designs. My con­ cern is with the representation of the body, therefore, and - with the exception of animal figures - I will not discuss the morpholo­ gy of the other major classes of design. The aim is to draw out the ways in which the body and its sexual identity are represented, not to account for the art as a whole. There have been few systematic attempts to study and inter­ pret the morphology of the human figures. The two major studies of the rock carvings of Bohuslan - Nordbladh (1 980) and Bertilsson (1 987) - are both preoccupied with the place of the carvings in the landscape and the co-occurrence of the different classes of motif on the panels. Morphological details as defined here are discussed, but not examined in great detail. Nordbladh (1 989) has also discussed the occurrence of armed figures in the rock carvings of Kville hundred. Papers have appeared regularly in the journal Adoranten, dealing with different aspects of the art, but have lacked any systematic sampling of the data. The only detailed and systematic approach based on a consideration of the

An Archaeology of the Body

33

Figure 1.1 Location map of G&tebo:tgs och BohusHin, showing places . mentioned in the text. The stippled area represents the main areas with carvings.

34

Interpretative Archaeology

variation within human figures is found in Mats Maimer's 'chorological' study (Maimer 1 981 ) . Maimer bases his study o f the material from Bohusliin o n the depictions of the carvings published by the Dane Lauritz Baltzer, updated by reference to surveys published after the completion of the initial study in 1972. The latter are used to form a 'control corpus' (sic). Although the scale is impressive, the study in its final form makes depressing reading, since, where interpreta­ tions are offered, they appear either totally ignorant of or immune to any of the theoretical debates of the preceding twenty years, indeed of the very environment in which it has been writ­ ten. If the material was revised between the completion of the manuscript and publication to take account of new data, the con­ clusions and methodology have not. Here is diffusion alive and kicking in the 1980s: . . . every archaeological type was first produced by one person living in a certain place at a certain time; thence the new idea spread to his immediate neighbourhood, and from there in ever-increasing circles, until it eventually reached the limits of our diffusion map. (Maimer 1 98 1 : e1 )

N o account i s taken o f the local processes behind the art, and although lip-service is paid to the importance of regional differ­ ences in meaning, the underlying approach is founded on the assumption that the phenomenon 'Nordic prehistoric art' (the unity of which is not so much examined as assumed) expresses the same fundamental ideas: in the central area of West Denmark, most interest is shown in abstract and symbolic designs: circular designs, hands and feet. Immediately to the east of West Denmark, mainly in BohusUi.n, but also in 0stfold, West Sweden and Scania, there is a pronounced inter­ est in scenes .... This may be explained by postulating that cultic ceremonies performed in West Denmark and well-known in these areas, were here por­ trayed in stone as there was less opportunity to practice them in real life. (Maimer 1 981 : 1 04; emphasis added)

Although Maimer works hard to bring to light the differences between areas in terms of the types of design found within them, the study is unable to explain or even address these differences. Indeed, the conclusions offered end up denying the variation the book spends over 1 00 pages establishing. This is to be explained

An Archaeology of the Body

35

by the fact that no attempt has been made to theorize what varia­ tion in the motifs might mean: without a framework which will account for these differences, the data produced are redundant, and the conclusions drawn from them colourless and trite. The study of human figures illustrates this point clearly. Maimer boasts that the classificatory scheme is capable of pro­ ducing anything between 1 44 and 522 possible types, but no attempt is made to interpret what the different types that exist mean. The scheme produces information with a built-in redun­ dancy. Partly this is because the author has adopted a scale of analysis which blocks off any access to such meaninga- we are left with statements about the universal depiction of items of wealth and status (p. 106) of the most startling banality. Contrary to both Maimer's and Burenhult' s (1980) claims, the way forward for rock art analysis is not to address issues of chronology but to theorize the art - a theorization which must extend way beyond the stale discussions of terminology - and study its appearance and meaning in local and regional terms. We should start from the local and regional, and from that point investigate whether there are any similarities. It is our rubric, as archaeologists, to question, not to assume. Maimer notes that rock art is generally not portable, and thus can only be indige­ nous, but his study fails to pursue this point and its contribution to the understanding of prehistoric rock art in the north is at the best limited. In order to avoid producing a superfluous and redundant amount of information, I have chosen a simpler classificatory scheme than Maimer's. This scheme recognizes the following divisions. For the human figures: 1 . Unarmed figuresa- figures without either sheathed sword or weapon held in the hand. 2. Unarmed figure with sheathed sword but without other weapon. 3. Armed figure with sheathed sword and at least one other weapon. 4. Armed figure without sheathed sword but with at least one other weapon. These classes are cross-referenced to the presence of the follow­ ing characteristics: erect phallus, with or without testicles; exag-

36

Interpretative Archaeology

gerated or otherwise emphasized calf muscles; exaggerated or emphasized hands and/ or fingers; figures with homed helmets; figures with long hair. Note was also made of the connections between different motifs in the art, such as human figures onboard ship designs or joined to disc motifs, and of the proxim­ ity of cup-marks to the different areas of the body. Regarding chronology, I have opted to treat the rock carvings as a whole, since I remain unconvinced by any attempts to date the rock carvings through reference to their occurrence on other, dateable media (metalwork), in dateable contexts (burials), or par­ ticularly on supposed typological/ stylistic features (Marstrander 1 962; Glob 1 969; Almgren 1 963; Burenhult 1 980; Maimer 1 98 1 ) . Scandinavian archaeologists, with the exception o f those working in Goteborg, seem to have faith, bordering on the theological, both in the existing schemes and in the potential to refine them and produce schemes of ever greater sophistication. Meaning is thrown out of the window. Maimer's study shows that it is neces­ sary to suspend consideration of chronology in order to approach meaning behind the motifs. Of course, there will be those who regard such an approach as dangerous, and who will continue to typologize and seriate until kingdom come. All we need note here is that in the last century such individuals have failed both to con­ struct a rigorous chronology and to say anything of interest about the carvings. They have had their chance: it is time to experiment with other approaches. The distribution of the different typological features on the human figures found in the study areas is shown in Tables 1 . 1 and Figure 1 .2. From these graphs and tables, we can make the following observations: 1 . Armed phallic figures - figures with scabbards or with scab­ bards and weapon - are twice as common as corresponding non-phallic figures. The lowest values of non-phallic figures with scabbards is 10 per cent (Bottna), the highest 25.5 per cent (Vette). The corresponding highest and lowest values for phallic figures are 45.2 per cent (Bottna) and 89.1 per cent (Svenneby). 2. Non-phallic figures are four times as likely to occur unarmed as phallic figures. The highest value of unarmed non-phallic fig­ ures is 81.7 per cent (Bottna), the lowest 63.6 per cent (Vette) . The corresponding highest and lowest values for phallic figures are 41.9 per cent (Bottna) and 4.3 per cent (Svenneby).

37

An Archaeology of the Body

Table 1.1 The relative frequency of the different typological characteristics for human figures in the study area.

2 3 4

a

np p

63.6 37.7

np p

79.2 4.3

np p

81.7 41.9

np p

66.4 30.2

b

25.5 48. 1

20.8 89.1

1 0.0 45.2

20.3 66.7

d

c

e

1 .9 6.5

5.2

8.2 22. 1

1 .8 1.3

4.3

4.3

4.3

3.7 8.8

1.1 4.4

2.2 5.0

3.7

4.5 2.6

5.0 6.5

3.3 3.2

g

0.9

h

6.7

10.9 32.5

5.7 6.5

5.7 13.0

5.0 12.9

1 .7 3.2

8.3 41 .9

11.1 28.3

3.7 2.5

3.6 2.6

5.7 6.5

3.3 16.1

3.0 1 1 .3

All figures are percentages. 1 = Vette; 2 = Svenneby; 3 = Bottna; 4 = Kville np = non-phallic; p = phallic; a = unarmed; b = with hilt; c = with axe; d = with drawn sword; e = with spear; f = with bow; g = with lur; h = with exaggerated hands; i = with exaggerated calves; j = with helmet.

2

NP %

p %

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

J

Figure 1.2 Graph showing the distribution of typological elements for phallic [P] and non-phallic [NP] figures in the study area as a whole.

38

Interpretative Archaeology

3. Although the number of figures in the sample with weapons is small, making it difficult to draw conclusions about the types of weapon carried by phallic and non-phallic figures, it is clear that the latter rarely carry drawn swords, just as they are much less common to carry sheathed swords than phallic figures. Similarly, they are only seldom depicted with spears. They are equally like­ ly to carry axes, and perhaps marginally more likely to carry bows than phallic figures. The only figure with a lur in the sample (on the panel at Hogdala223) is non-phallic. Phallic figures show a stronger relationship to helmets than non-phallic figures. 4. Exaggerated hands occur with equal frequency among phallic and non-phallic figures. 5. Exaggerated calf muscles reveal a stronger association with phallic than non-phallic figures.

Morphological Association between Motifs From the information shown in Table 1 .2 we can make the fol­ lowing observations: 1 . Figures with disc bod ies. Although there are differences in the individual areas under discussion, the Same distribution i n relation to phallic and non-phallic figures is shown in the sam­ ple area as a whole. This feature is often described as repre­ senting shields carried at the side of the body, and while this may be true in some cases, it is prudent to treat it as a morpho­ logical, rather than representational, characteristic. Where fig­ ures carry square shields from the Iron Age, they are not represented in this fashion, and the incorporation of a circular motif into the body of a figure is found with similar frequency in the zoomorphic stratum. 2. There appears to be little difference between the phallic and non-phallic figures in terms of which may be depicted onboard or otherwise joined to ships, joined to animals or disc designs (excluding the 'shields' discussed above). Phallic fig­ ures are a little over twice as common as non-phallic when joined to other human figures.

Height of Figures One dimension of variation which has received little considera­ tion is the enormous differences which occur in the height of the

39

An Archaeology of the Body

Table 1.2 The relative frequency of morphological connections between the major classes of design. 'Shield' np n np p np p np p

Vette Svenneby Bottna Kville

Overall

np p

20.9 1 6.9 24.5 1 7.4 5.0 1 2.9 1 4.4 13.2 15.8 14.7

Ship

19.1 40.3 22.6 15.2 28.3 1 6.1 35.4 20.1

29.6 24.0

Joined to Animal

4.5 5.2

3.3 3.2 2.2 2.5

2.6 2.9

Human

7.3 5.2

4.4 1 6.4

Disc

1 .8 3.1

4.0 9.6

1 .2 1 .9

All figures are percentages. np = non-phallic; p = phallic

3

100

01-1'---0

100

NON-PHALLIC

Figure 1.3 The relationship between the mean heights [in em] of phallic and non-phallic figures at 66 panels in Vette and Kville hun­ dreds, BohusHin.

40

Interpretative Archaeology

figl.lres depicted in the rock carvings. This is surprising given that spectacular examplesa- Torp in Vette, Litsleby in Tanum, Backa fu Brastad - are among the most frequently quoted and depicted sites in the literature. Figure 1 .3 shows the relationship beteen the average height of phallic and non-phallic figures at 66 panels taken from the sam­ ple area as a whole. Obviously, scale is significant only at the level of the individual panela- the height of figures taken across panels would be meaningless. Figure 1 .4 shows the same height comparison between fully armed and phallic warriors and the average height of the other types of human figure which occur together with them on the same panels. A total of thirteen sites, where warriors and other types of figure are present together, could be analysed in this way. From these graphs we can make the following observations: 4

•

50

100

OTHER FIGURE Figure 1.4 The relationship between the mean heights [in em] of fully armed and phallic warrior figures and other types of figures on thir­ teen panels in Vette and Kville hundreds, Bohusllin.

An Archaeology of the Body

41

1 . There are clearly consistent differences between the average sizes of phallic and non-phallic figures - at 44 panels or 66.7 per cent of the sample phallic figures were higher than non­ phallic, at 21 panels or 31 .8 per cent they were lower, and at 1 panel or 1 .5 per cent the two types produced identical average heights. 2. There are clearly consistent differences between the fully armed and phallic warriors, representatives of the aggressive masculine ethic, and the other figure types. Where they occur together, the former is consistently larger than the latter, the differences often being considerable.

The Representation of the Male Body

In his study of the rock carvings of Northern BohusUin, Ulf Bertilsson writes: 'There must have existed real warriors and organised rivalry in the area . . . . The depictions of battle scenes with armed and horned or masked men with accentuated calves appear in several parts of the area' (Bertilsson 1 987: 1 85). Nordbladh, in his study of these figures and their depiction with weapons and armour from the carvings in Kville hundred (1989), has compared them to evidence from areas to the south. He writes similarly: 'Groups of warriors constituted a special inter­ mediate level in society, where households and class could meet directly for symbolic competitiion of rank. . . . Successful fighting brought rank values to the group and prestige to the warrior' (Nordbladh 1989: 331). There is a general consensus, therefore, that the society which produced the carvings was dominated by ideals centred upon aggressive masculinity. To the extent that we can date the differ­ ent figures by the types of weapons they carry, it is clear that such ideals were dominant throughout the Late Bronze Age (c. 1 000-500 BC), since they are shown with horned helmets, and also with winged sword chapes of Hallstatt type (belonging to Period V or VI).aIt is improbable that all the human figures belong to the Late Bronze Age, however, and although it is not possible to definitely date any to the second millennium BC, as other designs (ships, etc.) belong there, some of the undiagnostic fig­ ures must certainly belong alongside them.

42

Interpretative Archaeology

These interpretations are, of course, well placed - the variation in the height of figures demonstrates clearly that, although war­ riors are less numerous than other types of figure, the carvings are focused on the principle of aggressive masculinity, since there is a consistent relationship between larger figures and the various symbols of this ethic. But this tells us very little about the precise variation exhibited in the human figures. What is the precise nature of the masculine code, and how does it relate to the differ­ ent types of human figure? If we have armed and-phallic male warriors on the one hand, then what class of human is represent­ ed by the other types of anthropomorphic designs? The first explanation for variation is sex: it is possible to attempt to account for the representation of non-phallic figures and perhaps (but not necessarily) unarmed figures on the ground that they are females. If this is the case, then how has the artist represented the female sex? Apart from Holmberg's depiction of a figure in the Varlos marriage scene (Holmberg 1 848: Figure 65), which is quite inaccurate, I know of no figures with breasts in the rock carvings. On the Maltegard Stone from Denmark, on which are depicted two human figures, it is claimed that the vagina on one is indicated by a short line between the legs, rather than the longer line standing out from the body on the other figure, which is clearly a penis. It has been argued that similar features among the Bronze Age figurines from southern Scandinavia show a sim­ ilar method of indicating female identity. Even assuming that these assumptions are correct, no such indicators exist in the carvings on the west coast of Sweden. So how, then, are we to rec­ ognize female figures? This topic has been the subject of considerable discussion (see Glob 1 969; Burenhult 1978; Elverheim 1 986; Mandt 1 986, 1 987; among others). Maimer (1981) refuses to go much further than a simple phallic/non-phallic distinction, which may or may not con­ vert directly into that of male and female. Three principles have, however, been suggested for the identification of female figures: 1 . Depiction with long hair. 2. Depiction with a cup-mark between the legs. 3. Depiction without weapons or sword scabbards. Each of these requires further examination, since their repetition ad nauseam in the literature appears to have lent them an author­ ity which is quite unrelated to the carvings themselves.

An Archaeology of the Body

43

The depiction of figures with long hair can be quickly dis­ missed. It is a rare feature and could only ever account for a small number of the non-phallic figures - of the sample from Kville and Vette hundreds I have counted only 14 figures, or 1 .3 per cent, with anything resembling long hair. More importantly, of these, half occur with phallic figures and half with non-phallic figures, thus indicating clearly that it cannot be a principle which distin­ guishes female from male in the rock art. The idea that when a cup-mark occurs between the legs of a fig­ ure it indicates female genitalia has equally poor foundations. In the sample, a total of 1 66 figures are associated with cup-marks, 'association' defined as both occurring within 20 em of the figure, and lying closer to that figure than any other. Figure 1 .5 shows the positions of these cups in relation to the different parts of the anatomy. Again, the 8 figures with the cup-mark placed between the legs are divided equally between phallic and non-phallic fig­ ures. Similarly, 5 are unarmed and 3 armed. It is also worth noting that a total of 7 figures occur with a cup-mark directly proximal to the penis. As the diagram shows, there are no appreciable differ­ ences between phallic and non-phallic figures in the proximity of cup-marks to other parts of the body. We can conclude, therefore, that the presence or absence of a cup-mark between the legs has nothing whatsoever to do with marking out female from male fig­ ures. Indeed, the cup-mark is regularly associated with male ani­ mal figuresa- behind the tails or between the horns of phallic bulls, for instance - and it may thus, in fact, have a pronounced associa­ tion with the masculine ethic. The third principle is, of course, one of convenience only. Many non-phallic figures are armed, and many phallic figures are depicted without weapons. The one place where this has been most persistently asserted is in the so-called 'marriage scenes', of which there are 19 examples - 3 from Kville, 2 from Vette (both discovered by the author) and the rest from Tanum hundreds. The basic argument is stunning in its simplicity - two figures are depicted in what appears to be an embrace, with arms locked and also joined at the waist by a line, presumably the phallus. Because of the perception of these scenes as sexual, it has been concuded that one figure - that with the phallus and sometimes the scab­ bard and/ or helmeta- is male, and the other must, de facto and de jure, be female, lacking phallus, scabbard or helmet. The 'female' is also, sometimes, depicted with long hair. As was noted above,

44

Interpretative Archaeology

c

8

A

23.5

25.3

21.5

~))

\-----

--·--/

8.9 f2.5l11.4

--~-~ /_____ 1

,_ 20.3

\(\

5.1?0 ~\

_13.9

i~» ~

----·~~------

9.6

7.5

~J -

-------~

18.4 2.3 10.3

16--:1 ~~4.6 11.5

J)

11.5

Figure 1.5 The positions of cup-marks in relation to nine areas of the body. A: percentages for human figures as a whole; 8: percentages for· phallic figures only; C: percentages for non-phallic figures only.

45

An Archaeology of the Body

•

Figure 1.6 The panel at Tossene 185, discovered by Goran Andersson in 1975. Redrawn from photograph contained in the Ancient Monuments Register for Tossene parish, Bohuslan

none of these assumptions has any validity, and the interpreta­ tion rests, not on a pattern demonstrable in the rock carvings, but on contemporary assumptions and morality. Nothing marks these figures out as female rather than male. But there are indications that they may both be male: 1. In five of the scenes, the 'female' figure has clearly exaggerat­

ed calves. Such features are also found on the male figures, and as was noted above, have a strong association with phallic figures generally.

46

Interpretative Archaeology

2. Within the representational designs of the carvings, pairing as a principle occurs only with definitively male figures - lurs and axes on board ships, paired and confronted warriors or stags - and seldom, if ever, with figures the identity of which is open to doubt. The exception to this are the footmarks, which carry no sexual symbolism. This male connection is well illustrated on the panel discovered by Goran Andersson in 1975 at Tossene 1 85 (Figure 1 .6), where two paired phallic fig­ ures are linked to two male stags above in a relationship which is clearly metaphoric - we are to regard the one pairing as the equivalent of the other. Although pairing may occur among female items in hoards and the like, the evidence for this is from outside Bohuslan, and outside the carvings and their proper, meaningful context. It is thus possible that both figures are male - this, of course, would require us to suspend our prejudices about what such scenes would then mean, and from my experience it is clear that most archaeologists are unwilling or unable to do so, and will go to extraordinary lengths to hang on to the heterosexual hypothe­ sis. It is, in fact, no more than prejudice masquerading as 'com­ mon sense' that makes the presence of two males appear unlikely - there is nothing in the evidence to preclude such an occurrence, but apparently everything in the archaeologist to do so. What we see here is undoubtedly the battle between our modern morality and that of a past we do not want to acknowledge. In passing, we should note that at Hoghem in Tanum, both figures are phallic (Figure 1 . 7). There is thus no basis for arguing that variation in the human figures of the rock carvings is related to the expression of a basic male-female opposition, and perhaps reason to regard females as specifically excluded from the carvings. The mistake made by Mandt (1 986, 1 987) and others is twofold: ( 1 ) to assume the absence of women in prehistory must always be an empirical problem, when we should pose both presence and absence in the­ oretical terms; (2) to pose the question of identity in terms which are non-discursive, that is in terms of complete bodies already divided into males and females. What is important here is the juxtaposition of identity to ambiguity - we are left with a struc­ ture of variation which establishes the axis of difference between human figures as one between male identity and a situation of

An Archaeology of the Body

47

Figure 1.7 The marriage pair and accompanying 'priest' at Hoghem, Tanum parish. Drawn from a rubbing made by the author in August 1990.

ambivalence, where sexual identity is absenta- they may be either male or female. This, of course, does not fit in with expectations made by archaeologists - probably unconsciously - on the basis of experience and representation in our own societies today. The problems faced by attempts to force the carvings into a simplistic male-female binary may not be methodological but originala­ archaeologists assume that this ambiguity is a methodological problem rather than a real, tangible aspect of the meaning of the carvings. Such ambiguity is the major discovery made by any

48

Interpretative Archaeology

attempt to interpret the carvings, but is not posed as the subject for theoretical investigation. It only appears as a problem when we pose the question of sexuality in non-discursive terms and start to look for criteria which divide male from female. We need to conduct a major overhaul of our theories about sexuality before we can approach meaning in the carvings.

Ontology and Sexuality: An Anthropology of Lack

If we are searching for some guidelines on how to approach thea. conceptualization of gender systems which, like the representa­ tion of the human in the rock art, fail to match our own binary structure, then we should turn to anthropology. We find, however, that we still face some theoretical issues which bar access to the material we seek. Archaeologists and anthropologists regularly draw a distinction between sex (biolo­ gy, nature) and gender (culture). One's sexual identity is deter- · mined by the presence or absence of particular anatomical and reproductive organs - a penis therefore male, a vagina therefore ·a female: a neat binary structure, to which culture comes secondar- _ ily and around which it weaves a network of supplementary meanings in different societies in different places and times. Stripa. away culture, and all you would be left with is the natural differ­ ence necessary for reproducing the species. Thus one's sexual identity is a component of one's ontological identity - at least to the extent that nature, like ontology, is opposed to history and to the specific cultural situation (cf. Nordbladh and Yates 1 990). This natural determinacy within human identity is only sus­ tained by the belief that culture is a secondary grafting of mean-· ing onto an originary core, and that it is not possible for culture to break with naturea- for societies to define things differently. It is not possible, for instance, for a male to bear a child. Only on these assumptions does the hierarchy and axiology continue to func­ tion, and identity therefore appear to be ordained, to be a 'methodological rule' of universal validity. Even though some gender archaeologists would not accept this description without some reservations, to the extent that they are gender archaeolo­ gists thay cannot, in practice, but underline its operation. But what if the prioritization of sexual identity is itself a cultur­ al construct? What if the binary male-female were only one way

An Archaeology of the Body

49

of conceptualizing the structure of sexual identity? If this could be shown to be the case, then we would no longer be able to give sex­ uality a determining role, and the prioritization of sex over gender would collapsea- we would, in short, have to start to rebuild onto­ logical identity once more from the ground up. In fact, precisely this can be shown to be the case. We all believe in the modern West that when one is born one is either male or female: no other possibilities are open. Identity must fall into either one or the other side. Of course, there are occasional cases of anatomical bisexuality, but they are certainly not statisti­ cally significant, and so can be easily dismissed. They are simply abnormal, exceptions to the rule which have no bearing upon the general situation. Moreover, we believe that one's sexual identity is fixed from birth, and will not change throughout life (except by surgery). Today there is even a range of methods for determining sex before birth. One is either male or female: ipso facto one's sex­ ual identity is a fixed component of the conception of one's onto­ logical identity, assured and characterized by the fullness and presence of natural features from the moment of one's appear­ ance in the world. What a shock, therefore, that our own culture does not provide the model for other cultures. What a shock that ethnography shows us that in other places, and thus certainly in other times, nature does not provide the framework for culture, but is rather interpreted through the medium of culture. Or perhaps we should say that what is natural is defined differently in different cultures, and that therefore different discourses produce different modes or instantiations known as 'nature' . Nature, like culture, has to be interpreted, and therefore has no separate identity, no logical priority. Consider the Sambia of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, for instance. Although anatomical differences at birth are used for the sex assignment of the infant, such organs are not regard­ ed as directly determining the sexual identity of the child. The organs are not points of presence; they are rather the effects of underlying essences, and these essences are not complete by themselves. A man will not develop out of a boy just because he has a penis. A distinction is drawn between the sexes such that females are believed to be vital and fast developing, reaching maturity through natural processes, while males are much slow­ er in attaining maturity. 'Maleness is believed to depend on the

50

Interpretative Archaeology

acquisition of semen - the essence of biological maleness - for precipitating male anatomy and masculine behavioural traits. Femaleness rests on the creation and circulation of blood. This essence is held, in tum, to stimulate the production of menstru­ al blood, menarche, and adult reproductive competence' (Herdt 1 987: 75-6) . Women mature naturally through the presence in their bodies of everything necessary to assure maturation - the organ tingu believed to manufacture menstrual blood - but the boy is 'lacking' in everything necessary to make him develop into a male. The semen organ - kerekukereku - can only store not manufacture semen, and since it is upon semen that the catego­ ry 'male' depends (rather than directly upon the possession of a penis) this semen has to be acquired. Both males and females are thought to have tingu and kerekukereku organs, but they are active only in one side of the sexual pol be detachable in much the same way: a few phallus depictions occur alone (Pettersson 1982), but many may occur on the ships, where they are usually inter­ preted as schematic depictions of the crew but in many cases adopt a strikingly phallic form. All this suggests that masculine identity is not an inherent or natural attribute of the body, nor determined by biology. Biological possession of a penis may have been a necessary pre­ requisite for a cultural designation as male, but it was not a suffi­ cient cause. The rock art is a corporal discourse producing at one end a body without the signs necessary to signify male identitya­ a body-without-organs - and at the other a definitively male fig­ ure, a body-with-organs. The signs of identity are written onto the surface of the body. Masculinity, far from being a basic prop­ erty of all bodies, is channelled through a certain set of signs which establish it. Thus in the proportions of the figure the phal­ lus and the calves are greater than we would regard as 'natural' and the head and upper torso are reduced in size (e.g. Figure 1 .9). This method of representation continues right up to the end of the Bronze Age, since these characteristics are found on figures with winged sword chapes from period VI. 'Real' (as we would call it) anatomy is subordinated to the cultural valuation of the organs on the basis of reference to a system of signs that estab­ lishes the masculine ideal. Identity is channelled through signs which do not belong 'naturally' on the surface of the body. Masculinity is thus a principle which has to be guaranteed cul-

Figure L9 Scene from the carving at Hogdal214, Vette hundred, documented by the author in 1989. The late Bronze Age warriors are accompanied by isolated leg designs, a relatively common feature on the rock carvings, and one which is not the result of weathering or incomplete designs.

~

~

~

~

~

~·

~

~

;:r

00

0\

An Archaeology of the Body

69

turally, since the body is lacking, in much the same way perhaps as we saw is the case among the Sambia, another society domi­ nated by the ideals of an aggressive masculine ethic. The body has no inherent identity. Thus in the rock carvings it does not form a symbolic signa- in the way defined by Kristeva (1986) as one differentiated from its surroundingsa- but is articulated in semiotic chains of reference. The body may be joined to each and every other design of the carvings, in metonymical chains, each design being contiguous with another. What articulates the dif­ ferent designs, at least as we can identify it clearly in the anthro­ pomorphic and zoomorphic strata, is a principle of masculinity that is applied to bodies from the outside. The whole carving and burial evidence can be seen as articulating a system based around sexual identity not as a corporal but as an incorporal transforma­ tion applied to bodies which lack the identity associated with the aggressive masculine ethic. Sexual identity is achieved through signification, not through natural or biological processes con­ tained within the body itself. A social context for this transforma­ tion may well be that of initiation, as was suggested by Moberg (1969, 31).

Conclusion

An approach to treating the body as a category worthy of histori­ cal investigation is already implicit in the work of many gender archaeologists - Serensen ( 1987) for example. What I have attempted to do in this paper is to demonstrate that the data is available to allow us to explore the past with imagination, defy­ ing the banalities of conventional prehistories. But there is noth­ ing. in what has been said above that need directly contradict the orthodox interpretations of this material. In order to accept one (or at least the approach) and attempt to develop the perspective it proposes we do not have to refute the other, and this not because of some (no doubt admirable) liberalism but because his­ tory is not a monolithic concept. There are many different histo­ ries occupying the same time and space - this is the most incisive insight of recent post-processual archaeology, that histories coex­ ist, either symbiotically or antagonistically, within the parame­ ters of the same context, and develop by different tempos and times. There may be a time of the elites, of chiefly power and the

70

Interpretative Archaeology

system upon which it depends, and a time of the body, which is intimately related to it but not necessarily dependent or deriva­ tive. It is likely to follow an altogether longer dynamic. In seeking to interpret the past we will need to write many different histo­ ries, and in the institutional battle over paradigms and truth it is the question of history - of historicity - which is central, not the question of 'The Past'. It does not mean rejecting commensurabil­ ity in favour of the spectre of an 'anything goes' (such an attitude to alternative discourses has never existed in any society) but commits us to changing the parameters of what we have hitherto censured as 'Truth'. In the work of the last ten years we are begin­ ning to leave behind the monolithic systems with which the "new archaeology" attempted to occupy and imprison the past. Where processualism limited and censored archaeological data we now see a resource in expansion. Archaeological data is not limited, only the minds that interpret it. Material culture, as signification in general, has many different dimensions, many different mean­ ings: in accepting and developing such a position, our work structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist or whatever - will have become truly post-processual. References Almgren, B. (1 963) Bronzezeitperioden och Felszeichningsdatierung, Uppsala. Andersson, S. (1 980) 'Rosen och stensattningar i Goteborg: Undersockta 1 960-1 970', Fynd Rapporter, 1 63-86 Barthes, R. (1 984) Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, London: Jonathan Cape Barrett, J. (1 987) 'Fields of discourse: Reconstituting a social archaeolo­ gy', Critique of Anthropology 7:3,e5-1 6 Belsey, C. (1 984) Critical Practice, London: Methuen Bertilsson, U. (1 987) The Rock Carvings of Northern Bohusliin : Spatial Structures and Social Symbols, Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 7 Bogue, R. (1989) Deleuze and Guattari, London: Routledge Burenhult, G. (1 978) Hiillristningar: Hiillbulder fran sten och bronsdlder i Norden, Malmo: Malmo Museum Burenhult, G. (1 980) GOtalands Hiillristningar I, Stockholm: Theses and Papers in North European Archaeology 10 Broholm, H. C . (1 953) Danske Oldsager IV. Yngre Bronzealder, Copenhagen: Nordisk Forlag Corbett, G. B. and Southern, H. N. (1 977) The Handbook of British

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Mammals, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell Coward, R. and Ellis, J. (1 977) Language and Materialism, London: Routledge Cullberg, K. and Cullberg, C. (1 964) 'Goteborgska stensattningar', Fynd: Goteborgs och Bohusliins Fornminnesforenings Tidskrift, 63-8 Dansie, 0. (1 983) 'Deer', in J. E. Cooper, M. F. Hutchinson, 0. F. Jackson and R. J. Maurice (eds) Manual of Exotic Pets, Cheltenham: British Small Animal Veterinary Association, 8G-92 Davis, S. J. M. (1987) The Archaeology of Animals, London: Batsford Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1 984) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1 988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone Elverheim, I. (1 984) 'Kvinnofigurer pa hallarna i Tanum' , Adoranten, 8-13 Fredsjo, A. (1952) "'Faxen" : En gravhog fnin bronsaldem i Kareby sock­ en', Fynd: Goteborgs och Bohusliin Fornminnesforenings Tidskrift, 9-12 Fredsjo, A., Nordbladh, J. and Rosvall, J. (1 971 ) Hiillristn ingar i Kville Hiirad: Svenneby Socken, Goteborg: Studier i Nordisk Arkeologi 7 Fredsjo, A., Nordbladh, J. and Rosvall, J. (1 975) Hiillristingar i Kville Hiirad: Bottna Socken, Goteborg: Studier i Nordisk Arkeologi 13 Fredsjo, A., Nordbladh, J. and Rosvall, J. ( 1 981 ), Hiillristningar i Kville Hi:irad: Kville Socken, Goteborg: Studier i Nordisk Arkeologi 1 4 / 1 5 Freud, S. (1 900) The In terpretation of Dreams, Pelican Freud Library, Volumee4 Giddens, A. (1 984) The Constitution of Society, Oxford: Polity Glob, P. V. (1 969) Helleristningar i Danmark, Copenhagen: Jutland Archaeological Society Guattari, F. (1 984) Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, London: Pelican Hallstrom, G. (1917) 'Bohuslans fasta fornlamningar fran hednatiden: 7. Tanums harads bronsaldersgravar', Goteborgs och Bohusliins Fornminnesforenings Tidskrift, 1-78 Herdt, G. (1 987) The Sambia: Ritual and Gender in New Guinea, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Hodder, I. (1 986) Reading the Past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Holmberg, C.-A. (1 848) Skandinaviens Hiillristningar, Goteborg Kristeva, J. (1 984) The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell Lacan, J. (1977) Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Alan Sheridan, London: Methuen Laing, R.D. (1 969) The Divided Self, London: Pelican Laing, R.D. (1 983) The Voice of Experience, London: Pelican Lecercle, J.-J . (1 985) Philosophy through the Looking-Glass, London: Hutchinson Maimer, M . eP. ( 1 981 ) A Chorological Study of North European Rock Art,

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Stockholm: KVHAA's Handlingar, Antikvariska serien 32 Mandt, G. (1986) 'Searching for female deities in the religious manifesta­ tions of the Scandinavian Bronze Age', in G. Steinsland (ed.) Words and Objects: Towards a Dialogue Between Archaeology and History of Religion, Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1 1 1-26 Mandt, G . (1 987) 'Female symbolism in rock art', in R. Bertelsen, A. Lillehammer and J.-A. Naess (eds) Were they all Men? An Examination of Sex Roles in Pre!zistoric Society, Stavanger: Stavanger Archaeological Museum,e35-52 Marstrander, S. (1 962) 0stfolds ]ordbruksritningar, Oslo: Sammenlignende Kulturforkning Serie B: LIII Moberg, C.-A. (1 969) 'Vad hiillristningar beriittar och vad man beriittar om hiillristningarna', Hiillristingar i Sverige, A. Fredsjo, S. Janson and C.-A. Moberg, Stockholm: Forum, 9-48 Nordbladh, J. (1 980) Glyfer och Rum : Kring Hiillristnigar i Kville, Goteborg: Goteborgs Universitet. Nordbladh, J. (1 989) 'Armour and fighting in the South Scandinavian Bronze Age, especially in view of rock art representations', in T. B. Larsson and H. Lundmark (eds) Approaches to Swedish Prehistory, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, International Series 500 Nordbladh, J. and Yates, T. (1 990) 'This perfect body, this virgin text: Between sex and gender in archaeology', in I. Bapty and T. Yates (eds) Archaeology after Structuralism: Post-Structuralism and the Practice of Archaeology, London: Routledge Olsson, H. (1 971 ) 'Goteborgomradets Rosen' Uppstas fOr seminariet i nordisk och jarnforande fornkunskap vid Goteborgs Universitet Pettersson, J. (1 982) Hiillristningar pd Tjorn: Andra Delen, Malung Randsborg, K. (1974) 'Social stratification in Early Bronze Age Denmark: A study in the regulation of social systems', Praehistorische Zeitschrift 49,e38-61 Serensen, M. L. (1987) 'Material order and cultural classification: the role of bronze objects in the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age in Scandinavia', in I. Hodder (ed) The Archaeology of Contextual Meanings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Whitehead, H. (1 984) 'The bow and the burden strap: a new look at insti­ tutionalised homosexuality in native north America', in S. B. Ortner and H. Whitehead (eds) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 80-1 1 5 Wright, E . (1 984) Psychonalaytic Criticism: Theory i n Practice, London: Methuen Yates, T. (n.d.) The Rock Carvings of Vette Hundred, Bohusliin, unpublished MS in Uddevalla: Bohusliins Museum

Chapter 2 The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space

Julian Thomas Sculptures are stopping places along the journey. They are where the walk meets the place. Richard Long

Constructing Space, Constructing the Subj ect

One of the principal grounds for the existence of an interpretive archaeology lies in the inevitable incompleteness of archaeologi­ cal evidence. It was a cardinal understanding within 'processual' archaeology that even if the archaeological record were fragmen­ tary, mathematical techniques could compensate for any inade­ quacy (e.g. Groube 1981 ). By these means it would be possible to apply the techniques of geographicala'spatial science' to archaeo­ logical materials. Nevertheless, this optimism with regard to the potentials of scientific methodology was offset by a pessimistic attitude concerning the kind of knowledge of the past which could be generated. Spatial archaeology (Hodder and Orton 1976; Clarke 1 977), in particular, was based on a Cartesian notion of space as res extensa, a conception of the world as composed of geometric entities and in which human intelligence, the res cogi­ tans, has an ambiguous presence as the 'ghost in the machine' . People are seen as intelligences moving about within physical bodies, a perspective which reduces the human body to the status of a mere vehicle for the conscious mind. More seriously, such a view also implies that once human beings have died, their intelli­ gence has fled the world, and the spaces and works which they 73

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leave behind constitute a realm of empty spatial extension. Thus the most that can be done with these traces is to study them as manifestations of abstract generative structures, universal in their occurrence and of which the archaeological past merely provides a fresh set of examples. These problems of universalism and abstraction provided the focus for early crises of faith in the project of spatial archaeology (e.g. Hodder 1 978). It could be argued, however, that an adequate approach to the study of the significance of space in past human worlds requires both a rejection of the Cartesian mind /body duality and a recognition of the interpretive character of the archaeological enterprise. In the latter case, this amounts to the understanding that no matter how complete our sources of evi­ dence, we can only make them comprehensible through an active process of writing the past (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 19). While this should in no sense be seen as licence to say whatever we like about the past, the acknowledgement that the controlled use of an 'archaeological imagination' is not only acceptable but unavoidable is a profoundly liberating proposition. In the case of spatial archaeology, the fact that the people who created and dwelt in the spatial configurations which we record and excavate are now absent cannot be taken as reason enough to ignore the way in which these places were lived through. We cannot put our­ selves back into the heads of past people, but we must put the people back into the spaces of the past. In this context, one of the strands of social thought which may be of use to us is phenome­ nology, in which the way in which human beings experience their world is explicitly addressed. Of course, the great drawback of any such approach is that it is almost invariably geared towards the disclosure of some fundamental and primordial human consciousness. To the archaeologist, such a proposition may be both theoretically unsound and unnecessary as a desired goal. What may be of interest is not certain primal responses to environmental and social phenomena, but the way in which human beings in different historical and cultural milieux have experienced and interpreted their circumstances, and in the process have come to recognize themselves as subjects. What I am advocating here, then, is not an uncritical acceptance of the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but their reading through the lens of Marx and Foucault. In other words, a project to which archaeology might reasonably contribute may be the

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establishment of an historical phenomenology . In this contribution I would like to assemble some of the potential elements of an historical phenomenology of the experi­ ence of space, and make use of them to provide an interpretation of megalithic architecture in the British Isles. Several authorities have expressed the view that time and space are not merely back­ drops to existence, but are actually constitutive of society (e.g. Giddens 1 984; Gregory 1 989), a position which is ultimately attributable to Heidegger (Steiner 1978: 77). One interpretation of Heidegger' s project is that he hoped to replace the transcendental subject of Husserlian phenomenology, a given intelligence to whom phenomena were presented, with the condition of Being­ in-the-world. In the hermeneutic reading of Heidegger favoured by Gadamer, the existence of the human subject, Dasein, consists of self-interpretation, experience and reinterpretation (Warnke 1987: 38). For Heidegger, this hermeneutic circle of existence indi­ cates that 'Being itself is time' . As with time, so with space. The subject does not merely inhabit space, spatiality enters into being itself (Gregory 1989). Physical presence in the world is a funda­ mental structure of the Being of Dasein. Here 'Being-in' refers to residing, dwelling and being accustomed to a world. It is a condi­ tion of being alongside a world in the sense of being absorbed into it (Heidegger 1 962: 79) . Thus the dichotomy between a human intelligence, locked away somewhere inside its physical carriage, and a world out there is a false one: 'when Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always 'outside' alongside beings which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered.' (Heidegger 1 962: 89)

It is not the case that human beings have an inside world which can in some way be experienced prior to 'external' reality. In every case, an awareness of one's own Being comes from an engagement with the world. Equally, such an experience of the world takes place through our projects, through having concern­ ful dealings with things and other beings within the world. Thus it is our manipulation of things (the present-at-hand) in perform­ ing the necessary tasks of life which discloses to us both the char­ acter of the world and of our ownmost Being. Yet at the same time, it is not the case that there is any choice of whether or not to

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be in the world. The only option is between a struggle to achieve an authentic state of Being, and an immersion in the 'they-self', simply another way of Being-in-the-world. One of the basic underlying themes of Being and Time is the way in which we fail to notice that which is most immediate. Thus the question of Being itself is something so fundamental that it has been virtually ignored by philosophers since the Greeks. Yet despite this, a full ontological understanding of Being can only arise out of the everyday, taken-for-granted mode of Being. All questions presuppose as their ground an inarticulate sense of what they are about. So the project of understanding Being cannot be a deductive one, which works from the basis of some solid presupposition. Instead, it peels away at the average understanding of the world to uncover something more funda­ mental. In so doing, it places the pre-ontological knowledge of Being at the centre of the enquiry, and this is obviously some­ thing which makes it of interest to archaeologists. Presumably we too want to know something about the ordinary everydayness of human beings. This does, of course, raise the question of exactly what we want to know when we study the past. Is there an agreed notion of what we are trying to uncover? Or for that matter do any of us have any but the vaguest idea of what we are searching for? This may be no more than admitting the strength of Heidegger' s argu­ ment: if we could formulate the question we would already know the answer. However, there is a further point. Generally, ever since we have had something which could be called a social archaeology, we have tended to set our sights on what might be seen as somewhat grandiose targets: social organization, ranking, stratification, empires. Other forms of archaeology, too, presup­ pose that what they are doing is correct because they are address­ ing issues of critical importance, like the economy or the environment. We constantly assume that it is these 'big issues' which we should engage with, and that answering these ques­ tions will lead to a better understanding of... something or other. Somewhere in here I sense an unasked question of why we do what we do, and what we hope to learn from it. Without in any way wanting to advocate a return to Hawkes' 'ladder of infer­ ence', it could be possible that we have constantly overlooked that which is closest to hand. True, we have in recent years seen a greater concern with material culture. But could it be argued that

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this has only been so long as things have been seen as the means of gaining access to codes of meaning, or symbolic orders? Is it the case that in overlooking the question of how people relate to material things in the most immediate way, we have missed an opening for finding out what our own discipline is actually ask­ ing? One strand of thought which has something to contribute to these issues is the contemporary convergence between time­ geography and structuration theory (Giddens 1 981; Thrift 1983; etc.), and here we may find some helpful tools of analysis. Giddens makes use of Hagerstrand' s time-geography as a means of investigating the ways in which societies are integrated and reproduced. A central concept here is that of presence availability: the opportunities for spatio-temporal coupling and face-to-face contact afforded by the rhythms and life-paths implicit in differ­ ent social formations. Giddens (1981 ) lays much stress upon the revolutionary effects of literacy and, later, electronic media of communication in transforming 'time-space distanciation', and bringing about a change from 'social integration' to 'system inte­ gration' (Thrift 1 9 87: 403). However, it may be fair to suggest that this point of view underestimates the 'textual' character of mater­ ial things: material culture can be seen as a technology which stores signification which can be drawn upon in social action (Barrett 1 988; Tilley 1 989) . As such, material culture may be employed in pre-literate societies as a means of presencing. That is to say, it can introduce absent persons or classes of person into social discourse by means of metaphors and mnemonics, thereby influencing the nature of interaction (Ray 1987: 68). Another concept which can be drawn from time-geography is that of the dominant locale, a place to which subjects repeatedly return, and which serves to 'generate the major structural princi­ ples implicated in the constitution of different types of societies' (Gregory 1 989). For Giddens, such dominant locales are central to the way in which societies bind space and time, by acting as storers of 'authoritative and allocative resources' (Giddens 1981 : 94). In pre-literate societies, the integration of such spaces into cycles of activity sactioned by tradition may be important both to the cre­ ation of routine and, thereby, to social reproduction (ibid. : 38). Such spaces will tend to be architectural, and it is at this level that one may link the question of movement through space to that of the manipulation of the configuration of space. To make a 'build-

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ing', to enclose an area of space, is to establish a discontinuity in space as a whole, to enable contrasts to be drawn between 'inside' and 'outside', and to attempt to separate something from the whole unstable sea of meanings outside (Conkey 1 982: 1 1 7; Hodder 1988: 68; Yates 1989: 250). It is this same process of enclo­ sure, bounding and segmentation of space which Foucault (1977) sees as being caught up with the development of the 'carceral' society. Enclosure allows the creation of an 'analytic space', a space which can be conceptually controlled, and it is this kind of control over the space which subjects dwell in and move through which has become total within our own society. In the Neolithic, just as we are concerned with a landscape which has not 'filled up' demographically, the social landscape is one over which this clas­ sificatory control would have been highly incomplete. It is within the analytic space of the workplace, the prison, the school and the hospital that the human subject is monitored, identified, broken down and isolated. In the distant past, these options did not exist. Just as material objects which have been made by people have a textual character, so space is never experienced in a neutral or innocent way. Space, whether humanly constructed or merely appropriated in the mind is 'read' in relation to previously encountered spaces and internalised codes of value and meaning, rather than known primordially (Duncan and Duncan 1988). As Moore (1986: 86) has demonstrated, meaning does not inhere in the structure of space: it has to be invoked in the practice of read­ ing. One reads meaning into, not out of, a text (Outhwaite 1 985: 24). So the understanding of a space actually involves a participa­ tion in the creation of meaning (Warnke 1987: 68). This is not to say that the meaning of space is totally lost from one moment to the next, and that each person entering a space will understand it in a different and unconnected way from any other person's experience. Instead, the continuity of interpretation lies in the reading rather than in the text itself, in what Gadamer would call a tradition of interpretation. Thus Bourdieu (1977) has shown the way in which habitual actions carried out within a domestic space are contained by, but also constantly recreate, the meanings attributed to the particular areas of the house. The reading of this space is contained in the process of physically moving about in space. The 'book' from which the children learn their vision of the world is read with the body, in and through the movements and displace-

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ments which make the space within which they are enacted as much as they are made by it. (Bourdieu 1 977: 90)

Actual bodily movement through and action in ordered space are simultaneously both action and interpretation; they are therefore intelligible as an act of reading, where reading itself is understood as conjoined decoding and interpretation. (Moore 1 986: 85)

This adds another dimension to the 'weaving dance' of move­ ment through time-space (Pred 1 977) : it is not merely an ergonomic project of pairing up and synchronization; it is a con­ stant process of interpretation of space, its meaning, and one's place within it. By definition, this is an intensely physical and sensuous experience which cannot be seen as entirely cerebral: it saturates the fleshly body (Grange 1985). Nor will this process be limited to the built environment of humanly constructed space. The primal forest, the sea and the mountain are themselves always already interpreted, and are read in relation to this inter­ pretation. What Pred calls the 'choreography of existence' is found in the same actions as Bourdieu and Moore identify with the reading of spatial texts. To share presence with a thing or per­ son is to read and interpret it. It follows that the identifying char­ acteristic of constructed space is the way in which it can channel bodily movement, and hence can be deployed in such a way as to influence the way in which space is experienced and read. The way in which the human body mediates the reading of spatial texts only serves to emphasize Foucault's point that the body is caught up in a political field which constitutes a system of subjection (1 977: 25) . If movement in space is necessarily a hermeneutic act, then the particular forms which that movement takes will contribute to the creation of subjectivity. This effective­ ly returns us to Heidegger, and the way in which Being is contin­ gent within time and space. Space and time enter into the being of the subject, whose life-path forms the grid within which self­ recognition becomes possible. The dialectic of presence and absence in time-space actually determines the way in which the subject is given to itself. All of the above clearly depend upon a quite specific percep­ tion of the nature of the human subject and the way in which it is constituted, the very element which I have suggested to be lack­ ing from phenomenology. Crucial to the argument is Foucault's

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conception of a certain 'technology of the self', an apparatus com­ posed of ideas, beliefs and practices in terms of which the subject forms through the process of self-interpretation (Foucault 1 988; Thomas 1 989). One immediate problem with this scheme which has recently been pointed out by Peter Dews is that it almost requires that something like a self must already exist in order to construct itself (Dews 1 989: 40). An alternative might be found in Lyotard's or Deleuze's accounts of the production of the self-con. scious subject through the containment of libidinal energy (Dews 1984). However, both of these seem to raise this energy to the sta­ tus of a transcendental, trans-historic force, equivalent to the Freudian thanatos or the Nietzschean 'will to power' . I would pre­ fer to step back from such a naturalist theory of pure forces and into the realm of language, a move which has considerable impli­ cations in the context of the present paper.alt may be legitimate to seek an origin for the will to know in the separation between the signifier and the signified term. Language, never able to appre­ hend the thing in itself, consisting only of differences with no positive terms, sets up an eternal deferring of the encounter with the signified. This lack of congruence between the world of things and that of the words with which we attempt to describe it can be seen as creating a certain differential or potential expressed as a desire to know. A desire which, by definition, can never be fulfilled. Returning to a more Foucauldian line of argument, we must stress that this will to know is always located in the world, and is always dispersed in networks of power and knowledge which are congruent with social relations. Far from the idealist position which would see the drive to know as wrought into the human condition and contained in a primordial form in the human mind, it is necessary for the subject to insert itself into the net­ work of power and knowledge in order to gain selfhood . This insertion takes place through the adoption of language. With lan­ guage comes necessarily the desire to know oneself, or to put it in other terms, becoming a being for whom one's Being is an issue. Necessarily, the desire to know is turned inwards as well as out­ wards, such that the subject comes to recognise itself as a subject through a hermeneutics of the self. However, this self-interpreta­ tion is always a social practice, which takes place in conditions which are historically and culturally relative, tied as they are to the relations of power. The formation of the self thus takes place

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in relation to a set of practices and techniques which are the province of the society rather than the individual, and these are the technology of the self. Only through a particular, historically and culturally specific technology of the self can the subject form as a centre of interpretation, through the act of self-reflection. What I should like to argue is that at particular points in human history these technologies change qualitatively. Further­ more, such a technology consists not merely of intangibles, but also of particular aspects of material culture which have a role in locating the subject in relation to both the physical and the meta­ physical world. Primary among these is architecture.

Megalithic Origins: Where the Walk Meets the Place

The argument advanced so far has suggested that the bodily movement of human beings through space is directly implicated in both their interpretation of the world and the formation of their subjectivity. It is evident that the synchronous development of monumental architecture and some element of food produc­ tion at the start of the Neolithic period in the British Isles imply a transformed spatial order, both in symbolic terms and in those of the labour regime. How would this differ from the way in which space had been appropriated in the preceding Mesolithic era? The nature of a hunting and gathering lifestyle is such that rou­

tinization in time-space will be fairly well developed. In Giddens' terms, hunters and gatherers will organize their movements with a view to obtaining co-presence with seasonally available plants and animals. Equally, the exchange of information, gifts, raw materials and marriage partners will require synchronization in the movements of hunting bands. In this way, an acute aware­ ness of a particular form of time and space might be assumed on the part of the Mesolithic population (Ingold 1 986: chapter 6). The seasonal round becomes a 'spatial story' (de Certeau 1 984), a series of repeated events and encounters which weave time and space together into a kind of narrative. We can probably also assume that such an awareness would result in the naming of particular often-visited places, and the incorporation of these names and locales into some form of cosmology. In this way, the subjective experience of space on a routine and repeated basis would result in the creation of 'places' . Put another way, the reg-

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ular movements of hunting bands might be seen as a process of encoding, in the course of which space was interpreted and given meaning. In returning to the same locales on a seasonal basis, people would be building up a tradition of interpretation relative to lived space. In a qualitative way, the appropriation of landscape in the Neolithic differs from this pattern. Instead of subjectivity gradu­ ally creating place over a period of time, the process began with the creation of place, in an actual physical transformation of space. It follows that the construction of a monument guides movement, conditions the way in which a place is 'read', and is instrumental in the creation of subjectivity. If we think of the Neolithic less as a synonym for farming, and more as a mode of social reproduction (and, by implication, of the production of human subjects), then this form of spatial appropriation can be seen to be fundamental to the lifestyle, rather than an 'optional extra' to be indulged in under conditions of 'stable adjustment' (Case 1 969: 181; Thomas 1 988a: 63-4). Two particular groups of megalithic monuments which fall demonstrably at the start of the Neolithic sequence very effectively demonstrate the role of archi­ tecture in the Neolithic landscape. The first of these is the men­ hirs, or upright monoliths of Brittany (Giot 1988). Several of these seem to have been broken up and incorporated into the fabric of later passage graves (ibid.: 321 ), a circumstance which seems to indicate their relatively early date. A number of the menhirs bear pecked or incised designs on their surfaces, generally representa­ tional in character. At sites like St Denec (Finistere) these include hafted axes, while in the cases of St. Samson-sur-Ranee and the broken stone split the Gavrinis tomb and the capstone of the Table des Marchands, animals are represented (LeaRoux 1 985) (See Thomas and Tilley: this volume). Other motifs include puta­ tive shepherd's crooks, ploughs and boats. As Bradley (1989: 79) aptly points out, these designs seem to refer to many of the key attributes of the new way of life. They are elements of a trans­ formed technology of the self. The second group of monuments are more central to the con­ cerns of this paper. Kinnes (1 987: 34) points out that two tradi­ tions of sepulchral architecture can be discerned in late fourth millennium be Britain: an eastern, lowland grouping of earthen long and round mounds containing embanked linear mortuary zones, and a western group of box-shaped megalithic chambers,

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often set in small circular cairns, distributed around the shores of the Irish Sea. Such an orthostatic chamber, as Kinnes points out (1981 : 84), implies continued access to the mortuary deposit and a continuity of use. The simple, often unicellular nature of the ear­ liest tombs in these western areas has frequently been remarked upon. In Ireland, Portal Dolmens, often declared in the past to have been a feature of the late Neolithic (Herity and Eagan 1977: 80), now seem to be accepted as late fourth millennium lie in date (ApSimon 1 986: 6). A similar early dating for a portal dolmen is implied from the Welsh site of Dyffryn Ardudwy (Powella1 973). The earliest passage graves in Ireland, extant perhaps by 3000 be, were simple, boulder-built monuments with negligible passages (Sheridan 1 986: 1 7) . For the Clyde region, Scott ( 1 969: 1 8 1 ) declares that: 'The primary megalithic burial chamber in Scotland, which probably developed from a wooden prototype, was a slab-built quadrangular structure, set overground, intend­ ed for successive burials' . Similarly, in the Orkney archipelago, both Henshall (1985: 85) and Sharples (1985: 64) affirm that the earliest megalithic tombs were the simple bipartite and tripartite structures of the Orkney­ Cromarty tradition. In all of these cases the major determinant of the architecture seems to be the provision of the chamber space. The remainder of the structure may be unimpressive, but this need not suggest that the tombs were inadequate for the purpose required of them. I suggest that the earliest megalithic tombs of western Britain had as their function the separation of an area of space from the landscape as a whole, within which ancestral bones could be deposited. Both these tombs and the Breton men­ hirs were 'carriers' of certain symbolic media (bones, inscrip­ tions) which imparted a certain significance to the place where they were located. In other words, these early monuments were engaged in the creation of dominant locales, which would influ­ ence patterns of human movement and interaction in the future. In both cases a significant aspect of the monument was that of presencing: the tombs presenced the ancestors in the landscape, the menhirs embodied symbols of production, reproduction and power. Both kinds of monuments affected the nature of day-to­ day social discourse by introducing certain values into the con­ text of interaction. The meanings of significant places were now bound up with the ideals of a new kind of society, and it may be that the construction of such a monument would have been one

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of the first acts undertaken by a group of people newly acculturat­ ed to the Neolithic way of life. By reconstructing the landscape, people were providing themselves and their offspring with reminders of 'how to go on'. The introduction of the ancestors, in particular, into everyday life in such a massively physical a man­ ner would have had one overriding effect: that the human sub­ ject, developing an identity in the context of a society deeply attuned to its ancestors, would do so in a particular way. The emergent conception of self would be one which was always related to the past, and always located in terms of kinship.

Transforming Megalithic Space

Kinnes (1975: 20) defines three ways in which the basic box cham­ bers of the Irish Sea zone were combined as modules to provide more complex orchestrations of enclosed space: linear, dispersed and agglomerate patterns (Figure 2.1 ) . Kinnes is at pains to dis­ tance this scheme from 'sub-Darwinian principles of evolution and reversion' (ibid. : 20), although other discussions of the increase in scale and complexity of monuments over time have been more explicitly evolutionary in tenor (Darvill 1 982: 28-9).

However, rather than evoke these generalized mechanisms of universal causality it might be worthwhile to consider specific ways in which changes in the configuration of space might denote changes in the use and significance of the tombs. By examining several of the areas in which insular traditions of megalithic architecture grew up in the earlier third millennium be it may prove possible to isolate some particular trends within this process. In the Orkney Islands the process of change which grew out of the prototypical bipartite and tripartite tombs was one of the lin­ ear extension of the internal chamber area. The resultant form, the stalled cairn, could have anything up to fourteen pairs of stalls, separated by orthostats and all equally accessible from a central passage (Henshalla1 985: 87; Sharples 1 985: 67). None the less, externally many of these tombs remained relatively undistin­ guished. The development of the chamber space seems to have been connected with the deposition and manipulation of human bones and other materials (Richards 1988: 49), a trend also noted within the Cotswold-Severn group. In the latter, the change from

The Hermeneutics of Megalithic Space

85

ITO

D D

D D

D

Figure 2.1 Patterns of combination of the simple cellular chamber (after Kinnes).

simple chambers reached by short passages from the sides of a trapezoid cairn to clusters of transepts reached from a single entrance in the mound terminal would have allowed greater con­ trol and classification over deposited material (Thomas 1 988b). But equally, the transepted tombs introduced a number of con­ straints upon the way space was to be experienced : only one entrance was now available, and in order to gain access to the chamber it was now essential to cross the forecourt area. The forecourt, a symbolically-laden space which at various sites has revealed hearths, pits and deposits of animal bones and stone axes, is one of the critical developments of this second phase of megalithic architecture. In the Clyde region, Scott (1969) outlined a sequence in which the simple box forms which he termed 'protomegaliths' were transformed into more complex structures. Beginning with the addition of a functional entrance at one end of the chamber, the access to the burial deposit was gradually elaborated with the

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Interpretative Archaeology

addition of portal stones, flat fa