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Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity

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Modernism/modernity 11.1 (2004) 1-16 "Archaeologies of the Modern" invites a double explanation: first, of a title that associates the modern(ist) scene with the excavation of apparently fragmentary pasts; second, of the issue's unconventional format. The issue is dialogical in structure and provocative in intent. It conjoins essays authored by cultural historians and by archaeologists, and accompanies each contribution by an archaeologist with a brief response from a cultural historian, and vice versa. The aim of this device, as well as of the special issue as a whole, is to inaugurate a dialogue between reflections on archaeology as a modern discipline and inquiries into the archaeological imagination in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural forms. We believe that this dialogue transgresses the limits of conventional interdisciplinarity because it excavates forms in the cultural imaginary that find a home in no orthodox disciplinary field. One simple and limited aim of the issue is to contribute to the new history of archaeology. It was only in the 1980s that histories of the publications of supposed great and originary minds in archaeology were augmented by simple sociological and ideological motivation: for example, middle-class Anglo-American experience reflected in archaeological method and theory; nineteenth-century nationalisms fueling archaeological research into local origins. Research into the history of archaeology based upon other than published sources had to wait until the mid-1990s (notably associated with the AREA Project: see Nathan Schlanger's contribution to the dossier in this issue). Anything other than a strictly internalist account of archaeology may well be far off, but there is more to archaeology than the discipline. Here our issue's title points to a much wider aim of furthering what may be called an archaeological history of modernity and its cultural imaginary, modernism, through an exploration of their archaeological components. To explain what we mean by this we begin with a classic modernist and archaeological gesture (one of Duchamp's readymades) and then sketch three archaeological moments of the last century or so. These lay the ground for a glossary of some key features of archaeological discourse that are the subject of this issue's papers. Consider the snow shovel chosen by Marcel Duchamp as the protagonist of In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915). The shovel poses fundamental questions about the nature of objects and their relation to the world. Duchamp's shovel was bought off the shelf of a hardware store, torn from the everyday and set in a museum gallery with a title. It is a fragment of the material culture of the early twentieth century, a piece of machine-age trash—quite unexceptional. But in its association with Duchamp, in its gallery siting, in its titling, it is also a special shovel. It bears an argument about the character of contemporary art (the gallery and its objects; the artist's work and choices). It prefigures a narrative (contemporary newspapers had carried the story of a man who had broken his arm clearing the streets of snow). It is also a relic, an object of worship and even pilgrimage, a fetish—preserved (and, indeed, recreated) for posterity so as to keep alive a distinctly modern practice of decontextualization and recontextualization. The readymade piece of art is, of course, duplicitous. In the gallery it betrays its function and elicits new significances only through this betrayal. It is tagged with the story of a future denouement. It doesn't dig, but breaks arms. Duchamp's In Advance of the Broken Arm positions itself ahead of the work of digging, of uncovering and amassing. The shovel is an avant-bras: we might push the gesture further and say that In Advance of the Broken Arm moves in advance of a double movement that would break the arm of certain longstanding disciplinary conventions: an antiquarian tradition in archaeology with its cult of the past as radical continuity; the anti-antiquarian strain in studies of modernism and modernity with its celebration of history as radical discontinuity. The shovel is a token of digging, but only in a manner of speaking. No longer able to seek out origins in depths, it...
SCHNAPP, SHANKS, TIEWS / archaeology, modernism, modernity
1
MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER
ONE, PP 1–16.
© 2004 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Archaeology, Modernism, Modernity
Editors’ introduction to “Archaeologies
of the Modern,” a special issue of
Modernism/Modernity
Jeffrey Schnapp, Michael Shanks, Matthew Tiews
Archaeologies of the Modern
“Archaeologies of the Modern” invites a double explanation:
first, of a title that associates the modern(ist) scene with the ex-
cavation of apparently fragmentary pasts; second, of the issue’s
unconventional format. The issue is dialogical in structure and
provocative in intent. It conjoins essays authored by cultural his-
torians and by archaeologists, and accompanies each contribu-
tion by an archaeologist with a brief response from a cultural
historian, and vice versa. The aim of this device, as well as of the
special issue as a whole, is to inaugurate a dialogue between
reflections on archaeology as a modern discipline and inquiries
into the archaeological imagination in nineteenth- and twenti-
eth-century cultural forms. We believe that this dialogue trans-
gresses the limits of conventional interdisciplinarity because it
excavates forms in the cultural imaginary that find a home in no
orthodox disciplinary field.
One simple and limited aim of the issue is to contribute to
the new history of archaeology. It was only in the 1980s that
histories of the publications of supposed great and originary
minds in archaeology1 were augmented by simple sociological
and ideological motivation: for example, middle-class Anglo-
American experience reflected in archaeological method and
theory;2 nineteenth-century nationalisms fueling archaeological
research into local origins.3 Research into the history of archae-
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM1
MODERNISM / modernity
2ology based upon other than published sources had to wait until the mid-1990s (nota-
bly associated with the AREA Project: see Nathan Schlanger’s contribution to the dos-
sier in this issue).
Anything other than a strictly internalist account of archaeology may well be far off,
but there is more to archaeology than the discipline. Here our issue’s title points to a
much wider aim of furthering what may be called an archaeological history of moder-
nity and its cultural imaginary, modernism, through an exploration of their archaeo-
logical components.
To explain what we mean by this we begin with a classic modernist and archaeologi-
cal gesture (one of Duchamp’s readymades) and then sketch three archaeological
moments of the last century or so. These lay the ground for a glossary of some key
features of archaeological discourse that are the subject of this issue’s papers.
An Archaeological Gesture
Consider the snow shovel chosen by Marcel Duchamp as the protagonist of In
Advance of the Broken Arm (1915). The shovel poses fundamental questions about
the nature of objects and their relation to the world. Duchamp’s shovel was bought off
the shelf of a hardware store, torn from the everyday and set in a museum gallery with a
title. It is a fragment of the material culture of the early twentieth century, a piece of
machine-age trash—quite unexceptional. But in its association with Duchamp, in its
gallery siting, in its titling, it is also a special shovel. It bears an argument about the
character of contemporary art (the gallery and its objects; the artist’s work and choices). It
prefigures a narrative (contemporary newspapers had carried the story of a man who
had broken his arm clearing the streets of snow). It is also a relic, an object of worship
and even pilgrimage, a fetish—preserved (and, indeed, recreated) for posterity so as
to keep alive a distinctly modern practice of decontextualization and recontextualization.
The readymade piece of art is, of course, duplicitous. In the gallery it betrays its
function and elicits new significances only through this betrayal. It is tagged with the
story of a future denouement. It doesn’t dig, but breaks arms. Duchamp’s In Advance
of the Broken Arm positions itself ahead of the work of digging, of uncovering and
amassing. The shovel is an avant-bras: we might push the gesture further and say that
In Advance of the Broken Arm moves in advance of a double movement that would
break the arm of certain longstanding disciplinary conventions: an antiquarian tradi-
tion in archaeology with its cult of the past as radical continuity; the anti-antiquarian
strain in studies of modernism and modernity with its celebration of history as radical
discontinuity. The shovel is a token of digging, but only in a manner of speaking. No
longer able to seek out origins in depths, it instead excavates passages (snow removed
from city streets) across the labile, unsteady surfaces of an epoch that places constant
demands upon the recent and remote past while feverishly seeking innovation; an
epoch in which institutions dedicated to the recovery, preservation, reconstruction,
and display of ancient “finds” coexist with institutions of countermemory dedicated to
the cult of ever renewable, ever new trouvailles. That such trouvailles may include
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM2
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trouvères or may choose to privilege ancient textual/architectural remains (as in the
cases of Eliot and Pound) merely underscores the point.
Decontextualization and recontextualization—how does this duplicity and irony
relate to the practices that long placed archaeology in the service of historical, na-
tional, and international myths of origin and (dis)continuity: of group identity forma-
tion (nationalisms), race (ethnicity), technological progress, the rise and fall of civiliza-
tions, and the like? And how does this distinctly modern(ist) culture of objects intersect
the history of archaeology itself, as well as more recent critiques of archaeology, as it
were, from the inside? Is the broken arm that the shovel betokens a future in which
archaeology excavates in the service of discontinuity? These are among the questions
that the present special issue seeks to explore.
Modernist Dreams of An Other Archaeology
To speak of a literal archaeology of the modern era might appear perverse given the
negative role assigned to archaeologists and antiquarians in the most advanced expres-
sions of modern culture. From Gustave Flaubert to the avant-gardes and beyond, the
archaeologist, whether amateur or professional, has routinely been dismissed as an
intransigent and acritical worshipper of the past, and as an adversary of the new, the
unexpected, and the unknown. Indeed, when Flaubert sends his two “imbeciles,”
Bouvard and Pécuchet, into archaeological raptures, it is only to underscore their un-
thinking pretension, most tellingly when they learn of phallic symbolism among the
ancient Celts—“and for Bouvard and Pécuchet everything became a phallus. They
collected the swing-bars of carriages, legs of armchairs, cellar bolts, chemists’ pestles.”4
In their archaeological excess, the pair recruits even the most functional objects of
material culture into a bathetic ancient symbolics; their combination of rapt fetishism
and autodidactic ignorance cruelly parodies amateur antiquarianism. The 1909 Found-
ing Manifesto of Futurism, similarly, launches its incendiary appeal for a worship of
the future against “the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides, and
antiques dealers.”5 Boccioni and the Futurist painters take aim at a similar list, de-
nouncing restorers, critics, and gouty academics, but singling out for special attention
“affected archaeologists with their chronic necrophilia.”6 Professors, tourist guides,
antiques dealers, archaeologists: the tumor of passéism was fed by the nineteenth
century’s seemingly insatiable appetite for experiences of the past as present, whether
this meant continuity in the form of relics collected, inserted into bourgeois interiors,
or styles from the past revived and resurrected as ornamental surfaces laid over ma-
chines or modern constructions. Whether in its houses of secular worship (such as
museums and libraries) or in its amusement parks, the century constantly sought to
animate the present with expressions of a past that was felt to be ever more remote,
thanks to the tumultuous impact of the industrial revolution and the resulting time-
space compression and acceleration. But in its very remoteness that past became ma-
terial for reanimation from the dead into living forms, as well as a realm of pleasurable
fantasy and consumption associated with leisure.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM3
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4So when Tristan Tzara first codified the emancipatory nature of Dada’s work of
demolition nearly a decade after Marinetti and Boccioni, the archaeologist remained
squarely in the line of fire:
DADA; every object, all objects, feelings and obscurities, every apparition and the pre-
cise shock of parallel lines, are means for the battle of: DADA; the abolition of memory:
DADA; the abolition of archaeology: DADA the abolition of prophets: DADA; the aboli-
tion of the future: DADA; the absolute and indisputable belief in every god that is an
immediate product of spontaneity . . . Liberty: DADA DADA DADA;—the roar of con-
torted pains, the interweaving of contraries and all contradictions, freaks and irrelevan-
cies: LIFE.7
The avant-gardes’ target is twofold: on the one hand, nineteenth-century amateur ar-
chaeology as driven by the culture of connoisseurship and collecting, associated with
the country estate, the bourgeois interior, and the museum as reliquary; on the other
hand, a newly emerging professional or “scientific” archaeology, driven by field re-
search and supported by academies and universities. The two are collapsed into a
single monolithic antiquarianism whose deeper logic is declared insidious because it
locates the past at the very core of a conservative, continuity-based vision of the fu-
ture. The diagnosis is largely correct. Much as in the science fictions of Jules Verne,
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and H. G. Wells, amateur and professional antiquarians were
committed to a futurology that either elevated objects outside of time and space into a
realm of transcultural and transhistorical beauty (the cult of the masterpiece) and/or
subordinated them within grand evolutionary schemes and narratives in the service of
a higher law (progress, science, nationhood, humanity, God). Hence Tzara’s leap from
archaeology- and memory-bashing to the bashing of prophets and futurologists. And
hence the importance granted to accidents, freaks, and exceptions to any and every rule.
As is made explicit in Tzara’s text, the abolition of archaeology has nested within it
a positive counterproposal. It stands as the precondition for an other (and even othering)
archaeology loosely affiliated both with Freud’s tracking of subterranean psychic and
somatic intensities, and with an ongoing modern preoccupation, extending from
Nietzsche through Artaud and Bataille, with tapping into “prehistoric” instinctualisms,
violence, savagery, sacrifice, and sacrality. Instead of feeding necrophilia, this modern-
ist archaeology purports to operate in the service of life. It unburies life forms resistant
to or hostile to Culture and Civilization. Irreducible and intractable, its “finds” refuse
to be absorbed into grand narratives of nation-building, science, or progress and yield
surprises, shocks, thrills, and traumas. They belong either to the realm of prehistory or
to the material culture of the everyday.
This other archaeology purports to free objects from the onus of having to signify,
to function, to be accessible or available. It cherishes the duplicity of archaeological
objects: their moments of decontextualization and recontextualization. In being dug
out and ripped from its matrix, the old object holds the potential of producing the
effect of the new, by virtue of its very remoteness and alterity, its singularity. The
process, the duplicity, is one of estrangement, re-collection, recovery.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM4
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Three Modern Archaeological Moments
1. April or May 1896: An Archaeology of the Psyche
In a letter to Stefan Zweig in 1931, Sigmund Freud complains, or brags, “I have
sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities,
[and] have actually read more archaeology than psychology.”8 The obsessive nature of
Freud’s antiquity collecting is well documented. In Edmund Engelman’s famous pho-
tographs of the study at Berggasse 19, glowering masks dangle precariously over ar-
chaic gods huddled cheek by jowl on every available surface.9 H. D. describes her first
reaction to the doctor’s examining room as speechless amazement before the wealth of
collectibles: “Sigmund Freud does not speak. He is waiting for me to say something. I
cannot speak. I look around the room. . . . Pricelessly lovely objects are displayed here
on the shelves to right, to left of me. . . . no one had told me that this room was lined
with treasures.”10 Freud’s personal physician relates that Freud called his collecting
“an addiction second in intensity only to his nicotine addiction.”11 But Freud’s interest
in archaeological artifacts is not manifest simply in a mania for figurines. Although his
confession to Zweig may well be exaggerated, his lifelong fascination with archaeology
was systematic enough to call for a library of archaeological treatises running to hun-
dreds of titles and to undergird a close friendship with Emanuel Löwy, recently redis-
covered as a “forgotten pioneer” in archaeological research.12 Underlying this scien-
tific curiosity is a personal enthrallment to the figure of Heinrich Schliemann: as early
as 1899, Freud writes Wilhelm Fliess of his envy for the discoverer of Troy, whose
archaeological motivations he ascribes to childhood dreams as vivid as his own early
love for Rome: “happiness comes only with the fulfillment of a childhood wish. This
reminds me that I shall not go to Italy this year.”13
Even before this avowal of personal idolatry, Freud had introduced archaeology as
a methodological correlate to his developing theories of therapeutic psychology. “The
Aetiology of Hysteria” (Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie), first presented as a lecture to the
Viennese “Verein für Psychiatrie und Neurologie” in April or May 1896,14 opens with
a justification for Freud and Breuer’s approach based on comparison to excavation—
an “advance” in archaeological technique. Freud turns from the patient’s autobiographi-
cal self-assessment to the analyst’s clinical discovery by invoking the switch in author-
ity from history to material culture that Gavin Lucas limns in this issue. An explorer
happening upon some ruins may, Freud suggests, simply ask the locals (“perhaps semi-
barbaric people”) to divulge any indigenous traditions concerning their history. “But
he may act differently. . . . he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and,
beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried.” If he is successful, the
unearthed artifacts will “yield undreamed-of information about the events of the re-
mote past. . . . Saxa loquuntur!15 For one archaeological tradition, stones speak about
their history. For the excavatory analyst, hysterical symptoms are eloquent about their
traumatic causes.16 Both authorities, we might add, will exhibit a similar tendency
towards collection and display of the curiosities they expose.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM5
MODERNISM / modernity
6As with so many things Freudian, the systematic role of archaeology in Freud’s work
has been the subject of controversy in the past twenty years. While Peter Gay is willing to
term it “a master metaphor for his life’s work,”17 Donald Spence finds its implied positiv-
ism inadequate to the “anecdotal rather than archival” nature of the “so-called data” of
psychoanalysis,18 to which Donald Kuspit responds that, on the contrary, psychoanaly-
sis achieves its hermeneutic goals even more successfully than archaeology.19 Freud’s
use of the metaphor is inscribed in a synthetic discussion of the relation of archaeo-
logical practice to modernist thought by Julian Thomas in his essay in this issue.
The complexity of critical reaction may simply reflect Freud’s own equivocations:
the archaeological metaphor appears at odd intervals throughout his writing—in case
studies: Dora, the Wolfman, the Rat Man; in the analysis of Wilhelm Jensen’s archaeo-
logical fable Gradiva—subject in each case to varying qualifications and stipulations.20
In its final evocation, in a late paper on technique, “Constructions in Analysis”
(Konstruktionen in der Analyse [1937]), the exact equivalence of archaeology and psy-
choanalysis—“the two processes are in fact identical”—is almost immediately negated
by the caveat that “the analyst works under better conditions . . . since what he is
dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive.”21 The dis-
tinction here echoes the avant-garde critique of archaeological passéism.
The complexity of the comparison between archaeology and psychoanalysis is not
lost on Freud. He finds a means of redeploying facets of archaeology for the modern
aspirations of a science of the psyche. The analogy recruits not just the depth model of
excavation, but other aspects of archaeological practice: its stratigraphic mapping of
temporality onto spatial relations; its conscription of fragmentary evidence into a causal
narrative. Freud compares the layers of the psyche to those of an archaeological dig,
“and if an object makes its appearance in some particular level, it often remains to be
decided whether it belongs to that level or whether it was carried down to that level
owing to some subsequent disturbance.”22 And the broken objects found in this strati-
graphic psyche, like the “priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity” to which he
compares them,23 must be reassembled to produce their meaning. It is this—cru-
cially—that distinguishes the archaeology of the psyche. The biographical event is
redescribed as a psychic object whose causes and effects can be reconstructed only ex
post facto by the patient analyst, who dusts them off and interprets them in relation to
the other shards buried in the ruins of the psychic landscape. Like Freud’s figurines,
like his speaking stones, the psychic object—defamiliarized but uncannily at home—
most strikingly links psychoanalysis and archaeology: disciplines concerned with ob-
jects recognizable enough to inspire the reconstruction of their narrative, but remote
enough to be accessible only through the ministrations of an expert.
2. July 1926: “Archaeologisms”
Théophile Homelle, the director of the dig at Delphi, announced as early as 1895,
“Primitive forms of art now take pride of place in archaeological research,” and gushed
that archaic sculpture “has the beauty of a half-opened flower, keeping still hidden and
intact its glory and its perfume.”24 But it was not a premonitory whiff of the aesthetics
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of classical Greece that modern art found most salutary in archaic archaeology. If the
primitivism of the early years of the century relies on the trappings of cultures far-
flung in space—African masks and Tahitian maidens—it avails itself equally of the
remnants of far-off times, furnished by an archaeology moving beyond Winckelmannian
classicism and hellenism, a move whose specific implications for Greek modernism
are outlined by Gregory Jusdanis in this issue. But Picasso’s Iberian heads and Le
Corbusier’s polychromed Moschophorous are not reference points along a scientifi-
cally established timeline, but end-runs around the inevitability of archaeological chro-
nology: before and outside history, so temporally distant as to escape the taint of his-
toricism—and thereby ripe for exploitation by modernism.
So it is when Christian Zervos founds the journal Cahiers d’art in 1926. Subtitling
the publication “Revue d’actualité artistique” (Review of artistic contemporaneity),
Zervos underlines its commitment to the latest and most cutting-edge artistic produc-
tion. The Cahiers showcase the cream of the avant-garde crop: Braque, Gris, Léger,
Matisse. Above all, they champion Picasso, Zervos’s particular favorite, whose work he
would present in a thirty-three-volume catalogue raisonné beginning in 1932.25 But
Zervos’s insistence on the modernity of contemporary art goes hand in hand with a
presentation of the archaeological object in the power of its alterity. Implicitly reframed
by juxtaposition with cubist painting and International architecture, the artifacts un-
earthed in archaeological excavation shake off their dust and present a brave new face
to the world. From the first issues, the Cahiers ran articles on Cycladic figurines and
Cretan faience, on Etruscan mural painting and Mesopotamian pottery. For some
contributors, the importance of this material lay in its crystallization of an untainted
originary moment in human existence: Hans Mühlestein devotes a five-part investiga-
tion to “The Origins of Art and Culture” in the Cahiers for 1930, which is introduced
with an explicit call for a “return to the source.” “Whoever has a true interest in art
cannot be satisfied with the doctrines inspired by classicism, which rest only on a de-
rivative conception of an anterior state where instinct plays the most active role. They
are only a consequence: we must go back to the origin.”26 The implicit substitution of
a good archaic history for a degenerate classical one may just replicate a shifting ar-
chaeological chronology. More radical is the gesture Zervos himself advocates: wrench-
ing objects out of their context so that the journal becomes the forum for encounters
between the past and the present, “in order to show the unity of the human spirit
under its surface complexity, and the modernity of the great works of the past.”27
It is in this spirit that Zervos enlists Georges-Henri Rivière, student at the École du
Louvre and sometime contributor to the Cahiers, to kick off a series presenting ar-
chaeological finds—an ongoing set of avant-garde field reports—with a manifesto of
sorts in seventh issue of the journal. “Archéologismes,” presented in extenso in the
dossier hereto, hits the high notes of vanguard-approved archaeology: not classical but
archaic; not European but world-wide; not museified but site-specific. “Parricide daugh-
ter of humanism,” archaeology is its own worst enemy, toppling the museums it seeks
to feed and revealing life where it sought to document history. At the same time,
Rivière lauds the fruitful archaeological dig and hardnosed archaeological rigor. Ar-
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MODERNISM / modernity
8chaeology shows us, not the course of civilization, but the force of the object—modern
and ancient are equal; Minos, divested of his legends, reclaims his palaces, their trea-
sures, their frescos. (Arthur Evans, the excavator of Minoan Knossos, certainly colluded
in wresting his archaeological finds from a detached and prehistoric past with his mod-
ernist reconstructions of the site and its society—they appear distinctively contempo-
rary.) In a warning sadly unheeded by many of his colleagues, Rivière concludes, “those
who expect to return to the source will find fog . . .”28 In Rivière’s series, ceramics from
Knossos and sculptures from China rub shoulders with etchings by Braque and paint-
ings by Léger. It is not long before his presentations move from print to museum, as
his archaeologisms lead him to organize a celebrated exhibit of the American Indian
collections at the Trocadéro in 1928 and from there to a career in museological inno-
vation, showcasing archaeological objects for their artistic and cultural creativity.29 This
archaeology is no longer metaphorical but utilitarian, a machine for producing objects
whose alterity undergirds revolution.
Interlude. 1937: The End of History
“Be that as it may, history has ended.”30 When Alexandre Kojève explicated Hegel’s
Phenomenology of the Spirit to the Parisian intellectual elite between 1933 and 1939,
history became no longer a set of stuffy traditions to be violently abandoned. It was
done, finished, reduced to a few posthumous spasms and an internecine debate over
whether Napoléon or Stalin was its last avatar. Georges Bataille, whose archaeological
interests are discussed by Carrie Noland in these pages, writes Kojève in 1937 in be-
mused agreement with his analysis: “I grant (as a likely supposition) that from now on
history is ended (except for the denouement).”31 It is during this denouement that an
irregular attendee of Bataille’s experimental “Collège de sociologie,” Walter Benjamin,
was hunched over a reading desk in the Bibliothèque nationale, assembling material
for his monumental Arcades Project. The debris of history surveyed by Benjamin’s
rearguard angel is exhaustingly exhumed and laid out in this accumulation of historical
objects, which consistently seeks to “blast the continuity of history.” What Jens Malte
Fischer has called an “archaeology of bourgeois interiors”32 finds its justification in
resisting the subsumption of those objects into narration.
In fact, an object of history cannot be targeted at all within the continuous elapse of
history. And so, from time immemorial, historical narration has simply picked out an
object from this continuous succession. But it has done so without foundation, as an
expedient; and its first thought was then always to reinsert the object into the continuum,
which it would create anew through empathy. Materialist historiography does not choose
its objects arbitrarily. It does not fasten on them but rather springs them loose from the
order of succession.33
If the historical continuity implied by some archaeology is rewritten as ontogeny by
Freud and repudiated as oppressive by the avant-gardes, its end, or explosion, will
require a new relationship to its objects. The unfinished heap of material making up
the Arcades Project suggests the hazards of such an undertaking.
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3. 1961: The Archaeology of That Silence
The award for the most extensive use of the term archaeology to describe humanis-
tic undertaking goes, of course, to Michel Foucault. Yet when Foucault invokes ar-
chaeology in the preface to the first edition of Folie et déraison (Madness and Civiliza-
tion), it is easy to gloss over the reference as unremarkable. Bemoaning the silencing
of madness by its constitution as a mental illness, Foucault counters with his plans for
recovery. “The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue of reason about madness,
has been established only on the basis of such a silence. / I have not tried to write the
history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.”34 The inspiration
here seems still to be a metaphorics of excavation—a silence buried under layers of
reason’s chatter yearns only to be unearthed so that, like Freud’s stones, it too might
speak. As a philosophical gesture, it repeats the same distracted wave of the hand with
which Jean Cavaillès treats phenomenology as an archaeology—for its depth model of
epistemology.35 The same appears to be the case when Foucault subtitles Birth of the
Clinic “an archaeology of medical perception [regard],” although here perhaps the
flavor of rigorous scientific inquiry into the past is added to the mix as well. As it turns
out, though, these archaeologies contain seeds of a complexity only hinted at by their
initial uses.
What it all adds up to, we learn in The Archaeology of Knowledge, is the redescrip-
tion in terms of topology and stratigraphy of what used to belong to chronology. “There
was a time when archaeology, as a discipline devoted to silent monuments, inert traces,
objects without context, and things left by the past, aspired to the condition of history,
and attained meaning only through the restitution of a historical discourse; it might be
said, to play on words a little, that in our time history aspires to the condition of ar-
chaeology, to the intrinsic description of the monument.”36 Foucault’s archaeology
provides a description of discourses in their positivity, just as Rivière’s provides a de-
scription of Minoan palaces without their legends. At the end of history—here, history
as the story of the subject man—it is ironically archaeology that, stripped of its
narrativizing propensities, can once again serve to describe the past. That Foucault
precisely rejects the depth model of interpretation that archaeological excavation would
seem to invite, and indeed repudiates the very notion of object, serves only to show
the many points of contact between a multifaceted archaeology and the complex var-
iegations of modern epistemology.
Modernism/modernity—An Archaeological Glossary
We have outlined what may be called the duplicity of the archaeological object and
have tracked aspects of some archaeological modernisms that work upon this duplic-
ity, playing the fragment against context in relation to epistemology, temporality and
emancipation. We will amplify our illustration of three archaeological moments with a
glossary. Many of the terms here are tropes—in particular, narrative scenarios, charac-
ter types and metaphors.37
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM9
MODERNISM / modernity
10 surfaces—depths
The archaeological matrix, sometimes called the archaeological record, is consid-
ered as an amalgam of layers. The concept of stratigraphy is used to decode this amalgam.
In this decoding, the archaeologist digs down to find meaning. But digging
stratigraphically is impossible without the concept of horizontal surface interface—
edges, moments of discontinuity when one layer becomes another. The establishment
of such surface discontinuity is the focus of much archaeological excavation. And, of
course, it involves sideways movement across a surface, planning features such as walls
and pits, as one goes.
This is not simply to map the spatial coordinates of a 3-D matrix—the phases per-
haps of a ruined building. There is no comprehensible past down there to be discov-
ered in some kind of 3-D form—for archaeology depends upon tying layers to date
(there is no innate chronology to sediment), choices of what to distinguish, upon de-
fining the interfaces between and across layers. The concept of interface is thus a
supplement to the stratigraphy—an immaterial concept external to layering, but es-
sential to it.
the academic
Applies systems of knowledge, and builds synthetic arrangements recounting the
past as narrative, as causal chain, system, whatever.
origins—continuity
Much archaeology is a quest for contemporary origins (this is where and when we
come from) and is thus premised upon a continuity between past and present.
(dis)continuity—shock
Of course there is a particular and material continuity that lends extraordinary force
to notions of geneaological continuity—the materiality of the past has survived, ruined
and decayed, but nevertheless present to the archaeologist.
The materiality of loss, however, the experience that so much is gone, that so little
remains as inheritance, is simultaneously the ground for radical discontinuity. The
implications are threefold. First: The waste and loss that may be the real story of his-
tory means that ideas of sociocultural continuity (of community, identity, technology,
progress) may be quite literally groundless. Second: The fragments of history attest to
massive lacunae, and assembling the pieces as a narrative can only occur locally, if at
all. Third: Radical historical discontinuity throws suspicion on accounts and narratives
that depend upon notions of sociocultural and biological similarity that transcend his-
tory (notions, for example, of universal human values). Radical discontinuity may thus
mean a shock of radical difference.
difference—primitivism
Evolutionary schemes play upon a past that is different from the present in being at
an earlier, more primitive stage. Here discontinuity is explicitly and intimately tied to
grand metanarratives of historical contintuity.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM10
SCHNAPP, SHANKS, TIEWS / archaeology, modernism, modernity
11
authenticity—aura
Depth and origin are often equated with authenticity.
An authentic artifact may be considered to possess aura. And aura, of course, may
involve a sense of distance and difference.
The grounds for authenticity and aura are material—the piece of the past has sur-
vived and its materiality is witness to this survival, its metonymical bridging of time
and making good of loss.
the amateur (archaeologist/antiquarian)
Hooked on the aura of the past.
the scavenger
Recycling bits of the past otherwise discarded, making them live again, finding
value where there was none perceived.
embodiment—document
The material past is encountered unspoken, and is ultimately ineffable (but see
mute-ability). Here is a profound question that can only be resolved as fatally flawed
translation—how are we to document the past on the basis of its fragmentary material
remains? We can only interminably scribble on the ruins which always hold back more
than ever could be said or pictured.
Encountering the archaeological past is distinctively sensory—embodied. Just like
memory, we feel as much as rationally decode the past. This is associated with its
ineffability—it is often only felt. Reactions may range from fascination through dis-
gust to veneration of the sacred.
the fieldworker
Engages with archaeological places, and decontextualizes site and artifact, rips them
from their setting, for there are only ever fragments, and choices must be made, of
what elicits attention, of what to record, of what to conserve.
topography—topology
Ruins in the land—this is one of the sites of archaeology. It may be conceived as
“the field.”
Sites may be represented as coordinates—spatial grid reference. They may be de-
scribed topographically. More accurately, and with Michel Serres, their representa-
tion requires a topology that can deal with the palimpsest that is landscape—the per-
colating time that folds together the many fragmentary traces of pasts present in any
one place.38
temporality—actuality
Four archaeological temporalities:
The moment (for example, of origin, or of discovery) arrested/captured.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM11
MODERNISM / modernity
12 Date—the application of chronometry.
Ruin and decay—a continuity from past through present.
Actuality—a return of what is no longer the same. The nonarbitrary conjunction of
presents: the past’s present, the instant of archaeological excavation or discovery, and
the time of viewing, reading, recollection.
systematics—loss
The archaeologist faces a mound of debris. One way of making good the loss inher-
ent in the fragment is to define categories and classify. Writing catalogs.
Or, in choosing a systematics that eschews the construction of a coherent historical
narrative (inadequately based upon scattered archaeological fragments), archaeolo-
gists may instead approximate an artifactual cladistics.
the museologist
Managing the archives. May be a scribe, writing inventories and catalogs.
mute-ability
Archaeologists may think they can read the traces of the past—the mute stones
speaking through the work of the archaeologist.
This translation or representation is one of many metamorphic processes that are
the subject of archaeological interest. Rot and decay. Restoration. And also everyday
discard turned into history.
the manager
Managing the inventories, site access, access to the archives.
ruin—entropy
The loss that is at the heart of the archaeological project—history as ruin—is a
precisely modernist experience of the twentieth century. How can we hold on to the
mass of information and detail, the lives descending into chaos?
horror—abjection
There is horror not only in the metamorphic processes of decay that apply to our
own materiality. But also in the entropy that is history—the tendency to misunder-
stand (so much is missing), the drift into formlessness. Then there is the sickening loss
that is the horror of history—the wasted lives. So much thrown away.
A forensic horror too, as at the scene of a crime—the chance find of a finger bone
or tooth (or, so often now, the mass grave of anonymous victims) attesting to . . .
symptomatic logic—forensics
At a scene of crime anything might be relevant. The archaeological site is cognate
with the crime scene. The tiny fragment may be significant and provide a clue to some
deeper meaning or knowledge. The fragment or trace is here conceived as a kind of
clue or symptom.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM12
SCHNAPP, SHANKS, TIEWS / archaeology, modernism, modernity
13
In a symptomatic logic superficial and isolated finds, events and observations are
linked to underlying process. A symptom may lead to medical diagnosis. An archaeo-
logical find may track the migration of an ethnic group.
forensics—anthropometrics
The desire is for some kind of control over the incidental details, a system that
might lead to identification. Just as Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, and a nine-
teenth-century will to knowledge, codified and cataloged fingerprints and ears, the
shape of eyebrows in a forensic anthropology, a physiognomic science of character,
race and conformity, so too did, do, archaeologists collect skulls and flint tools, mea-
suring and comparing in a systematization of ancient race and cultural industry.39
the connoisseur
Their esoteric knowledge is based upon tying apparently incidental detail to the
authority of the catalog. In such attribution of item to class the connoisseur judges
quality and value.
the collector
Recontextualizing fragments. The collection is always more than an account of the
past and more than the sum of its parts. It is rooted in heterogeneous association. The
collector is fascinated by the life of an artifact—its journey through making, use, dis-
card, recovery, re-collection.
re-collection
It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory,
the work of archaeology is re-collection—the reinsertion of pieces of the past into a
form that carries significance in the present, carried forward from the past. As in
memory, the (archaeological) traces of the past do not constitute a timeline or linear
account. They resonate with a present experienced moment; this is what precipitates
their reemergence, their recollection. This is actuality.
absence and negativity
It is not that the archaeological past is absent. It is more precisely not present. Or,
we might say the trace means the past is absent in its presence. Archaeology is a dy-
namic of presence and absence.
In this dynamic, all historical culture is residual. There is a negativity represented
by the loss of the past, its absence. This negativity is the only condition for knowledge
of the past—waste and garbage are the condition of historical insight and knowledge.
agent and artifact
What is the distinction between the history of human agents and the history of
material traces? Between people and tools? People and artifacts have, we may say,
been intertwined for as long as there have been modern humans. We have always
been cyborgs, material agents, embodied agents, materially located agents, people
conceivable as things, artifacts playing active roles in society and history.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM13
MODERNISM / modernity
14 Material culture, the subject of archaeology and a new interdisciplinary field (ma-
terial culture studies) that also includes anthropology, sociology, economics, design,
and art history, is thus something of a tautology—because human history (of culture)
has always been material, in the social fabric, in the materiality of human agents.
Archaeology thus, potentially, merges with natural history, as it did in its antiquar-
ian beginnings, as chorography mingled topography with writing on nature, with specu-
lation on field monuments, with philological focus upon place names, with an interest
in old things found, in the animal and plant species of a landscape.
To what extent is the individual agent lost in the tide of history? Is archaeology best
understood as the evolution of species of tools? Are overarching structures (social,
cultural, biological) the real subject of deep human time?
the legislator
Policing the past—determining what should be kept and protected.
New Archaeological Histories
We have histories of published ideas in archaeology, and histories of class determi-
nation in the creation of archaeological knowledges. One of the aims of this collection
is to contribute to a new history of archaeological dispositions, of the forms of a cul-
tural imaginary centered upon traces of the past in the present, their metamorphoses
in the interests of modernists and antiquarians, the fears and gratifications.
Another goal of this special issue is to show that despite modernist critique of anti-
quarianism, the connections between modern culture and archaeology are multiple
and productive. The twin poles of association evoked by Duchamp’s shovel—a
metaphorics of embodied excavation and a turn to the accumulated, to the object—
resonate powerfully with modernist thought. Between—and beyond—these poles lies
a complex of notions: archaism and primitivism, topography, stratigraphy, cladistics,
that speaks to the richness of this encounter. What follows is an attempt to begin a
discussion between archaeologists and humanists about the vectors of its continua-
tion.
Notes
1. Glyn Daniel, A Hundred and Fifty Years of Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 1975).
2. Bruce Trigger, “Alternative Archaeologies: Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist,” Man 19 (1984):
355–70.
3. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett, eds., Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), John A. Atkinson, Iain Banks, and Jerry O’Sullivan,
eds., Nationalism and Archaeology (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996), Margarita Díaz-Andreu and
Timothy Champion, eds., Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe (London: UCL Press, 1996),
Meskell, Lynn, ed., Archaeology under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Medi-
terranean and Middle East (London: Routledge, 1998).
4. Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet, trans. T. W. Earp and G. W. Stonier (Norfolk, Conn.:
New Directions, 1954), 131.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM14
SCHNAPP, SHANKS, TIEWS / archaeology, modernism, modernity
15
5. F. T. Marinetti, “Manifeste du futurisme,” Le Figaro, 20 February 1909; trans. Jeffrey T. Schnapp.
6. Umberto Boccioni et al., “Manifesto dei Pittori futuristi,” Poesia, 11 February 1910; trans.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp.
7. Tristan Tzara, “Manifeste Dada,” Dada 3 (1918); trans. Jeffrey T. Schnapp.
8. Freud to Stefan Zweig, 7 February 1931, Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans.
Tania and James Stern (New York: Basic Books, 1960), 403.
9. See Edmund Engleman, Sigmund Freud. Wien IX. Berggasse 19 (Vienna: Verlag Christian
Brandstätter, 1993).
10. H. D., Tribute to Freud, in Tribute to Freud, Writing on the Wall, Advent, ed. Norman Holmes
Pearson (1956; Boston: David R. Godine, 1974), 96–7.
11. Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), 247.
12. See Keith Davies, “Die archäologische Bibliothek Freuds,” in “Meine . . . alten und dreckigen
Götter”: Aus Sigmund Freuds Sammlung; 18.11.1998–17.2.1999, Sigmund Freud-Museum, ed. Lydia
Marinelli (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1998), 156–65; Harald Wolf, “Archäologische
Freundschaften Emanuel Löwys und Ludwig Pollaks Bedeutung für den Sammler Freud,” in ibid.,
60–71. On Löwy, see Friedrich Brein, ed., Emanuel Löwy: Ein vergessener Pionier (Vienna: Verlag
des Clubs der Universität Wien, 1998).
13. Freud to Fliess, 28 May 1899, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess
1887–1904, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1985), 353. Freud may well have been misled about the provenance of Schliemann’s
interest in Troy by Schliemann’s own self-mythologization. See Inge Scholz-Strasser, “Vorwart” to
Marinelli, ed., Aus Freuds Sammlung, 13.
14. According to James Strachey’s Editor’s Note to the Standard Edition, the text was published in
May and June of 1896 with a footnote indicating its origin as a lecture delivered May 2 of that year;
Freud’s correspondence, however, seems to place the lecture on April 21. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration
with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 3:189.
15. Freud, “Aetiology of Hysteria,” in ibid., 3:192.
16. See also Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C.
Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
17. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 172.
18. Donald P. Spence, The Freudian Metaphor: Towards Paradigm Change in Psychoanalysis
(New York: Norton, 1987), 79; quoted in Kenneth Reinhard, “The Freudian Things: Construction
and the Archaeological Metaphor,” in Excavations and Their Objects: Freud’s Collection of Antiquity,
ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 59. For Reinhard, the meta-
phor is best understood in Lacanian terms as a topologics in which the Thing serves in the economy of
construction, rather than excavation, shifting the subject’s relation to meaning as such as opposed to
uncovering hidden meanings.
19. Donald Kuspit, “A Mighty Metaphor: The Analogy of Archaeology and Psychoanalysis,” in
Sigmund Freud and His Art: His Personal Collection of Antiquities, ed. Lynn Gamwell and Richard
Wells (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
20. For a comprehensive discussion of critical attention to the metaphor and of its several itera-
tions in Freud’s work, see Karl Stockreiter, “Am Rand der Aufklärungsmetapher: Korrespondenzen
zwischen Archäologie und Psychoanalyse,” in Marinelli, ed., Aus Freuds Sammlung, 80–93.
21. Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” Standard Edition 23:259. See Kuspit’s discussion of the
importance of this distinction in “A Mighty Metaphor.”
22. ibid.
23. Freud, “A Case of Hysteria,” Standard Edition 7:12.
24. Théophile Homolle, “Découvertes de Delphes,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. 3, 13 (1895):
207, 331; quoted in Robin Barber, “Classical Art: Discovery, Research and Presentation 1890–1930,”
in On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth
Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Gallery, 1990), 398–9.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM15
MODERNISM / modernity
16 25. Christian Zervos, Catalogue général illustré de l’oeuvre de Picasso, 33 vols. (Paris: Editions
Cahiers d’art, 1932–1975).
26. La Rédaction, introduction to Hans Mühlestein, “Des origines de l’art et de la culture,” Cahiers
d’art 5 (1930): 57, trans. Matthew Tiews.
27. Christian Zervos, “Fausses libertés,” Cahiers d’art 2 (1927): 125; Statement at the back of the
final issue, Cahiers d’art 7 (1932); quoted in Sophie Bowness, “Braque’s etchings for Hesiod’s ‘Theogony’
and archaic Greece revived,” The Burlington Magazine 117, no. 1165 (April 2000): 210.
28. Georges-Henri Rivière, “Archéologismes,” Cahiers d’art 1, no. 7 (1926): 177. See full text in
dossier hereto.
29. See Eveline Schlumberger, “Georges-Henri Rivière: Homme-orchestre des musées du 20e
siècle,” Connaissance des arts 274 (January 1975): 100–7.
30. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 152; quoted in
Denis Hollier, ed., The College of Sociology (1937–1939), trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1988), 88.
31. Bataille to Kojève, 6 December 1937, in Hollier, ed., College of Sociology, 90.
32. Jens Malte Fischer, “Imitieren und Sammeln. Bürgerlicher Möblierung und künsterlische
Selbstinszenierung,” in Stil: Geschichten und Funktionen eines kulturwissenschaftlichen
Diskurselements, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1986), 384.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), frag. N10a,1, p.
475.
34. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), xi.
35. Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 5 n. 8. Gutting’s book provides an in-depth discussion of what Foucault means by
his archaeological methodology.
36. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 7.
37. See also Michael Shanks, “Culture/Archaeology: The Dispersion of a Discipline and Its Ob-
jects,” in Archaeological Theory Today: Breaking the Boundaries, ed. Ian Hodder (Oxford: Blackwell
Polity, 2000); Shanks, Experiencing the Past: On the Character of Archaeology (New York: Routledge,
1992); Shanks, “L’archéologie et le passé contemporain: Un paradigme,” in Une archéologie du passé
récent, ed. Alain Schnapp (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1997); Shanks, “The Life of an
Artefact,” Fennoscandia Archaeologica 15 (1998); Shanks, “Photography and the Archaeological Im-
age,” in The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, ed. Brian Molyneaux
(New York: Routledge, 1997); Shanks and Christopher Tilley, Social Theory and Archaeology (Cam-
bridge: Polity Blackwell, 1987), chap. 1; Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of
Archaeology, trans. Ian Kinnes and Gillian Varndell (London: British Museum Press, 1996); Brian
Neville and Johanne Villeneuve, eds., Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002).
38. See, for example, Michel Serres, Eclaircissements: Cinq entretiens avec Bruno Latour (Paris:
F. Bourin, 1992).
39. See Ginzburg, Clues, Myths.
11.1eds_intro. 2/6/04, 10:23 AM16
... Pour l'archéologie, la tendance a été de reproduire cette séparation entre tradition et modernité et de définir la culture matérielle sous les termes de cette rupture. Le lien entre l'archéologie et la modernité a été largement analysé (Schnapp et al., 2004;Shanks et al., 2004;Thomas, 2004aThomas, , 2004b. Les recherches ont pris de l'importance au cours des cinquante dernières années en archéologie historique (Funari, 1997(Funari, , 1999, et en ce que les auteurs anglo-saxons appellent l'archéologie du monde moderne (Rathje et Murphy, 1992;Schiffer, 1991) ou celle du passé contemporain (Blaising et al., 2017;Buchli et Lucas, 2001b;González-Ruibal, 2008;Graves-Brown et al., 2013;Harrison et Breithoff, 2017;Harrison et Schofield, 2010;Holtorf et Piccini, 2011). ...
Thesis
Au Chili, le processus de modernisation qui, au début du XXe siècle, s'est traduit par l'expansion du capitalisme et de l'industrialisation a eu des répercussions économiques et sociales profondes. La culture matérielle associée aux industries minières modernes et leur influence sur les sociétés autochtones ont cependant fait l’objet de très peu d’études archéologiques. Cette thèse s’intéresse à l’exploitation du soufre dans la communauté autochtone quechua d’Ollagüe, située dans la région d’Antofagasta, au Nord du Chili. À partir de la fin du XIXe siècle, après la guerre chilienne contre le Pérou et la Bolivie (1879-1883), la région entama un long processus d'expansion capitaliste lié à diverses activités minières extractives. Les camps miniers, en tant que nouveaux centres de travail, ont fait appel à de nombreux produits, services et travailleurs, entraînant un vaste processus de migration et une augmentation de la population. Dispersées dans le paysage andin d'Ollagüe, à 4000 mètres d'altitude, les ruines de l'extraction minière du soufre témoignent des impacts de l'industrialisation et de l'expansion capitaliste dans la région. L’étude des transformations socioculturelles générées par l'exploitation minière industrielle dans la communauté locale est fondée, dans cette thèse, sur la documentation de trois camps miniers de soufre abandonnés – Buenaventura, Station Puquios et Santa Cecilia. J'explore leur histoire à travers l'étude de l'espace social et de la culture matérielle pour examiner l'identité des travailleurs miniers et de leurs familles, ainsi que leurs conditions de vie et de travail sur les hauteurs des volcans. Soulignant les spécificités de la modernisation et de l'expansion capitaliste du Chili, cette thèse aborde la culture matérielle industrielle en termes de continuités, de fragmentation et de ruptures. Elle vise à rendre visible et à valoriser la culture matérielle moderne associée aux industries minières du XXe siècle. Je soutiens que le processus de modernisation, les ruines industrielles et la culture matérielle du passé récent ont généré des espaces de mémoire qui sont aujourd’hui entrelacés avec les préoccupations contemporaines de la communauté autochtone locale.
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The Aboriginal cultural traditions of Australia, their histories, philosophies and characteristics, have fascinated and intrigued European observers and scholars for a very long time. This paper explores some implications of recent ethnographic information and engagements related to the themes of Indigenous rock art, knowledge and the understanding of Country in the Kimberley region, Western Australia, for the interpretation of archaeological evidence. It is argued that the Aboriginal understanding of cultural features and practices, rock art and the natural environment is best described within a framework of relational ontology. This orientation has important consequences for the conceptualization of a range of interrelated key themes, most importantly ‘space and place’, ‘story and narrative’ and ‘knowledge and representation’. Thus, the paper calls for the development of opportunities of intellectual engagement and exchange as well as collaborative and creative responses, which should also include new forms of expression in academic contexts that themselves reflexively engage with the limitations of writing and representation.
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Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.
Article
The reading of James Joyce's work has been characterized since the early days of the "Joyce industry" by a tension between the specialist and the amateur. This article explores the ways we might consider amateur reading practices in the light of recent theories about genetic criticism and the interconnections between archaeology and literature. Using the Phil Phillips Collection in the Rosenbach Museum & Library as an archaeological site for the moment before Joyce studies moved away from the amateur and into the highly specialized strata of the professional, this article considers how the authority surrounding the archive may be destabilized.
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This article examines similarities and differencies in the questions that prehistoric archaeologists ask and the answers that they are predisposed to accept as reasonable in different parts of the world and under changing social conditions. Archaeology is strongly influenced by the position that the countries and regions in which it is practised occupy within the modern world-system. Three basic types of archaeology are defined and examined: Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist. The significance of these types for problems of objectivity in archaeology is examined briefly.
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Nationalism, Politics, and the Practice of Archaeology. Philip L. Kohl and Clare Fawcett. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 329 pp.