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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 29 Seeing the Past/Reading the Past

Karen Bassi

If archives can be said to be instituted, and their documents are collected and conserved, this is so on the basis of the presupposition that the past has left a trace, which has become the monuments and documents that bear witness to the past. But what does it mean to "leave a trace?" (Ricoeur 3:119)

Abstract: Speaking of what he calls the "uneasy dialogue" between ancient historians and Classical archaeologists, Ray Laurence notes the absence of "a theory of representation of the material world in language." And he suggests that the cause of this uneasiness is a poor understanding of "the role of material objects in texts.” It may be going too far to suggest that this unease is due to the fact that inanimate objects and physical structures in texts necessarily refer to the temporal limits of human life. Nonetheless, such a theory must be based first of all on an understanding of their temporal effects; in disciplinary terms, it must establish the criteria by which physical objects and features become sources of historical ‘evidence’ or archaeological ‘artefacts’. How do we respond to the claim in a recent (2007) article in Brill's New Pauly Online, for example, that archaeological artefacts are "tangible evidence for the past" (Hauser 1, “haptisches Zeugnis der Vergangenheit”)? While this claim may seem hopelessly naive, it has a history that can be traced to the anecdotal effects of physical objects described in ancient Greek narrative (cf. Fineman). Utilisding work in museum studies, thing theory, phenomenology, and the history of disciplines, this article brings this history into contact with contemporary archaeological theory and, more specifically, with the metaphor of ‘reading’ the past in its material remains. The question posed here is how objects within narrative prefigure “the potential for narrative within the artefact.”

Resumé: Dans son commentaire sur le "dialogue difficile" entre historiens de l'antiquité et

archéologues traditionnels, Ray Laurence fait remarquer l'absence partagée d'une "théorie de la représentation verbale du monde matériel". Il en conclut que la cause de ce manque de dialogue pourrait être une mauvaise compréhension du rôle des objets matériels dans le texte. Il est sans

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 30

doute exagéré de penser que la difficulté en question est due au fait que tant les objets inanimés que les structures matérielles représentées dans un texte renvoient inévitablement aux limites temporelles de l'existence humaine. Pourtant, il serait bon qu'une telle théorie soit basée en premier lieu sur une meilleure compréhension de leurs effets temporels. Dit de manière plus disciplinaire: une telle théorie doit établir les critères qui permettent de transformer des objets ou des aspects matériels de devenir des sources de "preuve" historique ou des "artefacts" archéologiques. Comment réagir par exemple à l'idée défendue dans un article récent (2007) dans le Brill's New Pauly Online, selon laquelle les artefacts archéologiques représentent une "preuve tangible du passé" (Hauser 1, “haptisches Zeugnis der Vergangenheit”)? Une telle idée peut paraître d'une naïveté insondable, mais elle a une histoire qui remonte aux effets subjectifs des objets matériels décrits dans les récits de la Grèce antique (cf. Fineman). En s'appuyant sur des recherches en plusieurs disciplines (muséologie, théorie de l'objet, phénoménologie, et l'histoire des disciplines scientifiques, cet article veut rapprocher ce type d'histoire ancienne de la théorie archéologique contemporaine, plus spécifiquement de la métaphore de la "lecture" du passé dans ses traces matérielles. La question posée est celle de savoir comment des objets présents dans un récit peuvent préfigurer le "potentiel narratif contenu dans l'artefact".

Key words: Archaelogy, artefact, evidence, Greece, museum studies, reading

The OED defines the modern museum as “A building or institution in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are preserved and exhibited. Also: the collection of objects held by such an institution" (2a).1 From its inception in the collected curiosities of sixteenth-century Europe to its recent incarnation as a site of cultural interactivity, the museum has become a defining feature of the global landscape. And in the process, the OED definition is showing its age. For while the museum can still be referred to, as the British Museum does on its website, as a "memory store of the cultures of the world"2

1 Cf. Bennett on the modern museum involvement "in the practice of 'showing and telling': that is, of exhibiting artifacts and/or persons in a manner calculated to embody and communicate specific cultural meanings and values." (6) Also, Mason (18) and Shanks (“Culture/Archaeology” 288-290).

2 The quoted phrase is from the British Museum website www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk: "The exhibition The Museum of the Mind (Room 35, 17 April - 7 September 2003, admission free) explores how the creation of objects and images helps to shape and sustain memory. It looks too at the British Museum's role in housing the collective memory of human civilization. Today many visitors see the Museum as a memory store of the cultures of the world, ancient and modern." On a recent visit to the British Museum, pamphlets expounding the rightful ‘ownership’ of the Elgin Marbles by the Museum used similar terms and could be found in all of the

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 31 this euphemistic vision has given way to the intense scrutiny of cultural theorists and the practitioners of the new museology for whom memory and culture, viewed in the context of the post-colonial museum, are contested categories. The political and social history of this development, including its relationship to the rise of global capitalism and tourism, is the subject of extensive research. My interest in beginning this essay with the definition of the museum, however, is connected neither to the history of the museum per se nor to the debates over how museums should conduct themselves.3 Rather, I want to focus attention in a broad sense on the two tasks to which the museum is assigned, namely, to preserve and exhibit objects. It may seem self-evident that these tasks form a natural pair or, more to the point, that preservation requires spectators (which may or may not be coextensive with a ‘public’). But what seems natural also raises the question that links these two tasks, namely, How is the past produced out of the perception of material or visible phenomena in the present?4

The epistemological and ontological questions that have occupied contemporary philosophers of history – together with the related question of whether history writing is or is not a form of literature (or fiction) – raise the more fundamental question of how the past is figured in the pre- or non-historical genres. One premise of this essay is that the long-standing debate between the disciplines of ancient history and Classical archaeology can be advanced by an attempt to answer this question. In English language scholarship, this debate has been recently addressed in Eberhard W Sauer's edited volume, Archaeology and Ancient History, Breaking Down the Boundaries. As stated in the introduction this volume is aimed at integrating or transcending the two disciplines in order to arrive at a greater truth about what actually happened in the ancient past.5

antiquities galleries; a version of this pamphlet is available at

But underlying this aim is the implicit assumption that textual (i.e. literary) evidence must be approached with a greater degree of scepticism than material evidence; in other words, that material remains provide more immediate information about the past. It is admitted, of course, that both textual and material sources require

www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/explore/highlights/article_index/e/the_elgin_marbles_ownership.aspx. 3 On the history and political work of museums in the West see Whitehead, esp. chapter 1; Rectanus; Fyfe ; Mason; Henning, chapter 1; and Bennett, chapter 1.

4 Cf. Grethlein 45-47. 5

Both terms are used in Sauer's Introduction. Cf. Zettler's call for a holistic approach to ancient Mesopotamia. Childs discusses the "connections between texts, monuments, and archaeological data" (401) in the study of chronology.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 32 interpretation and thus, taken together, the essays implicitly agree on the need for more collaborative research among specialists in both disciplines.

I mention the archaeology/historiography debate here, however, not because I want to argue for the relative merits of either field, but because it speaks to the relationship between visible or material phenomena and the narrative content of the past. We can begin with the proposition that – insofar as the past is realized in the virtual witnessing of what is no longer or only partially visible – material remains are the effect and not the cause of that realisation. In addition to putting pressure on our ability to access the past, this conclusion compromises the founding principle of empiricism, namely, that sense data are the sources of knowledge. And this contested claim brings us to the discipline perhaps most directly concerned with what the past has left behind, namely, archaeology; in what sense are archaeological artefacts, as is claimed in a recent article in Brill's New Pauly Online, "tangible evidence for the past?" (Hauser 1, “haptisches Zeugnis der Vergangenheit”).6

Another way to put the question is to ask about the process by which objects in situ become objects in museums.

7

The idea of an object in situ is of course already implicated in an assumed connection between its ‘find spot’ and its original use or function or meaning. At the same time, the terms in situ and ‘find spot’ establish the archaeological credentials of an object or feature, i.e. its value as evidence for the past as an accumulation of acts or events somehow connected with the object.8

6 This essay provides a brief but informative overview of archaeological practices from the establishment of the discipline in the 18th century. See also Preucel and Bauer. It should be admitted here that while ‘tangibility’ is not the equivalent of ‘visibility’ these aspects of material remains are mutually reinforcing.

It may seem obvious that an object or physical feature becomes archaeological over time not by virtue of the fact that it was made sometime in the past, but by virtue of the fact that it has survived into the time of archaeology as a discipline. The history of this survival serves as a corrective to the dominant role of memory in scholarly discussions of time in the ancient Greek context, particularly in the epic or mythological

7 The Archaeological Museum in Lipari, Sicily (Museo Archeologico Regionale Eoliano Luigi Bernabò Brea) provides an interesting comment on this process. There, the excavated tombs on the island have been

reconstructed inside the museum, complete with replicas of the pottery that now resides in nearby display cases. This kind of display both reifies and compromises the ‘original’ or in situ context of the objects.

8 The fact that the ‘find-spots’ of ancient artefacts that make their way into museums is often unknown – and that this fact often goes un-remarked in catalogues and captions – demonstrates the bias for objects over context in the early history of Classical archaeology. An object's provenance, which is not to be confused with its location in situ, has more to do with its market value than with its perceived scientific or historical value, although the latter adds to or subtracts from the value of the former. On this topic see Murray, chapter 1.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 33 tradition from Homer to the tragedians.9 One aim here is to shift the emphasis away from the human (and traditionally divinely enabled) capacity for remembering past events to the specific material or visible phenomena that comprise a past worth recording or narrating. The point, in other words, is not to assemble these phenomena in a "memory store" but to think about how such notions contribute to the idea of a timeless, universal, and transcendent Greek past.10

While the phrase "tangible evidence for the past" may seem outmoded, the idea it conveys is in fact current in archaeological literature.

11

In the most recent edition of Reading the Past, Current Approaches to Interpretation and Archaeology, for example, Ian Hodder and Scott Hutson make the following statement:12

Although the [archaeological] evidence does not exist with any objectivity, it does nevertheless exist in the real world – it is tangible and it is there, like it or not. Whatever our perceptions or world view, we are constrained by the evidence, and brought up against its concreteness . . . So even within our own subjective perspectives, we often find it difficult to make our coherent arguments correspond to the evidence. (148)

Here, in a book that advocates a post-processual archaeology, the defensive tone ("like it or not") and the over-determined appeal to "evidence" reveal both the dominance of the idea of "tangible evidence" (Hauser 1) and a resistance to that dominance. Or, to rephrase Ankersmit's conclusion that the historical text "lies halfway between the empirical statement and metaphysics" (146), we can say that the archaeological artefact lies halfway between the tangible and the invisible. As an overview of recent interpretive and theoretical debates over the meaning of archaeological material, moreover, Hodder and Hutson's book ends up being,

9 Alcock (16-35) discusses the uses and abuses of social or political memory as an explanatory phenomenon. Referring to a selection of stories about memories of past events, she notes how "physical world and tangible objects prompted and guided the course of memory; each possessed strong material correlates." Tatum notes that: "Material objects play a crucial role in human memory's construction of its sense of the past." (167) It should be noted here that the ancient ‘art of memory’, the ars memoriae described by Cicero and Quintilian, is an art of visualisation.

10 For the phrase "memory store," see above, footnote 2. Neer offers a relevant critique of the "Greek miracle" (3).

11 For the phrase "tangible evidence for the past," see above, footnote 6. 12

These statements are repeated almost verbatim on 198-199, in what is presumably an editorial oversight. Cf. Hedrick (49). Ober (183-211) argues for the "contingency of signification" with respect to archaeological features.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 34 somewhat paradoxically, both a manifesto and an apology. The basis of the manifesto is an array of hermeneutic and post-structuralist theory guided, as the title indicates, by the metaphor of reading the past. The book – and Hodder's brand of contextual archaeology in general – have been the subject of a continuing debate within the Anglo-American archaeological establishment.13 The institutional stakes of this debate are important but are not my focus here, except insofar as they demonstrate the disciplinary utility of the book's governing figure, i.e. that of ‘reading’ the past. In conceptualising the aim of archaeological research, this figure is common – even dominant – in the theoretical literature of the last thirty years.14

My intent in asking these questions is not to dispute the validity of post-processual archaeology but to investigate the figure of reading the past in archaeological theory and, by extension, in theorising the relationship between visual experience, verbal or narrative emplotment, and a concept of the past. To this end, Hodder and Hutson's book can be productively read as a commentary on its own theory of reading, beginning with the following conclusions:

In this disciplinary context then, what do archaeologists gain or lose by making legible what is tangible or, more concretely, by making the ‘viewer’ of objects into a virtual ‘reader’ of objects?

We are on better footing when reading material culture partly because material culture is not as abstract or complex as text. Text is complex because it is designed to express complex ideas and thoughts, and has to be fairly precise and comprehensive. But there are no grammars and dictionaries of material culture language. Material culture symbols are often more ambiguous than their verbal counterparts, and what can be said with them is normally much simpler. Also the material symbols are durable, restricting flexibility. In many ways material culture is not a language at all – it is more clearly action and practice in the world, and these pragmatic concerns have a great influence on the symbolic meanings of material culture. In so far as material culture is a language, it is a simple one when compared to written or spoken language. For these varied

13 Cf. Hamilakis (13-14) for a relevant critique of the notion of an "archaeological record".

14 See, for example, Tilley, Material Culture and Tilley, Metaphor. Both books demonstrate the persistence of the metaphor of reading in archaeological discourse and its links to the discipline's empiricist history. On Tilley's structuralist approach to artefacts, see the critical analysis of Martin (327, with footnote 35). See also, Michael Squire's recent review of Anne Steiner's Reading Greek Vases (Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.11.19) for a useful critique of the metaphor when applied to images.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 35 reasons, material culture texts are easier to decipher than those written documents for which we do not know the language. This is why archaeologists have had some success in 'reading' material culture, even though they have rarely been explicit about the 'grammar' which they are assuming. (168)

In a book about the difficulty of interpreting or ‘reading’ material remains, this late assertion that artefacts are at once less complex and more ambiguous than texts is somewhat unexpected. So too is the authors' conclusion on the following page that "Text is only a metaphor, not an analogy, for material culture," where "only a metaphor" constitutes an apology and a preference for analogy – it is presumed – on the assumption that analogy constitutes a more scientific mode of explanation (169; cf. 245-246). How should we read this qualified – even hesitant – appeal to ‘reading’ the past through its material remains, where the relative ease of reading is measured against the impossible task of reading texts in unknown languages? To begin with, the assertion that "Text is complex because it is designed to express complex ideas and thoughts" (168, emphasis added) is open to objection on two related grounds. First, it attributes complexity to the a priori intention of an author, rather than to the reader or to an interplay between the two; hence, ‘reading’ the past is difficult not because material remains are less complex than texts but because those remains are not intended to be complex. Second, insofar as Hodder and Hutson explicitly argue that the meaning of archaeological artefacts is located in part in the intention of an original maker or user, the idea that texts are more complex because they are designed to be so has the effect of denying complex ideas and thoughts to this maker/user. Thus, the example of reading unknown languages becomes a way of side-stepping the issue; the real difficulties lie in reading languages that we do know.15

If, however, we agree for the sake of argument that texts are more complex than artefacts, then figural language (including metaphor) contributes to this complexity. And if we agree further that texts are less ambiguous than material remains, it must be because those remains are not figural, i.e. because ‘what you see is what you get’. But, of course, this conclusion can only be proven (or denied) in the kinds of questions asked by the analyst or ‘reader’. Thus, the premise that material remains are “easier to decipher” (Hotter and Hutson 168) than texts will elicit questions that minimize their ‘hidden’ or unintentional or latent content. In other words, an assumed commensurability between materiality (or visibility) and

15

Cf. de Man (16-17) on reading as the displacement of grammar (and logic) by rhetoric. It is on this basis that he equates a resistance to theory as a resistance to reading.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 36 meaning makes the metaphor of reading material objects otiose and finally amounts to a disavowal.16 Another way to put the matter would be to say that the principal aim of the archaeologist in this account is not to ‘read’ the past but to see (and touch) its objects, i.e. to position himself or herself as an actual (not virtual) observer of the past where tangibility again contributes to an illusion of contemporaneity. We might note here too how the tangibility of an archaeological artefact is precisely what is sacrificed when it is placed within a museum display case. There it can be seen by the viewing public but can only be touched – in principle – by experts.17 This restricted tangibility is, of course, a defining feature of archaeology as a practice and a discipline. Moreover, while the term ‘material culture’ is commonly used in academic discourse, its repeated use in the passage above (nine times in as many sentences) exemplifies the hyperbolic language needed to figure material remains as the legible content of culture.18

Another instance of the disavowal of reading material remains – and one that pertains more directly to our topic – is the fact that Hodder and Hutson have very little to say about reading contemporary literary or historical texts, i.e. about the difference between pre-historical and pre-historical archaeology. Thus, even though they want to champion ‘idealism’ over ‘realism’, i.e. even though they want to posit the meaning of archaeological objects and features in the intention of an original producer or user, contemporary texts are of little interest to them.

In short, these passages point to the theoretical impasse in which the authors find themselves, one in which they are implicated as writers and readers of their own text.

19

16 For a similar critique of Hodder's approach, see Preucel and Bauer (87). Also, Porter 66 and passim on disavowal as a feature of idealist approaches to the material (i.e. archaeological and art historical) objects of Classical studies.

The point here is not that contemporary texts are records of past intentions

17 Many monumental archaeological sites – including World Heritage Sites – do often allow visitors to touch (walk on, sit on) the remaining architectural features. But the articles of theUNESCO World Heritage Convention consistently insist that ‘protection’ of the sites, which must include restriction of access, is a primary goal.

18 Miller (3-21) presents an overview of material culture studies, beginning with how it differs from "linguistics" (6). Cf. Shanks on "material culture" as a "tautology" (“Culture/Archaeology” 295-296). Martin provides a brief summary of semiotic and structuralist approaches to archaeological artefacts (327).

19 Hodder and Hutson: "By idealist we mean any approach which accepts that there is some component of human action which is not predictable from a material base, but which comes from the human mind or from culture in some sense." (20) For a critique of intentionality in the history of hermeneutics and in Hodder's earlier work, see Johnsen and Olsen: "The failure of [Hodder's] theory as it was advocated during the 1980s derives

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 37 (of the author or anyone else) or that such intentions constitute the meaning of the past. Rather, this resistance to reading texts as a way of ‘reading’ artefacts is a symptom of the fact that, in James Porter's words, "Ideals have a way of seducing us with their very non-locatability"(69). Here, in other words, the non-location of the intention of an original social subject is the source of this resistance.

Thus, the question raised is disciplinary in nature, namely, whether ‘readers’ of archaeological artefacts can be readers of written texts and vice versa. To be fair, Hodder and Hutson do claim that intention is located both in the mind of the past social actor and in the mind of the observer or archaeologist (188). And they are aware of the political implications of their idealism, i.e. that the attribution of intention is never neutral. Thus, the link between past meaning as an effect of the intention of an original agent and as an effect of ‘reading’ the material remains that he or she has left behind is dialectical. But then the failure to engage with the theoretical implications of reading contemporary literary or historical texts, i.e. with the possibility that they may reveal something about past intentions with regard to the material environment, can only be explained as a defence of the singularity of artefacts and of their immediate reference to a past reality. If texts are objects to be read, then archaeological artefacts are not texts. And this is the conclusion to which Hodder and Hutson finally come at the end of their book:

While archaeologists may read material culture, we do not read it as if it were text. There are distinct differences between material culture and spoken or written language, differences which need to be researched further. Material culture often appears to be simpler but more ambiguous than language, and, in comparison to speech, it often seems more fixed and durable. In addition, most words are arbitrary signifiers of the concepts signified . . . in contrast to the majority of words, many material culture signs are iconic or indexical. These and other differences imply that archaeologists have to develop their own theory and method for reading their own particular data. 20

from his emphasis on limited horizons, where priority is given to the past horizon in which the past material text once originated (even if this priority is sometimes collapsed into the horizon of the present reader)." The phrase "past material text" can be read as furthering this collapse (432).

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20

The call for archaeologists to "develop their own theory and method for reading their own particular data" complements the call to "examine their own writing." The latter is found in Hodder and Hutson (223). See also Joyce whose book focuses on the applicability of Bakhtin, Barthes and White to archaeological writing.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 38 So we come back somewhat circuitously to the question of tangible evidence, here expressed in the conclusion that archaeological artefacts are "more fixed and durable" than speech. This conclusion is problematic on several grounds. First, the notion that material phenomena are more permanent than ephemeral speech is not directly relevant to the metaphor of reading the past as a figure based on reading written texts, even if somewhat inconsistently.21

But more difficult is the related claim that material remains are less arbitrary than words. To begin with, reading is only partially a matter of deciphering individual words (or signifiers) whose relationship to a given referent may be arbitrary, although the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign in Saussurean linguistics has succumbed to post-structuralist critique.

And second, while texts may be more fixed and durable than speech they are like material remains insofar as they too are subject to physical and temporal contingencies. In short, the comparison with spoken language elides the fact that texts are also artefacts. This elision then leads to a form of disciplinary protectionism and isolationism expressed, as above, in terms of archaeologists' "own theory and method for reading their own particular data."

22

As a vehicle of meaning, moreover, reading is a process of predication, subordination, figuration and narration. Thus, the idea that an individual material object is analogous to an individual word is logically compromised by the claim that the former is less arbitrary than the latter.23

21 Cf. Hodder. In this article, Hodder anticipates the arguments in Hodder and Hutson, with some of the same inconsistencies. Of interest here is the conclusion on: "There is thus again greater uncertainty in understanding much material culture than there is in reading or listening to a text. Thus, rather than talk of reading the past it might be better to talk of sensing or seeing the past…In sayings such as 'I see what you mean,' we recognise the ability to go beyond the reading of a text to use the senses to place abstract generalized meanings into context." (260)

And this is where we come to Hodder and Hutson's ambivalent appraisal of historical archaeology:

22 Moore (89-93) provides a pertinent overview of Ricoeur's critique of structuralism based on the dominance of sign over the sentence, i.e. of semiotics over semantics.

23 This claim is based on the notion that iconic or indexical images – whether in the shape of an object or in pictorial form – are less arbitrary than linguistic signs. But even if we were to accept this account of iconicity, such images are no less difficult to ‘read’ than linguistic signs. See, for example, Tilley's suggestion that one of the carvings from Nämforsen "actually appears to be a depiction of a deity rather than a normal human figure" because this figure appears in isolation and has a "unique headdress" (“Material Culture” 36). The assumption – first made by Hallström – that this carving is a human figure is plausible (there appear to be two arms and two legs), but the lack of a top/bottom orientation or rather the assumption that the things that look like legs are

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 39 Historical archaeology is an 'easier' approach. Here the data are richly networked, much survives, and there are many leads that can be followed through, even in the absence of literary texts, which themselves only provide another context in which to look for similarities and differences. The same problems remain – of having to define whether the written context is relevant to the other contexts (e.g., the archaeological layers), and of deciding whether similarities between two contexts (written and non-written) imply the same or different meanings. (191)

If words and by extension written texts, are more arbitrary than objects, then historical archaeology should be more and not less difficult to ‘read’ than pre-historical archaeology. The "easier approach", comprised of shared similarities and differences on a linguistic model, implies moreover that archaeological objects and contemporary texts simply serve as illustrations of one another.24 This implication corresponds to what Ian Morris has called the "bits-and-pieces" (41) approach of Hellenist archaeology, although this is precisely the kind of approach that Hodder and Hutson want to argue against. Morris uses the metaphor of bits-and-pieces to refer to a disciplinary practice that preserves things at the expense of words, or objects as discrete entities at the expense of a synthesis of events; his overview of the dominance of philology in Classical studies puts this strategy into perspective. Thus, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is countered by the implication that archaeological objects and features are, in some sense, pre-discursive; in Hodder and Hutson's terms, they are easier to ‘read’ because they are less arbitrary than texts.25

below the things that look like arms (unless the figure is standing on its head), could lead to other plausible interpretations. And while Tilley's speculation that the figure is a deity is also plausible, it is just as plausible, in the context of the rock carvings, that elks are gods. In short, iconicity does not easily translate into ease of reading.

The idea that reading contemporary

24

See also, Laurence and Berry (1-9); Smith (60-67); Shanks, Classical Archaeology, chapter 5. Snodgrass criticises the assumption that "archaeological results can speak to us in the language that is essentially the same as the language used by documentary sources" (195). Here ‘speaking’ seems to be a version of ‘reading’. Cf. Veyne: "Often early historians and even those of today cite still visible monuments from the past . . . less as proof for their assertions than as illustrations that take on the light and brightness of history more than they actually illuminate it." (8)

25 Hedrick notes the move among archaeologists toward "a more hermeneutical (one might even say literary) approach to archaeology” (47). Cf. Dyson: "One can argue that the creation of any degree of any real humanistic meaning in the fragmented, disconnected world produced by field archaeology requires the imaginative insight of the historical novelist, who weaves together the limited physical evidence for the historical record with fictive

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 40 literary or historical texts may make the work of the historical archaeologist less easy, either because meaning is not located in the mind of the author or because texts are not simply illustrations of objects (or vice versa), further complicates what it means to read artefacts. In short, the metaphor finally works in defence of the persistent empiricism of the discipline, founded on the priority of visual (and tangible) objects positioned in an original place and time.26

It is not surprising that this persistence is essential in the history of science. But what makes this history pertinent here is its debt to the relationship between empirical observation and reading practices. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have shown how scientific knowledge in 17th century England was corroborated and authenticated by the creation of ‘virtual’ eye-witnesses to experimental trials.27 In order to protect against the failure of actual eye-witnesses to produce assent among those who had not seen the experiment with the ‘naked eye’, natural philosophers produced multiple virtual witnesses through detailed written descriptions, or what Shapin and Schaffer call a "literary technology" (69).28 Exemplified by Robert Boyle's reports of his experiments with the air pump, these writings did not produce "witnesses in spite of themselves" as Bloch says is true of historical documents (qtd. in Ricoeur 3:143), but witnesses as an intended effect.29

but probable connectors." (44) What Dyson means by "real humanistic meaning" is not clear. But he makes the relevant observation that certain ancient sites, i.e. those that play prominent roles in historical or literary texts, have been more aggressively excavated than others (37-38). It may be that "real humanistic meaning" is the effect of these choices.

Here in fact may be a productive way of comparing documentation in history with documentation in the empirical sciences, in which we can include archaeology. In the former, recorded observations of prior human actions can become ‘historical’ over time even though they were "not intended to inform or instruct their contemporaries, much less future historians." (qtd. in Ricoeur 3:143).

In the latter, the written documentation of data is motivated by empiricist claims to scientific discovery or advancement. Of course, random or unintentional observations may become the

26 See Moser on the history of visual representation in archaeological research and publication. Throughout her essay, Moser wants to maintain a distinction between how meaning is expressed in visual images and how it is expressed in "verbal communication" (see esp. 268-269 and 276-277). But since verbal communication, including Moser's essay, is the medium of interpreting the images, this distinction is less simple than it sounds. 27 Cf. Langbein on the two eye-witness rule in the history of European penal law.

28

See also Bann on the relationship between antiquarian collecting practices and literary production in the 18th century (130-132).

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 41 source of scientific data, but this only contributes to the disputed if enduring claim of ‘disinterestedness’, i.e. to the dominant narrative of scientific inquiry.30

The principal variables in this narrative are spatial and temporal; the virtual eye-witness ‘sees’ what happened in his or her absence and what is no longer visually available in the present.

31

Thus, although experimental trials in the 17th century constructed witnesses to ‘matters of fact’ rather than to artefacts, i.e. to what was presented as given by nature rather than made by man, this only raises the question of the distinction between the two.32

If, as I have argued, the metaphor of reading the past in archaeological discourse is a form of disavowal, it is also analogous to the metaphor of seeing the past in historical and scientific discourses.

To the extent that the existence of a virtual eye-witness implicitly confirms the fallibility or insufficiency of an actual eye-witness, for example, it also undermines the notion of an original past moment in which observation provided direct access to the facts of experience. The question raised here then is not whether things actually existed or happened in the past but how this common sense notion is complicated by the presence of readers as ex-post-facto viewers.

33

The third or missing term in this seeing/reading binary is, of course, writing. I refer first of all to the writing of the analyst (scientist, archaeologist, museologist) which, following the linguistic turn, has been both the means of exposing the power dynamics inherent in the disciplines and the object of that exposure. In confessing their own

In both formulations, the past refers to what is no longer visible although the terms of the analogies are reversed. In history and the history of science, what cannot or can no longer be seen are the data that constitute readers as virtual viewers. In archaeology, what can be seen (deposits and artefacts) are the data that constitute viewers as virtual readers. By using the term ‘data’ here I mean to emphasise the source of the disavowal in both cases, i.e. the simultaneous acknowledgement and denial of the difference between empirical observation in the present and in the past.

30 On ‘disinterestedness’ in the history of disciplines in the West, especially its relationship to the reliability of testimony in science and history writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Dear: "disinterestedness was the most important characteristic a historian could have" ("From Truth to Disinterestedness” 625). Dear points to the important paradox that the historian who took part in the events about which he wrote was both more reliable as an actual witness and less reliable as an interested party to those events.

31

Cf. Dear ("Narratives"136-137).

32

On the flawed distinction between cultural and natural objects, see Frow.

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 42 interestedness or ‘intentions’, academic writers claim more power for their readers in the promise of interpretations freed from the search for origins and a singular truth. But the paradoxical nature of this claim is clear; confession is a mode of what might be called expertism tempered with idealism (in the form of stated intentions).34

Within disciplines that take visible phenomena as their objects, the metaphor of ‘reading’ the past operates within an ocularcentric system in which reading is the after-effect of seeing. Thus, just as logocentrism is based on the premise that speech is prior to and therefore more authentic than writing, ocularcentrism is based on the premise that seeing is prior to and therefore more authentic than reading.35

One way to deconstruct this system is to suggest that reading is prior to seeing or, to re-phrase Derrida's observation about language and writing, that ‘seeing is a species of reading.’

In other words, both systems are based on a hierarchy of cause-and-effect that is simultaneously temporal and qualitative. As a disciplinary strategy, ocularcentrism works in the service of preserving the contemporaneity and tangibility – the ‘presence’ – of the discipline's objects or artefacts; seeing, in other words, is in the eyes of the (expert) writer. In writing about objects as texts to be read, the expert presents his or her own writing as an image of his or her objects. Writing is thus accorded what might be called a museographical function, namely, to preserve and exhibit objects for a reader who, like the museum visitor, is kept at a distance. But it must be admitted here too that –almost imperceptibly – we have conflated the virtual with the actual reader, i.e. the archaeologist as the ‘reader’ of his or her artefacts with the reader of what he or she has written about them. This conflation may be a predictable feature of the ocularcentric system in which seeing is endowed with immediacy and authenticity and reading is naturalised as the next best thing to seeing. More succinctly, the metaphor of reading material remains reveals the failed or deferred promise of seeing them.

36

34 I use the language of confession instead of the more common ‘meta-’ forms to emphasise the idealist over the formal aspects of this kind of academic writing.

This suggestion, based on an analogy with Derrida's notion of an "arche-writing"

35 On logocentrism, see Derrida, chapter 2, ‘Linguistics and Grammatology’. The term ocularcentric is used by Jay ("Scopic Regimes" 3) and, in a more extended form in Jay (“Downcast Eyes” 3) and passim to describe and defend the dominance of visual perception in cultural explanation, and its denigration in post-Enlightenment thinking. I adopt the term here in a more restricted sense, namely, as an analogue to logocentrism based on prioritising discourses related to writing and reading.

36

Derrida: "It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment, an essential but determined mode, a phenomenon, an aspect, a species of writing." (94)

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 43 (142), is predicated on the fact that reading is a practice of seeing differences and similarities displayed in graphic form.37

This fact is necessarily acknowledged by archaeologists who take a phenomenological approach to their objects, although they do so with some ambivalence. In a recent book, for example, Christopher Tilley offers the following summary of a phenomenological approach to prehistoric stone monuments:

Thus, the discursive interplay between readers as virtual viewers and viewers as virtual readers is symptomatic of the instability of the ocularcentric system. In the context of the disciplinary literature I have been discussing, the trope of reading the past maintains the dominance and priority of visual perception in Western epistemology while it also registers the difficulty of doing so. This difficulty is linked to a strict phenomenology in which meaning is produced in the moment of direct sensory contact with the physical world. This is not to imply that vision is the phenomenologist's privileged sense or to deny that the past is always mediated through some present moment or ‘lived experience’. But this kind of analysis faces a dilemma in the fact that, within a given disciplinary framework, writing is the principal means of giving meaning to that experience.And just as writing is not simply the graphic inscription of speech, so too it is not simply the graphic inscription of the raw data of sensory experience (with the possible exception of putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard).

The aim of phenomenological analysis is to produce a fresh understanding of place and landscape through an evocative thick linguistic redescription stemming from our carnal experience. This involves attempting to exploit to the full the tropic nature of our language in such a way as to see the invisible in the visible, the intangible in the tangible. The mode of expression must resonate with that which it seeks to express. (“The Materiality of Stone” 30)

Here we confront again the familiar attributes of visibility and tangibility as the sources of meaning where – it is implied – meaning is equated with what is invisible and intangible. We can note here too how, by catachresis, seeing’ (rather than touching) what is intangible constitutes a kind of ocularcentric slip. We find ourselves, in other words, not only in a phenomenological dilemma but also in a linguistic or semantic loop. The dilemma lies in the fact that phenomenology becomes a branch of metaphysics to the extent that sense perception is a means of accessing what is beyond the senses. The loop is formed in the related assertion that "carnal experience" is the source of language's ability to access

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 44 carnal experience. The latter is revealed in the work of "thick linguistic redescription" in which form "resonate[s]" with content. As I have suggested above, this form of confessional academic writing betrays an idealist faith in authentic or original intentions, although admittedly modified by the fact that the intentions are those of the expert writer and not of an original social subject as the user or producer of the artefacts or features in question. But the crucial question posed by this strategy has to do with reading as a practice that gives access to what is intangible and invisible.

One response to this question would be to say that writing about prehistoric monuments, like Tilley's menhirs in Brittany, puts particular stock in the metaphor of reading precisely because there are no contemporary written texts to be read. Thus, even though the metaphor is not restricted to prehistoric archaeology, the spectre of pre-literate humans is the controlling figure of this compensatory gesture. Using a process of ‘redescription’, in other words, the archaeologist ‘reads’ what these pre-literate humans would have written about their monuments had they been able to do so. While I admit that this suggestion is a bit over the top, it nevertheless exemplifies both the power invested in literate cultures and the temporal effects of that investment in what I have referred to above as an ‘insistence on contemporaneity’. In short, what gets lost in this ocularcentric system is time; the figure of reading the past resists the fading of its object in the interest of fixity, durability, and universality.

Recent work on the history of the museum reveals the validity of this suggestion, beginning with arguments advocating the use of state or public funds for the purpose of building museums and extending to the development of the discourses of art history, archaeology, anthropology, and related disciplines. In summarising this history in their general introduction to Grasping the World, The Idea of the Museum, Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago state that:

Museum objects are staged to be 'read' in a variety of ways, or in ways that privilege their aesthetic significance (as works of 'art') or their documentary status (as relics or as 'scientific' evidence of a time, place, people, spirit or mentality) or, commonly, some combination of both. (4)

The idea that museum objects are ‘read’ in privileged ways seems non-controversial. But at the same time the use of scare quotes in the passage assigns an ironic or dismissive quality to the act of reading similar to that assigned to ‘art’ and ‘scientific’ evidence. If we are supposed to read the latter as euphemisms for under-examined truth claims, then in what sense is the act of reading objects also a kind of euphemism? According to Preziosi and

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 45 Farago, the museum-as-text is part of a discursive formation in which ‘reading’ the museum's objects has negative effects, and where ‘staging’ is an expression of the coercive potential of those effects. More to the point, the authors allude to the fact that the history of preserving and exhibiting objects is embedded in what are now understood to be the progressist claims of Enlightenment thinking; in this scenario, the reader of objects becomes a victim of this history.38

As it is employed here, the metaphor of reading material objects is a way of responding to the paradox that objects in museums are more than what is seen or, as Preziosi says in a more recent article: "Museum objects are literally both 'there' and 'not-there,' present and absent." (54). While we may debate the extent to which the statement that objects are ‘not there’ is literal (especially given the scare quotes) the implications of this and similar statements complicate the conventional notion that objects pre-exist what is said about them. If objects are texts to be read, then what ‘is not there’ takes precedence over what ‘is there’, i.e. over the fact of their material existence. On the one hand then, the metaphor of reading objects has the effect of making them disappear. In literal terms, this effect describes the experience of reading museum catalogues and captions in which the time spent reading deflects, defers, or substitutes for the time spent viewing.

39

If, in Ricoeur's words, visible objects leave "traces," as in the quotation that stands as the epigraph to this essay, W V Quine provides a useful commentary on what this might mean:

But on the other hand, the figure works in more subtle ways and is marked by the hesitation or over-determination with which it is often employed in the literature.

Past sense data are mostly gone for good except as commemorated in physical posits. All we would have apart from posits and speculation are present sense data and present memories of past ones; and a memory trace of a sense datum is too meager an affair to do much good. Actual memories mostly are traces not of past sensations but of past conceptualization or verbalization. (2-3)

38 Cf. Mason (27) where the idea that museums are texts holds out the Freudian promise of discovering the unintentional or hidden meanings that motivate display practices and which are tainted, we can assume, with the same Enlightenment ideas about ‘art’ and ‘scientific’ evidence; in this scenario, the reader of objects becomes a hero.

39

Cf. Tilley on the "deadening verbal and visual catalogue of the empiricist archaeological text” (7). Also Olsen (195-196).

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 46 Unlike Ricoeur, Quine is principally interested in the use of ‘ordinary’ as opposed to literary language. And the limiting factor in his analysis is the "actual memory" of a past measured (it seems) in the life span and life experience of a given individual. In this context, "physical posits" are the principal vehicles of an ever-receding but personally experienced past that fades over time from sense data to memory traces.40

Thus, if we reverse the prioritising of the terms in question, i.e. if we put forward the proposition that reading comes before seeing, then we are no longer committed to the absolute immediacy of visual perception and to the intentions of original social subjects as viewers. Nor are we committed to finding meaning in what is intangible and invisible. The priority of reading, in other words, favours contingency over causality and interpretation over reference.

In thus localising the meaning of physical remains in the context of the past as "actual" or lived experience, Quine emphasises how their meaning is not produced in an original moment of perception or "past sensation". Rather, it is produced in the present moment of viewing and, more significantly, is expressed in terms of prior acts of conceptualisation or verbalisation. If we extend this conclusion to a past that exceeds an individual life, i.e. to the historical or archaeological past, its implications become more revealing. For if the qualification "mostly" in the sentence quoted above expresses the possibility, however remote, that past sensations can be retrieved in an individual's memory, it also expresses the impossibility of this retrieval when extended to a past that exceeds an individual life. In the context of this extended horizon, the meaning of physical or visible remains is not contingent upon prior sensations just as it is not adequately explained by appeals to memory. Rather, it is contingent on the verbal forms by virtue of which objects and physical features exist as remains or traces or monuments, i.e. by virtue of the promise of seeing the past.

41

40 Cf. Quine on what he calls "the modulus of stimulation" (28), by which he refers to "the maximum duration recognized for stimulations" (33) that elicit the "stimulus meaning of a sentence for a speaker at a date" (33).

It also allows us to hold in suspense the intuitive immediacy of the visual sense, just as the priority of (an arche-) writing holds in suspense the intuitive immediacy of speaking. One of the virtues of this priority is that no object or physical feature is trivial

41 Cf. de Man: "Literature involves the voiding, rather than the affirmation, of aesthetic categories. One of the consequences of this is that, whereas we have traditionally been accustomed to reading literature by analogy with the plastic arts and with music, we now have to recognize the necessity of a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and music, and learn to read pictures rather than to imagine meaning" (10, emphasis in the original)). Here the metaphor of reading pictures emphasises the contingent (i.e. non-intuitive) effects of visual (and aural) phenomena. Reading texts, as de Man later says, leaves a "residue of indetermination" (15).

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Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No 3 (2011) 47 because of its perceived uselessness or because it is obsolete. Rather, reading objects and artefacts in these terms acknowledges the epistemological displacement – caught in the OED definition of the museum – that forges the link between exhibition and preservation or between seeing and time.

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Professor Karen Bassi is Professor of Literature and Classics and Chair of the Department of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Acting Like Men, Gender, Drama and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece (University of Michigan Press, 1999), co-editor of When Worlds Elide: Classics, Politics, Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), and is completing a book on visual perception in the Greek conceptualisation of the past.

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