O brave new media-world that has such synergies!

I don’t know what Kathy was talking about a few posts back: everything that I do is sexy — not least of which is data entry. One of the truly fun things for me as I went along, transferring data from the paper site forms to the digital database, was that I got to relive my field experiences from 2008, and even, on occasion, learn about new Munsell soil colors that I didn’t even know existed.

Well, so “10.5YR” probably wasn’t the intended hue in the Munsell system, and it remains a mystery as to what the recorder actually meant by it in reference to the color of the soil matrix in a certain stratigraphic unit (SU). Apart from that peculiar situation, however, I have been able to clear up various scribal errors encountered along the way (“sandy day loam” might be a good name for a cosmetic) and, in doing, call back to memory many a scene at Pyla-Vigla. Now we are finishing up the 2009 data, but it was fun to visit a bit with those forms before they move on down to the ol’ genizah. Actually, if I understand correctly, they might be making their home in the UND Chester Fritz Library‘s special collections.

Speaking of the good ol’ CFL, Dr. Caraher recently gave a talk there about archaeology, inter/trans/cross/post-disciplinary “synergy“, and the implications of the “New Media“. For me, at my vantage point as a MA student, much of the “new world” that Bill is heralding is hardly odd or novel to me. Sure, some of this is a function of my proximity to Bill, but I was already becoming acculturated into this world before I even met Bill Caraher. I am really no more tech-savvy than my colleagues, Sara and Kathy, but I have not known archaeology prior to the use of computers for data recording, storing, and processing. Sure, I wasn’t necessarily the one “doing” it, but digital media was always a companion, even in the gritty, windswept wastes and sage-choked gullies of North Dakota.

Sure, back in the day, they didn’t have computers. I get that. I even have some idea of how they did archaeology in the absence of digital technology.

But I didn’t think, at the time, that it needed any more persuasive explanation than what could be given for any other tool in the archaeologist’s methodological toolbox. As an educated member of the “Millennium Generation”, my response to the question of whether or not there could be a beneficial rapprochement between scholarship and digital technology would have been something along the lines of:

duh!

But, for all of the audience members who might still have been wrapping their minds around the idea of such a rapprochement (I doubt that any current faculty members actually were), that wasn’t the point of Bill’s talk, per se.

To be honest, I paused for quite a while after typing that last sentence. Since then, both Bill and I have attended panel discussions on the already decades-old “new media” at the UND Writers Conference featuring such artists and luminaries as Stuart Moulthrop, Mark Amerika, Scott T Miller, Deena Larsen, Cecelia Condit, Frank X Walker, Saul Williams and Art Spiegelman. Bill has shared his musings on the conference presentations, here. (I attended the same panels as he did.)

I get what the hubbub is about. I’m just having a hard time mustering the patience to join the hubbub for any length of time. Yep, it’s crazy. I can write an article on this website which people can read on their telephones next door and in Singapore — at the same time.

Crazy.

OK, moving on …

As relatively “at home” as I am with this medium, it really comes more easily to Kathy to notice and to articulate the peculiarities of it. Even Bill has to work harder, I think, although he makes up for it in the time and energy which he has put into considering the matter over the years. I’m pretty sure that Homi Bhabha wrote something about this phenomenon somewhere. In effect, Sara and I are more indigenous to this “culture”, that is, this collection of signs. Oddly enough, even though I had no real experience with the internet prior to my freshman year at the university, I have still taken to it quite readily. I was eased into it in many ways. It expanded on and synthesized many other languages to which I had already been exposed. All I needed was an occasion to “speak” the language, and its relationship to the other languages already conditioned me to find occasions and to seize on them without waiting to puzzle over them.

We are all multilingual, even if we do not think of it in those terms. And, as with conventional languages, there aren’t really hard-and-fast boundaries between languages more broadly considered, despite attempts to demarcate and to standardize. I learned to write with a pencil and with crayons. I first encountered language as sound filtered through the flesh of my mother’s belly, and I have no recollection of when I first recognized that sound as being related to a conscious effort to communicate thought. I’m pretty sure that I was more concerned with my physical dependency on a world external to myself to keep my body from protesting at the lack of nourishment. If I had to guess, I would guess that my earliest cognisance of language was tied to that very practical concern.

And so began my adventure in semiotics.

(I know that it is considered to be bad style in English written composition to begin sentences with conjunctions.)

(But I’m blogging, baby!)

As fun as metanarrative can be, however, it is also a good way slip into the pond and completely lose one’s train of thought. I had hoped to write something profound about the synergistic possibilities of the “new media”, but I got bored and a bit perplexed with all of the new media hullabaloo and I still have a hard time not thinking in terms of synergistic research. Can someone please help me? I’m not really Miranda in this story, nor am I Caliban, nor am I the castaways. To use one of Kathy’s favorite concepts, I’m not hubristic enough to claim to be Prospero. Maybe I am one of the spirits, the cultural hybrids. Publishing and the new media, peer-review and the new media, authority and the new media, class and the new media, professionalism and the new media, profit and the new media … I get it, I think. Perhaps it is the perceived rigidity of these older concepts which constitutes the “brave new [old] world” for me.

Maybe I am Miranda.

Miranda: … O brave new world that has such people in’t!

Prospero: ‘Tis new to thee.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest; Act V, scene I.

"Prospero and Ariel" by Eric Gill. BBC Broadcasting House

PS: I think that there is one point, at the very least, which ought to be clarified. The “sandy day loam” was a typo and that means that it was typed and that, in turn, means that there has been another step in this process — other elves at work — besides the steps with which the UND spring 2010 team have been involved. At least one of Dr. Pettigrew’s students at Messiah College in Grantham, PA has done some work in preparing the PKAP data from 2008-2009, most notably by transposing the prose portions of most of the site reports onto a Word document. This has been of immense help to Sara and myself.

heeding Ekho: post-processual archaeology meets art

J. William Waterhouse. "Echo and Narcissus" 1903

Recently, I had the opportunity to conduct a podcast interview with PKAP 2009 artist-in-residence, Ryan Stander in the studio adjacent to my little nook here (the Paul Aaron Ferderer Memorial Office). The primary topic of our interview was Ryan’s show entitled Topos/Chora: Photographs of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project which opened on the twenty-ninth of February at the Empire Theater in Grand Forks. Now and then our discussion strayed to Ryan’s blogging on art, space and the sacred as well as other issues in the ordering and conceptualization of space, that is, the cultural construction of landscapes which is such a key point of interest throughout Ryan Stander’s work as well as along the progress of PKAP. Kathy took on the burden of preparing the interview questions herself, so I went into the interview armed with a remarkably thoughtful series of questions which drew not just from a consideration of the works included in the show, but also on Ryan’s musings over the last few years on his blog, The Axis of Access. Sara has also been of tremendous assistance in setting up the technological side of the recording and now, of being its editor-in-chief. Here’s hoping that my Garrison Keillor voice cut the lefse …

Little does Ryan know that we’re planning to leave in the Lake Wobegon bit, complete with sound effects:  by “just for fun” I meant “intended to be the main feature of the site” …

As a veteran of PKAP myself, I have taken particular interest in the concept of this show (Topos/Chora, that is, not PHC). The idea of an artist-in-residence with PKAP isn’t entirely new, considering that Joe Patrow accompanied the first UND crew out to Cyprus in 2006 as a documentary filmmaker. Even during the 2009 field season when Ryan was shooting, there was yet another documentary filmmaker working in conjunction with PKAP by the name of Ian Ragsdale. Likewise, I don’t think that there has been anyone on the team to date who hasn’t taken at least a few photographs of archaeological fieldwork in action and a few of us, at least, were not unconscious of some rudimentary elements of photographic composition.

But Ryan endeavored to produce art: photographic images of an archaeological site and archaeological work in action as art. Ryan, a relative outsider to archaeology — an observer — is reflecting on archaeology through his artistic medium. Not only that, but he is inviting the viewer of his work to reflect on archaeology through his work.

This is where things get a little spacey.

Or a lot spacey.

Any archaeologist who has followed PKAP is probably already conscious of the Post-processual leanings of the project as a whole and, to various degrees, of its scholars. In fact, I would go so far as to say that PKAP is one of the more exemplary Postprocessualist-oriented projects in Cyprus, judging from my own experience with PKAP and from the impression which I got at the 2008 CAARI conference in Nicosia. It’s kind of PKAP’s schtick, as it were. That’s not to say that the project isn’t actually driven by specific research questions nor that those research questions aren’t intended to “further illuminate our understanding” of x, y and, z, but it can lend the impression to an outsider that the project is either a tad quixotic or that these relative greenhorns have bitten off more than they can chew.

Under closer investigation, this impression is quite wrong on both counts. If anything, PKAP guards more fiercely against cowboy archaeology than many other projects and quasi-projects on the island. Working closely with the Department of Antiquities and eschewing “boys with toys” who are less concerned with research questions and more concerned with thrill, the PKAP directors are especially conscious of the archaeological innovations to come, taking care not to damage for no reason what techniques of the future might be able to study better. The data measurable at any site multiplies with the precision of and shifts in questions asked. Here, the scholars are especially conscious of that fact. All archaeologists — all researchers — can be said to have bitten off more than they can chew once one takes into account the vastness of potential implicit in their subject matter.

With the PKAP sites, there is no rush. The threat of urban or suburban development, which so often forces the archaeologist’s hand, is minimal, so the PKAP scholars have the leisure to “do it right” in a way which makes their work stand out in comparison to other projects at similar sites lacking higher concentrations of “important” monumental architecture and artifacts. Actually, the presence of high concentrations of “culturally significant” monumental architecture and artifacts doesn’t necessarily halt real estate development, even in the old town of Nicosia, as the Orthodox Church in Cyprus makes plans for even more monumental architecture of its own. Besides, cultural significance is all relative anyway: that stuff was then, this is now. This is living, that is dead. This is relevant, that is obsolete.

That’s just it: those who would say such things are more right than many archaeologists would like to admit. Where would the archaeologist’s craft be if it weren’t for the past equivalents to today’s fast food chains, suburban housing projects, office buildings, industrial parks, and big box stores  ”infesting” the landscape and plopping down on top of something else? Material culture doesn’t cease to be material culture the closer its “birth date” is to the present. Put another way, when you pave paradise, you only give it a new life. To quote Marc Bloch’s quote of Henri Pirenne: “If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff; but I am a historian, therefore I love life!” One could easily replace “historian” with “archaeologist” here — or, at least, one would think.

I mentioned “Post-processual” archaeology above and, considering that many people reading this blog are not archaeologists, I think that a definition might be in order. Postprocessualism is a deliberately reflective approach to archaeology and only hesitantly postivistic. While increasing the scientist’s concern with method, it takes it so far that it runs the risk of undermining archaeology’s claim to being a science altogether. To some, this is an un-scientific excess; to insiders, perhaps, it is hyper-scientific to the point of being post-scientific (implying, then, that science has an end). On some level, research conclusions rely on scholarly consensus in order to live — all the more so in fields of inquiry which do not permit controlled experimentation. Numbers don’t lie, but the humans who lend significance to the numbers can never be entirely objective. In the face of consistent, controlled experimentation and sound math, human subjectivity is understandably rendered negligible, but no matter how hard archaeologists may try, they simply cannot carry the scientific method all the way through. Scholarly consensus is vital.

Needless to say, then, when those consenting scholars are overwhelmingly men (of the male sort) or when they come from the colonial or dominant/hegemonic cultural center, then, in general, they can be expected to look at the world more like men, in general, as opposed to women, in general, or as members of a colonizing society and dominant culture, in general, as opposed to members of a colonized society and subaltern culture, in general. The focus on urban centers in archaeology is partially a product of this — along with a heavy helping of pragmatism (urban sites are more compact and yield more artifacts than rural sites). The focus on finite cultures and periodization is yet another artifice born of cultural bias, especially nationalistic assumptions. This, of course, betrays a sort of collective narcissism on the part of the researchers. They look for civilization and empire and they find them; they look for male dominance and they find it — or, when they don’t, the data is anomalous. Scorning the naïvété of past archaeological paradigms, the empiricism-driven Processualists still couldn’t keep from falling in the pond, so to speak.

Postprocessualism, as with “Postmodernism” more broadly, also tends towards narcissism: this time with its emphasis on reflective research. This is a conscious narcissism aimed at reducing unconscious narcissism with the excuse that at least what is in the open can be better accounted-for.

Right into the middle of all this wanders Ryan Stander with his camera, very much like the picnicker who joined the melée at the First Battle of Bull Run/Manassas, with an even more ambiguous sense of his “business” in engaging in this contest. As the archaeologists reflect on their work among themselves, Ryan reflects on their reflecting, and invites us to do the same by means of his carefully-selected, “reflective” photographs.

But we call it art.

Can a blog change its skin?

There’s a reason that this one didn’t make it as a proverb: blog skins are altered, shed and reassumed with ease. The development of blog “skins” is a great outlet for the artistically-inclined, and, with the number of artistically-inclined folks out there, there have been many skins developed for sharing which I could apply to this blog with a few clicks of the mouse. Now, considering that we will be increasingly personalizing this blog in response to concerns both functional and aesthetic, I’d like to open this up to preliminary discussions on color, graphics, fonts and layout …

Who let this guy in?

My name is Christopher Gust and I’m one of three interns collaborating on the projects to be discussed in this blog. I am a MA candidate at the University of North Dakota, majoring in history and minoring in English. I am an aspiring medievalist and cultural historian with a long-time fascination with archaeology and material culture studies. I spent the summer of 2004 at various Pre-Columbian/Pre-Contact sites throughout North Dakota and, in 2008, I accepted Dr. Caraher’s invitation to join the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project in the Republic of Cyprus/Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area. Now, as I complete my thesis concerning medieval ghost folklore and the dialogic aspects of sermon exempla under the guidance of Drs. Broedel, Caraher, Sauer and Beard, I look forward to engaging the material which Dr. Caraher has provided our “public history” team this semester. Considering that some of these projects will continue for multiple semesters in the hands of other students, I also look forward to laying both a substantive foundation in terms of quality and quantity as well as a legacy of daring creativity and avant-garde conceptualization for those who will come after. In our own, small way, I see this team as participating in a larger movement of pioneers moving into the foggy, increasingly complicated and frequently alarming future of the present disciplines of history and archaeology. One thing is certain, and that is that our disciplines will not be static, just as they have not been static in the past. The key lies in anticipating change and learning not only to adapt to it for the sake of our own paid employment, but to thrive amid it to the edification of our fellow humans.

That’ll do for now. I look forward to meeting our readers over the course of this semester through our communication on this blog, and I hope that you get to know me a little better with every new post.

Until next time,

Christopher Shaw Gust

the laboratory is within the experiment

… or, at least this blog itself is expected to morph considerably over the course of these next few months. In setting up the blog I hastily chose a simple, pre-packaged visual format which vaguely reminded me of the most assertive visual backdrop of the PKAP site: the Mediterranean Sea. I’m not sure that I would call it a neutral space — that is, the sea-scape presented by the Mediterranean Sea in Larnaka Bay — but, neutral or not, it does draw the gaze more than the landward portion of the panorama. But maybe that’s just me. Judging from the Topos/Chora photographs, I don’t think that I’m the only one who was drawn to the great blue expanse ….

So, this is all to warn our audience ahead of time that we will be “tweaking” or “niggling” the particular manifestation of this blog as we go along. If you have any ideas which you would like to contribute, we welcome and encourage them.