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.Something WalterEcho-Hawk, a Native American attorney, said has stuck in my mind. What are youdoing with all those bones? he asked.A valid question.This argument of waste does not just apply to the past I fear.But neither is it anargument for abandoning archaeology.Desire and metaphor 57Pot washing, Back Swinegate, York:excavations February 1990There is a nervous and neurotic feel to some archaeology; of researchers working oncompiling complete inventories of sites and finds.A fixation on the past as somehowcomplete in itself.We only need, or rather are obliged, to copy.And there is a feeling ofExperiencing the past 58retention.Holding back on oneself.Not committing oneself (reasonably perhaps) until allthe facts have been gathered.But also retention in the sense of not letting go.The feelingthat we cannot let go of the past but must preserve and conserve.Robert Hewisonidentifies this retention in Britain with a cultural and commercial complex he calls the heritage industry and which proffers a consoling and spurious preserved past in asociety in decline (1987).It seems difficult to find fault with an ethic of conservation the code of conservingthings from the past considered valuable in some way.Conservation is a powerfulseductive logic.And the gratification or satisfaction which comes from conserving thepast is a significant impulse to carry out archaeological work.It is a little sickening tothink of the loss of so much of the past due to contemporary development and neglect.There is gratification in ridding oneself of this nausea.Conservation stems loss anddecay, and I would connect it with a series of drives: ridding oneself of nausea, of decay;there is a sense of illness, and holding off death.The past is gone, its absence marked bydecayed and disordered remnants.Perhaps archaeology can fill the gaping hole of theabsent past.But with what? Scientific archaeology purifies the past with clean reason;order is brought to the disorder of decay which putrifies.The past is cleaned up; dirt anddecay removed or transformed into knowledge.A conserved past contributes to the healthof the present; it is wholesome and nourishing.But the sanitation operates against anotherdisorder, that of irrationality which is associated with magic, emotion and sentiment.Inarchaeology it is thought that these may lead to problems; they have to be controlled.Thebody is dirt.Archaeology achieves its ends partly through a sacrifice of the body (Ialmost say flesh) of the archaeologist.The movement of our life-cycles, the personal,subjectivity, feeling seem irrelevant to archaeological discipline.This sacrifice isweighed against saving the past.In Britain many ancient sites, usually architectural, are in the care of the state and areopen to the public.There is a very distinctive style to most of these sites.Many are ruins,but consolidated.Loose stones are mortared in position.Walls are cleaned and repointed.Paths tended or created.Fine timber walkways constructed.The ground is firm withneatly trimmed lawns.Park benches are provided.This is all justified in terms of health(stopping the further decay of the monument) and safety (of the visiting public).Howeverreasonable such a justification, it creates a distinctive experience of the visit to such anancient monument.Masonry, grass and sky; such monuments are almost interchangeable,if it were not for their setting.I think of the contrast of much archaeological excavation.Excavating in the North East ofEngland, particularly on inner-city sites in Newcastle upon Tyne, firmly reinforced myfascination for archaeology.Thick disturbed deposits, complex and indeterminate; therewere several metres of remains from pre-Roman to twentieth century.Damp earthinessand the never ending succession of interpretive decisions, deciding on what to make ofthe flows of clay, silts, sands, rubbles, interruptions of later insertions, drains,constructions.At the castle, work was beneath a Victorian railway viaduct only metresaway from the still-standing keep of the thirteenth century.Complex experiences.Desire and metaphor 59Norham, NorthumberlandHaga dolmen, Bohuslan, SwedenThe excremental culture of archaeology, which may wish to avoid the nausea of lossand an absent past, finds gratification in a purifying, but perhaps neurotic, desire to holdon and to order.It is allied with the marginalization of feeling and of heterogeneity, theirreducible otherness of the past.And there is the failure (for me conspicuous) to theorizedeath and decay.These are tamed in archaeology as mortuary analysis,18 or understood asobstacles to a clearer (cleaner) knowledge of the past [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]