THE WALES

Just a quick update. I'm away to THE WALES this weekend, Conwy in the barren north to be exact*, on a field trip for my course at the University of Glasgow. I'm going to try and update this blog every day via the Blooger app on my phone so we'll see how that works out.
The trip seems to be mostly focused on the post-interesting period, spot the prehistory gimp, and I have to give a brief presentation on the medieval high crosses at Penmon Priory on Ynys Mon. It will be interesting to see if I can make the presentation interesting given that I don't really find the subject all that, well, interesting.
The trip should be fun all the same and I'm looking forward to hearing everyone tripping up over the various Welsh place names in their presentations. :D Plus Marc, from the ever awesome Archaeosoup Productions, hails from Conwy and so has given us a run down of the notable drinking halls of the historic wee town. So expect plenty of pictures of archaeological Wales and the interiors of various public houses over the next couple of days.

Yachi da!

*Can you tell I'm from South Wales?  :D :D

A slideshow I had to prepare for a presentation on archaeology and popular culture. Specifically on the material manifestations of pop culture. The presentation looks at the intra-generational conflicts that manifested in the post war period, the end of hippy idealism as seen through the events at, and remains of, the Isle of White Festival in 1970 and the material culture of 1970's punk rock.

Pop Culture and Material Culture

View more presentations from Welsh_Andy

Old Posts, New(ish) Blog

After having used Wordpress pretty much exclusively for the last couple of years I'm switching back to Blogger for some of my blogging, possibly all in future. I'm going to use this blog for posts related to archaeology and am thinking of setting up other blogs for creative writing and graphic design.
I'm doing this as I would like to get greater integration with my Google+ account and to save on the faff of logging in to multiple places. I'll still be using the Whit? blog but mostly for lulz and the like. ;)
I was going to transfer all my old posts about archaeology from my Whit? blog on Wordpress. That seemed like one hell of a faff so I'm just going to link to them here.

Whit? Archaeology Posts

Christopher Tilley, Swedish Megaliths and Police Violence

One of the courses I have opted for this semester is Landscape Archaeologies Past and Present, a look at various approaches to landscape and the importance of understanding how people in the past have interacted with and perceived the landscape. As part of that course we have to give a presentation on a paper by an archaeologist of prominence in the field. The paper I was given to talk about was Art, Architecture, Landscape[Neolithic Sweden] by Christopher Tilley in Barbara Bender's Landscape Politics and Perspective.
Needless to say my presentation went awfully. I choked and died and the witty and pertinent points I had drawn out were lost as I fumbled my way through umming and ahing like a priest caught with his pecker in a choir boys gob. Damn anxiety >:(
The presentation was really short so I didn't have time to address most of the points that I wanted to. I shall, therefore, attempt to do so here. As the presentation was a graded piece of work I won't go over what I included in my stutter... talk as I wouldn't want to plagiarise myself. :D
The paper looks at the various forms of megalith found in three regions of southern Sweden and the manner in which they interact with/compliment the landscape and the effects they have on people who view and/or interact with them. My talk looked at the way in which Professor Tilley believes that people would have interacted with the monuments and the role that they played in people's changing perceptions of landscape. Here I shall be looking at what I feel to be some serious shortcomings to his methodology, and phenomenological methods in general, and that wider societal effects of some of the concepts inherent in Tilley's approach to understanding the monuments in their settings.

Authentic Experiences of Megaliths

My main problem with this paper, and Professor Tilley's approach, is with the notion of an 'authentic' experience of megaliths. In the paper he states

“A megalith in an urban environment does not work. It is as f the modern buildings surrounding the tombs detract from them as signifiers of the past, deconsecrate their space.”

I take significant umbrage with this notion for a number of reasons. Firstly this implies that archaeology exists in isolation from the world. It does not. Archaeology is vital and existant in the present and therefore it will exist in an urban context as well as a rural one. If we want to experience megaliths in anything approximating the manner in which the people whose cultures built the monuments did then we need to experience them in as natural a state as possible. Natural that is for us, the observers.
Tilley here is creating a dichotomy that is, if anything, a hindrance to understanding these monuments, Our species is an urban one and has been for a very, very long time. Because of this our natural setting is an urban one. When we look at our natural environment, the towns and cities we inhabit, we do not see 'landscapes' but instead a vital environment with which we interact and move within. When we look at the countryside, Tilley's 'authentic' location, then we see a landscape, a vista. Something that is other. Obviously this is not the case for 100% of the world's population, nor even the UK's, but there are now more people living in an urban environment than at any point in our species existence.
Look at the images below and the difference between the manner in which we perceive them is obvious. On is an environment we would engage with when going about our daily business the other is a 'landscape'. It is not an environment we would generally engage with or move within but one that we observe and move across in order to observe further.



How did the megalith builders perceive and interact with their environment? Did they move within it or over it? The manner in which they would have interacted with their landscapes would have more in common with the way n which we interact with our own urban environment.
I do not, can not, believe that the modern buildings surrounding the megaliths in Falköping municipality, the area to which Tilley is referring, deconsecrate the tombs. The modern structures and urban setting do, if anything, the exact opposite. They establish a continued consecration of the megaliths through their being a part of a living human culture. They are more alive in this way that any dolmen or stone circle on the most remote windswept moor or rural idyll.
Tilley is reifying the rural setting of this archaeology and displays a bourgeois idealism which he acknowledges yet refuses to address. In fact he embraces this idealism willingly, supporting it by saying that he 'objectively' knows that all other archaeologists feel the same. By projecting his own biases and ideology onto these megaliths Tilley attempts to isolate them from extant human culture. To render them comfortable and, ultimately, sterile.
In the article Professor Tilley claims that in an urban setting there is no dialectic between the non-human environment and the cultural form. He acknowledges that the landscape is “as much a human artefact as the town” but that the town is not culturally encoded in relation to the monument. The problem here is that the rural setting is no longer culturally encoded in relation to the monuments. Forests no longer exist which once hid these monuments from view, new forms of agriculture have wiped out previous forms into which these monuments, we expect, fitted. Landscapes have changed and been dramatically altered.
Because Professor Tilley has developed this dichotomy between rural and urban I feel that he can not understand the place of these monuments in a human environment. In an urban setting we unthinkingly interact with our environment as that is our 'natural' setting. If we insist that megaliths only 'work' in a rural setting then we are separating them from their natural context, that of being within a human society/culture. It would make sense to attempt to understand megaliths through an urban setting before making any statements about authenticity and reifying contexts and dichotomies that were not extant when these tombs were built.

Authenticity Problems

I only want to talk briefly about this but I feel that concepts of the authentic use of any part of the lived environment or of heritage in general is extremely troublesome and can be used in order to justify the most brutal of repressions against groups who are deemed to be socially unacceptable. The idea of authenticity and the authentic use/experience of the countryside has in the past, and at present if we look to today's events in Basildon, been used as an excuse to oppress and assault traveler communities throughout Britain. For this reason archaeologists should be extremely careful when bandying around such concepts that we live in a society that will take the idea of authenticity and use it to crush communities and break skulls.
It is because of non-authentic use of Stonehenge that English heritage supported this.

Phenomonological Fallacies

When Tilley says that the “starting point for such an encounter must inevitably be our own personal experience of architectural and environmental space and the way they play off each other to create a distinctive sense of place” why does he do so after discounting the actual personal experience of such things that happens in the natural world. Why does he reject the urban setting that is for the majority of us the totality of our experience of architecture and space. Abandons that in favour of the 'other' that is the rural environment.

I feel this to be a shortcoming of phenomenological approaches. Well, the few that I have so far come across in my experience as a student of archaeology. They don't take into account that whilst people do have a transcendental side to them, we can all have our breath taken away by a beautiful vista for example, but that is not how we view the world most of the time. We are less inclined to be concerned with the manner in which the curve of our street draws our eye inevitably towards the off license on the corner than with hoping the bloody rain holds off on our way to get a four pack.

WWCRD?

Well?

Archaeological "Science"

I've just finished my second year of studying archaeology at the University of Glasgow and have been quite amused by the conflict between those that see archaeology purely as a science and those who see it as an entirely subjective enterprise, more so even than the other 'soft' sciences. A conflict that can be seen illustrated with considerable venom on Geoff Carter's blog. The root of this conflict is the perception of some that archaeology, or any other discipline, is only one or the other. A 'hard' empirical practice on the one hand or a 'soft' discipline subject to the whims of human subjectivity on the other.

'Difficult Choices'

With the latest onslaught by the government on our society we are repeatedly told that, with regards cuts, there are difficult choices needed to be made with regards where these cuts are going to be made. These 'difficult choices' are usually framed something like this.

Which of these do you value most?

1-The community archaeologists

2-The crossing guards outside the local school

3-Street lighting on dangerous streets

Well, to be honest I want all of them. How about we frame the question slightly differently?

Which of these do you value most?

1-The community archaeologists

2-Billions spent on nuclear weaponry that we must never use

3-Corporate tax avoidance robbing us of billions that could be spent on services

Looked at like that the answer is easy. We are basically being offered something of a Sophie's choice. We are given a limited set of choices, all of which are a direct attack on our societies, our culture, our heritage, the things that make us who we are and which improve our quality of life.