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Issue 62December 2001ContentsnewsDetectorists report thousands of new finds to archaeologists Neolithic farmhouse found in Scotland Lost Roman town abandoned 2,000 years ago found in Kent Roman water-lifting machinery unearthed in London Excavating a Scottish rebel’s luxurious stronghold featuresCitadel of the Scots Reading the land Great sites: Meols lettersOn black and brown rats, medieval crafts and cannibalism issuesGeorge Lambrick on Government policy on the heritage Peter EllisbooksPrehistory in the Peak by Mark Edmonds and Tim Seaborne Shadows in the Soil by Tony Waldron Europe’s First Farmers edited by T Douglas Price Landscapes of Lordship by Robert Liddiard CBA updatefavourite findsOnce lost, twice excavated. Richard Brewer’s came from a museum sub-basement.
ISSN 1357-4442 Editor Simon Denison |
Peter EllisOthers, like Proust, may wish to expire in front of Vermeer's canvasses, but not the archaeologist. There's just too much stuff there to be identified. To start with there's all that pottery crying out to be tied down to Delftware beaker type 4 sub-group 142 (BK04.142: Jones 1988b, type 17c - why don't they stick this on the picture?). Then there are the wainscote tiles which, though fabrics can no longer be gauged, can certainly have their designs put in order, plus a nice lot of glass and metal, clothes and furniture. All in all, an archaeologist's dream. Presumably there are others in art galleries stuck in front of one of these Vermeers whose interests are virginals or maps or milk or whatever, and they, like us, must realise that what we specialists are getting out of it all is a bit different from what everyone else seems to be getting out of it. The great mass shuffling past the canvasses in art galleries must be having instead that vague thing - an art experience. They don't peer at Constables to see if there are any cropmarks in the fields the other side of the Haywain, they don't look only at the spurs on Van Dyke's portraits, they don't notice immediately the whacking great service trench outside Van Gogh and Gauguin's house in Arles, they aren't peering at that medieval longhouse in the background of a Deposition, or interestedly counting the feathers on the arrows sticking out of Saint Sebastian. The only art experience known to an archaeologist is a really nice photo of a ditch section with every stone hanging in the perfectly vertical face and the ditch sides as carefully cleaned and restored as any Leonardo. While archaeologists don't know much about art, we know what we like. For instance, illustrations should be at scale so you can take measurements off them. If it has to be an oblique view then it must be an isonometric or axonometric with that slightly weird Daliesque effect. Our preferred view of a pot is not a still life of Caravaggio but one with the pot's inside on the left and its outside on the right. If, as occasionally happens, the frustrated illustrator, fed up with yet another box of finds to draw, does one of those reconstructions with human figures, the archaeologist will stop by the drawing board long enough to sneer: 'Oh very artistic'.
This rugged anti-aestheticism probably comes from the view that there is no evidence of art as a separate endeavour till quite recently. Some really nice objects, like flint scrapers, did really nasty things involving skins and piles of disgusting waste. Others come from graves or bogs or rivers. There is clearly some difference here between the old view of art and the new - between hiding things and sending them straight down to the auction rooms. The point is that in the past you can't detach how something looked from what it did and what it meant. This is what makes looking at finds in museums so depressing. Strangely enough, though archaeologists may have no time for art except to confirm their classifications of Delftware, today's artists wouldn't have got anywhere without archaeology. Those icons of the modern art world, Tracey Emin's bed or Cornelia Parker's exploded garden shed or Damian Hurst's sliced-through farmyard animals, mean nothing without their ironic references to museum displays and archaeology's interest in the meaning of ordinary things. But why bother to get the MoD to shell your shed and then pick through the wreckage, or get a steamroller to flatten your cutlery and then hang it up (as Cornelia Parker does), when you can pursue the same ends much more interestingly by excavating the past?
Obviously the answer is that these days art pays rather better than archaeology. Perhaps we ought to recognise this and explore new sources of funding. Looked at from a Tate Modern perspective an archaeological excavation would make a splendid piece of performance or installation art in its own right. Perhaps we should be applying for Arts Council grants and putting up our sites for the Turner Prize. |
CBA web:British ArchaeologyFebruary 2000 CBA BriefingFieldwork CBA homepage |
