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Comment: Art and re‐presentation of the past

Article in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · December 2002

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9655.00055

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5 authors, including: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Through the dark vale: interpreting the Stonehenge Palisade through inter-disciplinary convergence View project Interpretation through emergence: reconstituting the lost complexity of late Neolithic Early Bronze Age cosmovision by inter-disciplinary method View project Yannis Hamilakis Brown University

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Art and the re-presentation

• f the past

Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender (2000) discuss a number of important issues to do with art and the representation of the past and, although I feel that they do not do justice to the com- plexities of the issue (for example, they fail to mention and engage with the tradition of archaeology as art history, so prominent in many contexts outside the Anglo-Saxon canon), their arguments are worth taking seri-

• usly and constitute another welcome and

important addition to the growing literature

• n multivocality in archaeological fieldwork.

Here I take issue with only one crucial aspect of their argument, typical of the broader trends in recent influential theoretical currents in archaeology, as well in other dis-

• ciplines. The art installations created by the

authors (2000: 47-9) at Leskernick aimed, amongst other things, at ‘acknowledging and making tangible … the possible significance of these stones to its prehistoric inhabitants’. It is this particular point that I want to interrogate here, the idea that installations like the ones employed by the authors will be able to con- tribute to the understanding of the meaning and significance that prehistoric people at- tributed to landscape features. My objection is this: while the authors wish to understand prehistoric people’s engagement with their environment and its surrounding features, most if not all of the installation devices they adopted seem to privilege only one specific mode of engagement, visual perception.These include the attempt to highlight the shape of rocks by wrapping them with cling-film and painting them, producing visual frames based

• n the shape of doors and horizon silhouettes

through the doorways, highlighting prominent features with flags, documenting the installa- tions with photographs, and so forth. While these devices are interesting ways of conceptualizing perceptions of space, they are based on the assumption that sight would have been the most crucial sensory engagement of the prehistoric people with these features. In fact, this line of argument is a by-product of recent phenomenological trends in archaeol-

• gy which, despite the oft-repeated appeals to

bodily experience and embodiment, mostly focus on sight and vision (e.g. Tilley 1994). Evidently this approach is a reflection of the Western bias towards vision from the eigh- teenth century onwards (Classen 1997a: 402). In the Western hierarchy of the senses, vision

• ccupied the highest position, forming with

hearing the ‘high’ or ‘distant’ senses; touch, smell, and taste, on the other hand, were classed as the ‘low’ or ‘close’ senses (cf. Hami- lakis in press; Rodaway 1994: 26), a sensory hierarchy with strong gender connotations (Classen 1997b; but see Nash 1996). These ideas were closely associated with notions that attribute a privileged role to the gaze and construct science as a mode of observation; they were also linked with emerging media such as photography, as well as with a notion

• f embodiment which emphasized bodily

control and middle-class respectability. Y et a growing body of work in anthropol-

• gy, as well as in fields like history and human

geography, has shown time and again that many pre-modern and non-Western modes of bodily engagement with the world deploy a variety of sensory devices, and not simply or primarily vision. Even as late as the sixteenth century in France, for example (Febvre 1982: 423-37), sight seems to have been less devel-

• ped and of less importance than touch, smell,
• r hearing. Things that people in the West

now would describe in visual terms, would have been then described in haptic, olfactory, and auditory terms. T

• return to Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender’s

paper, while the shape of the rocks in Lesker- nick may (or may not) have been a prominent feature in prehistoric people’s bodily encoun- ters with them, why should we not assume that the texture of the rock (sensed through touch) and even the sound of the rock when

COMMENT

154 COMMENT hit (cf. Rainbird in press) were equally or even more important? If so, then the devices and installations which involve the wrapping of stones with cling-film and their painting, which privilege one sensory dimension, in fact prohibit a crucial sensory, experiential engagement with the materiality of the land-

• scape. The installations in Leskernick thus are

interesting modern experimentations in an archaeological site. The claim, however, that they are also a ‘window’ into prehistoric people’s perception of their surrounding envi- ronment is problematic, as it is based on a modernist notion of sensory hierarchy which stresses vision. Y H University of Southampton Classen, C. 1997a. Foundations for an anthro- pology of the senses. International Social Science Journal 153, 401-12. ——— 1997b. Engendering perception: gender ideologies and sensory hierarchies in Western history. Body and Society 3: 2, 1-19. Febvre, L. 1982. The problem of unbelief in the sixteenth century: the religion of Rabelais. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Hamilakis, Y . in press. Archaeology as oral history: towards an archaeology of the

• senses. In Thinking through the body: archae-
• logies of corporeality (eds) Y

. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik & S. Tarlow. New Y

• rk:

Kluwer/Plenum. Nash, C. 1996. Reclaiming vision: looking at landscape and the body. Gender, Place and Culture 3, 149-69. Rainbird, P . in press. Making sense of the petroglyphs: the sound of rock-art. In Inscribed landscapes: rock art, place and identity (eds) B. David & M. Wilson. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rodaway, P . 1994. Sensuous geographies: body, sense and place. London: Routledge. Tilley, C. 1994. A phenomenology of perception: paths, place and monuments. Oxford: Berg. Tilley, C., S. Hamilton & B. Bender. 2000. Art and the re-presentation of the past. Journal

• f the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6,

35-62. Installation art has been claimed as a means of ‘re-presenting’ megalithic monuments such as Leskernick Hill in Cornwall (Tilley, Hamilton & Bender 2000). Cling-film, paint, and coloured fabrics are used by Tilley and his colleagues as mimetic, marking, and mapping devices to uncover multiple properties of stones not discernible within the frame of photograph, book, or computer screen. ‘We cannot recreate the meanings that the stones had to the Bronze Age inhabitants of the site’, they write (2000: 43-5). ‘Our work is our creative response to their creativity or, better, the ruins of their creativity’.The authors con- tinue: ‘For example, by wrapping cling-film

• n a stone and subsequently painting it, we

are creating something new: a synthesis of the stone shape that we have not created and something which we have added to it’. They explain (2000: 49): ‘The process of wrapping served to energize the stones with our ideas and thoughts’.The authors (2000: 60) present their novel approach as an attempt ‘to forge a middle way between the personal, idiosyn- cratic approach to landscape characteristic of environmental artists and the disengaged and disinterested objectivity of visual representa- tion in contemporary archaeology’. I fail to see how this procedure advances megalithic archaeology. The authors may find it ‘engaging’ to cover selected stones with coloured materials and reshape their archaeo- logical spoil heaps during summer fieldwork. They may even believe that in doing so, they are echoing the ritual performances of the Bronze Age megalith builders. But on what grounds should the rest of us take it that such antics inform us in any way about the past? Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender (2000: 55) chose to erect door frames on Bodmin Moor, and through these, to record horizon lines. They also remodelled their spoil heaps ‘so that they mimicked the shapes of the distant tors’ (2000: 46). Whatever the temptations to mimic the contemporary landscape in this way, the Bronze Age inhabitants of Leskernik surely did no such thing. Unlike hunters and gatherers, pastoralist-agriculturalists in the late Neolithic were distinctive in labouring to create an artificial landscape of stone rows, circles, and cairns in counterpoint with the locality which they had deforested, and with special reference to the local horizon (North 1997: 358-9). Nothing suggests a concern with mere replication of natural horizons. Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender (2000: 49) single out certain particularly large or promi- nent stones for artistic ‘re-presentation’. By covering individual stones in coloured shrouds and by mapping selected zones with colour- coded flags, they ‘attempt to evoke a ritual- ized world of stone that linked the Bronze Age people to the ancestral past in a world

COMMENT 155 replete with myth and memory, nurtured through ritual and ceremony’ (2000: 52). Is it likely that such invented theatricals have any bearing on what the Bronze Age inhabitants

• f Bodmin Moor may have been doing with

these stones? I am sceptical. Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender acknowledge that they are responding to, and artistically embellishing,

• nly the ruins of Bronze Age creativity. No
• ne would wish to deny that this can result

in dramatic and startling alterations to the contemporary Cornish landscape. But what of the intentions of the Neolithic inhabitants themselves? If such matters are no longer thought to be of interest, in what sense are Tilley and his colleagues to be considered archaeologists? The past does matter, and, in this context, a more persuasive and authorita- tive approach has surely been that of Southampton University archaeologists in their meticulous photographic recording of the stones at Avebury and subsequent com- puter simulation of their original placement in a Bronze Age landscape (Southampton 2000). Their use of split-image photomontage to juxtapose the multiple properties of the stones as they mutate under changing weather and light conditions may well yield results remi- niscent of a cubist painting (2000: 58). But where does this get us? The findings reported in this article appear to be completely arbi-

• trary. For example, why does these authors’

landscape apparently exclude the sky? And why is it always the daytime landscape which is chosen? Surely even installation art can stretch to the night sky? But then, why look to contemporary abstract art in the first place for theoretical assistance when we have the recent findings of a now matured archaeo- astronomy? Ruggles (1999) and North (1997) have persuasively argued that the Bronze Age megalith builders were manipulating their landscapes for the time-factored, ceremonial horizon viewing of stellar, lunar, and solar

• cycles. These early farmers moved tons of

stone and earth in order to create artificial horizons for such purposes. They accurately marked cosmologically significant points on these horizons using wooden and stone gauges, employing standard units of measure- ment and relying on a sophisticated knowl- edge of proportions in right-angled triangular geometry. Tilley and his colleagues have recom- mended ‘environmental art’ as a contemporary practice which can sensitize us to the possible ritual functions of megalithic monuments. I would suggest performance art as a much more appropriate candidate. At least this artistic medium stresses collective rather than individual representations, and may usefully explore a variety of possible contemporary ceremonial functions for the stones. In this spirit, anthropology staff and students from the University of East London participated in a collective performance within Stonehenge to greet the summer solstice sunrise in the year

• 2000. Stonehenge has long been a contested

site (Bender 1998), and on this enjoyable

• ccasion torch-bearers escorted our contin-

gent of samba drummers and dancers to ‘reclaim the stones’.Whether performances of this kind can tell us anything about the orig- inal intentions of the Bronze Age inhabitants

• f Salisbury Plain is doubtful. But archaeology

aside, I suspect our ancestors might have found marginally more relevance in this invented collective ritual of resistance than in the obscure, individualistic, and idiosyncratic cling-film-and-paint offerings of Tilley and his colleagues. L S Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of East London Bender, B. 1998. Stonehenge. Oxford: Berg. North, J. 1997. Stonehenge: Neolithic man and the cosmos. London: Harper Collins. Ruggles, C. 1999. Astronomy in prehistoric Britain and Ireland. London:Yale. Tilley, C., S. Hamilton & B. Bender. 2000. Art and the re-presentation of the past. Journal

• f the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6,

35-62. Southampton 2000. http://www.arch.soton. ac.uk/Research/Avebury/VirtualAvebury/ Hamilakis’s claim that by discussing the visual we are reflecting a Western bias towards vision as the primary sensory engagement with the world was rather predictable and indeed is a criticism that we might well agree with in general terms. Engagement with the stones was undoubtedly an experience involving all the senses and we readily acknowledge that texture and sound were of essential sig-

• nificance. However, the purpose of the article

was not to argue for or against a hierarchy of the senses (a fairly futile debate that would ultimately threaten to impugn the validity of the entire sub-field of visual anthropology) but to explore the possibilities of visual

156 COMMENT imagery as an alternative means of conveying an experience of landscape and place, another way of telling about the powers of the stones in the past and in the present. We know of no effective means in conventional print media of conveying an experience of sounds or textures that would not reduce or translate them into secondary representations in the form of words or images. We would wish to maintain that part of the power of the images may be that they require no such translation. While Hamilakis makes important points about the significance or otherwise of the visual as a means to interpret the stones, Sims’s commentary is more difficult to respond to in a reasoned manner, as it is largely a personal diatribe betraying an ignorance of the prehis- toric remains (there are no megaliths on Leskernick Hill in the normally accepted understanding of that term, and we are dealing with a site of Bronze Age not Neolithic date) that we are investigating and an almost wilful misunderstanding of the aims and objectives of our research as stated in the article, which was to use visual imagery both as something purely contemporary (of the present and for the present) and to provide an interpretation of the significance of the stones on a hill amongst which two Bronze Age villages were built. It is not some futile attempt to recover the original inten- tions in the minds of the builders, which Sims seems to think ought to be our primary goal, a relic of dated empiricist epistemol-

• gy which most archaeologists and anthro-

pologists abandoned twenty or thirty years

• ago. Our installations and images are, we

argue, valuable intellectual resources in that process of interpretation, which is always a contemporary act. Our previously published research on Leskernick Hill and Bodmin Moor (Bender, Hamilton & Tilley 1997; Tilley 1995; 1996), which Sims obviously has not read, has demonstrated quite clearly the relevance of localized landscape features to the siting of individual houses and monuments on Bodmin Moor down to the level of the orientation of doorway entrances to distant hills and rocky

• tors. We have explicitly criticized the obses-

sion with the sky and the movements of the sun and the moon in contemporary archaeo- astronomy (as only one factor of varying sig- nificance in the choice of the location and architectural arrangements of some sites) which Sims naïvely regards as providing unprob- lematic truths about the past. A: ‘Dislike intensely. Visually offensive,

• btrusive. I was offended when I realized

that more orientation and behaviour was influenced by the wrapped stones.’ B: ‘Helps you see, think, they jump out. Provides landmarks. Flags especially allow you to imagine/see divisions and barriers. I just feel I’m coming to grips with my ori- entation on site in large part because of the art work.’ The two comments cited above were made during interviews with members of the Leskernick project team who experienced the art works in the field at first hand. Our instal- lations provoked strong gut reactions and people tended to be either very positive in relation to what we were doing or very

• negative. Surprisingly few people were indif-
• ferent. These violent kinds of reactions are

interestingly mirrored by the two commen- taries on our paper. C T, S H & B B University College London Bender, B., S. Hamilton & C. Tilley. 1997. Leskernick: stone worlds; alternative narra- tives: nested landscapes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63, 147-78. Tilley, C. 1995. Rocks as resources: land- scapes and power. Cornish Archaeology 34, 5-57. ——— 1996.The powers of rocks:topography and monument construction on Bodmin

• Moor. World Archaeology 28, 161-76.

Rethinking animism

Stringer concludes his article on animism (1999) by discussing, at some length, another study and my Faces in the clouds (1993). Unfor- tunately, he misrepresents what I say. Guthrie, he writes, thinks that animism is giving ‘human personality to non-human objects’ and that animism can be ‘reduced only to those non-empirical entities that appear to have personality or other “human” attributes’ (Stringer 1999: 551).That is, I equate animism with anthropomorphism. Actually, I recommend clearly and repeat- edly that these two terms not be equated.

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