View all news

Sonic Strata

14 April 2016

by Ralph Hoyte

Need to return to 'the archaeological'.

'Archaeology' means digging up things (you find things, you interpret them and the individuals and cultures that created them)

'Literary Archaeology' means 'digging up' words from archives, perhaps (they exist, you have to find them, then interpret them)

'Experimental archaeology' (also called experiment archaeology and experiential archaeology) is a field of study which attempts to generate and test archaeological hypotheses, usually by replicating or approximating the feasibility of ancient cultures performing various tasks or feats. It employs a number of methods, techniques, analyses, and approaches, based upon archaeological source material such as ancient structures or artifacts.
 
It is distinct from uses of primitive technology without any concern for archaeological or historical study. Living history and historical reenactment, which are generally undertaken as a hobby, are the non archaeological person's version of this academic discipline.
 
 

One of the main forms of experimental archaeology is the creation of copies of historical structures using only historically accurate technologies. This is sometimes known as reconstruction archaeology or reconstructional archaeology; however, reconstruction implies an exact replica of the past, when it is in fact just a construction of one person's idea of the past; the more archaeologically correct term is a working construction of the past. In recent years, experimental archaeology has been featured in several television productions, such as BBC's "Building the Impossible" and the PBS's Secrets of Lost Empires. Most notable were the attempts to create several of Leonardo da Vinci's designs from his sketchbooks, such as his 15th century armed fighting vehicle.

 
'Living archaeology,' says Richard Gould, 'is ethnoarchaeology in the active voice'. Using as case studies his own observations of Australian Aborigines, and those of others, the author presents a unified theory of ethnoarchaeology. He demonstrates a reliable way to infer adaptive behavior in prehistoric communities by studying adaptive behavior in a contemporary society and noting the evidence of this behavior in material discards. Gould examines and dismisses the argument by analogy, long accepted as fundamental in earlier archaeological studies of this kind, and, as an alternative, he proposes the argument by anomaly. The book starts by recording a day in the life of a traditional Australian Desert Aborigine camp. the author identifies many social, verbal, and ideational interactions that would be difficult, if not impossible, to infer directly from the typical 'archaeological' remains of this non-material behavior. The book examines differences between actual as opposed to anticipated human behavior and suggests that understanding the reasons for these contrasts is what characterizes ethnoarchaeology at its best.
 
'The Archaeology of Memory'. Well, you can do a Masters at Chester: http://www.chester.ac.uk/postgraduate/arch-death-and-memory; http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~rvandyke/Publications_files/MemoryCh1.pdf looks interesting.
 
DAUNTING!
 
 
I dunno. The subject is daunting from every angle: the need for authenticity and rigour (Google wants me to spell that 'rigor'. **** off, Google!); the politics; the ethics, the history; the science, the being forced to look at things you really don't want to, the literary angle, the legacy. How much dem a pay I??? :))


Shipshape and Bristol Fashion they did go
Down the Avon Gorge under the cliffs in tow
Out to the Bristol Channel where the Severn did flow
Carrying trinkets for the African Kings, Yo heave ho!
 
Ho! And out to the Bristol Channel where the Severn did flow
Carrying trinkets for the African Kings, Yo heave ho!
 
The winds o’er to the Guinea Coast their ship did blow
They anchored in the Bight of Benin and to the shore did row
They loaded up with slaves till their gunwhales were low
And set off for Amerikee with their cargo of woe
 
Ho! They loaded up with slaves till their gunwhales were low
And set off for Amerikee with their cargo of woe
 
And back from the Americas they did come
Loaded to the gunwhales with sugar, 'baccy and rum
Ho King of Spain here’s one up yer bum
An' a pox on the Frenchies and those Portuguese scum!
 
[CHORUS]
Ho! King of Spain that's one up yer bum
An' a pox on the Frenchies and those Portuguese scum!
 

(From an old work of mine, re-used recently for a response to John Akomfrahs' 'Tropikos' at the Arnolfini in Bristol)
 
 
 
Er, where was I? John MacFarlane, in the Guardian of 2 April, says:


The Deutsches Museum in Munich is currently hosting ‘An Anthropocene Wunderkammer’, which it calls ‘the first major exhibition in the world’ to take the Anthropocene as its theme. Among the exhibits is a remarkable work by the American writer and conservationist Julianne Lutz Warren entitled, ‘Hopes Echo’. It concerns the huia, an exquisite bird of New Zealand that was made extinct in the early 20th century due to habitat destruction introduced predators and overhunting for its black and ivory tail feathers. The huia vanished before field recording technologies existed but a version of its song has survived by means of an eerie series of preservations: a sound fossil. In order to lure the birds to their snares, the Maori people learned to mimic the huia song.  This mimicked song was passed down between generations, a practice that continued even after the hulia was gone.  In 1954 pakeha (a European New Zealander) called RAL Bateley made a recording of a Maori man, Henare Hkamana, whistling his imitation of the huia's call. Warren's exhibit makes Bateley's crackly recording available, and her accompanying text unfolds the complexities of its sonic strata. It is as Warren puts it, "a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds echoing in that of a dead man echoing out of a machine echoing through the world today.” The intellectual elegance of her work – and its exemplary quality as an Anthropocene-aware artefact – lies in its subtle tracing of the technological and imperial histories involved in a single extinction event and its residue.

What a wonderful idea: 'sound fossils', 'sonic strata ', 'a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds echoing...' I'm going to clothe the bones with voices; they are going to whisper to me; but what it is, is indisputably mine