If man is a sapient animal, a toolmaking animal, a self-making animal, a symbol-using animal, he is, no less, a performing animal, Homo performans, not in the sense, perhaps that a circus animal may be a performing animal, but in the sense that a man is a self-performing animal--his performances are, in a way, reflexive, in performing he reveals himself to himself.
(Victor Turner The Anthropology of Performance 1986, 81).
This session seeks to explore the innovative ways in which archaeologists are using contemporary performance (and performative) theory in archaeology. Engaging in performance as an archaeological endeavour involves situating action as both creative and dynamic, allowing the traces and materials of the past to become animated and narrated. Thus the practices of producing pots, ploughing fields or building monuments can be seen as a way into understanding what it meant to be at those moments in time. This entails recognising that bodies, materials and landscapes are not isolated fields of study, but rather they are entwined within human experience and the (re)negotiation of identities and world-views. In this session, we are interested in debating whether the social dynamics of performance are essential to human experience, looking in particular at the varied scales on which these acts may occur.
Peoples’ social worlds operate on a number of different levels, from the intimate moments of quotidian life to community and public displays. Archaeological remains are necessarily tied up with these different scales; the challenge is recognising the performances they facilitated and imagining how they might have come to perpetuate world-views. Archaeology offers an unique dimension in which to explore how social practices were enacted in the past and we encourage participants to explore new ways of engaging with archaeological data. Papers discussing the performance of archaeology across all periods and locations, alongside multi-disciplinary approaches, are encouraged.
Speakers:
The Pour: casting and staging the Bronze Age
Kate Waddington, Cardiff University
The pour is an incremental stage in the process of bronze creation. In archaeological discourse, cycles of production, exchange, consumption and deposition are themes that forge interpretations of bronze materials. The magical and transformative qualities of metalworking also evoke Bronze Age cosmologies and belief systems. Yet, in recent literature, little attention has been paid to the choreography of bronze casting, and the powerful and performative processes of artefact creation. In this paper I discuss the practice of mould making and bronze casting and my experiences of working in a foundry. In July 2007 I spent a week learning the art of Bronze Age bronze casting on the Arran Islands, County Galway, Ireland, with the group UMHA AIOS (Irish for ‘Bronze Age’). Here I played the seven stages: neophyte, apprentice, associate, producer, analyser, academic and novice! During this time, I produced replicas of artefacts recovered from my own excavations at Whitchurch in Warwickshire, England, which create the stimuli for this discussion. Experiments with mixtures of materials, including clay, dung, water, sand, beeswax, charcoal, copper and tin, culminate in a display of dramatic proportions: the pour.
‘Topography drives tactics’: scenario, programme, and the military imagination
Mike Pearson, University of Wales Aberystwyth
This paper reflects upon the relationship between landscape and contemporary military training, and then examines the potential of the performative to inform approaches in archaeological interpretation. It arises from conversations, interviews and observations at the Sennybridge Training Area (SENTA) during an AHRC Landscape and Environment programme network workshop. Compulsorily requisitioned in 1940, this large area of upland in mid-Wales includes infantry firing ranges, a ‘German’ village (FIBUA) – a cluster of simple architectural forms lacking vernacular detail - built in the early 1990s to rehearse ‘fighting in built-up areas’, and a central impact area long regarded as a dangerous and inaccessible no-man’s land.
The paper is in three sections:
The first involves discussion of ways in which this landscape has been variously named, mapped, modelled and re-imaged by the army: how soldiers regard and experience it, and its role in the creation and disciplining of the military body.
The second draws upon performance theorist Diana Taylor’s elaboration of the performance scenario and architect Bernard Tschumi’s model of programme to help explicate aspects of military training and strategy as active choreographies: ‘there is no space without event, no architecture without programme…without violence’.
The third develops a combination of programme and scenario in proposing a shift from deductive to inductive modes – ‘reading onto’ as much as ‘reading from’ - in archaeological interpretation: conceptual, virtual or imaginary movements – of dance, sport, war – are played onto sites as forms of animation and motivation, suggestive of ‘secret maps and impossible fictions’.
Performance, animism and perspectivism: transformations at British Neolithic monuments
Ffion Reynolds, Cardiff University
This paper considers performance in relation to the construction of world-views in animistic societies. It also explores new and exciting research done by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro relating to Amerindian perspectivism, a concept very similar to animism, which has only recently entered archaeological debates. Moreover, it concerns how these theories may provide us with helpful stepping stones into the reconstruction of Neolithic lifeways. Could animistic or perspectivist procedures in any way broaden our understanding of the ways in which megalithic monuments might have been used? To illustrate some of the possibilities, I will be describing a perspectivist performance which I witnessed in the Amazon jungle last year, and look at the way this may inform the construction of their world-view. Animistic and perspectivist systems of thought provide powerful cosmological schemes in which close identification is made between different kinds of people and other types of being, be it animal, object, thing or essence. It has helped, and continues to help dissolve the nature/culture, subject/object, human/non-human dichotomies which plague western thought, and through this may help us understand what these monuments meant to the people of prehistory, where dichotomies such as these may not have existed – as in many animistic and perspectivist societies.
Half Life
Angus Farquhar, NVA
The presentation is focused on a contemporary large scale art installation which sought to animate aspects of the prehistoric sites centered around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll in September 2007. Recent academic research and publications on rock art and Neolithic burial techniques formed the basis for a purely art based approach to "performing the landscape" with new and dynamic permanent path lines being created as thresholds and portals to locations, some of which had lain hidden under forestry plantation for up to 40 years. The manipulation of trees and entrances, created new ways of perceiving the chosen sites in relation to surrounding natural features, aiming to explore the mindset and intent that led to the original marking outcrops and erratics, 4-5,000 years previously. Such work might release the possibility to challenge modern audiences to think beyond their immediate perceptions of the natural world and to experience more directly a theoretical interpretation of past belief systems.
Art as an act of imagination is free from the need to be grounded in explicit evidence and as a result can either be powerfully focused and visionary or vaguely irrelevant depending on the liberties taken with the scientific analysis surrounding a particular site. At best it can lead to a level of interpretation and public engagement that moves away from dull signage and conservatively factual displays that typify much outdoor presentation of key prehistoric sites in Scotland.
Space, Shape and the Performance of Social Differentiation in Prepalatial Crete
Kathryn Soar, University of Nottingham
The Early Minoan period of Crete saw the possible existence of two different cultures living side-by-side: one in the South of the island and the other in the East. The differences between the two are best exemplified by their respective tomb architecture - tholos tombs and house tombs. However, it is not only the physical architecture of the tombs that illustrates the differences between the two cultures. I believe that an analysis of the performative aspects of the two societies, as practised in their cemeteries, also speaks of an ideological and socio-political divide. Both societies saw the emergence of social hierarchies and differentiation around 2800 BC (EMII), but I argue here that the performances which occurred at this period as part of funerary rituals can be reconstructed and used to illuminate the different ways the two societies reacted to this development. By looking at these performances - dance and processions - I hope to point out how performance can be used as a tool to reconstruct the ideologies of these two different social groupings.
L'art du déplacement: parkour and some physical re-engagements with archaeology
Andrew Cochrane, Cardiff University, and Ian Russell, University of Notre Dame
I am Jack’s quadriceps. I am the great extensor muscle of the knee, forming a large fleshy mass which covers the front and sides of the femur. I extend and straighten the leg outwards when he runs.
Recent criticisms of the phenomenological approach to understanding how some people in the past engaged with an environment have highlighted the predominance of depictions of protagonists romantically strolling through the landscape. It is perhaps ironic that sites which were once locations of toil, exertion and struggle are now almost only approached as areas for leisure and reflection. This paper seeks to explore alternative engagements with the present past. Inspired by the art of parkour, we move – both theoretically and physically – away from more sedate preambles and enactments. We choose instead to explore the performance of running through space and place. Through a rapid, visceral engagement with space, the capricious possibilities of engagement are confronted both as pleasure and pain. The ground creates the canvas, with bipedal locomotion the ‘frame by frame’ for new experience. Via the process of time lapse pixilation, we present a three minute moving picture of us performing through and in an archaeological complex. Stop-motion animation is followed by re-animated discussion.
Performing the valley: journeys to causewayed enclosures
Jess Mills, CADW: Welsh Assembly Government’s Historic Environment Service
During the Neolithic numerous causewayed enclosures were constructed in and around the Great Ouse, Nene and Welland river valleys. Recent studies on causewayed enclosures have focused upon themes such as construction, materiality and deposition. In contrast, this paper will look at causewayed enclosures from a movement perspective. That is, how enclosures were actively created and sustained through performed movements and how journeys to them reinforced varying senses of identity.
Spaced far apart within each valley, attending a gathering at one of these enclosures would have engendered, for many people, quite a long journey along the course of each valley. Such a journey would have mimicked and re-enacted the more ancestral routine journeys made by later Mesolithic people – journeys that were unencumbered by social expressions such as monumental architecture, garden plots and domesticated herds. Through encouraging longer-range movements that encompassed large tracts of the valley, gatherings at these enclosures may have been as equally concerned with the ‘performed’ journey to the enclosure as with what actually occurred at each site. Hence, we can see that to attend an enclosure was an essential act of ‘performing the valley’. These performances were fundamental to constructing identities and maintaining convivial relations amongst disparate groups living within each valley.
Engaging with the Unknown: The Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age of the northern Clun Hills of Shropshire and Powys
Bronwen Price, Cardiff University
Prehistoric lives permeated the upper Severn and Camlad valleys during the third and early second millennium cal BC through a multiplicity of moments, recollections and traditions. Ranging from crossing marked fording points in the upstream tributaries, picking apples and raspberries from the forests and crafting axe-hammers from the Group XII picrite source at Hyssington, these engagements conciliated between action and the norms and values of agents’ circumstantial contexts. The resultant world-view became momentarily realised in the nature of ensuing action, before being re-aligned in perpetual discourse (Goffman 1969; Giddens 1984; Turner 1987). I argue that the concept of the unknown, as an awareness that something is ‘not known about’, was a constant yet dialectical factor in the realignment of world-views at this time. As knowledge it formed part of the social framework of these communities, but its malleability entailed its constant application, detachment and re-definition throughout daily life. In this way, people understood their worlds as merging fields of known and unknown elements, and this knowledge is archaeologically accessible through the study of durable performance taboos. I will look at specific acts of deposition and movement to establish how knowledge of the unknown nature of certain circumstances was materialised. This will include considering past performance at sites such as Sarn-y-bryn caled timber circle, the Trelystan ‘houses’ and a section of the supposed Kerry Hill trackway (Chitty 1963), thereby integrating rather than reifying monumentality within prehistoric lives. I will also demonstrate how this process varied according to context; agents’ active interpretations of institutionalised taboos will be contrasted through time and relative to perceptions of identity. This paper will incorporate Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age taskscapes on a number of scales and apply the theory of performance through engagements with the unknown.
Writing as performance
Kathryn Piquette, UCL
Within archaeology written evidence is often overlooked in discussions of material remains and social practice. Drawing on a case study of inscribed material from early Egypt (c.3300-c.2700bce), I argue that because graphical culture is materially embedded, it requires consideration alongside other archaeological data. Equally, the interpretation of philological meanings must also take account of the processes and contexts by and in which images are materially expressed. Through consideration of the materials and materiality (see Ingold 2007; Gibson 1979) of script, attention is directed to the session’s theme of performance and the embodied acts involved in image production and reception. For example, foundation selection and shaping, the subtraction or addition of materials in rendering images, decisions regarding image organisation, and the ways in which these recursively influence ‘reading’, object manipulation and other forms of engagement are discussed. Part of my exploration of scriptorial practice has involved the reproduction of inscribed objects through experimental archaeology. Here the notion of practice as consisting of both participation and reification (Wenger 2002) has also proved valuable. Rather than treating past meanings as something simply to be extracted by the viewer, this paper offers a way of presenting a more holistic account of past scriptorial evidence as performative embodied experience.
References
Gibson, J. J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin.
Ingold, T. 2007. Materials Against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1-16.
Wenger, E. 2002. Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity., 1998 edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Making the Past feel at Home
Christine Finn, University of Bradford
This presentation explores attachment to objects and place, specifically the context of a home. It describes a narrative in which a house co-exists as a dwelling place, excavation site, studio, and mnemonic, and not least a place of private and public performance.
Enclosure: awakening the Neolithic mind: Performance as ritual across a mythographic landscape
Simon Pascoe, co-director Red Earth
This paper introduces the work of Red Earth and specifically the recent performance project Enclosure, a one-off site-specific event on Hambledon Hill in Dorset, the largest Neolithic causewayed enclosure in Europe.
Enclosure was a response to a landscape resonant with ancient history: an experiment in archaeological interpretation. As artists we were not attempting to reproduce Neolithic ritual but rather articulate imagined possibilities as to what that experience might have been: using the vocabulary of contemporary artwork (performance, installation, sound) to create a visceral experience that engaged physically with the Neolithic landscape.
Enclosure took place on the autumn equinox 2007 and marked this point of convergence: day and night, summer with winter, life with death. The audience joined artists on a journey that charted a physical and mythical voyage reactivating both landscape and cultural memory: stimulating a sense of atmosphere, awareness and awe theoretically compatible with ritual events that may have taken place on Hambledon Hill thousands of years ago.
Having accepted the premise that the equinox was recognised as an important point in the Neolithic calendar, could we use it as an interface between our two cultures? Could we get any closer to the Neolithic mindset through an emotive and experiential encounter with a very specific time in a very specific landscape? Could we cross an impermeable boundary and reconnect with both the land and with the people who shaped it?