Key Pages
Main GroupCornelius Holtorf and Michael Shanks in conversation
on archaeology and contemporary culture
CH: I would like to talk to you about the ubiquitous links between 'the Archaeological' (as you have been calling it) and contemporary culture. On what archaeology is about, in the larger picture.
This image is familiar to me, there are things I associate with it. But one thing is clear. Whatever you may be able to argue in abstract terms (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/v011/11.1shanks.html), this image does not show rubbish. It is not about decay and loss. It is about creativity and memory.
I recognise the image, I said, and what it shows. You have published it before (or something very much like it). I saw some of the artefacts and the skull in your house when we met (it may have been in Wales). So this is very personal, for me but even more so for you. A personal archaeology of an archaeologist, albeit one that draws on ideas and technologies that are available to many of us.
But what does a more public archaeology look like? What are the personal archaeologies like of people who are not themselves archaeologists? That's what I find interesting.
Here is Claes Oldenburg's archaeology. The question is not whether it was really intended as an archaeological image or not. My question is: how can it not be an archaeological image? A stereotype? Certainly.
MS: This is a wonderful opening. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's trowel - for us archaeologists this may well be a stereotype, but the context of this oversized trowel in Oldenburg's and van Bruggen's body of work makes it something quite different. And I think you are right - it cannot be taken other than as an archaeological image, a component of a contemporary archaeological culture.
Regularly Oldenburg takes ordinary things, transforms them in some way (supersizes them, makes them in an incongruous material), and so alerts us to something we may overlook in the everyday. There is something here as well about artifact and architecture - an effect of supersizing.
When I was working on our Sicily field project it seemed to me that three components of archaeological interest that cross cut the professionals, locals, amateurs were
- the figure in the landscape (an interest in place attached to the ideological orientation that is landscape)
- collections (of various kinds, personal, institutional)
- metamorphoses
The Oldenburg/van Bruggen trowel references two of these, maybe coincidentally - the metamorphosed trowel ... marking a site ...
CH: Yes indeed, the notions of The Site, Collecting, and Change are significant to archaeology, and often evoked in archaeological environments. But of course none of these are specific to archaeology.
What other components of The Archaeological are there? Can we add to this list, not with an intention of closing it, but hoping to open up further what archaeology is about?
I recently came across Rolf Jensen's book The Dream Society (1999). He is a Danish business consultant (http://www.dreamcompany.dk/en/), so this is quite another perspective than what (I presume) you and I normally read. But there are actually quite a few books like his, all pointing into roughly similar directions. Very interesting directions.
Jensen argued that businesses (surely archaeology too is 'a business') need to take into account the changing parametres of society. Now we are living in what he calls The Dream Society. This means that businesses are thriving on the basis of the stories they tell. For consumers are increasingly buying stories connected with products rather than the products themselves. For example, when we buy eggs we are willing to pay a little more in order to hear a story about free-ranging chicken. Likewise, we are prepared to donate money to Amnesty International or Greenpeace because (besides everything else they do) they tell us stories about rescuing human beings or natural environments that we respond to very passionately.
By the same token, advertising is becoming more emotional, appealing to our hearts rather than our brains.
Jensen says that now new kinds of stories are emerging that are particularly characteristic for The Dream Society. All of them provide experiences by engaging people in different ways. Three out of the six main stories of Jensen's visions can be told, in parts, through archaeology (the other three are Togetherness, friendship and love, Who-Am-I, and Convictions). These stories are about
- Adventures: archaeology is particularly good at telling adventure stories, usually based on work ’in the field’. Significantly, Rolf Jensen himself is seen on his webpages as sitting at a desk with an Indiana Jones film poster on the wall behind him (http://www.dreamcompany.dk/en/who/).
- Care: in the Dream Society, people have an increased need to provide care. They like caring for pets and saving whales from extinction. The Red Cross enjoys wide esteem around the world because it cares for people, unconditionally. Likewise, significant parts of professional archaeology have in recent years redefined their own profile in terms of preservation. Archaeology is now often presented as being about managing ancient sites as non-renewable resources, saving – as and when necessary – precious sites or at least their scientific information from obliteration by modern development through rescue excavations. It is widely appreciated that archaeologists care about the past and what is left of it.
- Peace of Mind: in an insecure and constantly changing world, people have a demand for peace of mind and reassurance in relation to their livelihoods, traditions and values. In their search for orientation, they like romanticising the past, and they trust established brands more than new products. Among the themes which these brands draw on are stereotypical sceneries of the past, some supplied by archaeologists. In a way, such sceneries have become archaeological brands themselves. Jensen’s exemples include the world of Classical Greece featuring shining temples with Doric columns and philosophers immersed in discussion on the market square. He also refers to the Scandinavian Vikings who venture out in their longboats to plunder foreign shores, yet preserve their purity of mind. -- Peace of mind can also be evoked by stories that extent our own daily routines back into the distant past. Recent Swedish newspaper reports, for example, were entitled ”Commuters in the Stone Age” and ”Norrbotten was multi-cultural already 10,000 years ago.” The ubiquotous celebration of origins provides reassurance in an insecure present. (I know you have got loads to say on that, and indeed have said much in your weblog)
I find all this interesting precisely because it is less academic and firmly rooted in hard financial interests. Even there archaeology has a secure place - possibly more secure than in the quibbles between academics following different theoretical approaches and all that.
Another book of that genre (Joseph Pine II and James Gilmore's The Experience Economy, 1999) argues that once you begin to offer experiences to people, you should consider charging for them. Even if this is not practical or possible, it should still be the design criterium, these two economists say:
What would you (need to) do differently if you charged admission?
What experience could you stage that would be so engaging that visitors/customers would be willing to pay a fee to encounter it?
The presumption is that asking yourself these questions will ultimately make you provide the more memorable experiences, and thus also create more satisfied visitors/customers.
Of course, all this is not just about customers being entertained: experiences are first and foremost about engaging people.
So what are we to make of that?
