Dem Bones, Dem Bones...

For the past several years now, I have been working with a group of theoretical archaeologists on a series of interdisciplinary approaches to performance and the past which we have termed Theatre/Archaeology.

The initial contact arose from a desire to find alternative ways of describing and documenting what is, or rather was, going on in devised performance, which is inevitably past‚ and ultimately enigmatic. We quickly discovered mutualities of interest and approach.

We talked of excavation as performance. Of the dramatisation of the past within heritage contexts. Of the sensualities of site. Of spaces, bodies and events. Of endless problems of presentation and representation. Even of performance as an experimental archaeology of events. And I was excited to discover a growing archaeological interest in the traces of ceremonial and funerary ritual: in the discernment of the body orientations and actions of knowledgeable individuals. In performed behaviours. In ephemeral events. In the phenomenology of place. In all of those things which have been conventionally regarded in archaeology as unknowable or tangential, yet which constitute the very substance of our discipline.

Within an interpretive archaeology - an understanding of what may have been possible within certain material conditions - we may have a contribution to make. And one of the most interesting projects for Theatre/Archaeology is surely to try to reveal performative behaviours in the past.

Around 6000 years ago, a series of fundamental changes occurred in Britain which we can characterise as domestication - of food supplies and of society itself. The forests were felled; there was the advent of pastoral and arable agriculture; the building of permanent houses and their concentration in settlements with sedentary populations; the first use of pottery and of new stone technologies of flint-knapping and polishing. In sum, the arrival of a new cultural package. This was the dawn of the so called new stone age or neolithic.

It also witnessed the adoption of new ritual and funerary practices, evidenced at a series of ceremonial sites and tomb monuments. This may have involved new beliefs. But I’d like to consider it sensually, as the advent of a set of body practices manifest in space and in relation to the dead, as new attitudes to the human body, both as active agent and as corpse.

We rarely see dead bodies, skeletons or even human bones. They were a common sight in the neolithic - seen, smelled, touched, manoeuvred...

Anthony Giddens suggests that social life is lived out in a seriality of encounters‚, in the face-to-face co-presence of other participants, in highly localised arenas. These encounters occupy regions of space and time, the opening and closing of the bracket‚ marked by mechanisms and techniques of entry, body positioning and turning away. The hunter-gathers of the mesolithic had built few permanent structures. They roamed the land in search of game, albeit along regular routes. Such encounters may have been informal for these figures in the landscape‚ - on path, in clearing, around fire - the human body experienced principally in relation to natural features and to flimsy impermanent dwellings.

Their dead were disposed of in ways which we can barely discern. Perhaps they were just left on the ground for carrion. Or thrown into the nearest river. Got rid of. Or more formally perhaps, hung in a tree for the birds to eat. Or covered in a pile of animal bones. Or cast in the same midden as the food remains. Environment - topography, climate, flora and fauna - and body - living and dead - then, in a field of fluid, tactical and improvised engagements.

The neolithic came late to Britain. Nevertheless, a repertoire of built structures rapidly emerged, with an insular flavour. Soil, timber and stone were fashioned into a range of tomb architectures, avenues and circles which reached their zenith with the final phases at Stonehenge and Avebury. The neolithic begins with the construction of ‘place’.

These architectures separate and demarcate: they mark out, mark off and set aside space. They are the transformations of space through objects - linear and circular configurations and constraints which affect and regulate the way space is experienced and interpreted. They inscribe the newly cleared landscape. They are ‘special places’ where the human body is framed and observed in relation to new facades, backdrops and screens. Where movement is controlled and channelled. Where actions and performances are staged. And where encounters, events and physical intercourse may be prescribed and choreographed. They are the locations of events : feasts, gatherings, burials. They are about the movement of people, not the stars.

Within enclosures and at locales and settings - in places specially allocated and ‘bracketed off’ from other activities, in places of meeting and of regionalised practice - individuals are brought together in time and space. Here the architecture may act directly upon the body - causing irregular movements and orientations, channelling the eye, regulating patterns of visibility and hiddenness, controlling the spacing and timing of encounters. And here there can be the formal and strategic deployment of the body in extra-daily practices.

At such places, there is often an articulation of interior and exterior, inclusive and exclusive, watchers and watched even. And particular discourses are protected from evaluation through restricted access. We might suppose that a society engaged in structuring the landscape is also engaged in creating its subjects. For these constructed features have a constraining effect upon interpretation. They channel and direct movement, the encounter between body and environment, in choreographies which prescribe time and sequence and which ultimately map patterns of practice...and - whilst this will always remain inaccessible to us - of belief.

Amongst the earliest sites are the causewayed enclosures, discontinuous ditches surrounding a central area and crossed by....well, causeways. These ditches don’t defend, they demarcate. And they are filled with extraordinary debris. At all levels, there are the disarticulated remains of dozens of individuals (350 at one site) : scattered single bones and parts of skeletons - limbs, torsos and the pelvis/femur/lower vertebrae assemblage which is always the last to fall apart, because of the strong sinew attachments. Also single skulls. And bundles of bones. And enveloping them, the remains of feasts - animal bones from meat-rich parts of the body. And quantities of unweathered drinking cups and bowls.

The conjecture is that these were vast mortuary enclosures or open-air cemeteries, where bodies were left on the surface of the interior - to rot, decompose and naturally deflesh in a process called excarnation - and then handled, carried, used, deposited - in fragments - in subsequent rites. The access of the living to this reeking site was restricted to the narrow causeways. And there they ate and drank amongst the remains, in a conflation of choreography and improvisation and sensual contact with organic objects which many performance artists will doubtless appreciate. Significantly, certain parts of the bodies are under-represented!

Simultaneously with the causewayed camps, new tombs-types emerged, apparent today in the landscape as long mounds. These mounds cover a number of different structures, in two basic traditions. In the south and east of England, they are of timber and turf. Further west are tombs with dry stone masonry and stone built chambers. And in the far west, there are the table-like structures - uprights and capstone - of the classic megalithic dolmens. Both traditions involve communal burial rites : the tombs include the skeletons of many individuals which were ordered, sorted, reordered, m ixed, reassembled over centuries of re-entry. Here the identity of the individual is subsumed within that of the community, albeit the community of ancestors. They become literally of the one body‚.

But we should not view the tombs as monuments, as mausolea, as mere depositories of the dead. They were sites of long-term, though intermittent, activity...functioning as shrines, as the locale for rite and ritual. And we should not isolate mortuary practice from social practice: these are places of the dead and the living.

In all types of tomb, the bodies were defleshed elsewhere. Perhaps in temporary pits. Or exposed on platforms, as in North American native practice. And again all the parts are not here! There is then a suggestion that some parts of each body are in the tombs, others in the enclosure ditches! What is certain is that the placing of bones in mounds was only one stage in a complex ritual sequence and that the internal patterning in the tombs may be the end product of long process of additions and removals from the burial deposit, whilst the mortuary structure was still accessible. Bones - and parts of bodies - were circulating - disarticulated - like religious relics. Perhaps whilst the corpse was regarded as unstable, dangerous, polluting - with its corruption marginalised to the enclosures - bones came to represent the revered ancestor.

Physical access to the bones was controlled. At the earth sites, there is an embanked linear zone across which may be a bedded timber facade...an avenue of posts aligned to the mortuary area ...and an enclosure, chamber or platform. So whilst the corpses were available for the selection and manipulation of bones, entry was limited and channelled directionally. The bodies were defleshed elsewhere, on occasion the flesh even being burned off in an investment of effort by others. The arrangements of skulls and long bones - and variation in the number of ribs and vertebrae - indicate conspicuous selection, the deposition being only the final phase in a circulation, and the pattern a result of additions and removals. Bones were even moved from one side of the mortuary to the other. There are piles of male and female...patterns of laying out and grouping...breaking down and reuniting. Eventually, earth was piled on the wooden structures - frames, mortuary houses, rows of posts - and on the pits and hearths.

This involvement with the bodies of ancestors was even more protracted in the chambered tombs such as West Kennet. Here, over several hundred years, bones were moved and removed : placed in, taken out, resorted, rearranged, reassembled...the remains of previous generations mixed with those of the present. The tomb consists of five chambers, with a facade and forecourt area bearing the remains of hearths, pits, platforms and pig feasts‚. Defleshing again occurred outside, perhaps on the forecourt itself. In the five chambers, individuals were separated according to age and gender. But the bones are sorted, skulls in one area, long bones in another. And skulls...are often under represented!

Entry was possible, to allow an approach by the living to the dead. The architectural complexity stage manages the encounter with the remains. But perhaps not for everyone. The spaces are confined: few people can fit physically at one time. This has led commentators to suggest that there are two groups present. Only insiders - with specific knowledge of layout and contents - could enter. Entry requires stooping, bending, squatting, in a poorly lit charnel house. Here perhaps the privileged feasted with the ancestors, as evidenced by the smashed drinking vessels, burnt soil and bones. Perhaps they then returned to a larger audience - outside - with new knowledge, or even to display body fragments.

Megalithic tombs then represent a ‘stage’ for the performance of rituals.. Rituals involve the manipulation of space and material objects : they represent a microcosm of the world which can be manipulated within a bounded analytic space - passage, chamber, forecourt - in a combination of visibility and hiddenness.

John Barrett suggests that the facade distinguishes ‘those who face it’ from ‘those who face out from it’ passive spectators and active agents. The forecourt is a stage, the chambers a back-space. He imagines a turning away‚ an entry, a reemerging. Inside a series of choices are presented - left/right, front/back. Bones are added - or withdrawn for display - consulted, reinterpreted and placed in new spatial configurations - in a complex interplay of deposit and rite, of the living and the dead - in a confined space. There is a physical constraint on the way in which the chambers are experienced. Entry is on a specific axis, traversing a courtyard through its pits and hearths, into a passage of limited height.

And as performance theorists, it’s here that we might contribute. We might begin to envisage a series of entrances and exits signalling dramatic thresholds. And a pattern of inciting incidents‚ and their trajectories. Changes of consequence. Crises. Ruptures - or sudden shifts - in orientation.. Nodes or densities of activity. Breaks or pauses. Irrevocable acts such as the display of the dead. And decay‚ as in the breaking of vessels. We might envisage the existence of the event for the participants as a chain of physical orientations and mutual reengagements. As an interrupted practice of different modes of expression - of varying types and intensities - from display to disengagement. As a discontinuous activity‚ including changes in style, mode, material. As a kind of incoherent behaviour‚ switching from whisper to oratory within a performance continuum. We can envisage changes in proxemic and haptic engagement, in quality of light, surface-texture, temperature, odour...kinesic restriction inside the tomb, the facade as framing backdrop outside...different tones of voice inside and outside. And I might suggest that the demeanour of the watched was different confined in the chamber than in front of the crowd...

These tombs channel body movement and influence the way in which space is experienced and read. However the interpretation of constructed space is never entirely free, bound as it is both by cultural conventions of reading‚ - habituation to a particular tradition of interpretation - and by the physical reality of the spaces entered and the bodily movements necessary to pass through them. Habitual actions are not only contained by - but also constantly recreate the meanings attributed to - architectures.

The work of theoretical architect Bernard Tschumi might help us understand the linkage, causal or otherwise, here of space and event. He suggests that spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces: architecture and events constantly transgress each other‚s rules. It is not a question of knowing which came first, movement or space, which moulds the other, for ultimately a deep bond is involved. They are caught in the same set of relationships, only the arrow of power changes direction. And these relationships are of three orders : indifference, when spaces and events are functionally independent of one another; reciprocity, when events and spaces are totally interdependent and fully condition each others existence, and conflict. He devises hypothetical programmes - sequences of events, usages, activities, incidents - and projects them onto autonomous spatial architectures - frame after frame, room after room, episode after episode - as a form of motivation and suggestive of secret maps and impossible fictions‚. We might do the same at the chambered tombs.

Eventually the tombs were filled and blocked. The last acts in several include the reconstitution of individuals from scattered parts...the construction of virtual individuals from the bones of several others....and the uniting of crania with different lower jaws...

The latest tomb types have a long passage and a single chamber, with a mass of mixed bones. In Brittany - at Les Pierres Plattes - the passage turns through a right angle. Suddenly, you are bending, crawling, in total darkness. In torchlight, the walls are revealed to be covered in carvings - of ribs and torsos. The passage resembles an internal organ. Your body is in a body, with bodies. Perhaps this ‘theatre of death’ was experienced alone as an extraordinary encounter with one’s ancestors - a rite of passage - all one’s senses alert. Or as a graded, deeper and deeper access. Or perhaps it involved a guided reading, a performed interpretation for a small group, huddled in front of the images. At Gravrinis, the whole tomb interior is covered in swirls, axes, ribs - a dizzying, disorientating other world - which unites the bodies of the living and the dead within this one theatre.

Then around 2700bc, everything begins to change. The early Bronze Age in lowland Britain is marked by fundamental changes in mortuary practice. The ‘classic’ Beaker-associated rite of burial involves the inhumation of a single individual. The accent changes from bones to bodies, from ancestral remains to a single episode of deposition, from tombs to graves, from recurrent ritual to funeral, from circulation to interment. From the moment of death, there is a single trajectory, which ends with deposition. But this liminal period does include others. Who prepare, flex, decorate, tend and carry the body. Who watch silently. Who officiate at the grave side. Funerary rites reproduce the obligations of the living. Perhaps too there is a need to create a certain impression in a short period, requiring a specific arrangement of body and objects. Here is the beginning of funerary rite, the corpse as dominant referent, visible perhaps, and carried to the grave under the view of onlookers. Julian Thomas comes closest to distinguishing the performative nature of this activity, suggesting that “...the intended reading of the dead person was made by the audience within the temporarily restricted conditions of the funeral‚ with the large pit acting as a stage for its display”.

The particulars of disposal vary widely : bodies are interred crouched, flexed or extended; lying to the left, to the right, on the back and even face down; partially covered, shrouded, wrapped; in wooden structures and in wicker, plank or log coffins. Occasionally, they are accompanied by objects drawn from a standardised repertoire of daggers, knives, small tools and ornaments. From time to time, the burials include an array of singular objects of stone, gold and rarer materials - mace-heads, body ornaments, multiple bead necklaces. Whilst these objects are no longer interpreted as for the use of the deceased in the echoing vaults of eternity‚, they are still often viewed as constituting indices of status, rank and occupation of the deceased, a correlation being drawn between material value and social station.

Yet far from simply marking the rank of the deceased - and identifying some newly emerged social elite - these artifact assemblages are increasingly regarded as the fortuitous outcomes of a reordered funerary ritual‚, as more to do with the structure of the funeral that the status of the individual. For they include three orders of material : that affixed to the corpse (dress, ornament, decoration). That purposefully placed around the corpse. And the discarded paraphernalia of mourning. The archaeological record then is constituted as the material residue of a series of acts within which the body is the principle referent.

It is the mourners who are the active participants in the liminal period which includes preparation, transportation, positioning in the grave and covering. The funeral may be seen then as a choreography with - and around - the body. And the creative and practical deployment and manipulation of a particular set of cultural resources - site, objects...and even the corpse itself. The absence of objects may in fact reflect the nature of the funeral, not the poverty of the deceased.

The twin procedures of body and grave preparation culminate in interment. The location, the nature and arrangement of the funeral assemblage and the positioning and orientation of the body may all tend towards ‘display’, towards the construction of an image in death. The positioning of the body and objects in many graves suggest that it may have been on view‚. The funeral is directed towards a moment of visual perfection. And this may have involved the creation of a highly formalised, idealised and restricted identity in death which has only a tenuous link with that of the living individual.

We might then regard the deceased as the principal performer in a sequence of events, public and private, more or less explicit. We might see the grave assemblage as a composition of body and objects, a perfect stage picture, the final curtain perhaps. We could call this a ‘frozen moment’, in a infinitely long performance, for the archaeologist too looks at him. His folded body is a body we can look at. Here surely is an arrangement which can be, which is meant to be, looked at by others, kin and strangers. In a kind of dead tableau vivant (sic) he performs her own ultimate rest. This is a body in repose, in the posture of enfolding another on a cold night, but perhaps also performing a quiescence it did not know in life. Here is the intimately familiar and the infinitely other : partner, father, brother, son.

Julian Thomas again : ‘...the focus of signification must have been not the monument but the body itself’. And for some contemporary watchers that and that alone. For this performance, this terrible stillness, evokes the most extraordinary range of emotions, memories of the past, hopes and fears for the future. Of course, he did not do this himself. This arrangement is a conflation of ‘how he would want to be remembered’, ‘how we want to remember him’ and ‘how things should be done’, the correct way to go on. He follows direction so perfectly!

The presence of the corpse institutes ‘the see/being seen’ dyad. Here is the watched, the corpse. And here too are others who may prepare, flex, decorate, tend and carry the body. Who grieve and who officiate at the grave side. Who kneel to place objects...but who also continuously step back to look, who change status from participant to watcher. Although the dead body is an entirely compliant body, it is the most evocative and immediate medium for symbolic association. It is a unstable sign-vehicle : it is always an icon of the absent person. In the conventional sense, it does not gesture‚ - the essential mode of ‘ostending’ the body - although it does adopt postures and positions - flexed and carried - it may never have achieved in life. And it does engage in meaningful physical communicative acts with others, in the form of proxemics and haptics. Held, manoeuvred, touched... In the sequence of preparing body we can envisage undressing, redressing, decorating, manipulating, binding and transportation. In the sequence of preparing ‘place’, we can envisage the selection of grave location, clearing the vicinity including burning, digging the grave - and scratching marks on the grave wall, ‘the doodling of a bored individual awaiting the burial’ . In chalk lands, the grave and upcast would create a white terminus for the cortege, a focus for the choreography; the stripping of turf would create a white and delineated arena for the performance, bringing the participants into stark relief, and altering the ergonomic engagement with surface, necessitating and prescribing changes in gait and deportment.

Both trajectories meet at the grave side. Here we might discern the body orientations, the proxemic and haptic invasions and ergonomic problems : Of manoeuvring the body into the grave - a process differing with the size of the pit and the nature of the mortuary structures. Of the physical decorum necessary to position it. Of the composition of the body/object image. And then the discarding of the objects of the living, the leftovers of feasting objects left outside the coffin but within the pit. In distinguishing objects found within - and those placed outside - the coffin we distinguish different moments in the funeral sequence. And we see precise inciting and irrevocable incidents such as the breaking of objects and their arrangement them. Or the upsetting of a beaker.

Grave dimensions vary markedly from shallow pits - within which the folded body fits tightly -to deep trenches. Bodies as also left on the ground surface. And in ‘mortuary houses’. The size and shape of these arrangements affect access to watching; angles and perspectives of viewing - sight-lines - and the ‘living-to-dead’ proxemics during viewing. Bodies on the surface are therefore available for public gaze whilst those in shallow pits may contrive a more intimate regard for those standing at the grave’s edge. Yet these periods of observation may have been fleeting...prior to wrapping, covering, shrouding, the closing of the coffin. And then endless revisits to a place of remembrance.

At some graves there are the remains of concentric circles of temporary stakes, evidencing perhaps spatial organisation of the watchers. They certainly create an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’, a ‘no-go area’ to which access may be restricted. They certainly mirror the shape naturally adopted by a crowd whilst watching an event, the circle. And they delineate an arena for the cortege. The body is often variously ‘staged’. In the grave it may be framed by chalk blocks. Or set against backdrops of moss, reeds, rushes, straw, leaves. Or rest on a hide or blanket. All of these serve to disattend ‘out-of-frame’ activities. The presence of mortuary structures, biers and coffins may lift and define the body, aiding visibility. And there is some suggestion of ‘viewing platforms’. This may raise questions about sequences and time scales, for some mortuary chambers do seem to have been reentered and semi-articulated bodies reordered. Or perhaps they were transported from afar - close to disarticulation - and interred in that state.

Again then we might begin to elaborate a ‘scenario’ identifying sight lines and backdrops; routes and locales; arrivals and passings...approaching and being approached...encounters and movements; episodes and disengagements; discontinuities of behaviour - fleeting modifications, changes in status watcher to watched; performance manifest for occasional periods of time. We might characterise it as a series of inciting moments : the moment of death, the commencement of laying-out, the placing in the grave...As the interplay of strategy and improvisation, in the field between motivation, material conditions and execution. I might envisage the existence of the event for the participants as a chain of physical orientations and engagements. As an interrupted practice of different modes of expression and demeanour, of varying types and intensities, switching from intimate to public, within a performance continuum. As a series of experiential changes. We might suggest how the bodies of watchers and watched engage with surface and volume, object and setting, in extremis and in repose. Not to say this did happen but perhaps this could have happened.

One of the closest convergencies between performance and funeral is in the functioning of objects. Performance values objects: they so often enable it to operate. In performance, the properties - or ‘props’ - may be appropriated from everyday life - found or they may be specially made - fabricated. But whatever their origin or market value, once selected by, isolated and recontextualised in the activity, they become invested with a richness of denotative and connotative meanings which jostle to inform interpretation. In performance, objects help establish and identify dramatic location, social situation, historical period and character, when they function as insignia or emblem, an index of gender, status, class or type. But they are inherent unstable, they are polysemic...

In Bronze Age burials the body is often accompanied by objects. As Julian Thomas says, “The grave assemblage can only thus be grasped as a unity by the onlooker because all the items concerned have some relation to the body.” I could suggest that these objects function in all the ways they do in performance, in that field between omission and ostension. Here too we know that we have to take the things we perceive for something else: for signs, stand-ins, for present substitutes which represent an absent world. They are on display, transformed into components of communication.

These objects may be found‚ or fabricated, like and unlike, selected for appearance, texture, personal preference. Here are insignia, talismen, mementos, equipment... of the living as well as of the dead. They may be denotative perhaps, of gender, status, rank, profession, of the state of death itself. This may be reinforced by their placement and spatial relationship to the body and each other, the corpse determining the arrangement. Objects may be included for aesthetic and decorative reasons. They may be practical tools or fictive devices to establish a separate reality. Equally, the range and configuration may be conditioned by the context, by the need to be seen.

Of ‘made’ objects, some axes are standard, some morphologically similar but of diminutive size and a few atypical, exhibiting, for instance, thinness. Such miniaturisation and change need not spring from economic determinism but from the demands of display. Indeed the manipulation of identity may be possible with grave goods of low secular value.

Yet for the watchers - kith, kin, colleagues, foes, the curious - these objects evoke a multiplicity of meaning, for they will always be working with familiarity and difference. Here may be ‘known’ objects, with individual or family significance, the meanings inscribed in one context contributing to the meanings which are available to be recalled in another. Here may be new objects or new configurations of object signifying the changed status of the dead: the look of unfamiliar object against familiar body. And interpretation here is a matter of great complexity for there is flexibility and mobility in their meanings and perhaps semiotic ambiguity as everyday objects slip the threshold and are transformed into objects of performative communication. The reading of any one object may be within any and all of the four key moments in the working of artifacts: the representational, the decorative, the functional and the cognitive (together with the surrogate moments formed from their interaction). And this may alter according to change of context during the funeral trajectory. Objects may be read singly, in various combinations or as a whole, their very portability adding to their shifting identities in situations intimate and public.

But everything is not here. The assemblage is characterised by omission. After all, it‚s me who wears my uncle’s gold watch, which was his uncle’s before him, my father’s gold ring. In the grave then these few objects act as a kind of aide-memoire, a set of mnemonic devices, evoking memories of other times and places, of similar objects, similar occasions, innumerable mental constructs. Indeed the flexibility and versatility of what is after all a fairly limited repertoire, may leave more room for the engagement of the watchers.

These burials are about the creation of identities. A ‘poor’ grave therefore might reflect an intimacy of interment, the deceased known to the mourners - the ‘family face’ - without the need for further indexical referencing. But at Bush Barrow in Wiltshire, where the body is on the surface, in the public domain, the large number of objects - helmet, weapons, regalia - serve to denote identity or identities to the maximum number and variety of watchers. This is a kind of closure where the possibility of misreading is reduced; the message is over-determined and controlled. No one is left in any doubt.

Of course, this examination of the ‘performance-like’ nature of early Bronze Age funerary rites may be little more than an extended metaphor. But it may provide the means to describe them as complex space/time manipulations. Archaeology rarely gets further than the under-problematised ‘artist’s Impression’; we at least need the scenario or storyboard, some representation of that complex interaction of place, people and objects which constitute its assemblage. And this will not be easy. We might attempt to reconstruct the discrete narratives of watchers and watched - experiences, body orientations, perspectives - composed as a kind of script , as a work of informed fiction. But if we are to regard the human body as a moving agent in a series of deliberate choreographies, then our ability to perceive and discuss movement as a flow of events in space depends on having appropriate modes of registration. And maybe that’s where contemporary performance can also help.

But why all this, you ask? In our mirroring of theatre and archaeology, what might we contribute to an understanding of the past? As John Barrett says, “An interpretative archaeology tries to get close to understanding how other ways of seeing the world were once - and one hopes, still remain - possible: nothing more”. This is a political project, in the present, in which we can participate. Our craft is that of moving bodies in space. This we do in our imaginations, on choreographic plans, in rehearsal, in performance, in relation to built scenographies and found spaces. We can suggest how the body might engage with surface and volume, with object and backdrop, in extremis and in repose. Not to say this did happen but perhaps this could have happened, and would have, if I had been there! Choreographing the past!

And what of the other way? Archaeology has made me appreciate the way I exist in time, deep time, as well as space. I am connected to my ncestors by heredity, by family trait, by body features and habits I can barely discern - my ears, my accent, the way I hold my knife... And I have an increasing urge to know them, to know where they lie. I need to know because if I do not, others may commit unspeakable atrocities on my behalf in their name as in former-Yugoslavia. It is surely the great tragedy of the twentieth century : our displacement and the mechanisation of their disposal. At least archaeology reveals our ancestors as active, energetic agents, bodies amongst bodies, living and dead in a dynamic choreography. And incredibly, it has recently given us a face, the face of the iceman, the face of the neolithic....

Mike Pearson Roehampton University of Surrey Drama Seminar December 1999