An archaeologist was giving a lecture on that creation myth in which the earth is a sphere carried on the back of a turtle. 'But what's the turtle standing on,' shouted a wag from the audience. 'Well, unfortunately,' answered the archaeologist, 'it's turtles all the way down!'
I suppose it's inevitable that a conference on 'An Archaeology of the Voice' should concentrate on metaphors of excavation and retrieval: digging, stripping, opening, unearthing, revealing. Equally unsurprising that there should be much talk of discovering - deep-down - that priceless artifact, one's true, essential, authentic, natural voice. And thereafter of cleaning the hidden treasure, conserving it, restoring it, displaying it. But since excavation is a work of destruction - one layer is destroyed as we dig down to the next - we should be careful what we discard in delving for the illusionary bottom. For it is in these strata - of socialisation and acculturation, accent and affectation - that the real nature of the voice lies. This is what Roland Barthes describes as its 'grain': 'the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue'. Which is perhaps why I found as much in the field recordings of Albanian men at a funeral - part mourners, part football crowd - as in the sublime, rehearsed polyphony of A Filetta from Corsica in Llanbadam Church.
Michael Shanks has written, 'Archaeology is about some very basic and mundane things: grubbing around in decayed garbage, recovering traces of things and processes which go largely unnoticed today - what happens to broken bits of pot, to things that get lost, abandoned buildings, rotted fences, microbial action. A creeping, mouldering underside of things'. Archaeology leads equally to thoughts of ruin, decay, putrefaction. And of aging, erosion, wearing...Which is perhaps why I found as much in the struggles of the canu pwnc group from Rhydwilym chanting John 1:1 - 'Why do you move from a minor third to major third in your chant?' asked the Vietnamese musicologist. 'Because we can't sing in tune', replied the aged choir - as in the practised harmonies of the equally aged Balkan 'grannies' of Bistritsa.
In contemporary parlance, archaeology is a material practice, set in the present which works on and with the traces of the past. What archaeologists do is to work with evidence in order to create something, a meaning or narrative or story which stands for the past in the present. Archaeology is the relation we maintain with the past. People experience things, appropriate them and produce a meaning for themselves. In this sense, archaeology is something that each of us routinely does: this we could call 'the archaeological imagination'. And there is increasingly a feeling that archaeology should include a defamiliarising of what is taken as given, revealing the equivocality of things and experiences: an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy; an approach which embraces the impossibility of any final account of things; a poetics of the past; a practice sensual, subjective and phenomenological - making sense of things that were never certain or sure in the first place. Which is why I found nothing in the presentations on the development of vocal technique in English theatre and much in Roberta Carreri's autobiographical account/demonstration of her years at Odin Teatret, half remembered, part-fictionalised, always embodied.
But what are the points of contact between archaeology and the voice? Three interlocking notions come to mind: the voice in the past, the voice of the past and the voice as past.
Whatever its motives, archaeology does work with the traces of human actions. Yet the human voice is that most ephemeral of traces. We cannot know what the voice was in prehistory but at least we can assured that it was used. Body remains - like the Neolithic 'iceman' trapped in a glacier - have larynxes and ear-drums: people wailed in the throes of battle-field deaths and sang on the wagon loaded with corn.We cannot hear the past but it was not a silent place.
Continues in 
Still Digging .pdf
