In recent years a growing interest has emerged in the field of acoustics in archaeology. The majority of this research deals with the sounds created by things such as musical instruments or hammer stones in producing rock engravings, and with the acoustic properties of place, ranging from early modern London to megalithic monuments and caves to different areas of landscape (Lund, 1981; Mills, 2001 and forthcoming; Ouzman, 2001; Reznikoff and Dayton, 1989; Smith, 1999; Watson and Keating, 1999). While many researchers’ agendas are connected to a critical awareness of the dominance of vision in most archaeological practice, the rationale for this research often comes down to a practical need to address the acoustic traces of the material past that would have been implicit in peoples’ lives.

Some of this research attempts to address the sounds of daily life in the past. In the context of landscape, for example, Steve Mills (2001; forthcoming) has begun to develop what he calls auditory archaeology on the basis of research in the Teleorman River Valley of southern Romania. In his doctoral dissertation, ‘The Significance of Sound in the Fifth Millennium cal. BC Southern Romania: Auditory Archaeology in the Teleorman River Valley,’ Mills identified auditory character areas, such as woodland, river bottoms, grasslands, etc. (2001). The sounds generated in these areas were treated as properties of the corporeal environments of people’s everyday lives. Mills argues that sound was an integral component in generating social relationships in the past.

Such studies challenge archaeologists to take sound seriously. In this regard we may consider, along with what can and cannot be seen from particular places in a site or landscape, what can and cannot be heard in the same locales. Considerations of the acoustic qualities of various locales in the ancient Athenian Agora, for example, might be regarded as of immediate relevance for understanding site-specific issues of performance in Ancient Greece (speech, oral poetics, drama). But such issues are not so easily addressed. The architectural fabric of the agora has transformed substantially. Sounds heard today would give us no indication whatsoever of how sounds reverberated off various structures in the 5th century BC. The continuous and relentless background noises of life in the city of Athens—the lorries, buses, cars, mopeds, and pedestrian foot traffic—have replaced others. Even at sites like the Ancient Greek theater of Epidauros or the monumental city of Teotihuacán in Mexico, materialities have been transformed in ways that are difficult to completely account for in questioning their acoustic characteristics in the past. How can we be certain we can ever hear the same sounds as the ones that were implicated in past lives?

To be sure, noise connects us to deeper textures of the material world and qualities of corporeal experience. To hear noise is to hear things (Heidegger, 1971: 26; Ingold, 2000: 244-250). Indeed, some background noise is resistant to the flow of time. Sea noise ‘never ceases; it is limitless, continuous, unending, unchanging’ (Serres, 1995: 13). The ever-present murmur of Proteus (the sea god who stands at the beginning) outlasts that of even the most seemingly permanent landforms (Serres, 1995: 14). There is also the ceaseless chatter of the wind in the trees, the fall of rain upon the pavement of the streets of Pompeii, the agitation of the cicada in the olive groves of the Mediterranean; all are transient and yet recurrent. These are philosopher Michel Serres’ belles noiseuses (Serres, 1995). These background noises are the first to be filtered out in archaeological practice and yet they are fundamental, not simply to our experiences of place, they are fundamental to our very being (Serres, 1995: 15; also Witmore, 2004(in press)).

Imagine the belles noiseuses of a lively countryside during harvest as depicted in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1993). Painted in 1565, The Harvesters portrays field hands reaping corn in the countryside in the month of August. For Tim Ingold, the painting ‘vividly captures a sense of the temporality of landscape’ (1993: 164). In his well-known discussion of the landscape’s temporality, Ingold focuses on six aspects of the landscape scene that unfolds before the viewer’s eyes, ‘the hills and valley, the paths and tracks, the tree, the corn, the church, and the people’ (1993: 166). Each of these elements has a different temporal rhythm; each has a different pace within the flow of time over the long, intermediate, or short term. For Ingold, this temporality is what forms the subject matter of archaeological inquiry. What of the noise?

Breugel’s countryside is full of commotion. But one must move about the scene in order to better hear. Taking a break from a morning of hard work, people eat and drink, and a woman cuts a loaf of bread. The murmur of conversation is broken by roaring and hearty laughter. Scythes slice through stalks of corn. These dry stalks crunch and crackle, as they are stacked into orderly piles for binding into sheaves. Wind fills the leaves of the trees and the corn on the field with a recurrent chatter. Some birds take flight, scared up by people carrying bundles of corn on the path. A bell tolls in the church to the right. A few seconds later, it is joined by a faint series of rings in the direction of the distant village by the sea. More wind provokes a raspy response from the dry stalks of corn as we hear the heavily breathing field hand carrying jugs of sloshing water. Moving through the middle ground of the scene, a donkey bellows. A dog barks. The squeal of axles in need of grease falls in with the steady thud of the mare’s hooves upon the dry and compacted path. A great distance remains over seemingly permanent, but ever-changing, hills before we will be able to detect the continuous noise of our destination; the noise, whose temporal range is greater than any other feature of the Bruegel’s landscape ‘pace Ingold,’ of the sea.

Add force to things and we gain sound. These sounds, these belles noiseuses, are temporally situated and yet many of these sounds as qualities of things are potentially recurrent. Like the hills and the valleys, perhaps some of the trees and the church or even the scythes some noise persists. But alas this brief example can’t take us very far except into the realm of the imagination, because we are left only with the reality of oil on wood. The sixteenth century countryside of The Harvesters was mobilized with the aid of paint, palette, brush and so on; but even so, Bruegel, the master painter, did not mobilize the noise. His countryside was solely to be visualized.

Our ability to manifest aspects of the multiplicity of the material world depends on our instruments and media whether tape, pencil, and notebook or paint, brush, and wooden canvas (Witmore, 2004). This holds for a richly evocative poem or a musical composition that related the sound of a storm. But such transformations filter out the noise of things and animals, our other ‘companion species,’ who also have an impact in the co-constitution of Bruegel’s countryside (Haraway, 2003a and 2003b). I suggest that sound is not solely temporal so long as the things remain. Moreover, sound isn’t simply like the material; it constitutes a form of material action. Yet the chatter of things is often all too easily overlooked. Things are all too often treated as silent.

Belles noiseuses and media—the case of the map

It seems to me that questions of vision and sound in archaeology tend to boil down to how the free-standing, intentional, human subject perceives the world (Bradley, 2003; Ingold, 1993; Thomas, 2001; Tilley, 1994). But in dispelling this myth, could the not-so-silent-things lend their qualities to human sensation? Could our sensory apparatus be a collective one—i.e. one based on the entanglement of people and things, one that extends through maps, survey instruments, and other things? Moreover, how do these collectives of people and things work on the ground amongst the belles noiseuses?

Let us take another example from the writings of anthropologist Tim Ingold—the discussion of maps, wayfinding and navigation in his The Perception of the Environment (2000). Ingold contrasts two different modes of moving about a particular place: navigation and wayfinding. Navigation, for Ingold, is a mode of movement, which involves the intermediary of the map. With the additional means of a topographical map, in moving from one location to another a person situates themselves on the ground through a comparison to a ‘location in space, as defined by particular map coordinates’ (Ingold, 2000: 237). This activity is divorced from any historical narrative of place that might have resulted from prolonged inhabitation over time. In navigation there are basically the places designated by the map and the non-places in-between. By means of navigation, Ingold states, ‘it is possible to specify where one is – one’s current location – without regard to where one has been, or where one is going’ (Ingold, 2000: 237). As though connecting the dots, navigation allows a person to move from place to place, these places being translated as grid coordinate to grid coordinate with the aid of a flat projection of the region.

Wayfinding, by contrast, ‘depends on the attunement of the traveller’s movements in response to the movements, in his or her surroundings of other people, animals, the wind, celestial bodies, and so on’ (Ingold, 2000: 242). For Ingold, such ambulatory knowing cannot be accommodated by a conventional dichotomy between mapmaking (cartography) and map-using (navigation). This is because the wayfinder’s understanding of the location of place unfolds overtime through the accretion of many different experiences. The wayfinder situates a location in relation to memories of earlier journeys and engagement. ‘Every place holds with it memories of previous arrivals and departures, as well as expectations of how one may reach it, or reach other places from it’ (Ingold, 2000: 237). According to Ingold, the wayfinder’s ‘richer and more varied’ sensory engagement with the material world brings about a different understanding of a region (2000: 242). This understanding is one mitigated by a different relationship with things, one that is arguably more receptive to their belles noiseuses.

Consider the ambulatory knowledge of the Umela who inhabit the dense and continuous forest of Papua New Guinea. Alfred Gell argues that the forest environment transforms Umela sensibilities so that sensory perception is more centered upon hearing (1995: 235). In the thickly covered forest the Umela ‘travelled with eyes downcast, looking for thorns and obstacles on the path (and other signs, such as tracks) while they ‘surveyed’ their surroundings with their ever-receptive ears’ (Gell, 1995: 238). Hearing for the Umela is the sense for detecting events and things at a distance. Hearing has spatial associations. The multitude of sounds produced by companion species, the winds, the trees, flowing water or other humans, all were factors in Umela activities involving wayfinding while in the forest. They form a primary aspect of their accreted experiences of the surrounding environment. Admittedly, given the nature of the vegetation and the terrain the Umela are a unique case of people-without-maps—without, that is, flat paper projections of a region. Nevertheless, Ingold’s distinction between navigation and wayfinding is a useful way of emphasizing the action of our instruments and media in forming an even more dispersed, posthuman collective (Hayles, 1999).

In both navigation and wayfinding, we find ourselves dealing with particular collectives of people and things. For example, in the case of the mapping of the Peloponnesus, Greece the French cartographers during the 1829-1831 Expédition Scientifique de Morée, with theodolites, tapes, compasses, chronometers, trigonometry, and so on, shifted a great deal of ambulatory knowledge constitution on the ground to a two-dimensional, combinable and standardized transformation of the surrounding landscape that is now part of the sociotechnical collective (person-with-a-map) that is a navigator (Boblaye, 1836). The flat projection of an absent region printed in Paris can return to facilitate a different mode of engagement with a place in the Peloponnesus. Without the map, subsequent navigators of the region such as English classical (and Shakespearian scholar) William George Clark might have had to resort to other modes of engagement, perhaps mobilizing other instruments (compass, sextant, or telescope) or relying on local people that possess ambulatory knowledge of a region, or perhaps he might have had to tune into other qualities of the material world in order to find his way (1858). Without the map (which is based upon cascades of other inscriptions) humans necessarily are entangled with other elements of place, other things. For the Umela, the belles noiseuses of the forest form a rich language (Gell, 1995), which, through the flat projection of the map, are simply background noises.

Indeed, we may recall from the discussion of archaeological media above that without our instruments and media we would not see anything. This is because so many hours of energy consuming sensory engagement (which would have incorporated other things) necessary to find one’s way through unfamiliar territory (or, indeed, trust in a local guide) has been delegated to a thing—a flat, combinable, fungible inscription—that transforms something of the reality of a place visually through linear perspective, triangulation, and calculation (Witmore, 2004). As navigators (a-person-with-flat-projection) we can now roam freely about the world, but through the prosthetic extension of the map we see and only see.

In both wayfinding and navigation, things have a stake. But we cannot forget the novelty of what it is like to be in the world without the aid of immutable mobiles (such as the map) or scopic instruments (such as the theodolite). Without these media and their associated instruments, the character of one’s sensory relationship with a landscape changes. Different collectives of people and things relate to the world in different ways. It is in this way, I suggest, that sounds might have other relevance as qualities of the material world and of the corporeal experience of various places. To argue that such belles noiseuses be considered as qualities of the material world is not to say that all that transpires in a place must be documented and preserved. Sound is, of course, fundamental as a quality of the material world and our companion species but this is not all. There is even more to the issue of noise and to understand this we must boldly grapple with time itself.

Return to the belles noiseuses