Sociotechnical genealogies of archaeological practice and the presence of 19th century military innovation, skill, and knowledge in the archaeology of Greece

by Christopher Witmore

(paper presented at the Anthrolopology of the State: The State of Anthropology Conference, Stanford University, 2005)

Introduction

In September of 1804 a young artillery officer and military geographer by the name of William Martin Leake was dispatched by the British government to the Morea as the Greek Peloponnesus was then known. As an agent behind a British national imperative to check French expansion in Greece, Leake’s mission was to coordinate among local Ottoman authorities, assess the defenses, determine the potential for local support of French forces should invasion occur, and gather geographical information of the relatively unknown interior.

Over two decades later, on August 30, 1828, 14,000 French troops landed at Petalidi in the Gulf of Coron in an effort to dislodge the Turkish forces that remained in the Morea after the Battle of Navarino, which ended the Greek Revolution. Attached to this military force was a scientific contingent modeled upon the collaborative body behind the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypt. The French Expédition Scientifique de Morée was a large state-sponsored mission that involved the intense scrutiny the Greek landscape through the instrumentalites of science and specifically the Depot of War (Dépôt de la Guerre).

On July 19th 1981, a team as part of the Argolid Exploration Project, undertook an archaeological survey of the town and fortification at Iliokastro in the Southern Argolid, of the Peloponnesus. While two of the team members, Tom Boyd and Mark Munn, along with compass, tape, and drawing materials, set to delineating and measuring the main town wall and other exposed lines of structural fabric, the remainder of the party, Dan Pullen, Anne Demitrack, and Michael Jameson, began a series of pedestrian survey transects (lines walked at an equal distance) across a field to the south of the fortification to look for any exposed surface materials (ceramics, lithics, and so on).

So what is the connection between the activities of the French and British militaries from the early half of the 19th century and those of contemporary archaeological practice? From a modernist perspective, contemporary archaeology may seem distant from the imperialistic practices of Britain and France in the early 19th century. However, in this brief paper I suggest that the activities of Colonial Leake and the French Expédition are intimately folded into contemporary archaeological survey practice; indeed, so much so, that it is as if the British artillery officer and the brigades of French troops, military geographers and topographical surveyors along with their instruments and media, were here and now, operating alongside archaeologists in the Greek countryside.

Sociotechnical genealogy

Without things, without the plans, maps, and texts, without the theodolites, measuring tapes, and drafting utensils there would be no archaeology; there would be no science. The past continues to have action so long as it is present through the mundane needle of hand compass or the flat, paper projection of a region. Indeed, what I am interested in is how such things have come to be folded into our contemporary practices. In this paper, I argue that the enrollment of the instruments and modes of documentation mobilized by archaeologists on sunny, summer morning just over twenty years ago occurred in the context of late 18th and early 19th century military questions of how to best describe place.

From enlisting survey instruments in the production of a planimetric, optically consistent, combinable, legible and mobile inscription of an ancient tholos tomb to compiling a flat projection of a region in the documentation of a 5th century BC landscape in Greece, such transactions “are still present and available to us now” through our instrumental and scenographic prosthetics, in our most mundane of practices. Transactions between people and things performed earlier and at a distance have contributed to the sociotechnical collectives we are today. In order to understand the nature of these mixtures of people and things around which archaeological practice has operated for so long, I endeavor to briefly accentuate the transactions, which enrolled and enlisted the combination of maps, plans, diagrams, theodolites, and measuring tapes in the first place.

A sociotechnical genealogy, therefore, unfolds, disentangles, these transactions between people and things which are ever so tightly knotted into who archaeologists are and what archaeologists do. And by sociotechnical, I am referring to the analytical leveling and symmetrical treatment of the humans of society and the things of technology that are mixed so thoroughly together in the archaeological collective in the constitution of knowledge associated with the Greek countryside.

The world through scenographies

At the turn of the 19th century questions of what to observe, of how to best describe place, were inconsistent and varied. At the time when the Romantic traveler was still in search of the ideal picturesque view, imperialist states and militaries were in need of more precise and detailed modes of documenting place. Large flows of funding from the governments of Britain and France led to a substantial amplification in geographical research as well as technological innovations and refinements such as John Harrison’s timepiece, more sensitive compass needles, and other aspects of cartographic measurement.

The time it would take to move military resources, the course and condition of overland routes, areas of offensive and defensive superiority, details of agricultural production and local economy—by the late 18th and early 19th the British and French militaries were after such information and especially better maps. In the ongoing national enterprise of cartography, accuracy, precision and detail were becoming more critical and necessary in translating a particular region, landscape or site. The right combination of instruments, media and linear perspective would allow the military to transport such places to another locale while maintaining something of their reality on a two-dimensional surface. One couldn’t effectively establish and control an empire from a distance without the ability to accurately grasp the coastline or understand the potential difficulties posed by the overland movement of supplies, troops, and guns.

In 1804 the interior of the Greek Peloponnesus was largely unknown to the outside world and by the turn of the 19th century Britain and France were vying to know it. When William Martin Leake first set foot into the Peloponnesus he was a captain in the Royal Artillery. Trigonometry, triangulation, computation of distance—for the artilleryman, exact calculation meant the difference between victory and defeat. For the surveyor, the geographer, these forms of numerical calculation provided modes of delineating and ordering space. Leake’s orders specified that he was to ‘take surveys, and lay down plans whenever such operation can be conducted without the fear of exciting jealousy and displeasure in the people of the country’. To this end, Leake derived over fifteen hundred measurements toward the mapping of the interior. Bearings in degrees when combined with distances measured through a combination of time and measured paces served as a basis for the triangulation with which he constructed his maps. Leake also describes, surveys and maps dozens of archaeological sites for the first time.

Precise and well disciplined in his observation, Leake was the first to collate two-dimensional, optically consistent maps with detailed topographical observation and ancient geographical description by such authors as Pausanias or Strabo. Indeed, maps, scaled diagrams, and measured plans are directly combined with scholarly discussions of classical sites his Travels in the Morea (1830). This combination of media is part of a military geography’s answer to the problem of description in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in Britain and in France. It also makes Leake’s work easily legible, fungible (future archaeologists can build on it), and verifiable. Moreover, Leake enrolls other actors in such practice—sextant, theodolite, pocket watch (it is unlikely that he carried a chronometer), tape and notebook at prominent geographical stations. These instruments and media establish regularity to practice; they set a ‘template to standardization’. Given the same instrumental mixture, transforming ramparts of a citadel into a series of grid coordinates involves a similarly structured engagement, a routine, whether one is at the site of Roman Gythium or the Bronze Age citadel of Tiryns, whether one is in the 19th century or the late 20th.

With Leake, questions of what to observe were mediated by the state body of the military. But with the French Expédition (1829-1831) crossovers between questions of classical topography and those of the military and state were even more pronounced. Under the auspices of the Depot of War, the French mission was to produce a topographical memoir of the Peloponnesus. According to Anne Godlewska, the topographical memoir produced by the military geographers (ingénieurs-géographes) of the Dépôt was a new genre of descriptive geography ‘designed to assist in the administration of a newly conquered territory’ (1999, 159). In the case of the Peloponnesus, of which the French regarded themselves as liberators, the topographical memoir contained information on natural species, geological resources, the constitution of the soil (in order to understand the potential productive capacity of the land), demography, local politics, ancient to contemporary history, agriculture (in the form of crops, labor, technology and especially any surplus over sustenance), statistical knowledge, fortifications, ancient ruins, sources of freshwater and other sundry geographical details. This synthesis was directed toward aspects of geographical concern that might play a role in relations between the state and local populations. In all, the topographical memoir needed to be accompanied by a precise and comprehensive map.

With the French map, at a scale of 1:200,000 and in six sheets, the precise coordinates and elevations for archaeological sites, water sources, rivers, etc. were established not only in relation to each other and the greater region, but through the incorporation of a geodesic survey, precise coordinates for ancient sites, monuments and landscape features were calculated relative to the globe. In this way, the map provided an exact and globally accurate, 3-deminsional comparative basis against which ancient measurements and distances could be rendered, with a level of precision that Eratosthenes and Ptolemy could only dream of.

The visualization of region on the ground is necessary to both the soldier and the scientist, not to mention, the seemly harmless classical topographer and archaeologist. Once a flat, mobile, optically consistent, immutable inscription was produced, scholars no longer needed to rely either on wayfinding or on local guides to locate a site or region of interest. Traveling into the interior of the Peloponnesus would no longer be the sole enterprise of the adventurous, foolhardy, or the well connected military geographer. It could be accomplished by a new collective—a person-with-a-map. This very map provides the groundwork for subsequent maps, which come to be part of the survey team of the Argolid Exploration Project I began this paper with.

In swapping properties with things through such acts of technical delegation whereby programs of action shift from one or more entities—hundreds of troops and military topographers investing thousands of man hours measuring, triangulating and squaring—to others—a person with a compass or a map—those instruments and media, which are now folded into our practices, have some role in directing our archaeological engagements. After a template to standardization is established, as with William Martin Leake’s combination of text, map and plan detailing the ancient city of Messenia, subsequent topographers and archaeologists would reiterate such practice on the ground and translate such sites through similar modes of articulation. Likewise, the intense scrutiny and detail of the French military cartographers, army personnel, theodolites, sextants, chronometers, and so on, led to the transformation of a few thousand square kilometers of mountainous terrain into a few hundred square centimeters of a combinable, verifiable, and repeatable flat paper projection that would mediate the engagements with, or the knowledge constitution of, the landscapes and sites of the Peloponnesus by subsequent Classical topographers and archaeologists.

The acts of enrollment, enlistment and delegation that resulted in a standardized practice for documenting archaeological sites and the first accurate and optically consistent map of the Peloponnesus, are intimately folded into and have action in the regional survey practice of archaeologists in the late twentieth century. While the right combination of text, map and plan, which are intimately tied to military questions of how to accurately describe place, provide the media needed for the professionalization of archaeology in Greece, it was in these military contexts that the standard instruments and paper-based combination of mixed media that archaeologists take for granted were first mobilized in the documentation of the Greek countryside. In this way, the imprint of the state through the intermediary of the military can be found in the most mundane of places, in the most humble of things, in our most necessary scenographies.

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