Datacore: First Response

Archaeologists think too much. Or perhaps it is fairer to say, we think too archaeologically. I remember when I first came across artists doing research, it was about 2010, I was studying at the University of Southampton in England and I got together with Louisa Minkin and Ian Dawson at Winchester School of Art to run a series of workshops. First, we showed a group of artists how we ‘do’ digital archaeology, I think we tried out some Reflectance Transformation Imaging and some photogrammetry. Then, they invited us up to do some print making.

Naturally (or so I thought), my first instinct was to want to understand the process. I wanted to understand each stage so that I could create the kind of print I had in my mind. I wanted to understand the methodology so that I could apply it in a predictable and (skill not withstanding) repeatable way. I remember Louisa (very diplomatically) suggesting that this might not be the best way to learn to print and that rather than holding this entire process in my head, I should just… play.

At first, I didn’t know what she meant. How could I meaningfully engage with practice if I didn’t understand it? How could I understand its relationship to my other work? How could I situate the images I was to produce in relation to other data, arguments, interpretations, if I didn’t ‘get’ the process of making?

Over time though, Louisa’s words crept into my thinking and my doing. As I started to play, with print, with photography, with sound, as I started to worry less about outcomes and invest more in the doing, I began to notice things. Creative artefacts were no longer outputs, creativity wasn’t theoretically generative, creativity and play were just their own thing. This is why it is a real joy to read other archaeologists losing themselves to play and just being present in the archaeology.

The piano lines in Reflexivity (instrumental), the piece of music produced out of this experiment and embedded in this paper, are so much fun to listen to. There is that initial repetition there, like Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, this is getting serious, then there is a stumble, a skip, and the section line is kicked, the finds tray is dropped and the pencil goes straight through the wet paper. This is archaeology. Then, the beat comes in and you are sitting shotgun in a Fiat Panda with dust flying up behind you and smiling widely. It is lovely to hear these data, such intricate impressions of the rhythm and metre of archaeological work, repurposed and expressive.

But so what? Well…

It is too easy to see these kinds of experiments as being light relief from the real business of archaeology, but the opposite is true. For a start, it takes bravery to play in public, particularly in a place where everybody is taking things quite seriously. But we need people to do this, because it is only through this kind of play that we start to feel out the full scope and character of our discipline. We need to explore and play if we are to imagine what archaeology might be. It is also through this kind of play that we observe sometimes hidden pathways out the back of our own discipline (probably at the bottom of the garden and through the gap under a fence) and into other places. In this case, cutting a path between archaeology and experimental approaches to music making.

Just like we do in our heads, the ringing tap of the leaf trowel as you tap it on a brick while trying to concentrate on what you are doing. Play, method, practice and skill all act upon each other. Any conception of rigid boundaries exists only on the surface, in our externalised lingua franca of epistemologies, theories and methodologies. We have been (ironically) very bad as archaeologists at looking beneath the surface, at the flow between different disciplines, different ways of doing archaeology, and different ways of being archaeological. To echo (and misquote) the question posed and answered by the authors:

Was this a good strategy for sonification? Doesn’t matter. There is something much more important going on here.

Cover Image Detail from a page in The school of the heart; or, The heart of it self gone away from God brought back again to him, and instructed by him. In 47 emblems (1676), by George Wither. Via Public Domain Image Archive.