Imaginary, but by No Means Unimaginable: Storytelling, Science, and Historical Archaeology Author(s): James G.

Gibb Source: Historical Archaeology, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2000), pp. 1-6 Published by: Society for Historical Archaeology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25616780 . Accessed: 31/07/2013 10:41
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FORUM
James G. Gibb Archaeologists as Storytellers

Imaginary,But by No Means Unimaginable: Storytelling, Science, and Historical Archaeology

ABSTRACT
a phrase coined "Imaginary, But by No Means Unimaginable," and Ywone at the by L. Daniel Mouer Edwards-Ingram 1998 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, a new approach to archaeological epitomizes analysis and public interpretation. The suddenness with which examples of storytelling appeared in conferences and publications has

left little opportunity for comment, particularly to address the theoretical and methodological issues that underlie this hybrid of science, humanities research, and artistic expression. This than commentary suggests that storytelling is more a means of engaging public audiences: it is a form of analysis.

Praetzellis and brief closing remarks by James Deetz, the session played to a well-filled room and since has been published as a special issue of Historical Archaeology (Praetzellis 1998). Deetz (Gibb 1997a) described the session as unlike anything presented at the 29 previous meetings of the Society, "a healthy dose of humanism in an arena where we often substitute histograms and binary plots for the pulse of human life." Different, certainly. Performers moved about the stage and ballroom, two or more voices often heard rather than one, the texts interpretiverather than analytical. Each performer offered a new way to look at and interpret the past. Adrian Praetzellis brought a complexity of Asian-Euroamerican social relations to 19th century Sacramento and an earthiness to Yankee

The meteoric rise of storytelling as public interpretation began when Mary Praetzellis organized the "Archaeologist as Storyteller" ses sion for the Society for Historical Archaeology's 1997 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology. Comprised of nine performances sandwiched between a short introductionby Adrian

archaeological

Introduction Storytelling has burst into historical archaeology with as much exuberance and promise as any

theoretical precept that has visited the field in merchant Josiah Gallop, rarely expressed in a the last thirty years. Unlike the purveyors of conference paper or journal article. One could almost taste freshly baked bread toward the end paradigms, the storytellers bring a wide range of perspectives to their craft, and they emphasize of Julia Costello and Judy Tordoff s presentation on traditional Italian bread baking in and around performance, not concept, product, not abstraction and they speak in the vernacular rather than in Calaveras in the County, California. Many the abstruse language of philosophy. In this audience some at probably forgot point during the performance thatWilliam Harris's letter to discovery of a too long hidden eloquence, however, the storytellers have given short shrift to two Governor William was wholly fictional, a Jeffreys questions: why and how should archaeologists tell piece borne of Dan Mouer's imagination and many stories? This commentary explores the issues of years of archaeological and historical research in theory and method in storytelling, largely through Tidewater Virginia. examination of a remarkable series of publications As the papers went to press Mary Praetzellis with the unremarkable title of Los Vaqueros as Storytellers II," organized "Archaeologists Project Final Report Numbers 1 through 6. This presented at the annual meeting in Atlanta. The series offers a new approach for conveying the room, a large one, was packed. Eight presentations results of archaeological research to non-specialist by 12 performers, 7 of whom had been involved It also may offer?although this was audiences. in the previous year's session, gave voice to: the not the intention of the authors?a new approach United State's first avocational archaeologist and to archaeological analysis. third president; Lowell, Massachusetts, boarding

Historical Permission

Archaeology, 2000, 34(2): to reprint required.

1?6.

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2 house keeper Amanda Fox; Catryn, an enslaved South African girl in Cape Town; circuit preacher John Early in New Canton, Virginia; madams,

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 34(2)

prostitutes, and 'Johns' in fin-de-siecle Los Angeles; Californian cowboy Fermin Valenzuela and a fictitiousuniversity student; and a Caribbean planter and a slave, alternating with an American male and a Jamaican female archaeologist.

All of the papers from both sessions introduced novel ways of exploring and presenting the past. Always imaginative, sometimes surreal, these presentations are more than historical fiction, and more than "just the facts." Their influence, growing within the profession, now extends to a larger public. Despite wide dissemination, and perhaps because of the emphasis on product, historical archaeologists?me and some of the storytellers, inclusive?have misunderstood
The cause: archaeologist-as-storyteller. lack

the one literary, occupy independent domains: the other scientific. As long as archaeologists accept these dichoto mies?scientist and popularizer, report and answer to the question, why stories, story?the remains inescapable. Stories are a means by which interpreterscan bring the results of scientific research to non-specialist audiences, but stories have no place in research. Stories, so conceived, educate the public and earn its support, or such was my assumption in reviewing the first of the Archaeologists as Storytellers series.
Each of these performances was well fully so in several instances, and well stories were not so much fictitious written, beauti The presented.

the

as interpretive, These carried out in an entertaining, engaging manner. are exactly the kinds of performances that will build constituencies the communities and help satisfy our ethical obligations that we serve (Gibb 1997a).

to

of a clearly defined theoretical underpinning that justifies storytelling and provides a basis for method.

Why Stories?
A story is a narrative, a tale, an account of events fifth century BC Histories), (e.g., Herodotus's personalities (e.g., Plutarch's Lives from 1st and or attitudes (e.g., Samuel 2nd centuries A.D.), Or Virtue Richardson's [1741-1742] Pamela; word The suggests fiction, but?as Rewarded). aver?a will any journalist story need not be fictional. A fictional account, however, can accurately represent the time and place of cultures and events past (e.g., Defoe's [1722] A Journal of thePlague Year), even if the details derive from

No mention at all of how these stories might Indeed, directly serve professional audiences. my one criticism of the 1997 session was that the performers had no plans for taking their show "on the road." They were playing to the The realization that stories wrong audience. might have analytical value came to me in an unexpected way. In July of 1998, the London Town Foundation, me to write a play about ghosts for Halloween, drawing material from The Lost Towns of Anne and archival Arundel Project's archaeological research at the site of colonial London, Maryland. I agreed, partly intrigued by the possibilities of the genre and partly as a means of promoting research. The project staff and archaeological volunteers, however, had not yet collected enough and archival?to information?archaeological tell coherent, interesting stories about colonial London's residents. Taking a cue from Mary
operators of an historic house museum, asked

the author's imagination rather than from direct observations or critical evaluation of documents. Technical writers, by contrast, narrate process, not

Sagan, Michael Graves, Jacob Bronowski, Ivor Noel Hume, or whatever antonomasia pleases the reader? Most archaeological data and interpreta tions in printed media appear as reports: detailed documents methods, background material, describing and techniques of data recovery and analysis, and interpretations. In practice, if not in theory, storytelling and technical reporting

product. They tell the reader how they analyzed a problem and came upon a solution, rather than rendering interpretation into narrative. After all, is not the former the job of the scientist? Is not the narrator or interpreter a popularizer, a Carl

and Clarissa Pamela (1747-1749), (1741-1742) the diaries of William Byrd and James Boswell, and a number of other English language plays and novels helped flesh out personalities, motivations, and social mores and customs. They contributed to context in the absence of more site-specific
contextual data.

Praetzellis's storytellers, I developed threevignettes that integrated data through literary material, drawing on English-language novels, plays, and diaries of the period. Samuel Richardson's novels

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Gibb?IMAGINARY, BUT BY NO MEANS UNIMAGINABLE 3 I could not be sure thatmy protagonists would What I did not learn frommy brief experience have used thewords that I put into theirmouths, as a playwright, was method. How do we create acted in the ways I made them act, or even interpretivehistorical fiction that is true in scope that they would have found themselves in the ifnot in detail? The Los Vaqueros Report Series, situations inwhich I placed them. The vignettes prepared by theAnthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University in California, provides a suggested, however, patterns and relationships that The Lost Towns Project staffmight look for methodology, although not in an entirely explicit or deduce from the growing archaeological and manner. archival databases. For example, when innkeeper Elinor Rumney gently chides her husband Edward for talking to, rather than ferrying, travelers, that raises the issue as to the appearance of the ferry and its landing. Was the landing a distinct space Research Design and Narrative

in which travelers could wait, meet, and interact with one another and the ferryman, observing or suspending the rules of deference? To what extent did Elinor and Edward cooperate in the operation of the tavern and ferry? Identification and study of submerged ferries and landings could contribute to a clearer understanding of Colonial Period travel and the relationship between ferries and taverns. Archival study of the wealth and position of ferrymen and their clients, and of the

authors have revisited Cook's (1998) A Life in "Katherine Nanny, Alias Naylor": Puritan Boston with conventional scholarly papers in Cheek (1998). Yamin's (1998) "Five Points" a out data recovery of substantial story grew Several project report in New York City, and Beaudry's tales were (1998a, 1998b) two Massachusetts drawn from extensively documented research at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury and

Archaeological stories, at least those presented in theAtlanta session and inPraetzellis (1998), derive from recently concluded or ongoing research.

individuals competing for ferry licenses, could contribute to a broader understanding of colonial social relations and how those relations were expressed in travel when strangers encountered one another. The Lost Towns Project staff did not consider these questions prior to my having written the play. They will now.

To the Boott Mill boarding houses in Lowell. what extent these storytellers relied on a particular method, only they can answer, but their scientific

Creating encounters among ghosts, and between ghosts and museum interpreters,in a way, became a form of analysis, subject to further study and hypothesis testing. Just the act of imagining the language and forms of address used by the ghosts suggested subtleties in the relations among London's residents and visitors thatmight have research. gone unaddressed by conventional a sustainable with believable story plot Creating and dialogue requires precision and logic no less demanding thanwould be required in formulating as Storytellers the performances, reading published versions of the first performances, and attempting my own interpretive historical fiction led me to two and testing hypotheses. Attending the Archaeologists

research designs and rigorous analyses must have shaped the concepts and plots underlying their stories. Put another way, the stories reflect the investigators' research interests and findings. The Los Vaqueros publications more clearly illustrate

the relationship between research and interpretive historical fiction. Praetzellis et al. (1997) Tales of the Vasco includes a brief discourse on methods. They describe their five tales, in the introduction to the booklet, as fact-based works of fiction:
Our

stories are neither The Objective Truth nor . . . are they constructed out of thin air. The scenarios?an and a correspondence?are interview, meetings, pure

invention, but all the historic characters actually lived on the Vasco [an area 30 mi. east of San Francisco]. We have constructed the details of their lives from a variety of sources. We will never know, however, their motivations, emotions, attitudes, or thoughts; nor whether they would approve of how we have pictured

observations: them (Praetzellis et al. 1997). (1) interpretive historical fiction holds great promise for engaging and educating and On the following page Praetzellis et al. (1997) audiences; specialist- and non-specialist a can it tool, (2) provide powerful analytical provided a portion of one of their tales, complete an explicitly subjective, but rigorous, means of with footnotes (Gibb 1997b) to illustrate how their stories derive from original research. The exploring archaeological and archival data.

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4 Tales, however, lack footnotes, in-text citations, and the other paraphernalia of academic writing, and rightly so?the original research already had been thoroughly documented in technical reports. This snippet provides the firstexplicit explanation of the method underlying the product. The Los Vaqueros Project began in 1980, a series of contracted research projects designed to identify and evaluate historic and prehistoric

HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 34(2)

archaeological in an arid canyon innorthernCalifornia. Praetzellis et al. (1997) provided a working history that of offers a chronology of human occupation the Vasco and identifies historical contexts with which research questions might be constructed et al. and findings interpreted. Fredrickson documented (1997) linguistic, ethnographic, and some archaeological fieldwork pertaining to the aboriginal occupation of the area, as well as historic

sites prior to reservoir construction

The Anthropological Studies Center at Sonoma State University printed 150 copies for distribution to local and state libraries, historical societies, informants, colleagues, and high schools (Mary The volume is Praetzellis 1998, pers. comm.). well designed, illustrated, and bound, and an contribution to local and excellent, accessible

Los Vaqueros Watershed, California," synthesizes archaeological, archival, and oral history data in a format suitable for a wide range of audiences. The contributors constructed their essays in terms of the historic contexts, questions, and in the less intellectually results documented accessible technical reports. [For the issue of intellectual accessibility see Davis (1997:85).]

contexts for evaluating the historical significance of Native American sites. Ziesing (1996, 1997a) described archaeological investigations at four historic sites, dating largely from the second half of the 19th and the first third of the 20th centuries. Each of these technical reports posed this rural community. Readable, and sometimes research questions appropriate to their scope, and methods appropriate to the questions. They moving, the tales convey more about life on the reviewed the history of the area, discussing such Vasco, and of conducting archaeological research issues as: the colonial Spanish presence; the shift there, than straightforward, "just the facts" kind from livestock raising to grain agriculture during of reporting ever could. The authors anticipated the 1870s; land speculation and litigation in the the greater interest that this reportwould generate, 1880s and 1890s; tenancy in the latterpart of the printing 400 for local and statewide distribution 19th and early 20th centuries; and immigration (Mary Praetzellis 1998, pers. comm.). innovative in building substantive and ethnic diversity throughout the prehistoric Although from and historic periods. data, and public interpretationfrom synthesis and From the historical review, Praetzellis synthesis, nothing in the Los Vaqueros Project Praetzellis (Ziesing 1996:27-32), identified three report series suggests the analytical value of stories. in his introduction to the principal research contexts for the historic sites: Adrian Praetzellis, Historical social and the environment, Archaeology volume, "Archaeologists as ranching adaptations For each modernization. and context, relations, Storytellers," attributes this interest in storytelling as to a need to indulge, to say what a site is really as a six and many primary question they posed without having to qualify every point; to about identified and specific they secondary questions, data requirements and potentially contributing convey impressions without undermining science. sets. data Stories, however, need not be an end product, Subsequent chapters archaeological the last, not-entirely-demonstrable word on a site documented methods and findings, and offered Louis Peres' tale, told to a So far, and its occupants. recommendations for future research. pretty standard stuff. Reports 5 and 6, however, set this series?and the entire project?apart from anything that I have seen in compliance or fictional interviewer, can redirect research and
technical analyses.

state history. Report No. 5 is Tales of theVasco (Praetzellis et al. 1997), mentioned above. The series number assigned to this publication suggests that itwas written before Report No. 6, the synthesis, although the numbering may be an artifact of the review and publication process. One step removed from synthesis and two steps from the original research, Tales of the Vasco breathes life, as the cliche goes, back into the now deceased denizens of

Peres, a Jewish French emigre and the one of the Tales of the Vasco, states of subject grant-funded archaeology. his first that "From Rancho No. wife, Maria Antonia, was a Catholic 6, Ziesing's (1997b) Report that is a fact. Anyone researching the of and to Reservoir: Mexican, Archaeology History When

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Gibb?IMAGINARY, BUT BY NO MEANS UNIMAGINABLE 5 the Peres family, or the adobe ranch house in which they lived in the 1880s, probably would have uncovered that bit of information. When Peres sends his daughter Lucy out of the parlor, and confides to the interviewer that he does not mention his ex-wife around his new wife, the devoutly Jewish Palmyra Levy, that is imagination. It also is the first step in looking at some very Summary and Conclusions While some might quibble over departures from the absolutely demonstrable, none would dispute well told. Stories can captivate thepower of a story

since Peres did not "speak English so good." Yet when he married a couple of years later, he chose not a French woman but a Mexican, and a Catholic at that. This is a matter of public their common record, as is the divorce. Was religious heritage a factor in the marriage of Louis and Palmyra and, if so, why was it not an

important social issues. When Louis Peres arrived in San Francisco in 1860, he stayed at theHotel de L'Europe, run by French expatriate Daniel Orlette; a logical decision

issue in themarriage of Louis and Maria? An ineffable affair of the heart? Or were ethnicity and religion of less concern than they would become a few years later (1870s) in a more settled society? The answer, as far as this commentary goes, is unimportant. The question, on the other hand, is very important,arrived at through a tale that uncovered a possible inconsistency, a bit of plot that perhaps does not work quite right or that needs some explanation. In the fictional interview, Louis states that Palmyra is religious, implying that he his not. Praetzellis et al. are telling their readers that at least in this case,
the wife?not the husband?is concerned about

highlight subtleties of social relations overlooked inmore conventional analyses. Storytelling is a form of experimentation and analysis in which the storyteller-analyst examines certain conditions, while holding others constant, determining how the actors might have behaved. Insights derived from such tales may have testable implications. Would itbe hyperbole to say that therehave been more stories told around screens and excavation units than scholarly papers printed in journals? Probably not. I doubt there is a practicing field archaeologist who has not speculated about a particular artifact or deposit while excavating, screening, or recording. Sometimes serious, often

and communicate, educate and inspire. But they can be written as much for the writer as for the listener. Rooted in original research, products of theory and method, stories explore new vistas and

facetious, these attempts at storytelling in the field lack the rigorous logic and supporting data that go into a fact-based story; but they are a good start. Tales of the Vasco serves as an excellent

archaeological, archival, and oral history data into a coherent story and to "explain" the inconsisten cies. Hardly the products of idle or lazy minds, these Tales grew out of meticulous research and careful writing, and a commitment to creating understanding as well as knowledge. The Tales were created, not in lieu of rigorous analysis, but in addition to those analyses. The remaining is to revisit the original data and challenge analyses with the perspective gained through storytelling.

a shared religious heritage. We do not know what piqued Louis' interest in Palmyra, but his Jewish identity, expressed or not, might have been important to Palmyra. The reader can comb Tales of the Vasco for similar leaps of imagination, bits of plot?based on considerable knowledge of the history and to bring archaeology of the region developed

model for archaeologists writing interpretive historical fiction. We owe its production, in part, to the Contra Costa Water District, the sponsoring agency, for their imaginative approach to compliance with the nation's environmental laws. To my knowledge, the Los Vaqueros series is unique: may it not remain so for long.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Al Jason Luckenbach, on an earlier commented clarity where and Adrian several there was Praetzellis D. Liz West and Moser, version of this paper, offering muddle. Praetzellis Mary

patience this commentary, to another,

to conscientiously replied about I appreciate their work: their questions and good humor. The views expressed in except are mine. where specifically attributed

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