When The Hand That Holds The Trowel Is Black

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Social Archaeology
`When the Hand that Holds the Trowel is Black...' : Disciplinary Practices of
Self-Representation and the Issue of `Native' Labour in Archaeology
Nick Shepherd
Journal of Social Archaeology 2003 3: 334
DOI: 10.1177/14696053030033003
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Journal of Social Archaeology
ARTICLE
Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)

Vol 3(3): 334352 [1469-6053(200310)3:3;334352;034876]
When the hand that holds the trowel is

black . . .
Disciplinary practices of self-representation and the issue of
native labour in archaeology
NICK SHEPHERD
Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa
ABSTRACT
This article uses images from the archive of John Goodwin, one of the
first professional archaeologists in sub-Saharan Africa, to open up a
set of questions around relations of work in archaeology in particular, practices involving the use of native labour. It seeks to tell the
story of those men who dug, sieved, sorted, located sites and finds,
fetched and carried, pitched camp, cooked and served food, negotiated with local chiefs and suppliers, and assisted in the interpretation
of artefacts and events, yet who remain unacknowledged in official
accounts of the discipline. Restoring to such men the dignity of a name
and the lineaments of a biography is a first step in a process of redress
involving archaeology in colonial and former-colonial contexts. Used
in this way, photographs provide an opportunity to imagine a process
of editing or reframing, so that the figure on the margins of the scene
steps into the foreground, or steps behind the camera to become the
framing consciousness.
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KEYWORDS
archaeology colonialism
labour photography
when the hand that holds the trowel is black . . .
knowledge production
native
SECRET HISTORY
The secret history of archaeology in Africa is the history of native labour.
It is the story of those men (and they were almost always men) who dug,
sieved, sorted, located sites and finds, fetched and carried, pitched camp,
cooked and served food, negotiated with local chiefs and suppliers, and
assisted in the interpretation of artefacts and events, but who remain
unsung and unremembered in official tellings of the development of the
discipline. In many cases, they were and are skilled practitioners: not
Archaeologists, or even archaeologists (for such is the politics of naming
in the sciences), but something else, field-hands, or assistants, or more
usually just boys. In almost all cases they were and are far more directly
related to the remains which they disinterred, to the hand that made the
pot or the bones in the grave whether on grounds of culture, tradition,
history, lineal descent, or whatever than the archaeologist on whose
behalf they laboured. Yet, in the ironised contexts of the construction of
archaeological knowledge in the colonies and former colonies (and the
essential tenor of this enterprise is that of irony), they are almost never
referred to, or are referred to in passing or with contempt.
If these men let us call them co-workers are textually absent, then
they are present in another and more unnerving fashion. The spread of
archaeological fieldwork in Africa coincided with the popularization of
camera technologies and the techniques of photography and the photographic record became an important part of the procedure of excavation.
In South Africa, archaeology and photography coincide exactly. Paul
Landau (2001) notes that from the 1870s on in South Africa, wealthy white
families went to photographic studios to have their portraits taken (2001:
151), and it was not long before cameras were taken into the field to establish a range of genres (the hunting photograph, the ethnographic photograph, the study of nature and landscape and so on). This is the same
decade in which one first finds a continuous published record of research
on prehistory in local journals like the Cape Monthly Magazine and the
Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society. The optical empiricism of the late nineteenth century and the status of the camera as part of
a truth apparatus being forged by science and police work in modernising
states in Western Europe (Sekula, 1989) meant that the techniques of
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Journal of Social Archaeology 3(3)
336
Figure 1
photography played an important part in a number of fledgling disciplines,
archaeology and ethnology among them. In Africa, as elsewhere, cameras
were taken onto archaeological sites to document sediments, record finds,
capture mises-en-scne and record scenes of camp life (Shanks, 1997). And
it is here, captured to one side of the frame, leaning on a shovel, or bent
over a sieve or more occasionally, looking boldly back at the camera
that we encounter the issue of native labour.
When photographs come out of storage, it is as if energy is released,
write Hayes, Silvester and Hartmann in the introduction to their book on
Namibian photography (Hayes et al., 2001). My interest in this subject
began with a single image (Figure 1). Two men occupy the frame, a sieve
lying between them. To the left of the frame is John Goodwin (19001959),
the South African-born, Cambridge-trained archaeologist, who returned in
1923 to take up a post at the University of Cape Town as research assistant
in ethnology under A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. A contemporary of Louis
Leakey, Goodwin was one of the first professional archaeologists to work
in sub-Saharan Africa. He was largely responsible for the establishment and
disciplining of archaeology in Southern Africa in the decades of the 1920s
and 1930s, and set in place a basic nomenclature and typology for Stone
Age studies which is still in standard usage (Goodwin and van Riet Lowe,
1929). Goodwins legacy is a significant one, but remains largely neglected,
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even within the discipline, although this is being remedied by a current

research project (Shepherd, 2002a, 2002b, in press). His considerable
personal archive occupies just over 100 boxes in the manuscripts and
archives division of the university library. As well as manuscripts and typescripts, lecture notes, correspondence and site notebooks, it contains
several hundred photographic plates, photographs and negatives.
To the right of the frame is an unnamed co-worker. Roland Barthes
(2000) writes of the punctum, the point in any image, which skewers our
interest, which captures our attention and imagination. The punctum of this
image is provided by the expression on this mans face. He looks back at
us with a disconcerting frankness. We register a pair of muscular forearms,
a composed presence. Goodwins gaze is oblique. He holds a cigarette
between the fingers of his left hand. What has passed between them and
the taker of the photograph? A communication hangs in the air.
As is the case with most of the images in the collection, this image is
uncaptioned and unprovenienced. Goodwin is identifiable from other
photographs. The site is identifiable from the grid markings on the wall as
being Oakhurst Cave, a large and productive site in the southern Cape
excavated by Goodwin in six visits between February 1932 and February
1935 (Goodwin, 1937). There is no reference to the second figure, the
unnamed co-worker. However remarkably he recurs in a second set of
photographs from the site of Forest Hall, excavated in June 1940, in which
he appears as one of a group of native labourers. Who was he? Thus began
an investigation within an investigation.
ADAM WINDWAAI
In June 1940, Goodwin and B.D. Malan, accompanied by Mrs Jean Malan
and an unspecified group of assistants, excavated Forest Hall shelter on the
southern Cape Coast. No field notebook was kept, nor were the results of
the excavation published. In 1988, nearly half a century after the event,
M.L. Wilson published a short report in the South African Archaeological
Bulletin based on material from the site in the archaeological and physical
anthropological collections of the South African Museum, and an interview
with Berrie and Jean Malan.
The site of Forest Hall is on the Forest Hall estate, about 2 km east of
Keurboomstrand, and about 800 m east of the better-known Matjies River
shelter, at the base of some steep coastal cliffs. It faces east and is screened
by dense coastal forest that makes its present environment dank and unattractive (Wilson, 1988: 53). The excavation was carried out over a period
of three weeks. The party camped in a fishermans shack nearby, with water
for cooking and drinking being brought on donkey-back from Forest Hall
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(estate) every other day (Wilson, 1988: 53; note the passive, indirect
construction).
The deposit consisted of an upper shell-midden capping, surmounting
stratified fine, damp black soils. In all, 19 ft 5 in (5.9 m) of deposit was
removed, a considerable depth of deposit by any standards. Only a
representative collection and unusual items were retained from the excavation. The remains of two and possibly three individuals were excavated,
but no record was kept of the depth at which they were found, or of any
artefactual associations. A feature of the stone artefact collection is the
relative absence of diagnostic artefacts (in the sense of artefacts which
could be assigned to an archaeological culture), leading Malan to describe
the excavation as boring and a waste of time. A postscript on Forest Hall:
the depth of the shell-midden and the relative uniformity of the deposit led
the excavators to assign it, dismissively, to the shell-midden culture of the
last 3000 years, a variation of what Sampson (1974) would call the Strandloper industries. A sample of Donax serra shells collected from the base
of the shell-midden capping was submitted for dating by Wilson and
returned with a date in the early Holocene, 9770 80 BP, making the
deposit considerably older than first imagined.
One part of the series of photographs from Forest Hall deals with technical shots of the excavation. We see a deep trench running along the back of
the rock shelter, essentially a means of finding human skeletal remains. The
shell-midden capping is clearly visible. Berrie Malan brushes loose deposit
from partially-excavated human remains. Another part of the Forest Hall
series deals with images of camp life. In the framing of the scene black coworkers carry out their tasks on the margins of the cameras interest. Another
image: four figures face us across a campfire (Figure 2). A fifth figure lifts a
kettle from the flames. A pencilled note on the back of the photograph reads,
Forest Hall; Goodwin, Jean and Berrie Malan. The caption is not in
Goodwins hand and was added by Ione Rudner, a keen amateur archaeologist with a long history of involvement in the discipline, who went through
the collection in 1979. Goodwin has his arms folded on his knees. To his right,
sitting close to him but caught in the shadow where Goodwin is bathed in
light, is the unnamed assistant from the Oakhurst Cave excavation.
He appears in two other images. In the first, which is taken shortly before
or after the previous photograph, he can be glimpsed in the background,
working in the excavation (Figure 3). In the second (Figure 4), he appears
to the left of the frame with another co-worker (bringing to three the
number of native labourers employed on the site). As in the previous
photographs, his poise is notable. My attention is drawn to his bare feet.
As vignettes of camp life, the Forest Hall photographs are fascinating,
but their lack of annotation, other than long after the fact, makes them
appear ghostly, stray remembrances. In them the contradiction emerges
sharply. While the white excavators live on, in their own words (in Wilsons
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Figure 2
Figure 3
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Figure 4
report), in the memory of others (Ione Rudner) and in official accounts of

the disciplines coming into being (Deacon, 1990; Goodwin, 1935, 1958;
Malan, 1956, 1970), their black co-workers have been lost in time. I carried
out a systematic search of material covering the period of Goodwins fieldwork in the southern Cape. Working from a list of published site reports,
field notebooks and personal and professional correspondence, it proved
impossible to identify with any certainty even a single black co-worker in
these images. In fact, what becomes remarkable is the near-total absence
of reference to black excavators, assistants and camp followers. When the
hand that holds the trowel is black, it is as though holes dig themselves and
artefacts are removed, labelled and transported without human agency. An
account book belonging to Goodwin records the following entries:
Water carrier
1/0
To boy for 2 days
2/6
These come between Paraffin 3/6, Sardines 9d, and Hotel lunch 22
Jan. 6/0. In a site notebook from the excavation at Glentyre Shelter (near
George, close to Oakhurst Cave) we find:
Work stopped on 21 July. Thursday. (Adam Windwaai came to help on the
last day)
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The name Adam Windwaai needs some explaining. Adam is easy enough:
Adam, the first man. Windwaai is an Afrikaans name meaning the blowing
wind, or blowing in the wind. Adam, the first man, blowing in the wind.
JUSTUS AKEREDOLU
In the mid-1950s, Goodwin travelled to Nigeria where he undertook a series
of excavations in association with Bernard Fagg, the pioneering British
prehistorian in West Africa (along with Thurston Shaw and Oliver Davies).
This time, in a correspondence with his wife, he makes direct reference to
his co-workers. The shift in register to the letter format (gossipy, confiding)
is significant, as, no doubt, are the possibilities presented by distance and
the appearance of the exotic. In a letter of 5.1.1955, addressed to My dear
Everybody, he writes:
The staff consists of the following: Mr Jacob Eghnevba, with a strong
accent on the , the rest is merely an added noise. vb stands for a b with the
lips not quite closed, a sort of hard w. As in Yoruba the letter n is a
nasalisation rather as in the French but softer.
Akeredlu (Justus) is from Owo, about 100 miles due north. He was trained
for 3 years in England, went to France, Switzerland & Italy, and is in a
temporary post which he hopes to make permanent soon. He has his own
chlet at the rest house & we eat together in the mess. Luckily he does not
share my chlet! So far (although I took in one belated traveller) I have had
my little place to myself. He comes in from time to time, & puts pottery
together. He is trained as a museum assistant but has little power to think
things out. He is an expert wood-carver in ebony etc., essentially a rather
artistic craftsman. Thin and tall, with a narrow face & skull and a pleasant
smile, about 42 or so.
He has a little Bini (Benin) boy as his personal servant, a nice lad who loves
cleaning my bicycle, for which I dash him a bob or so a week. He says he
would prefer a book on geography whether he means an atlas I dont
know, he is about 1314.
Haruna Rashid is at sergeant-major level & an Assistant, whereas
Akeredlu is an Instructor grade. He is Hausa-speaking from Kano on the
north and was at Ife with us, a nice lad of about 30 or perhaps less. Very
willing, a little presumptuous (he likes a pop into my bathroom & use my
toothglass for a drink of water) but quite courteous and helpful.
Two of my labourers, Gruba and Admu, I had at Ife, both very nice men,
not very hard workers, but willing, a third is Enobi (like N-O-B) who is new
to me. Then by some curious chance another man (known as Conjo) has
drifted up from the Kongo tribe at the north of the Conjo. His people were
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all cannibals 40 years ago, and he is like a Nubian slave, short legged, stocky,
bullet headed and just one mass of muscles. He works the others off their
feet, quite happy to do all the pick & shovel work. I can only suppose he has
escaped justice by coming here. He speaks Hausa, but seems to have got
along in French in the meanwhile. The rest all laugh at him and say
un-deux-trois-beaucoup de travail, words they have picked up from him.
He smiles happily but the joke is clearly wearing thin!
In a letter of 1.1.1957 addressed to My beloved W.L.G. (Winnifred L.

Goodwin), he writes:
On Friday the labourers went on a slow-down strike as they felt I ought to
find a place for them to sleep. They have been dossing in the compound of
the Seriki Hausa (chief Hausa) and he is kicking them out. I scouted round
and found a funny little Junior Staff house (No T16) was empty, just next to
our present dig. So I went to see the various people who might be
responsible, one after the other. They were all very cooperative and hopeful,
but nobody seemed to know who had the final say.
The real trouble is my men get from 2/8 to 3/- per day and are foreigners,
while the local minimum is 5/- a day. The results are that everyone puts
prices up to outside people, and my men cant meet it out of their pay. They
get a rice and gravy breakfast brought round by a Mammy (market woman)
for 3d, which I augment at 11 with a penny worth of peanuts from another
Mammy. When they get paid on Saturdays they have a bust of buying and
eating, but whether they get anything else I dont know. Rooms run from
12/6 to 1100 a month, but they have only been offered a room between
them for 1100.
When we returned (from Ugbeku) two of the men were ill so I sent them
with notes to the hospital. One is just bronchial from the Harmattan, the
other is not at all well. I had sent him in a week ago to be treated for syphilis,
but after reacting well to the treatment, he has more or less collapsed, but he
was too late in the vast hospital queue, and will have to wait until Jan 2nd for
treatment if he survives. I have dosed him with aspirin meanwhile.
In another part of Goodwins archive, following the conventional separation of image and text, are collected a set of photographs from his sojourn
in Nigeria, including several, that show his co-workers. We see three men
crouching in a hole (Figure 5); a close-up of a figure excavating with a handpick (Figure 6); two men bending over a sieve (Figure 7); and my favourite
five figures standing in an excavation, separated by baulks of deposit
(Figure 8). Most of them produce a smile for the camera, although in
another photograph taken immediately before or after this one (not reproduced here) they are scowling.
Once again, none of the images is captioned, although the packet of
photographs has a note in Goodwins hand, Nigeria 55. It seems reasonable to infer that several of the figures in these photographs are the subject
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Figure 5
of Goodwins first letter home. A number of the men are recognisable
across the set of images. The figure at the back and to the right of the frame
in Figure 8 is the same man shown in close-up in Figure 6, and may be Justus
Akeradolu (although I am unable to confirm this). Amidst this swirl of
names and faces, it is the detail in Goodwins letters that speaks tellingly
of colonial relations of work. We have Goodwins concern over the shared
toothglass; the penny-pinching detail of payment and the cost of food and
lodging; the colonial shibboleths (cannibalism!); and the final, chilling
observation (if he survives); all of it framed by Goodwins breezy paternalism, for which the correct term must be racism. Most damaging is his
summation of Justus Akeredolu (little power to think things out, essentially a rather artistic craftsman).
And there things would rest, were it not for the fact that Justus
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Figure 6
Akeredolu leaves a biographical trace, not in the discipline of archaeology,

but in the related field of art history. In 1986, Frank Willett published an
account of his life in the journal African Arts under the title of Nigerian
Thorn Carvings: A living monument to Justus Akeredolu. Willett is the
author of African Art: An Introduction (1971). Trained as a philologist and
anthropologist at Oxford, he was seconded to the Department of Antiquities in Nigeria in the mid-1950s. From 19581963 he was employed as
Government Archaeologist and Curator of the Ife Museum (Kense, 1990)
and during this period Akeredolu acted as his assistant.
(Chief) Justus Akeredolu (?-1983) was born in Owo, was trained as a
sculptor and went on to become Curator of the Owo Museum. In 1950, he
was awarded a Government scholarship to study museum work at the Institute of Archaeology at London University. On his return in October 1954,
he was appointed to the post of Technical Instructor, and (his) skills were
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Figure 7
Figure 8
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put to use at once in the Nigerian Museum in Lagos . . . in restoring missing

parts of sculptures in wood (Willett, 1986: 50), a position which he held until
his posting to Ife in 1958. His death in 1983 was due to cancer. In Willetts
paper Akeredolu is remembered for originating a demanding medium, the
carving of miniatures from the thorns of the silk-cotton tree. These thorn
figures are conical in shape and between 2 inches and 4 inches high and
depict a variety of scenes from everyday life (boy hoeing, girl grinding
meal). Akeredolus figures have attracted many imitators. The form reportedly thrives in Nigeria and in Mexico, where a similar species of thorn is to
be found (Willett asks: Was this stimulated by imported thorn carvings from
Nigeria? Or did a traveller who had visited Nigeria, seeing such thorns in
Mexico, suggest that they might be carved? Or is it a case of independent
invention?). He concludes: Perhaps the continuing use of a medium one
has invented is the best monument an artist could desire. Certainly no one
has yet come close to matching Akeredolus skill in using it (Willett, 1986:
53); a fitting epitaph for Goodwins rather artistic craftsman.
The story here is in the slippage between the terms art and craft
(rather as in the slippage between archaeologist and co-worker). Where
Willett sees artistry and innovation, Goodwin is able to see only the dull
application of a craft. The irony of Akeredolus entry into the official record
will have escaped nobodys notice. He is able to elevate himself above his
peers not as a maker of history, but as its raw material. His thorn carvings
remain sought after by collectors who, like Willett, admire the delicacy of
his touch (Willett, 1986: 50).
NATIVE LABOUR
Of what do such fragments speak? At one level they speak powerfully of
the partial and limited nature of the archive. The Goodwin Collection
makes me privy to Goodwins life, thoughts and interior processes to a
remarkable degree, down to his undergraduate poems and on-site
doodlings, but cannot begin to specify his co-workers. But there is another,
and more specific challenge, I think, presented in terms of disciplinary
habits of self-representation and the elision or effacement of labour. These
habits of elision are well-established, of course, not only in colonial archaeology. What else is a site report but the presentation of a fait accompli, an
exercise in the removal of agency? Sections are cut precisely, squares
numbered, finds bagged and labelled, in the unfolding of a process as necessary as it is inexorable. The implication is that the actual human agents are
irrelevant, what counts is the extent to which they act on a methodology.
Hodder (1989) notes a shift in the style and rhetoric of the archaeological
site report. Early examples of the genre give actor-oriented accounts and
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make use of personal pronouns. In the late nineteenth century (a) transformation occurs towards more distant, abstract, decontextualised
accounts (Hodder, 1989: 271), and the use of passive voice (a sandstone
block was found). Underlying these shifts are changes in the modes of
authority in the discipline, and the nature of its institutional insertions. For
the archaeological agent to appear god-like in her or his authorship of the
site, the excavation is presented in the indirect, passive voice.
In a colonial context such habits of elision were compounded by a
specific anxiety operating around the issue of native labour, which takes
us simultaneously to the heart of colonial political-economy and to the
centre, the deepest wellings, of settler imaginaries. A concern with native
labour, its tractability, its cost, its continued supply, runs as a thread through
colonial and apartheid histories, from attempts to indenture the Khoisan,
to the practices of slavery at the Cape, to the growth of the trade union
movement and its challenge to the apartheid state in the 1970s and 1980s
(Elphick, 1977; Elphick and Giliomee, 1989; OMeara, 1983; Seekings,
2000). In a justly famous essay, J.M. Coetzee uncovers the history not of
work, but of its opposite, Idleness in South Africa (1988). He writes of an
enduring tradition in the discourse of the Cape in terms of which indigenous people are represented as idle and indolent (and thus anti-modern, antiprogressive). In an ironic inversion, with the advent of the British at the
Cape this charge of idleness was transposed onto the Boers themselves.
One reading of the history of apartheid is as an attempt to counter the
seductions of idleness, to take away from white men the freedom to drop
out of the ranks of the labouring classes, a process in which might be
divined the demise of White Christian civilization at the tip of Africa
(Coetzee, 1988: 35).
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the fusion of racist thought and
ideas about native labour was well underway. Patrick Brantlinger (1998)
notes that the Victorians viewed Africans as a natural labouring class,
suited only for the dirty work of civilization (Brantlinger, 1998: 183).
Imperialism expressed a turning outwards, a nostalgia for a lost authority
and for a pliable, completely subordinate proletariat which had been lost
at home. In this context, Racism functions as a displaced or surrogate class
system, growing more extreme as the domestic class alignments it reflects
are threatened or erode (Brantlinger, 1998: 184). In one of the few passages
in which he reflects on the question of native labour, Goodwin expresses a
similar sentiment. In 1945, he published what was, until recently, the only
locally-produced text on archaeological methodology, Method in Prehistory. In a section on Excavation he has this to say:
In Europe the season generally coincides with part of the Long Vacation.
There a return is made again and again over a period of years to the same
site. Work is done by European workmen under supervision, or by partly
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trained students again under supervision. It has been found that two or
three workmen and a casual hand are all that can be adequately controlled,
while half-a-dozen students are the maximum that can be organized for
supervision. In Africa two labourers (who should be employed for cleaning
and camp-work only, unless particularly dependable and trustworthy), a
student and the trained supervising excavator are generally the most that
can be used in one trench or section, digging and sieving alternately.
(Goodwin, 1945: 90)
In those two words, dependable and trustworthy (or as Goodwin has it

in his letters, willing), might be read all of the hopes and fears of colonial
labour policy. Interestingly, of course, Goodwins own practice belies this
statement, as attested by the photographs in his archive; just as, on a
broader stage, native labour was to play a far greater role in building
settler society than is generally admitted, doing not just its heavy-lifting but
a good deal else besides.
Elements of Goodwins descriptions of his co-workers, in particular the
mixture of familiarity and distance, and the latent cruelty, point the way to
a psychoanalytic reading of such relationships. In 1990, I acted as a research
assistant and reader to J.M. Coetzee in a project on the work of Geoffrey
Cronje, apartheids founding ideologue, published as The Mind of
Apartheid (1991). Coetzee finds in Cronjes writing a rich vein of obsession,
which he explores in terms of a thematics of contact, pollution and mixture.
He notes that: As an episode in historical time, apartheid is overdetermined.
It did indeed flower out of self-interest and greed, but it also flowered out
of desire and out of the hatred of desire. In its greed it demanded black
bodies in all their physicality in order to burn up their energy as labour. In
its anxiety about black bodies it made iron laws to banish them from sight.
Its essence was therefore from the beginning confusion, a confusion which
it displaced wildly all around itself (Coetzee, 1991: 2).
These dynamics of attraction and repulsion gave rise to one of the central
fantasies of settler life, that of an African continent free of Africans, but
simultaneously a place where labour continues to be performed, where
work is done. This fantasy of leisure and innocence gave rise to a set of
practices to do with the effacement of native labour: the maids room
tucked around the back of the house, the township thrust beyond the city
limits, the glaze which crosses the madams eye as the tea tray is set down
and the dirty dishes removed. Njabulo Ndebele, the South African writer
and critic and member of a newly-empowered black elite, describes the
experience of visiting a game lodge in the late-1990s, some years down the
road of South Africas political transformation (Ndebele, 1998). Intended
as an exercise in relaxation, it becomes, instead, an unexpectedly painful
one, for Ndebele is thrown up against the celebration of a particular kind
of cultural power: the enjoyment of colonial leisure.
For Ndebele, everything is still in place, from the clearing in the middle
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of the bush, signifying civilization to the faceless black workers, behaving

rather meekly, who clean the rooms, wash the dishes, make the fire, babysit
the children, and make sure that in the morning the leisure refugees find
their cars clean. Living somewhere out there, beyond the neatly clipped
frontier, the black workers come into the clearing to serve. And then they
disappear again. In their comings and goings, they are as inscrutable as the
dense bush from which they emerge and to which they return. He asks:
How can the game lodge evolve forms of leisure that are rooted in contemporary South African experience, catering for a new leisure clientele and
guaranteeing profitability? How can the game lodge participate in the
general liberation of leisure? And then, more disturbingly: Is it possible
that South Africa is one big game lodge where all its black citizens are
struggling to make sense of their lives, like people who awake in an
enormous vacation house which is now supposed to be theirs, but which
they do not quite recognize? . . . We think: there is no peace for those caught
in the process of becoming.
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
By focusing on relations of work in archaeology we are reminded of a
number of things. In the first place, we are reminded that knowledge in
archaeology is produced and constructed (rather than discovered), and that
such production involves sweat and toil. The act of knowledge production
takes place, as Foucault reminds us in The Archaeology of Knowledge
(2001), his major synthetic work, under certain conditions and relations,
including relations of work and material production. The flip side to this
observation is that such conditions and relations inevitably determine the
nature of the knowledge which is produced. As over-worked as the notion
of knowledge production may appear to be, it retains a surprising relevance
for archaeology, a discipline which remains generally committed to a model
of scholarship in which knowledge is discovered (rather than produced).
On the one hand, this is in contradistinction to the discipline of social
anthropology, which advertised its reflexive turn as early as the mid-1980s
(Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Marcus and Fischer, 1986). On the other hand,
this is despite the advent of post-processual archaeology in much the same
period (Hodder, 1987, 1994; Shanks and Tilley, 1987a, 1987b), and the body
of exciting and theoretically-adventurous work collected under that
heading.
Indeed, there is a consummate irony here, that archaeology, a discipline
whose methodologies involve maximum physical exertion, hours spent in
the pit or at the sieve, so routinely should lose sight of its own conditions
of material production. Like the clue in a murder-mystery, that which is
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nearest at hand is least remarked. The troubling narrative of archaeological

production is shaded out by the spectacular narrative of discovery, the
miraculous moment of the opening of the tomb, or the unearthing of the
rare find. Goodwins co-workers present us with an extreme instance of the
elision of native labour, but such practices were, and in some cases still
are, widespread within the discipline (Fotiadis, 1993). The interest of
Goodwins relations of work lies not in their exceptionalism, but in the
manner in which they direct us towards the practices which define the
episteme.
The notion that archaeological knowledge is constructed leads us, in turn,
to a further possibility: the notion that knowledge might be differently
constructed. It opens the possibility of new knowledge, even of new forms
of knowledge. Returning to the photographs: if we imagine a process of
digital editing, the image is reframed, the figure on the margins or crouching in the shadows steps into the foreground, or even better stands behind
the camera, becomes the framing consciousness behind the photograph.
Embedded in this point is a comment on the nature of the photographic
archive itself. The images that interest me are the images that are unprinted
and unprintable within the traditional genres of archaeological production. Instead, what we find in site reports are stylised shots of individual artefacts (strategically lit and arranged against neutral backgrounds), and
carefully composed shots of archaeological deposits (brushed, tidied,
squared-away and labelled). These form a class of imagery from which coworkers and assistants are edited out, along with extraneous items of equipment, signs of camp life, collapsed sections and misplaced artefacts, in fact,
any signs of production or failure. However, even in the most dispassionate
of hands, the camera excels at admitting the unexpected, at finding serendipitous arrangements of light and shadow and surprising compositions of
figures, in short, at evading control (where control is a notion much-used
by archaeologists in connection with the process of excavation).
And it seems to me that therein lies the lasting power of these images:
in that they are able to open up spaces for alternative apprehensions of the
real, to gesture towards newness, even if they fail to specify its nature.
Archaeology in South Africa, and elsewhere, is caught at a moment of transition, which will either see the old and established patterns of operation
confirmed, in a (neo) colonial division of labour and reward, or the emergence of something new. In my own practice, the photographs of the
Goodwin Collection become a medium through which to rethink (the
fashionable word would be to deconstruct) the terms of engagement of
archaeology in this part of the world. Archaeological texts have been closed
against so many things, but most of all they have been closed against the
conditions of their own production. Question: What happens when you
open up your text? Answer: You let in the light.
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NICK SHEPHERD is a senior lecturer in the Centre for African Studies

at the University of Cape Town. He recently won the Archaeological
Dialogues essay competition on the future of archaeology. In 2004, he
will be based at Harvard as a Mandela Fellow, continuing to work on the
socio-politics of archaeology in Africa.
[email: shepherd@humanities.uct.ac.za]

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