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John Bintliff

Is the Essence of Innovative Archaeology a Technology for the Unconscious?

Abstract
Using Barbara Ottaways career as a stimulus, this contribution will come to radical opinions regarding the true nature of Archaeology and Archaeologists, in which recent dramatic advances in Cognitive Science will play a central role.

Introduction
Barbara has combined expertise in European Prehistory with excellent skills in field techniques, and at the same time she has become one of our foremost authorities on the origins and development of metallurgy in Europe. Although her first interest was in the scientific study of metal production, she gradually added a deep interest in the social and general cultural significance of metals in Ancient Europe. At home on an excavation, in the laboratory, in a lecture-room and a seminar on archaeological theory, Barbara has shown us a very rare combination of practical and intellectual skills, offering an ideal role model for young researchers to follow. The following essay is in homage not only to a friend and former colleague, but to what she represents.

The essence of archaeology?

My encomium to the range of skills Barbara is gifted in, gives me a launching-point for asking: what might be the core nature of the discipline of Archaeology, if not a pick-and-mix of many activities, some of which are just as much a part of numerous other disciplines? After all, an archaeological site is rather like a civil-engineering project, the only difference being that our earth-movers, EDM devices, and plans, are for mapping what has been already built, rather than what is to be built. This is not so surprising, since much of our physical methods and technologies have come into Archaeology from practical Earth Sciences, from the 19th century onwards. Laboratory analyses and their insights into materials are also spin-offs from the same 200 year long development of the Physical and Natural Sciences. Barbara herself

exemplifies this continuing debt through her first full-time lectureship, in an outgrowth of a Department of Nuclear Physics (the School of Archaeological Sciences at Bradford University). As for archaeological theory, it is a commonplace that every scrap of it is a second-hand pass-down (with a significant time-lag) from other disciplines: since the 1960s our debt is especially owed to Social Anthropology, Geography, Cybernetics and Computer Studies, Literary Theory and Philosophy. Oddly, History has not been a central source of ideas for archaeologists over this same period, although it had been a major player in the 19th to early 20th centuries. Teaching, we can pass over quickly, as a task all disciplines require to train new generations of scholars. What are we left with? Hardly, it seems, our practical methods and our intellectual techniques. Merely our subject-matter. And here we come to a curiosity. There are innumerably more people in the world, who conduct field measuring and earth-moving, laboratory analyses and library research, in order to modify the contemporary built-environment, global ecology, human health and social welfare, or the production, circulation and consumption of goods, than the small community of Archaeologists. The latter show far less interest in the present and the future, but tend to be obsessed only with what has already happened, preferably a long time ago. Barbara and the present writer are amongst them. But equally perverse in this way of life, you will object, are Historians. What distinguishes Archaeologists? Well that is simple we are obsessed with past things rather than the written statements and thoughts of previous peoples. Archaeology strictly-defined, is the study of the material culture of the Human Past. Nothing better encapsulates this (let us be honest) peculiar pursuit, than the custom that the famous archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler instituted on his excavations: by the gate through which visitors could enter to view his sites, he left a large box full of everyday finds, simple potsherds or iron nails, for the public to take home. I can remember myself, as a schoolboy, travelling to the town of Saint Albans, not far north of London, to see the Roman Theatre which he had excavated, and still being able to collect a few such objects from the waiting tray of small finds. So it seems that this strange fascination for ob-

John Bintliff

Fig. 1: The hill of ancient Koroneia, facing east towards the drained basin of the former Lake Copais.

jects made and used by dead people, is not confined to Archaeologists, but strikes a ready chord with people from a wide range of backgrounds. Now before I go any further, I shall need to counter an objection, from some of you readers, that surely Archaeology today, is an active and responsible contributor to contemporary and future society. It can give us our Heritage, which it seems we need to reproduce our cultural identity, and to place us somewhere firm in a shifting world. I have dealt with this worthy but largely spurious claim elsewhere (Bintliff 2004), but if anyone really wishes to praise the role of Archaeology in reinforcing ethnic, racial or national identities, please consult the history of Archaeology, where we see how thoroughly our discipline has been abused by nationalists and dictators to boost their antagonism to other cultural groups and to further programmes of internal and external conquest. In any case, most archaeologists, in every period, have primarily and very fundamentally been attracted, usually to the level of a fixation, to things buried in the ground left by people now dead, in their own right. Listen to those who know or knew: Binford (the most fun you can have with your pants on ), David Clarke (Archaeology is Archaeology is Archaeology ). If we accept that this might be, for at least the majority of practising archaeologists, the core of our discipline, which we started this essay searching for, then let me spend the remainder of my piece trying to understand why we do this. At the same time we can illuminate why a vast part of the general public seems capable of responding instinctively to the same delight deriving from old things lying in the ground.

Perhaps a good way into this investigation of the raison dtre for being an archaeologist will be to take you into my own current project. In 2006 I wished to find a new focus for fieldwork in a region I have been active in since 1978, the province of Boeotia, central Greece (cf. Bintliff/Snodgrass 1985; 1988; Bintliff/ Howard/Snodgrass 2007). My attention was drawn to a massive isolated hill in the centre of the region (fig. 1). It lies amidst a fertile valley, surrounded by dramatic mountain ridges on three sides (limbs of Mount Helicon), and a former giant lake on the final direction of approach. In fact it is an ancient city, Koroneia, a significant urban centre from Archaic Greek to Late Roman Antiquity (some 1.300 years), according to historical sources. In addition, previous archaeological visitors to the hill have recorded surface pottery indicating a prehistoric occupation and also, in the form of a Crusader tower at the foot of the hill, clear hints of a significant Medieval usage. Altogether a place of focal human presence of some 5.000 to 6.000 years, perhaps at its maximum occupational extent 100 hectares or a square kilometre. What can I find out about this city from ancient written sources and previous archaeological visitors? Remarkably little, it turns out! The city of Koroneia never aspired to a significant role in Greco-Roman History. It defended its independence from aggressive neighbours with varying degrees of success, making good and bad alliances in order to achieve this and on two notable occasions the wrong choices resulted in the citizens being carried off into slavery. Also on two occasions Roman emperors intervened to help the citizens out when the lake was flooding part of

Is the Essence of Innovative Archaeology a Technology for the Unconscious?

their land, or great landlords were putting undue pressure on the rest of the population. The prehistoric surface finds are reckoned to be slight, and clearly the settlement was not one of the regional centres in Bronze Age times like its visible neighbour across the old lake-bed at Orchomenus. As for the Crusader tower, whether it was a lone fortification of the distant Frankish Duke in Thebes, or accompanied a village, is unknown, but we can suspect the latter from our research elsewhere. As for its post-Medieval successor, a village now called Koroneia high up the mountainous slopes to the southwest is in fact a settlement of Albanians, encouraged to settle the province in the 14th and 15th centuries AD (and till renaming in 1915 AD carrying its non-Greek name of Koutoumula). What has been found in terms of physical traces on this hill by previous visitors with archaeological interests? On the top of this steep eminence, a Roman brick building with many vaults stands clear of the bushes and scrub, suggested to be a bathhouse, and not far off someone once dug into a small buildingcomplex (but never admitted to this through publication) hypothesized to be an antique church. Small fragments of a fortification believed to be ArchaicClassical Greek in date were noticed at a couple of points around the rim of the hilltop which ought to have been the acropolis or upper town, and a long time ago educated travellers claim to have seen parts of an ancient fortification around the foot of the hill, thus protecting the lower town. Several earlier visitors wondered if a large depression in the southern side of the hill might mark an ancient theatre, and one or two found some nice architecture in the same sector, which might come from the marketplace (Agora) or one of the temples mentioned as worth seeing by the Roman travel-writer Pausanias. Not much left in surviving texts and surface monuments, for a town of up to 12.000 or so people at its florescence (if we adopt some commonly-used formulae for estimating the population of a Greek city cf. Bintliff 1997), with 1.300 years of urban status, plus a few more thousand years as a probable village before and after its life as an ancient town. Or to put it more pertinently in human terms, if we allow for some ups and downs in the urban sites size, and a guess at the extent of the preceding and succeeding village, we might guesstimate that some 350.000 people lived out their lives on this hill, without apparently so far leaving us much to talk about or admire. Now come with me to this locality, and as we did for the first time in 2006, walk around this large ancient site, and ask whether we can do more to bring back to life these third of a million almost-forgotten, and certainly neglected lives. At first sight we were rather pessimistic about that goal. The hill is hard of access, so modern agriculture can only profitably work limited terraces, thus most of the hill is covered, even during the arid summer months, with grasses

and low bushes. Not much to see at first sight on the surface, beyond those rare traces of buildings definite or possible, which previous visitors were able to observe. Allow me a brief but important diversion. Around the turn of the 20th century AD the famous physicists Ernst Mach and Niels Bohr engaged in an academic argument, but one which reaches right to the roots of scientific research (Fuller 2004). Bohr argued that Science progresses through a few great minds producing vital new concepts and insights, which lesser researchers can apply in the lab. Mach though believed that the army of hands-on experimenters, or individuals handling or observing real-world data, were the real creators of new knowledge of the world. It seems to me clear that archaeologists, or at least the majority who do fieldwork or work with finds, are essentially tactile investigators in the mode of Mach, and that is precisely why we love to discover things, hidden in the earth. Our obsession (particularly Barbaras and mine), is to make sense of these objects whether tiny seeds detected through the sieving of occupation deposits, or the foundation walls of Early Christian basilicas one hundred metres long. And the special fascination of Archaeology is to put every thing into its context the sediments it occurs in, the other objects or structures it is associated with, the entire findspot or site locality, then the age and region the object can be placed in, and the past lifestyles and mentalities each object was embedded into. Why should this kind of tactile enquiry encourage such devotion, to the point of obsession? I take my view on this from Evolutionary Psychology (Bintliff 2004; 2005). As a relatively weak animal, but mentally gifted well beyond its size, the human genus has survived and flourished by observation, discovery and experimental manipulation of its surroundings. This has been just as true of human relationships with the landscapes, plants and animals which directly sustained human beings, as of the social and psychological world in which people have needed to form marriages, behavioural rules, as well as form and reform cultures to represent and make intelligible the human experience. Without realizing it, humans are constantly storing such experiential information in their neural-networked brains, whilst on a daily basis, the beyond-conscious realms of the brain rework, classify and file our observations (usually it seems when we are fast asleep). The common human aspiration to travel, encounter other cultures, our appreciation of landscapes and other aesthetic experiences, the pleasure we get from physical exercise, appear in this light as useful but also recreational spin-offs from quite essential human behavioural imperatives. To survive and prosper in the present we need to be attentive, as well as manipulative of our physical and social world. But possessing such a drive, and most

John Bintliff

Fig. 2: Density of surface pottery in the areas at Koroneia surveyed in 2007. Each dot represents ten potsherds. Recording and GIS research by Bart Noordervliet.

importantly stimulated to respond to it by sensations of pleasure in the act of discovery, has led us, by one of the many unintentional offshoots of Darwinian fitness which the late Stephen Jay Gould was so fond of reminding us (Gould 1981), to deploy our fascination for tactile exploration into not so clearly (if at all) profitable avenues. And here we have arrived at a delightful paradox: an animal tuned to make sense of a past world in which nothing he/she can do will make any difference to the people who inhabited it. Archaeology could then be seen to be a parallel to the male nipple: we dont actually need it, but it was a natural feature of the hominid mammalian body and has no observable effect on male survival rates, so it is reproduced on all humans, whether or not the female hormones switch it on for practical use. Let us return to what we now can recognize as essential Archaeology: this pleasurable search and interrogate pursuit, on the slopes of Koroneia city. We take a team of ten or a dozen students and postgrads, begin to mark out a mobile grid over the site, and set them to collect observational data on the surface (Bintliff/Slapsak 2007; in press). This is the way I go about giving my dead third of a million Koroneians some more, hopefully an immense amount

more, past for us to understand their lives from. At once our focussed physical effort rewards itself: looking with great care at the groundsurface and interpolating what we can see in the open areas of the site, onto those parts with high grass or bushes, allow us to see that the uppermost part of the hill has large expanses where between three and 30 potsherds per square metre can be registered. Next the team are set to collect a sample of these broken pots for every grid unit of 20x20 metres, so that the chronology of the finds from every part of the city can be reconstructed (after washing), through close-study in the base laboratory by our ceramic specialists. At a first calculation, our city surface provides several million pieces of broken ceramics, with a wide range of periods, functions and origins (fig. 2). Certainly a giant step forward for teasing apart the embodied ancient lives whose domestic, ritual, public and commercial waste has been imprinted into such abundant human debris on the disturbed surface of the city hill. But there is more: as we move from one grid unit to the next, our hitherto unparalleled inspection of the city surface begins to yield another harvest, signs of differential use of the city space (fig. 3). In one sector just below the Acropolis, we come across large architectural fragments, seemingly of public buildings, even possibly the ancient Agora or main square of the town. Secondly, and over large parts of the upper hill, the telltale signs of private housing: clusters of loomweights, storage vessels, grain rubbers, tied at times to narrow terraces and regular dividing walls. Even at one point the urban mansion of a wealthy Roman emerges in an area with extensive mosaic floor fragments. We can begin for the area so far studied in the summer seasons of research in 2006/07, merely the uppermost part of the city hill, to map in tentative uses of space, separating off the dominant private housing zones from those seemingly devoted to public buildings. Furthermore, in two localities giant olive presses and a large dump zone for pottery wasters reveal industrial-commercial sectors of the ancient town. As we continue in the following years to move around and down the hill to the plain below, terrace by terrace, small grid-unit by small grid-unit, we hope to be able to continue mapping-in the varying use of space in the Greco-Roman city, but also such a slow progress will give us the fine-tuning through differential spreads of pottery from each period, to reveal the changing extent of the settled space, a clear indication of population fluctuations. How large was the hypothesized small prehistoric village at the site, and which periods did it flourish in? How rapidly did the Greek city arise in the crucial era of city-state formation between 800 BC to 600 BC (Late Geometric to early Archaic times)? Did the ancient town suffer notable expansions and contractions through the subsequent 1.200 years as a city (Classical-Hellenistic-Early

Is the Essence of Innovative Archaeology a Technology for the Unconscious?

Fig. 3: Provisional functional space in the upper part of Koroneia city. Recording and GIS research by Bart Noordervliet.

Roman-Late Roman periods)? Our previous largescale surveys at other central Greek cities (Askra, Haliartos, Thespiae, Hyettos and Tanagra), have all revealed such insightful changes to their size. Finally, can we find the Medieval village which normally accompanies Crusader towers in southern and central Greece, providing the source of their inhabitants food needs? And was that village, if and when located, abandoned as most others we have studied, due to the 14th century AD Black Death and a high level of warfare during the late Middle Ages (Bintliff 2000)? We actually know already, through our collaboration with the Ottoman historian Professor Machiel Kiel (Bintliff 1995) that the traditional villages of this district by the 15th century AD are already in place, with just one near neighbour to ancient Koroneia, a village called Aghios Georgios, a Greek community, the rest being recent Albanian immigrants. It is almost certain that the Medieval villagers of Koroneia shifted residence

across the Valley some two kilometres during the 14th and 15th century, to form the core of the presentday Aghios Georgios settlement. Preliminary fieldwalking by our team in 2006, between the ancient city and that village also encountered high-levels of ceramics as we approached the village, covering the expected centuries from ca. 1500 AD to recent times. Another research line we are already pursuing is to fit the many surface wall traces of the ancient city to the topographic possibilities and limitations of the hill itself, which was clearly also transformed for terracing and street-lines to make it more livable and accessible. My students Janneke van Zwenen and Bart Noordervliet have begun to make a microtopographic three-dimensional fine-detail plan of all the surfaces of the hill. The areas where house terraces were implanted, alleys and streets, should be revealed, whilst computer-modelling of the effects of insolation and wind are offering testable hypotheses on which were

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the desirable and the less desirable sectors for habitation and public space. I do not object to my essential archaeology being characterised as Neo-Empiricist, as one reviewer of my 2004 paper cited above termed it (but as a positive comment!). Ironically, since I studied archaeology at university one of the most striking developments in our discipline has been in Archaeological Theory. Moreover the first wave of such theorising the Processual movement considered fieldwork to be about testing hypotheses, or providing raw data to do so from, whilst the second wave the Post-Processual movement has argued that all archaeology is theory-laden and thus neutral fieldwork and its interpretation are both impossible. I have come to believe that both positions are rather inadequate, and sit offcentre to the essence of our discipline. This turns out to be a little case study in a global view of the human condition, if we subsume the archaeological enterprise into one small branch of how humans make sense of, and negotiate their world. We looked earlier at the great importance to humans of the observation, classification and storage of the constant flow of experiences we register from our physical, sensual encounter with the world around us. One of the fastest-growing and most remarkable fields of knowledge is indeed in Human Cognition. It appears that the Descartian model of the self-aware human individual, just as much as the model of us as Pavlovian robotic dogs, fail woefully to model the way we humans think and act. The advances coming rapidly from Cognitive Science seem to me to make the relevant discussions in Archaeological Theory look sadly speculative and amateur (for readable overviews see Greenfield 2002; Douglas 2007; Frith 2007; Johnson 2008). If Processual archaeologists were more concerned with humans as social groups performing in positive and negative feedback to interconnected systems (ecological, economic, socio-political, ideological), Post Processualists have reacted by privileging the independent individual human agent making his/her world. It seems now that neither model comes anyway near the reality of human behaviour. From the womb the human is collecting experiences, not through conscious decision in infancy, but automatically; these are data which the expanding neural networks of the brain sort and store. Is it not astounding that a major part of the storage capacity involved is in place before we reach adolescence? As juveniles and adults we can indeed choose to learn and observe, and are led to do so by our parents, colleagues and teachers, but formal choice is just a small fraction of what gets registered in the immense filing-cabinets of our brain. Cognitive research, especially through electronic brain-imaging, has led to the view that the major part of human decisions, actions, views is unconscious, inspired by the responses fed to us by our pre-patterned brain. Generally we become conscious-

John Bintliff

ly aware that we will make a particular action or reach a particular view of a situation, a slight instance after the message comes from our brain to move the appropriate body-part or react in a distinct way. Yet wonderfully, this imbalance between a small part of our thoughts and actions which is under conscious control, and that larger part which is unconscious input from our almost infinite structured neural-networked brain, is freed from determinacy. Each of us is still a unique storehouse of lifetime experiences, like no other person in the world in an absolute sense. As we accumulate experiential data, we and our neural-networks are constantly evolving. On the other hand, the I does not exist at any time, since from womb onwards we are inextricably entangled in physical and cultural contact with other human beings in ever-widening circles. Webs of sound, feeling, images and messages flow in and out of us from society and environment, constantly registered, filtered and filed in the brain, so that re-encountering similar phenomena triggers recognition and response. So just as the human genus has colonised the world, so it colonises lost fragments of its own past, re-entering the forests with our ancestors, rebuilding their monuments. In Barbaras case this entails rediscovering metallurgy and realizing how societies were in turn affected by the new potentials it opened up. In my case, tracing the debris accumulated by a third of a million people who lived on the hill of Koroneia between 5000 BC and 1400 AD, will hopefully enable me to retrace the main lines of the long-term cumulative biography of their community.

References
Bintliff 1995 J. L. Bintliff (ed.), The Two Transitions: Current Research on the Origins of the Traditional Village in Central Greece. In: J. L. Bintliff/H. Hamerow (eds.), Europe Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Recent Archaeological and Historical Research in Western and Southern Europe. BAR International Series 617. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum 1995, 111-130. Bintliff 1997 J. L. Bintliff, Further Considerations on the Population of Ancient Boeotia. In: J. L. Bintliff (ed.), Recent Developments in the History and Archaeology of Central Greece. BAR International Series 666. Oxford: Tempus Reparatum 1997, 231-252. Bintliff 2000 J. L. Bintliff, Reconstructing the Byzantine Countryside: New Approaches from Landscape Archaeology. In: K. Blelke/F. Hild/J. Koder/P. Soustal (eds.), Byzanz als Raum. Wien: sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften 2000, 37-63. Bintliff 2004 J. L. Bintliff, Experiencing Archaeological Fieldwork. In: J. L. Bintliff (ed.), A Companion to Archaeology. London: Blackwell 2004, 397-405. Bintliff 2005 J. L. Bintliff, Being in the (Past) World: Vermeer, Neural

Is the Essence of Innovative Archaeology a Technology for the Unconscious?

Networks and Archaeological Theory. In: T. L. Kienlin (ed.), Die Dinge als Zeichen: Kulturelles Wissen und materielle Kultur. Universittsforschungen zur prhistorischen Archologie 127. Bonn: Habelt 2005, 125-131. Bintliff/Howard/Snodgrass 2007 J. L. Bintliff/P. Howard/A. M. Snodgrass (eds.), Testing the Hinterland. The Work of the Boeotia Survey (1989-1991) in the Southern Approaches of the City of Thespiai. McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute 2007. Bintliff/Slapsak 2007 J. L. Bintliff/ B. Slapsak, The Leiden-Ljubljana Ancient Cities of Boeotia Project. Season 2006. Pharos. Journal of the Netherlands Institute in Athens 14, 2007, 1527. Bintliff/Slapsak in press J. L. Bintliff/B. Slapsak, The Leiden-Ljubljana Ancient Cities of Boeotia Project. Season 2007. Pharos. Journal of the Netherlands Institute in Athens 15, in press. Bintliff/Snodgrass 1985 J. L. Bintliff/A. M. Snodgrass, The Cambridge/Bradford Boeotian Expedition: The first Four Years. Journal of Field Archaeology 12, 1985, 123-161. Bintliff/Snodgrass 1988 J. L. Bintliff/A. M. Snodgrass, Mediterranean Survey and the City. Antiquity 62, 1988, 57-71. Douglas 2007 K. Douglas, The Other You. New Scientist 1 December, 2007, 42-46. Frith 2007 C. Frith, Hands Up if You Think Youve Got Free Will. New Scientist 11 August, 2007, 46-47. Fuller 2000 S. Fuller, Thomas Kuhn. A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000. Gould 1981 S. J. Gould, The Pandas Thumb. New York: W. W. Norton 1981. Greenfield 2002 S. Greenfield, Sensational Minds. New Scientist 2 February, 2002, 30-33. Johnson 2008 M. Johnson, Body Meanings. New Scientist 12 January, 2008, 46-47.