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TRACING ARCHAEOLOGY Words Nicole van Roij
During the Christmas Holidays, I was trying my best to avoid watching dull family movies on the couch. The ones I dislike most are adventure movies with heroic protagonists, like in Indiana Jones and The Mummy. What triggers me most in these movies is the representation of the archaeologist as a handsome, tombdiscovering acrobat. In these movies, the archaeologist is combatting and unveiling the traces of the past, reading landscape, object and architecture like a true detective. As designers of the built environment, our interest similarly lies in the reading of traces, albeit, gratefully not receiving the status of a pop-culture hero in doing so.
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From these pop-culture sensations, I wonder: Are researchers and designers of the built environment just as advanced and fearless in interpreting traces as archaeologists? In every-day life, the profession of the archaeologist is most likely not as adventurous as we see in popular culture. According to the dictionary, archaeology is the study of physical remains of human cultures. This includes the studying of linguistic codes, artefacts ranging from cutleries to stone columns and landscapes shaped by industries. The most obvious distinction between archaeology and architecture is arguably that archaeologists focus on the past, while architecture has a tendency to focus on the present and future. A similarity might be that both fields seek for relations between materials, artefacts and cultures. Also, in both fields, the interpretation of these relations has changed in the past century. Until the beginning of the 20th century, archaeology has mostly been about collecting, classifying and studying artefacts in relation to cultures. The
collecting of artefacts thrived with the development of great museum collections and world expositions. Here, artefacts could be seen as material traces which narrated human culture and ethnographical pasts. After the 1920s, the focus on the artefact as inertly dead matter changed and was replaced by, what is called in archaeology, functionalist theories. In these theories, all social and cultural phenomena are seen as functional in the sense that they work for the needs of society. Social relations become more important than things, and artefacts become plain reflections of what was deemed fundamental: social relations. Artefacts were seen as tools, extensions of the body. After the 1960s, structuralist and symbolic anthropology shifted the view on artefacts from ‘good to use’ objects to, reciting the words of Lévi-Strauss, ‘goods to think with’. The symbolic meaning, performances, ritual and exchanges are a part of the culture of the object. Understanding them, to the point that materiality becomes an integral dimension of culture. In other words, artefacts and physical traces are not only objects of a culture or tradition, but part of a larger structure of
