archaeography

Murphys, CA
March 2005
Photo Credit: Ralph Maurer

I asked Ralph to take this picture as we were walking down the main street of Murphys. We were using a disposable camera. I don’t think I’ve ever used a disposable camera before, but we were forced to buy one the day before in Yosemite. It was snowing, and we didn’t want the digital camera to get wet.

I believe I wanted this picture because the bathtubs made me think about the archaeological practice of collecting. I don’t know why they were there. Murphys has a few antique stores, so perhaps someone intended to clean them up and sell them. Perhaps someone really likes bathtubs.

We had to get the film developed, so it was a couple of weeks before I looked at the final prints. When I saw this one, I was very disappointed. Why?

I think I was disappointed because, on second look, what had once seemed like an interesting scene now looks trite and hackneyed to me. There are so many pictures out there like this. The object, collecting the object, fetishizing the object, decay, ruin, abandonment … I had hoped to move beyond these lenses, and I had failed.

Then I realized what was interesting about this photograph. Perhaps interesting only to me, but it redeemed it, at least a little, in my eyes.

In researching grave goods, I have been very intrigued by graves where an object appears multiple times. I don’t mean finding two pots instead of one pot. Many 4th-c. BCE northern Greek burials have a strigil among the grave goods. A few graves have multiple strigils – around ten. Many graves have astragals – knuckle bones perhaps used as gaming pieces – some as many as 80 astragals. And so on.

Why do I think this is interesting? I thought about why an object might appear multiple times. Perhaps the mourners were trying to emphasize the importance of the object. Perhaps the dead person had owned 10 strigils or 80 astragals. Perhaps there is some religious significance we are missing. Or perhaps it was part of a funerary performance in which mourners each placed one of the object in the grave.

I wish I could have taken photographs of the bathtub scene as the bathtubs appeared – in other words, documenting accumulation as performance. To emphasize the multiplicity as more than a single event of multiplicity – as a performance and a creative act, both on the part of those who accumulate (or deposit) the objects and on my part, as the photographer and archaeologist.

Perhaps an interesting lens for viewing archaeological time. Lin Foxhall wrote a great article called “The running sands of time: archaeology and the short-term” (World Archaeology 31:3), questioning archaeologists’ tendencies to focus on long-term temporal processes rather than short-term, “human time” temporal processes. On the other side of the coin, many archaeologists focus on the “end” result of accumulation rather than the act of accumulation. The act of excavation should make us, as archaeologists, think more abstractly, more deliberately, and with greater focus on the accumulation itself rather than on the end or beginning of the process.

Although photographers often believe they are "capturing a moment in time,” the act of offering a single photograph is, in fact, not part of a dynamic process but rather the mummification and arrest of change, accumulation, destruction, and even waiting.

In a great seminar several years back, Michael showed part of a film that would be relevant to mention here, if I remembered the name. The scene was outside, on a little stage, with lights and music. Two men (?) were sitting in chairs. Somehow they were killing themselves. Poison? Bleeding to death? I can't remember. As the music played, snails collected all over their dead bodies. The entire thing was very much a performance -- and in my eyes, not so much of decay as of accumulation, collecting, assemblage.