archaeography

The quarry as place: conceptually, it coheres along the lines of practice. Workers use specific tools in sequence. Stone is cut, frequently to many different sizes. Once cut, blocks may be selected, prepared, cut further, or simply left alone. Throughout all of this, residues of action pile up, crash into each other, and are even obliterated. The traces of one season’s cutting are themselves cut away, and the place contends with itself to retain itself. But quarries are much more than this. In the very act of taking away, the quarry is also relocated through its material being. It exists in a distributed sense in many far away locations. This image presents one of the many blocks of quarried stone that currently rest, sometimes quite curiously, as almost forgotten elements of the front yards of numerous houses in Providence, Rhode Island. Cut from local stone, this roughly hewn block likely traveled no farther than Rhode Island or Connecticut. Yet materially, this and other blocks of stone in the Fox Point area (several are ‘finished’ with rectangular frames surrounding empty circles, or circular in shape, with rough exteriors) implicate these distant locations with the actions that occurred at the stone source. The place, as it were, is displaced, first to Fox Point, and then again in new actions and uses: ornaments; impromptu playgrounds; flowerbeds.