"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
In the long run all things that humans create are ephemeral, as Shelley reminds us. Our sense of permanence relates to the scale of our lifetime. Children (if they're lucky) live in a reassuringly unchanging world. Only as we grow older do we realise that the world is in constant flux. That which we experience, as William James suggested, is a stream of consciousness which we segment in order to lend it some sense or coherence. But the sense of disruption brought about by change also has a political dimension; in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels lament that;
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. *All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned*, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
Similar sentiments are found in Victor Hugo’s reactions to Hausmann’s Paris and more recently in Marshall Berman’s _All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity._ (1982).
This session will consider the way in which some structures that appear permanent are not, and how what may have never been intended to persist becomes a permanent landmark. Indeed, are ephemeral elements such as cranes, scaffolding or graffitti integral to what is otherwise supposed to be the permanent, pristine landscape? What is it that gives us the sense that things _are_ permanent in the first place? How do notions of permanence and ephemerality apply at different times and in different cultures (e.g. settled vs. nomadic groups)? Why is modernity seen as a time of constant change, in contrast to a slower, more stable past, and is this true?
Speakers:
The unstable and unattractive Neolithic: archaeology of the margins and the ephemeral
Douglass W. Bailey, Cardiff University
The current understanding of the Neolithic in southeastern Europe is weakened by our neglect of the temporary and ephemeral activities that occurred away from traditional sites such as villages or aggregations of pit-features. Excavations and interpretive attention continues to focus on the obvious and the easy to detect, to record and to analyse: houses, pits, burials, large faunal assemblages, raw material sources. Even in those examples where hyper-analytic work is being carried out to recover the traces of ephemeral activities (e.g., at Catalhoyuk to the east), efforts are concentrated in obvious places (e.g., houses, buildings, the village). Critically, we have neglected the majority of Neolithic life: those activities which, by their nature were impermanent and ephemeral, and which occurred in the margins of the cultural landscapes, out beyond the edges of sites. A consequence of this negligence is that we have reconstructed a Neolithic that disproportionately values the move towards sedentism, permanence of residence, and the creation of places that were ‘home’ to long-term economic, productive and socio-political strategies. The alternative proposed here is to rethink the reality of Neolithic life by examining the gaps in between the obvious and monumental. The argument is that, today as in the Neolithic, the majority of life takes place in the margins and in the gaps. Reconstructions that neglect this majority tell only one, significantly limited, story of the period.
The industrial ephemeral: saying goodbye to a Montana dam
Caitlin Desilvey, University of Exeter
The practice of cultural remembrance is usually assumed to be incompatible with the deterioration and/or destruction of the material past. An increasing number of scholars, however, have begun to suggest that the resonance of thetransitory can be a powerful catalyst for memory-work of a different kind. In this paper I explore these ideas in anindustrial landscape on the cusp of a major transformation. A $100 million environmental cleanup is now under way at the confluence of Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers in western Montana. The cleanup involves the removal of millions
of yards of sediments (contaminated by the upstream copper mining industry) and the industrial infrastructure of a 100 year-old hydroelectric dam, including a historic brick powerhouse. In the surrounding communities, anticipation of dam removal has released a pulse of pre-memorial activity-oral history projects, community gatherings, museum exhibits, commissioned artworks and installations, intensive media coverage. Considered as a collective form of leave-taking, this pre-memorial activity resists (by necessity) the location of cultural memory in material artefacts and suggests, instead, an expanded model for remembering the past in place. The Milltown experience lends itself to the development of a theory of 'kinetic memory', linked to process and change rather than permanence and preservation.
Planes, trains and automobile-collision scenarios: accident simulation from an archaeological perspective.
James R. Dixon, Faculty of Creative Arts University of the West of England
Engineered accident simulations are among the most ephemeral of moments yet also the most purposive. Seconds of extreme violence divorced from their ‘real world’ equivalents. The purpose of such an exercise is to accurately recreate the physical consequences of a moment from the past in order to refine material forms of the future.
The transient, simulated moment of impact is at the centre of a complex network of people and things, events, philosophies, politics and emotions. Thinking about the things used in or created for such a moment, we can move away from a consideration of objects whereby we simply endow them with transferred human agency. Rather, following the recent work of proponents of actor-network theory and ‘thing theory’, we can consider how objects act in their own right, alongside humans rather than in their place. Here, objects will be left to their own destructive devices.
This paper aims to describe milliseconds of physical contact through the material things present during collision.
"Ultima Ratio Regum: Evaluating the Impact of Warfare on the Mycenaean Kingdoms”
Kate Harrell University of Sheffield
Warfare is generally an event-based activity, and thus can be extremely difficult to see in the archaeological record.
There is a tendency to forget that warfare was common practice in the Bronze Age until there is some visible destruction
in the archaeological record that requires explaining. Yet we must not dismiss the fact that warfare was generally a
reoccurring event and that victories and losses on the field directly impacted the respective Mycenaean kingdoms.
Thus we should be looking at the archaeological assemblage to progressively chart the co-development of society
and socially-sanctioned violence to see how they impacted one another. One type of assemblage that is especially
helpful when analysing the impact of warfare on the Mycenaeans is that of the mortuary arena. This is because
Mycenaean funerary rites are very public, with tombs being reused through the generations and descendents entering
the tomb and adding and removing grave goods from the collection of deceased ancestors. Mycenaean funerary
remains are thus a combination of personal rites and public rituals. As warfare is also a combination of personal
and communal sacrifice, this mortuary data then will help elucidate the ephemeral nature of warfare in this period.
Is it True that Anyone was Ever ‘Pre-modern’. An Archaeology of the ‘Myth of the Clean Slate’ (Toulmin 1990) and Its Supposed ‘Pre-modern’ Obstacles.
Stephanie Koerner (University of Manchester) and Joseph Leo Koerner (Harvard University)
Until rather recently the historiography of archaeology and the humanities and human science has been written around themes of received opposing Enlightenment and Romantic positions on goals to create a ‘science of man” Rowlands and Gledhill 1977: 143) and/or the implications for such goals of clashes between Relativity Theory and Comptean positivist theses on scientific unity, ‘purely descriptive language’, the impartiality of empiricist methods, and social progress (e.g., Carnap, 1934; Cassirer, 1942, 1960, Neurath, 1973).
The situation is beginning to change perhaps in relation to experiences of wider contradictory trends in the dynamics of pedagogical institutions and public affairs. For example, the publication of the proceedings of 2006 Ename colloquium in Belgium begins by stressing: “Heritage is now in the midst of a series of contradictory transformations. In some places, unprecedented levels of public and private funding have been applied to the cause of heritage conservation, yet in other places, the physical destruction, looting, and vandalism has never been so great…. How will these contradictory heritage trends resolve themselves?” (Silberman ed. 2007). These trends are not restricted to contemporary times. Research that goes against the grain of ‘meta-narratives’ about the Birth of Modernity is illuminating analogous situations where the complexities of threats to existential and moral conditions of possibility for plurality of human heritage have been eclipsed by preoccupations with: (a) what Stephen Toulmin (1990) calls the ‘myth of the clean slate’ (beliefs “that any new construction is truly rational only if it demolishes all that was there before” [Toulmin 1990: 173]) and (b) beliefs that the heritage of ‘pre-moderns’, publics’, the ‘mob’ – in short, ‘others’ – are obstacles to such ‘starting from scratch’ (Koerner 2006) . Some of today’s most widely publicised images of ‘globalisation’ and ‘risk management’ exhibit such preoccupations (Beck 1994; Koerner and Singleton 2007; Felt and Wynne eds. 2007).
Our contribution will focus primarily on the question of the session abstract: “Why is modernity seen as a time of constant change, in contrast to a slower, and more stable past, and is this true?” The above outlined preoccupations do not arise in a social vacume. They are not unique but also do not form anything like a unified continuum. We will explore examples of circumstances under which preoccupations with what Toulmin calls the ‘myth of the clean slate’ gave rise to conditions that made it possible claim that what distinguishes ‘moderns’ from all ‘others’ is consciousness of the contingency of all human truths – with attention to the importance to such claims of caricatures of ‘other worldviews’ (pre-modern, public, etc) as supposedly unable to, denying and or governed by fear of contingencies of change.
Particular emphasis falls upon materials from our research on circumstances where the ‘myth of the clean slate’ and caricatures of its obstacles legitimated
(a) reducing existential and moral crises to problems of knowledge, and or issues of trust to matters of ‘expert competence’
(b) promoting what Stephen Toulmin (1990) calls ‘the myth of the clean slate’, that is preoccupations with beliefs that “any new construction is truly rational only if it demolishes all that was there before” (Toulmin 1990: 173) and characterisations of ‘tradition,’ ‘pre-moderns’, publics’, the ‘mob’, and/or ‘others’ as obstacles to such ‘starting from scratch’ (Koerner 2006)
(c) marginalising the logic and rationality of adaptations of local communities of ‘we’.
We will conclude with comments on how materials on these circumstances can (a) widen the scope of the historiography of archaeology in that illuminate hitherto obscured aspects of what Hans Blumenberg (1983) calls the ‘legitimation of the modern age’, and (b) contribute to ‘an archaeology of transience’ that recognises that no one was ever pre-modern’.
References:
Blumenberg, H. 1983. TheLegitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by R. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
Koerner, J.L. 1998. Bosch’s Contingency. In G. v. Graevenitz, O. Marquard, and M. Christen (eds.) Poetik and Hermenutik 17 (Kontingenz), 245-284. Munich: Wilhem Fink Verlag.
Koerner, S. 2006. Towards Archaeologies of Memories of the Past and Plannning Futures: Engaging the ‘Faustian bargain’ of ‘Crises of Representation,’ in I. Russel (ed.), Images,Representations, Heritage, 187‑192. New York: Springer
Silberman, N. ed. 2007 Proceedings of the 3rd Ename International Colloquium, “The Future of Heritage. Changing Visions, Attitudes and Contexts in the 21st Century.” Ghent: Ename Centre for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation.
Toulmin, S. 1990. Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
‘The world turn’d upside down’: the elusive archaeology of Revolution
John Mabbitt, School of Historical Studies Newcastle University
Archaeological ephemerality is usually treated as an unintended and unfortunate result of particular ways of life, construction techniques or materials. However, in many instances, it can be better understood as the result of deliberate choice and selection, allowing ephemerality to be understood in the same framework of discourse and meaning as other manifestations of material culture.
There are few contemporary monuments to the English Revolution and Civil War; the lasting memorial is a rich tradition of localised memory, centred on ephemeral traces of short-lived occupations and actions. Deliberate selection of small, or petty, sites of memory contrasts with the deliberate destruction of structures such as the town defences that formed such an important part of pre-war civic identity and the later formal memorialisation sponsored by the particular political culture of nineteenth-century England.
The creation of sites of myth and the absence of formal memorial is an inversion of a contemporary dominant discourse and modern archaeological theory that offers opportunities to challenge interpretations of this contested past and the interpretive schemes on which they are based. ‘A world turned upside down’ has been the commonplace of historical, social and religious studies of the English Revolution since Christopher Hill’s seminal study; it can also be applied to theoretical archaeology.
Always there at Derby Day? Looking into a Crystal Ball
Pat Reynolds, Surrey County Council
This paper is a reflection on an Action Research project with Travellers in the South East, from conception to archived DVD.
At its heart is one of a dozen community-produced video histories, in which a fortune-teller at the Derby looks into both the future and the past of Gypsies on Gypsy Hill, a temporary settlement which takes place at Epsom Racecourse each year.
My paper uses this video history to consider the nature of 'permanence' in a community where recent change is associated not with the mutability of life on the road, but with stability of residence: "going to brick". Manifest and celebrated Gypsy presence in settings such as Derby Day is contrasted to the invisible presence of nomads in the "pristine" landscape: stopping places are recorded only by bunds, not in the Historic Environment Record.
‘Seeing things Invisible’: Ephemera and transience … in Las Vegas?
John Schofield English Heritage
Anyone who has visited will know what I mean: Las Vegas is at once the strangest and the most fascinating of places. A journalist once described it as ‘a Lego city’, and ‘a place where people go to have fun’. The built environment of the city reflects that – always changing; the sands always shifting. And those that own and run the show, the likes of Steve Wynn, are always looking to improve it – make it bigger and better; but ensuring it continues to shock and surprise. A motto on Wynn’s desk states: ‘Vision is the art of seeing things invisible’.
But Vegas’s influence extends beyond the bright lights of the Strip. During the 1950s the city embraced the atomic testing programme with great enthusiasm. And domestic architecture in the city reflects that relationship. Then there are the monumental remains of the testing programmes, and the peace camps that exist outside the Nevada Test Site.
I wouldn’t claim to understand Las Vegas (does anyone?); but I have begun to appreciate it, and to recognise its peculiarities; its quirks and conundra. This presentation will focus on one particular aspect of the weirdness: the contradictions that exist both within Vegas and beyond, between the ephemerality of 'permanence' on the Strip, and the permanence of ephemera in the city’s desert environs. In Vegas itself, the themed hotels of the Strip never last long despite vast investment; while suburban sprawl on the city’s edges are constantly expanding to create new (permanent, and character-less) desert settlements – Vegas is the fastest growing city in the US. A short distance away, the permanence of the ephemeral can be seen amongst the atomic architecture of the Nevada Test Site, and at the accompanying peace camps. Here the infrastructure of specific scientific experiments, and the stone arrangements left by protestors could last thousands of years in a desert environment where lack of development pressure and environmental conditions favours long-term survival. The place that gives Nevada its identity, its focus – Las Vegas, and its Strip – is the thing that changes most often, and most dramatically. To quote Frank Sinatra – now isn’t that ‘a big, fat, fucking surprise?’
‘…..We Will Remember Them’: The Ephemerality of War Memorials
Samuel Walls Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter
War Memorials may appear to be very permanent elements of 19th and 20th century landscapes but they are often much more ephemeral than they first look. Commemorative monuments can be seen as attempts to halt time in rendering permanent significant moments in time, through their scale and choice of materials. However, one only has to investigate the most important war memorial in Britain, the Cenotaph, to realise the ephemeral nature of many of war commemorations can be integral to their design and subsequent uses.
The Cenotaph was initially designed as a temporary monument for use in the Victory Parade in July 1919, which the troops marched past to pay their respects. However, the publics’ response to the monument overwhelmed officials as thousands of wreaths were laid at its base. Consequently a permanent structure was built, being unveiled on Armistice Day 1920 by the King. Therefore Britain’s seemingly most permanent war memorial was only initially intended to be a temporary structure.
War memorials are also frequently moved, particularly those that are located in buildings, whose uses are changed. The same situation can apply to externally located memorials for a variety of reasons, such as changes in road layouts, accessibility, to be cleaned or subsumed within another monument.
The other ephemeral nature of public war commemoration is the laying of wreaths, which are as important if not more so, than the monuments themselves as commemorative material culture. Wreaths are laid on Armistice Day every year on most war memorials, but also on other significant anniversaries, and also after more contemporary events, such as (quite recently) in Madeline McCann’s home village of Rothley, Leicestershire, or after Princess Diana’s death and 11th September 2001. These ephemeral commemorative events are vital in understanding the intentions of these monuments as well as their continual renewal as commemorative foci over time. Both the potential ephemerality of memorials themselves and their designed ephemeral components have influenced the changing commemorative efficacy of the materiality, biographies and landscape contexts of war memorials.
Made to last – The permanent yet ephemeral nature of the air-raid shelter
Ross Wilson University of York
What constitutes the ephemeral or the permanent is the negotiation of space-time that occurs with an object. Material culture possesses the ability to communicate the social experience of the passing of time. We speak of objects in society which were there ‘before I was born’ or ‘after we were married,’ indicating their occupation of both distinct and multiple periods of time and space. What enables this quality is an object’s capacity to rework and impact upon the consciousness of individuals. This occurs through the way in which space and time are altered by and with objects. These issues will be explored in this paper in relation to objects which occupy and alter space-time. Especial attention will be paid to the air-raid shelters of the Second World War. These structures, which can now be found in allotment gardens across Britain, occupied a distinct period of history and formed a central place in the lives of many during the bombing raids on the country. After the war their location and function were re-imagined as they were put to use as tool sheds, compost bins and borders for allotment tenants. They remain monuments to the war on the home front as they remain useful to allotment gardeners; they simultaneously occupy several different areas of space-time. This paper demonstrates the way in which the permanent and the ephemeral are results rather than attributes, consequences of the way in which time and space are formed.
Hagia Sophia: plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change
Zeynep Aktüre, Assistant Professor, Izmir Institute of Technology Department of Architecture (Izmir, Turkey)
In a recent article, Geoff Bailey describes five categories of palimpsests to argue for the usefulness of the concept as a metaphor in archaeological explanation. One of those five categories corresponds to a succession of meanings acquired by a particular object throughout its archaeological life, as a result of different uses, contexts of use, and associations, some of which are identifiable by physical modifications, including its ongoing significance as an archaeological remain or a museum exhibit. The proposed paper will elaborate on this idea on the basis of a single example: Hagia Sophia.
The choice for this monument has been motivated by three coinciding events. In early September this year, I participated in a cultural heritage workshop that started with a visit to Hagia Sophia to decipher the narratives of the monument and figure out their addressees and the activities they perform at the site. The following day, the 10th International Istanbul Biennial opened with parallel activities including installations at the ‘Entre-Polis’, one of which was Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Construction Site’. The artist explains his work as an interpretation of the transition of Hagia Sophia from a church into a mosque with minimum destruction, through small interventions at certain critical points he calls ‘acupuncture points’, such as the four minarets added to four outside corners in such a way as to surpass the summit of its dome or the abandonment of its original horizontal axis through the addition of a mihrab that shifted the orientation towards Mecca. This conceptualisation accords well with Bailey’s (2007: 203) emphasis ‘on the interplay between erasure and inscription … and how that interplay creates complex layered and multi-temporal entities that disrupt conventional views of temporal sequence.’ Hagia Sophia would appear as one of those entities whose apparent permanence with respect to our lifetime renders for us bearable the fact that the whole world is, in fact, a huge construction site that is in constant flux occasionally through severe disruption, where material permanence is possible only through an interplay of successive episodes of destruction and construction that result in a cumulative palimpsest, another one of Bailey’s five categories.
Just four days after the opening of the Biennial, the governing Justice and Development Party’s group that holds a majority in the municipal council of Greater Istanbul agreed on discussing a mosque proposal for Taksim Square in the next council meeting. Taksim Square ‘is considered the heart of modern Istanbul, and the location of the Cumhuriyet Anıtı (Republic Monument), which was built in 1928 and commemorates the formation of the Turkish Republic.’ The construction of a mosque there may, therefore, be evaluated as an equivalent of the shift in the original axis of the patriarchal Hagia Sophia Church towards Mecca. Apparently a small intervention in the vast palimpsest that is Istanbul. However, reversing the French saying, the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.
The foundation of an association for the construction of a mosque in Taksim leads back to the early 1950s to which period date the first attempts, under the liberal Democrat Party government, to reverse some of the earlier revolutionary policies imposed by the strong single-party government of Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party. Hence began the on-going pressure from the addressees of one particular narrative on Hagia Sophia for a re-opening of the monument for Muslim prayer. In the year 1934, Atatürk had personally signed an order for the conversion of the monument into a museum. This would reveal the significance of Hagia Sophia as perhaps the most sensitive ‘acupuncture point’ in the palimpsest of the secular Republic of Turkey. Rather than Abdullah Gül’s still debated recent election to presidency, the opening of Hagia Sophia for Muslim prayer, especially when coupled with the construction of a mosque in Taksim, would be the emblem, at least for me and perhaps for some other people, of a profound disruption of secularism in Turkey.
This encourages me to take the risk of ‘overinterpretion’ in evaluating, as a conclusion, the still standing scaffolding, which was erected in 1992 for the on-going latest restoration campaign, as another small intervention whose apparently temporary but practically permanent presence gives at least temporary permanence to Hagia Sophia’s current museum function, preventing for the moment a re-consecration of an initially sacred monument that had earlier been de-consecrated after its re-consecration as a mosque.
1. Bailey, Geoff 2007. ‘Time perspectives, palimpsests and the archaeology of time’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26: 198-223.
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taksim_Square (accessed on September 27, 2007)
3. The reference here is to the concept of ‘overinterpretation’ introduced by Umberto Eco, chiefly in: Eco, Umberto with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, and Christine Brooke-Rose 1998. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, edited by Stefan Collini. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.