Introduction: Archaeology and the Media more

CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 11 1 INTRODUCTION Archaeology and the Media Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack Media’s Past ‘What hath God wrought?’ The first message transmitted by electric telegraph by Samuel Morse in the mid-nineteenth century whispered a sharpened edge of uncertainty that was soon to cut through the world, transforming it forever. Revolutions of media followed: prewar radio, postwar television, and the entry into a digital era in which we are now approaching. Archaeology has, like many other disciplines, featured prominently in each. ‘Television once bought me the best meal I have ever had on British Rail’, Glyn Daniel wrote having enjoyed first-class hospitality after being mistaken for Woodraw Wyatt on a train bound from Cambridge to York (Daniel 1986: 269). But he could just as easily have been recognised as Glyn Daniel, professor of archaeology and British Television Personality of the Year for 1955. Archaeology, it might be thought, had not just sung a note of celebrity, but a whole chorus. A deeper look into the first figures for television ownership in private domestic households in Britain for 1956 might put this into a different context. These estimate that the total number of homes with a television tallied to just 36.5 per cent. The CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 12 12 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack consumers of this relatively new media were predominantly well off, educated, middle-class citizens, and although the transmission of particular programmes became an event of communal viewing, their accessibility was limited. The perception that archaeology was reaching a mass public is in many respects correct, but an understanding of just how, who, or through which media is justifiably a little skewed. Even so, electronic media had begun its relationship with archaeology that is today of greater magnitude than ever before. But various chapters in this volume reveal how other forms of mass media – well established before TV – continued to be fascinated by new and amasing archaeological discoveries, as well as the conflicts, personalities, and imagination of a past that could be made less foreign with an expert touch. What is more uncertain is how archaeology should be equipped for the digital age of multiplicity in voice, choice and unparalleled speed, and scope of communication. Media, in its most basic form, is a means to mass communication, or an agency by which that communication is transmitted, transferred, or conveyed. ‘The media’ may be viewed as an entity in itself, a body of journalism with broadcast values that intersect markets of commerce, audience profiles, the boundaries of discursive space, and disciplinary expertise. It may also be understood as a process of translation or engagement embedded in the materiality of the media form. Different media convey different messages in varying ways, impacting on the context of interpretation as well as framing and reframing contexts for consumption. The circumstances that precipitated the amalgamation of the following chapters began their course in summer 2004 when, during the organisation of an interdisciplinary conference on misrepresentation in the media, we realized that many of the concerns stated to us about the transference of scholarly research to a wider audience through the media of various technological forms were congruent with many questions being raised by archaeologists. Few of these were in print, however, and the vast majority was being expressed in pubic debates and conference venues, while many more appeared in the everyday exchange of views and opinions. While the relationship between archaeology and the media has deep historical roots, it has largely been perceived as a direct or hierarchical passage of information from expert to audience, complexity of scholarly rigour to the excruciating simplicity of popular tone. It was our aim, therefore, to bring together contrasting perspectives on a diverse range of media and their impact on the way archaeological narratives are produced and presented, along with the successes, failures, ethics, and potentials of a relationship that CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 13 Introduction 13 is ultimately symbiotic. The ways in which these perspectives are conveyed are equally varied, representing a range of communicative and analytical styles. This volume is therefore not a manual on how to enter the media or a handbook for communicating with the media (for basic guides, see Danien 1997; Klesert 1998; Milanich 1999; Stoddart and Malone 2001). Two primary aspects of archaeology’s relationship with the media have been ‘frozen’ for a moment in this volume. First, engagement with the mass media has precluded a conglomeration of concerns regarding representation of archaeology and archaeologists, accuracy of information and reportage, the ‘dumbing-down’ of information, individual credibility within one’s discipline, and the legitimisation of archaeological narratives as recognised by a mass audience. While archaeology is enjoying more media presence than ever before, television is unlikely to be financially damaged if archaeology was to disappear from the screen. The enormous benefit of media interest is precariously balanced against ‘non-professional’ archaeological narratives and the proliferation of ‘other’ narratives. While multiplicity is a key aim of postprocessual methodologies and arguments, the openness of truth claims beyond disciplinary walls – expounded by the media – has become a cause for concern from numerous archaeological corners. While the authority of archaeological narratives may be under scrutiny, the political accountability of archaeology’s relationship to the media is also distinctly apparent (e.g., Coleman and Dysart 2005; Daggett 1992; Gero and Root 1994; Rao and Reddy 2001; Seymour 2004; Spriggs 1994). Ian Hodder (2003: 166; 1998) has described how at Çatalhöyük, for example, press conference days organized by the excavation sponsors attract fifty or more local, national, and international media representatives. This coverage has meant that Çatalhöyük has become a stage for politicians – both local and European – to gain their own media coverage with their own political intentions. These range from attempts to raise an awareness of the local importance of the site and region in the past and the present, the difficult question of the genetic ancestry of the local population to the ancient inhabitants, and the relevance and potential of the European Union for Turkey. ‘As a professional archaeologist and as a member of society,’ reminds Hodder (2000: 11), ‘one has to be responsive to the impact of one’s work’. A critical analysis of archaeology’s relationship to the media is an essential part of this pro-active awareness. Second, the materiality of the media bears an impact upon the way archaeological data is collected, compacted, interpreted, and disseminated. It also bears direct relevance to the means by which the mass CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 14 14 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack media engages with archaeology and vice-versa. Old media technologies are not simply succeeded by new and novel technologies. They blend and merge many aspects of the techniques required for their function as well as retaining, enhancing, or displacing technological components or designs and the issues that these critically raise for social analysis. Media impact on the world and life within. As Bolter and Grusin (1999: 15) state, ‘No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces’. How should archaeology even begin to reflect on its situation among such tumultuous and rapid transfers, let alone contemplate its next move for survival? Inevitably, television receives much of the emphases within this volume, and with good cause. It accounts for 40 per cent of all leisure time in Britain (Roberts 2004), and almost every survey that has been carried out on the public reception of archaeology has found television to rest comfortably as the most popular means to information (Merriman 1991; Paynton 2002; Pokotylo and Guppy 1999; Pokotylo and Mason 1991; Ramos and Duganne 2000; Statistiska Centralbyrån 2002). With important bodies such as the Archaeological Institute of America working closely with the Learning Channel (Hammond 1992), for example, television’s visual impact has been instrumental in presenting archaeology to an audience hungry for images of the past. The wide range of media technologies discussed in this volume signifies the diversity of research that is available from the archives and stores of broadcasters and museums. In some cases, media may be regarded as untapped resources either for communication or critical analysis. For example, one particular area for future consideration is radio – which, as mentioned in numerous chapters throughout this volume, has been used successfully at least since the BBC broadcasts from the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, by Cyril Fox and his staff in the 1930s, forties, and fifties, and John Irving’s The Archaeologist series in the 1950s. It is often perceived that because radio usually goes unnoticed, it therefore has a minor role to play in the routine of everyday life (cf. Pertti 1997). However, sound may be regarded as an ordering presence in a domestic routine, filling empty space and time with a familiar texture in which everyday life takes place (Tacchi 1999). Radio’s regular use maps memories of past experiences and moods within an encompassing soundscape. Although the experience of listening is difficult to put into words, radio sound may be opened to analysis as part of the material culture of the dwelling place or an agent in the formation of the social environment. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 15 Introduction 15 This introduction aims to open a critical analysis of archaeology’s relationship with the media by providing a background to the themes presented throughout this volume, situating these arguments within the broader context of media analysis and the related concerns raised within other disciplines. The chapters that follow will not only be of interest to archaeologists working with the media, but for wider debates regarding issues of representation, identity formation, public communication, and the political accountability of archaeological interpretation. The chapters that have been brought together for this volume can add not only to archaeology’s awareness of its location within a sociotechnic world and the effects that media may have upon the structure of archaeological practice, but may actively contribute in the broader discussions of the history and possibilities of an increasingly media-oriented society. We cannot escape media; it is all around us, permeating the practices through which our intelligibility of the world transpires. We cannot stop this mediation: it has no off switch; it lives and feeds upon our own necessity to communicate; we cannot escape media. Archaeology’s Reception of the Media The terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘archaeologists’ embody a myriad of images and meanings both inside and outside the discipline itself. It might seem strange, then, that concerns of misrepresentation often dominate the reaction to any mere mention of mass media forms, when in reality there is little common consensus both nationally and internationally as to what constitutes these terms in the first place. Whilst heterogeneity of opinion lies within the profession itself, a series of caricatures are repeatedly conjured up within media images of the archaeological profession. As Ascherson (2004: 145) notes, the foundations for many of these lie upon nineteenth century stereotypes, although various others have been added more recently by Hollywood cinema (Day 1997; Hall 2004). A variety of assumptions exist regarding archaeology and archaeologists (Holtorf 2005a; Merriman 1991). However, many of the most prevalent distinctions are historically those between the heroic masculine explorer (either male or female) and the absent-minded collector, antiquarian, or professor – or as Kidder (1949: xi) once wrote, ‘the hairy-chested and the hairy-chinned’. These caricatures are often combined with the portrayal of the archaeologist as the expert, adventurer, digger, discoverer, and treasure hunter (Ascher 1960; Bray 1981: 225–227). The most valued archaeologies appear as those that hold the key to mysteries CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 16 16 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack unsolved, unravelling the truth behind the oldest, grandest, or most splendid of ancient wonders. Reactions to these portrayals in commercial cinema are invariably divided between those who believe that there is ‘a legitimate cause for concern… [in that] these often erroneous and stereotyped images are a driving force in shaping popular perceptions of our discipline’ (Baxter 2002b: 18), and those who believe that ‘the profession should derive a measure of pleasure in seeing itself evolve in film, very much in command of the great, grand sweep of time and place, the setting for human cultural and biological evolution’ (Day 1997: 44). Placed somewhere between the two, Hall (2004: 171) believes that a fluctuation between images such as ‘the positive pursuit of hidden knowledge’ and ‘the negative rape of the sacred and indigenous’ is ‘healthy’, reinforcing ‘the reality of cinema as something made by diverse makers and audiences and reflecting wider political debates, not just what we might call the mechanics of the discipline’. The concern with how archaeology and archaeologists are portrayed in the media signifies the importance of representation (e.g., Felder et al. 2003; Gale 2002). With regard to broadcast television, Cornelius Holtorf’s chapter ‘An Archaeological Fashion Show’ identifies the way archaeologists present themselves through what they wear. It becomes clear that archaeologists may express a combination of their personality and ambitions, or their clothing may draw upon specific contexts of archaeological practice. Depending on what is being signified – the exotic, the (sexy) adventurer, the competent professional, the eccentric, the scholar – particular popular stereotypes may be emphasised to their own advantage, utilising the perception that you are what you wear. However, Holtorf warns, fashion styles may be ambiguous, open to unintended interpretation. Yet it is this ambiguity that may open discussion about what an appropriate image of archaeology and archaeologists might be, thus empowering archaeology to present its own image against the morass of traditional programming. It is arguable that many of these images have been challenged through innovative programming in the last 15 years. This has not meant that series such as Channel 4’s hugely successful Time Team (first broadcast in 1991) are closed to criticism (Fig. 1.1); in fact, the success of the series has instilled those two words ‘Time Team’ as a bye-word for British archaeology in the public consciousness, and has subsequently opened the programme to criticism as to what an appropriate media portrayal of archaeology and archaeologists should be. Cleere (2000: 91), for example, expressed his disappointment that the CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 17 Introduction 17 Figure 1.1 The Time Team crew film Francis Pryor at the excavation of a Neolithic causewayed enclosure at Northborough Fen, Cambridgeshire, in 2004 for an episode in the programme’s twelfth series, broadcast 30 January 2005 (Marcus Brittain). producers lacked, in his words, ‘confidence in the appeal of the subject’ by relying on a non-archaeologist as the link between specialist knowledge and narrative communication (see also Stoddart and Malone 2001: 461). Added to this, Cleere’s criticism of the programme’s format of a three-day excavation as ‘presenting a somewhat distorted and oversimplified picture of what archaeology is all about’ (2000: 91–92) is unlikely to be alone. The media portrayal of excavation and the ongoing process of interpretation are two of the main topics of disapproval within the discipline. While Fowler (1981: 63) acknowledged that these may be ‘flatly unphotogenic’, Hudson (1981: 119) – applauding the extent of archaeology’s media attention in previous decades – lamented that archaeologists had yet to present to the ‘great mass of the population in [Britain] the importance of a disciplined and logical approach to our heritage’. Little difference may be noted in today’s criticism of archaeological excavation and recording on television, reproducing an image of a practice that is ‘simple and speedy’ (Hills 2003: 207) or ‘untidy, rushed and incomplete’ (Schadla-Hall 2003: 56). As Finn (2001: 265) acknowledges, ‘[I]mpatience, necessary to the process of journalism, rubs against the pace of archaeological excavation’. Finding a successful format in broadcast media, one that suitably pulls in the audience ratings and satisfies the demand for appropriate CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 18 18 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack representation by the subjects of its content, are hard to come by (West 2004), but Time Team appears to have at least contented the former with viewing ratings in excess of 3.4 million, if not fully succeeding with the latter. Its ‘sister’ spin-off Extreme Archaeology was directed at a younger, fashionable viewing audience, attempting each week to enter a danger zone and investigate perilous sites often under potential threat. The reception to the all-bar-one female cast (a welcome blend in an otherwise male-dominated frontline role) was mixed despite a format otherwise not dissimilar to that of Time Team. One broadsheet commentator rather crudely described the programme’s intention as ‘a cross between Charlie’s Angels and Tomb Raider’ with a result nearer to ‘a joke’ (Hoggart 2004). The content of a broadcast format is a measure of its time and its audience and may be tightly bound with changing ethical certainties. In an episode of the BBC’s archaeological quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? in the 1950s, for example, a number of models characterising varying ethnic physical traits were paraded in front of the studio panel of distinguished academics, whose task was to name their country of origin. Despite the embarrassingly offensive comments by one member of the panel – a rather inebriated Margaret Mead – the episode was relatively acceptable over 50 years ago (see Daniel 1986: 253–254), yet the same format would be unthinkable today. The popularity of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? was due largely to the magical personalities of its contestants (Fig. 1.2), but its game show format in the 1950s and 1960s succeeded, as Mortimer Wheeler explained, because the viewer was ‘interested in watching your process of thought’ (quoted in Hawkes 1982: 299). Much more of the archaeological thought process is presented in Time Team, but as with many archaeological programmes, the product of that thought process is then left open to criticism. A lack of interpretation, and the mistrust of insight to the past beyond the material reality of the artefact (Holtorf 2003: 126), lies precariously balanced against the alternative that is an excess of interpretation. While the latter may grasp the heavy baggage of metanarrative, each could be tried and in many cases found guilty of lacking the wider context informed by previous research (Hills 2003: 208). When used, previous research may vary in quality and extent between media forms or individual reportage. The popularity of ‘treasure hunting’ and narratives of the past often labelled ‘fringe,’ ‘fantastic’, ‘cult,’ ‘alternative’, or ‘independent’ archaeologies are often framed within these formats considered to be media friendly (Cole 1980; Feder 1984; Fagan 2006; Williams 1991). This entails a proliferation of imagery, a lack of information on previous research, and high CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 19 Introduction 19 Figure 1.2 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, British Television Personality of the Year for 1954, as featured on the front cover of TV Mirror magazine, 29 January 1955, promoting his book Still Digging. Copyright © IPC Media, Ltd. entertainment value, all in contrast to the seriousness of scientific endeavour. ‘Alternative’ and serious archaeology subsequently have become perceived as two separate cultures competing for the same audience. It is no coincidence that the French word for static or interference in media transmission is parasite. Silence is a hindrance to the transmission of news, and archaeological dead air or gaps within the media market are regarded as an empty space to be filled, and a parasite to be removed before it is fed by ‘erroneous belief’ or irresponsible ‘treasure hunting’ (Eve and Harrold 1987; Gregory 1983). A different view has been that ‘alternative’ and serious archaeology can be merged together in a programming format that, by combining the interests of each party, would ultimately rationalise mistaken belief into responsible practice. However, with a title reminiscent of a 1950s BBC television series Buried Treasure, a recent attempt to merge these two ‘cultures’ within a BBC series entitled Hidden Treasure (first broadcast in CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 20 20 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack autumn 2003) proved less than successful in satisfying vexed opinion (see, for example, Fowler, this volume). Described as ‘absurdly irresponsible’ by Tony Robinson (2003), the celebrity presenter of Channel 4’s Time Team, the format of Hidden Treasure was straightforward enough: recent finds, usually via an independent metal detector enthusiast, are analysed, recorded, and conserved before the findspot is subjected to a small excavation comprised of modest evaluation trenches to recover any other associated artefacts and place the original find in a context of interpretation. However, the main criticism directed towards the programme was its keen emphasis on the artefacts’ present-day monetary value – declaring in the opening sequence that there is ‘serious money to be made’ – and the attraction that this inevitably had with regular viewing figures in the region of 2.6 million (Selkirk 2003: 390). These concerns are directed towards the effects that these messages may have against the hard work of finds liaison officers and others in the UK to present the ethic of the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Treasure Act, under which any finds of gold, silver, coin hoards, or prehistoric metalwork are reserved by the crown. Equal disdain has been noted against the British Museum’s cooperation with the programme as part of an outreach agenda and related exhibition, The Buried Treasure: Finding our Past1. As Merriman (1991) has shown through a series of revealing surveys, a particular level of heterogeneity of public opinion with regard to the usefulness and purpose of archaeology suggests that attitudes to alternative archaeological narratives and techniques are open for consumption through the media. Rather than equating this appeal with a dangerous opening in the ‘media market’, the response has been to suggest a complex alignment with multiple individual attractions to the past based on personal value and social background. Irwin and Wynn (1996) have revealed that the public understanding of science depends upon the social context in which knowledge was an issue. It has been suggested that this is an area in which archaeology lacks research and an understanding into the ‘psychology and culture of professional antiquity looters’ (Fagan 1996: 241) and, as Holtorf suggests, ‘the specific contexts from which, in each case, the fascination for a particular approach to archaeology and the resulting interpretations of the past emerge… [and the] social and cultural needs to which they respond’ (2005b: 549). As Cooter and Pumfrey (1994: 249–250) acknowledge, if a distinction exists between the ‘popular’ and the ‘learned’, it is ‘not because the latter is poorly understood, but because it is developed by its recipients for different purposes’. Without disregarding the ethical accountability of both CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 21 Introduction 21 archaeology and the media (see Fagan and Rose 2003), it is maybe within this space that a mutual benefit for different archaeologies may lie – not, as illustrated in the example above, by merging the two perceived ‘cultures’ together. Education or Entertainment? In its earliest days, public service broadcasting (PSB) began with the recognition that the new media of television and radio would have a significant and beneficial impact on society. In the pursuit of healthy citizenship, it was imaged that PSB would play a leading role by providing particular genres of impartial programming with a series of definable qualities that served particular audiences and moral cultural codes. This tradition of PSB began with the ethos that the expert knew more than the viewer and that detached from the reality of their content, programmes could observe social life at a much deeper level than the common person confined to its experience (Murdock 1999: 14). Today, PSB has been relaxed in wake of a competitive multichannel commercial market. According to Ofcom, the UK’s independent broadcast communications regulator, the purpose of public service broadcasters is to provide a wide range of subjects through high-quality programming with the view to inform, educate, and entertain the widest possible range of audiences (Ofcom 2003, 2005a, 2005b). As Tim Gardam of the BBC explains, this is no easy exercise in which ‘modern television’ relies on innovative formats to ‘find new ways to bring an area of experience to an audience’ (3WE 2000: 164). The line perceived between education and entertainment sometimes mistakenly draws a distinction between learning and leisure, or when one is either active or passive in engagement. Although the mass media is widely acknowledged as a potential educational medium for archaeology to offer informed views of the past, television in particular has accredited debate as to what an appropriate format for presentation should be in an accessible yet informative way. Norman (1983) acknowledged that for archaeology to have some educational basis, its presentation should be in an entertaining format. But there is no clear-cut set of rules as to what this format would be. ‘What is entertainment?’ ask Curran and Seaton (1988: 236). ‘All media industries compete to create it.’ The regular grumble against the presentation of ‘alternative’ archaeologies, the caricature of archaeologists and archaeology in general, or the ‘dumbing-down’ and exaggeration of serious archaeological issues is a familiar tactic when claiming legitimacy to matters of fact, but it as also precluded CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 22 22 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack by a mediatisation of that archaeological desire – the pursuit of a viewing public and audience ratings. In reality, the broadest range of credible programming will include both education and entertainment in a blend that is messily termed infotainment. But it is important to remember that the television or radio programme is not an end in itself. Hunt (2004: 94), for example, perceives history on television as a process in which history is only the beginning. The viewer is an engaged participant who is drawn into a subject as a result of his or her initial contact with a programme. This is a ‘learning journey’ in which the inspired viewer is gradually given the opportunity to ‘travel’ to a series website from which he or she will be guided to further reading (probably an accompanying book to the series), after which the viewer may then travel to a historic attraction, heritage centre, or museum. The final destination in this journey, according to Hunt, is higher education where the more specialized learning is nurtured. History on television is therefore not regarded by Hunt to be the same as academic research, and he maintains that they should not be compared with the same goals. ‘Television’s purpose’, Hunt (2004: 95) claims, ‘is to excite and inform a broad public, not push the boundaries of scholarship in the same way as a monograph or journal article’. In this view, television is the bridge between an increasingly specialized academic language and an accessible popular narrative. This is discussed further below, but if Hunt’s views are valid, then there is a pressing concern that archaeologists must consider. An important point noted by Hills (2003: 207) is that the increase in media interest in archaeology corresponds with an emerging threat to the place of archaeology in the English national curriculum and archaeology’s uncertain status within the university system. The number of people completing the journey to archaeological courses in higher education is also decreasing in the UK. According to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service statistics, a high of 3,543 admissions to undergraduate level in 2000 dropped to a low of 2,603 in 2003 – a decrease by almost 27 per cent – with only a marginal rise again in 2004. This is partly a reflection of the dramatic rise in the 1990s of university places in expectation of a boom in applications resulting from media interest, only for many of these new seats to remain empty resulting in a considerable over-supply of undergraduate places. Consequently, departments have been forced to recruit from a much wider social spectrum, which has been possible because of the subject’s accessibility through television, leading to some of the best widening participation figures in higher education (Mark Horton CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 23 Introduction 23 2004: personal communication). Reasons for this decline in admissions are likely to be multi-faceted. One likely cause is reflected in a recent survey of graduate’s starting salaries from British universities2. Archaeology ranked last out of 61 different subjects. This is matched with overall low profit margins and low rates of pay (Aitchison 1999: 30–49; Aitchison and Edwards 2003: 38–52), a condition mirrored in the United States (Wilson 2001: 37–38). While the media presentation of the reality of archaeological practice is favourable in principle, should we really be asking where the distortion truly lies? Trust and Mistrust of the Media ‘Unchecked fantasy about the past,’ Fowler wrote in the early 1990s, ‘splurges forth daily without blush’ (1992: 36), yet accuracy is regarded as one of five key journalistic values. The susceptibility to inaccuracy or blatant misrepresentation remains a common matter of anxiety and mistrust towards media journalism. This is a concern that archaeology shares with many other disciplines (e.g., McCleneghan 1994; Moore and Singletary 1985; O’Keefe 1970; Tankard and Ryan 1974). But the prevalence of inaccuracy is debatable. Recent analysis of television reports of the Rwandan refugee crisis of 1994 and the conflict in Angola, for example, concluded that a significant degree of the information was misleading and sometimes inaccurate, presented as facts with little social or political explanation and context, and that gaps in coverage were filled in with images based on neocolonial beliefs. Different media presented parts of the larger picture, reporting broken narratives and a piecemeal view of reality (Philo 2002: 175). Elsewhere, a survey for the coverage of science news in reporting found that almost 60 per cent of the scientists interviewed felt that it was generally accurate (Tichenor et al. 1970), although another survey reported that only 29 per cent of the stories reviewed were free of errors (Pulford 1976). Inaccuracy may be due to journalists not taking into account the expertise of their source, opting instead for individuals less qualified for comment on a particular subject (Dunwoody and Ryan 1987). Even for stories where it might appear more appropriate to consult multiple sources, ‘a sizeable proportion of journalists may use very few’ (Stocking 1999: 25). Most archaeologists who have had contact with journalists will have a tale to recount of an occasion of inaccurate reportage to varying degrees. But how prevalent are the worst cases? A survey of Cultural Resource Management (CRM) reports in New York State newspapers published between 1995 and 2000 found that over 10 per CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 24 24 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack cent of the articles contained overt inaccuracies (Kuhn 2002). This is marginally higher than other survey results of scientific accuracy (e.g., Borman 1978), but is still marginal in the broader context of archaeological communication. Why then might mistrust in the media still remain? Mistrust of the media has historical bases in 1930s sceptical visions of technological futures, particularly in reactions from the so-called Frankfurt School to early visions in the opening decades that drew upon the Enlightenment promise that utopia would be realized through reason. In 1932, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World anticipated a future of social and biological conditioning centres run by an efficient totalitarian state of docile human clones blissful in their servitude to an overbearing political executive. ‘To make them love it,’ Huxley wrote in the foreword to the 1946 edition (reprinted in 1994), ‘is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and school-teachers’. An iron curtain silencing the truth had been wedged between knowledge and reality. This would be echoed later in the century in the simulacra of Baudrillard (1988) in which individuals, duped by the mass media, would choose spectacle over reality. While Huxley prophesised, Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) similarly claimed that contemporary capitalist society would divert the route of reason away from utopia into a route towards chaos. Instead of enriching human life towards emancipated consciousness, they saw a progress of knowledge that had amounted to a reason of technical expertise, instrumental in the violent domination of nature, the subjugation of people equated with ‘the primitive’, and the fortification of powerful and dominating systems of belief. Replacing the term ‘mass communication’ with ‘culture industry’, they argued that culture had become industrialised and commoditised, and that the reproductive capabilities of technological media had transformed the free human spirit – embodied within the creative possibilities of art – into an alienated subject obedient only to its dominant political master. Although television was still in its relative infancy, Adorno (2005), writing in 1951, could see the immediacy of its future triumph while lamenting the concealed realities of the Second World War in the manipulation of public opinion through ‘information, propaganda, commentary, the film crews in the leading tanks and the heroic death of war reporters’. He feared for the future of media when already ‘the identity of film interests’ lay side by side with ‘weapons interests’. By the 1980s, Marxist analyses demonstrated with clear empirical data the tensions between political ideologies and the media’s potential CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 25 Introduction 25 as an ordering mechanism in the construction and maintenance of citizenship. In a classic example, Curran and Seaton (1988: 5–113) described how a radical press in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century was fervently consumed by a working-class audience. Standing independent from the vagaries of commercial or political pressure, vital issues of social interest were addressed, challenging not only the managers of policy and political trust, but also the editors of mainstream journalism for fuelling rather than questioning the policies that had led to a redundant and impoverished culture. Curran and Seaton revealed that in order to suppress anti-government fervour, Parliament attempted to restrict the readership of the press to the affluent, more ‘respectable’ levels of society by raising stamp duties and introducing press taxes. Moves were then set in motion to transfer ownership of the presses to ‘responsible’ entrepreneurial ‘reformers’ who cared more about profit and self-gain than they did about free speech. The result was that industrial commercialisation flourished once the press taxes had been repealed, enabling cheap popular newspapers supported with commercial advertisements to out-circulate the radical press, emphasising views that would sustain subservient citizenship and social order. In recent years, exposé journalism has continued to attract a popular following revealing the bowdlerisation of political ‘spin’, corporate agendas, and military blunders among others. With accessible and persuasive writing, Noam Chomsky, for instance, has infiltrated the common consensus of the educated politically aware on the media portrayal of current affairs. His criticism of the American mass media presupposes that since media productions are now owned by large corporations, they work within the constraints of state and private power and under the same pressures of competition and profit as other corporations (Herman and Chomsky 1988). This, according to Herman and Chomsky, is to the detriment of the quality and freedom of reporting, particularly since the main source of news is the government – thus necessitating a favourable relationship with its source and by implication a favourable, perhaps less accurate, report of political issues. Furthermore, Chomsky (1989) has argued that citizen participation in political expression may lead to an ‘excess of democracy’ that threatens the authority of the elected government, hence necessitating a ‘necessary illusion’ of a democratically free and inclusive society propagated by the media that in turn may be regulated and restrained by the powers that be. Cynicism towards the media in the last two decades has continued to be framed with scepticism towards political institutions in general. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 26 26 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack In the UK, the turnout of the electorate for the general election fell from 72 per cent in 1972 to 59 per cent in 2001 (MORI 2001). In the United States, more people voted for the final of the American Idol singing contest than in the presidential election. At the same time, surveys have indicated that only one-third of Americans trust the accuracy of news broadcasts (Pew Research Centre 2002). One explanation for increasing scepticism of media news reporting is that the reportage of political issues through a cynical media lens inverts that cynicism back to the bearer of information (Cappella and Jamieson 1996). With these external influences, archaeological scepticism lies partly within the degree of journalist accuracy, but also in the ongoing reiteration of the representations that have already been outlined, fuelled by fiction, cinema, and caricature. But if these perceptions are currently being questioned and reframed, then a space is also being opened in which the political accountability of the media to archaeology can also be re-addressed. In the United States, for example, many CRM schemes are supported by both state and federal taxpayer money and projects can have an enormous impact on local communities. Through local and national press, public opinion may have a significant influence on the government stance in a particular issue (it is, after all, public favour that wins votes), and these decisions quickly flow in the direction of agency decision makers (Kuhn 2002). In this context, accurate press coverage is deeply relevant for the long-term survival of thorough archaeological investigation. Translating Archaeological Narratives Archaeology’s use of the media for securing archaeological futures is by no means new. Mortimer Wheeler found in the 1920s that media interest could be fostered as an aid in securing donations and additional funds for excavation. Why then has such little attention recently been paid to the relationship with the media? Is mistrust to blame? This is a difficult question, particularly in light of Karol Kulik’s ‘A Short History of Archaeological Communication’. Kulik traces a long and mutually beneficial relationship between archaeology and various forms of contemporary media, noting the earliest mass communication of archaeological issues at least as far back as the 1840s. A flourish of media interest between the 1920s and the 1950s coincided with the developing technologies of electric media. However, Kulik identifies the period between the 1960s and 1980s in CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 27 Introduction 27 Britain as a ‘schizophrenic time’, during which a split between a ‘digging’ and a ‘thinking’ profession overlaps with an ambivalent period of archaeological communication despite a public and mass media still hungry for the past. The media subsequently became attached precariously to the ‘digging’ side of the profession, while the thinkers slipped into hibernation from public view. Kulik explores why, despite such a varied and historically symbiotic relationship, there has been ‘amnesia’ about the relevance of archaeological communication and the changing forms that this has developed through time. The era of changing attitudes to media identified by Kulik coincided with an era of significant transition in archaeological thinking – what Clarke (1973) called the ‘loss of innocence’. This characterised one of a series of archaeological crises of interpretation, and in many ways paved the epistemological way for the so-called post-processual archaeology, chewing the heart out of disciplinary foundations and then spitting them back out, fragment by fragment. During the 1980s and early 1990s, post-structuralism had become a burgeoning theoretical pursuit for archaeological ‘readings’ of material remains. This was a violent deconstruction process of the traditional (or modernist) foundations of archaeological thinking, looking to break away from author-centred interpretation and instead explore the potentials of a multiplicity of interpretation, reflexivity, and intertextuality. Eventually, the effects of these transformations would be felt in almost all aspects of archaeological thinking. However, the principles that were embodied within the media offered little for the revisions of post-processual archaeology. Perceptions were that the mass media remained locked within in an age of positivist certitude. Why might this be? The distinct presence of archaeology in the media between the 1920s and the 1960s coincided with the emergence of two new information technologies: prewar radio, and postwar television. As an analogue media, the television – like the press – produced a linear sequential output of information, passed from one recipient to the next. This was a hierarchical exchange of information from expert to witness, scientist to layperson, from a centralized source akin to the laboratory. In this positivist sequence, the press may have been likened to an empowered individual body that was ahistorical, autonomous, and rational, lacking context through a perceived objectivity (Christians et al. 1993: 27). Similarly, analogue television displayed what Gripsrud (1999: 35) describes as an orderly barrage of ‘free-floating signifiers and addictive entertainment that eludes serious contemplation’. This was clearly the antithesis of archaeological CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 28 28 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack post-structural theories of the text. Instead, the media was better suited to a passing era in which archaeologists and journalists were of the same breed: neutral observers and the collectors of value-free empirical data. This notion of diegesis left little room for multiplicity or reflexivity. In a very broad sense, this fostered scepticism and mistrust of a mass media that was thought to be dualist, balancing singular narratives of truth and falsehood, right and wrong. It is no mere coincidence that the resurgence of media presence by the early 1990s corresponded with an increasing accessibility and speed of digital technologies. ‘It was inevitable,’ writes Julian Richards (2004: 48), archaeologist presenter of Channel 4’s Meet the Ancestors, ‘that the relationship between archaeology and broadcast media would change’. In the final section of this chapter, the parallel associations between globalised digital technologies and archaeological goals are discussed in more detail, but what is pertinent here is to acknowledge that the nonlinear, hyper-mediated digital information flows of this new technology correspond with the multi-vocal objectives of contemporary archaeology. Storytelling the Past Today, through a series of external and internal pressures, it has become accepted that an integral part of archaeological management is that people should benefit from archaeological research in some way. One of the difficulties has been communicating the complex results of the theory building that is identified with post-processual narratives of the past. Added to the jargon bursting of much archaeological analysis, the often complicated language of theory and science is ill equipped for the direct transfer of information to a consuming public. Again, these are issues that have been voiced within the wider academic field. Since the 1960s, creative styles of writing that are fluent and comprehensible have been something that science editors have increasingly preferred to publish (Hollander 1987; Ramsey 1986). Yet it is still necessary for Wynne to restate that scientists ‘need to communicate more clearly and entertainingly in lay terms’ (1992: 38). This is just one of the issues that Brian Fagan and Francis Pryor discuss in this volume, maintaining their dissatisfaction that increasing specialization and a ‘publish or perish’ mentality has little time for generalized narratives in a language that is accessible to lay audiences. Holtorf (2005b: 547) even notes a disciplinary air of resentment towards the storytelling of ‘alternative’ archaeologists, whose capacity for popular narrative has proved to be successful for connecting to CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 29 Introduction 29 mass audiences. But popular writing, Hills (1997: 222) has suggested, is thought to be simplistic in both content and practice – a natural ability that, unlike academic authorship, does not necessitate training or rigour. In reality, the most successful and receptive forms of mass communication writing are from a craft that has been moulded, rehearsed, and refined. However, ‘contrary to received opinion,’ Pryor (1996) has retorted elsewhere, ‘it is beyond (and not beneath) the training and perhaps even the ability of many archaeologists.’ Few university courses include creative ‘popular’ writing as a taught requirement, yet at least one consensus states that, ‘[t]he best archaeologists are invariably the most skilful storytellers’ (Young 2002: 241), while another acknowledges storytelling as a form of archaeological analysis (Gibb 2000). Writing the scientific and the poetic may not be that far removed from each other. As Locke (1992: 203) cogently argues, ‘Life itself is inaccessible, incomprehensible, meaningless, but the metaphors of science and the metonymies of literature, of all art, help to make it accessible, comprehensible, meaningful.’ Archaeology has been drawn upon as both metaphor and inspiration in the fictional and poetic literary traditions (e.g., Evans 1989; Finn 2004a; Garcia i Quera 2004; Girdwood 1984; Korte 2000; Russell 2002a, 2002b). The idea of the past and archaeological remains have been sources of imagination in creative writing for centuries, and friendships between the men and women of letters and archaeological pioneers have inspired some of the most popular classic works. The current fashions of popular culture are thus that an extensive readership exists for works that combine an in-depth archaeological setting with a fluid storyline – ‘a very good example,’ writes Evans (1983: 70) regarding fictional works, ‘of archaeology serving the present.’ These themes are amalgamated together in Christine Finn’s chapter ‘Darkness Disseminated’, in which she explores the emotive sensation that quietly weeps from the photographic images of P.V.Glob’s 1965 classic text The Bog People. This insight retraces the interweaving connections between journalist reports, editors’ use of Lennet Larsen’s photographs, a group of English schoolgirls’ inspiration and innocent fascination, audiences, artists, translators, and writers, all of which conceal a collective influence in the merger of science and wonder in Glob’s work. But the interplay of Heaney/Larsen/Glob (poet/artist/archaeologist) ultimately results in a powerful form of storytelling. Finn recalls the immediate captivation awakened by her first experience of the book and her surprise that ‘no longer part of common parlance’, the work had become omitted from ‘popular cultural currency’. However, Finn’s chapter describes the recent stirring CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 30 30 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack of Larsen’s photographs and Glob’s work from the dormancy of memory. Never tired of expression, it is a healthy reminder that good storytelling – unlike many academic texts – is a curious phenomenon that never dies. Communication as a Continuum Clearly, this form of authorship reaches an audience well beyond most academic textbooks. Its currency lies in the responsiveness of the audience. An alert, intrigued, and returning audience is invaluable. As novelist Jean Auel asserts, ‘Romance the public. They’ll love you for it’ (1991: 128). However, the translation of academic texts by the media for a mass audience is more often berated either for dumbing-down intricate and detailed research, or for a shortage of accurate dissemination. In many ways, this perceives two realms of authorship that work on different levels of authority completely separated from one another. In one corner is academia and science, in the other popularisation and non-science, competing against one another for overall recognition by the public mass and legitimacy to claims of ‘matters of fact’. In this conflict of narratives, the flow of information is one way, from the top of ‘high’ culture to the bottom of ‘low’ culture: academic to popular (Hilgartner 1990). The popular is then regarded as a sacrifice of authority and scholarship, and hence irrelevant to its forward progress. Yet while various media may rightly be criticised for sensationalism or misinformation in specific cases, mistrust in the filtering process of translation for the public consumption of archaeology has been less critically discussed. The reality may in fact be a complex circularity of recursive ideas rather than a simple top-down linear passage of information. The public communication of archaeology requires the art of storytelling, but the formal language of academic writing also tells a type of story, one that serves professional needs within the archaeological community. By no means homogenous, these have a purpose in addition to the communication of ideas: they are the product of research and a measure of individual or team diligence and aptitude; they ‘define communities and hierarchies in their author bylines and citations’; and they are an author’s claim for their small place in archaeological history (Gregory and Miller 1998: 115). This is a multi-layered form of storytelling in a particular language grounded in context and tradition. The surface layer is the transmission of the idea. But when that idea is being transmitted as a story to the public, it is not necessarily a different kind of story to the one presented in the professional CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 31 Introduction 31 text, where it differs is the degree to which that story is told. The way a story is told will have a significant impact on the outcome that is the production of knowledge (Curtis 1994). Popularised knowledge therefore actively filters back into scholarly research, feeding the process of knowledge production (Whitley 1985). There is an extensive body of literature on the communication and public understanding of science that has tried to come to terms with this issue (see, for example, Weigold 2001). A classic argument by Cloître and Shinn (1985) is a useful introduction to the applicability of these works to an archaeological context. Rather than defining a stern distinction between narratives of science and narratives of popularisation, they identify four types of scientific text placed along a flowing continuum (Fig. 1.3) ● ● ● ● Intraspecialist – typified by the specialised academic publication with empirical data, supporting expert theory, and references to other key works. Interspecialist – including those texts and presented papers that bridge between related academic specialisms. Pedagogical – or the textbook stage of communication, in which the completed theory and paradigm is presented and set within a historical perspective of disciplinary progression. Popular – in which characteristic images and analogical metaphors are presented in the popular press and broadcast documentary. These gradual differences in the styles and contexts of communication and reception emerge along a continuum as the transmission of ideas flows between the intermediate stages of communication. Moving along an continuum of archaeological communication, one might expect to see decreasing reference to the methodologies for the collection of data, or detailed discussion such as empirical phenomena (statistics, spatial analyses, etc.) and typological distinctions, or soil composition and matrixes, but increasing reference to the historical significance of the work in comparison to other work. Also, devices such as graphs, tables, and detailed plans give way to montages, cutaway diagrams or plans, and a reliance on metaphor and icons. Similarly, specific or quantitative arguments shift to broad and qualitative narratives. The flow of information along the stages of the continuum is not necessarily smooth or without difficulty. Cloître and Shinn (1985) describe how a series of barriers may hinder this flow in a process that they describe as ‘crystallisation’. Here some theories or detailed CLACK_CH_01.qxd 32 Intraspecialistic stage 5/18/2007 Pedagogical stage 12:38 PM Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack Popular stage Page 32 Interspecialistic stage Figure 1.3 Science communication as a continuum (after Bucchi 1998: 10). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 33 Introduction 33 aspects of knowledge may be less suited than others for the media, while some may not be suitable at all. In other cases, the specific constraints of a medium’s format may mean that information may be suited to one medium over another (radio rather than the press or TV). The continuum of Cloître and Shinn exposes the recursive nature of popularisation back into the scholarly field, but through a way in which the movement of knowledge production stops along the continuum at the point of popularisation. This is a model that has largely been implicit within archaeological conceptions of media communication. The production of knowledge at the level of the specialist is presumed to be distanced from popularisation. Popularised knowledge therefore becomes regarded as a justification of archaeological practice in which, as Cloître and Shinn (1985: 47) suggest, it is ‘more crucial to know that something has occurred than to know the minutiae of the occurrence itself’. By distancing the production of knowledge from the sphere of popularisation, archaeological practice is thought to be legitimised as certain and authoritative (Bucchi 1998: 11). It is no wonder, then, that parody and guffawing sometimes accompany television programes such as Time Team when inflated details in reconstructions arise from the minutiae of data with partial or no explanation of archaeological inference. But to what degree is this a problem? Could this in fact be regarded as an opportunity for creative dialogue in a space in which some ideas may skip a stage of the continuum altogether in a process that Cloître and Shinn (1985) call ‘deviation’? Indeed, it is here that Massimiano Bucchi (1998) has argued for a positive tension between academia and the media, breaking from the traditional top-down hierarchy of knowledge transferal by relocating it within a site of plurality rather than a ‘celebratory discourse’. The implications of these arguments for communication as a continuum open various avenues of discussion from which to approach archaeology’s relationship with the media. First, this is a means through which the Popperian demarcation problems between what constitutes a science and non-science are avoided. Second, the boundaries between disciplinary fields are allocated fluidity for intersection between multiple considerations and approaches to specific issues. Third, the recursive nature of archaeological communication is open for both analysis and consumption. The production of knowledge can be seen to begin not just at the top level of a hierarchy of communicative stages, but could be conceived at any of the stages through which numerous forms of knowledge are transferred at any given time. Clearly, this is related closely to the social studies of scientific CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 34 34 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack knowledge in which, for example, the early works of Bruno Latour (1987) and Joseph Rouse (1987) demonstrated how academic knowledge is produced within a network of external and internal power relations, multiple competing dialogues of narrative, and the accountability of expert knowledge systems to historically situated sociopolitical contexts. The media seeps between the levels of the continuum, not as a facilitator of icons of truth between two opposite realms separate from the practice of knowledge construction, but as a part of the practice of archaeology itself. Has the Media Changed Archaeology? Archaeology’s relationship with the mass media remains contentious. However, apprehension is not confined to archaeology. Unease is reflected throughout the wider academia field. Describing the tension between the media and academia in general, Gripsrud (1999) and Peters (1995) suggest that different forms of cultural production are being shaped within each. The journalist is located in a media world constrained by a time and space of sharp deadlines and frames for presentation that are alien to academia. Academic publications, by comparison, are often the result of a lengthy research project and are written for a relatively small and closed group of specialists. Both, however, inhabit a common ground with a professional ethos historically rooted in the Enlightenment, where through ‘critical examination of available information’, the forms of knowledge about the world in which we are placed could be distributed with ‘some responsibility for the nature of public discourse’ (Gripsrud 1999: 39–40). Journalism and academia are brought together in a complex endeavour in which both strive to maintain legitimation and recognition within their own professional field, as well as the field adjudged by the anonymous ‘mass’ public. At present, this is a field in which the mediation of information to the public is more suited to the everyday practice of the journalist rather than the academic. This may necessitate a particular level of media literacy on behalf of the academy in order to successfully report on a particular relevant issue. As Marion Benz and Anna Katrien Liedmeir demonstrate in their chapter ‘Archaeology and the German Press’, knowing when or how information should be exposed to journalists is no easy matter, and timing is key as to whether or not an archaeological story may take precedence over other news when media interest is searching for a theme most relevant to a specific social context. They note that variations in CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 35 Introduction 35 editorial interest may result in competing styles and frames for presenting the news to which they are held responsible, and that the desired knowledge of a readership may be closely aligned with the amount of space that will be allocated for certain types of news. Local news reports stress different aspects of a story to that of the national news, and may be the first stage in the dissemination of news between sources that rapidly expands reportage and readership. The novelty of Benz and Liedmeir’s work lies in their perspective on ‘the press’ with the view to understanding the dynamics of the decisionmaking processes from the perspective of news marketability. Knowing where, how, and when to publish a press release can be the difference between a successful report and one that goes unnoticed. The field in which the media and academia make contact may be tipped in favour of the former not just as a result of media literacy. As Gripsrud (1999) outlines, the mediatisation of scholarly information and the strive for a heterogeneity of popular recognition – as opposed to homogenous recognition within one’s disciplinary field of expertise – may even be deemed academically damaging. There could be many reasons for this, but one in particular is what Gregory and Miller (1998: 108) describe as ‘the traditional rules of science popularization’. This entails the professional taboo of disseminating information about data prior to its publication in academic journals. A recent example of this conflicting interest in Australia is recounted by Colley (2002: 154–161), when in 1996 an article was submitted to Antiquity journal in Cambridge claiming that thermoluminescence dating of flaked-stone artefacts from the Jinmium rock shelter in the Northern Territory could establish a human presence in Australia as far back as 116,000 BP, doubling all previously authenticated dates. The implications of new claims for human evolution are significant for origin theses on a global scale, and there was an inevitable scientific debate thrown between articles in various peer-reviewed publications. New dates offered for indigenous settlement in Australia have additional political sensitivity with the interest of descendent communities, requiring the greatest of care to ensure media accuracy when reporting new information. Having agreed to pass the story to a journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Jinmium findings were to be made public simultaneously with the journal publications. However, for reasons that remain unclear, the news broke several weeks early, quickly spreading to media outlets worldwide. What followed were a series of articles published in the Australian national newspaper rebuking the dates and criticising the release of the story to a single newspaper, while also criticising the political stance (in this case CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 36 36 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack pro-Indigenous) that the Herald had adopted. ‘The Jinmium researchers’, Colley concludes, ‘fell foul of rivalry between two Australian newspapers owned by competing media interests’. While the consequences of a media profile may be perceived by some parties as a hindrance to the progression of one’s own career, another perspective views the entirety of contemporary academia as a practice completely transformed by the media. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1998), journalistic values and commercial criteria – including a dependence on viewing figures as a judgement of success and quality – have infiltrated the academic field and transformed the nature and standard of scholarly output. This is illustrated by the replacement of long-term research projects with modest or uncertain outcomes by projects designed with the intent of rapid social recognition, necessitating short-term production and a clearer result in sight. Even more alarming for Bourdieu is that traditional assets of scholarly value become replaced by the cogs of the publicity machine, not just through public monitoring systems such as the Research Assessment Exercises or University League Tables in the press, but the whole principle of research in general. These concerns have been echoed throughout archaeology particularly where inappropriate ethical practice or the transgression of professional values have been explained by the desire for recognition within the media. A recent example is the Shinichi scandal in Japan in which the exposure of forged discoveries, redolent of the Piltdown and Moulin-Quignon experiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contested the confidence in Japanese prehistoric chronology. The scene centred upon Japanese archaeologist Fujimura Shinichi, whose uncanny ability to find rare Palaeolithic artefacts in the unlikeliest of locations had raised doubts about their authenticity. Nicknamed “God’s Hands”, Shinichi’s finds had pushed back the earliest presence of humans in Japan by almost 600,000 years. But on 5 November 2000, after Shinichi announced his latest discovery, the daily newspaper Mainichi Shimbun printed a series of stills from a video recorded by journalists the previous night that captured Shinichi planting the artefacts. With the revelation in headline print, Shinichi’s reputation was destroyed and the authenticity of 180 prehistoric sites came into question. An article in the British journal Science entitled ‘Japanese Fraud Highlights Media-Driven Research Ethic’ blamed the infiltration of Japanese media in archaeology for the failure to spot the fakes sooner (Normile 2001). It stated that the Shinichi case exposed ‘a sloppy side of Japanese archaeology in which press conferences take precedence over publication’ (2001: 34) and CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 37 Introduction 37 that impressive discoveries and press conferences are deemed more important than accurate scientific debate about the respective claims. The Shinichi case is an extreme example and it is as yet unclear as to the degree with which the media’s relationship with Japanese archaeology may be held accountable for an individual’s duplicity. Three logics of blame have been cited in the Schinichi scandal that indicate a polarity of opinion. ● ● ● The media was not directly accountable. Academic pressure to produce spectacular results was to blame (Normile 2001). The increasing mediatisation of the broader archaeological field is guilty for the rise of fakes in general, of which Shinichi is but a part (Bahn, cited in Stoddart and Malone 2001). Japanese nationalism turns a blind eye to possible false claims because of its dedication to document the primacy of the Japanese race (French 2000). However, other suggestions as to the media’s influence upon the course of research within Japanese archaeology would indicate that an answer is far from simple. Within the climate of postwar Japan, a new vision of Japanese identity sought to rebuild from a prewar nationalist ideology based on emperor worship (Fawcett 1995). Highprofile media attention began in the early 1970s to the mixed reaction of archaeologists, who sensed that political meddling was misrepresenting their interpretations in order to reinforce new pride in the past and present image of Japanese nationhood (1995: 243). Habu and Fawcett (1999) critique the use of archaeological evidence for substantiating an ethnic homogeneity between past and present Japanese worlds in which the Yayoi period (ca. 300 BC–AD 300) had been a model for society and the main object of media focus. They describe a case in 1994 when new discoveries from an excavation at Sannai Maruyama – a site of the Jomon period (ca. 10,000–300 BC) – drew considerable media attention, and with the view to preserve the site, educational tours were encouraged attracting thousands of visitors. As a result, thousands of letters written to local newspapers lobbying for government funding to save Sannai Maruyama produced the desired result. Newspaper articles, television specials, lectures, and symposia about the site resulted in its designation as a National Historic Site to which by 1997 more than one million people had visited. In a transformation of values, the Jomon period has become a significant aspect of Japanese identity, regarded as the origin of many aspects of Japanese culture. This wave of thinking in the public CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 38 38 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack consciousness was not new to scholars who had long engaged in the appreciation of the specificity of the Jomon period to modern Japanese identity. Previously, the main barrier for the communication of such ideas was an ‘image of the Jomon people as impoverished and primitive nomads [that had] been perpetuated by the media’. With the relinquishing of such an idea by the mass media came new opportunities for the funding and exploration of a period that already had a presence in the academic consciousness, but on a scale that without popular support could never have been realised. Each of the two cases outlined above contain an archaeologist’s or archaeological use of the media to forward a programme of research. One, of course, is distinctly negative; the other, though still open to critique, is more positive in contrast. In any event, they each represent (a) skilful steerage of media coverage to their advantage, and (b) the infiltration of the media into archaeological discourse. The first of these, as Kulik explains in this volume, has been prevalent throughout archaeological history at least since the 1870s. The potential of, for example, future funding through media coverage is ever anticipated with welcoming delight. The second point, however, is more often regarded with an uneasy anxiety or pessimism. It would be unsurprising if there were not discomfort in the realisation that the course of academic scrutiny has been influenced in some way by media interest. But new and significant discoveries can inevitably lead to a lifetime’s work, and the media, after all, is driven by revelation. There are positive and negative sides to this impact on the discipline, two sides that are inherently ethical in nature. In light of this, the media’s impact on the blossoming of archaeological research on battlefields of the First World War is the subject of Jon Price’s chapter ‘Great War, Great Story’. This contribution follows personal experiences on the Western Front of France in a modern-day attrition of belief that has transformed a negative media perception of the disturbance of twentieth century unmarked war graves into a positive statement of mutual gain. Innumerable bereaved families received letters or telegrams with the words ‘Regret – No Trace’, receiving a year later by a Red Cross decree the chilling confirmation ‘presumed dead’. In an anonymous poem ‘To My Unknown Warrior’, written in 1920, the painful thought of an unmarked grave has been powerfully articulated. The most terrible words in all writing used to be ‘There they crucified Him’, But there is a sadder sentence now – ‘I know not where they laid Him’…Surely ‘missing’ is the cruellest word in the language. (quoted in Bourke 1995: 41). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 39 Introduction 39 It should bear little surprise that the empathy of events still moist in recent memory should attract a high level of public interest. Price elucidates how this media and public interest awakened conflicts between professional and amateur as to who should be excavating this past. His account demonstrates how the media, in the right context, is both willing and wanting to finance projects that in turn can offer a visual journey with a strong story, particularly one that bears direct relevance to present-day memories. As Price’s case unfolds it becomes clear that the support of the media in Great War archaeology also stimulated a course of academic interest and pursuit that was largely absent before. A Visual Archaeology Decline of Television Anthropology Throughout this introduction, we have maintained that archaeology is among a range of disciplines that share many distinct concerns regarding public communication and their location within a world informed through the mass media. Arguably, one of the most significant similarities with archaeology’s fluctuating presence and role within the media is the changing reception of anthropology within popular culture. Self-reflective critical analysis of anthropology’s relationship with the media is far more established than that of archaeology, principally through the lens of what has been called ‘visual anthropology’. Three core perspectives on the remit of visual anthropology have emerged. The first concentrates on the production of ethnographic film and its application in pedagogical communication. The second is the study of pictorial media, in particular the historical and indigenous visual record (Scherer 1990). The third addresses visual communication in its widest sense and encompasses all forms of visual culture in the human world, ranging from gesture, ritual, and performance to architecture, artefact, and landscape (Banks and Morphy 1997). For two decades from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, ethnographic film had a distinctly high profile on British television. It is estimated that over 100 hour-long television documentaries were made during this period that were based directly on the fieldwork of consulting anthropologists (Henley 2005). Exploring a range of styles and formats, the most notable programme during this period was Disappearing World produced by Granada Television. Broadcast from 1970 with peak-time transmission, its success was recognised by a British Academy for Film and Television Arts award in 1974, and it was voted by the public as the best commercial television series of the year in 1978 (Henley 1985: 9). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 40 40 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack After the early 1990s, funding for ethnographic film dramatically decreased, and between 1989 and 1999 the number of broadcast hours of ethnographic documentaries placed within the category ‘international documentary’ declined by 42 per cent while those filmed specifically in developing countries reduced by 50 per cent (Ruby 2005: 160; Stone 2000: 4). Disappearing World disappeared from the television screen in 1993, and programmes that attempted to follow the series were scheduled outside of peak-time viewing and were heavily criticised for resorting to sensationalism (Singer 2002). Despite suggestions that recent geopolitical events could benefit from a revival in programming that directly sought to educate and bring about understandings through cosmopolitanism or relativism, no such trends have been identified within the programming mix, leaving the once prevalent anthropological presence on television screens distinctly absent today (3WE 2001). This decrease in broadcaster’s and audience interest in anthropology lies in distinct contrast to the rapid increase of archaeological output on television screens and media outlets in general. Exploring some possible reasons for this may be informative as to the status of archaeology’s currency in the media. In the late 1960s, Margaret Mead (1967: 169) had heralded electronic communication media as a ‘quantum leap’ in the development of human society, while others in the 1970s attested to its integrative capabilities for dispersed communities of individuals by ‘participation in social and political events, a common perception of the world, and a reinforcement of public opinion’ (Eiselein and Topper 1976a: 111). But it was also regarded as an imperfect tool, evident in the ‘violence, tension, alienation, personal anxiety, [and] bewilderment’ that ensued in everyday life. The rate of social change was deemed too fast for the individual to cope with. Hence, with its ‘holistic, cross-cultural, and objective viewpoint of man,’ anthropology, it was argued, ‘could provide insight into the nature of our society, [which] if communicated to the masses, could serve to further integrate our mass society with a common understanding of ourselves’. Academic texts were inadequate for passing this message, but a mutual gain of social change could be gained from a relationship between anthropology and the media. By expressing their research findings to a mass audience through the media, it was thought that it might be possible to draw a positive reaction from policymakers and legislators, therefore fulfilling anthropologists’ responsibility as a citizens and legitimising their academic place in society (Eiseline and Topper 1976b: 119). However, a series of events had already tarnished the authority of these ideological romanticisms. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 41 Introduction 41 In 1971, a controversy emerged upon the declaration of the discovery of a lost, primitive tribe removed from modern civilising processes and living in caves deep in the forests of the Philippine island of Mindanao. The Tasaday tribe caught the imagination of the world with early media reports claiming the tribe had no words for ‘war’, ‘weapons’, ‘conflict’, or ‘violence’ and had been living ‘a quiet, unobtrusive life outside the boundaries of the civilized world and its problems’ (Palmer 2000: 226). Doubts as to the tribe’s authenticity described the discovery as a case of misinformation or propaganda devised and dramatised by the government of President Ferdinand Marcos to quell the anti-war and environmental protests of the 1970s. Arguments over the tribe’s authenticity regarded claims of its primitiveness as exaggerations or overt errors of fact, resulting in a blend of uncertainty and ‘scholarly ambivalence’ – the consequence of which was a loss of public confidence (2000: 225). Developing the filming techniques of Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic films from the 1920s, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson shot a series of silent films in 1930s Bali with the intent to observe the unfolding of everyday events, devising hypotheses of the culture as a whole. By the 1960s, the tradition of cinema verite (or ‘truth film’) became the favoured model for recording the actualité of the world by immersing the camera within the reality of the social – thus setting the film outside its context as a neutral, detached observer of events. But only later was it realised that this neutrality was an illusion, when in fact the situation itself was being transformed by the presence of the camera (Sherman 1998: 21). In a distinctly archaeological manner, the object of study was destroyed in the process of recording. Rosaldo (1993) has argued that claims of primitivity, such as that with the Tasaday controversy, are connected with those tenets of colonialism that display nostalgia for the cultures that it has destroyed. The transformation from a bygone, exotic, traditional, and ideal society to one tarnished by the touch and modernising effects of the Western gaze is experienced as if it were a personal loss. This empathetic nostalgia is set within its own historical and cultural specificity (1993: 71), one in which ‘[m]ourning the passing of traditional society and imperialist nostalgia cannot neatly be separated from one another’ (1993: 86). This has been a difficult issue for a discipline whose legitimacy for describing social reality has been questioned through a ‘crisis of representation’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986). And it appears that ethnographic film in the broadcast media has as yet been unable to resolve its imperial legacy (Fischer 2003: 371–392; Jenssen 2005). Palmer (2000: 230–231) summarised these concerns by stating that ‘[d]isciplinary consciousness CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 42 42 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack and even embarrassment over “primitivity,”… suggested to some observers that anthropology might not be able to sustain itself without it…. Eliminating primitivity as a working category leaves anthropologists with few, and some might say impoverished, options to describe indigenous people’. This was further compounded by the indigenous use of the media to seek political goals by deliberately presenting and emphasising dominant popular images from the Western gaze to attract further media attention for the authentication of their own ethnicity (Conklin 1997; Ramos 1987; [Fig. 1.4]). In addition, ‘Indigenous Media’ has also become recognised as an important voice for the drive towards self-determination and resistance, even if maybe reinforcing aspects of an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ distinction (Ginsburg 1991, 1994; Hartley 2004; Meadows and Molnar 2002). These are important issues for an archaeology located within a postcolonial world of globalisation and multiculturalism, and an archaeology that is bringing into dialogue and reflection the ontological baggage of its modern origins. Yet these remain issues that have yet to transgress any discussion of archaeology’s accountability to Figure 1.4 Eytan Kapon and Andre Iteanu filming in Papua New Guinea for their documentary Letter to the Dead (Andre Iteanu). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 43 Introduction 43 social life through the media. Recalling for a moment Rosaldo’s culturally situated sense of nostalgia, ‘“We” (who believe in progress) valorize innovation, and then yearn for more stable worlds, whether these reside in our past, in other cultures, or in the conflation of the two’ (Rosaldo 1993: 70). It is therefore informative to consider for a moment – beyond pragmatic pedagogies, self-representation, and commerce – what archaeology’s role within the media is thought to be if anthropology and the ‘primitive’ had not been overlooked by broadcasters so much as replaced by archaeology. What would be the implication of this statement? To open the discussion in its most basic form, one might say that whereas media executives once looked to anthropology as the voice and image for legitimising Western otherness and claims as to what it is to be human (stimulating a distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Pre-Modern’), archaeology through advanced visual technologies now serves to either reinforce this traditional ethic in a more cautionary way, or to openly challenge it. Alex Holmes, a BBC executive producer, has commented, ‘We need human stories, reflecting the world back to people, with strong narrative’ (3WE 2000, 159). This forms a significant theme in Tim Taylor’s ‘Screening Biases’ in which it is argued that by ‘reflecting our own prejudices’ through the medium of television, it may be possible to undermine and ‘screen them out’ from archaeological inference ‘by presenting a broader view of what it is to be human’. This, Taylor argues, necessitates an open mind and a distinction between ‘sensationalism’ and the ‘sensational’. Though a matter of perspective, the sensational is among the common aspects of human life that we share – if not by experience then by common knowledge of its existence, such as sex and violence. If deemed ‘sensationalism’ they would be unworthy of inquisitive scrutiny. The distinction is an important preservative for, in this case, aspects of prehistory that could lose interpretative grounding when a distinction is not in place. The discomfort that Taylor describes towards evidence of cannibalism, for instance, lies in the desire to view the past in light of the present to view ourselves. Always a controversial topic (see Salmon 2000), discomfort with the archaeology of anthropophagy lies within a perceived universality of humanness. Cannibalism is therefore a focal taboo – an act of self-consumption (Morris 1996: 144), simultaneously unsettling and intriguing. This is personal. And it is the personal, the human, aspect of the past that archaeological programming has succeeded from anthropology. The personal is expounded in narratives such as Howard Carter’s ongoing search for King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 44 44 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack BBC’s recent Egypt series (broadcast in 2005); the retracing of the fate of Ötzi in NOVA’s ‘Return of the Iceman’ (broadcast in 1998); and the uncertain final years of life before the eruption of Vesuvius in Channel 4’s ‘The Private Lives of Pompeii’ (broadcast in 2002). Indeed, the pinnacle moment in each episode of the BBC’s Meet the Ancestors series is when the viewer is confronted with the bust of a three-dimensional facial reconstruction from the cranial remains of an individual. Since the nineteenth century, the face has been presented in such a way as to signify the nature of the inner human state (Tagg 1988: 37). Presented as an artefact in a darkened room or a specimen in a laboratory, the reconstructed faces hold a plain expression of peaceful, timeless neutrality, a reminder that whatever gruesome events may have led to this person’s death, the victim of history is born inherently good (Fig. 1.5). Literally putting flesh onto the past, it is the metaphorical epitome of the journalistic translation of archaeological narrative. Figure 1.5 A facial reconstruction by Richard Neave from the skull of Philip of Macedonia (John Prag, Manchester Museum and British Museum Press). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 45 Introduction 45 There is a broad context in which the changes in fortune of archaeology and anthropology in the media may be understood since a whole pool of serious documentary programming on television in particular has disappeared from the schedules. Third World development and political issues have virtually disappeared, along with global environmental matters (although this latter is now emerging again as a topical issue within the media). Yet archaeology proliferates. Why might this be? First, much of archaeology programming could be regarded as light entertainment rather than serious documentary on serious issues. This may not be desirable, or indeed justifiable in many cases, but may often be the perception. Second, archaeology must be tapping into what programmers generally regard as the dominant collective sentiment. Though it will differ from nation to nation, the reaction to a global present – if reflected in the majority of the most detailed and most successful British archaeological programmes – is one of a distinctly ‘local’ feel. The archaeological context for these programmes lies predominantly within the British Isles. When these formats, such as Time Team, have expanded to ‘exotic’ international locations, the viewing figures have been notably lower than the domestic stage. Indeed, the appeal of the ‘local’ to the distinct disadvantage of the ‘global’ is a marketable product, acknowledged by television executives (3WE 2000: 152, 159): I know from past experience that films from the developing world don’t bring in the audiences. They’re not about us, and they’re not usually about things we can do anything about. (Steve Hewlett, director of programmes, Carlton Television) People want domestic stories. (Peter Salmon, former controller, BBC One) Ratings indicate there is a more limited interest in international programmes. (Tim Gardam, former director of programmes, Channel 4) The developing world is not of general interest unless there’s a very British angle. (Chris Shaw, senior programme controller, Channel 5) Archaeology’s presence in the media is clearly not detached from the history of programming, sociopolitical perceptions, market trends, or credibility of other broadcast genres. If archaeology’s relation with the media and archaeology’s place in a particular historical context are to be fully appreciated, then a comparative analysis and step into media discourse is required. This may prove instructive in future research to provide a clearer understanding as to why some narratives and programme formats are preferred above others, or CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 46 46 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack why archaeology is better suited to be received and favoured by a viewing audience in one particular way rather than another. Film as an Artefact of Visual Archaeology A recent document issued by Tessa Jowell, secretary of the British government’s Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, argued for the cultural benefits that are gained from government funding of the arts. Reference to film was notable only by its omission from the discussion, despite the citation of museums, music, drama, painting, and opera (Jowell 2004). The reasons for this absence may lie in a distinct opposition between ‘entertainment’ and ‘cultural engagement’, reminiscent of the dualism between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, grouping film as some all-encompassing term for the entertainment of large audiences (Hill 2004). In this view, the visual qualities of film become located within the peculiarities of cultural taste conceived through the inner workings of Bourdieu’s ‘cultural capital’. The heterogeneity of film is disclosed within Bourdieu’s (1984: 271) distinction between ‘“ambitious” works that demand a large cultural investment’ and works ‘overtly designed to entertain’. Within this model, film as an expressive form becomes ambiguously situated in a position relative to the other arts, with the potential to become recognised as legitimate art (Bourdieu et al. 1990: 96–97; cf. Hill 2004: 30). However, a hierarchy between different styles of film – industry, entertainment, and art – ultimately creates an uncertainty about its position in relation to other art forms in a hierarchical order of cultural ranking. In spite of this, film has mass appeal whatever its position, and in whatever form is produced, a double status may at once be apparent: that of educator and tool of social improvement, and that of threat to appropriate social norms and requiring censorship and regulation. It is unsurprising, then, that much of the analysis of archaeological film has been set within this popular distinction, favouring critiques of archaeological representation within cinematic film-as-industry as a result of its popular appeal and excess of repetitive imagery. The importance of these analyses has already been alluded to, but their emphasis has created an imbalance against the consideration of pedagogical films, the novel use of film as cultural commentary and political expression, and film as a document of archaeological practice. If in place of categories of distinction, these film forms were merged together along with the practices of filmmaking and the trajectories of engaged viewing, then their totality would redefine these works as CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 47 Introduction 47 material documents or sites for deliberating historiographies of archaeological discourse. Commercial broadcast television is also pulled into this single frame. Traditionally, archaeology is presented within a programming format that embodies many of the conventional strategies of documentary film and the cultural and technical tensions inherent in the presentation of authentic reality. In a similar way, many of the technological traits and skills associated with photography became embodied by its cinematic successor (Carlson and Gorman 1990) – a sense of the medium within the medium, or what Bolter and Grusin (1999) call remediation. This, in conjunction with traditional notions of reality, gives photography a dominant place in the representational field of archaeology and warrants discussion here as a visual form open to be ‘read’. Collected together, these elements of film are artefacts of visual archaeology, similar to the principles of what Sherman (1998) calls ‘folklore documentary’. This approaches film as a surface reflection or trace of something produced in a specific time and place, ‘a reflective process of interpreting ourselves and culture’ (1998: 1). Through focus and frame – action and interaction – both on and off the screen, something is revealed about the filmmaker, the object of the work, the audience, and the context of the work’s production and reception, each within their own historical situation. This places five media artefacts of visual archaeology (to which others may be included) within an equal space for reflection, from which layers of meaning may be extracted. These media artefacts offer new insights into past and present archaeological practice, the situation of archaeology in contemporary popular culture, and the currency of novel and traditional documentation media. Film as Cultural Commentary with Political Expression In Tom Stern’s ‘“Worldwonders” and “Wonderworlds”’, film is explored from the standpoint of ‘cultural investment’ as a counterbalance to dominant industrial cinematic forms. First, he identifies a number of changing trends in the portrayal and use of archaeology in twentieth century German film, placing these shifts in their historical social context. He then explores an alternative style of film, one that could transcend the dominant categories of representation that have been constructed through ‘the repetition of stereotypical imagery’, and ‘the excessive usage of superlatives, and media-friendly sound-bites’. Stern elucidates a tradition of archaeological filmmaking that since the 1980s has been developed in a series of annual European film festivals, CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 48 48 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack providing ‘a link between science, education, museum, film production, and the public’ and uniting ‘archaeologists and filmmakers, historians and physicians, museum directors, editors and students, interested lay persons and journalists’ (Denzer 2004: 39). In recent years, these have proliferated, with at least seven festivals of archaeological film in Europe and the United States in 2005 and the inclusion of a session for material culture and archaeology in the Royal Anthropological Institute International Festival of Ethnographic Film. Stern is looking to identify a mode of filmmaking that does not just represent or portray an idealised world, authenticated through classical forms of cinema and documentary, but one that asks questions of archaeology itself and the practice of investigating the past. Pedagogical Films Films used as teaching aids for archaeology students have been in use in institutions at least since Jacquetta Hawkes was commissioned during the Second World War by the British government to make an educational film about prehistoric life in Britain (Hawkes 1946). Pedagogical films, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s (see Allen and Lazio 1983), have been commissioned to provide accessible introductions and guides to all forms of methodological practice and thematic interpretation. When documentary films such as Archaeology in the Laboratory, Advance into the Past: Modern Archaeological Methods (see Bricker 1973 for a review), The Survey (see Clewlow and Cowan 1975 for a review), The Artefact, and The Dig (see Beale 1975 for a review) are considered along with contemporary introductory texts and practical manuals, the methods of filming, the reasons for their commission, and the methodologies objectified within the films offer an alternative historiography of the changing discursive location of these principles of practice. In many cases, the sociopolitical relevance of a film may offer alternative views on the accountability of archaeology to its historical context, questioning the received view. For example, while filming The Beginnings of History, Hawkes pondered the necessity of its commission, writing that ‘it is remarkable that in the middle of a war two Government departments… should undertake a work so apparently unpractical and so little urgent’ (quoted in Finn 2000a: 127). With heavy references to invasion and a cleanly ‘charm more usually seen in war-time romances’ (2000a: 128), it is tempting to hypothesise that when glossed up, the 1940s archaeological narratives could potentially provide a propaganda device for social cohesion in a time of CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 49 Introduction 49 crisis, reflecting concerns of invasion, but simultaneously reassuring with an enduring image of time-honoured British origins. Searching for Reality in Commercial Broadcast Television As an artefact of visual archaeology, broadcast television commercially aimed for a mass audience betrays the measure of what may be regarded as an appropriately authentic image of the past. The degrees of reality that are considered stable enough as a stage for the past appear to hold no fixed position. But where lies the reality? Richard Leakey (1983: 162) humorously recounted the choreography for a film shoot of the moment when an Australopithecus skull was first uncovered, whereas on the ninth or tenth ‘discovery’ of the skull, he finally ‘no longer cared if it remained lost for ever’. The question of the ‘real’ is one that lies deeply at the heart of discontent regarding archaeology’s relationship with the media. Is it possible to balance a level of uncertainty with claims of legitimacy for narratives of the past? Different genres of film have both aspired and alluded to different levels of reality (Corner 2000). To reveal the visible world, the classical realist film of cinema verite relied on an invisibility of form and style, a camera that is forgotten by the viewer, and a narrative to expose the reality to the viewer. The documentary form that many archaeological programmes utilise draws from these conventions, presenting a fiction through an unsteady camera, a crouching trench level shot, the scraping of the trowel. As Caughie (1980) has previously established, these ‘apparently unpremeditated’ fictions serve to create an impression of ‘unproblematic fact’ and guaranteed authenticity. The real world is not therefore revealed directly through the mirror of a documentary form, but is presented by reference to other established conventions associated with its reflection. The conventional procedures of documentary production have become enriched and expanded by computing technology generating the experience of reality with an ever increasing minute exactitude. But even the simulation of realities with the impressive digital technologies of Computer Graphic Imagery (CGI) resort to the ‘cinematographic deceits’ of film to satisfy the expectation of a viewing audience familiar with film animation (Earl 2005: 214). When 15 million people tuned in to watch the first episode of the BBC’s CGI spectacular Walking with Dinosaurs, the hyper-realism of cynodonts and Leaellynasaura was viewed with the same ‘shortcomings and flaws associated with traditional media,’ such as grainy monochrome night footage or the presence of the camera when ‘the hot breath of a CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 50 50 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack meat-eating utahraptor steams up the lens’ and T-Rex showers the camera with a roar of saliva (Scott and White 2003: 322–323). In each case, a simulated reality bears its presence through the screen. The assertion of truth and authenticity through the choreography of the real in forms of archaeological documentary is the subject of Angela Piccini’s chapter ‘Faking It’. Piccini observes the rhythmic landscapes of light, movement, and sound utilised to instil an aura of immediacy in archaeological documentary. Despite the performative tweaks and pulls that are utilised in the documentary strategies for authenticating truth claims, the audience appears to place its faith in dramatised simulated reconstructions – the past in costume. This, Piccini deduces, is due to a ‘visual and sonic richness’ of slow-motion film, allowing ‘the eye to linger on detailed materiality’ and ‘dramatic sound design’. This is the texture of experience. The presence of immediacy becomes authenticated through the familiarity of the ‘grainy visual texture and low lighting and/or sepia tones’. This is the materiality of memory. Simon Schama justifies his preference for traditional film as opposed to digital video by explaining a mode of engagement for the viewer in which ‘digital video is not the same…. [T]he plasticity of film… does better approximate the cognitive writing we use when we summon up memories, both public and private’ (2004: 29). He is referring to a dream-like state in which recollection is abstract, piecemeal, lacking clarity and focus; tape achieves something ‘other than the passive recording of reality’ (2004: 30). Elsewhere, the step towards authentic levels of reality for archaeological truth claims in film has taken a different path towards the broadening genre of ‘reality television’. In the 1970s, a BBC production called ‘Living the Past’ housed a group of people of different social backgrounds in a reconstructed Iron Age village as an experiment to see if the modern citizen could cope with a prehistoric way of life (Percival 1980). The programme was recast in 2001 with a fly-on-the-wattle-wall reality format under the name ‘Surviving the Iron Age’3. For the purposes of authenticity, the 17 participants were inhibited from carrying out research into Iron Age life before they were filmed spending seven weeks in an alien prehistoric world. As either a social or archaeological experiment, the programme was doomed from the start. After one week – with no background research, only three days of food provisions, and concessions of medication, contraception, and clean water miraculously beamed into the Iron Age – food poisoning, contestation, and foul weather started to take its toll. Subsequently, private medical care and rubber boots were also beamed into the Iron Age. The choice of participant was also questionable. Having entered the Iron Age fiasco, one CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 51 Introduction 51 participant pondered that ‘I don’t think you can live an Iron Age lifestyle anymore because there is too much legislation these days’. Grimacing aside, there is a serious point here in questioning the quality of such programming and its validity to archaeology’s relationship with the media. Juliet Gardner, historical consultant for the first recent-history reality programme on British television, The 1900 House (first broadcast on Channel 4, 1999), claims that viewers are likely to imagine themselves in the ‘particular historical circumstance’ in which the participants have been placed, asking, ‘What would it have been like for me?’ (Gardner, cited in Nelson 2004: 4). This creates a picture of the physical conditions of the past through a passage of empathy and an attachment to the participant’s own situation, returning again to what Merriman (1991: 28–29) describes as a means for ‘orienting themselves in the present’. However, while the blend of the modern and the past in this particular format holds the potential for a viewer’s engagement with the past through distinctly archaeological means – excavating a surface reality and projecting one’s background knowledge upon the depth to reveal the contours of the past and the present – the result in this case is that archaeology is resigned to the status of a production prop, the stage for social observation. It is inevitable that successful television themes become merged together, but Big Brother and archaeology have been an unlikely and unsuccessful partnership. At first glance, these genres specifically design ‘abnormal terms of living within surveillance space’ to study contemporary social interaction by dispensing with the difficulties of separating the personal from the social by creating its own form of the social to extract a particular form of the personal (Corner 2002). Yet the opportunity to observe the ‘real’ behaviour of people remains illusive since the conditions of such behaviour have been manufactured, creating a new microsocial in which living space becomes performance space. ‘Surviving the Iron Age’ lacked authenticity because it was never intended to be ‘real’. Instead, as Palmer (2003: 23–24) acknowledges, it belonged to a ‘product-commodity aimed at consumers,’ seeking not diversity or plurality but to ‘engage our appetite for the titillating and exploitative’ by bringing together ‘contestants’ that stereotypically represent various opposing communities (e.g., homosexuals and homophobes, Pagan druids and Roman Catholics) with the anticipation of social breakdown, trauma, and conflict. This represents the cautionary tale of an archaeology, albeit a cursory one, entering a media frame that is the direct inverse of contemporary archaeological discourse. Archaeology’s relationship with the media is a continual learning process, but examples such as these must be CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 52 52 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack highlighted for both their strengths and their failings and critically analysed to continue an understanding of archaeology’s reception within the media and popular culture. Photographs: Readings and Realities At least since the seminal works of Berger (1980) and Barthes (1981), the certitude of photographic representation has been put into question. No longer is a photograph merely the consequence or passive document of a combination of mechanical shifts and chemical reactions, but a physical, material artefact resounding with meaning and open to be ‘read’ and scrutinised as a product of discourse. In order to connect with a form of reality, photographs require a temporal context (Baines 2005; Shanks 1997: 79). The photographic reality is a discursive idea through image. Both the visual primacy of an idea and the quality of imitation or semblance are etymologically linked with the Greek verb ‘to see’ (Mitchell 1986: 5). The representational power of the image may therefore invoke a tumult of emotion through passion, hatred, fear, and love, transforming the image into a gesture to act. It is no wonder that anxiety often amounts from images that support truth claims to reality. In Layla Renshaw’s ‘The Iconography of Exhumation’, the emotive quality of images is exposed within the context of Spain’s contemporary political economy and the social memory of a crushing civil war. Renshaw delicately pieces together a conflict of images within the threads of a society still in anguish with its own history. As the Spanish Civil War gained notoriety after the 1930s as a testing ground for European ideologies and new weapons under the conditions of war, so too did the press coverage receive an onslaught of critique empowered with hindsight (Aldgate 1979; Bennett 1982; Large 1990: 223–266). In a retrospective essay on Spain’s civil war, George Orwell wrote, ‘I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie’ (1974 [1938]: 233). However, Renshaw outlines a current conflict of images between two competing forensic groups in Spain, each exhuming the skeletal remains of its forebears. One is strategically moving away from the objects of Orwell’s criticism, emphasising the personal identity of the deceased and the human rights of their living descendents without explicitly expressing political utterance; the other, more overt in its ideological message, emphasises the political affiliation of the deceased. Within the exhumations, the tender bodies bear trauma CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 53 Introduction 53 marks, a ‘silent witness’ to their own horror. The silent gesture of these images is framed within the media’s photographic representations of the graves, removing all trace of ‘archaeological, forensic, or even historical methodology’, valuing the act of exhumation rather than the process. Then, by deliberately choreographing the juxtaposition of flesh and bone, the living and the dead, the power of the image transcends time by drawing on familiar icons to carefully critique successive governments while maintaining its own historical frame through the secure reality of archaeological science. While Latour (2005: 14) laments that ‘[t]he beautiful word “reality” has been damned by the too many crimes committed in its name’, here at least – in the exhumation of the Spanish Civil War graves – it is striving for forgiveness. Documents of Archaeological Practice Considering the contemporaneous invention of photography with the earliest forms of archaeology, it is unsurprising that the photograph has sustained its primacy within archaeological documentation (Bohrer 2005: 189). However, as Miller (1972) has acknowledged, the early documentary capabilities of the photographic medium for archaeology were restricted first by traditional interpretations of reality drawn from eighteenth and nineteenth century notions of truth and the precisions of fine art, and second by the limitations of the medium itself to capture the detail of the feature being presented. Embodying the photographic medium and enhancing it with the properties of motion, the purposeful use of film as an interpretive aid in archaeology has been proposed and utilised numerous times since the 1960s. Varied uses of film include an efficient time-saving recording device for excavations working within limited time frames (Girouard et al. 1973; Hanson and Rahtz 1988; King et al. 1970); the recording of underwater shipwrecks (Gifford 1974); and in ethnoarchaeology to penetrate and interpret the world of the ‘other’ (Pratap 1988). However, film has remained fairly limited in use largely due to cost, varying quality of resolution, and issues of storage, accessibility, and presentation of the films. Despite these shortcomings, there are a range of interpretive possibilities that are embodied within the stores and catalogues of museum basements and television archives. Many newsreel archives contain a wealth of unique short footage recorded around the world since 1910. Some of this is already available on line and is open for use in the classroom or lecture theatre (see Grant n.d. for appropriate hyperlinks). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 54 54 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack In addition to the hours of footage filmed for 10–60 minute broadcast documentary programmes, numerous motion picture films, often high-quality home movies, were recorded during early excavations throughout the world. Sometimes ‘limited in scope and context by their silence,’ they still remain of ‘considerable historical interest today as visual ethnographies of the archaeology of a bygone era’ (Beale and Healy 1975: 890). Tarabulski (1989), for example, describes the experience of piecing together film from the 1925–1930 excavations by Alonzo Pond in Algeria for a documentary production ‘Reliving the Past: Alonzo Pond and the 1930 Logan African Expedition’. The blackand-white silent films on 16 mm and 35 mm nitrate stock had originally been produced as a visual supplement to the collection of photographs from the excavation. Subsequent interviews with Alonzo Pond re-inscribed contextual meaning to the films, making a historical artefact come alive as an interpretable document of the excavations as well as an historiography of archaeological practice in Africa during the 1920s. In a similar vein, films recorded on excavations by Agatha Christie in Syria during the 1930s and at Nimrud in Iraq during the 1950s are more than interesting artefacts of individual voyeurism. They reveal unknown insights into the everyday life on the excavations, the connections and interactions of excavators and onlookers, unuttered aesthetic interests of the cameraperson, and a record of early archaeological investigations in changing countries (Trümpler 2001). The archival material for past television broadcasts also offers similar insights, but recent uses of such material point to an additional potential. This became apparent during recent research at Sillbury Hill in Avebury’s World Heritage landscape. From 1968 to 1970, four seasons of excavation at Europe’s tallest Neolithic man-made mound were broadcast as part of the popular BBC series Chronicle. For centuries, local folklore had claimed that the mound concealed a burial with great treasures of a chieftain king, thus attracting a number of audacious excavations in the eighteenth century – the largest being the first, when in 1776 Colonel Drax, the duke of Northumberland, sunk a vertical shaft directly through the centre of the monument, recovering little sign of any burial or magnificent treasures. Following the line of a horizontal tunnel dug at the base of the mound in the nineteenth century, the BBC footage of miners cleaving their way through soil and stone (under the archaeological supervision of Richard Atkinson) was set to make ‘television history’, with the pinnacle moment being the opening of a central chamber. In an anticlimactic finale, neither chamber, body, nor treasure were found. The shafts were backfilled and Silbury Hill retained its mystery. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 55 Introduction 55 More recently, the ethic behind the television sponsorship of this glorified treasure hunt has been firmly placed in question (Smith 2004; Wainwright, in Whittle 1997). There are two key reasons for this, each of which has benefited from a return to the BBC film footage. First, apart from a small popular chapter in the BBC’s accompanying book of the Chronicle series (Atkinson 1978), a report of the excavation was never published until the difficult task was accepted by Alasdair Whittle (1997) 30 years later. However, most of the original plans and drawings had been lost and many of the photographs and slides were without context or index. But many hours of uncut black-and-white film footage did survive and proved useful in piecing together the unnamed fragments of the archive. According to Whittle (1997: 13; 2005: personal communication), a three-dimensional perspective in the film was hindered due to the cramped conditions of the excavation tunnel, but in conjunction with the site diaries, a clearer context could be salvaged from the audio records of the workers’ discussions, individual views, and Atkinson’s interviews while inside the tunnel. The second critique of the excavations appeared after a torrential storm in 2000, when the 1776 shaft reopened as the material covering its entrance twice collapsed into a deep, seemingly bottomless cavern. Investigation by English Heritage concluded that the rainwater had seeped through voids in Atkinson’s shaft, possibly a result of poor backfilling in 1970, and a number of large cavities threatened the structural integrity of the whole monument (McAvoy 2005). After alien hunters caused further damage by abseiling into the open shaft in 2001, English Heritage used the film footage in conjunction with seismic technology to assess the changing condition of the 1968–1970 excavation shaft. The results were later broadcast in a documentary on BBC2 called ‘The Hill with the Hole’. For Amanda Chadburn (2006: personal communication) who led the investigation, combining the films with the original project design for the Chronicle programmes provided a familiarity with the biography of Sillbury’s previous investigations and formed a ‘reality’ of past events, offering an environment for understanding the current instability within the structure. The films now provide a pathway to addressing the lack of detail in the archive by providing a context and subsequent index for the surviving material in Avebury’s Alexander Kieller Museum. The Silbury Hill film footage, although maybe not directly intended as an archaeological document, has breathed life and soul into an otherwise fading event. While this may have been an unimagined resource for the construction of future memories, its monochrome tint has become a substitute body for an otherwise silent record. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 56 56 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack Archaeology, the Media, and the Digital Future Writing about the glitzy streets of Paris in 1935, Walter Benjamin mused upon the enticement of the consumer by the display of commodity fetishes: ‘Look at everything, touch nothing’ (Benjamin 1999 [1935]: 805). Consumers, Benjamin believed, had become epitomised by the mass-flâneur taking delight in the conditions of detachment that provided their frame for spectatorship of the sights laid before them. Capitalism had induced a dangerous ‘dream-filled sleep’ over Europe, facilitating, among other things, the rise of fascism (1999 [1935]: 391). Society needed to be awakened. In 1936, while the Frankfurt School despised the oppressive forces of media for its legitimisation of fascist claims and prophesised subsequent chaos out of the ‘phantasmagoria of false consciousness’, Benjamin argued for the positive use of image reproduction technologies to ‘shock’ and ‘illuminate’ the collect of mass culture into democratic revolution (Benjamin 1992 [1936]; cf. BuckMorss 1989: 253). Motion picture film, according to Benjamin, was not only an object for criticism but the medium through which the present state of mass culture could be criticised (Hansen 1987: 182). ‘Any man today,’ he wrote, ‘can lay claim to being filmed’ (Benjamin 1992 [1936]: 231), hence upsetting the authoritative chain of hierarchy between the author and the viewer/reader. Benjamin’s important essay of 1936, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, was not translated into English until 1969, over 30 years after its original German publication. Benjamin’s vision of a democratic revolution through technology has only recently enjoyed serious reflection owing to the development of digital technologies of ‘image (re-)production’ and the globalising effects of communications media. This digital future is here, ‘proliferating faster than our cultural, legal, or educational institutions can keep up with them’ (Bolter and Grusin 1996: 314). In this final section, we look to how archaeology is equipping itself for the new media world and the effects that this may have on future disciplinary discourse. Digitising Archaeological Practice Previously, we outlined how the old medium of film could be brought into a serious analytical frame for archaeological reflection. More recently, new digital audiovisual media have become recognised as an archaeological medium to enhance interpretive capabilities during and after excavation. This is largely due to a combination of discursive trends and the increasing accessibility and affordability of digital CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 57 Introduction 57 technologies. With the view to plurality through a ‘reflexive’ excavation method, Ian Hodder (1997, 1999, 2000, 2003; also Berggren and Hodder 2003) has consistently argued for ‘social engagement’ both on and off site in a continual interpretive process that highlights multivocality, interactivity, and contextuality. The methodology incorporates a range of multimedia as integrative devices for tracing this process, attaining what John Cole anticipated film could achieve in the early 1970s if archaeologists turned the camera on both ‘their sites and their actions upon them’ in the realisation that how a site is dug is just as important as what is recovered (1972: 12). In each case, the goals are similar. Film, according to Cole, can provide ‘a fluid, continuous record of excavation progress and process’ (1972: 12); digital video, Brill (2000: 229) suggests, can provide a record of ‘the daily evolution of the dig as well as the accompanying processes of interpretation and decision-making’. Digital video is now used as a pedagogical tool for the dissemination of a range of flexible ideas, as well as an integral element in the realisation of the multi-vocal challenge that a reflexive methodology entails (Brill 2000; Nixon 2001; Stevanovic 2000; Witmore 2004). This experimentation with digital technology may appear similar to that of film, but digital technology has many advantages over the old medium. The footage can be edited into manageable chunks and uploaded with ease for either public consumption or professional deliberation. The footage can also be viewed immediately on or off site, allowing the replay of conversations and ideas to be shown between team members in different parts of the site at different times or simultaneously. The expense of reproduction is greatly reduced and a computerised database permits search capabilities and direct access to the archive, as well as its storage in a manageable way. Through the remediation of old technologies into new, many of the challenges, difficulties, and epistemologies associated with the older medium become reframed and realigned rather than replaced. It takes time for cultural practices to catch up with novel technologies. Virtual reality, for example, has the means to involve the viewer in a participatory experience of architecture reconstructed from material remains (Fig. 1.6), but instead reconstructions invariably reproduce the underlying cartographic principles of traditional excavation photographs, sterilized of human life (Earl 2005: 214–215). Digital ink scanning is replacing hand-drawn diagrams, but more often than not, these are still printed on paper for traditional bound copies of reports. The conditions of onsite practice continues to be altered by the presence of the digital video camera, although – as Brill (2000: 232) CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 58 58 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack Figure 1.6 Virtual reconstruction within the uncovered remains of a Neolithic settlement at Banpo Museum, Xi’an, China (Timothy Clack). acknowledges – this is a matter of acclimatisation, alleviated with time as the new medium becomes a familiar or naturalised presence during practice. The question of reality, however, may be entirely reconfigured by the digital medium. Whereas the reproduction of the mise-en-scéne may be choreographed for photographs and film (cleaned, scaled, emphasised, dehumanised), the frail innocence of the photograph is jeopardised when digital images are manipulated with relative ease, constructing an entirely new reality and authorship. Owing to the sheer abundance of imagery that can be produced in digital form, the ambiguity of these themes may be overlooked. The image itself may even be lost or forgotten altogether. CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 59 Introduction 59 Alternatively, the addition of other metadata – such as a signature or hyperlink to an original – may enhance the authenticity of the image, combining durability, usage, and memory (Tringham forthcoming). The key issue here is that new forms of media pervade every facet of our everyday lives. Whether it was the analogue technologies of prewar radio or postwar television or today’s digital technologies, each has changed the way we perceive and act in the world around us. Different forms of media affect different situations in different ways, but in each case a new opportunity for revealing meaning and creating narratives is brought to light. One of the classic attempts to understand these associations is in the work and foresight of Marshal McLuhan (1964), whose ideas argued against linear narratives of explanation. Prior to the electronic media, the output of information through media technologies necessitated a mechanised sequential structure with interlinked parts of a whole laid out in a series, one following the other in a linear form. McLuhan’s dissatisfaction with this sequential exchange stemmed from its inability to provide explanation with any principle of causality. One mechanical event in the sequence simply resulted in change – a relayed passage of motion from one component to the next. Instead, McLuhan argued that an explanation of causality would emerge when this sequence was broken by the flow of the instant in the ‘nuclear age’ of electronic media. This form of media could handle many operations at the same time, producing a synchronised, non-sequential information flow moving at such a speed that cultural practices would have to adapt to cope with novel situations. Crucially, it was not until the advent of a new medium that ‘the lineaments and assumptions’ of the old medium could be revealed (McLuhan 1960: 567). Indeed, McLuhan notes that ‘our practice can be years ahead of our thoughts’ (1960: 574), and it is practice that is infiltrated by electronic media with ‘personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences… [leaving] no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered’ (McLuhan 1967: 26). Analysis based on a linear sequence of change was unsuitable for the explanation of these associations. A nonlinear sequence could provide self-understanding of mediation by looking at the manifestation of the process itself. By ‘probing’ the technologies, their interconnections could be revealed. This was a deconstruction designed not, as Gordon (1997: 302) points out, to ‘finish’ the hole that the drill makes, but to understand what it ‘churns up’. With every new medium, institutional organisation would be transformed, along with ‘new patterns of awareness of human association’ (McLuhan 1960: 572). Informational CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 60 60 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack studies that looked for understanding in the content of media transmissions were therefore missing the key point: that the content of the medium was another medium. The message that was carried by a medium or technology was the particular ‘scale or pace or pattern’ of change that it brought to human affairs. McLuhan’s famous line that ‘the medium is the message’ emphasised the necessity to understand the medium itself because it is that which ‘shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action’, not the information or message that it relays (1964: 9). McLuhan’s work preempted the age of digital media, an age in which Giddens, echoing McLuhan, has recently commented that ‘[i]nstantaneous electronic communication… alters the very texture of our lives’ (1999: 11). As was previously noted, a parallel between the increasing presence of digital technologies in our lives and the presence of archaeology in the media is unlikely to be a coincidence. Setting aside the market forces and audience desire implicit in the resurgence of archaeology in the media, the parallels between the conceptual apparatus of digital systems and the values of postprocessual archaeology are compelling. Hodder (1999: 178–187) identifies no less than nine direct convergences between the goals of ‘archaeological theories based on the metaphor of the text’ and the framework of these new technologies. These directly concern archaeological practice in a globalised world through the use of multimedia technologies for processing and critically interpreting archaeological data. Deciding upon which intersection of text to follow in hypertext, space blurs the distinctions of authorship of data, empowering the reader as part of the interpretive decision-making process. Similarly, placing data on the Internet makes it accessible and open for contestation and adjustment to multiple viewpoints in a narrative that is collaborative and radial or rhizoidal. These digital encounters have already been recognised for their potential in archaeological pedagogy. At the grass roots, archaeological teaching has been criticised for remaining in a methodology of linear information exchange even though the technologies of teaching have changed significantly in the last 30 years (Fagan 2000). With this hierarchical form of preaching, the lecture hall creates ‘an intellectual chasm between student and teacher’, whereas a future pedagogical philosophy would place the student at the centre of a net of resources (including the instructor) interacting with materials and ideas in a nonlinear flow of information and multimedia (Clarke 2003; Michaels and Fagan 1998). This appears an appropriate model for a new generation of students already relatively media savvy and taking respon- CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 61 Introduction 61 sibility for their own learning. As Pickering (1997: 56) remarks, ‘When a difficulty arises adults are likely to say “where’s the manual?” Children are more inclined to say “let’s ask the computer”’. Elsewhere, broadband technologies have generated an added incentive for prospective benefactors to invest in archaeological work, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between recipients. For example, the Archaeology Channel, an online information resource, obtained underwriting support through commercial companies by designing video productions of the funded work that may be marketed as a presentation of public outreach. One of these films is A Journey Through Time: Archaeology at St. Johns, a 15-minute documentary about a late prehistoric Chinookan village near Portland, Oregon. This film was produced for CH2M Hill, which provided partial funding for the excavations – the financing of which allows a level of selfsustainability for the Archaeology Channel, while projecting an archaeological story to a wider public (Prouty 2005)4. So much data: input, output, upload, download, link, hyperlink, file, transmit, transmute, troubleshoot, search, save, send, receive. Where does one begin? In ‘Digital Media, Agile Design, and Politics of Archaeological Authorship’, Michael Shanks looks at the materiality and interconnectivity of media during the decision-making processes in the creative design of cybersystems for data consumption. The material qualities of media technologies, Shanks explains, are deeply embedded in the course of processing information. Changes in technology extend a new world of engagement with information. As Lupton (1995: 99) suggests, our own bodies even become inscribed with particular forms of media (a PC, for example) to the degree that media forms from previous engagement (pens, for instance) become awkward and unfamiliar, or inadequate extensions of the self. Rather than defining a process of collection or presentation of data, Shanks argues for an interactive process of translation. Through this engagement, assumptions and preconditions that lie historically embedded within the categories of data may be freed from the constraints of essentialism in a creative experience of democratic pluralism. A Digital Democratic Discourse? Many of the visions for a future digital world resonate of the contrasting arguments during the early twentieth century. On one side is a democratic utopia, an openness of free speech and transparency of information – a unity through diversity. On the other side are alienation, privatisation, and overpowering surveillance. Somewhere in CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 62 62 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack between lies contextualisation of the cultural situation of democracy and multi-vocality of opinion – what Giddens (1999) calls the democratisation of democracy. In the 1960s, Habermas (1989 [1962]) lamented the transformation of rational public discourse from a forum of enlightening discussion into the marketing of legitimating discourses by exercising public relations upon the stage of commercialised entertainment. At the same time, however, the technology of Informatics was moving towards a new field of communication and social relations. In 1969, the first commercial satellite was launched into the earth’s hemisphere. More than 200 now link people and their machines – a network of interconnected political, technological, and cultural practice – i.e., globalisation (cf. Giddens 1999: 11). The impacts of the associations between the media that we create and the mediations that create our social framework are transforming the way we live our lives and the course of archaeological futures. If this entails a democratised democracy of narrative and archaeological practice, which indeed it should, then the media’s relation to this process will be a driving force. In one of the most radical document statements by a public service broadcaster in 80 years, the BBC recently outlined its perspective on the future of digital broadcast technologies (BBC 2004). It was predicted that the two phases of a digital revolution will have taken place by 2012 when the switch from analogue to digital in the UK will be complete (2004: 54). The first phase took place during the early to mid-1990s, when improvements in the distribution and mobility of digital technology provided a wider level of consumer choice. The second phase – characterised by an increasing number of the population adopting the technologies of the first phase, and more importantly the rapid growth of high-speed broadband opening access to a ‘potentially limitless range of programmes, services and content on demand’ – has only just begun. The BBC’s (2004: 8–9) foresight is exciting and dynamic, arguing that [i]nteractivity, effortless communication and sophisticated consumer content creation will all become ubiquitous in digitally-enabled homes…. [This] will include new ways to involve people in civic processes and institutions, personalised learning tools, access to previously closed archives, new ways of connecting communities, more convenient ways to watch and listen to programmes, more localised content, tailored services for minority groups. Soon digital TV and radio will offer the same flexibility as the Internet, empowering users with the choice of where and when they wish to watch any particular programme (2004: 51). The BBC expects CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 63 Introduction 63 that by 2016, seven in ten homes will be able to set their own viewing or listening schedules (Fig. 1.7). Audio-video downloads and fileshares, and the increasing portability of the Internet and on-demand video – such as personal video recorders, mobile phones, and podcasts – opens an unprecedented level of choice to an engaged audience. In addition, interactive TV brings the nonlinear logic of hypertext into the viewing experience, enabling non-teleological encounters with archaeological narrative. At present, more than half the population in the UK has digital TV and Internet in its homes, four million of which have broadband access (Ofcom 2004). However, engaging future generations with traditional television programming will become much harder with a fragmented audience showered with choice. Declining viewing figures may be expected for individual archaeology programmes, but with a simultaneous increase in the number of people watching archaeology programmes in general. The future of viewing fashions poses a challenge for archaeology in the digital age. News media may resort to commercial strategies of ‘partisan news’ to entice audiences, while archaeological programmes that represent the frontispiece to a viewing journey may become even less concerned with quality and content. This is a risk justified by surveys indicating that homes with digital media tend to watch less serious or ‘high ground’ programmes than homes with traditional analogue (BBC 2004: 54–58). The challenge is for archaeological programming to continue to innovate in style and content, building on its already substantial market and popular interest in order to maintain its appeal in a multi-choice broadcast environment. Year 2016 % of people regularly using Digital television Digital audio broadcasting Broadband* On-demand video** 40% 70% 60% 100% 40% 15% 25% 20% 15% 15% Have Maybe Have not *e.g. PCs, mobiles, games consoles. **including PVRs, DVD-Rs, i-Tunes. Figure 1.7 Estimated use of digital media by 2016 (BBC 2004: 51). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 64 64 Marcus Brittain and Timothy Clack It might be that the future of interactive archaeological experience lies beyond traditional television programming formats. Indeed, television itself appears to have declining relevance in the lives of many young people. In research carried out by the BBC in 2004, over the space of a decade, children between the ages of 10 and 15 consumed over 20 per cent less television per week (BBC 2004: 91). One probable reason for this, the research concluded, may be the wider range of media technologies that many children now have in their bedrooms in comparison to their parents’ living room (BBC 2004: 53). Video games are one such media device. In another BBC survey, 59 per cent of 6–65 year olds play computer games of one sort or another, with a total of 26.5 million ‘gamers’ in the UK (Pratchett 2005: 5). In ‘The Past As Playground’, Andrew Gardner describes how images of the past that have been propagated from archaeological pursuits have infiltrated the passivity of video game leisure time. Yet in many cases these images are an array of curiosities and disturbances of the past. Gardner suggests that this use of the past and archaeological situations by gaming industries indicates not only an embedded interest, but also an opportunity for new narratives of the past to be explored among the ‘gamer’, console and screen. ‘Diverse and challenging visions of past societies’ may be opened to and through the gamer in a learning experience, particularly where anticipation in simulations results in a different ending to the past upon every visit. Uncertain Futures Digital broadband technologies may soon be the media norm for viewing patterns and the rapid dissemination of information at all levels of society. These have been described as a citizens’ medium, or what Zizek (2004) has called a ‘netocracy’. Indeed, with 32 million Americans publishing and reading Internet ‘weblogs’ and one-third of Americans below the age of 40 using the Internet as their main source of news, these are unsurprising claims (Himmelsbach 2005; Pew Research Centre 2005; Shanks, this volume). In many cases, these developments will restructure not only the way archaeological information is presented and consumed, but also the way it is created. The power of this medium is reflected in the growing number of reported ‘cyber dissidents’ who express views or write news reports news ‘deviate from the government line’ in countries regarded by Reporters Without Borders as ‘enemies of the Internet’. At least 1,006 cases of censorship were reported, in 2005, while on the first day of January 2006, 70 cyber dissidents were in jail ˆ ˆ CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 65 Introduction 65 around the world (Reporters Without Borders 2006: 6–7). It is no surprise that demon and demos have the same etymology (cf. Latour 2005). Digital cyberspace simulates realities and miracles; it does not spontaneously manifest them. In many regards, the future is uncertain. The expertise necessary to design and function digital technologies, and dominant programming systems required for their function in addition to their cost, could prove to marginalise rather than empower multiple communities around the globe. Similarly, the shrinking of public space through centralisation by large, unelected multinational media corporations leaves the visions of a future ‘democratising medium’ in the balance. Assessing the future importance of public service broadcasters, for instance, the BBC estimates that by 2010 ‘substantial parts of UK broadcasting will be owned by large global companies (BBC 2004: 58). Giddens forewarns that a digital world brings with it new responsibilities to avoid a future parallel between the ‘Global Village’ and ‘Global Pillage’ (1999: 16). Already deeply accountable to globalising processes (Olsen 2001), archaeology’s role with the media will change in tandem with media technologies of global communication. So too will the way that archaeology is practiced, produced, and presented. It is essential that archaeology broaden and extend its understanding of its location to such transfers in the future. Notes 1. http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/buriedtreasure/ (accessed Sept 2005). 2. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/pdfs/graduates.pdf (accessed Sept 2005). 3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/surviving_ironage/ (accessed June 2006). 4. The film may be viewed online at http://www.archaeologychannel.org/content/ video/stjohns.html (accessed June 2006). CLACK_CH_01.qxd 5/18/2007 12:38 PM Page 66