**[WAC-5 Conference](http://www.american.edu/wac5/) Session: Archaeology
and the Arts: the Ancient Muses and other Inspirations**

*Organised by:*

+----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| *John H. Jameson Jr. (USA)*      | *Lance Foster*                    |
|                                  |                                   |
| *Senior Archaeologist*           | *Iowa Tribe of Kansas and         |
|                                  | Nebraska*                         |
| *Southeast Archeological Center* |                                   |
|                                  | *59-777 Kapuhi Place*             |
| *U.S. National Park Service*     |                                   |
|                                  | *Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712 USA*       |
| *2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive*       |                                   |
|                                  | [*lancemfoster@yahoo.com          |
| *Johnson Building, Suite 120*    | *](mailto:lancemfoster@yahoo.com) |
|                                  |                                   |
| *Tallahassee, Florida 32310*     |                                   |
|                                  |                                   |
| [*john_jameson@nps.go            |                                   |
| v*](mailto:john_jameson@nps.gov) |                                   |
+----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

*FORMAT: PANEL & DISCUSSION*

The practice of archaeology, as well as archaeologically derived
information and objects, can inspire a wide variety of artistic
expressions ranging from straightforward computer-generated
reconstructions and traditional artists\' conceptions to other art forms
such as sculpture, poetry, and opera. Although some level of conjecture
will always be present in these works, they are often no less
conjectural than technical interpretations and have the benefit of
providing visual and conceptual imagery that can communicate contexts
and settings in compelling and unique ways. The cognitive connections
between archaeology and art reflect an inductive approach in defining
and explaining the resource and making it more meaningful to the public.
An emphasis on artistic interpretations and narrative is consistent with
a new direction in archaeological practice that challenges the
positivist paradigm of processual archaeology, promotes the relevance
and validity of deductive reasoning over inductive reasoning, and
represents a fundamental change in how archaeologists plan and conduct
research and evaluate significance.

A newly published book, entitled \"Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the
Arts,\" examines a variety of examples of this new approach as it
applies to more meaningful and effective approaches to interpretation
that emphasize public awareness, access, and inspiration. Part of the
discussion of this session will focus on the development of the book and
the initial reactions from the reading audience. Panel members will be
composed of several of the book authors plus other contributing artists
and archaeologists. Position papers will be prepared by panel members
that describe why they were drawn to this theme and how they view the
connections between art and archaeology. Position papers will be posted
on the WAC-5 web site in early 2003. At the beginning of the session,
panel members will give brief synopses of their respective position
papers. This will be followed by discussions and feedback with audience
participation/interaction followed by a question-and-answer period.

Session schedule:

9:00 John H. Jameson, Jr. and Lance M. Foster - Introduction to Session

9:05 John H. Jameson, Jr. - Archaeology and the Arts on the
Inspirational Highway

9:25 Lance M. Foster - Confessions of a Monster: Artist or
Archaeologist?

9:45 David Middlebrook - Connections of Archaeology to Large Scale
Public Art

10:05 Johannes Kranz - Community Building And Identity: A Sculpture Park
In Malacatoya, Nicaragua

10:25 Christine A. Finn - \"Figures in a Landscape\": Jacquetta
Hawkes\'s 1953 film about Barbara Hepworth. Introduced by Christine
Finn. (video and stills)

10:45 Questions & answers

**11:00-11:30 BREAK**

11:30 James G. Gibb - Awash with Art, Archaeologists Take their Cue

11:50 Sarah M. Nelson - Writing Fiction as a Tool for the Archaeologist

12:10 Alessandra Lopez y Royo - Prambanan: dance, architecture,
archaeology

12:30 Nicola Laneri - Stratigraphy: Digging Living Layers and
"Art-aeology Experience" and ArcheoTrance: An Archaeological Dance
Floor.

12:50 Questions & answers

**1:00-2:00 LUNCH**

**2:00-3:30 Plenary (see WAC-5 Program)**

4:00 David G. Orr - Sherds ABOVE the Loess: Historical Archaeology as
Art

4:20 John E. Ehrenhard - Archaeology Goes to the Opera

4:40 Claire Smith, Kirsten Brett, Peter Manabaru, and Jimmy Wesan - From
rock art to digital image: Archaeology and Art in Aboriginal Australia

4:40-6:00 ISSUES IDENTIFICATION, OPEN DISCUSSION

## *Presentations*

**Introduction**

*John H. Jameson, Jr.*

*Lance M. Foster*

The practice of archaeology, as well as archaeologically derived
information and objects, can inspire a wide variety of artistic
expressions ranging from straightforward computer-generated
reconstructions and traditional artists\' conceptions to other art forms
such as sculpture, poetry, and opera. Although some level of conjecture
will always be present in these works, they are often no less
conjectural than technical interpretations and have the benefit of
providing visual and conceptual imagery that can communicate contexts
and settings in compelling and unique ways. The cognitive connections
between archaeology and art reflect an inductive approach in defining
and explaining the resource and making it more meaningful to the public.
An emphasis on artistic interpretations and narrative is consistent with
a new direction in archaeological practice that challenges the
positivist paradigm of processual archaeology, promotes the relevance
and validity of deductive reasoning over inductive reasoning, and
represents a fundamental change in how archaeologists plan and conduct
research and evaluate significance.

**Archaeology and the Arts on the Inspirational Highway**

*John H. Jameson, Jr.*

Senior Archaeologist

Southeast Archeological Center

U.S. National Park Service

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, Florida 32310

<john_jameson@nps.gov>

Public archaeologists in the National Park Service and elsewhere are not
content to rely solely on traditional methodologies and analytical
techniques in their attempts to reconstruct human history and bring it
to life for the public. We want to venture beyond utilitarian
explanations and explore the interpretive potential of cognitive imagery
that archeological information and objects can inspire. In partnership
with professional interpreters and educators, we use the power of
artistic expression to convey archeological information and insights to
the public. At our parks and historic sites, we use the archeological
record to enhance the visitors\' experience, and, working with our
public interpretation colleagues, help to create opportunities for
visitors to form intellectual and emotional connections to the meanings
and significance of archeological information and the people and events
that created them. Since 1991, the Southeast Archeological Center,
through its public archeology interpretive art program, has supported
national parks and other public agencies in producing art works that
help tell the fascinating stories of America\'s cultural heritage. A
newly published book, entitled \"Ancient Muses: Archaeology and the
Arts,\" examines a variety of examples of this new approach as it
applies to more meaningful and effective approaches to interpretation
that emphasize public awareness, access, and inspiration.

**Confessions of a Monster: Artist or Archaeologist?**

#### Lance M. Foster

Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska

59-777 Kapuhi Place

Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712 USA

<lancemfoster@yahoo.com>

I profess to be both an American Indian artist and an archaeologist. I
have always been Indian, and I have always been an artist, from my first
scrawling as a toddler. But I have not always been an archaeologist.
Many of my Indian friends do not believe that I can be both. In
examining the relationships between Indian art and archaeology, I
believe I have found a unique personification. In my initial attempts at
writing this article, I used a conventional, scholarly tact, full of
quotes, bibliographic notations, using plenty of "therefores" and
"thuses." But, halfway along, I realized that anyone could have written
that way, given the proper research and sources, and it would have been
just as dry and postmodern as you please. So I tossed that first draft
into the wastebasket. I wanted to talk about art, from the gut, from my
experience as both an Indian artist of the Iowa tribe, and as an
archaeologist.

**Connections of Archaeology to Large Scale Public Art**

*David Middlebrook*

School of Art & Design

San Jose State University

One Washington Square

IS Bldg., Room 221A

San José, California 95192-0089

<lruble@apr.com>

I believe our ability to survive the last ice age has given us our
present-day intelligence. What peeked my interest were the
thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings of southern France which I
believe were the first signs of the intellectual revolution. I have
incorporated these images into many of my large scale public art pieces.
In recent years I have become at one with the technical and esthetic
challenges of combining natural materials with intellectual and
emotional content. The engineering tension and balance is part and
parcel with the intent and substance of the work.

**\"Figures in a Landscape\": Jacquetta Hawkes\'s 1953 film about
Barbara Hepworth. Introduced by Christine Finn (video and stills)**

#### Christine A. Finn

The Institute of Archaeology

University of Oxford

36 Beaumont Street

Oxford OX1 2PG

United Kingdom

<christine.finn@archaeology.oxford.ac.uk>

\"Figures in a Landscape\" is a film by Jacquetta Hawkes about the
landscape sculpture of Barbara Hepworth. In the 1920s and 1930s, Barbara
Hepworth was one of a small group of pioneering sculptors in London
committed to exploring abstraction. By the early 1930s, she had
developed her mature style: a sensuous kind of organic abstraction,
sometimes incorporating strings, wires, colored paint, or holes piercing
the sculpted form. Jacquetta Hawkes\' film about Barbara Hepworth was
one of many works that had the goal of reminding archaeologists swept up
in a frenzy of postwar scientific and theoretical advances of the human
values of their profession. Hawkes\' work now begs reevaluation at a
time when archaeologists are more aware of the need to communicate to
the general public.

Community Building And Identity: A Sculpture Park In Malacatoya,
Nicaragua

*Johannes Kranz*

Fundacion \"Casa de los Tres Mundos\"

Antigua Plaza de los Leones

Granada, Nicaragua

[info@c3mundos.org.ni]{.underline}

In Malacatoya, one of the poorest rural areas of Nicaragua, the
Foundation "Casa de los Tres Mundos" is erecting a sculpture park.
Oversized copies of salvaged pre-columbian findings have been molded to
give back a piece of history and identity to the people of a newly
constructed village. The following paper presents this innovative
educational and preservational initiative that could serve as a model
for joint efforts in community building, the strengthening of local
identity and the challenge of preserving cultural heritage in similar
projects throughout the world, particularly in underdeveloped countries.

**Awash with Art, Archaeologists Take their Cue**

*James G. Gibb*

Independent Scholar

2554 Carrollton Road

Annapolis, Maryland 21403

[jggibb@msn.com](mailto:jggibb@erols.com)

The arts surround us, from pictures and posters, poems and songs, music,
movies, books, and the buildings and landscapes we inhabit. Notice,
however: few lecterns. The days of lyceum talks are not over, but radio
and television, magazines and pulp fiction certainly have eclipsed them.
Archaeologists are taking the cue of those in the retail and
entertainment industries, and using the arts to convey the excitement
and discoveries of archaeology to broader audiences. Communicating
archaeology through the arts offers challenges and rewards, and not a
few ethical pitfalls, but it is happening, it has been happening, and it
will continue to happen.

# Writing Fiction as a Tool for the Archaeologist

#### Sarah M. Nelson

University of Denver

Writing fiction about a specific archaeological site or group of sites
helps to interpret the site, because it makes you consider how the known
facts fit together, and how actual people would have lived at the site
and interacted with each other. The fictional approach requires the
archaeologist to:

-   Generate hypotheses about social aspects of the site

-   Have a regional focus, because a story needs more than a single site

-   Create a "theme" such as ethnicity, gender or power, to give the
    story cohesion.

In addition having to think about an actual story reveals
inconsistencies in the data, which may become the focus of the story. It
keeps the site interpretation from being one dimensional. The setting is
also important -- the ecological data that archaeologists study are also
important for a story, and will help shape it. The author needs to know
about the weather, climate, subsistence base, settlement pattern, and so
forth, as well as the social, economic, political and ideological
structure.

These benefits will be illustrated with an extended example consisting
of excerpts from *Spirit Bird Journey* with commentary.

# Prambanan: dance, architecture, archaeology

#### Alessandra Lopez y Royo

Senior Lecturer, School of Arts: Dance & Dance Studies

Roehampton University of Surrey, Froebel College Roehampton Lane

London SW15 5PJ UK

<a.lopez@roehampton.ac.uk>

The 9^th^ century temple complex of Prambanan in Central Java is known
for its narrative reliefs and for its dance panels, located around the
outer balustrade of the main temple, *candi* Siwa. In recent years the
dance reliefs have received much attention and efforts have been
directed at studying the dance movements captured by the sculptors of
these panels, with a view to reconstituting this obsolete dance
vocabulary . This in turn has led to choreographic experimentation. The
paper will focus on the process of reconstitution of the dance
vocabulary of the Prambanan temple complex and the recent work that has
been done on it using animation and motion capture technology. The work
did not occur in isolation; indeed the whole complex has been the focus
of collaborative research involving architects, dancers and
archaeologists, exploring the dance/temple connection and mapping the
diverse contextual meanings the Prambanan dance sequences have in
performance, in architecture and as iconography.

**Stratigraphy: Digging Living Layers**

*Nicola Laneri* and "Art-aeology Experience" (Italy)

Istituto Universitario Orientale

di Napoli, Italy, and

The Italian Academy

for Advanced Studies in America

932 Schermerhorn Hall\
New York, New York 10027

<n.laneri@tiscali.it>

*Stratigraphy* is a multimedia art installation that represents an
"excavation" of different ethnic "layers" in New York City's
neighborhood of East Harlem, in Manhattan. This archaeological
excavation of a contemporaneous context was made digging sounds,
material culture and images of a dialogical discourse between the
"conservation" of the Italian tradition, represented by the words of
Rosa Morrone, the owner of an Italian bakery in East Harlem since the
1950's, and the neighborhood's "innovative" facade, expressed by the
words and work of the Puerto Rican painter-muralist-chalker James
DeLavega. The images and objects that form this project embody the
diverse ethnicities (Italian, Puerto Rican, Mexican) now present in the
neighborhood and how diverse forms of cultural interactions (peaceful
and violent) between these groups have led to the re-creation of "new"
material culture (for example espresso coffee made with an Italian Moka
machine and Puerto Rican coffee, pizza prepared by Mexicans, Italian
Madonna statues dressed with real hair---an Hispanic tradition\--and
worshipped by Asians) shared amongst all of these communities and
re-made throughout the cultural, functional and ritual transformation of
their values during the last century.

**ArcheoTrance: An Archaeological Dance Floor**

Art-aeology Experience will propose a two hour DJ set in which
archaeological sounds will be remixed with dance music to entertain the
archaeologists at the WAC-5.

**Archaeology Goes to the Opera**

#### John E. Ehrenhard 

Southeast Archeological Center

National Park Service

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, Florida 32310

john_ehrenhard@nps.gov

\"Zabette: An Opera in Three Acts\" premiered in a1999 performance at
the Rialto Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a story of a free woman of
color in nineteenth century coastal Georgia. It is a story of love,
trust, and betrayal; a story of tragedy and triumph of the human spirit.
The libretto by Mary Bullard was inspired by archaeological and
historical studies at Cumberland Island, Georgia in the 1970s.

**Sherds ABOVE the Loess: Historical Archaeology as Art**

### David G. Orr

Senior Regional Archeologist

U.S. National Park Service

Research Professor of Anthropology

Department of Anthropology

Temple University

<david.orr@temple.edu>; <david_orr@nps.gov>

It has long been accepted that the archaeological remnants of antiquity
exert an intrinsic aesthetic power far removed from their scientific or
historic value. What is less well known is that archaeological objects
recovered from American Historic Sites also possess such power.
Information about early American objects, virtually non-existent in the
mid-nineteenth century, was begun to be vigorously collected by the
early twentieth century. The \"birth\" of an anthropologically based
Historical Archaeology field did not occur until the 1950\'s. Both
studies, the material cultural approach to American history and American
Historical Archaeology, are practically contemporaneous in their origin.
The idea that the shattered things recovered in the infant stages of
historical archaeology until today are somehow inherently aesthetic is
still a foreign one to most people.

This paper will address these origins and provide an approach to the
utilization of historical archaeological objects (and assemblages) as
\"works of beauty\" and worthy of a fine arts approach. This realization
should give all of us a new perspective on the complex matrix of
functions which historical archaeological material possess. Attention
will be focused on a select group of early eighteenth century English
slipware pottery found in ONE context in Philadelphia and how this
assemblage could easily produce a very striking art historical/aesthetic
exhibit. The problems of American Antiquarianism and its relationship to
collecting are also explored. Yet, properly staged, such an
aesthetically motivated exhibit of historical archeological
\"treasures\" would not be antithetical to American anthropologically
driven archeologists.

# From rock art to digital image: Archaeology and Art in Aboriginal Australia

*Claire Smith*

Department of Archaeology

Flinders University

Adelaide, SA, Australia.

<claire.smith@flinders.edu.au>

*Kirsten Brett*

*Peter Manabaru*

*Jimmy Wesan*

Barunga-Wugularr Region

Northern Territory, Australia.

This paper investigates the changing uses and meanings of Aboriginal
arts from the Barunga-Wugularr region of the Northern Territory,
Australia. The central theme is the manner in which Aboriginal people
use visual arts to establish and maintain connections with the world
around them. Rock art images are used to convey social and cultural
information and provide visual cues for oral histories. When transferred
into a digital format they can form the basis for educational tools that
effectively extend Indigenous forms of instruction.

PANEL:

## John E. Ehrenhard

Southeast Archeological Center

National Park Service

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, Florida 32310

john_ehrenhard@nps.gov

## Christine A. Finn

The Institute of Archaeology

University of Oxford

36 Beaumont Street

Oxford OX1 2PG

United Kingdom

<christine.finn@archaeology.oxford.ac.uk>

## Lance M. Foster

Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska

59-777 Kapuhi Place

Haleiwa, Hawaii 96712 USA

<lancemfoster@yahoo.com>

## James G. Gibb

Independent Scholar

2554 Carrollton Road

Annapolis, Maryland 21403

[jggibb@msn.com](mailto:jggibb@erols.com)

**John H. Jameson, Jr.**

Senior Archaeologist

Southeast Archeological Center

U.S. National Park Service

2035 E. Paul Dirac Drive

Johnson Building, Suite 120

Tallahassee, Florida 32310

<john_jameson@nps.gov>

**Johannes Kranz**

Fundacion \"Casa de los Tres Mundos\"

Antigua Plaza de los Leones

Granada, Nicaragua

e-mail office: [info@c3mundos.org.ni]{.underline}

e-mail privat: [johaan33@hotmail.com]{.underline}

## Nicola Laneri

Istituto Universitario Orientale

di Napoli, Italy, and

The Italian Academy

for Advanced Studies in America

932 Schermerhorn Hall\
New York, New York 10027

<n.laneri@tiscali.it>

**Alessandra Lopez y Royo**

Senior Lecturer, School of Arts: Dance & Dance Studies

Roehampton University of Surrey, Froebel College Roehampton Lane

London SW15 5PJ UK

<a.lopez@roehampton.ac.uk>

## 

## David Middlebrook

School of Art & Design

San Jose State University

One Washington Square

IS Bldg., Room 221A

San José, California 95192-0089

<lruble@apr.com>

**David G. Orr**

Senior Regional Archeologist

U.S. National Park Service

Research Professor of Anthropology

Department of Anthropology

Temple University

<david.orr@temple.edu>; <david_orr@nps.gov>

**Claire Smith**

**Kirsten Brett**

Department of Archaeology

School of Cultural Studies

Flinders University of South Australia

GPO Box 2100

Adelaide, SA. 5001

Australia.

<claire.smith@flinders.edu.au>

**Peter Manabaru**

**Jimmy Wesan**

Barunga-Wugularr Region

Northern Territory, Australia.