Archives – Can You Dig It? Time, Materiality, and the Archaeology of Archives
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-02-08

Archaeology and the archive occupy similar metaphorical space. Both are regularly invoked as specific modes of historical thinking (consider, e.g., Foucault 1969, Derrida 1995, Olivier 2008), not only for their cultural resonance but also for the particular practices that underlie both archaeological and archival work – preservation, organization, and so on. And recently, both have been portrayed as (more or less intentional) materializations of memory, as palimpsestic accretions, as memory practices (see, e.g., Lucas 2012, Shanks 2012). That archaeological practice quite literally entails the creation of an archive – that the archaeological process involves collecting, selecting, organizing, and preserving materials – will not be surprising to any of its practitioners. But, despite archaeologists’ familiarity with the archiving of archaeology – as well the acknowledged conceptual overlap between archaeology and the archive – practical considerations of what archaeology might bring to the archive have been relatively rare (Baird 2012). What is archaeology of the archive?
Following historians of science, Nathan Schlanger has argued that, “To reach the science in the making as much as the applauded result, to grasp the quotidian as much as the extraordinary, historians of archaeology need to turn to … the archives of the discipline” (2004: 166). Archives, more than published results contain the traces of scientific practices – of course, they are, at the same time, the traces of another set of practices. And so, historians of archaeology are in an exceedingly advantageous position to consider the conceptual overlap of archaeology and the archive.
In this paper, we ask what – beyond metaphor – archaeological practice might bring to archival work. We consider this question via two very different archives, the archive of the Nichoria excavations, housed at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA), and the personal archive of the Czech philologist and archaeologist Antonín Salač (1885–1960), housed at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (AVČR). The former compiles materials produced during the Nichoria excavations – field notebooks, end of season reports, photographs – in an “organized” typology; the latter contains a great mass of textual ephemera, essentially unprocessed – the residue of Salač’s life. What does it mean to approach these archives, archaeologically? What do considerations of materiality – concomitantly, of context, of temporality – bring to these archives? Recent conceptualizations of archives and archaeology as assemblages, as memory practices, are often attended by the idea that archaeology’s approach to the past is necessarily different from that of history – that history is sequential, perhaps, and that archaeology, because it is material, is multitemporal. But archives – the sources of “historical” work – are, themselves, material – and, so, they are also multitemporal. Ultimately, then, approaching our archives with specific reference to their materiality – their “archaeology” – we create histories of archaeology that destabilize boundaries between the “historical” and the “archaeological”.

Author - De Armond, Thea, Oakland, CA, United States of America (Presenting author)
Co-author(s) - Duray, Anne, Stanford University, Stanford, United States of America