Researching the Archaeological Past through Imagined Narratives

A Necessary Fiction

Daniël van Helden, Robert Witcher, Daniël van Helden, Robert Witcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138303638
• eBook ISBN: 9781351398695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Archaeological interpretation is an imaginative act. Stratigraphy and artefacts do not tell us what the past was like; that is the task of the archaeologist. The diverse group of contributors to this volume address the relationship between archaeology and imagination through the medium of historical fiction and fictive techniques, both as consumers and as producers. The fictionalisation of archaeological research is often used to disseminate the results of scholarly or commercial archaeology projects for wider public outreach. Here, instead, the authors focus on the question of what benefits fiction and fictive techniques, as inspiration and method, can bring to the practice of archaeology itself.

The contributors, a mix of archaeologists, novelists and other artists, advance a variety of theoretical arguments and examples to advance the case for the value of a reflexive engagement between archaeology and fiction. Themes include the similarities and differences in the motives and methods of archaeologists and novelists, translation, empathy, and the need to humanise the past and diversify archaeological narratives. The authors are sensitive to the epistemological and ethical issues surrounding the influence of fiction on researchers and the incorporation of fictive techniques in their work. Sometimes dismissed as distracting just-so stories, or even as dangerously relativistic narratives, the use of fictive techniques has a long history in archaeological research and examples from the scholarly literature on many varied periods and regions are considered.

The volume sets out to bring together examples of these disparate applications and to focus attention on the need for explicit recognition of the problems and possibilities of such approaches, and on the value of further research about them.

1Historical fiction and archaeological interpretation

Introduction

Daniël van Helden and Robert Witcher

Archaeological stories

Humans are the ‘storytelling animal’ (Gottschall 2012). We weave narratives to shape and make sense of the world around us—past, present and future. Over the last 20 years, there has been a resurgence of interest across the humanities and social sciences in the role of narrative in the creation, communication and consumption of meaning; there are now also growing calls in the sciences to learn from this research and to harness the techniques of narrative storytelling for more effective presentation and dissemination of scientific research (e.g. Dahlstrom 2014; Martinez-Conde & Macknik 2017). At the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, archaeology has a particularly well-developed literature on the role of narrative, built on a long tradition of critical reflection on reasoning and writing about the material remains of the past (e.g. Evans 1989; Hodder 1989; Terrell 1990; Pluciennik 1999, 2015; Joyce et al. 2002; Holtorf 2010). In part, this attention reflects the challenges of working with rich but incomplete, and often ambiguous, archaeological evidence that both demands and defies ordering into meaningful accounts. The result has been great experimentation with, and analysis of, different narrative forms. It is one specific form—fictional narrative—that is the focus of the present volume.

Along with the 15 other contributors, our aim is to examine the intersection of archaeological research and historical fiction sensu lato. Historical novels, films and TV series present imagined narratives of periods and regions that often have been investigated thoroughly by archaeologists; indeed, some of these fictional accounts make extensive use of the results of archaeological research. Such imagined narratives often have been dismissed by archaeologists, either outright as fantastical tales or, more specifically, for particular misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the past. The latter, in fact, may be a constructive process, drawing the attention of archaeologists to neglected aspects of the past and prompting new and more rigorous research. But just as frequently, historians and archaeologists have welcomed these fictional narratives, both for ‘bringing the past to life’ for wider audiences and as objects of serious study in their own right (e.g. Wyke 1997; Smith 2001; Bernbeck 2005; Mattingly 2011: 4–5; Cyrino 2015; Augoustakis & Cyrino 2016). Indeed, a number of professional archaeologists have turned their hands to novel writing, and many more have experimented in scholarly publications with forms that either resemble or make direct use of fictive techniques. The latter range from short fictional vignettes, intended to engage the reader or to exemplify specific points, through extended accounts that foreground marginalised groups, to imagined journeys that evoke the experiences and even emotions of past people. Often such fiction is used to disseminate to the public the final results of a research project or of an excavation (e.g. Cooper 2003; Leach et al. 2010; Savani et al. 2018), but these techniques also have been used as part of the research process and for communication with other archaeologists.

While recognising the importance of fiction as a means of public outreach, this volume focuses primarily on the use of fiction within the research process itself. Hence, it is concerned primarily with archaeologists as producers rather than consumers of fictive accounts. It is also focuses on the epistemological and ethical aspects of integrating fictive techniques into archaeological thinking rather than the aesthetic or artistic value of the resulting fictions. In short, how can these techniques be used by archaeologists to achieve a better understanding of the past?

We start with two basic premises. First is the centrality of the imagination in the study of the past. Archaeologists excavate material traces from the ground and generate vast amounts of data, but these must be transformed into information and knowledge through a fundamentally creative process (see Edmonds 1999: x). Second, the aims and methods of archaeologists and historical novelists are more similar than the widespread and deeply rooted notion of ‘fact versus fiction’ allows. There are indeed important and meaningful distinctions between archaeological and fictive accounts of the past, but they are not fundamentally different (see Elphinstone & Wickham-Jones 2012: 536; cf. De Groot 2015: 13–22). These two premises allow us, temporarily at least, to put fictional and scholarly accounts on to the same analytical plane. Such equivalence may appear irresponsible, but as each of the contributors to this volume demonstrates, both archaeologists and most fiction writers maintain a fundamental commitment to the evidence and to advancing truthful accounts of the past. Far from arguing that evidence and emotion can be freely mixed—or are synonymous even—the contributors explore, and sometimes blur, but do not erase the distinction between fact and fiction.

The editors of a recent volume, Subject and narrative in archaeology, point to an “increasing clamor for and interest in alternative forms of archaeological narratives, involving [amongst others] writing fiction” (Van Dyke & Bernbeck 2015: 1). This claim is evidentially true, as demonstrated by the contributors to this volume, but it also requires context. First, the use of these fictional forms is still disputed, and, second, although interest has indeed increased, it is by no means new. In this introduction, we first explore the question of archaeological fact and fiction and the line that may or may not divide them. We move on to present case studies of the intertwining of archaeological research and fiction writing to demonstrate both the risks and the opportunities involved. We then present a selection of examples to establish the long history of the use of fictive techniques in archaeological accounts of the past. The second half of the introduction reviews some of the key fictive techniques used (e.g. vignettes, journeys) and discusses the authors’ motivations and intended outcomes. We then review some of the key objections and challenges to the use of fictive techniques, before outlining the contributors’ individual chapters. In neither this introduction nor across the volume as a whole have we attempted to impose any grand overarching theoretical framework for the use of fictive techniques in archaeology. Our aim is to draw attention to the scale and breadth of the use of these techniques and to hear from a diversity of contributors about their theoretical and methodological practices. In this way we hope to open up a space for the investigation of the potential of fictive techniques in the archaeological research process.

The borderline between archaeological fact and fiction

In the popular perception, there is a strong distinction between fact and fiction, and between their practitioners. The archaeologist is a scientist who discovers material traces of the past, analyses them rigorously and reports them objectively in scholarly site reports, replete with technical language, data, diagrams and references. In contrast, the novelist or filmmaker is an artist, inventing characters, dialogue and stories about the past. Hence, one informs, the other entertains; one discovers facts, the other makes them up. In more formal terms, there are perceived to be epistemological differences in the uses of evidence by, and truth claims of, archaeologists and the creators of historical fiction. Archaeologists generally reflect and reinforce, to varying degrees, this distinction of fact from fiction. Part of the very origins of the discipline was a process of distancing and differentiating itself from antiquarianism and folklore and aligning with scientific developments such as evolutionary studies (Trigger 2006). To stray too far from objective description and analysis of the evidence, to move too close to the arts (see Figure 1.1), is to risk consorting with those who, with either good intent or bad, invent things about the past (e.g. Kristiansen 2011: 77). The archaeologist’s responsibility is to the evidence and to the past; the novelist’s is to his or her reader in the present.

Figure 1.1The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) by Francisco Goya. Plate 43 from Los Caprichos. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Creative Commons Attribution CC0 1.0 Universal

The discipline of archaeology as a whole therefore reflects wider anxieties about authority and the past, and works to reinforce the division of its own enterprise from that of historical fiction writing. Archaeological authority lies, at least in part, in maintaining disciplinary coherence and respectability via a well-policed borderline, and one does not need to look hard to find the border guards in action. Three examples—selected for no other reason than they were published in the same recent year and reflect work on varied archaeological contexts—demonstrate the case. Brian Hobley (2015: 157) states “‘speculation’ is […] carefully avoided by professional archaeologists, while ‘interpretation’ is acceptable if based upon evidence”. Claudia Sagona (2015: 92–93) argues that “imaginative forays into the sensual, emotive and subjective” risk “weaving untenable threads into the fabric of academic discussion”, and Dennis Harding (2015: ix) warns that “we should guard against allowing the ‘empathic’ approach to prehistory to take us beyond the limits of archaeological inference”. These statements introduce the terrain through which runs the borderline separating fact and fiction: on one side is interpretation and on the other imagination, and similarly, inference versus speculation and objectivity versus subjectivity. Although these examples are all recent, the borderline itself is far from new. Similar concerns can be found in the archaeological literature extending back for decades. Eighty years ago, for example, the Aegeanists Alan Wace and Carl Blegen (1939: 131) stated that “the archaeologist is or should be cautious [and] prefers to state the facts as he knows them quite frankly rather than indulge in free reconstruction of pre-history for which he sees little or no real evidence”. Indeed, the same basic conceptualisation of fact versus fiction can be traced back deep into the ancient Greek past, such as Aristotle’s distinction of history and poetry and Thucydides’ (1.20–23, see Węcowski 2008) critique of the fantastical elements in Herodotus’ Histories (the latter intended as moral lessons of the past rather than a record of what happened).

The repeated articulation of such concerns in the archaeological literature over the last century illustrates both the perception and the policing of a line between scholarly archaeology and historical fiction. As will be demonstrated below, an important observation is that this borderline, and its maintenance, transcends wider trends in archaeological thinking through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whether in the culture-historical, processual or post-processual eras, the need to reaffirm the borderline reflects the persistent perceived threat to, and presumably crossing of, that line by fellow scholars whose methods are deemed inappropriate. Indeed, the uses of fiction, poetry, theatre and multimedia in some archaeological approaches over the past 25 years have been characterised collectively as, precisely, ‘transgressive archaeologies’ (Praetzellis 2015: 119–31; see Southgate 2009: 173–78 on the parallel debate in the study of history).

But how real or meaningful is the line threatened by such transgression? What distinguishes the craft of the archaeologist from that of the historical novelist? After all, they often write about the same periods, places and events and draw on the same evidence. Their specific written outputs (site reports versus novels) and their audiences (archaeologists versus the public) are largely distinct, but how different are their general aims and methods? In the words of archaeologist Stephen Lekson (2018: 191), “surely pre-history and good historical fiction will share some methodological chops? Both interpret, extrapolate from factors to sequences, causes, and narratives”. The specific methods may vary—the use of statistics or the invention of dialogue—but the broader objectives and working practices demonstrate strong similarities. Indeed, a collaboration between the archaeologist Caroline Wickham-Jones and the novelist Margaret Elphinstone led them to the conclusion that the differences between archaeology and fiction writing are “generic not intrinsic” (Elphinstone & Wickham-Jones 2012: 536; see chapters by both of these authors in this volume). In other words, they are set apart by the specific practices of each genre rather than by their fundamentally different natures.

To explore these issues in more detail, we start in the next section with a discussion of two historical novels—Salammbô and The Source—examining the complex interrelations of archaeological fact and fiction. Specifically, Salammbô is used to demonstrate some of the risks involved when the line between archaeological and fictional accounts becomes blurred. Conversely, The Source offers an example of how the novelist can draw on archaeological evidence in ways that imitate those of the archaeologist, and even advance ideas that are only entertained by archaeologists many years later with the subsequent discovery of new evidence.

Historical novels and archaeology

Salammbô

For centuries, the past and its material remains have offered a rich source of inspiration for artists, poets and writers. Before the Enlightenment, their works freely mixed evidence and imagination, epitomised by Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantastical views of ancient Rome. As a clearer distinction between ‘fact’ and “fiction’ began to crystallise, however, such works came under critique as “imaginative archaeology” (e.g. Murray 1888: 21) and were dismissed as liable to mislead. But the power of such representations is sometimes too deeply ingrained in the cultural imagination to disregard them. The risks of this interweaving of archaeological evidence and imagination, fact and fiction, is well illustrated by Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 novel Salammbô. The novel is set in ancient Carthage in the years following the First Punic War and focuses on the daughter of the Carthaginian general, Hamilcar Barca. The book was a publishing sensation, not least because of its lurid scenes of child sacrifice. When Flaubert was drawn into a dispute with scholars of history, who questioned his depiction of Carthaginian life, he deferred to his ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Historical fiction and archaeological interpretation: Introduction
• 2 The cornflakes of prehistory: Fact, fiction and imagination in archaeology
• 3 Voices from the silence
• 4 Beyond archaeological narrative: Imagined worlds of Neolithic Europe
• 5 Imagined realities in academic and fictional accounts of the British Mesolithic
• 6 Walking in someone else’s shoes: Archaeology, empathy and fiction
• 7 The multiverse of fiction: Exploring interpretation through community archaeology
• 8 Entering undocumented pasts through playwriting
• 9 Encountering the past through slag and storytelling
• 10 Writing wonders: Poetry as archaeological method?
• 11 Ambiguity and omission: Creative mediation of the unknowable past
• 12 Spartacus: Blood and Sand (STARZ, 2010): A necessary fiction?
• 13 Archaeology, historical fiction and Classical Reception Studies
• 14 Imagining the past through Film and Cultural Studies
• 15 Archaeological narrative and humour in a post-truth world: The obligatory sum-up article
• Index