Material Culture and Text

The Art of Ambiguity

Christopher Tilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781138818095
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317599661
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1991, this is the first book-length exploration of post-structuralist discourse theory in archaeology. It tackles the most basic problem of historical and archaeological analysis - the relationship between text and artefact – in an analysis of prehistoric art fusing theory and the practice of interpretation to create a fresh framework for understanding the relationship between past and present. Focusing on a collection of rock carvings from northern Sweden, the author shows how alternative conceptualizations of the material from structuralist, hermeneutic and structural-Marxist frameworks substantially alter our understanding of their meaning and significance. Engaging readers in an interpretive process, this book is for specialists in archaeology, anthropology, art history and cultural studies.

Part I

READING A MATERIAL TEXT

Figure 1 View of the rapids and islands at Nämforsen downriver, taken from the north-east, with the Island of Brådön in the centre, 1939 (After Hallström 1960: Photo 63)

Figure 2 Brådön viewed from Notön at high water 1907 (After Hallström 1960: Photo 113)

1

MOTIFS AND RAPIDS

Figure 3 View of the rapids (Photo: Gösta Westman)

Nämforsen. In the late spring, the roar of the water can be heard from a considerable distance. The tree-clad cliffs forming the northern river banks rise here to a height of more than 60 m providing a panoramic view. In the midst of an expanse of towering pine forest the turbulent water crashes over the rocks and whirls in a series of magnificent rapids, between 3000 and 2000 BC the last barrier before a long narrow inlet of the open sea. On bare, glossy rock surfaces polished by ice and water, along the margins of the river shores, and on two islands in the river course surrounded by the seething water, is an enormous accumulation of carved or pecked motifs.

Some images which fascinate me:

Figure 4 A writhing mass of elks interspersed with boats and shoe sole

Figure 5 A ‘love scene’ overlooked by an elk

Figure 6 Phallic man and double-headed elk

Figure 7 A couple, one figure with marked swelling in the belly, stand by an upturned elk head

Figure 8 Boats transform into elks

Figure 9 Elks transform into humans

Figure 10 What is it?

Time and humanity have altered and transformed these traces of the past: transported blocks of ice or stone abrade, rocks crack and split, their surfaces transfigured. Black lichen and other vegetation grow in areas no longer exposed to the full force of the waters; fires made by fishermen against the cold; rock blasting to aid the salmon catch or log floating; the construction of timber ballast beds and a hydroelectric power plant – all these have combined to obscure the physical remnants of the past.

But time has also added to original event and experience: a textual accretion continues to grow. The carved rock surfaces are now overlain by an opaque slime sticky with words and figurational representations. Nämforsen has been disseminated and may now be ‘seen’ not only in Ângermanland, northern Sweden, but in Stockholm, London, New York or Rio de Janeiro. Already an interpretation of an interpretation, the carvings provide an infinitely expansive medium of discourse – at times frothy with the agitation of reaching absent meaning – which simultaneously reveals and obscures.

Their failure to disclose social signification has resulted in the deadening verbal and visual catalogue of the empiricist archaeological text, the ‘standard’ work from which subsequent chronological and chorological obsessions take their point of departure, attempting to pin the carvings down as precisely as possible in space and time. But of social and cultural and cosmological context so little has been said.

What is to be made of these rock carvings? Since they are so utterly removed from contemporary experience, must our reaction to them always remain one of alienation? What is their meaning, significance and value today? Our reaction may be one of fascination but must this inevitably be reflected in interpretative incompetence, a dumb failure to discover meaning? Or can we hope to mediate them productively, reinscribe them into the present, open out the carvings to subjective experience once more?

2

NÄMFORSEN THROUGH THE EYES OF HALLSTRÖM

Hallström devoted most of his active working life – forty years – to documenting the rock carvings of northern Norway and Sweden, producing two massive catalogues of the finds with appended dossiers of plates (1938, 1960). His work on Nämforsen, documented in Monumental Art of Northern Sweden from the Stone Age and published only two years before his death, in many respects marks the culminating point of his work. Nämforsen, only partially documented previously, was, after Hallström, the largest known conglomeration of rock carvings in the whole of Europe, only exceeded by Val Camonica in northern Italy (and now, more recently, Alta in arctic Norway). In the face of the ravages associated with the construction of a hydroelectric plant ‘absolutely special means and measures, beyond those usually available to scientific research and the care of ancient monuments’ were required (Hallström 1960: x).

The title of Hallström’s book appears odd, the average size of the rock carvings being about 40 cm. He himself remarks on this in the preface (p. ix) and initially suggests it was an attempt to find an adequate expression to convey a sense of the sheer quantities of the carvings. In the conclusion we have another clue: Hallström notes that this is a ‘heavy book’ (p. 370). He in fact transforms a disparate series of documents (individual rock carving surfaces) into a monument. That which is truly monumental is Hallström’s effort – the book itself, the long years of dedication, the supreme effort of will to complete it in his later years, despite failing health. Mobilized and compressed into a bound text, the rock carvings serve as Hallström’s personal monument, his claim to immortality. This monument, although signed under the aegis of a proper name, is paradoxically more like a gravestone without any inscription, for it signifies a textual space that is meant to exclude its author: an object intended to be unmediated by a constitutive subjectivity.

Hallström’s aim was to present a scientific treatise, to document the rock carvings for posterity with the greatest possible rigour, omitting no detail. Such ‘scientific’ treatment meant (and still means) that any interpretative understanding of the rock carvings had to be reduced or confined to an absolute minimum. Beyond the descriptive catalogue and the plates detailing what and where, the less said the better, for this would be to stray beyond the permitted bounds of discourse. Of the 205 pages of the text Hallström devotes to Nämforsen, 141 or 69 per cent consists of a description of different rock carving surfaces. A further fifty pages simply enumerate, compare and contrast the different categories of carvings – human figures, boats, birds, etc. delineated in the main catalogue.

Hallström’s research at Nämforsen was carried out primarily between 1934 and 1947, supplemented by work on smaller sites, and there can be no doubt about his dedication to the task. He notes almost drowning in the rapids on one occasion with his wife, building bridges out to isolated rocks in the seething river channel, crawling with smarting hands over precipitous and rough rock surfaces, searching the area by day and by night with floodlights and in any and every possible type of weather, checking out accounts of local people and previous antiquaries who had been to the site. Few stones indeed were left either unturned or untrodden. Such determination can only be admired and the finished catalogue is an exemplary piece of documentation executed to the highest possible standards, for which we all owe him a great debt.

The interpretative result: ‘this concluding chapter obviously does not present any conclusion’ (1960: 377). Hallström’s entire life’s work ends without any conclusion. In this sense it is a complete failure. He clearly has little more grasp of the meaning and significance of the rock carvings at the end than he had at the beginning. All he can finally say, a few lines before the book ends, is that ‘the most important thing is the material’ (p. 377). But this failure was built into Hallström’s project from the very beginning, predetermined. He cannot conclude, cannot say anything about the meaning or significance of the carvings, because the premises (largely unexamined) from which he worked systematically prevented him from doing so.

He states that the task of the student of rock carvings is twofold: to document them as precisely as possible and interpret them ‘in the best possible way’ (p. xiv), a position which appears to be reasonable enough but actually contains the seeds of its own dissolution. It becomes increasingly clear in Hallström’s text that to document as ‘precisely as possible’ systematically blocks not only the ‘best possible’ interpretation but any interpretation at all. What does Hallström mean by this term ‘interpretation’? He never cares to specify what this concept is supposed to imply or involve. He writes of ‘mastering’ the carvings, a ‘need for a penetration into the essence of this rock-art’ (p. 366), of ‘reading’ the figures, and at one point even employs a military metaphor – he wants to ‘conquer’ them (p. 138). This mastering, conquering, penetration and reading of what he speculates might be considered to be ‘the literature of the period’ (p. 370) involves repeated checking of figures on different rock surfaces, at different times, in different seasons, in different lighting conditions, during the day and at night. This may permit eventually, and given luck and circumstance, the reading of the ‘literature’, the carved rock surfaces.

Hallström ‘reads’ in a rather peculiar way: words without subjects or objects, without referents, without sentences, lacking any structure, any grammatical system. Hallström’s is a reading which can never recover meaning. ‘The cat sat on the mat’ or ‘mat the on sat cat the’ or ‘the mat the sat on cat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title1 Page
• Copyright1 Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Reading a Materiaol Text
• Part II Mediating the Text
• Appendix Review: Material Culture in a Text
• References
• Index