Material Mnemonics

Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe

Katina T. Lillios, Vasileios Tsamis, Vasileios Tsamis

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781842177839
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

How did ancient Europeans materialise memory? Material Mnemonics: Everyday Practices in Prehistoric Europe provides a fresh approach to the archaeological study of memory. Drawing on case studies from the British Isles, Scandinavia, central Europe, Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula that date from the Neolithic through the Iron Age, the book's authors explore the implications of our understanding of the past when memory and mnemonic practices are placed in the center of cultural analyses. They discuss monument building, personal adornment, relic-making, mortuary rituals, the burning of bodies and houses and the maintenance of domestic spaces and structures over long periods of time. Material Mnemonics engages with contemporary debates on the intersection of memory, identity, embodiment, and power and challenges archaeologists to consider how materiality both provokes and constrains the mnemonic processes in everyday life.

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Introduction

Katina T. Lillios and Vasileios Tsamis

Beginning in the 1990s, archaeologists and other scholars of material culture increasingly turned their attention to memory and devoted themselves to identifying and analyzing memory practices, memory sites, and material mnemonics (Alcock 2002; Bradley 2002; Buchli and Lucas 2001; Forty and Küchler 1999; Hallam and Hockey 2001; Jones 2007; Mills and Walker 2008; Radstone 2000; Saunders 2003; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2003). This mnemophilia is likely related to and dependent on emerging intellectual currents in the study of agency, biography, time, nationalism, and identity politics. Whether memory studies remain a theoretical horizon – broadly experienced but short-lived – or mature to become part of a more enduring phase in the evolution of archaeological theory and practice is, however, unknown.

Writing about memory is to open a Pandora’s Box of further possibilities. To avoid a lengthy and generalised discussion of the subject, we wish to briefly consider those writers and their works that have influenced today’s archaeologies of memory, specifically in the ways they articulate everyday memory, the collective, place, and the senses. These writers include Halbwachs (1992[1925]), Bachelard (1964), Casey (1987), Nora (1989), and Connerton (1989).

The works of Maurice Halbwachs focus on two main lines of research. The first is social classes, in particular, the working class (e.g. in terms of consumption, housing, and life styles), and the second is the role of memory in a program of collective psychology. Halbwachs criticizes scholars who consider memory as solely developed from individual psychology. His analysis stresses the importance of society in the creation of memory. In his work On Collective Memory (1992[1925]) he demonstrates that the past is not kept in individual memory, and it cannot be relived as such. In contrast, collective representations constitute memory based on the necessities of the present. He applied this reasoning to the history of Christian civilization in La topographie légendaire des évangiles (Halbwachs 1941), showing how religious beliefs are based on a history whose essential events are materialized in very particular places (e.g. the Sea of Galilee, Mount Zion, etc.). Finally, he explains how the re-settlement of these religious sites functions to address issues of the present, transforms memory and, at the same time, guarantees its continued existence.

A fundamental work in the meanings of domestic space and memory, and of relevance to archaeologists, is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964). Bachelard analyses domestic space as triggering memories with its smells, spatial orientation, and interaction with people. He believes the house is constantly interacting with its inhabitants, a space which contains compressed time, since it is seen as ‘accumulating’ different experiences from different people. According to Bachelard, we should go beyond the problem of description and instead focus on how we inhabit space (1964: 4). The way we inhabit space is based on memories and the fact that the more securely these memories are tethered to space, the sounder they are. Focusing on the house people are born in, Bachelard puts forward the idea that such a house is not only an embodied experience or memory, but also an embodiment of dreams. Each part of the house can remind us of childhood dreams (both metaphorically and literally) and plans for the future. Therefore, space is not only remembered, experienced, and lived, but it is also dreamed and imagined.

A thorough description of the varieties of emplaced human memory is stated in Edward Casey’s Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (1987). In his book Casey uses habitus in order to provide a framework for linking emplacement with embodiment and a phenomenological framework to argue for the primacy of place over space. “We come to the world – we come into it and keep returning to it – as already placed there” (Casey 1996: 18). Both sensory experiences and spaces are emplaced from the very first moment and at every subsequent moment as well. Embodiment and emplacement become the fundamental essentials for Casey’s geographical self. The self does not exist independently of body and place (1987: 147).

Furthermore, Casey demonstrates the major role of the human body in remembering and forgetting the past. Bodily movement takes people into places and helps to remember them vividly. Hence, memory is not just something of the past, but something practiced in the present. Casey emphasizes that place is crucial in understanding memory. He explains that place has been overlooked because memory was linked with time and that place was diminished to description. Having been in places is a fundamental resource for remembering our being in the world. Thus, places serve as reference points and triggering mechanisms for the formation of memories in the present (1987: 215). The slow re-emergence of place as a viable and productive notion only occurred with the recognition of the importance of the body in spatial orientation and in ordinary perception. This recognition is adopted by Casey in his later work The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Casey 1997).

In Pierre Nora’s three-volume work Les lieux des mémoires (Nora 1997), we encounter the importance of places in the creation of France’s identity. In the above work, authors like Le Goff (Reims, ville du sacre) and Nora (Entre mémoire et histoire, Les memoirs d’Etat) understand memory as constantly changing, manipulated by people and used in everyday life. Body, space and memory can be seen as closely knit in Nora’s suggestion for the existence of lieux de mémoire, where specific places (e.g. war memorials) trigger memories and encourage locality. Memory is seen as an everyday phenomenon in past societies, in contrast with the modern societies where it is focused on specific places (Nora 1989: 7). Memory and History are seen as contradictory terms. The very need of western society to rely on history proves, according to Nora, that modern society does not rely on everyday memory (embodied and uncontrolled) to remember the past. Memory is attached to human experiences having material, experiential, functional and symbolic attributes (ibid: 19).

The division between pre-modern and modern society in terms of memory’s role is certainly over-simplistic. Everyday memory is important in every society. Places, feelings, emotions and songs evoke memories about the past and are triggered by sensory experiences. Nora focuses on the relation between space and memory, and the correlations between memory and bodily or commemorative practices in modern society. In addition, his simplistic dichotomy of premodern/modern society oversimplifies the available evidence without taking into account regions where lieux de mémoires existed in the past (e.g. Egypt, Greece, and South America).

Paul Connerton advocates the importance of social remembering through rituals and the application of the human senses (Connerton 1989: 48). Memory is embedded in bodily practices having personal and social significance. While Nora advocates the importance of spatial remembrance, Connerton introduces the importance of habitual memory (1989: 72) and the crucial role of establishing social relations through communal ceremonies. Social memory, for Connerton, is found in commemorative ceremonies, which are performative in nature and thus sedimented in the body (1989: 71). This social bodily practice can be distinguished into two different types of experiencing. The first is incorporated practice, which entails bodily gestures and expressions between bodies, and the second is inscribed practice and has to do with modern devices for storing and retrieving information. Space, memory and bodily experience should be analysed together since they are variable in meaning and in constant interaction acquiring and suggesting different modes of experience and remembering.

Archaeology was keen to follow the developments of the above writers, in particular, Connerton (Bradley 1998, 2002) and to incorporate them in the study of the past. This trend is exemplified in two recent publications on archaeology and memory that treat memory as a social construct, variable by gender, ethnicity, class and religion. The first is Archaeologies of Memory (Van Dyke and Alcock, eds. 2003), which demonstrates memory’s mutability and the fact that it emerges from actions of remembering and forgetting. The second important work is Archaeologies of Remembrance: Death and Memory in Past Societies (Williams 2003). As the title indicates, this volume emphasises mortuary practices and the role of death and memory in the past. However, memory is also found in everyday practices and experiences, and is part of the mundane and the repetitive. This is where our edited book comes to life.

Scope and aims of book

Many archaeological works on memory treat memory (and forgetting) as an isolated theoretical concern or as an adjunct to the study of death and mortuary practices. This volume focuses on the construction of social memory and the shaping of identity. It also explores the link between materiality and the human senses, which is critical to understanding how memory works.

The papers illustrate, using different contexts and scales of analysis (artefacts, monuments, landscapes, practices), that memory is, in fact, central to understanding human cultural and social behaviour. As Hamilakis asserts, “all archaeology is about memory” (Hamilakis, Chapter 10). Indeed, one could suggest that, paraphrasing Willey and Phillips (1958), “archaeology is about memory or it is nothing.” To ignore the historical entanglement of human behaviours – the well of memories from which ancient peoples drew in their choices, gestures, and actions – is ultimately to deny the humanity of the past.

This volume includes a geographically diverse set of European case studies – from the Iberian Peninsula, the British Isles, Italy, Greece and the Balkans, central Europe, and Scandinavia.¹ In this way, regional patterns and variability in the ways ancient Europeans appropriated the artefacts, monuments, and landscapes of their past to create their futures are illuminated. If one views memory as central to the cultural behaviour of human communities, one might reasonably suggest that an ethnography of mnemonic practices would be an important and fertile direction for archaeologists to endeavour in the future.

This volume is organized chronologically as a way to consider how mnemonic practices transformed over time, particularly as human groups increased demographically and in the complexity of their social and political structures. While social evolutionary studies and memory studies are generally in tandem, the papers in this volume suggest that memory and material mnemonics, as key political and symbolic resources, may be deployed as well as resisted in patterned ways.

Neolithic memories

García Sanjuán and Wheatley analyze how materiality affords and constrains mnemonic practices in their study of landscapes, funerary monuments, and artefacts from Late Neolithic and Copper Age populations in southern Spain (Chapter 2). The web-like, recursive relationship between artefacts made from special stones, such as quartz, tomb orientations, and the natural landscape is skilfully explicated by the authors, who suggest how this relationship was manipulated by ancient groups to evoke and shape temporality. For example, they convincingly argue that the highly unusual orientation of the dolmen of Menga can only be understood when we consider its alignment to La Peña de los Enamorados, with its distinctive anthropomorphism, and the ancient monuments that lie at the base of La Peña. Their work illustrates the rich insights gained when geoarchaeology, a landscape approach, and a concern with historicity and memory are harnessed.

On a different scale, Lillios (Chapter 3) examines the mnemonic practices materialized through the biographies of the engraved slate plaque relics of the Iberian Neolithic and Copper Age. These small objects, shaped out of fragments of hand-sized engraved slate plaques and perforated, presumably for personal wear, suggest a more intimate and fluid quality of memory than the monuments and rocky landscapes described by Garcia Sanjuán and Wheatley. Whether these small-scale mnemonics were invoked to challenge the messages implicated in the original slate plaques or monumental-scale mnemonics, such as megalithic burials, or whether they reproduced these messages, is, however, unclear.

In Chapter 4, Skeates continues with this examination of small-scale mnemonics in a discussion of the role of body ornaments in Copper Age Italy. The proliferation of ornaments during this period in Italy, with their different sensory properties and evocations, is striking. These ornaments included “beads of bone, shell, baked clay, wood, and stone, including imported steatite, basalt and amber; pendants of stone, boars’ tusk and leather; perforated seashells and teeth of deer, dog, fox and shark; copper rings; carved bone pins with decorated heads; and grooved bone toggles.” Skeates argues that the ornaments marked and shaped personal identities, values, relationships, and practices, but he also wants us to be attentive to the distinctive materialities of portable objects within specific cultural historical contexts – in this case, the Copper Age of Italy. He suggests that well-travelled ornaments, those used and reused for long periods of time, may have served to establish and legitimate the reinvented social histories of new kin groups that were emerging at this time in Italy.

In Chapter 5, Jones invites us to consider the mnemonic role of violent behaviours associated with the destruction of Neolithic monuments – including houses and causewayed enclosures – in the British Isles. He challenges the traditional opposition often made by archaeologists: violence/destruction vs mnemonic practices that is often implicated to explain different archaeological phenomena in the British Isles. Like Skeates, he grounds his mnemonic practices in culturally specific ways, suggesting that the periodic destruction of sites was a distinctively Neolithic way of expressing time, transformation, and memory.

Bronze Age memories

In Chapter 6, Tsamis continues this exploration of the non-mortuary world in examining the mnemonic practices materialized and experienced multisensorially in the built spaces of Bronze Age settlements in Central Macedonia, Greece. He shows how everyday, mundane practices like wall reconstruction, food consumption, and storage negotiated and produced memory. The sensory potential of those practices is analysed in order to show that maintaining access routes, spatial orientation, and spatial allocation of practices shaped locality, identity and memory. Food and drink, smells, and textures are seen as mnemonic corporeal practices that created a link with the past. Through the study of successive building phases he suggests that inhabitants of these settlements remembered their ancestors through the maintenance of their everyday experiences. This was not a static process, however, as each generation would have altered who and what was remembered. Tsamis reminds archaeologists that continuities must also be explicated and interpreted, as well as rupture and change.

In another provocative chapter, Levy (Chapter 7) challenges us to consider the mnemonic consequences of objects and sites hidden from view – namely the Bronze Age hoards deposited in the bogs of Denmark. She articulates her discussion to gender, a key axis to which material mnemonics, if viewed as symbolic capital, must ultimately be tethered. She contrasts the mnemonic properties of bog deposits to monumental mounds, also present at the time, and suggests that rituals connected to bogs were more cryptic, more open to m...