Field notes. The pragmatics of an archaeological sensibility — what might one do in an archaeological visit to the beach?

For as long as I can remember maps have made me anxious. Where does one draw the line of a coast, a road, a river?

In archaeological excavation one is regularly required to document, record, draw, photograph textures. In a measured plan of a paved surface one chooses a scale and this regulates the limit of detail, the resolution. At a scale of 1:10 one is unlikely to resolve, to record individual 5cm pebbles because they will be too small to feasibly draw. And so what? Does one need to record every pebble?

Might this not compromise an intention to document faithfully?

It is not the smoothing out, the approximation that troubles me, the scaling. I love engineering and architectural drawing to scale and appreciate the different techniques (what a wonderful and simple an instrument is the parallelogram of the pantograph!). Miniature models can fascinate; is it not something to do with the zooming in and out, the distillation of essentials, the negotiation of focus?

(In our Three Landscapes project at Stanford Humanities Center way back when in 2000, Cliff McLucas, Dorian Llewelyn and I constructed a digital deep map of California that was 13 meters long and 2.5 meters high — the scale and 300-dpi-high-resolution of the print hung on the wall outside my lab (in 13 sheets) required just this kind of zooming in and out, standing back and drawing close, in order to take in the whole as well as the detail.)

No, my concern is from what does one start? Where is the edge?

(And what an archaeological, a geological task this can be — to distinguish layers of accumulated time and matter.)

On the beach at Nyborg, on the island of Fyn, Denmark

Where is the edge — of course there isn’t one.

Zoom in, amplify, and one finds more and more detail, granularity — fractal self-similarity. We are drawn mise-en-abyme, worlds within worlds. William Blake comes to mind with the romantic sublime of god in a grain of sand.

The fascination of tide pools — a coastal allegory.

On the beach across the North Sea on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne

Pebbles and sand.

To create a Sierpinsky carpet draw a square, subdivide it into nine, remove the middle square, and apply the same procedure, ad infinitum. Algorithm — subdivide a shape into smaller copies of itself, remove one or more copies, and continue recursively.

A Menger sponge is created in the same way but begins with a three dimensional form.

The extraordinary attribute of such forms is that they have infinite perimeter and no area! The same paradox of subdivided time and space is found in Zeno’s story of the race between Achilles and the tortoise — Achilles can never overtake the tortoise because each time he reaches the point where the tortoise was, the tortoise has moved slightly ahead. The remaining area of the carpet approaches zero, yet an infinite number of squares remains. And Achilles gets ever closer to the tortoise, yet an infinite number of steps remains.

One might be mindful of such fascinating aspects of abstract space and time that may be subdivided infinitely, but the embodied and located experiences of such intersections, interminglings of spatiality and temporality are typically more pragmatic and involve compromise, approximation, fudging, blurring.

With my pen I draw a line. With a camera I frame and release the shutter. I have long used drawing and photowork to think through such matters. Employing an archaeological, an archaeographical sensibility adds valencies to these matters of time and space: signal-noise focus-blur ratios, strategies of engagement (frames, grids and amplifications), atmospheres out of which figure and ground separate.

This summer I was back in the north of Europe on western and eastern edges of the North Sea, in the borders between England and Scotland, and on the island of Fyn in Denmark, exploring the archaeology of this archipelago.

Allegory. In my long-labored fieldwork that started with an investigation of the borders of empire, of kingdoms, of regions I have found only temporary resolutions of such appropriate concern with continuities and discontinuities. Boundaries, edges resolve as processes of negotiation and alliance, transgression and transformation, border crossing and smuggling.

And, of course, the connecting as well as distancing medium, tissue, is the North Sea.

Lindisfarne, looking south

The tides in north Northumberland in the UK make of Lindisfarne a Holy Island for half the day. The waters and sands come and go and shift. Wasn’t it a series of great storms in the sixteenth century that created the dunes of this coast?

Ladby, the fjord by the Viking ship burial, whence the setting out, and thence the return

At Ladby is a ship in the earth, a burial and extraordinary assemblage of ship and goods, earth and sea. Notoriously Lindisfarne suffered a major Viking raid on its monastic community in 793. The ships would have landed in the haven now known as the Ouse.

Lindisfare, the Ouse

Hutton’s unconformity at Siccar point

Waves upon a shore. The eternal rhythm of tides in the here and now is a manifestation of geological uniformitarianism. We witness the deep time of the earth’s vital metabolism in everyday micro processes.

Grains of sand sink to the bottom of the ocean and accumulate over aeons, becoming-rock. James Hutton, a geologist who lived and thought in the Scottish borders of the late eighteenth century, called a break in the normal progression of sedimentary deposits, where newer deposits are lain on top of older, an unconformity. I am here photographing the angular unconformity at Siccar Point in which a sharp change can be seen in the orientation of bedding planes, with horizontal beds overlying those that have been rotated to vertical. As Hutton and his friend Playfair recognized, this can only have involved time unimaginable. I am staring into an abyss of time.

So what? Well, archaeology isn’t just about the past. It’s about the past in the present and involves more-than-people. Connections with geology are very clear. It was just this summer that I realized again that an archaeological sensibility might be applied to much more than the human past. Archaeologists have been so concerned with tracing the people behind things — how one might use the things people have left behind to reconstruct the ways they lived in the past. And people have always also been connected to milieux, environments, other species, other humans, worlds of things.

On those beaches in Northumberland and on Fyn I found myself again camera in hand exploring eco-literacy — modes of engagement that might open up our understanding, might make manifest the workings, experiences and qualities of living environmental systems. Opening up an environmental aesthetics.

Here’s a technique out of archaeological method, out of archaeological engagement with things — grid and amplify, section and magnify.

A 60 megapixel sensor on a digital camera generates a huge and detailed image. Here is a photo of the beach at Nyborg again alongside nine tiles taken from a 10×8 grid applied to the image — amplifications of water and pebbles. Deep mapping.

Not fractals, but momentary snapshots of the extraordinary richness of ongoing tidal rhythm, breathing, the noise of life.

Nybord Strand, Fyn, Denmark