Representations of anthropological and archaeological knowledge in non-academic arenas have attracted much critical attention in recent years. Anthropological film, in particular, with its stereotyped tradition of presenting images of black people for white audiences, has been problematised. Yet the most accessible interface between the academic archaeologist and the public psyche, archaeo-historical documentary film, remains untheorised. This paper explores the televisual articulations of one of the more persistent popular images of the presented past, the Celtic warrior/ druid/artist. Like any delineated and labeled ethnic or cultural grouping, however, Celts are a contingent, multilayered cultural construct. When taken as a seamless whole and used as an archaeological model, this construct simply reproduces the British Iron Age as an always-already-ahistoric romantic image. Why, then, are the makers of English-language documentaries that deal with all things "Celtic" so resistant to the newer critical approaches within both archaeology and As anthropologists and archaeologists continue to problematise their representational practices (Gero and Conkey I99I, Hodder I986, Shanks i992, Shanks and Tilley I987a, b, Tilley I990, to cite the obvious), it is surprising that archaeo-historical documentary film has received so little attention. Certainly there have been numerous programmes about archaeology and archaeologists, but these have been understood as transparent, neutral commentaries about the field and its finds, as value-free containers of information. In recent discussions on the "arch-theory" electronic mail discussion list (arch-theory@mailbase.ac.uk),2 for example, many discussants seemed unconcerned with the ways in which we, as archaeologists, present our information; they were satisfied with programmes which were "fun" and accessible. The prevailing attitude is "If it's on TV, at least it's reaching the public." There is almost no consideration given to the ways in which television as a mode of both visual and textual communication is implicated in power/knowledge relations. I wish to examine such relations in light of the use of a multifarious Celtic cultural package in archaeologically informed English-language television documentaries. So-called Celtic images have been used to explain and illustrate the British Iron Age, the early medieval period, and contemporary cultural/ethnic (i.e., political) identitis. Such static constructions position and fix a monolithic Celtic subject. In this way, "questions of cohesion, of territoriality and boundaries, of the tensions pr,4vd by the perception of an over-centralised super-state, are mediated through and possibly partially formed by television's representations" (Paterson I993:6).
The adoption of Celtic themes in the presentation of heritage sites in Wales builds upon identifiable features of British history and the belief that ‘Celtic-ness’ has some basic appeal to modern visitors. Whereas such presentations have significant economic impacts, particularly through tourism, they rest more firmly on the bases of myth and nostalgia rather than upon any dynamic vision of a Welsh heritage. Visitors, who are often not Welsh, are drawn to such places as a means of knowing the past and encounter an experience that engenders interest and may help them relate to their own identity, Visiting heritage places is a meaningful act of consumption which asserts the importance of roots and the attractions of a representable past.
This book is about archaeologies both in and of the present. Its aim is to identify the challenges and pitfalls of an archaeology of the contemporary world, but not to be an authorized manual. Archaeology has become a case limit for interdisciplinarity, as it is the one discipline that is so freely and exuberantly adopted, complicated, and transformed by other disciplines. In that they all study contemporary material culture, it is clear that other disciplines also do ‘archaeology’ in one way or another. The study of the present opens up issues of ownership not normally addressed by archaeologists. If it is an archaeology of us, who is the ‘us’ that we are concerned with? The archaeology of the contemporary is thus inevitably drawn into politics in terms of the extent to which work in the field constitutes or necessitates advocacy. Archaeologies of the contemporary extend our understanding of the mobility of matter, a mobility that suggests the operation of matter as media, and evokes the materiality of media. Here, the ephemeral event becomes a productive site for extending our understandings of matter, media, and mobility. Methodologically, archaeologies of the contemporary must overcome the banalization of everyday experience, studying people, places, and things in action. As such, archaeologists must see themselves as participants, and shape their participation to contemporary circumstances.
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