Emplotment as Epic in Archaeological Writing: The Site Monograph as Narrative

Abstract

) sought to understand the 'fictions' of historical narratives -that is, aspects of historical writing that are imposed on past events by the form of historians' narrative discourse. In Metahistory (1973), his magnum opus, he was particularly interested in a set of four tropes that provide alternative ways of imbuing past events with meaning (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) and in the generic story structures or modes of emplotment that often correspond to those (romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire). White's critique of historical narrative, although by no means generally accepted among historians, continues to be a touchstone for debate about the discipline and its discursive product (Ankersmit, Domanska, and Kellner 2009, Herman 2011, Doran 2013, Wilson 2014.The continued relevance of White's work to debates about historical writing makes it a convenient point of departure for thinking about the corresponding 'fictions' of archaeological narrative. The most immediate problem that such a plan encounters is that White's work has had relatively little impact in archaeology, even in the expanding critical literature on archaeological narrative. Analyses of archaeological storytelling, in other words, have not found White's four modes of emplotment particularly useful. One might conclude that White was wrong, or that his framework simply doesn't apply to archaeology. A more interesting question to ask is whether archaeological narratives are somehow different from their historical counterparts. This paper argues that White's framework is a helpful point of reference for thinking about the nature of archaeological narrative and the disciplinary identity of archaeology. It proves useful to identify a fifth mode of emplotment beyond the Whitean four. At the most general 2 level, archaeological writings are emplotted as epic rather than as romance, tragedy, comedy, or satire. Considering archaeology to be emplotted as epic leads to an understanding of archaeological narratives as multilayered, multi-authored, and not necessarily confined to a single text. Archaeological Writings Contrasted with Those of HistoriansArchaeology and history share the general goal of telling (true) stories of the human past and making sense of (explaining, interpreting) those stories. I consider archaeological writing to be fundamentally narrative in its basic orientation, a claim that is debatable but which seems readily defendable. The fundamental importance of cultural history, for example, is recognized across a wide spectrum of theoretical perspectives (e.g., Tilley 1996, Morris 2000, Pauketat 2001, Shennan 2002. Following Pluciennik (1999, p. 654) and Rudebeck (2000, pp. 13-14), I define a narrative as referring to a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Narratives thus recount an ordered series of events and reach closure. The structure of beginning, middle, and end is provided by plot, which can be understood as the logic that connects the diverse elements of a story (Ricoeur 1984, pp. 40-41, 64-68). (Broader de...

The Turkish harem in the Karyatid Temple and antagonistic narratives on the Athenian Acropolis

“…For example, it can be argued that Arthur Evans's work on the Minoan civilization is fraught with a Eurocentric and orientalist ideology that troubles our current understanding of 126 On the narrative turn in history, see Roussin 2017, 393-398. 127 E.g., Silberman 1996Pluciennik 1999;Joyce 2002;Lesure 2015. 128 Loukaki 2008, 15-24, 47-52.…”

Words that Archaeologists Choose

“…In their expressions, archaeologists normally use writing conventions and styles that match 'professional coding and expectations' of the discipline (Gomes 2020). Professional codes, though, can and do change over time, on a macro-level in terms of the preferred genre (Hodder 1989;Lesure 2015), but also on a micro-level with factors such as word choice.…”