Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time

Abstract

Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been overlooked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart of the discipline. So while the visual is linked with spatial properties that are resistant to change, the aural is connected with the temporal and is considered momentary and fleeting in nature. Still, it is argued that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human sensation -to being. In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities and events quite distant in a linear temporality are proximate through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation I suggest we might learn what we can understand from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. But rather than reproduce an unnecessary dualism between seeing and hearing, this endeavor will require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time through other, complimentary modes of articulation and engagement.

Surface assemblages. Towards an archaeology in and of the present

“…In doing so, I refer to a notion of assemblage which is specifically archaeological but which simultaneously draws on a Deleuzean notion of the assemblage by way of Manuel DeLanda's 'assemblage theory Bennett 2010; see further discussion in Harrison in prep. a) and which incorporates a sense of the symmetrical relationships between people and things (after Latour 1993;Murdoch 1997;Serres 2008;see Olsen 2003;Witmore 2006b;Webmoor 2007;Webmoor and Witmore 2008).…”

“…It is a four-dimensional transgression between depth and surface resulting not in fixed gesture but in percolations of time and material (e.g. Witmore 2006b).…”

“…Shanks and Tilley 1992) or the ways in which simultaneous, overlapping pasts are contained within it (e.g. González-Ruibal 2006b;Lucas 2005;Olivier 2003;Schlanger 2004;Witmore 2006b;Witmore, in press). But the commentators were right to push the concept of modernism and its conceptual differences from that of modernity, as well as some of the ways in which modernist tropes such as an emphasis on empiricism and experience might be potentially useful to archaeology.…”

Timber Monuments, Landscape Andthe Environment in the Nith Valley, Dumfries and Galloway

“…We must also remember that the world is revealed to us through all our senses, not just through vision (e.g. Ingold 2000; 2004; Witmore 2006), and some of the relationships formalized in the construction of monuments may well have arisen through movement and habitation before clearance took place, through an understanding of and engagement with the world revealed through the feet (Ingold 2004). The presence of these monuments and the activities that gave rise to their construction are likely to have served to maintain these open areas in what would otherwise have been a wooded environment.…”

Participants:

“…Rather than understanding change as spawned out of the succession of dates, in my work I have attempted to account for such multi-temporal simultaneities and voids. 52 There is a related point here in that historians and archaeologists often assume the past as preexisting, as preceding, the present occasion of our relationship with the materials at hand. But to always regard old things as "of the past" is to ignore the fact that they exist within concurrent sets of relations with those whose orientation is not always to study them.…”