TAG 1996 - INTRO TALK

Glocalising Catal: towards postprocessual methodology

(?put everyone watching each other slide on at beginning - and explain)

Is a ppa methodology possible? Hasn't been looked at eg many dig forms I suspect still have the Philip Barker separation of description and interpretation and his whole outlook to objective recording. Nothing much has changed here. So what would a ppa methodology look like?

I faced this at Catal when people asked me are you doing a pp excavation - what does this mean?

I dont have clear answers yet. I feel that as a team that we are groping towards issues and solutions. The fundamental issues we seem to be dealing with are: being critical of taken for granteds and in several senses being reflexive; being relational or contextual - the underlying idea here is that meaning is relational - everything depends on everything else. So to interpret involves creating a circuitry between participants in the project and between different types of data. One implication of this is that conclusions are always momentary, fluid and flexible as new relations are considered; being interactive in the sense of creating information that can be questioned and approached from different angles; being multivocal, plural, open or transparent so that a diversity of people can participate in the discourse about the archaeological process.

Whether you call these themes ppa is not important - I do think they underlie the ppa debate. But I think they are more important than that - I think they are central aspects of what is called high or late or post modernism - again it doesnt matter what the label is that you give.

For me the key linking concept behind the varied aspects of these high/late/post modern trends is globalism. Globalism can be defined in a number of ways but it involves things like the closer integration caused by new trends in economies (especially global scales of production and global markets), the new information technologies, and other global issues such as environmental issues. But at the same time these processes and their technologies lead to fragmentation and individualisation. This is partly the product of niche marketing and the new the fragmentation of work practices. But it is also the result of the reaction against globalising and homogenising tendencies so that we see the formation of new and diverse identities, local and self.

And so glocalisation - the two sides of globalism

We come in with:

We have the global in universal and specialised codes and terms; and in the computing needs for codes; and in the need for objective comparisons

These are archaeological specialist interests; but there is also the desire for other interests as in New Age women's movements - the Goddess Tours and Linda Evangelista slide. These are both global and local - carpets too - a diversity of interests

Part of this diversity is the Turkish and local understanding of the past and Catal; local fundamentalist Islamic; local attitudes towards women being covered. And there is the local inability to participate in the global technologies and debates

How can we impose our specific archaeological perspective on the local and the diverse without feeling the need to be reflexive, contextual, interactive and multivocal?

Part of the answer is just to say get involved in heritage and museums and the Web etc. We are doing this but it is not enough - because the Womens' Movements complained back to me 'but it is already interpreted'.

This simple statement undermines the objectivity, distance, neutrality etc that arch method has built up for itself. The challenge for a ppa is to go beyond a method which excludes and dominates, which separates description and interpretation as if description was mere data that could be objectively handed out to people to subjectively interpret. The challenge is to pull reflexivity, contextuality, interactivity and multivocality down into the very process of the construction of data. So far interpretive or pp approaches have been limited to the very latest stages in the archaeological process - to armchair interpretation. The challenge is to introduce them at the primary level - at the trowel's edge.

This takes us back to Philip Barker and the notion that has come to dominate field archaeology - which is that descriptive recording can be separated from interpretation. There has always been a contradiction here because at the same time as wanting this objectivity, Barker and others accepted that all recording was interpretive - that a section or a plan was not what was there but an interpretation of what was there. The contradiction. We can't ignore this any more. If recording is interpretation, interpretation cannot be left to after recording. It has to and does occur before recording. Again, interpretation at the trowel's edge.

But it is not just a matter of interpretation occurring prior to recording - it also occurs prior to excavation - in fact interpretation determines methodology (eg sampling)

So how are we creating reflexivity, contextuality, interactivity and multivocality?

Specialists on site - this like in many Nr Eastern sites, but actually in the trench (?slide). The aim - to contextualise specialist data (what does burned bone look like at Catal); and to empower and inform the digger specialist by being surrounded by information so that interpretation can be based on full information. This has been conflictual and difficult (see video talk this pm) because it involves breaking down barriers and boundaries - it involves redefining the archaeological object (this afternoon)

Getting info back to the digger is essential - it has to be fast. So the computer local net (slide) - immediate data input (including digitising) and interlinking - speed.

For similar reasons a full time on site data analyst

A database that has codes but is flexible and fluid but allowing change and interaction - interactive and relational (see Tim Ritchey paper)

But also one that is cross referred to contextual information that is more interpretive - eg the diary. This allows the interpretation to be set within a context of production of knowledge - as you will see on the database this is often highly personal and angry - links to a different form of knowledge

Video documentation and digitising onto database. Despite the editing that is then needed, this allows more of the context to be recorded and allows later reevaluation

Anthropologists working with us - both in the local community and with us to expose and probe some of the unexamined assumptions we bring to the data

Putting it all on the Web - widely available; not hoarding the data as 'ours' until publication but involving a wider world in the construction of knowledge

Using hypertext to allow some of the decentring of the author and some of the openness and interactivity required - see some of the problems of this in the papers of Ruth Tringham and Sue Thomas.

Virtual reality as a technique for understanding the site but also providing a non-specialist 'front end' to the database so that people can interact with the site at different levels of knowledge - flying in and clicking and getting into the database and learning about the process so that a critical approach can begin to be taken even by non-specialists

Have we been successful?

As I said before this is an experiment and there are a LOT of problems to sort out. The idea for this session was in part to help us formulate our ideas better and to get feedback.

Whether we have been successful is best left to the participants to say during today - and for you to judge - but the video at the end of the day is the best way to show the tensions and difficulties and unresolved problems.