I am totally for the archaeology in and of the present that Rodney Harrison defends in his powerful text. In fact, I have defended a similar idea elsewhere, although in a rather less eloquent and straightforward way. I have suggested that we could transform ethnoarchaeology, an archaeological subdiscipline that already deals with the present, into a true ‘archaeology of the present . . . that . . . deals with people that are alive and things that are in full use, and which accepts that all presents are entangled with a diversity of pasts in a percolating time’ (González-Ruibal 2006a, 112). With the author, I think that archaeological engagements should not be reduced to the past – understood as something remote and finished: archaeology can be a very creative way of dealing with the present, and even of transforming it. I also coincide with Harrison in considering that the archaeology of the contemporary past is less harassed than we tend to think and that we should be less anxious in defending ourselves against possible attackers and focusing more on creating exciting work.
Having said that, I would enter a double caveat: first, although the subdiscipline is becoming more and more accepted and even well regarded by our colleagues, this does not necessarily mean that it is solidly established from an academic point of view. It would be worth studying how many people are actually accessing teaching or research positions in academia with a contemporary-archaeology profile and how easy it is to obtain funding for archaeological projects dealing with the 20th and 21st centuries – in comparison with the archaeology of earlier periods.
Second, the situation Rodney Harrison depicts fits well the Anglo-Saxon world (and especially the UK), but I wonder how true it is in other countries and research traditions. In Spain, for instance, post-medieval archaeology in general is yet to be accepted. The immense majority of university and research positions are occupied by prehistoric and classical archaeologists and there are virtually no journals (except very local ones) where post-medieval (not to say contemporary) archaeological research can find a place without creating a scandal. I have the impression that the situation is not very different throughout most of continental Europe: the archaeology of the contemporary past does not seem to be well accepted in places like Germany or France, at least in academia. Heritage managers and contract archaeologists seem to be more progressive-thinking in these countries. Thus in a recent volume on the archaeology of modern and contemporary France, the majority of case studies for the more recent past come from rescue excavations conducted by the INRAP, which sponsors the publication (Bellan and Journout 2011). My impression, then, is that academic archaeologists have to keep making the point. Rodney Harrison, however, shows us the way to follow: less self-exculpatory, more assertive and thoughtful.
I would like to focus the rest of my comment on another issue: the surface/depth dichotomy. I think that Harrison's stance and mine are ultimately very close, but we emphasize different tropes, which are coherent with the kind of research that each of us develops. Tropes are not innocent, as the author clearly shows: they shape the way we think and act. For this same reason, I would not reject the notion of depth too hastily. We could start by saying that the surface/depth dichotomy, as any other modernist dichotomy, is flawed and that it is better to bypass it and talk in other terms: in topological terms, for instance (Witmore 2007). The author, in fact, believes that already, as is clear when he argues that the present is a ‘physical stratum that contains not only the present, but all its physical and imagined pasts combined’ (p. 154). Surfaces are deep, then, and multilayered: Harrison also admits that surfaces are ‘thick’ (‘tactile planes, thick with the traces of assembling and reassembling materials’ – p. 160). My intention here is not just to bypass the surface/depth dichotomy, but to argue for the relevance of the second concept.
I think depth is still fundamental to what we do, as archaeologists and as social scientists. In the first place, a call for working on surfaces and assemblages does not seem to me to be very urgent, at least in Anglo-Saxon archaeology, where most practitioners are engaged in surveys, field walking and creative activities of one kind or another; excavation – at least in the conventional way – is not the primary means of working with the contemporary past or the present (cf. McAtackney, Palus and Piccini 2007; Holtorf and Piccini 2009; Harrison and Schofield 2010) and the tropes of stratigraphy, disclosure and depth do not seem to be the most relevant. This is not to say that Harrison's article is unnecessary: just the opposite. It provides a badly needed serious theoretical grounding to many archaeological engagements with the present and the recent past. However, too much emphasis on surfaces should not detract from literally exploring depth through archaeological excavation. Harrison is careful not to dismiss it, although he prefers to see excavation as a method for exposing surfaces rather than for exploring depths. I would reverse the trope and argue that even when we do survey, we are metaphorically excavating the present. Excavation is for me still the primary trope of archaeology (on the epistemological relevance of excavation see Edgworth 2011). It is the only thing that archaeologists alone can do – at least real excavations, not mock ones. Artists do surface collecting (Mark Dion); cultural geographers and urban explorers investigate derelict places (Edensor 2005; DeSilvey 2006); photographers document material traces, both massive and subtle (Vergara, Burtynsky, Sternfeld, Bernd and Hilla Becher). They all work on the surface. Only we archaeologists (and those who have learned from us, such as forensic scientists) have developed a whole methodology to see what is beneath the surface. Furthermore, this methodology is powerful not only epistemologically, but also politically: we can find horrible things digging, such as mass graves and torture centres (Funari, Zarankin and Salerno 2009). Excavation is something so unique and revelatory that it has managed to fascinate philosophers for over a century and frighten violators of human rights all over the world.
Harrison's misgivings with the trope of depth in archaeology, however, have less to do with physical depth and the method to explore it (stratigraphic excavation), than with the modernist concept of depth, which, according to him, distances us from the past. In that, he follows Julian Thomas, who criticizes the concept as an allegory for the modernist pursuit of knowledge. I have to say that I do not feel the need to throw away all modernist concepts. Some of them are obviously problematic and even harmful (progress, for one). Others, instead, can be crucial in epistemological and political terms and should be, in my opinion, preserved, although not in their dichotomic form. I think that it is worth keeping the idea of depth as a metaphor of the quest for knowledge, but not merely as opposed to surface. With Lévi-Strauss, a great modernist himself, I believe that ‘the true reality is never the most manifest one; and that the nature of truth is already shown in its care to hide itself’ (Lévi-Strauss 1955, 62). This is the motto, in fact, that has guided, consciously or unconsciously, most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, some of them as post-structuralist as Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour.
Besides, I am not sure that working on the familiar (as opposed to the unfamiliar) necessarily allows for a more egalitarian and accessible archaeology of the present. I think that alienation and depth should not be confused with distancing. According to Harrison, by emphasizing otherness and the uncanny, people might end up feeling the recent past remote and inaccessible. This might be so in some cases, but not always. On the contrary, defamiliarization can force us to feel the past closer than ever. Consider the archaeological practices developed in Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s, in which former Nazi spaces were discovered and conspicuously marked out in the familiar urban landscape by civic groups – and, in some cases, excavated (Bernbeck and Pollock 2007). This was conducted in a very democratic way by grass-roots associations and was lived as a revelation by many Germans who found that their everyday environment was full of abject traces (Koshar 2001). By revealing an uncanny recent past in the neighbourhood, rather than separating it from people the new history movement was bringing it close to them (perhaps unbearably close!): it can be argued that the abolition of distance was the main aim of the practices carried by the movement, which ‘rejected historiographical distance and placed fascism firmly within West German society’ (ibid., 241) – through the material traces of the past in the present. This abolition of the past as purely past is clearly observed in the Topography of Terror (Bernbeck and Pollock 2007). The promoters of this initiative wanted their excavation of the Gestapo headquarters in the centre of Berlin to be an ‘open wound’ (Koshar 2001, 228), a reminder that the past was not (and could not be) closed and separated from the present. There is nothing more present- and future-oriented than an open wound. My experience working with the remains of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship is quite similar to the German one. Far from creating distance, the revelation of uncanny traces of the recent past produces just the opposite: great fascination (figure 1). Dealing with recent traumatic issues implies working in the threshold between alienation and sameness: it is precisely the ambiguity of this liminal space that produces a sense of the uncanny.
Figure 1 On the surface, from the depths: the moment of discovery of a helmet during the excavation of a trench from the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).
Preserving the idea of depth does not mean understanding it as opposed to surface. As I have already said, surfaces are deep, and, likewise, depth is on the surface. That is something that Julian Thomas does not seem to be grasping in the paragraph that Harrison quotes. According to Thomas (2004, 170), the orientation towards depth, concealment and mystery buttresses the belief that the past is separated from the present, whereas the truth is that the remains of the past are all around us: the past is not a substance secreted in dark places. What Thomas and Harrison seem to be forgetting in their critique is that, for Freud, the past is around us and in dark places at the same time (like the Nazi remains in Berlin): the past is in the present, but we still have to dig it to disclose it. If Freud (2006, 544) is able to ‘unearth the missing fragments of an infantile experience’, it is because their traces exist (and are at work) in the present, as fragments of memory, denials, lapses and unintentional gestures (ibid., 111): signs that have been left behind in historical processes (ibid., 79). ‘Even things that seem to have been totally forgotten are present somehow and somewhere’, says Freud (ibid., 80, my emphasis). Laurent Olivier (2008, 87) follows this path when he writes that ‘it is possible to do archaeology more deeply [plus profondément] than usual by simply observing things around oneself’. Surface and depth, present and past, are on the same ontological level. If for Freud the past was something separate, dead and finished, his entire project would have no reason of existence at all. What the Freudian perspective implies is a complete rearrangement of temporality, which is at odds with modernist historicist time, but in keeping with archaeological time (cf. Olivier 2008). Besides, Freud did not consider that he was just revealing the past exactly as it was. There was a creative element in excavating the mind: it is not by chance that he talks about ‘constructions’ in psychoanalysis (Freud 2006, 77–89). As surface and depth should not be opposed, neither should truth and rhetoric. Naturally, not all archaeology of the present has to follow the Freudian model. The tropes of depth, concealment and repression undoubtedly work best for those archaeologies interested in deconstructing and exposing power and the effects of power, including trauma. But it is certainly not my intention to make an archaeology of the darkest aspects of modernity the only possible archaeology of the recent past and of the present: as Harrison and others have demonstrated (see Pearson and Shanks 2001; Holtorf and Piccini 2009; Harrison and Schofield 2010), this is only one among the many possible archaeological engagements with the materiality of the present. Surface assemblages, as Harrison proves, offer all sorts of exciting possibilities – provided that we do not forget their depth.
