Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology, Technology, and Ethics

By Oxbow Books

Scholars working in a number of disciplines – archaeologists, classicists, epigraphers, papyrologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists, Mayanists, philologists, and ancient historians of all stripes – routinely engage with ancient textual sources that are either material remains from the archaeological record or historical products of other connections between the ancient world and our own.

Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In 12 representative case-studies drawn from research in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica, scholars use various lenses to critically examine the interface between archaeology and the study of ancient texts, rethink the fragmentation of their various specialized disciplines, and illustrate the best in current approaches to contextual analysis.

The collection of essays also highlights recent trends in the development of documentation and dissemination technologies, engages with the ethical and intellectual quandaries presented by ancient inscriptions that lack archaeological context, and sets out to find profitable future directions for interdisciplinary research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Dec 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782977674

Book preview

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Introduction:

No Discipline is an Island

MORAG M. KERSEL AND MATTHEW T. RUTZ

As a discipline archaeology may be distinct, but it is hardly isolated: its scope is as broad as the disparate fields that inform its methods and perspectives, among them anthropology, art history, epigraphy, and the physical and biological sciences. Archaeology’s object of study is as varied as the material traces of human behavior, from prehistory to recent history. In contrast the study of the premodern textual record is not a single discipline at all, but rather an array of fields and sub-fields loosely allied around a common purpose: to gain insight into the human past principally through written text, a powerful if relatively recent technology for visually and physically encoding natural language, storing and transmitting information, and extending, supporting, or subverting memory. Ancient texts bear witness to the multiple uses of writing, from mediating political and economic interactions to reproducing, reflecting, and refracting culture to both literate and non-literate audiences, both of whom would have encountered text albeit in powerfully unequal ways. Writing can be viewed as occupying a particular and peculiar niche among the rich repertoire of human communication technologies that are embedded literally as well as figuratively in frameworks of material culture and the built environment, squarely in the domain of anthropological archaeology (e.g., Andrássy et al. 2009; Glatz 2012; Houston 2004a).

However, even before the practice of archaeology, certain bodies of ancient literature were carefully transmitted across space and time, and some of these corpora even managed to survive down to the present in some form, be it complete or fragmentary (e.g., Reynolds and Wilson 2013; Tov 2012). Bearing witness to this long process are the anthologies that constitute the core of the traditional canons of the world’s ancient literate cultures: classical works from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The complex processes behind the transmission of ancient literature took many historical forms, but forces that were highly intentional as well as entirely random or accidental inevitably buffeted the texts that somehow survived. Similarly, other ancient texts survived on monuments that never quite slipped from view, but whose meanings were transformed or obscured by the interest or neglect of various shifting audiences over time. In either case, until the relatively recent advent of archaeology as a mode of inquiry (Trigger 2006 [1989]), vast bodies of text were excluded from reckonings of the distant past (e.g., Baines et al. 2008; Sanders 2006). Beginning in earnest in the fifteenth century, European antiquarians began uncovering ancient inscriptions in the classical Mediterranean world, and since that time countless premodern texts inscribed in many media have been found throughout Africa, the Americas, Asia, and beyond.

Perhaps surprisingly, archaeology and the study of the premodern textual record may be thought of as approaches that are interdependent and complementary as well as independent or even contradictory. The adoption of one of these views or the other has largely depended on a given scholar’s training, disposition, research questions, and preferred interpretive lens. In historical perspective, from the eighteenth century on the archaeological discovery of previously unknown texts led to the adaptation of existing interpretive methods, such as classical philology, to deal with new epigraphic environments. In addition this glut of new data brought about the creation of entirely new fields, such as Assyriology, Egyptology, or Maya Studies, that are devoted to recording the epigraphic record, deciphering obsolete scripts, and reconstructing the lost languages and language families encoded in those scripts. For much of the twentieth century, archaeological and epigraphic research largely moved in different directions, sometimes in parallel or complementary configurations, sometimes at odds or simply mutually uninterested. This fragmentation of research programs prompts some fundamental theoretical questions and presents a number of practical problems, and thus the relationship between archaeology and textual study periodically needs to be revisited (e.g., Kohl 2006; Moreland 2001, 2006; Zettler 2003).

Despite this complicated, sometimes fraught history, archaeological and textual research trajectories intersect necessarily and unavoidably in a number of ways. In light of this entangled relationship, we may reasonably interrogate the roles ancient texts play in archaeological discourses. First, premodern texts suggest taxonomies, both explicit and implicit, that allow scholars to assign names: names to places (e.g., historical geography, urban/non-urban/cosmic topography), names to periods (including both emic and etic reckonings of time in a given sequence), names to people (e.g., ethnolinguistic identification, titles or epithets, and actual people, that is, names of specific persons and kinship groups), as well as names to objects, architecture, and features in the built and natural environments. In addition, texts can act as informants and provide descriptions, however limited or tendentious, of how objects, features, spaces, or landscapes functioned or were perceived in a variety of ancient social contexts. Alternatively, interpreting textual finds found in situ frequently provides the basis for making inferences about who inhabited or otherwise interacted with spaces, especially in the case of archives, libraries, or other inscribed remains found associated with architecture or environmental features, such as display inscriptions, graffiti, or textual deposits. Textual documentation sometimes suggests a chronological anchor, be it relative or absolute, explicitly stated in a dated record or inferred from palaeographic, grammatical, iconographic, prosopographic, or other markers associated with a text. In terms of ancient written records’ analytical effects on academic discourses, the technology of writing itself is often ascribed as a correlate of social complexity or an attribute of civilization (e.g., Powell 2009), which in turn necessarily informs how researchers construct narratives about the past. Some ancient texts espouse specific narratives of ancient events; others are swept up in modern scholars’ narrativized reconstructions of the past. For both of these reasons, ancient writings can also act as a tether that connects the past to the present, with profound effects on popular interest in archaeological and historical research, the amount of funding available to support research, tourism and economic development or exploitation, identity politics, as well as nationalism and modern state-craft. Finally, textual research can and does recover meaningful information about the past from otherwise contextless ancient texts, either from the received canons that have a complex or scarcely known transmission history as material objects, or from more recently rediscovered textual artifacts that were dislodged from their archaeological context by whatever means.

Looked at from the opposite perspective, what role does archaeology play in discourses focused on ancient texts? In the case of some textual traditions, archaeological investigation is responsible for the creation of the corpus itself, in the sense that archaeological excavation or survey has recovered scripts, languages, and text corpora that had otherwise been lost to history. It may even be argued that the proper study of the origins of the world’s writing systems is as much a problem of prehistory (i.e., the domain of archaeology) as it is one of epigraphic and historical research (e.g., Darnell et al. 2005; Goldwasser 2011; Houston 2004b; Sanders 2006). In addition, the emphasis of archaeological research on context effectively circumscribes textual sources from any period in analytically productive ways: there are innumerable examples of excavated textual artifacts that cohere archaeologically in ways that are not apparent in the contents of the texts themselves (e.g., Cohen et al. 2010; Rutz 2013; Stocker and Davis 2004; Zettler 2008). The archaeological sequence also has the ability to provide a chronological anchor that can support, undermine, or problematize any chronological scheme suggested in the textual record. Similarly, archaeological research can affirm, contradict, or complicate the assumptions and received wisdom of living cultural traditions or purely historical modes of inquiry. Above all, archaeology can and does shed light on facets of human life around or outside the purview of even the most robustly diverse array of ancient textual documentation. Because of archaeology’s focus on the material traces of the human past, textual studies have been enriched by thinking about materials and materiality in relation to the social practice and products of ancient writing. On the one hand, archaeological research helps to place texts (ancient narratives or descriptions, as well as physical manuscripts or inscribed objects) in a world of other things, schemes of value, and webs of cultural meaning; on the other hand, textual studies have grown to include the material analysis of inscribed objects in order to understand their physical properties and composition, which in turn can elucidate textual production as a craft (a technological, cultural, and socio-economic practice) with material correlates in the archaeological record (e.g., Houston 2012; Payne 2008; Piquette and Whitehouse 2013; Taylor and Cartwright 2011). A closer analysis of inscribed materials has also made it possible to source individual inscribed objects or groups of objects (e.g., Goren et al. 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011; Powers et al. 2009). Current practices in the imaging, documentation, dissemination, and conservation of ancient inscriptions have all undergone radical transformation in recent decades (e.g., Bodel 2012; Gütschow 2012; Hahn et al. 2007; Hameeuw and Willems 2011; van Peursen et al. 2010; Powers et al. 2005; Zuckerman 2010a, 2010b). Though not solely a contribution of archaeological science, at least some of these developments were arguably catalyzed by concurrent developments in archaeological research. Finally, archaeological modes of analysis have played a central role in how scholars of all stripes conceive of and handle contextless or undocumented inscriptions. Two fundamental dimensions of this engagement are the authentication of contextless objects through non-textual means and the proposition that inscribed objects that lack context pose serious intellectual and ethical problems that cannot be ignored.

The interplay between textual research and archaeology is not only a function of a shared interest in the past, but also a common purpose: concern for the fundamental issues surrounding our access to and perceptions of the past. The purpose of this volume is to scrutinize the relationship between textual and archaeological approaches by moving beyond the tendency to treat texts and archaeological remains as independent or even casually interdependent sources of information. Central to this discussion is a concern with the ways in which the two discourses inform each other, the ways in which their results are disseminated, and the intellectual and ethical issues that arise from the functional fragmentation of research agendas that ultimately share a common goal.

The relationship between text-based research and archaeology is clearly not without its challenges, especially concerning artifacts with missing or incomplete object histories. Scholars tend to split into two opposing camps. One side maintains that archaeological items found on the antiquities market with no accompanying background documents, or those from unauthorized archaeological excavations, should be ignored, flagged, or otherwise marginalized in academic discourses. The other side holds that historical data can and do hold value that should be preserved, disseminated, and integrated into historical syntheses regardless of how such data came into view, a position encapsulated in the following quotation, which refers to the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property: A policy that disregards essential data, excluded after some arbitrary date imposed by a patently political body and enforced by academic censorship, is objectionable to scholarship and should be rejected outright (Owen 2013a: 6; cf. Owen 2013b: 335–356). The nature and evolution of the gulf that separates these perspectives has a complex history that we will not rehash, but it seems likely that a genealogy of mentalities and practices in each discipline ought to be significant: archaeologists view the issue through the lens of anthropological ethics, while philologists, epigraphers, or text-based researchers have no unifying agenda or guidelines to regulate intellectual practice beyond accurately and thoroughly representing the historical record — and surely it is also telling that scholars who work mainly with texts cannot be conveniently labeled under one rubric, but are rather divided up among numerous fields and subfields of area studies.

At least in part, the chapters in this volume seek to respond to this current disciplinary divide by addressing one or more of the following three principal aims: (1) to confront the bifurcation of archaeology and the study of early textual sources; (2) to rethink the fragmentation of the various specialized disciplines that ask questions about the interface between archaeology and the textual record; and (3) to discuss the best practices in archaeological and epigraphic methods, documentation and dissemination technologies, and ethical practices for dealing with early inscriptions.

This synthetic volume brings together archaeologists and those who study premodern texts to once again draw attention to the importance of the topic and to stimulate discussion of a number of perennial questions: Do ancient documents speak for themselves or do they require contextual information that can only be supplied by archaeology? What are the limits of contextual analysis? What are the major archaeological and conservational problems confronting the study of the epigraphic record? What technologies are the best at recovering and preserving the information encoded in ancient inscriptions, and what are the analytical payoffs of such technologies? How should scholars deal with the long-term big data challenges of access, preservation, and stability presented by the proliferation of new technologies for non-print-based dissemination and storage? What methods do the least harm in documenting inscriptions? What are the most effective ways to publish and disseminate ancient texts for the benefit of researchers and other interested communities? What are the particular complications of using ancient textual sources to access the past? Are texts unique or privileged as types of communication embedded in the archaeological record, or do texts fall somewhere on a spectrum of symbolic, figural, and material data? How are forgeries, both ancient and modern, to be detected and dealt with, and how serious a threat do forgeries pose to the scholarly production of knowledge about the past? What are the major intellectual and ethical issues of either utilizing or ignoring contextless or undocumented inscriptions? At the symposium from which this volume derives we asked scholars who routinely engage with the archaeology of texts – ancient historians, archaeologists, Assyriologists, classicists, Egyptologists, epigraphers, lawyers, Mayanists, papyrologists, philologists – to take up these and other pertinent questions and to reflect on how their work interacts with textual, historical, and archaeological problems. Our aim throughout has been to be selective and representative, not exhaustive or comprehensive.

In his contribution on the Persepolis Fortification Archive, Matthew Stolper interweaves the themes of archaeology, ethics, and technology in a fascinating case study of how history can be written using the tiniest of fragments, providing invaluable insights into the imperial city of Persepolis between 509 and 493 B.C. Using new and innovative imaging and publishing technologies, Stolper highlights the importance of these tablets, excavated in the early twentieth century, in the past and in the present for our understanding of ancient daily life.

Drawing from the Mesoamerican, Egyptian, and Anatolian worlds, Nicholas Carter, Scott Bucking, and Timothy Harrison examine texts in landscapes, each in turn illustrating the conclusive consequences of the importance of text in context. Discussing the Classic Maya hieroglyphic record – text from pots, text from wall paintings, text on paper codices, text on buildings and monuments – Carter illustrates the link between those texts and the built and ecological environments of the ancient Maya. He demonstrates the importance of archaeological context in shedding light on the textual record. Through an examination of graffiti at the Egyptian sites of Beni Hasan and the temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahri, Bucking illustrates the human and natural agencies that contribute both negatively and positively to the functional aspects of archaeological and epigraphic landscapes. The marks of the sixth century monks left on the even older Egyptian landscape, the effects of the subsequent archaeological excavations, and the forces of nature demonstrate the importance of having the complete history of texts in spatial and architectural contexts in order to produce a meaningful comprehensive narrative. The archaeological excavations at Tell Tayinat undertaken by Harrison and his colleagues have produced some of the richest evidence for how texts and material culture, when examined together, produce unexpected insights into the complex social and historical experiences of the ancient past. In the recent discovery of a cache of cuneiform tablets dating to the late eighth–seventh centuries B.C. Harrison makes a persuasive case for the need to consider epigraphic and archaeological evidence jointly, which in this example may point to the intersecting roles played by divine authority and religious ritual in framing our understanding of the ideological world that the texts inhabit.

The two chapters dealing specifically with text and interpretation present case studies from Mesopotamia and China, each concerned with ancient divination. In discussing the ancient meaning, theory, and practice of divination, Matthew Rutz provides a description of the importance of the intellectual curiosity of nineteenth century travellers and explorers in Mesopotamia. Their early archaeological and commercial pursuits brought to light evidence for ancient Mesopotamian life-ways and practices, but just as important are the lingering assumptions and interpretations that can come to be the received wisdom of a relatively young field like Assyriology. While Rutz illustrates the importance and usefulness of artifacts that may not have a secure archaeological documentation, he makes a contribution to discussions on missing knowledge when the tablet does not go hand-in-hand with its archaeological find spot. In this case the different sources for understanding Mesopotamian extispicy in the early second millennium B.C. have a very uneven archaeological distribution, with significant impact on the contextual analysis of the corpus as a whole.

In his chapter on a collection of Late Shang (ca. 1300–1050 B.C.) divination inscriptions from Anyang acquired in the 1930s and now in the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University, Adam Smith recounts an overlooked aspect of a single bovine scapula, which he argues is indicative of ancient scribal education. In this instance the texts do appear to speak for themselves, for while they have no recorded associated archaeological findspot, the inscribed material does provide a precise site of origin. However, according to Smith it is the combination of the archaeological context and the writing style that leads to the conclusion that most of the inscriptions are by scribal trainees, suggesting that the Anyang divination workshops instructed their own scribes, an overlooked aspect of this important corpus. These two chapters focusing on divinatory texts from different areas of the world and different time periods illustrate the significance of obtaining the complete object biographies for the inscribed materials: text and context are inextricably linked and are interdependent. Together they can and do provide a greater understanding of people in the past.

The contributions on the technological aspects of text and archaeology, with specific examples of digital recording, archives, databases, and access, provide exemplary models of best practice, collegiality, and knowledge dissemination about ancient inscriptions. In her contribution, Eleanor Robson showcases three innovative technologies that are encouraging the development of a comprehensive cuneiform corpus. Oracc (The Open, Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus) and its core project GKAB (The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700–200 B.C.), and Google Earth offer new features for the widest possible range of users, complementing the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative’s aspiration to be a comprehensive archive of digital images of original objects inscribed in cuneiform characters, occasionally with transliteration and translation, as well as a repository for older, published hand drawings of inscriptions in the cuneiform script. In her discussion Robson illustrates how writing systems come to life through the newest technologies for communication and interpretation.

In their chapter Lisa Anderson and Heidi Wendt discuss the U.S. Epigraphy Project (USEP), a digital record of over 3,000 Greek and Latin inscribed objects housed in more than 80 museum, university, and private collections of ancient art and artifacts in North America. Through the lens of the project’s historical development Anderson and Wendt provide a basic orientation to the practical and intellectual advantages of digital humanities scholarship. In particular, they emphasize innovative possibilities for engaging with epigraphic materials at multiple levels of academic inquiry. They reinforce the contributions of Robson and Stolper by highlighting the need for participation in digital and academic peer communities: collaboration and knowledge exchange are integral to demonstrating affinities not only between texts represented in single collections of epigraphic materials, as in the Persepolis Fortification Archive, but also in comparing epigraphic data points to other forms of ancient evidence (e.g., tablets made of clay, wood, or stone, parchment manuscripts, papyri, and ostraca).

In the final section of the book, scholars were asked to contribute case studies and insights on intellectual and ethical issues associated with the forgery of ancient texts and the publication of undocumented textual materials. A goal of the symposium and the subsequent volume was to move beyond the us vs. them paradigm encapsulated by the constricting publication policies of some journals dealing with ancient inscriptions. Christopher Rollston tackles the always fascinating and ever thorny issue of forged inscriptions. Through a discussion of the basic content, probable purposes and motivations, putative dates, and the means of detection of various forgeries from antiquity up to the present day, Rollston demonstrates that, while there have been some recent high-profile cases like the James ossuary and the Jehoash inscription, forgeries are not a new phenomenon. Rollston’s chapter is also a cautionary tale. He asserts that most recent forgeries (i.e., since the time of the Renaissance) have appeared on the antiquities market, leading to the conclusion that scholars who rely on artifacts from the market should beware: a lack of documentation immediately raises questions of authenticity, which may lead to a skewed academic understanding of the material. In their contribution Neil Brodie and Morag Kersel also present a cautionary tale involving incantation bowls, WikiLeaks, and the problems presented by lost archaeological context. They reveal how scholarly debate over the importance of documentation has deteriorated into sometimes-rancorous disagreement, with occasional legal consequences. Using a WikiLeaks published report on a private collection of incantation bowls, Brodie and Kersel raise questions surrounding documentation and evidence in the social lives of objects, in this case mundane objects inscribed with culturally potent textual material. This chapter echoes the sentiments expressed by Cherry and Gerstenblith that undocumented textual materials should only be studied with the permission of their rightful owner, affirming the significance of the law in the intersection of archaeological ethics and historical research on textual artifacts.

Patty Gerstenblith offers some explanation of the development of a publication policy that might satisfy both sides of the clash over undocumented artifacts. She articulates the policies of some of the key organizations whose membership is comprised of advocates for each side of the debate. Complementing this is John Cherry’s chapter, which begins with a fascinating case study involving September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center, a group of cuneiform tablets and plaques looted from somewhere in southern Iraq, repatriation efforts, the conservation and academic study of this corpus of material, and finally finding a suitable place of publication for this important but undocumented group of tablets. Examining the editorial position of 19 leading academic journals Cherry attempts to answer his salient question don’t these artifacts deserve a little love? Undocumented collections of texts present a unique set of opportunities and challenges for scholars in the twenty-first century. While ethically and legally problematic, these collections hold significant value for our understanding of the ancient world.

Examining the archaeology-text nexus from multiple perspectives, contributors to this volume discuss current theoretical and practical problems that have grown out of their work at the boundary of the division between archaeology and the study of early inscriptions. In the twelve representative case studies drawn from research in Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica, scholars use various lenses to examine critically the interface between archaeology and the study of ancient texts, rethink the fragmentation of their various specialized disciplines, and illustrate the best in current approaches to contextual analysis. The collection of essays also highlights recent trends in the development of documentation and dissemination technologies, engages with the ethical and intellectual quandaries presented by ancient inscriptions that lack archaeological context, and sets out to find profitable future directions for interdisciplinary research. Chapters in this volume illustrate both the value of studying undocumented texts and the importance of texts in context, suggesting a closer look at the practice of ignoring potential benefits of undocumented material and the benefits of archaeological context in presenting a comprehensive picture of the past. We hope that this is the beginning of a rapprochement in the divide over archaeology and textual study.

References