Computing Futures: Visions of the Past

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Computing Futures: Visions of the Past Dr. Robin Boast

Boast, R. (2002) Computing Futures: A Vision of the Past. In B. Cunliffe, W. Davies and C. Renfrew (eds.), Archaeology: the widening debate. London, British Academy, pp. 567-592.

There is no doubt that computers, or digital equipment, has had an impact on archaeological work. Compared to when I started in archaeology, in the late 1970s, computers are certainly pervasive today. Then computing was a mainframe activity, where, if we used computers at all, we worked on punched cards and delegated the processing to technicians, never seeing the computer, only the reams of paper output. The development of the Personal Computer and the incorporation of digital technology into a variety of equipment used on site, from the EDM to the tea kettle—the use of computers for everything from project accounting to planning to GIS, and the complete domination of the word processor—certainly seems to have justified the early claims that ‘computers are going to take over.’

This prophetic claim of digital domination has been with us since the earliest electronic computers. We are constantly bombarded with endless presentations and illustrations of the digital as dominant. The Internet is soon, always soon, to be the saviour of the information society; we will soon, again soon, be performing all recording on site electronically; we will in the not too distant future, how distant is the future?, be wearing our computers. The prospect of digital field clothing is ‘just on the horizon.’

But just how real is this picture of our digital future? It all seems to plausible, so possible. Aren’t there prototypes available now? Haven’t we seen digital technology explode in power and shrink in size? Aren’t computers and digital equipment all around us, just as they said it would be, just as it was predicted? Well yes and no.

One thing we can be sure of is that history is always written in light of the present. I can also be fairly sure that crystal-ball gazing is one of the most tenuous and myopic pursuits that one can engage in. I am reminded of a scene from the Simpsons1 where Professor Frink, the Jerry Lewis style socially-challenged scientist, is demonstrating his first computer sometime in the late 1960s. He confidently predicts for the audience of bell-bottomed students that in fifty years computers will be twice as fast, one-hundred times as large and will be the masters of mankind. Though this is ‘just a joke’, it is far more accurately reminiscent of the claims I have heard over the past thirty years than the neat digital hagiographies we read today.

Computer domination has been a constituent of digital discourse since the 1940s and the advent of the first electronic computers. However, the tradition of mechanical domination, which is genealogically related to digital domination, is much older. The extensive output of H.G. Wells (Wells 1895; 1927a; 1927b) and the plethora of films that start with Metropolis

1 Simpsons™ cartoon show (The Fox Network)

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(Directed by Fritz Lang (1927)) and continue through The Terminator (Directed by James Cameron (1984) ) attest to the extensive fascination, and fear, of mechanical domination that has grown up with industrialisation. The computer has fit into this domineering, controlling, paternal role like a glove. The ease with which the computer has been able to take over the traditional, industrial, role of dominating and controlling machines seems to justify the twentiethth century postulate that machines, and then computers, will come to control and dominate us all. Who would question that computers will increasingly dominate all aspects of our lives, including all aspects of archaeological work? Whether anyone is willing, or feels it necessary to, question this postulate, perhaps we should indulge ourselves and look at just how such a postulate has managed to be built and maintained.

There is not space here to discuss in detail the history of mechanical domination as it has come to be realized in nineteenth and twentiethth century western thought (Shapin 1996), but perhaps we could just follow a very brief resumé.

The idea of a rational society run along rational, mechanical, lines is as old as the enlightenment, and the genealogy for the twentiethth century was well formed from the eighteenth century automatons through the nineteenth century utilitarians (Mill 1871; Sen and Williams 1982). Many literary works in the early twentiethth century presented a world controlled and ruined by machines. Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), The Machine Stops (E.M. Forster, 1928), Modern Times (Chaplain, 1936), and Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) all present a rational world controlled by machines where the humans live in servitude. Though the list is potentially vast, I will, for purely arbitrary reasons, begin this resumé with H.G. Wells.

In 1936, Wells presented a paper to the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the World Encyclopaedia (Wells 1936). His premise was that “Some favour the idea of a gradual supersession of the political forms and methods of mass democracy by government through some sort of élite, in which the mark of science and the technician will play a dominating part”

(ibid, pg. 11). Wells’ assumption was not that there is a need for a rational, controlling élite—not a ruling élite. Rather, the élite would merely be the interpreters and administrators of a controlling science; “It is science and not men of science that we want to enlighten and animate our politics and rule the world.” (ibid, pg. 11). Wells saw this World Encyclopaedia as a vast information system that would educate and determine a rational democracy:

I ask you to imagine how this World Encyclopaedia organisation would enter into his [the modern educated man's] life and how it would effect him. From his point of view the World Encyclopaedia would be a row of volumes in his own home or in some neighbouring house or in a convenient public library or any school or college, and in this row of volumes he would, without any great toil or difficulty, find in clear understandable language, and kept up to date, the ruling concepts of our social order, the outlines and main particulars in all the fields of knowledge, an exact and reasonably detailed picture of our universe, a general history of the world, and if by any chance he wanted to pursue a question into its ultimate detail, a trustworthy and complete system of reference to primary sources of knowledge. (ibid, pg. 13)

In 1938, Wells published an even more demanding vision of mass control based on educational regimen. In his book World Brain (Wells 1938), Wells argued that “Mental and moral adaptation is lagging dreadfully behind the change in our conditions. A great and


menacing gulf opens which only an immense expansion of teaching and instruction can fill.”

(ibid, pg. ix) Even more like the contemporary heroic language of the Internet, Wells continues to demand a universal system of knowledge:

The missing factor in human affairs ... is a gigantic and many sided educational renascence. The highly educated section, the finer minds of the human race are so dispersed, so ineffectively related to the common man, that they are powerless in the face of political and social adventurers of the coarsest sort. ... In a universal organisation and clarification of knowledge and ideas in a closer synthesis of university and educational activities, in the evocation, that is, of what I have called a World Brain, operating by an enhanced educational system throughout the whole body of mankind, a World Brain that will replace our multitude of uncoordinated ganglia, our powerless miscellany of universities, research institutions, literatures with a purpose, national education systems and the like; ... any hope of an adequate directive control of the present destructive drift of world affairs. (ibid, pg. xiv)

For Wells, such an encyclopaedia “would play the role of an undogmatic Bible to a world culture,” (ibid, pg. 14) and he dismissed the claims of the detractors of globalization that ‘not all people think alike’ as a matter of intellectual laziness.

You see how such an Encyclopaedic organisation could spread like a nervous network, a system of mental control about the globe, knitting all the intellectual workers of the world through a common interest and a common medium of expression into a more and more conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity, information without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny. It could be developed wherever conditions were favourable; it could make inessential concessions and bide its time in regions of exceptional violence, grow vigorously again with every return to liberalism and reason. (ibid, pg. 23)

Not all saw the rational, industrialized controlling force as a democratic one. After the Second World War, in the depths of the Cold War, the fear of mechanized domination as a totalitarian force became the norm; the central, massive, electronic computer replaced the encyclopaedia as the means of rational and unerring control—a totalitarian control. Since the 1950s there has been a steady flow of prophetic claims as to when, never whether, computers would surpass humans in intelligence and, hence, control the world. In 1959, Simon and Newell stated that within the foreseeable future, thinking machines will equal humans (Newell and Simon 1972); by 1970, Martin Minsky confidently stated that “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of a human being;” (Minsky 1967) and even as late as 1983, Professor Edward Fredkin predicted that:

There is no principle of science or engineering that prevents us from making intelligent computers that are infinitely smarter than ourselves. ... We must ask ourselves what such machines will be doing in the future. ... They may take away some of our (nuclear) toys, they will solve weighty problems that we ourselves have been unable to solve. They will talk to us only to amuse themselves and so, in some sense, keep us as pets. (Prof. Edward Fredkin, Interview on BBC television, Oct, 1983)

Though we may happily have our anachronistic laugh over these statements, we must remember that many of the suppositions which underlay these now seemingly absurd prophesies continue to dominate our own prophesies about the future of digital domination, especially in terms of its social impact. The forecasts about digital culture are still largely informed by assumptions of universal encyclopaedic knowledge, of self evident technocratic efficacy, and of the necessity of globalization. One thing has changed, however, in this testimony to digital domination, that is the position of the mechanism—of the computer. Moving as it has from the dominance of knowledge (as universal information), to dominating


machine, to dominating computer; it has now moved full circle back to the global encyclopaedia—to the Internet.

In this paper I will explore two areas where computers are extensively used: in the production of text and visualization. This will not be an extensive inventory of all the uses of computers, nor of the specific projects of use. Rather I will explore how computers are used and whether in the production of the products of their use, in producing texts and visualizing pasts, the computer is necessary.

The Production of Text The single greatest use of computers in archaeology, as in all areas, is, ironically, in the

production of texts. Though there are more high profile uses, such as Virtual Reality reconstructions, statistical applications, imaging, GIS, etc., there is no doubt that, if we include email, hypertext, notes as well as traditional writing, at least 80% of all computer use is for the production of some sort of text. Equally ironic is the fact that much of this text production is a prelude to printing, either directly on a local printer, or for a published work in a journal or as a book. Increasingly, it is true, journal articles are produced and disseminated via the World Wide Web (WWW), so it is hoped that the volume of paper will decrease in forthcoming years. But it is equally true that since the great expansion in personal computers in offices and education, the volume of paper produced in these “paperless offices” has skyrocketed. With the vast growth in WWW resources over the past five years there has also been an extraordinary increase in the number of published works (Tran, 1998).

It seems as the ease with which text production increases, so does our ability to generate text on paper. Here I am less interested with the viability, or not, of the paperless office. The huge success of the word-processor2 makes clear its future utility and ever-expanding use. Whether we ever manage to do the majority of our reading “on-screen” is an unanswerable question at this stage—I find it near impossible to read more than a paragraph or two on the screen without eye-strain. I am interested, however, in the way that the use of the word-processor, email and hypertext has impacted the practice of archaeology, in particular the way archaeology is represented by text.

Despite the many heroic discussions of electronic text as a free an open form, textual production on computers has several distinct expressions. Though all are interrelated, they are not the same despite being lumped together. A classic example of this lumping of all electronic textual production is William Mitchell’s “on-line hypertext” City of Bits (Mitchell n.d.).

... this same ease of cutting, copying, and otherwise manipulating texts permits different forms of scholarly composition, ones in which the researcher's notes and original data exist in experientially closer proximity to the scholarly text than ever before. According to Michael Heim, as electronic textuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. . . . By connecting a small computer

2 One should be aware that the primary use of the word-processor, like the spreadsheet—the two most successful applications ever on computers—are tied as much to the industrialisation of the office, the automation of the secretary, as it is to the utility of such computer based applications.


to a phone, a profession will be able to read `books' whose footnotes can be expanded into further `books' which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition" (10-11), The manipulability of the scholarly text, which derives from the ability of computers to search databases with enormous speed, also permits full-text searches, printed and dynamic concordances, and other kinds of processing that allow scholars in the humanities to ask new kinds of questions. Moreover, as one writes, "The text in progress becomes interconnected and linked with the entire world of information" (161). (Heim 1987; cited in Mitchell n.d.)

Mitchell does not distinguish between word-processing, conventions of footnoting, hypertext or databasing. The ability to manipulate texts, through cutting, copying and pasting, has certainly changed the way that we go about producing texts. Even I remember, and I am not that old, having to type my essays on a manual typewriter, with carbons; then manually “cutting and pasting” text and retyping. Using a word-processor, I certainly read my text less, and less carefully, than when I had to retype it several times. I use paraphrasing less and I find it much easier to paste-in quotes.

But the world described in Mitchell’s paragraph takes for granted that what I do when I am writing and editing, chasing references and checking sources, somehow has a universality about it because I can now do it electronically. By simply transferring, and translating, this work from books and libraries to computer networks, this process, how we are never told, allows me to access “a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition.” Wasn’t this the same promise made for Wells’ World Brain?

Mitchell goes on to discuss another use of electronic text as if it were all part of the greater whole:

The keyboard is my café. Each morning I turn to some nearby machine—my modest personal computer at home, a more powerful workstation in one of the offices or laboratories that I frequent, or a laptop in a hotel room-to log into electronic mail. I click on an icon to open an "inbox" filled with messages from round the world-replies to technical questions, queries for me to answer, drafts of papers, submissions of student work, appointments, travel and meeting arrangements, bits of business, greetings, reminders, chitchat, gossip, complaints, tips, jokes, flirtation. I type replies immediately, then drop them into an "outbox," from which they are forwarded automatically to the appropriate destinations. ... If I have time before I finish gulping my coffee, I also check the wire services and a couple of specialized news services to which I subscribe, then glance at the latest weather report. This ritual is repeated whenever I have a spare moment during the day. (Mitchell n.d.)

I too have a ritual, of sorts, as do most other people who more or less live the “professional, middle-class, western” sort of life that William Mitchell and I do. I do my ritual in the office when I first arrive in the morning. I open my mail (both electronic and paper), work on drafts of papers (both electronic and paper), I go over submissions of student work (both electronic and paper), I too work out all the “appointments, travel and meeting arrangements, bits of business, greetings, reminders, chitchat, gossip, complaints, tips, jokes, flirtation” (both electronic and paper) that I have to, or want to, deal with. I too like the speed and convenience of email for both official work and just keeping in touch, but many of my friends, especially in the developing world, do not have email, so I also have to write letters. Sometimes, with very special friends, I prefer to write, by hand, a special letter.

I am not trying to make a Luddite point here. The point that I am trying to make, as throughout this paper, is that there are a massive range of different things going on in Michell’s daily routine. Organizing the office, writing, editing, collaborating, teaching, gossiping, flirting


have been technically mediated for millennia. The fact that Mitchell chooses to mediate most if not all of his activities electronically is a choice many of us now have. It is not necessarily better, nor worst, to mediate these social tasks electronically. The question is whether electronic mediation creates a substantially different social practice than other forms of technical mediation?

As I hope you have guessed by now, my answer is no, it does not. This is not to say that electronic mediation—the use of computers, the Internet, and email as our primary form of textual exchange—does not have any effect. It just doesn’t have the effect claimed.

The claim is that electronic text, and hypertext in particular, will herald the “death of the book” and the birth of a more “natural,” “individualistic” and “transparent” form of writing. This allusion is, of course, to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Dissemination. Derrida, heavily quoted by Mitchell, makes the argument at the beginning of Of Grammatology that “the development of practical methods of information retrieval extends the possibilities of the 'message' vastly, to the point where it is no longer the 'written' translation of a language, the transporting of a signified which could remain spoken in its integrity” (Derrida 1967: 86). He goes on to declare that the purpose of Grammatology is to escape the encasement of the book through the end of linear writing and, hence, the end of the book. Derrida argues in Dissemination that “one cannot tamper” with the book form, through writing processes that question that form, “without disturbing everything else” (Derrida 1981).

I do hope that the irony of Derrida using the “form of the book,” twice, to make this point is not lost on him. It is certainly lost on Mitchell who declares that “Derrida, more than any other major theorist, understands that electronic computing and other changes in media have eroded the power of the linear model and the book as related culturally dominant paradigms.” (Mitchell n.d.)

We may forgive Mitchell a bit of his enthusiasm for when he was writing in 1994 the Web was yet young and seemingly democratic. The power of history is the ability to see how things actually turn out. In 1999 we have a clearer view of where the Web is going and what its development heralded.

In a forthcoming paper by Charles Gere on the computer and hypertext as allegory, he reminds us what should be now clear to all, that “A map of world Internet connections showing density of ‘net traffic could equally well serve as a map of the distribution and movement of power and capital,” that largely because of the non-linearity of hypertext, the openness of the textual form and the ability to link to diverse international web-sites—but despite the fact that users cannot create links unless they set-up their own site—

... the Internet and the Worldwide Web are proclaimed as potentially radical and emancipatory developments in digital technology. They are characterised as potential sites of resistance to the hegemony of the established order. However radical the Internet might appear it is fundamentally bound up with the operations of a particular phase of capitalism. The global communications network which enables the Internet to exist itself exists because of the needs of industry to communicate quickly and efficiently across national borders. Indeed the Internet is a kind of superstructural mirror image of that form of capitalism inasmuch as it reflects the distribution of computer networks across the globe. (Gere, forthcoming)


Now more than ever, and even from its earliest days, the Web is a site for commerce; personal and corporate sites abound, but practically always with the same purpose, to sell something, an image, a product or a life story.3 Identity, in many social groups, now depends on your ability to create an advertised image on the Web, and this is true whether you are a new car from Germany or a secondary student from Australia.

This may be, we could counter, a temporary setback; a momentary realignment and appropriation of a largely popular political media. The power, as Marshall McLuhan would argue, is in the media itself, not how it is used.4 This is but a hostile invasion that must, and will, be resisted. Or, at worst, a new territory within the medium that can be ringfenced and controlled by the essentially “fluid” and “individualizing” nature of the Web. The Web by its nature will resist. But Gere again reminds us that:

This is not some hostile invasion, but simply capitalism claiming its own. The Web is not a radical new phenomenon, but simply a more sophisticated development of nineteenth century technologies such as the telegraph and the typewriter. Combined with the power of the spectacle, through the monitor, it is powerful and seductive. But this should not fool us into mistaking it for something it is not. The Web exists because beneath it, and the Internet, and all the other manifestations of digital media, is the ‘processed world’ of millions of office workers who sit in front of terminals, word processing, data processing, or data inputting. (Gere, Forthcoming)

In archaeology our rhetoric of computing is almost exclusively dominated, whether Processually or Post-processually, by an almost total ignorance of this history of representation.

Textual Representations: Now and Then

Now

Ian Hodder’s excavations at Çatalhöyük have relied extensively on the integrative and fluid nature of computing environments to fulfil their project goal of a Post-processual archaeological method (See the Çatalhöyük web site at: http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/catal.html). In his 1998 paper, ‘Always momentary, fluid and flexible’: towards a reflexive excavation methodology (Hodder 1997), Hodder emphasises the role of new information technologies is achieving his goal of moving interpretation into the context of production—of achieving integration and collaboration among all the team, specialists and diggers, on-site and fully integrating recording and interpretation.

If we look at the Çatalhöyük Home Page, we find a simple and modest outline of the contents of the web-site. Ignoring the menu for the moment, we are first told that the site is “designed for those interested in the ongoing excavations at Çatalhöyük.” We can then follow

3 The preliminary findings (September, 1999) of the Virtual Society programme has shown that, far from being a level democratic and identityless space, is actually a space with “virtual power structures that mimic real space.” (http://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/virtsoc/) 4 Hypertext creates a palemcest of layered meaning wherein hegemonic authority defers to multilinear relativism. For McLuhan and other cyber enthusiasts, this necessarily tolerant structuration of knowledge approaches a state of spiritual nirvana more closely than any other medium to date. (http://landow.stg.brown.edu/cpace/infotech/asg/ag25.html)


one of the twelve links to ‘Recent Additions’ (three links), ‘General Information’ (five links) or to ‘Research Materials’ (four links).

Following these links, I am struck by how conventional the content and presentation is. Though the whole does not read much like a site report, it certainly reads quite conventionally as an exhibition or as a prospectus. The site as a whole would not look out of place alongside most contemporary charity’s annual reports.5

At the beginning we have the “Mission Statement” which tells us, among other things, that the “ultimate aim is to provide the Turkish Ministry of Culture with a well planned heritage site.” The only allusion to the broader theoretical and IT programme when we are told that the on-site museum will be “enhanced by virtual reality techniques and interactive video.”

A few links do seem worthy of further investigation in this light: The “Çatalhöyük Discussion Group” and the “Excavation Database.” The Çatalhöyük Discussion page allows for any visitor to join a discussion of existing topics or, one assumes, start a new one. The day I logged on, in early-September 1999, there were a total of 243 postings discussing around 40 topics ranging from “the tin resources in anatolia” (only two postings) to “matriarchy” (with several discussions and an average of four postings each) to the most popular “give this planet a chance; the origins question” (with 31 postings) (http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/discussion/cataldisc.html). Up and running since February 1999, the amount of discussion seems very impressive. The discussions range, as you would expect, is from the interesting to the banal—perhaps a bit skewed to the banal—but, as an historian, I am very pleased that such “shop talk” is being recorded.

However, what is being recorded is not so much “shop talk”—that vital bit of interpretive discussion that takes place in all disciplines around the evening field table, in the conference pub, or at tea in the trenches—but is a “Notes and Queries” page. Postings to a discussion page, like its published counterpart, are always argumentative essays, no matter how short, and cannot be an electronic substitution for chit-chat.

What also strikes me about the Çatalhöyük Web Site, and just about every other web site I have visited, is that there is little about the presentation of these texts that is necessarily dependent on the technology of the Web. Certainly there is a fragmentation of the narrative that is different than the standard site report or journal article, but there is much more shared between the two than is not.

Academic web sites generally, and Çatalhöyük specifically, are largely made up of traditional textual narratives with hypertext-links rather than references or footnotes. All of the Çatalhöyük Archived Reports (http://catal.arch.cam.ac.uk/catal/archive_reps.html) are shockingly traditional with the links only to tables and figures, presented as separate image pages, and the ubiquitous ‘so-and-so this volume’, linking to yet another page of traditional 5 Perhaps this is a greater indicator of Hodder’s globalization than he would like to admit. The general corporate tone and presentation, the array of corporate sponsor’s logos at the base of the page, makes certainly more than a inadvertent reference to global corporate culture.


specialist reportage. How is the computer necessary for this? We could equally, and quite easily, argue that the traditional textual forms are better as they at least provide conventionalized textual forms whose integration of narrative, image and reference is well known.6 As with the database and the discussion group, the texts of the site create an ‘interaction’ and ‘flexibility’ of recording and interpretation that results in little more than a rather conventional, though slightly more detailed, recording system.

The On-line Database is quite revealing in this respect. It offers the detailed and formal recorded data on features and deposits as well as skeletons—I thought that there may be more caution here, but none seemed to be considered—but also, in keeping with the project’s goal to “make visible” all aspects of recording and interpretation, the daily diaries of the excavators are also available.

This I find an enjoyable feature, with a mixture of the usual description of features, samples taken and work completed, with some lively commentary on method and site management. On 26/06/99, Craig Cessford wrote:

I am basically treating this like an area of floor, which is what it is in terms of broad category, and this means four flotation samples which might give us west to east spatial patterning. I am also taking two archives, one from each end, as somebody might actually look at these unlike 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of those we take which just waste time on site, take up lots of space while drying and then need to be stored. (Cessford, n.d.)

And on 22/08/98, Naomi Hamilton wrote: Some time during today, when the lab should have been locked anyway, they took away everything in my in-box in the belief that it was finished with - and didn't actually take the things from the out-box! It's going to take some work getting it all back, as it clearly wasn't all logged back into the finds lab - they only fished out 11 things, and unfortunately I know I had far more than that in my back-log. I haven't the time or energy to sort it out today, but when will I have? (Hamilton, n.d.)

Though I suppose that I am meant to recognize how unique this system of recording is, and it certainly is if we only look at the past 30 years or so, I am struck by how similar these diary entries are to the many that I have read from the first fifty years of this century. In particular, I find the structure of the discussions, with their emphasis on description of work and features and the critiques of site management, to be almost identical with the site-notebooks of Sir R.E.M. Wheeler.

Does this mean that this programme of interaction mediated by computer systems is a mistake? Or that simply because the interaction achieved through the computer systems at Çatalhöyük or elsewhere can be achieved through other technical means that these programmes are a waste of time and money? Of course not. Simply because computers are not the only means for achieving such recording does not mean that they are not a good means for doing so. As Ian Hodder has reminded us so often (Hodder 1996), the work at Çatalhöyük is an experiment, and experiments are a good thing. The over-standardization of archaeological field

6 I am well aware of the mountain of Post-modernist critique of traditional textual forms, and do not deny many of their conclusions. The point I wish to make here is that the simple modification of the referential system and the distancing of the image from the text does not even remotely challenge the critique of the authorial status in traditional textual forms.


methodology is in disparate need for alternatives, and, perhaps, the work at Çatalhöyük may offer us a few. The error here is the claim that a globalizing interaction is being achieved that is substantially different simply because it is utilizing the iconic technological mediation of global corporate culture. The impacts of the Çatalhöyük experiment, if any, will be from achieving a different mode of production and a different archaeological culture, not because it used computers, however helpful. I do not think, however, that the forms of scientific life being lived out at Çatalhöyük are anywhere radical enough to have much effect.

Then

Hypertext and the Internet are not the first settings in which the nature of the book has been challenged. All through the twentiethth century, the death of the book has been championed (Foucault 1977; Derrida 1976; Baudrillard 1988). Even before Derrida, Baudrillard and Foucault were questioning the authority, and accepted histories, of the book, cultural critics and social anarchists were directly challenging both the narrative and physical form of the book. We could certainly mention the work of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project,7 or Marcel Duchamp’s Museums, but equally, and more directly, the work of Guy Debord.

Guy Debord, of the proto-situationalist group l’Internationale Lettriste and author of La Société du spectacle, composed his autobiography, Mémoires, in 1957 as a coded history of l’Internationale Lettriste formed through collages and quotations; an “anti-livre” that could only be fully deciphered by members of the group. Debord even had the book bound in sandpaper so that it would destroy any book it was placed with (Hussey, 1999).

Despite these deliberate attempts at the destruction of the book form, the book survived. The book remains the authoritative media for academic and official texts; it remains the primary forum for critique and political dissent despite the immediacy of both film and television; more interestingly, it remains an important medium for experimentation. The challenge, if there has been a successful one yet, is to the preeminence of text (Bakhtin 1984), a critique that computers cannot resolve either.

In the way of an historical aside, it is useful to remind ourselves that the translation from scribal culture to printed word was not simple either. That the “printing revolution” was the effect of a long and always provisional social process in western culture that required an immense investment, in both new infrastructure and new skills. The rise of the book as an authoritative media was neither natural nor self-evident. As Adrian Johns’ book The Nature of the Book demonstrates it took over 150 years and immense social and technological effort to transform the book from unauthored scribal copy, to author-ative published book (Johns 1998).

The first printing press came to London in 1476, and was kept within Westminster Abby, printing a select series of texts for a select group. By the early 17th century there were twenty licensed printers in London, though it is estimated that there were several hundred unlicensed

7 For best discussion of Benjamin’s Arcades Project see Susan Buck-Morse (1995) The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


printers in London at the time. By the middle of that century, there were also presses in many other English cities printing a variety of official, but mostly unofficial, material. Though we can superficially see a great deal of similarity between this scenario and the rise of the Web, I wish to focus on the production of political pamphlets.

An enormous number of public media was available to the 17th century populace. “... books and newspapers (relegated more to the elite), pamphlets, broadsides, oral communication, woodcut prints, paintings, stage plays, ballads, sermons, official proclamations, petitions, and riots” (Griscom, n.d.) were all recognized forms of “public communication.” Tim Harris, in his book Propaganda and Public Opinion in Seventeenth-Century England, sets the scene:

It is well known that from the eve of the Civil War there was a sudden and dramatic surge in the output of the press. As censorship controls broke down following the meeting of the Long Parliament in late 1640, there was a great explosion if pamphlet and other printed materials, discussing a wide range of political, constitutional, and religious topics, and it is probably not too controversial to assert that the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was accompanied by a concomitant media revolution. (Harris, 1987: 52)

Literacy rates were extraordinarily high8 and, with the addition of public readings, very few members of the populace in the towns were not well informed. But the political participation did not end with the passive reading of news in its various forms. Frederick Siebert, in his Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776, gives us an astounding account of the shear volume of print in the early 1640s:

An analysis preserved in the Thomson collection in the British Museum shows that although only twenty-two pamphlets were published in 1640, more than 1,000 were issued in each of the succeeding four years. The record number of 1,966 appeared in 1642. (Siebert, 1952: 180)

There was little financial incentive to publish a political pamphlet in the 1640s (many of which today would be viewed as at best libelous and at worst treasonable) and there was a great deal to lose. The pamphleteer was driven, so we are told, by an earnest commitment to the betterment of the state, by the direct power that could be achieved through print. Print, in the few years before the Royalists regained control over the presses in 1644, was an interactive network of common voices that was loud enough to be heard in the seats of political power in England. However, like the early Internet, this programme of “open” publication was very difficult to control. The King and Parliament both attempted to control the presses through licensing and sanctions—neither worked. The public’s prodigious desire for information had to be satiated, but, as with the Governments of today, it also had to be controlled.

The solution, as increasingly is the case today with the Internet, was the institutionalization of the newspaper and the magazine into the hands of the aristocratic and commercial authority (Griscom, n.d.). The strategy of translating the public desire for information from the open unruly independent presses into an enterprise of authoritative, and regulatable, printers—the control of the citizenry through appropriation and construction of a market rather than 8 At an absolute minimum, 30% of the male population in the countryside could read, while in London, male literacy rates were upwards of 80%. Even in the lowest classes, probably over 20% of husbandmen, nationally, could read.


approbation—is one of the most successful creations of modern capitalism. It worked well for printing and it is working well for the Internet.

Afterthoughts on Hypertexts

In 1945 Vannevar Bush, an engineer, published what is now seen as the pioneer article on Hypertext (Bush, 1945). In his article, Bush defined a system that he called the “memex”; a system by which someone could follow the various pertinent books, articles and notes on any subject. Memex would allow the user to not only examine all these relevant works, but, in doing so on memex, will be building a trail of the many items. Within this memex trail the user can insert a comment or two, linking it within the path of the trail or to some item, create side trails, add a “longhand” analysis of their own, and build up an encyclopaedia of their own on any subject.

Though Bush was not even anticipating a computer environment for his memex, his article (along with a number of other encyclopaedic utopias) is used extensively as evidence of the deeply modern and self-evident form that has now come to be known as Hypertext (See Landow, http://landow.stg.brown.edu/ht/memex.html). Though the ur-article of Hypertext, Bush’s vision of “Hypertext” is not very much like Hypertext. Bush’s memex is a mechanical translation of the practice that we go through in the library; a mechanization of the card-catalogue, notepad, and manuscript on the library desk.

The Hypertext of the Internet remains an authored system, where Bush’s memex is an authorial system.9 Authored systems, like the printing press, are easily appropriated; authorial systems are not. As Charles Gere reminded us above, the global capitalism that has so swiftly appropriated the WWW and has so successfully stabilized HTML as an authorial system, best suited to advertizement over research, is not a “hostile invasion” but a claiming of what is their own. It is the application of a strategy of appropriation that is as old as modern capitalism, and it is likely to be as successful now as it was in the mid-17th century.

Reconstructions In the 1960s Robert G. Chenhall, wrote in his influential paper The Impact of Computers on

Archaeological Theory: an Appraisal and Projection, “With this quality of perceptual data, it will then be possible to make inferential, socio-cultural statements that are also data supportable and, at least logically and statistically, replicable.” (Chenhall 1968). Chenhall saw the accuracy, perceptual quality and objectivity of the computer mediating the necessary subjectivity of the archaeologist to produce reliable inferences about the past. The road to this golden age of understanding was limited by only four factors: (1) the speed and power of computer equipment, (2) the scale and quality of data (by which Chenhall meant the the appropriateness of measurements for the computer) (3) training of archaeologists in programing logic and statistics, and (4) the lack of creative imagination (Chenhall 1968: 23). The first of these three are

9 The only authorial system available on computer that is anything like the memex is CABINET. (Boast, 1997)


recognisable to all who have read anything on the use of computers in the arts; all identify the, temporary, limitations of computers and of the inappropriate skills of the researcher to cope with the demands of the new technology. The last needs some explanation.

Chenhall sees “creative imagination” as a necessary skill of the researcher to open up the possibilities of testable questions. It is this “technologically-mediated objective viewpoint from which we can see the past accurately, without the fog of our subjective selves confusing the inferences.” Clearly Chenhall felt that not only was an instrumental mediation necessary, but the mediation of a very special instrument—the computer. It was the computer, coupled with the skilled archaeologist, that could produce the perceptually accurate view of the past (Elsner, 1994). Though Chenhall was not speaking of Virtual Reality, or as archaeologists prefer to label it today “visualising archeology,” his view was of a future where computers would act as a primary mediator through which the archaeologists could view the past.

Almost thirty years later, in his Introduction to his and Silotti’s colourful tome Virtual Archaeology (Forte & Siliotti, 1997), Maurizio Forte would claim that:

As progress marches on, we will be able to reconstruct [through the use of computers] ever larger segments of our most distant past, leading to a more accurate understanding of the microcosm of the ancient world. The problem for archaeology is to retrieve the maximum possible amount of information from the material culture, so as to recapture its non-material aspects as well. (Forte, 1997: 9)

Forte sees “virtual archaeology” as a coupling of the scientifically accurate data acquisition practices of modern archaeology and the “re-presentational” accuracy of the new computer technologies. Not only is this coupling fruitful in itself, but it will lead to an “archaeology of the third millennium [which] will very likely be a science with a strong technological element that will enhance out of all proportion our ability to explore, to interpret and to classify, bringing with it a greater and more penetrating ability to reconstruct the past.” (ibid, pg. 9). As with Chenhall, it is a coupling of an empirically rich archaeology with the presentational realism of the computer.

The stated purpose of Forte and Siliotti’s book makes this clear, as we assume is the purpose of the printed computer visualisations themselves, which offer no less that “the reader the most faithful re-presentation of the ancient world possible: highly realistic in information and with a high scientific content.” The context for computer visualization in archaeology is clear enough. As with Chenhall, the purpose is to recreate the past for the viewer: the viewer, “Through the interaction between exact science, information technology and new research methods ... embarks on a technological voyage into the past.” (ibid, pg. 10).

These computer presentations have moved on since Chenhall’s call for deeply embedding cybernetics into archaeological practice. Forte and Siliotti remind us, however, that though the focus of application has shifted from statistics to visualization, the urgent sense of embedding this progressive medium within archaeological practice remains, and largely for the same reasons.

But the traditional roots of these reconstructions—this visualizing ambition—goes back much further. During the nineteenth century, an explosion of technological innovation created


whole new forms of presentation and performance. The development of then very expensive plate glass was increasingly in use in superior shops in the new Department Stores by the 1830s creating the proscenium frame that came to surround all of the various forms of exhibition in the nineteenth and twentiethth centuries, including the computer monitor. The lighting of London’s streets in 1814-1820 meant that this increasing range of framed tableaus were well lit and on display throughout the day and much of the night. By the 1840s museums, increasingly public, were able to extend their openings to the night so the “working classes” could view the edifying displays which increasingly drew on the new technologies. The developments in lighting generally10 had a massive effect on display and the theatre. Along with the use of new materials in scenic design and costume, and the use of new pyrotechnic and chemical technologies, the ability of displays to present distant times and places advanced beyond all previous ambitions.

The advancements were not just technological, but also in the range, scale, but mostly the fidelity of the displays themselves—in the desire to create a visually “realistic” view of the past. These technological developments helped fuel the variety of different presentations of distant lands, historical events and unique views, and in the rise of the historical theatre. In response there was a huge increase of public interest in these presentations with tens of thousands of people attending the increasing diversity of exhibitions (Mitchell, 1988; Booth, 1981; Stokes, 1972).

My concern here is not to explore the many forms of historical representation developing from the early nineteenth century rather with one specific setting in which the dialog between the new technologies of accurate representation—the presentation of the new “historical mindedness”—and the new discipline of archaeology came together to create a set of re-presentations of the past whose realism, attention to detail and engagement with the viewer was unequalled until the “heritage” boom of the 1980s. I refer to the tradition of the Victorian Spectacular Theatre as produced and practised by Charles Kean, Beerbohm Tree, the Bancrofts, Hermann Vezin and of course William Godwin, and popularised by the Paintings of Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites and in the writings of Oscar Wilde.11

By the mid-1800s, theatre had been transformed into a picture of the world. Influenced initially by the spectacle painting of C. William West, Francis Darby and John Martin, the development of which is expressed in the excessively realistic and allegorical paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the century, theatre was increasingly considered as an artistic composition. This emphasis on composition was not as we would suspect today, an emphatically subjective presentation, but emphasized the objective and even scientific re-presentation of the objective scientific history. Painting, illustration, theatre, exhibition and the Diorama, having been stripped of their roles as the accurate recorder of the contemporary by 10 Gaslight 1817, Limelight 1837, Electric carbon-arc 1848, incandescent carbon-filament 1881. Introduction of “focused limelight” in Kean’s Henry VIII (1885), first focused beam of light. 11 See Stokes (1972) for a full discussion of the Victorian Spectacular Theatre.


photography, were now the definitive re-presenters of the absent, the past, the vast and the distant.

Nowhere was this preoccupation with re-presenting the objective past so apparent as in the Theatre. In its ability to provide a three-dimentional, visually realistic experience of an accurately reproduced setting of the past, the theatre was unrivalled in the nineteenth century. The historical theatre of the middle and late nineteenth century in Europe, and primarily in England, was increasingly a site of collaboration between actors, artists, scenic specialists and archaeologists. This collaboration was exemplified by the productions of two men, Charles Kean and William Godwin. Both Kean and Godwin had trained as architects, published extensively on classical architecture, and both were Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries.

Kean was an avid supporter of historical reconstruction in the theatre. In his 1853 production of Sardanapalus, at the Princess’s, Kean produced what was seen at the time as a masterful re-presentation of the Assyrian setting. Kean’s purpose went well beyond performing Byron’s tragedy “to render visible to the eye ... the costume, architecture, and customs of the ancient Assyrian people, verified by the bas-reliefs. ... to convey to the stage an accurate portraiture and living picture of an age long since past away.” (Cole, 1859: 58-59).

Kean’s Sardanapalus was a grand reconstruction of Layard’s Assyrian discoveries at Nimrud and Nineveh between 1845-1855, with Kean acknowledging Layard in the Programme Notes. Layard’s four books on Nineveh were shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and then again at the Crystal Palace in 1854. The excavations, extensively covered in the London Illustrated News and the press generally, were hugely popular. The play opened with a massive procession with musicians, archers, spearmen, dancing-girls, nobles, officers, eunuchs, standard-bearers and Sardanapalus on an “authentic” chariot drawn by two white horses (Booth, 1981: 20). The accurate depiction of the objects and settings that most people were aware of from visits to the British Museum and the illustrated magazines was a huge success and forged a programme of further collaboration between archaeology and the historical theatre and art in the second half of the nineteenth century.12

William Godwin, born in Bristol in 1833, made his living, initially, as an architect, but wrote regularly in his early years as a theatre critique for the Bristol paper. Only after 1865, and a with the help of a long-term affair with the actress Ellen Terry, did Godwin gain the contacts and associations in the West End theatres to realize his programme of extreme historical realism.

Godwin published what is seen as both his manifesto and the manifesto of the realist theatre in thirty-two articles on The Architecture and Costume of Shakespeare’s Plays, published in

12 Art too was influenced by the effect of extreme realism. Luke Fildes constructed a life-size fisherman’s cottage in his studio to complete his painting of cottages in England and Scotland. Alma Tadema, whose extensive archaeological research into this painting of Coriolanus is well known, also had a weekly shipment of roses from the French Riviera sent to him through out the winter to produce the pedals in The Roses of Heliogabalus (1896). Holman Hunt brought both a goat and Dead Sea mud back with him to paint The Scapegoat (1854). Every object in John Poynter’s Israel in Egypt (1867), an extensive outdoor spectacle, was recreated from intensive archaeological research.


The Architect (31 October 1874 to 26 June 1875).13 These articles represented years of scholarly research by Godwin into the fifteenth century architecture, costume and furniture, and formed the basis of his life-long critique of the London Theatre. The foundation of this critique was the lack of fidelity between the scenery, setting and costume of the productions and the “real” past; a critique against the emphasis, as was common in the nineteenth century theatre, on the actor and their persona to an emphasis on the play as a re-presentation of the past as it was.

“The use of scenery, dress and other accessories directly implies an intention to reproduce the original scene, and consequently an error in either of these vitiates the whole result, not will excellence on the part of any actor atone for the inaccuracy of his personal appearance or of the scenery by which he is surrounded. I do not need to deny that a person totally ignorant of the past may feel himself satisfied in spite of the grossest anachronisms, but his satisfaction will be that of a man who is merely anxious to be amused, entirely irrespective of any desire to be instructed, whereas I maintain that we do not go to a theatre simply to hear passionate recitations and funny speeches, but to witness such a performance as will place us nearly as possible as spectators of the original scene of the the thing represented, and so gain information of man, manners, customs, costumes, and countries—and this result is only obtainable where accuracy in every particular is secured.” (Godwin, 1864)

Through his theatrical contacts, provided largely by Ellen Terry, Godwin began working on a number of productions as scenic and costume designer including several projects with the Bancrofts at the Prince of Wales’s Theatre and one at the Haymarket.14 One of the early, and greatly successful, productions was W.G. Wills’ play Claudian, which Godwin worked for some time in 1876-77, with Wills and Lady Archibald Campbell.

Claudian was the story of the curse of eternal youth, put on the Byzantine emperor by a Christian Hermit; a curse that could only be broken when the rock of Byzantium was “rent asunder.” Godwin invested a more scholarly effort and research on Claudian than any other project he had taken on to that time. He comprehensively reviewed the standard works on Byzantine art and architecture, read Appollonius Sidonius and Eusebius, describing his design for the first act in an open letter to his fellow architect, and producer of the play, Wilson Barrett:

“The foreground is a bit like Constantine’s forum; to the left, solidly built, and of true dimensions, is the end of a Doric portico; to the right a portion of a circular Ionic portico; a low wall bounds the plateau, and over this we see the tops of dark cypresses among other trees and commemorative pillars, and, on a rising hill beyond, stately many-pillared structures, while, in the far distance, the blue waters of the Bosphorus and the hilly shore beyond, complete a picture of which Mr Walter Hann might well be proud. In the walls beneath the porticos we recognise the opus sectile, or large mosaics, of which Mr Godwin speaks in his pamphlet. The capitals and friezes reveal the coarse carving of the time, and the marble and gilding exhibit something of the costly splendour. Under one portico is a marble statue of Venus with gilded drapery and in the centre of the stage is another statue similarly treated.” (Godwin, 1883: 277)

The extreme archaeological realism of the scenic design drew a number of criticisms. The scenic spectacle was described as an “archaeological tyranny” that could go no further and the play was subjected to parodies in Punch (Anonymous, 1883).

A View from the Gods

13 The articles were reprinted in Edward Gordon Craig’s, Godwin’s son, journal The Mask, May/June 1908 -- April 1914 14 See Booth (1981) pg. 23, for a detailed discussion of the early theatrical consultations of Godwin.


If anyone has seen a virtual archaeological reconstruction, or any VR reconstruction for that matter, you almost always start with the same initial view. It is an angelic view, a view taken from the optimal position for the detached objective eye: the position taken is always about 200 meters up in the air, 300 metres distant, and always at a slight angle to the main orientation of the structure to be viewed. As a view it has a very long pedigree, it can be seen in the “antiquarian” and architectural etchings of the eighteenth century, in the popular panoramic paintings, in the panoramas themselves and in the “scenic” photography from the nineteenth century.15 It is also the view of the stage from the upper balcony of a European theatre, better known as the “Gods.”

The perspective is a necessary one, one that sets the viewer up as a subject; a subject that can view in a detached and internal way. Just as the theatre sets us in a dark and comfortable environment to detach our bodies, but not our vision, from the action on the stage, so the angelic perspective, the view from the Gods, is appropriated for the entry into the framed performance of the computer representation. As Damisch put it:

“Perspective is not a code; but it has in common with language the fact that, in it and by it, is instituted or constituted, by means of a point, an instance analogous to that of the “subject” in language, of the “person,” always placed in relation to a “here” or a “there,” with all the possibilities of passing from one position to the other which derive from that.” (Damisch (quoted in Bann, 1995: 116)

This view portrays the historicity of the activity at hand, that of the production and use of the virtual archaeological reconstruction. From the early days of the 1980s, archaeologists have claimed that their primary interest in this technology is as an exploratory tool; as a means of investigating the past (Reilly, 1992; Miller and Richards, 1995; Huggett, 1995; Wood and Chapman, 1992; Eiteljorg, 1988; Burridge, B.M. Collins, B.N. Galtin, A.R. Halbert & T.R. Heywood, 1989). This investigation is through a realist reconstruction of the past—an archaeological investigation that returns the archaeologist to the stage. As an interpretive statement of current research, the computer representation offers a contemporary stage on which the realist agenda of William Godwin is again played out. As with Godwin’s productions, they are not the past, but an authoritative, archaeologically valid, replica, where the key issue is getting the view of the archaeology right.

Paul Reilly recognizes that the models created are surrogates when he defines the virtual as “an allusion to a model, a replica, the notion that something can act as a surrogate or replacement for an original. In other words, it refers to a description of an archaeological formation or to a simulated archaeological formation.” (Reilly, 1992: 162). Reilly defines a virtual archaeology as the construction of a rich variety of metaphorical data on the computer and sees this data as the evidence for archaeological discussion. He argues that by “enhancing and enriching the quality of this metaphorical data we hope to stimulate more and new archaeological discussions.” (Reilly, 1992: 166-67). Forte, Silotti and Reilly recognize that the computer reconstruction is a “picture” of the past. The contemporary “virtual” status of the 15 The “Angelic View” was first seen on William Sherwin’s engraving of “The Royal Exchange” (1674) (BM 1880-11-13-3679). Such engravings were not used as architectural drawings but as limited edition gifts to benefactors and sponsors of the construction.


reconstruction is recognized by all as a “model” or “replica” that can stand for the original. A statement, more sympathetic to that made by Reilly 100 years later, is found in Godwin’s article of October 10 1885 in The Dramatic Review.

“The Archaeologist or antiquary, however much Mr. Whistler may think the contrary, is something more than a frequenter of museums and a patron of pigeon-holes. His method or mental attitude is of special significance; and you can no more make his off hand than you can make an artist: indeed he must have some of the artist’s qualities, or, at least, be able to imagine in his mind’s eye the features of the past and interpret its records and memorials.”16 (Godwin, 1885: 113)

Here Godwin is arguing for a situation far more similar to that attributed to virtual archaeology by Reilly; that there is a special kind of an artistic eye that can recreate the vision of the past. Godwin does not mean by “artist’s qualities” what we might mean today; he means the ability to represent the subject accurately, as it is or was. The art for Godwin, and his friends such as Wilde and Whistler, is not an interpretive endeavour, but a representational craft: it is not the art of the impressionists, but the scholarly art of the Pre-Raphaelites and nineteenth century realists.

In both of these settings, that of the archaeological computer representation and the historically realist stage of Godwin, what matters is not the objects from the past, the “raw material” or “thing in itself,” but the idealised space of the reconstruction. It is through this reconstructed frame that the analyst, or viewer, is provided with “a powerful analytical aid in allowing computer representation of primary data. ... Unlike the raw material from which the recorded data was drawn, this metaphorical data can be dissected and explored repeatedly in an almost limitless number of ways.” (Reilly, 1992: 166-67).

Just as Forte informs us that as “progress marches on, we will be able to reconstruct ever larger segments of our most distant past, leading to a more accurate understanding of the microcosm of the ancient world,” (Forte, 1997: 9) so Godwin tells us that “to witness such a performance [of a realist play] as will place us as nearly as possible as spectators of the original scene or of the thing represented, and this result is only possible where accuracy in every particular is assured.” (Godwin 1864 ). Accuracy in both cases was, and is, the paramount concern; necessary to produce the effect of realism in staging the past.

Most important is authenticity. This is not just a measure of the correspondence of the presented to the real, but a matter of determining the authority of this correspondence. In his forward to Forte’s book, Lord Renfrew claims for the validity of such reconstructions, he argues that it is necessary that:

“In every case it is the archaeologist who has to supply the data. If the aim is to reconstruct a ruined site to show how it originally looked, then ultimately the archaeologist is responsible for providing the missing elements. If there is guesswork involved, the archaeologist does the guessing. But now [because he is using a computer] he has to do it in a logical and structured and ultimately more fruitful way. The very task of setting up a computer reconstruction obliges the archaeologist to pose the right questions, and then answer them. This whole procedure makes the computer reconstruction a valuable research tool.” (Renfrew, 1997: 7)

16 The Mr. Whistler he is referring to is the painter, and Godwin’s good friend James Whistler. Despite the snipe at Whistler’s comments on Archaeologists, Whistler remained Godwin’s friend and champion, even marrying Godwin’s widow and defending his honour in a brawl with Augustus Moore at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1890.


The emphasis on both valid expertise and the computer as a rational setting for exploration, emphasise the importance of the computer in archaeology. It is not just an instrument, no matter how useful; it is not just a more efficient representational device, the time, expense and effort put into computer reconstructions deny any such claim; it is a necessary archaeological site upon which the expert archaeologist, the archaeological evidence and the viewer come together to confirm the “valid” past.

Stephen Bann argues that this effect, the desire for the real which began in the nineteenth century, of which photography was only an unambiguous sign, made the “staging of the past” an inadequate goal by the end of the nineteenth century. In staging the past, the historical objects were given heightened identity through representation. Coupled with the recreated historical settings that were becoming commonplace, it became possible to “live the past.” (Bann, 1995: 130-131). He was speaking of the nineteenth and twentieth century pass-time of “reenactment,” but the reality effect of the computer reconstruction, with the requirement of interactivity, creates a stage where it is both possible to maintain the objectivity of “staging the past” and the romanticism of “living the past.” In the interactive computer model, the stage can be set for the viewer as a detached observer, the angelic eye, the view from the Gods, but it can also be set for the viewer as reenactor. The voyeuristic viewer, empirical to some, can follow any number of historical narratives within the reconstructed space as either detached observer or engaged reenactor.

The Computer has become a scientific stage on which archaeologists can finally reenact the past “accurately,” “authoritatively,” and without the annoying subjectivity of human actors. Archaeologists, like the nineteenth century theatregoer, “register the image not only as an accurate record, designed to satisfy antiquarian interest, but as a ‘shifter’ (to use the linguist Jakobson’s term) between present and past.” (Bann, 1995: 120). It does not matter that much if the contemporary archaeologist uses the computer generated stage as Godwin intended, as an objective detached view of a scene from the past, or as an engaged Post-processualist interpreter; the game is the same:

The computer program requires the archaeologist to make decisions about the original texture and colour of all the surfaces of the buildings. Decisions have to be taken, or alternative possibilities formulated, about the destroyed upper parts of buildings. The computer reconstruction also brings to the surface interesting questions about the original lightning of each room and house. The resulting 3-D experience has to be seen to be believed: that is what virtual reality is about. (Renfrew, 1997: 7)

Indeed it is. It is a spectacular performance, one that again demands that we suspend our belief that the object we are engaging with is a contemporary computer with a keyboard and mouse, as the theatregoer of the mid-nineteenth century was to suspend their belief that they were looking at a contemporary stage, to convince ourselves that we are looking at the real past.

Computing Futures Where does this leave us? What is the hope for computing in archaeology if all it really is is

the continuation of traditional representations by other means? What happens to computing in


archaeology if it is stripped of its preeminent position as a unique modernizing force? What happens to archaeology’s “brave new world”?

The answer, as far as I am concerned, is “not much.” If we look to computing as a valuable tool, at least in some contexts, rather than uncritically converting to the corporate hype, then there is little to be worried about. If I may remind us again of Charles Gere’s declaration that computers—whether denoting the Internet or the box—are the natural instruments of modern global capitalism, then it is less surprising that they should occupy, mythologically, the position of Colonizer. How similar the discourse of computers is to that of the “improving” colonizers of the nineteenth century. We continue to blindly accept this global colonizer into our discipline as an unquestionable civilizing force. The evidential connotation of power, efficiency, technological superiority and universality are constantly mobilized to paint the computer as such a force for all places, all times and all genres.

But we must remember, in these post-colonial times, that we now know a thing or two about such imperialistic claims. We know from the post-colonial experience of the past fifty years that far from swamping and destroying the colonized culture,17 as many early anthropologists believed, we now find that western imperialistic culture was simply assimilated. Just as nineteenth and twentiethth century European culture is characterized by the assimilation and translation of diverse colonized cultures, so the colonized cultures were assimilating useful bits from us.

Just as there is not one universal cinema, or photography, or literature, so there is not one universal computing. The question should not be what the future of computing in archaeology will be, but what archaeologies may choose to do with computers in the future? Far more interesting questions may be asked such as: What can we show, and learn, from a computer reconstruction that we cannot from a model?; What opportunities for archaeological writing arise when we can move records, descriptions, notes and other “data” exclusively onto interactive databases?; What happens to our use of objects when they move from the collection to diverse representations on a computer?; and, most importantly, What can’t we do with computers?

I have said before that this is not a Luddite text. I used a word processor to write it and many of the references are intentionally from on-line sources. I use computers daily in my work and will continue to do so. My problem has been with the idea that there is this thing called Archaeological Computing that has some identifiable future, as though the prophetic identity is attached and determined by the instrument. Of course there are things called computers—and many associated things called applications, networks, digital images, etc.—and they will continue to be used in archaeology as elsewhere. These things will also have a future in that they will change in form and purpose. But the question of the futures addressed here are a matter of changing practice. We can easily imagine a future for archaeology where there is no computer use at all. We can equally imagine a future for archaeology where the only

17 This of course precludes the most effective colonial tactic for destroying a colonized culture, genocide.


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