The pulse of the living: bones and stones speak
When one is asked what archaeology is, the response often includes things like:
- Scientific study of past human culture and behaviour through the examination of material remains, including preserved bones and fossils of ancient woods or seeds, used by previous human societies.
- The study of human history and prehistory through the excavation and analysis of sites, artifacts and other physical remains
- Scientific study of the life and culture of ancient peoples.
- Excavation of ancient cities, relics (tools and pottery), artifacts, underwater sites, etc.
How do we touch such “out there” definitions? How do we incorporate them into the fabric of our lives and make them resonate with the pulse of the living? After all, we are studying the past, which was made up of the living—and the dying – as is the present. A definition of archaeology needs something else, something that brings it home to us, that makes it our own, that indeed makes the past our own.
While we dig in the ground uncovering secrets from the past, trying to decipher them and learn what they have to teach us, it is important not to forget the overriding reason that we are involved in this endeavour:
- Archaeology is about meeting ourselves.
Anthropology, archaeology and the idea of the primitive
During the colonial period of the United States, early scholars investigating both contemporary and past Indigenous societies combined cultural anthropology (or ethnography) with what would later be considered archaeology, the study of ancient remains. For this reason, in North America archaeology is more commonly considered a sub-discipline of anthropology. In Europe the discipline’s trajectory was quite different, with prehistoric archaeology developing out of geology and historical archaeology out of classical studies, making anthropology and archaeology two completely different disciplines.
Nonetheless, the early years of anthropology everywhere were as much influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution as were many other fields. In the 19th century, the prevailing view of anthropologists, and many social theorists in general, was that culture evolves through three progressive stages: hunting or savagery (the primitive), herding or barbarism, and civilization, which had Europeans at the top.
Anthropology, with its ideas about social evolution, was a useful tool of the European colonial project…
This was the time when Europe was exploring, conquering and colonizing many heretofore-unknown (to them) parts of the globe. Anthropology, with its ideas about social evolution, was a useful tool of the European colonial project, serving to explain (to them) the great variation that existed among the peoples of the world—as well as to justify “leading” these peoples to “civilization.” The term “exploitation” was not popular at that time.
The early 20th century was the beginning of the end of this reign of cultural evolutionism. But one of the basic assumptions evolutionism left behind is that the human mind is everywhere essentially the same—even if for the evolutionists it had meant that “the primitive” could eventually be raised higher.
It wasn’t until the late 20th century and the era of postcolonial social science that scholars started to see the concept of the primitive as Eurocentric, racist, simplistic and anachronistic. In this sense, one could say that these disciplines began to discover love, if by that we mean relationship, respect and equality.
One could say that these disciplines began to discover love, if by that we mean relationship, respect and equality.
Today, it’s widely recognized that the combined insights of anthropology and archaeology are crucial to helping unravel the rich complexities of human history and cultural diversity, and to understanding our past and present. In short, what these two interlinked fields underscore is that emeralds of wisdom about what it is to be human can be found everywhere and everywhen.
Archaeology and the relativity of time
Archaeology has the capacity to expand our sense of time. It helps us think in terms of hundreds of years, thousands of years and even millions of years. And yet we are whispers of time, each of us occupying only the briefest of a split second of the 4.6 billion years since our Earth, Sun and all the other planets and moons in our solar system were formed.
As well, all the chemical elements that were present when the Big Bang—the Great Explosion that created the universe—took place are the same chemical elements that make up our bodies. We are made of the same stuff that exists out there, way beyond our own small galaxy. It’s a very humbling thought.
Anthropology and archaeology help us understand that all human societies have the need to measure time. And yet, while we have in common with others the concept of time, there are so many different ways that time is experienced, expressed, imagined. For some civilizations, it’s a straight line from yesterday to today to tomorrow. For other civilizations it’s a three-dimensional spiral, much like a conch shell or even a spiral galaxy. Life and time, for these last, are not A to B but exist simultaneously on different planes or dimensions.
Let us consider just a few examples. Many Western societies, shaped by Christianity, have a linear conception of time. It’s measureable and has a beginning and an end, like an uninterrupted arrow. Clocks or printed calendars or even computers, and certain holidays, become important markers of time.
But many other peoples still do what our early ancestors did before any formal calendars existed: they look at natural and repetitive cycles such as the rising and setting of the sun, the waxing and waning of the moon, the movement of stars and constellations, the regularly changing seasons of the year, rainy and dry periods, hot and cold periods, the birth and growth cycles of different plants and animals, the changing colours of leaves.
This cyclical conception of time typified the ancient Mayans, for whom time was not something objective but an ongoing process given shape by the participation of human beings.
This cyclical conception of time typified the ancient Mayans, for whom time was not something objective but rather an ongoing process given shape by the participation of human beings. Without this participation, there would be chaos. The Popol Vuh, a philosophical Mayan text of the K’iche’ people first written down in the 16th century, talks about these ideas.
Cyclical or nature-based images of time are much older than the linear image of time. This doesn’t mean that they are primitive or that the Western temporal calendar is somehow more advanced. Although an in-depth discussion of this topic is beyond the scope of this essay, in many cultures both past and present, the relationship between time, math, astronomy and even architecture has been very complex and multifaceted. For example, the Maya were tracking the planets long before Copernicus was born. They also had a mathematical and astronomical precision that surpassed Ptolemy and still leaves many Western mathematicians and astronomers speechless. I mention this only to reaffirm that not only our disciplines, but the popular imagination must once and for all throw aside any trace of evolutionism or the idea of “primitive” and “advanced.”
Archaeology and nature-centred Indigenous knowledge: past and present
Today, the average Western person “learns” about the natural environment in which they live through the mediation of equipment and machines that measure or take images or make “guesstimates.” Few of us in the Western world actually “touch” the natural world in which we live.
But in our cultures’ various pasts, we had to rely on observation and experience to understand these oh-so-important rhythms of nature. Our ancestors’ lives depended on this practical working knowledge for hunting animals, catching fish, collecting edible nuts, berries, tubers and vegetable matter, knowing the best time of year for planting or harvesting crops.
This is still the case today and nowhere is it clearer than among contemporary Indigenous peoples worldwide. Indigenous peoples are custodians of unique knowledge and practical systems that have evolved over millennia and that are often based on maintaining a balance between humans and the natural world. Passed down through generations, these nature-based systems emphasize such things as sustainable agriculture, water management and controlled fires that reduce fuel loads in forests, thus preventing out-of-control wildfires.
Consider the milpa, a traditional farming system of the Maya in southern Mexico and Central America that involves rotating agricultural plots—usually corn, beans and squash—within a forested area. These “food forests” preserve high levels of biodiversity and soil fertility. In the arctic areas of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Northwest Russia, the traditional Indigenous knowledge of the Sámi peoples has been essential in restoring peatlands, thereby helping to combat climate change and ecological degradation.
There are so many examples of nature-based Indigenous knowledge and practices from around the world, and all have in common that rather than being a thing of the past, their integration of cultural, spiritual and ecological insights has proved vital to conserving local environments and recuperating those that have been damaged. Both archaeological and anthropological studies underscore this fact.
It’s another expression of love, these worldviews of Indigenous peoples that see humans as an integral part of nature, not superior to other life forms but instead […] helping to maintain harmony within an ecosystem.
It’s another expression of love, these worldviews of Indigenous peoples that see humans as an integral part of nature, not superior to other life forms but instead, with a role in helping to maintain harmony within an ecosystem. It’s a co-existence of human beings, animals, nature, spiritual beings—whatever form they take based on local beliefs. It’s a richly decolonizing perspective, standing in sharp contrast to the “objectivism” of the Western approach to the environment that is based on a nature-human separation and that so easily leads to exploitation rather than custodianship.
We should keep in mind the words of Chief Dan George. A leader of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation born in British Columbia in 1899, in an article he wrote in 1972 he said: “My father loved the earth and all its creatures. The earth was his second mother. The earth and everything it contained was a gift from See-see-am […] and the way to thank this Great Spirit was to use his gifts with respect.”
Archaeology is meeting ourselves
In meeting the other—whether contemporary or hundreds and thousands, even millions, of years ago—we come face to face with ourselves. It’s through encountering the differences that make up the long evolutionary threads of humanity in all its myriad expressions and times that we encounter what we have in common: we are all human beings, all part of this “history of digging and deciphering” that we call archaeology.
And yet, so many people and even disciplines of study still refer to our ancient past as “primitive,” as something less developed and hence inherently of less value, less authenticity. It’s as if we’re saying that only now are human beings truly capable of thoughtful and intentional action, that our distant ancestors—be they Homo sapiens sapiens or Neanderthal or whomever—were not capable of perceiving, of observing or of acting with agency.
To be an archaeologist or anthropologist, we must dismiss or at least suspend the concept of the primitive, based so much on an “us” and “them” idea of the world. Only in this way will we be able to start uncovering and understanding not only what is common among all human beings, past and present, but the unique abilities that different peoples have, and had, whether they are our contemporaries or lived millions of years ago. What have we gained over time, and what have we lost?
In this endeavour, the production of both archaeological and anthropological knowledge involves not just emotional but political dimensions as well.
Archaeology is an act of discovery, of testimony, of revealing
In archaeology as in anthropology, we don’t like to make assumptions. We like to “suspend disbelief” and be open to new ways of seeing, new ways of listening, new ways of naming the universe and everything that is found within it, new ways of interpreting.
To make discoveries, we must be open to thinking outside the box and, most of all, to being surprised. Often, the knowledge we have, or think we have, is the best illumination for helping us begin to understand what we don’t know.
But “suspending disbelief” doesn’t mean suspending disbelief about our human condition or about the human condition of those who came before us. There are some assumptions that we can make: living beings—conscious and capable of feeling and perception as all living beings are—love and fear, cry and laugh, know loss and pain and joy, observe and draw conclusions, create ways to express themselves through language, symbol and object.
And who are we to say that our predecessors didn’t have the same capacity to feel and perceive? How can we think otherwise when it’s this very belief that drives us to dig in the earth or dive into the waters or penetrate caves? What are we looking for if not tools to unlock the answers to the three questions, expressed so simply yet so profoundly, by French painter Paul Gauguin, as the title of one of his most famous paintings: D’où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous? (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?)
And as that exquisite and eloquent historical philosopher, Ronald Wright, said: “If we can see clearly what we are and what we have done, we can recognize human behavior that persists through many times and cultures. Knowing this can tell us what we are likely to do, where we are likely to go from here.”
Archaeology is an act of decipherment
Bones and stones speak. They have a language and are a special kind of written record. Our task is to learn the language they are speaking. It is not an easy task, this decoding, this decrypting, this untangling and puzzling out the meanings, all the more so as the relationship between a sign or symbol— even a word—and its meaning is arbitrary.
These relationships reflect conventions among those who use them, and thus even the meaning of apparently identical signs or symbols, even the same word—carved into a stone or painted on the wall of a cave—can be very different from community to community, from people to people, from region to region, from one time to another.
It makes it even more a wonder that we can communicate with each other at all …
It makes it even more a wonder that we can communicate with each other at all, given the arbitrariness with which we assign meaning, from one society to another, and the random choices we make, from one society to another, of which symbol and which meaning we join together. And if these symbols and meanings are so diverse (and dispersed) in our time right now, then how much more dispersed, arbitrary and random are they from one time to another?
But we can and do understand, simply because we share the same human condition—past, present and future. It is that commonality that makes decipherment possible. We assume that our forebears had a sense of the sacred, of family and community, of the transitional nature of life, of the capacity for love and the need to express it.
But perhaps underlying this is our assumption that all human beings at all times have had a need to record, to make some kind of lasting account of how they named the universe and sought to make sense of it. Thus our task as archaeologists, as anthropologists and paleoanthropologists, is to decipher and learn languages for which we have no books, no recordings, no living speakers or composers or artists. It’s tremendously challenging, exciting and humbling at the same time.
Archaeology celebrates and affirms otherness as part of our common human ancestry
As an act of other-discovery and self-discovery at the same time, archaeology celebrates what we have in common through identifying our myriad differences. At a time when, in the world, we have powerful forces putting forth a message that otherness is to be feared and even destroyed, the message of both archaeology and anthropology is critically important. These are disciplines that teach humility, which is perhaps no more than modesty and respectfulness.
If we learn only one lesson from archaeology and anthropology, it should be this: there are so many ways to be human, so many ways to name the universe and understand it, so many ways to say love, that it would be foolish arrogance—and very dangerous—to think and act as if our way were the only way to be human, or our time the only time in which human beings have lived. We need a much broader perspective, one that understands the present by seeking an understanding of the past, and realizes that in our present, we find our future.
How archaeology keeps love alive…
“So many ways to say love.” We rarely talk about love in our different disciplines or lines of work, be we archaeologists or historians or anthropologists or scientists or politicians or economists or whatever. It is as if we are embarrassed to use the word. And yet isn’t that what fills us when we listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Isn’t that what so many poets and artists are trying to capture and express?
And yet so much in our Western civilization cuts us off from embracing love as a motivating force for doing research or carrying out scientific studies. But certainly it is this often most ineffable of qualities—this love—that is our most important motivating and inspirational force for what we do, for getting up in the morning, for embracing each new day as yet another possibility for learning, for growing, for discovery, for finding and affirming the common amidst the differences. If not this, then what?
How do we talk about the universality, both spatial and temporal, of love? How do we explore its origins? It seems to be cross-species and not just something specific to the human species, although those who feel uncomfortable with this idea say what we might call love is simply a “protective instinct” in non-human animals. But is that true? Though exploring non-human love is beyond the scope of this particular essay, it goes without saying that there are tangible cultural love behaviours and practices of love discourse that occur in all human societies and that show great variability as well as commonalities.
And always, there seem to be multiple entwinements of love and pragmatic interests, these latter differing from one culture to another, which highlights love’s psychological essence as well as its culturally-specific experience. Interestingly, love did not become a central subject of ethnographic research until the 1990s, and it remains a challenging area of study for both archaeology and anthropology.
Conclusion – and returning to the beginning
To close with what I said above: bones and stones speak. It is our task as archaeologists and anthropologists to tease out what they are saying, to realize that the knowledge they impart is not simply that of “collections”—the simple accumulation of rocks and bones in a museum and their classification based on age or size or composition or site of origin. They are much more than this. They are the “natural written record” of our common ancestry, our common identity. In short, archaeology is an act of love.
