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23-07-2015, 09:09

The Problem of the Individual in Archaeology

Without question, it is when archaeology is able to engage not just with “people in the past,” but also with the lives or deaths of single individuals that it most comes alive and often has the greatest popular appeal. One thinks of such examples as the unfortunate souls whose bodies were buried in the volcanic ash of the eruption of Vesuvius in A. D. 79, preserving the circumstances and the agonies of their very last moments; or the details (as revealed by examination of his stomach contents) of the last meal eaten by the “Ice Man,” who expired some 5,300 years ago atop a 10,000-foot Alpine pass; or the letters on wooden tablets, written and received by lonely soldiers stationed at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, at the very limits of the Roman empire, discussing their need for fresh pairs of socks and underwear. Such cases, because they are so vivid in “making the past come alive,” rightly receive a great deal of attention in the popular press and on television.



Yet these are quite atypical instances. Classical archaeology, for most of its existence as a discipline, has been focused not on named, known individuals, but on structures, whether material or socio-political. Traditionally, classical archaeologists have been drawn to the excavation of temples, sanctuaries, theaters, civic buildings, houses, and the like; but it is extraordinarily difficult to connect the evidence unearthed by such endeavors with individual life histories. Even research that concentrates on Classical Landscapes with Figures (Osborne 1987) finds it problematic, as chapter 4 also makes clear, to populate the villages, hamlets, and farmsteads discovered by survey with anything other than “faceless blobs.” For those seeking



To understand, say, the role of slavery or patterns of trade and exchange in the ancient world, the unit of analysis is largely at the level of the group, and involves study of anonymous agents or collectivities. There is, in short, a disconnect between the rich prosopography (i. e., descriptions of individuals’ careers, family connections, etc.) available from the Classical written record and the ability of archaeology to produce data about identifiable people.



Burial evidence, one might suggest, offers a more direct route to the individual. The excavation of an unrobbed grave, after all, surely provides invaluable evidence. This includes not only all that physical anthropology can deduce from the remains of the dead person (age, sex, stature, facial reconstruction, health, pathology, trauma, and now, with the help of DNA evidence, even family relationships: see Carter 2006:39-46, for an impressive case study in the territory of Metapontum in southern Italy). The burial can also tell us much about his or her status, beliefs, and treatment in death, as relected in the form and monumentality of the grave, in the objects interred with the deceased, in above-ground markers of the burial, etc. A remarkable example discovered not many years ago is the Toumba building at Lefkandi on Euboea, a massive stone and mud-brick structure measuring almost 50 X 10 meters, thought to represent the residence or tomb (or both) of a local early tenth-century B. C. chieftain and his wife (Popham et al. 1993). The site is striking both in its scale and in the exoticism of the associated artifacts. But in reality this tells us little about these two people, no matter how important they may have been within their own society: we cannot identify their names (this was not a literate age in Greece), and we know nothing of their life histories, how they achieved the prominence relected in their treatment at burial, or how they were regarded by their contemporaries. In any case, it is abundantly clear that the funerary “persona” does not necessarily relect the living individual and his/her life experience directly: status in life may be deliberately downplayed in death (Morris 1987), and survivors may intervene to mask reality, by creating what one scholar (Fleming 1973) engagingly termed “tombs for the living,” rather than for the dead.



Ironically, the majority of recent discussions about how to recognize individuals in the archaeological record have been by prehistorians (beginning, arguably, with Hill and Gunn 1977), despite what seems the obvious fact that accessing individuals, persons, and identities should be easier in a historical context than in prehistory. This development has been fostered in large part by the post-processual theoretical turn away from sociopolitical and technological styles of explanation at the systems level, towards an acknowledgement of the importance of individual actors and agency (Dobres and Robb 2000). Meskell (1999:34-36), writing about Egypt in a literate era, usefully discusses a number of dimensions of the individual that archaeologists might hope to recognize, whether or not they have written records available:



1.



The cultural concept of what constitutes a person: for instance, how did Classical Greeks perceive themselves?



The anonymous individual person or individual bodies (as relected, e. g., in mortuary remains or figurines).



3.  Individuals distinguished by their actions (in classical archaeology, good examples concern attempts to identify individual craftsmen or artists’ hands).



4.  The mention or representation of individuals in texts, iconography, or architecture (examples would include an inscribed bust of a ruler, or personal names on the Greek Linear B tablets).



5.  Historically known individuals (whether Egyptian pharaohs or Roman emperors).



This is a promising-sounding list, but in practice there are many complexities that surround study of this concept (see Hodder and Hutson 2003:121-124). To take just one example (item 3 on the list), the study of works of art has long been considered an arena in which classical archaeologists can “see” the hand of the individual artist at work. After all, our best surviving source on ancient painting and sculpture—the Elder Pliny (Jex-Blake and Sellers 1896)—casts his entire discussion not in terms of trends and traditions, but of named artists, many of whose works modern scholars have sought to identify in either original works or recognizable later copies. Sir John Beazley extended such efforts into the field of figured vasepainting: despite the fact that ancient writers barely mention this art form, and extremely few vases are signed, his application of the methods of connoisseurship first developed by Giovanni Morelli for the study of Renaissance painting led to Beazley’s recognition of many hundreds of black - and red-figure vase-painters with distinctive, individualized styles (cf. chapter 1 [a]). His work, notwithstanding some criticism and refinement, still serves as an essential underpinning of dating and classification in the Archaic and Classical periods. (Aegean prehistorians, indeed, have been emboldened by the apparent success of Beazley’s methods to apply them, sometimes unwisely [Cherry 1992], in the search for individuals in the altogether murkier artistic environment of the Bronze Age.) Yet the reality is that, although lesh-and-blood people of course produced these works, the names Classical archaeologists have given them merely relect analytical classifications; fictional elaborations of the life histories of largely hypothetical ancient artists (e. g., Boardman 1975:91-94) can provide no reliable insights into the lived experience of these people as individuals (Beard 1991).



Even so (the reader may insist), it must surely be the case that individual persons, their identities, their embodied selves—what a recent book calls “the archaeology of personhood” (Fowler 2004)—are more fully accessible in historical settings, with their rich and varied material culture and, especially, written records, which are hardly just “one more piece of evidence” (Shennan 1989:14). And would this not be especially so in Classical Greece, from which we have such abundant literary evidence, as well as the benefits of an almost obsessive drive in certain cities to erect inscriptions on stone?



Classical Athens is the city-state that has yielded by far the richest body of evidence—archaeological, epigraphic, and literary—and not only because it is also the most thoroughly explored. Even in this case, however, it remains surprisingly difficult to connect material remains directly with distinct individuals about whom we know more than simply a name. While this is a challenge for archaeology in every time and place, in Athens an additional factor intervenes. The very ideology of democracy, for which this city above all others is rightly celebrated, was also a confining one, and it militated strongly against the celebration of individual merit. Indeed, political practices such as ostracism—a procedure whereby a citizen could, by popular vote, be expelled fTom the state for ten years—developed precisely to neutralize the political power of individuals whose prominence was felt to constitute a threat to the democratic body-politic (Forsdyke 2005). Unlike in the modern world, where university buildings, hospital wings, and sports stadiums are routinely named in honor of a benefactor or even as acts of unashamed self-promotion, Athenian temples, sanctuaries, and many types of public building were invariably dedicated in the names not of individuals, but of gods or the demos (the people), for these were seen as spaces that belonged to a civic community and in which there could be little or no scope for personal aggrandizement.



These attitudes spilled over into artistic production. In the earlier decades of the fifth century B. C. we can see from a number of examples (e. g., the so-called Riace bronzes, representing two warriors) a growing interest in particularity and the representation of “real people” (albeit unknown to us); but from mid-century, around the time of the great sculptor Polyclitus, and throughout the High Classical era, sculptures become more generalized constructs (Fig. 11.1), and it it is scarcely possible to find anything that could plausibly be described as a portrait, in the sense of a recognizable likeness of a specific living (or dead) individual (Brilliant 1991). Even those that we know, from an accompanying inscription, were intended to represent a particular person appear to us as generalized abstract “types” (the heroic soldier, the victorious athlete); well known among these is the bust of the helmeted Pericles, depicted as a weary but wise soldier-statesman (Figure 8.1). The very epitome of this tradition, of course, is the sculptural program of the Parthenon, and especially its great frieze: intended as a self-representation of democratic Athenians in action, in reality it homogenizes them and strips from them any trace of true individuality, all the more so by depicting anthropomorphized gods and heroes in the same style (see Figure 9.4). In this context, it is no wonder that the sculptor Pheidias, by (allegedly) portraying himself among the figures on the shield of the cult statue of Athena Parthenos that stood inside the Parthenon, came to feel the opprobrium of his fellow-citizens: he had inserted the personal into the work of the body-politic.



 

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