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Modernity and the Past-Still-Present: Politics of Time in the Birth of Regional

Archaeological Projects in Greece
Article in American Journal of Archaeology · January 1995

DOI: 10.2307/506879
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Modernity and the Past-Still-Present: Politics of Time in the Birth of Regional
Michael Fotiadis
American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 99, No. 1. (Jan., 1995), pp. 59-78.
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Modernity and the Past-Still-Present:
Politics of Time in the Birth of Regional
MICHAEL FOTIADIS
Abstract the history of Greek archaeology, this was not the

With reference to the Minnesota Messenia Expedi. first time that the present would b e assigned such
tion, the pioneer of regional archaeological research a n important role. I t was a new beginning, however,
in Greece (1950s-1970s), I examine some of the meth. a reversal, as McDonald a n d Rapp indicate, a n d not
ods by which such research has construed its object and
only in terms of arrangement of chapters. In this
itself. Notions of time, especially the relationship of the
present to the past, have played a key role in that con- essay 1 identify some of the elements of that rever-
strual. The Expedition stressed its kinship with an ever. sal, and outline the relationship between present and
evolving tradition of knowledge deeply rooted in a West. past as it was constituted in the published reports
ern past, and it thereby became modern heir to that of t h e Expedition, especially in the volume quoted
tradition. At the same time, in comparing the ethno-
from above. I also ask why that relationship took the
graphic present in Messenia with the archaeological past,
it placed the Messenians of the 1960s in the margins s h a p e that it did. I have n o complete answer to that
of modernity, indeed of all time. In short, the Expedi- question, n o r perhaps can there be one. What I offer
tion introduced into Greek archaeology a modernist rep. instead are observations pertaining to historical
resentational strategy and epistemology. That important context-the project, its origins, its disciplinary
event is here analyzed with reference to its immediate
milieu, a n d finally, its vision of what archaeology
historical context. I argue that the modernism evident
in the Expedition's reports was intertwined with the o u g h t to b e a n d would become, the future identity
project's complex strategical situation and manifold en- of archaeological practice.
gagements in the disciplinary milieu, and with com- My intent is at once historical a n d epistemolog-
mitments to reform archaeological practice in Greece* ical: I try to situate agency at its interface with cir-
cumstance in the core of historical analysis, a n d show
In dealing with subject matter so diverse in time that such analysis sheds light o n specific details of
and type, even the arrangement of chapters can
archaeological k n o ~ l e d g eWhile
.~ therefore describ-
pose difficulties.. . . The order finally adopted not
only presents the historical material before most ing t h e disciplinary scene of which the Expedition
of the technical but reverses the historical ap- was a key element, I also argue that certain details
proach. That is, we begin with the best-known of t h e present-past relationship emerging from the
period (the present) and work backward through project are best understood with reference to the
time in the written documents to the target phase
in the Late Bronze Age. complexities of that scene.
-McDonald and Rapp, 19721
LEGACY OF A PROJECT
With this "explanatory r e m a r k begins the account T h e Minnesota Messenia Expedition occupies a
of t h e Minnesota Messenia Expedition (MME), the prominent place in the history of Greek archaeol-
first modern regional project in Greece: the present ogy. It represents a major reorientation a n d expan-
is to furnish a baseline, a network of points of ref- sion in goals and methods, leading Greek archaeol-
erence useful in the interpretation of the past. I n ogy into its modern phase. Fieldwork began in the
* I am thankful to the following colleagues for essential a colloquium on the history of archaeology at the Davis
information and comments on earlier drafts and parts of Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University (1994).
this paper: B. Caraher,J.L. Davis, P. Halstead, M. Herzfeld, 1 W.A. McDonald and G.R. Rapp, Jr., eds., The Minnesota
S.C. Humphreys, TW. Jacobsen, A. Kalogirou, S. Krebs, Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional En-
I. Morris, S.B. Sutton, and, especially, the anonymous re- vironment (Minneapolis 1972) vii (emphasis in original).
viewers and the editors of AJA. Past conversations with 21 am borrowing here some of the words-and con-
D. Grammenos and C. Greenhouse have also helped me cerns-of M. Foucault, e.g., "Questions of Method" [1981],
to sharpen my focus. Portions of this paper were presented in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller eds., The Foucault
at the 15th Annual Conference of the Theoretical Archaeol. Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago 1991) 79; cf.
ogy Group, University of Durham, England (1993),and at Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York 1979) 138-43.
59
Amerzcan Journal of Archaeology 99 (1995) 59-78
60 MICHAEL FOTIADIS [AJA 99
1950s. T h e project grew in the course of the 1960s, to virtually any region, and the same was true for
and continued until the mid-1970s.3 Its focus was the the chart. Thus, for the first time in Greek archaeol-
southwestern part of the Peloponnese, a n area 3,800 ogy, the aims and organization of archaeological
km*, encompassing Messenia and the southernmost research-what Americanists had been calling "re.
part of Elis. MME entailed surface exploration of search design"- could be viewed (literally) as elements
that area, several kinds of palaeoenvironmental re- separate from (and, perhaps, more fundamental
search, archaeometric analyses of artifacts and raw than) the research itself. As we shall see, there were
materials, studies of economic and demographic other important innovations as well.
documents from the Mycenaean period to the pres- T h e significance of the 1972 publication a n d that
ent century, ethnographies of farming communities of the project have been acknowledged in several
a n d manufactures, and a n excavation at the site of ways. T h e book-16 chapters by 17 researchers-
Nichoria (1969-1975), with its own set of erlviron. was greeted by reviewers with many more, and more
mental and archaeometric studies. To implement thorough, praises than criticisms. I t was hailed as
such a broad program of research MME brought to "a landmark in Aegean archaeology," "a pioneering
the field humanists and social and natural scientists study, unique for any part of Greek history, [provid-
at a scale unknown in Greece before the 1960s. ing] us with generous information o n Messenia from
Salient innovations were the adoption of the region. the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000 B.C.) to the present
through-time as the object of analysis, the system- day," and it was recommended to "both students of
atic attention to the landscape and its economic po- Mycenaean Greece, and members of future regional
tential (especially for the Late Bronze Age), and an expeditions."' It was "the beginning of a new ap-
emphasis o n ordinary settlement sites and their p r o a ~ h , "o ~
n e that sharply contrasted with archae-
humble wares rather than o n major centers and rich ological tradition in Greece, which had favored the
cemeteries. A demographic orientation was sustained study of sites in isolation from their landscape, em-
throughout: population size and distribution, and phasis o n the cultural identities of objects often
their changes from o n e archaeological phase to the divorced from archaeological context, and attention
next, were paramount concerns of the project, as were to historical continuitiesldiscontinuities. MME made
the volume and range of crops the land could sus. a contribution in "fundamentals of methodn and "pro-
tain.4 T h e 1972 publication comprised substantial duced at once a tool of prognostication for future
reports o n the regional studies, together with syn. exploration and a record of a very rapidly changing
thetic chapters a n d a n overview of the entire proj. land.""
ect." striking feature of the book's first chapter Broader recognition came in 1979, a t the Centen-
was a chart in circular format, MME's "Figure 1-1." nial Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of
Here, as well as in ca. 35 research questions, MME's America. In the plenary session, three of the four
"program," the aims a n d organization of the proj- speakers cited MME as a n example of new a n d ex-
ect, were clearly laid out.6 T h e questions were citing developments "long overdue in Classical
sufficiently general to apply notjust to Messenia but landsl'1° Two years later the director of the project,
3 R. Hope Simpson, "William A. McDonald and the Min- 5 Many reports rested on longer technical papers and
nesota Messenia Expedition" (summary), in N.C. Wilkie dissertations.The excavation has been published separately
and W.D.E. Coulson eds., Contributions to Aegean Archaeology: in three volumes (with a fourth, synthetic volume being
Studies i n Honor of William A. iWcDonald (Publications in An. awaited), under the series title Excavations at Nichoria i n
cient Studies 1, Minneapolis 1985) xix; W.A. McDonald, Southwest Greece (Minneapolis 1978, 1983, 1992).
"The Problems and the Program," in McDonald and Rapp 6McDonald (supra n. 3) 6-8. The chart, McDonald
(supra n. 1) 3 and 5; for the modest beginnings see espe- acknowledged (p. 5),had been adapted from R.S. MacNeish
cially W.A. McDonald and R. Hope Simpson, "Prehistoric et al., The Prehistory of the Tehuacan V a l l q 1 (Austin 1967).
Habitation in Southwestern Peloponnese," AJA 65 (1961) W.Jacobsen, in Archaeology 29 (1976)136-37; Jameson
222 n. 2. (supra n. 4) 1054;and Watrous (supra n. 4) 86, respectively.
Population size in the Late Bronze Age proved an al- 8Jacobsen (supra n. 7) 136: "it is the beginning of a new
most intractable issue, and continued to vei members of approach to (hopefully, a new era in) the study of Greek
MME even after the 1972 publication: seeJ. Carothers and prehistory."
W.A. McDonald, "Size and Distribution of Population in Hanfmann and Shelmerdine (supra n. 4) 251, 252.
Late Bronze Age Messenia: Some Statistical Applications," lo H.A. Thompson, "In Pursuit of the Past: The Ameri-
JFA 6 (1979) 433-54. The issue also attracted the attention can Role 1879-1979," AJA 84 (1980) 268; J. Wiseman,
of MME's reviewers: M.H. Jameson, in A H R 78 (1973) 1024; "Archaeology in the Future: An Evolving Discipline," AJA
L.V. Watrous, in AJA 78 (1974)85; G.M. Hanfmann and C.W. 84 (1980)281; and C. Renfrew, "The Great Tradition versus
Shelmerdine, in B i b 0 35 (1978) 252; and S. Dow, in CW 71 the Great Divide: Archaeology as Anthropology?"AJA 84
(1977-1978) 399. (1980) 294. The quoted passage is from Thompson.
199.53 MODERNITY AND THE PASTSTILL-PRESENT 61
William Andrew McDonald (b. 1913), received the pond) were, from a methodological viewpoint, fully
Institute's highest award, the Gold Medal for Distin- justified. The fact that they were addressed to MME,
guished Archaeological Achievement.I1 A sympo. however, affirmed rather than undermined the cen-
sium in honor of McDonald followed at the Univer- trality of that project. In the last analysis, the objec-
sity of Minnesota, his home institution, in 1983." tions concerned concrete points of survey concepts
The contributors addressed a large spectrum of and methods; they did not challenge the research
topics, from the analysis of archaeological sediments agenda that McDonald had outlined. In fact, that
to philosophy of science. The symposium was a cele- agenda has been at the core of nearly every regional
bration of the recently expanded horizons of Greek project to date.
archaeology, and a fitting tribute to McDonald. Let me return to the relationship of present and
Recognition came in yet another, more substan- past in MME's accounts. As Jacobsen put it in 1983,
tial, form. The 1970s and'80s indeed became "a new MME "represents a major step forward in the prac-
era'' for field practice in Greece. True, much work tice of archaeological ethnography in Greece."17Just
(especially, salvage excavation) continued to focus as in so many other respects, the Expedition has been
on isolated sites and to eschew the demographic1 a pioneer in that respect too. In "reconstructing a
economic orientation pioneered in the 1960s.At the Bronze Age regional environment" McDonald and
same time, however, projects of regional scope pro- his collaborators turned to the ethnographic pres-
liferated. Scores of them now were being organized, ent as a potential source of knowledge relevant to
especially by American and British archaeologists the reconstruction. They gave to the present a promi-
in collaboration with an international staff. A con- nent role, on a par with archaeological evidence,
ference in Athens, in 1981, included reports from Linear B documents, and palynological, sedimento-
29 such projects." Some were of small scale, limited logical, and other data, and in the 1972 book they
to a preliminary surface survey or to the analysis of devoted detailed descriptions to modern hfessenia
an excavated site's landscape from an economic view- in several chapters. Stanley E. Aschenbrenner con-
point, and were carried out by single individuals tributed an ethnography of Karpofora, a small village
or small groups with few resources.'Wthers were community; Herman J. Van Wersch discussed aspects
super-projects,involving dozens of researchers, and of the agricultural economy across the region; Fred-
implementing (and improving upon) the entire spec- erick R. Matson wrote about pottery workshops in
trum of objectives that MME had identified.15 Re- the district of Methoni; and McDonald and Kapp
gional archaeological research, a novelty in 1960,was made extensive use of demographic and other
already tradition in the early 1980s!In these new cir- data.18The sheer depth of attention accorded to the
cumstances, MME became a model-project, and its present was a novelty in itself. Reviewers of the book
1972 book a master.text, now providing points of ref- took a keen interest in the parts that dealt with the
erence for field practice in Greece. In fact, some of present. One would like to make Aschenbrenner's
the new projects attempted to distinguish them- village study "required reading for Aegean field ar-
selves- to assert their identities, as it were- by point- chaeologists:' and regarded Van Wersch's contribu-
ing out their differences with MME, and by criticiz- tion as a "fine chapter [making] good sense 011 the
ing it as often as they credited it.I6 The criticisms tricky subject of the agricultural economy of Late
(nearly all of which came from young archaeologists, Helladic Messenia:""Note that Van Wersch's study
and from the British bank of the archaeological focuses equally on Messenia in the late 1960s.)A sec-
l1 AJA 86 (1982) 250.

IqE.g.,Bintliff and Snodgrass (supra n. 15) 124, 128; is.
'2 Wilkie and Coulson (supra n. 3).
cussion, in J. Bintliff ed., ~VfycenaeanGeography:Proceedings
' W . R . Keller and D.W. Rupp eds., Archaeological Survey
ofthe Cambridge Colloquium,September 1976 (Cambridge 1977)
in the Mediterranean Area (BAR-IS 155, Oxford 1983). 58-62; and J.F. Cherry, "Common Sense in Mediterranean
l 4 E.g., in Keller and Rupp (supra n. 13): W .Gallant, Survey?"JFA 11 (1984) 117-20.
"The Ionian Islands Paleo-economy Research Project," 17TW. Jacobsen, "Another Modest Proposal: Ethno.
223-26; S. Van de Maele, "Prospection archi.ologique sur archaeology in Greece," in Wilkie and Coulson (supra
la frontikre attico-megarienne," 251-54; and R. Reinders, n. 3) 95.
"Halos, a Hellenistic Town in Thessaly," 217-18. IX In McDonald and Rapp (supra n. 1): S. Aschenbren-
'XE.g., J.L. Bintliff and A.M. Snodgrass, "The Cam- ner,"A Contemporary Community: 47-63; H.J. Van Wersch,
bridgeBradford Boeotian Expedition: The First Four Years:' "The Agricultural Economy," 177-87; F.R. Matson, "Ceramic
JFA 12 (1985) 123-61; J.C. Wright, J.E: Cherry, J.L. Davis, Studies," 200-24, esp. 211-23; and W.A. McDonald and G.R.
E. Mantzourani, R.E: Sutton,Jr., and S.B. Sutton, "The Nemea Rapp, Jr., "Perspectives," 240-61, esp. 245-56.
Valley Archaeological Project: A Preliminary Report," lq 1Vatrous (supra n. 4) 84, 85.
He,rperia 59 (1990) 579-659.
o n d reviewer indicated that Aschenbrenner's "cal- in round-table discussions and articles. The com-
endar of crop activities" would be useful to "even plex relationship of the present to the past contained
those casually interested in the modern Greek coun- in MME's account, on the other hand, remained
tryside:'2O and a third was "particularly impressed unexamined.
a n d fascinated by the analysis of the contemporary Present and past in Greece now were increasingly
community" (though he was "less charmed by the compared, and, in the process, they became com-
discussion of agricultural economy")." Yet another parable. They became, that is, entities the research-
reviewer indicated that the diversity of approaches ers felt free to place side by side, and also were con.
"blends well as you see the details of a modern vil. sidered like one another in crucial respects. That
lage economic system blending on one hand with comparability did not, however, become an object
Mycenaean documents and on the other with resis- of analytical attention. Its scale was not circum-
tivity surveys:"2 scribed, nor were its conditions specified.24 The no-
In line with such assurances, discussion of the pres- tions of present and past appeared instead to gain
ent increasingly found a place in archaeological pub- a good deal of plasticity. What exactly belonged to
lications on Greece after 1972.Ethnographers, geog- the present and what belonged to the past n o longer
raphers, agricultural economists, and others began seemed to depend on strict chronology but on com-
joining regional projects, and archaeologists set out plex, implicit assumptions, and some elements of the
on rugged trails in search of the ethnographic pres- present and of the past as well came to be thought of
ent."' In the same period, as I already indicated, cer- as belonging to neither. As the chronology of specific
tain of MME's concepts and methods were drawn events (e.g.,political o r technological changes) was ne.
out of their context in the project and scrutinized glected, it became difficult to avoid contradictions.23
S. Diamant, in Antiquity 48 (1974) 77-78.

2" Age Kavousi,"JMA 6 (1993) 131-74; P. Halstead, "Tradition
R, Scranton, in CP 70 (1975) 30.5-306.
fl a n d Ancient Mediterranean Rural Economy-plus Ca
2 J. Fitting, in Technology und Culture 14 (1973) 487. change?"JHS 107 (1987) 77-87; Halstead, "Waste Not, Want
"At the 1981 conference in Athens (supra n. 13), three Not: Traditional Responses to Crop Failure in Greece," Rural
of the 29 projects in Greece reported a n ethnographic com- History 1 (1990) 147-64; Halstead, "Present to Past in the
ponent. At a similar conference held at the University of Pindhos: Diversification and Specialisation in Mountain
Illinois at Chicago in 1988 (Workshop o n Systematic Sur- Economies," in R. Maggi, R. Nishet, and G. Barker eds.,
vey in Greece), seven of the 15 participating projects re. Archeologia della pastorizia nell'Europa meridionale 1 (RStLig
ported ethnographic components (some with two o r more 56, Aordighera 1990); E.M. hfelas, "Prehistoric Survey a n d
ethnographers o n their staff). T h e Workshop's concluding Ethnology in the Dodecanese: Current Problems a n d Fu-
discussion was devoted to the "interface between ethnog- ture Research Strategies," in E.B. French and K.A. Wardle
raphy and survey"; cf. J.L. Davis, "Surface Surveys: New Twist eds., Problems in Greek Prehistory: Papers Presented at the Cen-
o n a n Old ASCSA Tradition," American School of Classical tenary Conference of the British School of Archaeology at Athens,
Studies at Athens ,Yeusletter 22 (Fall 1988) -5. ,\lanchester, April 1986 (Aristol 1988) 425-36; A. Sampson,
At least 15 items in Jacohsen's (supra n. 17) four.page " ~ 6 v o a p ~ a 1 o h o y 1 Bpauv~q
~ & q o ~ Nioupo
q Kat o ~ rlahi
o rq<
bibliography are studies by archaeologists, puhlished since A w 6 & ~ a ~ o o u , " N f u v p12l a (1993)
~a 101-38; T.M. Whitelaw,
1972 and focusing in significant part o n the present in "The Ethnoarchaeology of Recent Rural Settlement and
Greece. Examples of such work by archaeologists after 1985 Land Use in Northwest Keos," in J.F. C h e r r )J.L. ~ Davis, and
include H . Blitzer, "KOPQNEIKA: Storagejar Production E. hlantzourani, Landscape Archaeology as Long.Term History:
a n d Trade in the Traditional Aegean," Hesperia 59 (1990) hrorthern Keos in the Cycladic Islands from Earliest Settlement
67.5-711; Blitzer, "Pastoral Life in the hlountains of Crete," until Jiodern Times (L\ionumenta Archaeologica 16,LosAngeles
Expedition 32:3 (1990) 34-41; T. Cullen and D.R. Keller, "The 1991) 403--54.
Greek Pithos through Time: Multiple Functions and Di. 94 Jacobsen's (supra n. 17) is the only review article (his.
verse Imagery," in \$'.D. Kingery ed., The Changing Roles of torical and programmatic) o n the present.past relationship
Ceramics in Soriety: 26,000 B.P to the Present (Ceramics and in the archaeology of Greece since MME's puhlication. In
Civilization 5, Westerville, Ohio) 183-209; N. Efstratiou, that article Jacobsen did note some tensions in the rela.
"E6voap~a1ohoy1~&< B p ~ u v ~orouq
q opetvod< 01~1opodq~ q q tionship; he also addressed those tensions in a semester.
Po60nq<: To a p x a l o d o y l ~ &pyo
o urq M a ~ c S o v i aKal O p a ~ q long seminar, "The Ethnoarchaeology of Greece," which
1 [I9871 (Thessaloniki 1988) 479-83; Efstratiou, "Prehistoric he taught at Indiana University in 1982 (I attended several
Habitation and Structures in Northern Greece: An Ethno- sessions). Outside Greek archaeology, the comparability
archaeological Case-Study," in P. Darcque and R. Treuil eds., of the ethnographic present with the archaeological past
L'habitat Pgien prPhistorique. Actes de la table ronde internationale, hecame the object of intensive analysis; see esp. A. Wylie,
Athines, 23-25juin 1987 (BCH suppl. 19, Paris 1990) 33-41; "The Reaction against Analogy," in hf.B. Schiffer ed.,Advances
Efstratiou, "Production and Distribution of a Ceramic Type in Archaeological Method and Theoq 8 (New York 1985) 63-111.
in Highland Rhodope: An Ethnoarchaeological Study," '"or examples of such contradictions, see M. Fotiadis,
Origni, preistoria e protostoria delle ciuilta antiche 16 (1993) "Regions of the Imagination: Archaeologists, Local People,
311-27; D.C. Haggis, "Intensive Survey, Traditional Settle- and the Archaeological Record in Fieldwork, Greece,"Jour-
ment Patterns, and Dark Age Crete: T h e Case of Early Iron nal of European Archaeology 1:2 (1993) 163-64.
19951 MODERNITY AND THE PAST.STILL-PRESENT 63
In 1990 Susan Sutton introduced her ethnographic years? Shall we regard such knowledge as misguided,
contribution to the Nemea Valley Archaeological treat it as unreliable, even as erroneous?
Project by directly pointing to the emerging prob- To begin, the notions of error and of "bad prac-
lems: the search for the ethnographic present in tice" seem to me inadequate to account for the cir.
Greece has been guided by "an implicit assumption cum stance^.^^ Treating the product of some decades
that current Greek villages are carriers of an un. of archaeological ethnography in Greece simply as
broken agricultural tradition only recently trans. flawed o r riddled with misunderstandings would not
formed by the processes of industrialization, urbani. serve any productive purpose. To my mind, the
zation, and tourism." The resulting studies have been "flawsn- the partiality, the narrow focus- are the dark
so keen on identifying technologies supposedly un- side of that ethnography's strengths. That is to say,
changed since antiquity that they have disregarded to maintain a sharp analytical distinction between
other aspects of the present. Such endeavors, Sutton purely positive elements of that practice and others
observed, "underutilize the ethnoarchaeological in- that are mistakes would leave the latter incompre-
formation available and reflect a misunderstanding hensible; the same creative imagination and critical
of the historical context of contemporary Greek life." energy have given rise to both.2'' It rather seems nec-
Moreover, a "sense of untouched and timeless rural essary to think of partiality in positive terms as much
Greek life" persists in scholarship in spite of "con- as in critical ones, analyze it through nuanced de-
siderable evidence to the contrary."2h scription, and situate it in historical context. T h e
Sutton's remarks highlight a crucial effect of the purification of the present from elements supposedly
trend I sketched above: as the "best-known p e r i o d irrelevant to archaeology was an accomplishment en.
was made comparable to the past, its most cardinal tailing earnest scholarly labor. It was neither the re-
elements were suppressed. How was that suppres- sult of an intellectual myopia on the part of research.
sion accomplished, however? What logic gave to the ers nor the outcome of plain field observations and
image of an unchanging rural Greece so much force inferences mechanically following from them. It re-
that it would endure in the face of evidence to the quired instead a complex vision, o r t h e ~ r i a . "That
~
contrary? Why would reputable researchers time vision, in our discipline, has until now remained un-
after time disregard evidence, underutilize their in- examined. It continues to inform our publications,
formation, a n d misunderstand the context in which and it deserves, therefore, all our attention. It is that
they worked, their very object of study indeed? Could vision that I begin to document in this paper.
theirs be a series of instances of "bad practice:' o r I turn to MME for such documentation, first, be.
has it been "practice-as-usual" (with apologies to cause that project represents in crucial ways the mo-
Sandra Harding2j)? What status are we now to as- ment of origin of the vision. McDonald and his col.
sign to the knowledge produced in the name of ar- laborators did not take the relationship of present
chaeological ethnography in Greece in the last 25 and past for granted. T h e comparisons they drew
" S.B. Sutton, in Wright et al. (supra n. 13) 394. In the error in disciplinary matters, see M. Fotiadis, "What is
body of her contribution Sutton shows with concrete de. Archaeology's Mitigated Objectivism Mitigated By? Com.
tails that the villages of the Nemea valley have for two cen- ments on Wylie," AmerAnt 59 (1994) , , 549-50.
turies been in almost perpetual change. In a more recent "By the same token, there is no neutral, innocent
paper, she discusses several ofthe elements of ethnographic ground outside practice where one could stand to deliver
practice in Greece (since World War 11):Sutton, "Position- pure criticism; we can he critical, but we may not forget
ing the Greek Village in Anthropology: Vasilika and the that the practice to which we object also is the practice
Disciplinary Landscape:' paper presented at the Ameri. that has empowered our voices.
can Anthropological Association Meetings, Washington " In offering this alias for vision, I call attention to the
D.C., 1993. etymology of "theory" from words that mean "to see," "to
" SG. Harding, e.g., Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? view," "to be a spectator," etc. I also wish to underline (how.
Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca 1991) 54-70. Harding ever unoriginally) the privileged affiliation of vision with
distinguishes two sorts of (especially feminist) critics of theory in archaeology and other disciplines. See J. Fabian,
modern scientific practices, those who blame the problems Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
they identify on accidental "bad science" (and consider York 1983), esp. 106-109, and M. Herzfeld, Anthropology
therefore such problems correctable through routinely through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins
"good" scientific practice), and those "who think that ofEurope (Camhridge 1987) 202-204. In other words, I call
'science-as-usual'- the whole scientific enterprise, its pur- attention to a practice that begins with the following prem.
poses, and functions- should be the target of feminist [and ise, usually implied: if sight is our birthright, assuming
other] criticism" (p. 54). viewpoints in archaeology must also be our birthright.
2H For some of the problems attending the notion of
between the two epochs were exploratory, often ex- his-environment" (p. 259). Intertwined with this was
plicitly tentative-just as one might expect from re- another theme, cooperation among researchers from
searchers experimenting with new ideas about an very different fields, from engineering to ethnog-
old question. Such comparisons came to "fruition" raphy (esp. pp. 3-17).34 For neither theme did
when, redrawn by other archaeologists, they lost their MME's authors claim originality. In the opening
tentativeness and were extended and generalized.31 chapter ("The Problems and the Program," written
Second, I focus on MME because its account contains by McDonald) as well as in the concluding one ("Per-
a uniquely rich corpus of references to the present spectives," by McDonald and Rapp), they traced
and its relevance to the past (in particular, to the MME's origins to a tradition that reached back to
Late Bronze Age, MME's "target phase"). Elaborated the ancient Greeks and would continue with projects
in the context of a long narrative, those references yet to come (pp. 9-17, 256-60). McDonald acknowl-
allow us to document the present.past relationship edged extensive debts (pp. 13-17) to three "recent
in much of its complexity. They are, however, dis- team approaches to archaeological exploration,"
persed throughout that narrative, separated by text Robert Braidwood's and Bruce Howe's of the "fertile
not directly relevant to my task. My method, then, crescent" (begun in 1947), Robert Adams's of the
is to bring together many of those references, juxta- Diyala Basin (mainly 1957-1958), and William
pose them, and, with my comments, weave a new con. Sanders's of the Teotihuacin Valley (1960-1964). He
text for them. referred to those projects as "particularly instructive
Isolating sentences from their original context, models," and he noted another seven interdisciplin.
bringing together what was meant to be read at inter- ary undertakings, six American and one Soviet.
vals, and doing so for purposes other than those of McDonald's care in documenting MME's genealogy
the original authors: those are ingredients for a vio- remains exemplary.35
lent method, and that is, for me, a cause for hesita. The references to the Expedition's immediate ante-
tion. I know, however, at the moment no better cedents deserve close attention. They direct us to
method. I provide some context from around the the days-late 1940s to 1960s-when scientific hu-
critical lines, but I remain selective; readers of this manism and the doctrine of cooperation provided
essay should also read the bo0k.~2I hasten to add the social sciences of the Free World with an epis-
that, while I must touch upon many dimensions of temology as well as with a model for practice. "Man"
MME, what follows is far from a reappraisal of the was the ontological foundation of that humanism,
entire project, much less of its broader significance its natural-technical object of research, and politi-
for Greek archaeology. cal ideals appear to have played a significant role
in his constitution. Refashioned in the aftermath of
ECOLOGY, COOPERATION, AND
World War I1 and the horrors of Nazi racism, that
GENEALOGICAL RELATIONSHIPS
"man" was distinguished, above all, for his unity, in.
McDonald concisely acknowledged the object of deed his "universal brotherhood." His origins were
MME's research as "the interaction among humans, in nature, next to other organisms, from where he
other biota, and the physical environmentn (complete had been removing himself through cultural evolu-
with a quotation from Amos H a ~ l e y ~or~ "human
), tion. He was endowed with adaptive flexibility, a pro-
ecology in a particular historical period (the Late pensity for cooperation (but also a "territorial im.
Bronze Age) and in a specific region (extreme south- perative"), and a disposition for forming nuclear
west Greece)" (p. 6)- for shorter reference, "man-in- families, with a "natural" division of labor by sex
3 This dubious distinction applies to myself as well, in vey to his association with Carl Blegen in the 1939 season
my Ph.D. thesis, Ecology, Economy, and Settlement among Sub. at Ano Englianos. Moreover, the 1972 book is dedicated
sistence Farmers in the Serres Basin, Northeastern Greece, 5000- to the memory of Blegen. In an earlier paper McDonald
1000 B.C. (Diss. Indiana Univ. 1985). and in other work. also credited Blegen with the original suggestion and ad.
9 References to "the book," McDonald and Rapp (supra vice for the entire project: W.A. McDonald, "Some Sugges-
n. l), in this paper will, as a rule, be given in the text, with tions o n Directions and a Modest Proposal," Hesperia 35
page numbers alone, in parentheses, e.g. (p. 59). The in- (1966) 413. See also C.W. Blegen, "Preclassical Greece," in
dividual author(s) of chapters (supra n. 18)should be iden- Studies in the Arts and Architecture. University of Pennsylvania
tifiable by the context. Bicentennial Conference [I9401 (Port Washington, N.Y. 1969)
3". Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Struc. 1-14, esp. 12-13, where Blegen called both for "systematic
ture (New York 1950) 72. comprehensive survey of the districts of Greece" and for
3 T f . Hope Simpson (supra n. 3) xviii-xx. "combined effort" with scientists in solving archaeology's
35 McDonald (p. 3) also traced his interest in surface sur- questions.
19951 MODERNITY AND THE PAST-STILL-PRESENT 63
within them.36 Understanding cultural evolution in Scientific humanism and interdisciplinary coop-
terms of universal, natural laws - a kind of method- eration had until ca. 1960 largely bypassed Greek
ological naturalism- also was of critical importance archaeology. In the Classical Lands, "civilization"
for scientific humanism:' as was observable behav- rather than "man"was the object of study in the 1950s,
ior. Such behavior, the human scientists argued, was just as it had been before World War 11. The cultural
shaped by culture, and culture was grounded in the identities of artifacts commanded much of the atten-
natural environment, technology, social institutions, tion of archaeologists, and the most powerful theo-
and the like- in all except race. Research, moreover, retical notions were essentialized cultural entities,
was "for the benefit of all humanity: at the same time such as "the Mycenaeans: "the Minoans:' or "the
that "mental excellence and male dynamism [were] Greeks? Connoisseurship played an unmistakable
closely linked notions, and in turn closely tied to role in the service of such essences: a discriminat.
beliefs about scientific rationality?The American ing gaze could tell "purely Minoan" from "purely My-
New Archaeology took its shape with reference to cenaean" artifacts, or could distinguish "Oriental
many of the same premises and promises. influences" on "Greek objects:' and vice versa. As in
In that climate, fieldwork was an unmistakably all essentialist approaches, the boundaries of those
gendered noun. It was the setting where modern men cultural entities and their continuities in space and
in cooperation - researchers, most of them male- time were not always self-evident. Boundaries and
investigated prehistoric men's "drives toward co- continuities were, therefore, central foci of intellec.
~ p e r a t i o n . "In
~ ~the field the researchers enjoyed tual energy and controver~y.~~ As a corollary, the at-
camaraderie and bonding as much as interdisciplin- tention given to excavated objects varied according
ary exchanges. As McDonald reminisced, "common to the likelihood that their cultural identities could
problems were discussed over every meal and be- become known. In turn, materials such as seeds and
tween every jolt of the Land Rover" (p. 9). It was in sediments could hardly become objects of archae-
such circumstances that Braidwood and his team "ten- ological interest, and even pottery was excavated and
tatively explored a huge sector of the inner arc of largely d i ~ c a r d e d The
. ~ ~ only productive collabora-
the 'fertile crescent"' (p. 13). The other projects fol- tion in these circumstances was with architects, drafts-
lowed similar courses. men, and artists, who were entrusted with the ren.
3"ee, e.g., D.J. Haraway, "Remodelling the Human Way S.C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks (London 1978)
of Life: Shenvood Washburn and the New Physical Anthro- 109-29; I. Morris, "Archaeologies of Greece," in I. Morris
pology," in G.W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Bones, Bodies, and Behavior: ed., Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeol-
Essays on Biological Anthropology (History of Anthropology ogies (Cambridge 1994) 8-47; and a series of articles by
5, Madison 1988) 206-59, esp. 207-16. Haraway's is an un. S.L. Dyson, esp. "A Classical Archaeologist's Response to
surpassed account of the political ideals that shaped "uni- the 'New Archaeology:" BASOR 242 (1981) 7-13; "The Role
versal man," the vision of scientific humanism and the doc- of Ideology and ~nstcutionsin Shaping Classical Archaeol-
trine of cooperation in the Cold War decades. While her o -,
w in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." in A.L.
essay addresses the development of physical anthropology Christenson ed., Tracing Archmologyk Pest: The Historiography
in that period, it deserves careful reading by archaeolo- ofilrchaeology (Carbondale 1989) 127-35; and "Complacency
gists as well; see also her Primate Visions: dmder, Race, and and Crisis in Late Twentieth-Century Classical Archaeol-
Nature in the W o r l d o f M o h Science (New York 1989) 115-32. ogy," in P. Culham and L. Edmunds eds., Classics: A Disci.
Cf. B. Trigger,A Histoq ofArchaeologzca1 Thought (Cambridge plineand Profession in Crisis?(Lanham 1989)211-20. It should
1989) 259-70, 275-94. be evident, however, that I am in partial disagreement with
37 See, e.g., Trigger (supra n. 36) 289-92. those who find theoretical content lacking from Greek
:'X Haraway 1989 (supra n. 36) 121; Haraway 1988 (supra archaeology prior to the 1960s (e.g., Dyson 1981,8). In my
n. 36) 213. view, representing archaeological facts textually had a great
:'"'Man is born with drives toward co.operation, and deal of theoretical coherence, a big part of which is cap.
unless these drives are satisfied, men and nations alike tured in Morris's notion and analysis of "Hellenism." Cf.
fall ill"- this was a salient conclusion of UNESCO's 1952 K. Kotsakis,"The Powerful Past: Theoretical Trends in Greek
inquiry into the race concept, as quoted in Haraway 1988 Archaeology," in I. Hodder ed., Archaeological Theory in
(supra n. 29) 213. Of the 17 contributors to MME's book, Europe: The Last Three Decades (London 1991) 65-90.
16 were men. The woman, Catherine Nobeli (a chemist), For documentation, by statistical means, of proce-
was a coauthor. dures of pottery discard followed in early excavations, see
40 I d o not intend such remarks as a comprehensive T. Cullen, A Measure of Interaction among Neolithic Commu-
summary of the state of Greek archaeology in the mid- nities: Design Elements ofGreek C'rjirnis Pottery (Diss. Indiana
20th century o r before. The most thorough accounts to Univ. 1985) 179-88. For the untapped potential of many
date are those of W.A. McDonald, Progress into the Past: The categories of evidence of classical archaeology at that time,
Rediscovery of Mycenaean Civilization (Bloomington 1967); see esp. Humphreys (supra n. 40).
dition of venerable ruins a n d objects into detailed, the Schools a n d their excavations ensured both good-
resplendent records. T h e exceptions were of mar- knowledge a n d good taste. That excellent infrastruc-
ginal significance, and the developments of scientific ture, a n d the continuing inflow of funds for exca-
humanism remained unnoticed. The archaeology v a t i o n ~ ,made
~ ( ~ classical archaeology a vigorous dis-
of the Classical Lands was, by comparison with what cipline in the post-World War I1 decades. In the end,
went o n in other archaeologies at the time, a uni. being conservative could not be an obstacle, and it
formly conservative field."' was perhaps a virtue.47
It also was a Great Tradition, however, "prosper- T h e situation, however, was changing in seminal
ous, self-confident.. . with great support among the ways during the 1960s, and soon after 1970 changes
cultural elite of Anglo-American society a n d with would become evident even at the institutional level,
many resources available for major excavations and at least in the United States.4XBy 1970, n o fewer
for expensive museum acquisition^."^' It radiated than six field projects guided by the concerns of sci-
from the most distinguished universities of Europe entific humanism had produced substantial re-
and North America, where it was intimately associ- port~.~ "
While a small minority, such projects now
ated with Classics a n d Fine Arts, a n d a good part were a progressive force in the discipline. McDonald
of its curriculum entailed "the mastery of an elite placed the formation of MME in the period 1958-
material culture:'-l"ince the 19th century, the forces 1962, but he also made it clear that the project took
sustaining that tradition had also been capable of shape as it went along, in the course of the 1960s
founding new institutions, the Schools in Athens- (p. ti)."From McDonald's account one would have
the ~ c o l ef r a n p i s e d'archkologie, the Deutsches to conclude that none of the six contemporary proj-
Archaologisches Institut, and the American School ects in Greece had an influence on MME, for there
of Classical Studies were the first- a n d the large ex- is only a single passing mention of four of them in
cavations, some of them continuing for generations, the book (p. 12). McDonald's acknowledged nearest
at the celebrated sites of Greek antiquity T h e mis- parallels in his home discipline were instead in the
sion of such institutions was to provide field train- discipline's distant past, in the 19th century. They
ing a n d research, but they also developed into ideal were, especially, Schliemann's expeditions to Troy,
settings for the enculturation of young archaeolo- from 1870 on, and L'rxpkdition scienty5que de Morie,
gists (often students at dissertation stage) in the in the 1820s and '30s.
values of the tradition.4' In short, passage through Those old projects had indeed recorded ancient
" T h e theme of conservatism of classical archaeolog~ the British Academy Major Research Project in the Early
1s best explored b) D ~ s o n1989 (supra n. 40) dnd Dlson, History of Agriculture was initiated.
"From ~ e ~to iSew . Age Archaeology: ~ r c h a e o l o ~ i cTheory
al 4'' I have in mind the projects at S e a Sikomedeia, R.J.
and Classical Archaeology-A 1990s Perspective," AJ24 97 Rodden et al., "Excavations at the Early Neolithic Site at
(1993) 195-95; cf. Renfrew (supra n . 10). Nea Nikomedeia, Greek h1acedonia:'PPS 28 (1962) 265-88;
4'i Dyson 1993 (supra n . 42) 196. Dyson's claim about in Epirus, S.I. Dakaris, E.S. Higgs, and R.W. Hey, "The Cli-
support among the ;ultural elite is equally true for Con- mate, Environment and Industries of Stone Age Greece,
tinental society. Part I," PPS 30 (1964) 199-244; at Knossos, J.D. Evans, "Ex.
4 4 Dlson 1981 (supra n . 40) 9; Morris (supra n . 40). cavations at the Neolithic Settlement of Knossos, 1957-1960,
4'The dynamics of the process are described by both Part I," HSA 59 (1964) 132-240; at Saliagos,J.D. Evans and
Dyson 1981 (supra n . 40) and hlorris (supra n. 40) 35. C. Renfrew eds., Excavations at Saliagos near '4ntiparos
4f1 In the 1960s one excavation, for example, the Athe- (London 1968); at Franchthi Cave, Ti+'. J acobsen, "Excava-
nian Agora, received $1,000,000 fro111the Ford Foundation tions at Porto Cheli and Vicinity, Preliminary Report, 11:
(International Affairs Program), a very large grant for a n TheFranchthi Cave, 1967-1968,"Hesperia 38 (1969) 343-81;
archaeological project (Ford Fot1ndation.4nmual Report [I9661 a n d at Sitagroi, C. Renfrew, "The ~ i t o n o m yof the South-
33). East European Copper Age," PPS 35 (1969) 12-47. While
4i Cf. H.A. ' r h o ~ ~ ~ p s"Classical
on, Lands," ProcPhilSoc 110 none of those projects was properly "regional," they all
(1966) 100. shared with RlhlE the focus o n the natural environment
4 Y h e institutional changes were the founding of two and the interdisciplinary ideal. I cite only thefirst sub-
graduate interdisciplinary programs, the Program in Clas. stantial report of each project. A few other comparable
sical Archaeolog); Indiana University (1971) and the Center projects- most notably, the Argolid Exploration Project-
for Ancient Studies, University of hlinnesota (1953),as well were about to produce reports in the early 1970s; see hf.
as the fornlation of the Association for Field Archaeology Jameson, "The Southern Argolid: T h e Setting for Histor-
a n d the publication of its Journal of Field Archaeolo~o u t ical a n d Cultural Studies," in Dimen and Friedl (infra
of Boston University. Not insignificantly, the two graduate n . 67) 74-91.
programs were located far from the prestigious universities Cf. Hope Simpson (supra n. 3) xix.
that had sustained the Great Tradition. In Britain, ca. 1967,
19951 MODERNITY AND THE PAST-STILL-PRESENT 67
ruins as well as the modern inhabitants' customs, colleagues in the conservative home discipline. Here
inscriptions as well as the local flora, but they could scientific humanism had begun to be noticed. It was
not serve as models in 1960. Still, they were impor- treated with as much or greater disdain than curi-
tant enough to be given attention (pp. 10-11, 259- osity. The existence of a new approach within Greek
60)- in fact, distinctly greater attention than MME's archaeology created a tension, a divide indeed, with
contemporary projects in Greece: along with the an- the two sides maintaining an "uneasy relationship:'""
cient Greeks, and the Renaissance and Enlighten- Some of MME's reviewers, for example, would cast
ment travelers, the 19th-century projects stood as their praises in equivocal language: "The result is
markers of a long and evolving, if intermittent, Euro- rather a rag-bag in this case, but provides the raw
pean tradition in scientific practice and in the ar- material for a fuller cultural history of the area, and
chaeology of the Classical Lands. References to them, includes a number of bonus articles. . . and a digest
and an extended quotation from L'expddition (1833) of the conventional ancient history of the area."j4
to conclude MME's narrative (pp. 259-60), were there- Remarks such as this could come from many a clas-
fore of genuine, and considerable, historical interest. sical colleague in the 1970s. McDonald's collabora-
It seems to me, however, that those references in tion with social and natural scientists could be easily
the end also played a tactical role. Consider the cir- construed as, for example, an attempt to introduce
cumstances. If MME were to gain reputation as a into the Great Tradition "new-fashioned gadgets?
modern project, it had no choice but to emulate proj- It seems to me, therefore, that to remind his col-
ects from well beyond the archaeology of the Clas- leagues of precedents of collaboration among the
sical Lands, and to prove equal to them. T h e insti- founding fathers of the tradition was, on McDonald's
tution could be hypercritical, dismissive. O n one side, part,,foresight- a tactful way to spare the project from
Greek archaeology was at the time a target for ar- controversy. A balance had to be maintained between
chaeologists in departments of anthropology in the local tradition and what was patently foreign to it,
United States; they pointed out its "intuitive" char- and, to that end, mentions of Richard Chandler and
acter and construed it unsympathetically as a case Schliemann before those of K.V. Flannery and Wil-
counter to their own, "scientific" IVew Archaeology." liam Sanders were crucial: they would soothe the sus-
As one of them put it in 1973,"Very often, I'm afraid, picions of the classical archaeologists toward the new
these people [i.e., classical archaeologists] are mainly approach-whether or not McDonald intended them
concerned with a search for the left hand of the Vic- specifically in that role- and they would d o that well,
tory of Samothrace- rather than trying to work out since they also were of historical interest." Between
the nature of the civilizations they were studying."" tradition and modernity, between the past of a dis-
MME had to demonstrate its scientific authenticity, cipline and its future, McDonald and team treaded
its command of "man," in the face of such "ami- a narrow defile of collegial politics, and passed be-
cableness" on the part of anthropological archaeol- yond it.57
ogists. But it had, after all, to be more mindful of T h e tension I outline, however, left discrete marks
" See, e.g., "Archaeology First and Second Class," AFFA h1cDonald employed the same sensible means, yet more
'Yews, the 'Vewsletter ofthe Associationfor Field L4rchaeolog3'2:l explicitly: W.A. hlcDonald, "Acceptance Remarks," in Wilkie
(1953) 1-2. and Coulson (supra n. 3) xvii.
""On the Track of Ancient Cultures," a n interview It is also noteworthy that MhlE's book was kept rather
with hlichael D. Coe, Yale Alumni lblagazine 37:3 (1953) 14, free of references to the programmaticltheoretical writings
quoted by R.R. Holloway, JFA 1 (1954) 67. Cf. infra n . 37. of scientific hunlanism (including those of New Archaeol-
Coe had directed one of the interdisciplinary undertak- ogy). Beside the reference to Hawley (supra n. 33), there
ings McDonald acknowledged as deserving "special men. is only one other reference (p. 9) to a figure associated with
tion" (cf. above). that humanism and archaeology: J. Steward,Area Research:
"'The tension I am outlining is best captured in Theory and Practice (Social Science Research Council Bul-
h1cDonald 1966 (supra n. 35) 414-18, a most explicit ap- letin 63, New York 1950).
peal for reform in Greek archaeology. T h e phrase "uneasy " Fitting's review of MME (supra n. 22) unwittingly calls
relationship" is hlcDonald's from that paper. Cf. W.A. attention to this "narrow defilen-from the anthropologi-
hlcDonald, "Commoners and Kings," in h1.4. Powell, Jr., cal side. T h e author expressed both "pleasure for this
and R.H. Sack eds., Studies in Honor of Tom H.Jones (AOAT meticulous multidisciplinary volume," and "chagrin" for
203, 1979) 295-302. having4'beentaught to regard the work of classical archae-
"'J. Boardman, in C R 24 (1974) 308. Cf. Dow (supra ologists as sonlething o n a lower scale than what we [ar-
n . 4) 398-400. chaeologists in anthropology] were doing," hence nlissing
55 See hlcDonald 1966 (supra n . 33) 417. out o n developments in classical archaeology.
..
.Jb Sonle time later, in accepting the AIRS Gold hledal,
on MME's politics of time. The emphasis placed on to the next, from ancient origins to future redemp-
the project's genealogy, on its kinship with the West- tions. In that game of Romantic nationalisms, Greece
ern scientific tradition- that model of evolution of came to occupy a peculiar, uncomfortable place, be-
mind and knowledge through time -was one of the ing at once the foundation of Europe and, in Byron's
effects, but there were others too. In brief, some 19th- phrase, "sad relic of departed worth."62 Laography,
century premises and postulates about the object the discipline of Greek folklore, already in the 19th
of archaeology in Greece were eschewed or simply century made the best out of both conditions, con-
forgotten. Others, however, were adapted and suc- ceiving as its object those traits of contemporary
cessfully grafted onto the body of man-in-his- Greek peasants that could be traced back to antiquity.
environment. Thus cultivated in the climate of mod- Classical archaeology, on the other hand, capitalized
ern scientific humanism, they were refined, and they on the first condition, and only on occasion did
acquired new and greater vitality. I will proceed archaeologists focus on the peasants with whom they
with examples. mingled during fieldwork in the Classical Lands.63
The fact is that, by the later 19th century, notions
ESSENTIAL FARMERS
of survival served as points de repere across many fields
Some 150 years before MME, Hegel had felt that of knowledge, from comparative philology to anthro-
among the Greeks he was "immediately at home," pology. For the latter field, for example, since its
for they were with him "in the region of the Spirit."j% aboriginal races and nations could not fit the uni-
The 19th-century projects that McDonald cited as versal pattern of evolution, they were accommodated
precursors of MME had already eschewed such spe- as survivals from ancestral stages of mankind. Sur-
cial affinities with the past. Nonetheless, their episte- vivalism thus provided a powerful apparatus of
mology incorporated premises that were (by 1960, knowledge and discrimination; survivals could be in-
patently) discriminatory and scientifically untenable, voked in large taxonomic efforts, and as evidence
and that was a serious reason for which they could for the Europeans' advanced place vis-8-vis their
not serve as models for MME. In Propess into the Past, "living ancestors" in the Classical Lands and primi-
McDonald had already noted the racist, nationalist, tive races elsewhere. As my choice of words indicates,
and survivalist premises of the late 19th-century survivalism was intertwined with the notions of race
multidisciplinary teams.j"'Race" and "nation" were and nation as well.61
no longer central analytical categories of Anglo. Scientific humanism's "universal man" and MME's
American archaeological knowledge in the third refraction, man-in-his-environment,were, in theory,
quarter of the 20th century.60 "Survival," on the powerful antidotes against survivalism, just as they
other hand, proved more obdurate, and lingered on had been against scientific racism. Their immediate
insidiously.61 effect, after all, was to place "man" in nature, to en-
To assume a survivalist viewpoint is, in the most dow him with adaptive rationality, and thereby free
abstract sense, to understand certain traits of human him from the sway of "custom." The practice of man.
affairs as survivals from earlier states of those affairs. in-his-environment, however, turned out to be far
Survivalism, then, could be a powerful, extremely more complex.
versatile time machine: in the 18th-19th centuries McDonald cautioned against 18th-19th century
it had ensured (ideologically) the continuity of na. notions of survival by noting that the European trav-
tions through time, from one historical conjuncture elers of the period "usually viewed the contempo-
" 8 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy ofHzstory (Buffalo 1991) (Oxford 1980) 68. I am indebted to B. Caraher for pointing
223. out the location of the verse in Byron's oeuvre.
"McDonald (supra n. 40) 18, 28, 34-35; cf. 106, 159. "See references and discussion in Jacobsen (supra
" See B. Trigger, "Alternative Archaeologies: National. n. 15) 93.
ist, Colonialist, Imperialist," Man n.s. 19 (1984) 955-70. "Na. h4 It would take volumes to d o justice to survivalism,
tional character" was, however, a serious focus of Ameri- its origins, its contradictions and circularities, and its mul-
can anthropology's research intoUcultureand personality": tiple effects in the social disciplines and elsewhere. See,
A. Kiriakidou-Nestoros,He&wpiasqg~LLqw~rjglaoypapiag e.g., Herzfeld (supra n. 30), e.g., 8-11, 71-76, 136-38, and
(Athens 1978) 152; and Sutton 1993 (supra n. 26). Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern
" See Jacobsen (supra n. 17) 94-95, and esp. Herzfeld Greece ('4ustin 1982), esp. 102-105; Kiriakidou-Nestoros
(supra n. 30) 9-11 and 55-61. (supra n. 60), e.g., 149-52; cf. T.R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry
6'"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," canto 2, stanza 73. See Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley 1987).
J.J. McCann ed., Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works 2
19951 MODERNITY AND THE
rary inhabitants [of Greece] as nothing more than pears to have done in the thirteenth century BC?
pitiful survivors of ancient greatness" (adding that (p. 177).He amplified this statement by noting a de.
the travelers "often provide a lively account of the cline in pastoralism, and the insignificance of fishing
contemporary way of life"; p. lo)." MME's narrative and of the agricultural processing industry, which
indeed remained remarkably free of survivalist com- "provides only seasonal employment, mostly to
parisons. Matson attempted a few (pp. 200,217), but women" (p. 177). He added: "Bread, olive oil, wine,
their effect was dampened, and not only because he and cheese are the staples of the diet"; moreover,
placed them in the context of his "ceramic ecology" this is so "despite . . . the rural population's great
approach: through relatively detailed description, taste for meat" (p. 179). The picture was completed
Matson's potters became real persons, their craft con- with the broad assumptions offered by McDonald
cretely contextualized in the 1960s scene." Very and Rapp in the book's concluding chapter, "that [in
rarely did MME's authors appeal to "custom" (e.g., the Late Bronze Age] agricultural methods and pro.
p. 47). Even "the trip to the nearest perennial river ductivity were not significantly different; that the
for washing clothes.. . as old as Homer's description basic crops (though not necessarily their relative pro.
of Odysseus' meeting with Nausicaa and as recent portions) were comparable; and that agricultural sur-
as Aschenbrenner's observation in 1 9 6 9 was cast by pluses were a major item in the balance of trade,
McDonald and Rapp amid a discussion of natural as they are today" (p. 247). Van Wersch offered yet
determinants of settlement location (p. 252).'j7Uni- another assumption, "that the relative importance
versal man had arrived in Messenia: "Farmers here, of major land-use categories is approximately the
as meryuhere, are aware of their vulnerability to the same in the two periods" (p. 181). Who needs sur-
weather, and their age.old religious practices and vivalist premises where the past is so authentically
beliefs bear witness to the fact" (p. 251; my empha- present?
sis).Aschenbrenner, MME's ethnographer who spent There were, however, some problems with such
13 months in Karpofora, also was wary of survivalist broad assumptions- problems that MME's authors
assumptions, distrustful of continuity. When he gave themselues noted. The first problem was that the Ex-
examples of how his work might aid the archaeol- pedition appeared to have reached Messenia just
ogists: he spoke like an agricultural economist: "Thus, when this comparability between present and past,
for example, when jars for the storage of olive oil between the 20th century and the Late Bronze Age,
or wine are excavated or when Linear B tablets refer was becoming very tenuous. For McDonald and Rapp:
to amounts of these commodities, we may calculate
some range of values for area of land planted in such It would be preferable to make judgments using
village conditions in 1800 or even more recently,
crops or for labor expended in their production"
before the modernization of this part of Greece had
(p. 47). begun. One can see today great differences between
As the last two quotations suggest, universal man bustling towns on a highway or railroad and isolated
in Messenia would be, first of all, man the farmer. mountain villages; but even the latter have been
In addition, this identity appeared to have been his affected by modem trends [pp. 254-55; one may sense
since the Bronze Age. For Van Wersch, for instance, here a bit of nostalgia for the tnily authentic, pre-
modern, as it were, landscape].
who conducted his research on Messenia's agricul-
tural economy "in the second half of the 1960's A.D.:' Van Wersch makes the point too: "With the opening
the picture was quite clear: "In the twentieth century up of modern transportation, communication, and
A.D. Messenia depends as much on agriculture as trade patterns and the closer integration of the re-
its almost exclusive means of subsistence as it ap- gion into national life and into the world economy,
6.i For countless examples of such "lively accounts" see Greek) and ~ i h s q(modern Greek), which refer to a red
now R. Eisner, Travellers to an Antique Land: The History and ocher and slip, used by ancient and contemporary potters.
Literature of Travel to Greece (Ann Arbor 1991). The other (p.200) is a sweeping statement about the trans-
Matson, the pioneer of the integrated "ecological ap- mission and stability of the ceramic craft, "with sons suc-
proach"to archaeological ceramics,examined petrograph. ceeding their fathers,"from the Bronze Age to the present.
ically Mycenaean potsherds, tested clay sources, and de. 6' Cf. S.E. Aschenbrenner, "Archaeology and Ethnog.
scribed the work of potters in the district of Koroni, raphy in Messenia," in M. Dimen and E. Fried1 eds., Re-
southeast hfessenia (supra n. 18). Of the survivalist com- gaonal Variatzon in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Toward a Per
parisons I singled out, one (p.217) was linguistic and tech. spective on the Ethnography ofGreece (Annals of the New York
nological at once, concerning the words vihro< (ancient Academy of Sciences 268, New York 1976) 160.
the age-old equilibrium was d i s t u r b e d (p. 186). For marks: "Using the 1928 census as a base minimizes
Van Wersch that disturbance is a matter of the last as much as possible the most recent trends of accel-
century; until then (and, presumably, since the Late erated rural depopulation, metropolitan agglomera-
Bronze Age) "population had remained fairly stable tion, and transportation improvements" (p. 149; em-
while supported by a traditional economy" (p. 186). phasis in original)." Lukermann, a geographer, is
Van Wersch's way of coping with the problem, then, in fact quite skeptical about the full range of mean-
is to highlight that "traditional economy" by margin- ings "modernity" has; h e too acknowledges that a
alizing, in his description, elements of the present "shift" toward commercial economy, urbanization,
that would be foreign to it: for example, when he higher life expectancy, and relative political and so-
discusses farm capital, he takes trees and livestock cial stability already occurred in the period 1800-
to be its major components. H e mentions tractors, 1928. At the same time, however, h e attributes that
pumps, irrigation equipment, commercial fertilizer, "shift" (read: incongruity with the idealized, authen-
etc.; he proceeds, however, to give highly precise sta- tic, indigenous ethos of the place, its past-still.present)
tistics for barley and donkeys, grapes and hogs, but to forces from outside the region: "In so far as these
he does not quantify, o r even estimate, the signifi- conditions are within the context of what is meant
cance of any of the components of diesel technol- by 'modernization', they are exogenous forces to be sub-
ogy (pp. 178-79). We are left with the authoritative tracted relative to any comparison we shall make with
impression that such technology is so rare as to be earlier periods" (p. 151; my emphasis). Not only is
negligible, and so recently introduced that one can- Messenia's farmer in crucial ways premodern, then,
not yet foresee its effects. Messenia's agricultural econ- but he plays no active role in his own modernization.
omy in the 1960s was, after all, a money economy (it Modernity is allochthonous in Messenia. It has n o
had been such for generations), and a careful read- local origins, it can only be brought from else-
ing of MME's text will leave no doubt. Money, how- where.jO In Lukermann's geography of concepts, a
ever, plays no role in Van Wersch's economic analysis; dichotomy between "margin" and "center" is implicit.
the word "money" does not occur once, nor d o words I return to Aschenbrenner's work in order to obtain
that would imply the existence of financial institu- a sharper picture of that geography.
tions (e.g., "bank). T h e Messenians are said to have Aschenbrenner began his paper "Archaeology and
a "great taste for meat," not for money. According Ethnography in Messenia" (the first of two papers
to the picture that emerges, people may still be un- the ethnographer contributed to the conference "Re-
sure about the power of money.68 gional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus," in
Aschenbrenner often follows similar tactics. For 1975)" with comments on the comparability of
example, while noting in 1970 "some plowing by Messenia's place in Aegean archaeology, history, and
tractor" as well as plowing for cash, he also counts geography:
every horse (12 animals) and every able head of cattle
The position of Messenia in Aegean archaeology is
(22, o r 11 teams), providing Karpofora, a commu- not unlike the role this region has played in the course
nity of 353, "with twenty-three plowing units." H e gives of history. It is off in the southwest corner of Greece,
n o more information about tractors, the existence far from the center of activity and in a sense is geo-
of which is thereby forgotten (pp. 57-58). Modernity graphically isolated from the rest of the country.
Messenia has had its important, if ephemeral, mo-
is spurious in this rural landscape; it may be in the
ments in history, however. . . .
future of man the farmer, but it is not in his nature.
MME's book, and Aschenbrenner's chapter in par- For Messenia, that is, to be a suitable ground for the
ticular, contain many more references to a vanish- practice of archaeological ethnography, one needed
ing comparability with the Late Bronze Age (e.g., pp. first to construe it as a marginal region in general.
48,59, 183,211,223).Here are Fred Lukermann's re- Of particular interest here is the appeal to geography,
For comparable remarks in comparable contexts, and the idea a few steps further: "Present-day (1961) agricul.
an appeal to take money and its multiple effects seriously ture is ably surveyed, including the human and animal.
in our analyses of subordinate, supposedly precapitalist, population, capital assets (an average of 172 trees per farm),
societies, see E: Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Tolvards and a wealth of other matters . . . but it does seem as if
Post-ImperialGeographical Categories,"Critical l?tquirj (in some earlier year could have been selected, well before
press). the extensive changes produced by WW 11, the American
'>'' EE. Lukermann, "Settlement and Circulation: Pattern Mission, agricultural machinery." The "exogenous forces"
and Systems," in McDonald and Kapp (supra n. 1) 148-70. of Lukermann's text here are clearly identified.
"'Dew. in his review of MME (supra n. 4) 399, carried Aschenbrenner (supra n. 67) 158.
19951 MODERNITY AND THE
for it makes Messenia's marginality appear as a nat- example of spatialization of time. The ethnographer
ural condition, an effect of geography." Time is was not at all oblivious to the present, and he often
hereby spatialized: while the association of time with called attention to aspects of the farming commu-
history is retained, the "present-past" relationship, nity he had to leave out of his account. His approach,
mediated by the one between "modernity" and the however, was not merely "subtractive"(cf.Lukermann's
"past-still.present,"now reverberates as the relation. remarks quoted above). For the present to become
ship of "center" and "margin." Like a territory, like relevant to the past, Messenia and its farmers had
states, and perhaps empires, time has a center and, to be understood in their true, long-term nature, and,
inescapably, margins. to that end, ecological concepts proved indispens.
Spatialization of time, I may add, has been a cru- able. Not only crops, therefore, but also the farmers'
cial element of the logic of all regional archaeolog. diet and their time (schedule of activities) became
ical research. The shift of emphasis from sites to their the foci of Aschenbrenner's work. For 13 months in
landscapes, from stratigraphic units to environ. Karpofora, the ethnographer recorded "the distri-
mental zones, also fostered a change in the relative bution of the modern villager's work activities ac-
value of space over time. For example, classes of farm. cording to crop, month, type of work, and climatic
land became for regional projects as important as regime," and he compared notes with Van Wersch.
archaeological phases, and settlement location with In his report he tentatively suggests the utility of such
respect to land type became the focus of equal or data in reconstructing "a possible work calendar for
greater critical energy than settlement chronology. the Bronze Age communities in the same territory"
What must be remembered is that, in Greek archaeol. (p.50). Continuity is once more eschewed. What mat-
ogy, such a shift did not follow a peaceful course. ters rather is location in space ("same territory"), and
Rather it was met with strong resistance (in spite of the link is sought solely in the natural environment:
the age-old association of archaeology with expedi- the villagers' time is a calendar, tied to the cycle of
tion, and, therefore, with exploration of space), and crop activities, regulated above all by the scarcity
its legitimacy had to be won through maneuvers in of rainfall. ("Rain:' in various forms, occurs 14 times
the disciplinary arena.':' Casting time in a language in the course of 34 lines in Aschenbrenner's text:
that was common for space thereby acquired an pp. 50-51.) "Finally, during all the days of rain, the
emblematic character: it came to signal the new orien- press of agricultural tasks is relieved and indoor
tation in the discipline, and that may well explain crafts can be p u r s u e d (pp. 51-52). Naturalism and
some liberties that regional researchers were willing nostalgia- a nostalgia for the farmer fixed to his land
to take with the power released through spatializa- and calendar, a farmer productive even at home-
tion of time. Construing time as a territory with a blend nicely in this passage. The farmers' time is ir-
center and margins was perhaps one of those lib- revocably cyclical-a calendar that begins every
erties; it certainly went well beyond established tech- January, and always returns to its starting point. It
nical uses of the notions of center, margin, and time. has led nowhere, perhaps since the Bronze Age. Wit.
For instance, to call a part of the landscape "mar- ness, however: such time radically contrasts with the
ginal cropland to which barley is best a d a p t e d (Van researchers' time-the long, directional course of
1Versch's phrase, p. 182) was, in 1972, perfectly legiti- evolving scientific practice, from Herodotos to the
mate under certain agronomic assumptions.'~From future, as McDonald outlined it (see above). A differ-
such concrete usages of the notion of marginality, how. ence, indeed a qualitative contrast, between man-
ever, it proved a short step to Messenia's generalized in-his-environment and MME's own men is hereby
marginality with respect to modernity. metonymically, and generically, inscribed in time.
Aschenbrenner provides another, more rigorous Allochronism is an effective tactic for distancing re-
;'Theodore Bent had used similar tactics in the late ""Marginality" of cropland was soon, however, to be
19th century in "On Insular Greek Customs": see Herzfeld viewed as a function also of the farmers' goals, not just
(supra n. 3 0 ) 74-73. as a natural parameter. See G.A. Collier, 'Are Marginal Farm-
;'' McDonald had been a leader in that war in the 1960s lands llarginal to Their Farmers?," in S. Platner ed., Formal
(supra n . 35) 414-16; cf.J.E Cherry. "Frogs Round the Pond: .\lrthods in Ecor~omicAnthro@olog3!(M'ashington, D.C. 1975)
Perspectives o n Current Archaeological Survey Projects 149-38: cf: my Ph.D. thesis (supra n . 31). Some of that work
in the Mediterranean Region," in Keller and Rupp (supra ~ m influenced
s by the ideas of A.V.Chapnov, whose research
n. 13) 378-90; also S.L. Dyson, ':L\rchaeological Survey in among Russian peasants in the early decades of the 20th
the hlediterranean Basin: 4 Review of Recent Research," century had just been translated into English: A.V. Chaya-
.4mrr.4nt 47 (1982) 88-90, nov, The Ttzeory ofPeasaut Ecor~omj(Homewood, Ill. 1966).
searchers from researched, and safeguarding their to the 1975 conference must be read along with his
respective identities.75 firstis (they were given in different sessions) and, of
I claimed earlier that MME's conception of the course, along with the ethnographer's contribution
relationship between present and past in Greece re- to MME's book.
quired not mere observations but also a vision, o r
theoria. In the last few pages I have given some ex- A MODERN ARCHAEOLOGY
amples of that vision, with reference especially to Let me now discuss a second problem that MME's
Aschenbrenner's work. I will not attempt here to re- authors noted when they compared "the best-known
direct that vision, to demonstrate, for instance, with p e r i o d with the Late Bronze Age. Van Wersch puts
concrete details that Aschenbrenner's description it in the following way: "Farmers d o not keep records
of life in Karpofora in 1969-1970 was partial. The and, moreover, are very reluctant to divulge any in-
ethnographer did this himself. In a second paper formation that could possibly be used to extract
to the conference "Regional Variation in Modern higher taxes from them. Consequently, even pres-
Greece and Cyprus," in 1975, he drew a radically ent yield figures are only approximate" (p. 179).'"
different picture of Karpofora (based o n the same, McDonald and Rapp also note the problem when
plus additional fieldwork from 1971 to 1974).'Wne they attempt to estimate population density in vil-
still senses nostalgia in that paper, as nature, kinship, lages (p. 254): "The task is a tricky one, however, even
and domestic organization are given great attention. for the existing situation. We know from experience
But the details anchor the description firmly in the that published statistics can be unreliable, partic-
period around 1970. We are made aware, above all, ularly in terms of the specific village areas."xoThey
of the fact that Karpofora is part of a nation state- a continue with their efforts to solve such problems:
state that at the time was governed by a militaryjunta. they used air photographs, but those entail problems
We learn that the practice of agriculture in Karpo- too- clouds o r vegetation may obscure visibility, the
fora is articulated within a system of substantial loans scale of the photographs is not always calculable,
from the state. Machinery is a critical component some houses stand unoccupied. McDonald and Rapp
of farm capital: there are three (perhaps four, ac- conclude:
cording to a table) large tractors and 18 small, two-
Even for the modern analogue the only satisfactory
wheeled ones-enough to triple the community's solution is a large-scalejieldproject.It should be possible
cattle and horse power. Tractors were indeed acquired in the near future to make more accurate estimates,
during the 1960s, but, then, Karpofora had a mere but in the meantime we must assume that this ten-
400 ha to cultivate, with parts of it being unsuitable tative equation [i.e., 112 persons per village hectare]
for tractor plowing." We also learn that the farmers is reasonably dependable [p. 254, my emphasis].
are upwardly mobile, and that they have been so for McDonald and Rapp are not very specific here about
at least 15 years. For example, "more than a dozen the sort of project that could provide more accurate
village youths" have gone to, and graduated from, estimates. Would it be different from theirs? MME
university in the period 1967-1974. Moreover, nearly was, after all, such a large-scale field project. Their
every Karpoforite has plans to abandon the fields remarks lead to several issues, which I will try to take
and village life. Emphasis is given to the fact that, u p in order.
in the course of the 1960s, 25% of the people left First of all, if the farmers are suspected of with-
for one o r another urban destination, in spite of the holding o r distorting information-in effect, sus.
village's "abundant and fertile resources" and an in- pected of lying-and if the statistics of the Greek
crease in prosperity. The conception of Karpofor. state also are suspect, because they are embroiled
ites as a people fixed to their land and cyclical time in the farmers' lies, then the only authority imagin-
is hereby imploded. Aschenbrenner's second paper able that might secure a more accurate statistical
-.
My remarks olve much to Fabian (supra n. 30), e.g., Aschenbrenner (supra n. 67).
32-35, from whom I adopt the notion of allochronism. jq Cf. Aschenbrenner (supra n. 67) 161-62.
7" S.E. Aschenbrenner, "Karpofora: Reluctant Farmers Xo Peter Topping, who examined for MME census docu.
on a Fertile Land,"in Dimen and Friedl (supra n. 67) 207-21. ments from the 13th to the 19th centuries, was much more
--I~ Some of the earliest demonstrations of Western plow- confident in the accuracy of the recorded figures, espe-
ing technology in Greece after Independence had taken cially if they came from the Venetian censuses of the 17th
place in Messenia, not far from Karpofora, in 1830. See century: see P. Topping, "The Post-Classical Documents,"
D.L. Zografos, Iosopt'a rq< ~ A L q v t ~ r jy&mpyia<2
q (Athens in McDonald and Rapp (supra n. I), e.g., 70, 72.
1976) 1, 283-84.
19951 MODERNITY AND THE PAST.STILL.PRESENT 73
table of reality is the independent observer: a sci- resentation and reality. In "Unfinished Business:' they
entist, or preferably a sizeable group of them, pres- pointed to many directions for future research. They
ent at every field the moment of harvest, attending stressed the need for greater interdisciplinary col.
the birth of every lamb and foal, keeping eyes on laboration, the desirability of larger samples of ob-
doors in every house and barn-and not only for servations, of greater accuracy and of finer detail,
a single year. I hardly exaggerate. Good estimates and they even touched upon the refinement of con-
are based on good measurements; before calculat- cepts (e.g.,"time periodn).They subtly indicated their
ing totals and averages for an entire region, the sci unhappiness with the state of archaeological prac-
entist would find it necessary to measure the values tice not only in Messenia but, more generally, in
of the critical parameters in a suitably large sample. Greece-whereupon their unfinished business be-
MME's researchers did their best to adhere to such came Greek archaeology's unfinished business. They
principles, but they also had to rely o n Greek census pointed back to their Figure 1-1 (p. 6 ) ,hlME's inter.
data and other official statistics. Their point about disciplinary model: their concerns were as much, or
desirability of more accurate figures was not, how- more, with the shape of archaeological practice as
ever, a mere caveat or sign of self-evaluation. McDon- with man.in-his-environment. In fact, if the object
ald and Rapp's was a vision of the discipline's future: of research, that "man," was in 1972 somewhat in-
"It should be possible in the near future to make more accurately represented, the inaccuracies were about
accurate estimates." In their last section, "Unfinished its measurable performance, its size and production;
Business" (pp. 256-61), they indeed called for more they were not about its nature. Nothing in MME's text
intensive applications of the approach they pio- suggests that the nature of "man," as the researchers
neered in Greece. For example, a "combination of understood it, might itself be subject to revision.
geophysical methods could be used to delineate more There was no concern with the effects of a spatial-
accurately the size and shape of ancient habitation ized time, a time with a center and margins, on the
sites" (p. 257), and, if Nichoria, the excavated site, identity of "man," nor was there a concern with the
were to be placed in context, "a dozen or so repre- problems inherent in the notion of a past-still-
sentative sites should be studied in more detail by present. With regard to the Messenians, the terms
surface methods to record their complete physical of representation were already congealing: "farmers,"
setting" (p. 258). In their own last words, McDonald an official classification of the state for some of its
and Rapp put their vision concisely and forcefully: subjects (a term of representation), was taken as the
"It can be confidently predicted that archaeological nature of those subjects (a fact of reality). Represen-
efforts in the future will be increasingly interdisci- tation thus was becoming one with reality. Future
plinary in scope" (p. 259). They could, perhaps, have projects, yet more rigorous, would add detail to that
also written that "ours is only the beginning; what reality, make it more concrete and, thereby, difficult
we did can be done better, and we believe that it will to deny. They would also extend it to the rest of
be:' The same point was made in the conclusion of Greece.
a significant paper seven years later, and again in 1will call hlME's philosophical stance toward rep-
1984.X1 resentation and reality, and toward time, "modern-
Beside self-evaluation and a vision of the future, ist.'' Modernisnl in this case is a theory (vision) of
such statements also suggest a philosophical stance, archaeological knowledge and practice, an attitude
namely, that a reality exists that has hitherto escaped toward the object of the archaeological quest, the
representation but that can be represented, at least subject engaged in that quest, and the method of
in its most significant part, in the future. Such a the quest: the object is man-in-his-environment,the
stance deserves all our attention. It once more im. subject a team of scientists, and the method is an
plicates time; it resounds with optimism, as it re- inquisitive, relentless census of the former by the
minds us of the possibility of new knowledge; and, latter. Note that, while both object and subject are
above all, it concedes a distance between represen- generically "man" and remain physically copresent
tation and reality, and thereby calls attention to their in the environment for the duration of the project,
troubled relationship. they also are assumed to be quite (shall we say, gender-
It seems to me, however, that MME's researchers ically?)different. They are, in fact, distinguished from
in the end underestimated the distance between rep- each other in antithetical terms, and not simply by
8' Carothers a n d McDonald (supra n. 4) 439; W.A. in Studies Presented to Sterlzng Dow on His Eightieth Birthday
McDonald,"The MinnesotaMessenia Survey: A Look Rack," (Durham, N.C. 1984) 18%
virtue of their ephemeral relationship (observed and (the modernity of the researchers vs. the annual cycle
observers) but, more irreversibly, by nature: for ex- of the researched; a past still present, and still van-
ample, the ones are farmers and capable of lying, ishing; a reality still outside representation, yet by
whereas the others are scientists and zealots of the no means outside the terms of that representation).
truth.H2Moreover, while the farmers live in a world I call this stance "modernist" not to distinguish
where truth and lie still are contiguous with age-old it from a "postmodernist" one, nor to suggest that
beliefs and religious practices, the scientists already it is characteristic of an era from which we now have
know of independent methods for defusing the lies escaped. It is, of course, characteristic of an era, rather
and reaching a stratum of truth unencumbered by than just of MME, but that era has yet to end. I call
deceit. As I showed earlier, a few other differences the stance "modernist" in consonance with one of
separate them, most notably the directional time of its most pervasive premises and effects, one part of
the researchers versus the cyclical time of the farm- the reality to which it continues to give rise: moder-
ers, and their respective locations in relation to nity, the researchers'present, as a justly superior loca-
modernity, the center of time. tion. Others might find other adjectives more ap-
The elements that together constitute the mod- propriate; "masculinist" is a strong candidate, but
ernist stance, as I have identified them in the pre- "statist" or "governmental" could also serve, for the
vious pages, can now be summarized. They include approach borrows from the state its most funda-
1) a sharp distinction between researchers and re- mental technique of knowledge, the census, and it
searched (a distinction suggestive not simply of differ- extends it to the p a ~ t . "Positivist"
~3 may be for some
ence but also of a hierarchy, an axiology); 2) an yet another possibility. The avowed object of this
equally sharp distinction between object and method paper, however, is politics of time, so "modernism"
(a confidence in the independence of method, in will do.84
its effectiveness in overcoming the resistance of the For Greek archaeology, MME's book of 1972 con-
object; a method, we could say, despite the object); tains the first, and a remarkably rich, articulation
3) an emphasis on the authority of direct views of of the modernist vision. A large number of concepts
the object (a visualism, also deployed in the spatial- intercross and adumbrate one another, at the same
ization of time, and in graphic representations of time that a long record of observations is made rele-
the method, as in MME's Figure 1-1); 4) a sense that vant to large theoretical premises. To think of so rich
the method is still imperfect, but also a confidence and complex a vision as myopic would be, as I already
that it will be perfected (especially when it is deployed suggested, nonsensical. To treat it as arising from
more intensively); 5 ) a view of, indeed a commit- misunderstandings, o r even as ideologically guided,
ment to, the object's nature as at once docile and pro- would be to mistake its power for something inex-
ductive (a human nature dedicated to production: orably "in the nature of things," and to leave agency
settled and, thereby, accountable farmers, the ideal at its interface with circumstance once more out of
of an "agrarian state"); and 6) a tenuous, problemat- historical analysis. It would be, that is, to forget the
ical segregation of reality along several axes at once polarized institutional climate in which MME was
X? A story told by Hope Simpson at the symposium in farmer in the same context, then distancing, indeed con.
honor of McDonald in Minneapolis, in 1983 (supra n. 3) trasting them, in terms of knowledgelignorance.
xviii, helps to amplify this point: "Bill McDonald's work H"ee Fotiadis (supra n. 25) 151-68, esp. 159-62, for
in Messenia began in a spectacular way. In 1939 he assisted archaeology's "governmental" vision of itself and of its
Carl Alegen in the excavations at Ano Englianos. We are object. " ~ o v e r ~ m e n t a l i t yis" a notion that I take from
told that almost the first blows of the pick at the Palace M. Foucault, "Go;7emmentalityn [1978], in Burchell, Gordon,
sltc revealed a small damp clay slab with; rounded profile. and Miller (supra n. 2) 87-104.
The workman, in his ignorance, did what most Greek farm- X4 Modernism is today much discussed-and critically
ers d o when examiningobjects of types unknown to them. so- all across the disciplines. My description of it encom-
In hi\ curiosity he wiped it with his hand, and almost suc- passes only a few of the dimensions elaborated upon in
ceeded in erasing the first of the written records to be found the current literature. See, e.g., J. Habermass, The Philosoph.
at the site. Bill prevented further disaster by seizing the ical Discourse ofModernity: TwelveLectures (Cambridge, Mass.
tablet. From then on he spent most of his time on the ex- 1987); M. Strathern, "The Persuasive Fictions of Anthro-
cavation dealing with the tablets, as they emerged, en route pology," in M. Manganaro ed., Modernist Anthropology: From
to an elaborate drying out process." Archaeologists will Fieldwork to Text (Princeton 1990), esp. 91-113; also essays
perhaps all identify with McDonald's intervention. But the in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus eds., H7riting Culture: The Poetics
story also tells of tactics for the construction of archae. and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley 1986).
ological identity-first, by juxtaposing archaeologist and
199.51 MODERNITY AND THE PASTSTILL.PRESENT 75
conducted, between classical and anthropological qualified sflecijic comparisons. I now turn to some
archaeologists, and the unfriendliness that any proj- of them, leaving aside those of a predominantly en-
ect like MME would face from both sides; and it would vironmental scope (e.g., coastal configurations and
be to forget McDonald's commitment to moderniz- climate).
ing his home discipline, to reshaping archaeological When McDonald and Rapp compare 20th-century
practice in Greece. The success of that project de- statistics to Linear B records with regard to flocks,
pended, among other things, on MME's scientific "the only safe comparison . . . is that the sheep-goat
authenticity and that in turn did not depend only ratio was very different, a not unexpected situation
on the production of good records of vegetation his- in view of the importance of weaving woolen cloth"
tories and farming practices; the very ethos of scien. (p. 248). They observe that today's irrigated, inten-
tific humanism had to be reproduced within Greek sively cultivated bottomlands must have been marshy
archaeology. It is that ethos that we witness in MME's in the Late Bronze Age, perhaps available as pasture
rich and complex articulation of modernism. The to the large domestic animals but not to the smaller
combined requirement of mental excellence, male ruminants. "As for cultivated crops, the risks of at-
dynamism, and scientific rationality (to remember tempting a reconstruction should not be underesti.
Donna Harawayx" proved a dangerous power. The m a t e d (p. 249). They discuss reasons for which olive
men of Messenia-the real people-had to be, groves and vineyards may have played "a less impor-
through discourse, stripped of all those traits, gender tant role." They are equally cautious with wheat,
included. to allow for MME's researchers to demon- barley, figs, and flax. Indeed, even when they postu-
strate theirs. late continuity in "conditions like soil, climate, and
"Perhaps we may be pardoned for sometimes in- water supply . . . the basic determinants in agricul-
cluding what might be called hunches that depend tural regimes" (p. 251), they still qualify their con.
more on judgment and familiarity with the present clusions. Their estimate of 130 people per hectare
environment than on solid new facts about the past," of site area is based on "a strong impression that pre-
wrote McDonald and Rapp in their last chapter historic villages in Messenia and generally through.
(p. 240). Broad assumptions about the comparabil- out Greece were somewhat more densely populated
ity of present and past, then, as the authors empha- than nowdays [sicr (p. 255).88And, in an admission
sized, could be just this, hunches, tentative and ex. of limits to comparability, they qualify their broad
perimental. They had no claim to factual accuracy.8" assumptions as well: "There have certainly been
Making assumptions about the object of research changes since the Late Bronze Age in kinds and pro.
was, after all, an exercise of the researchers' intellec- portions of crops, in breeds of animals, in agricul-
tual freedom. Whence that freedom, however? What tural practices and equipment, in pestilences, and
forces gave rise to and sustained that space of free- in dietary preference" (p. 251).
dom where the researchers could take full charge Aschenbrenner is equally cautious in the end.
of the production of truth?x7 These questions did Along with the calendar, he recorded diet, farm labor,
not emerge. In the logic of modernism, intellectual yields for many crops, and the economy of water.
freedom required no explanation. Like vision, it M7hatis the relevance of his data to the Bronze Age!
could be defended (if necessary) as an inalienable "Something like an upper limit on the productive
right- the researchers'right: the freedom at issue was capability for ancient communities can be estimated
never extended to man-in-his-environment.His free. by using the production of modern communities
dom instead, from the modernist viewpoint, was that as a base" (p. 63). He also suggests that olives and
of ecological rhythms and of economic structures. vines imply a relatively stable community, that ir-
Be that as it may, next to the broad assumptions rigation may have been practiced in Messenia's past,
about the comparability, indeed similarity, of the and that families may have seasonally moved from
present to the past in Messenia, McDonald and Rapp's upland habitations to riverine sites.
last chapter also contains Inany cautious, highly If these comparisons between specific elements
85 Supra n. 36. 8Y That estimate was later revised to 140 persons per
Xti It is ironic that one of MME's reviewers, R. Hach- 1.53ha (i.e.,91.5 personslha) on the basis of a larger sample
mann, in HZ 219 (1974)623, praised the project for, among (n = 68) of modern village populations in Messenia: Caroth-
other things, "das Fehlen von unbewissennen kultur- ers and McDonald (supra n. 4) 435-38. The formula for
theoretischen Pramisen in ihrem Programm." the revisions was exacting, yet not all assumptions on which
X7 That is the main issue that occupied me in Fotiadis it was based werejustified. The "modern" population figures
(supra n. 25), esp. 162-64. used were those of the 1961 census.
'76 MICHAEL FOTIADIS [AJA 99
of the present and the past still seem vague, such the past in mind). MME's scientific humanism was
vagueness was inevitable in 1972. MME's research- adopted and reworked by some, eschewed by others.
ers were at that moment experimenting with a new The notion of tradition as timeless, unchanging
time machine (at least, with critical new parts in an habit- significantly, not as practices evolving in the
old one); they could not possibly be more firm and course of time-emerged as an analytical category
exact in their results. One expected instead that the and point of reference in archaeologists' writings.
new time machine would be perfected in the future. Sometimes it appeared amid discussions of unifor-
Perhaps because they were vague, however, the com- mitarian principles, economic and ecological theory,
parisons also proved more productive. They could or references to stone.using peoples around the
be easily extended, and they held a promise that world. Other times it leapt to the fore unexpectedly
more, and more concrete, points of comparison and without further elaboration. As the notion of
would be found. Once MME had shown that the pres- a past-still-present could not very well be sustained,
ent in Greece could be compared with the past, and it was replaced by another, equally troublesome, "tra-
that this could be done without resort to the old- ditional Greece," or "the present.that.was.no-longer-
fashioned premise of cultural survivals, observation there": "tradition" (in Greek, paradhosi) became a re.
of the present began to gain respectability among spectable antonym for " m ~ d e r n i t y . " ~ ~
archaeologists working in the country. "The future," The modernist stance, as I identified it above, has
the decades of the 1970s and especially '80s, took indeed been shifting in several directions. It is hardly
hold of the opportunity, and new ways were invented recognizable in the most recent publication of a re-
for making the present relevant to the past. Com- gional project in Greece, that of northern K e o ~ . ~ l
parisons drawn as late as 1992 were no less vague True, the book has a title that is ominously evocative
than those MME had been able to make in 1972.8y of the Braudelian longue durie, Greece's and the
All the same, ethnographers and other ethnograph- Mediterranean's inescapable fate, their cyclical time.
ically oriented researchers now were expected to fill Read the text, however. The authors make very cau-
a place in regional projects. Their presence among tious use of that cyclicity. The ethnographer has com-
the archaeologists guaranteed that comparisons be. pletely eschewed calendars of agricultural activities
tween the present and the past in Greece would be and diet; she undertakes instead a detailed descrip-
made. The shape of archaeologzcal practzce changed. tion of the demographic history of Keos in relation
to macropolitical and macroeconomic forces." The
focus of the ethnoarchaeological study is "largely
CYCLICAL TIME "IN THE FUTURE" abandoned but well.preserved material remains from
I cannot document here the changes that have the recent past," and the author made some efforts
taken place since 1972 in the politics of time of to date those r e m a i n ~ . ~ T h r o u g h othe
u t book, cycli.
archaeologists working in Greece. The story of those cal time stays submerged in the historical detail of
politics in the "new era" does not seem to me too each period, dispersed through a complex network
coherent (and I only take into account here those of relationships that reach well beyond the landscape
of us who have examined the present in Greece with of Keos. And at the end we also find an invitation,
q''See, e.g., C. Chang, "Archaeological Landscapes: The "traditional Greece" was interrupted because of EEC sub.
Ethnoarchaeolog) ofpastoral Land Use in the Grevena Prov- sidies, ca. 1980.
ince of Greece," in J. Rossignol and L. Wandsnider eds., In Greece during the later 1960s and '70s paradhosi be-
Space, Tzme and Archaeological Landscapes (New York 1992) came a commodity, and prices of arts and crafts, from old
65-89. doilies to 78 rpm records, soared. For the international
'"I Perhaps the most coherent picture of "traditional "popular" scene see Sutton 1993 (supra n. 26).
Greece" among archaeologists is in Halstead 1990 (supra "' Cherry, Davis, and hlantzourani (supra n. 23).
n. 23). A basic postulate here is the notion of "the sensible "' S.B. Sutton, "Population, Economy, and Settlement in
farmer," who "aims for overproduction and so breaks even Post-RevolutionaryKeos: A Cultural Anthropological Study,"
in a poor year and produces a surplus in an average or in Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani (supra n. 23) 383-402.
good year" (152; emphasis in original). It would be just as "Whitelaw (supra n. 23) 403 (my emphasis). His claims
apposite to postulate that, in Greece, sensible farmers do about the utility of ethnoarchaeological research in the
nbt stay farmers: see Aschenbrenner's (supra n. 76) "reluc. interpretation of the past in general (452) are, however,
tant farmers." It also appears from Halstead's text (147) that as vague as those made by previous researchers.
19951 MODERNITY AND T H E PASTSTILL.PRESENT 77
however subtle, to reflect on the distance between so be it-yet not in the name of a liberal, pluralist
representation and epistemology: approaching the archaeological record
Is this, then, the beginning of the end of tnodern- in Greece as the product of "strategists" located at
ism? The evidence at our disposal should be care- complex circumstances rather than as the product
fully evaluated before we draw such a conclusion. of "farmers,""shepherds," etc., and with an awareness
In 1981, archaeologists engaged in regional research of the historicity of such signs as "farmers" and "mod.
in Greece and the Mediterranean pointed out the erns," could be at once humbling and invigorating.
problems that modernization (not modernity) posed
PERSPECTIVES: AGENCY, CIRCUMSTANCE, AND
for the practice of archaeology in those lands. Par-
THE LONGUE D L I R ~ E
ticipants in the conference "Archaeological Survey
in the Mediterranean Area"" settled on few issues, I have singled out in this paper "agency at its inter.
among them, that "modern disturbance" is an im- face with circumstance" as a key to understanding
portant factor of "present surface configuration of the relationship between present and past in MME's
a site." Those remarks, echoing Van b'ersch's a de- account. More specifically, I have suggested that rep-
cade earlier, had a very good point;"" still, the resenting the Messenians of the 1960s as natural peas-
association of modernization with destruction of ants, inhabiting the margins of time, perpetually
archaeological sites in the Mediterranean was at caught in their cyclical calendar, was critical to MME:
times cast in peculiar terms: as one discussant put in its need for scientific authenticity and legitimacy
it, "several places in the Mediterranean area are now among both classical and anthropological archae-
suffering from intensive agricultural e ~ p l o i t a t i o n . " ~ ~ ologists. MME's vision of the present in Messenia was
But, far more important: I regard the discovery intertwined with the project's "complex strategical
made in the course of the first regional project in ~ituation:""~ it was intertwined with conflicts about
Greece, that man-in-his-environment is capable of and concerns with the shape of archaeological prac-
lies, as an extremely important one. Neither MME tice in Greece, and with threats to the identlty of that
nor any other archaeological project in Greece to practice vis-a-vis an old-fashioned, "aristocratically-
date has explored the potential of that discovery. biased'"" tradition of knowledge in the home de.
We should for a moment remember Umberto Eco partment and a new, glamorous, and aggressive fash-
and his effort to define the notion of the sign in ion of knowledge in neighboring departments. Such
the simplest of terms:qxwe should remember, that tensions left discrete traces on hlhlE's construal of
is, not simply that the possibility of telling the truth the present.past relationship, a construal that I have
is predicated upon the possibility of telling lies, but called "modernism." I noted that modernism was
also, that beings who can lie are, above all, beings tactically deployed, however reluctantly, to establish
who can signfy; in short, that "farmers" are able to the "dynamic," "masculine," "M1estern"identity of the
engage in representation just as much as we, "archae- Expedition-at the expense of the identity of the
ologists" and "scientists," are. What MME's research- Messenians, who were construed as lacking in pre-
ers discovered is that modern farmers - and, I would cisel\ those elements. I also have tried to show that,
dare think, those of theUtargetperiod," the 13th cen- as an epistemology, modernism is problematical, be-
tury B.C.- are, and were, not only producers of bread, cause it incorporates contradictory notions, such as
wine, and olive oil, but also producers of meaning; the past-still-present and a time with a center and
they were able to use that meaning strategically, de- margins, with the center being on directional time,
pending on circumstances, and they did so routinely. and the margins being on cyclical time. At least one
If that means that we should "grant them equal rights:' of hlME's researchers, Aschenbrenner, seems to me
'I' Cherry, Davis, and Mantzourani (supra n. 23) 478-79. substituting for something else. This something else does
'"Keller and Rupp (supra n. 13), esp. 4. not necessarily have to exist. . . . If something cannot be
4tJ Cf. Cherry (supra n. 73) 377. used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the
'I7 Ad. Ammerman, in Keller a n d Rupp (supra n . 13) 59 truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all."
(my emphasis). For the opposite attitude toward the inten- "" M. Foucault, The History ofSexuality 1: 4 n Introduction
sification of agriculture vis-i.vis the practice of archaeol- (New York 1980) 93: "[Power] is the name one attributes
ogy, see Thompson (supra n. 47) 100-101. to a conlplex strategical situation in a particular society."
"T.Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington 1976) 7: lio See McDonald (supra n. 36) xv.
'A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly
78 M. FOTIADIS, MODERNITY AND THE PASTSTILL-PRESENT
to have recognized that the project's factual claims There are indeed benefits to be gained from broad-
about the present also needed to be balanced. Such ening our perspective beyond agencies and their im-
problems notwithstanding; book reviewers found the mediate circumstances, and from considering long-
image of present-day hlessenia fascinating and edi- term structures a n d forces, the longuedurie. After all,
fying for almost everyone. Colleagues and students, the story told about Messenia in 1972 would not have
including myself, follolzred. I n the new era of archae- absorbed so much of my energy if it were not so anal-
ological practice in Greece that thus began, mod- ogous in its effect to the stories told about Greece
ernism proved a polzrerful representational strategy in the 19th century- in contexts involving ostensibly
both for reconstructing the past and for safeguard- different agencies and circumstances. At such a
ing the privileged identity of the researchers. thought, agency and circumstance lose their salience;
I find it hardly necessary to stress that agency and they become submerged as insignificant constituents
circumstance were far more complex than I have of a long-term tendency. What we are left with as
been able to represent. O n e might consider a host irreducible elements, transmitted from generation
of other parameters, local and global, from personal to generation, are an ideological longue durie, and
friendships and dislikes to patterns of funding also, a corpus of tactics, like the follolzring: "Exem-
archaeological research, the Greek policy for dis- plary choice of a marginal population is an effective
bursing excavation permits, and Greece's subordi- way- through metonymy- of marginalizing an en-
nate location in the Free World of the 1960s. What tire subordinate nation."1o2Allochronism, the habit
I have done is to concentrate on the most direct link, ofjustifying subordination by placing ourselves and
that between the dynamic of the disciplinary milieu the subordinate societies in distinctly different times,
and disciplinary knowledge. What attracted my at- is another of those tactics.
tention to that link in the first place is the widely I would like to think that archaeological practice
shared conviction that the circumstances in which we, and knowledge in Greece and elsewhere are possible
disciplinary practitioners, routinely find ourselves- without resort to such tactics. Recent indications
those "complex strategical situations"- leave no trace are good; holzrever, that remains more "unfinished
on the shape of knowledge we produce. Modernism business.""'"
in archaeology-not only in Greek archaeology-
has removed the knowing subject from the field of
objectivity. I feel the urgency for more balanced ac-
counts. To the extent that this is an appeal, it is one DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
for examining disciplinary knowledge and evidence INDIANA UNIVERSITY
in relation to the forms of power that bring them BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47405
to light.11" MFOTIADI@L?CS.INDIANA.EDU
11" See also Harding (supra n. 27), esp. her chapter of his active life as a businessman between Alexandria,
"'Strong Objectivity' and Socially Situated Knowledge." Egypt (where, before World War I, he became the owner
'('2 Herzfeld (supra n. 30) 73. of a hotel), and Thessaloniki (where, between World War
11" This paper is dedicated to the memory of my mater- I and 11, he represented a Messenian commercial firm).
nal grandfather, Constantinos Chryssoulis (1887-1960), a H e was, of course, unique-like all grandfathers.
Messenian, born in a village that he left. H e spent most
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Modernity and the Past-Still-Present: Politics of Time in the Birth of Regional

Article in American Journal of Archaeology · January 1995

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Politics of Time in the Birth of Regional

Archaeological Projects in Greece

Abstract the history of Greek archaeology, this was not the

l1 AJA 86 (1982) 250.

S. Diamant, in Antiquity 48 (1974) 77-78.

for examining disciplinary knowledge and evidence INDIANA UNIVERSITY

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