Los Angeles – then and now

The Los Angeles Times recently  had an online article showing two photos of the same place in downtown LA 50 years apart. At first it’s hard to convince oneself they are the same scene, ironically the only parts which seem the same are roads – which are in constant motion! It is amazing that in quite a relatively short space of time such changes can occur, and this isn’t on the edges of a city in the process of being built.

It makes me think of what Levi-Strauss said of cities in the New World,

The cities of the New World have one characteristic in common: that they pass from first youth to decrepitude with no intermediary stage. One of my Brazilian girl-students returned in tears from her first visit to France: whiteness and cleanness were the criteria by which she judged a city, and Paris, with its blackened buildings, had seemed to her filthy and repugnant. But American cities never offer that holiday-state, outside of time, to which great monuments can transport us; nor do they transcend the primary urban function and become objects of contemplation and reflection. What struck me about New York, or Chicago, or their southerly counterpart Sao Paulo, was not the absence of ‘ancient remains’; this is, on the contrary, a positive element in their significance. So far from joining those European tourists who go into sulks because they cannot add another thirteenth-century cathedral to their collection, I am delighted to adapt myself to a system that has no backward dimension in time; and I enjoy having a different form of civilization to interpret. If I err, it is in the opposite sense: as these are new cities, and cities whose newness is their whole being and their justification, I find it difficult to forgive them for not staying new for ever. The older a European city is, the more highly we regard it; in America, every year brings with it an element of disgrace. For they are not merely ‘newly built’; they are built for renewal, and the sooner the better. When a new quarter is run up it doesn’t look like a city, as we understand the word; it’s too brilliant, too new, too high-spirited. It reminds us more of our fairgrounds and temporary international exhibitions. But these are buildings that stay up long after our exhibitions would have closed, and they don’t last well: facades begin to peel off, rain and soot leave their marks, the style goes out of fashion, and the original lay-out is undermined when someone loses patience and tears down the building next door. It is not a case of new dries contrasted with old, but rather of cities whose cycle of evolution is very rapid as against others whose cycle of evolution is slow. Certain European cities are dying off slowly and peacefully; the cities of the New World have a perpetual high temperature, a chronic illness which prevents them, for all their everlasting youthfulness, from ever being entirely well.

What astonished me in Sao Paulo in 1935, and in New York and Chicago in 1941, was not their newness, but the rapidity with which time’s ravages had set in. I knew that these cities had started ten centuries behind our own, but I had not realized, somehow, that large areas in them were already fifty years old and were not ashamed to let it be seen. For their only ornament was their youth, and youth is as fugitive for a city as for the people who live in it. Old ironwork, trams red as fire-engines, mahogany bars with balustrades of polished brass; brickyards in deserted alleys where the wind was the only street-cleaner; countrified parish churches next door to office buildings and stock exchanges built in the likeness of cathedrals; apartment-houses green with age that overhung canyons criss-crossed with fire-escapes, swing-bridges, and the like; a city that pushed continually upwards as new buildings were built on the ruins of their predecessors: such was Chicago, image of the Americas, and it isn’t surprising that the New World should cherish in Chicago the memory of the 188os, for this modest perspective, less than a century in extent, is all that antiquity can mean in those parts. To our millenary cities it would hardly serve even as a unit of judgement, but in Chicago, where people do not think in terms of time, it already offers scope for nostalgia.

Taken from Triste Tropiques (emphasis added) 1961. Available at
http://www.archive.org/stream/tristestropiques000177mbp/tristestropiques000177mbp_djvu.txt

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Field recordings

Ventures and Adventures in Topography

I recently had a look what was going on at Resonance FM which I haven’t done for a while. I found a series of programs by John Rogers and Nick Papadimitriou, Ventures and Adventures in Topography. Nick is better known as one of Will Self’s friends from his psychogeographic meanderings. Here they follow the walking guides from the early 20th century based around London and the South East.

In the most recent program they follow Pathfinder’s ‘Afoot Round London’ (published in 1911), and a days walk from Grange Hill Station to Loughton. They’re basically there to see what has changed from the days of the mysterious Pathfinder to today, the results are not wholly unexpected, the tracks are now roads and busier with cars. However, it’s a nice idea and attempting to follow an old walking guide seems a more useful and objective mission than some of the more usual psychogeographic accounts. It also makes me wonder about the similarity to these methodologies and their relationship to phenomenological accounts in mainstream archaeological literature.

The radio program is quite light and enjoyable, there are some readings from the original Pathfinder text, which is almost poetry and the music behind by Fabrizio Paterlini is very nice.

http://venturesintopography.wordpress.com/

Voice On Record

Also on Resonance FM is episode 9: Dialects: From The Dawn of The English Language of Voice on Record. A series taking old vinyl recordings of the human voice and the environment, they’re just rather quaint to listen to. In this episode there’s a modern and original recitation of some Chaucer, and a nice old man recalling his days as a wheelwright and another chap’s earlier days as a lad drinking cider on the farm and hiding the smell from his mother by chewing parsley on the way home!

http://podcasts.resonancefm.com/archives/2787

Harvest (2009) for terrafon, traditional music ensemble and cropland

Finally I found this recording and video by Swedish composer Olle Cornéer. He has built a large gramophone horn attached to an old plough, the ‘terrafon’ which is then pulled along through a field by the members of a  ‘traditional music ensemble’. The sound of the plough is thus amplified as the plough cuts the land, giving an auditory aspect to the texture of the field, it seems quite bonkers but it would perhaps have pleased John Evans (2003).

http://www.ollecorneer.com/art/harvest/

Evans, J.G. 2003. Environmental Archaeology and the Social Order. London: Routledge.

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The Battle of Bosworth and the Landscape Lab

So the site of the Battle of Bosworth has moved. What does this mean? My immediate reaction was ‘not that much’, which I put down to my not overwhelming interest in the period or battlefield archaeology, plus the fact that the ‘new’ field is only 2 miles to the south west. Where a place of mass violence took place is, within reason, considered less important than what took place there; Richard III still died and this led to the rise of the Tudor dynasty. However there have been artefacts found on the new site including 22 lead roundshot and larger munitions which are among the earliest examples of their kind. This will add greatly to our understanding of late medieval warfare, apparently.

 

I recently completed my Masters degree and get my results tomorrow, exciting indeed. However since I left, ‘our building’ has been refurbished which included moving the Landscape Lab where my coursemates and I spent much of our time. What interests me though, is that the Landscape Lab still exists, with the same equipment, resources and lecturers in the same building but in a different place. The new students may indeed be unaware of the recent changes in the internal architecture of West Court. What does this mean to the sense of place of the Landscape Lab? The same things will occur in there; lectures, seminars, cake, and Bob and Colin will act in the same positions, as teachers. The only real difference is the relative place of the Landscape Lab. Previously it was at the end of corridor, past Colin’s and opposite Bob’s offices; it is now at the other end of the building on more of a thoroughfare. Practically this changes the proximity of Bob’s and Colin’s offices and stops the fire door from being opened to cool the room. Socially this means it’s less easy to engage Bob and/or Colin and loiter for help, it also means we can’t sneak outside for biscuits.

 

How this change of relative placing of the Landscape Lab will affect the next year’s Landscapees is unknown, if they have any insights already it’d be good to hear them. Otherwise I’ve just been informed Levi-Strauss has died so better get something down about the opposition between Landscape Labs and Battlefields.

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Winstanley

I recently watched the 1975 film ‘Winstanley’, the leader of the ‘True Levellers’ or ‘The Diggers’ who took over common land during the reign of Oliver Cromwell to grow crops on. The film was historically accurate in regard to it’s aesthetics, indeed only animal breeds known to exist at the time were used to add to the realism. To be honest it is rather slow and without any surprises but was interesting to watch.

For a film made primarily in the countryside there was a distinct lack of traditional landscape shots which would seem strange for an English film representing a piece of English history. The only landscape scene is of a rather uninspiring vista showing a path to the taken over common land which is generally used by the antagonists of the plot. Most of the film is of a repeating sequence of taskscapes, the most prominent being that of the makeshift village of the Diggers; the houses reminded me of the Welsh hafodydd described by Girald Cambrensis as being ‘made of twisted boughs fit for habitation for just a year’. This village was not used for long but represented a locality in space and English history which is still known today, but I wonder how easy it would be to recognise this settlement in the archaeological record?

So the Diggers took over the common land to grow crops communally. They failed. However over the last few years there has been a growing interest in growing one’s own food. I remember, as a lad, allotments being regarded as rather antiquated and being only fit for old men as as an escape from their wives. However if one searches for “allotment chic” via Google you receive (if that’s what you get from Google search?) 171 results. If you remove the quotation marks this jumps to 34,100 pages, with quotes like ‘[a]llotments are terribly chic now’ (www1), or ‘allotments are becoming hip’ (www2). I think this is great and I did myself start a collaborative allotment in Cardiff a few years ago, I wonder what happened to it? Anyway, allotments are gaining in popularity, and now, possibly one of the reasons for this, a Mr Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has started up a project, Landshare. Here people who want some land, as allotments are now in short supply, can find others with spare land so they can use it for horti/agricultural purposes. In my area there are 34 Landowners and 89 Growers, not bad. But wait, this craze for growing on other peoples land goes further, look to Todmorden, Lancashire for instance where we have the Incredible Edible Todmorden project. Local people have been growing vegetables on sites around Todmorden for a about a year and herbs for longer. They have generally had permission but in not all cases. However the council have been helpful in letting them use the fire and railway stations, the Lidl car park is now under vegetable attack and planning consents have been changed to make similar approaches easier. This is great, people are encouraged to pick some herbs while waiting for the 11.29 to Burnley!

I reiterate, this is great! People are following in Gerrard Winstanley’s footsteps but under a modern rubric of sustainability, minimising carbon footprints and reconnecting with the seasons all with their own work. It also makes me think about dominant frameworks of tenure and how the localised uses of land in Todmorden could be understood both economically and socially, but that’s for later. For now, get digging!

www1 Allotment wars flare up as gardening gets competitive. Found on

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/property/gardens/article5968124.ece
accessed 13.10.09 originally in The Times 29.03.09.

www2 Chic Sheds and Short Cuts: Allotments are becoming hip – and this is bad news. Found on
http://www.paulkingsnorth.net/plot6.html
13.10.09 originally in The Economist July/August 2006.

Landshare
http://landshare.channel4.com/

Incredible Edible Todmorden
http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/

Winstanley at IMDb
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073911/

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La Vie Moderne

As I sit here listening to Alan Stivell I think about last night and how I went to see the french film La Vie Moderne by Raymond Depardon. It is the third and final part in his Profils Paysans trilogy about the lives of a handful of upland sheep and cow farmers in the Ardèche region of France.  Well, it wasn’t really about their lives as a particular year in their lives which are undergoing quite a transition. The old way of life is dwindling with few young people taking up the work of the countryside.

There is little detail as to how the people actually got on with their lives, lived in their taskscape if you will, but it does show that all of them are inextricably tied to the local landscape. The old Privat brothers have an 80 year history which their nephew is following, with an outsider for a wife, but she too is tied by her sense of duty to her husband. The Jean Roys’ are in a similiar situation but their son doesn’t want to work the farm but stays for his family and a sense of honour.  There is a young family who have taken a farm over from Madame Bres, then another young  family who desperately want to start farming but can’t afford to renovate their barn or buy more goats.

Obviously these people would survive if they left the mountains but their relationship stands in counterpoint toRaymond Depardon’s. The first scene is of the director driving towards the Privat farm and the last the reverse a year later, yet their is no sense of loss on the director’s part. Regret yes, but he will go off and make another film somewhere else probably with other equally ‘local’ people and be happy doing it with no ontological anxiety.

The film is not an ethnography but does give a sense of the change happening in upland rural France which is probably shadowed in other areas too, north Wales for example. I would recommend it but be weary of the rather unsettling music at the opening and end which makes it a classic piece of French cinema!

La Vie Moderne at IMDb

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A new ShELP page

Just a quick note to mention there is a long awaited new ShELP page. It’s referred to as a Landscape in Haiku although I believe it is actually a renga form of poetry but I’ve never heard of that! Why not have a gander, and in the words of Luis, make some comments!

ShELP, a landscape in Haiku

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Strange agricultural marks

View Larger Map

(This is updated post using  embedded Google Maps where previously there was just a screenshot. It was very easy!)

As some of you may have heard the government has recently given the go ahead for the building of a third runway at Heathrow.

Leaving the rather large social and environmental impacts aside I was looking at the area that’ll have to be cleared and excavated around the village of Sipson and found this field using Google Earth. At first I thought they maybe excavation evaluation trenches that were dug for the archaeology, but they seem very close together and a little too big. After studying them for a while they aren’t as regular as at first look either.

View this aerial image on Multimap.com
Bird’s Eye view on Multimap.com
Get directions on Multimap.com

(unfortunately Multimap isn’t embedding properly, all that seems to happen is the above links appear, the Google Map worked fine, any clues?)

Then I thought I should use other resources. This is the image from Microsoft Virtual Earth via Multimap. As can be seen the land use is quite different. There are dates on at the bottom of the webpages but I’m not sure how accurate they are. However I imagine the Multimap one is older as the strips look quite entrenched.

Nevertheless, these older patterns don’t seem to bare any relation to the ones seen in Google Earth.

So if anyone has any ideas or indeed answers don’t be scared to get in touch otherwise I’ve been instructed to make my way to the local HER and have a rummage to see if there are any answers there and I’m very busy!

The grid reference is TQ 077774

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12th Dec, Fieldwalking and minibuses

Here we all are, quite an attractive bunch! We were out fieldwalking yesterday, we found 2 bits of flint and a beer can, very exciting. Lovely day too, a hint of mist and a long trip in the minibus home in the dark.

It got me started thinking about minibuses…most people use the trowel, specifically the 4″ pointing trowel made by WHS as the ubiquitous visual referent of archaeological practice and often as archaelogy itself.  However one can go about archaeology in many ways without a trowel;  fieldwalking, off-set planning, larger field survey, geophysics and so on. Now the minibus is nearly always nearby when doing most archaeology, from student training excavations, to commercial fieldwork, field trips to sites, visiting the SMR again a long list. So maybe this should be our symbol of group identity? Ok so other groups use minibuses too, but bricklayers and stonemasons will also use trowels.

Minibuses fill a range of roles too; transportation vehicle for work, for out of hours fun, tea room, tool shed, site office, drawing room, drying room, nap room(!), resting post during lunch, a shade from the summer sun, hideaway for a secret romantic encounter and so on, but these are all quite concrete uses. The poor old minibus is also used in more social ways; a barrier between groups as they eat outside or who eats inside or out. Then, whilst driving, who sits where, the site director as driver maybe, supervisors in the passenger seats then the rest of the group filtered to the back in sets of friends or length on a project.

They can create happiness, “yes! we got the good minbus on the way home today” perhaps a bus with more foot space (ancient Leyland DAF over new Transit) or without a hole in the roof. Creating holes in the roof can also recreate social roles, seeing a lecturer drunk jumping up and down on a roof is a surefire way to encourage interaction with students and teachers! Then knowing who knows who created the hole adding to the sense of group identity and disrupting power structures as the supplies manager struggles to get to the bottom!

Minibuses are used in a range of roles and as various places in quite a small physical space, and all are created and recreated during archaeological practice.  So maybe I’ll change the header picture here to a minibus sitting in a muddy field and apply for a D1 rather than looking up WHS next time I lose my trowel?

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Reindeer migrations

Good BBC radio programme about reindeer migrations and the herders who live and work with them, the Saami. An indigineous population of Europe living in some ways a life unchanged for thousands of years. On the other hand they can GPS collar some of the herd and keep an eye on them from their home or Land Rover!

Worth a listen – Kingdom of the Reindeer

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Graffiti archaeology

Here’s a great site, it’s been around for a while but I forgot about it….  
http://otherthings.com/grafarc/flash/view.htm

The author documents walls of graffiti and how they change over time, it’s great.  It shows the changing of the environment by human agency and is therefore archaeology (cf.
http://www.archaeology.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_archaeology_archive.html#107255655726655576
) .

But who cares, it’s quite pretty too!

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