Artefacts Archives - Nicholas Hedges

The Material World

July 19, 2012 by Nicholas Hedges

“What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist?”

So asks Tim Ingold, in his book, Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. It seems an obvious question, or rather, a question for which there is an obvious answer, but in terms of the field Material Culture it would seem to be not so straightforward. Citing a number of works on the subject, Ingold writes how “their engagements, for the most part, are not with the tangible stuff of craftsmen and manufacturers but with the abstract ruminations of philosophers and theorists.” Furthermore, “literature in anthropology and archaeology that deals explicitly with the subjects of materiality and material culture seems to have hardly anything to say about materials.” Ingold then goes on to cite an inventory of materials one might expect to see when dealing with this subject, as can be found in a book by Henry Hodges called Artefacts.

pottery
glazes
glass and enamels
copper and copper alloys
iron and steel
gold, silver, lead and mercury
stone
wood
fibres and threads
textiles and baskets
hides and leather
antler, bone, horn, ivory
dyes, pigments and paints
adhesives

In an array of books on his bookshelf, all dealing in some form with the subject of material culture, Ingold states that one looks in vain for any “comprehensible explanation of what ‘materiality’ actually means, or for any account of materials and their properties.”

To cut a long story short, Ingold goes on to question what the material world actually is – thus the question at the top: “What, then, is this material world? Of what does it consist?”

He writes:

“Christopher Gosden suggests, we could divide it into two broad components: landscape and artefacts. Thus it seems that we have human minds on the one hand, and a material world of landscape and artefacts on the other. That, you might think, should cover just about everything. But does it? Consider, for a moment, what is left out. Starting with landscape, does this include the sky? Where do we put the sun, the moon and the stars? We can reach for the stars but cannot touch them: are they, then, material realities with which humans can make contact, or do they exist only for us in the mind? is the moon part of the material world for terrestrial travellers, or only for cosmonauts who touch down on the lunar landscape? How about sunlight? Life depends on it. But if sunlight were a constituent of the material world, then we would have to admit not only that the diurnal landscape differs materially from the nocturnal one, but also that the shadow of a landscape feature, such as a rock or tree, is as much a part of the material world as the feature itself. For creatures that live in the shade, it does indeed make a difference! What, then, of the air? When you breathe, or feel the wind on your face, are you engaging with the material world? When the fog descends, and everything around you looks dim and mysterious, has the material world changed, or are you just seeing the same world differently? Does rain belong to the material world, or only the puddles that it leaves in ditches and pot-holes? Does falling snow join the material world only once it settles on the ground? As engineers and builders know all too well, rain and frost can break up roads and buildings. How then can we claim that roads and buildings are part of the material world, if rain and frost are not? And where would we place fire and smoke, molten lava and volcanic ash, not to mention liquids of all kinds from ink to running water? … If, moreover, they are part of the material world, then the same must be true of my own body. So where does this fit in? If I and my body are one and the same, and if my body indeed partakes of the material world, then how can the body-that-I-am engage with that world?”

When I read this, I thought about the dig I went on last year at Bartlemas Chapel in Oxford, when I found a small but rather beautiful piece of mediaeval (I think) pottery.

There are many ways in which one could interpret this find, but what I thought about was how this was like a missing piece of the present, and how, before it was lost to the soil, it had existed in a mediaeval present that was (save for the obvious differences) just like ours today. There was the wind, there were trees and flowers, the clouds, the sky and of course the sun, by whose light the beautiful glaze could be seen again, just as it had been by someone living hundreds of years ago. Reading what Tim Ingold has written about materiality and material culture above therefore made perfect sense.

And as regards my work with empathy and the importance in this respect of materiality and material culture, the idea of the body as part of the material world was also of interest. We are not set outside the material world but are an integral part – therefore it’s easier to engage empathetically with an individual through the objects those individuals once used. Empathy is as I’ve said before an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge. Knowledge as Ingold writes derives through movement: “It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe.” When I discovered the piece of pottery (through moving), I uncovered not only the object itself, but the material world by which it was once surrounded, including those people who once used it, or the person who even made it.

Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin 2

June 22, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

Since carrying out the observation of the Roman Coin discovered during a dig on 11th June I’ve been thinking about the coin in greater detail. One of the things which interests me about it are the vivid colours formed during its time in the ground; in particular those on the reverse side of the head, as can be seen in the image below:

It’s easy to think of the coin as having occupied two distinct periods (i.e. the 3rd century and today) and that it’s almost two distinct entities; the ‘new’ coin of some 1700 years ago, and the clipped and rather decayed coin it is now. But of course this coin is a singular entity which has occupied a span of time covering a range of years difficult for us to imagine. To borrow from Bill Viola, this coin has ‘lived’ this same continuous moment ever since it was ‘conceived’ – or in this case minted – and for much of its existence, it’s been laying out of sight, in silence, underground.

At some point 1700 years ago, the coin (we might assume) was lost and during the dig a week or so ago it was found. I find it easier however, to conceive of the coin’s entire existence if I forget these two ‘divisions’ and think instead of the coin as always existing – not lost or found, just always there – somewhere. Stating that it was first lost and then found creates a kind of void in between, in which the coin just sits – not really existing at all. Of course the coin was in existence for hundreds of years; before the city of Oxford was even established, and throughout the time during which it was made ancient. And in that time, beneath the ground, things were acting upon it, slowly changing its shape and colour; to make the beautiful colours we see today. The colours therefore can be linked to the passing of time – to the coin’s continuous existence. There’s a correlation between the passing of time and the formation of the various colours.

There is also something rather poetic about this as regards the way we imagine the past. For me, the distant past is often a dark and silent place (in the sense that it’s largely unknowable – not that it really was dark and silent) but one in which there was movement and colour – just as with the coin beneath the ground. Although out of sight to us today, we know that that things moved, that things were formed, that entities acted upon or influenced other entities. That there was of course colour.

Thinking about the coin a little more, I realised how else it’s changed from the 3rd century AD. Back then it wouldn’t have been valued as an object in its own right per se, but rather in regards to what it represented, i.e. a monetary unit. If I have a pound coin in my hand, I don’t value the object (the coin) so much as what it represents (a pound sterling). Now of course, the Roman coin’s original monetary value has been lost and it’s the coin as an object which has become important.

Archaeological Dig – Roman Coin

June 16, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

Further to my entry on the archaeological dig in Iffley, Oxford, I have carried out some extra work on the Roman coin we discovered whilst excavating the test-pit. The coin in question, dating from the reign of Emperor Postumus (260-269 AD) can be seen below.

Click here for the text of the observation.

Archaeological Dig

June 12, 2011 by Nicholas Hedges

For the past day and a half I’ve been working on the East Oxford Archaeological Project, digging a test-pit in a garden in Iffley Village. Although I’ve had an interest in archaeology for a long time now, I’d never dug before and so the last two days have been both good fun and very informative.

The weather on the first day was good and digging was fairly easy (save for some roots). As I said, I’d never dug before so it was interesting – even on this small scale – to see the process involved; how everything was observed and recorded.

There were a few finds; miscellaneous bits of pottery (including fragments of flowerpot and a possible Roman rim!), a curious brooch-like item, some bits of clay pipe and the piece-de-la-resistance, a Roman coin from the reign of Emperor Postumus (AD 260-269). The image below shows the position of the coin being recorded with GPS.

Now, most of us in our time have seen a few Roman coins; not least in museums. But finding this one coin (which, I was told, was in suprisingly good condition) was quite remarkable. It’s not a rare coin; it isn’t worth a great deal of money, but that we were the first to see it and to touch it in over 1700 years was amazing. Indeed, the very fact that in the 3rd century someone had walked nearby and dropped the coin where it lay in the soil until its discovery yesterday astounds me. The 3rd century seems – and in many ways is – a completely alien world, and yet, as the coin reminds us, it was the same world as we inhabit today.

Coins are of course objects of transaction. They are given by one to another in exchange for – amongst other things – goods and services. And behind every coin is a complex network of these transactions of which we, as finders, become a part – as much a part as the person who dropped it over 1700 years ago.

It’s also astonishing to think that, within the local context, the coin was lost centuries before Oxford – now regarded as an ancient university, was even established as a town. I couldn’t help think, as I stood in the garden, of how the local landscape looked when the coin was lost, and to then make my way within my imagination down to the centre of town, to ‘see’ what was there.

Ancient Reflections

March 7, 2010 by Nicholas Hedges

I went to the Ashmolean Museum today and found myself literally in the surface of an Athenian, black-glazed hydira (water-jar) dating from around 400 B.C. My reflection in the glaze became for a moment a part of its design and I wondered as I looked at my silhouette, who else had become a part of its fabric over the course of the last two millennia?