Staging the past

Giorgio Buccellati – July 2011

A chapter of the digital monograph: Site Presentation

Concept
Staging vs. self-declaration
Monument and process
The fragmented whole
“Dialogue in the Dark”
Site presentation as publication

Concept

Archaeology speaks of remoteness and of closeness. The past it explores is remote from our experience, because it exposes broken traditions for which our current cultural experience does not provide intuitive interpretive keys. And yet this distance makes it all the more attractive as a novel type of human experience with which we, simply as humans, instinctively identify.

The notion of “staging the past” suggests an active role on the part of the archaeologist in setting up interpretive parameters that explain what the visitor confronts. It is the nature of this confrontation that matters. We want to preserve the sense of wonder, and yet we want to attribute meaning.

It is a simple fact that no matter what we do in the field, we do stage the results. Even a total abandonment is a form of staging. We inevitably set up a frame through which, and through which only, the visitors views the ancient reality. In this sense, “staging” occurs no matter what. The point I seek to achieve with site presentation is to offer an explicit statement as to what my particular staging is intended to be, and to so articulate it that the visitors may benefit from the mediation I am offering, while allowing at the same time the benefit of an im-mediate confrontation with the original.

Staging vs. self-declaration

There is an argument to be made against an excessive and invasive type of staging, which may rob the visitor of a chance for a spontaneous response to the monument.

My favorite image is that of conductor. (This image was vividly brought to mind when, at the end of site tour, a visitor paid me the best compliment I ever received, namely that to him I seemed like a conductor leading the orchestra in a performance of his own work…) Very few among us can enjoy music by reading a score. We need a performance that translates the pentagram into sound. For a complex orchestral score, we need a conductor who ensures that the individual parts blend into a coherent whole. The secret is not to go beyond coherence, not to invade the composer’s space with embellishments, while at the same time allowing the listener to get in touch with the original in its authenticity.

Accordingly, we are indeed called to “stage” the past, but without robbing the original of its capacity for self-declaration. This is, in the final analysis, the merit and the bane of every exegesis. We want to help, not overwhelm, or worse misguide, the reader, the listener, the visitor. In our case, there are two principles that guide my approach. On the one hand, the objective status of the “ruins” is such, in terms of partial preservation, stratigraphic complexity, and uneven degree of exposure, that a special degree of guidance seems indispensable. On the other hand, the signage is either so clearly set apart to define itself immediately as extraneous to the ancient monument, or else sufficiently hidden to avoid intruding on the visitor’s spontaneous perception.

Monument and process

There is also another aspect that inspires my approach to site presentation. Besides the display of the document and its proposed interpretation as a monument, I aim to explain to the visitor the process through which archaeology goes in exposing the document in the first place, and the reasoning that underpins the conclusions we have reached. This also extends to the uncertainties and tentative proposals, and to the strategy we follow in the ongoing excavations in order to attempt a resolution of the same.

The fragmented whole

Besides being unobtrusive, the signs ought to meet another requirement that I consider central to my effort. Precisely because of the quantity and range of information available, it is helpful for the visitors to be able to identify at a glance what may or may not be of interest to them. This is achieved by identifying the content of any given sign with a title that describes briefly the content of the sign itself.

The result is similar to the goal of providing a titled segmentation within a digital text. Besides prioritizing interests, this helps in constructing one’s own text, for example by following differen threads on differen visits to the site.

“Dialogue in the Dark”

Another powerful image (besides that of a conductor transforming a score into audible music) is the Dialogue in the Dark pioneered in 1988 by Andreas Heinecke. Through a number of different means, people who have the gift of sight are confronted with a world of total darkness, providing an experience similar, however remotely, to that of non-seeing people. Thus the “Museum” consists of a series of rooms filled only with darkness, where visitors experience a variety of audible and tactile stimuli that serve as the only conduit to the physical reality around them.

The analogy with archaeology is, I believe, quite suggestive. Dealing as they do with broken traditions, archaeologists have to recover a remote human experience with which they have only partial points of contact. Through the darkness of remoteness they must discover closeness, the closeness of sharing what at first is not clearly in evidence.

In terms of site presentation, the archaeologists must be blinds guiding the blinds, in the best sense of the terms. We recover the experience of a non-ruined built environment through an understanding of its very ruins, the experience of a social context through the witness of artifacts and texts, the experience of aesthetic responses through the comparative study of stylistic choices made in the past, and so on. It is the gain we so derive, as social scientists and as humanists, that we want to transmit to the visitors. Far from wanting to pigeonhole their response, we want to offer the links that have made it possible for us in the first place to appropriate what we believe to be a valid dimension of our common human past.

Site presentation as publication

A goal of site presentation, which is in my view as important as it is neglected, is to serve the purpose of scholarly communication, much as any other publication. There are aspects of the built environment that can never be adequately represented in any other way, whether it is the relationship to the surrounding landscape, or the full sense of monumentality that results from the interaction of vast volumes and spaces, or details of stratigraphic interconnections linking sections and architecture. In this sense, “staging the past” means providing a visiting scholar with all the tools necessary for a proper understanding of what is framed within the context of the site following excavations.

It is also, of course, a “publication” aimed at popularizing the results as we understand them in the ground. The balance between “staging” and “self declaration” is particularly important: one does not want the explanation to offset the wonder, and yet at the same time one wants to help the visitor achieve a degree of understanding that enhances the confrontation with the original.