Archaeology as Science Fiction

May 18, 2009 Alun Science, The Past 4 Comments Archaeology, Pop Culture, Public Archaeology

TARDIS Bokeh. Photo (cc) Capt. Tim.

There’s an inter­est­ing post on Archae­olog: Archae­ology, Sci­ence Fic­tion, and Pop Cul­ture, by Dan Shoup, who’s more nor­mally found at Archae­o­pop. In it he puts for­ward two propositions.

1. In the pop­u­lar ima­gin­a­tion, archae­ology is a form of sci­ence fiction.
2. Archae­olo­gists should embrace this, and start writ­ing sci­ence fic­tion that pro­motes their vis­ion of the past and agenda for the present.

I’m sym­path­etic to this, but I’m not sure I agree with all of it, and I’m cer­tainly not as enthu­si­astic as Dan.

On his first point I think he’s right. For a lot of the pub­lic archae­ology is a form of sci­ence fic­tion. Com­mon things you hear from the pub­lic on a dig are: “Where’s yer hat ‘n’ whip?”, “Let me know when you’ve found Atlantis.” and “I sup­pose the only way we’ll ever really know is if someone builds a time machine.” I’m much more luke­warm on his second pro­pos­i­tion. Just because the pub­lic thinks some­thing, that’s not enough itself to jus­tify doing it.

One reason I’m not entirely happy about it is that it sits awfully close to the tired line that all his­tor­ical doc­u­ments are fic­tions. There’s prob­ably a long blog post to be writ­ten against that, but if it is true then we need a new word to dis­tin­guish fic­tions like “Alice in Won­der­land” or “The Lord of the Rings” from fic­tions like writ­ten state­ments on crim­inal courts or till receipts. That’s not what Dan is arguing though.

Instead he’s draw­ing on Sci­ence Fic­tion in the tra­di­tion of Robert Hein­lein. This is fic­tion based on and extra­pol­ated from groun­ded sci­entific spec­u­la­tion.* It’s also clear by infer­ence that Dan sees inten­tional archae­olo­gical fic­tion as being quite dif­fer­ent from typ­ical aca­demic archae­ology. One response would be a sar­castic cheer for archae­olo­gists who find the actual doing archae­ology bit too hard or too bor­ing, but that misses a lot of what sci­ence fic­tion is. Mak­ing a plaus­ible fic­tion demands put­ting the archae­olo­gical spec­u­la­tion into a ‘real-world’ (or close) con­text. Done prop­erly hard SF explores the lim­it­a­tions of sci­ence. One example of this in a bio­lo­gical con­text is ‘Wheel­ers’ by Jack Cohen and Ian Stew­art which looks at what pos­sib­il­it­ies for life and vari­ous repro­duct­ive strategies in the solar sys­tem. They admit there’s a bit of a fudge in side-stepping the prob­lem of how two spe­cies learn to com­mu­nic­ate with each other rap­idly enough for the story to work, but most of the book is an explor­a­tion of an idea by authors who nor­mally write non-fiction.

I should also con­fess that if my thesis gets re-written into one book then it’s most likely to come out either as a novel, or novel inter­spersed with explan­at­ory chapters because I’m inter­ested in the human pro­cess of using astro­nomy. That’s not always appar­ent from a list of tables and graphs. It’s the pro­cess of mak­ing notes for this which leads me to my big­ger con­cern. It’s far more likely that I’ll split it into two non-fiction books, though because I rap­idly hit a wall when I tried sort­ing things out in a NaNoWriMo.

Writ­ing fic­tion is not the easy way, if you do it prop­erly. It’s not simply a mat­ter of good sci­ence, there needs to be a nar­rat­ive too. Not every­one can write fic­tion. In the case of some archae­olo­gical writers the fur­ther they’re kept away from the pub­lic the bet­ter. This doesn’t apply to all archae­olo­gists but I’d rather read good aca­demic art­icles from archae­olo­gists who can’t write fic­tion, than the same archae­olo­gist writ­ing bad fic­tion. Des­pite that the pro­posal does raise some import­ant points.

I like the idea of pub­lic engage­ment being an integ­ral part of the PhD, espe­cially for pub­licly fun­ded stu­dents. I can’t see how it would work in the UK though. We’re pres­sured to fin­ish the thesis in three years if we’re full-time. Des­pite that some form of pub­lic dis­play whether it’s an art-work or a dis­play at the local museum or some­thing else would be a good idea. At least it would if it shif­ted atti­tudes to pub­lic engage­ment. Again, in the UK, the archae­olo­gists I know are all happy to talk with the pub­lic about their work. How­ever, it’s not rewar­ded work. Archae­olo­gical out­reach is col­lapsing in the UK and it’s pos­sible that the choice for some people in the future will be either pub­lic out­reach or a job. This needs lead­er­ship with someone will­ing to put money to imple­ment policy. I doubt it’ll come from the AHRC, the major fund­ing body in the UK, in the near future though, as they’ve been cut­ting fund­ing to pub­licly access­ible archives like the ADS and AHDS.

Where I do part com­pany more ser­i­ously is the need for archae­olo­gists to pro­duce pop cul­ture accounts of the past as opposed to pub­licly access­ible inform­a­tion. If pop­u­lar cul­ture is the cul­ture that people make for them­selves then it seems a bit odd to say they’re doing it wrong and that spe­cially trained pro­fes­sion­als should do it for them. Archae­olo­gists are people too so there’s no reason they shouldn’t par­ti­cip­ate in pop­u­lar cul­ture; it’s the implic­a­tion of driv­ing oth­ers out that doesn’t seem right. Every­one should have a right to engage with their past, and archae­olo­gists may be more use­ful if they give them the tools or raw mater­ial to do that rather than a fin­ished product. That doesn’t mean every­one has the right to be taken ser­i­ously or go around dam­aging sites to prove their pet the­ory. I think con­ser­va­tion is a harder line to hold if you hold a simple equa­tion that Archae­ology = SF.

Des­pite that it’s an inter­est­ing post. Some archae­olo­gists have an interest in sci­ence fic­tion which keeps bub­bling up in dif­fer­ent ways. Some people like Greg Fewer have used it as a seed for ser­i­ous work on extra-terrestrial archae­ology. I think Dan Shoup has an inter­est­ing lever for pulling apart argu­ments on pub­lic archae­ology. It’s not neces­sary to agree with all, or even any, of what he says, but it’s help­ful start­ing point for ask­ing what is archae­ology for?

*I don’t see the need for the diver­sion into spec­u­lat­ive fic­tion, there’s a long tra­di­tion of SF writers writ­ing about the past as well as the future, which strengthens his argument.