archaeology

Suppressing the Ground

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Plan of the theatre at Olympia, drawn by Wilhelm Dörpfeld

Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1853-1940) was trained as an architect, at the Bauakademie in Berlin and gained archaeological experience working on the excavations at Olympia. He was headhunted by Heinrich Schliemann, and went on to found the German School in Athens, which now takes his name,  and become the Director of the Athens branch of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Dörpfeld was a very capable draftsman and the drawings in his book Das Griechische Theater (1896) are typical of his work: precise, complete and detailed.

In Dörpfeld’s plan of the theatre certainty and interest are shown through exactitude and solidity of line, while presumption and conjecture are marked with dotted lines which skip across the surface of the page. Dörpfeld pays considerable attention to the paving pattern of the theatre floor; to the blockwork and cavities above “N”, and in the vicinity of “E”. He indicates subtle distinctions in materiality in these areas and notes alignments and misalignments. But what about the large areas of the drawing that escape attention altogether? The spaces between blocks, walls and drains are entirely empty, apart from the texture of the page on which they are printed. What takes place in these spaces? What purpose do they serve?

 

The theatre in Dörpfeld’s drawing stands out as a clear figure. Each block sits distinctly against a white ground. The sharp lines of the original ink drawing, and of the published engraving, lend themselves to describing sharp-edged objects. In this clear construction of figure and ground, the empty spaces of the page represent the condition of the ground. In opposition to the plenitude of significance which is sought in the objects disclosed by archaeology, the ground is represented as a place from which no significance is to be extracted. The ground is that which escapes attention. Representing the archaeological site as a place of painstaking clarity is only possible by subsuming all the various problems of ground in archaeological practice under the blanket representation of emptiness.

 

Dörpfeld’s plan suppresses the archaeologist’s problematic encounter with the ground. However, there are even moments in his precise drawing where the ground emerges as a difficulty. In the areas marked “V” and “F”, a flurry of little lines marks out the ground’s rumpled surface. They seem to gather together to mark out edges. If we consult the key, we might conclude that they are intended to signify marble (“MARMOR”), but there is a distinct difference between this and other instances of marble in the drawing: compared to the stones marked above “L”, the surface at “V” is rough. These scratchy lines do not seem to signify the veins of marble. They are ambiguous moments in which the archaeologist has been unable to suppress the ground completely. Again, in areas to the far left and right of the drawing, the rendering of solid stone fades away indistinctly into the empty ground (above “W” and near “B”). At these moments, the archaeologist’s ability to define an edge, to clearly mark the contour between something that is present and something that is not, fails. The problem of resolving an architectural figure from an archaeological ground merges with the problem of resolving an architectural figure from a drawn ground.

 

It is noteworthy that such failures are permissible at the periphery of the drawings – at a distance from the centre which is marked by the dotted circles and the centre line of the theatre – but not near the centre itself. Uncertainty occurs at the periphery.

 

The ability to form a strong figure is paramount for Dörpfeld. If the image was grey and murky, he would be unable to resolve architecture as independent and autonomous. Dörpfeld constructs a clear architectural figure, but in doing so, he also posits the ground as a vacancy, as that which escapes attention because it cannot be delineated.

 

In the publications of Layard and Schliemann, the site is morcellated and scattered through the text as a myriad small engravings: objects, architectural details, profiles, landscape scenes, ethnographic details, comparisons, speculative renderings, tracings, inscriptions, maps. Together this collection of details and fragments comprise an archive that is sorted according to the order of the archaeologist’s experience. The architectural plan is only one more artefact in this archive. Dörpfeld and Theodore Fyfe (architect for Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos), conversely, privilege the plan over the site, over the ground. The plan is the central document, the system of ordering to which all the other details are referred, the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion which functions to define the modern archaeological site. As such, plan substitutes for the ground in its function as a repository of archaeological knowledge.

 

More recently, archaeological criticism has queried the presumption of the archaeologist’s observational distance and noted the political dimension of the archaeological gaze. Julian Thomas writes:

 

The means by which we characteristically represent place, the distribution map, the air photo, the satellite image and the Geographical Information System, are all distinctively specular. They all imply a considerable distance between subject and object, and they all present a picture of past landscapes which the inhabitant would hardly recognise. All attempt to lay the world bare, like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table”, or like the corpse under the pathologist’s knife.

 

The distantiation of archaeological subject from object is produced by the representational techniques considered above, which chart a process of modernisation from the end of the nineteenth century. Archaeological drawing shifts to exclude the registers of the private and the uncertain. It remains possible, though, to see these registers re-surfacing in the most strictly controlled of drawings. Catherine Ingraham describes architecture as a practice of delineation associated with the ‘tactics of ideality’. These tactics can be clearly seen at work in the constitution of the archaeological site as a representation that can be shared publicly. The ground is problematic under these terms for two reasons: the ground is a necessary pre-condition of the line; yet it resists delineation. The ground is thus a representational problem for architecture, archaeology, and the complex interactions between the two fields. Ground cannot simply be “represented”, because it is a necessary condition of representation itself.

Density and Delineation

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Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik (1853)

“Subterranean Excavations at Kouyunjik” is a drawing from Austen Henry Layard’s Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). It is a grey image, closely hatched, depicting a vaulted underground space that divides into two vaults in the midground, and shades off into darkness in the distance. It is presented as a vignette without a distinct frame. The deep space contains artefacts and workers: in the foreground, one man gestures towards the most distinctly delineated element in the picture, a relief panel on the wall, which appears to have taken two other men by surprise. Baskets and tools sit at the feet of this foreground group. Deeper in the image the two vaults frame a pair of figures and a standing vase. The two figures face in opposite directions, one facing the viewer, mirroring the gesture of the man in the foreground. At the top of the picture, the subterranean space opens to the sky. It is not entirely clear if the vaults are caverns or chambers. The largest opening at the front is sufficiently irregular as to appear natural, while the central column between the two more regular vaults appears to be made of bricks.

 

To resolve the architecture of this space, one must carefully examine the engraver’s marks. Viewed closely, the image is an obsessive hail of tiny scratches. The engraver varies the materiality and tone of the image by adjusting the pattern and direction of this rendered continuum. At the very top of the image, against the fine, evenly ruled lines of the sky, a sharp edge – marked with a line – suggests that the face below it is constructed. The cracks and seams in this face are formed by the dark edges of each hatched patch. Before it, to the right and left is a sharp but irregular line of heavily cross-hatched shadow. On the right, though, this cavernous line and the smoother face are made continuous: the engraver has blended the hatching in order to dissolve the edge. Further down the page, the same thing happens on the left. Similarly it is unclear whether the large bank of irregular rubble directly behind the foreground group of figures is intended to be continuous or discontinuous with the smoother face above. A cut stone block appears to be embedded in the wall above the heads of the figures, as does something else that forms a dark edge, and other details that might be artificial fragments; but they are rendered in such a way that we are welcome to read them as mere clumps or irregularities in the earth. At its base, the central pier appears to be made of consistent if irregular blockwork; further up it appears to change into a more compact small-stone construction, shading off into surfaces of indistinguishable materiality.

 

Of this scene, Layard writes:

 

After the departure of Mr. Ross, the accumulation of earth above the ruins had become so considerable, frequently exceeding thirty feet, that the workmen, to avoid the labor of clearing it away, began to tunnel along the walls, sinking shafts at intervals to admit light and air. The hardness of the soil, mixed with pottery, bricks and remains of buildings raised at various times over the buried ruins of the Assyrian palace, rendered this process easy and safe with ordinary care and precaution. The subterraneous passages were narrow, and were propped up when necessary either by leaving columns of earth, as in mines, or by wooden beams. These long galleries, dimly lighted, lined with the remains of ancient art, broken urns projecting from the crumbling sides, and the wild Arab and hardy Nestorian wandering through their intricacies, or working in their dark recesses, were singularly picturesque.

 

Layard’s description shows that even the figure we think we have been able to discern in the image is illusory. The vaulted architecture of the image is not the ancient structure of the Assyrian palace referred to by Layard, but the architecture of the excavation itself. Architecture is present in the image not as the object, but as the result of the investigation. The only object that is clearly antique is the relief panel at the lower right. The earth is described as a thick conglomerate, a solid compaction of soil, pottery, brick and other architectural remains. Ancient artifacts – fragments of pottery and architecture – are not contained within the space, but fused with the matter that defines the space.

 

The spatiality of the image – comprehending image as a figure – relies on a reading of density, not delineation. In the same way, the spatiality of the archaeological site also relies on a reading of density. There is no clear figure discernable against a consistent and neutral ground. Both the image and the archaeological ground present a figure-ground problem that cannot be resolved with a mere increase in detail. The epistemic condition of the drawing, the forms of knowledge it allows, mirrors the epistemic condition of the archaeological excavation.

 

And

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On the subject of interdisciplinarity, this is the prologue from my MArch thesis a few years ago:

an architecture-and essay: conjunction of generalities. Here, architecture-and-archaeology.

The presumption of the innocuous ‘and’, with its two little hyphens (present as above, or implied) is interchangability. -and- is the joint of a modular system in which an endless series of substitutions could be made: architecture-and-text; architecture-and-politics; architecture-and-film; architecture-and-literature. To articulate a discussion jointed in this way would already be to assume the distinctiveness of the two terms: that architecture is a something; that archaeology is a different something; and that some conjunction can reasonably be expected. The agenda for an architecture-and-archaeology essay would apparently be to briefly outline some common ground, and to conclude with propositions for how architecture might profit from this exchange. Architecture-and-archaeology would be a foray into a foreign territory, followed by an about-face, and a return home bearing exotic goods. This thesis will, among other things, demonstrate why this conjunction cannot simply be performed. The disciplines of architecture and archaeology will be challenged as to their integrity; the extent to which they are distinct enterprises; and the validity of the generality implied by naming them as terms of an equation. As the distinctiveness of the terms breaks down, the problem will become one of description.

In particular, the -and- is often used to invoke interdisciplinarity: lines of communication are established between departments and disciplines, in order to bring under examination the various spaces which have, for one reason or another, slipped between departments. In this case the hyphens would mark the path of the interdisciplinary writer pacing back and forth between departmental libraries. This essay is not interdisciplinary (although this statement might be taken as one of the best pieces of evidence that it is in fact so). This essay will attempt to question, from the very cut of the spade, the divisibility of archaeology and architecture. Interdisciplinarity breaks down when there is no longer an interstitial space to occupy, and when it is precisely disciplinary distinctiveness that is under close examination. Standing on a bridge is difficult place to argue against the integrity of riverbanks.