Home Thoughts from Abroad Peter Ramsden Early anthropologists developed a notion that the only time you can see something clearly, and properly and in detail is when you see it for the first time. After that you see it through the eye of your experience of it. That’s one reason why they believed that it was necessary to go to as alien a society as you could possibly find in order to clearly see how a society works. They also believed that it would help if the society in question was relatively small and simple, and not overly-compounded by cultural influences from other, more familiar societies. In developing those notions, both of the need to see something for the first time or from a distance, and the need to see something in its elemental, unelaborated forms, I believe those early anthropologists showed a great deal of wisdom, whatever other flaws their intellectual programme may have had. What I would like to do here is to consider how that wisdom might operate in the sphere of archaeology, and if possible to suggest how it might benefit an archaeologist working in south-central Ontario, which is the experience I have had. I will suggest that it is of tremendous benefit for any archaeologist, but particularly one who works in a region which has tended to be rather parochial and intellectually isolated, as southern Ontario has at times, to try to acquire two different kinds of experience: First, to participate in field work and research that is far removed from their usual sphere of work, and in so doing to participate in an intellectual and research environment other than their usual one; and Second, to try to observe first-hand a way of life that is more closely tied to the land than that of the average academic or consultant. And just to explain my credentials, here are the regions where I have worked: Most of my own research has been in southern Ontario, dealing with both Archaic and Iroquoian time periods. I’ve also done research in the central Arctic, on Paleoeskimo and Thule periods. And I’ve done work in southern Ireland, dealing with land use in the Mesolithic and Neolithic. But just as important, perhaps, from the point of view of this paper, were experiences I had as a student, first in the western Arctic, and then in the southwest Yukon. These were my first experiences with societies that were both very foreign to me, and also small scale and virtually living off the land. Since they were very formative experiences for me, I’ll start with them and the impact they had on my ideas about doing archaeology. I. Experiences with small-scale societies / people living close to the land At some point in my student career, I developed an interest in Medieval archaeology, and wrote a term paper on some aspect of it for a course. In reading for that paper I happened across an old book dealing with the reasons for the establishment of ancient cities around the Mediterranean. The article began by citing a then-current theory that the earliest Mediterranean cities were on the sites of natural harbours, and that they were established when mariners in ancient times were forced by storms at sea to head for shore, and seek out sheltered areas. The author went on to observe that whoever came up with this theory had obviously never been to sea, noting that in times of storm a ship’s captain will generally seek out deep water rather than risking the more dangerous in-shore shallow water. Now, I’m not qualified to assess the merits of either side of the argument, but I was deeply struck by the notion that one ought not to theorize in the absence of real-world experience. And so it was that my early exposure to relatively isolated and small hunting societies made a deep impression on me, and made me look at both anthropological and archaeological interpretations and abstractions from the point of view of how they look in the real world, rather than in the often befuddled world of intellectual discourse. Ekalluk River, Victoria Island, NWT 1965 As a second year undergraduate student I was hired to be part of Dr. William E. Taylor’s crew excavating several sites on the Ekalluk River in the western Arctic. Our camp was located a few miles upstream from a fishing camp of Ikaluktormiut. These people made a substantial part of their living off the land; many of them maintained traditional ways of dress and were skilled in traditional subsistence and manufacturing technologies. Moreover, based on conversations I had with some of them in limited English and severely rudimentary Inuktitut, it seemed that traditional ways of thinking, believing and behaving were still very much alive as well. Some examples: 1. I learned that in any society there are people that aren’t very good at things, and those people leave their mark in the archaeological record as well. They make things that look all wrong, or don’t work very well. Others may be so inept that they make nothing at all, and are simply cared for by everyone else. There were both kinds of people on the Ekalluk River, and it’s a certainty that there are both kinds of people in every society that we as archaeologists have investigated. 2. I was also reminded that kids have to go through a long period of learning how to do things, of doing things badly, and of wild experimentation with things that can’t possibly work but that might be fun to try. Those things also find their way into the archaeological record. And I found that grown-ups do that kind of thing as well – making completely impractical things just for the hell of playing with the technology – or maybe just showing off. And I saw adults doing that. 3. The Inuit used to visit us to see what we had found, or we used to go and visit them to show them what we had found. They were fascinated that some of the older artifacts looked so different from what they were used to. I was fascinated by their fascination, and their explanations for why Dorset and Pre-D looked so different. There were two: one was that it was because they were made such a long time ago – before people had learned how to make things properly. The second was that they were just made by inept people. In both cases, their explanations revealed a striking familiarity with people who can’t do things very well – who bungle things and make things that don’t look right. There was a third kind of explanation, which was that these objects were made by a completely different kind of people, who just inhabited a different universe and operated according to different kinds of rules. I found that very striking as well – the ease with which they acknowledged the existence of people from completely alien contexts, even in their own past, whose actions just couldn’t be explained. I think all of these things reveal some deep truths about people in small-scale societies that we as archaeologists need to keep always in mind. But I’m afraid far too often we just accept the common notions, either popular romantic ones or old anthropological ones, that people living in such societies are essentially all the same, unaccepting of human variation, and unaware of any kind of broader, foreign world. Southwest Yukon, 1966 The following year, I had the good fortune to be hired by John Cook, then a PhD student at Madison, to take part in an archaeological survey in parts of the southwest Yukon. There I had the privilege to get to know a few of the Tutchone inhabitants of the area. The Tutchone first became familiar with the outside world during the Klondike Gold Rush, and then again during World War II. So when I met them in the 1960s they were quite ‘western’ looking, but in their every day lives they were still quite isolated, and many still made much of their living by hunting and fishing. In the course of living with and talking to them, I learned that while they displayed some behaviours that were familiar to me from the ethnographies, they didn’t do so in response to the kinds of high-level anthropological abstractions that archaeologists often seem to be so fond of using. Rather, they behaved in response to, and interacted with, other people – individual people whom they knew not as members of some abstract kinship or other social category, but as Joe, or ‘my wife’s brother’. Human behaviour doesn’t take place in the clouds of anthropological abstraction – it takes place on the ground, every day, and sometimes people will vary it, or ignore it, or make mistakes that catch on, or act capriciously. Those things too presumably make their mark on the archaeological record. The abstractions I’m talking about are things that I’ve seen archaeologists use very recently, although we’ve been obsessed with them for decades. Things like ‘exogamy’, or ‘clan’ or ‘lineage’ or ‘moiety’. Even things we tend to think of almost as absolutes, like ethnicity, language; or so basic as to be unquestionable – like a house, or a household: For people living by their wits on the landscape, these are all just tools, and any of them can be re-shaped or re-sharpened, or thrown away, as the day requires. The Question of moieties: According to the ethnographies, Tutchone society was divided into two exogamous moieties, Wolf and Crow. I had a conversation with a young Crow man one afternoon as he took me up to show me some grave houses on top of a hill near Canyon Creek. I had read that each moiety tends the graves of the other. Our conversation went something like: “You’re a Crow, right?”. “Yes”. “So you tend Wolf graves?” “[laughter] No why would I tend Wolf graves? I tend my wife’s family’s graves.” On another occasion I had a conversation with a middle-aged man who was a Wolf. I think I must have been interested in the issue of moiety exogamy, because I recall our conversation proceeding along these lines: “You’re a Wolf?” “Yes.” “So your wife is a Crow?” “I think so.” “Do Wolves have to marry Crows?” “I don’t think so. That’s not how it works. But the Wolves I know are all related to me” “But your wife is a Crow.” “Yes.” “Your sister is a wolf like you?” “Yes.” “Is her husband a crow?” “Umm, I don’t know - maybe.” Seeing places like Klukshu During our field season, were got to visit a number of old settlements (some of which were abandoned, some not entirely) dating back a couple of hundred years, and probably actually thousands. One of these was Klukshu, which was basically a hunter/fisher/gatherer summer aggregation site – a type of site that will be familiar to Ontario archaeologists. What struck me? First – where things were, and why. Bears were a big issue - in the placement of caches, for example. But also the village itself was placed so it was convenient to the salmon fishing, but at the same time a bit removed because of bears. next: the wide range of items and structures that you might never recover any evidence of, or at least not have a clue what they were. Also, the number of things that were located away from the village, or off to the edge of it – like drying racks and caches and menstrual huts –again the explanation given for these was bears. But also, isolated houses. Shamans? There were also houses of people that weren’t popular for one reason or another – located off by themselves. It impressed me how important individual and idiosyncratic factors were in almost everything. The locations of structures of all kinds had more to do with a)fear of bears, b) idiosyncratic interpersonal relationships and c) fear of the supernatural, than with any factors that an archaeologist might normally think of, or be able to test. II. Experiences doing archaeology in another region / time period Recognizing bone artifact categories and bone technology in the Inverhuron Archaic based on familiarity with Thule archaeology. recognizing artifacts that others wouldn’t: the non-flint problem. The disposable artifact problem. Also turns the other way - being able to recognize informal lithic tools in Ireland because my experience in Archaic in North America. Being exposed to a wider variety of human responses to various situations, and realizing that those responses are quite situational, and almost never driven by any sort of ‘cultural’ imperative. The greater the variety of both archaeological and living cultural contexts that you have intimate familiarity with, the more apparent it becomes that all of our anthropological and archaeological constructs are abstractions, from the very notion of ‘culture’ on down through various levels of social and cultural structures that archaeologists feel compelled to rely upon, despite the fact that they have long been abandoned, and quite gladly, by the anthropologists from whom we first borrowed them. But it’s actually worse than that. Even the degree to which these academic abstractions can be applied with any usefulness is variable from one situation to another. It’s been my experience, for example, that the concept of a ‘seasonal round’ – a template for a series of structured movements from one seasonally restricted resource to another by part or all of a group of people – will have meaning for people in one group, but draw nothing but blank looks from members of a different group, even though both groups do actually exploit different resource in different places at different times. So for some, there are rules, but for other groups, there aren’t – they just know that they go where food is available at any particular time, depending on what else might be going on. III. Experience doing archaeology in another intellectual environment Ireland: 1. the idea of viewing the landscape as a geomorphological problem, rather than an ethnographic one. Different research questions, different explanations: transposing analytical concerns from one context to another – relationships to environment, from Arctic to Huron. The idea that people’s subsistence and settlement strategies are contingent, and far more flexible than we give them credit for. (e.g. seeing mobility in Kawartha lakes Huron settlement). My Ancient connections paper [note: “Is There a North Atlantic Prehistory? The Case of the Neolithic and the Archaic”] : seeing contemporaneous similarities in quite distant regions and being forced to consider whether there might be underlying causes. My obsession with “The tyranny of the ethnographic record”. Seeing how people deal with societies very similar to the Hurons, for example, in completely different contexts opens your eyes to other interpretive possibilities. And knowing how adaptable and flexible people in all societies are makes all those possibilities plausible. So instead of looking at a longhouse plan and seeing a very fuzzy or perhaps poorly executed version of the requisite ‘central passage’ and bilateral sleeping platforms and just leaving it at that, you are suddenly curious to know “what else might it represent?”. Then I go on and illustrate my micro-stratigraphic analysis of Benson houses – e.g. House 1 – to show it is most plausibly interpreted not as a linearly bilateral arrangement at all, but as two extended families, on living in each end of the house, with a ‘mediating space’ in the centre.Hu Experience in another cultural region, or a completely different time period, and working in a different intellectual tradition can all have the effect of lifting you out of what is often a very narrowly focused, and unimaginative local paradigm. And the fact of the matter is that almost all archaeology is done within a local or regional context, and each region, be it a “culture area” or a modern region, or even a time period within it, tends to develop its own particular tradition of archaeological enquiry. Over time, certain kinds of questions about the past become just the accepted kinds of questions to ask, and certain kinds of answers, or sources of answers, likewise become accepted as the norm. This is not necessarily a bad thing in every respect: having a strong intellectual tradition and heritage can be a great asset. But it’s important to recognize the extent to which it can also be very limiting. Being forced to ‘start again’, in a new ancient cultural context or in a new intellectual milieu, will be a great aid in overcoming those limitations.