A Reflective Essay
By Rob Paton
I thought it worthwhile to post this reflective essay to show something about the development and structure of my part of the Deepening Histories of Landscape Project. To place the essay in context, it was written as part of the Craft of History Masterclass course for post graduates run by the School of History at ANU. The course consisted of a series of eight seminars on different “types” of histories. Each seminar was taught by an expert in the field and we discussed some selected readings. The idea was to reflect on how these different types of histories, and indeed many other sorts of histories, might impact on our own projects.
The essay is therefore not meant to be a highly researched piece, nor is it meant to be a formal account of the entire course and readings. Instead it is an intellectual reflection on where I see my part of the project within the bigger discipline. The course Convener for the Craft of History was Dr Carolyn Strange. I would like to thank Carolyn organising the course and for her patience.
During one of our classes I drew an analogy between what I was gaining from the Craft of History course and the meal I had cooked the night before; bringing to mind the bunch of ingredients I was faced with and the task of making a tasty meal. Although my comment was somewhat tongue in cheek at the time, the point I was making was, I think, an important one and worthy of some exploration.
Creating a good meal is an elegant balance between all of the ingredients, with thought given to combinations and how each plays off against the other. Complexity can be gained through simple delicate tweaks rather than the brutal use of too many spices and condiments, or the overcooking of the ingredients. But perhaps more important is knowing what question you are asking of the ingredients and the cooking methods. In an analogous way, for historians, questions guide the sources as well as methods. Both crafts certainly have rules, both are tempered by skill and both rely on what ingredients are available. Cooking and history also share a natural enemy – prescription – which needs to be fought against rather than safely embraced. As we all know from experience, simply copying a master chefs recipe will not duplicate their meal. Cooking, like history, seems more of a craft where techniques and ingredients are flavoured by passion for the subject and a desire to delight the audience.
I am not a chef. Nor am I a historian at this point. But I am very much an apprentice in the latter discipline. Like many students exploring new disciplines I try to make some sense of things through useful safe analogies. These devises provide a way to understand how newly acquired knowledge is structured and how I might fit in. Analogies are also a way to inspire imagination in a safe familiar harbour. Nurtured by teachers, analogies have proven to be excellent tools for learning abstract concepts. Physics is in fact still taught this way, as was the history of philosophy and the natural sciences when knowledge and ideas were spread and discussed with enormous success in the “invisible colleges” of 17th century Britain.[1]
For me at least, looking at the Craft of History in this way makes sense. It allows me to talk about my own project in easy to understand terms like – a “drizzle” of legal history, or a “dash” of national history and even a “squeeze” of biography. These historic ingredients are, from the accounts of every class leader, not quantifiable concepts. Nor should they be. The main lesson I took with me from our classes was that the sources and methods of interpretation in a good history will flavour that history. These sources and methods are delicately crafted around the questions we are asking, in much the same way a good chef crafts the ingredients and cooking method of a fine meal. The types of histories that are a product of those questions, like good meals, also have regard to the audience.
With considerable care not to refer to myself as “making a meal of my history project” here are some reflections on what I took away with me from the Craft of History.
The Meal (The Questions)
In my various introductions in the Craft of History classes I defined my topic, or the meal I planned to make, as something like this:
I am interested in the architecture of knowledge at the boundary between prehistoric archaeology and history. This interest comes from a sense of unease about archaeology’s increasing dependence on scientific forms of enquiry and the role this seems to play in “dehumanising” the deep past, particularly for Aboriginal people. After more than 30 years working as an archaeologist, rather than retreat from the discipline, it seems more fruitful to me to look for opportunities to engage with this problem. I was lucky enough late last year to be given the chance to join the Deepening Histories project at ANU as a PhD student. This project will allow me to spend the next 3 years exploring this line of enquiry, with a special emphasis on a field area in the Top End of the NT.
Looking at the topic and the Craft of History syllabus I thought that the ethnographic class would be of most interest. Others that caught my eye were classes on memory and biography. The landscape analysis in the environmental history also seemed to have some relevance. These were the “flavours” of my deep history dish. The remaining classes (and you could add many more types of histories to this list) all seemed outside of my field of interest even though I was intrigued generally with how historians worked their craft. This all made some sense to me.
By lunchtime on day two of the course my world seemed a bit less settled. The legal history class made me look back at my topic and reflect carefully on what I was doing. That is not to say I had a sudden epiphany over my lunch causing me to deftly apply a Foucaultian analysis to my topic. I have to confess to not being able to face deconstructing any writing, including my own topic, in the classic post-modernist sense, since I read an undergraduate essay that began “In this post-Foucault world…”. While I do not reject that form of analysis entirely because of this one sentence, I do tend to temper brutal deconstructionism with a desire to question and create.
I have chosen not to churn methodically through each of the types of history we discussed in the classes. This would be far too unfair on the reader. Our teachers, who generously gave their lively accounts also deserve more than to have me “make a meal of them” by tediously reciting their work. And I realise that there are many more types of histories that we did not cover. Exposure to a comprehensive range of histories was in my view not the purpose of the course anyway: it was primarily about us refining and understanding how we think about history. With this in mind, it seems interesting to revisit my topic through legal history. I could equally have chosen political history, public history or any of the other types to illustrate the discussion. To be honest I chose legal history partly because it seemed the most remote from my topic prior to the Craft of History course, but mostly I selected it because it is a poignant entree to introduce the influences of some other types of histories on my topic.
So how can legal history flavour a topic that centres for the most part on things that are prehistoric? The two things seem incongruous. However, the readings combined with the class discussion hinted that my initial impression was well off centre. I had begun to think about my topic in a different way. Examining how this change in thinking came about is worth some discussion.
A few days before the class I had particularly enjoyed reading the piece by Aspinall and van Klinken (2011) on The state and illegality in Indonesia. It elegantly illustrated how law, guided by principles derived from morals, ebbs and flows over us all like a tide defining the boundaries within which we all operate. This left me feeling a bit uneasy and confused about my own boundaries. I had entered what has been referred to as “nervous country”: a potentially dangerous place where the ground shifts under you and survival relies on re-thinking the world. I discussed this feeling of unease with one of my classmates over a long lunch (the long lunches are indeed a good thing!). The conversation threw up two related questions, that our legal history readings and class discussion had also made me aware of in relation to my topic: who owns the past? And what is authentic?
The question about who owns the past arose from the statement in my topic that archaeologists were “dehumanising” the deep past. This premise developed from an analysis of Peter Hiscock’s (2008) Archaeology of Ancient Australia, the most recent and most widely accepted text on the deep past of Australia. A quick read of Hiscock’s book leaves the initial impression that it is a good, substantive volume on what we currently know about the archaeology of Australia – a book about a particular place and time. Certainly, this has been the overwhelming response of most reviewers. But I think this misunderstands the prime purpose of this book. Hiscock’s work is subtly more than just a good review of the current literature. Like Shryrock and Smail’s (2011) historic text, Deep History, it focuses on the architecture of knowledge at the boundary between the traditionally defined disciplines of history and archaeology (roughly speaking the time when written records begin). Unlike Deep History, however, Hiscock argues for a structural separation of history from archaeology. He maintains that to see the past through the “veil of history” means degrading the deep past, particularly by interpreting archaeological remains in terms of crude ethnographic analogies from the present. He argues that the deep past may have been so very different from anything we know today, that it should ideally be interpreted through means as closely bound to scientific laws as possible, or as he describes it, through “methodological uniformitarianism”. Using this method, for example, stone artefacts are analysed in terms of patterns of mechanical fracturing rather than as tools that may have been used for things such as cutting or symbolic purposes. Hiscock’s method populates the past with metrical patterns that are only by necessity connected to human behaviour, because humans had to be there as agents for fracturing the rock.
While this argument may seem fairly innocuous and only bothersome to a handful of academics, at the heart of it lies a profound legal problem with wide ramifications. Effectively, methodological uniformitarianism makes the deep past terra nullius: a land belonging to no one. The rejection of ethnographic analogies and historic analysis in nearly all its forms breaks the association between the deep past and historic people, particularly Indigenous Australians. In doing so legal claims to lands, sites or even ancestry are brought into question.
Questions of legal authenticity of sites, places and objects are also raised. The claim archaeologists themselves place on the deep past through the rejection of historic analysis means that they also define what is real, or authentic, under law. In most Australian States and Territories, for instance, it is archaeologists’ who define and authenticate what constitutes the stuff of the deep past. Indigenous people are usually involved in the fieldwork, but their legal claims are nearly always via the archaeologists’ version of the deep past. For example, in a recent dispute in Tasmania where I was working as an archaeologist, I was asked to determine the significance of a piece of land that was being disturbed by a major bridge development. Like all other places in Australia archaeological sites in Tasmania are protected under law subject to proviso for their legitimate destruction via a permit system. Nowhere are Tasmanian Aboriginal people mentioned in this legislation. The assessment of the site is entirely a matter under law for a qualified archaeologist subject to the endorsement of the State Heritage Unit. I mention this project because it has a direct bearing on my thesis. It was the project that caused me to seriously question the role of archaeological science investigating and authenticating the deep past (the site ended up being very old – in fact the oldest most southern expansion of humans during the Pleistocene). The Tasmanian Aboriginal community asked me to work with them on this site as a test case to challenge the law, particularly the role that Aborigines play in site significance assessments and site management. The public face of this test case was the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s Legal Director, Michael Mansell. As well as being a lawyer, Michael has been a high profile Aboriginal activist since the 1960s, having been involved in campaigns for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights. His involvement in the archaeological test case meant that my archaeological work would have a high public profile in all types of media (magazines, radio, newspapers, television). In parallel the Aboriginal community ran large public protests with numerous arrests resulting. Intervention of the state and federal governments meant that the site was partly disturbed. But ultimately the result has been that the state government is reviewing its heritage laws in partnership with the Aboriginal community.
For me the Tasmanian project made me question deeply my own role in the process and led me to develop my thesis topic which I have shown to be flavoured by: a large dash of public history, a squeeze of interesting biography, a pinch of political history, a twist of national history and large dollop of legal history and the history of science. The Craft of History course caused me to again reflect on these influences on my topic and the breadth and depth of questions it is asking. Balancing these questions to produce an elegant and interesting history also requires me to carefully consider the sources and methods I might use.
[1] As an aside this is an interesting point. I have a long standing fascination with how we teach at universities: how knowledge is transmitted and developed. Observing our Craft of History classes I was reminded of readings from many years ago about the workings of the Invisible Colleges of 17thBritain. I think these Colleges still exist within our universities (as illustrated by the Craft of History course) and are wonderful ways of introducing scholars to ideas. So, in part, some of my reflections on the Craft of History, are about the course itself.