The Ingredients (The Sources)
By Rob Paton 

My cooking analogy is particularly relevant when discussing the sources I might use to address my topic. I liken it to opening my fridge, my pantry and my spice cupboard at the one time and staring wide eyed at the potential ingredients.  It certainly brings to mind my first few months of research where everything I pick up, watch on television or read in the papers seems to be relevant. But like good cooking, I remind myself that the meal directs the ingredients. The ingredients themselves are there to be interrogated and with care they can be selected and combined. In our readings, and in the classes, it was interesting to see the freedom, tempered with careful precision, which was used to select and interrogate the sources.

Again, I prefer not to review each paper and class, but instead focus on one example and then refer the lessons back to my own research.

I have chosen environmental history. The choice was not necessarily made because of its particular relevance to my topic, but because of the interesting and wide range of sources used by Tom Griffith (2010), and the delightful paper by Cronon (1992) on the histories of the Dust Bowl.

I was struck by how both Griffith and Cronon added a kind of vibrant life to objects (in this case the ice and the Dust Bowl), through the graceful combinations of scientific, oral, visual and archival sources. Griffith uses a combination of these sources to add a political flavour to his history, using the sources to make a compelling case for an ecological rather than environmental view of ice, which intimately involves humans. I recall the class discussing whether it would be possible to write a history from the same sources, promoting a climate skeptics point of view.  The answer was yes. However, Griffith made what I thought was one of the most important points of the session: as a historian you need to be honest about the sources by making explicit how they were being used and the purpose of the history.

Cronon’s paper was a real pleasure to read in terms of the use of sources.  His analysis of the divergent histories of the Dust Bowl using the same sources was compelling. He reinforced Griffith’s point that divergent histories can be written honestly using the same sources, depending on the point of view of the writer. Martin Thomas (2003) makes the same point in his book Imagining the Blue Mountains where he uses cliff top lookouts as a metaphor to analyse the way the same landscape can be imagined in a variety of ways by different observers or even by the same observer.

Turning to how these readings (and various others) caused me to reflect on my own topic and use of sources, I again draw on my cooking analogy.

Being a moderately capable cook I can quite easily make a spaghetti bolognese or a meat curry using identical ingredients in different ways. Both meals will be good, honest dishes with no compromises made. So where does that leave me in terms of being selective, precise and honest with my sources?  If I can make any history from my sources, am I simply adrift? (This is my recurring 2am in the morning question!). The answer is clearly no, because the source types and how they are used is intimately directed by my topic. To illustrate how this actually works, I would like to revisit a paper I wrote for World Archaeology in 1994.  For me this is still an important paper, because its contents, sources and structure relate closely to my present field area and relate directly to parts of my current topic.

The paper, Speaking Through Stones, is in some sense my first attempt to historicize the deep past by adding human agency via sources such as oral evidence, archival sources and more traditional archaeological metric data to help interpret very old stone artefacts. In summary the paper looks at the ritual uses of a class of stone artefacts called leilira blades (very long quartzite spear points), common in the central and northern parts of the Northern Territory. Evidence suggests that these have probably been made at quartzite quarries for about 3-5000 years. They were certainly made right up to the present as I recorded some men making them on film in the central Northern Territory. My argument in the paper is that these blades had no utilitarian function in the classic economic sense: they were not used for cutting, chopping, or hunting. Instead these blades were manufactured from only certain ritually important stone sources; they were then traded in elaborate initiation ceremonies covering vast distances; they were then deliberately destroyed once their symbolic function had been fulfilled.

The paper brought into question many traditionally held assumptions about hunter gatherer uses of stone “tools”. While this is interesting in many ways, what is perhaps of most interest here is the combined use of ethnographic oral evidence, film, archaeological data and archival sources to build my argument. In many ways I can now see the failings of this paper more than any modest success that it may have had.  What it lacks I believe is any analysis in terms of the history of science, or more precisely the architecture of knowledge at the boundary between science and history. It also glosses over important oral evidence that I had collected, and instead it uses what I sometimes call “Aboriginal bedtime stories”.  These are cute abstracts of myths that at the time (and for a largely British audience) I used to add some colour to the text.  That is not to say these oral mythologies are not important in the argument.  But at the time I failed to use this source as effectively as I could.  I think I am also guilty of a similar misuse of written historical evidence, which I simply cite rather than fully analyse.

Regardless of the deficiencies of the paper, I think its argument still holds together as a history of this class of artefacts. Many archaeologists argue, however, that the paper is fatally flawed as a piece of science, on epistemological grounds, because of its use of historic sources. With my consent (and encouragement) the paper is in fact still used as a teaching tool by archaeological “scientists” as an example of the gap between history and archaeology and to highlight the problems of using ethnographic and historic sources. I still hold a strong belief, reinforced by my present research into how historians actually use sources, that a case can be clearly made for a deep history whose strength is its hybrid character.

The Method (The Methodology)

There are very many methods of cooking, most of which have been known since antiquity. These include baking, roasting, frying, grilling, barbecuing, smoking, boiling, steaming and braising. A more recent innovation is microwaving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking

At this point I have to confess to being a little wicked. By framing this essay as an analogy I have been trying to show something of the strength of the analogical method of interpretation. My reason for doing this is because it is one of the main methods I plan to examine in my thesis, and hopefully use to bind the sources together at the boundary of history and archaeology.

I was relieved and impressed by the way historians use analogy and narrative to coalesce different sources in a precise and structured way.  For example, Kynan Gentry’s (2004) paper on Cape Kidnappers is a subtle exercise in mental gymnastics, combining landscape history, the history of place, along with traditional archival sources. This easy read belies his sophisticated method of intertwining sources into a clear narrative.

Methods of presenting and analyzing history can also be innovative (like the microwave). Martin Thomas’ use of film was intriguing.  Film and sound add a dimension that can be lost in the written record. In Thomas’ rushes, for instance, he showed an Aboriginal man who did not speak but whose body language spoke to an unresolved anger. Study of silences like this offer the historian another method of using sources. I found this particularly interesting, having made a few films and recently spending some time at the Victorian College of the Arts studying film as part of my research. I will not pretend I have mastered film in any sense, but there are hints that its use may provide some innovative ways of looking at history.

Critical analysis of method was a point that emerged in the class discussions. Being interested in the history of science/archaeology I have begun to reflect on the changing role of method in studies of the deep past. There has been, I think, a recent retreat to scientific method for methods sake by archaeologists. While this deductive format, what Hiscock (2008) calls “methodological uniformitarianism”, is structurally very elegant, its application to the exclusion of other forms of analysis has to be questioned. Returning to my original analogy, I recall when microwave ovens first became available my parents bought one. My mother, ever an innovator, would for years after the arrival of the new microwave, once a week cook the family roast in it. We were never quite sure if she did this so none of us would ask her to cook for the remainder of the week, or if she genuinely thought a microwaved roast was a good thing. In any case, the analogy speaks for itself.

Questioning methodology at this structural level can be a revealing exercise. It can bring into question, for example, the seemingly safe haven of scientific methodological uniformitarianism.  Take for instance how archaeologists, or even historians, generally treat time.  Most of us assume time is linear and progresses at more or less a given rate.  Our arguments about causation and so forth are generally structured around this premise, and it also helps us know when to meet for lunch.  Many physicists, however, do not think time actually operates this way at all. Nor for that matter is it known that way by all cultures. It would seem that an equally valid way to represent time would be as a flat plane with only a very short arrow of depth leading from the present to the face of the plane. The plane then moves forward, like a wave, and incorporates events and things which then have a spatial relationship to each other. While this may seem at first a bit abstract, it can in fact make sense for past things to sit alongside present things and events. Take the case of the rainbow serpent in Aboriginal oral history. Here rock paintings from several thousand years ago are treated as though they are modern and oral histories explain how these figures are responsible for the creation of things like roads. While we might be tempted to dismiss such stories as mere myth, would we dismiss a similar analysis of a landscape by an archaeologist who discusses site spatial patterning as though all the landscape was created in a limited time period, ignoring most geological antecedents. The answer is, we rarely do question such analyses, which form the bulk of archaeological works in Australia.

Conclusion

Assessing the impact that a course of study, like the Craft of History, has had on a particular topic does not seem like a valid way of recognising its value. What I see as its impact on my topic today will probably not be the same in a year or so: ideas shift, change and sometimes fragment. Perhaps a better way to reflect on the value of the course is for me is to consider if I now see the world a little differently to how I saw it a few weeks ago. The answer is yes. Very little has changed in me physically over that short time: I am a little older and possibly slower, but not noticeably so. So what has changed? I hinted earlier that exposure to the “invisible colleges” of the academy is how knowledge and ideas were once transmitted. I still think this is the case.

References

• Aspinall, E. and G. van Klinken 2011 The state and illegality in Indonesia, in Aspinall, E. and G. van Klinken (Editors) The State and Illegality in Indonesia, KITLV Press, Leiden.
• Cronon, A. 1992 A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative The Journal of American History March  1992.
• Gentry, K. 2004 Cape Kidnappers: A Sanctuary for More Than Gannets, in Department of Conservation Our World Heritage: Discussion Documents Towards a New Zealand Tentative List Department of Conservation, Wellington.
• Griffiths, T. 2010 A humanist on thin ice Griffith Review. Volume 29.
• Hiscock, P. 2008 The Archaeology of Ancient Australia, Routledge, Melbourne.
• Paton, R.     1994  Speaking through stones: a study from northern Australia  World Archaeology. Volume 26  Number 2.
• Shryrock, A. and D. Smail (Editors) 2011 Deep History The Architecture of Past and Present. University of California Press.
• Thomas, M. 2003 The Artificial Horizon:  Imagining the Blue Mountains Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.