Canadian archaeological landscapes and the literary imagination

images, representations, heritage, and the past poetic

Catherine Zagar Anthropology 4G03 Independent Research Supervisor: Dr. Tristan Carter McMaster University

Continued and new projects at archaeologiesensoria.wordpress.com

Acknowledgements

I extend my deepest appreciation to my project supervisor, Dr. Tristan Carter, for his patience, expertise, and shared interest in archaeological representation, and for providing me with the resources for my own academic endeavours between archaeology and literary/ cultural studies. I also extend my gratitude to Dr. Catherine Gris from the Department of English & Cultural Studies for her inspiration on the poetic end of things. I would also like to thank Ola Mohammed, for crunching statistics and helping to deliver a preliminary presentation at the MAS undergraduate symposium.

Abstract

This paper intends to develop a cross-disciplinary analysis of the imagery, or lack thereof, and relative presence of Canadian archaeology in the public imagination, using a recent (2009) survey of attitudes towards archaeology, a survey of the image-focused media outlet of National Geographic magazine, and a survey of landscape and (pre)historical imagery in contemporary Canadian/ Aboriginal literatures. One aim is to address the notion of archaeology as an enactment of the past, existing somewhere between history and memory, in both imagination and physical geography. Another aim is to draw comparisons between Canadian archaeological imagery and the poignant, persistent imagery of Canadian landscapes, (re)imagined by a number of Canadian writers. A final aim is to interweave the literary and archaeological imagination with personal and social enactments of the past, and with the implications of writing history, landscape and memory, in order to move towards an archaeological poetics of what it means to experience and imagine Canadian archaeologies.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
AN INTRODUCTION STATISTICAL METONYMY: ON THE PAGES OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC (THE) CANADIAN LANDSCAPE: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE LITERARY IMAGINED ABSENCE AND NON-HERITAGE: REMEMBERING THE ECO/ ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPACE SOME CONCLUSIONS: IMAGES, REPRESENTATIONS, HERITAGE, AND AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL POETICS IN CANADA DEFINITION OF ARCHAEOLOGY FROM A POET REFERENCES APPENDICES: SURVEY AND NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DATA, MAS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM 2010 PRESENTATION SCRIPT 6 14

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47 48 53

FIGURES
1. Photograph of the photographer-archaeologist at Signal Hill, Newfoundland 2. Picturing underwater archaeology in high resolution at Lake Laberge 3. Graph: Survey categories of Associations with archaeology, by number of responses 4. Graph: Survey categories of Associations with archaeology, by percentage 5. National Geographic cover page, November 2004 6. Graph: National Geographic cover stories % located by continent 7. Graph: National Geographic cover stories # located by country 8. Graph: National Geographic categories of archaeological imagery in featured stories 9. Table: National Geographic categories of Canadian archaeology 10. Graph: National Geographic categories of non-archaeological Canadian imagery 11. The rails remember: Picturing memorialized landscapes in Canada 12. Spectral Landscape: Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, World Heritage Site #96. 13. Negotiating the dead and lived spaces: Kogawas childhood home as a Japanese-Canadian heritage site 5 13 18 18 20 21 23 24 25 26 28 36 41

Figure 1. Photograph of the Photographer-archaeologist. Capturing contextual images in an excavation trench at Signal Hill National Historic Site, Newfoundland. The site includes fortifications constructed in 1799, and the project includes the (re)imagination of nineteenth-century lives of soldiers up until World War II. 5

AN INTRODUCTION

What this project is, or what precisely this project means, is an attempt to consider the discourse of images, motifs, and representations (re)produced through the archaeological imagined, and its relationships with memory, rememory1, cultural reclamations2 and in particular the literary reconstructions of historic/ prehistoric, colonial and indigenous pasts on the Canadian landscape. And in considering the vast political/ cultural/ geographic/ imagined/ photographed/ poeticized and continuously negotiated visions of Canadian landscapes, this project is at first an attempt to bring together a number of issues that arise in response to the ways in which the Canadian past and the structures of its heritage and history are imagined and written, and in response to the things that are (or perhaps are not) included in the memorialization of the Canadian landscape; but it is also an attempt to locate representations of Canadian archaeology in parallel with contemporaneous literary representations of the struggles of an often spectral heritage, history and memory that exists in Canada. What must be recognized is the continuous negotiation of the past/ present, and of national, cultural and personal identities with Canadas landscape imagined twice over3: the landscape, in its wild,

Mallot (2006) and Goellnicht (1989) on rememory in psychological, historical and literary studies in which activated bodies on continuously reconstructed landscapes of memory, recreate historical trauma over multiple generations. 2 Smith and Wobst (2005) indicate the sentiment of indigenous archaeologies and the need to reclaim a written colonized past in order to produce a decolonized future. 3 The Journals of Susanna Moodie, Margarget Atwood (1970) on the schizophrenic condition of the (perceived) divided Canadian landscape in literature and colonial history.
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sometimes tyrannous, rugged presenceits thrashing rivers, arctic deserts, purgatorial mountainsand again in an (often historicized) quest for the civilized landscapes of its cities, the perpetual movement of lights, trains and cars, its multicultural metropolis of ascending glass towers and the neat geometry of suburban streets which beat back against the encroaching wilderness. But these landscapes are more than literal representations of contrasting physical geographies. They at once invoke the metaphorical, suggest poetics, and provide means from which we might begin to consider the cultural, ecological, historical, and imagined divides that constitute, problematize, and at least in part embody, the discourses of the Canadian past and its representations of colonial, indigenous, and global/alternative heritages. Thus, the Canadian landscape can be thought of as a liminal geographical space, simultaneously imaginary, and with a number of overlaid cultural, historical, environmental, and experiential spaces available to archaeological imaginings and representations of the ideal/ ideological or contested pasts. That is not to say that Canadian landscape is merely a literal space, the thing one finds when looking out towards the horizon; and that the Canadian archaeological landscape is merely the material potential for reconstructing the past in an excavators trench. But it is to claim a unique situation of real and metaphorical images used to reinforce a series of social meanings: about the past, the present, and potentially the future. This is not a project of landscape archaeology in a literal sense, insofar as landscape archaeology through a number of situations and methodologies stands for the attempt to reconstruct a variety of past activities in which differentially engaged and
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empowered past peoples negotiate and appropriate their surrounding environments (Hicks et al. 2007). Nor do the questions asked so much contain a literal focus on Canadian landscapes and their effects on (pre)historic peoples as they do attempt an examination of the politics of remembered spaces: the past, imagined and represented through a number of vehicles (i.e. archaeology, historical documentation, literature), reveals the political dimensions of landscape between the past/ present, and the potential for embodiment, constructions of social memory, and the memorialization of particular events, peoples, and places on the landscape. By highlighting the permeable boundaries between the past and current notions of heritage and temporality, between archaeological practice, products, and poetics and selectively chosen representations of the past, we can begin to explore the contemporary power of archaeological landscapes born out of the discipline and reconstituted in the public imagination. In studies of archaeology and heritage in Canada, landscape can be used as an organizing feature in order to deconstruct representations of the past (Nicholas 2006). Here, the aim is towards a theoretical position in which the archaeological landscape is reproduced as a place for embodied memories4 and the formation of a number of lived identities and histories, and in which representations of the archaeological landscape reveal and reinforce social memory, and suspend archaeology in material and metaphorical contestations of the remote and remembered pasts. In particular, Canadas vast geographic landscape houses a number of literal memorialized spaces (i.e. UNESCO
4

Hamilakis (2002) on body memory in social, political and ritual landscapes.

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World Heritage and National Historic Sites) in which archaeology takes place, and which invoke a dominant conception of the past; but there are also a number of remembered places that are not explicitly literal, but frequently localized and experiential, passed down through imagined and reproduced structures of social/ cultural/ personal meaning that may or may not include explicitly archaeological notions of physical space and materiality (Strang 2003). But these, too, constitute a landscape on which to project the past: a landscape of codified history, an ancestral landscape, a creative and imagined landscape. These possibilities might be thought of as inherently bound in Canadian identity, as well as in the identities of other settler nations with indigenous populations, wherein the current trend of politicized archaeologies centre on reimagining the colonial and postcolonial projects, national and ethnic identities, decolonization and diaspora, and the personalization of the past (Meskell 2002; Stapp and Longenecker 2005; Wobst 2005). Ultimately the emphasis of this study falls on the Canadian imagination, metaphor, memory and productions of contexts and meanings around Canadian archaeologies. Of equal importance to this study is the role of imagery and literary motifs, identified in and about archaeological spaces and in the negotiation of historic/ prehistoric pasts. In particular, Canadian literature and its writers (whether indigenous, diasporic or culturally mainstream) share with archaeology the burden of narrative, retelling and remembering the past on a socially constructed and often colonial landscape. In literary representation, we find the active deployment of images of the past, which are
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entrenched in the dominant inscriptive attitudes of historicization5 and archaeological thinking; but the rewriting and reclaiming of the past through appropriated (literary/ poetic) means changes the emphasis from inscriptive historical attitudes to memory production through sensory/ embodied experiences. This change actively critiques archaeological representation, which in an attempt at understanding the past differently produces different images and different but simultaneous pasts. Note for example the juxtaposition of indigenous cultural values, represented in a past-poetic form, alongside theoretical and practical texts for indigenous archaeologies (Smith and Wobsts volume): 10,000 years wore this trail deep into the earth A newcomer says: Just think, we are probably the first human beings To ever set foot here ... But I feel the breath of my grandfathers in this place.

(2005: 280)

The use of such literary practices is a debate of the postcolonial projects, of appropriation versus reinforcement of colonial language norms, but it is often clear that the literary imagination can reproduce, and reassign cultural/ political/ personal meaning through its imagery. Writing the past, and the Canadian landscapes which problematize the past, is an enactment of social memory, a claim to identity, and thus the aim is to draw comparisons between archaeological landscapes and the persistent imagery of Canadian landscapes reproduced by Canadian writersto interweave the archaeological and
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White (2004) on the works and dramatic theory of Bertolt Brecht, which indicate historicization as a distinct interpretive attitude of theatrical actors, an attitude which can usefully be translated onto social actors and political landscapes on which the past is staged, performed, and collectively remembered.
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literary imaginations which are given the task of negotiating present Canadian identity through its constructed, contested and remembered pasts.

RESEARCH AIMS Ultimately, the aims of this study follow the examination of material and metaphorical landscapes, and the goal of archaeological representations and the literary imagination in reconstituting a Canadian past on a series of cultural, geographical, and memorialized landscapes. The first section of this study establishes archaeology in a public imagination, to determine what images/ representations of archaeology exist in popular/ dominant (non-academic) discourses the past, from where these images might originate, and what patterns of representation occur in response to things and places selectively remembered. Canadian imagery in the popular imagination is surveyed and placed in terms of popular history, memory, and heritage concerns, noting the relative absence of the archaeological imagined against an ecological landscape that instead inherits and reproduces Canadian identity. The sections following address issues of heritage, history, memory and identity which tend to problematize the presence of Canadian archaeology by drawing representations of the past from both the archaeological and Canadian literary imaginations. The literary motifs of absence, silence, spectral landscapes and negotiation with the dead are borrowed in order to examine the implications of imagining landscape and heritage through archaeological representations of the past. The questions become
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what these images might represent, in blurring the boundaries of history and memory, the physical and metaphorical, ecological and archaeological in the Canadian past; but also what connections can be made between poetic representations of the Canadian past and Canadian archaeologies, between what archaeologists do and how audiences might reproduce an archaeological imagination. The final section addresses the question of how this study might then move towards imagining and experimenting with an archaeological poetics in Canada: one which understands and creatively negotiates multiple approaches to multiple pasts within the ongoing restructuring of new and postcolonial Canadian identities.

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Figure 2. Picturing Underwater archaeology in Canada. Using high resolution photography and video, the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and National Geographic explores sunken 1901 steamer in Lake Laberge, Canada, declaring a preserved GHOST SHIP from the Klondike Gold Rush in the murky depths. Video aired November 23, 2009. 13

STATISTICAL METONYMY: ON THE PAGES OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

This section is dedicated to the statistical analyses which, perhaps surprisingly, have lead up to an engagement with the more abstract realms of representation, metaphor, and memory surrounding Canadian and world archaeologies: beginning with a survey of archaeological attitudes, a sample population of a Canadian university campus, and the image-laden pages of thirty years of the National Geographic magazine, we can begin to comment on the question of archaeology in the public imagination, of the deployment and appropriation of particular images/ representations of archaeological practices and products in particular regions of the world, and of the implications of Canadian identity and Canadian imagery linked to archaeological landscapes: At first, who is the accessible public imagination, and why does this matter? What kind of images/ representations of archaeology exist in the public imagination? Where might these images come from? What patterns (perhaps regional/ geographical, cultural, material) occur in these images, and do they reflect representations of archaeology deployed by the mainstream media? How is Canadian imagery placed in terms of history, memory, and heritage, and finally, how might Canadian archaeology be imagined through these images? Such questions mark a starting point from which this study delves into the relationships between writing and enacting spaces of Canadian, Canada and its multiple associated histories, landscapes of memory, and attempts at reclaiming and reconstructing the past
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within, outside of, and intertwined with the archaeological imaginarythe search for what meanings and memories are reproduced in images (or the absence of images) drawn from these spaces and imagined back onto an archaeological landscape. What is required is a discourse analysis concerning the images of archaeology, like those put forth by Joan Gero (1994), Wright and Levine (2000), and Christopher Tilley (1993); however rather than focusing on critiques of the culture of archaeology and how it might use gendered, patriarchal, politicized, or prestigious images to construct the discipline, the emphasis falls on the relationality of images, stereotypes, and representations moving back and forth through archaeological discourse and the public imagination. How does (or can) one affect, and how is one affected by, the other, amongst the multifarious interplays of (Canadian) nationality, identities, heritage issues, histories, and memorialized places that come to constitute the real/ imagined archaeological landscape? In 2009, a survey of Attitudes towards archaeology was conducted at McMaster University, based out of a class study of Archaeology in Popular Culture (see Appendix A). Students in this course, as well as McMasters Introduction to Prehistory Course, were invited to answer questions regarding their age, gender, ethnic/ cultural affiliations, exposure to archaeology in the media, and countries and things (translated into descriptive images) they imagined and associated with the practice and products of archaeology. Students then extended this survey to members of the university campus to create a sample population that would represent a particular type of public imagination, with the demographics as follows:
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The population sample was made up primarily of university students, of which 59% were female, and the majority of which were between the ages of 20 to 24. Sixty-seven percent identified their ethnic, national, or cultural affiliations as primarily Canadian, and several including multiple/ mixed ancestry in addition. Eighty-one percent identified their primary occupation as student. Already, the data problematizes the notion of a public imagination: it may be safe to conclude that the majority of respondents are educated young adults, likely from middle and upper class sections of Canadian society, and the same populations that would likely have an interest in the archaeological past, those that would visit museum exhibits and perceive the need to socially and temporally contextualize the past in ways that relate to the present (Canon and Canon 1996; Merriman 1989). But this population may likely, in the university setting, also encounter issues of heritage, identity, and the Canadian past through other popular, literary, representational and critical media. Nonetheless: From all those asked to list a country they associated with archaeology, only 5% of respondents listed Canada (although a surprising 7% appeared to imagine that Africa is a country). The most popular responses were Egypt, listed by 47% of respondents, and Greece, listed by 11% of respondents. It might also be of importance to note that of the 8 respondents who identified some kind of indigenous/ Native American cultural or ancestral affiliation, including Mtis, (just under 2% of the sample population), only one listed Canada, while two

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indicated no response, two noted that any country could be associated with archaeology, and three listed archaeology abroad in Rome, Egypt, and Iraq. What comes to light is the relatively minute representation of indigenous/ Native American populations within the survey population, and also within mainstream representations of Canadian heritage and history, and the often silenced or diverted issues of remembering, representing, and reclaiming a pre-colonial/ indigenous past within a colonial structure of history (for example, Carter et al. 2009 on the underrepresentation of indigenous histories in the media and Ontario school curricula). Finally, this study came to focus on things listed that respondents associated with archaeology (Figure 3). While almost 50% of the images produced were of things (objects like shovels, rocks, pottery and khaki clothing), the responses indicate a general trend towards archaeology imagined: the popular image appears to be that archaeology is made up of characters (primarily of the Indiana Jones type) who dig up things (which often include dinosaur bones), primarily located in Egypt. In addition to these results, at least 60% of respondents indicated that they were influenced by the images of National Geographic and the Discovery Channel at some point in their lifetime. But while perhaps the survey echoes popular media representations of adventurer archaeology, beneath this another level of representation, and a different pattern of imagery, also occurs: archaeology imagined is also bound up largely in physical places,

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monuments, and the dead, remains imbued with abstracted and recurring meanings of ethnicity, history, heritage, and a continuous remembering of the past.

Associations with archaeology by # of responses

Things Abstract ideas Characters Digging Human Remains Places Monuments Dinosaurs Egypt Institutions Tombs Actions 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Associations with archaeology, by %

Actions Tombs Institutions Egypt 2% 2% 3% 4% Things 18% Dinosaurs 5% Monuments 5% Places 8% Human Remains 11% Digging 12% Figures 3 and 4. Categories of things associated with archaeology, by number and percent of responses.

Abstract ideas 16%

Characters 14%

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A recent paper presented at the OAS Symposium in Waterloo ON (Carter et al: 2009) used a part of this data to question the lack of representations of Canadian archaeology in comparison to the significant popular emphasis on ancient Greece and Pharaonic Egypt, looking primarily at the influence of the popular media and school curricula to explain this phenomenon. But this current study (presented here) aims to take the analysis further in terms of what these representations (or lack thereof) indicate about the political, cultural, and historical landscapes of Canada. Associations with archaeology were grouped based on the images they reproduced, and following Carter et al. (2009), these archaeological images were compared at first to those reproduced by a major media outlet which appeared to influence the majority of respondents: National Geographic. How individuals and communities structure the past has a significant effect on what images are presented for the public imagination; thus, these structures (including codified systems of identifying and reproducing social meaning, i.e. things that should be remembered/ forgotten, things that are accorded social importance or elicit emotive responses) might be traced in patterns of images reproduced by forms of social media (Smith 2006; Holtorf 2006). In line with this reasoning, Smith (2006) notes that statistics measuring the circulation of popular publications that present archaeology to the public can be used to estimate the impact of media images on the types and concerns of archaeological landscapes found in the public imagination. For example Smith cites: Archaeology magazine, the publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, reported in 1994 that the magazine had a circulation of over 200,000, double that of a decade earlier. More recently that number has
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increased to 215,000 with an estimated actual readership of some 600,000. In the same period the half-hour Archaeology television series, which aired on the Discovery Channel in the United States, reached some 2,044,000 homes and an estimated 2,590,000 adults. National Geographic magazine reports some 9,000,000 readers. (2006: 127) In Canada these statistics likely differ; however a majority of Canadian-identified survey respondents indicated that they also read National Geographic magazine; and because Gale research lists National Geographics subject headings as primarily Geography with Archaeology second, and exploration and discovery, social sciences, history, and anthropology afterwards, this study used a survey of over 300 issues of National Geographic to pursue the questions of where and what images of archaeology are produced by the popular media, for consumption and reproduction in the public imagination. A number of famous images are presented and recalled in the public imagination through the vivid gold-framed covers of National Geographic, and within its covers, thousands more pages are laden with poignant visual imagery, all likely reproducing a number of socially coded values and assumptions about the importance of selected social and historical forces (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Negotiations of American social values at work on the cover of National Geographic, November 2004. Two sets of contradicting but self-perpetuating values, humanist/evolutionary scientific and traditional Christian ideology are reinforced through popular media. 20

Between 1980 and 2010, there were a total of 49 archaeological cover stories featured by National Geographic, in which 31% visually located archaeology primarily in Africa, and 29% in North America. However, when the data is expanded to include the countries in which archaeology is imagined, it becomes noticeable that the majority of images are drawn from Pharaonic Egypt, while North American archaeology becomes a space of the Maya pyramid-building civilizations and American colonial history (see Figures 6 and 7). It should be noted that the location of imagery produces a great deal of meaning, and perhaps, in perpetuating the long-drawn fascination with Ancient Egyptian culture, also reproduces American civic history and identity built on appropriated and consistently memorialized symbolisms of knowledge-seeking grand civilizations, mysticism, wealth, luxury and immortality (Brier 2004; Roth 1998). When data on the

National Geographic 1980-2010; 49 archaeological cover stories, % distributed by continent

South America 4% Australia 0% Europe 14%

numbers, locations, and types of archaeology in featured National

Africa 31%

Geographic stories are included, there are also

North America 29%

Asia 22%

notable similarities in patterns of imagery recalled, between

Figure 6. National Geographic cover stories located by continent.

things listed by survey respondents associated with archaeology, and National

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Geographics persistent imagery. Both sides are bound up in notions of place, memory, and identity: ancient and historic monuments, ruined cities, the spread of civilization and empire, and the dead who bring with them questions of ancestry and heritage. Finally, there is a dominance of the category of underwater archaeologyfollowed closely by burials, tombs, and human remains, suggesting that perhaps the imagery is meant to represent significant processes of recovering, remembering, and renegotiating things that have been buried into memory. In over 40 National Geographic visits to underwater archaeological landscapes, a great number of them are re-visitations to the wreck of the Titanic, whose resting place is ultimately a site both of continuous re-imagining of a historic tragedy and the personal negotiations of relatives and descendants had with the memorialized dead (Figure 8). But since the survey respondents primarily identified themselves as Canadian, questions must be asked of Canadian identity and history in popular representation. What values are imagined and reproduced on Canadian landscapes of politics, culture, history, and memory? Over the last thirty years, representations of the Canadian archaeological landscape have been few (only eight), and categorizable into underwater archaeology focused on historic and prehistoric shipwrecks, historic exploration of the Canadian wilderness landscape, and ethno-archaeological studies of indigenous/ Native American past populations (Figure 9).

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National Geographic 1980-2010: archaeological Cover Stories, in 27 countries, distributed over 5 continents (Australia excluded)
SA Peru Argentina United States NA Mexico Guatemala Canada Yugoslavia Italy Greenland EU England Czechoslovakia Croatia Bulgaria Turkey Russia/ Sibera Pakistan New Guinea AS Mongolia Jordan Israel Iran Cambodia Sudan South Africa AF Morocco Ethiopia Egypt (Pharaonic) 0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Figure 7. National Geographic cover stories located by country 23

National Geographic 1980-2010; categories of archaeological imagery

"Culture" Underwater Historical (western) Cult and religion Other Monuments Art Ancient cities Cultural heritage Treasures Ancestry (including hominids) Human remains, tombs, burials Civilization Colonial and empire 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

Figure 8. National Geographic categories of archaeological imagery in featured stories.

When Canadas archaeology made it onto the cover of National Geographic, the focus was either on colonial history or prehistory in the form of European Basque whaling ships, purportedly entering a terra nullius long before Jacques Cartier found his expeditions landing on the New World. Reproduced media emphasis on colonial and European heritage perhaps hints at why there is an absence of Canadian archaeology: National Geographic, in particular, very rarely enters the social and historical landscapes of the Canadian indigenous/ Native American populations, choosing instead the dominant imagery associated with Canadian history and identity. If the data is expanded to include the imagery associated with Canada outside of archaeology, Canada becomes a place represented by cultural heritage questions defined through land-ownership debates, as well as a near polarization of urbanism on one end
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and the wilderness, the arctic, and polar bears on the other (Figure 10). It might be accurate to note that rather than dealing directly with the past, Canada appears to deal with identity through the phenomenon of its landscapes. However, thinking back to the introductory section of this paper, it is necessary to approach the repeated images of Canadian landscapes as more than literal representations of physical geography with highly contrasted characteristics; and by invoking the metaphorical dimensions that these representations might suggest, we may discover patterns of images that reproduce the complex functions of Canadian identity, including the understanding and appropriation of notions of history, heritage, and the remote and remembered Canadian pasts.

Categories of Canadian Archaeology featured in National Geographic, 1980-2010 UNDERWATER 1. Sunken American colonial ship in St. Lawrence River (HISTORIC) 2. Sunken cargo ship in Lake Superior 3. Sunken schooner in Lake Superior 4. Sunken explorer ship in Northwest Passage UNDERWATER 5. Sunken Basque whaling ship off the coast of Labrador (PREHISTORIC) HISTORIC, 6. Camp: first Franklin expedition to the Northwest Passage EXPLORATION ETHNO- 7. Inuit and Viking artifacts in the high arctic /INDIGENOUS 8. Dentalium harvesting on Pacific NWC
Figure 9. National Geographic categories of Canadian archaeological landscapes.

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National Geographic 1980-2010; categories of Non-archaeological Canadian imagery

Tourism Rivers and lakes Cultural heritage, land ownership Cities, urban centres Documenting wildlife Polar bears National Parks Industry Wilderness "adventures" Arctic wildlife 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Figure 10. Categories of non-archaeological imagery in National Geographic.

The deployment and appropriation of particular images/ representations in popular media outlets like National Geographic situate archaeological landscapes in historicized and political structures of meaning. While the art, architecture, and culture of Pharaonic Egypt is easily appropriated to reproduce United States American social values, archaeology, the Canadian past, and Canadian identity appear to have a complex relationship of landscape imagery that represent archaeological concerns of history, living heritage and memory in neutral, often silenced ecological spaces, and in negotiations of the stark division of the urban and wild Canadian landscapes. But within these representations might also be suggested the common misrepresentation of an incompatible social/ historical division between the values of the urban colonialist project
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and of traditional indigenous cultures, locked in a continuous relationship of dominant linear narratives and the disempowerment of minority histories and identities (Wobst 2005; Bruchac 2005). Thus, the Canadian past/ present can be defined as bound within a series of landscapes on which memories are constantly reproduced from any number of incorporative practices (Wallis 2008). Canadian memory is inherited and reproduced on these landscapes, on which the relational identities and the past may be imagined, and on which archaeological notions of space, time, culture and discontinuity may be projected. The remainder of this study then answers to the question of whether these notions are ever imagined and contested outside of the popular media.

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Figure 11. The rails remember: Picturing memorialized landscapes in Canada. Rails cross through the Rocky Mountains and the town of Jasper, Alberta; a provincial landscape that has witnessed contestations of heritage and local/ historical transformations not exclusive from the construction of the Canadian Pacific Rails, to the internment and resettlement of Japanese Canadians during World War II, to the recent development of the Oil Sands industry. 28

(THE) CANADIAN LANDSCAPE: ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE LITERARY IMAGINED

Though it may appear to those outside of the archaeological and literary disciplines that this study takes an interpretive leap from popular archaeology towards the literary imagined, several attempts at comparing archaeological and poetic imagery have already been used as means of approaching issues of heritage and knowledge production about the past: how cultural pasts are imagined and reproduced, how narratives of identity and history (in Canada) are contested by stories situated on past landscapes, and how the genre-blurring of poetic form and archaeological landscapes has created a reflexive written experiment between the ways in which archaeology and the past are employed in the literary imagination, and the ways in which the literary imagination critiques archaeological notions of the past (Keil 1992; Evans 1993; Finn 2004; Edwards 2005; Wallace 2004). Thus, it is possible to invoke the values of poetic imagery, motif, metaphor, allegory (the processes of remembering and representing socially meaningful spaces) as literary foil to the archaeological landscape, particularly in Canada where literary representation is an often contested site for colonial, postcolonial and indigenous histories (Edwards 2005). This is not an attempt to point out the differences between the deployment and appropriation of images in archaeology and literature, but an attempt to uncover distinctive characteristics and relationships between the two, in order to come to an understanding of the nature of Canadian landscapes in archaeological representation. These relationships lie in the categorization of objects and places, the memorialization of
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events on the landscape, and the use of monuments, cities, stories, myths, etc., to establish continuity across cultural, ecological, and social environments, and to negotiate dominant discourses with the living and the dead. Another approach which links literary imagery to the images and discourses of National Geographic finds a literary archaeology in the poetic attempt to recreate not only the cultural past but also the cultural present by recycling cultural documents (Keil 1992: 238). Whether from written, photographic or artifactual documentation, social knowledge about the past/ present is encoded and recovered, and deployed on the literary landscape. Poetic images are thus those images in which social meanings, histories, values and narratives are precisely encoded, and those which mimic visual representation, and invoke patterns of sensory/ embodied experiences that reproduce social memory. While Hamilakis (2002) addresses the problems of written discourse within archaeology and pushes away from inscriptive practices, literary and inscriptive forms remain capable (therefore viable) of mimicking and appropriating representations from dominant written discourses (Mallot 2006), in order to manipulate the contemporary power of the archaeological landscape to recreate/ reclaim cultural pasts and affect cultural values of the present. In 1962, Canadian/ Ontarian poet Alfred Purdy wrote of an archaeological site: Standing knee-deep in the joined earth of their weightless bones, in the archaeological sunlight... standing waist-deep in the criss-cross rivers of shadows,
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in the village of nightfall, the hunters and silent women bending over dark fires, I hear their broken consonants... Remains of an Indian Village (2000: 53) The tone, the structure, and particularly the imagery appears to be a symptom of modern rational thought and archaeological awareness. A poetic examination would produce the words archaeological sunlight as a point of enlightenment, a revelation, a beginning of meaning, whereby the rest is read as a descent of dead imagery: the implication that this ruined and unknown past has no words of its own, expresses itself only as broken consonants in discontinuous dark spaces, fire-lit and smoky in contrast to the clarity of sunlight. What surfaces is a reproduction of a modern archaeological notion of knowing the past through rational deduction of material remains. Yet there are different conceptions of the past that surface as well: a contestation/ appropriation of archaeological landscapes in the literary imagination, which critique and reproduce different ways of knowing, and which may be included in archaeology and the politics of the past, in the reproduction of history and self-representation. In Ghosts and Poets at Batoche, Dave Margoshes writes that Outside the museum, the poem begins/ to take shape (2001:109); outside the dominant constructions of heritage, the poetic form, the authors licence of the imaginative and the narrativistic, can become the archaeological production: Now see: theyve found a man in a glacier,
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two thousand years old, or three, with everything intact: shoes, teeth, and arrows, closed eyes, fur hat, the charm he wore to protect him from death by snow. They think he must have been a messenger. (Atwood 1995: 81) The poet notes that the image of the body is still potent and manipulable on an imaginary landscape, like Heaneys Tollund man in the bog, as an archaeological product of ruptured history (Wallace 2004). But who could possibly know the truth in the message this body carried, and along the same questioning, Al Purdys archaeological sunlight would give us little more than a freeze-framed/ simulacrum (Atwood 1995:82) of a past landscape, a transferred attempt to know the past archaeologically easily becoming a projection of the dominant cultural present. And there are other responses to Al Purdys literary archaeology: translucent stone murmured of my beginnings cried out for my return to sunlight urged me to bring memory forward compelled my circle to complete the round curve of mountains face (Fife 1999: 305) Here, it is the archaeological artifact that cries out for the poets memory on a familiar landscape of lived heritage; the poet contests her memory against that of the stone, and insists that it is she, rather than the stone object, that is a part of the memorialized landscape. Purdys modern knowing of the past is now contending with other notions of archaeology, with other memories, histories, with the identities of those silent women (2000: 53) and the many silenced indigenous pasts. The poet writes,
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I have become so many mountains... So many ancestors So many photographs carried in my lungs So many landscapes. (Fife 1992: 307) So many landscapesthe geographic, archaeological, literary, imagined become sites for negotiating cultural values and forms of remembering. Here, particularly in the divide between the modern archaeological approach to material study and the indigenous/ alternative ways of knowing the past (Wobst 2005), the archaeological and the literary converge on a liminal political field outside of the museum, and quite possibly outside of traditional discourses of history. What this means, ultimately, is that the poetic form can create and appropriates images from the archaeological landscape, whether they are bodies or stones or mountains, and use them to reflect back on dominant representations of the past.

LITERARY MOTIFS: SILENCE, SPECTRE, AND THE DEAD Another possibility lies in the use of literary motifs (repeated images) to examine archaeologys relationship with Canadian history, heritage, and the past. A number of authors note that Canadian literature is entrenched with uncertainties around historic narrative and national and cultural identity formation, and that these uncertainties often exist in relationship to the Canadian past as it is imagined and reproduced on the landscape (Atwood 2002; Edwards 2005; Kogawa 1994, 2003). What surfaces in poetic imagery therefore echoes popular archaeological representations: the images that are
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excluded (i.e. from National Geographic), or reproduced silently on neutral ecological landscapes, hint at the uncertain histories of indigenous and diasporic cultures that trouble Canadian memory, identity, and heritage, and become the embodiments of the literary motifs of Silence, Spectre, and our negotiations with the dead. What Kogawa (1994) writes is the archaeological and historical silence that exists not only for indigenous pasts, but for diasporic communities and minority histories as well. Any number of communities (like the Japanese-Canadian communities displaced during World War II, of which Kogawa was a part) remember silently, but are obsessed with history/ and always scratching for clues (2003a: 135) on the archaeological surface. But it is, almost surprisingly, the dominant discourse of multiculturalism that silences the multifarious voices of the Canadian pastwhat does not appear in archaeological representation are the sites we wish to forget in order to maintain political ideologies of multiculturalism and globalization and the guise of equal cultural empowerment. Thus, heritage sites like the Kogawa family house (Figure 13), and the sites of Algonkian placemaker stories (Bruchac 2005) and the remains of abandoned villages (Purdy 2000) are left to be remembered by only those who experienced discrimination, social injustices, or the silencing of their cultural histories and identities: your words dart among the pebbles in the confines of my mind. i close my eyes for love of newborn guppies and flounder silently, the village heavy in my veins. (Kogawa 2003b: 105)

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The gothic Spectre, that of national literatures struggle with uncertain cultural identity, makes appearance as well, haunting the archaeological landscape and forcing the imagination to confront continuously our negotiations with the dead. Wobst notes that archaeological notions of space often imply that the centre of archaeological attention has been uncoupled from the temporal continuum of lived space and transformed into discontinued, dead, archaeological space (2005: 22); consequently, in representations of the archaeological landscape, we are left without anchors on the landscape for establishing a continuous identity, and we are left with the dead whose persistent remains we grapple with for ancestral ties and the definition of a heritagewe are left with a spectral landscape which remembers often more than we would like. Atwood writes that the poetic imagination, too, shares a fascination with such hauntings and with the Underworld, that dead space which lies beneath the surface, and is therefore motivated by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead in order to negotiate the past: to make a connection, to fulfill a contract, to reproduce some insinuation of permanence or reconciliation, some uninterrupted social meaning, in the telling of a story (2002: 156). But while Gothic speculation only highlights the difficulty in producing a continuous narrative from the archaeological dead, perhaps digging up remains and relating them back to the soil, to each other, and to ourselves, might result in a grounded embodiment of the Gothic fancy on the Canadian landscape, and the production of a different kind of awareness of the past, found in contested, lived, and relational archaeological spaces (Wallace 2004).
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nn

Figure 12. Spectral Landscape: Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, World Heritage Site #96. Boundaries are blurred between the sites visible geographic, ecological, and archaeological features: a landscape on which the remains of the dead persisttheir marked trails, buffalo bones, and abandoned campare used to reproduce a landscape oriented sense of heritage and identity. 36

ABSENCE AND NON-HERITAGE: REMEMBERING THE ECO/ ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPACE

The absence of Canadian archaeology in popular imagination is perhaps posed by the representational divide between the urban/ wildernessthe colonial project/ untamed landscapethat almost always excludes the remembrance of indigenous experiences. This absence may also be confounded by non-archaeological representations of (indigenous) cultural heritage defined primarily through land-rights disputes, and images of traditional land exploitation on ecologically governed cultural landscapes. But absence can also imply a very strong imagined presence, enforced by its nonrepresentation and spectral nature. And it appears that in the popular and literary imagination, it is the ecological rather than archaeological landscapes that inherit and reproduce Canadian memory, and that are given the task of negotiating Canadian identity over the discourse of historical narratives. The result is the striking presence of nonheritage in a (seemingly) neutral political and cultural space, and at the same time a reproduction of dominant ideological narratives concerning Canadian space twofold: the first as clearing space in the countrys wild interior for the establishment of the civilized city and its ordered streets and easily negotiable geographic spaces (Atwood 1970), and the second as the ever-problematic Canadianmulticultural project that, in constructing tolerance policies rather than those of acceptance often silences heritage and multiple voices in pursuit of a space of national unity. Canadian landscapes, and in
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particular the Canadian wilderness, are contrasted against projects of urbanization, which, while inherently representing the colonial project, may also reveal and reproduce social meaning and memory through interactions with the ecological landscape. Atwood recalls the difficulty of speaking about absent, or spectral things, and turns to ecology as a form of remembrance, of story-telling, and of the poetic creation of cathexis of environment6: Talking was difficult. Instead we gathered coloured pebbles from the places on the beach where they occurred. They were sea-smoothed, sea-completed. They enclosed what they intended to mean in shapes as random and necessary as the shapes of words. (1998: 59) Thus, she suggests the possibility of the imagined eco/ archaeological space, which perhaps is not at all a neutral political or cultural space, but one in which differing and contesting heritages and histories are aptly buried, if only to maintain the image of national unity. However, if landscape is used, particularly in a literary archaeology, as an organizing feature for the real and metaphorical images that convey the Canadian past/ present, then all archaeological sitessites in which memories are stratigraphically imagined, experienced and reproducedwhether represented or not in popular imagination, become historically and culturally codified in the context of the ecological environment, its transformations and representations (Nicholas 2006).Finally, it is also
6

See introduction of Stewart and Strathern (2003); cathexis in this sense is defined by an emotional investment or concentration in a thing, person, or idea.
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likely that the consistent representations of a Canadian wilderness identity makes it easier to construct boundaries between the past and present, and therefore between colonial history and indigenous pasts, by echoing the already deeply entrenched boundaries between wilderness and urban spaces. So finally, what can be drawn from the situation of Canadian identity in ecological landscapes, about the nature of the Canadian past as it is understood and represented archaeologically and otherwise? One interesting point, which is not a conclusion but a starting point for speculation, is that the notion of the ecological landscape brings a contrast to notions of the archaeological landscape in terms of space and temporality. While unbounded wilderness spaces carry with them the concept of cyclic, non-linear, regenerative time, urban boundaries find patterns of linearity and discontinuity in both space and temporal organization. Focus on the latter echoes modern notions of the archaeological landscape; however, the former insists on excavation beneath the past/ present divide, and its focus may even argue for a fundamental shift towards an archaeological notion of dynamic time, which rather than being oriented by linear historical narrative, can be traced topographically over the landscape and through the relationships between people, things, events and places: That is to say that pasts are thoroughly blended into the present; that pasts push back and have an impact within contemporary relations in a multiplicity of ways; and that these relations, these simultaneous transactions are what beget time. (Whitmore 2007: 195)
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Ultimately, the ecological landscape, while projecting cultural and historical neutrality from dominant discourse and the public imagination, may also constitute a space on which to project the past. Particularly in the indigenous worldviews, ecology is integrated with an ancestral, historical, and culturally codified landscape (Wobst 2005; Harris 2005), and can provide the same, differing, or contesting social understandings about the past as the archaeological imagined. Ultimately, representations of the ecological landscape, whether found in the archaeological or literary imaginations, also organize and reproduce the past through relationships of people, things, and their environments, and can provide a critique for archaeologys historicized practices and products, and for the different ways that the Canadian past might be imagined, remembered, and reproduced in negotiation with the multiple cultural/ heritage/ identity concerns of the Canadian present.

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Figure 13. Negotiating the dead and lived spaces. Not long before the Kogawa family house is petitioned for preservation as a heritage site, its entrance was marked for demolition; yet, while the cultural heritage of Japanese-Canadians is now celebrated by multiculturalist community discourse, the remembrance of loss, identity struggle, and violent discrimination is left to the living community who suffered through it. 41

SOME CONCLUSIONS: IMAGES, REPRESENTATIONS, HERITAGE, AND AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL POETICS IN CANADA A number of issues must be brought up around this studys treatment of popular archaeological/ literary representations and relations to Canadian cultural heritage before moving from the representational form of the past-poetic to an archaeological poetics which actively negotiates the complex situations surrounding the experience and understanding of the Canadian past. Easily the first problem is that National Geographic, which formed the core of the data gathered on imagined archaeological landscapes, is an American publication, and is therefore aimed at American values. The imagery deployed comes from a viewpoint outside of Canadian cultural/ ecological/ archaeological borders. Unfortunately, the Canadian counterpart to this publication (Canadian Geographic) has even less to do with archaeology than National Geographics 49 archaeology cover stories in over 300 issues. Yet, this media appeared to consistently reinforce the same Canadian wilderness/ urban landscape divides, suggesting that the perception of ecological phenomena and residual colonialism is internalized in the Canadian viewpoint as well: something well-known to Canadian writers, and returning always to the images in the Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood 1970)the anxious wilderness and the ordered sprawl of civilization which both shape Canadian identity and the ways in which people remember and understand the past. Another issue is almost purely statistical, although embedded in methods of discourse analysis, and yet affects a large section of this study. Following most closely
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the study of archaeological representations conducted by Christopher Tilley (1993), in which he categorizes and counts images deployed by the archaeological discipline, it became markedly difficult to consistently categorize the multitude of related/relational images that came from hundreds of survey respondents and over three hundred issues of National Geographic. In assigning arbitrary categories, how would we prevent the purposeful (biased) categorization of images into easily recognizable patterns? For example, should a movie be thought of as a thing in the same way as rocks, shovels and khaki pants? While no image was categorized more than once, a number of images (i.e. Pharaonic Egypt) fell into multiple previously assigned categories (treasure, tombs, monuments). Wherever possible, these images were placed into a separate category (i.e. specifically Pharaonic Egypt). The aim was to produce a fair distribution of images, with as little overlap as possible, given the often astounding complexity of archaeological relationships. Finally, if the goal is to move from the past-poetic/ poetic literary form and approach an archaeological poetics on the Canadian landscape (again, defined by active negotiation with the multiple available experiences understandings of the past), then perhaps the study focus should describe and incorporate, as much as possible by inscriptive means, the sensory experiences/ emotive properties embodied in contestations of eco/ archaeological spaces. Poetics and poetry in study largely entail the description of the senses, and to an extent, the nature and range of human emotions; yet, there might be concern in approaching the archaeological landscape from the literary imagination, that
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what will ubiquitously surface is a notion of sheer romanticism (like that found particularly in the flighted Gothic fancy of the spectre/ spectral landscape). However, the cultural, political, geographical and liminal spaces that archaeological representation shares with the Canadian literarythe attention to imagination, the movement and breaks of narrative/ story-telling, the continuous deployment/ appropriation of specific, deeply encoded images from the past and from memory, and the reproduction of the cultural past and presentlends this study a solid grounding in a literary archaeology that attempts a joined understanding of the images, contexts and relationships between Canadian identity, heritage, and the past on an eco/ archaeological, colonial/ postcolonial landscape. What we might eventually conclude is that history, memory, and landscape are bound up in the imagery of Canadian archaeology, and that the literary imagination both reveals and contests the dominant archaeological notions of space and time that often work to silence indigenous/ diasporic pasts under the assumption of a larger, singular, or less remotely perceived Canadian identity. Thus, remembering and rememory play a role in what images do or do not surface readily on the archaeological landscape and rather struggle in (poetic) resistance with the politics of imagining and representing the past in a country whose heritage is simultaneously remote and remembered. So what then for an archaeological poetics in Canada? In his Poetics, Aristotle wrote that poetry was cultural mimesis, fundamentally imitation, or representation, of human agency to convey meaning and understanding of the human condition, in the
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present as well as the looking back into the past. Thus, a poetic archaeology might be less concerned with what archaeologies might be, but with what archaeologies might do (Russell 2006: 27). And within the Canadian landscape, where there exist multiple identity, political and historical dividesbetween wilderness, urban space, colonial discourse, multicultural discourse, indigenous experiences, diasporic experiences, ancestral claims and transnationalityit becomes visibly necessary for archaeologies to become poetic, rather than passively narrative: to become active participatory interventions in the world which attempt to render meaning through the representation of beliefs in the past (Russell 2006: 27). Like indigenous efforts for reclaiming the past through decolonizing literatures, perhaps what is required is a further decolonizing of archaeological theory, practice, and representation. What is at stake is not only the materially preserved but also the bodily experienced and remembered that contribute to multiple ways of knowing the past, at once summoned by the current postcolonial projects of restructuring new/ reclaimed identities on the Canadian landscape. Another point of departure might be an emphasis on relationalitybeginning from the excavators attention to the soil and the distribution of remains within itin the ways that past peoples, events, and landscapes are perceived archaeologically, and in the ways that archaeological landscapes are represented within larger discourses of the past, cultural heritage, identity, and perhaps appropriately in Canada, indigenous experience/ personal/ decolonizing literatures. Thus, what might be imagined and experimented with

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as archaeological poetics is a sensitivity to the grounds elegiac capacity for recording and memorializing vanished histories and personal loss (Wallace 2004: 30). Thus, within these poetic notions, the possibility exists for the transference of the literary imagination onto the archaeological landscape, where cathexis/ mimesis are achieved through attention to the metaphorical/ representational forms of excavation, documentation, mapping, etc. carried out by the archaeologist. These practices are also reproduced by the creation of spaces for history, heritage, and active remembering through the deployment/ contestation of narrative authority, realism, authenticity, allegorical representation, and the sublimepractices which provide the possibility not only for reconstructing the past in an active way, whether in archaeological or literary imagination, but also for interrogating the past in terms of postcolonial discourses through multiple layers of social meaning, memory, lived heritage and non-heritage. These possibilities can be summed up as the engagement of the archaeologist with invention; non-identity and the necessity of going beyond what I have found; being drawn into metaphor and allegory. As an archaeologist, what constructions might I make? If the facts slip away so easily, how might I represent the past? (Shanks 1992: 180) These are ultimately the concerns of an archaeological poetics, within and outside of the Canadian landscape.

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ARCHAEOLOGY a poetic act, a conjuring of images and memory, a stratigraphic layering of meaning over a specific time, a space, an event, a sensory record of bodies reacting, of a thought that fills and [infinite] blank instant, the meticulous arrangement of symbols of who we might be and what we have experienced, the personal, the social, the improbable universal, the constitution of a history, histories, that come crashing together in the earth, only to be dug up again by our fervent resolve to remember.

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REFERERENCES Archaeology at Signal Hill, Newfoundland, Canada 2009 Photograph of the Photographer-archaeologist [image]. Retrieved April 30, 2010 from http://signalhillarchaeology.wordpress.com/. Atwood, Margaret 2002 Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998 Some Objects of Wood and Stone. In The Circle Game. Pp. 58-61. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. 1995 Man in a Glacier. In Morning in the Burned House. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc. 1970 The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Brier, Bob 2004 Egyptomania. Archaeology. January/February. 16-22. Bruchac, Margaret M. 2005 Earthshapers and placemakers: Algonkian Indian stories and the landscape. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Pp. 56-80. New York: Routledge. Cannon D, Cannon A 1996 Archaeology's public: A perspective from two Canadian museums. Canadian Journal of Archaeology 20: 29-38. Carter T, Brown K, Zagar CM 2009 Flying Under the Radar: Canadian/ Ontarian Archaeology in the Public Imagination. Paper presented at the Ontario Archaeological Society Symposium, Waterloo ON, October 17. Edwards, Justin D. 2005 Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press. Evans, Christopher 1993 Digging with the Pen: Novel Archaeologies and Literary Traditions. In Interpretive Archaeology. Christopher Tilley ed. Pp. 417-440. Oxford: Berg.

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Fife, Connie 1999 I have become so many mountains. In Native Poetry in Canada: A contemporary anthology. Pp. 306-307. Toronto: Broadview Press. 1992 Stones memory. In Native Poetry in Canada: A contemporary anthology. Pp. 305-306. Toronto: Broadview Press. Finn, Christine 2004 Past Poetic: Archaeology and the Poetry of W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Toronto: Hushion House Publishing. Gero, Joan M. 1994 Excavation Bias and the Woman at Home Ideology. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 5(1): 37-42. Goellnicht, DC 1989 Minority History as Metafiction: Joy Kogawas Obasan. Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature 8(2): 287-306. Gray, John 2003 Iconic Images: Landscape and History in the Local Poetry of the Scottish Borders. In Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern eds. Pp. 16-46. London: Pluto Press. Hamilakis, Yannis 2002 The Past as Oral History: towards an archaeology of the senses. In Thinking Through the Body: Archaeologies of Corporeality. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow eds. New York: Kluwer Academic/ Plenum Publishers. Harris, Heather 2005 Indigenous worldviews and ways of knowing as theoretical and metholodological foundations for archaeological research. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Pp. 33-40. New York: Routledge. Head-Smashed-in Buffalo Jump n.d. World Heritage Site #96 [image]. Retrieved May 4, 2010 from http://travelphotos.everything-everywhere.com

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Hicks D, McAtackney L, Fairclough G 2007 Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. California: Left Coast Press. Holtorf, Cornelius 2006 Experiencing Archaeology in the Dream Society. In Images, Representations and Heritage: Moving Beyond Modern Approaches to Archaeology. Ian Russell ed. Pp. 161-176. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. Institute of Nautical Archaeology 2009 Picturing Underwater archaeology in Canada [image]. Retrieved April 30, 2010 from http://inadiscover.com/news_events/current/aj_goddard/. Keil, James C. 1992 Reading, Writing, and Recycling: Literary Archaeology and the Shape of Hawthorne's career. The New England Quarterly 65(2): 238-264. Kogawa, Joy 1994 Obasan. Canada: Anchor Books. 2003a For Ben and Malcom. In Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems. P. 135. Ontario: Mosaic Press. 2003b The aquarium has its own silences. In A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems. P. 105. Ontario: Mosaic Press. Mallot, J. Edward 2006 Body Politics and the Body Politic: Memory as Human Inscription in What the Body Remembers. Interventions 8(2): 165-177. Margoshes, Dave 2001 Ghosts and Poets at Batoche. In Purity of Absence. Pp. 108-110. Vancouver: Beach Holme Publishing. Merriman, N. 1989 Heritage from the other side of the glass case. Anthropology Today 5.2: 14-15. Montgomery, Don 2005 Author and poet Joy Kogawas former childhood home [image]. Retrieved May 2, 2010 from http://www.gunghaggisfatchoy.com

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Nicholas, George P. 2006 Decolonizing the Archaeological Landscape: The Practice and Politics of Archaeology in British Columbia. American Indian Quarterly 30(3-4): 350-380. Purdy, Al 2000 The Remains of an Indian Village. In Beyond Remembering: The Collected Poems of Al Purdy. P. 53. Madeira Park, British Columbia: Harbour Publishing. Roth, AM 1998 Ancient Egypt in America: Claiming the riches, in L. Meskell (ed.) Archaeology Under Fire. Nationalism Politics and Heritage in the East Mediterranean and Near East. Routledge, London: 217-229. Shanks, Michael 1992 Experiencing the Past: On the character of archaeology. London: Routledge. Smith, George S. 2006 The Role of Archaeology in Presenting the Past to the Public. In Images, Representations and Heritage: Moving Beyond Modern Approaches to Archaeology. Ian Russell ed. Pp. 123-138. New York: Springer Science+Business Media. Stapp DC, Longenecker JG 2005 Reclaiming the Ancient One: addressing the conflicts between American Indians and archaeologists over protection of cultural places. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Pp. 171-186. New York: Routledge. Stewart PJ, Strathern S 2003 Introduction. In Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern eds. Pp. 1-15. London: Pluto Press. Strang, Veronica 2003 Moon Shadows: Aboriginal and European Heroes in an Australian Landscape. In Landscape, Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern eds. Pp. 108-135. London: Pluto Press. Tilley, Christopher 1993 Prospecting Archaeology. In Interpretive Archaeology. Christopher Tilley ed. Pp. 395-416. Oxford: Berg.
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Wallace, Jennifer 2004 Digging the Dirt: The Archaeological Imagination. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. Wallis, Neill J. 2008 Networks of History and Memory: Creating a nexus of social identities in Woodland period mounds on the lower St. Johns River, Florida. Journal of Social Archaeology 8(2): 236-271. White John J. 2004 Bertolt Brechts Dramatic Theory. New York: Camden House. Witmore, Christopher L. 2007 Landscape, Time, Topology: an archaeological account of the Southern Argolid, Greece. In Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. Dan Hicks, Laura McAtackney, and Graham Fairclough, eds. Pp. 194-225. California: Left Coast Press. Wobst H. Martin 2005 Power to the (indigenous) past and present! Or: The theory and method behind archaeological theory and method. In Indigenous Archaeologies: Decolonizing Theory and Practice. Claire Smith and H. Martin Wobst, eds. Pp. 17-32. New York: Routledge. Wright R, Levine MA 2000 Coswa Corner: Masculinist images of the Archaeologist. SAA Bulletin 18(2). Retrieved April 28 from http://www.saa.org/Portals/0/SAA/Publications/ SAABulletin/18-2/saa7.html. Zagar, Catherine 2008 The rails remember: Picturing memorialized landscapes in Canada [image]. Retrieved April 30, 2010 from authors private collection.

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APPENDIX A: ATTITUDES TOWARDS ARCHAEOLOGY, 2009 The data used to generate population consumption and (re)imagination statistics for archaeology in Canada was produced between 2009 and 2010, with Dr. Tristan Carters courses Archaeology in Popular Culture (2PC3) and Introduction to World Prehistory (1B03) at McMaster University. The McMaster Research Ethics Board granted approval for students to answer and subsequently ask the following questions of a randomly selected sample population on the university campus: 1. Gender: M F No response 2. Age: 15-19 20-24 25-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 60+ 3. Ethnic/ Cultural origins: 4. Primary occupation: 5. Is archaeology important: Y N 6. List five (5) things you associate with archaeology: 7. Name an archaeologist: 8. Name a country you associate with archaeology: 9. Have you ever seen an Indiana Jones movie: Y N 10. Have you ever played Tomb Raider: Y N 11. Have you ever watched an archaeology special on the Discovery channel: Y N 12. Have you ever read an archaeology feature in National Geographic: Y N 13. Have you ever visited an archaeological site/ museum of your own choice: Y N 14. Rank the following in order of importance (1-5): Medicine French Archaeology Engineering Philosophy This data was previously used in a number of 2PC3 student papers as well as Flying Under the Radar: Canadian/ Ontarian archaeology in the public imagination, presented at the Ontario Archaeological Society Conference, Waterloo 2009 by Dr. Tristan Carter, Kelly Brown, and Catherine Zagar (McMaster University).

Download project data in .pdf format at: http://archaeologiesensoria.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/survey1-poparch.pdf

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APPENDIX B: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DATA COLLECTION, 2010 The data used to generate publication and content data on National Geographic magazines was initially produced in 2009, by Dr. Tristan Carter, Kelly Brown, and Catherine Zagar (McMaster University) and presented in Flying Under the Radar: Canadian/ Ontarian archaeology in the public imagination, at the Ontario Archaeological Society Conference, Waterloo 2009. As a result of some errors discovered during the first statistical analyses, the data was recompiled in 2010, using 417 issues of National Geographic, dating from February 2010 to January 1980. The following data was collected: 1. Year, Month, Volume number and Issue number 2. Archaeology cover story: if yes, list Continent Country 3. Number of feature stories in the issue 4. Number of archaeology feature stories in the issue 5. Continent and country depicted in each archaeology feature story 6. Description of focus/ content in each archaeology feature story 7. Approximate date range of archaeological materials in each feature story 8. Description of all non-archaeological feature stories that involve Canada in each issue 9. Comments, description of imagery (including descriptions of cover images)

Download project data in .pdf format at: http://archaeologiesensoria.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/survey2-ng.pdf

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APPENDIX C: MAS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM PRESENTATION (MARCH 30, 2010)

Canadian Archaeological Landscapes and the Literary Imagination

Presented by Catherine Zagar and Ola Mohammed [Slide 1: Title and introduction] (Catherine) Introduction; note this is a combined archaeology and cultural studies project. Ola Mohammed is a combined English & Cultural Studies and Cultural Anthropology student; although she is not directly involved with this project, she acts as a critic off which I bounce ideas, and she also agreed to co-present my work today. I (Catherine Zagar) am a combined English & Cultural Studies and Archaeology student, with interests floating between literature and performance studies, gender, and postcolonial conditions. This presentation is done in the context of my 4G03 project, with the intention that the audience will have some feedback at the end, with which to finalize ideas, fill in theoretical and practical gaps, and draw together the multi-faceted issues of history, heritage, landscape, lineage, memory, and representationinto how we imagine archaeology here. We will begin by introducing some of our research questions, some interesting ideas that arose, and the problems we found in crossing disciplinary boundaries. We will then try to explore a way of using literature and an understanding of various real and imagined landscapes to talk briefly about developing and working with an archaeological poetics. [Slide 2: Research aims] (Catherine) Very briefly, the first set of research questions came from previous classes and the paper that Kelly Brown previously presented (note: this paper was entitled Flying Under the Radar: Canadian/Ontarian archaeology in the public imagination co-authored by Dr. Tristan Carter, Kelly Brown, and Catherine Zagar, presented at the OAS 2009 and MAS 2010 symposiums). 1. What kinds of images of archaeology exist in the public imagination? What public are we defining and why does this matter? 2. Where might these images come from? Do they reflect the representations of archaeology that come from image-focused media outlets? 3. How might Canadian archaeology be imagined?
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Every week these questions seem to change up a bit, revealing another detail that I would love to include, but I think it would be best to talk around the first of these questions for now, since we have such a limited time to talk. So before we take an eccentric or likely unfamiliar leap into poetics and the English classroom, we have some statistics to present, that might ground us in some sanity. [Slide 3: The (re)production of images] (Ola) In Anthropology 2PC3 with Dr. Carter, we conducted a survey of attitudes towards archaeology. The demographics ended up being male and female (but with a larger female population) university students between the ages of 20-24so this is the public whose imagination we would currently be peering into. This survey asked participants to list five things that came to mind when faced with the word archaeology. I was quite interested in the images that they returned to us. When we look past some of the preliminary data dealt with in Kellys paper, that the data tells us that archaeology is made up of characters (overwhelmingly fictitious and primarily named Indiana Jones) who dig up things, many time including dinosaur bones, primarily in Egypt we can see that imagined archaeology is also largely bound up in places, monuments, and the dead, imbued with the more abstract ideas of history and heritage. (See chart on slide.) Our survey also told us that at least 60% of the survey population was influenced by the images found in National Geographic and the Discovery Channel in how they imagined archaeology. Consequently, we went to these media outlets in search of popular representations of (perhaps Canadian) archaeology. [Slide 4: A Survey of National Geographic] (Ola) The images given by National Geographic were harder to categorize than those we found on our respondents survey sheets; however, can find some similarities in the images and patterns of images deployed. There are, of course, the fantastical treasures and art of the classical and Pharaonic worlds, but there is also a fascination with archaeology bound up in the notion of place and spacemonuments, the ruins of ancient cities, the spread of civilization and empire, as well as the dead, whose notion takes up in the ideas of literal, spiritual, cosmic, historic and alternate spaces, and whose present signals the pursuit of ancestry and heritage. All of this is only topped by visitations to the underwater realm, which is made up equally by the many re-visitations to the Titanic wreck, a place where tragedy, memory and death still loom large, and the world-wide hunt for sunken warships and treasure-full galleons.
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[Slide 5: Placing Canadian Archaeology] (Ola) Our final question is how might Canadian archaeology be imagined? In our survey of attitudes towards archaeology, only 5% of the respondents listed Canada as a country in which they imagined archaeology to take place, while a geographically-challenged near 7% imagined that Africa is a country. In turn, our survey of National Geographic returned only 8 featured articles related to Canadian archaeology in over 400 issues, the emphasis on colonial history rather than indigenous histories. With that, we expanded our assessment to include what imagery was associated with Canada outside of archaeology, where Canada appears to be a place of cultural heritage questions, and a somewhat balanced polarization of urbanism on one side and the arctic wilderness and polar bears on the other. What I would like to say is that Canada appears to be a kind of landscape phenomenon. [Slide 6: Some problems we face] (Catherine) But what happened ultimately was that I ended up re-doing the National Geographic survey from the paper with Dr. Carter and Kelly Brown, to produce different statistics, as well as solidify those we produced previously... thinking that I could use them in my current project as a guide; however, I faced a number of problems. Easily the first is that National Geographic is an American publication, and that the imagery deployed comes from a viewpoint ultimately outside of our cultural and ecological borders. Unfortunately, its counterpart, Canadian Geographic, has even less to do with archaeology, and though I did not give up this research avenue, I had a hard time escaping the urban/wilderness landscape divide. What I did not was that a similar duality exists in Canadian literature, thinking back on the Journals of Susanna Moodie, between the wilderness landscape and the urban sprawl of civilization... a very modernist, but also colonial, schematic for the division of the country, which shapes the experiences and histories of the people that remember. Another problem I found was in our method of discourse analysis. Following studies by Tilley and Joan Gero, that analyse images associated with defining archaeology, gender, and ideology, I found that it was not easy to categorize the multitudes of images that came from hundreds of survey respondents and 30 years of National Geographic. In assigning arbitrary categories, how would one prevent purposely categorizing images into the patterns we are looking for? Should movies be sorted into things along with rocks and shovels? And should polar bears stand alone for other reasons except for introducing an amusing interlude into the data?
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Finally, if the goal is to find an archaeological poetics, should the imagery be sorted by the sensory experiences and definitions of place and landscape that they try to mimic? Since poetics and poetry, in study might largely entail (a philosophical) description of the senses... My own concern has been how to approach poetics and imagery, since the mention of poetry ubiquitously evokes the notion of romanticism. Though I like to think that some romantics are the privilege of being a literature student, I would also like to remain in a more tenable realm of study. These are the problems that I am currently working on. However, from here I ended up taking a large interpretive leap, because what jumped out in the categories were the remembered places: monuments, cities, burials, etcthe landscapes that people imagine themselves and archaeology into. [Slide 7: New questions] (Ola) So what we might ask of these images are new questions: 1. What do these images represent? 2. Can any of the so-far lightly tenable links we might see, in placing representations of history and heritage in Canadian literatures alongside representations of Canadian archaeologies, tell us about what we as archaeologists do, and how our audiences might reproduce images of the past and our discipline? 3. Finally, how can this constitute an archaeological poetics? [Slide 8: The Literary imagination as foil] (Catherine) I am ultimately interested in (re)memory, history, and heritage in both disciplines, and since I also work with literature, especially poetry, I want to invoke values of imagery, metaphor, allegory, and the process of remembering and re-presenting spaces. Given this, I introduce the literary imagination as foil to the archaeological imagination not so much to imply that one might foil, or counter the other, but to see if we might find distinctive characteristics in perhaps the categorization of objects and places, the memorialization of events on a landscape: the use of monuments and cities to establish community, in the return to the extension of history and negotiations with the dead, with ancestry and lineages... And what I hope to eventually conclude is that history, memory, and landscape (both physical and representational) are bound up in the imagination of Canadian archaeologies, and that remembering and (re)memory plays a role in what images do or
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do not surface readily on the archaeological landscape, and that writers have known this and they struggle with the politics of imagining and representing things that have passed, and that archaeologists should be aware of this struggle, if not become involved themselves. So what then, for archaeology? [Slide 9: Archaeology: a poetic act] (Catherine) Rather than a conclusion, we leave you with two directions, two definitions, including the always scorned romantic, in hopes that we might introduce a re-imagining of archaeology and the meanings behind the images produced by, and associated with, what it is we do. [Slide 10: A poetics of archaeology] (Catherine) This is how I would end my presentation for now, with a definition and direction given by Michael Shanks in Experiencing the Past. What excites me is the chapter in which these lines (see slide) are an epigraph, and within it the possibility exists for the transference of the literary onto an archaeological landscape, and vice versawhere excavation, documentation, mapping, etc. carried out by the archaeologist is also identified with the roles of creating spaces for history, heritage, and remembering through the deployment of narrative authority, images of realism, authenticity, the sublime, the metaphor and allegory... and therein lies the beginning of a poetics of archaeology that encompasses the multitude of Canadian experiences

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