Thursday 17 November 2011

Plenary Introduction: Climates of Change.

As part of this year's Chacmool Conference "Climates of Change" I was responsible for running the Plenary Session, in which a list of four invited speakers delivered a 45 minute talk on the topic of the conference, from the perspective of their own research. Here is a copy of my opening remarks for you to read and comment on. What do you think of the notion of "progress traps" as I outline here, and as I discussed in class on Wednesday. Is it a useful way of looking at "collapse" in the archaeological record?

This year’s Chacmool Conference Topic: Climates of Change, like many of our past conference themes, is an extremely timely one. In the year since we selected this topic, we have witnessed the Arab Spring, the Economic Crisis in the Euro-Zone, and the election of a majority Conservative Government in our own country.

Over the past year, our University has also produced some cutting edge research into the effects of climate change. One such article, published in Nature Geoscience this past January, proposed the following “what if” scenario.

“What if” we completely stopped using fossil fuels and put no more C02 into the atmosphere? How long would it take to reverse current climate change trends? …..and will things get worse before the get better? Dr. Shawn Marshall and his colleagues ran simulations of these zero emission scenarios and determined that current-warming trends will likely continue, rather than reverse, over the next 1000 years.

We might also ask another “what if” scenario. What if Calgary, Toronto, or New York had to go several months without electricity? One hundred and years ago, this would have been achievable without much suffering, primarily due to the fact that fallbacks were still available – things like hurricane lamps, wood stoves, hand operated well pumps, and so on. However, as we became more and more confident in electricity as a source of power, such fallbacks fell by the wayside. We can no longer revert to these earlier patterns of living because we no longer possess the means of doing so. This is called a “progress trap” and it was first used by a former allumi of the Department of Archaeology, Ronald Wright, in his book “A Short History of Progress”.

A “Progress Trap” is when human ingenuity, which begins as a boon to human kind, creates unforeseen problems of a larger scale– especially when carried to excess, or when conditions change. Unlike catastrophic disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes, this is a kind of slow, creeping disaster than human societies often find difficult to detect. Because of this, the political will to address issues that play themselves out over long periods of time (climate change), is often non-existent. I believe this is due to two things: 1) the pathologically short attention span of present day civilizations, and 2) fear that decisive action might lead to decreases in status and lifestyle.

I bring up Wright’s concept of “progress traps” because I think they neatly tie together the different “climates of change” that define this year’s conference topic – each continually acting back on the other.

As our plenary speakers today will demonstrate, archaeologists are uniquely situated to examine progress traps because they can detect the slower moving forms of negative change that often result from unchecked human progress. In this way, archaeology will no doubt make valuable contributions in solving issues that stem from various climates of change.

Being a product of our department, Wright speaks directly to this very point in his book, explaining:

Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations, which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies — once mighty, complex, and brilliant — lie the most instructive lessons...they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong.

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Do MacGuffin's Drive Archaeology?

The term "MacGuffin" was first used by the famous film Director Alfred Hitchcock to refer to a particular type of plot devise often found in thrillers.  The MacGuffin is usually something everyone wants, desires, or searches for in a film. In order to obtain the MacGuffin, characters are usually willing to make sacrifices, place themselves in harms way, or do almost anything to get it. While the MacGuffin might be an actual "thing" such as the necklace in a crook film, or a briefcase filled with top secret papers in a spy film, it can also be undefined or left open to interpretation. Examples of these types of MacGuffins include money, victory, glory, survival, or a source of power. Some famous examples of MacGuffins in films include: the ark of the covenant (Raiders of the Lost Ark; the plans for the Death Star (Star Wars); the one ring (Lord of the Rings) and Rosbud (Citizen Kane).

If, as people say, Life Imitates Art, then can the concept of a MacGuffin be applied to a discipline like archaeology? In other worlds, to what degree to you think the search for particular objects or things has influenced the development of archaeology as a discipline?

Take Heinrich Schliemann's search for the ancient city of Troy for example... To Schliemann, the search for historic sites mentioned in Homer's epic narrative works was a complete obsession. At the tender age of 8 he announced to his family that he would discover the location of Troy. To this end, he searched the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey for clues as to where the site might be located. Using simple hypotheses developed from his readings, he was able to systematically dismiss locations that had been suggested by others, and eventually deduced that the ancient city of Troy was actually Hisarlik - a location in Turkey that matched Homer's description perfectly. One might argue that the search for this particular MacGuffin influenced the use of deductive reasoning in archaeology - something that would become a hallmark of the processual period.

Can you think of any examples of other MacGuffins in archaeology?