Reconstructing Canadian Landscapes

7/30/2019 Reconstructing Canadian Landscapes

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Canadian archaeological landscapesand 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


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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 andliterary/ 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.


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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-focusedmedia 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 itmeans to experience and imagine Canadian archaeologies.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

AN INTRODUCTION 6

STATISTICAL METONYMY: ON THE PAGES OF

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

14

(THE) CANADIAN LANDSCAPE: ARCHAEOLOGY

AND THE LITERARY IMAGINED

29

ABSENCE AND NON-HERITAGE: REMEMBERING

THE ECO/ ARCHAEOLOGICAL SPACE

37

SOME CONCLUSIONS: IMAGES, REPRESENTATIONS,

HERITAGE, AND AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL POETICS IN

CANADA

42

DEFINITION OF ARCHAEOLOGY FROM A POET 47

REFERENCES 48

APPENDICES: SURVEY AND NATIONAL

GEOGRAPHIC DATA, MAS RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

2010 PRESENTATION SCRIPT

53


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FIGURES

1. Photograph of the photographer-archaeologist at Signal Hill, Newfoundland 52. Picturing underwater archaeology in high resolution at Lake Laberge 133. Graph: Survey categories of Associations with archaeology, by number of

responses

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4. Graph: Survey categories of Associations with archaeology, by percentage 185. National Geographic cover page, November 2004 206. Graph: National Geographic cover stories % located by continent 217. Graph: National Geographic cover stories # located by country 238. Graph: National Geographic categories of archaeological imagery in

featured stories

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9. Table: National Geographic categories of Canadian archaeology 2510.Graph: National Geographic categories of non-archaeological Canadian

imagery

26

11.The rails remember: Picturing memorialized landscapes in Canada 2812.Spectral Landscape:Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, World

Heritage Site #96.

36

13.Negotiating the dead and lived spaces: Kogawas childhood home as aJapanese-Canadian heritage site

41


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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.


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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,

1Mallot (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 schizophreniccondition 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 memories4and the formation of a number of lived

identities and histories, and in which representations ofthe 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, re-

telling 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 earthA newcomer says:

Just think, we are probably the first human beingsTo 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

5 White (2004) on the works and dramatic theory of Bertolt Brecht, which indicate

historicization as a distinct interpretive attitude of theatrical actors, an attitude whichcan usefully be translated onto social actors and political landscapes on which the past isstaged, 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.PicturingUnderwater 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.


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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 ofCanadian, 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 ofcharacters (primarily of the Indiana Jones type) who

dig up things (which often include dinosaur bones), primarily located inEgypt. 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 ofadventurer

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.

Figures 3 and 4.Categories of things

associated with

archaeology, by number

and percent of

responses.

0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200

Actions

Tombs

Institutions

Egypt

Dinosaurs

Monuments

Places

Human Remains

Digging

Characters

Abstract ideas

Things

Associations with archaeology by # of responses

Actions

2%Tombs

2%Institutions

3%Egypt

4%

Dinosaurs

5%

Monuments

5%

Places

8%

Human

Remains

11%

Digging

12%

Characters

14%

Abstract ideas

16%

Things

18%

Associations with archaeology, by %


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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-hourArchaeology 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.


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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

numbers, locations, and

types of archaeology in

featured National

Geographic stories are

included, there are also

notable similarities in

patterns of imagery

recalled, between

things listed by survey respondents associated with archaeology, and National

Africa

31%

Asia

22%

North

America

29%

SouthAmerica

4% Europe

14%

Australia

0%

National Geographic 1980-2010; 49

archaeological cover stories, % distributed

by continent

Figure 6.National Geographic cover stories located by continent.


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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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Figure 7. National Geographic cover stories located by country

0 2 4 6 8 10 12

Egypt (Pharaonic)

Ethiopia

Morocco

South Africa

Sudan

Cambodia

IranIsrael

Jordan

Mongolia

New Guinea

Pakistan

Russia/ Sibera

Turkey

Bulgaria

Croatia

Czechoslovakia

England

Greenland

Italy

Yugoslavia

Canada

Guatemala

Mexico

United States

ArgentinaPeru

AF

AS

EU

NA

SA

National Geographic 1980-2010: archaeological Cover

Stories, in 27 countries, distributed over 5 continents

(Australia excluded)


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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

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45

Colonial and empire

Civilization

Human remains, tombs, burials

Ancestry (including hominids)

Treasures

Cultural heritage

Ancient cities

Art

Monuments

Other

Cult and religionHistorical (western)

Underwater

"Culture"

National Geographic 1980-2010; categories of

archaeological imagery


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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

(HISTORIC)

1. Sunken American colonial ship in St. Lawrence River2. Sunken cargo ship in Lake Superior3. Sunken schooner in Lake Superior4. Sunken explorer ship in Northwest Passage

UNDERWATER

(PREHISTORIC)

5. Sunken Basque whaling ship off the coast of LabradorHISTORIC,

EXPLORATION

6. Camp: first Franklin expedition to the Northwest PassageETHNO-

/INDIGENOUS

7. Inuit and Viking artifacts in the high arctic8. Dentalium harvesting on Pacific NWC

Figure 9.National Geographic categories of Canadian archaeological landscapes.


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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

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Arctic wildlife

Wilderness "adventures"

Industry

National Parks

Polar bears

Documenting wildlife

Cities, urban centres

Cultural heritage, land ownership

Rivers and lakes

Tourism

National Geographic 1980-2010; categories of

Non-archaeological Canadian imagery


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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.


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(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 ofdead 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 Pu rdys

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.


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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 non-

representation 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 non-

heritagein 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 ofacceptance 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

6See 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.


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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, whatconstructions 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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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, Catherine2008 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 coursesArchaeology in Popular Culture (2PC3) andIntroduction to World

Prehistory (1B03) at McMaster University. The McMaster Research Ethics Boardgranted 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 of2PC3 student papers as well as Flying

Under the Radar: Canadian/ Ontarian archaeology in the public imagination , presentedat 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 OntarioArchaeological 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 ImaginationPresented by Catherine Zagar and Ola Mohammed

[Slide 1: Title and introduction] (Catherine)

Introduction; note this is a combined archaeology and cultural studies project.

Ola Mohammedis 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 theaudience 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 publicare we defining and why does this matter?

2. Where might these images come from? Do they reflect the representations ofarchaeology 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 talkaroundthe 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 ofcharacters (overwhelminglyfictitious and primarily named Indiana Jones) who dig up things, many time

including dinosaur bones, primarily inEgypt

we can see that imagined archaeology is also largely bound up inplaces, monuments, and

the dead, imbued with the more abstract ideas ofhistory 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 ofplace 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 wheretragedy, 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 Geographicsurvey 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, betweenthe wilderness landscape and the urban sprawl of civilization... a

Reconstructing Canadian Landscapes

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