Aaron Watson Archaeology Research
Profile
Aaron Watson is an Artist and Archaeologist who has researched and published extensively on British prehistory, including award-winning investigations into the multisensory experience of Neolithic monuments. He is currently developing new approaches to the visual communication of archaeological sites and landscapes, including animation and short films. Aaron also provides images and illustration services for archaeology and heritage.
Archaeologists are in a unique position to push the boundaries of creativity in their interpretations. While archaeology is a present-day practice, its primary objective is to study the lives of past peoples who understood their world in very different ways. For this reason, the archaeological record contains evidence that has an extraordinary potential to be read in rich and varied ways.
In recent years, archaeological research has increasingly emphasised sensory experience. Investigations of prehistoric monuments are not only considering the visual relations between sites and landscapes but also the significance of touch and texture, the use of colour, and the possible role of sound.
While these studies encourage archaeologists to approach the past in new ways, the means by which such ideas can be explored and communicated are not so well developed. While research is beginning to consider the embodied experiences of light, sound and materiality, these ideas are often communicated in ways that have remained largely unchanged for decades.
Archaeologists rarely question whether their ideas are influenced by the ways in which the past is recorded, represented and communicated. For example, the recording and publication of archaeological sites is dependent upon specific conventions, and in particular two-dimensional stylised imagery such as maps and plans. Such conventions have become established as a means of conveying information to a wider audience, but this does not mean that they are unproblematic. Indeed, these conventions can impact upon our perceptions of the past in unexpected ways.
When a site is surveyed, for example, tapes and other measuring equipment are used to guide the production of a two-dimensional plan or map. The tape acts as a kind of filter, emphasising some very specific aspects of the site at the expense of others. The resulting plan contains lots of information about the relative locations of stones, earthworks or other features.
At the same time, however, it fails to convey their three-dimensional shape, colour, lustre, texture (both seen or touched) or visual symmetry. Nor does it communicate how these elements appear to an observer situated among them, or ways in the scene might be transformed in different weathers or at night. A place is transformed into a composition of abstract lines and symbols that is monochrome, static, lifeless and viewed from an impossible angle. Spontaneous way-finding, confusion and disorientation are banished. The site is also detached from its surroundings, with the landscape being replaced by the margins of the page.
In this sense, archaeological fieldwork acts as a translation between the experiences of the fieldworker and the limitations of publication - the printed page. In other words the inability of traditional archaeological publications to capture multisensory experience feeds back into the fieldwork process. There is rarely the time or resources to explore experiences that cannot ultimately be reproduced in the final publication.
This problem has been acknowledged more widely, and addressed during fieldwork. During excavations on Bodmin Moor, Barbara Bender, Chris Tilley and Sue Hamilton integrated elements of artistic practice; experimental photography, installations and published accounts that integrated personal accounts and experiences (Bender, B., Hamilton, S., Tilley, C. 1997. Leskernick: stone worlds; alternative narratives; nested landscapes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63, 147-178)
I am interested in developing alternative means for recording and representing places, complementing traditional fieldwork and publication. Not to replace established conventions, but to explore, reveal and overcome their limitations.
Unfamiliar approaches can have unpredictable outcomes. This will undoubtedly make demands upon audiences that exceed those normally expected of archaeological practice. Yet new approaches might make space for new understandings. Unfamiliar questions demand alternative answers. Unfamiliar fieldwork might result in unfamiliar monuments, thereby allowing the unknowns of the past to broaden our perspectives in the present.