CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings

Jim Harold

This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement. Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape. Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.

Introduction

The weather in the Kilmartin Glen area was changeable in the extreme: there was sun, a dreich chill, bitter cold sleet and snow coming as spitters, and as Storm Gareth reached its peak, high winds and driven rain. Not the best conditions to spend a number of days searching through forestry lands – close planting and forested slash – across hillsides and in and out of the damp, drookit and marshy lands that make up Kilmartin Glen’s perimeter. Kilmartin is a beautiful landscape, even under these conditions, that stretches roughly north–south on the western fringes of Scotland and has a rich history of human entanglements dating back well before the Neolithic, through the post-Medieval, to the present day. And while some of that history’s traces are evident on the land, opened, researched and catalogued over the generations, much still remained – until this survey organised by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) – hidden by, within, and under human land-use systems and husbandry practices.

Months prior to our physical visit to the Kilmartin Glen, an aerial LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) survey of the area was carried out using lasers to measure objects, from artefacts to landscapes. This was followed by careful reading and evaluating data in the HES offices in Edinburgh, that identified more potential archaeological sites hidden by the land’s overgrowth. The field surveys that followed were organised to confirm, discount or adjust these data sets as evidence of viable archaeology for insertion into the National Record for the Historic Environment (NRHE) archive, or ignored as digital anomalies.

Alex Hale, a member of HES and one of the research party, invited the artist and poet, Jim Harold, to accompany the survey, and together we set up a reflective research project within the larger HES programme. The speculative and ongoing nature of this reflective project within a programme are set out in this exposition: Critical Confabulations, Corresponding Practices and Mappings. Together, we sought to consider how and what the academic mindsets of an archaeologist and an artist might bring to the study of landscape as a complex site of entanglement and, in Timothy Morton’s terms (2010), strangeness and to the processes of recording and archiving used within such formalised research surveys.

No objects were collected. Instead, this HES survey of the Kilmartin area was instituted to confirm or reject sites, to itemise them and to add carefully formulated word data into the official archives. Language was, therefore, central to the form of the survey. Our approach, both accepting and critiquing these constraints, was intended to broaden the nature of the survey by bringing elements of embodied experience and poetic language to act as a foil to the survey’s main intentions. We were, as Jacques Derrida has discussed, exploring and experiencing a certain ‘mal d’archive’ (1995: 14) and, through our entanglements with the Kilmartin landscape, we hoped to expand our thoughts and understandings of place, time, archive, language and learning.

To this end, we offer the following exposition as an analysis of our thoughts and approach. Our points of critique – especially that relating to the formative nature of language expressed by, among others, Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Francois Lyotard – and as an evocation of the physicality of such a field-walking survey. This exposition, which is made up of a number of parts (four sections in all, plus a section of relevant ‘References’), may be followed in a linear fashion from our description of the weather encountered during the survey (‘Storm Gareth’) – an embodiment of the physical (human and landscape) – to our main narrative section ('Corresponding Practices and Mappings’), part analytic, part discursive text (with photographs) that sketches our journey through the landscape and our growing thoughts. This section is followed by a distillation, in the form of a downloadable portfolio of 8 poetic works (‘Just Days to the Spring Equinox’), that seeks to evoke a sense of landscape, language, and word entanglement. The final section (‘Extracts from our Daily Log’) is made up of excerpts from our notebooks, kept by us as we travelled through the Kilmartin terrain, a grounding of sorts but also a window into our shifting thoughts and reactions while walking and talking.

This linear approach is much like that followed by the project as it moved through the survey stages: from research, to walking the landscape, and evaluating and recording the finds. Walking the landscape pinpointed by GPS, our movements were determined, to some extent, by computer screen imaging. That said, however, as we naturally negotiated the landscape, deviated around obstacles, or were drawn by events within it, we also invite readers to choose their route through our exposition, allowing curiosity and intuition to act as a guide. Within and beyond critiquing archaeological mapping traditions, this exposition invites you to re-survey relationships with landscape, place and each other.

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Jim Harold, Alex Hale - CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings - 2023