This paper starts with the question: can rivers usefully be studied as artifacts?
The question may raise an eyebrow or two. For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape. Even in the midst of towns – bordered by buildings on both sides – rivers are often taken to represent ‘the natural’ or ‘the wild’ or ‘the environmental’. They tend to fall within the subject domain of the hydrologist or sedimentologist. In archaeology, rivers and palaeo-channels (traces of former river courses) are susceptible to a barrage of scientific techniques, not so much to the cultural theories applied to other more conventional kinds of artifact.

When I carried out an Extensive Urban Survey (Archaeological Assessment) of the town of Bedford, for example, I focused attention on 1) buried archaeology and 2) standing buildings. Some notice was taken of the River Great Ouse which flows through the centre of town, especially in relation to the position of the early ford which gave the town its name, the bridges which cross the river, and the commerce that river traffic brought. But for the most part the river as an archaeological feature or an artifact in its own right was neglected, relative to what I took to be the more ‘cultural’ fabric of the town.
Yet a river and its flow of water is actually often as culturally re-shaped, used and re-used, as any artifact or building. Thousands of years ago, its course may indeed have been the result of largely natural processes. It may well have been continually subject to natural processes of erosion and deposition, which continue today. But over the centuries most rivers – especially in Britain – have also been artificially modified, diverted, narrowed, widened, channelled, siphoned, straightened, dredged, deepened, dammed, redirected, embanked, canalized, and so forth. If the river ever was entirely a natural entity, it has long since been honed to fit human projects. If it ever was wholly wild, it has long since been at least partially domesticated. And if it ever was merely an environmental entity, it has long since taken centre stage in the cultural landscape.
Are rivers natural or cultural? Rivers defy categorisation as one or the other. If we have to classify, we might call the river a ‘natural artifact’. Whereas the form of most artifacts is more or less fixed, the river has a wildness and fluidity about it that cannot be entirely contained. Unlike things crafted out of stone or other solid material, this artifact can escape the bounds of its culturally applied form.
Consider a typical English river, long since canalised and artificially embanked. When it floods, the river breaks its banks. It loses its outlines and therefore its shape. Its very boundaries become fluid. From being ‘formed’ it becomes relatively ‘formless’, and the river’s wild or natural aspect reasserts itself. When the flood recedes, however, the artificial edges re-emerge and the river shrinks back into its culturally applied form once again.

The river in flood

After the flood
Sometimes, then, a river is more of an artifact than at other times. Its very status as an artifact or natural entity is fluid. Neither one thing nor the other, it partakes of both. And these different aspects, far from being stable, fluctuate in relation to each other.
Even a flood is not entirely a natural phenomenon. Factors that cause floods include ‘artificial’ patterns of drainage, embankment and other aspects of water control, as well as ‘environmental’ factors such as climate and geology – intermeshed together as all these are.
Of course, we also tend to think of artifacts as being made out of materials that are more or less solid, like wood, stone, bone, metal – or perhaps softer material like cloth. While liquids are materials too, their non-solidity somehow makes them less material, less artifactual, in our eyes. Our common-sense notions of materiality stress the solidity and resistance of material objects, their sharp edges or their solid surfaces, and the affordances these have for human action. Articles and books about artifacts tend to be about solid things like pottery, keys, cars, baskets, clothes, jewellery. Not liquids like water (though see Ingold 2007 for all that gets left out of archaeological accounts of materials and material culture).
But here again the river changes from one thing to another. As the temperature drops below freezing the surface of water hardens into ice. The affordances of the surface change into those normally associated with hard and solid surfaces, then change back again as the temperature rises and the ice melts. There is a shift from fluid to fixed and back to fluid again.
Most objects can be defined as such precisely because their surfaces are hard and thus present resistance to incursions from human subjects. You can shape or fashion objects, hold and manipulate, use or apply them onto other things, but you cannot merge with or immerse yourself in them. By way of contrast, the surface of the river, at least when not frozen, offers little resistance to the subject. You can jump into it, swim through it – be surrounded or engulfed by it. Even when standing outside of it you can see yourself and other things reflected in its shimmering surface.
Yet it still makes sense to talk of rivers as objects. Rivers stand (or run) as entities in their own right. What is more, they have cultural affordances just like solid artifacts do. The difference is that their affordances tend to be associated with flow rather than form. A supply of water in the form of a river or stream might facilitate the washing of clothes, catching of fish, transport of logs, floating of ships, irrigation or drainage of fields, driving of water-wheels, cooling down of heated materials, or performance of numerous other tasks. Rivers may be radically re-shaped to maximise efficiency in these respects. And like other artifacts, rivers can be used to shape diverse kinds of materials and turn these into artifacts too. Thus water-powered water-mills were used at various times and places not just to grind grain but also to saw wood, to pulverise rocks, to full cloth, mint coins, sharpen swords, drive weaving looms, and perform numerous other functions. At least until the advent of steam power, use and control of water flow was embedded in countless industrial processes and domestic activities – interwoven into the very fabric of economic and cultural life.
This picture of the River Great Ouse as it flows through Bedford town centre (below) appears to show a largely natural scene. Islands and channels and the river as a whole do not at first sight appear to be artificial. Channels are choked with weed and full of fish and waterfowl. Islands are overgrown with trees and other vegetation, providing a habitat for a profusion of wildlife.

But hidden within this stretch of river is a dense archaeology – a treasure trove of information about human cultural activity in recent, medieval and earlier times. This photo was taken along the line of a former weir, which ran diagonally across the river towards the island. The main purpose of the weir, in creating a fall of water, was to provide the power to drive watermills on either side of the river: material clues can be found which reveal the former location of these vanished features. Upper and lower levels were created. Flow of water was diverted by the weir through sluices into mill-races, the courses of which can still be discerned. A semi-circular channel was cut on the opposite bank to facilitate passage of boats around the obstruction presented by the weir, thereby creating an island where no island was before. In the channel a lock was constructed to enable boats to go from upper to lower river or vice-versa. The whole river was intensively controlled and managed as a series of descending steps in the direction of flow. Each step or sudden fall in water level was created by a mill dam or weir, so that the tail-race for one mill could be the head-race for another mill further downstream. Few of these were noted in my Extensive Urban Survey report.
The absence of most of the features today is itself in part the result of subsequent cultural processes. Weirs were removed completely or their location shifted in the course of 17th and 18th century navigation works, in order to open up the river to the sea, while at the same time a whole new series of locks and overflow channels were built. Mills stopped working as a result and mill-races were filled in. Further traces were obscured by extensive landscaping of the river and the creation of riverside embankments, promenades and gardens in the Victorian and Edwardian era.

An early 20th century boatslide
So interwoven are rivers and other watercourses with human projects, in fact, that we have to ask whether it is worthwhile to divide the environment up into natural and the cultural components at all. Compare for example the almost organic growth of buildings and streets in unplanned areas of towns with the rigidly channelled and controlled flow of water in a certain rivers. While rivers (like buildings) may be utilised for all kinds of social or cultural activities – from ritual deposition to river festivals and regattas – nearby buildings (like rivers) become habitats for insects, animals and plants. Swifts nest in the eaves, bats colonise the attics, moss grows on the roof tiles, and spiders flourish in the gaps within the walls. Which is natural and which is cultural? Rather than try and divide the world up in this way, we might as well accept that our environment is an inextricably tangled mixture of both.
Weirs, dams, sluices, lochs, overflows, mill-races mill-pools, jetties, wharves, revetments, embankments, dredged channels, and so on, are all parts of the artificial construct of the river. Yet perhaps its most artificial aspect, its most cultural dimension, is the very idea of the river as a natural rather than a cultural entity. Latour states that “the very notion of culture is an artifact created by bracketing Nature off” (Latour 1993: 104) – to which we can add the converse, that the very notion of nature is itself an artifact created by bracketing Culture off. The notion of the river as a natural entity is sustained precisely by playing down its cultural aspects and forgetting that it is a cultural artifact like any other.
There is a sense, indeed, in which rivers were the first artifacts. The great human transformation of the material domain may have started with things that were fluid rather than the fixed. From the moment that hominids placed stones across a stream to step across to the other side, or built a crude dam in order to create a pool for fishing or bathing, they were starting to influence and control the flow of water. Flow has been increasingly controlled by human beings up to the present day, while water has exerted a powerful influence over our lives and our imagination. Archaeologists focusing on the material traces of human actions – together with hydrologists and sedimentologists – can unlock the past through the study of rivers. The potential for an ‘archaeology of flow’ has yet to be fully realised.
A river, then, is not simply the natural phenomenon we might conceive or describe it to be. It is just as appropriate to study its cultural dimensions as it is to examine its natural aspects – to see it as a material artifact. Indeed, as is the case with all artifacts, whether solid or liquid, it is inevitably a mixture of the natural and the cultural. The two aspects are inextricably intermeshed. The works and designs and projects of human beings are woven into the form and flow of the river, while at the same time the river weaves itself into the very fabric of human existence. It flows through the centre of towns, under bridges, beside parks and gardens, into sluices and culverts and cooling towers. It also runs through dreams, designs, projects, poems, memories and myth. It is a part of the human story. For towns and cities that are built on rivers, those rivers run as continuous threads through their history and development.
REFERENCES
Latour, B 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, London / Cambridge MA
Ingold, T 2007. Materials against materiality, in Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1), 1-16.