Marey’s chronophotographic gun (1882).
OBSERVATION
“How does this [materialisation of movement] work for us and contend with moving projects in the way that Latour and Yaneva think about it in ‘Give me a gun and I will make a building move: An ANTs view of architecture’ [(2008)] and Tschumi in Architecture and disjunction [(1996)]: namely something seemingly so unmoveable that on closer inspection movement infiltrates every nook and cranny” (Posted by Oscar on Oct13/2009 03:22AM)
“As archaeologists we are necessarily interested in recovering the material traces of past movements, but these traces can’t be disentangled from the time/space in which they occur” (Posted by Keffie on Oct 13/2009 09:14PM)
Many of the issues addressed in Part One on co-presence extend also to Part 2 on observation. Observation raises questions relating to how we contend with material remains of usually immaterial practices. What we mean is that observation brings a two pronged way to consider both more of the completeness of movement by recognising the fact that it is still materialising. We cannot, as is obvious, see movement unless we ‘capture’ it like Muybrudge or Marey did in the late-nineteenth century. Therefore, we look for its indices in material remains. Observing is not just ‘looking’, it is also about intervening and meddling the material by ‘twisting the lion’s tail’ (after Francis Bacon, and Hacking 1983), which is to say, by moving. Furthermore, material traces imply an expression of the immaterial in the material; we cannot see the immaterial, it has to be felt, expressed or re-materialised. Oscar Aldred’s TAG paper asked a pertinent question about observation: how do we articulate this through our representational media? This is a question that lies at the core of the Symmetrical attitude (cf. Witmore 2004; Shanks & Webmoor 2010) and it is one that we hope to add to here.

There is a tension, briefly mentioned above, between locating and understanding the implications of movement. To locate movement through measurement has the effect of arresting movement outside of the flows of its temporal and spatial contexts. Because movement is both spatial and temporal at the same time, the significance of this is not that it happened, but that it happens and is happening – in the sense that it is ongoing and generative, rather than finished and singular. This is also an idea expressed within Karen Barad’s radical and entangled ontology: ‘The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgement; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind’ (2007: ix). Yet our discipline requires us to give movement an image. In this questioning of representation, for example, the commonly used application GIS is problematic as it does not show the emergent aspects of movement that each of the session papers brought forth so eloquently. Yet it helps to articulate and express what we mean because it is a tool or an instrument through which to look at and manipulate movement. What we mean is that an archaeology of movement should not exclusively focus on the captured image of representation, but also contend with the inter-dependent and emergent meanings that arise during intervention. There is always a surplus of meanings (Hodder 1991: 63) and there is enough of movement left in the material for us to observe. It then becomes a question of using the most suitable approach for the project at hand. The tension within observation between representation and intervention was commented on by the session’s discussant, Kevin McHugh, who noted that archaeologists seem to struggle to give a narrative to their material discourses (cf. McHugh 2009). Narratives we certainly create, but as Sarah Craft mentioned in her paper, the ‘along-ness’ of moving is often posited as being at odds with the material expressions that we encounter. McHugh noted that Cultural geographers, on the other hand, deal with the experiential aspects of movement in their narratives in a manner that transcends this discursive space. Thus, we should consider not only what movement is, but how forceful it is as well.
Annihilating time and space
Archaeology once measured movement so as to articulate it at the exclusion of observational experiences, but more recent approaches put them at the heart of their articulation; such as the phenomenology of Tilley, the work of Thomas, and the performance related work of Pearson. The conventions in phenomenology, on which many of these archaeological approaches draw upon, tend to relate the ‘human only’ perspective of movement. But there are other more substantial ways to relate these. So, rather than simply expressing movement’s measurement or articulating just human mobility, our approach to an archaeology of movement also reflects the mobility in the world around. An interesting proposition to examine is the idea that in articulating movement as measurement, time and space are annihilated, or are rather expressed differently to the way in which they are actually experienced. As Rebecca Solnit, in her River of shadows. Edweard Muybridge and the technological wild west (2004) suggests, the motion photography of Muybridge, from 1872 and onwards, epitomises this transition from lived time to representational or abstract time. And this was a general transition that was occurring in North America and North-western Europe during the late-nineteenth century. Along with the introduction of the railroad, and the widespread use of electricity and magnetism, motion photography removed both the mystery and innocence of movement by literally stopping it dead in its tracks. However, motion capture photography continues to be a pivot between two worlds: the humdrum of going along, and the exotic new world of imaging speed. In this context, the innocence that David Clarke (1973) referred to was primarily about method and technique, but did not extend to the connection that archaeology has had to the articulation of its co-present material world. In one way or another archaeology has always been connected to it, but in terms of how movement has been measured or captured in past and contemporary archaeology there remains a certain innocence. While archaeology is quite similar to motion capture photography in its potential role as a pivot between two worlds, its focus tends to reside on trying to capture movement rather than letting it be articulated as active observation within the material world: it tries to capture previous movements of one sort or another rather than attending to the ones being made in conjunction with contemporary movements (cf. Olivier 2008).
While motion photography captures stages of movement in a forward progression of time, archaeology attends to movement in two simultaneous directions. Archaeological documentation progresses forward similarly to motion photography, yet the act of excavating a pit, deconstructing a boundary or walking a beaten path reveal the shared ‘space’ between past and present (cf. Lucas 2001: 202-4). These practices allow movement to have both a presence in an already materialised form, but also to be situated in the generation of its own movements while attending to the material. Therefore, observing movement requires taking part by aligning the traces that we encounter archaeologically in materialised movement with the movements we engage in during our survey practices (those materialising). Thus, in this way the wrappings that constrain giving a fuller account of past movement are undone while it movements are materialising.

The Horse in Motion, by Muybridge. Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at a 1:40 gait over the Palo Alto track, 19th June 1878.
Giving archaeology back its movement
There are at least two ways to do this. We can change what we mean by movement archaeologically, or we can reduce or even remove the separation between materialised and materialising movement in creating an alternative ontology of movement. The first was discussed in several of the papers in the session. This is best explained as moving from simply recording or mapping of movement in terms of function and purpose, alignment and direction, or simply as points (i.e. the mechanics of locomotion), towards the performance of movement and its embodied knowledge/cognition. The second was also discussed as ensuring that the paths along which movement takes place in archaeological practice have an important structuring contribution to making archaeological narratives; a point raised by Julian Thomas in connection with time geography in an article on Theatre/Archaeology (Pearson 1994). By aligning the objects of movement with the encounters that take place, moving along a path of observation is also a path that uses the traces and markings of movement as a way to structure those observations. These observations are made from the perspectives of looking (representing) and manipulating (intervening). In which case, the path of observation is retreading along these markers as it becomes a path of significance; in a sense re-embodying the walking dead (after Gavin Lucas pers com.).
In both of these ways, we arrive at a closer approximation (that is all it can be!) of Bergson’s real movement, in having cause in a force of motion (2004: 246-91; 2007: 107-32). But while the actuality of movement is lost, what remains are the materialised objects resulting from it and ourselves. In one sense, we are trying to give movement back to archaeology by making movement both much more diverse in terms of its accountability in archaeological narratives because of its heterogeneous and divisible nature, and in making it more homogeneous than it currently is because we recognise its usefulness in all kinds of archaeologies. The tensions between these two also add further import to its productive and generative forces as they propel and give ‘body’ to ‘archaeological’ movements. However, examining movement’s heterogeneity over homogeneity is unnecessarily reductive. We aim to give our concern with movement more symmetry to our own practices, so that it looks and feels something similar to de Certeau’s montage as ‘efficacious meanderings’ (1984: xvii).

Cross town traffic by tschnitzlein (2006).
A montage of movements
Movement in archaeology is associated both with rest and with passage. In thinking about movement in this way, there is a certain programmatic effect that movement conjures up with respect to archaeological practice. We might think of this as being the movement between one site and another for the purpose of recording and documenting sites. This stop and start effect is a movement which is defined as much by surveying and the intrinsic rhythmic immobilities of getting to a site, as it is by its mobilities; rest on the one hand, and passage on the other. The space between place is a locus of movement, but it is defined by the places to which one moves, and thus, we need to consider the mobilities also associated with place. The question remains, how do we present this? Accounting for movement in our archaeology requires a blurring process, and an image that combines at least two kinds of mobilities: that of past movements that are materialised, in the concretisation of movement in place, relating to the rest and the recording; and to movements that are materialising in the eventfulness of moving from one place to another and, like movement, the flows of movement at places that are always in a process of materialising (see the Part 3). What comes with this is also the altering of speed of movement and its routine while getting to place and once at place. Referring back to motion capture photography, what we have are durational effects, such as a long exposure of a static camera while at the same time the world around it is in motion. The affect is an image that disrupts our sensibilities concerning movement because it shows blurred streams of movement – take any long exposure image of cars moving at dusk or night. However, what we are used to in archaeology are sharp clear images. Points and lines on maps of once moving bodies deposited in the ground, or, for example, ash cast bodies arrested in mid-flow in the volcanically buried Pompeii and their artifacts and moments frozen in time. But movement is a montage in play; ambiguous as well as purposeful: a combination and convergence of different exposures and circulating durations of movements that create a blurring of space and time. Thus, archaeology needs to become more accepting of these kinds blurred images rather than demanding sharp enhanced ones if it is to attend to movement in a full way. Movement is perpetual, not finite.
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Whitehead’s notion of society as an assemblage within a field of potentialities, or actualizations, is concerned with the kinds of mobilities we are suggesting here: that its entities are constantly in a process of becoming (Whitehead 2004, 1978). And Lucas’ pertinent commentary on the notion of assemblage in archaeology, drawing specifically on Whitehead, alongside Deleuze and Guattari (e.g. 2004), DeLanda (e.g. 2006) and Latour (e.g. 2004), also offers some possible paths through the difficult terrain of an ontology that navigates between the virtual and real. What this suggests for our notion of observation and movement, tacking along similar lines, is that movement is both virtual, but also real, transformed as it happens. Thus, movement, just like temporality within this ontological scheme, forms a tension in which the division between virtual and real, representation and intervention, is not so much to do with the activeness or stasis of the events connected with the material, but to do with where we locate/recognise/observe the interstices of transformation between objects and events. In this way, movement and place, spatiality and temporality are sutured together as it were. But instead of time providing the tension as in Lucas’ commentary, it is mobility we turn to. The objects connected with movement are useful and eventful as well as enduring (Whitehead) and perpetually perishing (Latour). And it is the concreteness of these ideas that are peppered in the third part of our extended conversation: in-betweeness and chiasma.
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