This is an excerpt from a portion of a paper entitled “Three Cities: thinking through embodied archaeologies with experiments in psychogeography and urban design” which I gave at TAG Berkeley back in May. The full version is available here: http://archaeologiesensoria.wordpress.com
Three cities, three walks.
During the Binchester excavations, I took three walks that purposefully mirrored Michael Shanks’ archaeological study of ‘Three Rooms,’ situation, power, and knowledge production (2004) and the ‘Three Landscapes’ Metamedia project at Stanford. The purpose of these walks was explicitly psychogeographical. As an archaeologist, I meant to attempt the dérive in three cities related to the landscape of the Roman Frontier: Durham, Nijmegen, and Edinburgh, and produce primary sensory data of the performative, documentary, and narrative turns that characterize an embodied cultural production of a landscape (Campbell and Ulin 2004). The study of these particular cities potentially add to the thematic study of Roman Frontiers and urbanism occurring at Binchester by nature of their historical situation, but at present they do more to consider, from a contemporary position, how a body might come to understand a landscape based on the principles of urban design. The experimental walks expose the ways in which the built environment regulates bodies, specifically by placing in their paths objects and spaces (stairs, passages, gateways, signs, structures, etc.) that come with variable social codes (where to walk, when to walk, who can center, what to do and not do, etc.). Thus, the desired result of the dérive experiment is to align present and past politics and extend the notions of ’embodiment’ in archaeology by focusing on the organization of cities.
The following sections present excerpts of process and data simultaneously through media and narrative. I followed the landscape without prior viewing of a map, without ever having been in the cities prior to experience their topographies. I attempted the mental map and the archaeological deep map by collecting and organizing information I gathered along my paths from buildings, street names, placements of objects, memorials, and open spaces, vistas, smells, the occasional local book, the intonations of conversations, and so forth. By reproducing the experience through narrative, digital video, photographs, audio recordings, and drawings, I paid most attention to non-material trace through the material world, and sensory, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic details of landscape.

Durham: The Performative Turn.
In the nineteenth century, William Hutton walked the distance of Hadrian‟s Wall, documenting not only the landscape, but engaging with it in an embodied way: his notes concern the affective power of the wall in evoking his memories and prior historical knowledge, and emotions that varied from pleasure to disappointment and loneliness (Nesbitt and Tolia-Kelly 2009). His experience of a divide of urban and rural, and internal-external boundaries reflected a social preference of industrialism at the time, but also the notion of Roman border politics; his choice of work belongs to performance phenomenology. As an archaeologist, I perform (acts, choices, tableaus) in order to produce awareness of my surroundings.
Length of experiment: Three hours in audio-video
Beginning point: Lobby of 16 North Bailey, following residential street to River Wear
End point: Front door of 1 North Bailey
Orientation of walk: River Wear
First performance: Mid-afternoon yesterday I listened to a man tell me that if I walked down North Bailey I would come to the lamppost that inspired the Chronicles of Narnia—unbelievable to me, but possibly a part of the town’s self-perceived local history. Today, I intend to walk down this street to the River Wear, and walk along it as if it were Hadrian’s Wall to the north. I come to a central point before a bridge, where the pavement becomes gravel, where 5 lampposts form a circle but no buildings are visible from the river crossing. Along the way, I can tell this was a coal-mining town at some point in the past by the metal boot scrapers built directly into the buildings near their entrances. They are not in use now, though, because they have been cleaned and brightly painted.
Second performance: I take 102 stairs and come upon an enclosed alley and a red brick structure that creates claustrophobia and the anxiety of being lost in an agitating colour, until suddenly cathedral spires become visible. I climb down 18 stairs to a footbridge over the Wear as two men in suits are having a conversation in French, and since they know the place and each other resolutely they must not be tourists. I walk up a hill to a sign that points to Darlington Street and enter Saint Oswald’s cemetery from the back, which is over grown and I get caught in the tangled grasses. The intonation of tombstones talks to me of Catholicism and Protestant women who died before their parents. I am moved to pity. I know how their resting place has changed in taste since then because raspberry bushes are surrounded by treaded grass and it opens a path to a green space, and they are in season. Etc.
Nijmegen: The Documentary Turn.
An important concern of documentation in archaeology filters from cultural anthropology and ethnographic documentation—the positional realities of things, and awareness that the focus of the camera lens at any given point tells a different narrative on the landscape. These narratives are not false because they shift as the camera shifts, or as the record of material trace shifts in different notations. Rather, they move towards embodiment: a range of experiences, not detached from the actual objects and social relations may be involved in photographs. Shanks reminds archaeologists that “in the texture of their detail, photographs provide a partially involuntary record; there is always in every photograph some escape from intentionality and processed experience” (1997:100), and they reveal the psychogeographer in only partial control of the landscape studied and the sensory narrative produced. As an archaeologist, I photograph traces (objects and structures) and organize them in order to explicitly read the subjective reality of place.
Length of experiment: Five hours in photography
Beginning point: 21 Okaapistraat
End point: Entrance to Museum Het Valkhof
Orientation of walk: Sint Anna to main roundabout and Waal River

Fig.1 note left at the end of Okaapistraat

Fig. 2 red indicates bicycle path

Fig. 3 overpass looking down on trains

Fig. 4 eagle as Nederland

Fig. 5 Main square looking to St. Stephens

Fig. 6 Residential section of Waal River
Edinburgh: The Narrative Turn.
Archaeological narrative is bound up in mimetic forces as the reflection and imitation of what actually happened in trace, memory, and fragment. But how does embodied experience and memory translate into narratives of past events? Psychogeography and the psychogeographer had their origins in the literary tradition and in the dérive of a physical city across a mental and cultural map that exists in memory and remembered experience: With the street no longer familiar, “the would-be stroller is forced to retreat inwards and to internalize his wandering” (Coverley 2010). By engaging the narrative form, Campbell and Ulin (2004) propose means to move into embodied archaeologies as modes of cultural production and the praxis of creative narrative, wherein writing becomes performative and the situation of historical reality involves translation from trace material and non-material experience to coherent textual representation. As an archaeologist, I produce and critique narratives of the past through perception—by juxtaposing them onto present landscapes and highlighting personal points of reference and psychogeographical patterns of social and historical information.
Length of experiment: Two hours literary organization of dérive via video of train ride out of Waverley
Beginning point: Waverley Railway Station
End point: Waverley Railway Station
Orientation of walk: Situating High Street

Fig. 1 train leaving Waverley

Fig. 2 train passing outskirts of Edinburgh
References
Campbell, Fiona, and Jonna Ulin. 2004. Borderline Archaeology: a practice of contemporary archaeology—exploring aspects of creative narratives and performative cultural production. PhD dissertation. Götenborg University.
Coverley, Merlin. 2010. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials.
Nesbitt, Claire, and Divya Tolia-Kelly. 2009. Hadrian‟s Wall: embodied archaeologies of the linear monument. Journal of Social Archaeology 9(3): 368-390.
Shanks, Michael, 1997. Photography and Archaeology. In The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, edited by B.L. Molyneaux, pp. 73-107. Routledge: London.
Shanks, Michael, 2004. Three Rooms: Archaeology and Performance. Journal of Social Archaeology 4(2): 147-180.