Mark A. Hall
Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland, UK
Abstract: This article looks at the depiction of
archaeology and archaeologists in popular cinema. A number of key films are
discussed to address the article’s main themes of cultural appropriation and
contested ground (encompassing treasure, the public, politics and gender).
Archaeology in film cannot be divorced from the wider cultural contexts in
which it operates and, though portrayals of archaeology and archaeologists are
frequently unsatisfactory, a positive conclusion is attempted which seeks to
understand the narrative drive of popular fiction and a long history of public
exclusion from archaeology. Most of the films considered do not warrant
labelling as great works of art, but they are part of a cultural form with
perceptions to offer, able to stimulate debate within a vital framework of
cultural practices by which identity – individual and social – is constructed
and evolved.
Keywords: cinema, Eurocentrism, film studies, popular
culture, treasure
Archaeology is about people; who they were, what their
lives were like, ... it asks where we have been, where we are going.
Timeline (2003)
Archaeology is the search for facts, not truth. If you
want truth, philosophy class is right down the hall ... X never marks the spot.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
INTRODUCTION
This article explores the portrayal of archaeology and
archaeologists in popular film. A detailed
discussion of the
complexities of popular
culture and film
is precluded; suffice it to say that the term popular is here taken as
reflecting mass- consumption, based on active choices by audience members, each
bringing their own knowledge and judgement to bear (following Bourdieu 1984;
see also Gramsci
1998; Hall 1998; Jones 1987; Willis 1995). Popular film
then is a dialogue, a contest between commercial producers and viewers, each
with their own agenda and social values, each with their own susceptibility of
influence. The focus of the article is on the archaeological element within
popular films but it does recognize that such films mediate other cultural
issues, including sexuality and fantasy (Petrie 1993).
European Journal of
Archaeology Vol. 7(2): 159–176
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com) and the European
Association of Archaeologists (www.e-a-a.org) ISSN 1461–9571
DOI:10.1177/1461957104053713
Popular film has always had an uneasy relationship with
the past and so with archaeology. It inherited this relationship from
pre-cinematic popular culture particularly painting, drama and narrative
fictions in magazines, newspapers and cheaply produced books (see for example
Shohat and Stam 1994:114–121; Tatum
1988:109–111 for the dime novel’s influence on the
western; Wyke 1997:10–46 for the influence of the 1895 novel Quo Vadis? and the
1872 painting Pollice Verso on the Roman epic – the latter holds for the most
recent Roman epic, Gladiator, see Landau
2000:24–25). Books and prints are popular cinema’s
cultural precursors from at least the fifteenth-century expansion in book
printing and artists’ prints (see for example Koerner 2002:18). These have a
shared concern with the mass production and circulation of copies to reach a
widespread audience. Books, prints and film are then resolutely concerned with
mass-produced culture accessed by multiple audiences in different places,
though each is ultimately based on a single, original work of art: the author
’s text, the artist’s picture and the film-maker ’s negative.
These precursors influenced cinema from its earliest days
and consequently the cinema experience has always been a means by which
individuals have been led to think about the past, particularly in terms of
what it means to be human. Such films focus not on material, factual accuracy
but on making the past familiar, particularly in terms of human behaviour. The
past is fictionalized and that fiction is reciprocally made ‘real’. This links
film to the debate that sees art and archaeology (as a representative of
science) at odds because the latter searches for a single, objective, empirical
truth whereas the former seeks imaginative responses (Woodward 2001:30–31).
Film historian Edward Buscombe (1988:14) has observed that it is not enough to
separate fact from fiction, ‘we need to trace the process whereby reality
imparts credibility to myth and myth charges reality with imaginative power ’.
Often then ‘truth’ becomes subordinate to narrative drive and a presumption of
audience knowledge and understanding.
Even the most authentic of films can have their
authenticity vitiated by the political context in which they are made (Haslam
2002:104), by the costs of production (money and time), and by the need for a
commercial or propaganda return. Similar constraints also affect the public
presentation of archaeology and it is also true that film-makers are often
aware of the deliberateness of any distortion for the sake of narrative drama
(Cadigan 1999; Landau 2000; Singer 1997). It is only in recent years that
archaeology has tackled notions of a non-narrative constructed past, in both
longer, historical perspectives of the discipline (e.g. Trigger 1989) and in particular
case studies such as that of the Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset, England (Darvill et
al. 1999).
The general theme of the article, the conjunction (for
some a disjunction) between archaeology and cinema is an increasingly analysed
aspect of social/ public archaeology on which there are a variety of
perspectives (Day 1997; Russell
2002a). There is also a broad area of common ground that
focuses on the exaggerated portrayals of archaeology. Though these criticisms
are often valid the overall effect is to make a crisis out of a drama with a
tendency to ignore deeper and more perceptive concerns about archaeology, its
practice and development. This article seeks to review and focus on some of
those deeper concerns within the
wider context of narrative consumption, hopefully striking
a balance between avoiding an apologia for some decidedly ‘ropey’ films but
recognizing the right of those outside archaeology to comment upon archaeology.
CULTURAL
APPROPRIATION AND CONTESTED
GROUND
What’s yours is mine
The filmic portraits of Egypt form the classic and
well-known arena for depictions
of cultural appropriation and of controlling dangerous
non-European cultures.
Many of the
films are well
recognized as part
of a wider
phenomenon of
‘Egyptomania’
(Curl 1994; Daly
1994; Frayling 1992;
Hamer 1993; Lant
1992;
Meskell 1998a; Shohat and Stam 1994).
The profusion of films that deal with archaeology and
archaeologists in Egypt
cannot be reconsidered here. A few words are in order,
however, to set the scene for
a wider analysis of archaeology as cultural appropriation.
Since the 1920s not a
decade has passed without at least one film dealing with
the horror possibilities of
Egyptian
archaeology. Usually this
takes the form
of a mummy
story and
invariably with the same basic title from The Mummy (1932)
through to The Mummy
(1999) and its
sequel The Mummy
Returns (2001). Sometimes
in these films
archaeologists
do get to
espouse archaeological wisdom
(in the 1932 film The
Mummy, the archaeologist Sir Joseph Whemple states: ‘much
more is learned from
studying bits of broken pottery than from all the
sensational finds. Our job is to
increase the sum of human knowledge of the past’), but it
is often as a foil for the
supernatural elements to come.
However, even into the twenty-first century, what these
mummy films retain is
a depiction of archaeology as a colonial imposition by
which cultural inheritance is
appropriated (see Fig. 1). Ultimately they feed off a
nineteenth-century western,
colonial agenda, mixing Egypt’s Pharaonic, Ptolomaic,
Coptic and Islamic heritage
to create an amorphous, imaginary past. During the
nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries
western archaeologists were
more than willing
to emphasize the
spectacular, the treasure and the arcane aspects of their
discoveries and so readily
added to the mix. Some films do permit Egyptians an
interest in their past but
usually this is through the veil of legend and
superstition. In The Mummy (1999)
the archaeological curator of the Cairo Antiquities Museum
leads a secret sect –
descended from the bodyguard of Ramses – pledged to defend
the world from
Imhotep (the Mummy). In The Mummy Returns one of the
henchmen of Imhotep is
the curator of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum.
Both these curators are
depicted as Egyptians engaged in arcane activities,
confirming their subservience
to the western, colonial myth about Egypt and suggesting
that only Europeans/
Americans can truly understand the Egyptian past, through
its appropriation and
redefinition,
often through the
practice of archaeology.
The persistence of
this
western cultural imperialism in popular culture has been
usefully characterized by
Shohat and Stam (1994) as ‘unthinking Eurocentrism’. As
they demonstrate, it is a
concept equally applicable beyond the context of Egypt to
the whole post-colonial
cultural landscape.
Figure 1. The western appropriation of the Egyptian dead –
the moment of discovery of the sarcophagus of Princess Ananka in The Mummy (UK
1959). As a consequence of this discovery the English archaeologist on the
right will become the first victim of the Mummy. The fibreglass sarcophagus is
now in the collections of Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland, UK. Image
supplied by the British Film Institute.1
Egyptian archaeology fares little better in non-horror
films. In the science-fiction adventures, Stargate (1994) and The Fifth Element
(1997) otherwise plausible, historically-set archaeological investigations in
Egypt are linked to visits by aliens and in the former, the Rosetta Stone
proves to be a gateway to another universe. In The Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981) we see large-scale excavations under way at the City of Tanis, in the
Egyptian desert. Often, but not exclusively, such forays are set in the 1920s
or 1930s and so often display hundreds of Egyptians as the labouring force
under foreign, imperial archaeological control (see Fig. 2). Things may be less
overtly supernatural in these films but Egypt is still commodified and closely
bound as a representation of the Oriental ‘Other ’. As Meskell (1998a:73)
observed of the film Stargate: ‘Egypt represents everything Other, everything
we cannot fathom or explain, all things ritualized, sacrificed and sexual’ and
summed up in the film as the queered, extra-terrestrial Ra, like Egypt
identified as inexplicable, unnatural and evil.
The English Patient (1997, adapted from the 1992 novel by
Michael Ondjate) powerfully evokes the spirit of archaeological enquiry between
the two World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Partly set in
Egypt it suggests that
Figure 2. A scene from The Mummy (UK 1959) in which the
‘natives’ labour in ignorance while the English archaeologist claims the
knowledge/treasure. The excavation amounts to little more than sifting through
sand and the archaeologist employs a magnifying glass to make the detective
analogy clear. Image supplied by the British Film Institute.
knowledge has no bounds but that its exploration,
recording and understanding does, often leading to contested ownership and
conflict. It is a story that is historically situated at the close of Egypt’s
direct European colonial experience and so
emphasizes the European
appropriation and exploration
of African culture through both
cartography and archaeology. The map and the museum, along with the census,
were the three key mechanisms of the grammar of colonial power, with
archaeological pasts embedded
in all of
them (Meskell 1998b:3,
following Anderson 1991:163). Eurocentric cinema uses the stock
character of the ‘discoverer ’ (of which the archaeologist is a sub-type) to
tell narratives of Third World/colonial penetration. Central to these are the
drawing or deciphering of maps (Shohat and Stam 1994:145–148). Although The
English Patient shares with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) the metaphors and
instruments of archaeology and maps, the former creates around them a space for
questioning the colonial narrative it evokes.
The treatment of Egypt and its archaeology is symptomatic
of wider imperial, Eurocentric attitudes to the whole of the eastern
Mediterranean/Near East region. A
significant slice of the twentieth-century narratives set in this part of the
world
was penned by Agatha Christie (Guglielmi 2001:351–389).
The filmed versions of her Oriental detective stories with archaeological
content are Death on the Nile (1978) and, set in Petra, Appointment with Death
(1984). In terms of historical archaeological practice they are accurate (not
least because Christie worked on a number of archaeological sites and was
married to archaeologist Max Mallowan) but they are not the neutral narratives
they portray themselves to be. They uncritically demonstrate the European
attitude to the Orient as an inheritance due to Europe because of the natural
progress of civilization away from the East and to the West. Mesopotamia is a
created, western archaeological narrative wherein the central theme is
progressing civilization, ‘[a] way of constructing history in its own image and
claiming precedence for a Western culture’ (Bahrani 1998:171). Christie, like
her husband Mallowan, and the archaeology that they practised, was complicit in
this Eurocentrism (Chaldis 2001; Guglielmi 2001; Schiffer 2001).
In A Month in the Country (1988 and see later in this article),
the grave-digging archaeologist – Moon – has no sooner found his grave (in
Yorkshire, England) than he is off to Basra and further excavation work there.
It is worth noting that popular fiction rarely, if ever, allows non-Europeans
the freedom and stimulation of self- directed archaeology. Europeans can engage
in archaeology anywhere for any reason, others cannot and must endure colonial
and class impositions. For a contemporary twist see Blade Trinity (2004) in
which Iraq is archaeologically identified (by a computer-generated Aztec-like
temple situated in the Syrian Desert) as both the cradle of civilization and
the birthplace of evil, here taking the form of the Ur-vampire, Dracula (very
much a metaphor for a biological weapon of mass-destruction).
Treasured objects
The quest for treasure as an archaeological motivation is
common in films, and is a
central strand of cultural appropriations. It is a
cultural concept with deep routes
springing from European mythology and story telling as
evidenced in tales such as
Beowulf, the Volsung
Saga and the
Mabinogion (Pearce and
Bounia 2000:48–59).
Filmically it is a theme most familiar from the Indiana
Jones trilogy: Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
(1984) and Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade (1989). All fuse notions of the mythic object
(the Ark of the Covenant,
the Shiva Stones and the Holy Grail, respectively) as both
existing and having real
supernatural power. The stories are placed within a
recognizably real, pre-Second
World War archaeological framework. Dr Jones teaches
archaeology at an American
university and also collects objects for the university
museum. In Indiana Jones and
the Last Crusade
we are explicitly
told that archaeology
is not the
search for
treasure, nor for philosophical truth, but for fact. All
three films, however, allow
their hero to
indulge in what
is effectively the
looting of indigenous
cultural
heritage, portrayed as the legitimate collecting of
antiquities. All three films reflect
western cultural imperialism (Shohat and Stam,
1994:125–126, 145–147) but also
make the occasional nod to indigenous rights. In Indiana
Jones and the Temple of
Doom, Dr Jones returns one of the Shiva Stones to the
village from which it was
stolen, on the basis that if he did not do so it would
only sit in a museum gathering dust with other rocks. Allowing that this is a
veiled admission that the items should not go to a foreign museum, nevertheless
this support for culture in the community
is, in effect,
misleadingly set against
the alternative of
museum storage. This does accurately reflect a perception in the popular
consciousness that objects in storage are being deliberately concealed from
view, and also raises the question of museums as dead places, where treasures
are merely hoarded.
Indiana Jones’s position is only marginally better than
the approach of his opposition, usually archaeologists working for the Third
Reich. Their desire in collecting such objects is to boost their own power.
Such archaeological work was carried out under the Third Reich and a detailed
examination of it has been written by Henning Haßmann (2000:65–139). There were
two key, mutually antagonistic, organizations: the Amt Rosenberg, founded in
1934, and the only slightly less sinister
SS-Ahnenerbe, founded in
1935 (Haßmann 2000:76–86;
Nicholas 1994:
72–75, 197–200 gives a summary). By the close of the 1930s
the SS-Ahnenerbe largely controlled serious – and often still respected –
archaeological research. But during the war years this was carried out in
tandem with the looting of museum collections, the falsification and
destruction of archaeological evidence and the collecting of Jewish skulls from
concentration camps; all to support and demonstrate Germanic racial superiority
from the days of prehistory (Haßmann 2000:96–108,
125–130).
If the Indiana Jones movies are one of the clearest
demonstrations of these issues
they are also the most recent in a long line of films
concerned with archaeology as a
treasure hunt. Earlier examples include Secret of the
Incas (1954; see Hall 2000) and
many of the Egypt-based films discussed earlier, along
with a host of films that
deal with shipwrecks
as sources of
salvageable treasure including
The Golden
Mistress (1954), Sharks (1969), Shark Treasure (1974) and
Titanic (1999). More recent
additions to the cycle include Lara Croft Tomb Raider
(2001), its sequel, Lara Croft
Tomb Raider: the Cradle of Life (2003), and Welcome to the
Jungle (2003). In the Lara
Croft films archaeology is graphically equated with
looting and site destruction
(notably the temples
of Angkor Wat,
Cambodia) and a
very ready client
relationship with auction houses. Given that these films
have a contemporary
rather than an historical setting they cannot be
understood in the way that the
Indiana Jones trilogy can. There is a barely discernible
difference in the way both
Lara Croft and her opposition loot archaeological sites.
In part this is because it
reflects its computer-game origin and the pared-down
dynamics of Eurocentric
treasure hunting which the film-makers perceived were
required to make the film
work
effectively, and in
part because archaeology
has largely failed
to
communicate
the complexities and
distinctions of archaeological method
at a
popular level.
In Welcome to the Jungle the treasure is a golden idol
retrieved from a hidden,
booby-trapped cave in a remote South American jungle.
Possession of the idol is
contested by the indigenous people, not because of its
historical worth but because
it is worth millions of dollars and when sold (to a
western collector) will give the
community the economic
independence they need
from American capitalist
exploitation of the area’s gold mines. It is a reworking
of the Secret of the Incas, which deploys archaeology not for its own sake but
to support the fight against the social and economic exploitation of indigenous
peoples. It turns superstitious prophecy about the loss of the idol into a
canny financial exploitation of it, but the drawback is that the cultural
heritage of an indigenous people is sold off, unrecognized. The narrative drive
of this story and its resolution is to persuade us that this is the right
solution but it is really the dressing up of an established stereotype in some
new clothes.
The Golden Salamander (1951, from Victor Canning’s 1949
novel) centres on archaeologist David Redfearn. In the film he is a museum
curator from (implicitly) the British Museum, sent to north Africa to retrieve
a collection of Etruscan antiquities acquired by the museum after their
recovery from a shipwreck. Redfearn has to check the inventory and then
catalogue and repack the collection; simultaneously he becomes embroiled in an
arms-dealing drama. The leader of the arms dealers owns the villa where the
antiquities are temporarily stored and is a collector, one who cannot abide
museums and glass cases full of objects he cannot possess. He sets fire to the
antiquities and Redfearn shoots him and manages to save most of the objects
from the flames. Redfearn and his near-nemesis are two sides of the same coin
and conjure a number of oppositions: professional versus amateur, colonial
versus indigenous, knowledge versus capitalism (the collector ’s passion is
linked to greed and financial gain). Essentially it is an imperial narrative in
which the West, through the British Museum, is shown as the natural inheritor
of Mediterranean civilization – by extension something North Africans can only
ignore or appreciate for its financial value alone.
Perhaps the most explicit rejection of treasure hunting is
the Egyptian film, Al Mummia (1969; also known as The Night of Counting the
Years). Set around Thebes at the end of the nineteenth century it tells of a
Horrabat tribesman who rejects his tribe’s practice of looting Egyptian tombs
for the antiquities market. He alerts the authorities in Cairo so that the
tombs can be excavated rather than looted. It thus recognizes the legitimate
role of archaeologists accountable to the state and to the public (Schnapp
1996:12) and distinguishes between archaeology and the seeking for treasure. It
also asks why so many archaeologists in Egypt are Europeans/ Americans and what
the relationship of Islam is to Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, both Pharaonic and
Coptic (an issue discussed in Hassan 1998). Of all the Egypt-based films Al
Mummia is the only one to offer a public archaeology dimension, in recognizing
that the protection and understanding of a nation’s cultural heritage requires
the consent and involvement of that nation’s people. That said, as Shohat and
Stam (1994:153–156) point out in their discussion of the film, the final
beneficiaries of the archaeological intervention are not Egyptians but their
French colonial masters. The loss, whether to the black market or to a European
museum, is still painful: ‘[t]he film ends, then, with the emptiness left in
the wake of the European intrusion’ (Shohat and Stam 1994:152).
Al Mummia is the most accomplished of a small group of
films that question the archaeological
appropriation (through archaeology)
of Third World
material culture into western museums (Shohat and Stam 1994:153). It can
be found though
in more mainstream fare. In the film Rush Hour (1998), the
Hong Kong Police retrieve stolen Chinese antiquities on the eve of the British
return of Hong Kong to China. These later go on display in Los Angeles at a
cultural and trade fair. The Hong Kong setting permits an astute, anti-colonial
sub-text, with the original loss of independence equated with the loss of
antiquities and their recovery symbolizing the restoration of independence from
British rule. The master criminal at the centre of the film is a senior figure
in the British administration of Hong Kong, who has long since turned to crime
to maintain his collection of Chinese antiquities. Super- villains and their
henchmen similarly engage in black market antiquities dealing in Never Say
Never Again (1983) and True Lies (1994). The collecting of archaeology indulged
in by the privileged aristocrats of knowledge and money in these works is in
direct descent from Renaissance collectors and their cabinets of curiosity.
European politics
European cinema has generally been less concerned with
Hollywood-style genres.
French and Italian films in particular have interesting
reflections on archaeology. In
L’Amour et Mort (1984) one of the main characters is an
archaeologist whose life’s
work has been the excavation of a Gallo-Belgic villa site
(almost single-handed it
has to be said, a common myth of archaeological fictions,
see Thomas 1976:314). As
his sense of approaching death intensifies he feels that
the only thing he will be
remembered for is a paper on Gallo-Belgic rubbish dumps.
There is a refreshing
ambivalence
here that questions
the value of
archaeology as obsession
while
recognizing the dedication of a life’s work.
Italy has given us Fellini’s Roma (1972) and Viaggio in
Italia (1953). The former is
director Federico Fellini’s personal look at the history
of Rome and includes a
section showing a subway under construction. We see
workmen crash through the
remains of a
buried Roman house.
There is a
brief glimpse of
beautiful wall
frescoes before the fresh air let in by the workmen
destroys them. We also hear the
workmen grumble about the continual delays caused to the
engineering project by
the need for archaeologists to record each new bit of
archaeology. It is a vivid
record of the days of rescue archaeology and of the
constant struggle between
archaeology and development pressure. Viaggio in Italia
tells of the personal inner
journeys of a married couple against the backdrop of the
ruins of Pompeii and the
museums of Naples. It clearly attests the importance of
historical and continuing
regional identity, something that is brought out by the
recurring emphasis on the
archaeology to be seen in Pompeii and Naples. This same
archaeology is shown to
be personally rewarding for the couple as they contemplate
their future together
(Mulvey 2000). Viaggio in Italia is also part of a long
line of films dealing with
human dramas set against the backdrop of archaeological
discovery (for others see
Membury 2002:8–18) but in its lack of histrionics and in
its more refined aesthetic it
does – rather like L’Amour a Mort – show that archaeology
can be a well-researched
supporting player in film.
French cinema has also given us the 1985 film Une Femme ou
Deux. The principal
character is a palaeontologist/archaeologist who discovers the fossil remains of a
Homo habilis skeleton. He labels the remains ‘41B Laura’,
and interprets her as the first European woman. Advice on the making of the
film came from Yves Coppens and the
French Institute of Palaeontology, which presumably accounts for
the realistic-seeming depiction of French archaeology. We see a
dedicated (not to say obsessive) archaeologist at work, struggling with
fund-raising and politics. We see glimpses of the museum context in which he
operates and we see disputes with colleagues and employers (notably when he
unveils his reconstruction of ‘Laura’ as a black woman, raising the ire of his
colleagues who condemn him as a leftist). The film does not naïvely set out to
paint archaeology as a positive social force but does recognize its importance,
its potential to be positive and that it is contested. In Une Femme ou Deux
there is no sign of the public, even in the museum where the archaeologist is
based. There is, though, a vocal public; the local community in the area where
the fossils were found perceives archaeology very negatively and protests
against further archaeological work because an influx of visitors is unwanted.
This may be a particularly Gallic nuance – certainly in the United Kingdom
archaeological discoveries in rural hinterlands are often seen as matters of
great local pride and as economic stimuli for the tourism-led economy.
More positive protest however crops up in the James Bond
adventure, The World is Not Enough (2000), which includes a scene set in
Azerbaijan dealing with a strong protest against the route of an oil-pipeline
going through a rock-cut medieval chapel. The protest is successful and the
pipeline diverted. In the Russian film, прощбние [Proscanie] (1983) a small island community
has to be relocated because the construction of a dam will flood their island.
The Academy of Sciences and Arts sends its archaeologists to collect two of the
peasant houses as a record. The community, however, does not want to move and
the film – the title translates as Farewell – asks if the saving of a couple of
houses is really any recompense for the loss of a community, the destruction of
a way of life. It is a point tellingly made because the film so skilfully
imbues every inch of the island with cultural significance.
A Month in The Country (1988, adapted from J.L. Carr ’s
1980 novel) is set in a Yorkshire village two years after the First World War
and concerns the attempts of two survivors of that war to rebuild their
fractured lives. One is engaged in the restoration of a Last Judgement
wall-painting in a church of Anglo-Saxon origin. The other is carrying out
small-scale excavations close beside the church in search of a lost grave. It
is through the archaeological work that they carry out that they begin to mend
their lives and develop a sense of landscape and a sense of history.
Gender and practice
A Month in the Country also raises questions of gender and
sexual orientation in
relation to archaeology through making the excavator
homosexual, which leads
him into military
misconduct and then
archaeology as an
escape. Queer
archaeology gets little airing then beyond a metaphor for
anti-social strangeness or
safely remote historical attitude. Women fare a little
better, but not hugely. In Une
Femme ou Deux
the strength of
the female characters
that surround the
archaeologist serve to point up the absence of female
archaeologists in the world portrayed – an absence made more pointed by the
film’s key archaeological discovery being the fossilized remains of a female
hominid. The archaeologist describes her as the first French woman, which is
acceptable to all concerned. What is not acceptable to the establishment is
that she is interpreted as a black woman. The overall impression given by the
films studied is of a male-dominated archaeological profession.
However, the trajectory of social change with respect to
women in society does seem to have a corresponding arc within film; into the
1980s there were virtually no portrayals of women as archaeologists and the few
that were can safely be characterized as inadequate and typified by Joan
Crawford’s mad scientist in Trog (1970). There was though an interesting strand
of female characters of a strong disposition able to take on and win against
male characters in a competitive environment: we might call them aspirational
archaeologists. The key examples would
be Anne Miller, who
plays a singing
and dancing archaeological PhD student whose main dance number redefines
(i.e. leaves in turmoil, a ‘Revisionist’ metaphor) the
Museum of Anthropological History
in On the
Town (1949). In Bringing Up Baby (1938), Katherine Hepburn
plays a somewhat disorganized socialite who, within the conventions of
screwball comedy, redefines her palaeontologist partner and his museum of
dinosaurs; she normalizes him away from being a cloistered curator, concluding
in her destruction of the dinosaur skeleton he has been reconstructing – his
body of knowledge – which he cheerfully accepts. Thirdly we have the female
support leads of Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in Raiders of the Lost Ark and
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, both of whom are correctives to the male
archaeological obsession. These have given way to portrayals of women as
archaeologists; though to date I have only encountered nine leading character
female notional-archaeologists (i.e. broadly encompassing archaeologist,
anthropologist, palaeontologist, historian and museum curator as the same basic
character brand, usually a sub-type of the ‘scientist’) in popular film.
Whether on the side of good – as in The Relic (1997), The
Mummy (1999) and its sequel, Tomb Raider (2001) and its sequel, The Body
(2000), Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park III (2001), Lake Placid (1999)
and Highlander III The Sorcerer (1999) – or bad – as in Trog (1970) and Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) – in the dramas being enacted these female
‘archaeologists’ are all portrayed as determined, independent and intelligent
(stock heroic requirements it has to be admitted). They variously combine
realistic elements of archaeological work – coping with fieldwork, with the
demands of financial sponsorship and academic integrity, and with the politics
of identity – with wider narrative concerns. In part their strong portrayals
recognize the real-world social recognition of equality for women. But several
of the films go beyond this and suggest that women professionals are human too
and subject to the foibles of greed, professional rivalry and psychotic,
mad-scientist obsession (as in Trog), and may also use female archaeologists as
examples of specialists in cutting edge, interdisciplinary study. In Highlander
III the female archaeologist works for the New York Museum of Ancient History.
She carries out her
fieldwork in Japan
specializing in the
boundary between
archaeology and folklore (though this is rather
simplistically portrayed as archaeology proving the literal truth of folklore)
which can be read as a plea for finding drama and human stories in the past.
The Relic tells of a wayward anthropologist who is
transformed into a brain- sucking genetic mutation, the Kathoga. During
fieldwork in the Amazon, he takes one of the ritual drugs of the ethnic
grouping he is studying but without having the antidote handy. By the time he
gets back to the office – the Field Museum, Chicago – he has become a horrific,
murderous beast who needs the hyperthalmus in the human brain to survive. He
establishes a lair in the sewers beneath the museum and begins to work his way
through the brains of the staff (all former colleagues) and also the guests who
arrive for the exclusive opening of the museum’s new
blockbuster exhibition on
world myths and
superstitions. The film’s several
sub-texts hinge on its monster
metaphor. Thus we
have a clear explication of the destructive professional
rivalries and gender politics at play in the museum but we are also reminded of
the inherited Eurocentrism of American culture through its own colonial
activities. Amerindian culture is somewhat tritely exploited for its
shock-horror potential and, although the Amerindians are tacitly recognized as
in control of their own environment, still the Kathoga metaphorically stands
for that culture, collected into a western museum and ultimately destroyed. The
Field Museum’s display of world myths and superstitions is implicitly a lesson
in western cultural superiority through rational, scientific, collecting
endeavour; the superstitions all appear to come from Third World cultures.
Trog (1970) is a film in which a power-mad
anthropologist/archaeologist discovers an ape-man or troglodyte, living in a
cave in Wiltshire, England, and bends it to do her will.
All these films demonstrate a wider narrative convention,
concerned with broadly-defined scientists meddling with what they do not
understand or are not meant to know (Hall 2000:97–98; Thomas 1976). Such films
reinforce the popular notion that archaeologists form an élite, with access to
privileged knowledge used for their own ends. The archaeologist-priest of The
Exorcist (1973) comes into this category and a more recent and eccentric
example of a Catholic priest-archaeologist can be found in The Body (2000).
Working in Jerusalem and confronted with the prospect of a recently discovered
body being that of Christ (thus proving there was no Resurrection), he commits
suicide. Faith and science (here again represented by archaeology) are clearly
not reconcilable and their relationship is one of conflict and violence,
thereby touching on
a widespread belief
or cultural norm
that science is the embodiment of rational enquiry and that it arose out
of a struggle with superstition. This has been challenged recently by
philosopher John Gray (2002:21–23), who observed that science actually
originated in faith, magic and trickery and is in part built upon prejudice,
conceit, passion, opposition to reason and social acceptance. Science is
sometimes regarded as a supremely rational activity, yet its history shows
scientists flouting the rules of scientific method. Not only the origins but
also the progress of science come from acting against reason. In this light the
metaphorical quality of the films under discussion in questioning the official
narrative of archaeology can only be welcomed as a point of debate.
Timeline (2003) is adapted from the novel by Michael
Crichton, for whom the dangers of science-out-of-control in the service of
capitalist imperatives is a constant thread. Filmically it can be seen in
Westworld (1973), the Jurassic Park franchise and now in Timeline. This fuses
time-travel back to the fourteenth century AD with the exploration of the same
piece of the past by a group of archaeologists, financed by a secretive
capitalist corporation. Although it portrays archaeology as very much the
handmaiden of history it nevertheless recognizes that the driving motivation
for many archaeologists is to understand people – who they were, what they did
and how both influence who we are and what we do. However the film also allies
this with a comfortable conservatism that sees constancy, caring and honour as
the distinguishing features of the past as against machines, gadgets and the
sameness of the
present and the
future. The film
does retain a
degree of ambiguity and never
quite decides (should it?) whether the common man’s contribution to history is
as important as that of the noble élites. It does argue that archaeology is for
all and that it is a social good but at the same time and in the interests of
dramatic narrative adds some of its own myths about how archaeology is
practised.
DISCUSSION : MAKING
A CRISIS OUT OF A DRAMA ?
It is easy to have an entirely pessimistic view about
archaeology in film, but recognizing the nature of cinema and its predilection
for narrative (which is historically dominated by a concern with myth rather than
reality) allows for more optimism. The cinematic image of archaeology
fluctuates between the poles of the positive pursuit of hidden knowledge (thus
dispelling ignorance) and the negative rape of the sacred and indigenous. This
is healthy and reinforces the reality of cinema as something made by diverse
makers and audiences and reflecting wider political debates, not just what we
might call the mechanics of the discipline. Archaeology is not an exclusive
entry into the truth (or a version of it); another way in is fiction which
often seeks to make meaning, through narrative and metaphor. At a
basic level fictional
archaeological narratives do
recognize the whole process of
archaeology, from fieldwork to museum curation, though admittedly this is often
on a speeded-up narrative-driven time-scale. As a depicted profession
archaeology is no worse off than other professions: scientists, psychiatrists,
doctors, teachers, architects and the police are equally misrepresented.
A recent analysis of archaeologists in popular culture
(Russell 2002b:53) suggested that 98 per cent of the British population had no
regular contact with a real archaeologist, seen as a factor contributing to the
haziness of the boundary between fiction and reality. The solutions offered
were to use cinema’s ‘stereotypes’ against themselves; to completely reject the
fictional images, or simply to continue to ignore popular culture. There is
another alternative. It is true that cinema’s stock characterizations and plots
(the ‘stereotypes’) are exaggerations, but exaggerations of a reality, the
underlying issues of which (and their historical antecedents) these films
capture quite well. The so-called ‘stereotyping’ is also due to a somewhat
playful, myth-making, narrative tradition which has a streak of
anti-establishment
ethos. Such narratives satisfy for many a sense of
exclusion from archaeology and museums, giving an alternative, accessible entry
into hidden knowledge through the consumption of narrative. This exclusion
manifests itself in the portrayal of archaeologists/curators as holders of privileged knowledge (in Doc
Savage Man of Bronze (1975), set in the 1930s, the archaeologist is a genius of
both archaeology and geology, his ‘-ologies’ emphasizing his high intelligence
and élite status). Into the mix are thrown notions of supernatural power,
colonial nostalgia, greed and treasure, in a male-dominated world.
There are of course drawbacks to a popular perception of
archaeology refracted by narrative conventions including a widespread dim
awareness of how the past can be legitimately acquired and protected.
Archaeology deems unethical the flouting of indigenous rights and the trade in
illicitly acquired antiquities but the thriving black market in antiquities and
the complacency of auction houses in their circulation are elided in the
popular, public consciousness and seem to be seen as equivalents to
archaeology. Archaeology is also much more multivocal and multicultural in the
wake of post-processual and social archaeology. Narratives of popular culture
have not really adapted to this, though there are glimmerings. A.I. (2001)
includes a deep-future postscript in which alien or highly evolved human- robot
creatures can recreate the past through memory recovery. This is an eloquent
metaphor for the agenda of social archaeology in wanting to recover past human
complexity – recognizing that people in the past constructed their own
identities through bounded interactions with each other, with élite power
structures, and with their environment in its physical and temporal
manifestations.
It follows that the making of personal and
social/community identities is a
constant on-going process. In our own contemporary world this also includes
looking back at the past, to challenge its guardianship and explore
fictionalized variables. In the same way that archaeology is in fact full of
cultural biographies – of objects, of
sites, and of
landscapes – that
constantly have their
meanings changed through time and space so the process of our
understanding of these changes – archaeology – has a cultural biography of
which popular film and its narratives are but one reflex. I am not arguing that
those who see these films simply accept them and perceive archaeology
accordingly (just as people can choose a fringe archaeological text over a
specialized report without automatically accepting the fringe discourse, see
Mathews 2002:158–159), though there are those who undoubtedly do. Rather, I
have tried to elucidate what sort of messages – deliberate or unintentional –
are being put out by popular cinema and so are available to
believe in or
not, consciously or
subconsciously by individuals. Cinema in particular has yet to
catch up with displaying a real public face to archaeology (though historically
some of these films can be seen as critiquing a lack of public archaeology).
The more that the public is included in archaeology the greater the chances are
of this changing.
The other major drawback is cinema’s sense of
authenticity. Most of the films in question are not concerned with giving
precise lessons in historical, archaeological or scientific fact. It is
certainly true though that many of them claim to achieve a look that is
authentic but this is a narrow meaning of authenticity, one essentially
to do with persuaded believability. It is the creation of
a believable context in which the examination of human behaviour, fears and
anxieties, of possibilities and pleas for knowledge can take place (and again
there is an element of deliberate and delighted-in provocation, a common trait
within popular culture). Viewed from the position of circles of consumption and
production such films can work as metaphorical dialogues on cultural exclusion,
Eurocentric and professional superiority, political and bodily identity and an
abiding desire for stimulating stories – a key pressure valve of popular
culture, if you like, a self-administered sugar-coated pill.
If the films often seem repetitive this is due to the
persistence of some archaeological practices, the stubbornness of inherited
perceptions held by audiences and the narrative conventions of cinema (its
semiotic language relies on such conventions to help tell a story in a concise,
understandable and inclusive way). If we read such films in an overly literal
way we will miss their (sometimes unintended)
point. If we
allow them to
stand as colourful,
narrative-driven popular metaphors questioning received wisdom then they
form a valid, more coherent debating position in a social dialogue. With
archaeology, as with other bodies of knowledge, if people are not engaged by or
clear about what the discipline is saying (and sometimes in spite of this) then
they will tell their own stories of exploitation, adventure and criticism.
These stories may be fantastic and unbelievable but they also inspire wonder at
human drama in the past and ask archaeology and archaeologists to do the same.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Sue Pearce and Nick Merriman for their
encouragement and discussion, and to the Society of Museum Archaeologists which
gave me the opportunity to present an earlier, briefer version of this article
at its Reading Conference in 2000 (subsequently published in the conference
proceedings: Hall 2002). Neal Ascherson provided much needed detailed comment
and drew my attention to the full complexity of the practice of archaeology
under the Third Reich. Finally thanks to the helpful comments of two anonymous
referees and to Alan Saville’s judicious editorial hand. Any remaining errors
and unthinking Eurocentrism are entirely the responsibility of the author.
NOTE
1. Copyright note
concerning Figures 1 and 2. The author of this article made extensive searches
in both the UK and the US to find the current copyright owner of the 1959
Hammer version of The Mummy but was unable to identify anyone holding the
UK/European licensing rights.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Mark A. Hall is
a graduate of
the Universities of
Sheffield (ancient and
medieval history) and Leicester (museum studies) and has worked in
museums in England and Scotland. He is currently Human History Officer at Perth
Museum and Art Gallery, where his chief responsibility is the curation of the
archaeology collection. His main interest is medieval material culture
(particularly gaming, early medieval sculpture and the cult of saints). An
interest in cinema led naturally to an interest in the way archaeology and
museums are portrayed by that medium.
Address: Perth Museum and Art Gallery, 78 George Street,
Perth, PH1 5LB, Scotland, UK. [email: mahall@pkc.gov.uk]
ABSTRACTS
Romancing the stones : L’archéologie dans le cinéma
populaire
Mark A. Hall
Cet article traite
de la représentation de
l’archéologie et des
archéologues dans le
cinéma populaire. De nombreux films clés sont analysés afin d’aborder
les sujets principaux de l’article : l’appropriation culturelle et des éléments
contestés comme les trésors, le public, la politique et le sexe. La
représentation de l’archéologie dans un film ne peut être séparée des contextes
culturels généraux dans lesquels elle évolue et, bien que les évocations de
l’archéologie et des archéologues ne soient souvent pas satisfaisantes,
l’auteur cherche à arriver à une conclusion favorable en essayant de comprendre
le dynamisme narratif de la fiction populaire et la longue histoire d’exclusion
du public des domaines de l’archéologie. La plupart des films considérés
n’aspirent pas à être classés comme chefs d’œuvres, mais font part d’une forme
culturelle parfois perspicace et capable d’inciter le débat dans le cadre
essentiel de pratiques culturelles qui
construisent et développent l’identité
individuelle et sociale.
Mots clés: cinéma, eurocentrisme, étude de films, culture
populaire, trésor
Romancing the stones - Archäologie im Spiegel des
Kinofilms
Mark A. Hall
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung von
Archäologie und Archäologen im Kinofilm. Eine Reihe von Schlüsselfilmen werden
diskutiert, die die Hauptthemen des Artikels, nämlich kulturelle Aneignung und
umstrittenen Bereiche (einschließlich Schatz, der Öffentlichkeit, Politik und
Geschlechterfragen), ansprechen. Die Darstellung der Archäologie im Film lässt
sich nicht von den weiteren kulturellen Kontexten trennen, in denen sie wirken,
und es kann – wenngleich auch die Abbildung von Archäologie und Archäologen
häufig unbefriedigend ist – ein positiver Schluss gezogen werden, anhand dessen
versucht wird, den erzählerischen Antrieb der öffentlichen Fiktion und die
lange Geschichte des Ausschlusses der Öffentlichkeit von der Archäologie zu
verstehen. Die meisten der einbezogenen Filme können zwar nicht als große
Kunstwerke gelten, aber sie sind Teil einer Kulturform, die Ansichten anbietet,
die eine Debatte innerhalb eines vitalen Kontextes kultureller Praktiken
ermöglichen, durch die Identität – sei es die des Individuums oder der Gruppe –
geschaffen wird und sich entwickelt.
Schlüsselbegriffe: Kino, Eurozentrismus, Filmstudien,
Populärkultur, Schatz
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