Archaeology, the Sex Pistols, etc.

Founded in London in 1975, the Sex Pistols are widely considered to be one of the best and most influential punk rock bands--perhaps even one of the most influential modern bands period--despite existing for less than four years and only releasing one full-length album. Their M.O. was to subvert everything--music, pop culture, politics especially--at all costs; thus, they’re still, in 2011, the posterboys for rebellion and angst. The band’s singer, John Lydon (better known as Johnny Rotten), has laced this contemporary rebellious through all his art--from his work with the Sex Pistols to his subsequent music with PiL to his butter commercials to his drawings. Some of the latter of these enterprises--the drawings, I mean--are currently, believe it or not, the subject of an archaeological debate.

Yes, Johnny Rotten is relevant right now in the world of archaeology--but as Guardian art writer Jonathan Jones stresses in a recently published polemic, he shouldn’t be. Archaeologists writing in the journal Antiquity have been urging that Rotten-scribbled graffiti (pictured above) in a London house be preserved; they liken his doodles, in fact, to paleolithic cave art and thus deem them necessary to save and cherish. But is using archaeology to talk about modern history a fresh approach to an oft-overlooked science? Or is it a desperate attempt to get the largely-apathetic public to care by using the archaeological skill set to examine things that are more “fun” and “relevant”?
James argues that the preservation status of Rotten's graffiti is a cop-out. “Their real agenda,” he writes, “is to provoke their own profession, to imply that archaeology should be about graffiti as much as it is about cave paintings. But here they are being the opposite of subversive.” They seem to think that by tying their cause to a subversive icon, Rotten, they can modernize their time-worn art. Appealing to the masses, however, is neither what Rotten is about nor what archaeology has ever been about. Many archaeologists have tried different tactics--such as writing essays for “lay people,” or talking about Indiana Jones using archaeology, etc. - to draw younger people in, but one has to think that doing so can corrupt the practice. It’s true that Rotten’s drawings (or Indiana Jones, for that matter) define an epoch just as rock art did--but the implications of such art, both why and how it was made, are completely different. Rock art is a cultural, sociological movement--a testament to the evolution of mankind. Rotten’s drawings, while cool and fun and everything, are just one man’s haphazard work. By suggesting that Rotten’s work is equitable to that of, say, the San people, these archaeologists are feeding into the hands of the modern-day folks who are uninterested in their work to begin with.
They are also feeding into the hands, meanwhile, of their Western archaeologist forefathers. In attributing preservation status to Rotten’s doodles, they are doing exactly what has been done throughout history: placing importance on the Western man’s work, glorifying the white man as a hero and a visionary. It’s unlikely that these same archaeologists would call for the preservation of King Sunny Ade’s doodles. Perhaps some Africans would, but it wouldn't be under the same auspices or authority, This notion that Western art is better and/or more important has pervaded archaeological history. That archaeologists frequently in the past thought that impressive findings in Africa had to have been imported some how by the Western world is a form of imperialism that isn’t all that different from what these archaeologists now are doing. While the Rotten ordeal is not on as large a scale and may not be that huge a deal in the scope of things, it stands as a signifier for Western self-importance in the field of archaeology.

Granted, Johnny Rotten is awesome (full disclosure: PiL is one of my favorite bands of all time), and these archaeologists are both entitled to do what they want and make their work “relevant.” But it’s a shame their framing Rotten’s graffiti in the context of archaeology, because it just gives the people whose attention they’re attracting the wrong idea.

The Gentlest Exploitation

One longstanding difficulty in dealing with Africa as a focus of study is its representation, as it has a history of having its history rewritten by outsiders, from explorers to colonialist powers to anthropologists in the modern day. Sometimes it can be easy to spot the heavy hand of Western influence on the African past and its present image, but often the effects are more insidious--and therefore all the more unsettling. I'd like to look at two examples of well-intentioned exploitation of African peoples and their representation: anthropological interaction with the Hadza of Tanzania, and the popular film The Gods Must be Crazy. 


The Hadza are a community in Tanzania that subsist mainly by hunting and gathering, adhering relatively closely to practices that for most of the rest of the world are buried in antiquity. This has led them to be the focus of many anthropologists with points to prove about Homo sapiens' technological and social past. However, their use as an archaeological case study is problematic, as often anthropologists' desire to preserve their "primitive" society results in keeping them impoverished--they are discouraged from the beneficial practice of cattle herding, and since archaeologists don't want to disturb the subsistence patterns that make them so special by compensating their time and involvement with food, the Hadza are often given things of little use for their participation. Planting the Hadza, a contemporary people, in the past is not only a fallacy but a disservice to their history.

A photo from National Geographic's Hadza album, which literally illustrates the temporal paradox surrounding this people: in one photo Hadza hunters wear cargo shorts and plastic sandals, while National Geographic's main article says that these "hunter-gatherers live 10,000 years in the past."

Similarly, in The Gods Must be Crazy (1981), the Kalahari bushmen are depicted as a people outside the world--a people so unlike us in our greed, materialism, and labor-saving devices that they seem more like children than anything else. The film received favorable reviews from many critics but was critiqued by Toby Alice Volkman in a review which discussed its negative impact and implications--mainly in its controversial portrayal of black Africans as either primitive innocents or bumbling gunmen. As Volkman concludes, "[the] San (Kalahari bushmen) are very much of this planet and of this moment. The denial of this reality allows South Africa to continue to dispossess them of their autonomy, their history, and their land."

Two San natives inspect the Western materialism that has touched their community in the form of a glass cola bottle.