IN THE MIDST OF RICH MEADOWS, I WALKED WITH COMPANY:

CREATIVE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

Lara Band

It’s 9.30am and, dopey from a night interrupted by barking foxes and the August heat, I’m cycling along east London’s Greenway, a tree, shrub and grass lined footpath, cycleway and nature corridor formalised in the 1990s. On much cooler winter days, steam wraiths rise from cast iron vents along the route: the Greenway is built over Balzalgette’s Northern Outfall Sewer, itself built in the 1860s to manage London’s wastewater following the cholera outbreak of 1853-4 and the Great Stink of 1858. I’m just crossing over the Channelsea, a mostly culverted tributary of the River Lea, when a rat rockets out of the undergrowth hurtling straight towards my front wheel. I swerve and tilt, heart racing, more with surprise at the sudden movement and the thought of crashing than the being rushed at by a rat. The rat, in fact, seems more scared than I am: tiny paws scrabbling on flagstones, it scuds 360 degrees and races back into the buddleia and brambles. Righting myself I reflect on the appropriateness of our encounter on my first day of fieldwork, and cycle thoughtfully onwards…

Vignette (en route to research)

In the midst of rich meadows I walked with company is a six minute film I made with Middlesex Filter Beds Nature Reserve in Hackney, London, UK. The filterbeds were constructed in 1852–1853 to provide clean water to east London, a function they served until closure in 1969. Much of the infrastructure is extant within the now formalised nature reserve. As a professional archaeologist and through my recent MA in Contemporary Art and Archaeology at UHI [1] I have been exploring ways to work with and not on sites, to acknowledge the deeply entangled more-than-human world we all live in [2,3].

Prior to visiting the site I resisted an urge to carry out historical research, rejecting the traditional archaeological ‘map regression’ exercise that layers historical maps in order to target areas for survey. I chose instead a methodology of creative practice as research, a messy and iterative process that embraces unpredictable but illuminating results [4]. Rather than follow a predefined plan I bounced curiously down lines of desire, laying myself open to surprise associations and serendipitous encounters; a creative research method vibrantly and sensually described by Premjish Achari (after Jose Esteban Muñoz) as ‘cruising utopia’ [5]. The inherent fluidity of this approach aligned neatly with my theoretical context, as hinted to above; seeking to understand the ways in which archaeology can recognise and negotiate unruly more-than-human entanglement at heritage sites [6,7,8]. Embracing a utopic ‘ecology of practices’ [9] including walking, drawing, listening, noticing, filming, photographing and recording sound, I developed a creative and performative mapping process with each action [10].

Back home each night, and beyond, I continued to write and draw. I played increasingly with film and sound and carried out historical research. Rather than a process of (on-site) archaeological field survey that maps remains and gathers evidence for an (off-site) analysis and report, my research merges and feeds back, in a continuous process of folding and becoming with the site: the film presented here is just one knot in an infinite set of relations [11,12].

From my field notes:

I get to the Nature Reserve and, not entirely able to shed instinct, head straight for an information board installed by a weeping willow. It tells me the waterworks closed in 1969, then ‘nature quickly took over’. I run my fingers over the surface, dusty green-grey and rough with algae and blackspot blown in by the wind and rain. Like the vegetation at the site, this board itself is in succession. I bend down, squinting, and notice rows of tiny triangular meanderings. I’m transfixed at their detail and contemplate the things, human and fellow being, that have brought this slug or snail grazing site together. I continue on, mapping the rest of the site with my body: walking, looking, listening, feeling, sniffing, tracing, filming, writing, photographing, recording. I cycle home. That evening, I overlay a photo of the snail grazing trails on a map of the site. Playing with scale, I trace a course across the nature reserve, to follow the next day.

Day two on site and I follow that map, still cruising utopia [13]. Part way across the site, sun bleached scrub turns to dank woodland, a sudden drop in light and temperature. The River Lea and the Hackney Cut squeeze closer together here which might explain this change; or perhaps humans have taken advantage of the earlier infrastructure, using the extant concrete filterbed compartments to actively create and manage different habitats. It seems most likely that a combination of human, and fellow-being opportunity and interaction over time has brought this sensorial threshold into being: a crack, an interstice, a thin place that suddenly reveals the intensity of more-than-human relationships here, and by extension, everywhere. Damp and mossy, packed with decaying plant matter accumulating around the boles of closely packed birch and alder, it smells different too. I find out later this is the result of the chemical compound geosmin, produced by soil-dwelling fungi and microorganisms. Human noses are attuned to this smell, sniffing it out much further than its immediate environs: the effects and entanglements of microbial life reach far beyond their physical borders [14]. I’ve only just begun to see the dense meshes of the site and there’s certainly more to explore.

Through the wood and into the light, I emerge into a grassy open area. I continue with my snail trail map. I find lichen and moss-covered quarry tiles and a broken ceramic drain and wonder if it’s part of a filterbed era sanitation block - an unruly privet bush nods in agreement. Snail tracks crisscross these tiles too, tangled trajectories weaving themselves through the lives of others. Subsequent research reveals that snails travel at one metre per hour though they can go faster by slipstreaming on each other’s slime [15]. My journey across the nature reserve would take a snail eight days though they rarely venture more than ten metres from home. Snail geography and temporality confront my human perception of time and space, something I think through later with the film’s layered time, depth and scale. My research also reveals that the filterbeds were implicated in the 1866 cholera epidemic in which nearly 6000 Londoners died. I make blackout poetry from the official report which gives both title, and impetus to my film [16]. In the midst of rich meadows, it was perfectly clear I walked with company encapsulates the site’s past and ongoing web of relations whether human-led landscaping, chattering birdlife or hungry snails, or the bacteria geosmin that gives wet woodland its earthy smell and the Vibrio cholerae that so intimately entangled with humans in 1866.

Continuing to think through filmmaking, I combine slides I’ve made with fallen leaves with historic maps, texts, my field recordings and drawings and more. I layer sound and image intuitively and sometimes by happy accident. Non-linear and abstract, the film resists archaeology’s predilection for humanly coherent temporality and narrative. The film’s underlying motif, of my feet walking a spraypainted labyrinth fortuitously graffitied at the centre of the site, plays on the use of labyrinths as paths to knowledge and for choreographed dance: the Greek root of choreography, khoreia or ‘dancing in unison’ seems ridiculously appropriate.

Through a field survey using all my senses and by expanding my notion of fieldwork to incorporate on-site and off-site work as a wholly iterative process of creation, I generated an understanding of more-than-human worlds, of temporal and geographical scales impossible to approach through traditional archaeological mapping practices. Being fully open to unforeseen connections between humans, fellow beings and place brought entanglement in messy more-than-human worlds. Unlike a traditional archaeology of place, my research didn’t attempt to provide answers. Instead it opened up a necessarily porous and flickering space, one enabling a deeper reflection on entangled pasts and presents - as well as speculation on uncertain, but wholly interconnected, futures.

Biography

Lara Band is an archaeologist and creative practitioner whose work explores climate, heritage, and more-than-human worlds. She combines film, sound, and site-based participatory practice with research, bringing archaeology into dialogue with environmental and ecological change. As well as curating a week long programme showcasing sound for CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory conference) she has shown work at the Small File Film Festival, Ramsgate Festival of Sound and at many international conferences.

Notes

1. Antonia Thomas, “Contemporary Art and Archaeology: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy and Practice in the Digital University”, in Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era, ed. G. Moshenska (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 19-40.

2. Nils Bubandt, Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen, and Rachel Cypher, eds. Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene: Doing Fieldwork in Multispecies Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctv2h43983.

3. Torgeir Rinke Bangstad and Þóra Pétursdóttir, “An ecological approach to heritage”, in Heritage Ecologies, ed. T.R. Bangstad, Torgeir Rinke and Þ. Pétursdóttir (Routledge, 2022), 3-28

4. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (I.B.Tauris, 2007)

5. Premjish Achari. 2022. “What Does Art/Artist Think? Making a Case for Artistic Practice as Research”. jar-online.net (May 28, 2022): https://doi.org/10.22501/jarnet.0056

6. Emma Waterton and Hayley Saul, “Ghosts of the Anthropocene: spectral accretions at the Port Arthur historic site”. Landscape Research, 46, no. 3 (2020): 362–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2020.1808957

7. Stein Farstadsvoll, “Mold, weeds, and plastic lanterns: ecological aftermath in a derelict garden, in Heritage Ecologies, ed. n . T.R. Bangstad and Þ Pétursdóttir (Routledge, 2022), 327-349

8. Bangstad and Pétursdóttir, “An ecological approach to heritage”

9. Stephanie Springgay and Anise Truman, “On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability”, Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24, no. 3 (2018): 212, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464

10. Daniel Lee, “Process, practice and archaeologies of the moment” in Re-mapping archaeology: critical perspectives, alternative mapping, ed. M. Gillings, P. Hacıgüzeller. and G. (Routledge, 2019), 160

11.. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1000 Plateaus (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-25

12.. Tim Ingold. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. (Routledge, 2013)

10. Achari, “What Does Art/Artist Think?”

14. Farstadsvoll, “Mold, weeds, and plastic lanterns: ecological aftermath in a derelict garden”

15. University of Exeter. “University study uncovers the secret lives of UK garden snail“, August 23, 2013, https://news-archive.exeter.ac.uk/featurednews/title_315519_en.html

16. General Register Office, Report on the cholera epidemic of 1866 in England: supplement to the twenty-ninth annual report of the registrar-general of births, deaths, and marriages in England (George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1868) https://archive.org/details/b28067423/mode/2up?q=%22lea+bridge%22