Kitty Hauser. Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, & the British Landscape 1927-1955.

Smith, Pamela Jane

KITTY HAUSER. Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, & the British Landscape 1927-1955. xii+314 pages, 120 illustrations. 2007. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 978-0-19-920632-2 hardback 65 [pounds sterling].

In a letter preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, Gordon Childe offers an insight into O.G.S. Crawford's personality. 'I am sorry that Austin [assistant editor of Antiquity] is so difficult to collaborate with ... you have the same reputation, you know.'

Since the subtitle of the book under review refers to Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927-1955, one might expect that its author, Kitty Hauser, would also offer insights into this contrary man. Crawford was the great pioneer of aerial photography and a firm proponent of innovative British landscape analyses and Hauser chooses 1927 as the beginning date for her study precisely because Crawford founded Antiquity in that year. He was, in fact, the first researcher to discuss fully the archaeological implications of 'shadow sites', the term used in her title.

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Hauser approaches her subject as an art historian. She contributes clear, detailed analyses of the lives and art of British Neo-Romantic and Surrealist artists active before and during WWII. She offers a brief history of their involvement with the National Buildings Record and provides a creative analysis of the 1943 Neo-Romantic film, 'A Canterbury Tale'. She examines in fine detail (p. 13) 'what it meant [for Neo-Romantics] to see, experience and represent the British landscape' and notes that Paul Nash, John Piper and Geoffrey Grigson greatly admired Antiquity, a journal 'so amenable to the Neo-Romantic imagination' (p. 14). These artists were deeply affected by the dramatically beautiful aerial photographs newly produced by Crawford and G.W.G. Allen (see Chapters 3 and 4). Antiquity, for its Neo-Romantic readers, remained 'a celebration ... where modernist forms and surreal objects were domesticated by their absorption in a recognizably local and safely historicized landscape' (p. 132).

However, Hauser is less informed as an historian of archaeology; when she leaves the familiar ground of Neo-Romantic art, she tends to misunderstand her subject. In an analysis of Crawford's thinking (p. 134), she argues that he was acting as a 'diviner', piecing together a bounded whole, a 'pre-existing pattern'. She also suggests (p. 122) that Stuart Piggott and Jacquetta Hawkes were 'Neo-Romantic archaeologists' whose archaeology was influenced by their choice of art and friends. Hauser is here underestimating the importance of epistemological realism in Piggott's, Crawford's and even in J. Hawkes's thinking.

In fact, Piggott stated in an interview that, as a Humanist, his archaeology was not influenced by Neo-Romantic intellectual trends. He and the other pre-WWII 'Young Turks' lived before the early post-processualists of the 1980s who may indeed have been affected by Neo-Romanticism; some did see archaeology as art rather than science.

In interwar archaeology, Piggott, Hawkes, Phillips and Clark were clearly Realists; they used separate, independently constructed lines of evidence to create 'networks of resistances'. Clark and Piggott, in their 1933 investigation of Grimes Graves, compared lithic analyses with the results of studies of pottery, mollusca and fauna, finding that all evidence favoured a Neolithic date, a type of reasoning characteristic of Critical Realism. Most archaeologists believed that there was a real world; it was knowable but their knowledge was not final, complete or whole.

Crawford, a confidant of Childe, was deeply interested in the Dialectical Materialism championed by many intellectuals of the 1930s, an aspect that Hauser overlooks. Crawford explored the implications of dialectical analysis for the interpretation of landscape palimpsests, history and human progress. He had little time for Neo-Romantics, as Hauser notes (pp. 127, 150).

When returning to a discussion of Neo-Romantic sensibilities, Hauser offers lively, detailed descriptions and analyses, as well as colourful and relevant historical accounts. In her opening paragraphs (pp. 1-5) she defines topophilia, a term used by W.H. Auden to characterise a generation of artists and writers in the 30s and 40s. Topophiles had 'visual imagination ... a wilfully parochial outlook ... a reluctance to engage with the homogenizing forces of urban modernity' and an interest in the 'local landscapes marked by time, places where the past is tangible', 'immanent', 'recoverable' and ultimately 'redemptive'; 'fundamentally counter-modernist' and armed with an 'archaeological imagination', Neo-Romantic topophiles valued ' the presence of the past in a landscape despite the incursion of modernity' and represented 'a powerful counter-impulse to [modernistic] culture of interchangeable surfaces covering over all traces of history.' Especially flourishing during the war, 'by 1945 it had acquired the status of officially approved national art.'

Neo-Romantics were attracted to aerial archaeology, Hauser explains (pp. 174, 176), because it was 'predicated upon the essential ineradicability [author's emphasis] of marks or disruptions ... no matter how long ago they were made'. Aerial archaeology is inherently redemptive because 'it rests upon the idea of a recoverable past'; the landscape can ideally 'be thought of like Freud's conception of the psyche, where "everything is somehow preserved and ... can once more be brought to light"'. 'Aerial archaeology suggests that sites, while usually invisible, can always reappear with the return of spring'. Although poetically expressed, the author once again tends to misconstrue archaeological evidence. Landscape evidence is not 'ineradicable'; Allen and J.K.S. St Joseph did not return repeatedly to the same site to seek redemption. They returned precisely because the evidence is eradicable.

The problems associated with the interpretation of how early-twentieth century archaeologists viewed their subject will, we very much hope, be further discussed in Kitty Hauser's forthcoming biography of Crawford, based on research completed since Shadow Sites.

PAMELA JANE SMITH

(with thanks to Martyn Barber, Mark Bowden, Christine Finn and Colin Shell for discussion)

Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK

(Email: pjs1011@cam.ac.uk