This is an occasional update from Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology members about their research projects, fieldwork and latest activities. If you would like to see your work featured, send an email to website@spma.org.uk
Susana Pacheco (CFE-HTC, Nova University of Lisbon FCT)
As part of my PhD project “The Industrial HER. An archaeological vision of women’s lives and stories through photography”, this summer, I’m developing a somewhat different type of fieldwork. Perhaps it is better to call it laboratory work, or is it?
The main goal of this project is to understand the role played by women in the Portuguese industry, focusing essentially on the textiles and canning sectors. Recognising the problems they faced, both directly as members of a community in which they were not always well-accepted or sometimes not even treated as human beings, or indirectly as they were erased from documents, historiography and archaeological records. To fulfil this goal, a different type of materiality was chosen – photographs.
For that reason, photographic objects are being archaeologically analysed, just like one archaeologist would do with ceramics. Following a new methodology, these artefacts are being analysed in every possible way. Their materiality is being considered. Their formats, signs of use, marks of the passage of time, dimensions, biographies, and every aspect that one would consider for a piece of ceramics and beyond.
At the same time, their decoration (the image itself) is also being analysed, or “excavated”. In the words of Ralph Mills: “Objects within the same stratified deposit, physically and temporally, form an assemblage. While this might be within a three-dimensional soil layer, it can also be a ‘deposit’ depicted in the two-dimensional stratigraphy of a painting or photograph that captures assemblages frozen together in time. It is therefore possible to ‘excavate’ an image in an archaeological sense” (2017: 116). So, one could say that a photograph is an archaeological context. Therefore, it can be excavated just like any type of ruin.
In this sense, the fieldwork being developed for the past few months (and that will be carried out during the next ones as well) consists of an archaeological analysis (and “excavation”) of this unconventional type of post-medieval materiality. Their study allows us to learn so much about the historical subjects (women) that are the main focus of this project. Like almost no other materiality, they enable us to see their facial expressions. An interpretation of their emotions, recognising their possible fears and understanding their relations with the people and objects surrounding them in their daily lives are just some of the possibilities they offer archaeologists.
This fieldwork (or laboratory work) brings immense new perspectives on the lives of these agents who are often undervalued by Portuguese archaeology.