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A load of old balls - Ep 17
513 Plays1 year ago
In this month’s tea-break, Matilda is joined by Andrew Meirion Jones, Professor of Archaeology at Stockholm University and one of several researchers who have attempted to unravel the mystery of the elusive Scottish Carved Stone Balls. If you’re looking for a definitive answer, then this isn’t the episode for you (or the podcast really!), but tune in if you’re interested in hearing about the different theories, learning how they were made, and finding out about the link between them and ancient Peruvians taking hallucinogens…
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/teabreak/17
Links
- UHI Lecture by Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark
- ScRAP Webinar by Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark
- SAS lecture by Dr Alison Sheridan
- English Heritage / Dr James Dilley making a carved stone ball
- “Carved Stone Balls” paper by Dorothy Marshall
- “Making a Mark” paper by Andrew Meirion Jones and Marta Díaz-Guardamino
- Blackfoot Project
- Coa LANDcraft project (Portugal)
Guest Contact
Name: Dr Andrew Meirion Jones
email: [email protected]
Contact the Host
- Email: [email protected]
- https://www.thearchaeologiststeacup.com
- insta: @the_archaeologists_teacup
- fb: /TheArchaeologistsTeacup
- twitter: @ArchaeoTeacup
Affiliates
- Motion: https://www.archpodnet.com/motion
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Transcript
Introduction to Tea Break Time Travel
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to episode 17 of Tea Break Time Travel.
Tea Choices and Autumn Vibes
00:00:21
Speaker
I am your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I'm savouring a Roy Boss caramel tea because, you know, the nights are getting longer, the mornings are getting cooler, so I'm trying to embrace the autumn spirit with some nice caramel. And joining me on my tea break today is Andrew Marion Jones.
Meet Andrew Marion Jones
00:00:36
Speaker
I hope that I've pronounced that correctly. I realised I forgot to ask for a pronunciation check before we started. He was Professor of Archaeology. It was good.
00:00:44
Speaker
who is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Stockholm. Thank you for joining me today, Andrew. Are you also on tea this morning? Yes. So, as a British person, my kind of blood is entirely made of tea. I start the day with an English breakfast, but I've never switched to chamomile.
00:01:09
Speaker
Especially, because do I detect a slight northern twang to your accent? Yeah. So indeed, the home of tea in the north of England, I could argue. A camomile though. Oh, that's quite different. You need to be relaxed. Yeah. Having moved to Sweden recently, the selection of teas are very different here. So green tea and
Andrew's Archaeology Journey
00:01:35
Speaker
camomile.
00:01:41
Speaker
They do do rhubosh and other teas, but for some reason, the blend of rhubosh tea, I can drink rhubosh in Britain, but in Sweden, does something stretch too. So I'm on camera this morning.
00:02:02
Speaker
fair enough. It is interesting indeed how all the different because I lived in the Netherlands for a long time and there as well they have a lot of infusion black tea. So if it's a mango tea, it's actually black tea with some mango in it rather than a mango tea. So it's interesting other different things. Well, I hope that you're feeling nice and chill and relax then with your chemistry. So as you are a professor of archaeology, you have a lot of experience under your belt in archaeological research, but how did you actually first get into the topic of archaeology?
00:02:32
Speaker
Kind of accidentally, I started out my first winter university to study science and really didn't enjoy the science very much and went on an archaeological dig which was run by the Scottish film school so I went to university in Scotland
00:02:57
Speaker
which is run by the Scottish Field School, which is a kind of voluntary organization. We were digging a pictish site in Fife. So I was actually at University in Dundee, and I just crossed the bridge over to Fife. And since then, I decided, around that time, I decided, actually, I really didn't enjoy studying biochemistry.
00:03:32
Speaker
at Glasgow University. The Scottish system is very, it's like the American system, you can major and minor and you can pick up grades or are done several years in Dundee as a scientist and was able to carry
00:03:51
Speaker
was great over to Glasgow. That's very useful. Which was really good. Since I started studying in Glasgow in 1989, and since then, I haven't stopped. Once I discovered it, I absolutely loved it.
00:04:17
Speaker
I gravitated. I think having studied the sciences, I gravitated towards the humanities side of the subject. So doing archaeological theory was really exciting to me and I figured that
00:04:44
Speaker
and kept exploring that. Yeah, no, amazing. And it's very interesting indeed to hear that you're... Because we've had a couple of people on who sort of had an interest in one subject but weren't really feeling it and then found archaeology but combined them. But it's interesting to hear that you indeed went in completely a different direction. Well, I did use the biochemistry for my PhD. So,
00:05:17
Speaker
in pottery. That sounds very scientific indeed. Which is super scientific. Yeah. So I kind of, you know, always had that, always had that in the kind of background. But having done that in my PhD, I, you know, and so that was quite intense over a kind of four year period. I decided, actually, I'm going to shift towards studying the archaeology of art instead.
00:05:46
Speaker
Yeah, so that's interesting. And I mean, well, I guess we'll come back to that a bit later. But was there anything in particular that drew you to the archaeology of art specifically rather than I mean, because there's such a broad range of theories and that kind of topic? I guess I'd always again, through the theory, I'd always had an interest in art. And while I was at Glasgow, I was living with artists
00:06:17
Speaker
were attending Glasgow School of Art. So I spent lots of time talking high-blown French theory with a bunch of artists. Since then, I've always had an interest in contemporary art and just kept
00:06:51
Speaker
PhD was groovedware from the site of Barnhouse up in Albany. Groovedware, as you may know, was decorated with cover linear designs, which we also found in Irish passage tombs. I actually ended up getting more interested in the designs on the pottery than on the contents of the pots.
00:07:20
Speaker
know if that's fair enough, fair enough. Well, we'll go I think we'll go into that a bit
Time Travel Dreams
00:07:24
Speaker
more later. But for now, as this is indeed a time travel tea break, if you could travel back in time, where exactly would you go? And why? Well, again, I think probably the archaeology of art would be my main guide, my main area of interest. So I mean, somewhere like Nazca would be pretty cool, just to see how those masculine lines were made. And to
00:07:51
Speaker
completely finely dispelled. Eric Bondineken and the idea of spaceships landing in Peru. And Sheva de Juana in Peru would also be pretty cool. I've written little bits about it in general kind of books. And that's like an amazing, it's flowed for me out of Indiana Jones.
00:08:20
Speaker
a jungle temple. Oh, wow. Okay. With all these amazing craft designs on the exterior. And they're probably taking extremely potent psychedelics before so the initiative to kind of enter in the temple and then probably feeding them with these
00:08:57
Speaker
ghostly sounds. I mean, this is all the logical interpretation, but it'd be lovely to actually see what was happening during the creation of these, you know, it's got amazing reliefs, carved reliefs of shamanic, hybrid kind of human animal figures. Although you'd hope if you were there, you wouldn't be one of the, you know, initiates, you'd have to take a step back. That might be a bit of a harrowing experience. Yeah.
00:09:28
Speaker
Well, no, that sounds incredible. It's definitely very different as well to any other suggestions that we've had so far on the podcast going down to jungle temples in Peru. So looking forward to that journey. But for today, thank you very much for joining me on this tea break.
Carved Stone Balls of Scotland
00:09:43
Speaker
And before we talk more about today's object, we're first going to journey back to around 3000 BC to the area that we now know as Aberdeenshire in Northern Scotland.
00:09:52
Speaker
It's early morning, the first rays of sunshine are only just beginning to pierce through the thick mist that's managed to roll its way all the way up through the valleys from the distant ocean. The dawn bird song is muffled, doesn't quite cover the sound of rustling footsteps. Suddenly, some figures emerge from the mist wrapped up in warm in an outer layer of furs, thick leather boots, the insulating hay lining sticking out slightly at the top as they tread their way heavily through the dew-laden grass. One of the figures stumbles slightly, lots of rabbits around here,
00:10:20
Speaker
almost falling over, the bags that are slung across their back tip out their contents. The group stops and helps them to gather their fallen items, searching through the tall grass for all the objects before heading on. But there's something that they've forgotten. Hidden amongst the ferns just off the path is a ball, so dark in colour it's almost invisible in the shadows. As we look closer, we see that actually it's made from stone and has been carved into four knobs decorated with beautiful swirling patterns.
00:10:45
Speaker
And today we are looking at, for those of you who have been listening into this before, my absolute favorite object, the carved stone balls of Scotland. And we'll get into the details soon. But first, as always, I wanted to have a look at the most asked questions on the internet about this object courtesy of Google search. Weirdly, there weren't actually that many sort of autofill questions in Google. I guess people
00:11:07
Speaker
don't know about these objects or aren't quite as interested maybe as I am, but the two sort of main ones that came up first, one was, of course, what are the carved stone balls? And I guess we'll get into the details in the next section, but perhaps sort of a basic description, Andrew, or sort of the kind of base facts of these balls. As you say, they are dark stone and they're mainly kind of made of really tough stones like granite, it's really hard stones to carve.
00:11:37
Speaker
And they're carved sometimes with the same kind of curvilinear designs I was talking about earlier. And there's two sizes of balls, one's about 70 millimetres, one's just over 100 millimetres in size. And they can be carved in lots of different ways. You said series of knobs on them, but they can also
00:12:07
Speaker
have balls with a whole series of knobs almost like looking like hedgehogs or something or, you know, raspberries, something like that. So there's, you know, a real variety of shapes of these things.
00:12:28
Speaker
But just to clarify, though, so are they always decorated in some way or do you also have? No, no, they're not always decorated. Quite a lot of them are playing in actual fact. The research I've done on them shows that, you know, an enormous number actually completely playing. So one of the things we did was
00:12:58
Speaker
museums in Scotland and England, and in museum collections there are actually quite a lot of plain balls, which were kind of unrecognised, were often labelled as cannonballs or post-medieval
00:13:16
Speaker
You know, so we actually did a lot of work trying to show these things were actually nihilistic. Yeah. I mean, the idea of someone dropping a ball out of their bag that's only kind of partially carved is exactly, I think, what was happening quite a lot the time.
00:13:37
Speaker
Oh, well, I mean, we did go back in time and see it happening, so it makes sense. And I mean, they're called the Scottish Carved Stone Balls. Are they only found in Scotland then? No, I mean, they're mainly found in Scotland, but they are also found in Ireland, Northern Ireland.
00:14:09
Speaker
There's even one in Scandinavia. There's one in Norway, which I've never seen and I've been hoping to visit at some point. And now we know why you went to Stockholm. Well, it's in... yeah, it's in Stalingberg. It's a fair play.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah. True. I mean, yeah, it's a long, long country. And the carved stone balls, are they always found? So, I mean, in our one, they're sort of dropped out of a bag and are lying on the ground, sort of an alone find, I guess, a lone find. Are they found in usually particular site types, or is it varied? So, they've really seen this
00:15:02
Speaker
hardly any of them have archaeological contacts. So there are a few from Kist in Aberdeenshire, but the best contacts they come from are actually Neolithic settlements in Orkney and in the Hebrides.
00:15:29
Speaker
Which relates to the next question actually, which was who made the carved stone balls and when? So they're sort of mainly dated to the Neolithic then? Yeah, so they're dated to the Neolithic and we now have much clearer sense of the dates. I'm just going to have to look this up because I've actually written about this and I can't remember the precise
00:15:56
Speaker
dates we came up with, 29th or 28th century Calvary Sea. Okay. Roughly is when they date. So they're down to around about the 26th
00:16:19
Speaker
kind of period of time in which they made a mere 400 years. Yeah, wow. And how many are there? How many sort of examples? That's actually a really difficult question. There's at least 400. And depends on the literature that you look at. Dorothy Marshall, who first
00:16:57
Speaker
There's a proper excavation. They've found Calvesden Ball. Yeah. And there's other excavations in Albany that have found Calvesden Ball quite recently. Okay. And then they're also being found, they're also being excavated from museums. So one of the interesting articles by Alan Samuel some years ago was this
00:17:29
Speaker
TV, it'd been on the TV programme, someone had shown it from Bromley Museum in London. Oh!
00:17:43
Speaker
one. So, you know, balls are appearing from museum collections all the time. So at least 400, I would say is a reasonable estimate for how many there are. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, that's fascinating. Well, thank you for that little introduction. I think we've sort of covered Google's most search questions now then, but let's have a very quick break and we will be back soon.
00:18:13
Speaker
Welcome back, everyone. So, we now know a little bit more about carved stone balls, but Andrew, maybe you can tell us even more about it.
Classifying and Making Carved Stone Balls
00:18:21
Speaker
So, we spoke a little bit about the kind of variation of these balls themselves. What is it that actually links them then together? How do we know that they're one category of the carved stone balls? Okay, that's quite a tough one. So, I mean, in terms of category, in terms of typology, there are
00:18:48
Speaker
earlier, and she's one of the first people back in the late 70s to castle these balls. It's mainly their size, and most of them are around 70 millimeters in size, and then you've got this larger group. There's just over 100 millimeters. So it's mainly their size, their geology, so most of them
00:19:17
Speaker
of metamorphic or igneous rocks, which are obviously out of the geology of the northeast of Scotland. Then you've got similarities of design within the balls as well. Yeah, so that's what links them together as an object, as an object category.
00:19:47
Speaker
And so how many, so you've said that there's sort of varying designs, how many different designs are there? So you had mentioned that there were some that were smooth, there were some that looked like hedgehogs. Are there kind of variations within those designs as well? Well, that's actually a really tough question. I mean, one of the things, one of the things my research has done
00:20:19
Speaker
One of the first things I did when I was studying these objects was working with artists. In fact, we talked about art earlier. Working with artists at Winchester School of Art, we actually made calf symbols. Okay. And I looked the papers on
00:20:52
Speaker
So, I wanted to test that. I wanted to see if, you know, it kind of worked in my mind, but I wanted to see if it really worked in practice. I mean, this was going back 10 years ago now. I did a workshop with
00:21:22
Speaker
sculpture students. And we made custom balls, but we made them, we cheated. We didn't make them out of stone. I was about to ask, did you use the hard, hard thing? You made them out of plaster. Ah, okay, okay. And so I presented to the students my hypothesis that these things were made in a series of sequential stages. They start off kind of making it completely
00:21:51
Speaker
spherical ball, a smooth ball, and then you divide up spaces on that ball, and then it stops carving out between the spaces. And as you carve out between the spaces, the knobs, which are found on these balls, appear. So my hypothesis work, they are the various types
00:22:31
Speaker
was to teach us how complex these things are. I mean, I'm not a sculptor, but I found actually making these things three-dimensionally to be really complex trying to understand the three-dimensional kind of geometry.
00:23:00
Speaker
knobs with them and then the balls with their four knobs are some of the easiest to make. Oh really? I would have thought it was the other way round because they would need to be so perfectly positioned but the ones with multiple, you could just kind of cheat a little bit but no that's not the case. Well I guess if you looked
00:23:24
Speaker
But I think if you look, I mean, they are a little bit haphazard. You're right. But as we were learning, we used the just four knobs and that was
00:23:44
Speaker
relatively simple to understand. So you mentioned that these are made out of plaster. Are you planning at any point to replicate the workshop using stone? No. I mean, basically, the workshop was just to kind of understand the process. It was a bit of experimental archaeology to see if my hypothesis actually worked. Yeah. And since then, so I did a very large
00:24:22
Speaker
Britain and Ireland. Was this the making mark? This is the making mark, yeah. So we visited, I think, pretty much every museum in Britain and Ireland.
00:24:46
Speaker
reflectance transformation imaging of the eye. So we were recording the balls to see if we could see any evidence of working on
00:25:01
Speaker
on the surface. This relates to it. So, I do micro-ware analysis and use-ware analysis, and I really, really wanted to do a project on the Carved Stone Balls from a micro-ware perspective to see if I could do anything, but it was too complicated because it seemed that they
00:25:19
Speaker
because of the way that they had been found and processed post findings, it was sort of unsure if a USWR study would actually be possible because their context is so unknown, if that makes sense. So we didn't end up doing it. But that sounds, yeah, really interesting. And did you then find that there was evidence of kind of post working then? Yeah, so basically, so once once I worked out that what you have, the kind of types that we find are actually
00:25:51
Speaker
understood that, you know, the working of these objects was really important. We actually found evidence of, so they're kind of, they're working and they're kind of making up their mind about what the design is. So this, in some cases, they're starting off with one design and then they erase it and then start a different design.
00:26:26
Speaker
finished. Yeah, okay. I mean, one of the multi-knobbed balls where they just started packing out spaces for individual knobs and then they just left it. Obviously, it was too much bother. One of the things we realized was actually those plain balls
00:26:51
Speaker
were really important because that was a kind of early stage in the process that smoothed the ball into a sphere and then they just left it and that was certainly a
00:27:09
Speaker
ball that'd be discarded partway in the process. So it's during the Neolithic, so presumably they're using stone
Carving Techniques and Theories
00:27:16
Speaker
tools. So you mentioned pecking, but from my memory, I mean, for example, the Towie ball is so, the design is so carved beautifully. I mean, would that have been using flint tools? Do you think that that's maybe late Neolithic, so we're starting to see the ball? I don't think, no, I don't think it is metal. I mean, this
00:27:44
Speaker
that some of them may be Bronze Age because of the fineness of their working. And there are some from Bronze Age kissed in Appalachia. So one of the things I wanted to firmly show was that they, you know, as far as we could see that most of them were Neolithic and the best context we could find were
00:28:12
Speaker
nearly fixed settlements. But yeah, the details of how they're made still escapes me to be honest. It's exactly, I mean, the tower ball is just staggering. Yeah. And this other amazing ones is the Alford ball as well, which is also from Aberdeenshire.
00:28:43
Speaker
And I mean, I've kind of first sighted, it looks like a tennis ball, it's not got the kind of knobs on its surface, not very heavily carved, but what they've done is carve in beautiful detail in between the knobs. So what's technically known as the interspaces between the knobs are beautiful.
00:29:12
Speaker
Oh, right, yes, yes, I think I've seen things with that one. Yeah. So, the Towie Ball gets all the publicity, because it is amazing, but this one is almost as nice. Yeah, yeah. One of the amazing things we discovered with the Towie Ball was dancing complete as well.
00:29:34
Speaker
Really? Yeah. So, all the publications of the Tory Ball show you this beautifully carved ball. I think it's beautifully carved, but what they don't show you is that one of the knobs is completely uncarved. True. So, you know, that was until we actually visited New
00:30:19
Speaker
And we briefly mentioned earlier the idea of use. So we've talked a bit about kind of what they are, how they might have been made. But as when I was looking this up, one of the main big debates is of course about why they were made and what they were used for. So why is there so much debate about this? How is it so difficult to understand what they would have been used for?
00:30:28
Speaker
So even the most amazing
00:30:42
Speaker
I think, I mean, the debate is basically they're fascinating objects. I mean, I think they're one of the most interesting objects. I agree. They can walk out from the Neolithic. Yeah. And they fascinate people. They've fascinated such a range of people. So this is not just
00:31:08
Speaker
are interested in them. I think it's just striking because some of them are so beautifully made and so intricately made, and then we just cannot work out what they're all very used for. So what are some of the most popular theories then? Well, I mean, it depends
00:31:33
Speaker
You gurgled it and there wasn't much coming up, but there's some amazing stuff on the internet around them. So there's discussions of them as kind of alien eggs, and it's kind of slightly crazy. The pseudo input here.
00:31:55
Speaker
And there's one theory that was popular, what, 10, 15 years ago was from an experimental archaeologist in Exeter. And he argued that they were used for rolling megaliths. So like ball bearings. Oh, okay. And he has devised a whole
00:32:35
Speaker
I can't imagine the Towie ball being used as a simple ball bearing, I must say. Well, the weird thing was they did this in the Stonehenge landscape, so they had these runners, these
00:33:05
Speaker
But, I mean, there are actually no boards further south than Yorkshire. Oh, right. There's a lot of megaliths in Aberdeenshire, but no caste symbols associated with them. And if my dates are correct, then they predate those megaliths right there.
00:33:31
Speaker
you know, at least 500 years. Okay. Yeah. So likely a nice theory, but not necessarily practical. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, he demonstrated, yes, he could use balls to move leglets, but I mean, as you say, things like the tauey ball, and many of the balls have these knobs on them, they're really not very good for, they're not spherical.
00:34:04
Speaker
Right, of course. So I can reject that, that theory. And then there's, I mean, there's, there's whole papers on the aerodynamics of these
00:34:31
Speaker
symbols. But then Dan argues that basically they're throwing them at wolves, or can any animals attacking their thoughts of sheep. But just throwing them with their hand or because one thing I guess I could understand is with these the sort of grooves in between the knobs that maybe there's rope or string or something. Yeah. So bowlers are one of these. That's it, bowlers, yes.
00:35:03
Speaker
to John Evans, the kind of early researcher on stone tools. So that's not unreasonable, but I still don't quite understand if
00:35:19
Speaker
if they're throwing these objects at animals. Why carve in so much detail? It's not even like you're just whittling away at a thing. If you're saying it's really hard stone and they're using flint tools, that must be quite a lot of work. Yeah. I think my provisional best interpretation at the moment is actually it's the process of making them
00:35:59
Speaker
came going back to this workshop in now Winchester. One of the things we realised that was involved in making these things was all the kind of
00:36:28
Speaker
kind of carving them out. You've got a whole series of different things. So you start off with polishing, you're shaping, you're hammering, you're pecking, and then you're polishing. And those are two things that we find happening with stone tools in the Neolithic. So it's almost like a portfolio of? Yeah, I think that
00:37:02
Speaker
through making. One of the most amazing kind of encounters we had when we were doing the Making of Art project and with Cafton Balls was visiting a small community museum in Glasgow in
00:37:22
Speaker
kind of outer edges of Glasgow. And the people running the museum were stone cutters. Oh, okay. And at the time I was talking about them as art and they were like, it is art, this is art, how could you call this art? And then I started talking to them about what I thought was happening, which is that they were kind of making them, that these were kind of like,
00:38:06
Speaker
they've been trained in exactly the same way to be given a lump of stone and told, shape it this way and do this before lunch. You've got to at least master this process before lunch. And then they just completely understood that
00:38:36
Speaker
that people in prehistory could have actually been working these objects in order to understand how to work stone and the properties of stone. So that's my best interpretation at the moment. One of the things I will say though is that these are amazing
00:39:05
Speaker
objects, and I don't think I've got to the bottom of them at all. People seem to have been interested by this idea of them as things kind of in process, things in the making. But I don't think, you know, it wouldn't surprise me if someone comes along and says, actually, you know, they're fishing weights, or they're loom weights, or they're hanging out with something, and now we can
00:39:35
Speaker
work this out. I don't think I've finally got to the bottom of them. And I'm probably going to keep studying them. That's a good excuse too, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, I think we should probably stop there because I need to top up my tea. But for everyone listening, hopefully you can also top up your tea a little bit and we will be back very soon.
00:40:02
Speaker
Welcome back everyone. I hope that the teacups are fuller and the biscuit jar is emptier.
Art's Role in Archaeology
00:40:07
Speaker
So thank you so much for telling us all about those amazing objects, Andrew. But we did talk a little bit already about kind of art and the concept of art in archaeology and in prehistory and how you first became interested in it. So how would you say that the kind of topic of
00:40:22
Speaker
art, and I'm using this with kind of inverted commas, because I never know what terminology to use in this respect. In the field of archaeology, how do you think that topic has kind of developed over the years? Is it something that is quite commonly studied now? Is it always studied? I mean, it's kind of always been studied, I guess, but it's had a renaissance in the last maybe 10 years. It seems to have been a lot more
00:40:51
Speaker
focus on the archaeology of art fairly recently. I'm not entirely sure why that is. I mean I've always been studying it. I started out studying rock art in Scotland and I mean started out right at the beginning with this grooved work pottery. So I mean I've always been fascinated by it but I mean there's
00:41:21
Speaker
There's a large group of researchers studying rock art globally, and that's been of interest, I think, pretty much since the discipline began. And what would be your kind of elevator pitch if someone would say, but why? Why is it important to look at art in the past? I mean, I guess it's important because you're
00:42:02
Speaker
not so interested in the sort of representational aspect of art. I'm more interested in how things are made and I'm more interested in how people are relating to their environment through making. So how they're actually
00:42:28
Speaker
living rock surfaces or painting on living rock surfaces. And what that's given you is a sense of how they're relating to particular places and how they're relating to themselves, how they're relating to people in the past. So you can often see surfaces that are carved over and over or painted over and over.
00:43:06
Speaker
each other in the past, which is kind of what archaeology is. I'd say quite a key part of archaeology. But of course, it is quite a sort of complex topic, the idea of art, because as you say, it's so kind of based in what people are interpreting and how they're relating themselves to the world around them. So is it possible to study that archaeologically? Or what are the difficulties of that kind of research topic, would you say?
00:43:35
Speaker
It is possible to study archaeologically. I think the instinct in the archaeological art to begin with was to study art in terms of representation and symbol. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I've kind of shifted the conversation towards
00:44:06
Speaker
Yeah, the process of relating to the environment and to each other through art making. I actually think the study of art's got as much relationship to the study of technology and I think actually the study of processes of making through technology, chin up as well, those are actually
00:44:46
Speaker
I don't think it has to be something that's beyond the reach of us as archaeologists. And you mentioned before, you've worked with artists and you worked with the stone cutters. Would you say that it's important in this topic to already have an understanding of art or craft, or is it more important to work with others? How does that balance out, would you say?
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think it is useful. I mean, I think it's useful to disentangle yourself from conversations about art, because I think we tend to get into a tangle over the definition of art in archaeology. And I think it's art, one of those
00:45:42
Speaker
words in the English language that's actually extremely difficult to pin down. And it's really difficult to pin down archaeologically, but also in the contemporary setting, you know, the debate, so for what art is constantly changing. So I found it very useful to read contemporary art.
00:46:10
Speaker
But actually working with makers is really, really useful.
Digital Repatriation and Collaboration
00:46:16
Speaker
Artists tend to think completely differently to the lateral thinkers. And it's always enjoyable to work with people like that. So I've worked over the last 10
00:46:32
Speaker
based at Winchester and Louise in Lincoln. It's based at Central St. Martin's in London. So one of the amazing things we've been doing since the Garf symbols project is working with Indigenous makers in Canada. Oh, okay, nice. So we've been working with members of the Blackfoot community. Okay.
00:47:02
Speaker
techniques are used for looking at the casting balls. The artist I was working with got really excited by the techniques. And as I said, Louisa is based at Central St Martin's, which is one of the biggest art schools in the UK. Okay. And she taught those techniques to all sorts of people in the building. So they're now using
00:47:27
Speaker
the same techniques that we use in archaeology in the fashion school and central St Martin's fashion school. The leading edge fashion is coming out of central St Martin's. We're expanding the archaeological field. I love the fact that archaeological techniques are being used. We were approached by
00:47:55
Speaker
at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, in Canada. And the University of Lethbridge is cited on the, on what's known as Treaty 7 land, so it's a part of a Blackfoot reservation. And they're quite a lot of Blackfoot people working in the university. And we put on an exhibition at the end of the Making of Wild project.
00:48:28
Speaker
said these techniques could be used to record Blackfoot artifacts. So we've been doing that. So we've been recording artifacts that are in UK museums, and which have been kind of lost by the Blackfoot. They didn't even know they were there.
00:49:05
Speaker
in Lightfoot territory by digitally recording objects and giving those digital records to the Lightfoot community. Amazing. And this is a project that's still ongoing? It's pretty much winding up now. We did it mainly over the pandemic.
00:49:34
Speaker
pandemic I spend each week talking to people about foot reservation in Alberta and we've now run out of money unfortunately so the project is kind of winding up but the main aim was to create a website with selected objects and the website is managed
00:50:07
Speaker
So it's like a digital version of the objects and the technologies. Yeah. So it's kind of, I mean, digital repatriation, I guess, is one way of thinking about it. But it's not really repatriation. It's more about
00:50:35
Speaker
I've learned a lot about some porcupines and how to fancy these porcupine crumbs. And do you find there's quite a difference in the, because I imagine for the previous projects as they were focused possibly mainly on British prehistory, you mainly worked with kind of British crafters and artists, but do you find that there's quite a cultural difference in working with artists from other places? Are there different perspectives being given?
00:51:02
Speaker
I mean, there are different perspectives. The main thing with the Blackboard is that unlike Western artists for the Blackboard, these objects are actually living, they're living beings. So, you know, that's something we discuss all the time in
00:51:28
Speaker
in archaeology that maybe people had a sense of amnesty but actually to be talking to people who
00:51:41
Speaker
is really striking. That would be almost interesting then to do an expanded carve stone ball project, but taking them outside of the UK, working in different cultures and seeing how they would interpret them.
Future Projects and Global Art Exploration
00:51:56
Speaker
I didn't show any plug for people carve
00:52:07
Speaker
some of the biggest rock arts sites in North America and there's a lot of food and energy. I see, I see. It could be a future project. Are there any exciting future projects related to carving art, archaeology that are coming up?
00:52:27
Speaker
I'm doing several things at the moment. At the moment, I'm working in Portugal in the Coa Valley, which is one of the most amazing places
00:52:55
Speaker
rock art from the Gravetti in Paleolithic, so 30,000 VP, up to the 20th century. And our focus is actually, I'm working with Portuguese colleagues, and our focus is on post-Paleolithic stuff, so we're looking at Neolithic and Calcolithic.
00:53:32
Speaker
with carved materials, so actually working with painting, ochre painted. Oh, amazing. This is kind of amazing. Yeah. Oh, very cool. Sounds very interesting. Well, it sounds like you have a lot to be getting on with, so I should probably let you get back to it, let you get back to work. But thank you so, so much for joining me today, Andrew, to talk all about the carved stone balls and art in archaeology.
00:53:47
Speaker
art which is actually painted which is a departure from here.
00:54:00
Speaker
Okay, that's great. Great to chat. And if anyone wants to find out more about Andrew's work, about the projects that we've mentioned, or about the Carved Stone Balls, just check the show notes on the podcast homepage. Also, do keep an eye on my socials, the archaeologist teacup, for a very exciting Carved Stone Ball announcement that will be coming up in the next month or so.
00:54:23
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you want to help support the show and all of the other amazing series that form the Archaeology Podcast Network, why not become a member? You'll be helping me and my fellow hosts to create even more amazing archaeological content and interview fantastic expert guests like Andrew. And you will also have exclusive access to ad-free episodes, bonus content like our quarterly online seminars, which look at different topics within archaeology. For more information, check out the homepage at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:54:51
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
00:55:02
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.