Leskernick, Bodmin Moor, Southwestern England

Anthropologists and archaeologists have been working together for five seasons on a rather isolated part of Bodmin Moor where, on a low stonecovered hill, there are two small Bronze Age settlements, field systems, burial cairns, a stone row, and stone circles, all of which are about 4,000 years old. What we have is the wellpreserved remains of a smallscale, very modest Bronze Age world, one that encompasses everyday and feastday. We have combined excavation with a great deal of experiential surveying. We move around between houses, out through doorways, down droveways, along stone rows, and up to the high tors, trying to understand how people might have engaged with the land as they built their homes and enclosed their fields, moved around with their herds, headed down to the spring or the ford over the river, stopped at a field shrine, or walked the length of the ceremonial stones. What places were privileged? What links were made between places? Between past and present? We found, for example, that house doors were oriented towards the tors on the high places; that as you entered the house you were often faced by a particularly fine stone in the back wall; that as you walked down the stone row, at a particular point where the row crossed the water, a very important hilltop and tor came into view. What we think we can begin to delineate is the world of a small community in which all of life circles around the stones. The stoneswe suggestare the ancestors or ancestral spirits, and the communication between Bronze Age villagers and these powerful and empowering stones is reiterated at every level, from the intimately domestic to the field shrine to the subtle transformations of stone flows to the great cairns on the tops of the encircling hills and the human claims to the high tors made by way of walls and cairns (fig. 3). There is no divide to be made, as archaeologists have so often done, between a ritual landscape and an everyday one, just asas I mentioned earlierthere is no divide between the natural and the cultural. This is a world in which timethe time of the ancestorsand place are fused, where the ancestral past is renewed through the activities of the livinga place where much of the ritual is communal, though there are some more secret places and places that are set apart (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 1997).

We are all too aware that our attempts to understand the prehistoric embodied landscape, the engagement of prehistoric people with the world around them, is filtered through our sense of place and landscape, and so we have been concerned to understand how, over the past five years, we have interacted with the moorhow age, gender, social position, and variable context all play into our experience, our changing, dynamic experience of place. And just as we have attempted a more phenomenological approach to a prehistoric engagement with place, so we are concerned with a contemporary embodied negotiation of landscape. How do we move around? How do places get invested with memories? How do we appropriate ancient footpaths and house spaces or make the journey to and from the hill, and how, back at our basethe caravan parkdo we move between caravans (our homes) and the communal spaces of pub and washhouse? Who moves where? With whom? When? How? And how do these intimate spaces of temporary habitation interdigitate with our wider landscapes and networks of social relations?

We have created art installations (Tilley, Hamilton, and Bender 2001) (fig. 4), a website, and a travelling exhibition. Our worklike any ethnographic or archaeological undertakingis an intrusion on local or regional sensibilities, and in this instance there was an added urgency in making contact because among the many local or regional groups were Cornish nationalists who undoubtedly resented our (English) appropriation of their history. We needed not only to explain what we were doing but to make clear that our interpretations were just some among many. We wanted to create spaces for other people to consider and to express their involvement with the moor and with the past. Sitting in on the exhibition, talking to people about what the moor and the prehistoric settlements meant to them and about their reactions to our work and to the exhibition, we came to understand better the heterogeneityand fluidity and contextdependencyof an engagement with place and past. We saw, for example, how peculiar our myopic concentration on the Bronze Age landscape appeared to most local people, who saw stone row, medieval field systems, 17thcentury granite working, and 19thcentury peatcutting either as layered palimpsest or, more simply, as history. We saw how ignorance of official history could go handinhand with a great depth of local knowledge and how the same person who helped create parts of the exhibition could, in a slightly different context, vent his anger at our invasion.

Navan or Emain Macha, Northern Ireland

Emain Macha, or Navan (what you call it already says a great deal about where you are politically located), is in County Armagh, one of the counties most heavily affected by the Troubles. Emain Macha/Navan is an Iron Age site. People built, on the top of a glacial drumlin, a huge structure of concentric timber circles, filled it with stones brought from many places, and torched it. They then mounded it with earth, again brought from many places. This transfer of stone and earth must surely suggest the bringing together of varied histories/mythologies/memories. But Emain Macha is not just a prehistoric siteit is the location of the Ulster Cycle, the epic tales of CuChulainn, Conchobar, and Deirdre of the Sorrows, probably Iron Age in origin but written down by medieval monks. Unlike, for example, the English Arthurian tales, these stories are precisely located in and around the hill. Emain Macha was a site of such significance and power that, it is said, St. Patrick built his church at Armagh in sight of, and in opposition to, the hill.

So far, this project has been less concerned with the prehistory or even the epic stories than with contemporary perceptions of and contestations over the site and the surrounding landscape (Bender 2001).

There is a quarry alongside the site, and the owner, a man with powerful Unionist connections, was about to get permission, more or less on the nod, from the local council to quarry twothirds of the way around the site, leaving it as an island in the middle. The archaeologists from Belfast created sufficient fuss for there to be an inquiry. They then had to marshal support against the quarry, and the support had to come from across the spectrum: church dignitaries, politicos, Paras, Unionists/Loyalists, Nationalists/Republicans, local people and people from across the border. The archaeologists proposed that this was a site, a landscape, that everyone could and should fight for, for its significance, its history, preceded all the Troubles. It was, they said (somewhat muddying the argument), a place that belonged to all the people of Ulster.

They got support from all across the spectrum, but what became clear, in talking to people and reading the numerous newspaper and agitprop accounts, was that the different groups did not buy into the idea of a past untainted by contemporary political fault lines. The different constituencies marshalled different histories. Thus: Here was a kingdom that was the last to surrender to such invaders as the Gaels, Scythians and Normands, and kept itself to itself, separate from the rest of Ireland. The time has come for us to say thus far and no further, or to use an old Ulster saying Not an inch (South Belfast Post, January 10, 1985). Not an inch is, of course, a Loyalist war cry. Or again: For hundreds of years the Gael has stolen our heritage . These men stole Navan from us by force in the past, now they are attempting to steal it with words, they cannot be given the chance to claim for themselves something that is ours by right (Young Unionist 1 [1985]). Or the Republican counterpart: The preservation and care of Navan fort is not a matter which can be left in the hands of eleven bigoted councillors . [We] have little faith in Chris Pattens Inquirygiven the destruction wrought on our Irish culture and heritage by his countrymen down the years (The Ulster Gazette, February 1985). Or, in the nonsectarian Peace by Peace (April 1985): There have always been divisions population shifts and shifts of allegiance. there is no single Irish tradition or community or tribe . No group has any right to claim they are the true people of Ireland or people of Ulster. We all have a right to be here. They signed up to different histories but nevertheless signed the same petitions and stood shoulder to shoulder as witnesses at the inquiry.

As it happens, the inquiry was not exactly evenhanded, and the quarryman won, but the outcry was so great that the minister for Northern Ireland had to intervene and put a stop to his plans. My first concern was to understand the way in which the presentpast was used in the construction of group identities, how it wound its way around the materiality of place and landscape, and the complex relationship between an intimate sense of place and history and the larger political landscape.

I then became interested in the presentation of place/landscape that followed on from the dispute. The minister said that if this place was so important it ought to have an interpretive centre. The archaeologists claimed that such a centre would be a Flagship of Peace. The Americans put up 4 million. A fine and sensitive building was erected, and an English firm was brought in to mount the exhibition. It was an exhibition that avoided all politics. Labelled The Archaeologist as Detective, it could have been anywhere, any time. Quite separate from and with no attempt to create connections with the archaeology, there was a bloodandguts video of the Ulster Tales.

So much could have been attempted. The exhibition could, for example, have shown that the Ulster Tales are a reworking of an earlier historythat they were set down by monks who often wavered in their allegiance between pagan and Christian ways of referencing and reworking the past. It could have shown that CuChulainn, the Hound of Ulster, has gone on being used and reused until, today, his image graces not just the Dublin General Post Officehis statue proudly commemorating the 1916 Easter Uprisingbut also the paramilitary murals on the gableends in the Bogside area of Republican Derry (fig. 5) and those of Loyalist buildings in Belfast (fig. 6).

One could despair at the conservative rendition of a linear past that is boxed up and frozenthe assumption that the delineation and interpretation of the past is unproblematic and has no bearing on the present. The notion that this place might be a Flagship of Peace seems laughable, and yet, while this pap is served up for adults or families, something quite different is created in working with children at the museums interpretive centre. The education programme is run on a shoestring, but most days a class of Protestant primaryschool children and a class of Catholic children are brought on site together. They go to the top of the hill, stand on the prehistoric mound, and look down over the city of Armagh. They take on boardoften for the first timethat there are two cathedral spires (one Catholic, one Protestant), discuss why St. Patrick might have placed his church there, look down on the old quarry and discuss the events surrounding it, and talk about where they themselves come from and the places that are important to them. The idea is to get them to feel that they all have a stake in the landscape and a responsibility towards it.

Branscombe, Devon, Southern England

In the village where I live in East Devon, I am working with people on something called Where Memory Meets History. We use oral history and archival material, go walking with people and plot memory maps (fig. 7), and talk around photos and objects that trigger more memories. Each year we mount an exhibition in which peoples different ways of understanding this place and landscape and their relationship to it work off each other. We witness how, unselfconsciously, a person can express nostalgia for the past and a hardheaded recognition of rural poverty, class and gender inequality, andsometimescovert (sometimes overt) hostility:

The exhibition is put on in the late autumn at a time when, after the summer visitors, the village turns in on itself. It is mainly for people who live locally, and it is a celebration of a complex sense of local identity (fig. 8).

It is quite a complicated business, trying to recreate a multivocal sense of place, a past that is both golden and hard, one that is not over and done with but in process. It is also complex because I live in the place, am implicated in the project and imbricated in the community, andif I am honestuse the project in part as a way of creating my own sense of place and belonging. I have to negotiate in a way that is different from other times and places when I arrive from somewhere elseand leave. It is no bad thing to have to face some of the fallout from asking people to open up and talk about their worlds. It is too easily assumed that remembering makes people feel good. But what of the woman who screams abuse in the middle of the supermarket not because of anything that has been shown in the exhibition but because she fears that this raking up of the past might expose her own painful and secret history? Or the woman who takes umbrage because the transcription of her story has marked her with a Devon accent? She went to grammar school and worked in the bank; she has two voices, one formal, and onewhen she forgets herselfDevonian. But she refuses to accept this, and suddenly I become the OutsiderI am putting her down. And here is a minor ironythat I wanted to show how subjective peoples feelings about past and place are and yet I thought that I could objectively record their voices. Surely, I thought, it was my job to be accurate, to pin down every nuance, to record, before it disappeared, the sound of Devonian voices? And yet what I transcribed was not what she heard, and indeed to some extent it was not what I heard. Even though it was accurately transcribed, it did not look the way it sounded.4 It looked harsh. I should not have been surprised. It is not just what you say or write or feel that is subjective but also how you say it. Form and content play off each other.

In the end, we recorded the Branscombe voices in three different ways: the first, for the archives, one that tried for academic fidelity; the second, a transcript that was on public view and with which the person talking felt happy; and the third, a shortened, more dramatic version that made sense to an exhibition viewer. This is an acknowledgement that the transcripts, like maps or any other recordings, are indexicalcontextspecificand that the record is powerful and can be used or abused.

Leskernick, Emain Macha, Branscombe: different questions are being asked, but there is always the impossibility of disentangling time from place and landscape, always the need to recognize that in the unending performance of social life our stories can never be completedthe pages [will] keep growing.