CRITICAL CONFABULATIONS – Corresponding Practices and Mappings

Jim Harold

This exposition is based on an archaeological survey in the landscapes around Kilmartin Glen, Argyll and Bute, western Scotland, and references digital datasets – archaeological reference points –alongside the acts (enactments) of field walking, photography, drawing and poetry – experiences and representational discourses – to consider how land and landscapes may be read as dynamic palimpsestic and multi-dimensional fields of entanglement. Digital datasets were used by the survey to garner fruitful material to aid identification and to analyse (subtle) surface archaeological remains in the inhospitable terrain on the hills bordering Kilmartin Glen. By analysing, categorising and archiving such information, through naming and cataloguing, archaeological methodology effectively orders and tames such wildernesses. We, by contrast, are seeking to draw art and archaeological practices into dialogue with one another in order to assert the importance of recording experiences and random acts as a part of field research and, thereby, to both re-vivify and re-wild our encounters with landscape. Our exposition, and shared practices, intentionally encourage nuances of reading and interpretation that are found at the dialogic intersection between an artist/poet encountering archaeological landscape survey, and an archaeologist experiencing artistic, poetic and linguistic readings of land: reflecting in the process upon contemporary methodologies and underlying theoretical discourses. As such this research sits within the wider contemporary turn towards interdisciplinary practice, and seeks to establish a dialogue across disciplines; between humans and landscapes, practice and matter, that provides emerging approaches and hopes to remind us of the wild experience.