The Alamogordo Atari Excavation as the Archaeology of An American Experience

My blog is late today mostly because it took me forever to write this new conclusion to the final chapter in the first part of my book project on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. You can check out the book project here and get a broad sense for how the book is organized.

This conclusion is an effort to connect our work at the Alamogordo landfill more clearly to the archaeology of the American experience and to tease out how “garbology,” the recent discussion of things, and media archaeology and archaeogaming help us understand contemporary society more clearly. I’m not sure that I’m there yet, but I feel like this is a good bit closer to where I need to be than I was, and I suppose this is the goal of revision.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this chapter is also the conclusion of the first part of this book. The first four chapters of this book have sought to unpack some key concepts in the history of the archaeology of the contemporary world and provide a context for the Atari games excavated from the Alamogordo landfill. The archaeology of contemporary garbage, the ongoing conversation about things and consumer culture, and the emerging significance of media both in and for archaeological work developed at the intersection of archaeology and contemporary American culture. These developments in the field both paralleled and interrogated significant moments in the American experience: the so-called garbage crisis of the 1970s, the growing critique of consumerism in the 1980s, and the embrace of digital technology at the turn of the 21st century. The recursive relationship between the American experience and the emerging field of the archaeology of the contemporary world means that studying the development of the field is every bit as significant for understanding the character of American society over the last 50 years as the material and immaterial culture that the archaeology of the contemporary world takes as the object of its inquiry.

This recursive critique of the American experience provides a context for the excavation at the Alamogordo landfill. The excavation revealed the detritus produced by a small southwestern city, and, although we were not able to explore it systematically, the assemblage included artifacts consistent with late 20th-century consumer culture. From celebrity posters to housewares, beer cans, catalogues, newspapers, broken household plastics, and holiday wrapping paper, the landfill itself embodied consumption practices of the city of Alamogordo that parallel the national markets. The material in this landfill, however, also spoke to the post-depositional processes that created unstable scarps, noxious smells, and harmful gasses. These processes, ironically, made it truly difficult to study the landfill in a safe and responsible way. In short, the excavation of a contemporary landfill exposed us directly to the material challenges of doing archaeology of and in the contemporary world. The Alamogordo landfill’s chemical and structural volatility demonstrated how the processes that remove post-consumer waste create spaces whose very materiality resisted analysis and interpretation. Sites like the Alamogordo landfill exist outside the American experience by design. As Michael Thompson’s classic study Rubbish Theory postulated, the removal of the games from the experience of American life through their time in the landfill allowed them to acquire a new status that quite literally clung to their physicality. The smell, the damage done to the cartridges, and the certificate of authenticity all reinforce the provenience of the games which enabled them to follow a trajectory from trash to treasure. The marginalization of modern trash deposits allowed the games to pass sufficiently out of mind and circulation that they could acquire a new value and cultural significance.

The use of the Alamogordo landfill as the dumping ground for Atari games also anticipated recent literature that has stressed how the disposal of e-waste is a global industry. Marginal spaces like a small city in the New Mexico desert became appealing sites for the bulk deposition of corporate e-waste for both economic and regulatory reasons. This coincided with a broader view of the American West as empty space suitable for the disposal of a range of toxic and radioactive waste. In this way the practice looked ahead to dumping e-waste in South Asia and Africa in the 21st century where objects manufactured with material extracted from the Global South would return to the Global South when no longer useful. The deposit also revealed the international and national networks of manufacturing, distributing, and disposing of Atari games. The distributed origins of the American experience relies more and more heavily on global networks of trade and manufacturing. Objects such as the Atari cartridges represents relationships that extend well beyond the national borders. In this way, we can see how Congolese miners, Chinese assembly line workers, Filipino ship crews, midwestern retailers, and Nigerian landfill scavengers encounter and participate in a globalized American experience that supports our consumer culture. In the 1980s, the emergence of these global networks contributed to how Atari gaming consoles re-shaped middle-class American domestic space. In the 21st century, the glass screen of the modern cellphone represents the best metaphor for this distributed experience. Designed to allow us to have experiences that are materially present in the palm of our hand and infinitely expansive through the images that appear on the transparent glass screen, they make manifest the distributed nature of contemporary culture. The Atari games excavated from the Alamogordo landfill, then, tell the story of the supply chains, e-waste, and a small town dump create the backbone of the late 20th-century American experience.

Discard practices and the distributed character of American experience represent the material components of the Atari deposit in Alamogordo, and in many ways, this emphasis coincides with archaeology’s traditional interest in things and materiality. When most of us think about Atari, however, we tend to think about the digital worlds that video games created. Even with the comparatively primitive graphics of the E.T. game and its unforgiving gameplay, the Atari game allowed players in the 1980s to transform the passive experience of watching television or films into an active encounters with characters, plots, and settings. The emergence of media archaeology explicitly considers how the games themselves operated at the intersection of various media forms. This relationship between the games and the blockbuster film E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark amplified their significance and generated excitement in anticipation of their release. Moreover, the excitement surrounding these transmedia artifacts coincided with a growing interest in blurring of boundaries between media experiences and the physical world in movies such as Tron and novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. The excavation of the E.T. games in a project funded by Microsoft and streamed through the company’s X-Box gaming console leveraged the nostalgia for Atari games to promote the latest transmedia platform. The work of archaeogaming specialists both at the excavation and in the wider field of video game archaeology demonstrated how both the physical and digital artifacts associated with contemporary media co-constitute the distinctive experiences. Whether these encounters in digital space traced by the global reach of the internet are sufficiently spatialized in the physical world to constitute a distinctly “American experience” remains to be seen. What is more clear is that manufacturing, discard, and our interconnected digital world presents new opportunities for archaeology to interrogate the present and future of physical and digital objects.

Three Things Thursday: Atari, Teaching, and Cyprus

Thanksgiving break is always an opportunity to slow down and be thankful for all the little things that make my life better. Historically, I dedicate Thanksgiving day to catching up on grading and taking a swing at the pile of books and articles that I’ve set aside to read “sometime.” Both of these tasks are pleasurable enough and remind me of the amazing privilege that I have both to teach and to read for a living. 

To start this celebration a bit early, I’m going to indulge in another favorite pastime and offer a little Three Things Thursday (albeit one day in advance):

Thing the First

As I continue to work to revise my book, one thing that I find both challenging and rewarding is re-writing the early chapters of the book so that they read more like the later chapters. One of the areas where I’m investing a good bit of effort are the little preludes that I include in each chapter. These preludes come before the … ludes… er… introduction and serve to connect each chapter to the two case studies that anchor the book: Atari and the Bakken. They also allow me to interject a more personal component to the book that connects the concept of the contemporary to the work of the archaeologist as an individual. 

Today I’m going to retool the short prelude to my chapter on things (that incidentally, will be the basis of a graduate reading class that I’ll teach on the topic next semester). As it stands now, I reflect a very common question that I get when someone learns that I’m an archaeologist: what’s the coolest thing that you’ve ever found? In my revision, I’m going to shift the focus to the moment that the massive excavator revealed the Atari games in the Alamogordo landfill in 2014. In this moment, the games shifted from being low value trash to being high value commodities. In some ways, this moment restored the games to the position that they held in my childhood when as far as I can recall, the latest Atari game was among the first things that I ever wanted. In other words, I was able to witness the moment when Atari games acquired new value and a new context. This also pushed me to consider how things work in our society. 

Thing the Second

I’m finding it more and more challenging to manage the end of the semester rush. It’s not that I feel particular flustered or stressed, but I have come to really worry about my students who are clearly struggling at the confluence of the holidays, the end of the semester workloads, family, and first sustained stretch of winter with its cold, shorter days, and weather. This distressing situation has once again pushed me to think about student workloads and the current structure of our semester. 

As I begin to design my classes for the spring semester, I’ve started to think about two alternative models. The first one would be a model that splits courses over two semester. Each semester would have a 7 week class focuses on one major assignment. The grade would be recorded in the second semester. A course of this design would keep the course clear of the end of the semester exhaustion, stress, and busyness. Of course, if a student took multiple classes with this schedule, it would do little to alleviate the anxiety caused by competing responsibilities. 

Another model would be one that makes a 16 week course into a 12 week course by giving the students a week off every 5 weeks (i.e. 4 weeks of class and one week off). This course design would help students manage their workload better for my course during the semester and perhaps provide them with an alternative structure for better pacing their energy over the course of the semester.

Thing the Third

I’m really enjoying some of the recent scholarship on Cyprus. This week, I’ve read Catherine T. Keane’s “Ecclesiastical Economies: The Integration of Sacred and Maritime Topographies of Late Antique Cyprus,” in Religions 12 (2022?). Keane situations Early Christian architecture within its economic and social landscape with particular attention to the coastal location of Christian churches. This, of course, not only contributes my (very slowly) ongoing work at Pyla-Koutsopetria where a church stood on the coast and my work at Polis which has worked to be more attentive to the larger context for the two Early Christian churches in the local landscape. 

I was similarly pleased to discover Simon James, Lucy Blue, Adam Rogers, and Vicki Score’s article “From phantom town to maritime cultural landscape and beyond: Dreamer’s Bay Roman-Byzantine ‘port’, the Akrotiri Peninsula, Cyprus, and eastern Mediterranean maritime communications,” in Levant 52.3 (2020), 337-360. I’ve just started to digest it, but it unpacks another coastal site that we’ve long known about, but have never seen published in a comprehensive or sophisticated way. The article by Simon James et al. looks to be a key step in that direction and the concept of a maritime landscape that is something other than a nucleated settlement is particularly appealing for a site like Koutsopetria which appears to have never developed any of the institutions that one might associated with a formal town or village.

It’ll take me a while to digest both of these rather recent articles, but I’m excited to try to apply some of these authors’ observations to my work on Cyprus.      
 

The Alamogordo Atari Expedition and Archaeology of the Contemporary World

This summer I’ve been spinning around a good bit lately with various projects occupying my attention for a moment and then drifting off as another project pops to mind. This seems to be problem that I encounter when confronted with uninterrupted stretches of time. 

Over the last few weeks, for example, I’ve worked on mid-century housing in Grand Forks, on fortifications and an unpublished assemblage of ceramics from the Argolid, the small area of E.F1 at Polis on Cyprus, and my book on the archaeology of contemporary America. I’ve also puttered around with census data from Grand Forks, photography from the Bakken oil patch, and some bits and bobs from Pyla-Koutsopetria. 

It would be a mistake to think that I haven’t been doing work almost every day, but it would also be a mistake to think that I’ve gotten anything done.

That all being said, here’s the latest thing that I’m working on. It’s the first part of a chapter on the Alamogordo Atari Excavation which will be the first chapter in part 1 of my book. I tried to strike a breezy note, but I’m not entire sure that I succeeded!

In April 2014, I found myself standing in the Alamogordo desert watching a massive backhoe excavate the town’s landfill. The purpose of this stinky undertaking was to expose a deposit of Atari video games dumped there in 1983. I was with a kind of dream-team of archaeologists who hoped to document the excavations. The team included Andrew Reinhard, who would popularize the concept of “archaeogaming” via his blog, articles, book, and, ultimately, in his 2019 dissertation which drew upon his experiences with the Alamogordo excavation. Raiford Guins was also there. He was the leading scholar on the material culture of video gaming who had just published book on the history and after life of video games and gaming consoles. Richard Rothaus and Bret Weber accompanied us as well. The former was an experienced contract archaeologist in the US, a proficient and critical digital archaeologist, and a the field director of the North Dakota Man Camp Project. The latter was the co-director of that project and a historian of the 20th century American West who had field work experience in Cyprus. The team brought together years of archaeological field experience, a detailed understanding of video games and digital media, and historical perspectives on the American West. Our team also had experience documenting modern material culture, the archaeology of the contemporary world, and critical attention to digital practices in our field.

The story of the Alamogordo dump of Atari games had acquired the status of an urban legend which expanded widely in the early days of the internet. Despite contemporary media coverage of the dump of Atari games, including a story in the New York Times, Atari fans composed a shadowy alternate narrative. The majority of the dump, they reasoned was the poorly received game based on the Steven Spielberg film, E.T. Atari executives had rushed a video game version of the plot through development so that they game debuted in time for Christmas 1982. The game’s developer Howard Scott Warshaw was a highly regarded programmer who had earlier in the year adapted another Speilberg film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a well-received video game. The E.T. game, in contrast, received mixed reviews by critics and gamers found it frustrating particularly because of the difficulty in extricating E.T. from pits which were a common feature of the game. Despite selling over a million copies, the game started to appear in lists of the worst game ever released. This, in turn, fueled speculation that Atari dumped tens of thousands of games in the Alamogordo landfill to hide the game’s poor sales. The burial also coincided with the beginning of the early-1980s “video game crash“ which not only crippled the industry but also forced Atari itself in bankruptcy. The location of the dump surely added to its legendary status. Alamogordo itself was associated with the Trinity nuclear test in 1945 at the nearby White Sands Missile Range, the nearby town of Roswell with its history of UFO sightings, and the 1969 Huckleby mercury poisoning when a local farmer accidentally fed his family pork from mercury poisoned hogs with tragic results that garnered national media attention. In other words, Alamogordo already had a reputation for secret events, mystery, and tragedy that undoubtedly informed how Atari fans understood the dumping of the games.

The confluence of popular culture and contemporary archaeology forms a further context for the Alamogordo excavation. Rather than being a systematic and scientific excavation, such as those carried out by as part of William Rathje’s Garbage Project in neighboring Arizona, the excavation was organized by a documentary film crew funded by Microsoft to make a film for their X-Box accessibly via their gaming console. The film Atari: Game Over would use the footage of the excavations in the final part of the documentary which would reconnect the game’s celebrated developer, Howard Scott Warshaw, with his creation. The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) set most of the conditions and methods governing the excavation. As archaeologists we were consulted on before the project and interviewed during and after the excavations. As the backhoe reached closer to the levels known to contain the Atari games, we were let under the safety tape to sort the trash removed by the excavator and to identify any video game cartridges. Andrew Reinhard and Richard Rothaus made the triumphant first identification of an Atari games. The moment offered the film makers an opportunity for archaeological theater as the crowds assembled to watch the final day of excavation cheered on each new discovery.

The commingling of narrative, objects, media, and practices in the excavation at the Alamogordo landfill provides a compelling view of archaeology’s place in the contemporary world. This chapter will present a traditional view of the excavation of the Atari games in the Alamogordo landfill. It will attend to the planning, stratigraphy, and dating and context of the landfill and the deposit of Atari games. The dirt archaeology of this chapter introduces the first part of the book which traces three major themes important to archaeology of the contemporary world. The next chapter focused on the unique roles that the archaeology of modern trash has in the archaeology of the contemporary world. Chapter 3 connects the Atari excavations to the recent turn to things, materiality, and agency as part of both a larger critical concern for consumer culture and and a reconsideration of the role of things in archaeological thought. The final chapter in this section turns to media archaeology and offers a context for the Atari games as media artifacts which opens onto conversations about the archaeology of the digital world, and ultimately archaeology in digital worlds, such as Andrew Reinhard’s archaeogaming.

The Dark Abyss of Time

This weekend, read Laurent Olivier’s The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (2011). It’s good. 

Despite my best efforts, I’ve been slowly drawn back to the topic of time and archaeology and history over the the last year. Some of this come from my recent, largely stalled, efforts to sort out what it means to produce an archaeology of the contemporary world. In particular, I am interested in understanding what it means for an archaeologist to be contemporary with a particular artifact, object, building, or event. 

Olivier does not comment on this directly, but as the title of his book suggests, he recognizes the past and the present as being distinctly separate with the position of the archaeologist and the position of an object from the past being incommensurate points. These points, however, are not necessarily on a linear continuum, but like objects in our unconscious that appear in the present but are clearly of the past. As archaeologists, our job is to make sense of these objects in our present world and to attempt to comprehend both their pastness and their nowness. 

This perspective is intriguing to me, in part, because it situates archaeological knowledge as a challenge to the assumptions of linearity that define the modern world. The modern concept of progress assumes that the present overwrites the past as it builds upon it toward a new future. The existence of the past in the present, however, whether through patina, the unexpected appearance of an object, or through traditions, monuments, or excavation, confound the linear progress of time and create the space of a discontinuous present. This kind of contemporaneity between the past and the present suggests that archaeological time is deeply anti-modern in its conceptualization of the world. 

This got me thinking about some of our work at the Wesley College Documentation Project. One of the buildings, Sayre Hall, is a memorial to Harold Sayre who died in the 1918 in World War I. Olivier’s book reminded me of the deep irony that this building will be demolished in 2018, in the name of modern progress. World War I was a truly modern war that both on display the horrible achievements of the modern Industrial Age and shook the confidence of a world that looked toward modernity as the end to the conflicts had defined the “barbarism” of the pre-modern world. It seems to me that nothing better highlights to dehumanizing cost of modernity that the destruction of a monument to a soldier who died fighting in modernity’s war.

On a less somber note, this weekend, I wrote an (overly long) email to my colleagues on the Alamogordo Atari Excavation in my ongoing effort to understand how the Atari games became archaeological artifacts.

Here’s more or less what I wrote:

As you can probably tell from some of my writing, I’ve increasingly seen the games themselves as a bit of McGuffin. After all, there wasn’t any great mystery regarding whether the games were actually there or not – that was pretty well-known and documented. Moreover, even if there are open questions concerning how many games were deposited and for what purpose, these questions are much more likely to be answered through careful archival work than excavating an entire landfill.

So the question that has been bothering me is why did these games become the object of archaeological work. After all, it’s pretty rare that archaeologists excavate something for no other reason than to check on archival records. This isn’t a super solid research question, of course, but we can get a pass because we didn’t properly speaking organize the excavation. From what I can tell, the excavation was designed to resolve the urban legend, but this simply changes the question a bit and asks “why did the urban legend emerge?” That question is to me, basically the same as “why did we excavate the games?”

Olivier’s book plays around a good bit with Freud, which I think is pretty helpful as Zak Penn’s documentary is [almost] explicitly Freudian and our “quest” for the games is essentially an effort to interrogate or critique modernity (or at very least demonstrate that despite modernity we can still create meaning in the past). Olivier likens the archaeological record to our unconscious in that it exists in fragments of the past that appear through excavation in the present. In other words, like Freud’s unconscious, the archaeological record – objects – are transposed from the past into the present. They mean something, but their meaning isn’t clear and direct and it’s always mediated by present concerns, but nevertheless “real.”

We create this unconscious in two ways. As an interesting aside, the Atari games, of course, were in secondary discard (in that they were cast aside and forgotten) but there were also pressures that sought to drag them into primary discard. For example, the site was called a graveyard or a burial (not on a literal sense). Their burial in Alamogordo both placed them out of sight (and memory) and located them in a known place for known reasons (laws against scavenging, cheap disposal rates, et c.). This tension, I supposed, served two functions: on the one hand, secondary discard attempted to push the games out of memory and into our “unconscious.” Efforts to mark the games as being located in primary discard, in turn, kept some of their memory alive.

By excavating the games in their ambiguous discard we can see how some aspects of the past of the games is, on the one hand, forgotten, and, on the other, partially remembered. It moved the games into the place of legend and the partially remember unconscious of our memories. This move, I’d contend, was important because it forgot certain specific aspects of the past of these games. Namely, that the discarding of these games represented an economic move. These games were commodities, were ubiquitous, and were not – in any real ways – special. That memory had to be overwritten or forgotten, if we were to reinscribe the games with something of value to the present. This overwriting and reinscribing is the stuff of archaeology and of psychoanalysis. It’s all about managing the gap between the object as a moment from the past and our own place in the present. And since the act of discard and our act of excavation exposed this gap, our work revolved around making the the games relevant and significant for the present.

The metaphor of the gap as producing meaning is a useful one. First, it’s similar to how films work (Olivier, 186). Films depend on the gaps between frames to create movement, of course.

More importantly, establishing the gap between the past and the present by archaeology allowed us to create a more innocent past for ourselves. We used this gap to overwrite the consumerist and capitalist past of the games – which is anti-romantic (in every sense) and exposes us to the harsh reality that our childhood and fantasy life was not pure and innocent, but a the commodified product of our late capitalist world. Here we can even follow a bit of Shannon Lee Dawdy and say that these game’s particular patina transformed them from commodities to artifacts (and this transformation allowed them to become revalued in distinctive ways in the ebay auction).

Zak Penn’s documentary sort of wraps up this reading of the Atari dig by making the Freudian leap from the present to our buried unconscious all the more explicit. The sense of closure for Howard Scott Warshaw, the E.T. game’s creator, at the end of the film and the parallel between “our” childhood fantasies and Warshaw’s coming of age at Atari is simply too good to be true. Even as Warshaw’s fantasy came crumbling down, the existence of the games in some far away landfill held out the hope that some aspect of his innocence could be buried safely, and recovered like a psychoanalytic treatment that finds the source of pain, reveals it, and returns the conscious mind to its tenuous equilibrium.

 

 

 

 

Contemplating Contemporaneity

I’ve been thinking much more systematically about contemporaneity lately. This is in part because I’ve sent off a proposal for a book on the archaeology of contemporary American culture. While I have no idea whether it’ll be accepted, writing it, and my long-paused Atari article, stimulated me to think a try to wrap my head around recent work on contemporaneity.

What has intrigued me the most is how clearly debates about the nature of a contemporary archaeology represent a critique of modernity. In many cases, the archaeology of the present or the contemporary offers a counter method and narrative challenge to the persistent authority of periodization schemes which tend to fortify narratives of progress. These narratives of progress, of course, are intimately bound up with our modern understanding of capital and, as a generation of postcolonial and subaltern studies scholars have shown, colonialism.

The insistence on a gap or a “break in tradition” between the present and the past grounds archaeology in the modern era which sought to replace arguments for tradition (and the political baggages associated with them) with a new source of authority. Excavation was a particularly apt metaphor and method for revealing a past that past practices sought to overwrite and obscure. Layers of tradition, legend, and other “tainted” views, were pealed back by specialists in a performance that both produced new authority and grounded it in new knowledge. Modern geology developed stratigraphy to argue for an Earth that was much older than religious traditional would allow. Historians culled archives to produce new narratives that undermined (literally) the authority of the ancien regime. Psychology, as Julian Thomas has expertly shown, likewise looked to excavation and stratigraphy to articulate both the layers of the mind that create the individual, and ultimately, the interleaving of individual and societies. Similar efforts and metaphors appeared in the work of ethnographers who demonstrated that traditional folk tales often preserved truths about both specific pasts and universal pasts that later accretions have obscured. 

While it is easy enough to see the significance and value of insisting on barrier separating the present and the past, it likewise reasonable to understand how this divide provided a significant impetus for narratives of progress in which the contemporary authority overwrites tradition. Projected globally, the chronological divide translated to a spatial and political divide with the present of the West being represented as the ultimate future for “traditional” societies whose present will, in turn, be overwritten by a more rational, “advanced,” capitalist, and democratic future.  

Recent interest in contemporaneity between the present and the past looks to complicate and critique the relationship between archaeological work and modernity. As Rodney Harrison and others have observed, scholars have recently appreciated how incomplete or “unfinished” the project of modernity is, or to put it in less teleological terms, how uneven the surface of modernity is. As part of the effort to recognize and survey this unevenness in archaeology, archaeologists have increasingly sought to produce an archaeology of and in the present. In this way of thinking, the contemporaneity of the archaeologist and the archaeology challenges the view of the past as something “out there” to be uncovered but rather something co-created in the relationships between the archaeologist and the objects and situations and narratives that they organize as knowledge.

By drawing attention to the contemporaneity in archaeology, archaeologists of the present are in a place to trace the surface of the modern world and through the metaphor of the surface assemblage to understand how the interplay of the past and the present produces meanings that have distinctive meaning to the present. By doing this, an archaeology of the contemporary or, perhaps better, an archaeology of contemporaneity, offers two opportunities for the discipline (and, I’d suggested for society). First, it resists the practice of seeing the past a series of presents that invariably and inevitably led to our own world. By recognizing that a wider range of pasts can lead to a wider range of potential futures, it shifts our attention as archaeologists to the complexities of formation processes that embrace both past and present events, values, expectations, and narratives. Second, to understand the complexities of these assemblages, archaeologists have to move beyond disciplinary epistemologies, methods, and practices and to embrace a wider view of what constitutes archaeological knowledge. 

As I work to complete a draft of an article based on my experiences at the Alamogordo Atari Expedition, I’m increasingly struck by how our contemporaneity with both the objects of study (and their excavated context) and their larger cultural context revealed new narratives enmeshed at the intersection of popular views of archaeology and our own disciplinary biases.    

Three Things Thursday: A Wesley College Coda, Reviewing Poetry, and Narrating Atari

I have three little things today that are swirling around in my head like the projected snowfall for later this morning. None of them are particularly profound, but they all might be something later. Ya heard it here first, folks.

1. Abiding and Corwin/Larimore Halls. This is coda for my post yesterday on the current status of the Wesley College Documentation Project. Over spring break we cajoled Mike Wittgraf to perform a little concert and recording in Corwin and Larimore Halls. The songs we selected were somber in tone and included the well-known hymn “Abide with Me.” The title of this hymn, of course, come from John 15:4-6 which is the start of the Passion.

Yesterday in a faculty meeting, I was fumbling for a word to describe an individual who stays with the dying, and a colleague suggested the word “abider” (our faculty meetings can go to some dark places). I wasn’t familiar with this term, but a few Googles later, it indeed shows that it has some modest currency in contemporary language. This got me thinking about our roles as archaeologists in documenting Wesley College.

Are we working as abiders allowing the buildings to tell their stories before they’re gone? I know this sounds hopeless sentimental, but I’ve been struck how even my short time around these buildings has allowed me a much greater appreciation for not only their architecture and spaces, but also the stories of the individuals whose lives intersected with these buildings over the century of their existence. 

“Change and Decay in all around I see, O Thou who changest not abide with me.” 

2. Poetry and Slow Reading. As editor of North Dakota Quarterly, I get books for review on a weekly basis. As a publisher of my own small press, I know the important role of circulating books for review. At the same time, not all works that come across our desk at NDQ are equally worthy of review, and it is another challenge entirely to match the book with an appropriate reviewer. As a result, we usually have a little pile of books that have not gone out for review yet and this pile has only grown larger as NDQ has shifted its attention to reorganizing and preparing for our shift from in-house publishing to being published by University of Nebraska Press. 

On Wednesday, I hang out in the NDQ office and during little breaks the back issues of NDQ and the pile of books to review beckon to me. So I’ve taken to picking up books of poetry or short fiction and … gasp… just reading them. Mostly I feel not qualified to judge their quality, but recently I’ve started to think that maybe I can speak about this material from a distinctive perspective. After all, as a non-poet, non-poetry reader, and never-taken-a-college-level-English-class perhaps I could offer an “everyperson” view of various little books.

It’s tempting to start to write a little review series on the books that we receive. They’d be less critical review and more impressionistic and spontaneous. They might be fun to write and at least a little entertaining to read.

3. Contemporaneity and Archaeology. Over the last few days, I’ve returned to long gestating (marinating?) article on the Alamogordo Atari Expedition. The article was clumsy and poorly positioned, I think, but as I’ve let it rest for a bit, I do think that it has one thing to offer and that is a meditation on the issue of contemporaneity in archaeology (and particular in the work of archaeology of the contemporary world). As I have noted before, the assumption of the “broken tradition” between our world today and the world that we’re studying has, for centuries, allowed both history and archaeology to position the past in a place susceptible for study. By assuming the contemporaneity of the archaeologist and the archaeology, however, we disrupt this tidy arrangement and make space to recognize that the archaeologist and the archaeology are both enmeshed (or entangled) in a dense web of common relationships. Rodney Harrison has argued that these relationships produce what he has called surface assemblages. I’d like to add that understanding contemporaneity in surface assemblages and between surface assemblages and the archaeologist, opens and maybe even requires new forms of narration that accommodates the various overlapping webs of meaning making that such contemporaneity recognizes. For example, it will be increasingly difficult to approach archaeological knowledge making as an impersonal enterprise removed – through either a broken tradition or an objective scientific lens – from the person of the archaeologist and the larger culture. How do we embrace this freedom from conventional practices?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Book Tuesday: Atari Age and Artifacts in Silicon Valley

Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of reading casually just a bit in two books. First, I’ve read most of Michael Z. Newman’s Atari Age: The Emergence of Video Games in America (MIT 2017), and at the same time, I discovered Christine A. Finn’s Artifacts: An Archaeologist’s Year in Silicon Valley (MIT 2001). Both books offer distinctive impressions of late 20th century digital culture and contribute in some way to my long term research trajectories.

The utility of Newman’s book is more immediate. He frames the emergency of video game in the 1970s and 1980s against the backdrop of the video arcade with its seedy reputation inherited from gaming parlors of the early 20th century. (In my own experience, I never really understood why my parents did not let me go to the Silver Ball Arcade as a kid. There was something seedy about it in my parents’ mind (and a waste of money) that placed that space out of bounds for me and my brothers). Atari’s success involved translating the thrill of arcade games while domesticating them. The early advertisements for Atari, then, emphasized their domestic setting and showed families playing the games together. By the mid-1980s, however, the idyllic family setting had taken on a more male slant as mothers and daughters disappear and fathers, sons, and brothers remained, but still in the relative comfort of the domestic environment. The domestication of the arcade took place in two stages with the first locating the games at home among the entire family and the second returning game play to a male realm while still safely ensconced in the home. The final stage involved transporting the players from the home to the fantasy world of the game which almost alway was encoded male. Sports, war, and adventure outside the home (in space, in fantastic worlds, or as the protagonist of a feature film) remained the male domain for most of the 1980s (and perhaps today) as the safely domesticated games invited players to engage in less mundane adventures in fantastic landscapes. 

Finn’s book was one of this books that I should have read earlier. Finn, an Oxford trained archaeologist who had a career as a journalist, traveled to Silicon Valley in 2000 to experience the most talked about landscape in late-20th century American geography. While the book isn’t exactly a tourist guide, like that offered by Forrest Mims Siliconnections (1986), Finn is clear that her work “is a kind of Cook’s tour of my own, a brief one, and from the perspective of an archaeologist as foreign correspondent” (xiii).

As someone who just wrote a tourist guide to a 21st century landscape, I was thrilled to find that someone else had had this idea before me. Finn is a better writer than I am, but she also views Silicon Valley less through the lens of the tourist and more as a journalist. In particular, she focused on the characters whom she met during her travels. More than that, though, she demonstrates a keen eye for history and change in the Silicon Valley landscape and the often ironic efforts to reclaim some of the historical landscape of the Valley, but in a way that does not disrupt development and a sense of progress. A historic cherry farm gives way to high end shopping that includes a shop that sells imported cherries and cherry themed gifts. A retired computer engineer recreates a rustic garden in his backyard including a writing shed to escape from the very bustle that allowed him this luxury. Historic buildings are celebrated and moved to more convenient locations for visitors coming to the region for technology related business or travel. The landscapes that Finn creates demonstrates the deep ambivalence toward the changes in our late-20th century world. Her book bridged the gap between William Least Heat Moon’s PrairyErth: (a deep map), which is filled with compelling characters, and my own book, The Bakken, where I tried (perhaps unsuccessfully) to push the changing Bakken landscape to the fore.  

Archaeology of the Contemporary World

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a little book on archaeology of the contemporary world lately (actually, I’ve been thinking about this book for some time now). I’ve been collecting bibliography for the last few months, and this weekend, between grant applications, I read Rodney Harrison’s and Esther Briethoff’s survey of the field from this years Annual Review of Anthropology (here’s a preprint).

The article demonstrates the complexity, diversity, and expansiveness of the field which ranges from well-established and methodologically-defined sub-disciplines like forensic archaeology to small and distinctive studies involving objects, political, social, or economic situations, or marginal groups. There are a series of ideas that I extracted from this article that could help shape any future work on my part in this area.

Here they are:

1. Historical Archaeology. The relationship between archaeology of the contemporary world and the long-standing discipline of historical archaeology varies widely. On the one hand, the division is more or less chronological with historical archaeology typically involving material that has recognized heritage status (often 50 years before the present) or clear connections to figures or events of conventional historical significance (i.e. not every day life). On the other hand, the line between the contemporary and the historical is indeed a blurry one. Industrial sites, for example, may have long functional lives meaning that they are both conventionally historical and contemporary in use. The persistence of ruins, for example, in the contemporary world further complicates the line between historical and contemporary in the thinking of both contemporary and historical archaeologists drawing them both into one another’s methodological and experiential space. 

2. Time. I’ve recently thought a bit about the issue of contemporaneity on the blog and how it shapes both our encounter with the Atari excavation in Alamogordo and the way that we narrate it. The archaeology of the contemporary pushes us to think not only about time but about how temporality and chronology locates us as archaeologist in relation to what we study. For example, the tension between (a) our desire to isolate archaeological objects by removing them from our own temporal frame and locating them as part of a broken tradition, and (b) the basic familiarity with the objects that we study as part of the same modern world as the intellectual (and literal) tools that we use to document and analyze these objects. This ambivalent attitude toward the idea of contemporaneity represents a major epistemological challenge as well as a practical one. On the one hand, archaeology of the contemporary world insists on the archaeologist’s contemporaneity with their objects of study complicating the potential for the kind of empirical observations that have proven foundational to historical archaeological practice and the “new archaeology.” On the other hand, it has remained challenging to establish disciplinary metrics of rigor for archaeological practices grounded in experiential, phenomenological, or less formally empirical engagements with the past without eroding ties to the fundamental expectations of the archaeology as a discipline.       

3. Politics. There is a remarkably explicit political dimension to archaeology of the contemporary world. By this, I don’t mean political in a broadly theoretic way, but in a practical way. For example, Jason DeLeon’s recent work on migrants on the U.S. – Mexico border has an overt political dimension. Work emphasizing the role of archaeology in defining and understanding of climate change and the anthropocene in the contemporary world fits neatly and explicitly into a political narrative. Work in forensic archaeology and the archaeology of war is never without obvious political dimensions and the archaeology of homelessness and other projects that emphasize the marginal and hidden in western society represent clearly political commitments toward social justice, peace, and democratic ideals. Even when projects are somewhat more removed from the politics of the national headlines, there are commitments at the center of the archaeology of the contemporary world that frequently involve critiques of late capitalism and late modernity and the threat to the individual.

4. Theory. The political and chronological tensions in the archaeology of the contemporary are deeply embedded in the concerns of contemporary theory even if they are not articulated in this way. From the critical theory of the 1970s and phenomenological (and post-processual) approaches pioneered by Tilley and Shanks to crucial perspectives offered on science and technology by folks like Bruno Latour and Tim Ingold, archaeologists have almost universally assumed the grounding of archaeological practice in the contemporary would. This, in turn, opened the door to applying archaeology to the contemporary world in explicit ways. The acknowledgement of explicitly theoretical perspectives is, as one might expect, uneven as (see point 1) practitioners have varying degrees of investment in less overtly theoretical discourses (such as historical archaeology in the Anglo-American tradition), but the theory is there just below the surface. In fact, it is impossible to read archaeology of the contemporary world as existing outside a late-20th century (or at very least modern) theoretical context.

5. Method. Finally (and perhaps in some vague way, most importantly), there is the issue of method. As someone who has attempted to practice an archaeology of the contemporary world, the complexities of documenting the contemporary world in all of its contingency and dynamism remains a consistent challenge. Digital tools from video to photography, audio recordings, remote sensing, and various data collecting tools produce avalanches of data that contribute to an impressive and growing archive. The rise of crowd sourcing practices and platforms extends the culture and methods of data collecting from skilled practitioners to much broader audiences. Ethnoarchaeology, archaeological ethnography, and the reflexive ethnography of archaeological practice pollinated archaeology of the contemporary world with methods and practices from cultural anthropology, sociology, and oral history. The complexity and challenges facing an archaeology of the contemporary world is part of what gives this field its potential for both transforming more conventional archaeological practice and how we see ourselves. 

How these five themes would appear in a little book remains a bit hard to understand, but pulling these themes from the Harrison and Briethoff article feels like a meaningful start.

Contemporaneity, Objectivity, and Narrative

Over the last few weeks I’ve been letting my first draft of an article on the Alamogordo Atari Excavation simmer in the back of my head, and it has really benefited from the comments of my colleagues and friends! The article had some problems, including a bit of a weak focus which made it read like I was trying to do and say everything at once. Like a squirrel on a treadmill, I flailed about making a little progress and then being flicked this way and that without much in the way of control or a plan. 

Over the weekend, I was churning the ideas around in my head and realized that one of the problems with this article is that I was struggling to wrap my head around the concept of contemporaneity in archaeology. I suggest that one of the intriguing aspects of working on the Atari excavation is that we were essentially contemporary with the objects that we were excavating. This created an interesting tension between our tendency in archaeology of the contemporary world to de-familiarize the objects of our study and the tendency to recognize that archaeology of the contemporary world should and does speak directly to the personal experiences of the archaeologist. In the Atari excavations this was on display as the excavator ripped through the layers of the landfill to produce a clearly defined stratigraphic context for the Atari games and thereby transforming familiar fragments of our childhood to the unfamiliar status as archaeological artifacts. At the same time, our interest in the games and almost giddy fascination with being on site during this historic dig was tied to our shared experiences with Atari games and this familiarity was shared by the filmmakers who funded and produced the story of the excavations.

Fortunately, there has been some really good work on this over the past decade on the challenge of contemporaneity from smart people: Gavin Lucas, Rodney Harrison, and Michael Shanks. As Gavin Lucas has noted, archaeology developed its current view of the past as being non-contemporary with the present in the 19th century as part of its development of archaeology as a modern discipline and a distinctly modern way of viewing the world. For archaeologist, the study of the past became the study of periods, places, objects, and traditions that are distinct from modernity. Lucas connects this to a parallel development by anthropologists like Edward Tyler who documented traditional folk practices that persisted into the contemporary world and dubbed them “survivals.” Archaeology, in this context, became the study of objects that are in our world, but not of our world. 

Giorgio Buccellati, in a rather different context, referred to archaeology as the study of “broken traditions.” In other words, our unfamiliarity with archaeological artifacts is what allows for the archaeological process to construct meaning. For Buccellati, the first step in resolving this unfamiliarity is distinguishing between the objects emplacement and deposition. The former includes the physical context of an object, its relationship to other archaeological and natural objects and requires careful description. The latter involves the analysis of the object’s emplacement in terms of site formation. In short, the former treats the object as contemporary with the archaeologists, and yet unfamiliar, whereas the latter recognizes the object as part of a broken tradition that requires inference and argument to restore. 

Contemporaneity in archaeology, in various ways, plays a role in our ability to perform archaeological analysis. The contemporaneity of an object allows for us to describe its emplacement in detail, but at the same time, this description produces archaeological knowledge only when the object is part of a broken tradition that renders it outside our contemporary world. Archaeological objectivity, in this context, then, requires this bifurcated view: the object is both familiar and unfamiliar, contemporary and disconnected. 

Archaeology has tended to resolve this tension by appeals to comic modes of emplotment (and here I’m relying on Hayden White’s famous study of history, Metahistory). In comic modes of emplotment, fragmented and disrupted situations find ultimate integration and resolution. We tend to rely on organicist arguments that sees the fragments of the past as generating meaning from their restoration into a larger, more complex, whole (and as a result tends to rely on synechoche as the dominant trope). To be more specific, most archaeological monographs start with some kind of overview of the history, topography, or landscape of the site. They often take into account the contemporary situation of the area or site under study. Describing and analyzing the site involves the “destructive” aspects of archaeological work such as excavation, violent acts of mapping, and even breaking the landscape into pixels, bits, and bytes, but lest we despair that the initial (and contemporary) landscape is lost for good, archaeological monographs almost always conclude with a chapter that restores the fragmented landscape to a new, better, more complete whole.

To return then at the Atari excavation, by understanding the tensions between contemporaneity and narrative, the various ways of seeing the excavation of the Alamogordo landfill come into alignment. The traditional forms of archaeological narration require this tension between the objects presence in our contemporary gaze and a parallel recognition of the broken tradition that defines archaeological practice. These ways of seeing are resolved by appeals to comic forms of emplotment which produces landscapes that restore continuity between the past and present. For the Atari excavations, this involved both the recovery of the Atari games and affirming of the urban legend as well as the offering a sense of closure to the story of Howard Scott Warshall, the designer of the oft-critiqued E.T. game, who, like the lovable alien in the film finds his ways home.

Objects, Media, and Moviemaking: Narrating the Alamogordo Atari Expedition

It took me much longer than I imagined to get to this point, but I finally have something scholarly to show for my adventures at the Atari Expedition in Alamogordo, New Mexico. For something less than scholarly, you can read this.

This is not a final product, nor will it be the last word, but I feel like I have finally wrangled the maelstrom of ideas and experiences into a cohesive (if not coherent), presentation. The paper linked below represents my efforts to bring together five areas of thinking. First, I wanted to present a formal, archaeological description of the excavation of Atari Games from the Alamogordo landfill. Second, I wanted to do this in a way that explicitly references the complexities of both academic and popular archaeological narration. Third, I wanted to acknowledge the influence of the archaeology of the contemporary world on how we document 20th century archaeological work and the complicated and complicating concept of contemporaneity in understanding our recent past. Fourth, I want to recognize the materiality of the games themselves and demonstrate that this materiality influenced the way in which we narrated their discovery. Finally, I wanted at least to reference the growing and sophisticated field of media archaeology and demonstrate that the media, message, and materiality all contributed to our view of the Atari Alamogordo excavations.

This is too much to do in a single paper, but in the spirit of “always leave them wanting less,” I attempt to tell a compelling story amid a dense and complicate analysis. And I wrote this all in about 3 weeks.

This article would not have come into existence if not for the persistence and infectious enthusiasm of Andrew Reinhard and that Archaeogaming crowd. Richard Rothaus’s good humor, experience, and inventiveness ensured that we documented things “on the ground.” Bret Weber provided all sorts of intellectual and “social” support. And Raiford Guins provided an academic framework for the understanding of these artifacts in their material and cultural history. None of these people are to blame for this jalopy of an article draft. 

What I desperately need now is feedback. The citations in this article are minimalist and the argument is tangled. I recognize that I need to include figures. The conclusions is more of a concession of defeat than a brilliant synthesis and the introduction serves as a christening in which the ceremonial bottle of champagne fails to break. That all being said, I do think that this is salvageable, but not without help.

Please help. 

Here’s a link to the paper in Hypothes.is so you can comment on it. Or, if you’d rather, feel free to download it and shoot me feedback (or despair that I have a Ph.D.).  

Finally, where should I send this?