Many Stories to Tell

We cannot know the past. Not unambiguously, and not without substantial interpretation. That is a scary premise and a shaky beginning for someone who purports to investigate and interpret the archaeology of history and culture in early Virginia, a place and time whose histories have been studied as intensively as any on earth. Nonetheless, my certain belief in the uncertainty of knowledge is a principal reason for my writing. I might have chosen instead to write a novel, a book of unquestioned fiction based on my interpretations of life in the port of Rocketts, or at Jordan's Journey, or at Curles Plantation, but I did not. It could have been a detective story: the archaeologist as private eye, sifting through the clues of the past, squeezing the meager material evidence until a string of brilliant deductions leads, finally, to... to what? To truth?

Anyone who has ever had a heated quarrel with a lover should seriously doubt our ability to find out the truth of the past. You argue. Names are called and threats are made. What started the fight? Did X roll the toothpaste wrong or did Y forget to lower the toilet seat?

"You said..., then I said..."

"Oh no you didn't. First I said...., then you said..."

Two hours after the argument you're still arguing, or, perhaps, trying not to argue, about who said or did what, in what order. What was the actual course of events? What came first? What was the fight about? Two people who lived through that historic transaction only a short while ago cannot agree. The tone of his voice, the look on her face... What did they mean? These subtle spins on the events themselves may have meant something different to each of the combatants, even as the events unfolded. And, later, when the intent is to kiss and make up, rather than to make the opponent squirm, he himself remembers a different meaning to that tone of his voice, and she is quite certain she had a very different look on her face. Two people, one humble event in real life, and even these participants cannot help but reinterpret the past through the needs and perceptions of the present.

How silly it is, then, to think we can unearth sherds of broken dishes, lumps of rusty metal, stains in the ground, and reconstruct with certainty what really happened in the distant past, among people whose lives we never touched. How perverse to suppose that tax records, census documents, deeds, wills, and an occasional letter or diary, tell us what really happened in history. And how arrogant we are to believe that, even if these fragments of texts and materials carry the truth, we can actually read this truth faithfully. And if we had other texts, other artifacts, would these tell more of the same truth, or different truths? And if truth is multiple, if interpretations of events are plural, then what makes us think we can truly know any past, let alone all versions of that past?

If I had chosen to write a novel about an archaeological site--and I still might someday--and readers decided they liked my story-telling, then the rich documentation and archaeological record we historical archaeologists often deal with would allow me to write a novel a year, for the rest of my life, and not begin to exhaust in my lifetime the stories, the characters, and the events that unfolded on even a single city lot, or a single colonial plantation. Potentially, there are chapters in each of the thousands of artifacts recovered from one small excavation. Certainly a good writer would have no trouble writing a book around each character in the 40-odd households and firms that lived on or owned Lot 203 in the town of Rocketts, or the 60-some persons who settled at Jordan's Journey in the 1620s, or the 11 or 12 generations of households which called Curles Plantation home. So which story would I write?

As a scientist, I suppose I shouldn't have such a dilemma. After all, I should simply gather the facts and tell the story. I would test hypotheses and reveal the answers. And I wouldn't get bogged down in the particulars. A few years ago an archaeologist was damned if he or she could be labelled "historicist" or "particularist" or, a particularly horrific "historical-particularist." Science, or a peculiar view of it held by many in the archaeological profession, had no place for particulars. The study of the past was after bigger fish to fry than what John or Jane Doe did at some particular place at some particular time. That's fine as long as you remain in an ivory tower, and you can depict individuals as anonymous John or Jane Does. Many archaeologists can do that, as can many historians and many anthropologists. I cannot.

If you are a "generalist" in search of answers, in search of truth, and you are a social historian, perhaps you will comb, say, census records or city directories, and you will count things. How many times is someone called a carpenter? How many people were between the ages of 50 and 60? These numbers are data. You can manipulate these data. Add them, divide them, calculate their means, medians, modes, and interquartile ranges. You can plot them, scattergram them, and histogram them. Factor, cluster, and scale them. Roll out hypotheses about them, and test your hypotheses with calculable ranges of error and certainty. You can know something about the truth of the past within definable confidence intervals. And when you're finished with your research you know...what? There were 15 carpenters between the ages of 50 and 60 in place X at time Y. Or were there? Were some of these shipwrights and others cabinet makers? Was every carpenter listed as such? Did every record concerning every carpenter survive? Were some of these master craftsmen and others part-time nail-pounders? Were some shop owners and others slaves? What are you certain of? You know something not very specific about the past in general with some measure of statistical certainty, about which you cannot often judge the reliability or validity. This is a form of knowledge, to be sure, and often a useful one. But it is not the only one, and, I contend, not the most interesting.

There are other approaches. You could take a path that would be recognizable to the genealogist. Instead of searching through documents and counting carpenters, you discover someone. Not a John or Jane Doe, but a John Craddock or a Jane Randolph. One document tells you some skimpy tidbits about John or Jane, so you look through more documents, and more and more: city hall records, court records, military records, Freedman Bureau papers, newspaper advertisements. You take shovel and trowel and hoe and uncover the foundations of Jane's kitchen or John's privy. This approach leaves you with the scattered fragments of real people's lives. If you take time to chase down more fragments about relatives, neighbors, and business associates, soon you have fragments of a whole community. These pieces provide a mosaic, a puzzle, a kaleidoscope of slippery, changing, hard-to-nail-down, but nonetheless real reality. But there is no determined confidence interval. There is truth, but no measure of its truthfulness. There are stories, but they rely as much on the story teller as on the texts and the artifacts. Different readers will tell different stories about these same fragments. It is not a matter of one story being the right one. There are many stories to tell.

In neither type of knowledge is there any real certainty. The generalist will argue that his or her deductions and inferences can be tested or confirmed, but they are no more robust for all that. What differs in these approaches is the authority with which the researcher presents conclusions. In the first, the scientistic approach, conclusions are reached and presented with the authority of a pure method. In the latter approach, sketches and impressions are related, but no claim to perfect verity is made. The reader of the scientistic version of truth is confronted with claims of truth. The reader of the interpretivist text is provided an opportunity to sense the truth, and to help create it. Certainly the research speaks with some intention of authority, just as the artist is aware, dimly or acutely, of her intentions in creating a painting or a poem or a novel. But she is not the final arbiter of her work's meaning, for each of us encounters it on our own, and in our own contexts.

The archaeological, anthropological, culture-historical study of a community or place in the past requires some measure of each approach. As an archaeologist I claim a certain amount of expertise in unraveling the sequence of events on an archaeological site through the use of logical methods of excavation and interpretation of stratigraphy. I claim, too, a certain authority to speak about the artifacts of Prehistoric, Colonial and 19th-century America, particularly in the contexts of Virginia's history, a subject I have long studied. As an anthropologist, I further defend some claims about my general knowledge of human social life and culture. But I was as much a stranger to the people of Rocketts, and Curles, and Magnolia Grange and Jordan's Journey as anyone living today when first I began to delve into garbage piles and microfilm reels. My expertise, my authority to speak about the people who formed the sites I have studied comes mostly from the fact that I have spent much of my career thinking about them. None of this, however, privileges my readings of the textual and material fragments as ultimately more truthful than yours. I am telling stories. You may accept my stories--or your interpretations of my stories--only to the extent that I can convince you I have "been there," in the sense argued by anthropologist Clifford Geertz.

By "stories" I do not mean fictions. None of what you will read here is intentionally untrue (though some of it may be wrong). Geertz has written a wonderful and disturbing series of analyses of anthropology's guiding lights, the great ethnographers who did so much to define the field. In re-analyzing some of the classical writings of ethnography, Geertz has shown how the author's ability to convince the reader of his/her authority to speak is of far greater importance than the presentation of objective "data" when it comes to the canonization of ethnographic works. Even in those cases in which separate students studying the same human beings arrive at highly different interpretations of their culture or society, there is a tendency to continue to regard certain works as canonical based, perhaps fundamentally, on the stylistic characteristics of their presentations. Geertz completes his study with a wondering about the future of social science and human studies. He simply broaches the question of objective fact and meaning, but backs off, only slightly disturbed. Others like me, fools perhaps, rush into the void left in the wake of realization that human studies are searches for meaning as much as, perhaps more than, they are searches for information. Many are repelled by the notion that truth and rhetoric are bedfellows, but the thought, once savored, is liberating.

Historical archaeologists are confronted with the task of interpreting the lives and events of a parcel of ground occupied over many lifetimes. Our readings of a site and its history must "make sense." It must be internally consistent with the observations made in the field, and in the archives. That still leaves a great deal of leeway. Some might choose to view the hermeneutics of archaeology (or history, cultural criticism, or ethnography) as similar to the problem of a judge confronted by a myriad of witnesses, all of whom appear to have observed slightly different versions of the same "reality." The judge may seek to uncover one objective reality and assume that the various interpretations she hears are but approximations, like darts stochastically distributed around a bullseye. By hearing enough versions, the judge may feel capable of deciding what the real reality is. I have little confidence in such a method. Instead of seeking central tendencies, we can also keep our peripheral vision aware of the margins and outliers that real life always includes.

If there is a single, real, authoritative story to tell about any archaeological site I have excavated, I doubt that spending the remainder of my life studying in greater detail the field records, artifacts, and archival documents would be adequate to reveal it. Rather, I view the project of historical and anthropological interpretation as something more similar to a group therapy session, a political caucus, or that lovers' argument. There are various points of view, and all clamor to be understood, accounted for, and reconciled. The truth is not singular, it is multiple. Reality is always interpreted. It is not the finding of truth we are concerned with, it is perpetuating and enlivening a conversation about meaning and the nature of social life.