By Lara Band
(MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology student)
From July 15-20, I spent the week at Skaill, Rousay, alongside singer, songwriter and creative practitioner Aileen Ogilvie on what we started to call our artists’ Rousaydency: exploring place, time and archaeological practice through sound.
We worked together and separately in sound and excavation, bouncing ideas off each other, collectively recording sounds, coming up with a collaborative piece involving all archaeologists and visitors to the site, and our own pieces too (Aileen’s blog to follow soon).
As an archaeologist I’m interested in cultural heritage and natural heritage entanglements particularly in the face of climate change and loss of biodiversity. I’m also interested in ways of doing, communicating and using archaeology differently, to increase interest, appeal and relevance: in queering both the nature-culture divide and archaeological practice.
As a creative practitioner, I’m interested in the ambiguous nature of sound: it’s not material but it isn’t exactly immaterial. It hovers between the tangible and intangible, both but also neither. A church bell could be an archaeological object and, by UNESCO’s definition, bell ringing is intangible cultural heritage but what of the sound of the bell? It’s still part of the sonosphere.
As both archaeologist and creative practitioner, I’m also interested in barely-there sounds that help form our experience of place and time. The sound of the sea that Aileen and I noticed we could hear from the track up the hill but is muffled by the storm beach when on site.
The sharp and tiny slap of rain drops on waterproofs you hope will slow but becomes insistent. The sound of trowelling, signalling a change in archaeological deposit that that you hear before you see.
And how do the sounds humans make affect others? The death of 77 pilot whales stranded on a beach in Sanday the previous week already had Aileen and I discussing this. July 18 was also World Listening Day: the theme this year was the weave of time and the frequency of nature which seemed wholly appropriate.
If Aileen was inspired by Sigurd of Westness, Paul the Silent, a contemporary of Sigurd, became my muse.
As well as my trowel (of course) I’d brought contact microphones (which pick up the vibrations of the objects they touch, rather than soundwaves that travel through air) and electromagnetic microphones (which pick up electromagnetic fields and convert them into audible sound). I also brough my DIY shortwave radio hoping to catch a signal.
I set up my shortwave receiver at The Wirk, c.100m north of Skaill, where Paul the Silent apparently stayed in 1136. There’s a tiny fizz and crackle then nothing.
Horseflies love my still, careful listening and wrapped up against them in a non-breathable waterproof, I’m beginning to overheat. Paul the Silent remains so. I pack up and head back to the site where excavation for the day is beginning.
Now in Trench 19, I’m trowelling around a displaced fragment of masonry and send a nest of black beetles scurrying. We’re chasing walls, scraping, chatting, brushing. The occasional bleep and gribbet of the GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System – for recording real time location and height to sub-cm accuracy. The “‘donut on a stick” device you might see surveyors using) sounds the location of trenches, features and finds: Aileen and I record recording.
A woodlouse scurries and stops on a section wall about to be cleaned, feelers waving. Having already used contact mikes with Aileen to record the scrape of a trowel, a spade deturfing and the rhythmic thump of mattock on damp peaty soil, I pick up the vibration of rain and wind on the steel barriers placed around the trenches for health and safety. The electromagnetic microphones only pick up my phone chattering with 4g: always something left undone I neglected to try them on the GNSS – would this chatter differently? Next time.
That evening, having also spent the day trying to avoid trowelling worms, I listen to a wet and crackly recording from home, worm-bin worms turning food waste to compost. I think about the elements at all temporal and physical scales which helped create the site.
The Upper Stromness Flagstone Formation laid down between 393.3 and 382.7 million years ago that lent the building stone; the microbes and worms breaking down organic matter in unison, helping to create layers that cover and preserve. How these things, and the hundreds of years of human activity at Skaill Farm, are caught up in an ongoing web of relations.
The week at Skaill Farm was filled with sharing ideas, listening, recording and playing with sound.
It led to my piece SK24 (the Silent) as well as the wall of sound Aileen and I worked on together (watch this space for the next blog from Aileen!). It gave room for wondering on deep time and the persistence of things; human resonance/interference with fellow being worlds; interconnected bodies, spaces and materials; people and sites as receivers/transmitters.
These were all things I’ve been thinking about since starting the UHI MA in Contemporary Art and Archaeology but being on Rousadency with Aileen and excavating alongside the wider excavation team gave huge opportunity to think more deeply, to think through and with the site, on sound practice as archaeological research.
Lara is a student on the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology course, to find out more click here.
