"Hooker FSA" and the Harley

Christie's

Apparently intending to contribute to Dealer Dave's ignorant dismissal of the issue of "decontextualisation" (here and here), his ACCG sidekick, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London who lives in Canada but collects dugup artefacts from Europe writes on his blog:

[something undefined] is all about context. Not the context of the happenstance of objects at an archaeological site: a place that is in present time where objects persist, or have been lost to decay; a place that combines what was deliberate with what was accidental; where meaning must be applied, itself, filtered through the experience of the observer. That is micro-context. I am talking about macro-context: that which is closer to historical research. The historian, even when focusing on a single document must bring many another documents into play. If the historian fails to do this then subjectivity is given free rein.

Since the antiquarian fellow mentions documents, here are what collectors and dealers do to documents. This is lot 42 from a recent sale at reputable auction house (Christie's). These are not so much dugup as cut-out. The "collecting history" is rather vague: "Europe". I am not sure what sort of reputation one would be aiming for selling such dismembered artefacts as these with such scanty information about how they got on the market in such a condition, from where were these leaves cut out by whom and why? How do we know that were not surreptitiously removed in an Italian monastery backroom if the best the seller can do is "from Europe"? Anyhow, here they are:

Collectors' manuscripts (Christie's)

Note the cut-out collectable illuminated initial. This is exactly what artefact hunters are doing to archaeological sites to get out a single collectable isolated (decontextualised) object from the other archaeological evidence. That initial is collectable, it looks nice, it has a picture on it and you can "say something about the past" just by looking at the pretty picture. You can narrativise it and go on about the position of clerics in fifteenth century society. But what you cannot do is relate it to the whole page of text it was taken from (the micro-context in Hooker FSA's terminology), nor that to the book from which it came. Why a monk? Why there? Why not a wyvern or jabberwocky? Many questions will never be asked or answered because a collector has this decontextualised fragment in an ephemeral foreign personal collection.

cleric, ruler, box, stick

Imagining comparing this fragment with another initial in another collection from another source. This shows the futility of the non-argument of the collector that playing spot-the-difference with them can in any way substantively advance knowledge. Here's another monk, spot the difference ("filtered through the experience of the observer"). This one shows a woman with a spikey hat and low-cut dress taking an umbrella and handbag out of a box and giving it to a man dressed like a monk who is looking at her breasts and probably saying, "but darling, you shouldn't have". That's what I see here, it's different from the other one. We might say she "looks like" a queen and "they (queens) all wore dresses like that in those days". But so what? Both initials were ripped out of something else, taken from their context, the objects in the woman's hand are reduced to "looks like something I've seen somewhere else". But the 'pictures' illustrated a text and their connection with that text can only be seen if you have that text, this is not just the 'micro context' but the actual context, they were part of a physical whole resulting from a series of processes. This cannot be observed, let alone interpreted if that object has been ripped apart so some collector can satisfy their greed. Greed is all this is, masquerading as a home-grown scholar who 'needs' such decontextualised items to "study" them is just a (rather pathetic) excuse.

I'll not bother to explain here (the PAS can do it, that's what they are paid for) that the collector's definition of an archaeological site as merely "a place that is in present time where objects persist..." really misses the point.

Indeed, the Antiquarian Fellow cuts-and-pastes just below the passage above a fragment of a text by Colin Haselgrove, a quote he patronisingly admits is an important "principle" in the "archaeology of Celtic coins" (I am sure the professional numismatists would say this is part of "numismatics"):

"On their own, a collection of Iron Age coins from a particular site can only tell us so much It is commonplace among numismatists that to interpret particular features of a given collection, we need a knowledge of the normal pattern of coin losses found on sites in the region"

Well, maybe I am missing something here, but does this not say that a heap of decontextualised coins from goodness-knows-where on a table which cannot be assigned to a site means the destruction of precisely that sort of information which is so "important" to the study of the coins? An assemblage of coins from a site cannot be interpreted in any way at all (except the pictures and writing on them, like the umbrella in a box pictures above) unless we know how representative they are of the material on that site and we know something of the appearance of other secure assemblages from other sites in the region (and beyond).

Decontextualisation therefore leads to the loss of at least two types of information:
1) How the object came on the market and why it is not somewhere else.
2) allowing the object to be interpreted in a variety of ways besides the "it looks like" (spot-the-difference) kind.

Simples as they say. But I expect the simpletons (FSAs among them) will continue arguing, but basically we can all see that this is because they are incapable of grasping what it is we are discussing. 

BTW here's a few more details on the Harley manuscript, I cannot really add much to the cut-up one sold off by Christies' which is the product of pure unmitigated destruction and possibly a motor for more of this kind. Like the selling of decontextualised artefacts no-questions-asked to collectors like "John Hooker FSA".