The sights and sounds of an underground Roman landscape
Rose Ferraby and Rob St John are exploring the below ground landscape of Roman Aldborough through sound and visual art
Aldborough Roman town (Isurium Brigantum) in North Yorkshire was alive once more with the sound of archaeological exploration this May. In its tenth year now, the Aldborough Roman Town Project has been synthesising past work and carrying out surveys and excavations in order to better understand the complexities of this rich, archaeological landscape (see feature May/Jun 2012/124, News Jan/Feb 2014/134, News+ May/Jun 2019/166).
Archaeology offers us an intimacy with this place: looking out across the fields we are able to imagine and animate in our minds the features of the town, its material forms, the toand-fro of past life. This archaeological imagination is something that is honed and developed through extended work in the locale; a close knowing of the land. But how can we communicate this extension of the invisible past more widely?
One way is to explore through creative practice, experimenting with artistic methods as a means of expressing subtle understandings of landscape, and offering new modes of engagement which potentially draw in new audiences. Our new collaboration – soundmarks – is exploring the hidden landscape of Aldborough through sound and visual art. Funded by Arts Council England in partnership with English Heritage and the Friends of Roman Aldborough, we draw on our shared knowledge across art, landscape and archaeology to narrate past stories of life and change through creative techniques.
Over the summer, we will create an art trail through Aldborough. Around the trail visitors will be able to hear audio guides to eight particular locations, alongside soundworks and visual art based upon the sub-surface landscape. All elements will be available free online, and visitors will also be able to access the work at a new digital hub in the English Heritage museum. This is part of a broader project designed to improve understanding of the archaeology, including new interpretation media around the museum site, and to encourage new curiosity for Roman Aldborough.
We will host an exhibition and sound installation at Aldborough in late August, during which there will be an art-archaeology seminar to see how the work draws out research in the area. We will be running a series of workshops exploring the mixed use of sound and visual art to explore archaeological landscapes. A limited-edition artists’ book will unfold elements of the project, including the creative, collaborative practice. Mario Cruzado is making a film about our creative process, and a podcast will accompany the work. All this, we hope, will offer
both a sense of Aldborough’s subsurface archaeological world, and insight into creative practice and collaboration in archaeology.
Sonic boreholes
As we write, however, we are in that wonderful period of the project where we can experiment, swirling round ideas as we root through the Aldborough landscape. We’ve attached pinhole cameras to fence posts to capture tracks and traces of atmosphere. Hydrophones have been dangled and drifted in the river. Drawings have been sketched. Mental notes made. During the excavation Rob St John – a sound and visual artist – experienced the nitty gritty of the sub-surface for himself. We reflected on archaeological practice: the slow gathering and garnering of knowledge, the attentive reconstruction of an imagined past.
One evening when it was quiet, we returned to make our own excavations of the sound-world of site. We began with tools, and the scrapings and scrunchings that are so vital to our archaeological understandings: that acute listening that is so much part of “feeling” a layer or soil change. Contact mics were attached to a mattock, which then carved into spoil. Sub-angular grits and pebbles pranged and sang against the metal. Soft sandy silts purred past. The earth was alive with unimaginable nuances of sound, bringing forth the realisation that so much of how we sense archaeology is with our ears.
It was addictive, this new listening: utterly absorbing as each new area of ground offered up its voice. Already this collaboration has opened up new ways of understanding the world, a new vocabulary for the landscape, and a shared excitement of really getting under the surface of a locale in so many ways.
Two of the sites for the art trail are located down by the River Ure, now bounded by Environment Agency banks. Work by our colleagues Charly French and Sean Taylor (Cambridge University) is allowing us to imagine a very different and dynamic riverine environment in the past. Their sediment cores have shown the results of deforestation upstream, grey silts changing to coarser, less filtered grains. The Roman river would have been snaking and braided, forming temporary islets, and areas of flooding in the late
winter. We were excited by reanimating this environmental change in the landscape, thinking of ways of sounding these subtleties of sediment. We will be creating sonic boreholes at those sites, sinking through the vast depths of stratigraphy. To create this, hydrophones have been dipped in the river and down the abandoned boreholes, listening deep within the alluvial stretches. Rob will be immersing tapeloops in various substances from the floodplain to see how they decay and erode the very fabric of the sound.
Part of our sonic exploration has been more digital, as Rob shares the world of granular synthesis: a sampling of micro-sounds, or grains of sound, which can then be captured and layered to create a new sound-world. These scaled modes of selection and reconstruction echo the very heart of archaeological practice, excavating away and relayering in imaginative forms.
Much of the inspiration for this project lies in the back-and-forth of methods, ideas and practices between the two of us. First was a reverberation between excavation and sound recording. Then the manipulation of sound and the creation of images. The combination of felt archaeology, traced landscape and attentive listening has created a very particular visual imagination that will be articulated in the paintings that Rose is making. These slow, layered combinations of graphite and oil bars overlain with watercolour will have a dialect of mark-making formed in the sound worlds created by Rob, as well as in the felt archaeology of the site.
In our previous work we have both approached landscape with an interest in how being attentive to small details, processes, voices and stories, might bring us closer to an understanding of the relationships that exist between people and the land. Our creative practices find ways of picking these elements out, re-animating, re-layering and re-ordering them to bring new modes of understanding. The joy of this collaboration is being able to respond so directly to a site, to learn new ways of sensing and articulating landscape, and enjoying the freedom of the archaeological imagination. What particularly makes art and archaeology such exciting bed-fellows is the repeated themes of curiosity, discovery, imagination and sheer enjoyment of the narratives that can be drawn from monumental, or small and ordinary things.
The soundmarks exhibition will take place at The Shed, Aldborough August 24– 31 2019. On the last day there will be a seminar on art and archaeology, and it will then go on tour (www.soundmarks.co.uk). The Aldborough Roman Town Project is run from the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Isurium Brigantum: An Archaeological Survey of Roman Aldborough by Rose Ferraby & Martin Millett, will be published by the Society of Antiquaries in 2020 (https://aldborough romantown.wordpress.com). Rose Ferraby is an archaeologist and artist based in North Yorkshire; she co-directs the Aldborough Roman Town Project. Rob St John is an artist based in Bowland, Lancashire; his practice is focused on the blurrings of nature and culture in contemporary landscapes (see www. robstjohn.co.uk)