2. Annelou
Annelou van Gijn is an archaeologist and specialist in microwear and residue analysis, and recently retired as the chair of Archaeological Material Cultures at Leiden University. There, she also established and directed the Leiden Laboratory for Artefacts Studies. Annelou works to unravel the ‘cultural biography of objects’.
I met Annelou in her office at the University on Wednesday 29th March 2023, where she informs me with a smile she has actually recently retired, though it becomes clear to me very quickly that this is an example of the word ‘retirement’ being little more than a formality. Through the journey our conversation takes as we move between the office and the purpose-built lab with which she designed with her friend and long-time colleague Erik, and as she swaps her expired key card with him to get back into her classroom, I realise Annelou’s central importance and place in her discipline as being the result of a lifetime’s energy - a continuous investigation across a multitude of unique projects.
Annelou - There are quite a lot of names, of landscape features and also buildings which are very similar [between Yorkshire and the Netherlands) and this whole idea of dealing with water – the Dutch of course for this is ‘you struggle and you come up against’, the Latin quote of the Dutch coat of arms. I think it has a lion coming up out of the waves, a symbol of strength. I’m involved in two projects at the moment. One is the Doggerland project and the other one is a project about the late Neolithic – also a coastal project, a delta where they used to live on and off ever since well – we don’t know any more, we can’t go further down than from about the late Mesolithic because of the enormous deposition of sediment from the late Mesolithic. So 5500 B.C. all the way up to now, people have lived in this delta and have dealt with the water in different ways. For this project, ‘Putting Life into late Neolithic Houses’, we just built a dugout canoe…
Matt - Oh, wow!
A
Yes, well I do a lot of experimental archaeology so when you were saying about filming your childhood toys, for me, objects hold lots of memories of course and have entire biographies containing lots of stories to tell – they accumulate stories. And so when I used to be teaching seminars for Material Culture theory I always asked students in the first session to bring an object that was meaningful to them, and tell the story to the class, which was also immediately a way to break the ice between students because they had to be open about something. Something personal, you couldn’t just say ‘here are some keys’ – well, you could choose your keys - but there would also have to be some meaning as well.
So what we are doing with that project, and I will get to the Doggerland project in a minute – ‘Putting Life’ is my own project and Doggerland I am supervising a PhD student doing research of bone objects, fishing tools, and so I’m actually a bit at the side there - but ‘Putting Life’ also deals with a landscape very similar to what you are describing around East Yorkshire. The highways were the waterways – that’s how people communicated with each other which is one reason why we made this dugout, because we think that that’s the way people travelled, and we always underestimate the mobility of people and their capacity to do things, and to make things, I think we were far more technologically sophisticated than we sometimes think. So that’s something that interests us really and in this lab we study these biographies of objects: what is the material made of, how was it made, how was it used, and how was it deposited – how does it end up in the soil or sometimes reclaimed again. That wetland landscape is something that interests me a lot as well, and how people live in it, in ways good and bad. It creates possibilities but is also challenging, and so we want to explore how people lived around 2500 BC in this delta area of the Rhine-Meuse rivers. We have done a lot of research of finds which is one reason why it’s such a mess here – all these bits of pottery! We wanted to know what people ate, how they cooked, what they made – we also tried to understand a little bit more about how they were clothed, what kind of clothing they were using, whether they were making things of plants, fibres, or whether they were using wool. Those kinds of differences you can see on our tools in the shape of traces – we do forensic research around these.
We have an artist on board who makes visualisations of all these activities that we infer on the basis of our experiments, and the conjoined scientific research. We do a lot of material intensive and quite technologically advanced material analysis, traceology, and we then combine that with our experiments and it’s a kind of continuous dialectic between what we find by doing and making, and experiencing and how we see things – we do that with stone age tools as replicas and then we compare the traces we see on these tools with the traces we see on the archaeological tools, and if they match then we are a step closer to a better understanding.
We also find some really weird things, like they used to use hind leg bones of deer and sheep to make tools, like awls and chisels, and they would cut off the top end which have two – I always call them ‘ears’ – but they are quite special bones and we always consider that production waste or manufacturing waste, and I found here – I’m pretty sure – that some of them were used as ornaments.
M
How did you reach that conclusion?
A
Because they showed a lot of traces of rubbing against something… we couldn’t really see whether that was plants or leather or skin… we saw a very strange way in which they were surrounded by some type of rope, so then we thought that this might be part of a composite necklace.
For public outreach, this is more and more important because we are working with a lot of public funds, and it didn’t use to be but now it’s very much a part of project structuring.
M
It’s similar in art and culture as well. I feel like now I’m in a place where a lot of my work – and I see my teaching practice as being completely seamless really with everything outside of it, but I’m really passionate about public engagement. Everything you’re saying resonates so much with me – the handheld, the story, interpretation and conversation – I value those modes of communication so much now… often the power of these things I feel like is actually very much dependent on sharing. At the heart of it art and culture is so much about communication – in the present, active, but also interpreting the past in new contexts. And there is a lot of time spent physically making and absorbing research, but then… I always think that if I make anything, and one person responds to it or connects with that in any way then that is the role or function of that thing working. Because whether they intensely dislike that thing or find it confusing or whether it snaps back to something of their experience then it is still engaging something.
What I have already done in the initial phases of this project is to use Blender and other applications to explore 3D scans I’ve made from personal objects and stitch them into small film sequences, that sort of feel like documentary, without narration – I create fragments really, bits of contact printmaking using fossils or contact sound from walks along the coast, together with archival material and found footage… what I’m really interested in doing now, and I have some coaching scheduled with a dear friend of mine, a Creative Technologist based in Greece, is to create a virtual environment. It might be a kind of simulation of – or idea of – Doggerland, but that kind of blurs fact and fiction, bridging this research I’ve done and these conversations I’ve had with people about their experiences of a landscape changing within a lifetime and how coastal changes have affected them – their livelihoods – and then deeper time, end of the last Ice Age and post-glaciation. People might be able to experience this simulated environment and research material in a number of ways, so it could work as an archival presentation of physical things I’ve used in the construction that environment, it could be presented as a film, or a site-specific immersive sound piece in public places. I’m hopeful it will have a digital capacity and also a physical capacity. Now, being here this week is an opportunity to get a broader better contextual grasp and understanding of the subjects I’m examining from a completely different perspective, and with some objective focus. This is an attempt to interpret a much wider timescale and to apply those metaphors to a wider timescale, and geography as well, bridging two coastlines.
A
It's fascinating to think about that. My participation in Doggerland is very much focused on the objects, so my expertise is as a microwear analyst and experimental archaeologist, and together with a colleague who is also involved in my own project – he made quite a lot of the experimental replicas and objects, a lot of the points for example, and Merel Spithoven who is the PhD student I am supervising, she used them and she also made quite a lot of things too. She wrote her masters thesis with me and so that’s when she started the use-wear analysis. There is another student in Delft who has been doing a lot of hafting experiments, exploring hafting technology in their project, and around these points as we call them whether they were fish-hooks or whether they were parts of spearheads, that is one of the questions. What I like about them is that there hasn’t been that much use-wear analysis done yet - some turn out to be awls, just to make things… One was made of human bone, which is very interesting, because it’s a transformation…
They focus a lot on red deer – I think that relationship between humans and animals is very different now and I think that’s something that might be important to show in your work that we have a very different connection – at that time there could have been a much more spiritual connection with the animals that they were killing, and using those animals to the full – you can use the skull, you can use the antlers to make tools, you can use the skin to make clothing, so this whole living animal is transformed into a lot of living objects – you can wear the skin, you can make tents of it, clothes of it, shoes, bedding… the bones are used to make tools of, which are then used again to transform materials into useable things. Maybe weaving, making baskets. We know that because we can see for example that the awls were used on plant material, so that suggest that they were maybe making wickerwork, maybe making traps, things like that. And then the tendons as binding material, the teeth as ornaments – red deer teeth were frequently used as ornaments. What else do we have – the bladder, as a container, also the intestines were very good to use as a binding material because they are very strong. You can dry the meat and you can use it for the entire winter, and it’s a very good storage food. There’s very little that’s not used. To me, that’s fascinating, that there is this transformation of a living animal in nature into all of these things that play a role in these people’s lives.
M
And some functional, but maybe our ideas around what is functional are different now – I’m thinking of what you described there using a bladder as a container, or tissue as binding material – in contrast to using a skullcap as an ornament or a shield but then maybe those ornaments might have had a spiritual role to play. And today we’re – I feel like, we have this feeling that there is always this comfortable distance between us and other species, wherever we are, and that’s reinforced by everything from the media through to education and the reality of our physical trappings and habitation – we have this mentality that we are always comfortably one step removed. For how long I wonder? How sustainable is that mentality? What happens in the event of great floods to come or will extinction have wreaked havoc to the point that there is such a depletion of biodiversity that we never regain that or interpret the world in the same way?
A
I think you see a slow change of awareness in people. I mean actually it’s not that slow, it seems to be exploding actually around climate – it doesn’t really reflect yet though in people’s behaviour. That’s a little bit of a problem. But what I found really interesting – I’ve been for a long time aware that a lot of these animals were completely used but in terms of having a spiritual connection we can see with the necklace ornament which at a glance we would think might have been waste – as well as being a living animal it’s also an animal that you can manage in some sense - they are a little bit more sociable, they can be fed, you can actually manage them to some extent, and I think we have to start thinking about the animals as living animals in order to change this repulsion that many people feel for anything that still shows that it was an animal. I mean people eat their meat, but they have no association anymore with the beautiful eyes of a deer, or the scream it gives when it is killed. And I think once you are aware of that, we will be changing our attitude. I worked in Ethiopia for a while, and for several reasons we bought two little goats to kill, for meat, but also for the skin – we wanted to explore how to make a special sack which was made in northern Ethiopia. One of the local collaborators wanted to show how this was done, and but there was also a feast coming so were going to eat the meat.
Everybody was excited about it, there were maybe 25 people in the house – the excavation house… in the end, nobody wanted to look at it – we only killed one in the end, and the other one we gave away – it was on the roof of our building, and only our local collaborator, even the P.I. of the project said ‘no I don’t want to see this’… I went upstairs, and I filmed it. It was not nice. I mean the last scream is….it’s not a pretty sight, and it’s sad because you feel something, and it’s not a pleasant feeling, but then I thought ‘I’m so glad I saw this’, because it taught me that you cannot really waste things of animals too much, that you have to be aware that you are eating something that was once alive and very sweet, and very nice, so I think that connection that people used the have because they were slaughtering their own animals with whom they had lived for quite some time, so I mean I hardly knew the goat, it had been there for 2 weeks, 3 weeks, but already you have a bond because you scratch it, you like it, it comes to you, it nibbles your hands et cetera… I think that there is an awareness that people really need to have. And I think the same with plants. When you take away plants forever, they won’t come back.
In the project that I am doing – in a way they are related these two projects, they are funded by the same program of the National Science Foundation and this program had a couple of objections, and these are to bring together a very important public engagement aspect, modern or innovative research methods that were quite expensive and are now being used more and more in archaeological sciences, and involving commercial archaeology who are now very much exploited in many ways, and they have to do things quickly – so it was to create a consortium of people, public and commercial partners, and academics, like the Doggerland group, where people collaborate on a long-term basis. In a way, everybody benefits. They are very similar in their ultimate objectives and they way that they are structured. Public partners include museums – in my case it’s an outdoor educational centre near Rotterdam, different partners but the same idea.
You know archaeologists classify – you know like this is a key, and this is something else, and that is that, but when you look at it, like the example of this manufacturing waste, which turns out to most likely be an ornament, that’s totally unexpected. We think in terms of here is the tool and the rest is waste, but we now know that they might select pieces of that waste that can be immediately reused. So you refer to how we think of function very differently – yes we do. We think of function in a very strict way, although many of us, when you have sugar in your coffee and there is no spoon you might use your pen to stir your coffee, so we too break through the classifications quite regularly, and they have done that in the past as well, all the time, people are opportunistic, improvising… we are very good at improvising in general – in principle it’s a human feature to improvise in order to solve a problem.
In these points too, these awls we find indications that they were working with plants, but we also find that they were kind of lazy – when it was broken, they kind of changed it with least possible effort into the same object. So some of these little teeth, these little barbs, would break off, or the tip would break because of impact – they would just make a new tip, so they did a lot of readjusting of these. Which is interesting, because you see some of them are used for a very long time. Now, if our TV doesn’t work we throw it in the garbage. These points also accumulate stories as well, and the fact that they used the same animals to make them from most of the time sort of indicates that they had some significance – what exactly, we still don’t know, but the fact that they used human bones to do that as well is interesting to say the least.
M
I guess in some ways we’re talking about people having a real reverence for materials, but then maybe there is a stereotypical idea of people being precious with bones and with materials, but when it comes to human remains being reverent in a very different ways – preserving and closing those off. Once a person has died there is an immediate protective bubble placed around that body whether it’s a coffin or a tomb or a bog or something, but if you’re using human bones in this way then that’s something very different surely?
A
Well we know that in the late Mesolithic that they were experimenting a lot with bodies – taking pieces away, mutilating them sometimes. There’s some interesting work being done around this… if we think about now in Mexico, people dancing with skeletons and in our eyes how that might be absolutely irreverent, it’s ‘not done’ – in some societies they left bodies to be eaten by animals or just left behind. But the fact that they did play with the bones in that period to me is not actually that strange. I have never seen before that they would make tools of it though, whatever that means. It might have been that they did not having anything else, we don’t know. We also found another point from Doggerland – I think Merel maybe found one too, which had fish polish so we know they were not used just for killing land mammals but were also used to fish with.
The cultural period of the ‘Putting Life’ project is between 3000BC, a little before, until about 2400 BC. We built a house there – well, we built two, but the one that is still standing – the other one we have burned down, as a proper experiment of course quantifying temperatures et cetera and excavating it afterwards, the remains, that was the site on which we based the house plan which was excavated is dated 2500 BC, so we’re basically taking most of that period as a basis, and basically the third millennium BC is what we are interested in and how people lived in this delta, how they moved about, and what kinds of food they collected. So this Saturday we’re going to do spring cooking - the ingredients that we have known from the technical research telling us what they could have eaten in spring time, we are going to be cooking them, and then the residue is going to be analysed as a reference material for the archaeological cooking remains we will look at. We’re going to do some experiments with dyeing in pottery to see whether the residue impregnates the surface of the pottery, and if we can identify the signatures relative to each different kind of dyeing and if we compare that then can we find those types of dyeing in archaeological specimens. Also, we look at how they furnished the house, so the centre is an educational centre and totally non-profit. It’s run by volunteers, they come two and a half days a week, on Sunday it is open for the public, and people will tell you about the research we are doing. It’s going to be quite a big centre because we also hope to extend it and build two more of these same houses to show the public that the way we made it is a choice because we only have the original posts remaining, and we want to make different interpretations of this layout of postholes, with different roofing techniques… so the first house is already a little bit different from the second house, so that in people’s minds we make it so that once they have seen it ‘this is it’ – this is how it was – it sticks and that’s ‘the truth’. Which of course is not true, because there can be many different ways of building a house on the basis of the same layout of postholes.
M
How important is the truth, and what is the truth?!
A
I get so irritated because people throw this around all the time, and it seems like nobody’s talking about greys and in-betweens and ‘probables’. Everything has to be so polarised.
M
I get this impression that you are just so engaged and immersed in a huge range of different experimental and innovative activities, and it’s really amazing actually, this insight into an area of archaeological practice which I would not have otherwise known about – it’s very exciting.
A
Yes – the volunteers have been building all throughout the wintertime, they built an attic in the house, and now we are going to start making baskets and objects. We are running workshops to help teach people how to make those baskets as well and giving them knowledge and skills which they can then transfer to the loads of schoolchildren who are visiting the centre too. They will be making ropes from nettles. It’s fascinating using nettles because people are afraid of the sting, but not only are they perfect for arthritis, but nettles are very high in Vitamin C, so from young nettles you can make delicious soups, and third, they are perfect string material, so you can weave with them and they have the most beautiful fibres. Once you start working with them, the first few you think ‘this is unpleasant’ but you get used to it very quickly. It an engaging way of getting kids to understand a bit more about plants and what you can make with them, so in terms of the future and maybe sustainable technology, it’s something that is a tiny, tiny contribution, but we need to start thinking about not just having these plastic sweaters and plastic clothes everywhere. Like having wool, and flax, and hemp, and of these wonderful fibres that are maybe not as cheap, but they will last a lot longer, and they will not release lots of microplastics into the sea.
I now remember what I was going to tell you when I was side-tracked because I’m very excited about all of this! One of the workshops we did last year was we had somebody who is a survivalist – I mean you know we now have all of these survival experts right? And this guy knew a lot about plants, and out of the centre, which is in Vlaardingen near Rotterdam, we walked out and three hours later we were about 200 yards from the centre and he had told us so much about plants, and this is not even a natural environment, it’s a park type of situation, so all of these plants he was talking about we had found only 200 yards from where we started. That’s how much knowledge – how much usefulness there is in nature, and we tend to forget that.
M
In popular culture we tend to look at survivalists in a certain way, as a kind of politically charged subculture and maybe this is a distraction… if everyone had that kind of knowledge then there is something kind of special and interesting about that.
A
Well we look upon it as a kind of stupid play, but basically this is exactly how people moved around in the past.
M
Maybe even the idea of moving around and navigating the natural environment with our hands and feet, there’s some kind of mental threshold before that now…
A
I think maybe Covid had one good thing come out of it – mostly horrible things but one thing is that people started moving, and they started walking and appreciating nature much more, and I think that has really helped. There is an anthropologist who lives a nomadic life and we look upon that lifestyle and we think ‘poor nomad’, but mental health among nomads was always much better, because moving is something that really is good for us. It’s much better than sitting. And so moving around nature, maybe dealing with animals, plants, they have far less conflict. They may have more conflict with farmers but apparently this internal conflict that we all have because we are all sitting too close to each other – that’s far less of a problem for mobile people. We are meant to walk, basically, that’s what we are for. And I think that’s why with Doggerland we think ‘oh gosh’ they would have had to move around so much – they would have had to walk very long distances, but they didn’t care! Nowadays we can get on a plane and be in America by tomorrow, but we were not built for that. I always try to remember that when you think about how people live in a landscape because this is another thing in archaeology, they always made this division between material culture and landscape, but to me they are so completely interwoven.
M
That’s really interesting, this space that you are operating in – that seems really exciting to me to be bridging culture and landscape and not imagining them as two separate subjects.
A
You cannot think about technology without thinking about landscape. Archaeologists do that all the time. They pinpoint a source but they can’t… I mean what fascinates me is that we have places, we have individual places but how do they situate in a social landscape, how do they interact between each of these points that we draw on a map between archaeological sites? We know a little bit about Doggerland, there’s been a lot of research but how did these people move about? So we have a very interdisciplinary project in ‘Putting Life’, a team of very different people also, some who are not academics, for example a woodworker, an artist, and the guy you just met he was new into the project recently, he was so excited and he wanted to be a part of it, so after we had a meeting for two days we stayed in a wetland landscape in Holland – to be in the right landscape, so moved around in canoes – we have our own canoes actually, because I’ve now built four boats – and we talked about the landscape around us, but we were thinking ‘how did this process of making this dugout – how did it take place?’ and everyone had their input, and we were asking ourselves questions, and he said ‘these are questions I’ve never asked myself’. So this interaction between all of these different disciplines, different people with different backgrounds – 16 people – is so interesting because you very quickly make a leap into a different space. And then we translate that into new visualisations, and so we’re really trying to push our data to such an extent, and of course we are talking not about a deep truth but about our interpretations of data, and interpretations of experiences and experiments.
This is very different from the Doggerland project but both are dealing with water-rich environments and how do people deal with water and… this is very urgent now actually. This place may not exist in a couple of hundred years.
M
I was going to ask – I guess I might preface this by saying, and this is very naïve, and a little bit ridiculous but this idea did come to me a while ago but are we heading into something like a new Mesolithic?! What does the future look like in a few hundred years’ time? I think we’re very focused – or actually that might be very unfocused – on what the world might look like much further into the future, which possibly doesn’t help public engagement with an abundance of sensationalist or catastrophist terminology – but in the next few hundred years, what does that kind of future look like?
A
In the near future I think our digital capacities are pretty scary. On one hand it’s wonderful, but on the other hand I mean the control – it’s far beyond 1984, it’s horrifying. To me it’s horrifying. And you can think a little bit further into the complete collapse of our modern, highly technologically-based society that maybe we go back into a stone age – I can’t see it but yes it’s possible… I think before we get that far we’re going to slaughter each other. Because there are so many people, but nobody seems to care. In the 60’s there were lots of birth control programs and people were actually much more aware than we are now.
I’ve decided I don’t want to think too much about it. I want to do my thing.
M
Exactly and the things you’ve described – that you’ve described as being small things, small pieces of action – personally I feel like those are actually… I think really those hold the key to a way forward – the intimacy of working with people, for people – spending two days in a wetland building a canoe with someone you have only just met… these types of things can be world-changing, and I do imagine a beauty in that.
