I never thought I’d come back to live in Christchurch, let alone find myself irrevocably entangled with its archaeology. I’m not actually from the city, having grown up in North Canterbury, but Christchurch was still the urban centre I was most familiar with as a child, the place where my dad grew up, the location of my first flat after school, the city whose streets and shops and restaurants held memories and stories, both my own and my family’s. It was also the city – too close to home – that, having gone to university in Otago, having left, I couldn’t actually see myself coming back to.
Then the earthquakes happened.
I don’t think I ever actually defined a timeframe, but I know that when I first came back to work in Christchurch – initially in late 2010, as an intern for Kat in the period between the September and February earthquakes, and then more permanently in 2012 – I didn’t think I’d be here that long. I definitely did not expect to still be here more than 10 years later, still working with the city’s archaeology, still talking about it, still – thankfully! – finding interest in the city’s story, especially as it relates to material culture.
This sounds a little negative, I know, like the city sucked me in despite my resistance, a kind of grasping, elastic force that I temporarily escape but can never leave. That’s not quite right – it’s more that, in terms of my involvement with this collection and this project, one of the most significant aspects has been how unexpected it was, or rather, how much working with the archaeology of Christchurch at this scale has defied every expectation I had. I’m not still here because I can’t leave, I’m still here because I find it absurdly fascinating (this is, in itself, also unexpected, given how much I hated New Zealand colonial history at school – I am genuinely very amused that this is where my career has led me).
In which, contrary to the point made in the previous paragraph, the author has very literally been trapped by mounds of artefacts. Image: Wendy Gibbs.
Someone asked me at a conference recently if I was just going to talk about Christchurch archaeology for the next twenty years, the answer to which is basically, yes. There’s enough research potential in this dataset to fuel the work of more than one lifetime. So much of that potential, the most interesting aspects of it – at least to me – are the questions and studies that can only be answered through the collation of the data into a form that allows for large scale analysis of the city’s history as a whole. I want this data to enable researching Christchurch as an entity in itself, as well as the exploration of individual stories, places and objects within that greater whole. During the years I spent analysing artefact assemblages recovered from post-earthquake archaeological work here, the connections between people, places and things across the city became more and more evident. The questions I wanted to ask were increasingly about material culture use across neighbourhoods and suburbs, about commerce at a city-wide scale[1], about the connections that existed within social, political, geographical, religious and cultural communities and how they might be represented by the archaeology – and material culture – of the city. It became impossible to see each of these sites – thousands of them, now – as anything but one part of a much greater archaeological landscape. The dataset recovered from that landscape requires nothing less than to be curated and conserved for the future in a way that both realises the scale and interconnectedness of the city it represents and makes that data available to answer the questions it poses, from the small to the ridiculously huge.
It's a little bit overwhelming at times, the scale of what we’re trying to do with this project. At last count, there are over 1400 excavation projects represented in the Christchurch archaeological archive, almost a million fragments of artefact material, thousands of features from the city’s urban landscape – rubbish pits, drains, buildings, wells, cultural layers, buried floors and foundations – and tens, if not thousands of anecdotes about the people of the city and the places they lived. Each of those objects has a story, each site has a story (usually, more than one!), every person has a story – together, the clamour of all those stories can be deafening. But, I think, to torture the metaphor a little bit, they all deserve to be heard or, at least, to be made available to those who wish to hear them.
A selection of artefacts from the dataset. Image: J. Garland.
Hopefully, this database – and, more generally, this project overall – will go some way to making this possible. There is so much that can be done with this dataset and – as Kat said in her post a couple of weeks ago – if we don’t try to use it, if we don’t make it available to be shared and researched and interrogated, what was the point of collecting it in the first place? I want people to be able to look up the archaeology of their house; to find the rubbish that their great-great-grandparents threw away in the 1870s; to learn about the teenager who held up a carriage on Riccarton Road with a stolen antique pistol; to wonder why someone stuffed a handwritten copy of a poem about cowboys down the back of a fireplace; and to know that the bar they’re currently having a drink in was preceded, more than a century ago, by a hotel that once housed performances of naked people in ‘frozen’ tableaus of well-known moments of history. More than that, I want people to be able to research the history of dental hygiene across the city through the prevalence of toothpaste pots and toothbrushes in household waste, to see the palimpsest of the city’s infrastructure through the drains and roads layered under our feet or the way that Christchurch’s urban development impacted water use and quality in the nineteenth century through changes in wells and modifications to rivers and water channels. Or, you know, any of the myriad of other possible questions that could be asked of the dataset.
This copy of the poem “Lasca”, by Frank Desprez, was found folded up behind a fireplace, while this article recounts the rather dramatic events of the 3rd of October 1879 and their apparent origin in the bad influence of impure literature. Image: J. Garland and Star 10/01/1880: 2.
Like Kat, I feel a bit of a responsibility for this collection, to make sure people know about it, to see its potential realised, I suppose. It may not have been what I expected, but I feel very privileged to have been able to be part of the archaeological work here and I guess I want everyone to be as fascinated by what’s been found as I am. Because it is fascinating. Sometimes I wonder, if I’d had access to something like the Christchurch collection when I was at school, would I have been more interested in the history of my own community? I genuinely don’t know the answer – I was a bit particular (and very stubborn) as a teenager – but I’d like to think that the ability to connect that history to places I knew or to hold pieces of that past in my hand might have gone some way to making it slightly less surprising that this is where I ended up.
- Jessie
[1] Spoiler, this one I’m actually trying to answer!