Aim
Everything flows and nothing remains still
associated with Heraklit
In the introduction of the book about „the canoe, a living tradition” John Jennings (Jennings 2002) stresses the canoe as an “enduring symbol of wilderness and freedom throughout North America”. This wilderness and freedom I felt, when the change of perspective took place in my view: from the view from the land, towards the look from the water. This change of perspective restored the feeling of freedom and wilderness, which I lost during decades of submissive believe in filled pages of data, volumes of technical illustrations and piles of non-reflected statistics. I know today that this entire framework doesn’t improve scientific insight, quite the contrary; it confirms sometimes embosomed rituals of pseudoscientific fuss and allegiance.
So this site instead is an area of freedom, independent of academic conventions, regulations, considerations and prestige. The things that count here most are convincing evidence, profound knowledge, broad experience and openness of mind.
This site tries to find a non-elitist and low-threshold access for sharing information about archaeological and modern wetland phenomena’s. In this boat is equally space for people still living and working in wetland sites, tourists, sharing their photos about this sites, practitioners of experimental archaeology, professional and non-professional archaeologists, academic and not-academic, ethno-archaeologists or ethnologists, prospectors, boat builders, canoeists, fishers, divers etc., as long as they have something to contribute to archaeological and ethnological wetland matters.
Regarding this openness, the focus of this site is broadly transdisciplinary, as well as chronological and spatial unrestricted, boundless and free flowing like the wet wide web of the waters. Some other target characteristics which this site would like to share with the waters are fleetness, weightlessness, straightforwardness, agility and flexibility in producing and sharing information. Nothing here is cut in stone, everything flows and we don’t even know to which unknown waters this cruise will lead.
Another aim of the site is to contribute to non-ethnocentric and non-human-centric ways of looking at wetland archaeology and stressing criticism of ideology, in the way, that we learn to realise our own preoccupation in interpreting archaeological facts.
It should be possible to present here tentative work in progress, short notes of sudden inspiration without climbing up the greasy pole of more traditional scientific editing. I don’t blame this more academic ways, they have their entitlement. This site doesn’t want to compete with them and makes no pretence to be taken too serious regarding scientific standards. Based on the persuasion that archaeology is science fiction first of all (Fahlander 2001, see generalities and methodological frame), this site wants to present interesting, popular science fiction in layman’s terms at first place, but this doesn’t’ mean, that it can’t bring new and surprising inputs for the academics. And there is space for some ironies and satire too and everything should be read with a little twinkle in one’s eye.
Mainly involved in archaeological wetland research since 1979, I’m the guarantor that there is archaeological science in the fiction and not only fantasy. And that’s why it has to be up to me, to decide on my own, which contributions from others I want to share and which not. I have to guarantee, that the boat is not overloaded, that it doesn’t’ come in a tilted position, doesn’t keel over, doesn’t go aground, and doesn’t burst and that there are enough voyageurs for portaging the cargo, when the rapids are to wild to pass. No correspondence is conducted, when a contribution is refused. I hope there will be a lot to share instead.
Frances Anne Hopkins: shooting the rapids (1879)