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From pragmatology to archaeology, with the aid of a few vignettes from Greece

Christopher Witmore

Abstract

Archaeology’s original obligation has been to ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’.  There is nothing wrong with this commitment so long as archaeology holds fast to the cares specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta archaia’.  Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand their remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations.  Though ‘ta archaia’ things may be, they are also a lot of other things in addition.


Things, we might say, are simultaneously gatherings, matters of concern, objects and archives.  As ‘gatherings’ they connect achievements seemingly distant in time and space.  As ‘matters of concern’ they draw in various groups supposedly scattered in space and time.  As ‘objects’ (a term that we neither deploy in opposition to, nor as detached from, that which is commonly taken to be encompassed by the traditional notion of ‘subject’) things continue to do as they have always done—fulfill roles and swap properties with humans and nonhumans.  As ‘archives’ they bear traces of their many transactions/exchanges.  Just as it would be a disservice to things by emphasizing any one role over the others, it would be an injustice for archaeology to carve out a partial share in things as ‘ta archaia’.


My purpose in this paper is show how in order to be faithful to the bewildering diversity of things, archaeology cannot be construed as holding to domain of ‘ta archaia’ exclusively.  In order to be symmetrical, archaeology must come to recognize how it begins as ‘pragmatology’.  Much like things, ‘pragmata’ fulfill many more roles than what is covered by the ‘material past’. To this end, I offer several vignettes from Greece.   



Paper

In this paper I cover three closely related points regarding things. First, I briefly contextualize part of the rationale for taking things seriously and this will serve for both this paper and the overall session. Second, I explore things in some of their various guises with examples from Greece. Here, I seek to expose a pesky, if not dangerous, bifurcation between social multiplicity and natural unity; an opposition which continues to underlie just short of all archaeological understandings of the material world. Lastly, in following the necessary detour around this old opposition, I ask whether an archaeology that recognizes things as much more interesting, lively, and bewildering can do so given its obligation to the ‘material past’. If not, then I suggest we consider a surrogate term for these practices under the heading of pragmatology, which might be up to the task.

The so-called “turn (or return) to things” has now been covered from a variety of angles within the humanities and sciences. We may briefly situate this turn as a necessary path formed in the wake of the fragile Empire of Signs and the associated amnesia that came with drinking its brand of soft drinks. We may note a number of common characteristics to be associated with it:

It will come as no surprise to a TAG audience that archaeology has not figured very prominently in the “turn to things.” In a recent discussion exposing the roots of the turn, Frank Trentmann failed to list archaeology among the progenitors of the movement. His inventory included such usual suspects as anthropology, science studies, material culture studies (we may acknowledge the archaeological connection here, not that many commentators do) and, with thing theory, literary studies; it also included older endeavors such as folklore and museum studies.


Other examples are just as revealing. 1072 pages of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel’s Making Things Public contained the work of anthropologists, art historians, artists, architects, designers, engineers, legal historians, museum curators, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists of science and technology, and even English professors, linguists and political theorists; but no archaeologists, not a one.

To be fair, there are notable exceptions in participation and acknowledgement. We have now seen this topic raised at both TAG Columbia with Sev Fowles and Matt West’s session on Thing Theory and here at Stanford with the plenary session. Mention should also be made of, for example, the work of Bjørnar Olsen and Ewa Domanska. Despite the best of intentions, there is certainly no denying that archaeology has been largely ignored in the “turn to things”. Why is it that a discipline that has always been object-oriented in what it does, largely failed to make an impression on the humanities and sciences at large as to having a share in things? Why has archaeology not gotten involved?


Three reasons. Allow me to offer three informal considerations (provocations) for why this is so.


  1. As we stated in the session abstract: “instead of reassessing the unique potential of their own disciplinary practice and, in turn, contributing to and advancing these debates, practitioners have largely reconfirmed an old and deeply rooted inferiority complex of being a second string social science by adding the products of forerunner disciplines and sciences to their accounts of the past (an attitude which is in fact a product of the very rifted regime that these new discourses want to do away with).”  This attitude insults archaeology.
  2. It has to do with a negative bearing towards ‘things’ among archaeologists. Characterized by suspicion and even embarrassment, a peculiar dissonance surfaces with things and this is connected with an epistemological commitment where things are subsumed to interpretations, identities, social ties, beliefs, etc. The political economy of this way of rendering the world has deep roots, and is largely formed out of a modernist program that tried to purify the world by cleaving it into two altogether opposed realms. With this frame of reference in place, a focus on things can be construed nothing more than a misguided return to materialism, rather than an ontological turn that gives way to a much more refreshing and fascinating world.
  3. Ambivalence. And it is here that we may place the majority of archaeologists.


This session takes leave of these attitudes. We have chose the title “Archaeology: the discipline of things” for this session largely as a rhetorical gesture; but partially to remind us that at its etymological roots, archaeology is the study of “ta archaia”, literally, and however we may choose to quibble, old things. This concern for things is firmly tied to a program that seeks a different ontological grounding; one which denies the strife between objective matter and colossal social forces by placing all entities are on the same footing. This more democratic ontology has come to be provisionally labeled symmetrical archaeology.


For my part, I aim to address some issues that arise when archaeology takes things seriously. And I do so by working on the ontological grounds provided by a symmetrical archaeology. But first, what are things?


Things, we might say, are simultaneously gatherings, matters of concern, objects and archives.  As ‘gatherings’ they connect achievements seemingly distant in time and space.  As ‘matters of concern’ they draw in various groups supposedly scattered in space and time.  As ‘objects’ (a term that we neither deploy in opposition to, nor as detached from, that which is commonly taken to be encompassed by the traditional notion of ‘subject’) things continue to do as they have always done—fulfill roles and swap properties with humans and nonhumans.  As ‘archives’ they bear traces of their many transactions/exchanges. 


In what follows, we will take on each of these guises for things through several vignettes from the Argolid in Greece. In this, we do not aim to extend some new and strange qualities to things which they previously lacked, rather we undertake a recomposition of what was formerly split into two opposed realms. From here it is argued that we no longer operate under the old empiricism embraced by archaeology where practitioners were regarded as separate from the material past they work with, rather archaeologists begin in medias res, in the midst of things. This starting point opens up all kinds of bewildering possibilities we formerly left unacknowledged; it also challenges the very etymological basis of archaeology as the study of ta archaia. It is in this regard that a notion of pragmatology will be discussed by way of a conclusion. 


Gatherings
Here we encounter the oft-repeated etymological connotation of thing as gathering. We might best understand gathering as denoting the ways things draw together relations, events, and myriad entities distant in time and space. In this way, things are always simultaneously located and dislocated, singular and collective; they are composed of polychronic achievements.

Take the 13th-century church of Panaghia in Aghia Triada, Greece. Multitemporal in design and execution, this small church is built on the cross-in-square orientation with three parallel apses.

Despite distances in space and temporality, all these achievements are simultaneously aggregated into the church and, as a collective gathering, they participate in various church events, whether 14th-century liturgies or the Assumption Day ceremonies taking place in the photo, a slice of August 15, 2007.


    With thing as gathering the past is no longer demarcated and distinct, but folded and proximate; what are regarded as ‘material pasts’ continue to associate.


Archives
I use the term ‘archive’ loosely to refer to the ways things accumulate the mnemonic traces of their former relations. Archaeologists work with this aspect of things regularly. If we look closely at this sculpture of two reclining figures on a couch we may note the pocked, roughed faces and heads. That the finer facial details were never completed suggests that they were to be left to a later date and probably, given the statue’s current situation, a different location where it would acquire its final facial details. Events modify entities in subtle or obvious ways, and these modifications suggest possibilities as to the nature of these events. Likewise, a closer inspection of the surface will reveal details as to the tools and techniques of its execution. This sculpture carries these traces forward into new affairs, thus ‘archive’—a kind of locus for records of former transactions.


Things are always conspiring in relations and when we follow other associations more is revealed. Its locus outside the port authority of Ermioni speaks to the event that the statue was dredged up from the sea floor. This occurred during the construction of the new harbor facilities in the 1980s. This issue of relations brings us to things as objects.


Objects
As objects, things continually enter into different negotiations and fulfill various roles. Here, archaeologists commonly think of what remains of the material past as residues of a former, prioritized existence, which endures unyieldingly. Such seems perfectly plausible in the case of this monumental trapezoidal wall in the upper town at Hermion. It is easy to regard such a wall as durable and no matter when we speak of the wall, whether in the 2nd-century BCE or the 18th-century CE it is, as the Roman traveler Pausianias suggests to his readers, the (now former) temenos or sacred precinct wall of the sanctuary to the goddess of agriculture and grain, Demeter.


But even while ‘it’ continues to provide support as a foundation or delimit property boundaries, can we really always speak of the same wall, the same former temenos of Demeter, irrespective of the shifting associations around it?


We can. However, to do so is to maintain a split between unity and multiplicity in the form of “durable substance and transient accidents” (Harman forthcoming, 17). So we are at a crossroads. Either we can maintain such an assumed separation or we can recognize an alternative where the world perpetually perishes through its constant modifications. With the latter “even the tiniest shift in a thing’s interactions, as inevitably occurs in every moment, suffices to transform it as an event into something altogether new, even if strikingly similar to its predecessor” (Harman forthcoming, 83). This modification is not solely an issue of people/things relations; it is also one of relations among things.


    Here the trapezodial wall forms a section of a storage area in the rear of a house. In the storage area we find much more than an exchange between a Hermion family and accoutrements for the necessary upkeep of the house.  We find a wall in relation to a wooden latter, ladder, water pipes, a washbasin, water dispenser, liquid soap, hand mirror (formerly a rear view car mirror), rubbish bin, various liquid containers, a hand broom, a volunteer fig tree, stone tile, storage crates, a grape vine, rear dividing wall, a shade tree, numerous nails, hooks, metal implements, a tin covered roof, the door jam of the rear door to the house.


    Following Alfred North Whitehead, all these things conspire in wall relations and contribute to the occasion that is this storage shed. Any change in the lineup on this roster of entities would modify the nature of the shed, however slight or radical. Such is true for the structural wall in the kitchen of the adjoining house, the foundation of the school next door or the rear garden of this adjacent house.


    Belief in the arrow of time lends itself to the image that this trapezoidal wall is the former temenos of Demeter and it comes to us preformed as of this past. However, the alternative suggests that durability of the former temenos of Demeter is never given. Whether as a portion of a storage-shed, the foundation for a house, or a rear garden wall, new entities are formed with each of these shifting relations and in this, that which endures has to be constantly worked for and sustained. Here, Pausanias, the properties of limestone, millions of years of compaction, ancient stoneworkers, the Greek Ministry of Culture, numerous topographers and archaeologists and some, but not all, business owners in Hermion; all come to its aid.


    This brings us to things as matters of concern.


Matters of concern
Matters of concern are what draw diverse interests together; matters of concern prioritize issues of common care, interest and obligation among archaeologists and other vested (connected) communities. 


Here, consider for example Kastro; the top of a conical hill in the Loutro Valley. Kastro was surveyed by the Argolid Exploration Project in 1981 and labeled as ‘B16’. Interpreted as a ‘fortified habitation or refuge’ dating largely to the Late Geometric to Subgeometric (750-700/675 BCE), most of the site is enclosed by a massive rubble enclosure (stretches of which are 5m thick) covering an area of approximately 40x50m at the top of the hill, 112.50m above sea level.


On July 12, 2004, just one month shy of 23 years after the AEP field crew visited the area, a number of obvious transformations had occurred as inscribed on this sketch map from a 1981 field notebook.

While there are many more changes to be noted, these mnemonic traces speak to the uninterrupted and constantly shifting lives of these places. We may note the plural. As matters of concern we begin with the recognition of this conical hill in the Loutro Valley as disputed grounds. For archaeologists, this hilltop has, after a long process of study, come to be defined as the remains of a fortified habitation or refuge. For the landowner, this area is his property and at its center is a seasonal dwelling, which draws family members together at the height of the olive harvest. For people who frequent the area, the hill is a familiar feature of the northern skyline above the confluence of roads in the Loutro valley. It may be a fact that the conical hill is a former fortification site, but it is also many other things, many other locales, in addition. Whether an archaeological site with an enclosure or private property, whether a seasonal dwelling or a landscape feature, the hilltop gives off many different properties depending on what set of relations it finds itself in.

We may note that whether we are dealing with post-processual and social archaeologies or processual ones, diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a single natural world. Understanding things as matters of concern poses a challenge to any bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the other. Arguing for multiplicities of meaning, interpretation, belief, has left intact a mononaturalism, which offers but one reality at the expense of others.


A site on a hilltop is many. In paraphrasing Graham Harman, “B16” a fortification comes to birth only on the occasion of associations with crumbling stonewalls, archaeologists, bits of pottery, historians, local antiquarians, past-oriented folk and a hilltop; “since these associations shift constantly in both tiny and revolutionary ways, we have actors that perpetually perish rather than endure” (103). As archaeologists we do not have to tackle these difficult philosophical questions, questions which will be taken up in much more detail in Gavin Lucas’ discussion of Whitehead’s notion of ‘object and event’ later this afternoon, as archaeologists we only have to be open to other associations that things might be implicated in. And not to decide in advance what part the past should play in the world.


Archaeology and Pragmatology
It is no mere quibble (in reference to the plenary talk by Rosemary Joyce) to revisit the commitment of archaeology as specified in its etymology, the study of ta archaia, translated old things. The ontological grounds we now tread upon pose a serious question as to whether ‘archaeology’ as a term allows us to cover the range of associations things conspire within for those of us who seek to address them. I will now conclude by underlining what is at play in this.


The rationale for dealing with concurrent relations that the things we deem as the material past participate in is far from new. Archaeologists have long now shed the fairytale belief that we discover the past as it was. Lew Binford regarded the notion that we study the past directly as a continuation of self-deceit, as a charade. Instead, Binford argued how attention should be directed to the archaeological record itself.
We deal with, as Michael Shanks puts it, what becomes of what was.


In this, archaeology regards the past as preexisting, as preceding, the present occasion. But if this is not given, we have to contend with how materials are first bracketed as ‘of the past’. A storage-shed, a school foundation, a property boundary, the former temenos of Demeter; we speak of many things but not everyone of them can be essentially taken to be material past in essence. Not to be confused with an empiricism that reduced the material world to facts, to acknowledging these other lives, is to be more just, more honest, more faithful and, yes, more empirical. To predefine things as exclusively of the material past is a partial rendering of experience.


Things are much more interesting, variegated and heterogeneous than we have let on. As was mentioned at the outset we begin in medias res, in the midst of things and from here, understanding them as ta archaia becomes one negotiation of many others, all of which modify the material world in different ways. The common, unified world is not given; a common world, a common past, is what we must struggle for.


Here the notion of ‘archaeology’ as the logos of ta archaia may not provide adequate flexibility to tackle these issues. I want to leave you today with a proposition: the range of motion required to do things justice may be granted to practitioners under the banner of pragmotology.


As with the Latin res, the Greek pragma or, taken in the plural, pragmata designates a ‘deed’, ‘an act’, ‘an affair’, a ‘circumstance’, a ‘contested matter’, a ‘thing’.  Depending on the relations, pragmata also refer to ‘necessary or expedient concerns’, ‘actions’, ‘things of consequence’, ‘duties’ or ‘obligations’.
Pragmatology might provide archaeologists with the range of motion for engaging the other lives of things that regarding them as of the past in the beginning prevents. Understood in this way, ‘the past’, heritage, patrimony are always situated as object-orientations, they are the hard fought outcome of our practices.


This very possibility that we are always dealing with realities in the plural opens a far greater empirical realm to archaeologists. Such an ‘occasionalism’ is not a threat to archaeology. To the contrary, it lays out a world of exciting opportunities ahead of us. From here, archaeology becomes a struggle against the perpetual perishing, it forms eddies against entropy. Ta archaia are now what we generate and work hard to stabilize. Archaeology is an unforgetting that recognizes how tentative risky and difficult it is to maintain an enduring past.