AUTHORS: Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore

A book for University of California Press, Fall 2008

STATEMENT OF AIMS AND RATIONALE

This book is a primer for the discipline of 2010.

The proliferation of ‘archaeologies’ in recent years is astounding. From media archaeologists to archaeologists of knowledge or science, from archaeologists digging around in government archives to excavators of discourse, this proliferation is not just metaphorical. The rationales take on many guises with diverse vocabularies, but on a general level they may be seen as a reflection of what has been called ‘the turn to things’. Perhaps the strangest quality of this return to things, save a few notable exceptions, is a lack of archaeologists who actually practice archaeology in any conventional sense of the profession. Why are archaeologists not involved? What could archaeology contribute to these trans-disciplinary discussions regarding the relations between people and things?

‘Ta archaia’, quite literally ‘old things’ are at the etymological root of archaeology. So a concern with things, an obligation to 'materiality', a commitment to landscape runs to the heart of the profession. The weather patterns across the social and natural sciences are shifting; the traditional social-natural science divide (and its ontological grounding) is being challenged from different positions (actor-network-theory, technoscience studies, phenomenology, artificial intelligence, and so forth) and archaeologists are recognizing these profound transformations. However, 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, fighting under the colors of other disciplines and sciences (an attitude which is in fact a product of the very rifted regime that these new discourses want to do away with).

This book takes leave of such an attitude and revisits core aspects of the archaeological to offer a bold picture of what it is archaeologists do. It makes a case that at the heart of archaeology is a trans-disciplinary set of practices and understandings that address the very nature of what it is to be human and how in turn humans relate to things. This book makes a strong argument that archaeologists have a unique and long-term perspective on human relations with material goods, the design of things and the nature of the past. In this way, it offers an alternative thesis of how collectives of people and things relate with other collectives separated by vast distances in linear time and space. This thesis centers on a unique archaeological account of humanity which differs fundamentally from accounts that fall under the rubric of a modernist historicism. This book clearly accentuates a broad agenda that crosscuts the whole of what has in the last few decades become the fragmented field of archaeology. It proposes a creative and distinctive methodology and theory. The authors make the ambitious case that the sciences and humanities have much to gain from embracing an archaeological sensibility.

CHAPTER SYNOPSES

1. Introduction: The discipline of things -
Increased specialization within a discipline is a common trend in the natural and social sciences. And archaeology constitutes no exception. In contrast to the many positive assessments of the ‘states of affairs’ we introduce this book by arguing that the current fragmentation and specialization has led to a proliferation of multiple and incommensurable agendas. Such a ‘hyper-pluralism’ actually inhibits debate and discussion, by breaking up research traditions into multiple groups with shrinking scopes and, in turn, losing the ‘big picture’ questions germane to the entire profession. In place of the general and bold concerns characterizing some of the new archaeology and early post-processualism, the current archaeological archipelago is characterized by ‘isms’ and shallow theorizing. We highlight some of these major tendencies and characterize their research agendas to underscore the discontinuity in current archaeological efforts. We then lay out the fundamentals of an alternative, trans-disciplinary sensibility rooted in what practitioners in the discipline actually do (rather than what they say they do). As the following chapters will argue, this sensibility is one founded upon heeding the relations between people and things. This endeavor requires us to revisit and reassess our most basic ingredients within archaeology: materiality, agency, space and time. By appealing to these ‘common matters of concern’ and taking things seriously, we cut to the collective obligations of all archaeologists.

2. Artifacts: A history of archaeological engagements
In this chapter we take a broad view of the history of archaeology and its relationship with the material world. We emphasize archaeology’s changing relations with things – both antiquities and disciplinary instruments over the course of three centuries. In contrast to existing historiographies, we argue that the formulation and development of archaeology cannot be understood only through the context of changing ideas, theoretical trends and socio-political forces. Archaeology and its changing faces are also products of the proliferation of instruments and media, of changing modes of material engagement with the past. This is the material component of disciplinary practice ignored in most histories of archaeology. We exemplify an alternative genealogy using the study of megaliths in Europe since the 16th century as our case study.

3. Why things were forgotten
Things have been assigned an utterly marginal position in social science research. In this chapter we trace the genealogy of this asymmetry in western social and humanistic thought. It exposes how an ontology hostile to things won its hegemony in the 18th century. It goes on to show how this ontology has since surfaced as a skeptical attitude in which the material is treated with suspicion and rarely allowed any more than a provisional or derivative existence. Furthermore, it also reveals how this ontology has left its crucial mark on central approaches in recent material culture studies. The paradoxical outcome of this effective history is that the ontology responsible for the displacement of things also to a large extent grounds current programs of repatriation.

4. How archaeology reveals things - the role of media in fieldwork
This chapter argues that things have a tremendous role to play in archaeological practice. It goes on to fashion a new epistemology that allows for this. Augmenting the idea of 'circulating reference' from science studies with pragmatic philosophy's notion of justification, it works through the concept of mediation as an alternative to the kinds of portrayal which fall under the rubric of ‘representation.’ To illustrate the argument, we examine in detail how archaeologists move between the material world and a final document through the Teotihuacan Mapping Project (TMP). Between architectural details, structures, modern urban sprawl and survey stakes, excavation bulks and photogrammetric images, things contributed to the final appearance of the map; the map in turn, as the media architecture for engaging the site, continues to have a stake as a practical basis for current and future archaeological research. In contrast to conventional correspondence theories of practice and representation, things, specifically instruments, technologies and media, act in moving from the material world to archive, document and justification.

5. What it is to be human?/A long-term genealogy
This chapter takes a long-term view of how people get on with things. It makes the case that we have always been collective beings that blend with things. We have always been cyborgs. Challenging hegemonic conceptions of humanity and culture, we argue that it is not language or consciousness that constitutes the most characteristic feature of human being, but the blending with things. Proposing a different understanding of what it is to be human, we also suggest new possibilities for understanding how we live with things and the material pasts. Included in this program is also a plea for the rehabilitation of the dignity of things and of things studies in academia. Drawing inspiration from evolutionary psychology and design history we conclude this chapter by offering a new and challenging perspective on innovation and social change through the example of agriculture and early cities.

Relating closely to the perspectives outlined in the previous chapter, this chapter more specifically addresses the constitutive role of things in defining humanity. The initial production and use of stone tools is often referred to as a decisive developmental step in becoming human (“man the tool-maker”). Curiously, while modern life involves mixing with things in ever-increasing intimate combinations, this absolute condition is more or less ignored in most current attempts of defining humanity. Challenging hegemonic conceptions of humanity and culture, we argue that it is not language or consciousness that constitutes the most characteristic feature of human being, but the blending with things. By developing a different understanding of the nature of the human being we also open up new possibilities for understanding how we live with things and the material pasts. Included in this program is also a plea for the rehabilitation of the dignity of things and of things studies in academia.

6. Pragmatogony
This chapter addresses how things come together to make society and history. It makes the case that a thing, in cutting to the etymological roots of the term, is a gathering of a variety of achievements, which took place at a distance in linear space and time. In a case from modern material culture studies, we will ‘unpack’ the design of a Leica IIIc 35mm camera. From optics and glass to metal and leather casing we demonstrate how in beginning with things we are collectively and simultaneously entangled with a diversity of pasts.

7. The past no longer past
Building upon these different understandings of what it is to be human, of what is packed into a thing, we may now understand contemporary relations with the past in more intimate and immediate ways. This, in turn, brings us to attend to the issue of time itself. This chapter challenges the central conception of the past as distance, demarcated, and distinct. It takes leave of the image of the past as absent, which is built into conventional archaeological understandings of time as chronology or entropy, and offers a radically different understanding of multitemporal relations through the notion of ‘percolation’. To this end, it provides a detailed example in the form of a topology of an ancient Greek landscape. From classical walls mixed into 19th century houses to Roman roads that direct the flow of contemporary traffic today we trace the pleats and folds between various eras in the Peloponnesus.

8. Media and archive
Now that we have established how things have an active role in how we record and document the past, this chapter goes on to discuss the consequences for cultural heritage management or 'public archaeology'. We argue that the role of the archaeologist as custodian or steward of the past is under redefinition, and that the things of new digital technology fortify an emerging role of the archaeologist as mediating the past. The so called paradigm shift in heritage management cannot be disentangled from the platform shift of technology (from analog to digital). With examples of collaborative software and 3-D archive projects, we demonstrate that digital technology amplifies key activities relevant to an archaeologist as co-collaborator with the public: the documentation, archiving, distribution, and creative re-mixing of the past.

9. The future of the past
Throughout the book we have made a case that we are more than ever mixed with goods, things, with our material pasts, and that these push back. Current notions of heritage, of cultural values, of how we see ourselves, have tended to disarm the past as more or less irrelevant beyond contemplation and entertainment. Our conception of human beings as intrinsically enmeshed with things and thus with the past, has important ethical and political implications. However, these do not include reification or dinglich machen, thereby fulfilling the modernist horror scenario of making humans into things. To the contrary, the radical ethical implication of a symmetrical approach is to extend humanism’s care for people to also include things and non-humans (including our fellow creatures). Such an attitude is a key sensibility for living with the world over the very long term. This also forms the basis for an alternative notion of heritage making archaeology, the discipline of things, ever more relevant.