A sociotechnical genealogy of practice...

Where does archaeological practice come from? How do we understand it? To be sure, we are not alone in our interactions with the material world. But to whom do we owe the credit? Petrie or Pitt-Rivers? Wheeler or Kidder? Barker or Hodder? Yes, but this would provide a very incomplete picture. We have to retrace our genealogies of practice by collapsing the social and the technical, that is, by adding the instrumentalities, materials, and media to the collective.

One of us has recently argued that the work of the Napoleonic military geographer, William Martin Leake, is just as important and intimate to contemporary landscape practice in Greece as much of what transpired in the intervening two centuries (Witmore 2004). This is because it is with Leake that not only does a unique combination, a collective, of survey instruments—theodolite, sextant, pocket watch, tape, notebook, etc.—come together in the antiquarian engagements with the Greek countryside, but through a number of intermediate steps this engagement is transformed into unique combination of maps, plans, diagrams, and text. Leake’s act of technical mediation creates a template of standardization to be reiterated by subsequent topographers and archaeologists. Leake and the instruments and the publications change practice and help bring about the professionalization of archaeology in Greece.

But this notion of genealogy is not necessarily historical (in a classic sense), nor is it social, rather it is profoundly archaeological. Indeed, in one sense this is what we do when we engage in what is classically understood as “the search for origins”. And yet at the same time we avoid that chimera (Foucault 1984, 80). We deal in an act of archaeological genealogy by connecting, by temporally folding, both contemporary and past relationships with certain things into a constituting moment, a point of delegation, after which all subsequent relationships with the material world were transformed. It is only by relentlessly tracing every minute detail, by marking every actant, entity, and group present in every act of delegation that we can map the multiple fields that come together in Leake's practice. The archaeological is about connecting up a multiplicity of constituting moments in our (meaning a human/nonhuman collective) relationships with the material world.

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