THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF MATERIAL CULTURE

Two Bronze Age cremation vessels (contained within a single pit) are almost ready to be lifted and taken to the laboratory for further excavation and analysis. Note the extent to which the material culture of past societies has been assimilated into the material culture of archaeologists in the present day. It has literally been enveloped, wrapped and packaged in contemporary materials – silver foil, cardboard, rubber solution, moulds, masking tape, etc. This is not a special case, for nearly all finds get placed in plastic bags, boxes or other containers which are then covered with further layers of inscriptions. The envelopment of one material culture by another is not only a metaphor for cultural appropriation: it is that cultural appropriation.

The material field shown here was first excavated, the feature half-sectioned, about two weeks before. It was described in context sheets, planned, photographed, then left until the arrival of specialists. The neatness of the scene is explained by the fact that a thorough clean-up operation has taken place just before the specialists arrived. To explore the actual initial encounter between archaeologists and material objects, then, we would have to go back to a much earlier and messier moment in the excavation process....


THE EMERGENCE OF THE MATERIAL OBJECT

Here an artefact (a cremation vessel) and a feature (the pit in which the vessel is contained) are in the process of emerging from the ground. But the emergence of these two material objects from the past is contingent upon and intermeshed with the cultural agency of the archaeologist in the present. For evidence of this contemporary agency note the swirling marks and ridges of earth left by the trowel, the smoothed surfaces, the vertical section cut with a degree of precision, the incised line, the white labels nailed into the soil and the inscriptions marked upon them. Already numbered and labelled, the material object is undergoing a transition from a state of hiddenness to a state of being known: it is already being appropriated into the cultural domain of archaeological knowledge even as it emerges into view.

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