Session organizers: Michael Shanks (Stanford University), Timothy Webmoor (University of Oxford), and Christopher Witmore (Brown University)

Session abstract

‘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; and many of these shifts are centered upon a (re)turn to things. Under the banner of things, the traditional social-natural science divide (and its ontological grounding) is being challenged from different positions (actor-network-theory, artificial intelligence, posthumanism, cognitive science, environmentalism, phenomenology, science and technology studies) 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 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 session takes leave of such a parasitical attitude (an attitude which insults archaeology) and revisits core aspects of the archaeological. Drawing together a diverse group of archaeologists, it offers a bold picture of what it is archaeologists do. It builds 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 and companion animals. It speaks to our unique and long-term perspective on human relations with material goods, the design of things, and the nature of the past. Placing to one side the narrow foci of human intentionality, essentialist notions of property and meaning, this session offers far more interesting and refreshing accounts of our shared/mingled material world and the importance of the past. Indeed, the radical ethical implication of a symmetrical approach is to redeploy humanism’s care for people to encompass a collective of humans, things and non-humans (including our fellow creatures).

In the course of detailing a more democratic ontology this session will address a number of questions:

• How does a symmetrical understanding of people, things and animal relations over the long term offer alternative accounts of human history?
• In what ways do things and our fellow creatures come together with humans to co-produce society and shape history?
• How does a symmetrical archaeology reveal the extent to which thing are caught up in innovation and tradition?
• How do our accounts of the past change by understanding any period, epoch or era in terms of time percolation?
• In what ways do things impact sensation and cognition?
• Why have things, instruments and media been ignored in histories of archaeology and theories of ‘representation’?
• Why have considerations of ‘heritage’ become lodged with the non-material and how does care for people and things urge a reconfiguration of heritage?
• How will a ‘politics of things’ transform archaeology?

Session
 Participants 
in
 Order 
of Presentation


• From Pragmatology to Archaeology . . . with a few examples from Greece, Christopher 
Witmore
 (JIAAW, Brown University)
• 'Going 
along,
 remembering 
the 
way'.
 An
 archaeology 
of
 movement
 in
 Iceland
, Oscar
 Aldred (Department
 of
 History
 and
 Archaeology,
 University
 of
 Iceland)
• Making 
quarries 
move: the 
case
 of 
Fasillar, Bradley Sekedat (JIAAW, Brown University)
• Where 
is
 the 
Colosseum? 
Following 
the
 image/paper 
trails
 of 
an

 'emblem'
 of 
Imperial Rome Keffie Weiss (JIAAW, Brown University)
• Symmetry 
in 
the
 archaeology 
of 
technology:
 microscopic
 points 
of
 departure
 Krysta Ryzewski (JIAAW, Brown University)
• Dingpolitik and beyond: archaeology, symmetry, politics Alfredo González-Ruibal

 (departamento
 de
 prehistoria, 
Universidad 
Complutense
 de
 Madrid)
• Pyramids
 and 
Palimpsests.
 Object, 
Event
 and
 Assemblage 
in 
the
 Archaeological
 Record Gavin Lucas (Department
 of
 Archaeology,
 University
 of
 Iceland)
• Archaeological
 prostheses 
and
 visual media Timothy Webmoor (James 
Martin 
Institute,
University of Oxford)
• We have always been cyborgs Michael Shanks (Department of Classics, Metamedia Lab, Stanford University)