Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.

“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.

‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).

The past is both precedent and product. The past as precedent has always already perished. In this, the past that perishes is actualized in ever-burgeoning legions of material entities (Edensor 2005; Olivier 2008; Olsen 2003), but the past that perishes looses its immediacy in the lived moment. No one can encounter the same occasion twice. “A perished occasion subsists only as a “datum”: a sort of raw material, which any subsequent occasion may take up in its own turn, in order to transform it in a new process of self-creation” (Shaviro 2009, 18). The past as product is that which archaeologists and historians co-produce (co, as many other entities play a role in this) and that with which they co-emerge (for other angles on this process see Lucas 2001; for the past as an outcome of archaeological practices see, for example, González-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2004). Marble torsos, display pedestals, Francesco Morosini (the Venetian commander who fired his cannons upon the “beautiful temple” in 1687), long chains of negotiation, selection, transportation, controversy and acquisition; all contribute to the co-emergence of the Parthenon Sculptures—architectural sculptures become art works which become world heritage for some, objects of cultural patrimony for others. Working for these pasts is a perpetual and most necessary struggle.

Controversies revolve around things. An object-orientation suggests a particular angle of association with respect to the matter at hand (Harman 2002 and 2009). Here, the word ‘object’ is not to be construed in opposition to the word of ‘subject’. With an awareness of the shortcomings of the term (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), objects also participate in a given controversy, but the nature of that participation will vary depending on the associations it gathers. A particular object-orientation will always be one of many (Latour 2005). In this way, an object is not so much a substance as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44; Webmoor and Witmore 2008 have discussed this as mixture). Because objects, as actual entities or occasions, become something entirely novel with every new relation—even if what they transform into bears a striking resemblance to their former selves—their nature is highly variegated and uncertain. Put another way, “there is no difference which does not make a difference” (Bryant 2009).

Consider a section of stonewall in Nafplion, Greece. Running at an oblique angle along the rear of two former residences at 24 and 26 Zygomala Street is a large, polygonal wall of grey limestone.

It stretches 19.5 meters from a short segment of rubble wall, which forms the southeast corner of 26 to the edge of Zygomala street. At this junction, the wall abruptly turns a few meters shy of the street into an adjacent building. Resting directly upon bedrock, segments of this wall stand as high as 3 meters. Sections are still covered in wall plaster of various colors: red ochre, teal green, and white. This wall is not merely a static, impassive object across which historical events have washed—the most recent being its incorporation into the fabric of two former houses, the decay of these structures or the subsequent clearing of the debris. What is a relic wall for some is a matter of contention for others. A point of orientation for property boundaries, the rear support for a structural wall, a plastered interior edifice, the external defenses of an ancient citadel: the polygonal wall is all these things; which occasion we encounter is matter of orientation and gathering. We can no longer be indifferent to all these realities. Any thing held to be of the past by archaeologists or historians, under different fields of relation is something entirely novel, which may have nothing to do with a past orientation.

Thus far, it is fair to say archaeologists have missed this ontological multiplicity (although see Knappett and Malaforis 2009; Lucas 2009; Olsen 2003; Witmore 2009). Whether we are dealing with indigenous (Watkins 2000), interpretive (Hodder 1999), social (Meskell and Preucel 2004) or even processual archaeologies rooted in solid ‘fact’ (Binford 1972), diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations, beliefs and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a durable substance or a singular natural world (also see Latour 2003; from a yet another archaeological angle, see papers in Alberti and Bray 2009). In this, ‘data’, ‘heritage’, ‘evidence of a definitive past’ are prematurely conflated with reality and utilized as the final arbiter of disagreement. Phenomenological archaeologies have faired no better. With the latter, privilege is granted to human access to the world with relations between nonhumans consigned to the sciences (Brück 2005; Tilley 2004; for more of how phenomenology brackets the world as presented to human consciousness see Harman 2009, 78; and 2010). Understanding the lively, variegated nature of things 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 determinative substance, a definitive core, which assumes one reality at the expense of others. Marbles in London and Greece, a wall in Nafplion, a humble relic from our childhoods; all these things must be understood in the plural (Latour 2005, 116).

While things are clearly much more interesting than archaeologists have previously allowed, our freedom as archaeologists to follow things, formerly considered to be of the past, wherever they may go will run up against a snag contained within the very etymology of archaeology—the study of ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’. 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’—there is nothing wrong with this commitment. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand beyond this remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations. In other words, while marbles, monuments, walls may be ‘ta archaia’, they are also a lot of other things in addition. We can no longer assume that that materials we archaeologists engage are of the past, in advance.

If to be of the past is now an orientation among many, then perhaps it is time for we archaeologists concerned with concurrent relations with things to consider a new banner under which the range of motion required to do such concerns justice could be granted—might it be labeled pragmatology? Pragmatology is a reversal of what was taken for granted under a modernist empiricism. Pragmata are starting points, ontological grounds, for archaia, but in this the importance of archaia is not subverted. Archaeology continues to encompass that creative action for linking fragments to build temporally framed accounts. Pragmatology might provide a surrogate umbrella under which archaeologists who are concerned with stakeholder associations, questions of heritage, contemporary archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and reflexive method might operate.

References

Alberti, B. and T.L. Bray (ed.) 2009: Animating Archaeology: of Subjects, Objects and Alternative Ontologies, A Special Section for Cambridge Archaeological Journal. 19(3), 337-441.

Auslander, L., A. Bentley, L. Halevi, H.O. Sibum, and C. Witmore 2009: AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture. American Historical Review, 114(5), 1354-1404.

Binford, L. R. 1972: An Archaeological Perspective. New York: Academic Press.

Brück, J. 2005: Experiencing the past? The development of a phenomenological archaeology in British prehistory. Archaeological Dialogues 12(1), 45-72.

Bryant, L. 2009: The Ontic Principle: The Fundamental Principle of Any Future Object-Oriented Philosophy. Larval Subjects. Available at: http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/the-ontic-principle-the-fundamental-principle-of-any-future-object-oriented-philosophy/

DeSilvey, C. 2006: Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture, 11(3), 318-38.

Edensor, T. 2005: Industrial Ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford and New York: Berg.

González-Ruibal, A. 2006: The past is tomorrow: Towards an archaeology of the vanishing present. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 39(2), 110-25.

Hamilakis, Y. 2008: The Nation and its Ruins: Antiquity, Archaeology and National Imagination in Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harman, G. 2002: Tool-Being. Chicago: Open Court.

Harman, G. 2009: Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: Re.Press.

Harman, G. 2010: Technology, objects and things in Heidegger. Cambridge Journal of Economics 34, 17-25.

Hitchens, C. 1997: The Elgin Marbles: Should they be Returned to Greece? London: Verso.

Hodder, I. 1999: The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell.

Holtorf, C. and A. Picinni (eds) 2009: Contemporary Archaeologies: Excavating Now. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Hutchins, E. 1995: Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Jones, A. 2007: Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: CUP.

Kaldellis, A. 2009: The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens. Cambridge: CUP.

Knappett, C. and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer.

Latour, B., 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Lucas, G., 2001: Critical Approaches to Fieldwork: Contemporary and Historical Archaeological Practice. Routledge: London.

Lucas, G. 2005: The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge.

Lucas, G. forthcoming, Dead Things Walking. Journal of Science Technology and Human Values.

Malafouris, L. 2008: At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency. In C. Knappett and L. Malaforis (eds) 2009: Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer, pp. 19-36.

Meskell, L., and R. Preucel (eds) 2004. A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishers: Oxford.

Olivier, L. 2008: Le sombre abîme du temps. Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil.

Olsen, B. 2003: Material culture after text: Re-Membering things. Norwegian Archaeological Review, 36(2), 87-104.

Schlanger, N. 2004: The Past Is in the Present: On the History and Archives of Archaeology. Modernism / Modernity 11(1), 165-67.

Shaviro, S. 2009: Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Shanks, M. 2007: Digital Media, Agile Design, and the Politics of Archaeological Authorship. In T. Clack and M. Brittain (ed.) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 273-89.

Tilley, C. 2004: The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 1. Oxford: BERG.

Webmoor, T. and C.L. Witmore, 2008: Things are us! A commentary on human/things relations under the banner of a ‘social’ archaeology. Norwegian Archaeology Review, 41(1), 53-70.

Whitehead, A.N. [1929] 1978: Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: The Free Press.

Watkins, J. 2000: Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press.

Witmore, C.L. 2004: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’. Archaeological Dialogues 11(2): 133-64.

Witmore, C.L. 2009: Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices. In K. Ryzewski (ed.) Archaeology, Experience, Modes of Engagement, Archaeology, a special issue of Archaeologies 5(3), 511-45.

Yalouri, E. 2001: The Acropolis: Global Fame, Local Claim. Oxford: Berg.

Is this a description of archaeological excavation?

No. There are other archaeologies, other archaeologists (though they may not style themselves as such). They inhabit worlds parallel to our own, dealing for the most part with different kinds of substances and materials, using different equipment, in different environments or sites of discovery. This article deals with one of those parallel worlds, where a kind of archaeology is routinely practiced; this is the world of the scientific laboratory.

Electron microscope
(Photo by dpape, 2009. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dpape/4057926815/).

First, some background. Back in the mid 1970s there were three important ethnographic studies of the scientific lab, which radically changed our view of scientific work.

One of these was an ethnography of a protein chemistry lab reported in The Manufacture of Knowledge by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981). It contained a vision of the laboratory as a highly artificial environment, full of the apparatus and instruments of scientific work but little if any contact with any raw material or nature. As a result of that disconnection from the material, she tended to characterise scientific knowledge as a social construction, somewhat unconstrained by any external material reality.

Another was Laboratory Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979). The authors noted the sheer ubiquity of texts and inscriptive devices in the lab, seeing even large items of equipment like mass spectrometers as inscriptive devices for making figures or graphs or other kinds of readings. Texts to them were the principal kinds of artifacts constructed in the lab. Again, the focus is on the social construction of knowledge, through acts of inscription. Not so much on the material itself.

The third and perhaps the least known of those early ethnographies of the lab was Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science by Michael Lynch (1985). His study of a neuroscience lab is especially relevant to issues today, now that archaeology has gone through its constructivist phase and is looking more at how humans and materials interact with each other. What is very important about Lynch’s approach is that he directed his study at the interactions between scientists and the materials under investigation (as well as social interactions between scientists themselves). Conversations recorded pointed to actions being undertaken at the time and the materials being acted upon, including such things as lab rats and specimens of brain tissue that scientists were studying under electron beam microscopes.

Most interesting from our point of view is that Lynch explicitly used a range of archaeological perspectives in his ethnography of scientific work. The reason why Lynch found archaeological ideas so relevant was because scientists were themselves preoccupied to some extent, in their analyses of human tissue, with sorting out what was real from what was artificial; the identification of scientific artifacts was central to everyday lab procedures. The term ‘artifact’ (as used by scientists) refers to those aspects of evidence that were the product of scientific process.

Artifacts

In order to see what an archaeology of contemporary scientific discovery might look like, let’s see some actual examples of scientific artifacts - encountered in this case through an electron beam microscope. The following picture (not from Lynch’s study) shows a thin section of human muscle, which for the sake of this example we can call ‘natural’.

Field of evidence
http://moon.ouhsc.edu/kfung/IACP-OLP/APAQ-Text/W0-MS-01M.htm
Thanks to the IACP Anatomic Pathology website for permission to reproduce the image.

But not all the patterns visible here are natural. One can look at this thin section as we might do an archaeological surface or site. For standing out from the natural background are several artificial features or artifacts. Importantly, the arrows are not mine and the artifacts in question were not identified by me, but rather by the lab scientists themselves – the photo being used as a teaching aid so that students might recognise similar artifacts if encountered in their laboratory work.

1) Vertical bands of light and dark, forming a corrugated effect, caused by high frequency vibration of the knife or cutting block on which the thin section of muscle was sliced.

2) The horizontal white line (shown by the white arrows) is a mark left by the knife itself – in effect, a ‘cut’.

3) The undulating mark (shown by the red arrow) is a water mark caused by staining or dyeing, with the area above the mark stained darker than the area below. The line is wavy because it follows the corrugated shape of the thin section caused by the vibration already mentioned.

These explanations of the origins of artifacts are paraphrased from the more detailed accounts on the teaching website, which has many other photos of thin sections with examples of different sorts of artifacts frequently encountered in histology or pathology labs. In addition to the artifacts listed here, we also have to bear in mind of course that the thin section is itself an artefact, as is the blue colour or dye which helps to show the grain of the muscle so clearly, and so on. All these refer us back to the various processes of scientific work involved in the preparation of specimens prior to observation under the microscope, such as embedding, staining or cutting.

Recognition of artifacts is clearly useful to scientists; it is crucial that material traces of scientific process are not mistaken for non-artifactual or natural patterns. A kind of archaeology, bringing artifacts to light, is routinely practised. Discovery of artifacts in scientific work is not specific to the use of electron beam microscopes in biomedical laboratories. Scientists working with radio telescopes, deep sea cameras, particle accelerators, or any kind of scientific instrument, inevitably have to disentangle the readings of the material or phenomena investigated from those aspects of readings which are artifacts of the act of investigation itself.

What Lynch noted is that lab workers do not experience artifacts positively like archaeologists do – for example when we find pottery vessels, flint arrowheads or other artifacts from the distant past - but negatively as ‘intrusions’ or ‘distortions’ in the data (as ‘trouble’ rather than cause for celebration). To an ethnographer of science, though, discovered artifacts are valuable because they disclose the process of scientific work. The times when artifacts come to light - the moments of discovery as it were - are crucial moments in that they precipitate discussion and argument amongst scientists about what is real and what is not, what is natural and what is artificial, how the artifacts got to be there, how to interpret them, and what to do about them. All this is part of the practical process of making sense of evidence.

As archaeologists we deal with traces of past human activity, but we too leave our own traces on the material evidence we discover. Trowel-marks, boot-prints, knee-prints – such traces of our embodied presence, tools and actions tend to be swept away in the very process of bringing material evidence to light. That is part of the skill of archaeological fieldwork. Of course, all worked surfaces on an archaeological site (trowelled areas, half-sections, box- sections, bases of spits, trench edges, etc) are artifacts of the process of archaeology itself. But it would be a great mistake to take the presence of such artifacts to mean that knowledge thus produced is a social construction.

Look closely at any photo of an archaeological section and you will see that in addition to the ancient stratigraphy revealed there are also other marks - traces of the archaeologists’ own activity in bringing about the emergence of evidence. These might include:

1) machine marks, formed by the dragging motion of the blade of a JCB or other earthmoving machine during the removal of subsoil.

2) trowel scrape marks formed by repeated working of the section with the edge of the blade of a trowel.

3) incision-marks, made with the point of the trowel in order to delineate soil boundaries otherwise difficult to see.

4) surfaces so well cut and precisely vertical that all of the above traces have been removed.

Such material traces refer back to the various processes involved in the preparation of sections, prior to recording. Paradoxically, the more the section is worked, the less evidence there will be of that work (which erases most of its own traces as it goes), and the more the objective material patterns relating to human activity in the distant past will show through. The vertical surface of earth has been broken with the edge of the trowel in such a way as to allow configurations and sequences of layers inherent in the archaeological feature itself to be clearly discernible, while at the same time smoothing out marks left by the process of excavation.

Section through Iron Age pit, Heathrow
(Photo by Wessex Archaeology. Creative Commons Licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/322086296/in/photostream/)

Here is the point. The cutting of the section (an artifact of archaeological process), is precisely what facilitates the emergence and visibility of evidence about past events and processes. There is construction, in the sense of shaping and sculpting evidence, but there is also emergence of something that is not constructed by those practices. The same applies to thin sections of muscle or brain viewed under a microscope. As Lynch puts it, such artifacts are disclosures not only of the process of scientific work but also of the material or reality that is being investigated through that work. Without the artifact there would be no such disclosure, no discovery. This is knowledge, not just as social construction, but as the outcome of practical interactions between persons and materials.

References

Knorr-Cetina, K. 1981.The manufacture of knowledge - an essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981.

Latour, B. and Woolgar, S. 1979. Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Lynch, M. 1985. Art and artifact in laboratory science: a study of shop work and shop talk in a research laboratory. London: Routledge Kegan & Paul.

From October 16 to 18, participants met at Keble College, Oxford, for the 2009 CHAT conference. Over 30 papers engaged with the theme “Modern Materials: the archaeology of things from the early modern, modern, and contemporary world.” Both participants and subjects of discussion were wide ranging. While many came from all over the UK and Ireland, others contributed points of view from the US, Continental Europe, Africa, and even Taiwan. These papers engaged with “modern materials” from treadmills and theatres to workshops and the bricks they may have been built from, and even extended analysis to the “modern materials” produced in archaeological recording, such as photographs.

Of particular interest were several papers which came from outside the disciple of archaeology or anthropology altogether, such as Pearson’s consideration of the role of the theatre building itself in a performance event, and Fisher’s of the “flow” of modern packaging through homes from a design standpoint. Coupled with Harrison’s inside-the-discipline discussion of amusement parks and the social shifts towards an “experience economy” these papers suggest how direct consideration of material culture produces insights even into the contemporary. This point is reinforced by Ouzman’s consideration of graffiti through an archaeological lens, considering its role in “politically-engaged place-ma(r)king.”

The Saturday afternoon sessions engendered the most energetic debate, focused on “Archaeological Practices and Archaeological Knowledge.” Several papers made efforts to recast archaeology and its field more broadly, such as Webmoor’s call to engage in “epistemography” by studying both the things of the past and the way they are given meaning in the present, and Witmore’s observation that even “ta archaia” or “old things”—the traditional province of archaeology—are implicated in “webs of concurrent relations” and this requires an expansion into “pragmotology” to do them justice. In the course of these discussions, a tension was also revealed in the conference abstract’s question, “what is the distinctive contribution of archaeology” to the study of these recent periods. This raised the issue of whether. and in what sense, archaeological analysis of recent and contemporary material culture needs to justify itself to the—or a particular—public, or make a case for its contribution.

The keynote by Nick Shepherd provided perspective on the more inside-the-field debates explored in the conference. Expanding on views of archaeology as a product and producer of modernity, he argued that it also shares the same relationship with colonialism. In reviewing some episodes from the history of archaeology in South Africa and the field’s relationship with its supposed subjects (intentional and unintended), he laid out a case for a deep connection between an archaeological view and colonialism, and interrogated the possibilities for decolonizing archaeological practice.

Obviously, calls for an archaeology of the contemporary raise questions over the contribution, motivation, materials, and responsibilities of such study that have yet to be settled. In concluding the conference, Hedley Swain, who echoed calls to be mindful of relevance to the field’s publics, also voiced concerns that the debate remains “westocentric” and has not yet fully engaged with the “truly exceptional” aspects of material culture. Several noted that by expanding our purview from the things of the past to those of the present (a necessary move, many agreed, since archaeology has never truly been only “about” the past but fully and politically in the present as well) we must confront new issues and new stakeholders.
However, the offerings, arguments, and “musings” about how this can be done and why it matters fostered both lively and important discussion among participants, moving the discussion of archaeology’s place in the modern forward in several directions. This conversation is sure to continue when participants meet for CHAT 2010 in Aberdeen.

In 1922 the Mexican scholar Arreola published a study of maps and images which he had recovered from archives in Mexico City. Much of the material that he presented had not been studied before. Much of it was quite old, some of it dating to the initial conquest and consolidation of Mexico by the Spanish. One of these images was very old, even for being a copy of a lost original. It was called the ‘Mazapan Map’ and the original was estimated to have been rendered around 1560. It was part of 16th century records of farmlands and land ownership. The use of Nahuatl glyphs, the pictographic-ideographic language of the Aztecs, designating holdings and landowners, suggests it was most likely commissioned by the Spanish as part of reconnoitering their newly expanded empire.

'Mazapan Map'

The ruins of Teotihuacan cover the bottom portion of the ‘map’. The Pyramid of the Moon is at bottom left and the Pyramid of the Sun is at the bottom center. To the bottom right, the large, open rectangular shape of the ciudadela (1).

A ‘map’ complementary to the Mazapan was published two decades later in 1580. It was part of the relación geográfica de San Juan Teotihuacán. This map, rather than landholdings, emphasizes imperial infrastructure: the Spanish grafted over the Aztec. The road network emanates from the Aztec (and later Spanish) administrative center (Tenochtítlan) to the regions on the north of the Valley of Mexico. Like the Mazapan map, it also orients north to the left for the map-reader. Tenochtítlan can be seen at the crossroads (center right). The ruins of Teotihuacan are shown (highlighted in box) near the center, approximating the correct geographical relationship to the administrative capital, with the distinctive layout of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the avenida de los muertos (avenue of the dead) outlined by smaller structures.

'Map' from the relación geográfica de San Juan Teotihuacán

Rather than Nahuatl glyphs, the map’s labels are presented entirely in Spanish. A testament to the rapid changes in the intervening twenty years of Spanish domination of the region. The ruins of Teotihuacan are labeled Moctezuma’s oracle, which the accompanying text of the relación explains is a place of pilgrimage for the Aztec ruler and his priests. A place to offer sacrifices. The Aztec oracle is mentioned in other post-Conquest texts, and this map suggests that Teotihuacan was the place of the imperial prognosticator (2).

Now, fascinating as both of these maps may be, contemporary archaeologists at the site do not unfurl them when they lay out new excavation trenches. Nor would they use them for navigating the complex and monumental ruins. Indeed, art historians show more interest in them than site archaeologists. Simply put, they are not good maps.

In this short paper I want to pursue why they are not considered proper maps. This could take us down the road of theories of correspondence, art historical analyses of single-point perspective, the development of the astrolabe and other instruments or even information design - all great pursuits. I want to lodge their consideration, however, with why quotation marks bookend these maps: epistemology. To do this I am going to unpack several closely related propositions.

PROPOSITIONS

1) Epistemology has been wrongly scapegoated.
2) An archaeological commitment to things, to ontology, resuscitates its alter ego as ‘epistemography’.
3) Knowing the past is assembling past.
4) Epistemography is the past made durable.

To unpack this series of propositions I will come back to these proto-historic, historic and contemporary maps of Teotihuacan. These media cascades aid in manifesting the practice of archaeological assembling and the principle of ‘epistemography’.

Epistemology is as troubling as it sounds. Perhaps this is why the term has dropped out of common parlance amongst archaeologists – and for that matter, amongst social scientists. It is just too contentious and awkward – a new twist on the mantra: ‘an inconvenient truth’. And for good reason. If we have not personally and professionally come through the ‘science wars’ of archaeology – many of us are too early in our careers – then at the least most of us are familiar with the drama, posturing and exchanges in the theoretical literature. We’ve had our initiations into the ‘isms’. Optimistically we might say that these theory wars refined our respective outlooks on how to best engage with things from the past.

Positive no doubt. We could indeed trace trajectories of how these skirmishes, these family feuds –most vociferous in the states and UK - have been passed on to us as our disciplinary inheritance. And many provoking questions might be asked. For instance, was the inconclusiveness of the debates largely the result of an expanding academy? Did the rising power of the ‘pc’ movement muffle academic disagreement. While these questions would certainly touch upon the history and contemporary practice of archaeology, a tangible outcome of the theory wars has to due to with our discipline’s boundaries and policing. Something most savvy archaeologists are more than aware of with work engaging contemporary ruins that transgress canonical categories.

My proposition is this: epistemological considerations were scapegoated. And a less acknowledged consequence has been to drive epistemology from explicit consideration. To force it underground. Backfilling over it as an issue that had been dealt with, dismissed as unhelpful – even boring.

So why would I resurrect such a tedious topic. I am not going to defend it. At least not as it was adopted from the ‘handmaidens’ to the sciences. I am urging a reconfiguring of epistemology to fit matters of common concern for archaeology.

As it is, archaeologists appropriated epistemological concerns from the estate of philosophers of science, only to closet this new explicit (reasoning) identity within a closed architecture.

Consequently, these adopted values of ‘what is to count’ continue to exert real influence. From editorial boards, funding agency boardrooms, departmental offices, publishing houses, social relationships. Judgments informed by long-standing epistemological criteria are still very much a part of archaeology’s mundane practices of governance. Even if they are fuzzier for not being articulated in print and debate. Lodged in a bureaucratic pathology of sorts. And there remain real tangible consequences for practitioners.

Now there have been, to be sure, a few efforts at manifesting the operation of epistemology in the more recent literature. Upgrades for the archaeological process to bring it current for a more philosophically diverse, savvy and cosmopolitan archaeology (3). However, it is a commitment to ontology, to matters of concern, which offers archaeologists the best tool for exhuming epistemology. But this Lazarus must take on new form.

PROPOSITION #2: A TURN TO THINGS RESUSCITATES EPISTEMOLOGY AS ‘EPISTEMOGRAPHY’

Recently there has been a call to turn (or return) to things. Some may suggest this comes from Continental currents of thought as analytic orientations abate. Yet there are good reasons to dismiss this claim. Instead, spread roughly across the same academic topology as the earlier wranglings, disciplines ranging from anthropology and literary studies to philosophy and science and technology studies have pushed the idea of ‘taking things seriously’. This has been a much needed corrective to the postmodern paralysis. A hyper-interpretivism that stranded many areas of inquiry in a semiotic exile in the wake of epistemological grounding.

To be sure, there are subtle distinctions that manifold deep differences with respect to how the terms things, materials, materiality, material culture and even 'stuff' - for 'stuff it' theory - are used by archaeologists.

For my purposes, archaeology’s commitment to things, far from denuding archaeological explanations, is integrally involved in the transformation of ontology’s alter ego.

Epistemology has been deflated. In its stead, epistemography has been a more or less explicit component of the return to things. The close attention to scientific practice, launched by those students of science studying how work is accomplished, drew attention to the real content of scientific knowledge. Mundane media and practices involving their enrollment for making statements. ‘Circulating reference’, ‘lateral or serial relations’ or the ‘crafting of resemblances’ are rich descriptive accounts of how we move as archaeologists amongst sites, features, landscapes, artifacts, and our archives and media. With media made amenable to publication, presentation and calculation – to media made mobile. Through this process we make knowledge claims. The stuff epistemology was meant to study.

As it turns out, attentive description to this process re-oriented the idea of epistemology. It was all so close-to-hand that epistemology lost the detail (of knowing the past) for the forest. It took its 'eyes' off the action. Attention to non-lofty workings of archaeology and science may strike some as too simple. But I believe this has been beneficially humbling. Very small steps do the heavy epistemological lifting for science. This is a crucial Archimedean point for the discipline of things.

PROPOSITION #3: KNOWING THE PAST IS ASSEMBLING THE PAST

Epistemography is attention to these humble actions of people and things. Following how their relations form assemblages that endure - for the short or long-term. It is engineering. Let me be careful with this statement as I do not want to be confused for suggesting we construct knowledge – or even worse, that we ‘socially’ construct knowledge (an unhelpful adverb).

Digital Media Work: ratios of mediation

Transforming the dynamic and materially complex ruins in the landscape into media artifacts gathers certain qualities while sieving away others. This is a pragmatist perspective. It is not about fidelity or faithfulness. It is about accuracy and precision. Necessary to get the past to work. From this perspective, ‘epistemology’ (now bookended by quotation marks) is at the core of what archaeologists do everyday: we assemble the past to understand and engage it.

Let’s turn our attention back to the series of maps that have rendered the same ruins for nearly 450 years.

Reconnaissance survey and mapping of this archaeological zone took the better part of the 1960’s. The Teotihuacan Mapping Project’s (TMP) map was finally published in 1973. 147 maps at a scale of 1:2000. It covered the entirety of the architectural and artifact concentration - well over 20 square km. Map #1, or the ‘Millon map,’ became a rock star poster for archaeological mapping and cartography. Now, we can approach this map from a static, atemporal perspective. The TMP map as representation, removed from its relations. An independent referent or snap shot of the site – a static slice of cerca 1968.

Now epistemology would incline us to regard it as just such a stand-alone output. But a commitment to things and their relations with other participants – understood without an asymmetrical and arbitrary suture between bearers of ‘agency’ – reveals the map as gathering. Such a concern opens the black box and reveals a more messy middle. Not just a flat, two-dimensional analog of the site in analogue.

Mixed-maps of Teotihuacan (4)

Epistemography follows the relations that pass through the map like circuitry. It would ask not whether it is verisimilitude. But how well are these relations bound together? How sturdy is this feat of engineering? In fact, the TMP is formidable media architecture. It is built for future generations. It aligns not just future archaeological media, which hang upon its scaffolding, but also contemporary and future engagements with Teotihuacan. Since 1973, all archeological excavations and surveys have been conducted with relation to the TMP. From Sugiyama and Cabrera’s excavation within the Pyramid of the Moon, to Cowgill and Sugiyama’s exploration of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, to Cabrera and Gomez’s revealing of the apartment compound of La Ventilla. All inserted in the extensible media of the TMP map. More importantly, action, people, institutions and instruments – actants – distant in time and place are nonetheless all gathered up with the TMP map.

In terms of the (problematic) notion of cultural heritage, the map continues to coordinate non-archaeological engagement with the ruins. Beginning with establishing boundaries of the site. A collection of project archaeologists, local municipal leaders, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) officials, construction crews, fencing materials, heavy equipment, survey stakes, legal decretos or decrees and the map, expropriated well over a hundred residents from their land and pushed agricultural tenancy off the 263 hectares. And the map continues to coordinate how tourists tread, when vendedores sell their wares, and where toltec shamans with L.A. hippies bribe skeptical guards. Thirty years after its publication, this map was enrolled in even stranger relations. Sam Walton and Wal-mart, Jerry Yang and Yahoo!, Carl Sagan and laser time capsules. Eclectic collectives bound up with the TMP map at different times, for different reasons, and to different effects. An ecology of relations; complexly inter-dependent, overlapping in space and time. Yet all anchored to this archaeological ‘habitat’. A ‘heritage ecology’ involving all. And subsequent to 1973, all predicated upon, acted with, and aligned to this media artifact. This product of an archaeological intervention in the 1960’s.

We could, with more historical documents, follow the cascade of actions which ripple through these media. To see how well earlier maps gathered relations together. As we’ve previously considered, the 16th century maps would not have been considered maps. Not from an epistemic tradition that wants mimetic media. Unpacked by epistemography, however, these maps were enrolled in a host of actions. Territorial disputes, the determination of Aztec pilgrimages, the building of the Spanish Empire’s infrastructure, the guiding of its imperial governance. They also had a role in coordinating future engagements by antiquarian explorers. Explorers who grafted subsequent renderings of Teotihuacan into this growing network of visualizations. Romantic figures such as von Humboldt, Brantz Mayer, Désiré Charnay and Ramón Almaraz.

1844 Brantz Mayer map

1857 Désiré Charnay map

1865 Ramón Almaraz map

Teotihuacan Media Cascades

Throughout the 19th century, more and more maps were produced of the ruins. Each one assembled for different purposes. Drawing together different sets of relations and involved in heterogeneous actions.

We could consider any one. Marquina’s map of 1919 for instance. This map, perhaps more than any other, was integral to the trajectory of land expropriation of locals and set up the site’s management. Conspiring with an already dilapidated livestock fence to restrict inscription of Teotihuacan to the central area of the site. The central ceremonial district. A action that reverberates today through a network of actants extending to Bodega Aurrerá (Wal-mart Mexico) headquarters in Mexico City or Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale California campus.

Unlike the TMP, however, these other maps were not similarly engineered to align future media. Was this because they were deficient as 'representations'? Classic correspondence theory would say yes. They were certainly not Euclidean. And they were assembled without many of the qualities noted above. No modularity, universality, compatibility. They were not maps without quotations marks. This conclusion would close down the other sets of relations that these maps gather as an archive of Teotihuacan. Such an epistemic stance would sever the blood flow that innervates heritage at a site such as Teotihuacan. It would turn these maps into dead media.

PROPOSITION #4: EPISTEMOGRAPHY IS THE PAST MADE DURABLE

To conclude, I want to highlight why I am a fan of the TMP. Why these other maps, with or without quotation marks, are not the same for an important reason. For contemporary archaeologists, locals of the valley, heritage managers, shamans and UNESCO delegates, they are simply not as durable.

Less durable, they sustain less action. Epistemography moves our attention to this action of assembling people and things from the past and present. This is how archaeologists are taken seriously. The more heterogeneous, ‘heavy’ (with ‘actants’ and their relations) and useful the assemblage, the more (epistemic) weight it carries.

Epistemography is the Lazarus of epistemology. An epistemology centrifugally centered upon fidelity, coherence and correspondence. A troublesome taskmaster indeed. Asking archaeologists to search in abstraction for suitable principles. Criteria which were endlessly debated, never sufficient-in-themselves, and were finally dismissed – or at least closeted.

With a care for things, there is no divide between knowing and doing. These are heuristic, therapeutic terms: ontology, epistemography, pragmatology. And we shouldn’t set them up as new principles. But they bring our archaeological attention back to the ground. Back to mundane matters, back to the relational action of people and things. Gathering up relations, removed in time and space, these assemblages – like maps – are ‘living’. That is, they have dispersed, distributed, but nonetheless definite action. Essence performed not a background condition. An anthropocentric existentialism reconfigured for all.

Epistemology’s Lazarus is livelier for the resurrection.

NOTES

(1) The glyph next to the upside down, stepped image of the Pyramid of the Sun (bottom center), does not identify it as the “tower or hill of the sun” (whereas a glyph next to the stepped image at the lower left identifies it as the “tower or hill of the moon” [ytzacual metzli]), but rather indicates that the monument serves as the boundary of agricultural fields. Similarly, the ciudadela is identified as the “place of burials in honor of the sun” [tonali itlaltiloyan], possibly indicating an awareness of the mass, dedicatory burials beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The large personage in the center of the ciudadela (lower right) is labeled as the current landowner of the ciudadela. Who possibly owned the majority of the site in 1560.

(2) I always find this connection reassuring somehow: there were 'new agers' at Teotihuacan 450 years before I studied their engagements as forming one 'niche' of the overall heritage ecology of the site.

(3) Binford's "relative objectivity," Shanks and Tilley's "partial and contingent objectivity," Hodder's "guarded objectivity," and Wylie's "mitigated objectivism." These hybrids of post-analytic and continental currents of thought have been instructive. But they are little discussed outside cliques of philosophically inclined archaeologists. More importantly, they rely upon, reproduce and reify a presumptive split between people and things.

(4) The TMP or 'Millon map' with mixed maps of subsequent projects. Scales are relative to each map. Sources for adapted maps:

Millon, René, Bruce Drewitt and George Cowgill. 1973. The Teotihuacán Map. Vol. 1 part 2. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Serrano Sánchez, Carlos. Editor. 2003. Contextos Arqueológicos y Osteoloía del Barrio de La Ventilla (Teotihuacan 1992-1994). México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Sugiyama, Saburo. 2005. Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership: materialization of state ideology at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, Teotihuacan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Sugiyama, Saburo and Ruben Cabrera. 1999. Proyecto Arqueológico de la Pyrámide de la Luna. Arqueología 21:19-34.

____ 2007. The Moon Pyramid Project and the Teotihuacan state polity: A brief summary of the 1998–2004 excavations Ancient Mesoamerica 18:109-25.