Archaeolog

By Ian Russell

Photographs by Conor McCarthy

Caption: Banksy’s portable toilet monument with the Glastonbury ‘sacred circle’ behind

I would like to commend Prof. John F. Cherry for his recent contribution to Archaeolog titled ‘Has anyone seen Banksy?’. I am a firm supporter of the growing synergies between archaeology and contemporary art. As many archaeologists are collaborating on developing new paradigms for perception of archaeological research and conceptions of what archaeology is, I, however, am moved to make an urgent critique of Cherry’s article.

Although the article provides a well articulated timeline of some of Banksy’s work, notably after an expositional review of some archaeological theory and the intriguing work of Cassidy Curtis’ Graffiti Archaeology Project, I am concerned that in Cherry’s attempt to address the significance of Banksy’s art work for archaeology, he has not succeeded in critically engaging Bansky’s work, leaving us with some misconceptions.

Continue reading "I’ve seen Banksy. Have you?" »

Posted by Ian Russell at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On June 3 Cornelius Holtorf initiated an interesting discussion around the question “What comes after Post-processualism???” The discussion is extremely worthwhile and I wish add to a few comments in hopes of keeping it going.

Processualism and post-processualism: the powers of the paradigm, manifold as they are, add to the persistence of these terms. What are our beacons? How does one map the constantly fluctuating terrain of archaeology?

It is hard to ignore the deeply dug trenches which form the limes of the hypercritical period of 30 years ago, a period when these very terms were in the midst of acquiring definition. At that time the energies were fresh, the battles were raging, and the factions were given names. Historical though they may be, processualism and post-processualism have become terms of ease and convenience for our understanding of such a variegated terrain, a terrain largely oriented around a schism (with ‘historical’ insert ‘abandoned,’ as who exclusively ascribes to their core tenants (cf. Hegmon 2003)? Well let’s not be surprised if some, perhaps, still do!).

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Posted by Christopher Witmore at 6:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I recently attended the Nordic-TAG conference in Århus in Denmark. It was a gathering of some 200 Scandinavian archaeologists and archaeology students interested in theory. After one paper I made a comment that I did not find very original at the time, but I received so many reactions even after returning home that I am now thinking it may be worth considering this question again on this blog.

My point was simple. The speaker had framed his talk by the dualism of ‘processualism’ and ‘post-processualism’, suggesting a way of finally overcoming this long-standing division. I commented that this division was current some 25 years ago, that nobody except a surprising number of Scandinavian graduate students and post-docs nowadays seriously thought in terms of these polar categories, and that maybe it was time to realise that it is futile now to suggest (or wait for) the next big theory to replace ‘post-processualism’ as the key point of reference, whether positive or negative, for the entire discipline.

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Posted by Cornelius Holtorf at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over the last few weeks I have been causally reading through the various chapters in a recent book edited by Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden and Colin Renfrew entitled Rethinking materiality: The engagement of mind with the material world (2004). The book, the material product of a symposium with the same title held in March 2003 at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge, is a rich collection of 23 essays and one introduction which attends to what the editors describe as ‘current thinking about materiality in world archaeology’ (2004, 1). While there is a diversity of issues raised in the book, my concern here is with the nature of human and material relations specifically characterized in terms of a ‘dialectic,’ which was put forth and promoted by a number of the contributing authors.

Here is a list of select quotes:

• “I believe agency must be conceptualized in terms of a dialectic relationship with structure, or, in simpler terms, with reference to the ‘rules of the game’” (DeMarrais 12).

• “The affordances of the wheel-throwing technique need to be discovered each time, in real time and space within the totality of the interactive parameters. The cognitive dialectic is in a constant state of becoming through the process of ‘accommodation and resistance’” (Malafouris 59).

• “Once culture is externalized as material things which exist objectively in inter-subjective zones and which channel future actions, the result is a dialectic played out between kinds of agency” (Robb 137).

• “Studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects but must engage in the dialectic of people and things” (Meskell 249).

While each of these authors has a different agenda, all evoke the term ‘dialectic’ as a means of understanding the relationship between two poles of a bifurcation (DeMarrais and Robb), a duality (Meskell), or a separation within a set of relations (Malafouris) which they wish to ‘overcome.’ All of these archaeologists, along with others in the volume, are weary of what we might characterize as modernist dichotomies (subject / object, mind / body) in understanding how human beings relate to the material world (though they use the sufficiently all encompassing and ambiguous term of materiality; refer to my entry from February 24, 2006).

Continue reading "Deprivation through ‘dialectics’: Why some archaeologist’s are hamstrung by things and why things are hamstrung by some archaeologists" »

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 12:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)