|
|
Main
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
This paper starts with the question: can rivers usefully be studied as artifacts?
The question may raise an eyebrow or two. For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape. Even in the midst of towns – bordered by buildings on both sides – rivers are often taken to represent ‘the natural’ or ‘the wild’ or ‘the environmental’. They tend to fall within the subject domain of the hydrologist or sedimentologist. In archaeology, rivers and palaeo-channels (traces of former river courses) are susceptible to a barrage of scientific techniques, not so much to the cultural theories applied to other more conventional kinds of artifact.
Continue reading "Rivers as artifacts" »
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
Archaeology took on Science Studies (again) at the collective (4S) Society for Social Studies of Science and the History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association Conference this past weekend (November 2-4, 2006) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The working title for the conference this year was: "Silence, Suffering and Survival.” While there has been a long history of engagement between archaeology and philosophy of science, too often archaeologists have not taken active part in this inter-disciplinarian debate. Science studies opens a productive avenue for attending to pressing issues in the actual practice of the human sciences. Archaeology is emerging as a unique player in these studies, straddling as it does the natural sciences-humanities divide. And the discipline was well represented with an international assembly of archaeologists and philosophers.
The session was entitled “Silenced pasts: Archaeological practice and the politics of manifestation”. It was organized by Christopher Witmore, Matt Ratto and Michael Shanks. The session included:
Matt Ratto
The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Amsterdam
matt.ratto@vks.knaw.nl
“Epistemic commitments, virtual reality, and archaeological representation”
Michael Shanks
Stanford Humanities Lab, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
mshanks@stanford.edu
“Presence effects and archaeological media: case studies in performance arts”
Timothy Webmoor
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
twebmoor@stanford.edu
“Open source archaeology? The politics of collaborative heritage”
Christopher Witmore
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
The Artemis A.W. Joukowsky and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University
cwitmore@gmail.com
“Site-specific media, archaeology and collective (im)mortality”
Alison Wylie
Department of Philosophy
University of Washington
aw26@u.washington.edu
Discussant: intellectual boundary crossing and the legacy of archaeology and the study of science
Continue reading "Archaeology and Science Studies - round 2" »
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
text by Matt Edgeworth
images by permission of Fotis Ifantidis
In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, a lighting... Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. Martin Heidegger 1971 (1935): 53
‘Plan Générique’ by Fotis Ifantidis. http://visualizing-neolithic.blogspot.com/2006/05/plan-gnrique.html
In this short piece I sketch out why it is useful to think of excavation as a kind of clearing.
Continue reading "THE CLEARING: Heidegger and Excavation" »
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
The enchantment of the 'social' has, as it has in the other social sciences, achieved orthodoxy in archaeology. To play on the revered title of Alfred Gell's piece, 'the enchantment of the social, the social of enchantment' envelops itself so that 'the social' seems to both enchant archaeologists and archaeologists 'enchant' the 'social'. That is, 'the social' seems to become both the explanandum and the explanan for archaeological inquiry. This indeed appears to be a puzzling spell. How can we explain the phenomena of the archaeological past (or present) by attributing a Durkheimian 'force' behind the scenes which directs and compels events but which nonetheless is not itself explained? In stating that social processes, or social meanings, or (social) discourse accounts for the events of the past, we seem to be stating very little. Indeed, there is a tautology at work here. Or more precisely, there is simply tautology as 'the social' is not doing any work. It comes as a stand-in, a modifier or catch-all prefix; and it attaches itself first to domains of study: 'social lives', 'social meaning', 'social body', 'social structure', 'social environment'; then it goes on to define the very fields undertaking research into these domains: 'social archaeology'. What does that mean? Much like Ian Hacking's edification through tongue-in-cheek (or getting to laugh at our pretensions once in a while), do we need to attach 'social..." to everything. Does it clarify? Does it do anything other than assert the hard-fought battle of academic underdogs (sociology and its closest allies) to partition 'reality' into nature versus society, so that in this partitive scheme there was incontrovertible ownership of the 'social territory' and the blitzkrieging advances of the natural sciences could be contained? Is it simply entrepreneurial brandnaming in the academic free market?
As individuals in the science wars have told the story, such as Latour in his Reassembling the Social (2005), this is part of the story. But there is more, both internal to archaeology and in the wider arena of academia. No, the rise of 'social explanation' is not simply due to the 'social context' of disciplinary wrangling. Without the above qualifier, the issue goes to the heart of explanation in archaeology.
Continue reading "What's gathered under the banner of the 'social'? 'The enchantment of the social, the social of enchantment' " »
Posted by Christopher Witmore
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 Timothy Webmoor
The second installment of A Symmetrical Archaeology was organized as a full session at the Society for American Archaeology at San Juan, Puerto Rico (April 26-30th). Organized by Timothy Webmoor with Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks, and Christopher Witmore, the session brought together an international and trans-disciplinary group of thinkers to present a Manifesto for Symmetry in archaeology and the human sciences.
With few exceptions archaeology under-theorized its relationship to the material past prior to Clarke's 'loss of innocence'. Subsequently, a burgeoning 'theory literature' has attempted to systematize the relations between human behaviour and material culture. We argue that the resultant 'turns'/diatribe characterizing recent archaeological thinking derives from the shared, humanist presupposition of a radical division between people and things. In accentuating links and crossovers with technoscience studies and empirical philosophy, this session seeks to re-characterize archaeology's unique role in studying mixtures of humans (behaviour) and material things. Such a 'symmetry' of people-things forefronts archaeology in an inclusive 'ecology' of 'naturecultures'.
Joining the organizers were:
Dan Hicks, Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, UK
Alfredo Ruibal, Archaeology Center and MetaMedia Labs, Stanford University
John Schofield, English Heritage, UK
More information on the Symmetrical platform of a discipline of things may be found at 'Events and Articles' @ http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/Symmetry/814.
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
It was while searching for an appropriate symbol or image for the cover of a new book on ethnographies of archaeological practice that I encountered Janus - the Roman god of doors and gates. I was specifically looking for something in ancient material symbolism that encapsulated the idea of looking both inwards and outwards at the same time, a recurring and important theme of the various papers in the book. I didn’t really expect to find anything, and was surprised when I did. As a door-god, Janus has two faces. One face looks inwards (perhaps to the interior of a house, temple or city): the other looks outwards to the exterior world.
Roman Republican coin depicting Janus
(photo reproduced by permission from Livius.Org – see http://www.livius.org/ja-jn/janus/janus.html )
This seemed to me an image that could be usefully appropriated from the ancient world. Originating in a more symmetrical age, it can yet be taken to represent the contemporary ideal – so difficult to attain - of counter-balancing our outward looking objectivising gaze (on the material culture and practices of the distant Other) with a reflexive inward looking glance (at our own material culture and practices).
Janus is symmetrical in many different ways. He is both a subject (a supernatural being or divinity) and an object (a door). He is at once a person and a thing, with attributes of both. He looks both back and forth, to and fro, in and out, ahead and behind. His two faces are sometimes depicted as respectively male and female, bearded and non-bearded, old and young. He stands on the threshold – the present moment - between the future and the past. Hence his association with the winter solstice, the first month of the year, turning points and new beginnings. In looking forward to the future he also looks backward to the past.
This is more than just a superficial symmetry of mirror reflections: rather it is a deep symmetry which counterbalances opposites or polarities. And these aren’t just abstract symmetries to be theorised about. Most depictions of Janus are based, as well as on the vertical symmetry of the human body itself, on an actual axis of vertical symmetry out there in the material world that can be perceived through vision or touch - or indeed by the embodied action of going through a door. The door is ultimately a very practical item of material culture.
The symbolism of a threshold god is complex and remarkably relevant to any discussion about breaking down oppositions and dichotomies. A door facilitates communications and interchanges between opposed worlds that are separated by the door. The paradox here is that the very thing that unites is also that which divides. That which dissolves dichotomies and oppositions is that which sets them up in the first place. The door which is open, affording passage, can also be the door which is closed, obstructing movement. Indeed these are themselves really just two aspects of the same thing – yet another fundamental dichotomy that Janus simultaneously brings together and keeps apart.
Maybe ‘simultaneous’ is the wrong word. There’s something of the gestalt switch about Janus. A door is either open or closed, never both at once. You’re either on the inside or the outside. A similar alternating pattern of ‘either one thing or the other’ is easily identified in archaeological theory - e.g. the objective and subjective approaches towards the meaning of things that characterise much theoretical discussion today.
Thus in the emerging field of embodied archaeology, for example, there are alternative formulations of 1. the body as a universal or natural feature of human existence (serving as the basis for cross-cultural or cross-temporal comparisons and inferences) or 2. the body as a socially and historically constituted entity (implying that all archaeological or other cultural interpretation is contingent and relative). In reality, of course, the body is at once both a natural and a cultural entity. Yet it is quite difficult, it seems, for us to apprehend both aspects at the same time.
Ethnographies of archaeology raise another form of this conundrum. As archaeologists we are used to being the subjects behind the objectivizing outward-looking gaze. We are the observers, the interpretors, the explainers. What happens when that outward-looking gaze is turned back on ourselves - our own practices and our own material culture - transforming us into the objects of study? Can one be the object and subject of study simultaneously?
In this sense Janus hints at the very assymetry that symmetrical archaeology seeks to overcome – the tendency in all of us to look at one side of a question or thing and not the other, or to switch between alternative viewpoints without ever holding both views at once.
A god of symmetry or assymetry? Or both?
As it happens, on consideration I did not choose Janus for the book cover after all. For me, many classical depictions of Janus, like the one on the coin, are somehow too neat, too flat, too detached – literally disembodied . They are representations of representations of representations. As such they have lost something of the force of the embodied experiences that originally gave rise to them – the shock of materiality that is part and parcel of actual encounters with the world.
There are other Janus-like images, however, from outside of the Roman cultural universe. These are wilder, rougher, coarser, less abstract, more tactile. Take for example this two-faced stone carving - of Celtic, possibly pre-Christian workmanship - that stands on the Isle of Boa in Lough Erne, Co Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
Photo taken by Jon Sullivan of http://pdphoto.org/ who kindly placed it in the public domain
Its original symbolism is uncertain. It may have nothing to do with doors and gates, though it has acquired associations with Janus in modern times. Today it is the ‘January God’ of Seamus Heaney’s poem of that name, which captures something of the sheer power of its material presence:
“In the wet gap of the year,
Daubed with fresh lake mud,
I faltered near his power -
January God.”
(Seamus Heaney)
Like Janus, the Boa figure has one face looking forward, the other looking backward (though only one face is fully visible in the photo). One face is male, the other – arguably - female. Between the two faces on the top of the figure is a hole for holding water or other liquid – or possibly, as Heaney and others would have it, for affixing antlers. The faces, moreover, are not disembodied; they are part of a full figure sculpture which itself has two aspects or orientations. Because nobody knows what meaning the carving had for its makers, there is also the crucial dimension of mystery – the mystery of the not-entirely-explainable past - bound up with the special atmosphere of the site on the Isle of Boa where it stands.
For me it is both subject and object, person and material, cultural and natural. As subject, it can indeed be taken to be a material reflection of the observer – looking both inwards and outwards, ahead and behind – while retaining its distinctive personality as cultural Other. As object, it refuses to be entirely sublimated to the observer’s point of view. In receiving our gaze, it has something of the sheer stubborness that all archaeological evidence has - a certain resistance to interpretation. In returning our gaze, it can momentarily transform the viewer from subject to object, and challenge the assumed relation between the viewer and the viewed.
For all these reasons it was chosen as the image to appear on the cover of the book.
Matt Edgeworth
Posted by Christopher Witmore
Thanks to Ruth Tringham, Tim Webmoor and I had the opportunity to have lunch and coffee yesterday with Tim Ingold, a Professor of Anthropology and Head of the Department at the University of Aberdeen. Ingold is well known as a creative thinker across both anthropology and archaeology. Much of his work is on human perception of the environment in the vein of what he regards as an ecological perspective.
Over lunch and coffee we casually discussed common affinities between his work and our own in terms of a symmetrical archaeology. Conversation centered upon the notion of materiality as it is currently utilized in both anthropology and archaeology at large. We have a common frustration.
Paradoxically, the fashionable notion of materiality seems to have moved us further way from reality—the material world (Ingold would say the environment) populated by things, animals, etc. Materiality, it seems, has become the sole dominion of human subjectivity. For Ingold, materiality, in a sense, has been dematerialized.
Here Ingold’s concern echoes Bjørnar Olsen’s call for material cultural studies to move on from ‘the familiar story of how the subject, the social, the episteme, created the object; the story that everything is language, action, mind and human bodies’ (Olsen 2003, 100). Materiality has been over-dramatized to the wrong end, or at least a bit too far to one side of a divide which is of our own making!
Symmetrical archaeology excavates underneath the distanced, detached, and distinct view of the world and articulates the entanglement of humans and things. Indeed, our concern lies with the action and qualities of things in the context of these entangled sets of relations with humans.
But there is more to this. Materiality is too vague, too messy, too ambiguous a term for Ingold. Rather he seeks classification, precision, and order. Ingold is after more exacting categories that will aid anthropologists and archaeologists alike in a “sensible inquiry” into the material world. And, indeed, for this to occur we should not deal with the materiality of objects but with materials and their properties.
The properties of materials provide standards to power observations for overcoming the ambiguity of materiality. Things are gatherings, but not just of different materials. Things also gather together the people/material relations with different materials. With a new set of finer grained, classificatory schema we can build knowledge.
But, wait. Hold on. We need to slow down a bit, because I believe we have witnessed a similar pendulum swing before: from the complex and multiple to the concrete and exact and, after a generation or so, back again.
This is not a swing of the pendulum as if there was a choice between the ambiguity of materiality and the concreteness of material categories; rather this is a series of shifts along a passage between two simultaneous situations (the material world and properties of materials) with multiple intermediaries.
While I share Ingold’s frustration and find common ground with much of his work, my concern is that the powers of multiplicity, which the term ‘materiality’ holds on to, should not be forgotten in this passage. To be sure, multiplicity, raw complexity, ambiguity and materiality hold profound possibility (Serres 1995; also Witmore 2004a). They should neither be regarded as against categories of classification nor always completely subsumed to them. It is worth repeating over and over again—there is more to understanding than meaning.
I believe that we must understand materiality and properties of materials not as antithetical but as two circulating states of relations on either end of a process of acquiring definition. The movement from one state to the other is always a simultaneous process of reduction and amplification (Latour 1999; Witmore 2004b). Some people sample the world for properties of materials, but not everyone engages with things in the same way. As an archaeologist, the documentation of the material past requires various modes of engagement. This documentation requires rich mixtures of media.
Materiality should always be situated outside of the black box. It is never simply reducible to the social. It has never been solely of the material. It is the realm of the chaotic imbroglio. We must seek to understand it symmetrically.
References
Olsen, B., 2003: Material culture after text. Re-membering things, Norwegian archaeological review 36(2), 87-104.
Latour, B., 1999: Pandora’s Hope. Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Serres, M., 1995: Genesis, (tr. G. James and J. Nielson), Ann Arbor.
Witmore, C.L., 2004a: ‘Four Archaeological Engagements with Place: Mediating Bodily Experience through Peripatetic Video’, Visual Anthropology Review 20(2), 57-71.
Witmore, C.L., 2004b: ‘On Multiple Fields. Between the Material World and Media: Two Cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece’, Archaeological Dialogues 11(2), 133-164.
Posted by Christopher Witmore
I gave a lecture for Michael Shank's Ten things class yesterday. I laid out a road map for taking a thing and unpacking it.
I offered examples from my own work with maps. But in the lecture I worked closely with Bruno Latour’s excellent thesis (which pulls together work by S. Alpers, E. Eisenstein and W.M. Ivins) from his 1986 article "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with the eyes and the hands," in H. Kuklick and E. Long (eds) Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present Volume 6, London.
Begin notes...
A map.
Where do we begin with something so practical, so ubiquitous, so mundane? Where do we begin with something so utterly defined and black boxed that we tend to forget the complexities entangled within it? The aim with Michael Shanks' course Ten things - science, technology and society is to understand how things work to hold society together.
Lets begin with the most basic questions.
For me these usually have to do with the key ingredients of the world—space, time, materiality/matter and action/force (I said “agency” in class but it too has its black box in anthropology and material culture studies).
These may seem like strange ingredients to start with but they will help us begin to unpack something as incredibly complex as a map.
Continue reading "Unpacking a thing: a map from “Ten things – science, technology and design” February 23, 2006" »
Posted by Matt Edgeworth
Some thoughts and feedback on the Symmetrical Archaeology Session at TAG
This was a great session. The room was packed, with all seats taken and people sitting on the stairs – testifying to the topicality and importance of the topics discussed. The papers were stimulating and thought provoking, and it was only a pity that the time for questions and comments from the audience was so short (though the existence of this website, encouraging feedback, makes up for that). I agree with the general arguments for a more symmetrical archaeology, and accordingly haven’t commented on them here. However, three specific issues raised by various speakers seemed to me to be of particular interest, and I comment on these in some detail below.
Continue reading "A comment on "A Symmetrical Archaeology at TAG"" »
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
The first installment of A Symmetrical Archaeology was organized as a full session at the TAG gathering in Sheffield, UK (December 19-21). Organized by Bjornar Olsen, Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore - spearheaded by Chris - the session brought together an international and trans-disciplinary group of thinkers to present a Manifesto for Symmetry in archaeology and the human sciences.
The abstract for the session ran as follows:
Archaeology has long struggled with or even straddled divides as those between the material and the social, the present and the past, and the sciences and humanities. Caught in what can be broadly construed as a cyclical fluctuation between concerns with realism and constructivism, epistemology and ontology, objectivity and subjectivity our history of disciplinary “turns” associated with the negotiation of such divides is familiar to many. In this session we suggest a series of paths that do not lead to the continuation of such cycles of "dialectical war,” which faithfully and persistently repeat the gesture of the Kantian (Copernican) revolution.
Symmetrical archaeology gathers approaches that share the conviction that the world is far better represented and understood if conceived of in terms of mixtures and entanglements rather than dualisms and oppositions. It poses a radical levelling of the way we treat humans and things, both in our articulations of the material past and in our reflexive analyses of our own archaeological practices. However, this is not a claim to an undifferentiated world. We acknowledge the differences between entities but conceive of them as non-oppositional or relative facilitating collaboration, delegation and exchange. Through the application of the principle of symmetry we attend, not to how people get on in the world, but rather to how a collective, the entanglement of humans and nonhumans, negotiates a complex web of interactions with a diversity of other entities.
In accentuating links and crossovers with science studies, pragmatism, semiotics and empirical philosophy, this session reconfigures our understandings of human relationships with the material world in ways that are not necessarily subject to modernist thought. This session gathers together practitioners who wish to demonstrate how archaeology can set alternative agendas in the humanities and sciences by articulating a new “ecology” packed with things, mixed with humans, and which prioritizes the multitemporal and multisensorial presence of the material world.
Joining the organizers were archaeologists:
•Ashish Chadha (in absentia)
•Dan Hicks
•Maartje Hoogsteyns
And philosopher of technology
•Don Ihde
Unlike most sessions at TAG espousing collaboration and drawing upon thinkers outside of the confines of the discipline, Symmetrical Archaeology pulled together in a tight program interests ranging from historical archaeology to classical landscape to cultural politics, and involved in the session some of the very thinkers whose work has pushed informing fields of Hermeneutics and Science Studies away from asymmetry.
See - Symmetrical Archaeology TAG Session - for comments and a Podcast of the entire session coming soon.
A Symmetrical Archaeology will be at the upcoming Society for American Archaeology (SAA) (April 26-30).
Posted by Christopher Witmore
Matt Ratto, Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore organized a session at the Society for Social Studies of Science conference in Pasadena, CA this past weekend (October 20-22). The conference focus was on “The Representation of Controversial Objects: New Methods of Displaying the Unruly and the Anomalous in Science and Technology Studies.”
Here is the abstract from our session “The Past: What an Unruly Thing!” :
Archaeology as a discipline has always had to play a dangerous game, working both to explain and contain the past through scientific means and, at the same time, seeking to explore and manifest history as an interpretive and hermeneutic object. In this sense, Archaeology stretches over the divide (marked even more clearly by the “science wars”,) between science and the humanities, with archaeologists recognizing that they often have to play both sides.
One recent response to this has been the incorporation of new means of representing and engaging with the past; traditional archaeological tools such as the map, the photograph, the scale model, and the material archive have been supplemented by computation simulations, visual models, new forms of performance and other modes of engaging with and articulating history. This work takes many forms and draws upon such diverse fields as economics, physics, and computer science, as well as architecture, literature, cultural and theater studies. As such, much of it sits in a complex relationship to modernist epistemics, and works to balance probablistic theories of the past with possibilistic and interpretive stances.
This panel attempts to describe and explore recent developments in archaeology as a way of reflecting on the issue of representation and the “unruly object.” In the discussion that follows, we will reflect on the relationship between STS and archaeology.
Michael and Chris were able to highlight a number of Metamedia projects oriented toward manifesting qualities of the material world otherwise sieved away by conventional forms of documentation.
Our message: archaeology's strained position stetched across the divide between the humanities and sciences is of interest to science studies.
Michael pointed to "three agendas or trends emerging in archaeology that lend force to archaeology's uniqueness:
• an understanding of archaeology as mode of cultural production – a scientific practice working on what is left of the past, archaeology is not a discovery of the past per se;
• archaeology seen as a science of relations between people and things;
• archaeology as mediating practice - translating materiality and mediating past and present in future-oriented projects."
Michael suggested "that these developments are of significant interest to science studies not least because they invoke:
• radically new ways of understanding cultural materiality;
• a new history and genealogy of humans and (cultural) artifacts (to include a pragmatogony);
• reevaluation of cultural heritage – the intimate relationship between tradition, the remains of history and contemporary cultural values and identities."
In complementing Michael's piece, Chris suggested "archaeology, unlike other sciences, actively transforms its fields of study. Archaeology transforms material/event contexts of practice into a combination of displaced things and media (plans, maps, diagrams, text, images, etc.). In this regard, archaeology always returns to a material world permanently transformed.
This transformative aspect of archaeology's practice means we can only get one shot to manifest the material world sufficiently. Though we may not always be sure how the unruly qualities of the material past can make a difference in our practices now, we have to consider how archaeologists or an interested public will engage with the remnants of the material past 10, 50, 100 or more years from now. In this regard, we can only anticipate for future generations by giving something of our practice over to multiplicities, presences and ambiguities."
Beyond programs of action science studies has yet to sufficienctly grasp the richness of things. Archaeology has much to contribute in terms of how it attends to issues of material presence, experience and multiplicity. Fortunately researchers and philosophers of science such as Matt Ratto, Laura Watts and Don Ihde are listening.
Posted by Christopher Witmore
I recently attended Julian Thomas’ talk, “Archaeology and modernity: Depth and surface,” at the Archaeology Research Center at Berkeley. Julian’s talk highlighted the core argument of his recent book Archaeology and Modernity. In short, archaeology could not have existed prior to the modern era because modern thought created the very conditions for the existence of archaeology. Archaeology is distinctively modern. Yes. It is. Well, at least this is how it has always characterized itself. How else could it be?
Modernity, for Thomas, came about through a revolution in how humans thought of themselves in relation to the world. Modernity is characterized by epistemic breaks, philosophical ruptures, against the Aristotelian teleology and dynastic rulership of Medieval Europe and toward Renaissance humanism, Cartesian dualisms, rationalism, atomism and so on. With the social contract in place, the crossed-out God was replaced by Man. Constructed, planned, ordered, modern life, Thomas emphasizes, is put into theory before it is put into practice. Without modernity there would be no archaeology. Yes. There would also be no sciences, no nation-states. Without modernity the world would be a very different place.
Building up to the penultimate question, Thomas asks whether archaeology can exist outside modernity? Indeed, when it comes to this question of whether archaeology can exist outside of the conditions of modernism, Thomas is deeply pessimistic.
In addressing this very question, Thomas presents us with a tautology. Because modernity created the conditions for archaeology, archaeology is nothing but thoroughly modern, and therefore cannot exist apart from it. It is what it is.
Furthermore, the very modernist divides that Thomas contextualizes are, as he would maintain, arbitrary, oversimplified and outmoded. But if this is so why does Thomas reproduce them? Thomas argues for a counter-modern archaeology where ethics, politics, rhetoric, difference and dialogue take center stage. Such, he contends, is still a modern archaeology. Thomas reminds us that so long as we are modern (which if you are an archaeologist then you are) there will continue to be a counter point of view. The pendulum swings back and forth across the divides, first siding with one side, then the other, continually turning modernity’s revolving door of polarity and contradiction. A counter-modern archaeology continues to provide the energy and momentum for this.
After all we have no choice.
But what if the moderns got it wrong? What if we could bypass such a predicament altogether by retracing our steps?
Indeed, Thomas argues against “going back to first principles.” Fine. But Thomas readily embraces a modernist epistemology and this is the problem. He believes the thinkers of modernity. He takes their myths at face value. He boils the world down to subjectivity and meaning. He gives us a world-for-human-consciousness where the initiative always comes from the “thinking man.” This take on modernity validates what we have been spoon-fed for so long. In contrast, but not in contradistinction, I firmly believe that a recharacterization of modernity and archaeology is in order; a recharacterization of how we understand and interact with the material world.
This is not to suggest that we need to throw out the tub containing both the baby and the bathwater. Rather, this endeavor requires a symmetrical archaeology.
In a symmetrical archaeology modernist thought is treated as the outcome, rather than the prime mover. On the ground humans are always entangled within a heterogeneous collective. While Thomas has in his new book performed a great service for the history of the discipline, we need, more than ever, to understand how archaeologists operated on the ground under the banner of modernity. We need to understand how earlier antiquarians and archaeologists interacted with a diversity of entities in real-time practice, not just what they regarded as the outcome. We need to recognize how we have, in this sense, “never been modern.”
Digging under Thomas’ claims, there was no new man, no more rational mind, born out of a revolution of thought, rather the transformation came in combination with the proliferation of mundane and humble modes of engagement and articulation. Modernity presents itself as a revolution in thought when it was actually a revolution in how humans circulate something more of themselves and the world at a spatiotemporal distance. Modernity simultaneously denies the action of things. But this rebuttal is not a call back to materialism. Instead, along with archaeologists such as Bjørnar Olsen, Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor, I wish to plead for symmetry.
What are held as revolutions of thought occurred in step with the mobilization and proliferation of the printing press and graven images. They occurred alongside the slow accretion of optically consistent and standardized modes of showing and the ability to transfer something more of the world at a spacio-temporal distance. There are no mystical and over-dramatized ruptures, fissures or divides. We do not witness the birth of a new rational mind, but we encounter a collective on the ground, a mixture of a person, a compass, a chronometer, a telescope, a microscope or an accurate, optically consistent and standardized flat projection of the earth. We encounter the further distribution of humans and things in the world. We witness the birth of new collectivities, new mixtures of humans and things. What people thought in this context is a different question from who they are. Humans and things (modernism’s burdened ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’) are constructed simultaneously.
This is why we at MetaMedia are so thoroughly interested in archaeological relationships with the digital world, which cannot be wished away by a superficial critique of the digital as a “pattern of pixels” (let’s not forget the pixilated history of photography in its early years). More importantly, archaeologists are becoming ever more complex collectives. And in this digital world we have to understand ourselves (with the proviso that there is more to understanding than meaning) as post-human. The crossed-out God (who has never really gone away) needs to be joined by the crossed-out Man (who will also never really go away). We need to witness the birth of nature, we need to write a new contract. Following Serres, we need to articulate a natural contract, in order to understand how it is that we human beings are entangled with the world.
Archaeology, “the discipline of things” is ripe to take center stage in the articulation of this new contract, but this cannot occur if we limit ourselves to modernism’s myth.
In beginning to address Thomas’ extremely important question: can archaeology exist outside of modernism? Yes. Modernism, the myth of a new, more rational, free-standing, thinking individual, never existed as such. But there was also a great deal of value, which came out of the social contract, as Thomas has endeavored to point out so clearly. Both have to be thoroughly mixed with an understanding that the past, which is populated by things, has action, it continues to percolate and is itself entangled with the contemporary and the future. To be sure, this is a much more complicated and tricky task. But it is necessary. Let us put aside the oversimplified and contradictory framework that continues to burden modernity and begin to understand the world symmetrically.
[Please note: this entry was scripted in the Spring of 2005.]
|