"Mediation can be understood in a double sense. It can have a broad meaning encompassing all forms of representation, that is, all forms of translation from the material world to the discursive whether textual, visual, or aural. I suggest that mediation should be understood in a more focused sense, as doing something fundamentally different from the semiotically-limited notion of representation in conventional scholarly forms of documentation and inscription. With each step in the archaeological process, from excavating a trench profile, drawing building phase sections, taking photographs, sampling, measuring, narrating, etc. we lose “locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity”—aspects of the material world—yet we gain “compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality”—qualities of documentation (Latour 1999:47). Mediation occurs across this series of transformations between material presence and media. Understood in its more focused sense, “mediation” allows one to contemplate ways of transforming aspects of the material past while at the same time bringing forth something of the locality, multiplicity, and materiality left behind with conventional processes of documentation and inscription (Figure 1). Mediation is a mode of engagement, which takes us beyond narrative, for scholarly narrative obfuscates the multiplicity of material presence. In this more focused sense mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot adequately sum up. I argue, following Michael Shanks (1997), that it is a way of rescuing the ineffable. Moreover, mediation is a process that allows us to attain richer and fuller translations of bodily experience and materiality that are located, multi-textured, reflexive, sensory, and polysemous." (Witmore 2004).

Critically, mediation calls attention to the co-action of what are conventionally split apart - subject and object - in accounts of representation. In this regard, mediation symmetrically shifts the 'burden of knowing', of knowledge claims in archaeology, away from a subject(archaeologists)-society pole representing inert reality out there (Webmoor 2005). As is well documented in the discipline, this historical hope of knowledge through representation as correspondence-to-the-world underides everything which archaeology relies upon methodologically - from thermoluminescence data to maps, plans, stratigraphic profiles and 3-D rendering of sites. This was its hope for 'objectivity', but with the failure of correspondence theory in logical positivism, this very anchoring in representation predisposed the confinement of claims within the only pole remaining: the social. So that, 'everythig is social' (cf. Hodder 2004). Mediation (re)balances claims to know the world by excavating beneath representation as conventionally understood, and provides both an ontology of the co-creation of people-things and an epistemology not encumbered by the subject-world gap.

Refer to:

Webmoor, T. 2005: Mediational techniques and conceptual frameworks in archaeology. Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):54-86.

Witmore, C.L. 2004: Four archaeological engagements with place. Mediating bodily experience through peripatetic video. Visual Anthropology Review.

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