A pragmatic sensibility, which as I argue already pervades archaeology albeit in a non-explicitly acknowledged form, suspends the irresolvable epistemological worry about mirroring reality by shifting evaluation outside - to the end or outcome – of the representational equation. Pragmatists do this by affirming, phrased within traditional nomenclature, as a ‘natural’ or ‘direct realism’. But I need to specify why, beyond the evident dead-end avenue of relativism and objectivity, we may be reassured that in discarding epistemology and taking a third, less traveled path we are on the right track. Pragmatic thinkers, emphasize practice and useful outcome. But what does this mean for archaeology? For this we must turn from pragmatic thought to a complementary group of thinkers working in the trenches of the science wars – a war itself which, much like archaeology, spins endlessly around the dichotomous fulcrum of humanity-science, realism-antirealism, subject-object.

Emerging from the break-up of Philosophy of Science into more ‘applied studies’ of what scientists in various disciplines actually do, Actor-Network-Theory (Callon 1986, 1997, Latour 2005, Law 1999) more generally and Bruno Latour (1987, 1993, 1999, 2004) most prominently attend to ‘thick description’, ethnographic approaches to scientific practice. His revolutionary insight is that modernist epistemology must indeed be suspended as the constituent elements upon which is founded – knowing subjects and known world – are in fact erroneous. They are not in fact there; no autonomous, independent subjects building epistemological equations to ford the divide to objects ‘out there’. Complementing the pragmatic thinkers historiography of a misguided, ill conceived modern epistemology, Latour argues that the inheritance of modernist ontology is equally unwelcome. The ‘modern constitution’, developed as it was by the history of dichotomizing thought made infamous by Descartes, established the division of Nature from Society as the two purified building blocks of the world (Latour 1993:13-15) Figure 5.

Beginning and building from these distinct, basic blocks of existence, Latour traces how such a modern constitution gave rise to a host of derivative distinctions, particularly that between humans and things. Such ontological categories were slotted into one pole or the other; into the Nature realm or into the Society realm, or a 'hybrid' somewhere in between these rarefied realms. No wonder, for Latour, that such a constitution quickly developed the need for an appropriate modernist epistemology. Such an epistemology needed, for the moderns, to establish connections between the realm of humanism to the realm of naturalism Figure 6.

Individuals on the society side of the constitution made representation of what was across the divide on the nature side of the constitution. So that for the moderns, representing is knowing. As we have already seen, such a modern constitution and its modernist epistemology subsequently gave rise to a host of settlements for ‘polishing the mirror of representation’ via logical principles.

Such a historiography of modernist thought is in no sense unique. But where Latour distinguishes himself is drawing upon his attention to scientific practice, whether historical (Latour 1988) or contemporary (Latour 1987, 1999:ch.2, 1979), to argue that such a deeply entrenched constitution for how we think and act in the world is deeply ironic. As an anthropologist, Latour suggests that what we say we do as moderns is quite different from what we actually do in practice. This is because modern science, in practice, begins with mixtures or hybrids of nature-culture and, far from purifying and entrenching the constitutional division, proliferates these ‘quasi-objects’ which only artificially can be separated or sifted-out into nature and society (Latour 1993:1-3,52). In a sense, he feels we live under a false ontological consciousness.

To illustrate the ubiquity of networks of humans and nonhumans incapable of being purified into either the nature pole or society pole, Latour steps us through what scientists do in articulating knowledge. He does this to debunk the modernist constellation of ideas which begin from the assumption of divisions, whether ontological or epistemological. As he states, “words and worlds do not represent two statures facing one another and marking the respective territories of two kingdoms . . . rather, words and worlds mark possible and not very interesting extremities, end point of a complex set of practices, mediations, instruments, forms of life, engagements, involvements through which new associations are generated” (Latour 2003:39). In his ‘Circulating Reference’, Latour (1999:ch2) tackles both mutually supporting notions in a single example of fieldwork by botanists and pedologists in the Amazonian region of Roraima. To fulfill their project goal, the researchers must produce a report detailing the whether the savanna is encroaching upon the forest, or if the reverse is taking place. The report must accurately portray the state of savanna/forest battle in order that inferences as to cause may be generated and supported by the evidence. However, in creating the map replete with locations of botanical and soil samples, Latour notes that instead of mimesis of representation, of a report mirroring what is actually happening ‘out there’, what actually transpires in practice is a series of translations across tiny gaps of material to media. “In actual practice, however, one never travels directly from objects to words, from the referent to the sign, but always through a risky intermediary pathway” (ibid:40). So for instance of this intermediary pathway, the scientists taking soil samples must transubstantiate or translate a given piece of soil into a code on a Munsell soil chart. The soil’s moisture content, the illumination of the location, the condition of the chart itself, and of course the capability of the researcher to judge fine shades of color all inter-act to create, in the end, a color code. For Latour, this is not correspondence or mirroring of the world into representation. A series of actions on the part of researchers and savanna soil are coordinated, are articulated in order that the code will do more than resemble the soil: “it takes the place of the original situation” (ibid:67). It takes the place of the soil so that it can be integrated with other information collected while in the field – it must be inter-fungible with graphical notation, statistical nomenclature, and textual narrative. Instead of a correspondence of the code to soil, we have an actively manipulated transformation for specific purposes – for standardization Figure 7.

Latour describes this entire process of moving across a series of small gaps as circulating reference Figure 8. And, as we no longer are talking of society mirroring nature, but rather of a heterogenous series of operations which are enabled by considering the transformative capacity of the researcher and his/her media as well as the unique capacity of nonhumans to foster, inhibit or qualify this transformation, it is better termed mediation.

Mediation as the ability to transform via chains of reference a Brazilian landscape, or an archaeological feature or site, comprises more actors than the modernist constitution traditionally allows for; the entire process or event requires the negotiation of a host of actants (human and nonhumans) in order for the successful coordination of actions. Furthermore, to mediate, as opposed to ‘represent’ with its historical connotation, conveys the active, ongoing nature of such a process. As Latour summarizes the process, humans can no longer be assumed to be the prime mover of action, but instead a ‘distributed and nested series of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating role of all the actants in the series’ (Latour 1999, 181).

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