Two Bronze Age cremation vessels (contained within a single pit) are almost ready to be lifted and taken to the laboratory for further excavation and analysis. Note the extent to which the material culture of past societies has been assimilated into the material culture of archaeologists in the present day. It has literally been enveloped, wrapped and packaged in contemporary materials – silver foil, cardboard, rubber solution, moulds, masking tape, etc. This is not a special case, for nearly all finds get placed in plastic bags, boxes or other containers which are then covered with further layers of inscriptions. The envelopment of one material culture by another is not only a metaphor for cultural appropriation: it is that cultural appropriation.

The material field shown here was first excavated, the feature half-sectioned, about two weeks before. It was described in context sheets, planned, photographed, then left until the arrival of specialists. The neatness of the scene is explained by the fact that a thorough clean-up operation has taken place just before the specialists arrived. To explore the actual initial encounter between archaeologists and material objects, then, we would have to go back to a much earlier and messier moment in the excavation process....


THE EMERGENCE OF THE MATERIAL OBJECT

Here an artefact (a cremation vessel) and a feature (the pit in which the vessel is contained) are in the process of emerging from the ground. But the emergence of these two material objects from the past is contingent upon and intermeshed with the cultural agency of the archaeologist in the present. For evidence of this contemporary agency note the swirling marks and ridges of earth left by the trowel, the smoothed surfaces, the vertical section cut with a degree of precision, the incised line, the white labels nailed into the soil and the inscriptions marked upon them. Already numbered and labelled, the material object is undergoing a transition from a state of hiddenness to a state of being known: it is already being appropriated into the cultural domain of archaeological knowledge even as it emerges into view.

Mediating the encounter between the subject and the object is the trowel, which shapes and sculpts the material evidence while at the same time responding to the sometimes unexpected resistances it presents.

To see when the surface manifestations of such archaeologically significant patterns first started to emerge and take form on the horizontal ground surface, we would have to go back even further to a still earlier moment in the excavation process (to when the site has just been machined and hoed, with the pre-excavation plan about to be drawn)...


THE SHADOW OF THE ETHNOGRAPHER

Three levels of agency are depicted in this picture. First, the traces of human activity in the distant past – the ring-ditches and other features which are visible on the ground surface. Second, the agency of archaeologists in studying these patterns and bringing them to light – here epitomised by the digger standing with dumpy level, tripod and planning board in the centre left of the material field. Third, the agency of the ethnographer in studying the relationship between archaeologists and material remains – my presence made visible only by virtue of the fact that my shadow (and the shadow of the photography tower which momentarily provides my point of view) is cast over the scene.

The photo illustrates an important point about the object of archaeological investigation. Whereas the object of scientific work can often be the extremely small or distant (a track in a bubble chamber, a speck on a microscope slide, a star magnified hundreds of times through a telescope lens), here the objective material field coming under scrutiny presents itself as part of the landscape itself – the very ground upon which the archaeologist stands.

This makes an archaeological site a great place to carry out an ethnography of the relationship between subjects and objects. If ethnographers of laboratory science find it difficult to apprehend the raw materials and natural objects of scientific work ( to the extent that everything can sometimes appear to be the instrumentation or artefact of science itself), there is no such problem here. Here there is no difficulty in apprehending the objective material field or the archaeological engagements with it. As excavation proceeds and the hidden aspects of the material field emerge into view, the ethnographer has the opportunity to observe and participate in the unfolding of subject-object relations, interactions and transformations…

(scripted in 2006 with original photos from 1991 ethnography)

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