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Home |Christopher Witmore (Stanford University)
Abstract
Archaeology as a discipline has deeply transformed over the last 25 years. Indeed, today there seem to be as many forms of archaeology as archaeologists. One could argue that this is the success of pluralism. Still, others might contend that the current fragmentation is a post-hypercritical state which exists simply because the fragment is most resistant to critique. Whatever the response our complicity in this state of affairs is the easiest way to turn our back on archaeology’s unique, and rather tortured, state stretched across the divide between the humanities and the sciences and plagued by the divides between ideas and things, past and present, and so on. A symmetrical archaeology holds that these are divides of our own making. It argues that there is indeed a great deal of common ground to be had.
Furthermore, in excavating underneath such divides, a symmetrical archaeology recharacterizes the world, not in terms of dualisms or oppositions, but in terms of mixtures and entanglements. It poses that we treat humans and things in the same terms, both in our articulations of the material world and in the reflexive analyses of our own practices. A symmetrical archaeology accords the things of the past action today. Such matters of concern hold profound implications for a discipline which considers the past to be separate, distant and distinct. They offer substantial possibilities for grasping what it is to be human; for engaging in precisely how humans are blended with things; for understanding that just as things are ‘us’ that various pasts percolate ‘now.’
This paper will limn the symmetrical project by rummaging through the discipline’s tool kit and addressing some of the most fundamental questions in archaeology concerning agency, materiality, space and time.
Paper
What is a symmetrical archaeology?
The principle of symmetry begins with the proposition: humans and things are constructed simultaneously. Indeed, modernism’s burdened ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are regarded as purified ‘products’ of our particular relations to the world. Our analyses should never begin with such dualisms. Thought and action, ideas and materials, past and present are thoroughly blended. Any radical separation and opposition of people and the material world in which they live is regarded as the product of a specifically modern way of distributing entities.
Symmetry refers to an analytical leveling of these various entities. But, as we underlined in our session abstract, “this is not a claim to an undifferentiated world.” Symmetrical leveling is neither axiological nor is it ethical. As such, a symmetrical archaeology attends, not to how people get on in the world, but rather to how a distributed collective, an entanglement of humans and things, negotiates a complex web of interactions with a diversity of other entities.
In this brief manifesto I am interested in sharing with you the quickly developing blueprint of a program that has, as we suggest, repercussions across the whole of the discipline. In my contribution here, I aim to move fast. Take risks. Share some of our preliminary work and at the same time articulate connections, which unite the papers under the banner of this session. In this manifesto, I am interested in neither critique nor refutation. Instead, I am concerned with proposition and construction. In what follows I identify six key matters of concern associated with a symmetrical archaeology; a program best described as a new “ecology” packed with things, mixed with humans, and which prioritizes the multitemporal and multisensorial presence of the material world. Through a series of wide-ranging examples, I address some of the most fundamental issues in archaeology relating to agency, practice, materiality, space and time.
First matter of concern: Practice
How do archaeologists relate to the material world? Here, epistemology, sadly, has been, and continues to be, one of our greatest stumbling blocks. So long as we take for granted definitions of what it is to be human, what an object is, what constitutes an agent, or even where archaeologists work we will continue to be drawn into spirally controversies, which merely repeat polar shifts every generation or so. Here we encounter the fog of a modernist amnesia that leads to repetitive intellectual gestures. A symmetrical archaeology recognizes conventional bifurcations such as data and interpretation, the field and the contexts of knowledge production, the material past and the present loci of fieldwork as the outcomes of relations with particular entities of the world and not the starting point. One-way forward is to briefly suspend our interest in epistemology and recast our taken-for-granted aspects locally (cf. Witmore 2004a). In other words follow closely what we do in relation to the material past.
Elsewhere I have addressed this question through the notion of “multiple fields.” Drawing upon actor-network-theory, multiple fields cover the components, contexts and connections implicated in real-time practice.
The concept of ‘multiple fields’ carries a dual valence. First it refers to the recursive linkages implicated in our practice on the ground, whether along a transect in the Greek countryside or in a 1 x 1 meter trench somewhere in the American Southwest. In other words, the fields correspond to all the necessary components of the ‘heterogeneous network,’ which situates practice throughout its various stages of iteration.
Consider that at Çatalhöyük excavators focus a great deal of energy into knowing as much as possible about what it is they are digging when they are digging. Rightly so, but re-circulating knowledge about, for example, the classification of a seed in order to better understand the context under excavation involves many more interlocutors than an environmental specialist simply interpreting a carbonized seed as einkorn. There are many more entities—whether trowels, tapes, dumpy levels, labeled containers, notebooks, or the human excavator, whether the body sherd from area 1889 in which the seed is lodged, the clean and ordered spaces of the on-site laboratory facility, the microscope, the texts with plant taxonomies, and so on—that come into play (Last 1997, Archive report). In this way, the success or failure of an ‘interpretation’ rests on mobilizing the vast heterogeneous network which lies behind it.
In its second sense, ‘multiple fields’ counters the overly simplistic notion of correspondence between language and the material world (e.g. James 1978; Preucel and Bauer 2001). As such, multiple fields refer to the series of steps present in the translation of archaeological materials into a final publication. In this respect, ‘the field’ which is often regarded as a locus for the collection of data is dispersed along the series of transformations present between a survey transect in the Greek countryside and a 1:5000 chart listing artefact densities per grid square in an accompanying map of a site. Here, accuracy rests upon the traceability of our movements between the material word and what we say about it, or show concerning it, and not upon the correspondence between language and the material past.
By following what we archaeologists do on the ground, rather than what we may at times say we do, we recognize that ‘the field’ is not simply ‘out there’ because the things gathered from the surface move through other contexts of engagement, study, and articulation. The things of archaeology circulate far and wide through their constant substitutions (notebooks, catalog numbers, illustrations, photographs, etc.). Whether courseware ceramic fragments, bits of millstone or obsidian cores, these things eventually exist as material guarantors of an engagement on shelves in an archive.
Second matter of concern: Agency (or what it is to be human?)
Much of archaeology follows a very restricted definition of agency which is relegated to the freestanding human subject. Of course, others are aware of a material agency, but all too often things are glossed with the adjective “secondary.” Or, worse still, material agents are held as faceless minions deployed to cover for grand, insidious and mystical processes of power and change. The problem here is the maintenance of a firm separation between human and thing. So how do humans fit into this convoluted puzzle with things? And how do their relations play out on the ground? The excavation of wall collapse is a good place to start.
On the ground the human being is but one of a multiplicity of entities. So in the course of the excavation process the prime mover of an action is a “distributed and nested series of practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating roles” of all the participants in the series (Latour 1999, 181). Here, the notion of “mediation” refers to the multiple ways humans and non-humans swap properties in the process of moving toward a goal, a possibility, an outcome—say excavating densely packed wall collapse to get to a floor level.
So, to take an overly-simplified example, an archaeologist-with-a-pick is different from an archaeologist-without-a-pick, just as the pick is different within the hands of an archaeologist. The outcome of their combined action in the removal of topsoil or the excavation of wall collapse is different from the possible outcome of an archaeologist who excavates without a pick. A shift has occurred in what would have been the goals if the entities, the pick and the archaeologist, had remained independent of each other. An entirely different outcome occurs through the combined action of a new hybrid within broader sociotechnical collective—archaeologist and pick.
The center of this ‘program of action’ is neither with the pick nor indeed with the archaeologist. The action rests with the archaeologist-with-a-pick. It is not that some free-standing human excavates (here to add the designation ‘archaeologist’ is to situate the human within a complex heterogeneous network), but the distributed collective archaeologist-with-a pick excavates. But this very rough sketch is only partly the case.
Throughout the excavation process the sociotechnical collective is in a constant state of flux. ‘We,’ now understood as a distributed collective called the archaeologist, are constantly shifting our goals depending on the allies we mobilize to attain a particular end. To be sure, this end shifts depending on the properties of that ally or, in this case, tool. Wall collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-pick is very different from wall collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-trowel. Indeed, wall collapse, along with the person, also mediates the enlistment of the pick over the trowel. Follow this symmetry and we will not slip back into the duality of the human-in-his-or-herself or the tool-in-itself.
Third matter of concern: Translation
In the previous, very basic example, mediation transpired between multiple entities—tool, context, and archaeologist. In the course of an excavation these entities can involve previous engagements, theodolites, trowels, tapes, notebooks, cameras, digital video recorders, a site director, a pottery specialist—whoever, whatever—and the outcome of their long and complex transactions is often some mode of documentation. In this the process of manifesting the material world, there is more to understanding than meaning. Here, we encounter yet another sense for the term ‘mediation’ and it has to do with the process of translation.
Mediation is on one level conceived as a broader process than simply making sense of the material world. However, one even more focused sense of the complex term mediation, might be regarded as manifesting particular qualities of things. As such it refers to articulating aspects of the material world—something of the locality, multiplicity, and materiality—that are often sieved away by paper-based modes of documentation—a scenographic combination of text, map, plan and image. In this more focused sense mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot adequately sum up. It is a way of manifesting something of the ineffable (also Shanks 1997). 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. Indeed as archaeologists we have a responsibility to the qualities of things. We have a responsibility to also attend to the multiplicities, ambiguities, and presences of the material world within the archaeological process.
Fourth matter of concern: Change
Another set of stumbling blocks is to be encountered around the strangely chronological, but not wholly archaeological, notions of technological revolution, cultural transformation, epistemic change, paradigm shift, etc. Knowledge, understanding, being, these qualities of life are never completely stratified. Indeed, as we all are aware, the notion of ‘stratified’ deploys a partial designation at best. At worst it wraps periods up into neatly stacked boxes and separates them with laminar sequences and arbitrary divisions (refer to Lucas 2005). Transformation in these schemes often only comes about through radical revolutions. In other words how do we document change?
Ironically, one means of breaking up such stratification is through the notion of genealogy. But before we can proceed the adjective ‘sociotechnical” must be added as it collapses any firm division between society and technology. The term “sociotechnical genealogy” is slightly more symmetrical.
Let us consider the story of Franchthi cave, which is located in the southern Argolid, Greece. Franchthi’s story is one synonymous with transition—from hunting and gathering to sedentism and agriculture. Its stratified deposits span 20,000 years across three critical periods—the Upper Paleolithic, the Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic. Franchthi, it is widely held, contains a story of the ‘origins’ of agriculture (cf. Jacobsen 1981). Here beginnings lay buried.
Discussions of agricultural origins tend to focus on how humans with radically different ways of life can adopt a totally new one. On one side of a divide inhabiting the Mesolithic are hunter/gatherers, on the other, settling down in the Neolithic, are agriculturalists and pastoralists—humans of nature on one side and humans of culture on the other. Following Catherine Perlès, four possible scenarios for the transition into the Neolithic are posited for Greece: (1) autochthonous or the localized development of agriculture; (2) cultural diffusion, ideas shared by others; (3) demic diffusion, others settling in Greece; (4) a more mixed set of interactions between local foragers and incoming agriculturalists (2001, 38-51). While scholars debate the exact nature of the transition, all agree that a radical shift occurred—there was an origin to agriculture. Yet there are problems with this presupposition of a revolutionary transition.
Images of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition in Greece rest upon a misconceived and modernist notion of historicity around what it is to be human and how humans in turn relate to the world. Innovation, for Perlès and others, is about discovery. This implies radical shifts in how humans interact to the world.
However, because humans are always mixtures and collectives with their material environment, they are situated within a network of association and understanding which allows for changes we moderns would regard as revolutionary. Certainly, new actors entering the scene can affect shifts in another actor or actors’ path of relation to the world. The transformations occurring around 7000 B.C.E., however, are not solely about how new members are enrolled within a collective, rather they are about how the role of already-present-members or relations of the already-present-members change. In other words, instead of leaving some Lens nigricans or Lens ervoïdes behind to germinate, humans now help their cousin Lens orienntalis, which appears in the Franchthi deposits around 7000 B.C.E., along the way to maturation. The roles of lithics may change, but people can still fish for tuna, forage for barleys and hunt for game just as others did before with a newly modified ensemble of lithics. Radical revolutions are not the only explanation for the emergence of hybrids suggested by the things, which circulate from the cave floor deposits of Franchthi. More subtle genealogical shifts are also to be traced.
Fifth matter of concern: Time
Archaeology has long treated the past as separate, demarcated and distinct (cf. Lucas 2005, 1-31; Shanks and Tilley 1987; Thomas 2004). In this regard practitioners today are definitively divided from the past by scientific ruptures and epistemic shifts, which distance and delineate ‘us’ now from ‘others’ then (Latour 1993, 67-69). Because we have broken once and for all with the past, it is a locus to be protected and preserved (Lowenthal 1985). The past is an ‘object’ to be closed off and guarded behind the glass of the cabinet. In this regard time’s arrow is unambiguous and unidirectional. But time, it is suggested, is much more complex than this form of modernist historicism.
Time should no longer be solely regarded by its measure. Time is not simply an external parameter. It is not simply another dimension which affects the material world from the outside. It is far more complicated.
Time both passes and does not pass. It is turbulent. Time is like the weather. It is full of calms, whirlwinds, and chaotic fluctuations. Time percolates (refer to Serres 1995; Serres, with Latour 1995). In a symmetrical archaeology past is treated as no longer past. Something of it exists in the material here and now. It is accorded action and as such multiple pasts continue to mediate aspects of people’s lives in a multiplicity of ways today (also refer to Olivier 2003).
We know landscape to be a complex aggregate mixture of disparate times. In articulating this ensemble archaeologists can treat time as the sorter and situate each component in relation to another within a series of stacked boxes we call chronology. While the measurement of time is extremely important, this is not time itself (Serres with Latour 1995, 60-61). In contrast, one can treat the sorting as the maker of time and document the multiple material pasts of landscapes, sites, features and things as the gathering of disparate times that they are. The latter is the reality of the material presence encountered on the ground.
Here we encounter a problem with our old standby metaphor of the palimpsest. The nature of the palimpsest is that of erasure and sedimentation. Layers written, erased, rewritten, the processes of the palimpsest lend themselves to entropy, decay and stratification. But this only partially takes us down the very long path towards understanding the nature of time. What about points of connection, proximity and action between various pasts? What of the pleats and folds in the fabric of time?
For example, throughout Western Europe segments of a network of Roman roadways still direct the flow of people’s lives today. In each and every case the past has not passed but still has action. Portions of the ancient Roman road network and segments of the contemporary European transportation infrastructure are proximate. This material time is profoundly archaeological.
Sixth matter of concern: archaeology and ‘pragmatogony’
The etymology of archaeology rests upon the term “ta archaea.” This may be literally translated as “old things.” But now that we understand that the past is no longer past it opens up a whole world of “ta archaea” which have been denied their due recognition. Indeed, within a modernist historicism folks often tend to treat the past as quant and old fashioned (another set of connotations which cluster around the root “arche”). But without the material past we would be limited to interactions mediated by far fewer entities. Let it suffice to say, that the world would be a very different place.
This point brings us to another connotation of the ‘thing’ as a gathering. Consider, German engineers make great cars but they would go nowhere without Neolithic technology. Without transactions which occurred between people and things at a distance in time and space, which resulted in the wheel, the German automobile industry might not have existed in the first place. Of course, the wheels of a Mercedes S600 Sedan are nothing like those of several thousand year old carts. There are vast chains of transformation between them.
Here we challenge archaeology to open up the black boxes which pervade the contemporary world and accentuate the ‘ta archaea’. In the course of our daily lives we regularly interact with complex things—televisions, computers, and cell phones—which are proclaimed to be marvels of modern engineering, but which are really gatherings of many events from various times and numerous places. In tracing the genealogies of these things we articulate ‘pragmatogogies.’
The point here is as collective material beings we are entangled with transactions between people and things at a spaciotemporal distance which lend themselves to actions, performances, and practices now. It is as if they too were here and now. Through material things they are. Here we find ‘ta archaea’ entangled with some of the most seemingly modern and futuristic of things in our daily lives.
Conclusions
Archaeology as a discipline has deeply transformed over the last 25 years. Indeed, one could argue that the richness and diversity of approaches present in the discipline today is the success of pluralism. Still, others might contend that the current fragmentation is a post-hypercritical state which exists simply because the fragment is most resistant to critique. Whatever the response our ongoing complicity in this state of affairs is the easiest way to turn our back on archaeology’s unique, and rather tortured, state stretched across the divide between the humanities and the sciences and plagued by the divides between ideas and things, past and present, and so on.
A symmetrical archaeology holds that these are divides of our own making. In bypassing the divide between humanism and science across which archaeology in its current form is being continually stretched, strained, and segmented, it argues that there is indeed a great deal of common ground to be had. As such, symmetrical archaeology provides hope for an audacious, bold and risky synthesis. It charts confluences in spite of vulnerability. It constructs on a large scale in the face of fragmentation.
In this brief manifesto I have been unfair to my audience. I have moved way too fast, but at this point I am counting on my colleagues to elaborate on these matters of concern more fully.
In this session: