Alejandro Haber

Archaeology After Archaeology

Archaeological discipline is a search of knowledge of the past through material remains. This chapter anatomizes such a definition of the field in order to understand the decisions already taken by the discipline before arriving to particular contexts of practice. The working of archaeological discipline within the modern/colonial ontology is explored. The question of the place of archaeology within a decolonial turn is debated.

Counter-Practices of Global Life: A Response to Claire Smith

We had hoped for a substantive response around the argument presented in ‘What’s up with WAC?’, instead Claire Smith has responded with a list of what she styles as ‘errors of fact and errors of representation’. Nevertheless, we thank her for the attention with which she has read our paper, and we look forward to the ‘more discursive response’ which she indicates will be forthcoming. A careful reading of Smith’s response yields fi ve points at which she correctly identifi es errors of fact in our paper. So, for the sake of the record, and in the interests of getting this over with, here goes: • It is correct that most of the books distributed through the Global Libraries Programme are new rather than second-hand; • It is correct that Colombia’s bid for WAC-6 competed against Ireland rather than Jamaica, after Jamaica’s bid had been rejected; • It is correct that the room of the WAC/ Rio Tinto meeting in Melbourne was not — literally — ‘full of lawyers’. Rather, the tone of the proceedings was legalistic, and signifi cant Rio Tinto input came from ‘community agreements’ and ‘community relations’ specialists with legal training; • The sentence ‘WAC would become an archaeological/scientifi c organization whose salaried offi ce holders were paid by Rio Tinto’, should read ‘WAC would become an archaeological/scientifi c organization whose salaried secretariat was paid by Rio Tinto’; • The countries proposed for the WAC/ Rio Tinto try-out were not Cameroon and Argentina as stated, but Gabon and Argentina. The rest of what Smith describes as ‘errors of fact and errors of representation’ consist of a set of opinions, interpretations, the beginnings of counter-positions, and alternative (and, we would argue, often self-serving) readings of events. Smith’s response to our account of the Archaeologists Without Borders programme consists of additional information, plus a statement about possible future developments. Her account of the exclusion of Alejandro Haber from the WAC listserv dealing with the Rio Tinto encounter is perplexing: it is not that Haber was excluded from the listserv

Archaeology and Capitalist Development: Lines of Complicity

In this text I explore the different ways in which archaeology is committed in the sharp edge of marketplace expansion. As an active player in development interventions, archaeology has a place either as a good developer or as a bureaucratic quantifier of non-quantitative costs of development projects of intervention. As a passive agent, disciplinary archaeology provides raw resources (knowledge and materialities) for developers. Besides these different complicities, a more pervasive one consists on the archaeological consolidation of the ontology of time and history on which the very idea of capitalist development is based.

Agricola est quem domus demonstrat

The close relationship between the establishment of peasant modes of life and domestic architecture seems to be a promising line of research of the early South Andean history. The circum-Puna area has been considered as a relevant case in that process. In this paper, I critically review that idea, considering the following items: I review the kind of relationship between peasant life and productions and subsistence strategies, and I point out that that relationship is far from being one-way and progressive; I introduce a relational theoretical perspective that is coincidental with Andean perceptions of reality, as an alternative to the traditional theory of domestication; I present archaeological information from recent research in the Atacama plateau, that is relevant for the discussion of the relationship between peasantry and the house, emphasizing the long-term importance of domestic architecture in the demarcation of the social units of production. I conclude by claiming for the incorporation of alternative modes of understanding the long history of peasants in the Atacama plateau.

After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post-disciplinary Worlds in Archaeology: An Introduction

Do conventional discussions of archaeological ethics function as an ameliorative discourse in the interests of development, and of embedded disciplinary interests? Or do they open a set of resistant possibilities? How might such struggles be differently named and conceptualised? What are the effects of universalising what are often locally situated struggles under the heading of ethics? What is the relation between disciplinary discussions on ethics, and embedded power and vested interest? In archaeology? And in the world? This chapter introduces the debates covered by the volume “After Ethics: Ancestral Voices and Post-disciplinary Worlds in Archaeology”.