Christopher Witmore

Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology

What work does the adjective ‘social’ in social archaeology do? What is the character of human/things relations under the rubric of social archaeology? We raise these questions in relation to the recent Companion to Social Archaeology by Meskell and Preucel. While the corrective of the ‘social’ has been extremely productive, in broaching these questions we enter very murky waters. Our task in this article is to show where meanings of the ‘social’ have broken down; our charge is to demonstrate how frames of reference in understanding people/things relations have become muddled. By building on the strength of archaeology with regard to things, we seek to revisit the question: what is it to be human?

Symmetrical archaeology: excerpts of a manifesto

Abstract This article sketches the project of a symmetrical archaeology in brief. At a point when archaeology has arguably never been more relevant, it finds itself in a climate of necessary plurality where incommensurability is routinely shrugged off as a symptom of diversity; it finds itself in a state where seemingly incompatible differences proliferate on either side of the divide between the humanities and the sciences; it finds itself perplexed by divides between ideas and things, past and present, and so on. A symmetrical archaeology holds that these divides are of our own making. Without over-simplifying the world with an impoverished vocabulary of contradictory bifurcations, a symmetrical archaeology offers a profitable suite of perspectives and practices for recognizing the impact of things and our fellow creatures, ordinarily denied a stake in modernist myths of the world.

Worlds otherwise: Archaeology, anthropology, and ontological difference

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation—a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/or oppositional in any straightforward sense.

Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World

Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been over looked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart of the discipline. So while the visual is linked with spatial properties that are resistant to change, the aural is connected with the temporal and is considered momentary and fleeting in nature. Still, it is argued that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human sensation - to being. In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities and events quite distant in a linear temporality are proximate through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation I suggest we might learn what we can understand from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. But rather than reproduce an unnecessary dualism between seeing and hearing, this endeavor will require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time through other, complimentary modes of articulation and engagement.

On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece

Deeply embedded in much of archaeological thought is an epistemological scheme of the ‘field’ as separate from the ‘home-base’, whether laboratory, archive or study. This modernist division is inadequate, for it fails to account for the interconnected and nonlinear process of archaeological knowledge construction. Taking direction from science studies and specifically from the work of Bruno Latour, this article sketches a model of multiple fields, which may serve as an alternative to this divide. Through the effective juxtaposition of two case studies from the Greek Peloponnesus, it explores two disparate yet complementary cases of how multiple fields make up the epistemological terrain of archaeology. The first case study traces the strains of an early 19th-century web, which situates the process of knowledge production at that time, while the second focuses on the archaeological process by closely following the transformation of things into documents during a regional survey. By recasting and multiplying the ‘field’ in archaeology we move from an oversimplified and bounded modernist scheme to one that allows for the complexities of archaeological practices which involve the action of instruments, media and human beings.

Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics

This article responds to recent critiques of ‘symmetrical archaeology’. It addresses three common claims: (1) that symmetrical archaeology fails to see a difference between living and non-living entities, (2) that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for humans and other living things, (3) that symmetrical archaeology lacks any sincere ethical concern for things. This article demonstrates how these claims are based on common misunderstandings or misreadings, and offers further clarifications as to its perspective on ontology, ethics and things.

Echoes across the Past: Chorography and topography in antiquarian engagements with place

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The Adventure of Ideas

mention a growing body of literature on the archaeology of the body and of the senses (e.g. Hamilakis et al. 2001, Skeates 2010). But in the process of promoting this worthwhile approach, Edgeworth falls back on a set of enduring archaeological stereotypes that simply do not reflect the great breadth of archaeological practice and practitioners that exist outside his own experience. The first is of archaeology as excavation and discovery: ‘the practical task of excavating an archaeological site’ composed – according to Edgeworth – of intact, buried terrestrial deposits filling features such as pits, postholes and ditches, during which artefacts and structures ‘break out into the open, suddenly or gradually taking form for the first time in our cultural universe’. The second is a hero-myth of the thoughtful and skilful, experienced field archaeologist or noble digger (and an environmentally determined northern European one at that), who – trowel in hand – bravely scrapes, chops, jumps and digs in the harsh elements of pouring rain, wind and occasional sun, while fully engaged with the multiple sensory dimensions of the archaeological remains being excavated. Neither of these pictures adequately represents, for example, my own recent experience of excavating in a very dark underground cave whose largely featureless and disturbed archaeological deposits actually turned out to be well known to local herders and treasure hunters, and my experience of successive postexcavation analyses which repeatedly revealed dimensions of the artefacts that we had simply been unable to make sense of during the excavations. In other words, Edgeworth’s poetic ode to the trowel and celebration of the unsung skill and thoughtfulness of the field archaeologist is just too idiosyncratic. It is revealing that, in his short biography, Edgeworth labels himself as a ‘British field archaeologist’. In fact, his essay can simply be read as a personal account of a British field archaeologist’s own intellectual struggle to engage with, and contribute to, old and new archaeological theory, while marginalized from it by the nature of his profession. Nevertheless, there is a place in my heart and in the archaeological literature for self-reflexive thick description, and Edgeworth’s case studies contribute successfully to this genre, especially his second example about excavating a ring-ditch. Here, I found some nice, evocative descriptions of archaeological practice, and of the ways in which the meanings of excavated archaeological sites and artefacts can unfold over time, and for these I thank him. But it would be naïve to believe that his approach and perspective stem from ‘inside’ archaeology. Edgeworth’s advocacy of a greater emphasis on sensory engagement in archaeological practice and theory actually stems from a much wider, interdisciplinary, ‘sensory turn’ across the social sciences and humanities at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Howes 2006, pp. 114–115), to which archaeologists can certainly make their own small but significant contributions.