Yvonne Marshall

The cultural biography of objects

(1999). The cultural biography of objects. World Archaeology: Vol. 31, The Cultural Biography of Objects, pp. 169-178.

What is community archaeology

Community archaeology, understood as a distinctive set of practices within the wider discipline, is a relatively new development. Its most important distinguishing characteristic is the relinquishing of at least partial control of a project to the local community. This introduction takes a preliminary look at where this kind of archaeology is being carried out around the world and outlines what marks it out as different from other kinds of archaeology. In conclusion, it is suggested that community archaeology has a unique, if not critical, contribution to make to the future development of archaeology as a genuinely worldwide discipline.

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.

Animating Archaeology: Local Theories and Conceptually Open-ended Methodologies

Animists’ theories of matter must be given equivalence at the level of theory if we are to understand adequately the nature of ontological difference in the past. The current model is of a natural ontological continuum that connects all cultures, grounding our culturally relativist worldviews in a common world. Indigenous peoples’ worlds are thought of as fascinating but ultimately mistaken ways of knowing the world. We demonstrate how ontologically oriented theorists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold in conjuncture with an anti-representationalist methodology can provide the necessary conditions for alternative ontologies to emerge in archaeology. Anthropo-zoomorphic ‘body-pots’ from first-millennium ad northwest Argentina anticipate the possibility that matter was conceptualized as chronically unstable, inherently undifferentiated, and ultimately practice dependent.

A Matter of Difference: Karen Barad, Ontology and Archaeological Bodies

This article explores the implications of adopting Karen Barads agential realist approach in archaeology. We argue that the location of Barads work in quantum physics and feminism means it is uniquely placed to inform the ontological turn currently gaining favour for understanding the materiality of bodies. We outline Barads approach using a comparative reading of Sofaers book The Body as Material Culture and Barads Meeting the Universe Halfway. To illustrate, we think through Barads key concepts of ‘phenomenon’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘apparatus’ in relation to specific archaeological bodies; New Zealand Maori chevron amulets, Argentinean La Candelaria body-pots, Pacific Northwest Coast stone artefacts and Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial objects. Barads theory transforms the way we understand and think these object bodies. In particular, her relational ontology, which contrasts with a conventional binary separation of matter and meaning, produces difference in a new way; a difference which facilitates analyses conceptually unthinkable in conventional representationalist terms .

Situating the Greenham archaeology: an autoethnography of a feminist project

Abstract This paper discusses an ongoing investigation into the material cultural legacy and memory of the Greenham Common Womens Peace Camp. Using an autoethnographic approach it explores how a project at Greenham became an exercise in feminist practice, which aimed to stay close to the spirit and ethics of its subject of study, the women-only, feminist space of Greenham. We draw on principles from feminist and post-positivist scholarship to argue for the importance of reflexively exploring personal investments and situatedness in relation to research. The paper offers three narratives, one by each author, of our involvement with, and relationship to, the archaeological and ethnographic work at Greenham. It thereby also presents an account of how the objectives and methodologies of the research developed and changed over time.

Archaeological possibilities for feminist theories of transition and transformation

Archaeology takes up material fragments from distant and recent pasts to create narratives of personal and collective identity. It is, therefore, a powerful voice shaping our current and future social worlds. Feminist theory has to date made little reference to archaeology and its projects, in part because archaeologists have primarily chosen to work with normative forms of gender theory rather than forge new theory informed by archaeological insights. This paper argues that archaeology has considerably more potential for feminist theorizing than has so far been recognized. In particular it is uniquely placed to build theory for understanding change, transition and transformation over extended time periods, a potential explored through an archaeological case study of Pacific Northwest Coast people. In conclusion, some possibilities for expanding this case study into a wider comparative perspective are sketched out.

Introduction: adopting a sedentary lifeway

Abstract The adoption of sedentary lifeways is increasingly recognized as an independent development which has taken place in all regions and time periods across the globe. The papers in this volume argue that sedentism is not tied into a ‘Neolithic package’ in which a set of elements such as pottery, agriculture, sedentism and social complexity emerge together, each facilitated by and necessary to the others. Instead, it is argued that sedentism must be investigated as a process in its own right. This paper reviews how far we have come in developing such a perspective. It examines how we identify sedentism in the archaeological record, and suggests sedentism can be usefully understood as a process in which adoption and abandonment are equal possibilities. Finally, it considers how our changing views of where and why sedentism was adopted are leading to new ways of thinking about processes of social change.

Reading images stone b.c.

The vibrant artistic traditions of Americas Pacific Northwest Coast peoples are well documented in the ethnographic literature. Far less numerous, but equally fascinating, are the artworks which survive from a prehistoric period lasting at least 10,000 years. One little known collection of 136 stone artefacts from this area was brought together for exhibition in 1975. The striking and often explicit sexual imagery of these artefacts prompted anthropologist Wilson Duff to offer an unconventional, and therefore also controversial reading of their meaning in his book images stone b.c. In reading images stone b.c. through the lens of queer theory this paper suggests that the radical potential of Wilson Duffs ideas, and his vision of these artefacts in particular, was far greater than he was able to realize before his untimely death.

By way of introduction from the pacific northwest coast

The art of the Pacific Northwest Coast Indian people is flamboyant, monumental and complex. It is also deliberately ambiguous. That ambiguity is fundamental to both its form and meaning. Take, for example, the painted bentwood box design reproduced in Figure 1. At first glance even a trained eye sees a jumble of lines and shapes. Fortunately, however, Bill Holm (1983) has provided us with conceptual tools for sorting out this apparent jumble. To begin with it is necessary to distinguish positive and negative space. In this case the negative areas are white but they may also be incised; the positive areas are black and shaded, but they are commonly also raised. With close inspection it is then possible to pick out the main figure from the detail by following the continuous black or raised outline known as the formline (right-hand illustration in Figure 1). Holm (1983: 33-4) goes on to explain: