Multispecies Archaeology

Suzanne Pilaar Birch, Suzanne E. Pilaar Birch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138898981
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317480648
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Social Sciences

Multispecies Archaeology explores the issue of ecological and cultural novelty in the archaeological record from a multispecies perspective. Human exceptionalism and our place in nature have long been topics of academic consideration and archaeology has been synonymous with an axclusively human past, to the detriment of gaining a more nuanced understanding of one that is shared.

Encompassing more than just our relationships with animals, the book considers what we can learn about the human past without humans as the focus of the question. The volume digs deep into our understanding of interaction with plants, fungi, microbes, and even the fundamental building blocks of life, DNA. Multispecies Archaeology examines what it means to be human—and non-human—from a variety of perspectives, providing a new lens through which to view the past.

Challenging not only the subject or object of archaeology but also broader disciplinary identities, the volume is a landmark in this new and evolving area of scholarly interest.

p.9

PART I

Living in the Anthropocene

p.11

1

CALABRIAN HOUNDS AND ROASTED IVORY (OR, SWERVING FROM ANTHROPOCENTRISM)

Noah Heringman

Epochs, humans, and other species

In a review of The Epochs of Nature by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the German naturalist and antiquary Johann Reinhold Forster took issue with Buffon’s radical notion that human beings were a late arrival on the scene of antiquity. More like a writer of romances than a naturalist, in Forster’s view, Buffon defines the limits of the primeval ocean, produces now-extinct megafauna, and then causes the continents to separate before allowing humans to exist. Forster comments disapprovingly: “At last human beings too become inhabitants of this earth” (Forster 1780: 148). Zealous to prove that human antiquity is the only antiquity accessible to science, Forster disregards the uncertainty concerning human origins that is built into Buffon’s account.

The uncertainty is part of the point, however, and Buffon reflects explicitly on the instability produced by situating human origins in a diachronic history of species. Epochs of Nature is one of the first geochronologies to insist on a comparatively long prehuman past, and Buffon anticipates some of his contemporaries’ objections by establishing a human epoch, a seventh and final age “in which Man assisted the operations of Nature.” In this chapter, he locates the first advanced civilization precisely at the date of 7000 BCE. But in discussing the earlier epochs, such as the fifth, in which “the elephants [i.e., mammoths], and other animals of the south, inhabited the northern regions” (Buffon 1785: 306), Buffon raises the possibility of an earlier human presence, of beings roughly corresponding to what we now term “early hominins.” The interspecies nexus designated by Buffon’s term for fossilized mammoth tusks—“roasted ivory”—marks a point of archaeological curiosity in the late Enlightenment, a sub-epoch that some scholars are now calling “the early Anthropocene” (Menely 2015b: 3). Following the advent of modern geology in the nineteenth century, archaeologists located “men” more firmly “among the mammoths” (Van Riper 1993). This chapter is concerned with Buffon and his interlocutors in the 1770s and 1780s; although their conjectures on fossils and prehistory predate the discipline of archaeology (Schnapp 1997), I use the term anachronistically in the interest of a conceptual history (Koselleck 2002). Enlightenment naturalist-antiquaries such as Buffon began this conversation by expanding the area of uncertainty surrounding human antiquity, designating a domain in which fossil bones or knapped flint might count as evidence. For Buffon, then, the “archives of nature” (Buffon 1780: 1) include an archaeological record that encompasses other animal species as well as artifacts unattested in the written record.

p.12

A similar uncertainty attends the history of the Anthropocene, which some scholars backdate as far as the era of knapped flint and megafauna extinction, while others favor an industrial or postindustrial date, which correlates to Buffon’s epoch of “advanced civilization” (cf. Waters 2016).¹ As Kieran Suckling points out, one of the problems with the term “Anthropocene” is the absence of a biological criterion for dating the epoch. All other epochs (e.g., Miocene, Pliocene) are “named for the condition of the Earth’s plants and animals in that epoch. Epochs and epoch names are biocentric,” meaning that they describe ecological conditions rather than geological “drivers” or (in this case) a single species (humans) identified as a geological driver via climate change (Suckling 2015). This break with paleontological criteria feeds into a more widely noted problem with the idea of the Anthropocene, namely the encroachment of a ubiquitous human actor on the stage of geohistory. If Buffon’s seventh epoch anticipates these problematic aspects of the Anthropocene, then his earlier epochs de-center the human perspective, promoting the radical separation of history from geochronology that enabled geological reckoning in the first place. Although (pace Forster) he raises the possibility of a human presence before the separation of the continents in the sixth epoch, this is nevertheless the time of the mammoths and the question of human presence is peripheral to it. The recent recommendation by the Anthropocene Working Group to locate this epoch in the mid-twentieth century (Waters 2016; cf. Steffen et al. 2016) deliberately foregrounds human agency, but most attempts to define an “age of man” since Buffon have reached more deeply into the history of our species and others. This recommendation changes the terms of the debate, but does not diminish its relevance.

Buffon’s “Age of Man” implies earlier ages in which humans are not the main actors. If, then, archaeology has become “synonymous with an exclusively human past,” this may not be solely the result of its failure to depart sufficiently from the “completely anthropocentric perspectives in archaeology, natural history, and related fields in the nineteenth century” (Pilaar Birch 2018: 1). Multispecies archaeologists might, in fact, productively reach farther back to their precursors, the antiquary-naturalists, who entertained a version of the question of “how to know other living things archaeologically without recourse to humans as the subject of the inquiry, or as a controlling force” (4), before anthropocentrism became dominant in this form. The difference between Forster and Buffon illustrates the wide range of possibilities in natural history, which accommodated both Forster’s insistence that all antiquity was human and Buffon’s decentered engagement with geochronology, in which human time is almost an afterthought. The instability of the discourse and Buffon’s particular iteration of it are both useful for contesting the modern sense of scientific terms such as “anthropology” and “paleontology,” as this volume sets out to do. The project of redefining archaeology in multispecies terms calls for new origin stories, in which the boundary between archaeology and precursor sciences might be drawn differently—hence my occasionally anachronistic use of the term “archaeology” in this chapter.

The antiquity of other species

Although Buffon seeks to establish criteria for ecological novelty independent of any human-made record, he also mines the literature of antiquarianism to establish geochronological markers for his later epochs, especially the loosely defined transitional period during which “primitive” and then the first civilized societies might have established themselves. Other species play a part in these interactions, and geological conditions are even more fundamental, especially because (so Buffon claims) modern humans have a sort of evolutionary memory of the “convulsive motions of the [still-cooling] earth” that terrified their earliest ancestors (Buffon 1785: 381). For eighteenth-century antiquaries concerned with the excavation of cities buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, observations of the mountain’s current behavior played a somewhat similar part—though admittedly on a smaller temporal scale—in helping to establish what the experience of the ancient inhabitants of Pompeii and Herculaneum might have been. The volcanic inundation from Vesuvius was recognized as the “driver” of at least this local environmental history, and a bit later, in 1812, Cuvier used analogy to extrapolate the global force of geological catastrophe by describing the fossil record in toto as “the ruins of the great Herculaneum overwhelmed by the ocean” (Cuvier 1822: i).

p.13

The archaeological evidence from these sites, which made the daily life of the ancients so vividly present, disrupted historical temporality itself in profound ways. In addition to the volcano’s continued activity, other species—dogs in particular—were among the ecological constants that suggested a deeper, unrecorded human past underlying the ruins of 79 CE. Pierre Hugues d’Hancarville, glossing a scene on a famous black-figure vase found near Naples (the Hunt Krater), insists that the species of hunting dog depicted on the vase, originally from Epirus in Greece, survives in modern-day Calabria, south of Naples (D’Hancarville 1767: 3.206). The scene itself, d’Hancarville argues, depicts an actual event so ancient as to have survived in classical Greece only as a myth (the myth of the Calydonian boar hunt). The continuity of the nonhuman species is therefore important as a kind of source material on human antiquity that predates the historical record—what we would now call prehistory. D’Hancarville, espousing a euhemerist reading of mythology indebted to Giambattista Vico’s New Science, indicates that the boar in the vase painting is “of a monstrous size” (3.205) appropriate to the age of “heroes” in which it lived (3.207).

Buffon gives other reasons for the monumental size of the fossil bones and teeth of mammoths and other megafauna found in parts of Siberia as well as at celebrated New World sites, such as Big Bone Lick on the Ohio, remarking that “Nature was then in her primitive vigor” (Buffon 1785: 303). Buffon’s version of prehistoric gigantism makes the record of nonhuman species into something more than source material for human antiquity, but in both versions nonhuman species mark a locus of continuity in the archaeological record as it was understood in the late eighteenth century. As opposed to the “unknown animal” whose molars were found in conjunction with more familiar teeth and bones, the latter could be clearly attributed to “elephants” and “hippopotami” like those of the present day in all but size. The natural histories of Vesuvius and of Big Bone Lick, though on somewhat different scales, both concerned themselves with the continuity of species (boars, dogs, “elephants”) as well as their discontinuity (“the unknown animal”), unhindered by the distinction between paleontology and archaeology.

The history of Pompeii, and antiquarianism more broadly, also inspire scenarios in which humans are not the main actors. When Giuseppe Fiorelli perfected his technique of pouring plaster into the hollows that surrounded skeletons engulfed by volcanic ash and rubble—thus revealing the exact shape of the bodies of Vesuvius’s victims at the time of their deaths—his second subject was the entombed body of a watchdog, who thus became “perhaps Pompeii’s best-known victim”: “the cast of the dog with his slender legs seeming to flail in midair has never failed to evoke pity in those who see it” (Dwyer 2010: 87–88). Taken together with the famous mosaic of a dog bearing the legend “Cave Canem,” also found at Pompeii, this sympathetic identification suggests a way of decentering the human perspective in archaeology. Considering these canines, or the mammoths who take center stage in Buffon’s fifth epoch, as agents in an archaeological context might be seen as promoting a goal set by Donna Haraway in When Species Meet, the goal of “positive knowledge of and with animals” (Haraway 2008: 21). In the case of dogs in particular—who dominate Haraway’s inquiry—considering animal agency in this way might also express a kind of co-evolutionary nostalgia, harking back to a time in which hunter-hominins and their wolf-things roamed the savanna. Haraway herself rightly challenges such nostalgia (36), but acknowledges that the “temporalities” of companion species “include the heterogeneous scales of evolutionary time” (25). Cary Wolfe further extends this figurative sense of symbiogenesis, arguing that human faculties such as language derive from “ahuman evolutionary processes” and “recursive co-ontogenies” (Wolfe 2010: xxii).²

p.14

In one of Buffon’s variations on the story of human origins, the last survivors of a giant hominin “nation” migrate across what is now the Bering Strait at roughly the same time as the “elephants”; while the elephants ultimately perish in North America because they are unable to cross the mountains, the human giants press on all the way to Patagonia (Buffon 1988: 193). The appeal for sympathy here is more muted, but this story of the New World elephants’ demise arguably makes the survival of the Old World elephants more poignant. It also opens a distant prospect of the early history of domestication. In a more antiquarian register, Pietro Fabris illustrates the survival of an interspecies relation in his 1775 etching of the excavation of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, which shows the antiquarian spectators accompanied by a hunting dog (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Pietro Fabris, “Excavation of the Temple of Isis at Pompeii” (1776). By permission of Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preuß...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Multispecies Archaeology
• Archaeological Orientations
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Living in the Anthropocene
• Part II Multispecies Ecology of the Built Environment
• Part III Agrarian Commitments: Towards an Archaeology of Symbiosis
• Part IV the Ecology of Movement
• Index