The Routledge Handbook of Sensory Archaeology

Robin Skeates, Jo Day, Robin Skeates, Jo Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138676299
• eBook ISBN: 9781317197461
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Edited by two pioneers in the field of sensory archaeology, this Handbook comprises a key point of reference for the ever-expanding field of sensory archaeology: one that surpasses previous books in this field, both in scope and critical intent.

This Handbook provides an extensive set of specially commissioned chapters, each of which summarizes and critically reflects on progress made in this dynamic field during the early years of the twenty-first century. The authors identify and discuss the key current concepts and debates of sensory archaeology, providing overviews and commentaries on its methods and its place in interdisciplinary sensual culture studies. Through a set of thematic studies, they explore diverse sensorial practices, contexts and materials, and offer a selection of archaeological case-studies from different parts of the world. In the light of this, the research methods now being brought into the service of sensory archaeology are re-examined.

Of interest to scholars, students and others with an interest in archaeology around the world, this book will be invaluable to archaeologists and is also of relevance to scholars working in disciplines contributing to sensory studies: aesthetics, anthropology, architecture, art history, communication studies, history (including history of science), geography, literary and cultural studies, material culture studies, museology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology.

1

Sensory archaeology

Key concepts and debates

Robin Skeates and Jo Day

The aim of this opening chapter is to identify and discuss the key current concepts and debates of sensory archaeology, and to show how our authors have engaged with them.¹ We begin with the question of the very status of sensory archaeology: is it appropriate and helpful to describe this evermore popular area of study as a distinct field of archaeology, and one whose accumulated impact on the discipline can now be designated as a ‘sensory turn’? We then define and evaluate from an archaeological perspective the terms ‘sensorium’, ‘sensory order’, ‘sensescape’, and ‘ways of sensing’. We likewise discuss the concept of the sensorial field, which seeks to challenge various analytical divisions employed in sensory studies. The term ‘affect’ also requires special attention, given its frequent (and sometimes imprecise) use in the literature of sensory archaeology. We then reflect critically, from a multisensory perspective, on archaeological museums and heritage sites and on their associated professional principles and practices. Finally, we reconsider the methods that can be used to undertake sensory studies, particularly in archaeology. What emerges is both a healthy diversity of perspectives and—perhaps surprisingly—something of an emerging consensus.

A sensory turn?

The roots of today’s significant archaeological interest in the senses lie in an eclectic array of archaeological studies published during the last decade of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first (for previous overviews of this literature, see Fahlander and Kjellström, 2010, pp.1–7; Skeates, 2010, pp.5–23; Day, 2013, pp.5–19). Only a few of these publications were dedicated to investigating ancient sensory regimes (e.g. Houston and Taube, 2000). Instead, the majority touched upon the senses, experience, and perception, often uncritically accepting the Aristotelian five-senses model, and with arguments generally restricted to ‘the senses were there’ (Tringham and Danis, Chapter 4, p.51). These early archaeologies of the senses were closely connected to equally strong currents in archaeological theory and method, which can be characterised in terms of a growing interest in anthropologically, philosophically, and geographically informed themes such as: landscape and place (Bender, 1993; Tilley, 1994; Knapp and Ashmore, 1999), phenomenology (e.g. Tilley, 1994), time and memory (e.g. Gosden, 1994; Williams, 2003), visual culture (e.g. Tilley, 1991; Shanks, 1992; Thomas, 1993; Molyneaux, 1997; Jones and MacGregor, 2002), death (e.g. Parker Pearson, 1999; Nilsson Stutz, 2003), emotion (e.g. Tarlow, 2000), aesthetics (e.g. Gosden, 2001), performance (e.g. Pearson and Shanks, 2001; Inomata and Coben, 2006), the body, corporeality, and embodiment (e.g. Hamilakis, Pluciennik, and Tarlow, 2002), materiality (e.g. Gosden, 2004; Hurcombe, 2007), heritage and public archaeology (Merriman, 2004), archaeological representation (Shanks, 1992), and archaeoacoustics (Scarre and Lawson, 2006). The early corpus of work by Yannis Hamilakis (1996; 1998; 1999; 2002), which offered innovative thoughts and case studies on the place of the senses in past societies, stands out (in terms of its originality and quality), yet is intertwined within this context.

Such studies did not prove immediately influential. This is partly because they tended (with the notable exception of Hamilakis) to ‘treat sensorial experience as an epiphenomenon’ (Tringham and Danis, Chapter 4, p.49), which scholars could then choose to investigate (or not). But it is also because they were tied in the minds of sceptics to Christopher Tilley’s (1994) phenomenological archaeology, which a vociferous group of landscape archaeologists and archaeological theorists sought to discredit on the grounds of: excessive subjectivity; favouring the solitary individual at the expense of intercommunicating people; prioritising the senses of sight and proprioception at the expense of full-bodied experiences of the world; treating experiences of places as if encountered for the first time; assuming a physiological commonality between past and present human bodies; and so on (e.g. Hamilakis, 2002; Brück, 1998; 2005; Edmonds, 2006; Fleming, 2006; Barrett and Ko, 2009; Johnson, 2012; cf. Nugent, Chapter 7, on comparable criticisms and rebuttals of archaeologies of emotion). In the United States, both Ruth Van Dyke and Corin Pursell (Chapters 29 and 30) also point to the dominance of scientific, processual, and positivist perspectives in archaeological theory and practice, which have resulted in ‘theoretical stagnation and hostility to innovation’ and a consequent disregard for sensory perspectives (Pursell, Chapter 30, p.522; cf. Thomas, Chapter 31). Christopher Tilley (Chapter 5) dismisses his critics, because they ‘consistently and fatally conflate two very different aspects of experience: the personal and the subjective’ (p.78), and remains unwavering in his conviction that phenomenology—understood as ‘above all a philosophical position emphasizing the basis of all our experience and knowledge of the world in situated embodied acts … provides the basis for all studies of the senses and sensory experiences, whether explicitly acknowledged or not’ (p.76). Certainly, the close, formative connection between phenomenological archaeology and sensory archaeology cannot be denied, particularly in Northwest Europe and in the American Southwest (Nyland, Chapter 20; Van Dyke, Chapter 29).

Fresh impetus to the development of sensory archaeology was provided by the rapid and widespread success of the ‘sensory studies’ school established by David Howes and Constance Classen at Concordia University in Montreal (e.g. Howes, 1991; Howes and Classen, 1991; Classen, 1993). They drew attention to a growing corpus of anthropological and historical work in this field, particularly through the widely read Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Howes, 2005), but also through the creation of a new journal and monograph series dedicated to The Senses and Society. This school of thought can be broadly characterised by a revelation that ‘The senses are everywhere’ (Bull et al., 2006, p.5) yet generally taken for granted, a foregrounding of the senses as both an object and means of study, as well as an emphasis on their socio-cultural formation (Howes, Chapter 2). (The same statements apply to emotion—Nugent, Chapter 7.) Related features include: a rejection of the canonical and hierarchical Western five-sense model, inherited from Aristotle, in favour of a recognition that our experience of life is multi-sensorial; a related critique of the ‘visualism’ of Western culture and its institutions, including an omission of non-visual senses in scholarship; an aspiration to approach non-Western cultures on their own sensory terms; a post-humanist rejection of the Cartesian dualisms of mind–body, subject–object, nature–culture; an interest in the whole of the human body; an interest in the practices of perception and techniques of the senses; and a recognition of the contextual determinacy of ‘habitus’ in shaping diverse experiences and perceptions (e.g. Corbin, [1990] 2005).

Related recent milestones in the growth of sensory studies in archaeology include a series of monographs. Their authors (even if not self-defined as sensory archaeologists) generally subscribe to the tenets of the sensory studies school of thought. They also recognise the benefits of its shift in emphasis which has: prompted them to pose new research questions; broadened their perspectives on materiality and on social processes; brought them closer to the lived realities of archaeological evidence; revealed even greater diversity in the story of humanity; led them to produce richer stories about past lives; enabled them to identify and challenge biases and misconceptions about past experiences and perceptions; encouraged them to present archaeological knowledge in new forms; and led them to contribute to interdisciplinary discussion on the senses and society. The first single-authored volume was An Archaeology of the Senses: Prehistoric Malta¸ by Robin Skeates (2010), which set out to establish a better-defined methodology for an archaeology of the senses, particularly by undertaking a ‘careful sensory analysis of the space and phases of prehistoric Maltese civilization’ (Howes, Chapter 2, p.26). Two edited volumes soon appeared alongside: Making Sense of Things: Archaeologies of Sensory Perception (Fahlander and Kjellström, 2010), a small set of papers derived from a workshop hosted by postdoctoral researchers in the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Stockholm University; and Making Senses of the Past (Day, 2013), a larger collection of ground-breaking case studies stemming from an international conference hosted at Southern Illinois University Carbondale by Jo Day. The theoretical basis of sensorial archaeology was then given in-depth treatment by Yannis Hamilakis (2013) in Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect: a critical manifesto claiming that archaeology must undergo no less than a paradigm shift, in order to overcome its modernist and colonialist prejudices and to study instead the sensorial, mnemonic, and affective dimensions of human experience. Most recently, Coming to Senses: Topics in Sensory Archaeology (Pellini, Zarankin, and Salerno, 2015) is an eclectic set of papers stemming from a symposium held at the World Archaeological Congress in Jordan. Overall, these contributions range from what Ruth Tringham and Annie Davis (Chapter 4, p.51) characterise as ‘archaeology with the senses’ to ‘archaeology of the senses’.

Considering this ever-expanding corpus of studies, might a ‘sensory turn’ now be claimed for archaeology (e.g. Skeates, 2010, p.1), as for related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (Howes, 2006a), including classics and ancient history (Betts, 2017, p.1; Hunter-Crawley, Chapter 25)? Certainly, the impact of sensory archaeological studies on archaeological thought is growing, notably in material culture studies, which—in addition to a wide range of other interests—must now attend to the sensual qualities of things (Howes, Chapter 2). But Yannis Hamilakis’s (2013) call (echoed, among others, by Ruth Tringham and Annie Danis, Chapter 4) for the paradigmatic reconstitution of archaeological theory and practice as sensorial, while rhetorically bold and intellectually coherent, has been and probably will continue to be largely ignored by the majority of archaeologists, with their agendas set on a multitude of other academic and professional goals. Preaching to the unconverted in this ‘all or nothing’ way could alienate and stigmatise more than attract. As Corin Pursell (Chapter 30, p.523) points out,

Hamilakis has famously said that the sensory cannot be merely an additional tool of archaeologists, and instead must represent an entirely new mode of inquiry (Hamilakis, 2013, p.202). I suspect this will never come to pass in the Eastern Woodlands. Thus, contra Hamilakis, in my own work I have done exactly as he opposes, utilising sensory approaches as part of a larger toolkit to understand traditional anthropological questions.

So, we might question whether the constitutional designation of sensory studies in archaeology as a ‘turn’ is helpful in securing the place of the senses in archaeological method and theory, considering not only the diversity of archaeology but also the wide variety of sensory approaches that archaeologists have so far experimented with. This healthy diversity is reflected, for example, in the many headings under which such archaeological studies have appeared: initially under the umbrella of ‘anthropology of the senses,’ then branching off into ‘archaeology of the senses’ (e.g. Skeates, 2010), ‘archaeology and the senses’ (Hamilakis, 2013), ‘sensory archaeology’ (this volume), ‘sensorial archaeology’ (Howes, Chapter 2), ‘sensory archaeologies’ (Tringham and Danis, Chapter 4), ‘phenomenological multisensory research’ (Tilley, Chapter 5), ‘sensory-emotive archaeology’ (Nugent, Chapter 7), and so on. Pragmatically, then, we do not claim an intellectual turn or call for a paradigm change. Instead, we regard the continued proliferation of sensory studies in archaeology, including the varied definitions of their goals (as exemplified by the d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of plates
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Sensory archaeology: Key concepts and debates
• PART I Approaches to sensory archaeology
• PART II Sensorial practices, contexts and materials
• PART III Archaeological case-studies by period and region
• Index