Archaeological Theory in Dialogue

Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms

Rachel J. Crellin, Craig N. Cipolla, Lindsay M. Montgomery, Oliver J.T. Harris, Sophie V. Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429648762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

Archaeological Theory in Dialogue presents an innovative conversation between five scholars from different backgrounds on a range of central issues facing archaeology today.

Interspersing detailed investigations of critical theoretical issues with dialogues between the authors, the book interrogates the importance of four themes at the heart of much contemporary theoretical debate: relations, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms. The authors, who work in Europe and North America, explore how these themes are shaping the ways that archaeologists conduct fieldwork, conceptualize the past, and engage with the political and ethical challenges that our discipline faces in the twenty-first century.

The unique style of Archaeological Theory in Dialogue, switching between detailed arguments and dialogical exchange, makes it essential reading for both scholars and students of archaeological theory and those with an interest in the politics and ethics of the past.

1
INTRODUCTION

Locating the book

Locating theory

Where does theory happen? Does it happen in the Royal Ontario Museum as you handle a pipe shaped by a Wendat person 400 years ago? Does it happen as you drive between two cities to present seminars about a book? Does it happen as you trowel on a site in Turkey, or when you trace a piece of Comanche rock art in New Mexico? Does it matter where theory happens? And if so, what do these different locations mean for the theories that emerge from them?

Much of this book flows from discussion and conversation that took place over two days in room 415a of Lyman Hall at Syracuse University, New York. But these dialogues have a much deeper and more complicated history than that. They derive from countless previous conversations that took place in a variety of places, at conferences, in person, via email, and by Skype. These locations do, it turns out, matter.

This book seeks to interrogate contemporary archaeological theory but to do so through dialogue. If place matters, so does the act of conversation. So much of how we work through theory takes place in dialogue. You learn through conversation, and discussion opens you up to new possibilities and challenges. Reading theory is dense and difficult; the dynamics of talking allow you to contextualize it and bring out similarities and differences between alternative positions. Dialogue also allows us to engage abstract ideas with concrete examples, often making concepts easier to grasp. In this sense, to engage in theory is also to engage in a form of relationship-building, bringing different people, ideas, and things into conversation.

Discussing theory happens face-to-face, writing happens in many places. We began this project by writing the five single-authored chapters (Chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10). We then came together to discuss them and to plan out our dialogues. But theory changes as you move and shifts as you converse; it is always in process. The single-authored chapters changed in the light of our conversations and so our dialogues have shifted again.

Our conversation begins with materialized positions that open us up to each other. Our stance is that dialogues don’t end – this conversation will always remain open. In this sense, the “conclusion” sections to each dialogue chapter are really summaries of our current thinking and positions rather than a definitive or programmatic statement. This is not a solution; this is not teleology. The final published product of these discussions will only be a snapshot of this larger and ever-evolving dialogue and therefore should not be taken as the final word on the topics discussed in each chapter.

Our aim in this book is to open up theory to dialogue, to capture something of its ongoing and shifting becoming. This means several things. First of all, it means risk. By being open, by accepting that our own learning is unfinished, we have to face up to what we don’t know and be comfortable with disagreement. Our aim in this book is not to solve problems or present resolutions, rather it is to be open about the process of doing theory itself, the issues it poses for us, the way it can make us feel uncomfortable. Here we have to acknowledge the absence of authority, both between us as multiple authors and also between us, our readers, and our critics. Too often theory is written as a lone voice revealing mastery of the discipline; for us theory is much more complicated than this. It and we are multiple, unfinished, messy, and sometimes confused.

Opening ourselves up to different places, to different voices, and to different backgrounds is part of bringing different people together. As archaeologists we work in Europe and North America, on periods from many thousands of years ago to the last few centuries. Some of us work with Indigenous Peoples and some of us do not. Some of us rely upon text, some of us do not. These differences matter in some ways, in others, they do not. Different people, different theories, different places, different times, different questions: difference matters – but how? Here are some of the ways that we are different.

RACHEL: I am an archaeologist who studies the Neolithic and the Bronze Age of Britain, Ireland, and the Isle of Man: I also specialize in the study of metalwork. I study those periods because I am absolutely fascinated by how very different they are from the world I live in.

I grew up on the Isle of Man, a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea between England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The island is littered with the presence of the past from Viking boat burials to Neolithic stone circles: I knew I wanted to be an archaeologist from a young age. I moved to the UK for an academic job, but part of me always wants to go back home. I now direct fieldwork on the island, allowing me to spend at least a month there every year. The Isle of Man is a between place: it sits within the British Islands¹ but not the UK; we speak English but have our own native Gaelic language.

I am a feminist, though I don’t think I always have been. My parents jointly ran a small bed and breakfast hotel and split the work between them evenly, my Mum had a 51% stake in the business and my Dad 49%. My parents and grandparents did not go to university. As a child, “girl” never seemed less than “boy.” I was privileged enough and lucky enough that the world seemed pretty fair. Nowadays, the naivety of that position is very clear. One of the things I think the most about is how I can use the work I do to try and create worlds very different from our own and worlds that I want to be a part of. Theoretically, I situate myself as a posthumanist and a new materialist.

CRAIG: I’m an American (born and trained) museum curator and anthropology professor living in Toronto, Canada. My main interests include theory, the archaeology of colonialism, collaborative Indigenous research, and historical archaeology. I work in New England and the Great Lakes – two areas for which I am foreign, i.e., I am a settler colonist descended from a mixture of Italian and various other unidentified European groups. In any case, I come from places and groups different from the landscapes and communities in which I work. This is important to remember and something I always make sure to stress to my students and colleagues.

I am a first-generation academic who has special interest in increasing the breadth of our discipline by helping to pave the way for fellow first-generation academics, heritage managers, and/or archaeologists. I devote my scholarship and teaching to the broader project of decolonizing archaeology and anthropology, though I see this project as never ending. For me decolonization relates directly to attempts to reduce Eurocentrism and to help diversify the community of practitioners. I recognize that I cannot do these things on my own; it is a collaborative project through and through. But, perhaps unlike some of my colleagues who are devoted to similar projects of decolonization, I place great emphasis on theory (cf. Smith 2012; Cipolla in review a) in such projects as it helps me to think through and understand the world in which I work. Other aspects of my work and my experiences as an archaeologist are developed further throughout the book, so I won’t specify any further at this stage.

LINDSAY: I was raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in a middle-class mixed-race family. I am descended from a long line of educators and storytellers and was told from a young age that history mattered and that I should do work that made the world a better place. I am now an assistant professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, where I write and teach about Indigenous history, colonialism, resistance, and interethnic interaction. My current fieldwork is part of a multi-institutional collaborative project with Picuris Pueblo in northern New Mexico, which focuses on documenting archaeological evidence of agricultural production and inter-ethnic exchange at the Pueblo from the thirteenth century onward. Unlike some of my colleagues, I do not necessarily gravitate toward theory. My primary interest in social theory is in its utility as a language of empowerment: a lexicon with which to speak to the academy about things outside of academia.

Although my graduate degree is in archaeology, I position my work at the peripheries of a wider range of disciplines and methods, including ethnography, history, American Indian studies, and law. I often think of myself as a cultural Historian rather than an Archaeologist or Anthropologist per se because I am interested in bringing together a variety of archival, oral, and material sources to understand the lives of Indigenous people in both the past and present. My approach to research has been shaped by the work of various women of color, from the lessons I learned sitting at my grand-mama Martel’s dining room table, to the creative writing of novelists like Toni Morrison, to academic texts by Ella Deloria, Viola Cordova, Theresa Singleton, Sonya Atalay, and many others. These female voices have inspired my long-standing interest in cultural history and the role of brown and black people in creating and preserving such histories. More than that, they have inspired my abiding investment in activist scholarship, which uses academia as a platform for creating change in the world. Accordingly, I view myself as an advocate and an ally for Tribal Nations working toward social justice and decolonization in the present.

OLLIE: As an archaeologist, I work on a range of different issues. My main passion is archaeological theory; I love enquiring into how we think about archaeology and how we understand the past. Within that, in recent years I have become especially interested in new materialism, and I am often accused (mainly by my co-authors of this book) of an unhealthy passion for the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Beyond theory, my work focuses principally on Britain in the Neolithic, but I have written about European pasts from the Paleolithic to the present, and even dabbled in a little contemporary archaeology. I direct fieldwork on the west coast of Scotland and excavate sites from all periods of the human past. This means working with local people, visitors, and our diverse student body in a host of different contexts.

Writing about position is hard for me, because it forces me to face up to what Rosi Braidotti (2019a:478) calls my “unearned privilege.” I am the very model of a “majoritarian” subject: white, middle class, able bodied, straight, with middle-class parents; I never considered not going to university, and when I was there, I decided to be an academic and have been helped in all kinds of ways by that privilege. For me, I have become increasingly committed to thinking about the past through a Deleuzian lens because of the way this challenges the assumptions that sustain my privilege. A Deleuzian approach, especially one influenced by feminism, is committed to unpicking the claims to a universal humanity. It asks us: “What can a body do?” When you start asking that question about the past, you start asking it of yourself and asking it of others around you too. The answers force you to check your privilege.

SOPHIE: My work sits between disciplines; I am primarily an archaeologist, but I am also a Byzantinist. I am currently a temporary lecturer in Medieval Archaeology at Newcastle University, my sixth fixed-term role held across three continents since finishing my Ph.D. in 2013. Byzantine Studies is a messily constructed discipline focused on the Eastern Mediterranean between approximately 500 and 1500 CE, encompassing textual, art historical, and archaeological methodologies. In many ways on the fringe of Classics, Byzantine Studies has largely focused on elite culture, an aspect of the discipline that my work disrupts through working on questions of everyday life in rural Anatolia.

I was born in Britain, to a Northern Irish father and a Yorkshire mother, both of whom came from working-class backgrounds and went on to get university degrees. We’re all atheist (I’m either second- or third-generation atheist, depending upon which grandparent you trace lineage through). As I got further into my undergraduate degree in archaeology, however, I came to realize that we are very protestant atheists. From an early age, I was fascinated (as I think lots of children are) by who else I might have been if I had been born in another time or place. Part of thinking through this question at university meant reckoning with the almost evangelical atheism of my upbringing. Early on in my archaeo-logical education, my driving question therefore became whether I could get to a point where I could accept, really accept, that other people have a different understanding of the world than me. This became my entry point to archaeological theory, and particularly into thinking about both phenomenological approaches to the past and ontologies in terms of faith, belief, and knowledge.

Relationality, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms

Over the last few decades, relationality, ontology, posthumanism, and Indigenous paradigms have emerged as serious topics of interest and debate in archaeological circles (e.g., Alberti 2016 a; Fowles 2013; Fredengren 2013; Harris and Cipolla 2017; Thomas 1996; Witmore 2007). The origins of – or reasons for – these shifts are multiple. Some came from within theoretical debate and critique, but others emerged from a general dissatisfaction with the status of our discipline in the world. Internally, thinkers like Bjørnar Olsen (2003) critiqued post-processual archaeology’s textual metaphor (e.g., Hodder 1986) and urged archaeologists to “re-member” things. According to him, the textual turn had deleterious effects in our discipline; in its emphases on ideas, social relations, and culture in general, the actual stuff of archaeology was swept to the background. Archaeological materials became secondary to the past symbolic values that they might have carried. Concomitantly, archaeological interests of the time favored cultural construction and epistemology over realism and ontology.

External to these theoretical discussions, and preceding them by decades, was a growing scrutiny over archaeology’s colonial nature. This included critiques from Indigenous activists and academics like Vine Deloria Jr. (e.g., 1997, 2014). Such challenges highlighted the homogeneity of our field at the time – i.e., archaeology was most often practiced by white, western,² middle-class males. Yet these challenges also drew attention to the culturally insensitive (and imperialistic) ways that archaeologists treated ancestors – human remains – and generally handled the heritage of underrepresented and colonized groups. The hubris of archaeologists’ claims to know and to represent very different pasts from their own was and is a major point of contention. Echoed in post-processual approaches, such as Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey’s (1991) groundbreaking writings on gender, these critiques laid bare the disparities, contradictions, and asymmetries of archaeological research, showing that archaeology was far from a neutral scientific endeavor. Among the responses to these critiques were new ways of practicing archaeology, including Indigenous, collaborative, and community-based frameworks along with a general emphasis on increasing the diversity of practitioners. Implicit in this work is a growing scrutiny over the intellectual history of archaeology and the arbitrariness of the discipline’s Western assumptions – a trend that is partly mirrored in theoretical discussions featured throughout this book.

For instance, a majority of the theoretical struggles of late challenge the Enlightenment-inherited defaults that many archaeologists continue to rely upon (cf. Thomas 2004). This is most evident in the discipline’s struggle to come to grips with dualistic ways of seeing – and being in – the world. By emphasizing symbolic meaning over almost everything else, post-processual critiques operated within a binary framework that divided the world into ideas and materials, culture and nature, humanity and the world around it. The last few decades of archaeological thought explored the arbitrariness of these dualistic modes of thought, discussing how they obscure our understandings of the world, including our main subject of inquiry, the past. Thinkers like Timothy Web-moor and Christopher Witmore (2008) argued that the dominant framework of social archaeology was constructed on arbitrary and false divisions. Instead, they suggested that archaeologists should attend to the complex amalgamation of human–non-human relations that surround us. For these thinkers, the dominant dialectical models of post-processual leaning archaeologists did more harm than good. Of course, for these thinkers, the models that post-processualism critiqued were no better. This is because, broadly speaking, both processual and post-processual critiques adhered to the same dualistic way of seeing the world: one simply favored nature and materials, the other, culture and symbols (Harris and Cipolla 2017). Similarly, if we think through the most traditional of archaeological “paradigms,” culture history, it too operates through the same dualistic lens, cleaving the world into binaries and favoring one side over the other.

So how have archaeologists sought to move away from these dualistic frames and embrace the complex amalgams that Webmoor and Witmore urged us to look for? One of the primary routes has been to emphasize the world of relations – that is, how people, things, architecture, and landscapes are better understood by focusing on what connects them, rather than thinking of them as individual and bounded entities. Relations form one of the critical topics we investigate in this book (see especially Chapter 2). Within European archaeology, this interest in relations grew out of engagements with phenomenology, which emphasized how things could be understood as gatherings of relations (Thomas 1996). Alongside this, the burgeoning concern with personhood did the same for human beings (e.g., Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of provocations
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: locating the book
• 2 What do we mean by relational anyway?
• 3 Discussing relations: typology, difference, and change
• 4 Indigenous alterity as archaeological praxis
• 5 Discussing Indigenous difference: translation, ontology, and the future of European prehistory
• 6 A song of Byzantium
• 7 Discussing phenomenology and posthumanism: experience, assemblages, and beliefs
• 8 Posthumanist power
• 9 Discussing posthuman approaches to power: Marxism, politics, affect
• 10 In search of different pasts
• 11 Discussing different pasts: categories, interdisciplinarity, and metaontologies
• 12 Conclusion: continuing dialogues
• References
• Index