Andrew Jones (University of Southampton; amj@soton.ac.uk) and Dan Hicks (Oxford University; dan.hicks@arch.ox.ac.uk)

Details of the FORMAT of this session are online.

The second half of the 20th century saw the emergence of a distinctive body of archaeological thinking. This fifty-year period was punctuated by the repeated expression, in a variety of forms and contexts, of frustration with the discipline’s material focus. The idea of lifting ourselves out of antiquarianism, dry empiricism, and purely descriptive accounts was restated, from Walter Taylor to Lewis Binford, to Ian Hodder. Very often these involved ‘outbursts of anger in public over professional matters’ (Leone 2005), as archaeology made its own contributions to the ‘science wars’ between relativism and realism.

These successive generations of archaeologists called for materials to be treated as the evidence of past human lives, cultures or societies. They were determined to avoid what they saw as archaeology’s tendency to fetishise the objects of its studies. ‘Things’, as Olsen (2005) has put it, ‘were forgotten’. Or, perhaps worse, they were reduced to the representation of ‘society’. The pernicious divide in ‘social archaeology’ between archaeological methods and techniques and the study of meanings and contexts (Jones 2002), or between ‘materials’ and ‘culture’ in ‘material culture studies’, are just the most recent result of this series of calls for the archaeological process to be understood as representational (of some other, immaterial, entity), purified of its material engagements. Today, this is our inheritance in archaeological thought: what passes for archaeological theory almost always simply comprises the application of social theory to archaeological materials.

Meanwhile, across the social sciences late 20th-century impulse towards the reduction of the material to the social (which in post-processual archaeology was the result of an attempt to reconcile structuralism with semiotics) is increasingly critiqued. Recent literature in science studies has questioned the distinction between ‘the social’ in relation to ‘the material’ by considering the collective role of humans and nonhumans in the formation of ‘societies’ (e.g Latour 2007), and seeking to go beyond epistemological divisions by considering the pursuit of ‘messier’ research which considers how we analyse those things which do not neatly fit prior theoretical categories (e.g Law 2004) – things which, we might argue, are the very stuff of archaeology.

As archaeology rebuilds itself after its wars between humanistic and materialist approaches, this session considers the prospects for a theoretical archaeology that looks beyond a purified (Durkheimian) conception of the social. The session brings together archaeologists interested in the processes through which distinctively archaeological ontologies emerge from archaeology’s material practices.

The session asks:
- What is distinctive about archaeologists’ knowledge?
- Can we reconstruct a body of archaeological theory that is more than (or less than) social theory?
- How can we reconstitute archaeological methods and practices (whether in the field or in the lab) at the centre of archaeological thinking?

The session aims to complement recent approaches in ethnography (e.g Henare et.al. 2007) that seek fresh analytical strategies to the analysis of things. Rather than simply slotting things or artefacts into categories determined by pre-existing theoretical concepts or interpretive themes, a new generation of social anthropologists are proposing that they think through things as they emerge through ethnographic practice, and the contingency of anthropological theory upon such emergence. Such an approach proposes a radical rethink of artefacts as both embodying material and concept. Things or artefacts are then treated as providing multiple ontological perspectives. The close ontological relationship between thing and concept therefore generates new ‘worlds’ of conceptual and lived experience. These fresh anthropological perspectives consider the ‘thing’ as a heuristic device: a methodological entry point into understanding how humans and things are interconnected.

This session asks how, in practice, archaeologists might move beyond the familiar complaint of the unhelpful divide between ‘human’ society, culture or agency and ‘nonhuman’ materials, nature or affordances. To achieve this the session focuses on two themes:

1. Situated knowledges: examining the utility of standpoint theory (Hicks and McAtackney 2007), and perspectivism/perspectival multinaturalism (Viveiros de Castro 1998) in archaeology.
2. Ontology and archaeological practice: examining the emergence of archaeological knowledge through fieldwork (eg Edgeworth 2006) and artefact studies (e.g Jones 2002).
The session will be organised as a round-table discussion with an emphasis on a series of short, pre-circulated, co-authored papers, and plenty of time for a discussion of the issues raised within the papers.

Edgeworth, M. (ed.) 2006. Ethnographies of Archaeological Practice. Altamira Press: Lanham, MD.
Henare, A., Holbraad, M. and Wastell, S. 2007 Thinking through things. Routledge: London.
Hicks, D. and L. McAtackney 2007. Landscapes as Standpoints. In D. Hicks et al (eds) Envisioning Landscape Archaeology. Left Coast Press (One World Archaeology 52)” Walnut Creek, CA.
Jones, A. 2002 Archaeological theory and scientific practice. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Latour, B. 2007 Re-assembling the social. Oxford University Press: oxford.
Law, J. 2004. After Method. Mess in social science research. Routledge: London.
Leone, M.P. 2005. Walter Taylor and the production of anger in American Archaeology. http://www.bsos.umd.edu/anth/faculty/mleone/Walter_Taylor_Essay_2005.pdf