Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T11:19:36.329Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The new antiquarianism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2016

John C. Barrett
John C. Barrett*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET, UK (Email: [email protected])
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Christopher Witmore (2014: 215) recently observed that “things go on perturbing one another when humans cease to be part of the picture. A former house may be transformed through relations with bacteria, hedgehogs, water, compaction”; and if the materials that archaeologists confront are material memories (cf. Olivier 2011) from which a past is to be recalled in the future, then

The kind of memory that things hold often tells us little of whether materials strewn across an abandonment level resulted from the reuse of a structure as a sheepfold, a series of exceptional snow storms, the collapse of a roof made of olive wood after many years of exposure to the weather (rapports between microbes, fungi, water and wood), the cumulative labors of generations of badgers, children playing a game in a ruin, or the probing roots of oak trees (Witmore 2014: 215).

In other words, the things that archaeologists confront bear the memories of their own formation without the necessity of a human presence, and the traditional and often exclusive priority given to a human agency in the making of those things and in giving them meaning is simply misplaced. Things get on “just fine” without the benefit of human intervention and interpretation (Witmore 2014: 217). Should archaeology therefore allow that it is not a discipline concerned with excavating the indications of the various past human labours that once acted upon things, and should it eschew the demand to “look beyond the pot, the awl or a stone enclosure for explanations concerning the reasons for their existence” (Witmore 2014: 204)? Consequently, is archaeology now a matter of following the things themselves to wherever they might lead—what Witmore characterises as the New Materialisms—and if so, are we now to practise archaeology “not as the study of the human past through its material remains, but as the discipline of things” (Witmore 2014: 203)?

Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 90 , Issue 354 , December 2016 , pp. 1681 - 1686
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barrett, J.C. 2014a. The material constitution of humanness. Archaeological Dialogues 21: 65–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1380203814000105 Google Scholar
Barrett, J.C. 2014b. Some possible conditions necessary for the colonisation of Europe by domesticates, in Whittle, A. & Bickle, P. (ed.) Early farmers: the view from science and archaeology: 39–51. Oxford: British Academy.Google Scholar
Barrett, J.C. 2016. A possible political structure for the Linearbandkeramik?, in Amkreutz, L., Haack, F., Hofmann, D. & van Wijk, I. (ed.) Something out of the ordinary? Diversity and uniformity in the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and beyond: 505–15. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.Google Scholar
Bhaskar, R. 1979. The possibility of naturalism. Brighton: Harvester.Google Scholar
Bhaskar, R. 1997 [1975]. A realist theory of science. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Braidwood, R. 1958. Vere Gordon Childe, 1892–1957. American Anthropologist 60: 733–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1958.60.4.02a00100 Google Scholar
Bryant, L.R. 2011. The democracy of objects. Ann Arbor (MI): Open Humanities. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.9750134.0001.001 Google Scholar
DeLanda, M. 2002. Intensive science and virtual philosophy. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Geertz, C. 1973. Thick description: towards an interpretive view of culture, in Geertz, C. The interpretation of cultures: 3–30. London: Fontana.Google Scholar
Hodder, I. 2012. Entangled: an archaeology of the relationships between humans and things. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118241912 Google Scholar
Jones, A.M. & Sibbesson, E.. 2013. Archaeological complexity: materials, multiplicity, and the transitions to agriculture in Britain, in Alberti, B., Jones, A.M. & Pollard, J. (ed.) After interpretation: returning materials to archaeological theory: 151–72. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast.Google Scholar
Kauffman, S. 1995. At home in the universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. 1999. Pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies. London: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Maynard Smith, J. & Szathmáry, E.. 1997. The major transitions in evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Meillassoux, Q. 2008. After finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Morowitz, H. 2002. The emergence of everything: how the world became complex. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Olivier, L. 2011. The dark abyss of time: archaeology and memory (trans. Greenspan, A.). Walnut Creek (CA): AltaMira.Google Scholar
Olsen, B. 2010. In defense of things: archaeology and ontology of objects. Lanham (MD): AltaMira.Google Scholar
Olsen, B. 2012. After interpretation: remembering archaeology. Current Swedish Archaeology 20: 11–34.Google Scholar
Olsen, B., Shanks, M., Webmoor, T. & Witmore, C. (ed.). 2012. Archaeology: the discipline of things. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Renfrew, C. 1982. Explanation revisited, in Renfrew, C., Rowlands, M.J. & Segraves, B.A. (ed.) Theory and explanation in archaeology: the Southampton Conference: 5–23. London: Academic.Google Scholar
Rindos, D. 1984. The origins of agriculture: an evolutionary perspective. London: Academic.Google Scholar
Ryan, T. & McKevitt, S.. 2013. Project Sunshine. London: Icon.Google Scholar
Thompson, D.W. 1942. On growth and form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Silberstein, M. & McGeever, J.. 1999. The search for ontological emergence. Philosophical Quarterly 49: 182–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00136 Google Scholar
Smail, D.L. 2008. On deep history and the brain. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Wallace, S. 2011. Contradictions of archaeological theory: engaging critical realism and archaeological theory. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Webmoor, T. 2007. What about ‘one more turn after the social’ in archaeological reasoning? Taking things seriously. World Archaeology 39: 563–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438240701679619 Google Scholar
Witmore, C. 2014. Archaeology and the New Materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1: 203–46. http://dx.doi.10.1558/jca.v1i2.16661 Google Scholar