Archaeology and anthropology, despite their commonalities, have had a rather asymmetrical relationship, and the periodic attempts at closer collaboration resulted in mutual frustration. As both disciplines have recently undergone significant changes, however, with anthropology embracing more fully materiality and historicity, and archaeology engaging in contemporary research, often involving ethnography, the time is ripe for a new rapprochement. Archaeological ethnography, an emerging transdisciplinary field, offers such an opportunity. Archaeological ethnography is defined here as a transcultural space for multiple encounters, conversations, and interventions, involving researchers from various disciplines and diverse publics, and centered around materiality and temporality. It is multitemporal rather than presentist, and although many of its concerns to date are about clashes over heritage, this article argues that its potential is far greater because it can dislodge the certainties of conventional archaeology and question its ontological principles, such as those founded on modernist, linear, and successive temporality. 399
Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of assemblage, but in more recent years they have started problematizing it in interesting and innovative ways, beyond its common connotations of aggregation. Sociologists such as Manuel DeLanda and political philosophers such as Jane Bennett have been key influences in this move. These authors had adapted and modified the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In this article, an assemblage of sorts itself, I propose that we need to return to that original Deleuzian body of thinking and explore its richness further. Assemblages, temporary and deliberate heterogeneous arrangements of material and immaterial elements, are about the relationship of in-betweenness. I further suggest that sensoriality and affectivity, memory and multi-temporality are key features of assemblage thinking, and that assemblages also imply certain political effects. The omission of these features in the archaeological treatments of the concept may lead to mechanistic reincarnations of systems thinking, thus depriving the concept of its potential. Finally, I explore these ideas by considering communal eating and feasting events as powerful sensorial assemblages.
Assemblage is a concept common to a number of academic disciplines, most notably archaeology and art, but also geology and palaeontology. Archaeology can claim a special link to the term assemblage, though novel approaches to the concept of assemblage have recently been adopted from the fields of philosophy and political theory. These approaches, bracketed under the term ‘new materialism’, are discussed here. The introduction to this collection of papers outlines these approaches and evaluates their usefulness for archaeological practice and interpretation.
Recent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this ‘animal turn’, zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeology's ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdiscipline's firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of ‘subsistence’ and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human–whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbæk.
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