Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

Harris, Oliver

doi:10.1017/s0959774316000597

Cited by 97 publications

(52 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Although both terms can only briefly be considered here, it is useful to outline how they reframe approaches to archaeological evidence. Assemblages are what the world consists of, the myriad of interacting and animated elements (material, linguistic, symbols, representations) that form complexes, encompassing everything from molecules to whole-world systems and, importantly, expressions of those complexes (Crellin 2017; Delanda 2006; Deleuze 2009; Harris 2017; 2018). They are thus multiscalar and can be both managed or managing (or in Deleuzian terms, territorialized or deterritorialized: Deleuze & Guattarri 2013a).…”

Section: Theorizing Difference Positively: Towards An Analytical Frammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This geographical scale frames the analysis presented here, though it would be a mistake to suggest that this distribution did not also include regional differences, and that more refined study may lead to regional nuances in gendered experiences. There are few explicit considerations of sex- or gender-based identities in the published literature on the LBK, which, as Robb and Harris (2017) note, is common for the European Neolithic. This does not mean, however, that LBK scholars have ignored gender, or rather the categories of man and woman (e.g.…”

Section: Gender In the Early Neolithic: The Case Of The Lbkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

Bickle

2019

CAJ

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Gender in the European Neolithic has seen little debate, despite major scholarly interest in identity and social relationships. This article considers how gender operated in the Linearbandkeramik (LBK, c. 5500–5000 cal. bc), the first farming culture of central Europe. A new theoretical approach is developed from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and the feminist philosopher Braidotti, proposing that how difference and variation are conceived is an important element in how identity is experienced and performed. The concept of ‘difference-within-itself’ is introduced and applied to an assemblage of c. 2350 burials from the LBK via correspondence analysis. The results of this analysis are combined with variation in daily activities and health between male-sexed bodies and female-sexed bodies to argue that differences between males and females shaped lifeways in the LBK, providing different and varied ways of participating in social life. It is concluded that there was diversity and fluidity in female identities, while male identities had more limited possibilities and were subject to further social constraints. The implications of these gendered differences for models of LBK social organization are then considered.

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Section: Theorizing Difference Positively: Towards An Analytical Frammentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Gender In the Early Neolithic: The Case Of The Lbkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

Bickle

2019

CAJ

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“…An assemblage is the coming together and interactions of a heterogenous and nonhierarchical group of entities described by Bennett (p. 23) as "ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts... living, throbbing confederations" [1], constantly in flux or, as Harris (p. 90) describes, "in a state of becoming" [24]. The constituent parts of the assemblage are multiscalar [25], from the micro (such as microbes and bacteria) to the macro-not simply the human agent or a body of water, but even to the scale of human communities, overarching political systems, even the state, thus illustrating how tangible material entities and the immaterial might cohere to coproduce assemblages [26]. Key to understanding an assemblage is that it, as DeLanda observes (p. 2, my italics), 'actively links these parts together by establishing relations between them' [27].…”

Section: Introduction: a New Materialist Approach To Past Environmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Steel

2018

Land

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This paper examines how water shaped people's interaction with the landscape in Cyprus during the Bronze Age. The theoretical approach is drawn from the new materialisms, effectively a 'turn to matter', which emphasises the very materiality of the world and challenges the privileged position of human agents over the rest of the environment. The paper specifically moves away from more traditional approaches to landscape archaeology, such as central place theory and more recently network theory, which serve to separate and distance people from the physical world they live in, and indeed are a part of; instead, it focuses on an approach that embeds humans, and the social/material worlds they create, as part of the environment, exploring human interactions within the landscape as assemblages, or entanglements of matter. It specifically emphasises the materiality and agency of water and how this shaped people's engagement with, and movement through, their landscape. The aim is to encourage archaeologists to engage with the materiality of things, to better understand how people and other matter co-create the material (including social) world.Land 2018, 7, 104 2 of 16 with which they interacted. This shift in perspective actively embeds humans within the material environment, and draws attention to how human agency is constituted by the matter with which it engages. This is a recursive relationship: matter equally responds to, acts with, and even directs human agency, both enabling and provoking certain responses from the human actor. Therefore, although this approach questions the dominant, privileged position of human agents, it does not advocate that we cease searching for people and their actions within the archaeological record. Indeed, the new materialisms perspective potentially provides a middle ground between empirical, science-based archaeologies and social archaeology [5], bridging the intellectual gap that has developed between studies of the environment and artefacts: the former traditionally as a resource to be exploited and mastered, and the latter as objects created by, belonging to, and imbued with meaning by people. Central Places, Networks, or New Materialisms? People in the LandscapeIn this paper, I address the interactions of people with, and within, the Bronze Age landscape of Cyprus. Previously, archaeological studies of settlement and landscape have drawn upon central place theory and network theory. Central place theory [6] looks at political and economic relationships of settlements within a wider rural territory, specifically identifying locales that serve as the economic, sociopolitical, and ideological hub. There is an understanding that these are urban in character and have a centralised administrative role, such as the collection of taxes. Jimenez and Garcia (p. 85) [7] provide us with several criteria for the archaeological identification of a central place. This should be the largest site in the region, dominating it administratively, economically, and physically (presumably through ideo...

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“…In contrast to Fowler (2013b, 53-63) and Oliver Harris (2017), who argue that assemblages can become increasingly larger, differing in size according to scale (we reduce such assemblages to their constituent entanglements and term the largest entanglements the meshwork (figure 2)), we maintain that they persist as principally local and historically contingent phenomena bounded by events and the situated practices of everyday life. Delimiting time in the past, nonetheless, as indicated above, is an enormously difficult task for archaeologists.…”

Section: Reassembling Assemblages Of Practicementioning

confidence: 64%

Assemblages of practice. A conceptual framework for exploring human–thing relations in archaeology

Antczak¹,

Beaudry²

2019

Arch. Dial.

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In this paper we propose the conceptual framework of the assemblage of practice as an effective middlerange heuristic tool that bridges deep theory and the data available to archaeologists. Our framework foregrounds vibrant things as opposed to static objects, and sympathetically articulates the current concepts of entanglement, correspondence and assemblage. To us an assemblage of practice is a dynamic gathering of corresponding things entangled through situated daily and eventful human practice. Once reassembled by comprehensively and critically marshalling all the evidentiary lines available to archaeologists today, the assemblage of practice becomes a powerful analytical tool that illuminates changes, continuities and transformations in human-thing entanglements, and not only their impacts on local and short-term sociocultural developments, but also their repercussions on phenomena of much larger spatiotemporal scale. Our goal is to present archaeologists with a pluralistic, integrative and evolving middle-range framework that pays close attention to terminological precision and theoretical clarity and is conceptually accessible and widely applicable.

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Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology

Cited by 97 publications

References 33 publications

Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

Thinking Gender Differently: New Approaches to Identity Difference in the Central European Neolithic

Watery Entanglements in the Cypriot Hinterland

Assemblages of practice. A conceptual framework for exploring human–thing relations in archaeology

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