Notes on the Life History of a Pot Sherd

Abstract

This article discusses various life history approaches in archaeology: short life histories study the lives of things in the past (until they end up in the ground), long life histories study these lives going on until the present. Both approaches share the assumption that although people are free to give to a thing any meaning they want, their material essence necessarily remains unchanged. As an alternative, I present an ethnographic approach, studying the ‘life’ of a pot sherd on an excavation project. All the thing’s properties and characteristics, including its material identity and age, are taken to be the outcome of processes taking place in the present. The data presented shows in some detail how ‘momentary, fluid and flexible’ archaeological classifications and interpretations of material culture are. It emerges that the material identities ascribed to things are not their essential properties but the result of specific relationships of people and things: their very materiality is potentially multiple and has a history.

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