On the object of archaeology

Abstract

The paper ponders the object of archaeology, called here ‘the archaeological’. It argues that the existence of such an object is a necessary premise of the field and that ultimately it is on this object that the validity of all claims and arguments must rest. The paper suggests that the archaeological be conceived as a cultural phenomenon that consists in being disengaged from the social, an understanding that positions archaeology as a counterpart to the social sciences and the humanities, rather than a member in the same milieu. The first part of the paper focuses on the position of the archaeological with reference to the concepts of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’, which eventually leads us to a confrontation between archaeological statics and the dynamics of the world. Efforts to justify and understand archaeological statics consequently lead to the recognition of a constitutive distinction between buried and non-buried conditions, upon which the differentiation of the archaeological from the social is established.

A Case for Buried Culture: From an Unknown Known to a Known Unknown

“…Thus, to bury an object is to consign it to the subsurface, locating it beyond our senses and outside the sphere of social operations. The effectiveness of this procedure is readily illustrated in cemeteries, the idea of buried treasure, and the surprise of accidental archaeological discoveries [23]. Thus, landfilling is a remarkably straightforward and simple method to undo waste.…”

“…Thus, it seems that whatever social and conceptual venues are available to us, they persistently fail to capture the landfill as an instance of Buried Culture (i.e., a physical subsurface, posthuman cultural being): our concepts and reasoning are incompatible with it. They are incompatible because, as an instance of Buried Culture, the landfill consists in its a-sociality-being divorced from people, institutions, and the incessant circulations of resources and values [23]-while the concepts we bring to bear on it are inherently social. Consequently, when we apply these notions to Buried Culture, our sight is inevitably deflected, mistaking the known known (i.e., the socially constituted landfill) for the unknown known (i.e., the posthuman instance of Buried Culture), either confusing the frame for the object (the label for the substance) or a reconstructed past for the tangible present.…”

New Digs: Networks, Assemblages, and the Dissolution of Binary Categories in Anthropological Archaeology

“…The aforementioned studies see artifacts in terms of how they mediate social interactions. But they stop short of claiming that these things are agentive, as suggested in many archaeological renderings of assemblage theory or object‐oriented ontology (see Bray ; Cipolla ; Harrison‐Buck and Hendon ; Jervis ; for other recent views of material culture and archaeological objects, see Chazan ; Nativ ). Though archaeologists who adopt such theories draw from different philosophical sources (often DeLanda , ; Deleuze and Guattari ), the concept “assemblage” remains center stage, typically referring to the set of things, people, and organisms that make up a social context (e.g., Skousen ; Swenson ; Van Dyke ).…”