From examinations of prehistoric burial to understanding post-industrial spaces and heritage practices, the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is gaining increasing importance within archaeological thought. Their concept of 'assemblages' allows us to explore the past in new ways, by placing an emphasis on difference rather than similarity, on fluidity rather stasis and unpredictability rather than reproduceable models. Assemblage Thought and Archaeology applies the notion of assemblage to specific archaeological case studies, ranging from early urbanism in Mesopotamia (...) to 19th century military fortifications. It introduces the concept of assemblage within the context of the wider 'material turn' in the social sciences, examines its implications for studying materials and objects and urban settlements, and explores its consequences for the practice of archaeological research and heritage management. This innovative book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students of archaeological theory and researchers looking to understand this latest trend in archaeological thought, although the case studies will also have appeal to those whose work focusses on material culture, settlement archaeology and archaeological practice. (shrink)

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to (...) reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

In the 19th century, ‘scientific archaeologists’ split from their antiquarian colleagues over the role that provenience (context) plays in the value of an artifact. These archaeologists focus on documenting an artifact’s context when they remove it from its original location. Archaeologists then use this contextual information to place these artifacts within a particular larger assemblage, in a particular time and space. Once analyzed, the artifacts found in a site or region can be used to document, to understand, and explain the (...) past. Given the central place of context for archaeological excavation, archaeologists have done everything in their power to combat the black market. Hoping to stem the tide, archaeologists have leveled attacks on those who excavate these materials, those who traffic in them, and those who purchase them. Unfortunately, despite decades of argument and legal wrangling, archaeologists have been unable to stop the black market. The purpose of this paper is to analyze this failure from the supply side (what archaeologists call looting) and to suggest better ways to engage other stakeholders to the benefit of most, if not all. (shrink)

In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the critical issue of representation, of how the gap between people and (...) the world can be bridged. In the last decade or so, however, archaeologists have begun to make a more significant challenge to these ideas, and have attempted to offer a critique of our enlightenment heritage that is ontologically, rather than epistemologically, inspired. Drawing on the manner in which assemblages allow for the vibrancy of matter, are non-anthropocentric, multiscalar and more-than-representational, this article argues that Deleuzian thought offers the best chance to rework our understanding of the past in this manner. This is explored through a case study of three scales of analysis of Neolithic Britain. (shrink)

The practice of mortuary archaeology often relies upon the examination of funerary assemblages in order to reconstruct socio-cultural changes among a group of people. This paper takes a closer look at the grave goods from two pairs of Iron-Age elite Lucanian tombs at the settlement of Roccagloriosa in order to detect how funerary ideology changed over time. From the evidence I argue that there was an evolution of aristocratic gentilician identity alongside the establishment of the newly formed Lucanian ethnos in (...) Southern Italy between the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. (shrink)

At base, cognitive archaeology is in the business of using the archaeological record as an inroad to the abilities and expressions of past human minds. This does important work: explaining assemblages and patterns in the record, reconstructing past societies and people, as well as testing and probing hypotheses about minds and their evolution. However, there is often a long bow to be drawn from material traces to cognition; archaeological interpretation is often underdetermined. Using “Hawkes’ ladder” as a foil (...) and drawing on two cases of Neandertal cognition (mourning and numeracy), this chapter argues that hypotheses concerning cognitive features are not beyond archaeological inference. However, such hypotheses are often “thin”: concerning the capacities of past minds, as opposed to specific meanings or functions. Nonetheless, establishing thin hypotheses is critically important for at least two reasons. First, many productive debates in archaeology are about the cognitive requirements behind specific material traces. Second, establishing thin hypotheses about capacities is often necessary for disambiguating more detailed ideas about meaning and function, or about evolutionary histories, which affords both exploring cognitive possibility and potentially finding ways of testing between these. Inferential strategies in cognitive archaeology then can progressively circumscribe narrower forms of underdetermination, constraining and exploring the space of cognitive possibility. (shrink)

Roman pottery from Thasos. New evidence on the economy. This study deals with a significant assemblage of pottery dating from the 1st century BC to the end of the 3rd century AD from the excavations of the French School of Archaeology at Thasos. Their quantitative and qualitative analysis, as well as their chronological and geographical context, has allowed the author to develop a new methodological approach to their study, and shed more light on the trade and exchange networks of Thasos. (...) The types of amphorae from this period are not well documented on Thasos. Following the current study, however, we are now able to draw a number of significant conclusions about the material, but more work needs to be done in order to further elaborate on the typology of locally-produced pottery in the Imperial Period. Furthermore, the study of the fine ware pottery has established a broad quantitative data set, and will enable us to assess the nature and extent of imports. (shrink)

Ideas of ‘distributed mind’ are invaluable to archaeology in explaining the intimate involvement of artefacts in human cognition. Much of the work in this domain, however, focuses on proximate interactions of very limited numbers of individuals and artefacts. This chapter argues that people need to broaden the understanding of distributed mind to encompass whole assemblages of artefacts spread across space and time; and that these assemblages can be best conceptualized as networks in which both objects and people are enfolded and (...) enacted. While such networks may exist to some extent in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras, it is with the Bronze Age that they really come to the fore, extending the scale of human action beyond the proximate like never before. Examples of this extensive socio-material differentiation are taken from the Aegean Bronze Age, with a focus on pottery. (shrink)

One of the major problems (or sometimes pseudo-problems) that archaeologists and historians encounter in the study of ancient cultures is the need to differentiate and to identify the sources of the various concepts, techniques, institutions, forms, designs, motifs, etc., that, at any given moment of time, form the constituent elements of the culture or cultural product to which they have turned their attention; or—to pose the question in its proper framework—to analyse the process of cultural formation inherent in the subject (...) of their study. Such considerations have a special significance for archaeologists, whose essential concern is with the often incomplete assemblages of material remains left behind by the cultures and civilizations of the past, and whose central task is to enumerate and reconstitute the structures and processes that were operative in the societies in question. The study of acculturation—culture change, cultural diffusion, “stimulus diffusion,” culture contact, etc.—has been part of the theoretical and empirical concerns of anthropologists and sociologists since some decades ago, and the subject of an old and now almost abandoned debate. While the terminology of the social sciences concerned with living societies can also be found in archaeological and historical discussion, such concerns have had inadequate application in the fields of archaeological and historical practice. What has dominated and, to a great extent, continues to dominate historical studies is what we might call “the ‘theory’ of influence” and its corollary, “the migration hypothesis.” Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that one of the leading aspects of the study of a past society or culture is the concern with the “parent” culture(s) which influenced it, or the search for the location of its “migratory origins.” While this is especially true of studies relating to the societies of the Third World, it is not exclusively so—as we see, for instance, in the case of European prehistory. The immediate epistemological sources of such approaches are not difficult to identify, being principally located in 19th century diffusionism and, as we shall see shortly, in colonial ideology. (shrink)

This article is the result of preliminary works to study the function of spaces and to contextualize the artifacts of the Insula of the comedians and its northern surroundings. For two of the rooms in the Insula, which have been interpreted as areas used for culinary preparations, the analysis of the archaeological data from the archives of the excavations led by Ph. Bruneau’s team between 1961 and 1965 —along with their outstanding published monograph (EAD 17)—, has enabled us to (...) assess the stratigraphic remains recorded during the excavations and to link assemblages of artifacts, particularly ceramics, to stratigraphic sequences. We present both the built structures and all types of ceramic assemblages (fine, coarse, amphorae, braziers) that remained in situ at the time of the abandonment of the settlement, with the aim of providing a special distribution of those objects and proposing a dating for this final occupation. (shrink)

Describing an algorithm can provide a formalization of a specific process. However, different ways of conceptualizing algorithms foreground certain issues while obscuring others. This article attempts to define an algorithm in a broad sense as a cultural activity of key importance to make sense of socio-cognitive structures. It also attempts to develop a sharper account on the interaction between humans and tools, symbols and technologies. Rather than human or machine-centered analyses, I draw upon sociological and anthropological theories that underline social (...) practices to propose expanding our understanding of an algorithm through the notion of ‘collective intentionalities’. To make this term clear, a brief historical review is presented, followed by an argumentation on how to incorporate it in an integral perspective. The article responds to recent debates in critical algorithm studies about the significance of the term. It develops a discussion along the lines of cognitive anthropology and the cognitive sciences, therefore advancing a definition that is grounded in observed practices as well as in modeled descriptions. The benefit of this approach is that it encourages scholars to explore cognitive structures via archaeologies of technological assemblages, where intentionalities play a defining role in understanding socio-structured practices and cognitive ecologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese ClassicsJohn S. MajorBefore Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Chinese Classics. By Edward L.Shaughnessy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 262. $19.95.The eight essays in this collection (six of them previously published) show the combination of boldness and erudition that is characteristic of all of Edward Shaughnes-sy's work. The results of his investigations (...) are always interesting and felicitously expressed, and if one sometimes resists following the author quite so far down the evidentiary and interpretive road as he himself is willing to go, the intellectual journey is always a rewarding one.The common thread in these essays is Shaughnessy's belief that the Chinese classics, although admittedly written in their final form at a time well after the era [End Page 314] to which they refer-that is, during the Warring States Period or even the Han—preserve much material that authentically refers to, and was originally written more-or-less contemporaneously with, events of the Western Zhou era. He adduces evidence from bronze inscriptions, archaeologically recovered texts, positional and calendrical astronomy, and other securely datable sources to argue for the authenticity of portions of the classics, notably the Book of Documents, the Book of Poetry, and the Book of Changes.Publication of these essays comes just when the antiquity of the classics is being challenged more vigorously than at any time since the "doubting antiquity" movement of the 1920s. In particular, the evidence presented by Bruce and Taeko Brooks and their associates in meetings of the Amherst-based Warring States Working Group tends to support a view not only that the classics were written down much later than the events they purport to describe (almost everyone agrees about that) but that much of the "historical" material in the classics is closer to legend than to fact, and may well represent later confabulation for purposes of political or philosophical advantage. Shaughnessy's Before Confucius and the Brookses' The Original Analects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) strikingly represent two poles of the contemporary disagreement about the nature and authenticity of the Chinese classics.As a charter member of the Warring States Working Group who has consistently dissented from its more radical antiquity-doubting positions, I am perhaps unusually well placed to comment on the questions of dating raised by Shaughnessy's work. It seems to me that the key to the synthesis that I suspect will form over the next decade or so is the nature of the archaeologically recovered texts of the Warring States Period that have emerged from the ground in such profusion in recent decades, and continue to do so. These attest to several unexpected things, including the extent to which texts were possessed, copied, and circulated at the time; the implied high level of literacy among the contemporary ruling class; the degree to which assemblages of texts from individual tombs seem not to represent schools, master-disciple lineages, or clear doctrinal or ideological groupings, but rather to testify to a strong eclectic tendency among the contemporary literate elite; and the degree to which recovered texts anticipate later received texts, but in variant and/or partial form (for example, the Guodian Laozi text, recognizably Laozi but a far cry from the complete, received Daodejing).In view of all this, it seems to me reasonable to say that on the one hand a fair amount of material may well have come down to later ages from the Western Zhou and Spring and Autumn periods (through many vicissitudes of copying, recitation, variation, repairs to broken and misarranged bundles of slips, and so on), to enter wide circulation as texts in the Warring States Period. On the other hand, the late Warring States and Han editors of the textual tradition that had come down to them collated, amalgamated, sorted, augmented, and otherwise shaped the texts to a somewhat larger degree than has sometimes been supposed, and it is extremely unlikely that any of the Chinese classics were in circulation in anything like their received form at the end of the Spring and Autumn periods. Thus, while I... (shrink)

The work synthesises in 26 monographic chapters the results of a six-years long (2012 – 2018) interdisciplinary international project whose aim was to present the state of knowledge on today’s Poland during the Migration Period, and to compare the evolution of its settlement with that of its neighbours. One of its main results – the accordance between the palynological evidence of the change of environment (extensive reforestation and drastic reduction of anthropogenic indicators) and the archaeological reconstruction of the change (...) of settlement (disappearance of the Przeworsk, Wielbark and other cultures of the Roman Period by the mid-fifth century) – conclusively confirms the often questioned verdict of a sudden severe depopulation of the lands between the Vistula and the Oder, similar to that revealed in the rest of Central/eastern Europe (disappearance of the Elbe and Chernyakhiv-Sântana de Mureş cultures). An entirely new perspective opened by the project is the survival of enclaves with contacts all round the compass (the Eastern Empire, the Merovingian West, the Danubian lands, Scandinavia, the Western Balts). None of them yielded Slavonic material, even the longest-lived one recently discovered at Gąski-Wierzbiczany in Kujawy, evidently one of the main centres of the European Barbaricum and in the third and fourth century the Roman army’s recruiting station, which continued till the early seventh century; this evidence (or lack of it) is the death-blow to the theory of a supposed continuity of settlement – and so of ethnicity, necessarily Slavonic – from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages. Through these enclaves, southern cultural influences reached Scandinavia during the Younger Germanic Iron Age; the one at the mouth of the Vistula seems to have been the earliest and greatest recipient of the Imperial solidi in the Baltic zone, from which they were redistributed to the Nordic lands. A sample of other topics: tracing the extent (quite limited) of the Hunnic presence north of the Carpathians; evidence on fugitives from Hermanaric’s realm, including what appears to be the earliest known assemblage of the Dančeny-Brangstrup horizon; the Migration Period among the Western Balts, neighbours and cultural cousins, who did not take part in the Völkerwanderung. In the end, two leitmotifs of the work, one pessimistic, the other optimistic: short-sightedness and harmfulness of the official persecutive policy, in Poland and the majority of other European countries, with regard to amateur metal detecting, which only makes priceless potential evidence disappear without a trace; material remains and relative written sources (in this case Iordanes and Procopius) reflect the same historical reality and can legitimately be used to support one another. (shrink)

Alison Wylie is one of the few full-time academic philosophers of the social and historical sciences on the planet today. And fortunately for us, she happens to specialise in archaeology! After emerging onto the archaeological theory scene in the mid-1980s with her work on analogy, she has continued to work on philosophical questions raised by archaeological practice. In particular, she explores the status of evidence and ideals of objectivity in contemporary archaeology: how do we think we know about (...) the past? Her other key interests include feminist initiatives in Anglo-American archaeology, and ethical conflicts in current archaeological practice. Kathryn Denning recently asked about her adventures in archaeology and academia and her thoughts on archaeology’s past, present, and future. (shrink)

This book starts from the premise that methodology has always dominated archaeology to the detriment of broader social theory.

This paper explores the politics of representing events in the world in the form of data points, data sets, or data associations. Data collection involves an act of seeing and recording something that was previously hidden and possibly unnamed. The incidences included in a data set are not random or unrelated but stand for coherent, classifiable phenomena in the world. Moreover, for data to have an impact on law and policy, such information must be seen as actionable, that is, the (...) aggregated data must show people both something they can perceive and something that demands interrogation, explanation, or resolution. Actionable data problematize the taken-for-granted order of society by pointing to questions or imbalances that can be corrected or rectified, or simply better understood, through systematic compilations of occurrences, frequencies, distributions, or correlations. The paper describes and analyzes three different modes of authorized seeing that render data on global environmental phenomena such as climate change both visible and actionable. It argues that the political force of environmental data compilations derives from the divergent epistemological standpoints and expert practices associated with producing views from nowhere, everywhere, and somewhere. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concept of the Earth plays a pivotal role in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking in two ways. First, the concept assumes a special importance in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Husserl via the fragment known as “The Earth Does Not Move.” Two, from this fragment, the Earth marks a key theme around which Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy revolves. In particular, it is with the concept of the Earth that Merleau-Ponty will develop his archaeologically oriented phenomenology. To defend this claim, (...) the paper unfolds in three stages. First, I provide a preliminary reading of Husserl’s fragment, focusing in particular on the co-constitution of body and Earth. Two, I turn to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretations of this fragment, especially in the lectures on nature and then in the later lectures on Husserl. From these varying interpretations, the germs of Merleau-Ponty’s archaeological phenomenology are conceived. Accordingly, in the final part of the paper, I claim that Merleau-Ponty’s account of the Earth is Husserlian insofar as it reinforces the primordial “ground (sol) of experience” but at the same time marks a departure from Husserl insofar as the Earth registers a brute or wild layer that resists phenomenology. (shrink)

Household & Family Religion in Persian-Period Judah: An Archaeological Approach. By José E. Balcells Gallarreta. Ancient Near East Monographs, vol. 18. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 192. $33.95.

Gangestad & Simpson provide a persuasive argument that both men and women have evolved conditional mating strategies. Their references to “ancestral” males and females are rather vague, which is unfortunate, as they seek to justify their arguments by invoking human evolutionary history. When one actually examines the evidence for human evolution further, more support for their arguments can be found, as predominant types of mating strategies are likely to have shifted in light of environmental and anatomical developments. We can also (...) see in the archaeological record evidence for a further dimension of strategic pluralism – the use of material culture to advertise good genes in some species of ancestral males. (shrink)

Scholars have thoroughly discussed the visual aspects of Foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, as well as his own emphasis on how sight functions and what contexts and conditions shape how we see and what we can see. Yet while some of the images and visual devices he uses are frequently discussed, like Las Meninas and the panopticon, his diagrams in The Order of Things have received little attention. Why does Foucault diagram historical ways of thinking? What are we supposed (...) to see and understand through these diagrams? To examine the role of the diagram in Foucault’s archaeological method, this paper provides a close reading of how the classical quadrilateral visualizes the structure, function, content, principles, and underlying assumptions of language and thought. In analyzing the diagram as a way for visualizing history, this paper demonstrates how Foucault enacts a new visual language that emphasizes the contingency of thought. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 44, Issue 4, Page 433-460, December 2021.

The present research used archaeological data, i.e., the data obtained from kamekan jar burials in the Mikuni Hills of the northern Kyushu area in the Mid- dle Yayoi period, to test the parochial altruism model. This model argued that out-group hate and in-group favor coevolved via prehistoric intergroup conflicts. If this model is accurate, such an out-group hate and in-group favor could be re- flected in the archaeological remains, such as pottery making; the more frequent intergroup conflicts are (...) and the more each group is opposed, the more independent and coherent each group will be and more evident cultural identity could be estab- lished within each group. We employed an elliptic Fourier analysis for the shapes of kamekan jar burials. We examined whether frequent intergroup conflicts in the period influenced kamekan jar pottery between subareas of the Mikuni Hills. The results suggested that the shapes of kamekan jar burials after the KIIIa type are slightly different between subareas, which is partially consistent with the model. However, the results do not support the model directly. (shrink)

There is deep ambivalence about analogy, both as an object of philosophical fascination and in contexts of practice, like archaeology, where it plays a seemingly central role. In archaeology there has been continuous vacillation between outright rejection of analogical inference as overtly speculative, even systematically misleading, and, when this proves un-tenable, various stock strategies for putting it 'on a firmer foundation'. Frequently these last are accomplished by assimilating analogy to more tractible (better warranted, more readily controllable) forms of inference, salvaging (...) respectability but at the expense, ironically, of reverting to a strategy of elimination. I have been struck by the parallels between this pattern of response and that typical of philosophy; the central question raised in both contexts is that of whether, or in what sense, there is any distinctively analogical form of inference and what sort of warrant (formal, methodological) accrues to it. In what follows I will assess two recent philosophical positions on this question, first in their own terms and then in consideration of archaeological uses of analogy. In this I hope to put the projects of justification themselves on a firmer footing. (shrink)

This article discusses issues related to the origins of media culture by concentrating on the invention of the kaleidoscope, and the early debates it incited. The kaleidoscope was invented by the Scottish scientist David Brewster and first publicly announced in 1817. This article is the first published element of a broader research project that discusses the changing meanings attached to the kaleidoscope during the past two hundred years. The author approaches the topic from a media archaeological perspective. Beside the (...) material kaleidoscopes, attention is paid to what the author calls “discursive kaleidoscopes” – the traces the kaleidoscopes left in cultural and textual traditions. (shrink)

The reconstruction of hominins’ cognitive evolution has always been a crucial but challenging task. Researchers from various disciplines have tried to approach this issue, among which British archaeologist Steven Mithen’s cathedral model is regarded as one of the earliest and most creative attempts. In this model, he proposed that the Neanderthal’s mind is like a cathedral with disconnected chapels. Specifically, Neanderthals possessed advanced social, natural history, technical, and even linguistic intelligence modules, but the first three modules are isolated from each (...) other, meaning they cannot effectively use the knowledge from one domain to address the issue of another domain. This article challenges his reconstruction of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacities by presenting multiple forms of archaeological evidence bearing on various kinds of cross-domain thinking that has arisen over the past two decades. (shrink)