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3. Engagements with Things: The Making of Archaeology
- University of California Press
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36 Histories of archaeology are typically compiled around key figures, traditions of thought or wider social processes. These histories, often rich in biographical details, philosophical influences, and social context, have provided insights into how and why archaeology came into being and on its subsequent development and configuration in the various parts of the world. These are all important and effective accounts, and they have been constitutive for the way we understand our disciplinary past. Thus we do not seek in this chapter to abolish the many excellent stories of archaeology. Our objective is rather to enlarge, nuance, and complicate these stories by addressing issues that are rarely accounted for when the disciplinary past is narrated. A common trope, although one encountered with more frequency earlier, has been to present the birth of archaeology and its subsequent development as primarily the product of gifted individuals; of great minds struggling for truth and order (Daniel 1950, 1967, 1976; KlindtJensen 1975; cf. the intellectual genealogy of O’Brien, Lyman, and Schiffer 2005). Clearly, some scholars deserve more credit than others, but at the same time, we should inquire into the conditions that make possible the achievements of these key figures. What made their ideas and practices successful? Which allies were mobilized; what alliances were forged along the paths to such achievement? Another and increasingly popular approach has been to explain the states of archaeological affairs as intimately related to social and political conditions and needs. chapter 3 Engagements with Things The Making of Archaeology The Making of Archaeology | 37 Again, this perspective has produced a number of studies concerning the dynamics of scientific engagements and the often implicit conditions grounding them (e.g. Trigger 2006 [1989]; Patterson 1995). However, when social and political macro-processes have been positioned as the primary movers, we should ask for the utterly specific interlocutors and connections that remain cloaked underneath such processes. How, for example, do the methods of stratigraphical excavation, sectioning a ditch, and seriation, the use of graph paper, cameras, and Munsell-color codes, and the interest in experiments and reconstructions relate to often overdramatized enterprises such as nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism (cf. Diaz-Andreu 2007)? We propose a different perspective. Without questioning either the acumen of the “big men” or the “social” context that contributed to their success, we seek rather to bring into view the many ordinary men and women with pencils, maps, trowels, and tripods in their hands (Callon and Law 1997). On the ground, hidden beneath the sociopolitical canopy, are humble things and instruments, networked people, libraries , funding agencies, review panels, professional organizations, museum magazines, collections, laboratories, and continually renegotiated standards of what constitutes scholarly and scientific knowledge. The aim of this chapter is to suggest how a recognition of these cloaked crowds may enable us to produce richer alternative accounts of how the discipline of things came into being, and how it has been stabilized into the ecology of practices (scientific and grounded) now recognized worldwide as archaeology. Needless to say, this chapter itself is not an attempt at creating the exhaustive account necessary to meet these aims. Given the scope of this book, our goal is the far more modest one of drawing attention to the many things involved in the making and “ontologizing ” of the archaeological discipline.1 Artifacts, Museums, and the Birth of Archaeology How and when did archaeology as a discipline come into being? The term “archaeology,” as Alain Schnapp has pointed out, was increasingly 1. For further work exemplifying more symmetrical accounts of archaeological history , see Lucas in press; Olsen and Svestad 1994; Shanks and Witmore 2010b; Witmore 2012a; Witmore and Buttrey 2008; also consider essays in Schlanger and Nordbladh 2008. 38 | Engagements with Things used in the first half of the nineteenth century to refer to the study of the material past, a shift in terminology from what had hitherto been labeled “antiquarianism,” corresponding to “a modification of the role and purpose of knowledge of the past” (1996, 275). More precisely, according to Schnapp, the defining criteria for archaeology rested upon a trinity of combined principles—typology, technological evolution, and stratigraphy. While it is difficult to overstate the importance of the relations between these key principles as discussed by Schnapp, we suggest an answer to this question is that archaeology came into being when it became “visible” as a distinct “ecology of practices.” The notion of an “ecology of practices,” as discussed by Isabelle Stengers (2005, 2010), implies a particular community and its unique...