The Fragments of Modernity and the Archaeologies of the Future: Response to Gregory Jusdanis

"Ontologies of the present demand archeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past"

—Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, 2002 ¹

The broken pot, the pot in fragments, the scattered shards, is the image that Gregory Jusdanis's text leaves us with, along with the dilemma of whether to reconstruct the pot or display the fragments. The implication being that archaeology desires the reconstructed whole, whereas poets, some travelers and others perhaps, would find more awe and inspiration and mystique in the fragments and ruins, as many have done in the past. His final passage nicely and poetically sums up Jusdanis's edifice, whereby archaeology stands for science and knowledge, as opposed to the romantic inspirational desire of the traveler. Yet I want to complicate the picture we are left with, revisit some the ground he has covered, and perhaps, as an archaeologist, pick up some of the fragments from the ground, and attend much more carefully to their form, detail, historical and mnemonic weight.

Interestingly, the notion of the fragment is one of the recent preoccupations of archaeological thinking. While much of earlier archaeology was preoccupied with the restoration of the whole, the re-creation of missing parts, and the reconstruction of completeness, some of us, partly inspired by Oceanic ethnographies, have started thinking about the broken shards, figurines, bones, objects, and artifacts, in the recent or the remote past; some of these objects point to intentional fragmentation, and to their often wide circulation among people and communities, as tokens and talismans of human relationships, as devices that linked ("enchained") people over long spatial and temporal distances; ² at other times, these fragments may have acted as mnemonic objects that would have helped re-collect the fragments of memories, memories of events, ceremonies, and rituals; memories of people and places. ³

Moreover, the notion of archaeology as a science which strives to save the past and pursue the objective recovery of the truth, an image that emerges from Jusdanis's text, is one that has been heavily eroded, especially in the last two decades, and one that many of its practitioners will not recognize. For them, archaeology produces various pasts, out of the fragments and traces that have survived; this is a complex process of production, intricately implicated with processes of identity, politics, institutional power, disciplinary authority, and history. Archaeologists do not just save and reconstruct: they select and valorize, but also ignore and destroy; they produce material realities, but they also tell stories; they too, like poets, are cultural producers working in the field of representation. ⁴

This reexamination of archaeology's ontology has also led to the excavation of the discipline's genealogical and epistemic foundations. As Jusdanis implies, archaeology has been a key device of capitalist modernity, but one which possesses distinctive features that deserve closer examination. Even before the establishment of archaeology as an autonomous discipline, however, people were not indifferent to the material traces of the past; contrary to Jusdanis's claim that they showed "no interest in excavating the earth for its cultural treasures, other than the pursuit of the riches in graves," recent discussions have shown that in many different contexts starting from antiquity, ruins of the past aroused intense interest in people, who invested them with their own memories, meanings, and associations, often incorporated them in their own material and social lives, and produced their own narratives and stories about them. In other words they produced their own archaeologies. ⁵ Of course, archaeology as an autonomous discipline, a European nineteenth-century invention, established its own discourse, narrative techniques, institutional practices, and authority, often incorporating some of the premodern meanings, but shaped decisively by the national imagination; archaeology produced its object of study (the archaeological "record") in the same way that national imagination produced its object of desire, the nation-state. Travelers in the classical lands of the Mediterranean, who, for...