Multiple fields & archaeological practice: Media and Materiality

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Mediating Archaeology

Within the archaeological process as demonstrated by the AEP, some form of textual referent, an ‘inscription,’ marks each of the gaps—these constituting moments of articulation—between the material world and the final publication volumes and multiple articles. As media are a central actant within the chain of transformation, I would like to consider them in more detail.

What are media? What do they do? Thus far I have treated media as the modes of articulation through which knowledge is mobilized, manifested, and materialized. I have used the term ‘media’ mainly to refer to two-dimensional, fungible, and superimposable inscriptions such as text, plans, maps, illustrations, etc (Latour 1986; 1999). And once again we may recall that the term inscription relates to all the modes of transformation ‘through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace’ (Latour 1999, 306). In archaeology media also include both archives and collections. In Chapter 2 I traced a few lines of the genealogy of archaeological media through several case-studies. Here I wish to further unpack the concept of media as it is both understood within the discipline and how I enroll it in this dissertation.

To claim that things have a stake in knowledge is directly to challenge the ‘hegemony of interpretation’ as discussed by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2004). While I will further qualify these assertions in what follows, I suggest that it might be profitable to suspend our interest in interpretation, which occupies a central position in the Humanities in general and most (but not all) of archaeology in particular (contrary to Hodder 1999, refer to Arnold 2003: 59). In its place I argue for media to be recognized as modes of engagement (Witmore 2004). I advocate a more general process of mediation; a process centered upon distributed, yet entangled entities; a process which attends to sociotechnical collectives.

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