Site Home > Multiple fields & archaeological practice > Two turns deserve a third: a s...
Key Pages
Christopher Witmore |As long as our archaeological tradition puts forth a thoroughly modernist outlook it will remain asymmetrical. While the empiricist/objectivists might wish to maintain neat separations, the interpretive school cannot help but point out a blind naïveté for denying the social and political influences on science or indeed not recognizing that interpretation lies behind everything (cf. Thomas 2004a). Reality cannot be grasped by maintaining a firm separation of entities in terms of subject/object, nor can it be understood by positing the material world exclusively for human consciousness and then admitting that reality is indeed both subjective and objective (Hodder 1999, 32 and 104). Archaeology’s commitment to an oversimplified epistemology has led us to continually exaggerate the very dualist divides that many wish to overcome. In order to bypass the modernist predicament we have to re-characterize the archaeological process in less reductionist ways (Latour 1988).
The problem manifests itself if one views our activity as that of building society from objects left behind. Archaeologists were handed this neat separation on a platter by our Modernist predecessors (Thomas 2004b). But the critical hinge is that we do not deal with things-in-themselves alone. We deal with material transformations of the events and activities of a collective of humans and nonhumans. The oppositions of modernist thought do not and cannot accommodate the complex interconnected webs and collectives of people and things by forcing such diverse entities into little boxes labeled either ‘subject’ or ‘object’ and then subsequently entering into ‘the boring alteration of humans to nonhumans and back’ (Latour 1994, 795).
Consider once again that ‘the field’ as the locus of data collection as opposed to the labs, studies, or archives, the supposed loci of analysis and interpretation, is a gross oversimplification of the process of knowledge construction. This separation fails to account for complexities of practice and the multiple connections that extend beyond the contexts of archaeological work. Moreover, it rests upon a mistaken singular ‘Great Divide’ between language and things. If we follow the twists and turns of archaeological knowledge production in practice then we realize that in place of a radical separation between the material world and language, archaeology in fact transposes many small gaps between the material world and our modes of documentation. Each small gap coincides with the individual steps, the multiple fields, of the archaeological process from field walking to drawing sections, taking photographs, sampling, measuring, narrating, etc. It is in this respect that archaeology should always be thought of as an ongoing event.
This thesis project actually leads to the suspension of any concern with epistemology, because as a relational approach I focus in on how archaeologists enter into particular ontological configurations with other entities in the production of knowledge on a regional scale. It is in this regard that the notion of the archaeological ‘field’ must be reclaimed, reconfigured, and redeployed. Specifically, over the course of the next two chapters I will address how knowledge construction is wrapped up in real-time engagements between archaeologists, instruments, and media. In so doing, I undermine the notion of ‘the field’ and articulate a notion of ‘multiple fields.’
Taking direction from science studies and empirical philosophy, and more specifically the work of Bruno Latour, I hold the complex interactions between people and things in archaeological knowledge production in symmetry. Latour, a sociologist and anthropologist of science, bypasses (as distinguished from ‘overcomes’) modernist divides altogether. In this process he abandons contradictory relics such as subject/object, nature/culture, mind/body and structure/agency by the wayside. While there are many other thinkers behind this endeavor—Michel Callon, Donna Haraway, John Law, Michel Serres, and Isabelle Stengers, to name others who have exerted some influence on my work, this dissertation works closely with Latourian thought, as the repercussions of his ideas for archaeology are significant. Essentially, Latour wishes to close the gap that separates ideas and people from materials and things. In place of this ‘Great Divide,’ he articulates mixtures, imbroglios, hybrids of humans and non-humans. This endeavor requires a whole suite of concepts that are not weighed down by the conceptual burdens of the modernist predicament. This dissertation will work through a few. Altogether, Latour draws attention, not only to how instruments and media have an active role in knowledge construction and thus effectively redistributes action to the realm of things, but also to how that process is entangled within other spheres of influence—social, political, personal, and so on.
So if we now consider the complex relations between the heterogeneous entities involved in the archaeological process, then one cannot attend to the practices advocated by the interlocutors behind framework archaeology, for example, without contextualizing the complex relational web, which situates the project (BAA financial support, openness between commercial and academic communities, scale and need for large and experienced workforce, etc.) and which is made up of human beings, materials, and things. I will detail this heterogeneous network of mixed entities through one final example.
Return to: Theory into practice—the interpretive turn in fieldwork
Forward to: A brief symmetrical example from Çatalhöyük
Multiple fields and archaeological practice Home