In attending to an example of symmetrical archaeology, I will, ever so briefly, elucidate the sociotechnical web associated with the excavation of a feature from Çatalhöyük. Rather than separate the humans (excavators, laboratory specialists, local workers, project managers, goddess community members, etc.) from the instruments and media they work with and the things they unearth, I will detail their entanglement. My aim is to begin down the crooked path of re-characterizing our relationships with the material world through the intimacies of archaeological practice.

15/08/96, Roger Matthews records events of the day during the excavation of ‘Building 1’ in a diary for the Çatalhöyük website. So many millions of points of entry to such a detailed excavation, but I was brought here by the arrangement of diary entries on the official Internet site (they began these in 1996). Certainly, the position of Matthews as the ‘Building 1’ team leader (the leader tells me what interesting activities others further down the chain of command are performing), the proximity of this well transcribed day when a ‘major discovery’ occurs to the beginning of the list of diary entries covering the season, and my need for a speedy example also helped to bring me to this point.

While in the process of removing ‘large sheets of fallen wall plaster’ from an area denoted as ‘Space 71,’ Gavin exposes a section of a bucranium with attached horn. Unfortunately, Roger forgets to credit the mundane actants which aid Gavin in this endeavor. But, to be sure, delicate trowel work, perhaps with the aid of an agile dental pick, depending on which instrument is mobilized, would have been called for here. A complex, slow, and tedious negotiation must have ensued between high-grade steel (whether the trowel is WHS, Marshalltown, or some generic brand makes a difference), the silty clay soil (7.5 YR 4/6 a standardized color code provided with the aid of a Munsell color chart), and fragments of yellow-white plaster. This transformation of the potentially plaster covered bucranium (denoted as feature 19, (F19)) and its immediate context to a suitably hygenic state is brought about by the entry of other instruments and media into the process.

Along with the excavator, brooms, dustpans, buckets, tapes, pencils, unit sheets, stadia rod (generally10 to 15 feet long, 3 to 5 inches wide, and about 3/4 inch thick), dumpy level, and eventually, once all the unsightly particles of dust have been removed, the scale and camera have a part to play in this transformative process. During this excavation other actors enter into and out of the scene. Gavin must remove a portion of an excavation baulk that he (‘he’ as a collectivity encompassing pencil, paper, drawing board) must first transcribe into a 2-dimesional plan.

Laboratory specialists, other excavators and the team leader all enter into the exchange. Indeed, high volume funding contributes to this unique situation where the long distance between laboratories and archaeological site is reduced to but a few meters. These facilities contain a host of other personnel, instruments (optical equipment, measuring devices, computers, etc.) and media (various books and notes containing botanical and zoological comparanda, new laboratory forms, and so on) and, without doubt, all come together in the articulation of a bucranium and associated plaster inscribed as ‘Feature 19.’

The relational web of Çatalhöyük has become all the more complicated, by circulating every act of detour (delegation) in the chain of transformation back to material context (denoted as Space 71, Unit 1300) of the bull skull with horns. The upstream and downstream movement occurs from Space 71 to the labs, microscopes, and back again through an inscribed form to a Space 71, which has been re-characterized time and again through chains of inscribed translations that are very complex (the most recent translation occurred in 2000). These chains of translation connect up with those, which transpired at other times and in different places by virtue of media mobilized to facilitate this linkage. Mellaart’s 1967 publication of a ‘bull shrine’ (‘Figs. 8-9, 38-40, Pl. 28’) connects with the excavation of feature 19 in ‘Building 1’, in 1996. The displacement of a thing circulates back to effect the displacement of subsequent things.

This brief example of an event from the 1996 excavations at Çatalhöyük, thought not exhaustive, is symmetrical. The prime mover is not a single or number of humans taking the initiative and making an interpretation that this is bucranium potentially associated with a plastered bench. Rather, the prime mover is a distributed collective of people and things (instruments, media, and materials) translating the material world within a situated series of practices.

In the next Chapter I argue that in order to recognize the action of instruments, materials, and media in the articulation of knowledge concerning the material world, we must begin with our own disciplinary histories. In further developing the concepts of multiple fields and sociotechnical genealogy, the first portion of the chapter works through two case studies from the early nineteenth century. I argue that the instrumental collectives associated with the Napoleonic military geographer, William Martin Leake (1777 to 1860), and the French military Expédition Scientifique de Morée (1829-1831), are just as important and intimate to contemporary landscape practice in Greece today as much of what transpired in the intervening two centuries. The second half of the chapter details the enlistment of photography in archaeological practice of the nineteenth century as a faithful and dependable witness to the material world. This act of enlistment was critical to the making of as a professional discipline.

Return to: Two turns deserve a third: a symmetrical archaeology

Forward to: Chapter 2--Constituting the Field

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