Culture/Archaeology
– the dispersion of a discipline and its objects

Chapter in
Ian Hodder (editor)
Archaeological Theory Today: Breaking the Boundaries
Blackwell Polity

archaeology – two cultural locales
The museum and landscape – these are two of archaeology’s cultural locales.
Most of us will have made a visit to one of the great international museums. Somewhere like the Louvre in Paris. Its galleries display artifacts, mostly old, and many from archaeological sites. They are on display because, by some at least, they are considered worthy of attention. They have exhibition value. Why? It is difficult to dissociate the museum from Art, from artifacts held to represent aesthetic and cultural achievement (Shanks and Tilley 1992, Chapter 4). The finest examples of their kind. Paradigms. For people everywhere to admire, wonder at. And here in an old royal palace in Paris, Walter Benjamin’s capital of the nineteenth century (Benjamin 1982).

The Venus de Milo stands ritually encircled by visitors, solitary, punctuating the pattern in the marble floor of the gallery. It was acquired after a scramble on the part of several aristocrats to grab it after it first turned up on a beach of a Greek island. It was an adventure story rivaling those of Indiana Jones (Shanks 1996,page 150). Winckelmann, aesthete and art historian loved sculpture like this, though he didn’t know the piece, and was more interested in Roman copies of Greek sculpture. But he epitomises that romantic shift to a new way of looking and appreciating art and the Greek (Shanks 1996, pages 56–8). In a fundamental reevaluation of art history and the cultural significance of art works, he reenergised the classical tradition. In a lyrical prose he celebrated the aesthetic wonders of fragments left in the Vatican collection. His archaeology was simultaneously historical and transcendent. With Winckelmann we look back to the Greeks and their works, or what is left of them, to experience those human cultural values which escape time itself. We still live with the remains of this cultural ideology of hellenism (Morris 1994).
And the tension between historical provenance and universal value is there also in works from times other than ancient Greece. Islamic and Chinese ceramics may fill galleries too, on the basis of their attestation to the same transcendent cultural values.

Places then of cultural pilgrimage, these museums in the capital cities of the modern nation state (Horne 1984). Cultural treasure houses built upon the desire to acquire and own a transnational heritage the right to which modern imperial states considered theirs by virtue of global reach and power. So often this heritage has been seen as Graeco-Roman. The nineteenth century European states competed to acquire the best; their museums are less able to do so now, but the art market remains a determining force in the field of cultural value, dominated by corporate and institutional capital, such as the immense resources of the Getty Foundation.

The art object is at one interface of archaeology and culture. But another romantic, Herder, and again at the end of the eighteenth century, complained of this association of cultivation with universal human value or progress and western culture, writing instead of cultures plural, in an appreciation of the works and values of other societies. This anticipates an anthropological sense of culture as way of life. It was probably Tylor’s book Primitive Culture of 1870 which formalised this use, though tying it to evolutionary models of human development, from primitive to civilised.

Ethnic or national identity is also found on display in the museum, signified by archaeological artifacts. The Venus de Milo is simultaneously for all humankind, and (ancient) Greek. We find galleries in the Louvre of Roman, Egyptian, Celtic, Assyrian works (of art), alongside French, Italian, British painting and scuplture. Behind the classification and ordering is the equation of cultural work and some essential quality of identity.

Not in the Louvre, but in many other museums, we may be able to look upon the works of peoples categorised according to a more specialised and archaeological meaning of culture. Gordon Childe is associated with this sense of culture as recurring sets of associated artifacts or traits held to represent a people or society (discussed by Renfrew and Bahn, 1996 443-5). It emphasises the expressive or stylistic components of identity over issues of value. In prehistoric archaeology and in the absence of written sources, these cultures may be named after ‘type’ sites, regions or artifacts – the Mousterian culture of the middle palaeolithic period (after le Moustier); the bronze age Beaker folk (after a type of ceramic vessel); the TRB (Trichterbecker) culture group (another class of ceramic); the Wessex culture (a region of southern England). That such ‘culture historical’ interpretation is now academically discredited has not been fully accepted. Many archaeologists still orient their work around this concept of culture. Culture historical classification of archaeological remains, particularly prehistoric, is still the norm.
For archaeologists it is not enough that their collections of artifacts make cultural sense, whether it is in terms of artistic value or marker of identity; they must also be linked to a place, a setting. The key term here is landscape and the pivotal concept mediating archaeology and culture is identity.
The equation between people, their culture and the land they inhabit is central to the time-space systematics of the discipline of archaeology, as just outlined. It is an equation crucial to the coherence of the new nation states of modern Europe. It is encapsulated in the cultural attachment to land so characteristic of romantic nationalism.

Johannes Fabian (1983) has convincing clarified the dependence of anthropological knowledge upon travel and encounters with other cultures in other lands. This confrontation between western enlightenment reason with a cultural (and colonial) other was transposed upon time and history – those cultures that help us understand who we are live over there and back then, while we are here and now.

But landscape is a complex articulation of inhabitation, place and value. It is a term as complex and ideologically charged as culture (Williams 1976, pages). It should not be forgotten that the roots of the term still lie in the notion of an aesthetic cultivation of the view or aspect. Landscape painting and architecture improves upon nature according to particular aesthetic or cultural values. This submission of place to reason and imagination imbricates time and history. The landscape genre in the hands of Claude Lorrain and Poussin, the myriad of landscape painters from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, landscape architects like Repton, Uvedale Price and Capability Brown, was always explicitly or implicitly a relationship to history and sensibility to be found in land itself (Smiles 1994). History – ancient monuments and ruins, classical, medieval, prehsitoric. Sensibility – attitudes to the land which refer back to ideologies of the Roman campagna and classical pastoral. History and sensibility – a celebration of the rural, often over the urban and industrial, those scarring features of modernity.

Stephen Daniels (1993) has shown how the aesthetic of landscape has been central to the construction of national identity in Britain and the United States. Powerfully affective, it provides a deep cultural milieu, mapping out values and attachments. Landscape provided a basis for locating new communities of nationhood in a kind of collective cultural memory of belonging. Pierre Lora (1986) has written of lieux de memoires, places of memory. Memory has come to need the earth; for there are places where memories are stored, places which carry the mark of time. These are monuments and landforms which give history and shape to human communities, nations included. Consider, for example, the legacy of this concept of landscape in Britain. The English countryside is one of interwoven traces and layers of previous inhabitation, punctuated by monuments and the relics of times gone by; a particular cultural ecology of narratives, plants and creatures, geology, language, music, customs, architectures, traces, archaeological sites and finds. It is where the English belong and find their roots, though others may appreciate its beauties.
Those tensions noted in the concept of culture, between universal human values, the qualities of particular cultures, and the aspiration to cultivated intellectual or artistic activity, are here present also in landscape. Images of land the world over, photographs and paintings, are generated from the same aesthetic models. A place may qualify for the status of world heritage site on the basis of universal criteria or values applied without reference to geography or time. Yet narratives of identity may be considered to lie in the land itself, in an attachment of land, language, culture and people. In spite of social mobility and diaspora, land may still provide a basis for belonging, and the notion of aboriginal folk culture, deeply rooted in place, remains potent (see the complementary arguments in Chris Gosden’s chapter).

the concept of culture – a contested field
It was only in the eighteenth century that the concept of culture began to acquire its contemporary meanings (Williams 1976, page). It first referred to cultivation, to being cultivated, possessing civilised traits and values. As indicated, it was only later that culture came to have a plural sense of a way of life, a sense which led to its anthropological use, formalised in the discipline in the twentieth century (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952).

Association with value has been retained in a recruitment of the term in ideological positioning associated with the class organisation of the modern industrial state. Many intellectuals and academics from Thomas Arnold onwards have set up an opposition between the high cultural values of a canon of works, often entrusted to an educated elite, and the cultural artefacts of and produced for the industrial working classes, considered transient. It is certainly the case that more and more resources have been dedicated to the production of popular cultural artefacts. Adorno and Horkheimer (1979 [1941]) coined the term culture industry to refer to this articulation of economic and cultural interest. Dominated by the production of Americanist cultural goods by transnational mega-corporations like Sony and Disney, the culture industry spans the globe and popular consciousness. Mass or popular culture has often been derided or considered as an ideological expression of the false consciousness of the industrial masses (contra Swingewood 1977). It is the issue, for example, of the difference and respective values or qualities of a play by Shakespeare and an episode of the American TV series Baywatch, reputedly the most watched TV program in the world. The prehistorian Grahame Clark explicitly invoked the distinction when he proposed (1979, 1983) a direct correlation in human history between great cultural work and elite social groups, the corollary being that egalitarian societies invest in the lowest common cultural denominator and fail to produce cultural works of lasting value.

This highlights the role of the cultural critic (Adorno 1981). Some intellectuals and academics have seen their role as cultural policemen or guardians, upholding values, judging and condemning work not considered worthwhile. This implies a position for the critic outside of society. Other cultural critics have reacted against the polarisation of art and popular culture. It has also been a significant issue in modernist fine and applied arts, focusing upon the nature of the art object. It is encapsulated in the disputes over the value of some gallery pieces that make no reference to traditional artistic media, skills and qualities. In 1917, as one of the founding acts of modernism, Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in a gallery exhibition. This could be considered a work of art, in that it was an artist that placed the artifact in an art gallery. But, of course, this ‘readymade art’ provoked a hostile reaction from those who believed art was their high culture. The general point is that when culture is understood as a discourse of excellence, preserving timeless and universal human treasures, it actually translates class and other forms of social inequality into cultural capital. This is a form of value monopolised by certain elite groups, such as those who patronise Art and its galleries. Hence criticism of cultural value has raised awareness of ethnocentrism and the involvement of social power in the construction of knowledge and understanding. So in the museum it is often western culture that is valued and on display and other cultures are seen through western eyes.

Cultural Studies grew as an interdisciplinary field from the 1950s, bracketing value under an anthropological suspension of judgement, instead of polarising high and low culture. This opens up the study of all kinds of cultural artifacts other than those claimed as works of art. So Richard Hoggart pioneered with his study of popular working class culture in Britain (1957). No longer were only great works worthy of study and interpretation (Turner 1996). This has led to a broad interdisciplinary interest in culture operating under a definition such as the following. Culture: the social production and reproduction of meaning, the social sphere of making sense which unites production and social relations; a field of signification through which a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored. The interest in systems of meaning and signification is part of the ‘linguistic turn’ in the humanities and social sciences to issues of culture and communication (for anthropology, Leach 1976).

archaeology and the concept of culture
Archaeology may make references to art and humanity. It has an interest in classical civilised culture, primitive other or older cultures. The discipline has developed its own culture concept uniting material relics with peoples of the past. Archaeology has thus been an important part of the interplay and evolution of the references and meanings of the culture concept.
More generally, it is clear that archaeology and anthropology were central to the cultural development of the advanced capitalist nation states of the nineteenth century.

Political revolution (Britain in the seventeenth century, France and the United States at the end of the eighteenth) and its threat accompanied the forging of a new form of political unity through the industrial nation state (Hobsbawm 1990). From the beginning nation states have been founded upon a fundamental tension. On the one hand they have invoked, as unifying force and legitimation, enlightenment ideas of popular will and sovereignty, universal human rights. And the form of the nation state itself has been exported globally from its origins in early modern Europe. On the other hand they are all locally circumscribed, each independent of similar polities on the basis of regional, ethnic, linguistic, and/or national identity and history (Turner 1990). Archaeology and anthropology, disciplines formalised at the beginning of the nineteenth century, offered powerful ways of working on these new cultural issues.

A crucial factor in ideas of national identity was the imperialist and colonial experience of travel and other cultures (Pratt 1992). Both archaeology and anthropology have been powerful media in these cultural geographies of the imagination. Ethnography confronted the industrial west with its alternate and provided a foil, difference, against which western nations might understand themselves. Archaeology provided material evidence of folk roots of the new state polities, while also attaching the imperial states to the cultural peaks of history measured by artistic values and encapsulated in objects acquired, often from abroad, for the museums. This has been one of the main cultural successes of archaeology – to provide the new nation states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with histories and origin stories rooted in the material remains of the past (Díaz-Andreu and Champion 1996). Myths of ancestry were articulated in new national narratives, stories of belonging and common (civilised) community (the latter particularly identified with Graeco-Roman culture). Both archaeology and anthropology provided specific symbols and evidences used to create exclusive and homogeneous conceptions of identity rooted in national traditions, conceptions of race, ethnicity and language. Moreover archaeology provided an extraordinary immediacy apparently accessible without academic training – finds which could be displayed to speak for themselves in the new museums, the cultural treasure houses of imperial power, repositories of ancestral remains. Many archaeologies around the world continue to perform this role of providing material correlates for stories and myths of identity and belonging (Trigger 1984, Kohl and Fawcett 1995, Olivier and Coudart 1995; Meskell 1998).

culture contested
Conceptions of modern identity are still dependent upon the idea of the nation state and upon the formation of nation states in the nineteenth century. But recent history shows clearly their instability. They often have no obvious cultural justification in geography, history, race, or ethnicity. Nation states are social constructions (Anderson 1991; Bhabha 1990). Growing out of the demise of old empires, nation states have frequently been connected with enlightenment notions of human rights and rational government (democracy and representation), relying on these to unify people around a common story of their national identity. Such unified history and culture has always failed to cope with diversity. The distinction between nation and nation state has frequently collapsed into contention, with ideas of self determination and freedom, identity and unity colliding with the suppression of diversity, domination and exclusion that overrides a genuine egalitarian pluralism (Chatterjee 1993).

The tension between universal political and cultural forms and values, and local cultural textures has shifted emphasis in recent decades. Nations states now have less power and agency, which is in stark contrast to the ever-increasing influence of structures and movements of corporate and transnational capital. In a period of rapid decolonisation after the second world war this globalisation is about the transformation of imperial power into supra-national operations of capital, communications and culture. This postcolonial world is one of societies, including new nation states, that have escaped the control of the empires and ideological blocs of western and eastern Europe. An ideological unity is engineered through the culture industry, the mass media, and mass consumption – a predominantly American culture. And the integrated resources of the global economy lie behind this (Curti and Chambers 1996; Featherstone, Lash and Robertson 1995; Featherstone 1990; Spybey 1996).
But with international capital, global telecommunications and world military order, the nation state continues to be a major structural feature of this postmodern scene. It remains a major focus of regional cultural identity. The postcolonial state is heavily and ironically dependent upon notions of the state and nation developed in Europe, and so too it is dependent upon the same sorts of ideological constructions of national identity developed through history, archaeology and anthropology (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Hence a key tension or contradiction in globalisation involves the fluid free market between nations, epitomised in multinational and corporate capital and based upon ideologies of the free individual operating beyond boundaries of any one polity, and ideologies of difference, ideologies of local identity. Here the nation, nation state and nationalism remain potent.

And here archaeology remains a vital cultural factor, in the context too of ideas of heritage. For the crucial cultural issue is the ways local communities engage with these processes of globalisation. And the ways they do compare with the ways colonised communities dealt with imperial colonial powers; the interpenetration of local and global cultural forces is a feature of modernity since at least the nineteenth century. It is not simply a one-way process of influence, control, dissemination and hegemony, with an American western homogenised culture taking over and supplanting local identity. It is not just top down dominance, but a complex interplay of hegemony, domination and empowerment. The key question or issue is the way external and internal forces interact to produce, reproduce and disseminate global culture within local communities. To be asked is to what extent the global is being transformed by peripheral communities; to what extent, by appropriating strategies of representation, organisation and social change through access to global systems, are local communities and interest groups empowering themselves and influencing global systems.

Here then is a broad context for the interface of archaeology and culture. There is the part archaeology plays in the construction of national and cultural identities (Rowlands 1994). A key is an encounter with materiality and regional focus, the ruins of a local past, setting the homogenisation of processes like nationalism, colonisation and imperialism against the peculiarities of history and geography. This is about the relation between local pasts and those global methods, frameworks and master narratives which may suppress under a disciplinary and cultural uniformity the rich pluralism and multicultural tapestry of peoples and histories. So what is now termed ‘world archaeology’ (in relation to the mission of the World Archaeological Congress) implies questions of whether genuine local pasts (Shanks 1992, page 109), implicit in local and distinct identities, are possible. Archaeology’s focus on obdurate remains suggests the possibility of a material resistance to the ideologies of a homogeneous world uniform in its accommodation to the commodity form and principles of the global market.

Theories of culture connect with this postcolonial and postmodern scenario. Conspicuously it has not been possible to locate culture in essential or universal values or identities, yet any concept of culture remains inseparable from value and identity. Culture is therefore best treated as something which is constructed, emergent from social practice, and changing; it is not a unified body of symbols and values. Historian E.P.Thompson preferred to think of culture less as a whole way of life, more of a ‘whole way of struggle’. Being about values and identities, often in crisis in a modern world of change and dislocation, invoked in ideologies of the state and the manoeuvres of class hegemony, culture is always political and contested.

Definitions and uses of the concept vary quite considerably, as I have tried to show. This is part of its contested character. Less something that is easily defined, culture is a field of debate, a field of discourse. Accordingly cultural criticism and interpretation may be treated as historically specific and interventionist, raising consciousness, forging new cultural meanings, provoking dispute, rather than standing back detached behind eternal verities.
This discursive component is prominent in poststructuralist cultural critique. The unity of the human subject has been challenged, the individual, subjectivity and agency decentred and dispersed, through language, text and discourse. Primary foundational narratives and ideologies have been subject to withering critique. Two targets relevant to discussion here have been essential and proprietorial notions of culture and identity. Our identities are not something inherited or acquired, as essential qualities of our character or life, but are perpetually reconstructed in relations with others and with cultural artefacts. Postcolonial theory, closely allied to poststructuralist thought, has, as Gosden shows in Chapter *, similarly attacked these same notions of culture. This has occurred through its focus on culture contact in colonial settings, the insistence that contact and border zones do not display the sort of frictions and relations we are led to expect from theories of fixed, stable and coherent cultural identities.

Anthropological and archaeological theories of culture lend strong support to this thesis of hybridity and articulation. Woolf has raised profound questions of the stability and coherence of cultural identity in the Roman Empire. Anthropologist James Clifford (1988, 1997) has elegantly explored syncretic culture in his studies of art, travel, tourism and identity. And the traditional Childean concept of culture has been displaced by appreciations of the subtleties of style, function and artifact design (after Shennan 1978; Conkey and Hastorf 1990, Carr 1995).

To return to that other cultural locale of archaeology, consider how landscape is a syncretic field. The space of landscape is at once cultural and natural, connecting values, modes of perception and representation, experiences, artifacts, histories, natural histories, dreams, identities, narratives, memories in networks of cultural ecology. Everything that goes with living in a place. Though historically layered and composed of tracks and traces, landscape is beyond simple conceptions of depth and surface, beyond the linearity of chronology, narrative and physical cartography. Lived meaningful inhabitation, of varying time depth and subject to varying degrees of fragmentation and loss through time, landscape is a multi-temporal and complicated, folded cultural topology. Any practice of ‘deep mapping’, which might aim to capture this complexity, must itself be hybrid, syncretic, diverse (Pearson and Shanks 1996, 2000).

archaeology – a mode of cultural production
Let me now pull together some implications of this discussion of landscape for archaeologists and their discipline. The orthodox line is to separate archaeology from culture, while recognising the importance of (cultural) context for what archaeologists do. This is to take that distanced standpoint of the academic or intellectual following the methods and practices of their discipline. I wish to oppose this standpoint and separation of discipline and culture. While it maintains a disciplinary or discursive unity, it leaves unaccountable the work and works of archaeologists, other than as epistemology and method (cf also Shanks 2000 on cultural politics).

Instead I propose that we accept that archaeology deals in cultural artefacts, and its works have cultural effect. Archaeology is a mode of cultural production in which work is done upon the remains of the past (McGuire and Shanks 1996). This makes it impossible to separate archaeology as a method and epistemology from a cultural context. On the contrary, the unity and boundaries of the discipline are challenged, according to those same arguments against essentialism that have been employed for culture. Archaeology is no more, or no less than the work of its practitioners. While the discipline may define and police its community, values and principles, its ‘culture’, and establish an orthodoxy or integrity, there is nothing essential about this unity or coherence.

To accept archaeology as cultural work thus requires the dispersion of its disciplinary subject and object. This is implicit in those interdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies, material culture studies, cultural geography, comparative literature, theory itself. They construct linkages and translations across diverse disciplinary spaces, turning liminal issues into primary foci.
Two studies I have undertaken over the last fifteen years can be used as illustation here. The first was a year of research with Chris Tilley into the design of beer cans and bottles (Shanks and Tilley 1992, Chapter 7). It was planned as a comparative study of material culture, to try out some ideas we had developed for understanding the style and design of artifacts. A key interpretive tactic was to place beer cans into the context of alcohol consumption in two modern states of northern Europe – Britain and Sweden. The results of our study (accounting for the look of beer packaging) turned out to be less important than what we found out about ways of understanding cultural artifacts. First, it proved impossible to demarcate a coherent object of study. It just was not the case that the design of beer cans could be set in appropriate contexts in order to reach some understanding. We traced relevant connections with the cans through the brewing industry (back to the eighteenth century), marketing and advertising, the history of packaging, sites of mass consumption, the culture of drink, class differences, health-related issues, state licensing/legislation, state interest in alcohol production and consumption, even yeasts and pasteurisation. There was no object and contexts, simply networks of connection. Second, it was clear that there could be no understanding of beer cans which posited a line of creative determination or agency that had society, culture and its individuals expressing themselves (in whatever way) through material artifacts. I couldn’t actually answer who designed the cans, even though we met with the people employed by breweries who decided what words and imagery should go on them. It seemed to be more about norms, expectations, aspirations, an indeterminate state interest in control (albeit finding very concrete expression in taxation and legality) and the congeniality of the pub. These cultural subjects have agency. Who makes culture? Its not just people – the beer cans themselves are involved!

I later focused upon a class of ‘art’ objects, perfume jars from an ancient Greek city. I was ready this time to tackle what Stuart Hall and others have called the circuit of culture – from production, consumption, regulation of social life, to representation and identity (DuGay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, and Negus 1997). Rather than methodology I began with a single artifact (one of the perfume jars) and a principle – to follow whatever connections I could find engendered by its design and what I term its life-cycle (Shanks 1998, 1999) – the circuit of culture. Interpretation exploded into pottery manufacture, techniques of painting, reflections upon pictures of animals, soldiers and flowers, perfume and its consumption in temples and graves, experiences of war, mobility and travel (as the pots were widely exported), homoeroticism and the warrior band. The issue I faced throughout was containment: where and on what grounds should I stop exploring. For it was only to create a particular disciplinary intervention (write a book for classical archaeology) that I contained the dispersion according to chronology and subject matter (the early city state in the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC). The task of historiography became just this narrative containment as I set up the sources to outline the options facing the pot painter, the shape of archaic bodies, ideologies of certain kinds of cultural association – men armed, actually or metaphorically, for war.

The containment was in no way inherent or essential to the perfume jars that were my initial object of interest. I could have ignored chronology entirely, or gone beyond the cultural space of the early Greek state, while still being rigourously empirical – it could have been quite a different story. Of course.
I particularly confirmed for myself that the category material culture is something of a tautology. I was dealing with traces of an ancient social fabric. Division into matters of mind and materiality, or objects and cultural signification or value, were specious and distracting. The soldiers’ bodies were real, were felt, suffered, trained, enjoyed, and some have ended as archaeological sources. At the same time these are all cultural dispositions and performances, literally embodying the ideological conflicts and values, or so I argued, of the early state. Their soldiery and life as citizens of the new state necessarily involved the accoutrement of weapons, the artifacts of lifestyle. They were nothing without these, just as the ideologies of citizenry and war were nothing without bodies to uphold them. I was dealing with cyborgs. And just as the people of these cities, from potters to sea captains to slaves, were its historical agents, so too were cultural factors like a particular experience of travel, whose elements I tracked through a series of source materials.
So rather than demarcating archaeological methods, objects and interests, I traced connections. Cognate terms which can be applied to this include translation and social linkage, and articulation (Shanks 1999, Chapter 1). The historiographical task facing me as archaeologist and ancient historian was how to write about hybrid forms.

the archaeological
If archaeology is part of the cultural sphere itself, how then are we to distinguish archaeology. What makes archaeology distinctive? Do we look to its communities and subcultures? Is archaeology simply its practitioners and their ways of life? Is archaeology the way archaeologists do what they do?
Under a dispersion of the discipline’s subject and object, I propose that we think less of archaeology, and instead of the archaeological. This concerns social fabric itself, the materiality of all of society’s components). The archaeological is particularly about remnants, morbidity, entropy, traces, decay, the grubby underside of things, stuff lost or overlooked in the gaps.
The archaeological has affinities with many of modernity’s foundational experiences. It may even be described as one of (post)modernity’s root metaphors (on the importance of metaphor, Lakoff and Johnson 1980). I have already outlined some of these: experiences of immediate encounter with history in the earth; artifacts collected and owned as signifiers of identity; delving deep to find authenticity and identity; metaphors of roots, stratigraphy, subsurface structures finding expression at the surface; the archaeological component of cultural tourism. Freud’s archaeological interests are now well documented (Lowenthal 1985, pages 252-5), so it would seem appropriate that the archaeological should provide such a stimulating metaphor for his understanding of the human psyche. His medical and symptomatic logic of therapy and interpretation of a layered mind has been connected with a broad cultural field of speculative modelling (Ginzburg 1989; Eco and Sebeok 1983). This is concerned with traces, tracks and details and includes forensic detection, some branches of art history (concerned with attribution of works to artists through stylistic details), as well as archaeology. The great classical archaeologist and art historian Sir John Beazley had much in common with Sherlock Holmes (Shanks 1996, pages 37-41). A great appeal of the archaeological is its affinities with the work of the detective (for the subtlety of this cultural field see Merivale and Sweeney 1999).

The archaeological refers to the social fabric. As I have tried to indicate through my examples in the last section, the distinction between social or cultural and material, ‘the social’ and its ‘fabric’, is not easy to uphold. The archaeological is quintessentially hybrid. The social is a world of hybrids (Law 1991). This point is given much significance by the recent work of anthropologists of science and sociologists of technology who have radically challenged the orthodox separation of science, its objects and the natural world from social relations and cultural values (for example Mackenzie and Wajcman 1985; Pickering 1992; Bijker and Law 1992; Fuller 1997; Latour 1987). In this interdisciplinary development we hear no longer of science applied to society, or of the social context of technology. Instead science becomes a cultural achievement, technology has politics, and Edison, rather than inventing the light bulb, is shown to have engineered a heterogeneous or hybrid network of artifacts, scientific equations, dreams, capital, political good will, people and a laboratory in Menlo Park (Hughes 1983). Bruno Latour has even defined modernity in terms of its hybridity (1993), attributing its scientific and material success to a particular and paradoxical hybrid politics of representation in both the citizen body and natural world. His work on science and material culture has led him to develop an explicit (and evolutionary) archaeology of people, technics and knowledge (Latour 1999, Chapter 6).
a cultural agenda for archaeology

I end with a check-list of cultural issues which I consider as archaeological. Examples given are meant to make further open connections within this culture/archaeology.

challenging the canon of great works
The values of the art market permeate the world of archaeological objects. A task is to scrutinise them.

Note should be taken here of strategies in the art world which question the transcendence and status of the art object, or locate it in transient or immaterial forms. This is one of the guiding principles of modernism. Consider, for example performance based art (Goldberg 1998), arte povera (Christov-Bakargiev 1999), installation and conceptual art (Art and Design Editorial 1994; DeOliveira, Oxley and Petrey 1994).

difference instead of identity
As already well indicated in this volume – postcolonial theory takes us beyond a plurality of self-contained cultures, by challenging proprietorial and essentialist notions of cultural identity. The issue concerns constructions of community in the absence of a secure notion of identity.
exploring hybridity

The social fabric is one of hybrid forms. Cyborgs are not just a creation of science fiction. People-object articulations, they are the norm.
Look to borders and mixtures. Consider the implications of genetic modification and artificial intelligence (Haraway 1991, 1997). Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes have created the ethno-cyborg in their performance based border art which is about chicano identity and its ritual/material accoutrements and stereotypes (Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes 1996; http://riceinfo.rice.edu/projects/cybervato)

poetics of assemblage
Exploring hybridity may require a poetics of assemblage (Shanks 1992, page 43–7;1999, Chapter 1). This is based upon articulation as a process of bringing to expression and connecting what otherwise might remain unconnected or unrealised. It emphasises how the compositions of things and cultural identities alike are neither immutable, nor unified.

We should think of fields rather than objects. Consider a classic of interpretation in cultural studies – the account of the Sony walkman by DuGay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, and Negus. Consider the museum exhibitions curated by filmmaker Peter Greenaway (1991, 1993, 1997) – extraordinary collections of artifacts grouped through bricolage or montage that present non-linear histories and dispersed anthropologies (of the body, classification, flight ...).
Assemblage relates to collection, and though constantly denied, archaeology is a branch of collecting (Schnapp 1996, page 11). Susan Pearce (1992, 1997) has provided an introduction to the diverse energies of collection in relationship to personal and cultural identity.

The singular object or artifact, unclassified or unclassifiable according to conventional understanding, may break through history and the ordinary and engender wonder or fascination – this is, for me the attraction of the Museum of Jurassic Technlogy in Los Angeles – an out-of-time wunderkammer from the pages of Borges (Weschler 1995).

embodiment and the performative
The social fabric is felt and suffered as well as thought and valued. Attention is drawn to the embodiment and corporeality of society and culture.
This is now a well-developed field of thought and writing. Consider, for example, the relevance of the concept of performance. Identity has been argued to be a performative accomplishment. Social practice as performance is not about the expression or representation of a quality such as identity. Performance enacts and produces that to which it refers. So gender, for example, is both a doing and a thing done (Butler 1993). Performance thus complements arguments against essentialism: it presupposes that the acting self must enunciate itself rather than represent a given identity.
Concerning the performance of cultural identity, consider how heritage interpretation is founded upon performative and theatrical metaphors – the past is staged for the visitor (Kirschenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Paul Connerton (1989) has linked social memory with the enactment of cultural rituals.

non-linear histories and deep maps – realising new temporal spaces
Rather than reconstruct or resurrect the past, reflections here upon culture/archaeology suggest a different strategy of creating new articulations through an indeterminate chronology. Surface and depth are subsumed beneath connectivity. Challenges to depth metaphors of historical roots and appreciations of the folded cultural topology that is place and landscape introduce possibilites of flat chronologies, non-linear histories and deep maps – new conceptions of space and place, temporality and history.

In academic fields this is the further refinement of critical historiography, cultural geography and ethnography. Take, for example, the cultural mappings of modernity made by Alan Pred (1995). Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and Manuel deLanda (1997) have written explicit non-linear histories. Paul Carter has explored the colonisation of space in historical Australia through the cultural accretion of mapping, naming, narratives and textualities in his book The Road to Botany Bay (1987). Wilson Harris, Guyanese novelist and critic, makes fascinating use of metaphors of palimpsest and fossil beds in his understanding of history, race and culture in the Carribean (1983).

the lure of the local
How are we to travel and be guided round these new temporal spaces between global homogeneity and the unique locale?

Lucy Lippard (1997, 1999) has connected these questions with new art practices and experiences of travel and tourism in two suggestive compendia.

against mimesis
Theories of performativity and hybridity mean that we may not be able to easily represent culture and experience according to orthodox models of mimesis (by which is meant a naturalistic reproduction of what is represented).
How are we to write about things and people?

Should archaeologists aim to use all the power of computer generated virtual realities to rebuild and repeople antiquity? This grand mimetic dream lies behind many projects in academic archaeology and heritage interpretation.
Peggy Phelan (1993, 1997) and Elin Diamond (1997) have confronted the topic of mimesis from within performance theory in fascinating reflections upon the representation of performances in academic writing.

the return of the real
In spite of the postmodern impulse to surface, simulation and signification, empty pastiche supposedly in the place of authentic roots and history (Poster 1988), many artists are exploring realms and textures of corporeality and materiality.

Many are profoundly archaeological in their interest in decay, morbidity, historical accretion, patina, ruin and remnant. Look for examples in Grunenberg’s definition of a new gothic sensibility (1997). Damien Hirst (1997) notoriously explores these issues in many of his works – the archaeological formation process of rot, the conservator’s practice of pickling.
In a sphere of popular fascination with forensics read Gordon Burn on serial killer Fred West (1998) – a real-life horror story of bodies buried in basements and walls tied together in a suburban history of home extensions and sexual perversity. It is a gruesome story of mortuary practices and architectural history revealed in the real excavation of the scene of crime.

new modes of engagement and patterns of association
The archaeological community is its own connected culture of people/things.
Models of IT based hypertext have been proposed as a critical medium for connecting people, mixed media, sources and commentaries (for example, Landow 1994, 1997). The internet may provide spaces where may be constructed experiences and meanings which engage us intimately, which creatively address the issues of culture/archaeology in a postmodern and postcolonial idiom. Ultimately the sphere of culture/archaeology is about the construction of communities, of whatever kind – how we make ourselves.

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