Dan Hicks

Four forthcoming talks

2011-02-20T18:45:00.026Z

I'm giving a number of talks in London, Oxford and Reading over the next month. Details are below:

Thursday 17th March 2011, 6pm - 8pm  

What is a Fragment? Forms of the Material, the Cultural, & the Interdisciplinary (The Courtauld Institute)

Lecture for 'The Material Life of Things' Research Project, Courtauld Institute.

Discussant: Professor Danny Miller (UCL) .

This paper reflects upon the status of the idea of 'the fragment' in contemporary interdisciplinary material culture studies. In doing so, it uses anthropological thinking to interrogate how we comprehend the forms that the material, the cultural, and the interdisciplinary can take in the study of things.   

http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2011/spring/mar17_DanHicks.shtml

Thursday March 10 2011, 5pm-7pm 
The Museum as Field Site (UCL Research Seminar)

Research Seminar Series, Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies, UCL. 
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/calendar/articles/20110310b  

Saturday 5th March 2011, 11am-1pm (coffee from 10.30am)
The Materials of De-Industrialization (Ruskin Public History Discussion Group)
co-presented with Lisa Hill (Oxford), Hilary Orange (UCL) and Sefryn Penrose (Oxford)

Ruskin Public History Discussion Group, Ruskin College, Oxford

 http://www.ruskin.ac.uk/events/detail/Ruskin_Public_History_Discussion_Group

24th February 2011, 5pm - 6pm
The Museum as Field Site (Reading University Research Seminar)

Research Seminar, Department of Archaeology, University of Reading

 http://www.reading.ac.uk/archaeology/about/news/arch-events-seminars.aspx

Fragments of Life

2011-01-16T11:07:00.010Z

[This review of Ivor Noël Hume's recent autobiography will appear in the Times Literary Supplement next month. Cite this paper as Hicks, D. in press. Fragments of Life. Times Literary Supplement.]

Ivor Noël Hume. A Passion for the Past: the odyssey of a transatlantic archaeologist. University of Virginia Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8139-2977-4 (cloth) £26.95.

Ivor Noël Hume is famous as a British archaeologist who pioneered the archaeological study of the early modern American past. His autobiography brings his distinctive writing style to bear upon his own life and work. It describes a bleak and itinerant childhood, beginning in London in 1927, against which background Noël’s developing archaeological interests are introduced: a chance participation as a cub scout in the 1939 excavations at the Sutton Hoo Viking ship burial, collecting shrapnel after air battles, and explorations during Devon holidays at the deserted coastal village of Hallsands and the abandoned ruins of 19th-century Eggesford House.

Failed attempts to develop a career in the theatre prefigure the unemployed 22-year-old Noël’s ‘treasure hunting’ along the Thames foreshore in central London, donating what he collected to the Guildhall Museum. Offered a job at the Museum, and later joined by his wife Audrey, during the 1950s Noël became a pioneer of the archaeological ‘watching brief’. In workmen’s lunch breaks, at evenings and weekends, or ducking between machine bucket and trench, for eight years he collected and recorded archaeological remains exposed at construction sites in the Square Mile and beyond. Noël’s vivid anecdotal accounts of this nascent rescue archaeology, managed by Adrian Oswald and Ralph Merrifield and assisted by volunteers (the ‘Guildhall Irregulars’), feature coal sacks full of artefacts dragged from the Bankside Power Station site, a perfectly-preserved sparrow in peat below Walbrook Street, and a ‘Roman goat-skin bikini bottom’ from Queen Victoria Street. During the construction of the Lloyds Building in 1952, hundreds of bottles of port sealed after a fire in a pre-war wine merchant’s cellar are uncovered: the aroma drifts along Leadenhall Street ‘prompting wine connoisseur businessmen to stop, sniff, and smile’.

The Guildhall’s bitter rivalry with the London Museum, and especially with William Grimes’ Roman and Medieval London Excavation Council, is sketched. The adventurous ‘building site archaeology’ and Noël’s imaginative engagements with the press are contrasted with Grimes’ more scientific programme of controlled excavations at bombed-out sites, most famously at the Temple of Mithras. His account of the unrecorded destruction of the 1950s – what he calls the post-war ‘slaughter’ of London’s archaeological deposits – calls into question the response of Grimes and his colleagues. At the same time, Noël describes his growing commitment to post-Roman, and especially to post-medieval, archaeology, inspired by Oswald’s studies of seventeenth-century glassware and clay pipes.

The second half of the book reflects upon Noël’s activities after being hired in 1957, aged thirty, to direct the archaeological programme of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Some Guildhall themes resurface in Virginia. Difficulties with architectural historians, and with ‘anthropological’ approaches, recall earlier conflicts with Grimes, as Noël sets out his scepticism about programmatic or excessively scientific approaches, which downplay interpretation. He nicely explains how his interest in the seventeenth century was out of step first with the Roman and Medieval focus of London’s archaeologists, and then with the Georgian aspirations of Williamsburg preservationists. Indeed, much of his achievement in Virginia, especially in his excavations of Martin’s Hundred and Wolstenholme Towne at the Carter’s Grove site, was to reveal potential of the seventeenth-century archaeology of Virginia. But Noël also describes how the Guildhall’s failure to complete reports was reproduced in Williamsburg’s rescue activities. Combined with an excessive focus upon collecting and cataloguing artefacts, a habit learned from building site archaeology this has limited the impact of the extensive fieldwork undertaken by Noël at other sites in Virginia and beyond.

Despite the dearth of field reports, Noël’s ‘Virginia adventure’ produced a wide range of museum displays and popular publications, especially his 1970 Artefacts of Colonial America, which brought his broad knowledge of British material culture to an American readership. However, his 1969 introductory textbook, Historical Archaeology, was disliked by many because of its astonishing sexist comments on women in archaeology. An apology to what he calls the ‘anthropological bra burners’ is never quite provided here, and the book is predictably silent on African-American and indigenous history. Instead it repeats Noël’s more generalizing, but pioneering commitment to re-imagining ‘the broken and the commonplace’ as ‘tools to give post-medieval history a new dimension’.

The book concludes with regret for the changes at Williamsburg from the late 1970s, which redefined it ‘less as an ongoing restoration project than as a university campus, and regret for the closure of Colonial Williamsburg’s archaeological service in 2007, and regret for the selling-off of Carter’s Grove in 2008. Indeed, the book’s sustained melancholy reminds the reader that Noël’s vision of archaeology as ‘handmaiden to history’, rather than an anthropological pursuit, was wedded to a particular nostalgic vision of re-fitting the fragments of an imagined English past. With a degree of showmanship, he collides British 1940s counter-modernism with the latent colonial revivalism of 1950s Williamsburg. And while the empirical results of Noël’s ‘history with the dirt on’ were sometimes disappointing, his central role in establishing the archaeology of the modern period as a creative field of enquiry – grounded, in his famous phrase, in ‘the art and mystery of historical archaeology’ – is indisputable.

A Passion for the Past is a likable and honest account of an archaeological life. It re-states the humanism that lay at the heart of the 20th-century rescue and preservation movements: the persuasive suggestion that, as Noël has it, ‘artifacts have to be seen first as fragments of life and only afterward as potsherds to be scientifically studied’.

Papers for 'Manifestos for Materials' session (TAG 2010)

2010-10-20T14:22:00.043+01:00

The abstracts for the accepted papers for my session Manifestos for Materials have now been published. The session will comprise eleven papers by scholars working across archaeology, anthropology, architectural studies, cultural geography, and cultural studies. Paper titles and abstracts are provided below.

The session will take place at the University of Bristol on Saturday 18th December (all day). For more details for TAG 2010, and to register for the conference, see www.bristol.ac.uk/archanth/tag/index.html

Session Abstract
Manifestos are re-emerging, perhaps: from Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto (2003), to Danny Miller and Sophie Woodward's 'Manifesto for a study of Denim' (2007), to Bruno Latour's 'Compositionist Manifesto' (2010). These manifestos are diverse...[continue reading the session abstract on my previous post]

Introduction.

Dan Hicks (University of Oxford)

Does anything really matter?

Rosemary Joyce (University of California, Berkeley)

Manifestos assert positions that are intended to stir debate and action. Archaeology, as a practice of tracing human entanglements with nonhumans through their material disturbances, needs to confront the slippery nature of things, matter, reality, and the singularities we construct when we speak about traces as if they were bounded and static.

Let us begin as a manifesto should, by a series of assertions:

given that archaeology is a set of practices
given that these practices are directed at discerning material traces as evidence of human lives
given that the traces archaeologists discern are mediated through nonhumans of various kinds
given that archaeologists discern traces through contrasts, or what I will call disturbances
it is proposed that archaeological practices construe traces as bounded and static singularities when they would be better thought of as unfolding relations.

Can the thing speak?

Martin Holbraad (University College, London)

Arguing against humanist and posthumanist strategies for 'emancipating' the thing in recent years (by analogy to earlier attempts to emancipate the colonial subject), this paper proposes a manifesto for allowing things to speak in their own voice - what I shall call their 'conceptual affordances'.

A cogent take on the past decade's effervescence in the study of 'materiality' in the social sciences draws an analogy with post-colonial studies, and particularly the politically responsive concern with subaltern subjectivities (Fowles 2008, 2010). If much scholarship in the 1980s and '90s was directed towards theorising the 'agency' of colonial and post-colonial subjects, then the 2000s have been partly about making a similar move with respect to 'things'. In this paper I explore these 'emancipatory' moves in the recent literature on 'the rise of the thing', and argue that at most they manage to emancipate things by associating them with humans. Revisiting earlier arguments of my own in this vein (Henare et al 2007, Holbraad 2009), the latter half of the paper seeks to develop an analytical perspective that would allow things to be emancipated 'as such' - a manifesto for allowing things to speak to us in their own voice. Such an analytic, I argue, places the focus on things' conceptual affordances: the difference that things' material characteristics make to attempts to 'think' them. Among other examples, I make the case with reference to archaeological debates about skeuomorphism.

"We want to demolish museums..." Archaeology and the Futurist Manifesto

Paul Graves-Brown

Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto is probably the first thorough going statement of the doctrine of Modernism, and offers a straightforward challenge to archaeology and heritage. In a sense we have got the World that the futurists desired, and perhaps they can help us understand it.

Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto (1909) is probably the first thorough going statement of the doctrine of Modernism, and offers a straightforward challenge to archaeology and heritage. The Futurists wanted to dispense with the past, to "Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums!". In embracing the excitement and romance of new technology, even its devastating capacity for war, Futurists announced a faith in change and renewal which was later to inspire high Modernists such as Lewis Mumford and Robert Musil.

Whilst Marinetti and his friends were later condemned by their adherence to Mussolini's Fascism, and their hatred of museums might seem unpromising, I want to argue in this paper that the Futurist Manifesto has a great deal to say to us. Particularly those who are concerned with the contemporary past. We live in a World where fear of technology has been largely replaced by casual acceptance, and where continual change fuelled by a globalised economy is the norm. In a sense we have got the World that the futurists desired, and perhaps they can help us understand it.

Air apparent: a manifesto on spatial indeterminacy

Amy Kulper (University of Michigan)

If we embrace the manifesto’s perennial futurological bent and pair it with an emerging tendency in material culture to be thing-centric, how would a manifesto articulate the coming into being of something immaterial, like air?

Preserved in the etymology of the term 'manifesto' is a legal connotation related to the act of entering something into evidence. In his 1978 text Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan architect, Rem Koolhaas, opines, "The fatal weakness of manifestos is their inherent lack of evidence." Koolhaas is alluding to the projective or anticipatory structure of the manifesto - the promise of things to come - and with the idea of the retroactive manifesto, theorizing what is already there (in this case Manhattan) becomes the new mandate. But if we embrace the manifesto's perennial futurological bent and pair it with an emerging tendency in material culture to be thing-centric, how would a manifesto articulate the coming into being of something immaterial, like air?

The discipline of architecture is currently in a frenzied quest for tools, methods and techniques to ensure the generation of unique formal projects. But rather than a tool, technique or method, can the same results be garnered from an immaterial material - air - and a textual format that continuously anticipates the emergence of things - the manifesto? If air is 'impression without presence,' then as a material in the architect's palette can it transcend known outcomes producing architectures of indeterminacy? This manifesto will disprove the old maxim that you can't get something for (or from) nothing.

From verb to matter: transformations in architectural rhetoric

Axel Sowa (RWTH-Aachen University) & Murielle Hladik (University of Paris 8)

In this paper we will describe and analyse the techniques of persuasion in the realm of architecture and evaluate the possibility of manifestos based on matter and material under the conditions of contemporary design practices.

More than any other discipline, architecture has been framed and driven by manifestos. Especially throughout the 20th century, architects choose the manifesto as a common and appropriate genre to prepare and legitimize their actions. Manifestos had been used as tools for persuasion, as means to enhance acceptance and consent. Deeply rooted in the professional ethic of individuals and avant-garde groups affirming their personal attitude and style, the validity of the architectural manifesto is strongly related to the authorship of those who imagine and create the built environment. While, recently, manifestos have become rare, a new type of legitimation occurred in the architectural discourse. Furthermore, the creation of artefacts is facing new ethical standards of production form which new imperatives are derived: the economy of resources, the traceability of raw materials or the possibility to recycle used components brings matter into the centre of public attention. This renewed interest reveals a paradigm shift. In the current debate, notions of "concept" and "invention" are replaced by the more anonymous notions such as "life-cycle", "energy balance" and "sustainability" which are all pointing to the importance of materials and components. The paper will investigate the possibilities of manifestos for materials under the contemporary condition of architectural design and production.

Curating Haiti: reportage and creative archaeology

Christine Finn (University of Bradford)

This paper will contextualise the process of gathering and disseminating evidence of material culture from Haiti in the weeks after the earthquake of January 12, 2010.

The paper will show how the the author interpreted the Haitian earthquake over several months after visiting Port-au-Prince in the weeks just after the disaster. It will show how this international news was at the same time an intimate portrait of domestic life. And how a variety of processes transformed an immediate personal response into radio broadcast, then into site specific art installation. And how it continues to be adapted and proliferated as media - from discussion as archaeological and anthropological enquiry, to NGO and other charity dialogues, BBC World Service and Radio 4 scripting and broadcast, to photographic selection and editing, exhibition curation and written artist statements one for the site specific domestic location, another in a designated art space. It will draw upon a presentation which originated in Bristol, at CHAT 2006, where the author presented 'Leaving Home - the visual version' as a response to domestic change and loss. The three year project, Leave Home Stay, which emerged from this, became Leave Home Stay in Haiti in July, 2010, and was further adapted and re-curated for the Cube Cineplex gallery, Bristol, in October, 2010. For more background see www.leavehomestay.com

A materially affective manifesto

Oliver Harris (Newcastle University), Leila Dawney (University of Exeter) & Tim Flohr Sørensen (University of Cambridge)

This paper proposes an affective manifesto acknowledging the role of affect and emotion in creating a blurred space and boundary between human and non human.

Recently the humanities and social sciences have seen both 'material' and 'affective' turns competing for headway in an already crowded theoretical landscape. In this manifesto we take a different tack calling for a plural, eclectic and almost promiscuous use of these approaches in order to create space for an understanding of how affects create blurred and fuzzy boundaries between human and non-human. The notion of the 'affective field' (proposed and utilised in Harris and Sørensen 2010) creates just such a space. Here though we go further. By taking an interdisciplinary approach we refute claims that we must chose between things as concrete only in their relations with humans, or as having prefigured properties. Instead taking an affective approach to materials forces us to consider how things change through their intertwining histories not just because of how people think or understand them, but because of how people and things come to feel through each other. These histories mean that materials are always both here and now, and somewhere else, evading the moment and evoking their past and futures. A manifesto that calls for approaches that transcend the boundaries between affect and things has the potential to make a significant contribution to our engagements with the geographies and temporalities of the world in both the present and the past, as well our understandings of presence and absence.

Towards a manifesto for entanglement: possession, enchantment and fetishism in the age of disposability

Alison Hulme (Goldsmiths College, University of London)

This paper attempts to scope the potential for practical change in our relationships with objects, as well as map a more politicized Material Culture studies. Taking the work of Henri Lefebvre as its inspiration, it posits entanglement as an alternative to both fetishism and asceticism.

Far from being an out-dated form, applicable only in the era of grand narratives, the manifesto (especially one concerned with things) has renewed relevance in current recession-hit times. It presents an opportunity to scope practical change, as well as map a more politicized material culture studies.

The existing political angle within Material Culture tends to be that of David Harvey's call to allow the thing to uncover exploitative human relations. Thus Commodity Chain Analysis has provided some classic thing-following studies. Unfortunately, this concern has often lead to little else than the rhetoric of ethical consumption, which is all too easily hi-jacked by neo-liberal agendas in which the West buys the 'rest' out of poverty.

This paper will set out a vision for the study of material things that consciously attempts to politicize. Jane Bennett's concept of enchantment and more recent applications of Marx's fetish will be explored, alongside Henri Lefebvre's engagement with both the Surrealist and the Communist Manifestos and his thoughts on possession. Through a critique of these thinkers the beginnings of a Manifesto for Entanglement will be mapped out.

The vision is one that recognizes the false romance of 'making do', whilst acknowledging the ever-presence of new, pernicious forms of consumerism. It posits entanglement, as the lived experience of growing with things, the slow un-winding of self with object, the creeping up/rubbing off/entering in of things. As Lefebvre asserted, Entanglement is beyond ownership.

The dark matter of landscapes: manifesto for an archaeology of flow

Matthew Edgeworth (University of Leicester)

This manifesto presents eight reasons for bringing the flowing water of rivers and streams - the dark matter of landscapes, neglected in cultural analyses - into the main focus of archaeological study.

Matter can be in any one of three main states: solid, liquid or gas. In the archaeological study of landscapes, solid matter takes priority. Land itself is a solid by definition. So too are the soils, stratigraphies, sites, earthworks, features, fields, hedgerows, buildings which are constituent parts of landscapes. Pick up almost any book on landscape archaeology and you will find solid materials highlighted, with flowing liquid and gaseous materials cast into shadow.

Rivers and streams are the dark matter of landscape archaeology. Running through the heart of landscapes, shape-shifting as they go, liquids are rarely subjected to the kind of cultural analysis applied to solid materials. Study of rivers and their flow is left to hydrologists, sedimentologists, geomorphologists and other natural scientists. Flowing water is regarded as part of the natural background against which past cultural activity shows up, next to which sites are located, onto which cultural meaning is applied or into which cultural items are placed, rather than having any cultural dimension in its own right. Yet human activity, in the form of modification of rivers, is inextricably bound up with the so-called 'natural' water cycle. As dynamic entanglements of natural and cultural forces, rivers have potential to re-shape (our understanding of) landscape.

This manifesto presents eight reasons for bringing the dark matter of landscapes into the main focus of archaeological study.

100 Million years of modernity: a manifesto for fossil-bound commodity life

Mark Jackson (University of Bristol)

Invoking the need for a radical ontology of energy, the paper argues that our modernity is tens of millions of years old. Addressing modern consumption and urban materiality requires deconstructing thought/matter distinctions implicit in contemporary critical politics. Energy is the material vector for accessing a critical ontology of the present.

The concept of bio-power has long recognized the historical and necessary relations between life, and the discursive productions of subjectivities, polities and bodies. Recent theoretical work on the ontological conditions of matter and life requires, however, that we extend fields of bio-political concern to apparatuses whose borders between bodies, polities, and life are delineated less in terms of bounded conditions of consciousness or human agency, and more in terms of processes of materialization. Emergent domains of bio-politics thus need to articulate radical boundary conditions in ways that disrupt, or at least question, the previous categories that make the organic-inorganic/biotic-abiotic possible. Drawing on recent work in theoretical archaeology, material geographies, and political theory, this paper will question how the traditional discursive limits of commodity politics are truncated by material assumptions of matter and life, in particular assumptions about fossil energy. Using an urban case study on the energetics of carbon life, it will address how the limits and possibilities for a commodity bio-politics become thinkable through a radical ontology of oxidized fossil life.

Biodiversities: wildlife without recourse to Nature

Jamie Lorimer (Kings College London)

This paper offers a manifesto for lively difference. It summons forth a multiplicity of biodiversities that need not recourse to Nature. It presents an interdisciplinary approach to wildlife that is open to the virtual. The potential, import and politics of this manifesto are critically examined.

The paper offers a manifesto for lively difference. It aims to summon forth a multiplicity of biodiversities that need not recourse to modern understandings of Nature and its associated ontology, epistemology and politics. The paper links recent social science invocations of a vital materialism with parallel developments in conservation biology focusing on their shared interests in the diversity and dynamics of life and means to ensure their future flourishing. In the face of adversity wildlife management has tended to focus on the past and the preservation of pure, extant forms. In this paper I outline an alternative interdisciplinary approach to wildlife that is open to difference and the future virtual, in a Deleuzian sense. The paper presents the key components of this approach before reflecting on some of the frictions it engenders with powerful and prevalent forms of nonhuman biopolitics. The potential, import and politics of this manifesto are illustrated with reference to recent work on wilding in Europe and Asian elephant conservation in Sri Lanka.

Discussant: J.D. Dewsbury (Geography, University of Bristol)

Manifestos for Materials

2010-06-14T11:19:00.021+01:00

[image: Lyonel Feininger, Kathedrale, Holzschnitt für das Bauhaus-Manifest, 1919]

TAG 2010

I'm convening this session at the December 2010 meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, which will be held at Bristol University (17-19 December). The session abstract is below, and information about the conference is here. Registration for the conference costs £50 (waged)/£25 (unwaged).
The accepted papers and abstracts for this session have now been posted here.

Manifestos for Materials (convened by Dan Hicks, University of Oxford)
Sunday 19 December 2010

Manifestos are re-emerging, perhaps: from Donna Haraway's Companion Species Manifesto (2003), to Danny Miller and Sophie Woodward's Manifesto for a study of Denim (2007), to Bruno Latour's Compositionist Manifesto (2010). These manifestos are diverse, but while we might imagine manifestos to be concerned with human life, human thought, human politics, or human futures, material things/nonhumans figure prominently in these texts.

In this context, this session invites two kinds of contribution. First, papers that reconsider the place of materials/things/nonhumans in previous manifestos - from Communism, Futurism or Vorticism to Surrealism, Humanism or Cyborg Feminism - and their contemporary relevance, are invited. Second, papers written in the form of contemporary manifestos for materials - setting out particular visions of the study of material things, or exploring/questioning the contemporary utility of the idea of the manifesto - are welcomed.

Contributions along these lines, on the theme of 'Manifestos for Materials' are invited from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, art history, archaeology, cultural geography, STS, ANT, and related fields.

The call for papers for this session closed in September 2010. The accepted papers are listed here.

Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view

2010-05-28T18:31:00.050+01:00

[The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (OUP 2010, xviii+774pp, 98 figures, 2 tables, edited with Mary Beaudry) is published in August 2010. Full details of the contents are here, and the book can be pre-ordered here.

This paper is the introductory chapter to the volume, written with Mary Beaudry. Cite this paper as: Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry 2010. Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1-21. For the full text, with references, please see the published version in the book]

Introduction. Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view
(Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry)

Four years ago, we worked together on another editorial project—The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (Hicks and Beaudry 2006a). At the time, historical archaeology was emerging as an area of anthropological archaeology that was witnessing new discussion, energy, and innovation; it is still more vibrant today. Researchers using archaeological methods to study the modern and contemporary world have found themselves in the middle of a broader current of cross-disciplinary interest in the material dimensions of the world. In assembling that book, therefore, we started to think through why the archaeology of the modern and contemporary world—a long-standing backwater of anthropological theory and practice—might have been experiencing such resurgence. In our introduction to that book, we suggested that historical archaeology might represent one place in which anthropology could contribute to current interdisciplinary debates about material things. We were particularly interested in the idea that these debates and currents might develop into a broader ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, and in whether such a material turn would shift beyond an earlier ‘cultural’, ‘linguistic’, ‘literary’, or ‘textual’ turn associated with the scholarship of the 1980s, or else constitute simply an extension of its representational logic (Hicks and Beaudry 2006b: 6–7; see for example Preda 1999; Pickett 2003: 5). Without doubt, the period since the late 1980s had witnessed a fast-expanding literature in ‘material culture studies’ in which archaeology and anthropology have played a central role. But increasingly this literature was characterized by a dissatisfaction with what we might term purely culturalist studies of material culture, which served simply to reduce things to meanings, or else to social relations (Pinney 2005). As anthropological archaeologists, we were bothered by the idea of material culture studies as representing a new crossdisciplinary field of enquiry, rather than a place for conversation in which archaeology and anthropology might make more distinctive, more situated, and more modest, contributions. So, when we decided to work together again on a Handbook of Material Culture Studies, it was for two reasons. One was to explore, to gather together, and to celebrate a diversity of approaches to ‘material culture studies’ in anthropology, archaeology, and the related fields of cultural geography and science and technology studies (STS). The other was to try to pin down where our reservations about the idea of such a ‘material turn’ came from.

Material culture, objects, materiality, materials, things, stuff: a rock-solid, firmly grounded field for interdisciplinary enquiry is provided, it appears, by research that considers (to use the obligatory pun) what ‘matters’. The idea of material culture studies represents, then, for many a prototype for post-disciplinarity (e.g. Miller and Tilley 1996; Tilley 2006b). The purpose of this volume is to call that idea into question. In doing so, we set out what is perhaps a reactionary view of material culture studies, which involves unpicking the culturalist uses of materials that developed during the 1980s and 1990s. In this introduction, we want to explore this argument and to explain the editorial direction of the volume by reviewing some of the key arguments put forward in the five sections of the book: (1) disciplinary perspectives; (2) material practices; (3) objects and humans; (4) landscapes and the built environment; and (5) studying particular things.

Disciplinary Perspectives

The sentiment that a turn to the material represents a viable alternative to a pure culturalism, which still allows for an avoidance of the grand narratives of structuralism or traditional Marxism, has become increasingly common over the past decade. But does ‘letting things in’ to research mean the same for different disciplinary traditions and practices? Do different disciplines let the same things in?

Today, things are everywhere in the social sciences and humanities: from history and geography to literature studies, philosophy, and sociology. In the bookshops and libraries, accounts of particular commodities crowd the shelves of the modern history section: studies of cod (Kurlansky 1997), salt (Kurlansky 2002), chocolate (Coe and Coe 1996), opium (Booth 1996), tea (Moxham 2003), or tobacco (Burns 2007) proliferate. In their academic journals, geographers are embracing new vocabularies: cultural geographies of ‘a more-than-human world’ (Whatmore 2006), human geographies that accommodate ‘nonhuman social partners’ (Murdoch 1997: 328), and calls for a more general ‘re-materialization’ of geographical thought and practice (Jackson 2000; Lees 2002). In literature studies, Bill Brown (2001, 2003) proposes ‘thing theory’. In philosophy, Jane Bennett (2001: 92) develops the idea of ‘enchanted materialism’ to critique Weberian narratives of modern disenchantment. In sociology, Momin Rahman and Anne Witz (2003) interrogate the ‘elusive quality of the material in feminist thought’.

The intellectual points of reference in the study of things in different disciplines are always, to a greater or lesser extent, overlapping. But key texts are read through disciplinary traditions, and their reception diverges as particular disciplinary methods are put into practice. Things are therefore less straightforward than they might seem.

Consider what the idea of material culture studies in the five disciplines that we gave as examples above involves. Historians have worked in intellectual traditions that include a range of forms of material histories—whether Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ (Engels 1999: 79), or the historical materialism of Ferdinand Braudel (1973), or Asa Briggs’ (1988) attendance to Victorian Things. These are generally united in an understanding of objects as ‘alternative sources’ that can complement documentary materials in answering the questions posed by economic history and social history (Harvey 2009). Geographers’ interests in things have related to long-standing efforts to understand the constitution of lived space. These interests have been polarized perhaps more strongly between on the one hand the use of particular forms of Marxism to focus on ‘material and social conditions’ (Harvey 2989: 327) and consumption and commodity chains (Jackson 2000), and on the other the more recent extension of ‘human’ geographies into the study of non-human animals, or new technologies, or ecologies: in ‘hybrid’ studies populated by cyborgs and ‘companion species’ and ‘the implosion of trope and flesh’ evoked by Donna Haraway (1991a, 2008: 383n11; see Whatmore 2002), in the heady mix of ideas about materials, space, politics, and affect drawn from Gilles Deleuze, Michel de Certeau, Baruch Spinoza, and Alfred North Whitehead in nonrepresentational theory (Thrift 2007), or in geographical discussions of ‘material imagination’ (Anderson and Wylie 2009: 318). Sociological accounts, it comes as no surprise, have focused on the involvement of objects in social relations. They have similarly taken a range of forms: ranging from constructivist studies of scientific knowledge (SSK) (Latour and Woolgar 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981; see Preda 1999), to Michel Foucault’s (1977a) model of material constraint, to Anthony Giddens’ (1981) critique of historical materialism, and to the consumption studies of the 1980s (Campbell 1987). In cultural studies, these interests have run from Raymond Williams’ ‘cultural materialism’ (1958) to the idea of ‘Doing Cultural Studies’ by studying the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al. 1997). Brown’s ‘thing theory’ requires a reading of Martin Heidegger’s (1971 [1949]) essay on ‘The Thing’. Bennett's account of modern enchantments draws now from Henry Thoreau’s ‘attachment to the Wild’, now from Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’ description of the instability of physical systems (Bennett 2001: 14, 101; cf. Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Rahman and Witz use Judith Butler to make a connection between ‘the performativity of gender’ with ‘the question of the materiality of the body’ (Butler 1993: 1).

Marx, Braudel, Deleuze, Giddens, Haraway, de Certeau, Spinoza, Williams, Heidegger, Foucault, Stengers, Butler. These overlapping points of theoretical departure for different disciplines’ studies of material culture are, of course,within each discipline the subject of debate and argument (Buchli 2002a). But in practice, in the intellectual triangulations through which historians, sociologists, and others locate their enquiries into material culture—in the different ways that social theory or philosophy is put to work—disciplinarity still holds a strong influence. Drawing attention at the outset to the different disciplines that are drawn into dialogue with each other in this volume about ‘material culture studies’ is therefore particularly important.

This book gathers together a range of different perspectives upon material things that emerge from archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, and from complementary work in geography and STS. The chapters have been assembled to provide a snapshot of the wide range of approaches to material things that emerge from putting distinctive methods into practice, and working within particular traditions of practice and enquiry. These range from archaeological methods for examining material culture—in the laboratory (Jones 2002a) or the museum (Edwards et al. 2006), through landscape survey (Hicks and McAtackney 2007), or through excavation (Edgeworth 2003)—to qualitative and quantitative approaches in sociocultural anthropology (Epstein 2002; Bernard 2005) and the methodological challenges of postcolonial museum ethnography (Henare 2005a), the range of research methods used in human geography (Cloke et al. 2004), and what Annemarie Mol calls the ‘praxiography’ of STS (Mol 2002; also see Law 2004). For each of these four disciplines, the idea of material culture is both understood within particular intellectual trajectories, concerns, and debates, and as emerging through the answering of particular research questions, in the mise-en-scène of field practice. As field sciences, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and STS can bring a particular awareness of how research performs objects: how things emerge through research practice, rather than simply being bound up in social relations or webs of meaning. The status of objects as the provisional effects of contingent practices is, we suggest, precisely the same for other disciplines, and also for the vernacular material practices studied by anthropologists and others: these contingencies are, however, particularly clear in the practices of fieldwork. An awareness of disciplinary methods, and disciplinary histories, is a crucial first step in any adequate account of contemporary material culture studies.

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Part I of this volume explores a number of different disciplinary perspectives upon the idea of material culture studies. In conducting an ‘excavation’ of the idea of material culture in British archaeology and social anthropology, Dan Hicks (Chapter 2) argues that the field has developed in two main phases: the emergence of the idea of ‘material culture’ in the second quarter of the twentieth century, especially in museums, as a counterpoint to Durkheimian social anthropology; and the emergence of the idea of ‘material culture studies’ as a way of bringing together structuralism and interpretive/semiotic approaches in the 1970s and 1980s. This second process, which he terms the ‘Material-Cultural Turn’, provided a provisional solution to the critiques of a purely cultural turn in these fields by apparently reconciling relativism and realism, especially through the use of the practice theories in Bourdieu and Giddens. However, more recently a number of critiques from within material culture studies, especially relating to the limitations of the textual analogy of material culture, and arguments about the extension of ‘agency’ from humans to material things, have led to an unfolding of the idea of ‘material culture’. Hicks argues that recent thinking in archaeology and historical anthropology provides a basis for retaining the coherence of the idea of material culture studies by understanding things, and also the knowledge that is generated by studying them, as events and effects. As well as studying the involvement of things in historical processes or their effects upon human life, such a perspective breaks down the distinction between the researcher as subject and the object of scholarship. The implications of such a move, which Hicks describes as moving from the idea of ‘the humility of things’ to that of acts of modest witnessing (after Haraway 1997), are to call into question the idea of material culture studies as a post-disciplinary field. Instead, Hicks argues that an awareness of the contingency and partiality of our knowledge of the world is not a limitation of studying things through particular methods or disciplinary lenses: instead, this is precisely its strength. We shall return to this argument in the conclusion of this chapter, in relation to the relationships between actor-network theory (ANT) and material culture studies.

As well as archaeology and social anthropology, Part I of the book also draws together disciplinary histories and perspectives from cultural geography, folklife studies, historical anthropology, and STS. In their account of ‘material geographies’, Ian Cook and Divya Tolia-Kelly (Chapter 3) take stock of recent calls for the ‘rematerialization’ of cultural geography. They find that the idea of materiality in geography encompasses a very wide variety of concerns and theoretical approaches. Cook and Tolia-Kelly therefore choose to focus their discussion around a particular contemporary event: the wrecking of the container ship MSC Napoli off England’s south-west coast and the subsequent arguments over the fate of the commodities washed up on the shore: a sequence of events that was unfolding as they were writing the chapter. Through three themes—landscape, commodities, and creativity—the authors demonstrate the complexity that is revealed as soon as abstract concerns with materiality are put into situated practice.

In Chapter 4, Robert Saint George traces the development of an often neglected field in material culture studies: folklife studies. This historical account traces nineteenth-century studies of ‘folk’ artefacts, early twentieth-century studies of geographical distributions of customs and archetypical forms of houses or crafts, the rise of open-air museums, and the emergence of folklife studies as a ‘transatlantic intellectual formation’ after its practice was introduced in the United States, often as means of detailing the transfer and adaptation of European traditional cultures in new settings: such as Pennsylvania German, Pennsylvania Dutch, etc. Reviewing the work on material culture in folklife studies since the 1970s, and drawing especially on the writing of Henry Glassie, Saint George provides a new account of the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic material culture studies on the American East Coast.

In Chapter 5, Ann Stahl considers the place of material culture in historical anthropology. Reviewing the idea of material histories, she begins with James Deetz’s demonstration that material culture studies can bring much more than simply a new range of sources, to complement historical documents, to our understanding of the past (Deetz 1977). Stahl explores how anthropologists are building on studies by Sidney Mintz (1985), Igor Kopytoff (1986), and Anne Stoler (2001), especially through ideas of biography, deposition, and genealogy. Using examples from the history of West Africa, she demonstrates how material histories can provide distinctive accounts of ‘global entanglements’ that move beyond conventional concerns with the meaning of things. By following objects, over time and across, often wide, geographical spaces, Stahl argues that historical archaeology and historical anthropology reveal ‘material moments’: both in the past and, in her example of a fragmented Vaseline jar, the disciplinary present.

The field of STS, as it has emerged from the social constructivist approaches of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) since the early 1990s, has sought to accommodate non-human things within sociological studies. Bruno Latour has famously compared the relationship between sociology and STS to that between socio-cultural anthropology and physical anthropology, or between human geography and physical geography: as a kind of ‘physical sociology’, ‘which forces colleagues immersed in the “social” and the “symbolic” to take seriously the enormous difficulty of accounting for objects, which oblige them to take up the radical hybridity of their topics’ (Latour 2000a: 121). In Chapter 6, John Law reviews how STS treats materials. Focusing on how matter comes to ‘matter’, he contrasts SSK approaches with what he calls an awareness of ‘material semiotics’ and ‘the patterning of practices’. This shift involves moving from understanding objects as stable, and understanding objects (as in social constructivism) as created purely by human subjects, to a sense of the unstable and shifting nature of materials. Using Annemarie Mol’s arguments about multiplicities (Mol 2002), Law works through issues of ‘ontological difference’ and complexity (see Law 2004), and introduces the idea of an ‘ontological politics’. Law concludes that the understanding of material culture that emerges from STS turns on the idea of objects as ‘relational effects’, and an engagement with the multiplicities and complexities of both practices and materials.

The chapters in Part I demonstrate how material things emerge in different ways from different disciplinary concerns and traditions of thought. This encourages us to move away from understanding research practices as ontologically distinct from the vernacular practices studied. Part II explores in more detail the different approaches to ‘material practices’: both those of the researcher, and those ongoing in the world.

Material Practices

Part II reviews six kinds of ‘material practice’: agency, consumption, fieldwork/collecting, gift exchange, art (as a form of action), and deposition. In Chapter 7, Andy Pickering reviews the implications of the focus on practice and performance in STS literature. Building on his earlier conception of ‘the mangle of practice’ (Pickering 1995; Pickering and Guzik 2008), Pickering uses the idea of ‘the dance of human and nonhuman agency’ as a way of revealing that this focus on doing leads to an undoing of the ‘linguistic turn’ in sociology, since agency is no longer the sole preserve of humans. More radically than Law (Chapter 6), Pickering understands the performative focus of STS as leading away from humanistic concerns with meaning or semiotics. In a shift from epistemology to ontology, Pickering uses a series of examples—the environment, animals, buildings, and technologies of the self—as places to identify such dances of agency. He is concerned, like Law, with the new political formations that emerge from moving away from a purely humanistic focus to ‘ground level’ studies that can reveal alternative ways for organizing the world that offer alternatives to the subject/object distinction of modernist epistemologies.

In Chapter 8, the volume turns to a classic theme in material culture studies: that of consumption and consumerism (see Miller 1987). The turn to consumption, Michael Dietler shows, was part of a critique of production-focused studies that failed to take account of the ways in which people enrol things in everyday social practices. Reviewing the changing approaches to consumption in archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, Dietler notes that while early studies stressed the symbolic qualities of goods, more recent work acknowledges that material culture does more than simply symbolize. Using examples drawn from the study of colonialism and of food, alcohol, and drugs, Dietler makes a strong case for the importance of methods in consumption studies. An awareness of method means that a number of distinct lessons for consumption studies from archaeology and anthropology can be identified, first among which is a critique of assumptions of the uniqueness of modern or Western consumption practices. Dietler concludes that archaeology and anthropology have made a distinct contribution to a more general shift away from an interest in consumption as purely a domain of symbolic expression or meaning into its role as a practice with particular consequences.

Issues of method and practice also form the focus of Chapter 9, in which Gavin Lucas presents an overview of the history of changing practices of collecting and doing fieldwork among anthropologists and archaeologists. Reviewing the development of studies of the history of collecting in museum studies (Pearce 1995) and ethnography (O’Hanlon andWelsch 2000), and of fieldwork in archaeology (Lucas 2001a), Lucas notes a growing awareness of the importance of field methods in defining the place of material culture studies in archaeology and anthropology—and especially an awareness of the shift of focus away from collecting with the invention of modern ethnographic fieldwork that accompanied the rise of functionalist anthropology in the early twentieth century. Lucas shows how most recently, a self-awareness of the contingency of archaeological and anthropological knowledge upon field practices has developed, often through the idea of ‘reflexivity’ (Hodder 1997, 1999). Such awareness has led in anthropology to the problematization of the definition of the ethnographic field as non-Western in location, while in archaeology it has led to new kinds of field methods, including phenomenology. Lucas concludes by considering the development of ‘ethnographies of archaeological practice’ (Edgeworth 2006a), but strongly resists suggestions, such as that by Chris Gosden, of an elision of archaeological and anthropological field practices, for example in a focus on material culture. Instead, Lucas defines archaeological fieldwork as distinct in its interventionist and transformative nature, and in the centrality of scientific techniques in the analysis of material culture, which are united in the reconstitution of past material worlds in the present. Thus, Lucas argues, the different treatment of objects in fieldwork draws a line between archaeological and anthropological material culture studies.

The classic anthropological theme of practices of gift exchange is explored by Hiro Miyazaki in Chapter 10. Tracing the long history of debate in anthropology over Marcel Mauss’ classic essay The Gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (1923–4), Miyazaki explores the implications of Mauss’ proposition, that things exchanged as gifts come to contain within themselves some part of the giver, especially through the obligation to reciprocate. The problem of reciprocity—what power it is within the gift that requires repayment—is traced through debates, from Lévi-Strauss’ critique that Mauss mistook an indigenous concept (the ‘spirit’ (hau) of the gift) for a general theory of exchange, through the perspectives of Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Annette Weiner, Jonathan Parry, Nancy Munn, and Webb Keane. Seeking to move beyond the framing of these debates in terms of ‘problem and solution’, Miyazaki then examines the feminist critique of Mauss’ model of gift exchange, set out in Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift (1988), which, he argues, understands the relationships between people and things as ‘neither a problem nor a solution’. Instead, Miyazaki argues, Strathern’s account of relational personhood offers new ways of framing discussions of gift exchange, which move beyond bilateral distinctions between subjects and objects.

The inclusion of a chapter on the anthropology of art in a section on ‘material practices’ may at first appear a strange editorial decision. However, the study of artworks in anthropology has shifted in recent years from semiotic studies (e.g. Layton 1981) to interests in the practical involvement of artworks in social relationships, especially through Alfred Gell’s (1998) model of Art and Agency, which argued that artworks were enrolled as secondary agents in social life. Taking a very different approach to that of Gell, in Chapter 11 Howard Morphy argues that the cross-cultural anthropological study of artworks should involve understanding them not as objects in a conventional sense, but as ‘a form of intentional human action’. Critiquing Gell’s dismissal of the utility of the idea of aesthetics, and seeking to move beyond the idea of objects having ‘social lives’ (Appadurai 1986a),Morphy stresses the need to attend to ‘the cognitive and expressive dimensions of objects’ in order to comprehend ‘how they are seen and how they mean’. Morphy affirms that social actors sometimes believe that objects possess agency and that they have effects in the world, but is emphatic on the point that the goal of the anthropologist is not to conclude that objects do have agency but to achieve an understanding of how belief in the agency of objects comes about. To accomplish this, the anthropologist must first determine how an object functions in context, then attempt to explain why objects take the particular forms that they do. Offering a case study of Yolngu circumcision painting in Australia, Morphy calls for ethnographically situated and nuanced studies that retain the distinctive category of art (as action), rather than understanding artworks as simply another form of material culture and unpicking their uses in human social life.

The final contribution to Part II examines archaeological studies of practices of deposition (Chapter 12). Rosemary Joyce and Josh Pollard trace the development of the archaeological concept of the assemblage, and the different ways in which archaeologists have interpreted deposits that are the result of purposeful deposition. Joyce and Pollard work through Mike Schiffer’s processual model of deposition, the post-processual idea of reading assemblages as ‘structured deposition’, and more recent studies of depositional practice as the evidence of human actions (both ceremonial and everyday). Through a case study drawn from fieldwork at Mantecales, Honduras, they show how in the study of assemblage and deposition archaeologists have increasingly moved from the interpretation of meaning or social structure to interests in the role of materials in everyday practice, performance, and memory.

Objects and Humans

As will be clear already, the contributions in this volume question the a priori distinctions between material objects and human subjects in a variety of different ways. In Part III, such distinctions are explored through five themed chapters: exploring technology, material agency, personhood, embodiment, and the use of materials by non-human primates.

Kacy Hollenback and Mike Schiffer open the section with an essay on the current state of behavioural archaeology, a programme of archaeological research developed by Schiffer since the 1970s (Schiffer 1976, 1995a, 2008a). For Hollenback and Schiffer, a reliance upon material culture and technology is what distinguishes humans from other animals. Reviewing the study of technology in archaeology and anthropology before and after the invention of the idea of ‘material culture’, the authors introduce a series of concepts—‘performance characteristics’, the study of the ‘life histories’ of artefacts, and ‘behavioural chains’—that are central to their behavioural approach to material culture. The interest in long-term change and the ‘senescence’ (death) of technologies distinguishes this archaeological approach from sociological STS studies. Through two case studies—concerned with the failure of the early electric car in the 1920s, and with the relationship between the spread of smallpox and the decline of traditional pottery technology among the Mandan and Hidatsa of the Northern Plains of North America—the authors argue that behavioural archaeology offers distinctive perspectives on how human life is always indistinguishable from ‘material life’.

In Chapter 14, Andy Jones and Nicky Boivin take stock of current debates over the idea of ‘material agency’. One recent approach to the study of objects and humans through material culture has been to extend social agency to material things: whether understanding objects as fully agentive (Latour 1993a) or as the ‘indexes’ of human agency (Gell 1998). For Jones and Boivin, such arguments represent a central element of archaeology’s moving beyond the concerns with material culture as holding meaning, and the idea that material culture is analogous with a ‘text’ (Hodder 1986). However, quite distinct from the extension of purely social agency to objects, Jones and Boivin focus on how things’ actions can fall outside the constraint of human agency, or the extension of human intentionality. Through a discussion of ethnographic ideas of animism and fetishism, and drawing from work in STS and ANT, the authors show how many archaeologists are moving beyond a distinction between relativism and realism that characterizes conventional ‘material culture studies’. Using examples from Late Neolithic Orkney and from Rajasthan, India, they conclude that ideas of material agency move beyond a concern with the social, and that ideas from ANT can be used in archaeology to trace ‘courses of action [that] are mediated and articulated over time’ by both humans and materials.

Another way in which distinctions between humans and objects have been critiqued in archaeology and anthropology is through a shift from concerns with ‘identity’ to the idea that material things are implicated in the emergence of ‘personhood’. In Chapter 15, Chris Fowler provides an overview of the history of the study of material culture as either reflective or actively involved in the expression of identity in archaeology as background to his discussion of more recent critiques of the assumption that ‘persons’ exist as universal, bounded entities. Drawing especially upon Melanesian ethnography (e.g. Strathern 1988), Fowler uses ideas of distributed and relational personhood, and the idea of the ‘dividual’, to show how a focus on material culture can be used to critiqueWestern notions of the strictly bounded and indivisible self. Fowler argues that ethnographic observations about the diversity of understandings of the person are of particular importance for archaeologists studying past societies, especially since they do so through material remains that may have been involved in the creation of personhood. Using examples from both prehistoric and historical archaeology, Fowler shows how recent work in archaeology focuses not simply on the relationships between objects and humans, but upon the permeabilities between them, and the historical and ethnographic contingencies of ideas of persons and objects.

Another key area of research in which the permeabilities between humans and materials have been explored is in the archaeology of embodiment. In Chapter 16, Zoë Crossland traces the rising interest in archaeologies of gender and sexuality alongside concerns with the archaeology of the body and performance of identity, for example through studies of dress and personal adornment, since the late 1980s. Through two case studies, Crossland shows how archaeologists have increasingly shown the intimate connections between the body and material culture through the idea of embodiment, and how artefacts can represent extensions of the body. Considering how seventeenth-century ‘witches bottles’ as apotropaic devices acted as anthropomorphic bodily metaphors, she shows how these objects are suggestive of the body as a bounded and fragile vessel, but also represent through ‘an extraordinary redundancy of symbolism’ both witch and victim as ‘entwined and dependent biographies’. Then, through a discussion of forensic archaeology as a contemporary expression of changing ideas about the body and about perceptions of separation between the dead and the living, Crossland argues that forensic archaeology is a practice that attributes agency to the dead in ways that render an ostensibly empirical endeavour as a discourse that is as much about emotion and subjectivity as it is about science. In conclusion, Crossland argues that archaeological material culture studies can provide ‘alternate narratives of the coming into being of the bounded body’, in which materials and humans are studied together through objects.

The questioning of the limits of the person in relation to materials is taken one step further by a consideration of the distinctiveness of human manipulation of materials and uses of tools, as compared with non-human primates (cf. Strum and Latour 1987). Tanya Humle (Chapter 17) argues that certain non-human primates—capuchin monkeys, orangutans, and chimpanzees, and perhaps also gorillas and bonobos—can usefully be seen as having ‘material cultures’, and perhaps also more generally ‘culture’ if we apply an anthropological definition of culture as ‘a system of socially transmitted behaviour(s)’. In an overview of current thinking about primate use of material culture, Humle distinguishes between innate tool use and the reordering of the material environment beyond primates (in which we could include the use of cactus spines to remove arthropods from bark by woodpecker finches, or birds nests and beehives), from physical objects used as a means to achieve an end, which includes the use of stones as hammers and anvils, the construction of shelters, and the use of sticks to extract insects or honey from trees by primates. A central issue here is the social dimension of primate material culture, which includes learnt behaviour, through observation, imitation and teaching; the importance of studying primate use of material culture in the wild rather than in laboratories is therefore underlined by Humle. Through these discussions, she demonstrates the limitations of conventional divisions between biological anthropology from cultural anthropology. The chapter calls for the development of ‘cultural primatology’ as fusing elements drawn from a range of disciplines—anthropology, biology, archaeology, behavioural ecology, and psychology—and underlines the urgency of studying fragile and threatened primate cultures. Humle also eloquently argues for the importance of moving beyond studying the idea of ‘material culture’ in non-human primates in isolation from the idea of the existence of ‘culture’ among them.

Landscapes and the Built Environment

Part IV of the volume explores how the idea of material culture studies can be used to examine large entities, rather than discrete or portable objects. The chapters in this section draw together geographical approaches to ‘cultural landscapes’ and ‘ecological landscapes’ with the study of long-term change in the urban built environment, and two contrasting traditions of studying architecture and ‘home cultures’.

The idea of ‘cultural landscapes’, Lesley Head notes in Chapter 18, derives from the work of geographer Carl Sauer in the 1920s, which has led over several generations of scholarship to a conventional division of labour in geography between the ‘human’ or ‘cultural’ and the ‘physical’. Head traces how the ‘cultural turn’ in geography encouraged a strongly active understanding of the human cultural and meaningful shaping of landscapes, but then how more recently geographers have moved to an acknowledgement of the complexities and hybrid nature of cultural and natural landscapes, especially in the extension of the idea of ‘agency’ to plants, animals, and other elements of the ‘natural’ world. In this context, Head critically examines how the idea of ‘cultural landscapes’ has been put into practice in recent years, with particular reference to the ‘cultural landscape’ category of the World Heritage Convention, using examples of land and heritage management in Australia. Drawing on the arguments of feminist philosopher Val Plumwood, Head assesses whether the idea of cultural landscapes is ‘irretrievably anthropocentric’. Rather than an a priori discrediting of the idea of cultural landscapes, in favour of a blurring of distinctions between the natural and the cultural, Head argues that in certain situations the idea of cultural landscapes can have positive outcomes, especially in relation to the politics of indigenous heritage. This argument reminds us of the importance of our conception of human and material landscapes as historically contingent, and that the uses of such conceptions, but also any attempt to overcome them, are always situated and political.

In contrast with Chapter 18, Sarah Whatmore and Steve Hinchliffe (Chapter 19) use the idea of ‘ecological landscapes’ to seek to dispose of any distinction between cultural and material geographies. By understanding the materials of which landscapes are made as ‘energetic constituents in their fabrication’, they work through arguments in phenomenology, affect, and biophilosophy to craft a reconfiguration of ideas about landscape and ecology that allows for a sense of landscape as process, as affective materiality, and as an ‘enlivened’, more-than-spatial entity. Whatmore and Hinchliffe see landscapes as ‘complex assemblages’ in which people are situated on the basis of their relationships with human and non-human others. Examining two public spaces in the contemporary urban ecology of Bristol—Thingwall Park Allotments and the Royate Hill viaduct-reserve—Whatmore and Hinchliffe call for the study of ‘living cities’ (rather than ‘built environments’). Using concepts of vernacular ecologies and conviviality, they call for a rethinking of landscapes as ‘more-than-human achievements’ that are lived in before they are made, that arise not from pre-existing human vision and design but from relational engagements between human, non-human, and more-than-human agents. Such approaches, they argue, raise the potential for a ‘more-than-human politics of landscap-ing’, which could inform different approaches to urban policy and planning.

Urban spaces and urban materialities are also the focus of Roland Fletcher’s contribution (Chapter 20), but Fletcher’s concerns are centred around the effects of the accretion of the materialities of urban environments across time and space. Building on his previous studies of urban materiality (especially his The Limits of Settlement Growth), he begins by discussing the ways in which scholars across a range of disciplines have approached materiality, in order to situate his own treatment of urban materialities in terms of cross-cultural generalizations about the role of urban places in human experience throughout history. His aim is to address matters of words and representation, magnitude, and materials through time. Fletcher argues that textbased approaches to materiality have failed to engage with the sheer weight and power of urban materials. The very size of cities, Fletcher suggests, leads to what he refers to as ‘self-inflicted damage’ as a result of overcrowding and lack of investment in infrastructure, while warfare, especially in industrialized cities, has led to the large-scale, asymmetrical destruction of urban places. Through wideranging examples drawn from ancient, early modern, and modern urban contexts, he argues that archaeologists must engage more adequately with the material duration and persistence of urban places as a central element of any understanding of the contingencies and effects of urban history. Fletcher’s perspective is distinctly humanistic in that he raises the ethical dimensions of urban growth, florescence, decay, and destruction to human agents in all instances: even urban destruction by natural forces Fletcher sees as the ‘fault’ of improvident humans. In this way, his approach differs from the presentism of some geographical calls for non-human geographies of urban landscapes, and from the local contexts of such work that contrast with his sense of ‘the mega-scale’ to which he argues archaeology can provide particular access. Thus, Fletcher re-thinks urban landscapes as sources of an understanding of ‘the macro-scale of familiar public milieu’ as well as ‘the micro-scale of personal life’.

The final contributions to this section introduce two contrasting traditions of thought about the built environment. In Chapter 21, Carl Lounsbury moves us from the grand scale of cities across time and space to the smaller scale of buildings. Lounsbury’s perspective as an architectural historian is steeped in ideas drawn from social history and the decorative arts and strongly influenced by material in Americanist traditions of culture studies. He focuses on the study of buildings as sources of design and as cultural artefacts, using examples drawn chiefly from North America, tracing architectural history from design-oriented and antiquarian approaches through its transformation into a social science, with greater attention to issues of environment, resources, and indigenous and non-Western architecture. In contrast with studies of the aesthetics and style of architecture, or of the work of particular architects, Lounsbury draws on traditions in American anthropology and folklife studies that examine vernacular and polite buildings as evidence for the study of power, class, gender, and race in the past. Giving examples of studies of plantation landscapes and housing for enslaved Africans, of post-colonial architectural forms, and of ‘cultural landscapes’ centred around commemoration and public memory, Lounsbury provides an integrated overview of the study of architecture as material culture in traditions that have developed in the eastern United States.

In Chapter 22, Victor Buchli explores how material culture studies have contributed to anthropological studies of houses and households. Building on his previous work on the idea of ‘home cultures’, and his observation that houses represent ‘the context in which most other material culture is used, placed and understood’ (Buchli 2002b: 207), Buchli reviews a wide range of anthropological and archaeological studies of the domestic sphere. Drawing upon a range of social anthropological studies of households, and upon the tradition of material culture studies developed at University College London, Buchli provides an overview of the anthropology of the domestic sphere, tracing the emergence of interests in houses as processes, rather than as types or physical forms. Buchli explains how these developments have influenced archaeologists’ considerations of home life and how archaeology and anthropology can use houses and homes as places to study gender, sexuality, and consumption; techniques of governance; the impact of new technologies; and new conceptions of the body and the experience of personhood. Rather than fetishizing the dwelling as an object of enquiry, Buchli demonstrates that houses and homes represent dynamic, fluid, and lively environments in which to undertake material culture studies.

Studying Particular Things

One thing shared by many of the contributions to this volume is a commitment to the value of situated, extended studies of particular items or bodies of material culture: something that is all too often lost in theoretical debates about material culture or materiality. Just as Part IV introduced a range of situations in which material culture studies can be undertaken (from urban ecology to the domestic sphere), so our final section aims to show some of the analytical power that such studies of things have: allowing theoretical positions to emerge in particular material engagements—with stone tools, landscape gardens, ceramics, buildings, and ‘magical things’.

In Chapter 23, Rodney Harrison addresses one of the most venerable of archaeological objects: stone tools. However, the particular object studied by Harrison is a copy of a stone point rendered in glass by indigenous people in the Kimberley region of western Australia during the nineteenth century, and collected and accessioned into the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Reviewing alternative approaches to artefact manufacture, and reviewing the history of stone tool studies in archaeology, Harrison discusses the need to account for the social agency of indigenous people by understanding the Kimberley point as an artefact of colonial encounter. He also uses Alfred Gell’s discussions of the enchanting qualities of material culture in social life (Gell 1998) to introduce the idea of material agency. The brilliance of the glass Kimberley point, and the skill involved in its manufacture, contribute for Harrison to its status as a ‘captivating object’, the agentive qualities of which influenced the history of its being collected. But Harrison acknowledges that any account of the persistence of the object into the contemporary world involves more than an acknowledgement of its enrolment in human social agency. This is particularly clear, he argues, in accounting for the politics of indigenous heritage in Australia in debates over the repatriation of cultural remains, such as the kind of stone tools of which the Kimberley points were copies. Through ethnographic interviews with Aboriginal people working in the field of archaeological heritage management, Harrison discusses the use of material culture by people to express ‘a rather conservative or old-fashioned association between race, culture and material artefacts’. This ‘strategic essentialism’ involves the use of material culture for purely cultural ends by minority groups. In this nuanced argument, which deals with many of the same issues as those addressed by Lesley Head in Chapter 18, Harrison shows how in accounting for the material agency of objects we must also accommodate their contemporary political power. Such uses of material culture for culturalist ends are powerful, and challenge the archaeologist to account for those forms of contemporary politics that involve things as well as people.

In Chapter 24, Chandra Mukerji provides a detailed account of the study of French landscape gardens as material culture. She argues that the value in studying early modern designed landscapes lies in their role as sites of ‘ongoing experiments’ in relation to the human governance of things and the demonstration of the control of nature, and as part of political life. Mukerji discusses Louis XIV’s seventeenth-century gardens at Versailles, which were designed as a microcosm of the kingdom of France. She explains how the circulades of south-western France operated as utopian expressions of hope against the threat of potential loss of farm surplus. Recognizing the links between landscape management, politics, and religion provides a means of understanding how in France the symbolic aspects of landscape gardens were transformed over time into a far broader tradition of land use and land management: accomplished through particular material techniques and according to specific moral rationales, these landscapes served to demonstrate, validate, and underscore the ‘material order’ of French political and social regimes. Unlike many objects examined by material culture studies, like a silver spoon for example, gardens never hold the illusion that they are ‘wholly a product of human design’. Thus, Mukerji shows, studying designed landscapes reveal the implication of both the natural and the cultural in early modern hope and ambition, models of moral reform, and ideas of territorial governance. In this way, their study demonstrates how social regimes are always both ‘material and political orders’—enacted through the non-human, as well as purely the human, world.

Chapter 25 presents a dialogue between two archaeologists studying architectural construction during the European Neolithic. From four case studies, Doug Bailey and Lesley McFadyen develop four propositions about the archaeological study of the construction of ‘built objects’. First, they use the study of the practical and material dimensions of the construction of long barrows in southern England to argue that archaeologists should consider building as practice and avoid thinking about buildings as crystallizations of ideas, as fixed entities. The construction of such monuments was a process that McFadyen describes as ‘quick architecture’, referring both to the differential speed at which phases of building take place and to the ways in which building techniques and materials affect the builder. This approach emphasizes the dynamic nature of building over the notion of interpreting architectural evidence in terms of a completed form. Secondly, in a discussion of Neolithic pit-houses from south-eastern Europe they argue that conventional distinctions between above-ground, durable dwellings, and smaller dwellings constructed by digging a pit in the ground are unhelpful. Using ideas from the American Land Art movement, they consider the transformative aspects of creating and enclosing negative spaces. Thirdly, informed by architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi’s idea of Architecture and Disjunction (1996), Bailey and McFadyen question whether conventional distinctions of discrete construction phases for English Neolithic monuments is either helpful or possible. The idea of a construction sequence implies a continuity and regularity in construction activity, and treats the structure as fixed and constant. Neolithic constructions were nothing of the sort, the authors argue, but instead resulted from discontinuous and episodic activities and were often ‘mobile’ in ways that suited how Neolithic people lived their lives. Finally, returning to south-eastern Europe and to houses, a fourth proposition calls for the forms of houses to be studied at different scales from the conventional fine-grained detail of archaeological excavation. Here, the focus is on houses as objects that position people in space and create specific intellectual and physical engagements because, in ways suggested through the philosophy of Minimalist art, they become ‘environmental’ in the broadest sense. Developing these four propositions from four distinct archaeological contexts, Bailey and McFadyen disrupt conventional archaeological thinking about prehistoric structures. Through ideas of the pace and discontinuities of construction, and through a focus on digging as well as building and on houses as part of broader lived environments, they call for an ‘unlearning of how we look at the archaeological evidence of houses, building and architecture’. This approach moves far beyond conventional interpretive archaeology into new kinds of accounts of materials and practice.

The study of ceramics is the archetypal archaeological theme when the question of ‘studying particular things’ is raised. However, the study by Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris, and Peter Tomkins (Chapter 26) of a pithos (storage vessel) and rhyton (ceremonial vessel) from the early Bronze Age in the Aegean raises issues that go far beyond conventional ceramic studies, which focus on artefacts as evidence of economy or changing ceramic technology. Their focus is instead firmly upon what these objects do, rather than what they mean: they argue that their functions as containers means that they should be considered as part of broader technologies of containing, including baskets, gourds, or metal vessels, rather than simply within a sequence of ceramic typology. In this new approach to typology, based on items of material culture as ‘action possibilities’, the authors combine Jean-Pierre Warnier’s study of ‘containers and surfaces’ (Warnier 2006) with ideas of the ‘embodied mind’ and ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ drawn from cognitive psychology (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Their attention to categories of practice, while attending to the materiality of ceramics, builds in innovative ways upon Colin Renfrew’s (2001) idea of ‘material engagement’. They situate their discussion in relation to the long-term development of ceramic containers in Europe from their initial appearance in the Mesolithic, through the Neolithic and Bronze Age. The implication of this study of two Bronze Age artefacts is that archaeology can make distinctive interdisciplinary contributions by moving beyond ‘Artefacts as Categories’ (Miller 1985) towards a new appreciation of the form and type of artefacts that is grounded in the implication of particular material technologies of practice in both the cognitive and material dimensions of human life.

The final chapter in this section takes on these two overlapping dimensions of human life in a very different manner. Through his anthropological study of fetishes, commodities, and modern technologies, in Chapter 27 Peter Pels engages with categories of objects that are bound up with notions of magic. Magical objects lie at the heart of ethnographic concerns with the idea of material agency. Pels shows how the anthropological encounter with beliefs that things can ‘do something’ to humans led to an emphasis in scholarship on magic on the irrational and impossible, upon seemingly mistaken beliefs, psychological shortcomings, and misplaced subjectivities. He explores how over the course of the nineteenth century, ideas about magic and materiality were pulled apart from one another. But by juxtaposing William Pietz’s studies of the emergence of the fetish in early modern West Africa with the anthropological study of commodities, Pels elegantly situates the Marxian idea of commodity fetishism in broader historical context. He argues that anthropological material culture studies have increasingly downplayed the importance of fetishism. Anthropocentric models of the material culture of consumerism have not allowed for the more radical attribution of agency to commodities.

Through a series of case studies about twentieth-century and contemporary advertising, Pels builds an argument that bears some similarities to the ‘enchanted materialism’ of modern life evoked by Jane Bennett (2001), but is more explicit in how Western capitalism employs ‘magic’ and enchantment to construct and capture its markets. Pels sees these elements as bound up with technologies, with the prime example of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries being that of computer technophilia and the emergence within the hacker subculture of an overdetermined trope of programming as a magical activity performed by practitioners referred to as ‘wizards’ and ‘master magicians’. Computer technology, then, is an area in which fetishism is not rejected but embraced; the technology magically transforms the modern commodity into a highly materialized, magical thing. Pels argues in conclusion that the Western denial of distributed or material agency is precisely the source of the magical nature of certain technological objects in the modern world: an argument that compels us to rethink the historical and ethnographic contingencies and complexities in which ideas of material agency are debated or dismissed.

Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view

Together, the chapters of this volume demonstrate what the four disciplines assembled here—archaeology, anthropology, geography, and STS—have in common. Each chapter works in different ways within particular intellectual traditions, to answer particular disciplinary questions, through approaches that engage with, and sometimes immerse themselves in, complex environments of humans and non-humans, from gardens to ceramics to chimpanzees. Issues of method are more or less formalized depending on the discipline. As methods are put into practice, these studies regularly encounter, and must account for, the lives of non-humans as well as purely humans. In all four fields, these experiences are increasingly pressing researchers to move beyond the priorities of the linguistic or cultural turn, which were focused on an anthropocentric concern with the meanings or significance of material culture to people, and simultaneously beyond concerns with simply the use by people of objects in social relations. All four disciplines are seeking to retool themselves to accommodate the role of non-humans. This need is perhaps especially clear when analyses move beyond the ethnographic present and deal with transformation and change over time.

Why, then, after the editorial work that has gone into assembling these studies would we hold back from calling for a material turn that would replace the anthropocentric linguistic or cultural turn of the 1980s? The studies collected here hold many insights for the study of material culture—from ontological politics, to debates over material agency, to the implications of moving beyond literary and textual analogies for material culture, to the risks of reducing materials to anthropocentric accounts of the social. Without doubt, through editing this collection our firm belief in the importance of the study of material things in the humanities and social sciences, and our commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration, has become even stronger. But on what terms? The studies collected in this volume lead towards an appreciation not only of the effects of things, but also of things as the effects of material practices (both vernacular and academic). Material culture does not represent a straightforward object of enquiry, simply requiring new vocabularies for interpretation or abstract theorization. Instead, if we take seriously the critique of any a priori distinction between subject and object, then this must also encompass the academic researcher and her object of enquiry. Like any thing, for the disciplines gathered here knowledge is emergent and contingent upon material practice. This, we suggest, must be the point of departure for any interdisciplinary discussion of material culture.

Here, the distinction between material culture studies and ANT becomes clear. As a ‘symmetrical anthropology’ (Latour 1993a) that can present ‘the sociology of a few mundane artefacts’ (Latour 1992), ANT has provided a powerful model for how anthropological thinking about the place of material things in social life might achieve cross-disciplinary impact. It is above all in the transdisciplinary reception of ANT, we might suggest, that the strongest possible model for what a ‘material turn’ would look like is developing. But such a material turn would simply extend, through a rhetorical inversion, the cultural turn of the 1980s. While we share a sense of what we are leaving behind, the contributions assembled here (including our own) represent a series of crossroads rather than a new series of ‘turns’: turn upon turn, which would add up only to academic spin.

Anthropology has been here before: with the Durkheimian model of the social, and with structuralism. The transdisciplinary reception of the representational impulse in ANT—its status as a third twentieth-century theory ripe for application in diverse situations—makes it the rightful successor to the Durkheimian and structuralist models of anthropological thinking. But while we learn much from ANT, the contributions assembled here do not add up to a new interdisciplinary space in which to reconcile or inter-relate the cultural and the material, the human and non-human. Instead, they inspire us to foreground the partiality of the knowledge of the world that emerges from ‘field sciences’ such as archaeology, anthropology, geography, and STS as they are enacted. Unlike the idea of reflexivity, in which the situatedness of the human researcher in interpreting and representing the world is foregrounded to relate method and theory, we want to suggest that approaches to the study of things in these field sciences can provide distinctive resources for an ontological, rather than epistemological, retooling in practice.

And so we return to disciplinarity. A reactionary argument indeed: the continued relevance of modernist models of disciplinary purity. But that is not what we are after. Instead, our resistance to the idea of a postdisciplinary material turn emerges from our own deep sense, from the perspective of anthropological archaeology, of the complexity, mess, and diversity of the practices from which our knowledge emerges. Interdisciplinary collaborations are central to the future of material culture studies. But we must not forget that the things that we study are the effects of our practice, which is always historically contingent. And always political. When Bruno Latour talks of flat ontologies, these must extend between researcher and object of enquiry, as well as simply between humans and non-humans. Otherwise, we will simply continue to play back and forth across the categories of the cultural and the material: critiquing, collapsing, relating. Imagining that we represent a world, which we can hold at arm’s length, rather than enacting our knowledge of things. It is in this sense—a sense of the radical partiality of our knowledge of the world, which we might celebrate rather than shy away from—that material culture studies will, as Nigel Thrift suggests in his afterword that it has, come of age.

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (OUP 2010, xviii+774pp, 98 figures, 2 tables) was published in Autumn 2010. Full details of the contents are here, and the book can be ordered here.

Intimate Distance: Three Kinds of Detachment in the Archaeology of the Modern

2010-04-02T20:16:00.101+01:00

image: remains (earthworks and stone settings) of the site of a bender (tent) originally erected in 1999, and subsequently dismantled, at the Lees Cross and Endcliffe Protest Camp, Derbyshire (part of an environmentalist campaign against the expansion of two limestone quarries on Stanton Moor). From Anna Badcock and Robert Johnston 2009. Placemaking through protest: an archaeology of the Lees Cross and Endcliffe Protest Camp. Archaeologies 5(2): 306-322.

I'm speaking in a panel at a conference in Cambridge (30 June-3 July), which my colleague Tom Yarrow is convening with Matt Candea, Jo Cook and Catherine Trundle. The meeting - on the theme Reconsidering Detachment - is part of an ESRC-funded initiative called The Detachment Collaboratory

The long abstract for my paper is below: the paper takes stock of three alternative approaches to 'detachment' and 'proximity' in the archaeological study of the modern period.

Three kinds of detachment in the archaeology of the modern

Dan Hicks (Oxford University)

As in social anthropology, archaeological thinking has since the 1980s witnessed a series of critiques of scientific and objective detachment. However, these critiques have perhaps differed from those in anthropology in that the firm distinctions between scientific/objective and social-constructivist/subjective approaches described in the conference abstract have from the outset been considerably more entangled.

Since debates over distance and proximity have been perhaps most sharply focused in the development of the archaeological study of the recent past, this paper focuses on how in this field, instead of clear narratives around connection and engagement, a number of possible forms of detachment have emerged. The paper examines two kinds of detachment in the archaeological study of the modern period, and then considers an alternative approach to proximity and distance, in order to develop an archaeological contribution to the conference theme of ‘the analytics of disconnection’.

1. Critical Detachment

The first form of disconnection that I want to identify we might refer to as critical detachment, a term I use to evoke its commonality with certain forms of literary criticism, rather than with critical theory. It is associated most directly with archaeology’s version of the ‘cultural turn’, and operated by seeking hermeneutic distance through the contention, central to post-processual thinking, that archaeology is a contemporary practice that involves mediating relationships with the past. In contrast with socio-cultural anthropology’s model of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), in archaeology the more contemplative idea of Reading the Past (Hodder 1986) understood the past (and most commonly European prehistory) as other. In transferring this approach to the study of the modern period, archaeologists including Sarah Tarlow and Matthew Johnson extended this literary model to imagine apparently familiar objects of enquiry as ‘unfamiliar’ (Tarlow and West 1999). For example, in his discussion of medieval castles, Johnson sought

to stress the unfamiliar, to move away from easy readings, to interpret castles 'against the grain', just as literary critic Jonathan Dollimore suggests we should read Renaissance literary texts against the grain (Johnson 2002: 17).

Here, archaeological theory was imagined as analogous with the uses of literary theory in New Historicism: as a tool for a more nuanced (and thus more accurate) historiography. The distancing of the archaeologist as subject from the object of enquiry served to extend, rather than straightforwardly critique, ideas of scientific detachment. Where in a conventional model of scientific detachment the researcher was located nowhere, in the model of critical detachment the archaeologist stood, impossibly, between past and present: self-consciously mediating the interpretive reception of modern remains to write the ‘social archaeology’ of the recent past.

2. Contemporary Detachment

If in the critical-literary model of an archaeology of the modern period the researcher stood impossibly within a relationship between past and present, an alternative model of detachment - which we might term contemporary detachment - has sought to situate both the researcher as subject and the object of enquiry firmly within the present: distinct and detached, in other words, from earlier periods of archaeological study. This position has increasingly sought to define the idea of 'contemporary archaeology' - as uncoupled from the kind of 'historical archaeology' discussed above.

Where the critical model of detachment drew from the 1980s post-processualism of Ian Hodder and his students, the contemporary model has been associated with the parallel trajectory of 1980s archaeological thinking in Cambridge: the development from ethnoarchaeology of a distinctive British version of earlier Americanist trajectories in ‘modern material culture studies’, especially by Danny Miller and his students (Hicks 2010). In contrast with the critical-literary model, the use by Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas of the idea of ‘the contemporary past’ sought (pace Harrison and Schofield 2009: 196) explicitly not ‘to create a distance from the familiar’, but conversely to ‘mak[e] the undiscursive discursive’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 14).

Instead, however, after the publication of Buchli and Lucas’ thoughtful account, a tendency has developed towards a new form of detachment, as some in the field have increasingly sought to define 'contemporary archaeology' as fundamentally different from the archaeological study of earlier periods: as a distinct, and explicitly interdisciplinary, field of enquiry. For example, in their recent review of ‘archaeologies of the contemporary past’, Rodney Harrison and John Schofield criticize ‘a conservative and literal definition of archaeology, as something that should concern itself only with that which is ancient, or "archaic"’ (Harrison and Schofield 2009: 186). Instead, the authors list what they see as the main themes of contemporary archaeology, the coherence of which relies upon their apparent detachment from the worlds of the university- or heritage agency-based researcher: the list runs, with a certain predictability, from abandoned factories, urban graffiti, working class housing, and sites of political protest to disaster sites, battlefields and other sites of conflict and violence, crime scenes, virtual/digital worlds, and the material culture of counter-cultural movements. In a re-statement of the subalternism of Americanist Marxist historical archaeologies, and yet generalized to the extent that any explicit political position is stripped away, in this account ‘archaeology has a major role to play in foregrounding those aspects of contemporary life at the margins which are constantly being overwritten by dominant narratives’ (Harrison and Schofield 2009: 191). The suggestion is that such 'outsider' materials - retrochic readymades already uncoupled from the observer - represent somehow in themselves sufficiently archaeological objects of enquiry: so that they can form the proper focus for ‘contemporary archaeology’.

3. Disciplinary Detachment

In this way, like anthropological material culture studies two decades before, the idea of ‘contemporary archaeology’ came for some during the 2000s to be imagined as a separate field, standing apart from the discipline of archaeology. The apparently ‘interdisciplinary nature of the archaeology of the contemporary past’ has inspired rallying calls to explore ‘the new frontiers of archaeo-ethnography and auto-archaeology’ (Harrison and Schofield 2009: 198, 196). But such post-disciplinary arguments, as I have argued elsewhere for anthropological material culture studies (Hicks 2010), serve to deny the emergence of objects of enquiry from research practices. Instead, they seek to identify 'the archaeological' in contemporary readymade things or places that are away from everyday human life - abandoned, decaying, etc. This means in practice that the everyday or the apparently banal elements of modern and contemporary life - as studied, for example, by more recent work in anthropological material culture studies (eg Miller 2008), in feminist historical archaeology (eg Wilkie 2010), and elsewhere - find themselves outside the purview of the archaeology of the modern.

The final section of this paper therefore calls into question the slippage from the idea of an archaeology of the contemporary past to the idea of a special, and explicitly interdisciplinary, field of study which could be called ‘contemporary archaeology’: which reproduces the distinction between past and present that was at the heart of the critical-literary detachment described above. The critical and contemporary models of detachment have, respectively, understood the study of the modern as either fragmented or total, objective or subjective, monolithic or cosmopolitan, pure or hybrid, historical or avant-garde. At the same time, both models have served to bound off (and then inter-relate) the historical from the contemporary: leading to a persistence of the idea that mainstream archaeological research has an end-point that can never extend into the contemporary world.

In contrast with the critical and contemporary models of detachment, the main argument of this paper is that the extension of archaeological perspectives into the modern period has inevitably brought a breaking-down of conventional distinctions between the archaeological past and the archaeological present, and between scholar and object (Hicks 2003): but that this need not bring an end to detachment in the archaeological study of the modern. An understanding of the disciplinary enactment, rather than the straightforward representation, of the past underlines the emergence of archaeological materials from archaeological practices. Comparing this argument with recent discussions of the idea of ‘contemporary anthropology’ (Rabinow 2007, Rabinow et al 2008), the paper makes a new argument for disciplinary detachments, against the post-disciplinary status of the archaeology of the modern that has characterised both 'critical' and 'contemporary' models of detachment.

***

In this re-statement of disciplinary detachment – which actively recalls David Clarke’s commitment to archaeology as archaeology – we might usefully turn to WG Sebald’s reflections on Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia/Urn Burial (1658). Sebald suggested that the antiquary’s melancholic account of the excavation of cremated human bone in earthenware vessels buried shallow in the Norfolk soil showed how the practice of archaeology serves to collapse immediacy and distance in our conception and experience of the past:

Je mehr die Entfernung wächst, desto klarer wird die Sicht. Mit der größtmöglichen Deutlichkeit erblickt man die winzigen Details. Es ist, als schaute man zugleich durch ein umgekehrtes Fernrohr und durch ein Mikroskop.[The more the distance grows, the clearer the view becomes. You glimpse the tiniest details with the utmost clarity. It is as if you were looking through a reversed telescope and through a microscope at the same time] (W.G. Sebald 1995. Die Ringe des Saturn, pp. 29- 30)

Using Sebald’s evocation of what we could call the 'intimate distance' that emerges from the practice of archaeology to consider not Anglo-Saxon funerary remains, but the remains of the 20th century, the paper concludes by suggesting that a focus on the interventionist and transformative character of archaeological practices – from excavation and collecting to photography and writing – can serve to collapse our conventional scales of disciplinary proxemics. Re-evaluating the utility of new forms of ‘detachment’ – the creation of any object of enquiry as a form of methodological, enacted and partial separation, rather than distanced representation – the paper calls for a renewed (if moderated) sense of disciplinary distance and self-identity in the archaeological study of the modern. Through the intimate distance that emerges through archaeology's 'creative materialising intervention' (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 17), and thus through the sense of the contingency of our knowledge of the modern upon the means that we employ to study its remains, new, more provisional, forms of transdisciplinary collaboration can be developed. In the process, the place of 'contemporary archaeology' within the broader archaeological endeavour might be re-asserted.

References

Buchli, V. and G. Lucas (eds) 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.

Clifford, J. and G. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing Culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harrison, R. and J. Schofield 2009. Archaeo-Ethnography, Auto-Archaeology: Introducing Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. Archaeologies 5(2): 185-209.

Hicks, D. 2003. Archaeology unfolding: diversity and the loss of isolation. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 22(3): 215-229.

Hicks, D. 2010. The material-cultural turn: event and effect. In D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hodder, I. 1986. Reading the Past: current approaches to interpretation in archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, M.H. 2002. Behind the castle gate: from medieval to Renaissance. Oxford: Blackwell.

Miller, D. 2008. The Comfort of Things. London: Polity.

Rabinow, P. 2007. Marking Time: on the anthropology of the contemporary. Princeton University Press.

Rabinow, P. and G.E. Marcus, with J.D. Faubion and T. Rees 2008. Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sebald, W.G. 1998. The Rings of Saturn. London: Vintage.

Tarlow, S. and S. West (eds) 1999. The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of later historical Britain. London: Routledge.

Wilkie, L.A. 2010. The Lost Boys of Zeta Psi: a historical archaeology of masculinity at an American fraternity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wild Signs: graffiti in archaeology and history

2010-03-27T13:53:00.011Z

image: 17th- and 18th-century graffiti scratched into the limestone of Tewkesbury Abbey

Wild Signs: Grafitti in Archaeology and History - the latest (sixth) volume in the series ‘Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology’, which I co-edit with Josh Pollard - is now published. Edited by Jeff Oliver (Aberdeen) and Tim Neal (Sheffield), the book brings together a series of studies in the historical archaeology of wall art, graffiti and tree carvings.

BAR S2074 2010: Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology 6 'Wild Signs: Graffiti in Archaeology and History' edited by Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal. ISBN 9781407306353. £30.00. v+103 pages; illustrated throughout with maps, plans, figures, drawings and photographs.

The book can be ordered through Hadrian Books or Archaeopress, as well as through Amazon, etc.

Contents

1. Wild Signs: An Introduction (Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal)

2. Basque Aspen Carvings: The Biggest Little Secret of Western USA (Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe)

3. Elbow Grease and Time to Spare: The Place of Tree Carving (Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal)

4. Magic Markers: The Evocative Potential of Carvings on Stanton Moor Edge, Derbyshire, UK (Stella McGuire)

5. Traces of Presence and Pleading: Approaches to the Study of Graffiti at Tewkesbury Abbey (Kirsty Owen)

6. Signs of the Times: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Graffiti in the Farms of the Yorkshire Wolds (Kate Giles and Mel Giles)

7. ‘What the Frak is F***?’ A Thematic Reading of the Graffiti of Bristol (Travis G. Parno)

8. ‘Theo Loves Doris’: Wild-Signs in Landscape and Heritage Context (John Schofield)

9. Painting The River’s Margins (Tiago Matos Silva)

10. In London You’re Never More Than 10 Feet from a Rat (Stencil): The Rat and Urban Folklore (Paul Cowdell)

11. Afterword (Victor Buchli).

Series Editors' Preface

Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology is a new series of edited and single-authored volumes intended to make available current work on the archaeology of the recent and contemporary past. The series brings together contributions from academic historical archaeologists, professional archaeologists and practitioners from cognate disciplines who are engaged with archaeological material and practices. The series will include work from traditions of historical and contemporary archaeology, and material culture studies, from Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere around the world. It will promote innovative and creative approaches to later historical archaeology, showcasing this increasingly vibrant and global field through extended and theoretically engaged case studies.

Proposals are invited from emerging and established scholars interested in publishing in or editing for the series. Further details are available from the series editors: Email dan.hicks@arch.ox.ac.uk or joshua.pollard@bristol.ac.uk

This, the sixth volume in the series, assembles a series of innovative studies in the historical archaeology of graffiti. A rich variety of case studies that range from figures carved into the bark of aspen trees in upland Nevada made during the 1910s to stencilled rats on the streets of 21st-century Bristol, and from ships scratched into the limestone of Tewkesbury Cathedral to aircraft drawn on the walls of farm buildings by horselads in the Yorkshire Wolds during the early 20th century. Through these case studies, the editors clearly demonstrate the potential contribution of such sites to wider archaeological debates around the study of art and landscape: looking at the effects of artworks, rather than simply trying to interpret their meaning. This response to the ‘wildness’ of graffiti is contextualised in Victor Buchli’s afterword, which demonstrates the volume’s broader contribution to fields of material culture studies and the archaeology of the recent past.

Dan Hicks (University of Oxford) and Joshua Pollard (University of Bristol)

Contributors

Victor Buchli (Reader, Department of Anthropology, UCL)

Paul Cowdell (Ph.D. candidate, Social Science Arts and Humanities Research Institute, University of Hertfordshire)

Kate Giles (Lecturer in Archaeology, University of York)

Mel Giles (Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Manchester)

Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe (Independent researcher (retired), Reno, Nevada, USA)

Stella McGuire (Freelance archaeologist, Hathersage, Derbyshire)

Tim Neal (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield)

Jeff Oliver (Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Aberdeen)

Kirsty Owen (Historic Scotland)

Travis Parno (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Archaeology, Boston University)

John Schofield (English Heritage)

Tiago Silva (Graffiti artist, Lisbon)

Pitt Rivers Museum lunchtime seminars, Spring 2010

2009-12-30T19:50:00.016Z

[image: Excavated Grooved Ware (Neolithic) pits and their contents reassembled at

Over, Cambridgeshire. Photo by Mark Knight and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. From Pollard, J. 2001. The Aesthetics of Depositional Practice. World Archaeology 33(2): 315-333]

I'm convening the weekly lunchtime seminar series at the Pitt Rivers Museum next term. The list of seminars is below. All the seminars are 'brown bag' - ie you are welcome to come with your lunch. They run from 1pm to 2.15pm every Friday in Hilary Term.

The seminars are open to all within Oxford University - if you're based elsewhere and would like to attend one of them, please drop me a line at dan.hicks@prm.ox.ac.uk

Week 1: Friday 22 Jan 2010
Professor Patrick Wright (Nottingham Trent University/London Consortium)
Heritage, melancholy, and the place of criticism

Week 2: Friday 29 Jan
Professor Norman Hammond (Boston University)
Early Maya Economy, Society and Culture at Cuello, Belize

Week 3: Friday 5 Feb
Kate Brindley (Director of Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, and formerly Director of Museums, Galleries and Archives at Bristol City Council)
Banksy vs Bristol Museum (a conversation with Dan Hicks)

Week 4: Friday 12 Feb
Professor Nick Thomas (University of Cambridge)
The Museum as Method

Week 5: Friday 19 Feb
Dr Josh Pollard (University of Bristol)
The Aesthetics of Deposition

Week 6: Friday 26 Feb
Dr Jennifer Bajorek (Goldsmiths)
Photography in West Africa: photographic archives of the Independence period in Senegal and Benin

Week 7: Friday 5 March
Lisa Le Feuvre (Goldsmiths)
Curating Contemporary Art at the National Maritime Museum

Week 8: Friday 12 March
Nick Mayhew (Deputy Director (Collections), Ashmolean Museum)
Current research into the history of modern currency

Kitchens, smokehouses, and privies

2009-12-21T17:15:00.005Z

[My review of Michael Olmert's Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies is published in the current TLS (Christmas double issue). The opening lines are below; full text is printed in the TLS (No. 5568/69). Cite this paper as Hicks, D. 2009. The Smallest Rooms. Times Literary Supplement 5568/5569: 35]

Michael Olmert 2009. Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies: outbuildings and the architecture of daily life in the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic. Cornell University Press. ISBN 9780801447914 (cloth).

Since the late 19th century, a deeply canonical strand of architectural thinking has shaped how the historic environment is understood and debated in the eastern United States. The enactment of this idea of a canon of historic places and buildings is nowhere clearer than at Williamsburg, Virginia. From 1926 the Rockefeller-funded restoration programme pulled down 19th- and 20th-century buildings, reconstructing 18th-century structures on archaeological ‘footprints’. This landscape of freshly-cut timber and repointed brickwork came to operate not only as a Historic District and a theme park for ‘living history’ tourism and costumed interpretation, but also, like the adjacent self-consciously ‘historic campus’ of the College of William and Mary, as a place for envisioning America’s past and its English cultural pedigree.

In the wake of the Civil Rights movement, Colonial Williamsburg became an iconic space for the weighing of celebratory narratives of great men and great houses against the new social histories of slavery and everyday material culture. To paraphrase Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s study of A New History in the Old Museum, 1930s historic reconstructionism created a place for 1980s historical constructionism.

Twelve years on from Handler and Gable’s book, Michael Olmert’s popular overview of the 18th-century outbuildings of the Chesapeake Tidewater already sits on display alongside his Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg in the Local Interest section of the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Duke of Gloucester Street, where Starbucks coffee is served beneath reproduction 1920s light fittings. But insofar as Kitchens, Smokehouses, and Privies represents an update on the scholarly after-effects of 20th-century preservationism, it highlights issues of much more than local concern....

[the rest of the review, in its edited form, is in the Christmas issue of the TLS]

CHAT 2010 - The Archaeology of Northern Worlds

2009-12-15T19:36:00.012Z

[image: Excavation of Viking farmstead in Iceland in 1995 (left) and 1908 (photos: Gavin Lucas/Fornleifastofnun Islands)]

The first call for papers for the eighth annual meeting of the CHAT conference group (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) has just been issued, and is below.

The meeting will be held in November 2010 at the University of Aberdeen, and is being organised by Jeff Oliver. More details on the meeting will be provided on the CHAT website. The keynote speaker will be Tim Ingold.

John Chenoweth at Berkeley reviewed the 2009 meeting in Oxford (October 2009) on Archaeolog.

All enquiries about the meeting should be sent to CHAT2010@abdn.ac.uk The CHAT committee have set up a Facebook page for the conference.

First Call For Papers

CHAT 2010: ‘North’

Northern Worlds in Contemporary & Historical Archaeology
November 12-14, 2010, The University of Aberdeen, Scotland

Northern worlds have always suffered from stereotyping. Since the Enlightenment, ‘North’ played the role of frontier of geographic knowledge and wilderness of harrowing and sublime proportions. The last century saw its diversification as a space of untapped resources, from fur and gold to oil and gas. In other historical moments, north figured large as a relational concept in the formulation of identities and mentalities, especially by those farther south.

Drawing on the point of view that material culture can provide, CHAT North at the University of Aberdeen seeks to question and move beyond caricatures to explore, compare and reassess the diversity and significance of northern worlds.

Papers are invited that focus on the north broadly defined. Questions addressed by the conference may include, but are not limited to:

• How have changing perceptions of ‘north’ and ‘northern’ been articulated within historical and contemporary archaeology?
• To what extent has northern as a relational concept contributed to the formulation and negotiation of social and cultural identities?
• How has north been couched within colonial and post-colonial dialogues?
• To what degree has capitalism and industry reshaped landscapes of the north?
• What is the place of the north in relationships between modernity and aesthetics?
• What is the value of northern studies in historical and contemporary archaeology?

The organizing committee would like to invite papers on the broad theme of ‘North’. Please send a short title and abstract for paper and/or session proposals by May 31st 2010 to CHAT2010@abdn.ac.uk

A downloadable conference flyer for distribution and use within your academic networks will shortly be available at http://www.contemp-hist-arch.ac.uk/news.htm

More information, including details of conference venue and registration, will be available on the CHAT website in the New Year.

Please send any queries about the conference to the organizers at CHAT2010@abdn.ac.uk

Militant Modernism

2009-12-08T14:05:00.017Z

[This review of Owen Hatherley's book Militant Modernism was published in the journal Planning Perspectives

Cite this paper as: Hicks, D. 2010. Review of Owen Hatherley 'Militant Modernism'. Planning Perspectives 25(2): 272-274.]

Militant Modernism, by Owen Hatherley, Ropley, Hants: Zone Books, 2008, viii+146 pp, £9.99, (paperback), ISBN 978 1 84694 176 4

Owen Hatherley’s ‘excavation of utopia’ reflects upon the residual effects and potentialities of late 20th-century modernism in early 21st-century British cities. It does so by questioning four dimensions of conventional accounts of modernist urbanism: its brutality, its totalitatianism, its ‘sexlessness’, and its alienating effects. The book is best read from back to front. The third and fourth themes produce only disappointing digressions into film and theatre, pornography, and the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. But through a sustained archaeological metaphor, its opening sections nicely explore the irony of the potential status of the remains of future-oriented architecture and urban design as ‘modern heritage’.

Working backwards through the digressions on Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe or Wilhelm Reich’s pamphlet Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (Chapters 3 and 4), we arrive at Hatherley’s ‘excavation in Soviet Modernism’ (Chapter 2). Photographer Richard Pare’s documentation of the chipped render and water-stained interiors of the buildings of Bolshevik modernism is used to reflect upon how

‘if Modernity, or Modernism, is our Antiquity, then its ruins have become every bit as fascinating, poignant and morbid as those of the Greeks or the Romans were to the 18th century’ (p. 45)

Here, Hatherley puts archaeological studies of the 20th-century built environment to work for new audiences. A discussion of the Narkomfin Communal House in Moscow draws upon Victor Buchli’s An Archaeology of Socialism, and a reflection upon Albert Speer’s ‘theory of ruin value’ recalls archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf’s study of the National Socialist sea resort at Prora. The relationships between the ruined and the futuristic are elegantly segued with discussions of the aesthetics of Soviet Sci-Fi. But the stated aim – to critique conventional accounts of the totalitarianism of modernist architecture – fits awkwardly with Hatherley’s silence on the Left’s complicity in the emergence of Stalinism, and its effects upon buildings such as the Narkomfin as human, lived spaces, despite Buchli’s nuanced arguments on this theme.

The 42 pages of its opening chapters, and the short conclusion, present the main argument of the book. The Brutalist architecture created between the 1950s and 1970s in provincial British cities – buildings such as Wyndham Court, Southampton or the Park Hill Estate, Sheffield – represents ‘the most persistent reminder of British socialism’. They are the ruins of a Left-Modernist hope that might be ‘recharged and reactivated’. But rekindling their hope and ambition requires not ‘surrendering’ these artefacts of social democracy to the art-historical classification of heritage designation:

‘If we want to preserve what remains of Modernism, then we’re necessarily conspiring with the very people that have always opposed it: the heritage industries that have so much of Europe in their grip’ (p.5)

Instead of preservation or designation, we must account for the ‘in-built obsolescence’ of unrendered, reinforced, poured concrete: since ‘Brutalism, with its rough-hewn rawness, always was a vision of future ruins’.

Hatherley recounts his fin-de-siècle teenage vision of Southampton’s skyline from a suburban Asda forecourt, where council estates appeared ‘a shabby version of the glittering towers of science fiction’. From Edward Wadsworth’s industrial Vorticism to A Clockwork Orange’s celluloid rendering of Thamesmead, Hatherley re-imagines Brutalism through a kind of industrial sublime: ‘strange, inhuman and futuristic’. To a rather self-conscious soundtrack (Japan, Cabaret Voltaire and ‘early Human League’), a distinctive urban Romanticism emerges. Post-war concrete refracts the ‘technological primitivism’ of Wyndham Lewis into post-punk pop culture: from New Romanticism through Jungle, to UK Garage, to Grime – the ‘Hardcore Continuum’.

Hatherley develops an argument about ‘Brutishness’ and ‘Britishness’ that inverts more traditional, more pastoral post-war Romanticisms. He rails, Hoskins-like, against the ‘Disneyfication of Britain’: but here the concern is that the ‘roughness’ and ‘barbarism’ of urban Britain might be lost by allowing ‘modern ruins’ to become heritage. However, the complicity of modernist thinking in 20th-century conceptions of ‘heritage’, especially though town planning, is never considered. The distinction between ‘modernism’ and ‘heritage’ thus presented is much too clear-cut.

Nevertheless, while the metropolitan aesthetics of the industrial sublime can descend into a self-serving East London modishness based on a rhetorical ‘preoccupation with debris and ruin’ (Wright 2009: ix), at its best Militant Modernism captures the visceral consequences of growing up among the remains of provincial modernisms. The Brutalist hope that Hatherley describes is simply invisible in conventional accounts of the relationships between the built environment, popular culture and urban creativity. He challenges us to account for the ‘aesthetic effects’ of post-war built environments, and their political charge. In moving beyond a kind of British Ostalgie – simply extending conventional models of ‘English Heritage’ into the recent past – how might we reclaim this Brutish hopefulness as a resource for contemporary urbanism? Perhaps, as Hatherley suggests, through new forms of archaeology.

Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies

2009-10-15T19:25:00.038+01:00

The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies (edited with Mary Beaudry) is published in August 2010. Richard Wentworth has very kindly agreed to license a detail from his photograph 'Look Out (England, 2009)' for the cover. Contents and contributors are below, and the Handbook can be ordered here. The introduction to the volume is online here.

'We don't just study things. We study with things, and create new things in the process. If ever proof were needed, it lies in this monumental volume. Ranging across archaeology, anthropology, geography and science and technology studies, its contributing authors have worked with all sorts of things to create a text that not only places material culture studies on a secure footing, but will serve as a landmark for years to come.' (Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen)

'On the evidence of this Handbook, material culture studies has resisted becoming reduced to a staid academic discipline. In these essays, some assertive and combative, others reflective and inclusive, are found instead a remarkable enthusiasm that transcends traditional academic boundaries and topics to try and stay at the vanguard of intellectual debate. Whether through theories of exchange, or deposition, of art or personhood, contributors to this book seek new horizons that can also create bridges between historical disciplines such as archaeology and history with a whole range of social sciences such as anthropology and geography. There is the feeling that this is the moment in which understanding material culture, something central to humanity, its past and future, is being achieved at a level beyond anything that had previously been imagined: through what this volume effectively reveals is a huge amount of new research, which is complemented by a commitment to new thinking about the implications of this research. This is very exciting stuff.' (Professor Daniel Miller, UCL)

1: Dan Hicks & Mary C. Beaudry: Introduction. Material Culture Studies: a reactionary view (pp. 1-21)

I. Disciplinary Perspectives
2: Dan Hicks: The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect (pp. 25-98)
3: Ian Cook & Divya Tolia-Kelly: Material Geographies (pp. 99-122)
4: Robert St George: Material Culture in Folklife Studies (pp. 123-149)
5: Ann Stahl: Material Histories (pp. 150-172)
6: John Law: The Materials of STS (pp. 173-188)

II. Material Practices
7: Andrew Pickering: Material Culture and the Dance of Agency (pp. 191-208)
8: Michael Dietler: Consumption (pp. 209-228)
9: Gavin Lucas: Fieldwork and Collecting (pp. 229-245)
10: Hirokazu Miyazaki: Gifts and Exchange (pp. 246-264)
11: Howard Morphy: Art as Action, Art as Evidence (pp. 265-290)
12: Rosemary Joyce with Joshua Pollard: Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition (pp. 291-309)

III. Objects and Humans
13: Kacy L. Hollenback & Michael B. Schiffer: Technology and Material Life (pp. 313-332)
14: Andy Jones & Nicole Boivin: The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency (pp. 333-351)
15: Chris Fowler: From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality (pp. 352-385)
16: Zoe Crossland: Materiality and Embodiment (pp. 386-405)
17: Tatyana Humle: Material Culture in Primates (pp. 406-424)

IV. Landscapes and the Built Environment
18: Lesley Head: Cultural Landscapes (pp. 427-439)
19: Sarah Whatmore & Steve Hinchliffe: Ecological Landscapes (pp. 440-458)
20: Roland Fletcher: Urban Materialities: Meaning, Magnitude, Friction, and Outcomes (pp. 459-483)
21: Carl Lounsbury: Architecture and Cultural History (pp. 484-501)
22: Victor Buchli: Households and `Home Cultures' (pp. 502-517)

V. Studying Particular Things
23: Rodney Harrison: Stone Tools (pp. 521-542)
24: Chandra Mukerji: The Landscape Garden as Material Culture: Lessons from France (pp. 543-561)
25: Douglass W. Bailey & Lesley McFadyen: Built Objects (pp. 562-587)
26: Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris & Peter Tomkins: Ceramics (as Containers) (pp. 588-612)
27: Peter J. Pels: Magical Things: On Fetishes, Commodities, and Computers (pp. 613-633)

***

28. Afterword: Nigel Thrift: Fings Ain't Wot They Used t'Be: Thinking Through Material Thinking as Placing and Arrangement (pp. 634-645)

References (pp. 646-758)

Index (pp. 759-774)

Contributors:
Douglass W. Bailey, San Francisco State University
Mary C. Beaudry, Boston University
Nicole Boivin, University of Oxford
Victor Buchli, University College London
Ian Cook, University of Exeter
Zoe Crossland, Columbia University
Michael Dietler, University of Chicago
Roland Fletcher, University of Sydney
Chris Fowler, University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Rodney Harrison, The Open University
Lesley Head, University of Wollongong
Dan Hicks, University of Oxford
Steve Hinchliffe, University of Exeter
Kacy L. Hollenback, University of Arizona
Tatyana Humle, University of Kent
Andy Jones, Southampton University
Rosemary Joyce, University of California at Berkeley
Carl Knappett, University of Toronto
John Law, Open University
Carl Lounsbury, College of William and Mary
Gavin Lucas, University of Iceland
Lesley McFadyen, University of Leicester
Lambros Malafouris, University of Cambridge
Hirokazu Miyazaki, Cornell University
Howard Morphy, Australian National University
Chandra Mukerji, University of California, San Diego
Peter Pels, University of Leiden
Andrew Pickering, University of Exeter
Joshua Pollard, Bristol University
Robert St George, University of Pennsylvania
Michael B. Schiffer, University of Arizona
Ann Stahl, University of Victoria
Divya Tolia-Kelly, Durham University
Nigel Thrift, Warwick University
Peter Tomkins, Catholic University of Leiden
Sarah Whatmore, University of Oxford

Defining Moments: dramatic archaeologies of the 20th century

2009-10-08T08:18:00.019+01:00

image: Television aerials on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century roofs of Poble Sec (Barcelona). From Martin Brown's chapter 'From Ally Pally to Big Brother: Television makes viewers of us all' in Defining Moments (Archaeopress 2009)

The latest (5th) book in the Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology series (series edited by myself and Josh Pollard) will be launched at the CHAT 09 conference next week. Edited by John Schofield, it presents 16 reflections on the archaeology of 'defining moments' of the 20th century. More about the series here

The contents, list of contributors and our series editors' preface are below. The book can be ordered direct from Hadrian Books - bar@hadrianbooks.com

Defining Moments: Dramatic Archaeologies of the Twentieth Century

(ed. John Schofield, 2009. Oxford: Archaeopress. Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology 5. ISBN 978 1 4073 0581 3. £35.00)

Contents

1 1115 hrs, 24 June 2008. Drama and the moment (John Schofield)

2 1230 hrs, 12 December 1901. Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless message (Cassie Newland)

3 1140 hrs, 14 April 1912. The case of the RMS Titanic (David Miles)

4 1 July 1916. The Battle of the Somme and the machine gun myth (Paul Cornish)

5 11 August 1921. The discovery of insulin (E M Tansey)

6 2 October 1925. From Ally Pally to Big Brother: Television makes viewers of us all (Martin Brown)

7 1 June 1935. The introduction of compulsory driving tests in the United Kingdom: The neglected role of the state in motoring (John Beech)

8 Commentary: Visions of the twentieth century (Cornelius Holtorf)

9 16/17 May 1943. Operation Chastise: The raid on the German dams (Richard Morris)

10 1130 hrs, 29 May 1953. Because it’s there: The ascent of Everest (Paul Graves-Brown)

11 2228:34 hrs (Moscow Time), 4 October 1957. The Space Age begins: The launch of Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite (Greg Fewer)

12 11 February 1966. Proclamation 43 (Martin Hall)

13 March 1993. The Library of Babel: Origins of the World Wide Web (Paul Graves-Brown)

14 0053 Hrs, 12 October 1998. The Murder of Matthew Wayne Shepard: An archaeologist’s personal defining moment (Thomas Dowson)

15 0000:00, 1 January 2000. ‘Three, two, one …?’: The material legacy of global millennium celebrations (Rodney Harrison)

16 n.d. Conservation and the British (Graham Fairclough)

Contributors

John Beech (Applied Research Centre for Sustainable Regeneration, Coventry University)

Martin Brown (Archaeological Advisor, Defence Estates)

Paul Cornish (Senior Curator in the Department of Exhibits & Firearms at the Imperial War Museum)

Thomas A Dowson (independent archaeologist)

Graham Fairclough (Head of Characterisation, English Heritage)

Greg Fewer (Waterford Institute of Technology)

Paul Graves-Brown (independent archaeologist)

Martin Hall (Vice Chancellor, University of Salford)

Rodney Harrison (Lecturer in Heritage Studies, Open University)

Cornelius Holtorf (Linnaeus University)

David Miles (formerly Chief Archaeologist at English Heritage)

Professor Richard Morris (Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds)

Cassie Newland (PhD student in Archaeology, University of Bristol)

John Schofield (English Heritage)

Tilli Tansey (Professor of the History of Modern Medical Sciences, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London)

Series Editors’ Preface

Studies in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology is a new series of edited and single-authored volumes intended to make available current work on the archaeology of the recent and contemporary past. The series brings together contributions from academic historical archaeologists, professional archaeologists and practitioners from cognate disciplines who are engaged with archaeological material and practices. The series will include work from traditions of historical and contemporary archaeology, and material culture studies, from Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere around the world. It will promote innovative and creative approaches to later historical archaeology, showcasing this increasingly vibrant and global field through extended and theoretically engaged case studies.

This, the fifth volume in the series, brings together a highly innovative series of contributions that explore the material, social and institutional legacies of ‘defining moments’ of the 20th century. The ‘headline’ significance of these events is varied: some were of global impact (e.g. the creation of television and the World Wide Web, and the discovery of insulin), others more personal (e.g. the murder of Matthew Wayne Shepard); but all are telling of how the conditions of modernity and post-modernity that shape the networks and contours of contemporary life were brought into being. Innovation here derives from a distinctly archaeological perspective that is taken on critical historical moments, one which solidly foregrounds the materiality (and, in instances such as that of transatlantic wireless, the immateriality) of events.

Dan Hicks and Josh Pollard August 2009

Social Archaeology and the Decline of Modernism

2009-10-05T20:03:00.015+01:00

image: anthropologist Edwin Ardener (1927-1987)

The abstracts for the plenary session that will open the 2009 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference (TAG 2009), to be held at the University of Durham this December, have now been published. The full abstracts for the session, which takes place from 4pm to 6.45pm on Thursday 17 December, are here

The theme for the 2009 plenary session is The Death of Theory?. The session abstract, and my own paper abstract - 'Social Archaeology and the Decline of Modernism' - are below:

Session Abstract

In the last decade archaeological theory has passed from being dominated by grand theories (processual, post-processual, interpretative), to experience a fragmentation of approaches. This has left theory in small, easily consumed chunks, to be selected on a pick-and-mix basis. Some have even argued that archaeological theory is terminally ill, perhaps even already dead. In view of this situation in this plenary session the panelists will discuss whether this trend towards the break-up of the grand theories is inevitable, and if this is the only way that archaeologists can consume theory. Panelists will also deliberate if this is a healthy move, and if this description of the process archaeological theory is going through is indeed an accurate perception of the theoretical development of our discipline. Speakers will discuss these issues in relation to their own areas of specialism.The panelists are Marga Diaz-Andreu, Kate Giles, Dan Hicks, Richard Hingley and Lynn Meskell, and the debate will be presented by and chaired by John Chapman.

Social Archaeology and the Decline of Modernism - Dan Hicks

The emergence of the idea of 'social archaeology' has over the past four decades been bound up with the rise of the idea of 'archaeological theory' - from Colin Renfrew's inaugural lecture at Southampton university in 1973, through the Blackwell 'Social Archaeology' series, to the Journal of Social Archaeology. By archaeological theory, we have usually come to mean particular forms of social theory as applied to archaeological materials. Using Edwin Ardener's classic 1985 essay 'Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism' as a point of departure, this paper seeks historically to situate the recent and contemporary disciplinary influence of the idea of 'social archaeology', and its effects. In doing so, it will provide one perspective on the contemporary interdisciplinary relevance of the idea of archaeological theory.

Reference

Ardener, E. 1985. Social Anthropology and the Decline of Modernism. In J. Overing (ed.) Reason and Morality. London: Tavistock. pp. 47-70. [reprinted in E. Ardener The Voice of Prophecy 1987)

More details on TAG 2009

Improvement: what kind of archaeological object is it?

2009-10-01T16:58:00.011+01:00

[This review article works through the approach to 'the archaeology of improvement" adopted in Sarah Tarlow’s book The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain, 1750-1850 (2007, Cambridge University Press). Cite this paper as Hicks, D. 2008. Improvement: what kind of archaeological object is it? Journal of Field Archaeology 33(1): 111-116.]

image: An archaeological glimpse of the modern? An excavated section across a domestic brick-lined cesspit in London, infilled with ceramics, bricks, roof tiles and bottle glass in the late 19th century. Such deposits are associated with the end of the use of cesspits, as modern sanitary reforms introduced new sewerage systems. The pit is from 12-18 Albert Embankment Lambeth (sitecode ABK00), and is published in 'Two centuries of rubbish: excavations at an 18th and 19th century site at 12-18 Albert Embankment' by Kieron Tyler (with contributions by Alison Nailer and Lucy Whittingham) Surrey Archaeological Collections 91 (2004): 105-136 (courtesy of Museum of London Archaeology). The potential contribution of the archaeological study of such deposits to the theme of modern improvement is explored further below.

NB this is an edited version of the paper, without full references and citations. For the full version, please see the published paper in Journal of Field Archaeology 33(1): 111-116.

Introduction

Like many British archaeologists trained in the 1990s, I shall probably never quite shake my mistrust of grand schemes, prime movers, and quick fixes in archaeological explanation, and yet will always retain a kind of nostalgic yearning for the sheer breadth of engagement across times, places, and materials that sets the archaeological analyses of previous generations apart from purely sociological or contextual studies. This ambivalence is, I would hazard, what has attracted so many of the current generation of British archaeologists to the study of the modem world as a place for thinking through issues of scale, disciplinarity, and the place of material things in our comprehension of the past. But while the attraction is strong, and the material complexity and sheer range of possibilities are a constant stimulation, there is an ever-present danger that our ambivalence will combine with a creeping sense that the archaeological study of our recent past is decadent, self-indulgent, or narcissistic, and will give way to insouciance, political detachment, and downright intellectual ennui.

Sarah Tarlow's ambitious new study The Archaeology of Improvement in Britain helps us to think through these problems and challenges. Because it does so, this timely and provocative book will undoubtedly prove to be an important benchmark for all those interested in theory and practice in contemporary British historical archaeology.

What, the book asks, do lime kilns, threshing machines, Mechanics Institutes, transfer-printed ceramics, suburban cemeteries, ceramic field drains, lead water pipes, ice houses, asylums, rubbish pits, the Scottish clearances, argand lamps, bleach baths, cylinder-blown glass panes, London Bridge, and the Pump Room of the Royal Baths at Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, have in common? The answer is that each item on this list can be understood as associated in some way with the trope of "improvement" as it emerged in British literature between ca. A.D. 1750 and 1850. In making this connection, Tarlow's study prompts three further questions. What kind of historical archaeology does such a thematic approach produce? What kind of archaeological object is improvement? And, what are the implications of the approach set out by the book for the future development of historical archaeology in the United Kingdom? Inspired by Tarlow's volume, this review article takes stock of its approaches, arguments, and implications by exploring each of these questions in turn. As will become clear, the study holds up a mirror to some of the central problems and choices that face British historical archaeology today.

What Kind of Historical Archaeology?

Although the book suggests at the outset that it "is not intended as a critique of past work" [p. 1], a considerable chunk of the introductory sections is given over to distinguishing what kind of historical archaeology is not being presented. Two bodies of work are singled out for, there is no more accurate word, critique: "traditional" industrial, post-medieval, and landscape archaeology, especially that carried out in development-funded investigations; and "neo-Marxist" explanatory frameworks, especially the work of Mark Leone and those associated with the Archaeology in Annapolis project. The traditional and the neo-Marxist are caricatured as extreme tendencies - towards small-scale and empirical particularism on the one hand and reductionist and normative grand narratives on the other-between which Tarlow will seek to mediate.

The anonymous contract archaeologist is portrayed as a myopic accumulator of site-specific data. Site reports from development-funded archaeology are criticized for their lack of engagement with post-medieval material [p. 184]. Where later material is engaged with in grey-literature reports, the book bemoans "the limited ambitions of most archaeologists working in this period to interpret their work in terms of wider social and cultural change" [p.164], or the "naïve progressivism" of traditional industrial archaeology's focus on inventions and new techniques [pp. 5-6]. The results of fieldwork are frustratingly "hard to access, seldom properly published and almost never interpreted" [p. 189]. The potential role, or responsibility, of the archaeologist based in higher education to take the lead on precisely this kind of interpretive work, or to build new kinds of relationships with the professional sector, is not considered. On several occasions the tone suggests that Tarlow is calling into question the very idea of fine-grained studies of recent material culture, for example in the comment that "better dating of other tiles would allow more careful study of the fascinating history of underdrainage" [p. 61]. Archaeologists engaging in "the detailed study of material objects themselves" are characterized as only focusing on "manufacture, functionality and material" [p. 29]. Dissatisfied with the "good, detailed and meticulous work on the archaeology of later historical Britain" [p.197], Tarlow calls for archaeologists to "be far more ambitious" [p. 5], arguing in particular for "the development of interpretive historical archaeologies of Britain in future years" [pp. 164-165]:

Until now British later historical archaeology has had little in the way of synthesis, and virtually no arguments about historical process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; no canonical set of "big questions"; no home-grown interpretive narratives for new work to demolish or modify. [p.201]

Meanwhile, "Marxist" explanatory frameworks are dismissed as big questions, grand syntheses, and broad narratives that always reduce "the historical particularity of a context" to the negotiation of power relationships?' They cannot accommodate "philanthropy, aspiration and collective activity" [p. 9]:

[T]he archaeology of capitalism always asks the same question: what does this or that aspect of the material past tell us about relationships of power between social groups? [p. 10]

Marxist approaches are criticized as presenting the ruling class as "pantomime villains" who "clobbered the poor" [p. 200]. In relation to improvement in Britain this would lead to describing the Scottish clearances through "a cartoon history of dastardly villains, driven by wickedness and greed, and a helplessly passive peasantry, powerless to prevent the annihilation of their bucolic idyll" [p. 80]. Here, regrettably, the complexity of recent developments and current debates in Marxist historical archaeology are left unexplored (see discussions by Leone 2005; McGuire 2006).

Tarlow's contextual approach sets up this distinction between large-scale structures or explanations and small-scale situations or interventions, and then calls for a measured mediation between them. In doing so she contributes to an influential line of enquiry in British historical archaeology that has emerged since the early 1990s. We might usefully call this line of enquiry the "Interpretive Critique" of post-medieval archaeology. Like the Annapolis approach debated by Tarlow, this term could be understood as "a shorthand intended to represent a tendency rather than a creed" (Tarlow 1999a: 468). While it shares some characteristics with interpretive approaches in North American historical archaeology, the Interpretive Critique is distinct, and often self-consciously so. Developed especially by historical archaeologists who conducted their doctoral research in the atmosphere of Cambridge in the 1990s (Hicks 2007a: 1324), it applies aspects of British post-processual thinking to the recent past. For more than ten years scholars applying this critique have expressed frustration with purely descriptive and empirical accounts of the recent past, a dissatisfaction with grand, "totalizing" theory, and an interest in the use of social theory in archaeological explanation. Two books in particular stand out as landmarks in this tradition- Matthew Johnson's An Archaeology of Capitalism (1996) and Sarah Tarlow's own co-edited volume The Familiar Past? (1999, with Susie West). Like this reviewer, many will recall the excitement of the heralding of a "new postmedieval archaeology", and Tarlow and West's "manifesto for later historical archaeology in Britain" which called for the development in the United Kingdom of "the kind of large scale and ambitious research projects which have given American historical archaeology its particular vigour". A period of unprecedented activity and self-assuredness in British historical archaeology was catalyzed.

And yet, a decade since that fin-de-siècle optimism, the tone of The Archaeology of Improvement is considerably more downbeat. In this book-length restatement of the Interpretive Critique, the idea of improvement is deployed as a means of moderating impulses towards the fine-grained or the large-scale. Improvement is not a big question. So rather than "a set of closely defined rules and regularities”, the book provides "a web of ambiguities and further questions" [p. 190]. The idea of improvement, the book argues, can offer no new grand synthesis. No conclusions are drawn. Instead, the equivocal "Introduction" and the "Final Thoughts" pre-empt the volume's reception by its readership with bullet-pointed "notes and omissions" [pp. 27-32] and "questions and ambiguities" [pp. 197-201].

This self-denigrating open-endedness is frustrating for the reader, but it does make possible what I take to be the book's principal contribution. Tarlow thinks through and makes clear the attitudes towards archaeological materials that derive from the Interpretive Critique. What are the consequences, in other words, of shifting this approach from critique to practice? At this point we might consider our second question.

Improvement: What Kind of Archaeological Object is it?

The idea that the historical study of the late 18th and early-mid 19th centuries might make use of the idea of improvement derives from Asa Briggs' contribution to W.N. Medlicott's ten-volume History of England. The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867, first published in 1959. The period division for the eighth volume in the series was "unconventional" (Briggs 1959: 1) - 'caught between "Eighteenth Century England" (Volume 7) and "Late Nineteenth Century England)' (Volume 9). In his introduction, Briggs used the idea of improvement-visible in the utilitarianism of John -Stuart Mill, in the stadial models of society of Adam Smith, and in a wide range of contemporary literature that related to technology, agriculture, and governance - as a "clear-cut theme" for the timeframe: capturing the mood of a period of self-confident expansion in manufacturing and transport industries, trade and population, the bringing of the middle classes into political life, and the beginnings of modern local and national government in England. The Age of Improvement became a key introductory text for students. Well-thumbed, multiple copies may be found in continuing-education libraries in places such as Bristol, Birmingham, Oxford, and Leicester, since the volume was a favorite of extra-mural tutors on the new local studies courses that emerged during the 1960s. Such courses, and especially the idea of local history or local studies, were a central influence upon the development of industrial and post-medieval archaeology during the 1970s, and improvement provided a useful example of the relationships between ideas. and material change - visible, as Joan Thirsk put it, in both ‘plough and pen’.

Tarlow also uses improvement as a cross-cutting theme, but where Briggs used it to capture the self-confidence of economic, technological, and social change in the Georgian and early Victorian periods, in order to bring some coherence to this unusual period division within the ten-volume series, in Tarlow's analysis it somehow develops more weight. Improvement is capitalized. It is an "ethic" [p. 16], a "philosophy" [p. 33], an "aesthetic" [p. 192], and even an "ideology" [p. 189], albeit "never a fully articulated or an entirely coherent ideology" [p. 192]. Improvement means "both profit and morals" [p. 12]. It is an index of "cultural and ideological change" [p. 50]. It is both "cumulative and progressive" in focus [p. 17], concerned with the self or the divine rather than with society as a whole. It emphasizes "cleanliness, order, rational organisation, light and clarity" and an orientation towards the future [p. 67]. It is involved in "the positioning of people and families in social networks" [p. 26], and it is "a characteristic of modernity": "the sorts of improvement with which th[e] book is concerned were not preoccupations of medieval or even earlier modern people" [p. 11].

The book "tracks" improvement [p. 189] by defining it as a literary theme of the time, and then identifying manifestations ofit in four aspects of the material culture of late 18th-century and early 19th-century Britain: the rural built environment (Chapters 2-3), the urban built environment (Chapter 4), institutions (Chapter 5), and material goods (Chapter 6). This, then, is a kind of literary archaeology: improvement is set out as an emic, contextual category, which was current in the writing of the time rather than imposed by the archaeologist. Tarlow's literary archaeology involves a particular attitude to material things. Objects and "material practices" are for Tarlow "about belief, culture, aspiration and ways of understanding the world" [p. 10]. Tracking a literary trope serves to reduce landscapes, buildings, and objects to illustrations of an interpretive theme. For example, the field drains that are regularly encountered in rural excavations are used to suggest "the ideological meaning of drainage as an indication of Improvement" [p. 62]. Improvement is presented as "an especially useful lens for the discipline of archaeology” which can be used to "join material culture with ideology” [p. 18, my emphasis].

But the analysis is always lopsided. The chapter on material goods demonstrates the implications of the approach most clearly. A number of accounts of the excavation of rubbish pits, published in county journals such as Oxoniensia and Essex Archaeology and History are discussed [pp. 185-188]. Rather than using these accounts as a point of departure for more detailed examinations of the excavated material culture, they are subsumed in a historical narrative of improving change. A general shift from medieval and early modem disposal of waste in "open, unlined pits, or in heaps or layers on the ground." to "the use of deep, lined pits and redundant underground features" is suggested [p. 188]. Tarlow argues that the archaeological record holds evidence for "a particular frenzy of pit-digging in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries followed by a near ubiquitous abrupt (in archaeological terms) halt to the disposal of rubbish in pits in the first half of the nineteenth century" [p. 187]. Tarlow associates these apparent changes with "a growing intolerance of smells and mess in the immediate vicinity of the house" [p. 188], which in turn is connected with the idea of improvement.

Substantial dumps, or clearance layers, are indeed a common feature of late 18th- and early 19th-century urban archaeology in Britain, although most commonly they survive as in-filled features such as cellars, soakaways, or domestic privies rather than purpose-dug pits, and they more often comprise "dry goods" such as broken ceramics and glass than kitchen refuse such as animal bone. Tarlow is incorrect, however, to argue that there is an overall increase in the digging and filling of rubbish pits during the late 18th century: the digging of pits for domestic rubbish is a medieval and early modem phenomenon that declines markedly in British towns from the turn of the 18th century, rather than a century later. Meanwhile, in the first half of the 19th century, we clearly do not need the absence of archaeological remains to demonstrate the well-documented increase in refuse removal by scavengers and rubbish carters. In practice, by eschewing what Tarlow has previously described as "the mood-killing qualities of data-dense academic writing” the Interpretive Critique risks reducing objects to the illustration of its theme.

Implications

What, then, are the implications of the study for the future development of British historical archaeology? An important context for Tarlow's use of the idea of improvement as "a cross-cutting ethic that affected many spheres of practice" [p. 31] is James Deetz's account of the 'Georgian Order', previously developed in a British context by Matthew Johnson's Archaeology of Capitalism. But the strong thematic focus in this book, its weak model of engagement with archaeological material, and its critiques of the contributions of field archaeology point, in a way that those earlier studies did not, towards a division of disciplinary labor. The reader is reminded of David Clarke's famous warning in relation to prehistoric archaeology about the model of the academic as the "armchair synthesiser of the analytical work of the [field] archaeologist': a "dilettante" in contrast with the "unintelligent excavator or the narrow-minded specialist". The problem lies in the book's use of a literary, as opposed to an archaeological, mode of explanation. Unlike previous archaeological studies of improvement in Scottish contexts, which have been based on extensive fieldwork (Dalglish 2003; Symonds 1999), the landscapes, buildings, and objects constitute no more than what Max Gluckman would have called "apt illustration". The implications of this approach have both historiographic and geographical dimensions.

What kind of historiography results from such an approach? A central premise of the Interpretive Critique was the idea of the past as other, or, the importance of defamiliarizing the superficially familiar recent past before interpreting it. These arguments are restated here [p. 10], but the distance leads to a kind of soft focus in which material complexities are blurred. What emerges is a form of empathy with the past. Avoiding "anachronism" is set up as a major concern [pp. 27, 80]. The book aims "to draw out what is distinctive about later historical periods" [p. 10, my emphasis]. The result often seems little removed from the ideal of romantic historicism - wie es eigentlich war – that was famously problematized by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, updated through an interpretive turn that parallels the new historicist thinking of writers like Stephen Greenblatt. The surprising result is that "the historical archaeology of improvement in Britain" replaces the prime movers of 1980s Marxian archaeologies with improvement as a sort of surrogate capitalism, apparently wrung dry of "totalising" impulses and of any trace of a "radical agenda" [pp. 8-10], and yet bolstered by a single literary trope that smoothes out complexity, incoherence, or fragmentation. This brings about a certain timelessness, in which the social and material changes between the mid-18th and mid-19th centuries are almost unmentioned.

The geographical implications of the study relate to the Britishness in the title of the book. One of the initial concerns that was expressed about the Interpretive Critique in British historical archaeology was its tendency to "retain a local agenda" (Hicks 2000: par. 1). Here, in relation to improvement, Tarlow follows Briggs (1959) in his remarkable neglect of colonial history. In this respect Briggs' study is a prime example, perhaps, of the kind of "home-grown interpretive narrative" [p. 201] that Tarlow calls for. The fact that British colonialism was a central arena in which ideas of improvement were worked out, both in writing and in practice, is neglected. The stated reason for this - that such improvement literature "deal[s] mostly with the indigenous people of Africa or America" [p. 16] – obscures the central role of ideas of improvement in plantation slavery (Hicks 2007b), and the attendant attitudes to landscape, buildings, and human improvement that without doubt fed back into ideas of improvement in Britain at precisely this time (Hicks 2007c). These geographical restrictions mean that Tarlow's previous excellent work on utopian sites is omitted from the study, and the potential connections between utopian settlements and improvement are never made (Tarlow 2003). By writing out colonialism, Tarlow adopts a particular form of nationalist historiography which reproduces precisely the "concentrat[ion] on the very local" and the failure to "incorporat[e] a sense of larger historical processes at work" for which she criticizes previous studies in industrial archaeology [p. 27]. In these respects, despite the rhetorical discussions of traditionalist approaches, the study fits coherently into post-war traditions of local studies, most prominent among which was the Leicester school of local history.

It is a difficult and frustrating task to review a major publication by a leading scholar and a valued colleague that pre-empts so much of its possible reception. I do not believe that Tarlow's decision not to "foreground capitalism" makes her work "politically suspect" [p. 8]. And I do not feel that a focus upon ideas and philosophies is incompatible with an archaeological approach [p. 29]. Without doubt, the book is a landmark contribution to British historical archaeology, the product of considerable scholarly effort on the part of a key thinker in contemporary British archaeology. Nevertheless, the attempt to stretch the Interpretive Critique across a book-length study is unsuccessful.

The reasons for this failure relate to the use of two unhelpful models of radical difference: between past and present, and between British and non-British history and archaeology. The first leads to a historicist-interpretive model that uses archaeological engagements with material things only for the illustration of ideational themes. The second isolates the work not just from the central influence of colonial history upon modem Britain, but also from the thinking and perspectives of non-British traditions of historical archaeology.

Tarlow hopes that the book will be "employed, adapted or rejected by others in the project of developing a theoretically sophisticated...historical archaeology in Britain" [p. 2]. Its value is to expose the limitations of the conception of materiality (in both senses-objects and their significance) in the Interpretive Critique of post-medieval archaeology. We might think back to the problems identified with contextual archaeology in European prehistory in the late 1980s (e.g. Barrett 1988). It is important that historical archaeology learns from those debates and from the highly stimulating and materially-engaged studies that have developed from them (see most recently Jones 2007: 77-84). In the modem period the requirement to think through the archaeologist's material focus is felt even more keenly than in prehistoric studies. Like it or not, the landscapes, buildings, and objects that we record and excavate are the stuff of politics - whether in the unequal distributions of material things across human populations, in the material conditions in which new bourgeois ideas of self improvement were imagined and worked out, or in our own choices over which material things and human populations we choose to study and which we do not.

The challenge ahead will involve decentring the Britishness in British historical archaeology. Such decentring involves moving away from a focus only on human identities and ideas that neglects the complex affordances of material things, while also relocating our narratives of historical process to accommodate the unceasing mobilities of objects and people: mapping human and material movements onto one another without having to give way to the crude application of grand schemes. In doing so, British historical archaeologists must complement critique with more positive, creative, and constructive contributions that seek to answer archaeological questions about the recent past. After all (with apologies to David Clarke), historical archaeology is archaeology is archaeology.

Selected References

NB this is an edited version of the paper, without full references and citations. For the full references, please see the published paper in Journal of Field Archaeology 33(1): 111-116.

Briggs, Asa 1959. The Age of lmprovement 1783-1867. History of England Vol. 8. London: Longmans.

Clarke, David 1968. Analytical Archaeology. London: Methuen.

Dalglish, Chris 2003. Rural Society in the Age of Reason: An Archaeology of the Emergence of Modern Life in the Southern Scottish Highlands. New York: Plenum.

Deetz, James 1977. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Hicks, Dan 2007. The Garden of the World: A Historical Archaeology of Sugar Landscapes in the Eastern Caribbean. Oxford: Archaeopress.

Johnson, Matthew H. 1996 An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jones, Andy 2007 Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leone, Mark P. 2005 The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McGuire, Randall H. 2006 Marxist Historical Archaeology. In Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123-142.

Tarlow, Sarah, and Susie West (eds) 1999 The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain. London: Routledge.

Field/work - AHRA Conference

2009-09-29T12:14:00.012+01:00

I recently joined the Architectural Humanities Research Association - a not for profit and interdisciplinary academic organization for humanities research in architecture.

Their next conference, to be held in November at Edinburgh College of Art, is on a topic very relevant for archaeological and anthropological engagements with architectural history (and one I've been thinking and writing about a lot recently) -- fieldwork.

The details are below - more at http://www.ahra-architecture.org/events_2009.php

FIELD/WORK

6th AHRA International Conference

University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh College of Art

20-21 November 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Fieldwork has always been integral to the work of architects and landscape architects and the many forms of associated scholarship, from the site visit to the grand tour to the social survey. We visit sites – real and imagined – to collect, order, and interpret data, to establish parameters, frameworks, contexts, and outlines for design work. As the sites of design work and scholarship have become increasingly complex and mediated, the questions as to what and where the field is, how we collect data, how we ensure its reliability, and how it informs design work have renewed practical and theoretical significance. New configurations of fieldwork have blurred traditional distinctions between subject and object, observer and observed, audience and performer, material and immaterial, and even fact and fiction. Relationships between the field, data and creative work have, as a consequence, become integral to many contemporary forms of design practice and research.

In this respect, design based disciplines such as architecture and landscape architecture share a wider heritage with empirically-oriented disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, material culture and geography amongst others. This conference seeks to examine the question of fieldwork in its historical, contemporary, disciplinary and inter-disciplinary terms. The conference aims to explore the meaning, relevance and specificity of the term to architecture and landscape architecture by consciously stretching normative inherited conceptions of site visit to include notions of crime scene, reconnaissance, pilgrimage and beyond into corelate practices. The conference also seeks to draw attention to and consider the often ignored routines of design work, the habitual or casual handling of ‘data’, ‘evidence’, ‘facts’, ‘parameters’ or ‘contexts’. Included in this is the wider issue of what it is to work in the field, the trip to the field, tramissions from the field, the translations between field and studio, and the processing of data after the field. With an emphasis on the interplay between theory and practice, and a focused commitment to exploring the particularities of design work, we invite critical, historical and creative approaches to the legacy, currency and potentiality of Field/work, that seek to complicate, extend, contest and subvert the normative sites, practices and itineraries of field/work:

to the field

Often regarded as a less than formal registration of place, how do we update our understanding of site visit, field trip, study tour as a potentially critical device in globalised architectural design and research practice? Implicit conceptions of distance and proximity are complicated by emerging global networks of personal and institutional mobility. How do we think of multiplicities of fields and they way they interact? The three (or multiple) dimensionality of fields? Are imagined sites still valid as destinations? How can critical distance be activated locally?

in the field

What is it to look and see? What, who and where is: the point of view, the scale, the witness and the gaze, focus and distortion? How has time and history impacted on the value of embodied visual experience? What artefacts, networks, narratives are worth looking ‘at’ or ‘for’? How has the necessary, useful, obsolete of a field or site been conceived or articulated in the history of architectural practice and spatial production? What are the inflections and implications of individual and collective looking? How do disciplines of observation (mapping, surveying, tagging, tracking) operate and how do they relate to disciplines of design? Has architecture's interest in / study of / contact with ‘other' been assisted / mediated / filtered by the work of anthropologists? In what ways might recent developments in 'revisionist anthropology' suggest critical (re)-readings of (canonical) 'field work' and site-specific research in architecture?

from the field

Architects, landscape architects and urbanists employ a range of graphic, textual, spatial techniques/practices in relation to field and site. How are hybrid, experimental or contingent methodologies or processes a practice of design? How is or has fieldwork been 'taught' in architecture and related disciplines? How do anthropological debates on power-knowledge, ethnomethodology, sociology impact on architectural fieldwork? Cyberspace has re-defined notions of space and field, what are the consequences or opportunities for design praxis? What techniques and processes are privileged and why? What is edited in or out?

between field and studio

If field-work always implies a transmission of material back 'home' from the field, what media, tools and mechanisms are used and what are the consequences (ideological, productive, persuasive, etc.) of specific choices made? How does contact with the field act upon or transform mediation practices? What is lost in translation? What ways of making ‘field’ and ‘site’ (indexical, critical, historical, diagrammatic) are evident and particular to spatial production, rather than other materially sited production (film, sculpture, installation art, music etc)?

after the field

The field as a saturated condition that extends conventional concepts of 'site' or 'context' in architecture has opened performance- and process-based conceptions of design. What are relevant re-scriptings of ‘genius loci’, ‘site-specific’, ‘contextual’ and related architectural field terms? If empiricism tends to value a contemporary reading of landscapes, foregrounding subjectivity and subsuming historical takes from other eras, what are the ramifications for an architectural practice rooted in the contemporary and the at-hand? How does finding the limit, tolerance, saturation of a field influence design action? How do transformations of the term ‘field’ for instance as a boundary concept versus a concept to do with intensities and patternings transform knowledge in architecture and landscape architecture?

Landscape Archaeology and the Future of the Recent Past

2009-09-23T08:45:00.020+01:00

[Between 2004 and 2007 I was part of an English Heritage working group, with my colleagues Janet Miller and Andrea Bradley at WS Atkins, Victor Buchli at UCL, and Graham Fairclough and John Schofield at English Heritage, that explored the challenges of the definition and management of archaeological landscapes formed between 1950 and 2000. This initiative led to a number of outputs: a discussion document called 'Change and Creation' (2004), a special issue of Conservation Bulletin on the theme of 'Modern Times', and a popular book called 'Images of Change' which was published in 2007 (edited by Sefryn Penrose). This is the unedited versiom of my brief contribution to that book - 'Further Reading'.

Cite this paper as Hicks, D. 2007. Further Reading. In S. Penrose (ed.) Images of Change: an archaeology of England's contemporary landscape. Swindon: English Heritage.

Images of Change was an attempt to communicate the potential of the archaeological study of the recent past to a broad public audience. Stephen McClarence reviewed it for The Times, and Owen Hatherley wrote a very insightful review of the challenges raised by the book in the New Statesman last year.

Meanwhile British Archaeology reviewed it in the most recent issue (Sept/Oct 09), concluding with the words, "A thoughtful and very clever argument for a particular way of experiencing and seeing history in the landscape. Buy it."]

For the published version of this paper see Images of Change (English Heritage 2007)

Published in the closing years of the 19th century, legal historian F.W. Maitland’s seminal study Domesday Book and Beyond famously described the six-inch Ordnance Survey map series as a ‘marvellous palimpsest’ (Maitland 1988[1897]: 15). During the 20th century, this image of the map of England as a parchment on which the text has been continually scratched over and written across was extended by archaeologists and landscape historians - from O.G.S. Crawford to W.G. Hoskins - to describe the English landscape itself as a kind of layered document

Since the Second World War this idea of likening the English landscape itself, rather than our maps of it, to a historical document has had two consequences for the direction of landscape archaeology and landscape history. On the one hand, it has encouraged the idea that the English landscape requires a trained ‘reading’ in the field. On the other hand, it has instilled the view the post-war processes of development and change in the landscape in strongly negative terms, gradually eroding precious sources of information. These two sets of attitudes are united by a view of the archaeological as distanced from everyday life. Classic studies such as Richard Muir’s Shell Guide to Reading the Landscape or Mick Aston’s Interpreting the Landscape encouraged the reader to undertake site visits away from the city by car or by landrover, to reveal traces of the past through local history and parish surveys. Archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes’ contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain evoked a damaged British landscape that ‘shows in its ravaged face that husbandry has been replaced by exploitation - an exploitation designed to satisfy man’s vanity, his greed and possessiveness, his wish for domination’. Still more vividly, W.G. Hoskins, in his 1954 study of the Devon landscape, described the Luftwaffe pilots who had bombed Portsmouth as ‘missionaries of 20th-century civilisation’ (Hawkes 1951: 177, Hoskins 1954: 456; quoted by Muir 1998: 73). Archaeologists came to view their contemporary landscapes as something to be escaped from, or to be opposed.

Images of Change presents a number of challenges to this bundle of attitudes. Through their sustained application of archaeological thinking to England’s most recent landscapes, the essays in the book challenge the idea of bounding off archaeological landscapes from the contemporary world. Of course, taking stock of the sheer quantities and diversity of the remains of the most recent past does not require us to deny the importance of the protection, designation or recording of archaeological sites and monuments. But it does require that we develop an appreciation of change as a central part of all archaeological landscapes as they were lived in the past, and as they are lived today. Rather than being purely destructive, new places emerged through the processes of later 20^th-century landscape change, and old places were altered. These places are remembered, experienced and lived by people across the country in many different ways. Some are despised, some simply go unnoticed, some matter to people a great deal, and many attract conflicting emotions. But in all cases they represent a kind of heritage, and a place for dialogue. Images of Change challenges us to take stock of the diversity of material heritage that exists all around us in the English landscape.

The book’s firmly archaeological approach - identifying, describing and characterising - allows it not only to present a preliminary account of the material remains of landscape change in the later 20th century - a crucial and overdue task - but also to evoke the everyday nature of the sites and landscapes described. Any attempt to define or assess their character or value will quickly bring many different, and often conflicting, answers in many different places Thus, any effort to ‘read’ or ‘interpret’ them very quickly reveals that their potential meanings are limitless. And any field trip to the landscapes described are as likely to involve a bus ride as a Landrover journey. Many stories are waiting to be told at the - often very ordinary - places highlighted by the present book: from the heritage of multicultural landscapes in towns and cities across the country, or the changing roles of women in the home and the workplace, or the uneven processes of social mobility in post-war England, to personal memories of and attachments to particular locales.

By extending the archaeologists’ view of landscapes into the world that they inhabit themselves, the essays stay true to Maitland’s image of the continual layered changes in the English landscape. They encourage us to move beyond a conception of heritage as existing only in special places where it is valued, bounded off from everyday life. They also reveal that recent heritage is not simply intangible, like memories or values, but comprises very many different places that are concrete (often literally so!) and survive in the same ways as any other historical landscape (albeit in overwhelming quantities). The essays reveal how the landscapes of the later 20th century represent not only a significant dimension of English heritage that must be taken seriously in its own right, but also places in which local, political and personal conceptions of heritage can be explored in many different ways. As places for dialogue, the landscapes of recent heritage reveal how the value of what we define as heritage is never fixed or static. In this way, Images of Change makes a point that can be applied to archaeological landscapes of any period: that any choice to assign value to this particular place, or to that, is a contemporary choice. It serves to highlight certain stories, and to silence others. In other words, it is a political choice, and one that requires accountability.

The reader wanting to explore the material introduced in this book further could explore a range of further reading. Many geographers and architectural historians have engaged with such material: most notably Dolores Hayden’s Field Guide to Sprawl, with aerial photographs by Jim Wark, which provides a stunning, alphabetical journey around the built environment of later 20th-century America, and David Matless’ landmark study of Landscape and Englishness in the 20th century. Equally, the number of archaeological studies of the recent past has grown markedly in recent years, both in the United Kingdom and around the world (Hicks 2007, Rowley 2006). In industrial archaeology, for example, professional and avocational archaeologists have for four decades examined aspects of the landscapes of the 20th century. A good introduction here is Michael Stratton and Barrie Trinder’s book Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology. In historical archaeology, a range of studies of the 20th century have been carried out in Australia and the United States over the past 30 years, most notably in William Hampton Adams’ excavations of the town of Silcott in Washington State during the 1970s (Adams 1977). The growing range of different archaeological approaches to the recent past have been summarised in Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’ collection Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, and more recently in The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. Beyond archaeology, sociologists, scientists, artists, writers and many others have engaged with the material remains of the recent past in many different ways.

But the central challenges for the reader of this book of landscapes - some of which might feel intimate and personal, others distant or cold – mean that any advice on further reading is open ended. This is because the book challenges us to think through the idea of treating these landscapes as heritage. To seek them out and explore and study them. To debate their values as archaeological and historical resources. And to consider how they can reorient our vision of ‘English heritage’.In beginning this task, Images of Change underlines how the value of the material remains of England’s recent past - perhaps like all archaeological heritage - lies in their role contemporary places from which we can tell a diversity of stories.

References

Adams, W.H. 1977.Silcott, Washington: Ethnoarchaeology of a rural American community.. Pullman, WA: Laboratory of Archaeology, Washington State University (Reports of Investigations 54).

Buchli, V. and G. Lucas (eds) 2001. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge.

Cossons, N. (ed.) 2000. Perspectives on Industrial Archaeology. London: Science Museum.

Hawkes, J. 1951. A Land. London: Cresset Press.

Hayden, D. 2004. A Field Guide to Sprawl. New York: W.W. Norton.

Hicks, D. and M.C. Beaudry 2006. The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hicks, D. 2007. Historical Archaeology in Britain. In D. Pearsall (ed.) Encyclopedia of Archaeology. Elsevier.

Jones, D (ed), 2002. 20th century heritage: our recent cultural legacy. Proceedings of the Australia ICOMOS National Conference 2001 School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, University of Adelaide, and Australia ICOMOS Secretariat.

Maitland, F.W. 1988 [1897]. Domesday Book and Beyond: three essays in the early history of England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matless, D. 1998. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion.

Muir, R. 1981. The Shell Guide to Reading the Landscape. London: Michael Joseph.

Muir, R. 1998. Reading the Landscape, Rejecting the Present. Landscape Research 23(1): 71-82.

Rowley, T. 2006. The English Landscape in the 20th Century. London: Hambledon Continuum.

Stratton, M. and B. Trinder 2000. Twentieth Century Industrial Archaeology. London: Spon Press.