The ontological turn in Anthropology and the end of post-processual archaeology

The post-processual archaeology that dominated the scholarship of Anglo-American academics in the 1980s and 1990s now lies moribund, done in by an ‘ontological turn’ in the study of anthropology that began some 15 or 20 years ago. Anthropos is no longer the sole focal point; human beings no longer occupy the central place in our understanding of cultures and societies. As contemporary anthropologists have noted, human actions and ideas are not the lone contributors to the creation of a civilization's structures and objects or the development of societal forms. Other kinds of ‘life’, a variety of other non-human organisms contribute to their creation as well. They most notably include places and what we generally refer to as things: objects, constructions and materials. In effect, they include all the organic and non-organic components of the world about us. These are the ‘beings’, both animate and inanimate, that ‘make’ the world. Moreover, ‘things’ are no longer regarded as pure inert ‘objects’, only created or transformed by the will of humans or the force of their technology. The present transformations of the Anthropocene, which is producing climatic changes at a global scale, are pushing us to consider that ‘natural’ events—such as floods or hurricanes—may be the direct result of human actions and material ‘things’—such as the earth and the oceans—may be active agents of change. In other words, they are also the subjects of history.

The definitive collapse of the long-standing dichotomy between nature and culture to which this ontological shift has led is not without practical consequence for the very way in which we practise archaeology. It has effectively stripped humans of their privileged status as the lone beings endowed with knowledge and capable of action in an incognisant world that is subjected to their undertakings. But it seems to me that, at a deeper level, the ontological turn that ushered in the demise of processual and post-processual archaeology needs to be seen as symptomatic of the transformations that our post-industrial societies are currently undergoing. As Bruno Latour pointed out, the New Climate Regime that we entered with the period of the Anthropocene known as the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. Reference Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen and McNeill2011, 848) now obliges us to rethink our own ‘ontology’, which we inherited from the Moderns of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Latour Reference Latour and Portier1993), and more precisely to reconsider what was understood as ‘incidental’. Global warming has confronted us with an ‘active’ natural environment that has begun ‘reacting’ with ever-increasing force to the disturbances to which we have subjected it (Latour Reference Latour and Portier2017). In other words, ‘things’ are now present not as passive objects, but as agents. And this is undoubtedly why we have become increasingly attuned to the various ontologies that consider non-human entities, such as animals, plants and environments, as fully fledged ‘beings’ (Kohn Reference Kohn2013).

The ontological turn and the archaeology of things

An examination of the impact this ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences (including philosophy) has had on the manner in which archaeology is carried out today and on archaeology's methodological choices clearly reveals a shift in focus on to material remains, considered in and of themselves simply as ‘things’ (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012). We note, too, a marked interest in contemporary history and even in what might be called the ‘archaeology of the present’ (Olivier Reference Olivier, Blaising, Driessen, Legendre and Olivier2017a). Above all, we observe an attempt, and this is new, not only to identify the ‘things’ that are of archaeological importance, but to determine the particular aspects of these ‘things’ that make them important, regardless of the era from which they come down to us, for, fundamentally, they all appear to us in the present (Olivier Reference Olivier and Gonzalez-Ruibal2013; Witmore Reference Witmore and Gonzalez-Ruibal2013; Reference Witmore, Blaising, Driessen, Legendre and Olivier2017). This is the perspective in which archaeology has begun making its own ‘ontological turn’ (Olsen Reference Olsen2010), this new approach of temporality having reversed past perceptions of incidentalness, which was seen as archaeologically ‘marginal’ and/or ‘senseless’.

Here again, it seems to me that this evolution has not been driven simply by the research carried out by archaeologists or the influence that work done in other disciplines has had on them. The New Climate Regime brought on by the expanded Anthropocene has altered the ways in which we experience the world and, with it, our perception of the past and of history as well. As the historian François Hartog noted, much as Reinhard Koselleck had done so before him, these altered ways have generated a ‘New Regime of Historicity’ that Hartog roughly labelled ‘Presentism’ (Hartog Reference Hartog and Brown2015; Tamm & Olivier Reference Tamm and Olivier2019).

As is the case for the Anthropocene, it is difficult to determine the precise moment at which Hartog's Presentism began. It refers to a break in the continuity that linked past and present in the minds of historians and more generally all scholars who dealt with the past. The present is no longer seen as an extension of the past, as its outcome. And just as the past is no longer a substratum in which the present is rooted, the future no longer appears to us as that space in which the present will necessarily be carried forward and developed. In the ‘risk society’ that is the post-industrial world in which we now live (Beck Reference Beck1992), the future is no longer certain, for it carries within it the threat of environmental disasters on an unimaginable scale. Under these conditions, the conventional notions of historicity have crumbled. The break in continuity has upended the very foundation on which our certainties rested, leaving the present as the lone point of entry into the past. More precisely stated, it has made the past an entity wholly contained in the present where it exists in the form of traces and remains. The past now haunts the present, literally (Hamel Reference Hamel2006). It is no longer a time-frame to be evoked through stories, but rather a kind of evolving memory that is constantly being reworked and modified in the present.

This is the reason that archaeology has become the discipline par excellence of the age of presentism, for it examines the material remains of past cultures and civilizations that have been preserved in the materiality of the present in the form of fossilized vestiges (Olivier Reference Olivier and Greenspan2012). Witness the interest that archaeologists have shown for ‘things’ that are today directly accessible: the deserted sites where people buried their family treasures just before they were forced to flee (Burström Reference Burström2012), the ruins of forgotten internment camps of the Second World War (Early Reference Early, Mytum and Carr2013; Legendre Reference Legendre, Blaising, Driessen, Legendre and Olivier2017), vacated apartments and buildings where people squatted (Buchli & Lucas Reference Buchli, Gavin, Buchli and Lucas2001; Letesson & Jusseret Reference Letesson, Jusseret, Blaising, Driessen, Legendre and Olivier2017), in a word, all those places that are literally haunted by the past. In the age of presentism, archaeology has become the discipline that studies the material memory of places and things (Olivier Reference Olivier2019).

The matter of meaning

By re-establishing things and more generally all non-human entities as active beings, by denying anthropos the central role in the creation of cultures and by tearing down the barrier separating nature and culture, the upheavals wrought by the new environmental regimes (the new climate regime, the new regime of historicity) effectively present a head-on challenge to archaeological interpretation. If archaeology's principal mission is no longer that of recreating the historical ambience of periods of the past—lifestyles and technologies, practices and symbolic representations—then what is it to talk about? What can it say that has not already been said about the material remains that the discipline has been studying since its inception, such as debris, the remains of structures and layers of terrain? Or to put it another way, what new meaning, or what additional meaning that was heretofore partial or undervalued, can be drawn from archaeological remains?

The revolution that accompanied our entry into the Anthropocene and which has transformed the way in which we experience the world on a scale characterized by Latour (Reference Latour and Portier2017, 9–10) as ‘cosmocolossal’ and by Witmore (Reference Witmore2014) as ‘hypanthropic’ has stymied traditional ways of thinking. They have become inoperative, overwhelmed by the extent of this new and truly transformative situation. The reflexive temptation has been great to fall back onto old ways and re-establish in some profoundly reactionary form the identity that exploded under the pressure of the Anthropocene, which is the case of the various essentialist currents of thought that posit an ontological identity, as it were, of beings and things. Yet the collapse of post-processualism clearly indicates what led to its downfall. Far too much importance, and above all illusory importance, was given to the meaning that could be drawn from archaeological sites and objects considered as witnesses to the past. It was thought, or rather believed, that if we used the right theoretical tools, for which we generally looked to philosophy, anthropology and sociology, we could gain access to the symbolic or social worlds of the people who had created these objects or occupied these sites and even to their feelings. It is striking to note that whenever we were unable to find the explicit meaning of sites and things—the people who lived there or used them being long since gone—the tendency was to search for some complex, symbolic significance, which the earlier processual archaeology, fascinated as it was by the way in which systems functioned and structures were organized, had sublimely ignored.

We are now aware of all of this, but this is not to say that we need to find in archaeological vestiges or in ‘things’ themselves significance of another, more ontological order. It is not the kind of significance that is problematic, but rather the relation between material remains and their significance. Clearly, meaning—regardless of whether it is functional, symbolic, affective, or any other kind of meaning—can be random, purely gratuitous, beiläufig, as the Germans say. But do things have to have one lone, unequivocal meaning? And why does the unpredictable way in which things are formed or deposited necessarily alter their ontological integrity? What if the inverse were true? What if their significance lay precisely in the serendipitous, incidental way in which they were constituted? What if the identity or significance of ordinary, everyday things was multiple, variable, undecided and never pre-established? In a word, what if mere incidentality, Beiläufigkeit, were not the problem, but rather the manifestation, of a new relation to things?

The active role of incidentality in the constitution of archaeological remains

Archaeological remains basically present a variety of more or less accessible or explicit meanings that are determined in part by the way they were deposited in or on the ground. The ground functions as an active agent capable of altering or generating information. This is the factor responsible for what we have referred to, for lack of a better term, as incidentality. Interpreting remains is in this way an evolving process. It does not simply draw from remains information that has been more or less well preserved within them. From the moment remains are found, the process of interpretation invents or creates information that is in large part fictional. That interpretation of archaeological remains is based on a fiction is not only because the incidental conditions of their deposition cannot be securely reconstructed. It is fictional since we cannot grasp the missing information that has disappeared, as a result of erosion processes, recycling or lack of deposition. We therefore envisage the past to which these remains belong in a very partial and incomplete manner. But, in a subtler way, interpreting the archaeological evidence is constructing a fiction, since we approach it ‘from afterwards’, that is to say, through the post-history of these remains: they have been transformed and/or followed by a series of material formations that have created their own ‘inheritance’.

Once archaeological remains are unearthed they effectively become composite hybrids whose fictional, interpretative part is inextricably bound to the part generated by the way in which they were set into or onto the ground. The significance of archaeological remains is thus not univocal; it is rather plural and, above all, evolving. It changes based on the transformations the remains undergo from the moment they come in contact with the ground.

Assemblages of remains are highly unstable composites whose unpredictable variations influence more or less directly the significance that can be attributed to the objects or assemblages of objects of which they are composed. Thus, the random way in which remains come down to us does not diminish their ‘ontological’ significance; it rather transforms it and may, in certain instances, even enrich it with new, unexpected meaning.

How post-historical identity unfolds

Oblivion, destruction and obliteration are essential to the random evolution of sites and vestiges for, paradoxically, it is precisely because things and places have been abandoned and forgotten that there is room for their memory to be rekindled, for them to ‘reappear’. It is because nearly all of the once common, abundant remains were destroyed that those that are left take on a given meaning. It is the way we consider vestiges that creates, as it were, their historicity.

Here again, the post-history of remains and sites evolves through incidentality. And it is within their ‘subsequent history’ that the disappearance of the greater part of material vestiges and the reinterpretation of what remains of them take place. Post-history is archaeology's blind spot, yet it is fundamental. It is the black box that holds information and carries forward the material memory of the things that comes down to archaeologists. Even when sites are definitively abandoned and nothing further happens, remains continue to be subject to incidentality. Once a site has been forgotten, the accumulation of material remains may cease, but their organic components begin to disintegrate and, in the process, transform the nature of the assemblage. Or else the abandonment of a site allows other kinds of remains to be introduced onto it and carry its post-history forward. These other remains are unrelated to those they cover or adulterate. They are the material indications of the period of latency into which the remains had entered, and that period can be brutally interrupted when suddenly reactivated.

Paradoxically, identity and meaning are not directly tied to things, for things are constantly being reworked throughout their post-history. They can disappear altogether or be replaced by others. The disconcerting period during which the identity of remains is carried forward includes moments of latency, reactivation, re-inscription and translation. It is a non-linear time that cuts across the conventional chronological periods of archaeology and which is characterized by leaps forward, feedback effects and repetition (Olivier Reference Olivier2017b). The whole of this time needs to be taken into account in our study of material remains, for even when they are immobile and inert they are constantly being mobilized and reworked by incidentality. Remains have no fixed identity. Their meaning is never definitively established. They are always subject to reinterpretation, which is to say to fictionalization. This paradoxical time into which the theoretical models that posit identities that exist in and of themselves all dissolve is the time of memory. This is the new temporality borne by the Anthropocene that finds time compressed into the here and now, and we would do well to get used to it.