Archaeology turns round its objects as much as it turns them out. This is partially an artefact of its reflection, which is not always linear; it is sometimes cyclic. The cyclic is not a perfect circle. Our objects open themselves in new ways to archaeological engagement, but this new relevance surfaces through creative inspiration triangulated off previous orientations. In revolving around our objects, inevitably we return to a familiar place, even though it is where we have never been (González-Ruibal Reference González-Ruibal, Olsen and Pétursdóttir2014). The linear orientation, by contrast, is progressive. It fashions its every step anew. Thus its movement is supersessive – it pushes forward by violently casting overboard what is considered to be of less value (often on misconstrued grounds) and assuming its position. Whereas the former oscillates with various degrees of awareness, the latter strikes out with inevitable levels of amnesia. To attain a genuinely novel position one must struggle against forgetting former orientations, for to eliminate is to run the risk of repetition – blind to whether or not one ever truly invents – and even redundancy – with multiple copies the impact of our work is diminished. Still, if true improvement constitutes progress, then archaeology, when properly executed, moves in spirals, and our objects move with us.
Assaf Nativ's article moves in circles and reasons with lines. It advocates a different understanding of the archaeological record while generating momentum off other positions treated as merely derivative. It gives exclusive consideration to archaeology as a science, ignoring the necessary contribution of the arts and humanities, and the significant strength that comes with straddling both sides of this divide. Whatever one makes of its style and rhetoric, which open it to misreading, this article is not without its merits. My aim in openly pondering Nativ's pondering of the object of archaeology is to arrive at an understanding of its similarities and differences for the objects, archaeology and the archaeological.
‘What is the object of archaeology?’ According to Nativ, it is the ‘archaeological’. Though elusive and ambiguous, this term ‘is not so much an aspect of the social, as it is its counterpart, a mode of cultural being that belongs to the subsurface’ (p. 3). The archaeological, according to Nativ, constitutes a disengagement from the ‘social’, whatever one makes of this term, for its interactions occur under buried conditions without recourse to hyper-terrestrial humans and their relations. Thus it is among ‘buried culture’, with its subsurface dynamics, that one finds the true object of archaeology. From trash to Lower Palaeolithic hand axes, the article strives to build a case that the production of the archaeological through burial is, nonetheless, necessary for what it holds to be the constitution of the social. For without the moulting skin of the Earth's surface the present would choke on an accumulated wreckage of refuse and ruins, become motionless, and lose its ability to evolve.
Because the archaeological is necessarily asocial, it cannot be captured by terms like rubbish, garbage, waste, etc. (one might question whether Nativ's repeated use of the term ‘phenomenon’, a thing whose being is about being observed and offering itself to observation, fails to capture this object). The use of anthropically oriented terms fails to account for the autonomy of the underworld whose marvellous miscellany withdraws from all species of ‘social’ contact. Because archaeology possesses a matchless capacity to engage the chthonic realm (Nativ holds to the opinion that the only way to access it is through excavation), it becomes a counterpart and complement to the humanities and social sciences, one on par with these fields.
Pressing is the need to clearly delineate this object, for without it, according to Nativ, ‘archaeological insights are at risk of becoming vacuous and insubstantial’ (p. 20). Vacuous, because apparently, for all our attempts to come to terms with archaeology's object, we have failed to fully grapple with the buried realities of the archaeological and its asocial, subterranean modes of existence; insubstantial, because supposedly academic opportunism has led archaeologists astray in such a way that the archaeological was never ‘properly constituted’. The merits of this article are numerous: its emphasis on the autonomy of that which exists in the subsurface; its appreciation of non-human dynamics without obligatory recourse to the social; its appeal to better understand the contribution of what lies below in the emergence of what remains. This, to be sure, is not the first article to champion these emphases; it is not the first to assert our self-inflicted ignorance with respect to archaeology's true objects; it is not the first to claim that subsurface dynamics have been neglected. Despite the repeated exaggeration of novelty, within this article one finds numerous and striking similarities to work in the vein of processual archaeology and the turn to things. In what follows, I contend that Nativ's exposition of the archaeological further obscures differences that are maintained by recognizing things as the grounds for all archaeology and that his insistence on an exclusively chthonic object-in-itself betrays the ancient meaning of the term ‘the archaeological’.
The archaeological is dynamic and ever-changing. Organic remains and soluble minerals leach in podzols; bacteria consume wood tablets; deposits stabilize walls composed of rubble and mud mortar. Nativ grounds his understanding of the archaeological in vibrant processes, while treating actual entities as merely derivative. However, to treat things as processes misses the fact that wood tablets, in borrowing an expression from Graham Harman (Reference Harman2016, 7), change because they exist rather than exist because they change. Organic remains, bacteria and rubble walls are things rather than processes (Witmore Reference Witmore2014), and processes change depending on the introduction of different things – if a thick layer of clay was deposited over a rubbish-filled ditch, sealing it below the water table, then bacteria would no longer find a hospitable milieu in which to enjoy their wood fodder. An anaerobic bubble, which is also a thing, results from the presence of different entities, as is the case at Vindolanda.
In accounting for the transformation of an assemblage through excavation, Nativ returns to the long-standing contrast between dynamics and statics, which he regards as ‘a transposition of the distinction between buried and non-buried conditions’ (p. 10). As if caught by the gaze of Medusa, dynamics are rendered static in the course of excavation and mobilization, for statics amount to an ‘approximation of fixity’ (p. 10). What this emphasis on dynamics and statics misses is that change is more sporadic than continuous, and stability is a norm with buried conditions. The accumulation of surfaces around a Roman arch was not simply a gradual process; it was the result of resurfacing, the addition of fill, and accumulations that occurred sporadically, punctuated by periods free from oscillation. Any excavation constitutes moments of momentous metamorphosis, whereby what is immersed in a chthonic pool of entities acquires its revealed form within other assemblages, something of which is manifest through media. The notion of statics ignores the fact that objects are staged for articulation in the midst of extensive manipulation, whereby soils are displaced; fills and deposits are reformulated in spades and buckets; and other objects are shuffled through interactions with archaeologists holding trowels, writing descriptions and checking off context sheets.
Nativ can scarcely imagine a more definitive horizon than that which separates above and below, spreading out in all directions (after Edgeworth Reference Edgeworth2016). This article takes this distinction and elevates it as a fundamental divide, granting that which exists on either side legitimacy as two purified domains of reality, the buried and the social; one part consigned to the hard sciences, the other to the humanities and the soft sciences. It is strange for this article to underline how the Nature/Culture dichotomy is inadequate only to embrace (that is, reproduce) yet another bifurcation of the world, with two provinces fortified in mutual isolation. To regard the surface world as ‘social’ (i.e. ‘on the same plain as living people’, p. 21 n. 5) evokes that false image of humans holding a 50 per cent share in the reality of the atmospheric world. To maintain this oversimplified scheme, one has to ignore the trillions of ‘asocial’ circumstances above the surface, and ‘social’ rapports below.
The lifeworlds of trees, the boring bits of oil derricks, locomotive earthworms, agrarian ploughshares, excavator buckets of dredging machines, and communities of pocket gophers in the foothills of southern California (Erlandson Reference Erlandson1984) are among the countless thingly hordes that permeate the chthonic realm. Even if we continue to list off the millions of examples of how the buried world is hardly disengaged in toto, Nativ could counter that all of these ‘ambiguous phenomena’ (p. 12) involve phase shifts in moving from solid domains to gaseous ones. But this retort fails to appreciate how the legions of objects above and below are neither exhausted by their environment nor reducible to it. A black-figure kylix exceeds its time in the sun to enter the ground, and it persists throughout its sojourn in isolated chthonic darkness to return through the extractive endeavours of our colleagues. While a buried ceramic vessel is influenced by its solid subsoil context, it is able to move into other contexts, offering up other qualities. For Nativ, it is this emphasis on things that denies archaeology its object. Things, we are told, are both too encompassing and too specific to constitute the objects of archaeology. Moreover, by completely disregarding the past and memory, what he considers to be vague alternatives to archaeology's true object, he holds this perspective as an all-or-nothing concern. The ontological turn, according to Nativ, brought about the erosion of distinctions, and constitutes yet another example of compensating for what archaeology is lacking (Nativ Reference Nativ2017, 664).
It is not enough to make compulsory disclaimers; one has to demonstrate how one conception can account for the objects of archaeology and the archaeological better than another. Whereas appealing to expedient holisms erodes distinctions, insisting on the utter specificity of actual entities maintains them. The example of the truck slamming into the Newport Gate in 1964, originally discussed by Matt Edgeworth (Reference Edgeworth2016), is illuminating in this regard. Nativ argues that while the accumulated surfaces that encase 2.5 meters of the arch below the road surface are archaeological, the arch above the ground is not. By stating that the truck cannot initiate contact with the buried portion of the arch, there is an implicit claim that this subterranean portion exists as something else. Because the arch is caught between two modes of being, the gaseous environment above, and the solid one below, Nativ's scheme must split what is undividable, thereby depriving the arch of its unity as a thing. To be sure, there is a compound object formed by the surfaces, fills, accumulated deposits and the arch, for this is what participates in the 1964 incident described by Edgeworth. However, the Roman arch persists as a whole and is capable of offering a 7.5-metre passage should city officials decide to lower the road surface in an effort to forestall future clashes with lorries.
There is undoubtedly something different about dress pens held firm within an encapsulating matrix of limestone soil and conserved bronze fibulae sitting within a display case, but these differences cannot be boiled down to a binary taxonomy grounded in their contexts or any atmospheric shifts between the surface and subsurface. Nativ is right to regard subsurface rapports as autonomous, but he is wrong to deny the same autonomy to all things, whether we speak of ceramic kylikes displaced from within the ground, archways permitting movement since the 3rd century A.D., or the soil matrices. The conundrum of archaeology's object will not be solved by dogmatically reverting to a pervasive holistic perspective or by championing a prejudicial reasoning that embraces science for the underworld while consigning the humanities and the arts to the surface.
Ultimately, Nativ's view of the archaeological cannot accommodate the laths exposed under peeling plaster, the timber framing revealed by a crumbling brick veneer, or the dust-covered piano sitting in the corner of an abandoned room. It cannot accommodate a dusty box of lantern slides, graffiti or rock art latently persisting for centuries only to be disclosed by a child. It cannot accommodate the Jackpile Uranium Mine, which, though largely buried through remediation, still unleashes particle assaults on every horse tethered in pastures below Paguate Pueblo and every driver who passes through the Arroyo Moquino along New Mexico State Road 279. Nativ's object cannot be a matter of common concern for all archaeologists, for it does not accommodate those who undertake surface survey; those who study landscapes or ruins; or those who write on the phenomenology of menhirs, or articulate abandoned council houses or drift matter accumulated on Icelandic beaches. Nativ seems to have forgotten that archaeology has an obligation to its objects, its practices and its communities (Rathje, Shanks and Witmore Reference Witmore and González-Ruibal2013).
Though Nativ states that the archaeological cannot account for archaeology, his notion of the archaeological cannot account for its objects either. Framing the archaeological as a mode of cultural being that belongs to the subsurface actually confuses the difference that Nativ wants to draw out. For unlike anthropology, biology or zoology, archaeology is derived from an adjective, archaios, rather than a proper noun, such as anthropos, bios or zoon (and Nativ apparently holds to the confusion of adjectives – the archaeological – with proper nouns – the ‘object of analysis’). Etymologically speaking, it is to a quality, an attribute, of being olden, antiquated, erstwhile or ancient, rather than an actual object, that we are committed. Elsewhere, we have elided this difference by using the neuter substantive, ta archaia, ‘old things’ (Olsen et al., Reference Olsen2012, 3). However, by ignoring the difference between the archaios and ta archaia, one misses an important distinction between things and the quality of being ancient or old, what we might gloss as that attribute of holding memory. A few final points should be made here.
When Nativ contends that speaking of ‘the past, or evolutionary processes, or memory’ is ‘secondary (at best) to the archaeological mode of being’ (p. 14), he obscures the fundamental character of the archaeological. For with this wonderful exaggeration, useful for polemical one-upmanship, Nativ tears free of the ancient and long-standing connotations of the term. If there has always been an emphasis on the past, change or memory, then it is because that is what the archaeological refers to. But while the etymological commitment of archaeology to study things old or ancient poses a constraint, in the sense that it orients our practices, this constraint need not (as it has always been supposed) belong to the arche, the starting point; it can belong to the telos, the solution (Witmore Reference Witmore, Fortenberry and McAtackney2012; Reference Witmore, Blaising, Legendre and Olivier2017). In other words, our objects are not the same as the outcomes. Nativ holds that ‘it is the existence of this object that justifies the discipline in the first place’ (p. 8). I hold that it is our objects, our communities and our ends. By dogmatically circumscribing our objects in advance, we foreclose on the bewildering range of possibilities that comes from following things no matter where they may lead us. On these grounds, the question of how to proceed belongs to a wider field of possibilities, to the creative adventure that is archaeology, which draws upon the sciences, humanities and arts.
In all of this, we cannot deny the remarkable holding power of the soil. There is an enormous below-ground difference, and Nativ is right to direct practitioners to this with new relevance. Profound though this difference is, it does not warrant the creation of yet another false divide between the two purified domains. Being old or ancient is not synonymous with being below the surface, for the wreckage of the past is above and below. (Indeed, the terrific turmoil of disturbances that occur above ground ensures that not all old things enter the subsurface.) The difference made by the soil belongs to it and its rapports with other things, not to the archaeological, for what is held within the earth, as Nativ correctly surmises, exists apart from humans and is open to all manner of rapports. For a proper study of what Nativ proposes one would have to coin a completely new term. Why not chthonology, the study of that which is in or beneath the soil?
It is true that archaeology overlooks the question of what formerly buried things are within the antecedent lethe, when not framed in the open air as ‘of the past’, when not treated exclusively as objects ‘of human endeavour’, as props or stages for human events (thus, highlighting that expressive fallacy of always seeking explanation in human terms; Olivier Reference Olivier2011, 15–37; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012, 7; Witmore Reference Witmore2014). The article's strengths relate to its insistence on the importance of that which occurs in the ground, even if we archaeologists can only allude to the chthonic existence of things indirectly. But we should be careful of overdramatizing the underworld, for if chthonic things lack nothing, why should we bother them? Because problems unfurl through the spirals of archaeology, and our objects, under the influence of these problems and among other things within contrived settings, come to suggest something more of themselves: is this not the definition of research, to iteratively seek out, articulate and refine articulations of our objects and their rapports by turning around them?
