Assaf Nativ has written a bold and challenging paper and one which prompts a great deal of reflection. Although highly theoretical, it is also a paper that engages quite directly with the concerns of our discipline and is a good example of what one might dub philosophical (or meta-)archaeology rather than philosophy applied to archaeology. Moreover, Nativ has a very clear style of exposition that gives the reader a great deal to sink his or her teeth into. Which is precisely what I want to do now. And if what follows seems excessively critical or negative, I hope it will also be taken as a sign of my respect for his taking on a topic fraught with difficulties and a conviction that my commentary should try and match up to his own carefully argued text.
Nativ presents a deceptively simple proposition: to do archaeology, we surely ought to define what the archaeological is, it being the object (or subject) of our study. After all, how can we claim to study something if we don't define what it is we want to study? Now you might think that this ‘something’ is obvious or has been done countless times, but Nativ suggests otherwise. Like others (notably those within or allied to symmetrical archaeology), he argues that the object of archaeology is in fact divided between a proximate and an ultimate object: the former being the archaeological remains, the latter being the past, or past society, past behaviour and so on. More importantly, the former is simply a proxy or means to get to the latter – hence Nativ's attribution of the archaeological as being primarily instrumental rather than ontological and his phrasing of this division in terms of a disjuncture between the object of analysis and the object of interest. In other words, here is the classic ‘Indian behind the artefact’ syndrome.
I should say before I go any further that I too have made use of this argument so I fully appreciate its merit and sympathize with its claim. However, it is the conclusions Nativ draws from this division that trouble me, and from this point on I found myself disagreeing with most of the key steps in his argument. And here is why. Nativ seems to accept this division as more or less reasonable and wants to fully separate the proximate and ultimate objects into two realms: the empyrean or terrestrial realm of the social and the subterranean world of the archaeological. He admits to communication between the realms, such as discard from society entering the underworld through landfills and objects from the underworld re-entering society through practices like archaeology, but on the whole the two worlds are ontologically distinct. And they require two different practices. The implication is that archaeology should not try to mimic sciences which study the social (e.g. ethnography, sociology) because to do so is to see the archaeological as simply a mirror world of the social, a distorted reflection which after some methodological conversion (through formation theory and its like) can be translated into the social. This is not to take the archaeological seriously as something different in its own right. Again, I should point out that I have used arguments like this myself and I too believe it is dangerous to treat archaeology as a kind of palaeo-ethnography – not least because it will always come up short.
However, I simply do not see what purpose is served by making the distinction between the archaeological and social so stark. Indeed, to me it leads to all kinds of complications such as denying that Stonehenge counts as an archaeological object. It also leads him to privilege excavation over survey as methods for investigating the archaeological and developing convoluted suggestions for why survey and surface sites can still nonetheless fall within the scope of archaeology even if they are not, strictly speaking, archaeological objects. In fact, following his own logic, I also cannot see how he can still include archaeologies of the contemporary past as archaeological, when the vast majority of its objects clearly reside in the social realm. Ultimately, his argument verges on enacting a tyrannical purge on the discipline which would disenfranchise many of its current practitioners, despite the mitigations he offers towards his own logic.
But then again, his logic is not unassailable. Two issues stand out. First, there is his characterization of the archaeological as the buried, via the notion of statics. Nativ argues that the archaeological is given its definition through the act or event of burial, which separates it from the social, but then is further defined as something static through the archaeological operation, in distinction to the dynamics of the social. In fact he even suggests that this disengagement of the archaeological from the social is ‘first and foremost conveyed by archaeological statics’ (p. 11). But there is a real tension here that Nativ does not seem to acknowledge between the idea of burial defining the archaeological and that of statics doing so. Statics, as a product of the archaeological operation through inscription, as Nativ describes it, occurs during and after the archaeological has been unearthed, and therefore brought (back) into the realm of the social. A site, re-exposed to the surface, a pottery vessel unearthed – these are concrete examples of what the archaeological is; but in the very process of becoming archaeological, they are unearthed, not buried. In fact, as long as they remain buried, we can hardly be said to know them at all, except for that fact they lie beneath the surface. Nativ portrays statics as if it were a doubling or deepening of the disengagement of the archaeological from the social, but to my mind it actually cancels or reverses this disengagement. Excavation un-buries that which was buried, so how, then, can the archaeological be defined by being buried? This also touches on another issue to which I will return later – namely the relation between the archaeological object and archaeological practice.
The other problem concerns a similar blind spot in logic. On his journey to the great divide between the social and the archaeological, Nativ addresses another – that between Nature and Culture. He notes that the archaeological has always sat astride this division so it has no real purchase if we want to try and define what the archaeological is. Moreover, given the dissolution of this divide in recent years through studies such as actor-network theory (ANT), its claim as a framework for theorizing the archaeological is even less plausible. Not only that, this development threatens to dissolve all disciplinary and ontological boundaries altogether, the archaeological included – hence the need to rescue the archaeological through an alternative framework. And yet, despite this recognition, Nativ continues to rely on this divide in his analysis. How does he define the archaeological? Not simply as the buried – but as the cultural buried. He uses this phrase several times without comment or irony, it seems. Indeed, he has to because he knows full well the buried also includes earthworms, rocks, lava and water as well as potsherds, flint arrowheads and building foundations. In striving to separate the archaeological from the social through the concept of burial, Nativ seems to forget to address the separation of the archaeological from the geological, etc. And what about the submarine, for that matter? How do we separate the study of shipwrecks from molluscs or ocean currents? Of course ANT teaches us that all these things are entangled, but still – if there is an archaeological object, is it the same as an oceanographic one or a geological one? Nativ's silent insertion of the word ‘cultural’ before the word ‘burial’ suggests that it is not and that the distinction between them is based on that old divide he thought he had left behind.
In short, what Nativ's analysis has achieved, it seems to me, is not replacing one divide with another, but rather superimposing one upon the other, a point which he actually acknowledges in his text although he somehow seems unbothered by its implications. Instead of reducing our problems, he has multiplied them. I do think there was a simpler solution here. Put simply, rather than see the distinction of the proximate and ultimate objects of archaeology as a sign to drive them further apart and purge one of the other, it would have been better instead to think about how the two can be collapsed and brought closer together – but in such a way that does not reduce one as an instrument to access the other. At least, that has been how I have attempted to deal with this, drawing on assemblage theory (Lucas Reference Lucas2012; Reference Lucas, Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013; Reference Lucas, Chapman and Wylie2015b). That is also what I was implying in my question that Nativ quotes – what new entities archaeology can propose. However, I am not here to discuss my work but Nativ's. And so let me end by reflecting rather on why I think Nativ has taken the wrong tack.
His paper ends with some thoughts on the political implications of his analysis; specifically, he suggests that it is precisely because of the reduction of the archaeological to the social that archaeology as a practice has suffered so much abuse, as in the example he gives of biblical archaeology. However, he seems not to acknowledge the redemptive role of archaeology, also done in the name of the social, especially in historical archaeology and archaeologies of the contemporary past which engage with issues of racism, inequality, capitalism and so on. But more crucially, I am unsure about what Nativ is suggesting here – that archaeology can somehow become depoliticized through this reconceptualization of the archaeological? That he seems to aspire to this is evident in his espousal of academia as a disinterested space. It is possible, if not probable, that Nativ works in an academic environment where the political pressure on academia is much greater than in my home institution, and one should never underestimate such differences. Yet the political critique at the end of his paper still seems both one-sided and yet dangerously reactionary in its call for a depoliticised archaeology – a quest for knowledge for its own sake. And this ultimately brings me to what I think is the deeper problem with Nativ's approach. He is trying to define the archaeological, independent of or prior to the practice of archaeology. Indeed he states so, quite explicitly.
The fact that he claims that the practice of archaeology should not be defined by its object, as that would make it circular, seems to me very misguided. It is like arguing that ‘a chairmaker is someone who makes chairs’ is circular; well, yes it is, but so what? Shouldn't it be? At the root of Nativ's approach is an assumption that one can define the archaeological object independent of the practices surrounding it, even though he occasionally acknowleges that its definition is partly performative. Yet this flies in the face of everything science studies has illuminated over the past quarter of a century or more: a discipline and its object are co-constituted. It also contradicts Nativ's own definition of the archaeological as an articulation between burial (the archaeological-in-itself) and statics (the archaeological as constituted through excavation). It is not that archaeology invents its object (as in social constructivism or postmodernism), but neither does its object precede it, as in naive empiricism – or Nativ's analysis. Rather, each constitutes the other. That is why Stonehenge is an archaeological object, pace Nativ, and why that Ford Transit van (Bailey et al. Reference Bailey, Newland, Nilsson and Schofield2009) is also an archaeological object – even if (indeed precisely because) fifty years ago it would not have been considered as such. I think it is frankly dangerous to try and define the object of archaeology without simultaneously defining the practice of archaeology. Which means also thinking about why we do archaeology at all.
Nativ is right when he asks how we can study something if we have not defined what that ‘something’ is, but his whole argument presupposes what he is trying to claim – that this ‘something’ is distinct from what we usually think it is, whether that is society, human behaviour, etc. or simply the archaeological record as the residues of past society, human behaviour, etc. But what he also forgot to ask was why we want to study that something in the first place, except as ‘a pursuit valuable in itself’, which almost seems to imply that what that something is does not matter after all since it can apply to any object you choose. Why the archaeological as opposed to anything else? In the end, to talk about the archaeological object without also talking about archaeological objectives is precisely to revert back to the idea of a Nature, purged of Culture as if the two were ontologically distinct. For me, the archaeological is relevant because it is social; in purging the social from the archaeological, one also purges the relevance and point of archaeology itself. The problem perhaps lies not so much in our definition of the archaeological, but rather in our definition of the social and what scope archaeology has for redefining that. In this sense, Nativ's brief remarks on the interchange between the social and the archaeological would surely have been a more fruitful line of enquiry.
I find it regrettable that I am so at odds with Nativ's paper as I have the feeling that we are coming from the same place in addressing such an issue, but what we see from that position are two very different visions of archaeology – and the archaeological. Nonetheless, the opportunity to engage in a form of dialogue like this can only be a positive thing and I would like to end by thanking Nativ again for a very stimulating and provocative paper.
