There is more to the object's life than just deposition

Garrow argues that the presence of a practice of deliberate deposition in prehistory is too much taken for granted nowadays. I would like to add that archaeologists too often assume that it was really the deposition of the material we retrieve that was central to the act in the perception of prehistoric people. This is, after all, tacitly assumed in the way find distribution tends to be analysed. Comparing the presence of sherds of type A in one pit to a pot of type B in an adjacent ditch of a henge implies that what matters is the presence (‘deposition’) of the pottery in the pit and ditch fills. I wonder, however, if things are not somewhat more complicated than that. Sherds ending up in a pit can be the last part of a longer sequence of acts. For example, it might have been the content of the pot that mattered and for which it was brought to the henge. Something was done with it and it broke or was deliberately broken. From that moment, we are dealing with fragments of a pot, and we have to consider the way those sherds were treated and how these could end up in the archaeological record. This is a different stage, involving specific natural and anthropogenic processes. Selection and deliberate deposition of sherds may or may not be one of them. In the perception of the participants, it can, for instance, have been the eating of food during a particular event at that particular location – a henge – that was central, but not necessarily the final discarding of its container.

What I suggest is that we should analytically separate the significance of an object during its life and its significance during the moment when it was finally deposited into the ground, to become part of the archaeological record. For a modern example, one may think of the deliberate breaking of a glass during a Jewish wedding ceremony. In this context, and during a specific stage in the wedding, the glass is meaningful and becomes central to the act for a short moment. I wonder, however, if this is still the case after the glass has been broken and if it comes to the fore in a special treatment of the sherds afterwards.

Returning to archaeology, it seems to me that some of the claimed examples of structured deposition actually tell of very different practices ending up in deposition. Thomas (1999, 66) gives the example of an Early Neolithic pit at Wingham, Kent, where an assemblage entirely made up of waste flakes can be refitted back on to a core, ‘with no tools or utilized pieces having been created in the course of the reduction sequence’. This stands for a way of flint working that deviates from average practices, but also for a subsequent collection and deposition of waste in such a way that one gets the idea that a notion of completeness mattered here. This, however, is different from another example listed by Thomas (1999, 65: Balfarg, Fife), where he mentions a pit that was lined with potsherds of different vessels. Here, sherds were apparently used as building material to create a particular structure or to mark a pit in a particular way that was dug and subsequently used for some other purpose. Even if the sherds were specifically selected for this, it was not their deposition that was central here – the pit was dug and constructed for some other purpose.

And what to think of the ‘deposition’ of pyre ‘debris’ in prehistory (McKinley 1997, 137–39)? Does it represent a structured deposition of material, or is it merely the meaningless leftovers of a meaningful social practice? On the one hand, it represents the remnants of a special social activity, which took place at this location (a deceased was burnt, and vital remains were taken out and buried elsewhere or kept by the mourners). On the other hand, there are also indications that charred wood was substantially rearranged and that some bone and artefact fragments were left in place, although they must have been visible. In those cases the pyre remains became the centre of monumental Iron Age mounds (Fokkens, Jansen and Van Wijk 2009; Fontijn and Jansen, forthcoming). This suggests that both the taking out and the leaving in place of material were relevant practices here, and simply speaking of the deposition of pyre debris conceals such nuances.

So, in my view, a first step in redressing the balance in the study of structured deposition would be not just to compare the presence or absence of objects from different contexts, but also to include the practices in which they were involved in the comparison. What were the activities by which the material we retrieve ended up in the archaeological record? Here we may consider deposition of material as the final stage of a longer use-life, and accept that in the course of that life, and during deposition, its significance may have shifted from meaningful item to alienable thing, or vice versa.

Meaningful but beyond words?

Raising the issue of the meaning of objects brings me to another point made by Garrow: that material culture patterning does not have to come about as a result of underlying symbolic schemes, but ‘can just happen’ (p. 109). The way material tends to be treated and deposited need not be explicitly intentional, but might still evidence that it was meaningful, yet not meaningful in a referential, discursive sense. Already in 1995, Maurice Bloch argued that archaeologists have focused too much on the symbolic and the referential in their discussion of the meaning of objects (Bloch 1995). Material, he argues, can often ‘mean’ something in different ways. He gives the example of geometrical carvings on the three main posts and shutters of a Zafimaniry house in the eastern forest of Madagascar. These carvings ‘mean’ nothing in the referential sense: they do not stand for a concept or an idea – at least, this is not why they are carved. The practice of carving parts of the house, however, is considered essential to the life cycle of a family inhabiting the house. It is seen as part of a process of human maturation and settling down, in which the house is seen to ‘harden’, and the carvings honour the hardness of the wood. The house does not represent the marriage – the house is the marriage (Bloch 1995, 215). As such, the carvings do mean something as they seem to express a particular sense of ordering that is familiar and recognizable to the Zafimaniry. It is often this sort of non-discursive, material meaning that we are dealing with if we consider the possible significance of material culture patterning of the kind discussed by Garrow.

To take a modern example: a particular kind of disorder and litter, often including beer bottles reused as ashtrays, is often felt to make an apartment into a real students’ home. If the garden of that students’ home, however, is used in the same way, the non-student neighbourhood will have a bad feeling about the fact that ‘litter’ is dumped in a place that is – in their view – made for gardening. The different attitude towards waste in student communities is not something that is explicitly stated. Rather, it is something you can become confronted with if you are introduced to a students’ home as a green freshman, as ‘the way we do things here’. Rationalizing this attitude, for example by seeing it as a reaction towards bourgeois society, will come later and is perhaps etic rather than emic. It also will not make clear why it is particularly in the treatment of waste that such a reaction against society materializes. Material culture patterning implies that any society has preconceived ideas of where and how to do particular things – cultural biographies in the sense of Kopytoff (1986). Mapping the life cycles or biographies of that material is not necessarily about explicit symbolical schemes and cultural concepts, but it is about what people (implicitly) feel to be ‘the right way of doing things in a specific context’. As Kopytoff remarks (1986, 67), it is often only if we are confronted with a deviant treatment of an object that we come to realize that we actually have a prior conception of what would be the ‘right’ life-path of a specific kind of object in a specific context.

Dropping ‘ritual’ and ‘mundane’

Mapping the patterns (and deviancies) in the life-course of objects of a prehistoric society is – within the limitations set by the archaeological record and our own frames of reference – for that reason important in itself. I have the impression that this is also the agenda Garrow sets. I do doubt, however, if it is really helpful to label depositional practices with phrases like ‘mundane’ or ‘everyday’ activitities. This brings me to perhaps the only point where my opinion differs from Garrow's. He states that ‘material culture patterning . . . could have come about for relatively mundane reasons’ (p. 110), but this presupposes that a distinction between ‘mundane’ and non-mundane matters in prehistoric societies and is recognizable to us. In a similar way, his remark that archaeologists are to ‘investigate the material signature(s) of normal everyday life as well’ (p. 114) seems to suggest that everyday life is something different from ‘ritual’ acts. I wonder what was ‘mundane’ to the prehistoric societies we study and if it is helpful to use such a term here at all.

One of the major problems in the archaeology of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age is the problematic identification of clusters of pits, posts and artefact scatters as ‘settlements’. It is a paper by Jo Brück that sets this out wonderfully for south English sites (1999c). She demonstrates that there is a considerable variety among what are morphologically similar sites (1999c, 57). In terms of the presence or absence of particular artefacts, a functionally or spatially distinct category of ‘domestic’ site cannot be identified. Interestingly, Brück's table 4.1 suggests that the same holds true for supposedly ‘ritual’ sites that do look similar to henges. The same set of activities was certainly not carried out at all such sites (Brück 1999c, 57). It would be interesting to see to what extent some sites that we now a priori classify as ‘domestic’ or ‘ritual’ actually overlap in terms of the general biographies of objects on such sites.

This is the case with another controversial type of monument, the late Iron Age Viereckschanzen on the European continent – enclosed square areas often marked with earthen walls. Traditionally interpreted as Celtic sanctuaries, more recent research in Germany has shown that both the material present at such sites and the way in which it was deposited do not markedly differ from what is found in ‘domestic’ settlements. Although this is often seen to prove that Viereckschanzen were ‘domestic’ sites, it is perhaps more to the point to remark that our way of classifying sites is not in line with the evidence of people's activities there. We are, apparently, dealing here with activities with an archaeological fingerprint comparable to what we find on non-enclosed, unwalled residences (Wieland 1999). This makes it all the more important to understand why people in certain locations thought it important to shield such activities with square enclosures and earthen walls.

Summing up, I consider Garrow's review a much-needed critique of structured deposition, and an invitation towards an empirically based archaeology of material culture practices that will certainly prosper, perhaps even more so if we drop such preconceived modern labels as ‘ritual’ and ‘mundane’.