Claim one: dedifferentiation between things

A cursory glance at any excavation manual will reveal a host of agencies: earthworms and clay, microbes and rain, podzols and stonewalls, sun and soil, roots, lemmings and mold. These things sort or seal a deposit, leach surfaces, arbitrate order in phasing, contribute to compaction or solifluction, dry out a surface; these things root, burrow and/or decompose. All these things perform. They all intervene and play different roles in shaping the matter that we claim to know best. For Paul Graves-Brown, however, lumping animals together with inanimate objects misses the point that some ‘non-humans can originate action and some cannot’ (Graves-Brown Reference Graves-Brown2013, 184). A key, as he puts it, ‘cannot change its mind as to whom it admits to an apartment, but a bear can change its mind as to whether it is going to eat you’ (ibid.).Footnote ¹ A symmetrical approach to things is dismissed by Graves-Brown because its ontology misses the problem of free will and ‘to conflate their [things’] passive “agency” with that of sentient beings merely confuses things’ (ibid.).

But where do we draw this line, and for what purpose? To what end does this search for a last resort for dualistic thinking work – and how could it work without continuing to embrace a dogma of fundamental divides?Footnote ² One of our initial points was to oppose the assumption that things are epiphenomenal and residual outcomes of some social or cognitive priors rather than real beings with a genuine existence and impact in a shared and flattened world. Graves-Brown's sudden emphasis on free will hardly promises more than to lead us right back down that old track of idealism and methodological individualism. Just to raise one issue, to what extent is ‘free will’ a requirement for having agency among both humans and other animals? In what way, and for which reasons, should ‘originating action’ inevitably be conflated with free will or human-like intentionality? Moreover, bringing in the notion of symmetry was never about confusing farmers with shovels or sailors with navigational aids; it was never about turning differences into similarities or uniformities. The world, of course, is full of differences and to reduce them a priori to the outcome of any great divide (culture–nature, free will and necessity, animate–inanimate) is actually to gloss over and violate these differences. Thus to forefront symmetry is not to deny that beings are different; in fact, it is to acknowledge that these differences are constitutive for the world, including for human existence.

Symmetry is a notion that emerges from the premise that these differences are grounded in the qualities that objects or entities have, and which thus should be acknowledged and, at the outset, treated symmetrically without a priori subsuming them to an asymmetrical regime of radical divides. As an empirical discipline we need to hold assumptions of an entity's character and shape until the requisite work has been accomplished; thus symmetry is simply a guideline that helps to get at those differences without decreeing what they are in advance.

For Graves-Brown (Reference Graves-Brown2013), action is initiated by a privileged agent and is merely transferred down the causal chain among objects that lack any ability themselves to inflict independent blows on each other. This species of reductionism fails to account for bastions that outlive their makers; for terrace walls that are free of the intentions that farmers had for them; for watermills that are released to their own trajectories, that form new alliances and offer up unpredicted qualities. Whatever differences these things make cannot be explained by reducing everything to a supposedly primary rapport with a favored interlocutor, thus sidelining bastions, terrace walls or watermills as merely derivative. Indeed, the reasoning championed by Graves-Brown posits a more genuine, more definitive and cleansed reality, but this would provide us with insufficient traction in understanding the differences made to former timber buildings by wood and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, climate and moisture saturation in soil, plant roots and badgers. In archaeology the plot cannot be laid out in advance. Furthermore, these quips over definitions of agency completely miss the larger point. We need a different metaphysics to provide some purchase on the challenges-turned-catastrophes that we now face. Relations between permafrost and methane, between CO₂ and seawater, between atmosphere and sun require a very different sort of agency than that found in the reductionist scheme of Graves-Brown.

John Barrett, in a recent provocation, takes another line on the question of agency. By regarding things as agents, and championing a symmetrical commitment, our work is ‘in danger of missing a crucial distinction, that between living and non-living matter’ (Barrett Reference Barrett2014, 72). He states, ‘Organisms and machines certainly both do work, but the work of the organism, unlike that of the machine, is directed towards its self-affirmation and renewal. It is difficult to understand why this distinction appears to be so easily missed (cf. Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012).’Footnote ³ Barrett's aim is to create a taxonomy on the basis of an ontological discrepancy found in specific kinds of entity.Footnote ⁴ While the differences between organic and non-organic things may lay claim to one way of ordering and dividing the world, it does not easily follow that self-renewal and self-affirmation are exclusive attributes of living things. Do rivers not renew themselves? Does the steel structure of the Chrysler Building not self-affirm? Of course, rivers and structural steel do so in a very different way to walruses or molds, pine trees or Greek hetairai. And these things have vast differences between themselves, but like any other empirical discipline, we should be concerned with what is specific to such entities and not reduce their diverse beings to an outcome of the non-organic classificatory label attached to them.

To divide along the lines of living and non-living things is to give too much weight to only one kind of difference at the expense of others. Why elevate these distinctions – or ‘free will’ – to the point of fundamental ontological rifts? Real differences and qualitative distinctions between things are beyond numerous. Barrett's (and Graves-Brown’s) cautionary tale is actually a textbook case of purification, where the world is dissected and sorted into two utterly opposed realms, only this time it is not human thinking that is viewed as a transcendent realm removed from the world, rather it is life which exists in a way that base matter does not. Anthropocentrism is thus replaced by a quality seemingly possessed by all living entities, and the surplus bits and pieces, inanimate objects, continue as secondary being, deriving their vitality from elsewhere; never is this to be regarded as a quality of the thing itself. Thus we are thrown back into that choice of two realms, that of necessity and that of freedom.

Carving reality into organic and inorganic realms prejudices every interaction from the start, and denies innumerable differences between various life forms, some subjective, but others not. This bifurcation belongs to a classical definition of biotic autopoiesis and is doomed to repeat many of its pitfalls. Here, Barrett pulls back the veil on something that involves trudging old grounds. The theorists of symbiogenesis, and indeed Gaia, to whom Barrett alludes, see the opposition between life and everything else as inherited; they regard matter as part of the consortium of life. Autopoiesis is not solely biotic, it is also geological, and therefore metabiotic (see Clarke Reference Clarke and Sussman2012). For us, autopoiesis is the self-realization of things.

More pertinent grounds for critiquing the early forays into symmetrical archaeology (i.e. Olsen Reference Olsen2003; Witmore Reference Witmore2004) are related to how they placed more emphasis on action at the expense of other qualities; how they placed more emphasis on the assemblages and entanglements than on the autonomy and integrity of things; that is, how tombs and terrace walls, sledges and skin boats, withhold something in their contact with other things (Harman Reference Harman2009; Olsen Reference Olsen2010). However, to claim that in symmetrical archaeology ‘there are no autonomies: all objects and subjects are entangled and dependent’ (Sørensen Reference Sørensen2013, 14), speaks against the evidence to the contrary (see Olsen Reference Olsen2010, 154–55; Reference Olsen and Hodder2012b, 212–14; Reference Olsen, Carlile, Nicolini, Langley and Tsoukas2013; 179–81; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012, 120–22; Webmoor Reference Webmoor, Graves-Brown, Harrison and Piccini2012, 113; Witmore Reference Witmore2011, 12–14; Reference Witmore2014, 7–8, 13–17).

Here, we encounter a more pressing differentiation, between objects and relations, which symmetrical archaeology handles by opting for a balance between the autonomy of objects and their rapports. As argued by Harman (Reference Harman2014, 100), things are not always affected by each other; sometimes they just exist, non-relationally, and simply do not act at all, at least in the conventional sense of the word. And even if they mostly were, not all parts of their being are affected. Things do hold something in reserve, something that cannot be explained by such relational involvement or by the rationale of the in-order-to. Other distinctions also exist. The disjunctures between continuous and discrete, or between unity and multiplicity, are among the greatest challenges to mathematics and philosophy, and clearly also to archaeology.

Claim two: the exclusivity of things

There is, as Julian Thomas (Reference Thomas, Herschend, Hillerdal and Siapkas2015, 24) has recently argued, ‘a growing tension between the view that archaeology should be a “discipline of things” – to which humans, history and interpretation are incidental (Olsen Reference Olsen2012a, 25) – and a concern that without adopting “human exceptionalism”, archaeologists should not apologize for being interested in people (Fowles Reference Fowles, Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen2010, 23)’. Examples of this growing tension include Tim Ingold's recent (Reference Ingold2012, 427) charge that symmetrical archaeology operates with ‘a conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living organisms’. Symmetrical archaeology appears, as Barrett suggests (Reference Barrett2014, 72), ‘to be incapable of investigating those distinctive features of hominin biology that have contributed to the emergence of different kinds of humanity under different material and historical conditions’. These charges are based on a patent misconception where readers conflate the rejection of the rift between humans and the world as a move where humans, life and interpretation become merely incidental.Footnote ⁵ Here, we may add another rejoinder, recently voiced by Yiannis Hamilakis (Reference Hamilakis2013, 115), that ‘there is a danger that such emphasis on things will lead to an artificial separation between things and bodies, things and environments, and amongst things, the landscape, the atmosphere, and the weather’. Let us take up these points in turn.

Because some works under the rubric of symmetrical archaeology do not always mention reindeer, brown bears, minke whales, lynx or lemmings by name at every turn, it seems to be assumed that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for them. Indeed, for this to be the case, readers must either ignore numerous contributions where these things are engaged, or, more disconcertingly, embrace a rather circumscribed definition of what things are (see Pluciennik Reference Pluciennik2013; also Hamilakis Reference Hamilakis2013, 115). If we eliminate the opposed realms of culture and nature or subject and object, then why appeal to that familiar valorization of one side above the other? This would directly violate the principle of symmetry. Within a symmetrical approach, every being in the world can equally be seen as a differentiated thing; that is, farmers, centaurs, ruined temples, the goddess Athena, plowed furrows, earthworms and cisterns are equally individual and differentiated entities or units that cannot be broken into their parts (Witmore Reference Witmore2014, 4; cf. Harman Reference Harman2013, 6–7). Things do not gain their reality from elsewhere,Footnote ⁶ or by being situated dialectically. Things are irreducible to anything else.

To treat the difference between humans and things as fundamental and oppositional misses what is significant about the turn to things. For us, things have no opposites, thus they are non-oppositional (Bryant Reference Bryant2011, 75; Webmoor and Witmore Reference Webmoor and Witmore2008). Rapports between things are generative, but the relationship between farmer and furrow is not – a priori – more or less important than that between earthworms and soil, microbes and leather. Humans are thingly beings among others, but that, of course, does not imply that we deny the differences that distinguish us from other beings.

Barrett suggests (Reference Barrett2014, 66) that the logical conclusion is for symmetrical archaeology ‘to avail itself of the historical role of all material conditions’. Quite the contrary, it is about better caring for the past – not to be confused with history – by recognizing the roles of things, which are irreducible to anything else – agency, substances, etc. The past lingers on and gathers as material durations now coextensive in the present, constituting at all times an ‘effective archaeology’ (rather than an ‘effective history’, following Gadamer). This present past is far from solely an outcome of human management or intentions but sediments and transforms according to its own diverse material trajectories. If agencies, as Barrett defines them (ibid., 67), ‘are mechanisms that have a material effect’, then the expectation that a human-derived mechanism lies behind what has become of the past is one of archaeology's greatest fallacies. What has become of the past exists not as assumed categories of humanness, but as actual entities, as specific things and assemblages, and their rapports. They form dynamic and genuine ecologies that preserve and transform this gathering past; and in our engagement with it, the interactions between ruins and weather, bones and acidic soil, are not by necessity less important than those who supposedly abandoned these things. If everything comes to be defined by its encounter with humans, this closes off huge areas of interest to archaeology. Everything stands partially outside any zone of humanness – so to emphasize it above all else is to maintain an estrangement from our empirical grounds. A symmetrical approach thus conceives of archaeology as being about more than humans and more than the connection between people and other beings.

Claim three: ethics for things

Symmetrical archaeology, as with object-oriented approaches more generally, has also been attacked for lacking sincere ethical concerns and even, by allegedly dehumanizing people, for turning humans into things in an effort to legitimize dubious political doctrines. For example, in a discussion of Ian Hodder's entanglement theory (Reference Hodder2012), it was recently claimed that the blurring of the boundaries between people and things ‘opens the philosophical door . . . to the legitimization of slavery, the annihilation of whole groups of people, and the glorification of war’ (Pollock et al. Reference Pollock, Bernbeck, Jauß, Greger, Rüden and Schreiber2014, 156–57). Against such absurd measures it seems a minor accusation that this claimed blurring also threatens to turn us into ‘the fetishists that symmetrical archaeology wants us to be’ (ibid., 157). We have responded to the accusation about erasing differences above (never mind the fact that two world schemes of existence managed to underwrite all of these horrors). Here, we would just like to add that assessing the world by ethical principles that restrict us to human fraternity, however well-meaning, is disquieting. Thus, rather than grounding differences in an ethical and ontological exceptionalism, we propose a difference that is grounded in both the autonomy of, and the connectivity among, people, objects, environments and animals, all of which share membership in a dwelt-in world, but which two-world philosophies have obfuscated in favour of a fenced divide (Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012, 207).

Interestingly, symmetrical archaeology is at the same time accused of eschewing ethical grounds for non-humans, and naively depoliticizing the archaeological project. This confusion underlies the compulsion for an altruistic ethics for things – including the Parthenon, bronze arm rings from Jutland or undiagnostic potsherds – exemplified in a recent piece by Tim Flohr Sørensen. In his attempt at a deep reading of symmetrical archaeology, Sørensen claims to have come across a logical flaw in the writings of one of us. Referring to two statements by Witmore – one holding that symmetrical levelling is ‘neither axiological nor ethical’ (2007, 547), the other that ‘a symmetrical archaeology builds on the strengths of what we do as archaeologists’ (ibid., 549, Witmore's emphasis) – Sørensen claims to have revealed a problematic separation of practice from ethics, where ethics ‘curiously’ is ‘abandoned’; in other words, that our approach reflects a ‘naivety’ that ‘consider[s] practice and politics disconnected from the ethical field’ (Sørensen Reference Sørensen2013, 4).

First of all, we would like to state that naivety should not be underrated as a scholarly attitude (cf. Pétursdóttir Reference Pétursdóttir, Olsen and Pétursdóttir2014); being open-minded and curiously naive in our engagement with things and the world may indeed be more helpful than theoretical regimes where everything important is decided in advance. Unfortunately, Sørensen's claim is based on a conflation of two very different issues. One refers to the principle of symmetry, which is an empirical guideline that helps place prejudice to one side; the other is about what we – and indeed naively – can learn from our down-to-earth archaeological practices. Why should one jump from the proposition that the principle of symmetry is analytical to one where all of symmetrical archaeology is without ethical grounds?

While Sørensen subsequently admits that ‘a number of writings under the moniker of symmetrical archaeology’ have indeed explicitly been concerned with the ethics of archaeological things, he finds our position to be ‘unclear’, ‘not elaborated’, and he moves on by claiming that we disregard how all things, including non-humans, do not exist on a level ethical footing or have value without prejudice (Sørensen Reference Sørensen2013, 5–8). The latter, of course, is far from true (cf. Olsen Reference Olsen and Hodder2012b, 220–21; Olsen et al. Reference Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore2012, 206). Thus Sørensen's ‘discovery’ that things, including archaeological things and heritage, are treated differently is not exactly shocking news (‘While some non-humans find a place in the limelight, others are stowed away in storage facilities where the sun never shines’ (Sørensen Reference Sørensen2013, 7)). What is remarkable, however, is his proposition that those in the ‘limelight’ have been granted ‘thing rights’ (ibid., 5), or that ‘heritage management happily elevates (some) non-humans to the state of proper “beings”’ (ibid., 12). The ‘rights’ granted to these selected things are, of course, closely tied to human self-interest, and to their status as things-for-us (cf. Olsen Reference Olsen2012a; Pétursdóttir Reference Pétursdóttir2012; Reference Pétursdóttir, Olsen and Pétursdóttir2014). Without such human attachment and utility, even Stonehenge is claimed to basically be ‘a collection of rocks in the field’ (Smith Reference Smith2006, 3).

In all of this, Sørensen elides the difference between what is and what was by confusing relations between human bone and a bronze ring with the ethics of human perspectives on a bronze ring as a power-laden object. However, for a symmetrical archaeology, this difference is paramount. It is also amazing how freely Sørensen substitutes the principle of symmetry with symmetrical archaeology. These concepts are not interchangeable! Indeed, ethics are always tied to human relations with non-humans and not, as symmetry invites, relations also between non-humans. Moreover, things are not reducible to ethics, politics or anything else, for that matter, which seems to be what Sørensen is aiming for. Here, there is a disquieting confusion of ethics and ontology.

With Sørensen we encounter an ethics that results from a direct moral-evolutionary trend, where observers gain humility sufficient to recognize things as subaltern others – a seemingly enlightened trend that requires things to be admitted to the privileged house of humanity, rather than be redefined altogether, along with what it is to be human. This is a textbook example of normative thought – extending existing norms through the inclusion of excluded others. It assumes that the rights that humans have should be transferred to disenfranchised non-humans, anonymous artefacts, which, according to Sørensen (Reference Sørensen2013, 6), ‘are excavated simply to do the hard work of manufacturing raw data for the sake of the celebrity non-humans on the canonized heritage lists, contextualizing, illuminating and framing the celebrity non-humans’. Potsherds care nothing for fame. Potsherds do not complain when they are ignored in the shadows of more famous objects of archaeological interest, such as the Parthenon evoked by Sørensen. Moral qualities may be the province of archaeologists and farmers, but to impose them upon, or use them to characterize, relations between potsherds and other archaeological objects is to lose what is different about these specific things. This is precisely what is confused in Sørensen's reading of ethics and symmetrical archaeology and it misses a more fundamental point with respect to the roles played by things within our ethical considerations.

Suggestions as to a course of action, softer versions of the directives discussed by Alphonso Lingis (Reference Lingis1998; see also Morton Reference Morton2013, 140–44), occur with respect to the host of agencies found in any excavation manual mentioned earlier. A course of action is not solely dictated by codes, precepts or procedures, but nudged along by small things within the zone of archaeological labor.Footnote ⁷ A ‘zone’ places one in a space disposed to suggestions. The line of stones within a newly delimited excavation trench compels one in a very different way than the previous five seasons as an obstacle along a path. A patch of discolored soil provokes an excavator to hesitate, to question, to draw others in. Pits serve as inducements. Coins or sherds lure in students with feeling. Things within the zone of excavation suggest various courses of action and these suggestions can easily be surrendered to synthetic judgements. Care and uncertainty, naivety and humility, keep one in check better than assurance, confidence and certitude with respect to recognizing suggestions.

Archaeology without symmetry?

Symmetry is a principle, a component, a guideline, and symmetrical archaeology began with a problem-oriented set of emphases, which have been lost in critical misrepresentation. It was never a full-blown platform, but simply a tonic to be consumed in service of archaeology (Witmore Reference Witmore2007, 527). For the record, symmetrical archaeology embraced, from the beginning, the irreducibility of things – no thing can be exhausted by any other thing – and this was closely connected to the notion of manifestation, of translation, as a counter to reductive understandings of representation. It has always emphasized how all entities in the world are equally thingly, but this is not a denial of difference. Quite the opposite, in fact. Both relationality and non-relationality are to be held in symmetry. Thomas, Sørensen and others have targeted an emphasis on mixtures and entanglements – indeed, Sørensen situates this emphasis as an exclusive one. In this, they miss the crucial point that we have stressed both rapports and autonomies. Here, there is a difference between saying that things are made of diverse elements and saying that they are reducible to them. The dissolution of the arbitrary gap between humans and the world need not result in the cessation of autonomous things altogether.

The ‘symmetrical’ was always provisional. Once its liberating effects were expended as an adjectival qualifier, it was ready to be shed (Olsen Reference Olsen2007, 586; Reference Olsen and Hodder2012b, 210, 223; Witmore Reference Witmore2007, 527). When? Well, that is not up to us. It remains a challenge for archaeology when it fully recognizes that we begin not with a detached past, not with bits of pots that act as intermediaries to artisans, but with what becomes of what was, with things. As mediators, these things work to presence the past and hold memories not only of their human entanglement, not only of their contact with other non-human peers, but also of themselves and their own irreducible, individual being.