Change and Archaeology could have been an impenetrable theoretical text, but it is not. Rachel Crellin has written a book that is gratifyingly easy to read, the heart of which is a call to write alternative archaeological grand narratives of change—“ontostories”—in a way that is both postanthropocentric (decentering the human) and posthumanist (decentering white everyman). There are strong elements of theoretical and political corrective in the book, given that it aims to provide a more accurate account of how the world really works and emphasizes the situatedness and therefore ethical responsibility of all academic work. Archaeologists must tell better stories and in ways that allow past alterity to emerge.
Change and Archaeology is divided into three parts. Part I introduces seven hurdles to understanding change, some well known (“block-time” approaches), others less so (billiard-ball causation or anthropocentrism). Part II provides a clear overview and critique of archaeological approaches to change. Three themes—time, scale, and biography—are given one chapter each. The case studies are well chosen and explained, providing solid teaching material (Arthur Joyce's study of Monte Albán, or Craig Cipolla's work at Brothertown, New York, for example). Crellin's style of critique is balanced and evenhanded, even as authors fall foul of the seven sins.
Part III contains Crellin's own theory of change. The method—mapping flows of materials, both human and nonhuman—is active intervention, the creation of connections in contrast to the passive tracing of evidence. Foundational assumptions that ground her approach are adopted from the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze and his interpreters—Manuel DeLanda and Jane Bennett—which include a world built on relations rather than essences, motion as the norm (staticity is an achievement), and change as constant. Following Bennett, assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse, vibrant materials. Deleuze and DeLanda provide the more specific conceptual vocabulary increasingly familiar to archaeologists. Territorialization and deterritorialization describe how assemblages incorporate new components or lose coherence, while assemblages also have both expressive (meaningful) and material elements.
Crellin is well aware of the potential problem that some of the imagery—“flow,” “flat ontology”—encourages us to think in very generalized ways. Flow, for example, suggests the unidirectional movement of lots of the same kind of stuff, making it difficult to imagine concrete instances of change and local causality. Her answer is to emphasize that change occurs at different scales and tempos. DeLanda's “phase transition” is particularly useful in emphasizing that marked changes that we recognize archaeologically—such as the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in Europe—are the results of the accumulation of multiple, multiscalar, polytemporal causes.
Chapter 8, “Becoming Metal,” is an in-depth case study of the introduction of copper and bronze into Britain and Ireland, and it is a major strength of the book. In contrast to the conventional view of metal's introduction as the result of migrating populations, Crellin challenges the ceramic and aDNA/isotope-driven narratives of wholesale population replacement by focusing on the qualities and potentials of metal itself. The result is a fascinating, fine-grained story of local adaptation and change in which stone, metal, and humans feature equally. Metal needed to fit existing ways of doing things. Local communities in Britain and Ireland had long traditions of stone quarrying and working, and a “bridging object” in the form of the polished stone axe. Copper and bronze, therefore, were not initially “metals” in the way we experience them. Rather, they were a “stoney kind of a metal” (p. 223), only later giving way to a new type of substance as skill and experience disrupted received practices and meanings. Things are messy and complex, Crellin insists: “becoming metallic” was a slow, varied, and locally diverse process. I think this excellent case study is the answer to Crellin's worry that a relational approach might be taken as more descriptive than interpretive. Description per se is not a problem (Marylin Strathern—never short of an analysis—claimed that all she was after was an adequate description). The problems arise when the description is made to fit a theory rather than the theory being in service to a description. Assemblage theory enables Crellin to provide a far better description, partly because the theoretical concepts are treated lightly.
Change and Archaeology is a book that fits the theoretical moment perfectly. There are questions that could be debated. Is there a “really real” time that misaligns with our measurements of it? Why adopt Deleuze or DeLanda rather than the equally relational Vine Deloria? (Crellin's answer is a refusal to use other peoples’ ontologically committed worlds as resources for hers.) Should flat ontology be a starting point, or is it that our methods are ontologically flat? How much “alterity” does any all-encompassing theory allow for? These questions, however, do nothing to detract from the strengths of the book. It is a clear and accessible application of the most archaeologically workable aspects of assemblage theory to the crucial question of change in archaeology.
