Archaeological contexts are not a material record
In 1988, John Barrett wrote: ‘Archaeologists act as if the object of their study is a modern material record of past events’ (5). Here again in 2022, he is arguing this point: ‘Current procedures tend to treat archaeological data as if they were a record of earlier processes of formation. As a consequence, the methodological and theoretical challenge of archaeology has been one of identifying the processes that had resulted in the form of the record, and archaeology has focussed upon the role of past human actions in the making of such a record’ (2). Archaeologists do not hold a position outside of archaeological contexts; instead, in part, we inhabit and have to negotiate shared conditions with those others whose lives we are interested in. Why is Barrett remaking the point on record? It is so important to him that it is in the opening lines of his article.
Archaeological contexts are a negotiation of material AND historical conditions
In 2013, I wrote that I was worried that archaeologists were forgetting the edited volume The archaeology of context in the Neolithic and Bronze Age. Recent trends (Barrett and Kinnes 1988). It was in this book that Barrett wrote about his confidence in context and his assertion that archaeology is an engagement with the material and historical conditions of past people’s lives. Barrett repeated that archaeology is a negotiation of material and historical conditions in his 1994 book Fragments from antiquity. Then, in 2021, and here again in 2022, he writes ‘…to better understand, the historical detail of the material residue itself and of the lives of those others who were entangled within that material…’ (2). Understanding the circumstances of the material and historical medium, which Barrett articulates so well, is how I have gone about my own work – with turf and stone and Neolithic long barrows (2006), flint scatters and Mesolithic landscapes (2008), and sherds of pottery and Chalcolithic walled enclosures (2016). I have explored the relational qualities and dimensions of the material, the spatial and the temporal. Actually, because of Barrett, I have always led with time. Archaeological contexts are material timespaces. Even at the smallest of scales, with a sherd of pottery, other times and spaces and relations are latent in the material. Things happen to pots before and after they break; they do not remain frozen as objects, or as objects contained within a deposit or feature, but rather they have extended histories and geographies. Focussing on the pre- and post-breakage histories of pots tells us something about what happened to the objects prior to deposition; it gets at other kinds of practice, other times, and it takes us into other spaces (McFadyen 2013).
Archaeology is not the discipline of things
Barrett is rearguing that archaeology is not a material record and that the historical details of material should take precedence, and between these two points, he directly questions attempts to define archaeology as the ‘discipline of things’ (2002, 2). In particular, he directs his attention to the work of Olsen (2003), Olsen et al. (2012) and Olsen and Witmore (2015). I would like to make a few points myself on these works. Let me start with the material words in the text and images of Bjørnar Olsen’s 2003 article. Interestingly, in this article Olsen includes a critique of Barrett (1994): ‘…there is still a tendency in many studies to overemphasize the human-subjective and mental dimensions of how people relate to landscape and monuments’ (2003, 91). Critiques of anthropocentrism are important – no one is arguing against this – but is Barrett’s approach to, and understanding of, archaeological context anthropocentric? Further, does Olsen’s approach, an understanding that objects create the human subject, correct this? Let us start with the second of these points. There are some great photographs in Olsen’s work, and these are used to frame some great questions. For example, there is one photograph titled ‘Harbour materiality. Port of Murmansk, Northwest Russia’ (Olsen 2003, 93, Figure 3), and Olsen asks, ‘How do we “sublate” the sewer pipes or a rusty harbour terminal in a northern Russian port?’ (ibid.). However, there is no mention of what to use and how to work archaeologically with this photograph. Let me have a go…
It has snowed. The top half of the photograph is taken up with the crumbling and decaying floors, walls and ceilings of the port’s buildings. Several of the windows in the buildings are broken, and there is no evidence of the repair or maintenance of any of these buildings in a long time. Even so, there are two working spotlights that have been fixed to one building, and these are on. These lights are directed onto the pipeline that extends from the building, and that pipeline is new. The upper part of the pipe, where it extends out from a wall, is shining in the light. The lower part of the pipe is made of a different material, but this is also recent and intact. Its structural integrity is maintained by the use of wooden props along its length, and there is a worker next to them. There is time in materials, and there are the practices that relate to the freshness or decay of those materials (even without a human being depicted in the photograph’s frame). It is evident materially that the maintenance of that pipe, and whatever it transports, is more important than the building and whatever it contains. The material timespaces of the archaeological context articulate how people are dependent on the pipe and its contents. Why are these not brought to the fore by Olsen? A negotiation of material and historical conditions does do this, as does an understanding of the lives of those others who are entangled within that material, but this is in line with Barrett. What is clear is that this archaeology is definitely not about things in themselves.
Humanness as performance in archaeology
To be fair to Olsen, it is important to point out that, although Barrett is remaking his points on contexts and materials and histories, he is shifting his position on embodiment. It is significant that an influencing force in this article is that of the feminist theorist Karan Barad (2003 and 2007). Before discussing performativity and entanglement, it is important to point out that her focus is on the concrete specificities of bodies but that that focus is not located, and it is not static; it is not about interiority or essential humanity – they are volatile bodies (after Grosz 1994). Just like Elizabeth Grosz, Barad does this through a refiguring of the body so that it moves from the periphery to the centre of analysis and, so, questions centrality. I am not sure that a questioning of the centrality of bodies, or concrete specificities of bodies rather than general ‘just-are’ bodies, has ever featured in Barrett’s work before.
What I like about this approach, and what Barrett is picking up on, is that it implies that there are particular ways in which the desires, differences and bodies of subjects work. This is a spatially oriented formulation, frameworks where time is not dominated by space; it is in time (after Grosz 2017). Additionally, key is a consideration of the orientation of beings and the direction of becomings – humanness as performance, where matter is always more than itself and contains possibilities for being otherwise. Barad, and Barrett, reminds us that these productions are particular. There is an orientation of beings, and a direction of becomings – there is not a flat ontology (contra Olsen and Witmore 2015). Non-human relations are important and assemblages are all very well, but we need the particular – the orientation of beings and the direction of becomings need to be marked on: humanness as performance. Barrett is doing this now!
This has been a brief response, and it has focussed on Barrett and Olsen’s critique of each other’s work, but there are two things that I want to say to John Barrett myself. One is that he should be more positive and hopeful about the field of archaeology and the kinds of archaeological knowledge it produces. The other is to ask him to move on from worrying about the effects of Renfrew and Bahn (2004) and, instead, in relation to his work on the politics of context, read Rachel Crellin’s book Change and archaeology (2020).
