Some thoughts and feedback on the Symmetrical Archaeology Session at TAG
This was a great session. The room was packed, with all seats taken and people sitting on the stairs – testifying to the topicality and importance of the topics discussed. The papers were stimulating and thought provoking, and it was only a pity that the time for questions and comments from the audience was so short (though the existence of this website, encouraging feedback, makes up for that). I agree with the general arguments for a more symmetrical archaeology, and accordingly haven’t commented on them here. However, three specific issues raised by various speakers seemed to me to be of particular interest, and I comment on these in some detail below.

1. ON THE MATERIAL CULTURE OF ARCHAEOLOGY. Don Ihde argued in his talk, as indeed he has in his books, that science and scientific disciplines are embodied in their material apparatus. It is through the use of the artifacts/instruments/gear of science that science as a social or cultural phenomenon is reproduced. But the radical implications of this fundamental point did not seem to impact on any of the other papers. Hence the question which I asked in the discussion towards the end of the session. My question was:
Has symmetrical archaeology taken on the implications of what Don was saying with regard to the material equipment of the discipline of archaeology itself? To what extent is archaeology as a social and cultural phenomenon itself embodied in – and reproduced through the use of – its own material culture?
(by material culture I mean not just the trowels and theodolites and computers and other instruments of knowledge production, but also the artefacts which – though originating from other cultures in the distant past – are appropriated into our material culture by virtue of being identified/shaped as culturally significant to us in the practices of ‘discovery’).
I have two points to make here:
The first is that if the discipline of archaeology really is embodied in its material artefacts then many interesting questions could perhaps be asked and possibly answered (for example about the entanglements of subject/object and nature/culture in archaeological practice) by carrying out an ethnoarchaeological study of the artefacts of archaeological knowledge production. It is through the use of such artifacts, after all, that our perception of and contact with material evidence is mediated.
Should we aim therefore for a kind of strict reflexive symmetry in our approach to the study of the past? Should the very perspectives we apply onto the material fragments of the archaeological past in principal be applicable to the material culture of archaeologists in the present? That is certainly an argument of the forthcoming book on ethnographies of archaeological practice which I was telling you about in my previous message.
The second point is that the artifacts and features which archaeologists discover in the ground could perhaps be regarded as part of the material culture of archaeologists as well as the material culture of past societies. Such entities are symmetrical in the sense that they are literally ‘double-artifacts’ – partly the product of archaeological practice in the present AND partly the product of cultural others in the distant past. This is not a constructivist position. It does not negate the active role of the object in the constitution of knowledge. It is just a recognition that at any moment in the archaeological process the object has already been partly constituted by ourselves (as well as ourselves partly constituted by it). This point is of course entirely in keeping with the main thrust of symmetrical archaeology, which as I understand it sees the subject and the object as being entangled together from the start.
2. ON MATERIAL RESISTANCE. The discussion of zoo architecture by Dan Hicks focused on a lime-pit/bear enclosure which seemed to be particularly obdurate in the way it endured through time. Dan described it as ‘awkward’ and conyeyed a sense of the sheer material resistance it offered. It was almost as if the building had its own (stubborn) personality – a material force to be reckoned with by succeeding generations of zoo planners.
I really like this idea of material evidence having the capacity to be stubborn, awkward, resistant, recaltritant or just plain bloody-minded. The notion of material resistance could be a very valuable one to a symmetrical archaeology because it does not pretend to be a solely objective property of material. Material resistance arises out of the interaction of humans and materials. It is both active and passive. To say that something has resistance implies the question: resistance to what? And the answer is that material can be resistant in this sense to human action, and indeed to all the subjective or inter-subjective projects, plans, interpretations, anticipations or intentions that humans might seek to put into action. Neither subject nor object, resistance arises out of the entanglement of both.
This applies as much to archaeological interpretation as any other kind of human practice. In practice, material evidence can ‘resist’ the very archaeological theories that seek to shape it. If it were not for that material resistance contradicting and surprising our applied meanings and ideas, we really would be stuck in the ‘interpretivist’ world that symmetrical archaeology is so critical of.
So we are back in the entanglement of subject and object. It is easy to get labelled a constructivist or interpretivist by saying that archaeologists shape and sculpt material evidence, which of course they do. But the key point is that it is in the very process of ‘shaping the object’ that the resistance of the object is encountered, and it is in that encounter and against that resistance that our practical skills of shaping are honed. Without the shaping there would be no resistance – and vice-versa!
3. ON AN ONTOLOGY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECT. Bjornar Olsen’s paper rightly criticised those interpretive approaches which give precedence to applied meanings over materiality – especially ‘the readerly veil of humanly embodied meanings that envelopes it’. But in going back to the things themselves, as the phenomenologists exort us to, we risk going too far the other way and ending up in a similarly assymetric situation. The crucial point that Bjornar made, it seemed to me, was that in order to arrive at a truly embodied archaeology we would have to have an ontology of the subject and object.
Where better to try and arrive at an understanding of such an ontology than in our own material practices?
In this regard I would like to point out the existence of the following fieldwork report:
Edgeworth, M, 1991. The Act of Discovery: An Ethnography of the Subject-Object Relation in Archaeological Practice. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Durham.
(more recently published as Edgeworth, M, 2003. Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice. BAR International Series 1131. Archaeopress, Oxford). This is now available in a social software version.
Very important not to equate this report with the small paper I did for ARC in 1990, which is sometimes cited in post-processualist articles. The ARC paper was written while my fieldwork was still in progress and gave an inherently incomplete account of archaeological practice, favouring the role of the interpreting subject over the active role of the object. But the full fieldwork report, very rarely cited or discussed in the literature, gives a much more considered and balanced account of dialectical interactions between the subject and the object. It describes specific practical examples of the active role of the object and of material resistance as manifested in excavation processes.