Maria O’Connell, Texas Tech University maria.oconnell@ttu.edu
In the video clip, a team examines an underground structure somewhere in Brazil. The team is preparing for excavation. Bert Hölldobler and his crew are about to examine the abandoned ruins of a colony of Atta laevigata; leaf cutter ants (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009, 460). As Bruno Latour writes, “An ant writing for other ants, this fits my project very well!” (Latour 2005, 9). The fact that the colony under investigation was inhabited by ants, and that they have accomplished such a complex, ‘urban’ structure with roads, air exchange systems, chimneys, refuse heaps and even a form of agriculture (fungus gardens), makes it an ideal site for a thought experiment concerning Actor-Network-Theory, uncertainty, possibility, and the archaeological imagination.

Actor Network Theory, as laid out by Latour in Reassembling the Social (2005), posits five uncertainties that should be taken into account when tracing a network of actors:

a) First Source of Uncertainty: There is no group, only group formation. There are many ways to give actors identity. One way, the ANT way, is to allow the actors to identify themselves by their group formation and their own reports. For Latour, “social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition—like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger—but a performative definition” (Latour 2005, 34). One can only follow the traces that are left by the performance of the actors themselves. There are, in this investigation, no written traces, nor are the investigators able to decipher the ‘language’, even of the living relatives. For the Atta investigators, the only possible traces are the ruins themselves and their surface traces which manifest as gateways to the underground, surface pathways and clearings, and even pollutions, as well as the observed social behaviors of related social groups. Much can be observed in these traces, but they become uncertain in their multiple possibilities.

Figure 1 Partial excavation of harvester ant nest. Taken from “Small things considered: The microbe blog http://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2010/01/lea.html
b) Second Source of Uncertainty: Action is overtaken. In any course of action a great variety of agents enter in. For ants, as for humans, “action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (Latour 2005, 43). The agencies involved in any social aggregation are numerous. For the ants, the agencies found in the ruins include, among many others, fungus chambers, refuse heaps, foraging tunnels, and wind flow (which regulated carbon dioxide and humidity), all of which are mediators for the behavior of the ants. In living colonies, for example, low humidity makes the ants move their fungus gardens to more humid soil (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009).
c) Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects have agency too. The types of actors in any social aggregation should be increased. Observing ants in an archaeological sense certainly reminds one that other living beings have agency, but Latour goes further than that. Hölldobler and Wilson (2009) note that the wind flow over a colony can affect the social life of the ants because it mediates the rate of carbon dioxide exchange. Its mediation means that the wind is an actor in the social aggregation of the colony. When carbon dioxide rates go up, the colony respiration goes down, but it is not the ants which slow down; it is their fungus gardens. Gardens are their primary source of food, and lack of food is a serious crisis. More tunnels must be built for air exchange (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009). Fungus mediates. Fungus has agency. Fungus is an actor! So are tunnels, chambers, ceilings, pathways, clearings, rubbish heaps and other pollutions, etc.

Figure 2 Walter Schinkel and Harvester Ant Nest (taken from Centripetal Notion http://centripetalnotion.com/2006/06/01/00:02:14/)
d) Fourth Source of Uncertainty: Matters of fact vs. matters of concern. Let us indulge the notion that the modern ant society has a nature/culture divide. For said modern ants, the fungus gardens are simply the “wilderness,” a state of nature demanding control. The best Atta scientists are at work discovering and recording data about the fungal world and its interactions. For the rest of society, fungus is merely a matter of fact, something “out there” beyond society and safely ignored. It becomes a matter of concern when the fungus acts by slowing down its growth rate and breathing. Ant newspapers contain stories then about the rising cost of fungus, scarcity, price-gouging, and the fungus crisis out there in the gardens. Something must be done! Matters of concern break down the artificial modern divide, and help one to realize that in any social aggregation, “things could be different, or at least that they could still fail—a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be” (Latour 2005, 89). Archaeology reminds us, in our modern human society, how often beautiful social aggregates have failed.
e) Fifth Source of Uncertainty: Writing down risky accounts. A risky account realizes all of the above uncertainties. The ant excavation video has an accompanying voice over with one account of the ant society. They are “aliens” who lived in a mysterious “megalopolis”, a “city-state” built from their collective “will” and “hive-mind”, with an amazingly complex structure, gardens, chimneys, and air conditioning. Hölldobler and Wilson mention many of the same things in their accounts, but they make different assumptions. For instance, the ant, for them, does not have a hive-mind, or a collective will as such. Rather, like us, their society is made of little individuals doing their jobs. After all, they do have separate bodies and brains. Either one can be a good account, if they take into account the uncertainties as controversies that open the way for others to follow the traces and see what they find. The purpose of a risky account is, in Latour’s words to “extend the exploration of the social connections a little bit further” (Latour 2005, 128). All texts, including those inscribed in stone or soil, have their uncertainties.
It is not easy being an ANT. It is slow, it is detailed, and above all, it is uncertain. Christopher Witmore has written that” to consider the past in this way is to raise the question of ‘mediation’” (Witmore 2009, 515). After all, archaeologists ask questions, and such questions can take into account what is observed in the traces and begin to allow for the “bewildering diversity of things which have a share” (Witmore 2009, 514) in the objects and structures being studied. For example, for the ant archaeologists, the question arising from their observation that the ants have separate brains and bodies is “how does a superorganism [their name for a complex living organization, like society] arise from the combine operation of tiny and short-lived minds?” (Hölldobler and Wilson 2009, 6). One might well ask the same question about any past (or present) human society. The answer, when following the traces for the ants, is it arises in a complex, mediated relationship between the morphology and species of ant, the objects with which they live, including such things as the soil where they dig and the wind currents, objects that they construct, like tunnels, fungus gardens, chimneys, and garbage pits, their own languages for communication, and even what they happen to eat. And the results are beautiful, complex, and multiplicitous as well, varying not only from species to species but among colonies of the same species. If such is true of ants, then perhaps ANT and its uncertainties can help archaeologists imagine what Witmore calls open pasts (Witmore 2009, 514), where the possibilities in an archaeological site are as complex and uncertain as the collectives of objects, humans, and animals which constructed them.
References
Hölldobler, B. and E.O. Wilson 2009. The superorganism: The beauty, elegance, and strangeness of insect societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Witmore, C.L. 2009. ‘Prolegomena to open pasts: On archaeological memory practices,’ Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 5(3), 511-545.