Roderick Campbell (Brown University)

It is striking how many recent archaeological titles begin with the words “The Archaeology of …” or more pluralistically, “Archaeologies of …”. While the use of “archaeology” in the titles of books by archaeologists might seem to be fairly self-evident and reasonable, there is something slightly defensive, slightly insecure about the need to constantly wave the disciplinary flag. Moreover, I would argue, the potential problems inherent in this boundary marking exercise, come most clearly to the fore when the “…” of “The Archaeology of …” is some large inter-disciplinary topic like “religion”, “war”, “sacrifice”, etc. In these cases, the maneuvers that claim a piece of these territories for archaeology often include the application of a strict definition of “…” followed by methodological recipes for digging up this now reified intangible. Now this is not to say that methodological work is unimportant or that archaeologists shouldn’t pragmatically search for ways in which given phenomena might be reflected in the “material record”. This danger lies rather in the tendency to simplify and objectify in the service of finding “facts in the ground”. Starting from the limited territory claimed for archaeology in brandishing materiality frequently forecloses the possibility of understanding the full complexity or significance of the matter at hand. A more productive approach might begin with a transdisciplinary attempt to grapple with the untamed complexity of topics such as “religion”, “memory” or “violence” saving the question of how one pursues them archaeologically till after a better sense is reached of their potential social, material, political and inter-subjective entanglements.

In the case of the “Archaeology of Violence”, currently the focus of conferences and journal issues, preemptive focus on methodology and especially materiality is deeply problematic. Despite the facts that bodies are material and at least some violent practices leave their traces on the bones of their victims and that the archaeological literature is already full of papers on war and human sacrifice, a materially-focused archaeology of violence can be no more than a deflection from the heart of a subject too important for diversions. Archaeological approaches to violence tend to focus on its most obvious, physical forms and in doing so miss the crucial fact that violence is a relationship and therefore fundamentally immaterial (or perhaps more accurately, inter-subjective).
Violence is always the site of contest (of bodies, things, discourse) and part of that contest inevitably concerns what does and doesn’t constitute violence. Violence, in evoking intense anxiety is also something that provokes polarizing responses: either (and sometimes both) valorization or condemnation. Both responses, however, are deeply involved in issues of visibility – to claim that, for instance, war is glorious and therefore not really violence, or that it is hideous but exceptional are both mechanisms for distancing, bracketing off or making invisible. Violence is an issue with a built in cloaking device, deflecting and bending light around it. Even attempts to define (or condemn) violence without respect to a situated position frequently go astray at the diversion physical violence offers those in a position to write less visible but no less damaging structural or symbolic violences into the game.
Today’s official discourse, situated in a particular global structure of power and historical genealogy, focuses on intent and physical violence. Alternative, more inclusive and radical understandings, however, have begun focusing on effects and the causes of suffering whether the results of hostility, indifference or even good-will. A corollary of a focus on effects is the necessity of a broadened notion of violence – one that intertwines symbolic and structural with physical violence. In structuring exposure to suffering and providing the logics of inequality in hierarchies of worth, structural and symbolic violence respectively give acts of physical violence their contexts. Divorced from its moral economy and structures of inequality, physical violence, such as killing or torture, becomes unintelligible or at best reduced to mechanistic biological urges or functionalist instrumentalism. Symbolic violence, in constructing some individuals as “life not worth living”, supplies both overt and covert practices of violence with their victims even as structures of inequality both shape and are shaped by discourses of worth and entitlement while providing a normalized form for the distribution of suffering (including physical violence).
As such, an archaeology of violence cannot be merely an archaeology of skeletal trauma, weapons, fortifications, sacrificial victims or mass graves. None of these things can be made sense of without reference to the relational entanglements of discursive as well as physical bodies, in practices and meanings that were embodied but are not reducible to their material traces. Physical violence with its seductive materiality is but the superficial eruption of vast subterranean networks of existential hierarchy and moral meaning. Through its moral economies and implicated inequalities of being, physical violence is not only made sense of through reference to, but also constitutive of, historical constitutions of “the human” and of “civilization”. The danger of defining and objectifying violence in order to find it in the ground then, is the danger of foreclosing investigation of its most important aspect: the paradoxical immateriality of violence.