I have been fascinated by the implications of the speculative turn for archaeology for some time now (Graham Harman’s blog provides a conduit to the world of speculative realism; Harman currently has several books in press on the topic). I have been pulling together several pieces–aspects of which were presented in previous Theoretical Archaeology Group Meetings (Columbia and Stanford) and at the recent CHAT in Oxford–for forthcoming publications. What appears here is an extremely condensed version of a chapter for Brent Fortenberry and Laura McAtackney’s CHAT proceedings volume.
Archaeologists and historians inscribe the past as that which exists in advance of the present. Here, to exist in advance of has been synonymous, at least under a pervasive modernist empiricism, with existing apart from. By rendering the past as separate from the present, archaeologists and historians have enjoyed the ability to endow those things regarded as of the past with a determinative specificity that renders subsequent actor-relations as purely derivative. In other words, irrespective of any later adventures that may befall the marbles sculpted under Phidias in the 5th century BCE—that is, short of their utter destruction—they persist as enduring objects. No matter where they go, the marbles will always be, and have always been, the Parthenon Marbles whose genesis occurred in the Athens of 2500 years ago. This, as it is well known, is the stance taken by the Greek Ministry of Culture, which seeks the restitution of the sculptures.
“There is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere,” Alfred North Whitehead famously stated, because “[e]verything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (1978, 244). With this “ontological principle”, the past, which the modern empiricism mentioned in the preceding paragraph rendered as detached and broken from the present, is, from the angle of this former past, redistributed. For despite the fact that we all had childhoods that we may recall in various ways, what exists of our childhoods (well, my childhood)—boxed-up Atari video games, Kenner action figures, books, journals, photographs, marks of height at birthdays inscribed on the closet doorway—are simultaneously present in the various recesses of our parents’ house. To be alive is to coexist with such ‘mnemonic traces’ of what was (refer to: Gonzalez-Ruibal 2006; Jones 2008; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2004 and 2008; Schlanger 2004; Witmore 2006 and 2007). Even the supposed continuity I perceive through the ordering of experience in grey-matter recall is located in an occasion; more precisely thinking constitutes an actual occasion (see, for example, Hutchins 1995; also Malafouris 2008). With the ontological principle all pasts are our contemporaries.

‘Traces’ and ‘pasts’, ontologically speaking, are grounded in actual entities and no such entity can ever exist separate from its relations. For an entity to be so would, for Whitehead, result in a ‘vacuous actually’. As Steven Shaviro puts it “[n]othing comes into being once and for all; and nothing just sustains itself in being, as if by inertia or its own inner force” (2009, 20). Whether the Parthenon Marbles or a box of odd and ends associated my childhood, the past has to be worked for (also Shanks 2007).

Stated differently, “an object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates itself afresh, over and over again” (Shaviro 2009, 20). This is not to say objects do not have a history or genesis—their composite nature is inherited from past occasions. Rather, to speak of the Parthenon Marbles is to speak of efforts by Melina Mercouri, the Greek Ministry of Culture, UNESCO, descriptions in Pausanias, protests by impassioned Greek Students in London, the new Acropolis Museum, numerous articles and books, and a former temple, turned church, turned mosque, turned munitions depot, turned target-for-artillery, turned ruin, turned World Heritage Monument in Athens (see Hamilakis 2008; Kaldellis 2009; Yalouri 2001; also see Hamilakis’ entry from April of 2008 http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/archaeolog/2008/04/the_other_acropolis_project.html). To mention the Elgin Marbles is to refer to the Duveen Gallery, information cards on displays, the tenacious trustees of the British Museum, notions of common heritage, a Parliamentary Select Committee in 1816, a contentious firman, the 7th Earl of Elgin, Thomas Bruce and his country house at Broomhall (see Hitchins 1997). Incidentally, the cardboard box containing relics of my childhood will last only so long; without sufficient work to ‘rescue the contents’ from the closet other entities will intervene—nieces and nephews in search of new treasures or relatives who will see excess hordes off either through eBay or the dumpster (also see Auslander et al, 2009).
The past is both precedent and product. The past as precedent has always already perished. In this, the past that perishes is actualized in ever-burgeoning legions of material entities (Edensor 2005; Olivier 2008; Olsen 2003), but the past that perishes looses its immediacy in the lived moment. No one can encounter the same occasion twice. “A perished occasion subsists only as a “datum”: a sort of raw material, which any subsequent occasion may take up in its own turn, in order to transform it in a new process of self-creation” (Shaviro 2009, 18). The past as product is that which archaeologists and historians co-produce (co, as many other entities play a role in this) and that with which they co-emerge (for other angles on this process see Lucas 2001; for the past as an outcome of archaeological practices see, for example, González-Ruibal 2006; Witmore 2004). Marble torsos, display pedestals, Francesco Morosini (the Venetian commander who fired his cannons upon the “beautiful temple” in 1687), long chains of negotiation, selection, transportation, controversy and acquisition; all contribute to the co-emergence of the Parthenon Sculptures—architectural sculptures become art works which become world heritage for some, objects of cultural patrimony for others. Working for these pasts is a perpetual and most necessary struggle.
Controversies revolve around things. An object-orientation suggests a particular angle of association with respect to the matter at hand (Harman 2002 and 2009). Here, the word ‘object’ is not to be construed in opposition to the word of ‘subject’. With an awareness of the shortcomings of the term (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), objects also participate in a given controversy, but the nature of that participation will vary depending on the associations it gathers. A particular object-orientation will always be one of many (Latour 2005). In this way, an object is not so much a substance as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44; Webmoor and Witmore 2008 have discussed this as mixture). Because objects, as actual entities or occasions, become something entirely novel with every new relation—even if what they transform into bears a striking resemblance to their former selves—their nature is highly variegated and uncertain. Put another way, “there is no difference which does not make a difference” (Bryant 2009).
Consider a section of stonewall in Nafplion, Greece. Running at an oblique angle along the rear of two former residences at 24 and 26 Zygomala Street is a large, polygonal wall of grey limestone.

It stretches 19.5 meters from a short segment of rubble wall, which forms the southeast corner of 26 to the edge of Zygomala street. At this junction, the wall abruptly turns a few meters shy of the street into an adjacent building. Resting directly upon bedrock, segments of this wall stand as high as 3 meters. Sections are still covered in wall plaster of various colors: red ochre, teal green, and white. This wall is not merely a static, impassive object across which historical events have washed—the most recent being its incorporation into the fabric of two former houses, the decay of these structures or the subsequent clearing of the debris. What is a relic wall for some is a matter of contention for others. A point of orientation for property boundaries, the rear support for a structural wall, a plastered interior edifice, the external defenses of an ancient citadel: the polygonal wall is all these things; which occasion we encounter is matter of orientation and gathering. We can no longer be indifferent to all these realities. Any thing held to be of the past by archaeologists or historians, under different fields of relation is something entirely novel, which may have nothing to do with a past orientation.
Thus far, it is fair to say archaeologists have missed this ontological multiplicity (although see Knappett and Malaforis 2009; Lucas 2009; Olsen 2003; Witmore 2009). Whether we are dealing with indigenous (Watkins 2000), interpretive (Hodder 1999), social (Meskell and Preucel 2004) or even processual archaeologies rooted in solid ‘fact’ (Binford 1972), diversity is squarely situated in the realm of competing stakeholder interests, multiple interpretations, beliefs and different social groups; all are to be respected, all are erected on the bedrock of a durable substance or a singular natural world (also see Latour 2003; from a yet another archaeological angle, see papers in Alberti and Bray 2009). In this, ‘data’, ‘heritage’, ‘evidence of a definitive past’ are prematurely conflated with reality and utilized as the final arbiter of disagreement. Phenomenological archaeologies have faired no better. With the latter, privilege is granted to human access to the world with relations between nonhumans consigned to the sciences (Brück 2005; Tilley 2004; for more of how phenomenology brackets the world as presented to human consciousness see Harman 2009, 78; and 2010). Understanding the lively, variegated nature of things poses a challenge to any bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the other. Arguing for multiplicities of meaning, interpretation, belief, has left intact a determinative substance, a definitive core, which assumes one reality at the expense of others. Marbles in London and Greece, a wall in Nafplion, a humble relic from our childhoods; all these things must be understood in the plural (Latour 2005, 116).
While things are clearly much more interesting than archaeologists have previously allowed, our freedom as archaeologists to follow things, formerly considered to be of the past, wherever they may go will run up against a snag contained within the very etymology of archaeology—the study of ‘ta archaia’, literally ‘old things’. So long as archaeology holds fast to the cares specified by its etymology—a duty to stuff out-of-date; a concern for those forgotten associations covered by ‘ta archaia’—there is nothing wrong with this commitment. Difficulties ensue, however, when, in spite of its etymological roots, ‘archaeologists’ expand beyond this remit to encompass all things implicated within other webs of concurrent relations. In other words, while marbles, monuments, walls may be ‘ta archaia’, they are also a lot of other things in addition. We can no longer assume that that materials we archaeologists engage are of the past, in advance.
If to be of the past is now an orientation among many, then perhaps it is time for we archaeologists concerned with concurrent relations with things to consider a new banner under which the range of motion required to do such concerns justice could be granted—might it be labeled pragmatology? Pragmatology is a reversal of what was taken for granted under a modernist empiricism. Pragmata are starting points, ontological grounds, for archaia, but in this the importance of archaia is not subverted. Archaeology continues to encompass that creative action for linking fragments to build temporally framed accounts. Pragmatology might provide a surrogate umbrella under which archaeologists who are concerned with stakeholder associations, questions of heritage, contemporary archaeology, archaeological ethnography, and reflexive method might operate.
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