. . .continued from Part 1 of 2. Temporality The ethnographic examination of archaeological practice has become an established sub-domain (Edgeworth 2006, 2010; Yarrow 2003), although this reflexive platform has not developed in explicit contact with STS ethnographies of science (Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay 1983; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Lynch 1985). The characterization of scientific activity…
actor-network theory
Manifesto for archaeology of flow
an extract from a new book on the archaeology of rivers and other flows of materials. It argues that rivers are as susceptible to archaeological and historical analysis as more solid parts of landscapes are.
Object orientations? A commentary on Graham Harman’s intervention in STS and archaeology
Graham Harman diagrams the ‘fourfold’ object for STSers and archaeologists at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford Graham Harman recently visited Oxford for a week as part of a Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar. The organisers, archaeologist Chris Gosden and geographer Sarah Whatmore, both of the University of Oxford, put together an innovative format…
ANT, Ants, and Archaeology: A Meditation on Uncertainty
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,…
The realities of the past: archaeology, object-orientations, pragmatology
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…
Symmetrical archaeology: Two clarifications
Things are in the limelight. Fresh in the wake of TAG US where the plenary session was focused on the Future of Things, two announcements came through the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) listserv this past week for thing-oriented conferences/sessions. CHAT 2009 and What’s the ‘Matter’ in Anthropology, both set in Oxford, are…