Trowel Theologies: Archaeology and the Secular Project

Sunday, May 2nd 9:00 am-12:30 pm

Session Organizer: Ian Straughn (Brown University)

Session Abstract:

The discipline of modern archaeology has become widely recognized as a particular product of modernity and its epistemic modes of knowledge production. In the historiography of the discipline this has largely been centered on the field’s acceptance of Cartesian mind/body dualism, a subject/object dialectic, and a distinctly humanist historicism. While critiques of this relationship have often sought to soften these fundamental commitments to the project of modernity, the post- and counter-modernities that have been offered have largely recognized that archaeology as we know it cannot exist outside of its historical production, even as it attempts to weave a complicated web between the physical and social sciences as well as the humanities. This panel takes up an oversight, or perhaps a strategic avoidance, of archaeology’s loyalty to another underlying principle of modernity: secularism and the secular. A nest of questions can be developed around this theme which challenge not only the narrative of the discipline’s emergence within the academy but also current efforts to democratize both how we conceive of the past and employ methods for engaging it through the archaeological record of material remains. If archaeology seeks to embrace forms of alterity (and we should debate whether that is a goal), it will need to come to terms with its secular commitments. The questions this panel seeks to raise include:

• What are the roots of a secular orientation within archaeology and how has that continued to shape the professional character of archaeological practice? Who can and can’t be an archaeologist? What aspects of the past might he or she study?
• Did the secular exist prior to the Enlightenment and can we know it archaeologically? How has this allowed archaeology to play a role in the history of religions project?
• Can calls for a multi-vocal archaeology accept the voices of the non-secular interpreter? Can scripture and its exegesis serve as an equally valid ontological starting point or does this fundamentally undermine scholarly authority?
• Are the implicit metaphysics of archaeology and its theorization of matter/materiality, the body, and the past contradictory to the maintenance of a secular ethos? Has the place of the divine been fully removed from our ontology of things, humans, space and time?

This session will be organized as a round-table style discussion in which we encourage dialogue and participation on the part of both presenters and attendees. To this end most presentations will be along the lines of 7-10 minute commentaries intended to spark debate and reaction in the TAG spirit. The mission is not necessarily to provide answers or a manifesto but to begin to formulate what questions can and should be asked of both archaeology’s(ies’) and archaeologists’ intellectual and methodological commitments.

9:00: Ian Straughn (Brown University): Introductions
9:10: Zoe Crossland (Columbia University): Archaeology's Secular Humanism: The Challenges of Forensic Exhumation and Human Rights Work
9:30: Ian Russell (Brown University): Primetime: A Discussion of Clocks, Rocks and the Truth
9:50: Ian Straughn (Brown University): Archaeological Absence and the Absence of Archaeology in the Islamization of Knowledge Project
10:10: Rod Campbell (Brown University): Archaeology/Tolerance/Ontology
10:30: Coffee break
11:00: Maureen Marshall (University of Chicago): Armenian Archaeology and the Archaeology of Armenia: Religion, Identities, and the Practice of Archaeology
11:20: Severin Fowles (Barnard College/Columbia University): Pueblo Doings and the Critique of Pre-Modern Religion
11:40: Roundtable Discussion