Where’s the Theory in Archaeological Science? Materiality and Material Sciences in Concert

Saturday, May 1st:
9:00 am-12:30 pm

Session Organizers: Nicholas Wolff (Boston University) and Alex Knodell (Brown University)

Session Abstract:

This session aims to explore the middle ground recognized in recent years between radical functionalist and strictly symbolic approaches to material culture in archaeology. In mediating between these poles, the concept of materiality has emerged as a powerful means of understanding the recursive engagement that exists between the physical properties of the environment and the social practices that take place within it.

Methodologically speaking, archaeometry and related methods of scientific analysis are ideally situated to explore this complex relationship between culture and matter. All too often, however, the results of analytical techniques – as well as the techniques themselves – remain under-theorized due to core intellectual differences dividing practitioners of archaeological science and archaeological theory. In an effort to build on prior work bridging this gap and generate constructive dialogue, this session welcomes remarks on the relationship between materiality and the material sciences; case studies expanding the traditional purview of the material scientist into the domain of social theory (or vice versa); and reflexive comments on the methods we use in the study of material culture today.

9:00: Nicholas Wolff (Boston University) and Alex Knodell (Brown University): Introductory remarks
9:10: Jill Hilditch (University of Toronto): Bridging the Science-theory Gap, One Sherd at a Time…
9:30: Nicolas Wolff (Boston University): How Do Residential Spaces Work as Material Culture? A Micromorphological View of Material Practices and the Built Environment in Bronze Age Southern Italy
9:50: Lin Foxhall, Katharina Rebay Salisbury, Ann Brysbaert, José Fiadeiro, Anthony Harding, Colin Haselgrove, Emilio Tuosto, Peter van Dommelen, Ian Whitbread, et al.: Tracing Networks: Craft Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond
10:10: Chantel E. White (Boston University): Seeds of Materiality: Merging Theory and Archaeobotany in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic
10:30: Coffee break
11:00: Kimberly Kasper (University of Massachusetts, Amherst): The Material Complexity of Human-Environmental Interactions
11:20: Carolyn Swan (Brown University): “Art” or “Artifact?” Archaeological Science Weighs-in on Disciplinary Divides
11:40: Discussion

Abstracts and Participants:

Bridging the Science-theory Gap, One Sherd at a Time…

Jill Hilditch (University of Toronto)

An exciting theme to emerge from recent material culture/materiality debates is that human-artifact engagement is active, reflexive and dynamic: in other words, we should move beyond a ‘people make pots vs. pots make people’ dichotomy. Yet, the implications of such an approach have made little impact upon the traditional domain of archaeometry. However, for archaeologists the rapidly evolving field of ceramic analysis provides fertile ground for integrating material and theoretical perspectives. Frameworks for considering processes of technological transmission, such as communities of practice, can be anchored to ceramic characterization data in order to reconstruct the dynamic interactions between potter, raw materials and environment. In this paper I will demonstrate how these interactions at different scales of analysis, from the micro-scale of pot production to the meso-scale of a community of practice and even the regional macro-scale, can be used to bridge the science-theory gap.

How Do Residential Spaces Work as Material Culture? A Micromorphological View of Material Practices and the Built Environment in Bronze Age Southern Italy

Nicolas Wolff (Boston University)

This paper comprises one component of a larger research project that aims to reinvigorate static approaches to residential space and reorient methods employed in traditional household archaeology by advocating a greater appreciation for the materiality of the domestic built environment. A key element of the proposed shift is the consideration of a site’s stratigraphy – the very archaeological sediments of which it is composed – as material culture. The application of micromorphology in this regard provides a critical means of understanding the affordances of individual deposits, the depositional mechanisms or practices which come to be materialized, and the passage of time as these events are superimposed or cross-cut one another in the course of localized history-making. In this way I attempt to demonstrate an alternative means of approaching the complex set of relationships and narratives that constitute social and material aspects of home life – and the mutual interplay between the two. This argument is explored through the consideration of samples drawn from new excavations of Bronze Age residential sites in southern Calabria and Sicily.

Tracing Networks: Craft Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond

Lin Foxhall, Katharina Rebay Salisbury, Ann Brysbaert, José Fiadeiro, Anthony Harding, Colin Haselgrove, Emilio Tuosto, Peter van Dommelen, Ian Whitbread, et al.

Tracing Networks consists of seven linked projects in archaeology and computer science funded by the Leverhulme Trust. We are investigating contacts across and beyond the Mediterranean region, between the late bronze age and the late classical period (c.1500-c.200 BCE). Our main focus is on networks of crafts-people and craft traditions, asking how and why traditions, techniques and technologies change and cross cultural boundaries, and exploring the impact of this phenomenon. The programme sets technological and knowledge networks in their larger social, economic and political contexts. The dynamics of these human networks in antiquity revealed by archaeological research have important implications for computer scientists for how knowledge and information might be better communicated in our digital age.

Material culture is the primary evidence for cultural contact and knowledge exchange. Materiality is the means by which social and technological relationships are both manifest and constituted. Specific ways of ‘making things’ are key components in personal, familial and communal identities and relationships. Interrogating artefacts is therefore our key source of information about them. Therefore, a major element of our research programme is the creative deployment of scientific analytical techniques to address complex theoretical questions about the human contexts of their production, uses, exchange and movement. With archaeological and materials scientists we use well established techniques and develop new ones, exploring physical properties of materials for clues to materiality. Working in constant dialogue between theory and science stimulates new research questions, addressing large-scale issues on the transmission of knowledge.

Seeds of Materiality: Merging Theory and Archaeobotany in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic

Chantel E. White (Boston University)

This paper asserts that incorporating the concept of materiality into archaeobotanical research may provide a critical means of bridging the gap between traditional economic perspectives and the social theoretical approaches currently employed in studying the PPN. The concept provides a key to considering how the physical and material properties of early crops shaped the ways in which they were used and made meaningful to early Neolithic agricultural communities. As a case study, the earliest domesticated cereals, two-row barley (Hordeum distichum) and emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), are examined to explore how their material properties may have interrelated with the social and cultural lives of the people who tended, harvested, processed, and ultimately consumed these staple foods.

First, the defining physical characteristics of these plants are reflected upon: nutritional content, glumes, the cultivated/domesticated morphology, and the process of carbonization. These topics are then extended toward the social contexts of cereal-growing and processing activities using archaeobotanical evidence from the PPNA and Late PPNB site of el-Hemmeh in Jordan. In considering cereal cultivation as part of a larger sociotechnical system integral to the Neolithic worldview, aspects of material agency may also prove particularly fruitful to this discussion. Ethnographic evidence demonstrates that small-scale farming communities often view crops as possessing conscious and interactive characteristics, which influence the ways in which plants are grown and handled. The interplay between social, ritual, and practical subsistence concerns is thus critical to moving beyond archaeobotanical designations of domestication and exploring how Neolithic agricultural practices might have been organized and performed.

The Material Complexity of Human-Environmental Interactions

Kimberly Kasper (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

This investigation melds archaeobotanical method and social theory to define the decision-making processes associated with plant use of the Mashantucket Pequot located in southeastern New England. To situate Native Americans as historical actors after European Contact, this study integrates archaeobotanical evidence (seeds and wood charcoal) and ethnohistorical data to explore the mechanisms and strategies that cohered into a detectable set of human environmental interactions. Both the cultural and ecological conditions to obtain, manage and manipulate plant-based resources will be identified, locating the interactive relationship between individual choice, cultural predilection and environmental features. The Mashantucket Pequot Reservation, which has been inhabited by Native peoples for over 9,000 years, is an ideal landscape to examine these components because of the rich archaeobotanical, paleoecological, and documentary record associated with continuous Native American presence. During this 9000 year time period and more specifically during the Historic period, Mashantucket Pequot plant practices were experienced in everyday activities, reflections of previous and future histories of action and left behind significant cultural imprints on the landscape. This type of middle ground approach, which focuses on the materiality of archaeobotanical remains and the components of agency, highlights the complexity of Native American traditional plant use to understand the changes and continuities of “nature” and “culture” at the local, regional, and global scale. Documenting the creation and transmission of traditional cultural knowledge and gaining a diachronic perspective of human-environmental interactions is relevant to tie the study of archaeobotanical remains to a larger cultural realm of meaning and significance.

“Art” or “Artifact?” Archaeological Science Weighs-in on Disciplinary Divides

Carolyn Swan (Brown University)

David Hurst Thomas’s observation “it’s not what you find, it’s what you find out” is a familiar phrase to archaeologists, but is also one that sets off disagreement and debate about the nature, purpose, and use of ancient objects in the modern world. While archaeologists argue for the informational or data value of artifacts, museums and antiquities collectors argue for their aesthetic and artistic value—indeed, the perpetual conflict surrounding the collection of and dealing in antiquities (whether looted or not) is based on these differences of opinion and conflicting outlooks. While archaeological science has typically underlined the informational value of an artifact (i.e. as in the case of invasive sampling, when part of an object is sometimes sacrificed for the sake of obtaining more information), it has also encouraged the art-object orientation and aesthetic ethos of museums and collectors who often turn to scientists to ascertain the authenticity of an object as well as for repair and conservation measures. A future role of archaeological science, however, may be to help mediate conflicting ontologies. A paradigm shift is taking place as museums enter a “second museum age” of the 21st century and the changing function of museums is apparent, for example, from contemporary exhibits that blur the lines between what we think of art as opposed to artifact. This paper explores how archaeological science can serve to reconcile the divided emphasis on art or information, and illustrates how scientific analysis can change both our understanding and appreciation of ancient objects.