Archaeologies of technology

Archaeologists make use of several different ontologies to research and develop theories about ancient technology. After briefly sketching out central features of mainstream (materialist) technovisions, this essay concentrates on recent ontological trends emphasizing the 'mutual becoming' of people and products. Symbolic and structuralist orientations enable archaeologists to 'see' something of the social values and cognitive structures shaping technological traditions in the deep past. As the question of gender has become an explicit topic of interest, archaeologists are able, at long last, to theorise about ancient technicians as thinking and feeling women and men. To appreciate ancient technology 'as if people mattered', I outline my own preferred ontology--grounded in phenomenology and agency theory. It argues that the ancient technician's body was a mindful, sensual, socially constituted and gendered being making sense of the world--and themself--by working through it. Cha�ne opératoire data on technical gestures and related strategic choices of artifact manufacture, use, and repair provide the necessary empirical and interpretive link between the making of personhood and the making and use of products within the (ancient) body politic. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1181/thumbnail.jp

Agency in Archaeology

Ed. Marcia-Anne Dobres, PhD. and John E. Robb. Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinize the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognize that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group. Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/facbooks/1182/thumbnail.jp