Towards virtual typology

To use category names should be a commitment to tracing the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold (Tsing 2015, p. 29) Anna Beck’s paper is a welcome addition to the growing literature on assemblage theory in archaeology. It represents a detailed attempt to think through the implications of this approach for one of the most important areas of archaeological thought: typology. Building on the work of Chris Fowler (2017) and Gavin Lucas (2012) in particular, archaeologists are beginning to show the potential for linking cutting-edge theory with this most intransigent of archaeological concepts. Beck correctly skewers the way in which standard typological thinking rests upon the notion of an ‘ideal type’, the perfect Trelleborg house in her case, and how this representational, Platonic, mode of thinking, traps archaeologists in a limited and closed interpretive loop. As she rightly argues, a move to assemblage theory can help us make room for more complex and powerful descriptions that celebrate the heterogeneity and vibrancy of the past. This can be a world of shifting and mobile becomings, not static, closed off, and essentialised being. Typologies, as both Beck and Fowler (2017, p. 96) argue, are assemblages too

Becoming post-human: identity and the ontological turn

Within archaeology a range of new approaches, which we might broadly term relational, or post-human, are developing a radical critique of many areas of our disciplinary thought and practice. For example, they have challenged archaeologists to reconceptualise categories of person and thing and the relations, or mixtures, through which both are produced. So far, however, such approaches have had little to say directly on the concept of identity, despite the latter’s importance to archaeology over the last 30 years. Nevertheless, it is clear that these approaches’ avowedly ontological level of critique have the potential to make a dramatic impact on how we think about identity in archaeology, because of the challenge they make to approaches that prioritise humans over things. In this paper I explore the potential consequences of post-humanism for archaeologies of identity, and set out how our approaches in this vital and vibrant area must be reworked in the light of this emerging challenge

Affective architecture in Ardnamurchan : assemblages at three scales

This article considers three temporal scales of architecture in Ardnamurchan, Western Scotland: a house built and destroyed in the 19th century; a Neolithic tomb constructed around 5500 years earlier; and the landscape itself. In each case I draw upon the interrelated concepts of affect and assemblage to examine the way in which they emerged and endured through the interactions of multiple human and non-human actors. These theoretical concepts, drawn from the work of Gilles Deleuze, allow for new understandings of these particular places to emerge

Assemblages and scale in archaeology

The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualise the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the ‘great processes’ of change like the evolution of humanity, the colonisation of the globe or the origins of agriculture, and focussing on the momentary, fleeting nature of a small-scale ethnographic present. Where archaeologists have attempted to integrate different scales the result has usually been to turn to Annales influenced or time perspectivism-driven approaches and their fixed, linear, and ontologically incompatible layers of history. In contrast, I will use assemblages to examine how we can rethink both the emergence of multiple scales, and their role in history, without reducing the differences of the small-scale to an epiphenomenal outcome of larger events, or treating large-scale historical processes as mere reifications of the ‘real’ on-the-ground stuff of daily life. As we will see, this approach also has consequences for the particular kind of reality we accord to large-scale archaeological categories

Becoming gendered in European prehistory: was Neolithic gender fundamentally different?

It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naivety. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 BC onwards; the latter still form the norm in European and American contexts today, and our standard theories and methodologies are designed to uncover this specific form of gender. In Bronze Age gender systems, gender was mostly binary, associated with stable, lifelong identities expressed in recurrent complexes of gendered symbolism. In contrast, Neolithic gender appears to have been less firmly associated with personal identity and more contextually relevant; it slips easily through our methodological nets. In proposing this “contextual gender” model for Neolithic gender, , we both open up new understandings of gender in the past and present, and pose significant questions for our models of gender more widely

Future World: Anticipatory archaeology, materially-affective capacities and the late human legacy

Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially-affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these points in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern