Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis; and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations, but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC – third century AD): the fluid, the categorical, and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories, and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives, and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9244-

Are digital picturings representations?

The philosopher of art Roger Scruton has claimed that photographic images are not representations, on the basis of the role of causal rather than intentional processes in arriving at the content of a photographic image (Scruton, 1981). His claim was controversial at the time, and still is, but had the merit of being a springboard for asking important questions about what kinds of representation result from the technologies used in depicting and visualising. In the context of computational picturing of different kinds, in imaging and other forms of visualisation, the question arises again, but this time in an even more interesting form, since these techniques are often hybrids of different principles and techniques. A digital image results from a complex interrelationship of physical, mathematical and technological principles, embedded within human and social situations. This paper consists of three sections, each presenting a view of the question whether digital imaging and digital visual artefacts generally are representations, from a different perspective. These perspectives are not representative, but aim only to accomplish what Scruton’s paper did succeed in accomplishing, that is, being a provocation and a springboard for a broader discussion

Exorcising the ‘plague of fantasies’: mass media and archaeology’s role in the present; or, why we need an archaeology of ‘now’

Taking as its starting point Slavoj Žižek’s (1997) The Plague of Fantasies, this paper considers how the electronic mediascape and its contagious practices have come to dominate all areas of contemporary reportage and history-making. It suggests that Web 2.0’s reliance on ‘mob thinking’ and ‘wiki-histories’ can lead to a rapid and widespread erasure of alternative accounts and nondominant narratives. Against this background, the paper explores the urgency of developing an ‘archaeology of now’ which could provide a stimulus for the exploration of marginal and subaltern viewpoints and alternative contemporary histories. Such an archaeology might involve not only a focus on contemporary material evidence, but also the analysis of virtual material culture and the excavation of virtual media to reveal the power structures and micro-histories of the World Wide Web’s dominant narratives. The paper is intentionally provocative, and aims to stimulate a broader engagement with an archaeology of the present

Against Global Archaeological Ethics: Critical Views from South America

Archaeology as a discipline has been formed largely as a nation-state biopolitical device generating narratives and actions of control, management, classification, and ordering of persons and objects, pasts and presents, their stories, relationships and spaces from a Anglo-Saxon modern mode of knowledge production. In that sense, hegemonic archeology bears its colonial imprint and exhibits the principles that characterize modern Western science of universality, objectivity and rationalism. Thus, archeology has developed and expanded in close partnership with capitalism generating a true industry and mercantilization of the past. Simultaneously, it has been tried to globalize the vision of Western archeology and install a monoculture of knowledge to disqualify others worldview reducing and contracting the present and eliminating those conceptions that do not fit with the scientific canons and principles.Fil: Curtoni, Rafael Pedro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Investigaciones Arqueológicas y Paleontológicas del Cuaternario Pampeano; Argentin

Making feminist heritage work:Gender and heritage

In this chapter I examine the ways in which a feminist approach to heritage and heritage studies can be used to illuminate particular gendered processes: processes that include attentiveness to the gendered curation, protection, preservation and commemoration of the past. In doing so, I examine selected studies and perspectives that may be helpful in framing heritage research around questions of sexuality and gender, as well as suggesting what additional forms of analysis, methodologies, theoretical approaches and conceptualizations feminist theory can bring to heritage studies. In bringing together gender with heritage, I argue that these are generally structured around four broad areas of enquiry. First, there is the question of gender in relation to heritage in terms of what one might broadly term ‘representation’, understood in terms of heritage collections, sites and performances. Second, there is work framed around gender and heritage from the perspective of consumption – defined as encounters with heritage by educators, visitors and tourists. Third, there are questions of gender focusing on production, usually in terms of a concern with the gendering of workplace structures, curatorial practices and heritage management conducted by those outside particular heritage institutions as well as on the inside. Finally, there are issues of gender in relation to local and national heritage policies, as well as international protocol and convention. In the chapter’s concluding section, I suggest briefly what areas within heritage studies require further work from a gendered perspective and what areas are undergoing transformations that require us to rethink gendered approaches and paradigms. The chapter begins with a brief critical history that seeks to reclaim some of the earlier and more obscured history of gendered approaches to heritage