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The new antiquarianism?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2016

John C. Barrett
John C. Barrett*
Affiliation:
Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET, UK (Email: j.barrett@sheffield.ac.uk)
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Extract

Christopher Witmore (2014: 215)recently observed that “things go on perturbing one another when humanscease to be part of the picture. A former house may be transformed throughrelations with bacteria, hedgehogs, water, compaction”; and if the materialsthat archaeologists confront are material memories (cf. Olivier 2011) from which a past is to berecalled in the future, then

The kind of memory that things hold often tells us little of whether materials strewn across an abandonment level resulted from the reuse of a structure as a sheepfold, a series of exceptional snow storms, the collapse of a roof made of olive wood after many years of exposure to the weather (rapports between microbes, fungi, water and wood), the cumulative labors of generations of badgers, children playing a game in a ruin, or the probing roots of oak trees (Witmore 2014: 215).

In other words, the things that archaeologists confront bearthe memories of their own formation without the necessity of a humanpresence, and the traditional and often exclusive priority given to a humanagency in the making of those things and in giving them meaning is simplymisplaced. Things get on “just fine” without the benefit of humanintervention and interpretation (Witmore 2014: 217). Should archaeology therefore allow that it is not adiscipline concerned with excavating the indications of the various pasthuman labours that once acted upon things, and should it eschew the demandto “look beyond the pot, the awl or a stone enclosure for explanationsconcerning the reasons for their existence” (Witmore 2014: 204)? Consequently, is archaeology now a matterof following the things themselves to wherever they might lead—what Witmorecharacterises as the New Materialisms—and if so, are we now to practisearchaeology “not as the study of the human past through its materialremains, but as the discipline of things” (Witmore 2014: 203)?

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Type
Debate
Information
Antiquity , Volume 90 , Issue 354 , December 2016 , pp. 1681 - 1686
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd, 2016 

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