"Every object is a marvellous archaeological record of everything that ever happened to it." (Morton 2013, 112)
"Archaeology is the discipline of things." (Olsen et al. 2012)
The oldest thing on earth is a stone ax - and this thing was in use for 1,5 million years.
The beginnings of modern archaeology can be dated earlier back to the 1820s when Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen came up with his three-age system. His work paved way for THE archaeological method, namely typology. Before this the fascination with old things mainly took forms of purely aesthetic collecting, as old things were showcased in curiosity cabinets.
A particular type of artefact was seen as a manifestation of a particular culture. A thing was always seen as a cultural trait reflecting a geological area or temporal identity. Any similarities between artefacts from different areas but of similar age were taken as evidence of some sort of cultural connection between past people, or cultures. … Things became cultural markers.
…
The focus shifted from Europe to American archaeology that, unlike European archaeology, was dealing with a very different kind of source material. Whereas the roots of European written history reach far back to the Roman times, the history of America is short in comparison. Although there is a rich material culture from the historical times starting from the fifteenth century, the corpus of American archaeology consists of the study of living prehistoric cultures. Therefore American archaeology, partly as the study of the roots of living cultures, has been characterised as anthropological archaeology. There is a famous quote from the fifties stating that “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing” (Wiley and Phillips 1958)
…
Ethnography became the method of reaching the living culture behind the dead artifactual material culture. In addition to ethnography, archaeologists also started to experiment with the very same materials they found in ancient contexts in an attempt to test, using the same materials that would have been available in the past, which production methods could have been used when the artefact was made in the past. Today we refer to this branch of archaeology as experimental archaeology.
…
Bill Rathje came up with the idea of taking a look at modern garbage from an archaeological point of view by digging landfills and conducting surveys of people’s consumption and recycling habits. The result was a totally new understanding of consumption and the relationship between what people tell they consume and leave behind and what they actually consume and leave behind.
…
One important development that happened in the eighties and nineties was the idea
that material culture could be interpreted in the same way as text. Material culture meanings were therefore thought of as inherently lingual in nature. This reflects the broader development in social sciences after the so-called linguistic turn during the 20th century.
…
In addition to the concept of reading the past, another strongly linguistically inspired aspect of interpretation is to connect the material and the meaning through metaphor which is originally thought of as a lingual trope that connects two ideas through an often weird type of similitude, such as sunshine and happiness. Christopher Tilley (1999) proposes the use of a type of material metaphor he calls ‘solid metaphor.’ The solid metaphor is based on similarities between materials.
…
The idea that things have an equally social role in the actor-network as living actants sparked the idea that things could be studied from a social standpoint. This artefact biography approach is based on the idea that just like people have different type of agency throughout their lives, so do things. In fact this is applicable to things in the sense that different kinds of things, just like art in Gell’s case, are expected to have a certain type of effect on their surroundings. But the idea that things could be studied as biographical has been especially popular in archaeology as a tool to connect the things’ meanings in the past with those in the present. Therefore archaeologists such as Cornelius Holtorf have relied on object biography as a viable method in the study of the meaning of an archaeological object when it is found and, as he writes elsewhere, made old. It should be noted that Holtorf’s article is not how archaeologists traditionally write about things.
…
During the recent 15 years or so, many archaeologists have come to question such views and are now asking when were things forgotten in the first place. This recent development has been dubbed the turn to things. Things are thought of not as cultures, processes or interpretations, but as things. Things are referred to things themselves.
The beginnings of modern archaeology can be dated earlier back to the 1820s when Danish archaeologist C. J. Thomsen came up with his three-age system. His work paved way for THE archaeological method, namely typology. Before this the fascination with old things mainly took forms of purely aesthetic collecting, as old things were showcased in curiosity cabinets.
A particular type of artefact was seen as a manifestation of a particular culture. A thing was always seen as a cultural trait reflecting a geological area or temporal identity. Any similarities between artefacts from different areas but of similar age were taken as evidence of some sort of cultural connection between past people, or cultures. … Things became cultural markers.
…
The focus shifted from Europe to American archaeology that, unlike European archaeology, was dealing with a very different kind of source material. Whereas the roots of European written history reach far back to the Roman times, the history of America is short in comparison. Although there is a rich material culture from the historical times starting from the fifteenth century, the corpus of American archaeology consists of the study of living prehistoric cultures. Therefore American archaeology, partly as the study of the roots of living cultures, has been characterised as anthropological archaeology. There is a famous quote from the fifties stating that “American archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing” (Wiley and Phillips 1958)
…
Ethnography became the method of reaching the living culture behind the dead artifactual material culture. In addition to ethnography, archaeologists also started to experiment with the very same materials they found in ancient contexts in an attempt to test, using the same materials that would have been available in the past, which production methods could have been used when the artefact was made in the past. Today we refer to this branch of archaeology as experimental archaeology.
…
Bill Rathje came up with the idea of taking a look at modern garbage from an archaeological point of view by digging landfills and conducting surveys of people’s consumption and recycling habits. The result was a totally new understanding of consumption and the relationship between what people tell they consume and leave behind and what they actually consume and leave behind.
…
One important development that happened in the eighties and nineties was the idea
that material culture could be interpreted in the same way as text. Material culture meanings were therefore thought of as inherently lingual in nature. This reflects the broader development in social sciences after the so-called linguistic turn during the 20th century.
…
In addition to the concept of reading the past, another strongly linguistically inspired aspect of interpretation is to connect the material and the meaning through metaphor which is originally thought of as a lingual trope that connects two ideas through an often weird type of similitude, such as sunshine and happiness. Christopher Tilley (1999) proposes the use of a type of material metaphor he calls ‘solid metaphor.’ The solid metaphor is based on similarities between materials.
…
The idea that things have an equally social role in the actor-network as living actants sparked the idea that things could be studied from a social standpoint. This artefact biography approach is based on the idea that just like people have different type of agency throughout their lives, so do things. In fact this is applicable to things in the sense that different kinds of things, just like art in Gell’s case, are expected to have a certain type of effect on their surroundings. But the idea that things could be studied as biographical has been especially popular in archaeology as a tool to connect the things’ meanings in the past with those in the present. Therefore archaeologists such as Cornelius Holtorf have relied on object biography as a viable method in the study of the meaning of an archaeological object when it is found and, as he writes elsewhere, made old. It should be noted that Holtorf’s article is not how archaeologists traditionally write about things.
…
During the recent 15 years or so, many archaeologists have come to question such views and are now asking when were things forgotten in the first place. This recent development has been dubbed the turn to things. Things are thought of not as cultures, processes or interpretations, but as things. Things are referred to things themselves.
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