Emily Miller Bonney (editor) - Incomplete Archaeologies: Assembling Knowledge in the Past and Present

Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by
OXBOW BOOKS
10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EW

and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083

Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2016

Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-115-3
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-116-0
Kindle Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-117-7
PDF Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-118-4

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bonney, Emily Miller. | Franklin, Kathryn J. | Johnson, James A. (James Alan)

Title: Incomplete archaeologies : assembling knowledge in the past and present / edited by Emily Miller Bonney, Kathryn J. Franklin and James A. Johnson.

Description: Oxford : Oxbow Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015041336 (print) | LCCN 2015046730 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785701153 (paperback) | ISBN 9781785701160 (digital) | ISBN 9781785701160 (epub) | ISBN 9781785701177 (mobi) | ISBN 9781785701184 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology--Philosophy. | Archaeology--Methodology. | Antiquities--Collection and preservation. | Archaeological assemblages. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Eurasia--Antiquities. | Mediterranean Region--Antiquities. | Archaeology--Case studies. | Social archaeology--Case studies.

Classification: LCC CC72 .I53 2016 (print) | LCC CC72 (ebook) | DDC 930.1--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041336

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Front cover: Fragment of a Queens Face, Egypt, New Kingdom. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Edward S. Harkness Gift, 1926, www.metmuseum.org

Contents

Kathryn J. Franklin, James A. Johnson and Emily Miller Bonney

Hannah Cobb

Emily Miller Bonney

Hannah Chazin

James A. Johnson

Adrienne C. Frie

Claudia Chang and Rebecca Beardmore

Kevin Garstki

Joseph Gonzalez

Kathryn J. Franklin

Contributors

REBECCA BEARDMORE

Ph. D. candidate

Institute of Archaeology

University College London

UK

DR CLAUDIA CHANG

Professor of Anthropology

Department of Anthropology and

Archaeology,

Sweet Briar College

Sweet Briar

VA

USA

HANNAH CHAZIN

PhD candidate,

Department of Anthropology,

University of Chicago

IL

USA

DR HANNAH COBB

Lecturer in Archaeology

School of Arts, Languages and Culture,

University of Manchester

UK

DR KATHRYN JANE FRANKLIN

Lecturer in Social Sciences

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

IL

USA

ADRIENNE FRIE

Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology,

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

WI

USA

KEVIN GARSTKI

Ph.D. candidate in Archaeology,

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

WI

USA

DR JOSEPH M. GONZALEZ

Associate Professor of Liberal Studies,

California State University Fullerton

CA

USA

DR JAMES A. JOHNSON

Lecturer,

Department of Anthropology,

University of Chicago

IL

USA

DR EMILY MILLER BONNEY

Associate Professor Liberal Studies,

California State University Fullerton

CA

USA

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank a number of generous individuals and benevolent influences, without which this volume would not have been possible. Warm thanks to the organizers of the 2013 EAA meetings in Pilsen, Czech Republic, where the original session Some Assembly Required: Assembling people, objects, discourses and landscapes in archaeology, which sparked this book, was held. We are overwhelmingly grateful to the original participants in that session for their papers, comments, conversation, and intellectual generosity: Rebecca Beardmore, Claudia Chang, Hannah Chazin, Hannah Cobb, Chris Fowler, Adrienne Frie, Kevin Gartski, Lara Ghisleni, Joseph Gonzalez, Juhani Gradistanac, Anna Guengrich, Mariya Ivanova, Liliana Janik, John Janusek, Florica Matau, Dimitrij Mlekuz, Sophie Moore, Matthew Murray, Ladislav Smejda, Scott Smith, Andrea Vianello, and Nancy Wicker. We would also like to give express thanks to the scholars Chris Fowler and Carl Knappett, who provided peer review for the volume, for their heroic efforts. Finally, thanks to Julie Gardiner at Oxbow Books for seeing the potential in our idea and pushing us hard to finish.

Introduction: towards incomplete archaeologies?

Kathryn J. Franklin, James A. Johnson and Emily Miller Bonney

This volume is concerned with assembling. We take as our object the assembly of things, persons, ideas, times and spaces, as well as the effective surfaces created through such processes assemblages and the agencies invoked and sustained by assembling, dismantling and re-assembling.

In this collection of chapters we seek to move beyond the perceived complete and final affordances of the assemblage to a more thorough and critical interrogation of the always-incomplete processes of assembling. The assemblage has long been a mainstay in archaeology and has recently undergone serious re-examination and categorical revision (Latour 1999; 2005; Harris 2012, drawing upon DeLanda 2006; Fowler 2013). We wish to push the edge of discourse forward by recuperating to assemblages aggregate complexity, temporality and contingence; our primary strategy is a dismantling of allegedly complete and finished groups of archaeological objects and a shift of our focus to the intrinsic incompleteness of the processes involved in constructing social agents and their material worlds.

Critically, and perhaps paradoxically, we focus on the ongoing, contingent nature of assembling that highlights categorical incompleteness: that is, a condition of being-in-process, unfinished and open to further addition and transformation. While we build upon newly implemented and somewhat (re)invigorated approaches to the archaeological assemblage, we also draw focus to the ways in which archaeological inquiry remains rooted in notions of completeness and finalism. Such inquiries and their subject matter potentially distract, if not mislead, scholars from developing more comprehensive understandings of the continually ongoing and necessarily contingent processes of assembling that are both bound to and masked by the notion of assemblage. We suggest that instead of treating assemblages as fixed points from which the meaning of the past is revealed that we expand the scope of our investigations to explore how the complexity of meaning making involves multiple actions, temporalities and contingencies that are never finished, never quite whole. We acknowledge the scholars, and their analyses, that have critically redefined the ontology of assemblages, arguing that they are in-process or historically contingent in their entangledness, bundledness, or enmeshedness (Keane 2005; Harris 2012; Hodder 2012; Fowler 2013). However, once we assert that assemblages are incomplete the practices of material production, maintenance and reproduction take center-stage and our priority must be their