Christopher Witmore
Biographic Data
| ID | 130902 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Witmore |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Witmore |
| SIGNATURE | WITMORE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Texas Tech University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 937 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
On Striving as Readers: A Response to Greer
The capacity of northern European gentlemen scholars educated in the love of wisdom, human dignity, friendship and rationality to treat their fellow human beings with irreconcilable prejudice and hold to ghastly beliefs of racial superiority, which legitimated violence, exploitation and extermination elsewhere, is one of the great tragedies of humanism. That the images of the human cultivated in texts were at variance with the lived experience of…
Argos: Across the Thin Surface of Time
Under embargo until 15 September 2024. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by De Gruyter in Archiv für Religionsgeschichte on September 15, 2023, available at https://doi.org/10.1515/arege-2023-0012. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provide…
Excavating War and Idleness: The Case of Sværholt
For the last decade, the World War II prisoner-of-war camp and battery at Sværholt in northernmost Norway have been objects of archaeological investigation. This article presents the results from excavations and associated studies, including new descriptions of extant structures and found artefacts, comparative osteological analyses of middens, and their implications. Our purpose in presenting these results is to: 1) explore what an extraordinary…
Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology
A radical shift in orientation alongside the objects of archaeology has occasioned a reconsideration of what theory is in a very general sense. What function does it serve and how might we define it? In retrospect, these questions arise not in the context of paradigms and strong theories, which some consider to have run their course, but in their absence. Here, there is a danger that theory might be jettisoned altogether if its nature and purpose…
Theory Above? Theory Alongside
Matter
Matter is unruly. The word is both a convenient catch‐all for the ultimate stuff of existence and a specific ingredient lodged in the substratum of the real. Matter is regarded both as an inert basal layer embedded in a hierarchy of bodies and a quivering multitude obscured by a taxonomic distinction between the animate and inanimate. Materialism holds no monopoly over matter, as it also comes in idealist strains. From Marxism and material cultur…
Finding symmetry? Archaeology, Objects, and Posthumanism
Well before the turn of the century, it had become clear that archaeology's aspiration to study the past was, true to the modern project, a pretext for a deeper desire to fabricate its objects. Material culture, materiality, the material past, material residues, heritage—the objects of interpretive (post-processual) archaeology could only be characterized as a continuation of this modern project. While finding symmetry was tied to an upheaval fro…
Will the real materialisms please step forward
Chronopolitics and Archaeology
Symmetrical Archaeology
Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese
Symmetrical Archaeology
Hypanthropos: On Apprehending and Approaching That Which is in Excess of Monstrosity, with Special Consideration given to the Photography of Edward Burtynsky
Offering a more precise epithet for that which has emerged under the provisional label of the “Anthropocene”, this article trains its lens on some of the more-than-monstrous things that have revealed themselves in our calamitous times. It raises questions about how archaeologists are to apprehend and approach objects that differ in scale, speed, makeup, and efficacy from anything our field has ever dealt with. But rather than honing its analytica…
Chronopolitics and Archaeology
For the objects, archaeology and the archaeological
Archaeology turns round its objects as much as it turns them out. This is partially an artefact of its reflection, which is not always linear; it is sometimes cyclic. The cyclic is not a perfect circle. Our objects open themselves in new ways to archaeological engagement, but this new relevance surfaces through creative inspiration triangulated off previous orientations. In revolving around our objects, inevitably we return to a familiar place, e…
Coisas são nós! Um comentário sobre as relações humano/coisas sob a bandeira da Arqueologia Social
Qual papel desempenha o adjetivo “social” em Arqueologia Social? Qual o caráter das relações humano/coisas sob a rubrica da arqueologia social? Levantamos essas questões em relação ao recente “A Companion to Social Archaeology” de Meskell e Preucel. Enquanto o corretivo “social” tem sido extremamente produtivo, com o levantamento destas questões entramos em águas muito turvas. Nossa tarefaneste artigo é mostrar onde os sentidos do “social” falira…
Which archaeology?
Archaeology and the New Materialisms
This article revisits the object of archaeology in light of the New Materialisms. Orienting recent work around three propositions with respect to the reality and definition of things—that is, things are assemblages, things are participants, and things are things—it lays out the core features of the New Materialisms and goes on to address some compelling methodological issues. Ultimately, this article raises a challenge; that New Materialist persp…
Confronting Things
Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics
This article responds to recent critiques of ‘symmetrical archaeology’. It addresses three common claims: (1) that symmetrical archaeology fails to see a difference between living and non-living entities, (2) that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for humans and other living things, (3) that symmetrical archaeology lacks any sincere ethical concern for things. This article demonstrates how these claims are based on common misunderstandings or…
Chronopolitics and Archaeology
Archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the Hypanthropocene
Archaeology of the Anthropocene
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human …
Which archaeology? A question of chronopolitics
Archaeology is, as every student has learned, ‘the study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived’ (Bahn 2000: 2). In this chapter I draw a contrast between this denition and another: archaeology is an engagement with ‘old’ things (ta archaia) and their connections with an aim to understand the past and its relevance to life. My aim in so doing is to tease out some dierences between these two denitions in terms of ho…
Archaeology in the Making: Conversations through a Discipline
1. Introduction Part I: The Archaeological Imagination 2. Binford 3. Schiffer 4. Watson 5. Renfrew 6. Wylie 7. Hodder Part II: The Workings of a Discipline 8. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis 9. Kristiansen 10. Cowgill 11. Schnapp 12. Alcock and Cherry Part III: Political Ecologies (Realpolitik) 13. Leone 14. Buchli and McGuire 15. Conkey 16. Tringham 17. Meskell 18. Rathje and Shanks 19. Archaeology: An ecology of practices
Archaeology: The Discipline of Things
Archaeology has always been marked by its particular care, obligation, and loyalty to things. While archaeologists may not share similar perspectives or practices, they find common ground in their concern for objects monumental and mundane. This book considers the myriad ways that archaeologists engage with things in order to craft stories, both big and small, concerning our relations with materials and the nature of the past. Literally the "scie…
Worlds Otherwise: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference
The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University ("'Worlds Otherwise': Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference," convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss…
Symmetrical archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto
This article sketches the project of a symmetrical archaeology in brief. At a point when archaeology has arguably never been more relevant, it finds itself in a climate of necessary plurality where incommensurability is routinely shrugged off as a symptom of diversity; it finds itself in a state where seemingly incompatible differences proliferate on either side of the divide between the humanities and the sciences; it finds itself perplexed by d…
Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology
What work does the adjective ‘social’ in social archaeology do? What is the character of human/things relations under the rubric of social archaeology? We raise these questions in relation to the recent Companion to Social Archaeology by Meskell and Preucel. While the corrective of the ‘social’ has been extremely productive, in broaching these questions we enter very murky waters. Our task in this article is to show where meanings of the ‘social’…
Archaeology and the New Materialisms
This article revisits the object of archaeology in light of the New Materialisms. Orienting recent work around three propositions with respect to the reality and definition of things—that is, things are assemblages, things are participants, and things are things—it lays out the core features of the New Materialisms and goes on to address some compelling methodological issues. Ultimately, this article raises a challenge; that New Materialist persp…
Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics
This article responds to recent critiques of ‘symmetrical archaeology’. It addresses three common claims: (1) that symmetrical archaeology fails to see a difference between living and non-living entities, (2) that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for humans and other living things, (3) that symmetrical archaeology lacks any sincere ethical concern for things. This article demonstrates how these claims are based on common misunderstandings or…
Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World
Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been over looked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart…
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
Four Archaeological Engagements With Place Mediating Bodily Experience Through Peripatetic Video
Through the exploration of a hybrid space between artist and archaeological production, this article discusses the implications of peripatetic video, a form of located media, as a means of moving beyond the limits of conventional representation. While critical of archaeological dealings with issues of bodily experience and place, the article suggests an alternative is to be found in the work of media artist Janet Cardiff. Building on Cardiff's ar…
On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: Two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece
Deeply embedded in much of archaeological thought is an epistemological scheme of the ‘field’ as separate from the ‘home-base’, whether laboratory, archive or study. This modernist division is inadequate, for it fails to account for the interconnected and nonlinear process of archaeological knowledge construction. Taking direction from science studies and specifically from the work of Bruno Latour, this article sketches a model of multiple fields…
Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices
Hypanthropos: On Apprehending and Approaching That Which is in Excess of Monstrosity, with Special Consideration given to the Photography of Edward Burtynsky
Offering a more precise epithet for that which has emerged under the provisional label of the “Anthropocene”, this article trains its lens on some of the more-than-monstrous things that have revealed themselves in our calamitous times. It raises questions about how archaeologists are to apprehend and approach objects that differ in scale, speed, makeup, and efficacy from anything our field has ever dealt with. But rather than honing its analytica…
Archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the Hypanthropocene
Archaeology in the Making: Conversations through a Discipline
1. Introduction Part I: The Archaeological Imagination 2. Binford 3. Schiffer 4. Watson 5. Renfrew 6. Wylie 7. Hodder Part II: The Workings of a Discipline 8. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis 9. Kristiansen 10. Cowgill 11. Schnapp 12. Alcock and Cherry Part III: Political Ecologies (Realpolitik) 13. Leone 14. Buchli and McGuire 15. Conkey 16. Tringham 17. Meskell 18. Rathje and Shanks 19. Archaeology: An ecology of practices
Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology
A radical shift in orientation alongside the objects of archaeology has occasioned a reconsideration of what theory is in a very general sense. What function does it serve and how might we define it? In retrospect, these questions arise not in the context of paradigms and strong theories, which some consider to have run their course, but in their absence. Here, there is a danger that theory might be jettisoned altogether if its nature and purpose…
Finding symmetry? Archaeology, Objects, and Posthumanism
Well before the turn of the century, it had become clear that archaeology's aspiration to study the past was, true to the modern project, a pretext for a deeper desire to fabricate its objects. Material culture, materiality, the material past, material residues, heritage—the objects of interpretive (post-processual) archaeology could only be characterized as a continuation of this modern project. While finding symmetry was tied to an upheaval fro…
Archaeology of the Anthropocene
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human …
For the objects, archaeology and the archaeological
Archaeology turns round its objects as much as it turns them out. This is partially an artefact of its reflection, which is not always linear; it is sometimes cyclic. The cyclic is not a perfect circle. Our objects open themselves in new ways to archaeological engagement, but this new relevance surfaces through creative inspiration triangulated off previous orientations. In revolving around our objects, inevitably we return to a familiar place, e…
Excavating War and Idleness: The Case of Sværholt
For the last decade, the World War II prisoner-of-war camp and battery at Sværholt in northernmost Norway have been objects of archaeological investigation. This article presents the results from excavations and associated studies, including new descriptions of extant structures and found artefacts, comparative osteological analyses of middens, and their implications. Our purpose in presenting these results is to: 1) explore what an extraordinary…
Will the real materialisms please step forward
Confronting Things
Archaeology 2.0? Review of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration [Web Book]
The Cotsen Institute in Los Angeles has launched a new publishing initiative in 'Digital Archaeology'. Its first book, Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, edited by Eric C. Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Ethan Watrall, makes a grand claim, if only in its title, that archaeology has undergone, or is about to undergo, changes that bring about a completely new version or kind of archaeology. The analogy is with the W…
Special Reviews Section: Archaeology on the ground: the memory practices of David Webb: Diggers Alternative Archive, website and photography by David Webb: www.archdiggers. co.uk/diggers/frameset.html
The Adventure of Ideas
On multiple fields. Between the material world and media: Two cases from the Peloponnesus, Greece
Deeply embedded in much of archaeological thought is an epistemological scheme of the ‘field’ as separate from the ‘home-base’, whether laboratory, archive or study. This modernist division is inadequate, for it fails to account for the interconnected and nonlinear process of archaeological knowledge construction. Taking direction from science studies and specifically from the work of Bruno Latour, this article sketches a model of multiple fields…
Four Archaeological Engagements With Place Mediating Bodily Experience Through Peripatetic Video
Through the exploration of a hybrid space between artist and archaeological production, this article discusses the implications of peripatetic video, a form of located media, as a means of moving beyond the limits of conventional representation. While critical of archaeological dealings with issues of bodily experience and place, the article suggests an alternative is to be found in the work of media artist Janet Cardiff. Building on Cardiff's ar…
Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World
Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been over looked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart…
Special Reviews Section: Archaeology on the ground: the memory practices of David Webb: Diggers Alternative Archive, website and photography by David Webb: www.archdiggers. co.uk/diggers/frameset.html
Symmetrical archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto
This article sketches the project of a symmetrical archaeology in brief. At a point when archaeology has arguably never been more relevant, it finds itself in a climate of necessary plurality where incommensurability is routinely shrugged off as a symptom of diversity; it finds itself in a state where seemingly incompatible differences proliferate on either side of the divide between the humanities and the sciences; it finds itself perplexed by d…
Things Are Us! A Commentary on Human/Things Relations under the Banner of a ‘Social’ Archaeology
What work does the adjective ‘social’ in social archaeology do? What is the character of human/things relations under the rubric of social archaeology? We raise these questions in relation to the recent Companion to Social Archaeology by Meskell and Preucel. While the corrective of the ‘social’ has been extremely productive, in broaching these questions we enter very murky waters. Our task in this article is to show where meanings of the ‘social’…
Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices
Participants
As a field, the historical study of material culture is no longer new. It has its own journal (the Journal of Material Culture), its own e-mail list (H-Material Culture), its own circuit of conferences, centers devoted to the subject at several universities and museums, degree and certificate programs, and, of course, a full range of courses for students. It is also one of the most interdisciplinary ways of investigating the past, with historians…
Some Reflections on Heritage and Archaeology in the Anthropocene
Are we now living in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene? Geo-scientists discuss whether there is a need for a new concept covering the last 250 years' immense human impact on the earth. How are we going to understand and define ‘heritage’ and archaeology in a rapidly changing global environment? The ‘linguistic turn’ in humanities and social sciences has had a huge impact on both archaeology and heritage studies since c. 1980. A criti…
Worlds Otherwise: Archaeology, Anthropology, and Ontological Difference
The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University ("'Worlds Otherwise': Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference," convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss…
Archaeology: The Discipline of Things
The “science of old things,” archaeology is marked by its care, obligation, and loyalty to things, from ancient cities in the Mexican heartland and megalithic monuments in Britain to the perfume jars of the ancient Greek city-state and Leica cameras. This book seeks to understand the diverse practices that arise through this disciplinary commitment to things.
Archaeology 2.0? Review of Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration [Web Book]
The Cotsen Institute in Los Angeles has launched a new publishing initiative in 'Digital Archaeology'. Its first book, Archaeology 2.0: New Approaches to Communication and Collaboration, edited by Eric C. Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Ethan Watrall, makes a grand claim, if only in its title, that archaeology has undergone, or is about to undergo, changes that bring about a completely new version or kind of archaeology. The analogy is with the W…
Archaeology: The Discipline of Things
Archaeology has always been marked by its particular care, obligation, and loyalty to things. While archaeologists may not share similar perspectives or practices, they find common ground in their concern for objects monumental and mundane. This book considers the myriad ways that archaeologists engage with things in order to craft stories, both big and small, concerning our relations with materials and the nature of the past. Literally the "scie…
The Adventure of Ideas
Which archaeology? A question of chronopolitics
Archaeology is, as every student has learned, ‘the study of the human past through the material traces of it that have survived’ (Bahn 2000: 2). In this chapter I draw a contrast between this denition and another: archaeology is an engagement with ‘old’ things (ta archaia) and their connections with an aim to understand the past and its relevance to life. My aim in so doing is to tease out some dierences between these two denitions in terms of ho…
Archaeology in the Making: Conversations through a Discipline
1. Introduction Part I: The Archaeological Imagination 2. Binford 3. Schiffer 4. Watson 5. Renfrew 6. Wylie 7. Hodder Part II: The Workings of a Discipline 8. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis 9. Kristiansen 10. Cowgill 11. Schnapp 12. Alcock and Cherry Part III: Political Ecologies (Realpolitik) 13. Leone 14. Buchli and McGuire 15. Conkey 16. Tringham 17. Meskell 18. Rathje and Shanks 19. Archaeology: An ecology of practices
Chronopolitics and Archaeology
Archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the Hypanthropocene
Archaeology of the Anthropocene
What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological stratigraphy for a material paradigm of the Anthropocene, Alice Gorman explores the extent of human …
Which archaeology?
Archaeology and the New Materialisms
This article revisits the object of archaeology in light of the New Materialisms. Orienting recent work around three propositions with respect to the reality and definition of things—that is, things are assemblages, things are participants, and things are things—it lays out the core features of the New Materialisms and goes on to address some compelling methodological issues. Ultimately, this article raises a challenge; that New Materialist persp…
Confronting Things
Archaeology, symmetry and the ontology of things. A response to critics
This article responds to recent critiques of ‘symmetrical archaeology’. It addresses three common claims: (1) that symmetrical archaeology fails to see a difference between living and non-living entities, (2) that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for humans and other living things, (3) that symmetrical archaeology lacks any sincere ethical concern for things. This article demonstrates how these claims are based on common misunderstandings or…
Coisas são nós! Um comentário sobre as relações humano/coisas sob a bandeira da Arqueologia Social
Qual papel desempenha o adjetivo “social” em Arqueologia Social? Qual o caráter das relações humano/coisas sob a rubrica da arqueologia social? Levantamos essas questões em relação ao recente “A Companion to Social Archaeology” de Meskell e Preucel. Enquanto o corretivo “social” tem sido extremamente produtivo, com o levantamento destas questões entramos em águas muito turvas. Nossa tarefaneste artigo é mostrar onde os sentidos do “social” falira…
Chronopolitics and Archaeology
Archaeology (28 works) · History (28 works) · History (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Art (15 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation (12 works) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works)