Oliver J T Harris
Biographic Data
| ID | 187985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Oliver J T Harris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Oliver J T |
| FAMILY NAME | Harris |
| SIGNATURE | HARRIS O J T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leicester |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2053-9172 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 606 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
‘A Life Proper to Matter’: Re-Animating Museum Collections Through New Materialism and Microwear
This paper combines microwear analysis with new materialism to invigorate our understanding of past material worlds at multiple scales of analysis. Just as the development of new biomolecular approaches at scale has revealed an archive for research, so a combination of critical theoretical approaches and specific empirical analyses can do the same for objects, including those that would be considered to lack traditional ideas of ‘good context’. T…
On ‘Incompossible’ Pasts and the Powers of the False
What happens to the worlds that almost, but didn’t, happen in archaeology? When we excavate sites or carry out analyses, potential worlds are always coming into existence: the moment radiocarbon dates get remodelled, and a site jumps through time or swells or contracts; the news that a body that was sexed as female turns out to be male; or when something bagged as pottery turns out to be stone. Our traditional archaeological stories of the past i…
Long Barrows or Long Enclosures? A Survey of Evidence From Eastern England
Where are the missing long barrows of eastern England? Do they exist as the original earthwork form of cropmark long enclosures? Or do these represent a distinct tradition? To explore this, geophysical surveys were carried out on the region’s rare surviving long barrows. Comparable signals suggest that most long enclosures are indeed likely to have been long barrows. Other morphological factors, however, differ from long barrows elsewhere and, co…
Before, During, and After Gender: Notes on a Nonessentialist History of Difference
What would a nonessentialist history of gender look like? In this paper, we suggest that mainstream gender history, archaeology, and related disciplines have inadvertently black boxed some of the most interesting questions about what past gender may have been like. Traditional Eurocentric approaches treat gender as variable but only within certain predefined limits; they do not radically question what happens if we shift the term definitionally. …
Archaeology for Today and Tomorrow
Archaeology and capitalism
Use-wear analysis reveals the first direct evidence for the use of Neolithic polished stone axes in Britain
Polished stone axes have long been recognised as one of the most important forms of material culture in the Neolithic. Research over the last 40 years has done much to understand their origins, patterns of exchange across Europe, deposition, and social importance. Despite this long-recognised importance, little work in Britain has focused on the actual use of these objects. This article presents the first use-wear analysis of 20 Early Neolithic p…
To Gender or not To Gender? Exploring Gender Variations through Time and Space
This article is based on an EAA session in Kiel in 2021, in which thirteen contributors provide their response to Robb and Harris's (2018) overview of studies of gender in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, with a reply by Robb and Harris. The central premise of their 2018 article was the opposition of ‘contextual Neolithic gender’ to ‘cross-contextual Bronze Age gender’, which created uneasiness among the four co-organizers of the Kiel meeti…
From Typology and Biography to Multiplicity: Bracers as ‘Process Objects
In this article we put forward an alternative account of the famous wristguards, or bracers, of the European Early Bronze Age. Combining new materialism with empirical microwear analysis, we study 15 examples from Britain in detail and suggest a different way of conceptualizing these objects. Rather than demanding they have a singular function, we treat these objects as ‘multiplicities’ and as always in process. This, in turn, has significant imp…
Materials in movement: Gold and stone in process in the Upton Lovell G2a burial
Excavated over two centuries ago, the Upton Lovell G2a 'Wessex Culture' burial has held a prominent place in research on Bronze Age Britain. In particular, was it the grave of a 'shaman' or a metalworker? We take a new approach to the grave goods, employing microwear analysis and scanning electron microscopy to map a history of interactions between people and materials, identifying evidence for the presence of Bronze Age gold on five artefacts, f…
Beaker and Early Bronze Age Tin Exploitation in Cornwall: Cassiterite Processing Identified through Microwear and pXRF Analyses
The appearance of Beaker pottery in Britain and Ireland during the twenty-fifth century bc marks a significant archaeological horizon, being synchronous with the first metal artefacts. The adoption of arsenical copper, mostly from Ireland, was followed by that of tin-bronze around 2200 bc . However, whilst the copper mine of Ross Island in Ireland is securely dated to the Early Bronze Age, and further such mines in the UK have been dated to the E…
What Can A [Feminist] Body Do? Immanent and Emergent Capacities of Bodies at Chinchorro and Wor Barrow
What can a body do? To answer Baruch Spinoza's question, we engage with posthumanist feminist concepts of nomadic subjectivity and relations with non-humans. Through an exploration of two ‘patches’, the Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacama Desert in South America and the burials at Wor Barrow in the Neolithic of southern England, we suggest that these approaches open up a new way of encountering past bodies. What capabilities do bodies, past and pre…
Assembling past worlds
Chapter 1 introduces the themes of the book. It begins by exploring an initial theoretical provocation: that archaeology needs to develop an approach to the past that is posthumanist. From there it maps a brief history of archaeological thought, to trace the emergence of this perspective and then introduces the specific Deleuzian approach that the volume advocates. The chapter then turns to the archaeological material that forms the heart of the …
What could a dead Neolithic body do?
What could a dead body do in the Neolithic? In this chapter we explore how different affective relations emerged through the treatment of Neolithic bodies, both human and non-human. Beginning with fragmentation, before moving to whole burial and then cremation, the chapter explores how Neolithic bodies could be in more than one location at once, how they could fold flows of power into particular places and create spectacular and intensive events.…
Seven challenges for a posthumanist archaeology
What are the obstacles that lie before us in the attempt to develop a posthumanist archaeology? This chapter sets out seven challenges this book will need to meet in order to achieve its goal of developing a posthumanist approach to the past. These are to be post-anthropocentric; to embrace the vibrancy of matter; to recognise the importance of relations, process and history; to hold on to things themselves; to be more-than-representational; to w…
What worlds did Neolithic architecture create?
This chapter explores how architecture brought different worlds into existence in the Neolithic. The first part of the chapter examines how we can conceptualise architecture as dynamic and emergent through a discussion of causewayed enclosures and an emphasis on affect, event and process. The second part of the chapter explores how architecture played a critical role in the creation and maintenance of community. Through a discussion of house soci…
Fragments from philosophy
This chapter sets out the intellectual equipment we will need to meet the seven challenges defined in the previous chapter. It begins by introducing the reader to the primary theoretical inspiration for the book’s approach: the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, both alone and in conjunction with Félix Guattari. It briefly reviews archaeological engagements with Deleuze before developing an account of the principles, concepts and tools derived from hi…
Conclusion
In the concluding chapter of the book we return to the critical need for archaeology to develop a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric approach. This leads to a consideration of the seven challenges that stood in the way of this, which we identified in Chapter 2 . Have these been met, and where is there room for further development? Finally, the chapter, and the book, concludes that a major target for archaeology should be to pay closer attentio…
What were Neolithic materials capable of becoming?
This chapter explores the worlds of Neolithic materials and asks: what were they capable of becoming? Beginning with the movement of stone and wood across the landscape, it considers how materials both flowed extensively and created intensive, topological, relations. From there the chapter moves on to consider processes of assembly and individuation with clay and flints, as well as the breakdown of objects and materials in middens. The final part…
Time, history and memory
This chapter examines the nine neoconcepts identified over the last three chapters, developing what is termed an ‘ontography’ of the Neolithic. It begins by exploring a history of these neoconcepts, looking at how varying elements became important at different times during the Neolithic. This linear version of history by itself is insufficient, however, although alternative approaches arguing for an approach to archaeology as memory are equally p…
Assembling Past Worlds: Materials, Bodies and Architecture in Neolithic Britain
Assembling Past Worlds draws on new materialism and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to explore the potential for a posthumanist archaeology. Through specific empirical study, this book provides a detailed analysis of Neolithic Britain, a critical moment in the emergence of new ways of living, as well as new relationships between materials, people and new forms of architecture. It achieves two things. First, it identifies the major challenges tha…
What Difference Does Posthumanism Make
In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of ag…
Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction
Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situa…
Posthuman Archaeologies, Archaeological Posthumanisms
This paper maps and builds relations between posthumanism and the field of archaeology, arguing for vital and promising connections between the two. Posthuman insights on post-anthropocentrism, non-human multiplicities, and the minoritarian in the now intersect powerfully with archaeology's multi-temporal and long-term interests in heterogenous and vibrant assemblages of people, places, and things, particularly the last few decades of 'decolonial…
Archaeology, process and time: Beyond History Versus Memory
In this paper I seek to explore how a particular aspect of process philosophy can offer us new ways of thinking through time in archaeology. In contrast to current archaeological debates, which counterpose a model of archaeology as driven primarily by history and sequence with one of memory and contemporaneity, the process approach taken here develops a different account. Drawing on the three syntheses of time set out by Gilles Deleuze, the paper…
(Re)assembling Communities
Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History
In this article, we return to a fundamental anthropological question: How can we understand apparently incommensurate perspectives on the human body? While applauding recent moves to place local people's perspectives on an ontological rather than epistemological footing, we suggest that both of these approaches fail to explain how different ontological perspectives can ever communicate with one another and how historical change takes place. To un…
Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology
The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the 'great processes' of change like the evolution of humanity, the coloniza…
Enduring relations: Exploring a paradox of new materialism
In this article, the authors examine tensions between understandings of material things as either bundles of relations or as things-in-themselves. Rather than take either of these positions, they instead set out an argument for approaches that allow them to modulate between these understandings whilst treating both as relational. Taking such a position allows them to consider how things endure through time without returning to any notion of essen…
Rethinking emotion and material culture
In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip arch…
More than representation: Multiscalar assemblages and the Deleuzian challenge to archaeology
In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the…
Becoming Gendered in European Prehistory: Was Neolithic Gender Fundamentally Different
It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naïveté. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 cal BC onwards; the latter still form t…
Enchaining arguments and fragmenting assumptions: Reconsidering the Fragmentation Debate in Archaeology
In this paper we examine the recent popularity of notions of fragmentation and enchainment in archaeology and aim to further the debate of these important approaches. Although we applaud the aims, and recognize the seductive power of these concepts, we suggest that there are a number of problems with the terms as they are currently used. By unpacking these expressions, we suggest these issues can be addressed and the vocabulary can continue to de…
Assembling Past Worlds: Materials, Bodies and Architecture in Neolithic Britain
Assembling Past Worlds draws on new materialism and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to explore the potential for a posthumanist archaeology. Through specific empirical study, this book provides a detailed analysis of Neolithic Britain, a critical moment in the emergence of new ways of living, as well as new relationships between materials, people and new forms of architecture. It achieves two things. First, it identifies the major challenges tha…
What Difference Does Posthumanism Make
In this paper we argue that to understand the difference Posthumanism makes to the relationship between archaeology, agency and ontology, several misconceptions need to be corrected. First, we emphasize that Posthumanism is multiple, with different elements, meaning any critique needs to be carefully targeted. The approach we advocate is a specifically Deleuzian and explicitly feminist approach to Posthumanism. Second, we examine the status of ag…
Animals, People and Places: The Continuity of Hunting and Gathering Practices across the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Britain
This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the…
Beyond binaries. Interrogating ancient DNA
In this paper we explore ancient DNA (aDNA) as a powerful new technique for archaeologists. We argue that for aDNA to reach its full potential we need to carefully consider its theoretical underpinnings. We suggest that at present much aDNA research rests upon two problematic theoretical assumptions: first, that nature and culture exist in binary opposition and that DNA is a part of nature; second, that cultures form distinct and bounded identiti…
Emotional and Mnemonic Geographies at Hambledon Hill: Texturing Neolithic Places with Bodies and Bones
This article investigates the shaping of place through memory and emotion. In particular it explores how, by engaging with particular kinds of materials, people texture locales in ways which help to structure future actions. By examining the manner in which deceased human bodies were engaged with at the British Neolithic site of Hambledon Hill, this article argues that we can trace the creation of these mnemonic and emotional geographies and so a…
Making Places Matter in Early Neolithic Dorset
By exploring an Early Neolithic site this paper demonstrates how landscapes are constituted from connected places and, in turn, how places are constituted by materials. The paper aims to develop an approach that acknowledges the role of memory and emotion within this, and posits that these factors are crucial to how senses of place and community were formed in this period. By considering memory and emotion the paper demonstrates their centrality …
Posthuman Archaeologies, Archaeological Posthumanisms
This paper maps and builds relations between posthumanism and the field of archaeology, arguing for vital and promising connections between the two. Posthuman insights on post-anthropocentrism, non-human multiplicities, and the minoritarian in the now intersect powerfully with archaeology's multi-temporal and long-term interests in heterogenous and vibrant assemblages of people, places, and things, particularly the last few decades of 'decolonial…
To Gender or not To Gender? Exploring Gender Variations through Time and Space
This article is based on an EAA session in Kiel in 2021, in which thirteen contributors provide their response to Robb and Harris's (2018) overview of studies of gender in the European Neolithic and Bronze Age, with a reply by Robb and Harris. The central premise of their 2018 article was the opposition of ‘contextual Neolithic gender’ to ‘cross-contextual Bronze Age gender’, which created uneasiness among the four co-organizers of the Kiel meeti…
Posthumanism in Archaeology: An Introduction
Posthumanism is a growing field of interdisciplinary study that has emerged, principally in the last 20 years, as a broad church which seeks to reconceptualize human beings’ relationships with the world. At its heart, Posthumanism seeks to destabilize and question the category of ‘human’, which it sees as having previously been treated as transcendent and ahistorical. In its place, the figure of the posthuman aims to capture the complex and situa…
Making marks meaningful: New Materialism and the Microwear Assemblage
In this paper we explore how positioning microwear analysis within new materialism and assemblage theory allows us to develop new ways of thinking about meaning in the past. By mapping the detailed histories of an object’s making and use, we suggest that we can open up an understanding of marks as forms of material meanings. These material meanings operate as intensive events that fold together present and absent materials, as well as a range of …
Animals, People and Places: The Continuity of Hunting and Gathering Practices across the Mesolithic–Neolithic Transition in Britain
This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the…
Beaker and Early Bronze Age Tin Exploitation in Cornwall: Cassiterite Processing Identified through Microwear and pXRF Analyses
The appearance of Beaker pottery in Britain and Ireland during the twenty-fifth century bc marks a significant archaeological horizon, being synchronous with the first metal artefacts. The adoption of arsenical copper, mostly from Ireland, was followed by that of tin-bronze around 2200 bc . However, whilst the copper mine of Ross Island in Ireland is securely dated to the Early Bronze Age, and further such mines in the UK have been dated to the E…
Archaeological Theory in Dialogue: Situating Relationality, Ontology, Posthumanism, and Indigenous Paradigms
Archaeology, process and time: Beyond History Versus Memory
In this paper I seek to explore how a particular aspect of process philosophy can offer us new ways of thinking through time in archaeology. In contrast to current archaeological debates, which counterpose a model of archaeology as driven primarily by history and sequence with one of memory and contemporaneity, the process approach taken here develops a different account. Drawing on the three syntheses of time set out by Gilles Deleuze, the paper…
Towards Virtual Typologies
To use category names should be a commitment to tracing the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold (Tsing 2015, p. 29)Anna Beck’s paper is a welcome addition to the growing lit
Assembling places and persons: A tenth-century Viking boat burial from Swordle Bay on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, western Scotland
Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially Affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy
Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate i…
Can You See a Virus? The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs
He has fertilized an A to Z of postwar creativity, quite literally from Kathy Acker to Frank Zappa; he has acted as godfather for literary countercultures from the Beats to the Cyberpunks; he has haunted our media zones as an icon of iconoclasm - and William Burroughs has remained a critical curse. Leaving aside what Burroughs' academic marginality tells us - about Burroughs or academia - the main reason he has hexed his critics is also the key t…
Not Burroughs's Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters
Not Burroughs’ Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters Oliver Harris Abstract The essay reconsiders recent developments in the field of material scholarship and editing to advance the case for a social text approach that recognises the independent life of the text in its multiple material histories. Focusing on the especially complicated textual history of two works by William Burroughs—The Naked Lunch and The Yage Letters—it demonstrates the o…
Making Places Matter in Early Neolithic Dorset
By exploring an Early Neolithic site this paper demonstrates how landscapes are constituted from connected places and, in turn, how places are constituted by materials. The paper aims to develop an approach that acknowledges the role of memory and emotion within this, and posits that these factors are crucial to how senses of place and community were formed in this period. By considering memory and emotion the paper demonstrates their centrality …
Emotional and Mnemonic Geographies at Hambledon Hill: Texturing Neolithic Places with Bodies and Bones
This article investigates the shaping of place through memory and emotion. In particular it explores how, by engaging with particular kinds of materials, people texture locales in ways which help to structure future actions. By examining the manner in which deceased human bodies were engaged with at the British Neolithic site of Hambledon Hill, this article argues that we can trace the creation of these mnemonic and emotional geographies and so a…
Enchaining arguments and fragmenting assumptions: Reconsidering the Fragmentation Debate in Archaeology
In this paper we examine the recent popularity of notions of fragmentation and enchainment in archaeology and aim to further the debate of these important approaches. Although we applaud the aims, and recognize the seductive power of these concepts, we suggest that there are a number of problems with the terms as they are currently used. By unpacking these expressions, we suggest these issues can be addressed and the vocabulary can continue to de…
Talk about the passion
We would like to thank the five commentators for their thorough and stimulating reflections on, and criticism of, our article. The different comments raise various issues, and we appreciate their diversity of perspectives and their analysis of problems in our attempt at a rethinking of emotion in archaeology. The comments are each in their own way highly rewarding for us, and they certainly bring concerns to the fore that we have left out. Here w…
Rethinking emotion and material culture
In this article, we wish to return to the suggestion made by Sarah Tarlow a decade ago about the importance of understanding emotions in archaeology as a central facet of human being and human actions. We suggest a further expansion of this that focuses exclusively on the relationship between material culture and emotions (as opposed to textually, verbally or iconographically informed approaches), and offer a vocabulary that may better equip arch…
Animals, People and Places: The Continuity of Hunting and Gathering Practices across the Mesolithic–Neolithic Transition in Britain
This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the…
Animals, People and Places: The Continuity of Hunting and Gathering Practices across the Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in Britain
This article considers the long-debated and thorny issue of the transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain. The apparently polarised debate that has dominated this discussion is, we suggest, unhelpful, and rather than positing either total colonisation from abroad, or simple indigenous continuity, we propose a model where both incomers and autochthons had their part to play. To explore this further we trace continuities across the…
Reconsidering Archaeological Fieldwork: Exploring on-Site Relationships Between Theory and Practice
(Re)assembling Communities
Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture: Time, Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg
Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank’s The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten ca…
Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History
In this article, we return to a fundamental anthropological question: How can we understand apparently incommensurate perspectives on the human body? While applauding recent moves to place local people's perspectives on an ontological rather than epistemological footing, we suggest that both of these approaches fail to explain how different ontological perspectives can ever communicate with one another and how historical change takes place. To un…
From Knowing into Telling: A Dialogue in Five Parts
Image, Memory and Monumentality: Archaeological Engagements with the Material World. Edited by A ndrew M eirion J ones , J oshua P ollard , M ichael J. A llen and J ulie G ardiner
(2014). Image, Memory and Monumentality: Archaeological Engagements with the Material World. Edited by Andrew Meirion Jones, Joshua Pollard, Michael J. Allen and Julie Gardiner. Archaeological Journal: Vol. 171, No. 1, pp. 420-421
The Soft Machine: The Restored Text
A terrifying, surreal space-age odyssey, The Soft Machine initiated Burroughs' Cut-Up Trilogy that includes Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. The book draws the reader into an unmappable textual space, where nothing is true and everything is permitted, to make a total assault on the colonising powers of planet earth that have turned us all into machines. Edited and introduced by renowned Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, this new edition …
Enduring relations: Exploring a paradox of new materialism
In this article, the authors examine tensions between understandings of material things as either bundles of relations or as things-in-themselves. Rather than take either of these positions, they instead set out an argument for approaches that allow them to modulate between these understandings whilst treating both as relational. Taking such a position allows them to consider how things endure through time without returning to any notion of essen…
Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium: Introducing Current Perspectives
"Provides an accessible account of the changing world of archaeological theory. It charts the emergence of the new emphasis on relations as well as engaging with current theoretical trends and the thinkers archaeologists regularly employ. This book will be an essential guide to cutting-edge theory for students and for professionals wishing to reacquaint themselves with this field. Oliver J.T. Harris is lecturer in archaeology in the School of Arc…
Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially Affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy
Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate i…
Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology
The growing interest in assemblages has already opened up a number of important lines of enquiry in archaeology, from the morphogenetic capacities of matter through to a rethinking of the concept of community. In this paper I want to explore how assemblages allow us to reconceptualize the critical issue of scale. Archaeologists have vacillated between expending energy on the 'great processes' of change like the evolution of humanity, the coloniza…
Assembling places and persons: A tenth-century Viking boat burial from Swordle Bay on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, western Scotland
More than representation: Multiscalar assemblages and the Deleuzian challenge to archaeology
In this article I examine how Deleuzian-inspired assemblage theory allows us to offer a new challenge to the enlightenment categories of thought that have dominated archaeological thinking. The history of archaeological thought, whilst superficially a series of paradigm shifts, can be retold as arguments constructed within distinctions between ideas and materials, present and past, and culture and nature. At the heart of all of these has been the…
Becoming Gendered in European Prehistory: Was Neolithic Gender Fundamentally Different
It is notable how little gender archaeology has been written for the European Neolithic, in contrast to the following Bronze Age. We cannot blame this absence on a lack of empirical data or on archaeologists’ theoretical naïveté. Instead, we argue that this absence reflects the fact that gender in this period was qualitatively different in form from the types of gender that emerged in Europe from about 3000 cal BC onwards; the latter still form t…
Towards Virtual Typologies
To use category names should be a commitment to tracing the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold (Tsing 2015, p. 29)Anna Beck’s paper is a welcome addition to the growing lit
Archaeology is process
Assaf Nativ has written an interesting and, I think, important paper. It raises critical issues around the ontological status of 'the archaeological' and indeed about the purpose and aims of archaeology as a discipline. These are clearly topics that require consideration and critical analysis. His arguments are provocative, in the best sense, in that they will lead us to reflect on some of the basic foundations of what we believe archaeology to b…
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