Archaeologies of Automobility

Archaeologists are no strangers to the spaces and materialities of roads. The material cultures of prehistoric and Roman roads have provided an important focus for archaeological investigations, while modern road construction programmes have provided invaluable opportunities to conduct archaeological and geological investigations of sub-surface materials. In recent years, humanities and social science scholars have started to trace the material cultures and practices associated with the modern spaces of the car, road, and driving, and this chapter traces the outlines of what we might call an archaeology of modern automobility, discussing the findings of two research projects undertaken on the material cultures of automobility. Drawing upon research on the historical geographies of Britain’s M1 motorway the author examines how archaeological techniques (including field excavations) could provide an important complement to archival research in order to trace the design, construction, and use of such sites. In the second example, the chapter discusses a recent research project which attempted to write a cultural history and contemporary archaeology of the campaign for bilingual road signs in Wales. Drawing upon archival research, oral histories, and photographic research, the project reveals how the materiality of road signs was central to the motives behind-and effectiveness of-the campaign in 1960s and 1970s Wales.

Disaster

As recent events have shown, mass-fatality disasters can have long and painful aftermaths for the relatives and friends of victims. Archaeologists are becoming increasingly involved in applying their scientific skills to medical/legal issues such as victim identification and disaster-scene investigation, with the understanding that their evidence may be challenged in court later on when matters such as inheritance of property or liability arise. Although their findings refer specifically to the ‘court of law’, an argument is presented to apply similar standards in the ‘court of history’ in which most archaeological scholarship takes place. Disaster archaeologists work as teams under the direction of a controlling authority and in close coordination with law-enforcement and emergency services, so special training and procedures (such as ‘chain-of-custody’) are required along with special health-and-safety protocols. In short, disaster archaeology is an evidence-driven, problem-solving use of archaeology to assist the authorities to find out ‘what happened’ at a disaster scene and to aid the families affected by the disaster in the recovery process. It often takes place under stressful conditions and may not be for everyone, but it makes a difference to the people involved in such a disaster.

Building Thought into Things

This chapter retraces the steps of Bærentsen’s (1989) cognitive analysis of the evolution of the rifle. Bærentsen’s central thesis is that the actions and thought processes required to operate a rifle, at any one stage of its development, are ‘built into’ subsequent generations of the artefact. In the process of retracing and critically evaluating Bærentsen’s analysis, a different view gradually emerges, in which greater attention is paid to the interplay between the physical properties of artefacts and the structure of tasks. Throughout the chapter, the interdependencies between artefact design, task structure, task goals, and cognitive tasks are explored and developed.

Photo Essay

This illustrated essay presents a series of photographic images documenting the contents of an abandoned cobbler’s workshop in Cornwall, UK. A reflection on the process of encountering and documenting this place accompanies the photographs, and problematizes the impulse to conduct ‘salvage archaeology’ through means of visual representation. The process of photographic mediation is traced through four distinct stages: invitation, intercession, intrusion, and invention. The essay draws on the work of Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig to explore how the act of representation can be seen to be implicated in both the destruction and production of an object’s aura, particularly in relation to transient and ephemeral material cultures.

The Relationship between Ethnoarchaeology and Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past

This chapter explores the respective histories of both ethnoarchaeology and archaeologies of the contemporary past. On the surface the two subdisciplines appear to have much in common-they are both involved in studies of societies of the present and of the recent past. However, the methodologies that each employ in this goal, as a result of specific historical choices that practitioners of each subdiscipline made, are very different. Practitioners of archaeologies of the contemporary past generally use an archaeological methodology that was developed out of American ethnoarchaeology in the 1980s, while post-processual ethnoarchaeology in Britain undertook a major overhaul of these ideas. It is argued that archaeologies of the contemporary past could gain as much from an understanding of more recent developments in ethnoarchaeology with regard to methodology and ethics of representation, as they have from processual ethnoarchaeology.

Introduction

This book is about archaeologies both in and of the present. Its aim is to identify the challenges and pitfalls of an archaeology of the contemporary world, but not to be an authorized manual. Archaeology has become a case limit for interdisciplinarity, as it is the one discipline that is so freely and exuberantly adopted, complicated, and transformed by other disciplines. In that they all study contemporary material culture, it is clear that other disciplines also do ‘archaeology’ in one way or another. The study of the present opens up issues of ownership not normally addressed by archaeologists. If it is an archaeology of us, who is the ‘us’ that we are concerned with? The archaeology of the contemporary is thus inevitably drawn into politics in terms of the extent to which work in the field constitutes or necessitates advocacy. Archaeologies of the contemporary extend our understanding of the mobility of matter, a mobility that suggests the operation of matter as media, and evokes the materiality of media. Here, the ephemeral event becomes a productive site for extending our understandings of matter, media, and mobility. Methodologically, archaeologies of the contemporary must overcome the banalization of everyday experience, studying people, places, and things in action. As such, archaeologists must see themselves as participants, and shape their participation to contemporary circumstances.

Anthropological Approaches to Contemporary Material Worlds

This chapter explores the place of materials in contemporary anthropological research. Moving away from semiotic approaches to material culture, the focus is on the diverse ways in which the vitality of materials is invoked in different analytical traditions and diverse ethnographic settings. Phenomenological approaches to craft practice emphasize the intrinsic relationality and vitality of materials over and beyond the capacity of human intention to impose form. This celebration of the vital force of materials is contrasted to a darker and more explicitly material politics that emerges from contemporary studies of waste disposal and resource extraction where toxicity and deathly effects characterize the transformational force of material life. Anthropological investigations into material agency and the personhood of things also attend to the immaterial and affective dimensions of material relations and pose ontological questions about the social consequences of material life.

To the Things Themselves Again

What is a thing? It is an apparently simple question to which few philosophers or social scientists have devoted any serious attention. This chapter attempts to explain this neglect, and then to develop a way of thinking about the question by distinguishing things, and the concept ‘thing’, from objects and entities with which they are often conflated. This more refined and adequate conception of the thing is then deployed in order to help answer two related questions: ‘Why do things matter? What are the grounds of our attachment to them, and of our obligations towards them?’ It is argued that an endemic failure within philosophy and social science to reflect on what constitutes the thinghood of things makes it harder than it need be to answer questions concerning their value and why they matter to us.

Authenticity

The concept of authenticity has changed considerably through time. Medieval authenticity depended upon faith; medieval texts were not authored but came from God. In pre-Modernist modernity, authenticity derived from sincerity; either through reference back to tradition of through a claim to a natural purity. In late modernity, the era of Modernism, authenticity is an experiential function; it is concerned with the pragmatic quality of things. This process is complicated by the fact that ideas of authenticity can be applied to both persons and things, and that in a world of mass production and commodity, the authentic and the unique are not necessarily the same. Most importantly, whilst inanimate things can have life histories or ‘biographies’, only persons can have autobiographies, in the sense that they become authentically themselves by creating their own precursors. The essential problem for persons in the Modernist era is to be coolly authentic despite the fact that counter-cultural cool is continually commoditized by the Man.

Waste

This chapter considers the origins of, and possibilities for, an archaeology of the contemporary world derived from observations of recently discarded waste. It begins with a discussion of the pioneering ‘Garbage Project’ founded by William Rathje (1945–2012) at the University of Arizona, contextualizing its emergence from ‘behavioral archeology’ as well as the distinct milieu of Cold War America, to which it owes it epistemological and material roots. The chapter reflects on Rathje’s legacy with a consideration of the folk-archaeological activities of waste workers at a large landfill in Michigan. A discussion of fieldwork conducted at this landfill reveals the ethical and political dilemmas associated with understanding others through their rubbish, as well as the opportunities this practice offers as a means of social reflection.