Benjamin Alberti

Bruno Latour and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro provided the initial impetus for explicitly ontological research in archaeology. Their impact on archaeologists, however, has been quite different. What I call the “metaphysical archaeologists” trace their genealogy from Latour, though they are now equally influenced by “new materialism” and the “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2015). They have introduced an alternative metaphysical orthodoxy to archaeology. In contrast, Viveiros de Castro and colleagues have authorized the return of the grand ethnographic analogy to archaeology, particularly in the case of animism. A second, quite different tendency inspired by these same anthropologists is to engage with indigenous ideas as theories to reconfigure archaeological concepts and practice. I suggest that a point of convergence between the metaphysical and the latter anthropological approaches exists in their focus on the concept of alterity.

This article explores the implications of adopting Karen Barad’s agential realist approach in archaeology. We argue that the location of Barad’s work in quantum physics and feminism means it is uniquely placed to inform the ontological turn currently gaining favour for understanding the materiality of bodies. We outline Barad’s approach using a comparative reading of Sofaer’s book The Body as Material Culture and Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. To illustrate, we think through Barad’s key concepts of ‘phenomenon’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘apparatus’ in relation to specific archaeological bodies; New Zealand Maori chevron amulets, Argentinean La Candelaria body-pots, Pacific Northwest Coast stone artefacts and Nuu-chah-nulth ceremonial objects. Barad’s theory transforms the way we understand and think these object bodies. In particular, her relational ontology, which contrasts with a conventional binary separation of matter and meaning, produces difference in a new way; a difference which facilitates analyses conceptually unthinkable in conventional representationalist terms.

There are fascinating parallels in the ways bodies and pots were treated by the Formative period La Candelaria of northwest Argentina. Pots exhibit manipulated and transformed bodies, biomorphic forms and fantastic re-combinations of avian, frog, peccary, and humanoid body parts, as well as tattoos and piercings; faunal remains indicate bodies were the sites of modification, manipulation and mixing before and after death. The embodiment paradigm in anthropology understands bodies as made or fabricated, and the phenomenology of making presents pots and potters as co-constituted. In the same way, the pots and bodies appear to be responding metaphorically to one another. Are bodies in fact ‘made’ like pots? And are pots ‘marked’ like bodies? Equivalence is certainly suggested between people and artefacts at the level of personhood in Amazonian ethnographies.
The idea of ‘making’, however, is in danger of obscuring just this equivalence, given the emphasis on human-authored design. The material itself suggests ontological parity between these types of bodies rather than an analogical relation. In fact, ‘growing’ might better characterize the exuberance of the pottery forms, and suggests ways to get beyond the anthropocentrism of making. Ultimately, however, I argue that the body-pots and bodies are actually cases of a more general principle that calls into question any fundamental distinction between things that are made and things that are grown, artefact and organism. Making or growing a pot or body was an activity of the same kind as any other on-going natural process. It follows that when a maker decided to push and pinch wet clay to add a peccary head to the back of a pot she was responding to specific conditions at that moment and not worrying about a future goal. Design, then, was less about some imagined future event or plan and instead about responding to the on-going creativity of the world

Theorizing ontology can provoke difference to emerge in archaeology if cases are taken as enabling recursive effects on our concepts rather than as faithful descriptions of past ontologies. In this paper, miniaturized ceramic pots in funerary contexts of first millennium AD northwest Argentina are taken as a case of that nature. Such pots have conventionally been understood as responding to the body scale of those with whom they are buried (often children). That is, the body is small, so the pot is small. We have a rich repertoire of archaeological approaches to miniaturization, notably in the work of Douglas Bailey, among others. There are untapped theoretical resources, however, that might provide insight into the practice from an ontologically alter perspective. I draw on indigenous Amazonian theories to suggest that miniatures were ‘spirit traps,’ acting to ensnare desire-ridden spirits who were tempted to leave the body. Significantly, however, that interpretation rests upon alternative ontologies of scale, representation, and materials. The recursive effect, then, is to use the case to challenge archaeology’s conventional concepts. What is interesting, ultimately, is not the reconstruction of a past ontology, which is problematic for all sorts of reasons, but the conceptual work of producing difference.

Visual imagery can be understood to work in a number of registers. Most commonly, archaeologists have taken it as symbolic expressions, inventive ways to substitute for language or communicate ideas. Similarly, imagery can be understood to be organized in an isomorphic sense to social structure. There is also the question of how imagery actually works: what is it that moves us or works on us? Cognitive impact, conceptual play, or the affect of the abduction of complex intentionalities are some candidates.
Which register is appropriate for understanding the material that interests me, anthropo and zoomorphic imagery from first millennium northwest AD Argentina? What such approaches share in common is a focus on a particular type of audience and a finished object—on the effect of a completed work or image on a separated subject or recipient (“patient”). There is latent, however, another possibility: that the visual imagery communicated and worked at the level of practice. Interactive artworks, or work that is understood in some sense as on-going, points in that direction. I argue that the imagery in the pottery communicated not solely as a completed object aimed at a particular audience but was efficacious insofar as the practices associated with its production--and the place of those practices in a broader world of practices--were specifically embodied and understood. Drawing on Amazonian ethnography, I illustrate by discussing a parallelism between the incisions and moldings on pots and the painting of bodies, activities which can be understood as instances of non-representational image making.

Animists’ theories of matter must be given equivalence at the level of theory if we are to understand adequately the nature of ontological difference in the past. The current model is of a natural ontological continuum that connects all cultures, grounding our culturally relativist worldviews in a common world. Indigenous peoples’ worlds are thought of as fascinating but ultimately mistaken ways of knowing the world. We demonstrate how ontologically oriented theorists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Karen Barad and Tim Ingold in conjuncture with an anti-representationalist methodology can provide the necessary conditions for alternative ontologies to emerge in archaeology. Anthropo-zoomorphic ‘body-pots’ from first-millennium ad northwest Argentina anticipate the possibility that matter was conceptualized as chronically unstable, inherently undifferentiated, and ultimately practice-dependent.

My paper is about the theorizing of bodies in archaeology. Bodies are an important archaeological resource—from mortuary remains to figurative art, they reveal a great deal to us about people in past societies. In gender archaeology the visibility of bodies as archaeological evidence has lead to questions being asked of the very formulation of gender as a concept, of how gender is understood to operate through bodies and in society. The point I will argue in the course of this paper is that the sex/gender split naturalizes a binary division of bodies and hence naturalizes the exclusive division of bodies into male and female. Such a binary division may be a pertinent description of current ideals of the structure of bodies. Its establishment as a natural fact, however, is impeding the investigation of bodies in prehistory, preventing the questioning of how bodies gain significance, how bodies become sexed.

El presente trabajo resume algunos de los objetivos originales de la arqueología de género y sus influencias, además de su estado actual. Aunque las principales exponentes de la arqueología de género se vincularon conscientemente y claramente con el feminismo y la crítica social, existe otra corriente que propone separar el estudio de género de las metas políticas del feminismo. No obstante, dentro de ambos campos (feministas y no feministas) hay limitaciones con el concepto de género y los objetivos supuestamente 'científicos' adoptados en la mayoría de los trabajos que utilizan al género como parte del análisis. Por lo tanto, hay una necesidad de adoptar teorías feministas alternativas en arqueología. El presente trabajo sirve como una introducción básica a una literatura alternativa - los trabajos de las llamadas feministas de la 'diferencia sexual' y la teoría 'queer' -, en el cual se explora sus ideas acerca de sexo/género y las consecuentes implicaciones para los estudios arqueológicos. Así se concluye que las fuentes teóricas nombradas son necesarias para estudiar la relación entre cultura material, sexo/género y cuerpo, dejando en claro que los objetos materiales que nos rodean no sólo reflejan categorías fijas e innatas, sino que estáníntimamente involucradas en la producción y mantenimiento de categorías e identidades en general que son inherentemente inestables y variables.