Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-45l2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T17:51:56.778Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Assemblages, relationality and recursivity. Comments on ‘Archaeology and contemporaneity’ by Gavin Lucas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2015

Andrew Meirion Jones
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I warmly welcome Gavin Lucas's discussion of time and contemporaneity. I view this as another component of a sustained (and much-needed) investigation of the ontological character of archaeology. Gavin Lucas is presently at the forefront of this line of enquiry. His analysis is much more than an exploration of the ontology of archaeology. It is also a radical rethinking of the basis of the discipline. His analysis takes us back to ‘first principles’ and reveals unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions. Excitingly, his discussion touches upon the very basis of archaeological chronologies and archaeological stratigraphies, and forces us to think about them afresh. Worsaae, Montelius, Childe: these figures stalk the pages of elementary textbooks on archaeology, yet Lucas's analysis allows us not only to appreciate their analytical skills, but also to rethink and question them.

Type
Discussion
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , June 2015 , pp. 21 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alberti, B., Jones, A.M. and Pollard, J., 2013: Archaeology after interpretation. Returning materials to archaeological theory, Walnut Creek, CA.Google Scholar
Alberti, B., and Bray, T., 2009: Animating archaeology. Of subjects, objects and alternative ontologies, Cambridge archaeological journal 19 (3), 337–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alberti, B., Fowles, S., Holbraad, M., Marshall, Y. and Witmore, C.L., 2011: ‘Worlds otherwise’. Archaeology, anthropology and ontological difference, Current anthropology 52 (6), 896–912.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, C. 2013: The emergent past. A relational realist archaeology of Early Bronze Age mortuary practices, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gamble, C., 2013: Deep time, history, and the human–hominin imagination, in Robb, J. and Pauketat, T. (eds), Big histories, human lives. Tackling problems of scale in archaeology, Santa Fe, 57–76.Google Scholar
Hill, E., 2012: The nonempirical past. Encultured landscapes and other-than-human persons in Southwest Alaska, Arctic anthropology 49 (2), 41–57.Google Scholar
Holbraad, M., 2012: Truth in motion. The recursive anthropology of Cuban divination, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, A.M., 2007: Memory and material culture, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, G., 2012: Understanding the archaeological record, Cambridge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olivier, L., 2011: The dark abyss of time. Archaeology and memory, Lanham, MD.Google Scholar
Olivier, L., 2001: Duration, memory and the nature of the archaeological record, in Gustaffson, A. and Karlsson, H. (eds), Glyfer och arkeologiska rum. En vänbok till Jarl Nordbladh, Gothenburg, 529–35.Google Scholar
Pauketat, T., 2013: Bundles of/in/as time, in Robb, J. and Pauketat, T. (eds), Big histories, human lives. Tackling problems of scale in archaeology, Santa Fe, 35–56.Google Scholar
Robb, J., and Pauketat, T., 2013: Big histories, human lives. Tackling problems of scale in archaeology, Santa Fe.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, E., 2013: The relative native, Hau. Journal of ethnographic theory 3 (3), 473–502.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, C., 2013: Relational archaeologies. Humans, animals, things, London.Google Scholar
Witmore, C., 2006: Vision, media, noise and the percolation of time. Symmetrical approaches to the mediation of the material world, Journal of material culture 11 (3), 267–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar