Incomplete Archaeologies: Assembling Knowledge in the Past and Present

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Emily Miller Bonney, Kathryn J. Franklin, James A. Johnson
Oxbow Books, Mar 31, 2016 - Social Science - 176 pages
Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept – assemblages – and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists – and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated.
The ultimate aim is to reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasize the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artifacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology’s seeming-seamless epistemological objects.
 

Contents

Contributors
Why the Mesolithic needs assemblages
taphonomy as history and the politics of pastoral activity
miniaturizing identity and the remarkable
actual figural and imagined
lessons from Tuzusai and deassembling an Iron
Assembling the ironsmith
transforming the tomb of Gustav Vasa 15602014
world building and cosmopolitics in late medieval
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About the author (2016)

Emily Miller Bonney is an historian and Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton. With a PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology she specializes in the material culture of Bronze Age Crete and in particular Prepalatial mortuary practices. She is especially interested in how prehistoric material culture reveals the entanglement of things and people and places and how these processes shape social structures.

Kathryn Franklin is an anthropological archaeologist working on the intersections between local and world as mediated by travel, trade and political projects in the 12th-15th centuries, and with a focus on the territory of the modern Republic of Armenia. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014; her doctoral work develops the concept of cosmopolitanism in a late medieval context, as a practice of situated world-making. She is currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and working as a specialist on archaeological heritage analysis consultant to the Oriental Institute of Chicago.

James A. Johnson is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His work centers on the lifecourse of urbanism in the Eurasian steppe and Central Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages. His particular focus is on how urban centers breakdown and how such events are mediated through reuse of the landscape and continued use of material traditions. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, where his doctoral research centered on how pastoral communities disintegrated but during population dispersal began to use historical capital (pottery traditions) as a tool for social and political legitimation.

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