The paper presents the second part of an account of archaeological investigations at Perry Oaks S... more The paper presents the second part of an account of archaeological investigations at Perry Oaks Sludge Works, Heathrow, themselves part of a project to create an understanding of human inhabitation of the landscape and to develop a site narrative. The development of the landscape from the Bronze Age through to the Roman period are described.
Social archaeology emerged in the twentieth century, as social diversity within nation states bec... more Social archaeology emerged in the twentieth century, as social diversity within nation states became a concern in the modern world. As archaeologists began to shift their attention from description to explanations of cultural change, they came to appreciate the ways in which social dynamics structured the material remains of the past, as well as their contemporary interpretations of the archaeological record. Despite some early skepticism, archaeologists now regularly use inference and analogy to interpret social organization and social relations in extinct cultural systems, and recognize the social context of their work.
If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material... more If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material residue, then one way in which these conditions might be characterized is as the different ways they had enabled the development of different forms of humanness. The historical construction of this diversity is discussed here as the ways that the relationships between humans and things had been performed. This means that the practice of archaeology must question the recent desire to adopt a flat ontology that defines archaeology as the 'discipline of things'. It is argued that it was by means of the performances established between humans and their various objects of concern that different forms of human life were able to define themselves. The implications of this argument for the practice of archaeology are explored.
A critical evaluation of the recent interpretation of aDNA data that link the adoption of domesti... more A critical evaluation of the recent interpretation of aDNA data that link the adoption of domesticated plants and animals across Europe with a migration of human populations from southwest Asia and the Aegean. These data have been used to question previous models that argued for the uptake of farming by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations.
Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the m... more Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the monumental architecture of the Neolithic, in the Heathrow region. The report is based upon extensive excavations in the Perry Oaks area.
Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pus... more Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?
Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the m... more Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the monumental architecture of the Neolithic, in the Heathrow region. The report is based upon extensive excavations in the Perry Oaks area.
SummaryThis paper offers a provisional assessment of the development of settlement in part of Cra... more SummaryThis paper offers a provisional assessment of the development of settlement in part of Cranborne Chase between the Mesolithic and the Late Bronze Age. It builds upon the results of Pitt Rivers' work in this region between 1880 and 1900, as well as more recent excavation and field survey. Special emphasis is placed on three factors: the relationship between activity in this area and settlement both in central Wessex and on the coastal plain; the place of the more prominent ‘public’ monuments in contemporary patterns of settlement and exchange; and the relationship between cemeteries and contemporary living sites. We present the first results from the extensive excavation of two Deverel-Rimbury enclosures and associated barrows, and a new analysis of Pitt Rivers' work on the urnfield at Handley Barrow 24.
The similarity in the form and decoration of Beaker ceramics, and the comparability of many of th... more The similarity in the form and decoration of Beaker ceramics, and the comparability of many of their associations, distributed, albeit intermittently, across Europe and into northern Africa, has long held out the promise that a common origin and a single process of distribution, such as diffusion or human migration, might be identified that would explain the emergence and spread of this ‘cultural’ pattern. This expectation is now further enhanced, in some regions at least, by the recent analysis of the ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from human skeletal remains. This contribution offers an alternative approach to this material, one that treats human activity as the local construction of a form of life which, in some areas of Europe in the third millennium BC, converged upon a commonly expressed set of expectations about how some aspects of the world might operate.
The Darwinian theory of evolution states that changes in heritable variability are directed towar... more The Darwinian theory of evolution states that changes in heritable variability are directed towards adaptive fitness by natural selection. This theory has provided archaeology with both the means to investigate human evolution and the logic by which to analyse the development of material cultural traditions. It is also an evolutionary theory that has recently been questioned by treating organisms, populations, and ecologies as developmental systems. One result of this has been to see living systems as symbiotic processes, a development in evolutionary theory that works against the intellectual dichotomy separating the biological and the social sciences. Evolution is the process that enables internally generated change to occur in an organization over time. Most firmly associated with changes in systems of biological organization, evolutionary theories have impacted upon three different areas of archaeological research. They have provided for an increasingly refined understanding of the development of anatomically and behaviourally modern humans alongside the histories of our nearest hominin relatives, they have informed an understanding of the processes that might have resulted in different sequences of material cultural change where those changes have been taken to represent the transmission of traditions of behaviour, and they have been used to evoke a logic in the development between different scales of social organization. The first two of these areas have variously drawn upon the neo-Darwinian expression of what has been identified as the modern Darwinian synthesis, whereas the application of Darwinism to sequences of social development has been more contentious. It is therefore important that we begin by clarifying the neo-Darwinian principles that have found application in the archaeology of human and cultural evolution before considering the extent to which those principles have themselves come under review.
A critical consideration of some recent concerns with the 'flat ontology' between living and non-... more A critical consideration of some recent concerns with the 'flat ontology' between living and non-living things
Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material c... more Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material conditions that made the presence of a kind of humanness possible? This paper attempts to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between these two options and argues the case for, and briefly contemplates the practical implications of, an archaeology of the human presence. Archaeology's propensity to range across a variety of theoretical approaches, from the positivism of the new archaeology, through structuralism, post-structuralism and phenomenology, and on to the current concerns with the extended mind, network theory and the new materialism, and all within a period of fifty or so years, has been taken as indicative of an intellectual posturing that detracts from the 'real' business of doing archaeology (Bintliff 2011 and 2015). This criticism seems, to me at least, to miss the point. All these theoretical approaches are no more than ways to think about the same fundamental question: why do we do archaeology? They allow us to evaluate what we are attempting to bring into view by our study of the material residues of the past. The means by which we establish the object of our studies are not the same means as those that we must employ to achieve such an objective. It has been the failure to distinguish between our definition of what we are studying from the question of how we intend to study it that has resulted in the various theoretical approaches appearing as if they were needless methodological distractions rather than the essential mechanisms that will open-up perspectives on the reality that is the objective of our studies. This confusion between objective and method, which is expressed by the assumption that the objective of archaeology is given by the current methodology, continues to have a detrimental effect upon wider perceptions of the discipline. Most outside observers, along with all too many practitioners, define archaeology in the banal terms of digging, discovery of old things, and the physical analysis of those things (cf. Thomas 2004, 67-9). It is from this perspective that the history of archaeology is written as the development of techniques of recovery and material analysis. This consigns archaeology to the role of antiquarianism, the relevance of which for many contemporary concerns seems marginal at best. Such a negative perception surely contrasts with the more challenging view that archaeology could offer of itself, namely as an enquiry into the full chronological and global extent of humanity's place in history.
This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will ass... more This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will assign agency both to humans and to things. My case is that living and non-living things should be distinguished, and for archaeology to be particularly concerned with the ways different qualities of humanness have been constituted in the symbiotic relationships between homo sapiens and other living and non-living things.
The paper presents the second part of an account of archaeological investigations at Perry Oaks S... more The paper presents the second part of an account of archaeological investigations at Perry Oaks Sludge Works, Heathrow, themselves part of a project to create an understanding of human inhabitation of the landscape and to develop a site narrative. The development of the landscape from the Bronze Age through to the Roman period are described.
Social archaeology emerged in the twentieth century, as social diversity within nation states bec... more Social archaeology emerged in the twentieth century, as social diversity within nation states became a concern in the modern world. As archaeologists began to shift their attention from description to explanations of cultural change, they came to appreciate the ways in which social dynamics structured the material remains of the past, as well as their contemporary interpretations of the archaeological record. Despite some early skepticism, archaeologists now regularly use inference and analogy to interpret social organization and social relations in extinct cultural systems, and recognize the social context of their work.
If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material... more If archaeology is the examination of historical conditions with reference to a surviving material residue, then one way in which these conditions might be characterized is as the different ways they had enabled the development of different forms of humanness. The historical construction of this diversity is discussed here as the ways that the relationships between humans and things had been performed. This means that the practice of archaeology must question the recent desire to adopt a flat ontology that defines archaeology as the 'discipline of things'. It is argued that it was by means of the performances established between humans and their various objects of concern that different forms of human life were able to define themselves. The implications of this argument for the practice of archaeology are explored.
A critical evaluation of the recent interpretation of aDNA data that link the adoption of domesti... more A critical evaluation of the recent interpretation of aDNA data that link the adoption of domesticated plants and animals across Europe with a migration of human populations from southwest Asia and the Aegean. These data have been used to question previous models that argued for the uptake of farming by indigenous hunter-gatherer populations.
Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the m... more Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the monumental architecture of the Neolithic, in the Heathrow region. The report is based upon extensive excavations in the Perry Oaks area.
Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pus... more Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?
Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the m... more Describes the transformation of the hunter-gatherer landscape into a landscape dominated by the monumental architecture of the Neolithic, in the Heathrow region. The report is based upon extensive excavations in the Perry Oaks area.
SummaryThis paper offers a provisional assessment of the development of settlement in part of Cra... more SummaryThis paper offers a provisional assessment of the development of settlement in part of Cranborne Chase between the Mesolithic and the Late Bronze Age. It builds upon the results of Pitt Rivers' work in this region between 1880 and 1900, as well as more recent excavation and field survey. Special emphasis is placed on three factors: the relationship between activity in this area and settlement both in central Wessex and on the coastal plain; the place of the more prominent ‘public’ monuments in contemporary patterns of settlement and exchange; and the relationship between cemeteries and contemporary living sites. We present the first results from the extensive excavation of two Deverel-Rimbury enclosures and associated barrows, and a new analysis of Pitt Rivers' work on the urnfield at Handley Barrow 24.
The similarity in the form and decoration of Beaker ceramics, and the comparability of many of th... more The similarity in the form and decoration of Beaker ceramics, and the comparability of many of their associations, distributed, albeit intermittently, across Europe and into northern Africa, has long held out the promise that a common origin and a single process of distribution, such as diffusion or human migration, might be identified that would explain the emergence and spread of this ‘cultural’ pattern. This expectation is now further enhanced, in some regions at least, by the recent analysis of the ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from human skeletal remains. This contribution offers an alternative approach to this material, one that treats human activity as the local construction of a form of life which, in some areas of Europe in the third millennium BC, converged upon a commonly expressed set of expectations about how some aspects of the world might operate.
The Darwinian theory of evolution states that changes in heritable variability are directed towar... more The Darwinian theory of evolution states that changes in heritable variability are directed towards adaptive fitness by natural selection. This theory has provided archaeology with both the means to investigate human evolution and the logic by which to analyse the development of material cultural traditions. It is also an evolutionary theory that has recently been questioned by treating organisms, populations, and ecologies as developmental systems. One result of this has been to see living systems as symbiotic processes, a development in evolutionary theory that works against the intellectual dichotomy separating the biological and the social sciences. Evolution is the process that enables internally generated change to occur in an organization over time. Most firmly associated with changes in systems of biological organization, evolutionary theories have impacted upon three different areas of archaeological research. They have provided for an increasingly refined understanding of the development of anatomically and behaviourally modern humans alongside the histories of our nearest hominin relatives, they have informed an understanding of the processes that might have resulted in different sequences of material cultural change where those changes have been taken to represent the transmission of traditions of behaviour, and they have been used to evoke a logic in the development between different scales of social organization. The first two of these areas have variously drawn upon the neo-Darwinian expression of what has been identified as the modern Darwinian synthesis, whereas the application of Darwinism to sequences of social development has been more contentious. It is therefore important that we begin by clarifying the neo-Darwinian principles that have found application in the archaeology of human and cultural evolution before considering the extent to which those principles have themselves come under review.
A critical consideration of some recent concerns with the 'flat ontology' between living and non-... more A critical consideration of some recent concerns with the 'flat ontology' between living and non-living things
Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material c... more Do archaeologists recover the material record of past processes or the residues of the material conditions that made the presence of a kind of humanness possible? This paper attempts to emphasize the importance of distinguishing between these two options and argues the case for, and briefly contemplates the practical implications of, an archaeology of the human presence. Archaeology's propensity to range across a variety of theoretical approaches, from the positivism of the new archaeology, through structuralism, post-structuralism and phenomenology, and on to the current concerns with the extended mind, network theory and the new materialism, and all within a period of fifty or so years, has been taken as indicative of an intellectual posturing that detracts from the 'real' business of doing archaeology (Bintliff 2011 and 2015). This criticism seems, to me at least, to miss the point. All these theoretical approaches are no more than ways to think about the same fundamental question: why do we do archaeology? They allow us to evaluate what we are attempting to bring into view by our study of the material residues of the past. The means by which we establish the object of our studies are not the same means as those that we must employ to achieve such an objective. It has been the failure to distinguish between our definition of what we are studying from the question of how we intend to study it that has resulted in the various theoretical approaches appearing as if they were needless methodological distractions rather than the essential mechanisms that will open-up perspectives on the reality that is the objective of our studies. This confusion between objective and method, which is expressed by the assumption that the objective of archaeology is given by the current methodology, continues to have a detrimental effect upon wider perceptions of the discipline. Most outside observers, along with all too many practitioners, define archaeology in the banal terms of digging, discovery of old things, and the physical analysis of those things (cf. Thomas 2004, 67-9). It is from this perspective that the history of archaeology is written as the development of techniques of recovery and material analysis. This consigns archaeology to the role of antiquarianism, the relevance of which for many contemporary concerns seems marginal at best. Such a negative perception surely contrasts with the more challenging view that archaeology could offer of itself, namely as an enquiry into the full chronological and global extent of humanity's place in history.
This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will ass... more This contribution responds to recent calls to establish a ‘symmetrical archaeology’ that will assign agency both to humans and to things. My case is that living and non-living things should be distinguished, and for archaeology to be particularly concerned with the ways different qualities of humanness have been constituted in the symbiotic relationships between homo sapiens and other living and non-living things.
Archaeological Dialogues, Volume 23, Issue 2 December 2016
Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pus... more Contemporary archaeology seems to be marked by a questioning of the limits of interpretation, pushing for a radical change in the way we conceptualize our engagement with the past, the material and the world we live in: from archaeologies of affect, to new materialist approaches or calls to political engagement, practitioners seem to experiment with new questions and theoretical tools. As Artur Ribeiro points out in his contribution to the following collection of papers, ‘“new” has become the new normal’. But the question is, what are we trying to do with these experiments and what do we expect from archaeology in a world that is undergoing major changes and challenges?
PREVIEW contents, foreword, introduction: click link under files or more info
This book recons... more PREVIEW contents, foreword, introduction: click link under files or more info
This book reconsiders how we can understand archaeology on a grand scale by abandoning the claims that material remains stand for the people and institutions that produced them, or that genetic change somehow caused cultural change. Our challenge is to understand the worlds that made great projects like the building of Stonehenge or Mycenae possible. The radiocarbon revolution made the old view that the architecture of Mycenae influenced the building of Stonehenge untenable. But the recent use of 'big data' and of genetic histories have led archaeology back to a worldview where 'big problems' are assumed to require 'big solutions'.
Making an animated plea for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions, the authors consider how life was made possible by living in the local and materially distinct worlds of the period. By considering how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead, we learn about the kinds of identities that people constructed for themselves. Stonehenge did not require an architect from Mycenae for it to be built, but the builders of Stonehenge and Mycenae would have shared a mutual recognition of the kinds of humans that they were, and the kinds of practices these monuments were once host to.
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Papers by John C Barrett
This book reconsiders how we can understand archaeology on a grand scale by abandoning the claims that material remains stand for the people and institutions that produced them, or that genetic change somehow caused cultural change. Our challenge is to understand the worlds that made great projects like the building of Stonehenge or Mycenae possible. The radiocarbon revolution made the old view that the architecture of Mycenae influenced the building of Stonehenge untenable. But the recent use of 'big data' and of genetic histories have led archaeology back to a worldview where 'big problems' are assumed to require 'big solutions'.
Making an animated plea for bottom-up rather than top-down solutions, the authors consider how life was made possible by living in the local and materially distinct worlds of the period. By considering how people once built connections between each other through their production and use of things, their movement between and occupancy of places, and their treatment of the dead, we learn about the kinds of identities that people constructed for themselves. Stonehenge did not require an architect from Mycenae for it to be built, but the builders of Stonehenge and Mycenae would have shared a mutual recognition of the kinds of humans that they were, and the kinds of practices these monuments were once host to.