Circuits of reproduction: the opportunities and power to change

Circuits of reproduction: the opportunities and power to change Manuscript to be published in: Beyond heterogeneities: New perspectives on social and cultural diversity from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin. Edited by Kata Furholt, Margaux L.C. Depaermentier, Michael Kempf, and Martin Furholt. DOI: 10.59641/vl0230ox -----------------------------------------Abstract Understanding the role human agency and interaction play in the flows of history is fundamentally important to archaeological inquiry, yet conceptualising and exposing mechanisms of historical transformations on a human-scale remain woefully distant. Archaeology is well equipped to study history as sequences of transformative events linked together loosely by the thread of time, or as a continuous process of everyday life where time serves as a function of cultural persistence. Prioritising transformative events, however, often ignores the underlying political discourses that necessitated and engendered change, as well as those that failed to do so. Similarly, focusing on continuous flows of mundane and habitual practice conceals the potentially fateful effect of human agency. In this chapter, I articulate empirical data on contemporary political discourse about gun violence and death with theoretical considerations of the mechanisms and circumstances of indigenous social change. In so doing, I offer an agent-centred and human-scale approach to examine historical transformations through mortuary analysis. In the first half of the chapter, I reflect on contemporary politics and I highlight a number of factors of political discourse critical for understanding their social and political consequences. Building on such insights, I then outline an approach centring on the politics of death and Anthony Giddens’ largely overlooked combustion engine of social change, the ‘circuit of reproduction’. In the remainder of the chapter, I turn towards the case of the Bronze Age community of Kajászó, Hungary (ca. 2000-1500 BCE). Archaeological investigations at the cremation cemetery of Kajászó-Keskeny dűlő recovered materialities of political discourse between community members negotiating change and persistence during the terminal phase of the community. Using the evidence from Kajászó, I present some important implications of the outlined analytical approach for mortuary archaeology foregrounding historical contingency, political discourse and agency of participating social actors. Introduction Social change is often perceived as an earthquake shattering structured and institutionalised landscapes of human-material relations. It usually becomes recognised and perceived as an event (cf. Sewell 2005), a single and synchronous episode affecting multiple intersecting spheres of life and leading to the fundamental reconfiguration of social structures and institutions. Thus, in retrospect, social change becomes associated with detectable and definite adjustments, shifts or disruptions in social, economic and political practice and relations. In contrast, social change rarely becomes discernible and comprehensible as a process observing it directly in the moment. This scalar discrepancy in perceptions of history and social change – elusive in its process but visceral and consequential in its effect – is acutely present in archaeology. Archaeology is well equipped to study history either as sequences of transformative events linked together loosely by the thread of time, or as a continuous process of everyday life where time serves as a function of cultural persistence. On a macro-scale, archaeology possesses the ability to paint 1 grand syntheses of flows of history with a broad brush (Hodder 2000, 31). It helps to understand spans of time beyond human experience and comprehension by offering insight into sweeping reconfigurations of human-material relations and revealing varied articulations of enduring social, political and economic institutions (Earle 2003). In these narratives, historical transformations are regularly identified as events (Beck et al. 2007), which are understood better through their effect than through their causality and content. Such eventful interpretations of historical processes, however, are rooted in minute material residues of mundane acts of everyday life. Micro-scale observations – inherent in archaeological research – allow a glimpse into fine-grained temporal sequences of histories and everyday experiences of past social actors. However, these distinct historiographies rarely become synchronised (Kristiansen 2008, 14), and in the process of constructing archaeological narratives of change, insufficient attention has been given to the roles that human agency and interactions played in long-term transformations (Hodder 2000, 22). To bridge the gap between the flows of history and human agency and interaction, most archaeological approaches employ statistical abstraction of material diversity and historical contingency, obscuring such hallmark signatures of human agency. To provide more meaningful accounts of social change, archaeologists need to detect instances of political discourse about change and assess the ways in which human agency affects the course of history and gives shape to change (Johnson 2000, 211). Accordingly, in this pursuit of mechanisms of social change, I view agency through its implications of power and politics (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Giddens 1984; Johansen and Bauer 2011; Sewell 2005). Agency, from this perspective, refers to the capacity of knowledgeable social actors to engage in heterodoxic activities; to reinterpret and mobilise resources in innovative and creative ways; and, in so doing, depart from cultural schemas – meanings, rules and regulations informing social life – that initially structured such action. Exercising control over the production, circulation and consumption of materialities of political discourse, social actors have the capacity to shape the actions and perceptions of others, and by doing so, shape the structural conditions of their realities. By applying such restrictions on agency vis-à-vis human action, one can avoid diluting its analytical utility to examine the role social actors play in historical transformations. With such implications of human agency in mind, I turn to political discourse about gun control in contemporary US society, as it offers important insights to conceptualise circuits of reproduction – a critical condition of social change. In the second half of the chapter, I explore the archaeological applicability of this analytical framework. Perceptions of change: the limitations of scale When on June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States of America ruled marriage an undeniable right of all American citizens was an event (cf. Sewell 2005). It changed the lives and relations of many by allowing them to enter the social, legal and financial contract of marriage. The event had a cascading effect reaching multiple segments and domains of society, which is well represented in the diverse political discourse in its aftermath. The event was highly publicised and materialised by people from all walks of life and in a wide variety of genres. Too much emphasis on transformative events, however, can lead us to believe that history is just one damned thing after another. Such an eventful understanding of change considers history from a structural and systemic perspective. Social structure is understood as an arbitrary framework of meanings, rules and regulations (Roseberry 1989, 8). It encapsulates human practice until it can no longer hold and explodes under the pressure of contradictions between the ideal social norms 2 and the lived realities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 26). Social change, therefore, seems to take a step-like form, constituting seemingly stable and unchanging longer periods and shorter periods of rapid structural transformations. In Clifford Geertz’s words, ‘[t]he history of a great civilization can be depicted as a series of major events – wars, reigns, and revolutions – which, whether or not they shape it, at least mark major changes in its course. […] [This] sort of historiography tends to present history as a series of bounded periods, more or less distinct units of time characterised by some special significance of their own’ (Geertz 1980, 5). Such a structural and eventful approach to history often seems to be self-evident because most of social progress and interaction are doomed to remain invisible, hidden from the observer with no durable and recognisable rearrangement of human-material relations. The tireless, decades-long effort and daily struggles of human rights activists and members of the LGBTQ+ community to upset the status quo were dwarfed by the decision of the Supreme Court, and by the widely broadcast – materialised – announcement of the president of the USA. However, the invisibility and lack of immediate and discernible consequence of most political negotiation to upset the existing status quo is neither predetermined nor self-evident. This is tragically apparent in the distinct sociopolitical consequences of mass shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut (Sandy Hook); the Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, NV (Las Vegas); the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, TX (First Baptist); and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL (Stoneman Douglas) (Table 1). These occurrences reveal important factors about change and stasis and about the ways in which they affected political discourse over gun control. Measuring change: the efficacy of human agency Due to the nearly universal spread of social networks and the Internet, big data and data science provide extraordinary new sources of information and analytical methods for social scientists (Brady 2019). For example, aggregate search queries – supported by a number of online platforms (e.g. Google Trends) – provide data to gauge not only what the public cares about, but also to measure the intensity and endurance of civic engagement. Online search is an active form of information acquisition, and it presumes the searcher (actor) has some degree of prior knowledge and motivation for interpersonal engagement (Granka 2013, 272). Studies of Internet use vis-à-vis politics have demonstrated a positive association between high levels of political self-efficacy and online surveillance of political issues (e.g. Kaye and Johnson 2002). Individuals who felt more strongly that they could effect change in government were more likely to keep up with and seek out political information online (Robertson 2018, 55). Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that trends in online search queries centring on certain political issues reliably track their prominence in public consciousness (Granka 2013). In sum, online information-seeking behaviour can be considered a reliable proxy for political discourse. Through diachronic and quantitative assessment of online search traffic, one can measure the durability and intensity of public discourse over politicised issues. Undoubtedly, there are numerous characteristics of the tragic occurrences of death mentioned above that set them apart, and to expose them would require a nuanced sociopolitical analysis not feasible within the confines of this chapter. However, focusing on the ways in which these tragedies affected political discourse offers valuable insights into the necessary material conditions for effectuating social change (Figure 1). Even a brief comparison of the intensity and endurance of political engagement these mass shootings triggered seems to defy logic. The discrepancy is further highlighted if we consider two related occurrences: President Barack 3 Obama’s speech on gun control on January 16, 2013 (Obama speech) and the March for Our Lives protest (MFOL) on March 24, 2018, organised by surviving high school students of the Stoneman Douglas shooting. Figure 1 illustrates changing interest in gun control over time in the USA based on metadata of Google Search queries for ‘gun control’ (Google Trends 2018) between Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas. Values along the Y axis represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given time period. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. For better visualisation, data between April 1, 2013, and September 30, 2017, have been omitted from the graph. As can be seen in Figure 1, there were three extreme peaks in the intensity of political discourse regarding gun control in the past decade, and the direct aftermath of the tragedy at Sandy Hook is not one of them, nor is the fifth-deadliest mass shooting in US history, at the First Baptists Church, on November 5, 2017. The three extreme peaks include the Obama speech and the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas and the Stoneman Douglas shootings. The difference in the endurance of the effect of these tragedies on political discourse is also striking. Public engagement dwindled in a week or so in all cases, except for the aftermath of Stoneman Douglas. The level of media exposure of surviving Stoneman Douglas high school students, which was further amplified by their situational authority as surviving witnesses, generated unprecedented durability in political discourse related to gun control. In fact, MFOL protest – organised by survivors of Stoneman Douglas – activated a level of political engagement and awareness that surpassed such effect in the aftermath of the violent death of twenty young children and six adult caretakers at Sandy Hook. Another important aspect of political discourse on gun control is how it contributes to social change regarding the importance of firearms in US identities and politics. Polling data on gun control laws, reaching back to the early 1990s, provide surprising results (Figure 2). Despite the appearance and pervasiveness of Internet-based media and virtually unlimited access to information, and despite a significant increase in the deadliness1 and frequency of mass shootings, stricter gun control laws were significantly more popular three decades ago than they are now, and comprehensive federal gun control laws to curtail this epidemic are nowhere in sight. Although these modern examples of political discourse and social change – or the lack of it – seem to be far removed from archaeological investigations of prehistoric and archaic societies explored in the present volume, they raise important questions regarding the mechanisms of change and persistence. What is common among circumstances that prompt extreme intensity in political discourse? Why is there a significant discrepancy between the amplitude and endurance of political discourse in the aftermath of such tragic events? What made the survivors of Stoneman Douglas more consequential agents of change than the President of the United States? Envisioning change: theories of structuration Historical analyses necessitate unravelling of political discourse and relations between actors and durable structures to explore ways histories acquire shape and texture through continuous flows of action (Wolf 1982, 23). Therefore, historical research revolves around the dichotomies of structure and agency, the habitual and the political, or enduring institutions and quotidian 1 Based on publicly available data, 11 of the 25 deadliest mass shootings on record since 1966 in the USA occurred within the past five years (Statista 2022). 4 practical politics, and strives to explore the role of social actors in change and persistence. Most anthropological frameworks attempting to transcend these dichotomies can be traced back to the theory of structuration (Giddens 1984) and the concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977). The theory of structuration, and derivative theories of practice (Ortner 1984), emphasise ongoing practice of knowledgeable social actors, through which they continuously produce and reproduce structures, which in turn both enable and restrict social action. Despite its wide applicability, the theory of structuration has been criticised for being too abstract, for ignoring and obfuscating material processes, and for its inability to elucidate indigenous change (e.g. Beck et al. 2007; Preucel 2006). Furthermore, the emphasis on mundane acts of everyday life impedes our understanding of the efficacy of individual decisions in advancing, negotiating and contesting social change (Brumfiel 2011). As Sahlins (2002, 23) warned, we must avoid translating the apparently trivial into fatefully political by giving special attention to the articulation of the habitual and the political. To better understand the role and weight of human agency in engendering social change, anthropological research turned towards establishing the socio-historical or spatio-temporal contexts of political discourse2, instances of practical realisation of cultural categories in specific historical contexts (Sahlins 1985). Such encounters of contradictory consciousness (Gramsci et al. 1971, 333) – the recognition of divergence between what the world is and what it should be – manifest in condensed political discourse when the quotidian takes on an explicit political significance and simultaneously becomes marked (cf. Keane 2010), materialised and detectable against the backdrop of habitual processes of everyday life. Political discourse, in this sense, manifest in cooperative acts or resistance to structures of power by a variety of social actors as willing and active, intentional and conscious participants in diverse interdependent relationships and institutions. Aside from myriad historical contingencies of the above-mentioned mass shootings, they present an important parallel that helps explain their recurring effect on ongoing political discourse about gun control. They were instances of contradictory consciousness, moments of reckoning with the inefficiencies of social institutions, rules and regulations to effectively protect human lives. Such realisation is especially striking upon the death of children. As expected, against the backdrop of a constant but low-level political engagement about gun control, a significant increase in the intensity of political discourse could be measured in the immediate aftermath of each occurrence (see Figure 1). Scrutiny of the data, however, reveals important anomalies, namely the oversized intensity and – in case of the latter – unprecedented endurance of political engagement engendered by the Obama speech and the MFOL protests. Illuminating the mechanisms of social change, these examples highlight four critical factors of political discourse: (1) path dependence; (2) the situational authority of (3) knowledgeable social actors; and the (4) material conditions of political discourse. Mechanisms of change: socio-historical conditions of political discourse Meanwhile, most everyday occurrences can be shown to have major and unpredictable consequences at a certain scale; every act is part of a sequence of actions and the scale and directionality of its effects are profoundly dependent upon its place within that sequence, a condition referred to as path dependence in historical sociology (cf. Mahoney 2000; Sewell 2 This turn towards the political can be identified in political ecology (Johansen and Bauer 2011), ritual economy (Wells and Davis-Salazar 2007; Wells and McAnany 2008), historical processualist (Beck et al. 2007; Sahlins 1985; Sewell 2005), and pragmatic anthropological (Preucel 2006) approaches. 5 2005,100). Accordingly, the effects of a given occurrence may be magnified, compounded and broadcast or, alternatively, nullified and deflected by previous, subsequent or simultaneous happenings. Both the Obama speech and the initiation of the MFOL protests took place a month after mass shootings (at Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas, respectively). Although, these acts of political engagement were not themselves instances of contradictory consciousness, their political effect was a function of their temporal proximity to such occurrences. To better understand the social consequences of political action and the efficacy of human agency, one must consider their social temporalities at the scale where human action takes place and is perceived. Temporality of political discourse, however, does not provide an adequate explanation for the increased endurance of political discourse triggered by Stoneman Douglas and the related MFOL protests. Recent approaches to politics and power build on the understanding that – due to the dispersion and fluidity of power in societies – the process of political control is never complete and that, inevitably, enactment of power creates frictions (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 17). Implications of this analytical stance include shifting attention from sustained control over human-material relations to situational capacity of persons to enter into a play of power and manipulate culturally embedded social rules (cf. Wolf 1999, 5). Within such dispersed and amorphous manifestations of power, social actors with thorough and indisputable understanding and experience of instances of contradictory consciousness are able to gain situational authority, a contingent and context-specific power to set the agenda for public discourse over politicised issues. Political acts of surviving witnesses of Stoneman Douglas manifested in public engagement regarding gun control with previously unprecedented durability (see Figure 1). Despite their young age and political inexperience, these witnesses’ demands for stricter regulation resonated with larger percentage of the American population than did similar demands made by arguably one of the most powerful individuals in the world. Recognising situational authority is critical to detect instances when political actors navigate, negotiate, consent or contest the taken-for-granted, the status quo. Mechanisms of change: material conditions of political discourse What set survivors of Stoneman Douglas apart from survivors of Sandy Hook is that they acted as knowledgeable social actors proficient in manipulating readily available and hard-tocontrol digital media of communication and were thus capable of direct engagement in political discourse (Bromwich 2018; Kosoff 2018; Ohlheiser and Epstein 2018). As a Washington Post columnist put it at the time, ‘[t]he Parkland kids are rising to the occasion because they have to and because they have the skills. The Columbine High School shooting took place before social media, and the Sandy Hook survivors were too young’ (Fowler 2018). The consequences and the efficacy of human agency are inextricably linked to the material conditions that they invoke. An integrated approach to material culture triangulating materiality, materialism and materialisation offers useful vocabulary to clarify (Earle 2013). Materiality is the quality of being physical, durable and manipulable. Materiality is critical to understand the ways in which intersubjective exchanges become social – real – and simultaneously imbue objects and material contexts with meaning and value. Materialism argues that physical conditions of resources, technology and cultural objects determine and are determined by social and political relations of power. Access to materiality enables or limits social action and determines the effect of human agency. Finally, materialisation is the process though which social actors construct and manage meaning and structure social relationships. It refers to the transformation of worldviews, values, stories, 6 identities and the like into physical realities, comprehensible media of communication, and enduring mnemonic devices that can preserve, broadcast and carry social meaning. Approaches to politics and power often acknowledge the ways in which certain forms of materiality are privileged as dominant media of communication accessible to and controlled by the elite, while others are neglected (Miller 2005, 19). Limiting or allowing people’s access to media to materialise ongoing negotiations of cultural norms and social identities is operational in politics of power (Earle 2004, 112). In his study of the Mankon chiefdom in the Grassfields region of Cameroon, Michael Rowlands (2005, 80) draws attention to hierarchical materiality – a condition of unequal access to materialities for self-actualisation – and points out that one’s ability to become fully material is not solely a factor of access to resources but also contingent upon active participation in practical activity, which, in turn, can be limited or eliminated altogether. Such control, however, can be overcome by creative consumption and manipulation of hard-to-control materialities of the everyday. For example, Mark Hauser (2008) showed how production, distribution and consumption of locally produced utilitarian clay pots generated the necessary material condition of communication among the enslaved that ultimately led to the organisation of the 1831 emancipation war in Jamaica. Therefore, to move beyond detection of obvious markers of political discourse, the assessment of quotidian practices and habitual relations is necessary to identify alternative means of political discourse and to contextualise their meaning. With no enduring and privileged material residues, minor ruptures of social structure are limited in their spatial and temporal consequence and thus remain hardly recognised, with no fateful social effect (Sewell 2005, 7). To put it in other words, most political interactions remain micro-scale, culturally non-existent and therefore historically inconsequential. Consequently, history often appears as a sequence of major events, often referred to as ‘turning points’ or ‘watersheds’ associated with particular dates and assigned to prominent actors. The above examples, however, highlight that the alignment of certain conditions not only enhances the efficacy of human agency engendering indigenous change, but can offer a valuable insight into the ways histories acquire shape and texture. Such ‘engines of change’ are defined here as sequences of historically situated and interrelated instances of condensed political discourse – occurrences of contradictory consciousness – where knowledgeable social actors acquire situational authority and engage in the materialisation of values and beliefs through creative, divergent and heterodoxic processes of production and consumption. Engines of change: funerals as circuits of reproduction There is an underdeveloped and overlooked element of Giddens’ theory of structuration, which encapsulates the above-outlined conditions of indigenous change. Giddens describes particular moments of potential structural transformation – circuits of reproduction – that become ‘implicated in the “stretching” of institutions across space and time. […] They serve indeed to indicate some of the main forms of change involved in the transition from one type of social totality to another’ (Giddens 1984, 190-191). Giddens also notes that this particular situation involves the ‘clustering of institutionalized practices across space and time’ (Ibid, 190), and highlights that ‘reflexive monitoring of action in situations of copresence as the main anchoring feature of social integration, but both the conditions and the outcomes of situated interaction stretch far beyond those situations as such’ (Ibid, 191). Disguised by Giddens’ impenetrable 7 prose, circuits of reproduction3 define situations of high-density public and political interaction articulating various social and economic institutions and accompanied by reflexive selfawareness of knowledgeable actors. It is in these encounters, Giddens states, where effects of human-material interaction can reach beyond their immediate context and can engender structural change. Mechanisms envisioned in circuits of reproduction can be archaeologically detected within the mortuary domain. There are, however, some theoretical limitations embedded in mortuary archaeology that hinder envisioning agency, creativity and political discourse in the mortuary domain, ultimately rendering it apolitical and ahistorical. Despite well-established approaches to mortuary practice promoting the perspectives and the agency of mourners (Pearson 1999), mortuary archaeology seems to be trapped in the ‘fallacy of symbolism’ (Pels 2010, 231). Funerary practice is often conceived as a nomothetic institution, where liturgy is considered a static representation of social identities centring on the wealth and status of the deceased or determined by biological facts, such as age-at-death or sex (cf. Polányi 2022; Schug 2020). Ritual economy – an analytical strategy explaining how in middle-range societies worldview, economy, power and agency interlink in society and social change (Wells and Davis-Salazar 2007; Wells and McAnany 2008) – offers a theoretical framework that helps substantiate funerals as circuits of reproduction. The ritual economy approach privileges both ritual acts and the economic processes of production, allocation and consumption implicated within them. By emphasising the economy of ritual, it expands on the understanding of ritual practice in two important ways. First, it conceptualises ritual participants as intentional and conscious actors engaging in diverse, interdependent social relationships and institutions. Second, it defines the ritual domain as an articulation of varied economic institutions, where ritual practitioners engage in materialisation of values and beliefs for managing meaning and shaping interpretation (Wells 2006, 284). Simultaneously, by stressing the ritual of economy, it recognises the sociopolitical weight of public ritualisation of otherwise quotidian social and economic acts. Enactment of ritual temporarily diverts public attention and resources, constructing an opportunity for social actors to normalise, resist or negate relations of power, legitimise actions and construct narratives about how the world operates (Polányi 2022, 2). Thus, quotidian practices and materialities of everyday life become implicated in ritual practice by taking on indexical forms (cf. Preucel 2006), and – through processes of materialisation – embody and substantiate public and durable propositions. These materialities become tangible proof of moral order, which, in turn, inform sociopolitical and economic relations and everyday life and become habitual, unquestioned, uncontested. Finally, the anthropological concept of liminality (Turner 1969; van Gennep 1909) completes the conceptualisation of mortuary practice as a moment of contradictory consciousness. Communities can be conceptualised as actively constructed contingent webs of social, political and economic relations (Canuto and Yaeger 2000). Death disarticulates such webs of relations by breaking up alliances and reciprocal relations, patterns of interaction, craft and consumption. It exposes contradictions between the social world as habitually constructed and as practically experienced. Liminality induced by death provides room for creativity, improvisations and alternative social arrangements. Attempts to rearticulate relations take form in mortuary ritual. 3 Since Aristotle’s Πολιτικά, circuits of reproduction have been recognized as powerful engines of change. The philosophy of trias politica, the separation of three branches of government – legislative, judiciary, executive – is meant to circumvent the development of circuits of reproduction. In the absence of trias politica, societies are prone to develop authoritative regimes, which can initiate and enact structural changes with a stroke of a pen. 8 Thus, funerals are emotionally charged moments of concentrated attention that invoke the process of reconfiguring a community. This process involves political, discursive and conscious action for materialising propositions, which then circulate socially and endure historically. In the predictable and reliable repetition of death, funerals establish easily recognisable contexts within which ritual practitioners can detect opportunities to act outside the conventions of daily life. Consequently, examining sequences of funerals can inform us about political processes as ritual participants normalise, resist or negate newly formulated relations, legitimise actions and construct new narratives about how the world operates. Archaeology of funerals as circuits of reproduction Conceptualising funerals as circuits of reproduction has important implications for mortuary archaeology. First, conceptualising mortuary practice as the articulation of the habitual and political implies that materialities of funerary practice are derivatives of quotidian humanmaterial relations that become (re)appropriated, manipulated and deployed within the mortuary domain. Funerals – historically contingent moments of political discourse – should be examined contextually against detailed historical trajectories implicated within the framework of economic and social practices and the material conditions of everyday life. Contextualisation of the mortuary domain assists the identification of varied and changing repertoires of material practice that become operational in the politics of death. The ways ritual participants engage with such means of differentiation, culturally embedded or novel, local or external, utilitarian or prestige, set against the quotidian, may present active and creative acts of negotiation engendering change within the mortuary domain. Second, prioritising agency in mortuary analysis implicates funerals as an active domain where ritual participants engage in discursive processes of materialisation. Such an analytic strategy invokes the interpretation of material residues of mortuary practice as signs that are part of larger sets of indexical practice, which proposes that no form of communication has meaning in and of itself and that, instead, meanings are formulated cognitively and realised culturally through human-material interaction. It is an important departure from pursuing trans-historical – and often trans-cultural – laws to define the relationship of signifier (material residue) and signified (social, economic or biological categories). To draw on Richard Parmentier’s (1987) categorisation of signs, funerary assemblages are constituted of signs in history, value-laden objects implicated in social strategies that focus attention on specific historical processes and manifest historical intentionality, as opposed to being signs of history, retrospective and symbolic reflections of the past. Third, conceptualising funerals as historically contingent and discursive moments of contradictory consciousness has transformative implications for cemetery analyses. To support emic understanding and interpretation of material residues of political discourse and agency, burial assemblages should be studied sequentially; repertoires of material practice deployed at funerals must be evaluated relationally and in their spatio-temporal contexts to avoid the assignment of absolute values and trans-historical meanings to materialities of death. The Bronze Age community of Kajászó In the rest of this chapter, I present a case study to illustrate the interpretative consequences of the above-delineated analytical approach to mortuary practice and social change. The Bronze Age community of Kajászó (Hungary) occupied prime agricultural lands suited for cereal crops and herding and was incorporated in a Bronze Age polity along the Váli, a NW-SE tributary of 9 the Danube River (Figure 3). Like the neighbouring Benta Valley, the Váli Valley showed clear signs of political centralisation at the turn of the Early Bronze Age (EBA) and the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) (Earle and Kristiansen 2010; Szeverényi and Kulcsár 2012), a process linked to the organisation of Danubian trade in bronze items, raw materials and secondary animal products during the Bronze Age (Kiss 2011; Earle 2002; Sherratt 1993). The fortified settlement of the community, Kajászó-Várdomb (Kovács, T. 1969; Nováki 2004) is situated 16 km from the Danube, on an elevated plateau at the eastern bank of the Váli Valley (Figure 4). Limited surveys and unpublished probing at the settlement indicate a major MBA occupation, encompassing at least 1.7 ha (Szeverényi and Kulcsár 2012). Clearly visible from the settlement, the cemetery of the community is located on an elevated plateau across the valley, approximately 0.9 km to the west-south-west, encompassing 1.3 ha. At the cemetery, extensive rescue excavations began in 2007 (Kovács, L. 2008). Since then, various excavation campaigns have unearthed more than 220 burials (Figure 5, Table 2). Based on the typochronological data acquired during the rescue excavations, the cemetery and the contemporaneous settlement were likely in use by the Kajászó community during the end of the EBA III and throughout the MBA, between approximately 2000 and 1500 BCE (Kiss et al. 2019; Laabs 2013; Vicze 2011). As part of a research project (Polányi 2018), investigations between 2010 and 2014 were designed to recover complexities, idiosyncrasies and constituting processes of mortuary practice to recover instances of political discourse, human agency and creativity. During two field seasons, 76 cremation burials were excavated, which – except for one – constituted three adjacent grave clusters (Figure 6). Although samples were collected, no radiocarbon dating has yet been completed, due to insufficient funds. Based on typochronological assessment of recovered material assemblages, the burials were dated to the final period of the cemetery, at the turning of Vatya III–Early Koszider (Laabs 2013), or MBA III–IV (Vicze 2011; for broader chronological synchronisation, see Polányi 2022, Fig. 3). As noted previously, establishing links between quotidian practices and material conditions of everyday life and mortuary behaviour helps to assess available and changing means of differentiation – culturally embedded or novel, local or external, utilitarian or prestige – and to detect the ways in which ritual participants manipulated such materialities in the mortuary domain (Table 3). Although previous excavations at Kajászó-Várdomb offer virtually no information about daily life at the settlement, investigations in the neighbouring Benta Valley do provide relevant data. Based on surveys and cursory settlement data, Kajászó and the Váli Valley fit well in our current understanding of social organisation and regional polities (Earle and Kristiansen 2010; Szeverényi and Kulcsár 2012). Communities in this region inhabited fortified tell and tell-like settlements, densely populated open settlements, small hamlets or farms, and hillforts. Communities also used long-lasting, formal and bounded areas for disposal of the dead adjacent to their settlements. Numerous settlements and cemeteries along the Danube River endured for almost a millennium, offering evidence on everyday life and community organisation and attesting to an unparalleled sense of history and spatial belonging, as well as enduring social relations. Such strong transgenerational connection manifested in marked and visible resting places of the ancestors. Household excavations conducted at the tell settlement of Százhalombatta-Földvár provide relevant information on everyday life (Earle and Kristiansen 2010; Sofaer 2011; Sørensen and Vicze 2013). Accordingly, houses referencing households and family units were erected over old ones, suggesting stable family ‘plots’. Also, the fixed position of hearths throughout multiple 10 house construction phases articulated past and present by the stabilising power of fire. Such durable attachment to place through ancestral links signified and anchored households in space. Fire connected food preparation, feasting, destruction of houses and construction of ancestors by cremation. Space and place were likely non-discursive indices of social affiliations and identities. Designation of place by burial or funeral pyres and manipulation of spatial relations of burial features likely became operational in mortuary practice. Analysis of the Benta ceramic economy illuminates regional subsistence and social organisation (Earle et al. 2011). First, the relative frequency of storage vessels at settlements implies autonomous communities producing and storing their own staples. Second, patterns of pottery production and consumption indicate localised commodity chains and enduring potting traditions, connecting local potters and neighbouring farmers. Technological and formal considerations suggest that skilled potters purposefully produced distinctive pottery (Budden and Sofaer 2009). Third, there is evidence that houses were decorated with vessels hung on the walls, which suggests that pottery served as a prominent medium of communication. Present in the routines of everyday life that defined identity, relationships and meaning, local pottery was a significant index of community, social relations and local subsistence (Earle et al. 2011). As a manipulable and hard-to-control means of referencing social and economic relations, pottery likely had a critical role in mortuary practice, which is further accentuated by the strong resemblance between large storage vessels and burial urns and the frequent repurposing of used domestic vessels in the mortuary domain (Polányi 2018, 2022). Following centuries of stability and sociopolitical reproduction of communities, tell settlements and related cemeteries in the region also attest to a broad, sweeping change at the end of the MBA, when most long-inhabited tell settlements were reorganised, communities decreased in density, and all perpetual cemeteries were abandoned (Vicze 2011). Previous explanations of this transformation referencing large-scale migration and warfare have been criticised (see Fischl et al. 2013; Szeverényi and Kulcsár 2012); however, Bronze Age research still owes a comprehensive account of the process. Settlement pattern analysis along the Benta Valley suggests a complicated narrative characterised by more gradual changes culminating in changing economic and social organisation but continuous occupation of the landscape even after the MBA (Earle and Kristiansen 2010). Agency and political discourse at Kajászó Mortuary practice during the EBA III-MBA in central Hungary has been perceived as exceptionally standardised, with multiple recurring attributes (see Sørensen and Rebay 2009; Vicze 2011, the latter with extensive list of references), as follows: (1) Communities buried most of their dead in spatially defined formal cemeteries. (2) Being highly visible, cemeteries were situated in distinctive topographical locations adjacent to settlements. (3) Graves within cemeteries were often ordered within linear or oval shaped groups of ten to fifteen burials or remained unordered. Grave groups are generally considered to represent kin groups. (4) Grave groups and graves rarely cut into each other, suggesting their visibility during the use of the cemetery. (5) Most individuals were cremated, and the cremains were placed in cinerary urns (Figure 7). (6) Urns were covered with one or two bowls and were often accompanied by a small cup. Urns were buried in a standing position in relatively shallow pits. (7) One or a few pyre locations are found in cemeteries, which were likely used repeatedly throughout the use of the cemetery. At first glance, such a level of standardisation of mortuary behaviour would suggest little room for detecting agency and material manifestations of political discourse. Due to our 11 methodological approach, placing equal emphasis on grave locations and areas between graves, fragmentation and distribution patterns of pottery, stratigraphic correlations, and use-wear, we recovered numerous ways in which the Kajászó cemetery defies normative descriptions of Vatya mortuary liturgy and expands our understanding of MBA mortuary behaviours (e.g. Polányi 2015, 2016, 2018). Here, I will discuss three aspects of mortuary behaviour: contestation of space, creation of spatial or social references, and contingent modification of mortuary behaviours. The spatial distribution of burials did not follow any regular pattern but evidenced a fierce contestation over particular areas of the cemetery, representing a scramble for ‘prime real estate’ (Figure 8). Among the 47 graves detected in the southern grave cluster, we uncovered at least 12 partially or fully destroyed burials (26%) – all within a small, ca. 4 × 3 m area. In each case, large fragments of covering bowls and the cinerary urn were found below the depth that we identified as the Bronze Age walking surface. In multiple cases, we also found broken pieces of vessels down to the very bottom of once-existing burial pits. Based on our observations during the excavation, there is no indication of any looting activities after the abandonment of the cemetery. Recent destructive activities were also ruled out because this destruction zone was surrounded by burials with intact covering bowls at a higher elevation. I also identified a relatively high number of coupled burials comprised of two or three asynchronous but directly associated graves (Figure 9). In the southern grave cluster, we found seven coupled burials, one of which had three touching graves in identified stratigraphic relationship. The grave triplet (Graves 9, 41 and 42) provides a particularly stark example of the ways in which funeral participants engaged in mortuary practice (Figure 10). The three graves within the cluster were directly associated with each other. The urn of Grave 9 touched the cover bowl of Grave 41, which in turn touched the urn of Grave 42. We could not only identify the stratigraphic sequence of the graves, but also – based on fragmentation patterns – establish that the burials were not deposited in quick succession during the same funerary occasion. Some time passed between the deposition of Grave 41 and Grave 9, and again between Grave 9 and Grave 42. The primary burial was Grave 41, deposited in the deepest pit, at the centre of the cluster. Grave 9 was deposited next subsequent to a slight collapse of the cover bowl of Grave 41. Grave 42 was deposited on the other side of Grave 41 at some point after its cover bowl collapsed. We also uncovered evidence proving that at the time of the burial of Grave 42, all graves were still visible above the Bronze Age surface. Coupled burials (n=17) account for 23% of the excavated burials (n=75) within the three adjacent burial clusters. The percentage of coupled burials (n=15) for the southern grave cluster (n=47) is 32%, whereas during the 2007 excavations at Kajászó, only 6.5% of the recovered burials were coupled (Kovács 2008). In fact, I have not found comparable frequencies of coupled burials in any other MBA Vatya cemetery. Coupled burials included urns, covering bowls, or both that indicated direct physical contact upon their deposition, also revealing the temporal sequence of the interments. In one case, we found broken pieces of the primary covering bowl of the initial grave assemblage in the bottom of the pit of the subsequent burial, suggesting that the earlier grave was accidentally damaged. In almost all cases, initial grave assemblages showed minimal signs of damage despite direct contact between the vessels, seeming to indicate a knowledge of the placement and extent of earlier burials and a desire to establish physical contact. Finally, the excavation recovered tangible evidence of improvisation and path dependence – that is, modification of mortuary behaviour in response to preceding funerals. The intact 12 assemblage of Grave 28 was found within the destruction zone (Figure 11). This was one of two instances when large slabs of stone were placed on top of the grave. Furthermore, the cinerary urn of Grave 28 was the third-largest urn (⌀ =0.45 m). Despite the considerable size of the assemblage, the burial pit was so deep that the flat surface of stone slabs covering the assemblage aligned exactly with the Bronze Age walking surface. Despite its location, all parts of the assemblage were completely intact. All these lines of evidence point towards a conscious choice made by the ritual practitioners to protect that grave, make it invisible, and ensure its perpetuity even though doing so concealed it. Grave 45, the second burial with a rock covering, was part of the small and isolated burial cluster located between two larger ones. In contrast to Grave 28, Grave 45 did not include an urn or covering bowls but, instead, a small cup placed over a broken base of a large urn located at the bottom of the shallow burial pit (Figure 12). Three large slabs of rock covered the small amount of cremated human remains scattered in the pit. This reveals an alternative way in which ritual practitioners engaged with the use of rocks as protection or means of differentiation. This constellation of rocks and pottery suggests a completely different narrative compared with that of Grave 28. One potential hypothesis interprets the burial as a reparative attempt. After an initial episode of destruction indicated by the broken base of a large cinerary urn and residual cremated remains, mourners reconstructed the grave by placing a small cup in the damaged pit and covered it with three pieces of rock in an effort to delineate the burial and potentially protect it from subsequent damage. An alternative hypothesis interprets it as an altogether improvised burial event in which mourners intentionally constructed a minimalist burial assemblage marked by the creative use of rock as signifier. Discussion Even through this limited glimpse into the cemetery, Kajászó presents exciting and new patterns of mortuary practice that do not conform to previously reported patterns of Vatya mortuary behaviours. An immediate explanation may be that this cemetery was unique in some way. In my opinion it is, however, more likely that limitations inherent in salvage excavations – which account for an overwhelming proportion of Bronze Age cremation cemetery excavations – and/or limiting theoretical frameworks that guide research design and implementation (dis)missed significant levels of variability in Vatya mortuary practices. It is, however, striking that based on the 2007 and current excavations, there is significant variability in the use of space and in the ways in which social relations became materialised through burial practice. Despite the relatively large exposed area, burial densities detected in 2007 were nowhere near close to what we saw during the 2013-2014 excavations. Also, careful assessment of the documentation of the 2007 excavation suggests that there was no comparable level of grave destruction either. The contextual assessment of burial practice – which is hard to establish accurately in the absence of absolute chronological data – provides an interpretative sphere that can guide our evaluation of the spatial and material practice we recovered in rich detail. Based on the ontologies that define not only the parameters of action, but also the contours of social significance and meaning of materialities of mortuary practice, a sense of belonging to the community and gaining authority or identity through that connection was likely materialised through space by constructing a vertical connection with the ancestors, both metaphorically and physically. This significance of the construction of place was clearly indicated by the destruction zone, marking a volatile contestation of identities associated through such vertical connection. The second observation concerns the seemingly haphazard spatial distribution of burials in the 13 southern grave cluster, in contrast with the northern grave cluster – along with distribution patterns detected during the 2007 excavations – which indicates an orderly layout. Such discrepancy in the contestation of space between two adjacent grave clusters is striking and reinforces that there is no singular narrative that can account for the construction of these burial assemblages. The Kajászó excavation also reveals evidence supporting the conceptualisation of mortuary practice as a sequence of occurrences where mortuary practitioners are fully aware of the preceding burial occurrences and strategically or creatively modify material practices. Burials within the destruction zone indicate one such instance. The use of a rock covering in Grave 28, right in the middle of the destruction zone, may represent a creative effort to claim authority over the preconditions of membership in a social group expressed through space. However, digging the burial into a deeper pit and covering it with a flat slab of stone aligned with the surface made the assemblage invisible. The claim was seemingly meant to be permanent, but nonetheless represented a compromise in which the grave ceased to serve as a visible reference of exactly the claim secured by its longevity. Another way in which mortuary participants referenced and drew upon the history of the cemetery was by constructing burials as an extension of existing graves. The grave couples, which were found at high frequency especially in the southern grave cluster, may indicate an imperative to preserve, amplify and extend narratives of death initiated at earlier periods. The direct but cautious contact between earlier and later burials is suggestive of the construction of ancestors in reference to more distant ancestors, creating deep genealogies and intensified claims within the cemetery. The one example of a grave triplet (Graves 9, 41 and 42), with two later burials affixed to one predecessor, may signal a lateral extension or, conversely, a contestation of one claim with another. In any case, the precision of the linking strongly indicates a powerful awareness of and engagement with the cemetery as a continuous site of mindful and intentional activity. Conclusion Mortuary evidence presents a narrative of the Kajászó community approaching its disintegration by the end of the MBA, as indicated by residues of mortuary behaviour recovered during the 2013-2014 excavation campaign. A cacophony of mortuary practice, a clear shift in the use of space compared with earlier periods of the cemetery, and an increased level of engagement through hard-to-control means of differentiation are likely to be manifestations of volatile political discourse about community cohesion and corporate identities. However, the case study presented here merely approximates the resolution of political discourse that would be necessary to illuminate the processes that precipitated the dissolution of the Kajászó community and regional polities. An increase in the sample size of the mortuary analysis, rigorous application of radiocarbon dating, and a simultaneous investigation of the domains of everyday life would likely bring us closer to materialise the full potential of the presented approach to funerals as circuits of reproduction. Within the limitations of this chapter, my goal was to underline the capacity of this approach to detect human agency and political discourse in creative and contingent manipulation and deployment of culturally available repertoires of material practice. Due to archaeological formation processes, such idiosyncrasies of human-material interaction are rarely detected, and when they are, they often become discarded as noise vis-à-vis more robust and cumulative material traces of repetitive behaviours. The mortuary domain, however, is more likely to present 14 fortunate circumstances that both preserve and contextualise such residualities, providing a glimpse into political discourse and social change and persistence on a human-scale. On a more abstract level, I aimed to explore the recursive relationship between how people perceive history and the ways in which archaeologists construct narratives of the past. I find that our limitation to comprehend history in the present or, more specifically, to comprehend processes precipitating sweeping social changes manifest in presumed epistemological limitations of archaeology. Such a pessimistic outlook considers archaeology unlikely to ever achieve the temporal resolution required to expose unfolding sequences of actions that make up an historical event, or to ascertain the efficacy of human agency and its role in precipitating and directing broad social transformations (e.g. Bolender, 2010, 8; Hodder 2000, 31; Hodder 2016, 26). In contrast, I argue, on the one hand, that the explosion of high-resolution empirical data on contemporary political discourse offers an extraordinary resource to better understand and conceptualise mechanisms of social change and persistence, which, in turn, can contribute to refined analytical approaches to historical transformations, and on the other hand, that archaeology has the capacity to identify and assess materialities of interpersonal interactions within virtually unlimited iterations of historical settings, offering a unique perspective to illuminate current processes of political discourse and to improve our understanding of instances of change and – sometimes inexplicable – instances of stasis in modern society. Acknowledgements This paper emerged from the profound sadness and bewilderment I felt again and again following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in late 2012. 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Date Investigation / Institution 2007 # of excavated burials 90 Reference Salvage excavation along utility pipelines / Kovács 2008 Szent István Király Museum 2010 Shovel testing, geophysical survey, test 11 Polányi 2010, Polányi excavation of 37 m² / Northwestern University 2018 2013Geophysical survey, shovel testing, test 65 Polányi 2014, Polányi 2014 excavation of 196 m² / Northwestern University 2018 2020Intermittent salvage excavations / Szent István 60+ Kovács 2021, personal Király Museum communication Table 2. Overview of archaeological investigations at the Bronze Age cemetery of Kajászó. Bronze objects Non-local, easy-to-control means of differentiation Imported vessels Regional pottery Local imitation of non-local pottery Local pottery Hard-to-control means of differentiation derivative of quotidian human-material relations Differential treatment of the body Differential investment (quality and quantity) Spatial differentiation by pyre Spatial differentiation by grave Table 3. Archaeologically detected repertoire of material practice deployed at funerals. 20 Figures Figure 1. Level of interest in gun control based on number of Google Search queries in the USA (Google Trends 2018). Figure 2. Polling data from the last three decades regarding the adequacy of gun regulations in the USA (Gallup 2022). 21 Figure 3. Location of the Kajászó cemetery and Bronze Age settlements along the Váli Valley and the neighbouring Benta Valley (central Hungary). 22 Figure 4. Location of the Bronze Age settlement and cemetery of Kajászó. 23 Figure 5. Map depicting various archaeological campaigns at the Bronze Age cemetery of Kajászó. 24 Figure 6. Typochronological classification of graves uncovered during the 2010 and 2013-2014 excavations. 25 Figure 7. Standardised burial assemblage (illustration: László Gucsi). 26 Figure 8. Map of the ‘destruction zone’ at the Kajászó cemetery. 27 Figure 9. Map of coupled burials at the Kajászó cemetery. 28 Figure 10. Graves 9, 41 and 42, in the southern grave cluster. Figure 11. Grave 28 of the Kajászó cemetery. 29 Figure 12. Grave 45 of the Kajászó cemetery. 30