The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Europe and the People without History

In this paper, we analyse some of the issues associated with the posthumanist rejection of Humanism. First, we discuss some of the possibilities and challenges that New Materialism and the Ontological Turn have brought into archaeology in terms of understanding past ontologies and decolonizing archaeological thought. Then, focusing on the concept of agency, we reflect on how its use by some posthumanist authors risks turning it into an empty signifier, which can have ethical implications and limit archaeology's potential for social critique. The concept of things’ effectancy is presented as a valuable alternative to previous conceptualizations of ‘object agency’. While we acknowledge the heuristic potential of many posthumanist proposals, we believe that humanist perspectives should not be rejected altogether. Instead of creating rigid divides, we argue that elements of New Humanism, as recently defined by philosophical anthropology, can hold value when facing current societal challenges.

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Posthumanism, New Humanism and Beyond

Is the ‘material’ or ‘ontological’ turn a major new paradigm in archaeological theory? Or is it another iteration of the cycle of piecemeal innovation which has created a very fragmented discipline? While there are insights from recent scholarship in this vein which are certainly important, this paper will err toward the latter view. Even though ‘symmetrical’ and other object-agency approaches are still growing in mainstream archaeological debate, much of the source literature upon which they draw has been around for several decades, and accumulated a fair amount of critique. At the very least, therefore, we need to learn from the way the materiality debate is playing out in other sub-fields. Beyond that, I will argue, we should go back to the turn before this one—the practice turn—and explore that road a bit more thoroughly, if we are to find the most useful approaches to develop in the future.

Taking the Wrong Turn? Re-examining the Potential for Practice Approaches in Archaeology

Posthumanist or new materialist tools, positions and conversations contain some useful ideas for archaeologists to think with, but others that I find deeply problematic. In this opinion piece, I organize my thoughts around three posthumanist ‘turns’ to objects and materials, relations and assemblages, and non-human animacy. I appreciate how some strands of Posthumanism can help us think more creatively and thoughtfully about relations between humans and non-humans, but I argue against non-anthropocentrism, flat ontology and symmetrical archaeology. Animacy and perspectivism can help remedy colonialist and late-stage capitalist destructive forces, but archaeologists should take care not simply to appropriate, patronize, or re-colonize non-western thinkers. Ultimately, I argue, we should not need continental philosophy to remind us to care about one other, all living creatures and the well-being of our shared planet. What is needed today are ethics, not convoluted turns toward objects.

Ethics, Not Objects

World history is often framed in terms of flows of people: humans coming ‘out of Africa’, the spread of farmers in the Holocene, the disruptions of the ‘Sea Peoples’, or ‘colonisation’ by Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. In this article, the authors argue that world history is also about the flows of objects. To illuminate the impacts of objects on past societies, they introduce the concept of ‘objectscapes’ as a means of writing new kinds of histories of human-thing entanglements, in which objects in motion have roles to play—beyond representation—over both the short and long term. To illustrate, they present examples from two regions at the end of the first millennium BC: southern Germany and northern Syria.

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Objectscapes: a manifesto for investigating the impacts of object flows on past societies

This debate piece offers a critique of some recent ‘new materialist’ approaches and their application to Roman expansionism, particularly those positing that the study of ‘Romanisation’ should be about ‘understanding objects in motion’—a perspective that carries important political and ethical implications. Here, the authors introduce the alternative notion of a ‘predatory’ political economy for conceptualising Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. The aim is to illuminate the darker sides of Roman expansionism in order to produce more balanced and inclusive accounts. Two cases studies—the archaeology of the Roman conquest and of rural communities—illustrate the potential of such a perspective.

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The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

We thank Andrew Gardner, Alicia Jiménez, Lori Khatchadourian and Miguel John Versluys for their comments, and appreciate the opportunity to respond. We are pleased to see that all four commentators stress the importance of archaeological approaches that pay due attention to oppression and violence in the Roman world. We therefore believe that our core argument and its broader significance have been clearly recognised, as summarised in Gardner’s (2020: 1640–1642) remark that “the complexity of the Roman world [...] is indecipherable without connecting the violence with the grandeur, the frontiers with the capital(s), and the enslaved with the free”. At the same time, the respondents also raise a number of important issues and sketch out potential alternative (or complementary) views.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A8527F8A3BBDCF2F167C69A5BAA100BB/S0003598X20002100a.pdf/div-class-title-power-asymmetries-and-how-to-view-the-roman-world-div.pdf

Power, asymmetries and how to view the Roman world

This paper introduces the concept of ‘urban petrification’ in order to assess the peculiar trajectories of early Greek urbanism. It first explores the multiple dimensions of urban space, contrasting different sets of sources and their respective interpretive potential. In a second step, the case study of Metapontum in Magna Graecia (South Italy) is used to illustrate the complex ways in which urban petrification impacted on the creation, usage, perception, and transformation of public and sacred space in Greek cities. Discontinuities and interactions between ‘petrified’ urban fabric, space, and normative discourses can thus be linked to human agency and social tensions. Ultimately, it is argued that petrification, far from being a merely static or fossilizing phenomenon, should be conceived as a major factor in the creation of vibrant urban communities, located at the interface between temporal flow and structural inertia. On a conceptual level, it does not only provide a flexible framework for multi-scalar interpretation, but it also gives us the possibility to move beyond the old bias of Athenocentrism and understand the monumentalization of cities in the Greek world as part of specific urban biographies with their own chronological trajectories and peculiar local histories.

Dominik Maschek

Papers

The dark side of the Empire: Roman expansionism between object agency and predatory regime

Power, asymmetries and how to view the Roman world

Set in stone? Exploring multiple dimensions of petrification in ancient Greek cities