▪ Abstract This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.

Language and agency

Preface to the first edition Preface to the second edition 1. The problem 2. The systems approach 3. Structuralist archaeology 4. Marxist archaeology, ideology and practice 5. Archaeology and history 6. An ethnohistoric example: reconsideration of ethnoarchaeology and middle range theory 7. Contextual archaeology 8. Post-processual archaeology 9. Conclusion: archaeology as archaeology Bibliography Index.

Reading the past : current approaches to interpretation in archaeology

The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology

Archaeological approaches to social boundaries are currently emphasizing the dynamic nature of processes thought which individuals construct, maintain, and negotiate their identity. Although the integration of such concepts has led to a more accurate reconstruction of past social boundaries, it has also revealed a need for more sophisticated ways of interpreting material culture. This paper is a step in that direction. Focusing on pottery chaines operatoires and addressing questions about the salience and scale of particular behaviors, I seek to develop general propositions regarding the relationships between technological styles and aspects of social identity. To that end, I compare African pottery techniques at a subcontinental level and see whether there are recurrent patterns in their distribution and whether these can be related to specific social boundaries or historical processes of group formation.

Materializing Identities: An African Perspective

In this ground-breaking work, Norman Yoffee shatters the prevailing myths underpinning our understanding of the evolution of early civilisations. He counters the emphasis in traditional scholarship on the rule of 'godly' and despotic male leaders and challenges the conventional view that early states were uniformly constituted bureaucratic and regional entities. Instead, by illuminating the role of slaves and soldiers, priests and priestesses, peasants and prostitutes, merchants and craftsmen, Yoffee depicts an evolutionary process centred on the concerns of everyday life. Drawing on evidence from ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Mesoamerica, the author explores the variety of trajectories followed by ancient states, from birth to collapse, and explores the social processes that shape any account of the human past. This book offers a bold new interpretation of social evolutionary theory, and as such it is essential reading for any student or scholar with an interest in the emergence of complex society.

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Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations

Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.

Agency in Archaeology

Technology is not only the material means of making artifacts, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon embedded in social action, worldviews, and social reproduction. This paper explores the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of technology that is compatible with this definition. Because of its focus on social agency, practice theory provides an appropriate starting point for a social theory of technology. In addition, three other themes require explicit attention: scale, context, and the materiality of technology. Four case studies demonstrate how archaeologists are beginning to take technology beyond its material dimensions, and additional questions are proposed stemming from the theoretical issues raised in the paper. The purpose of this essay is to synthesize a diverse set of emerging ideas and approaches to understand better dynamic community-level social processes of prehistoric material culture production.

Social agency and the dynamics of prehistoric technology

List of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgments. Introduction. 1. Of Black Boxes and Matters Material: The State of Things. 2. Deconstructing the Black Box: Some Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Logos Tekhne. 3. Prying Open the Black Box: Philosophical Insights on Technology and Being. 4. A Synoptic Approach to Technology: Conceptual Contours of a Practice Framework. 5. Social Agency and Practice: The Heart and Soul of Technology. 6. Engendering the Chaine Operatoire: Methodological Issues. 7. A Future for Technologya s Pasts. Notes. References. Index.

Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology

Technological production is a materially grounded arena within which social identities can be defined, expressed and mediated. A focus on the microscale dynamics of social agency manifest in differentiated communities of people involved in material culture production and use draws attention to potential contexts accounting for the kinds of site‐specific technical variability often brushed aside as archaeological ‘noise’. This essay presents the outline of a conceptual framework and methodology for studying the social agency of prehistoric technology with the goal of understanding the dialectic of gendered practices and technical strategies. The main intent is to rethink the concept of technology so as to bring to prominence the artifice of technological activities as socially constituted. A case study considering late Ice Age (Magdalenian) bone and antler technologies practised in the French Midi‐Pyrenees provides grounding for the theoretical discussion.

Gender and prehistoric technology: On the social agency of technical strategies

Archaeologists make use of several different ontologies to research and develop theories about ancient technology. After briefly sketching out central features of mainstream (materialist) technovisions, this essay concentrates on recent ontological trends emphasizing the 'mutual becoming' of people and products. Symbolic and structuralist orientations enable archaeologists to 'see' something of the social values and cognitive structures shaping technological traditions in the deep past. As the question of gender has become an explicit topic of interest, archaeologists are able, at long last, to theorise about ancient technicians as thinking and feeling women and men. To appreciate ancient technology 'as if people mattered', I outline my own preferred ontology--grounded in phenomenology and agency theory. It argues that the ancient technician's body was a mindful, sensual, socially constituted and gendered being making sense of the world--and themself--by working through it. Chaine operatoire data on technical gestures and related strategic choices of artifact manufacture, use, and repair provide the necessary empirical and interpretive link between the making of personhood and the making and use of products within the (ancient) body politic. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Marcia-Anne Dobres

Papers

Agency in Archaeology

Social agency and the dynamics of prehistoric technology

Technology and Social Agency: Outlining a Practice Framework for Archaeology

Gender and prehistoric technology: On the social agency of technical strategies

Archaeologies of technology