Symmetrical archaeology: excerpts of a manifesto

Abstract

This article sketches the project of a symmetrical archaeology in brief. At a point when archaeology has arguably never been more relevant, it finds itself in a climate of necessary plurality where incommensurability is routinely shrugged off as a symptom of diversity; it finds itself in a state where seemingly incompatible differences proliferate on either side of the divide between the humanities and the sciences; it finds itself perplexed by divides between ideas and things, past and present, and so on. A symmetrical archaeology holds that these divides are of our own making. Without over-simplifying the world with an impoverished vocabulary of contradictory bifurcations, a symmetrical archaeology offers a profitable suite of perspectives and practices for recognizing the impact of things and our fellow creatures, ordinarily denied a stake in modernist myths of the world.

Keywords:

• Genealogy
• mediation
• multiple fields
• pragmatogony
• symmetry
• things

Acknowledgements

This article was first aired as a paper in a session entitled ‘Symmetrical Archaeology’ at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference 2005 in Sheffield, UK. In observance of full disclosure, portions of the ‘Fourth matter of concern: change’ were published in Witmore (2007). This point has been slightly re-tailored for inclusion here. I am grateful to Ewa Domanska, Bjørnar Olsen, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, Bradley Sekedat, Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor for conversation and feedback. I also thank the anonymous referees of World Archaeology for some helpful points of clarification. None of the blame for the inadequacies of this article should be attributed to them.