Process archaeology (P-Arch)

Abstract

We advocate a Process Archaeology (P-Arch) which explores modes of becoming rather than being. We advance three theoretical postulates we feel will be useful in understanding the process of becoming. And then six temporal propositions, with the latter arranged from the briefest to the longest timescale. We lay down the basic conceptual foundation of our approach using the example of pottery making and we follow the process of creativity in between the hand of the potter and the affordances of clay. This specific creative entanglement of flow and form on a fast bodily timescale provides our grounding metaphor for an archaeology of becoming over the long term. Subsequent propositions provide the basis for exploring issues of longer-term material engagement and change.

Keywords:

• Process archaeology
• form
• flow
• pottery
• Neolithic
• human becoming
• material engagement

Notes

1 We borrow the term from Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature (2011, 3) where it denotes ‘phenomena whose existence is determined with respect to an essential absence’.

2 For the tensions and contradictions between Process ontologies and OOO see Faber and Goffey (2014).

3 From over 20,000 years ago pots occurred at Xianrendong in the Yangtze river basin (19,300–17,100 BC) and ‘in Japan at Odai Yamamoto, Kubodera-Miniami, Taisho III and many other sites between 15,200–11,900 BC in the Russian Far East, along the Amur River, at sites such as Khummi, Gasya and Gromatukha, between 14,900–10,200 BC; and in the Transbaikal, between 12,300–10,200 BC, at sites such as Ust’-Karenga and Studenoe’ (Hommel, forthcoming).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Gosden

Prof Chris Gosden is currently Chair of European Archaeology, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. He has undertaken archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Sarawak, Turkmenistan and the UK. He has interests in the history of the rainforest, the history of the English landscape, the role and significance of museum collections and human intelligence. He is currently running a project funded by the European Research Council entitled ‘English Landscapes and Identities’. His latest book (with Duncan Garrow) is Technologies of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art 400 BC to AD 100 (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Lambros Malafouris

Dr Lambros Malafouris PhD (Cambridge) is Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture at Keble College and the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. His research interests lie broadly in the archaeology of mind and the philosophy of material culture. His recent publications include How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (MIT Press), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (with Colin Renfrew), Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach(with Carl Knappett) and The Sapient Mind: Archaeology meets Neuroscience (with Colin Renfrew and Chris Frith).