Flows of clay and site ontologies: towards a realist archaeology of congealment and emergence

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question of how a ‘site’ comes together through flows of materials. It engages with writing by geographers interested in flat ontologies who propose a view of sites as autonomous congealments of matter that have as one of their effects the suspension, rather than simply decentering, of human subjectivity. A case study from Honduras is used to illustrate the distribution of traces of subjectivity across flows of geological material at a scale that exceeds the locale of excavation, producing a new understanding of flows of these materials as phenomena of long duration and wide spatial extension. The article ends by considering the ways in which site ontology converges with Process Archaeology in a shared emphasis on modes of becoming, and the distinction between them introduced by adopting concepts from the agential realism of Karen Barad.

KEYWORDS:

• Site ontology
• congealment
• emergence
• phenomena

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rosemary A. Joyce

Rosemary A. Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, received the PhD from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985. A curator and faculty member at Harvard University from 1985 to 1994, she moved to Berkeley in 1994, and served as Director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology until 1999. She began participating in archaeological fieldwork in Honduras in 1977, and co-directed projects on sites occupied from ca. 1500 BC to the twentieth century AD. She continues research on Honduran collections in museums throughout Europe and the Americas, and directs a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide online searching for the colonial archive of Central America. Author of 9 books and editor of 9 others, her most recent are Painted Pottery From Honduras: Object Itineraries and Lives (2017) and Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras (2014).