Backdirt Ecopoetics

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I take an ecopoetic standpoint by attending to those practices that distinguish between dirt and backdirt on field sites. Fabricating this distinction features ongoing and intermittent speculation of dirt/backdirt on a continuum of archaeological value. Rather than positioning this distinction as external to the field site, it is rather a matter of being exposed to the site and exposing it in one and the same movement. A necessary quality of staying with the indeterminacy of this ecopoetic dimension of decision-making includes an embodied wit in contrast to a brainy rationality. Excavating with embodied wit implicates the relational interplay between exposing the landscape through excavating it and yielding to the excavation in the process. The field site is then made knowable by how the touching power of both excavators and field site threads the archaeologically imagined and material worlds.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecology
• exposure
• sensorium
• speculation
• monism

Introduction: Re-imagining Dirt/Backdirt

“Back Dirt—The excavated, discarded material (sediment, dirt) from a site that has generally been sifted for artifacts and is presumed to be of no further archaeological significance. This material may later be used to refill test pits, an action referred to as ‘back filling.’” (The Archaeological Institute of America 2023)

If anything is inescapable in field archaeology, it surely is backdirt. Materially, backdirt has a prominent presence at field sites, as it is the result of the excavating, sifting, and discarding of dirt through generally labor-intensive practices. Especially on remote sites, inaccessible to machine diggers, dirt is obstructive in its material presence, and strenuous effort is made to move it (metaphorically and materially) “back there,” out of sight and out of mind of the knowledge and value production machine. The backfilling practice at the end of the excavation, restoring the archaeological landscape to its naturalized heritage, is only the most characteristic practice of the labelling of backdirt, but it occurs throughout the entire duration of the excavation. Backdirt is the by-product of archaeological excavation methods. It is the packaging of archaeological value and knowledge, as it were, and of potentially significant finds and contexts. Dirt’s status as backdirt, however, is an ambiguous part of archaeological knowledge production and not always clear cut: as packaging of potentially worthy finds, it is discarded constantly throughout the excavation. Nothing is backdirt as much as it becomes and unbecomes backdirt, a negative in rhythmic cadence with the positive of the archaeological record. Archaeologists’ categorical decisions on which parts of a field site are labelled as backdirt, and which parts are labelled otherwise, is an ongoing and non-linear process. The start of a cross-section, for instance, can re-categorize those parts of a context that should be sifted and those parts that are (for now) made insignificant. During the cross-section, and depending on how conclusive the provisional findings of the dig are for the archaeological record, the backdirt-label might shift to encompass different parts of the trench or none at all. This mostly conceptual paper stays with the trouble of the dirt/backdirt distinction in fieldwork practices, without attempting to finalize the sorting of matter in one or the other category. I am thus concerned with how dirt/backdirt might embody a speculative dimension of the archaeological, out of which all that is (potentially) archaeological emanates. This paper does not explicate or differentiate between commonly adopted epistemologies in archaeology and their potential shortcomings but instead aims to contribute to a dimension of dirt/backdirt and backfilling that could be called ecopoetic, a non-dualistic relationality with soil and landscape. It does this without distinguishing a priori between the philosophical fields that set norms on which actors have legitimate access to knowledge claims and which do not. The reason for this is a very pragmatic one: field archaeologists are, in this paper, imagined as embodying a sense of wonder regarding the one (monistic) world that material artifacts, ecofacts, and dirt and backdirt are a part of (cf. Stengers 2011; Ingold 2018).

As I have addressed elsewhere in the context of the storying of worlds and the senses (Pijpers 2021), engaging with dirt/backdirt from this sense of wonder means engaging in a process of intimate correspondence with a trench, thereby situating archaeologists in landscapes with multiple present histories. This process of intimate correspondence in relation to the dirt generates affective and embodied relations between a site and its diggers. Digging in this sense is a process of building relations. However, as a practice of finalizing fieldwork, backfilling also cuts the connection with the immersive intimacy of the site and establishes a distance required for leaving the field (for now) and starting the translation into, and formal codification of, disciplinary knowledge. The local fostering of dirt is a cornerstone of field archaeology, and one might expect this cornerstone to be codified together with the artifacts and samples. While dirt/backdirt and backfilling are common encounters in field archaeology, and field archaeologists think seriously—and often—about the earth they move, it is rarely attended to in archaeological theory. As a concept, backdirt cannot be found in, e.g., the well-established index of Key Concepts by Renfrew and Bahn (2005). In contrast, any kind of translation and interpretation of artifacts and ecofacts can be said to start with wondering about the dirt/backdirt distinction: how is dirt potentially archaeologically relevant, and how is it backdirt?

To address this lacuna in theory (if not in practice) further and to understand how backdirt is interesting to archaeology as known (e.g., recorded, sampled, and tested) dirt, I borrow from the creative humanities: Van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, 78) provide a range of apt material descriptions of dirt, useful for further imagining dirt and backdirt (and their relation) in archaeology. Dirt, I paraphrase, is felt as repulsive and abject and is a denominator reserved for the unworthy, mucky, and superfluous. It is situated, as a loose end of matters of care, and medial, in-between value and worthless. In archaeological practice in the UK, backdirt is known as spoil, alluding to the fact that it is spoiled, displaced, or transformed from the strata that give context to artifacts and ecofacts. Dirt is also unclean: field archaeologists become dirty to some extent while stepping in the environment of the excavation site. In contrast, the traditionally scientifically valued writing up of field results and findings in research papers is ontologically quite distant from the messiness of fieldwork and requires a set of different skills. Moving through the pipeline of knowledge production, from the dirt of the field towards the research paper or book, is a process of re-articulation and addition to the multiverse (Latour 2004), but one wonders where the dirt went in the structuring of a pristine research paper. The cleaning of trenches is furthermore a common practice of field archaeology, allowing archaeologists to take finds materially out of their context, and out of the dirt, thereby extending the reach of the finds, while adding articulations to multiple (academic and professional) contexts. Dirt seems to be everything the clear organization and classification required from, and by, scientific disciplines, including archaeology, is not. However, this relationship is not unambiguous, linear, or universally agreed upon, as dirt is also constitutive and evocative of speculative thought in the process of knowledge production.

While contemporary dialogues in archaeological theory, such as the archaeology of symmetrical relations between humans and things (Hodder and Lucas 2017) or object-oriented philosophies (e.g., Harman 2005; Harman and Witmore 2023), have extensively pushed archaeology as a speculative discipline par excellence, this paper takes a different direction (cf. Ireland 2013; Wolfendale 2014). While it might be salient to rethink relations between humans and things (and human-things) in the context of dirt/backdirt, I have found nothing in archaeological fieldwork that is either symmetrical or particularly object-oriented: not social (and power) relations between archaeologists and/or things, nor environments or the mental contents engaged in knowledge-making (the three ecologies, Guattari 2000), nor even artifacts themselves.¹ An object-orientation seems to stage objects and purify the dirt from artifacts. In other words, object-oriented philosophy, as well as symmetrical archaeology, does not seem to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of the messy and non-symmetrical dirt/backdirt encounter on the site of excavation but instead aims to alleviate the trouble or render it fictional in a comprehensive metaphysics that centers on both objects and time. I hence do not consider the question whether time changes objects or how things engender time to be as relevant as Harman and Witmore (2023). Rather, my take on dirt and backdirt in this paper sides with an “onto-topology” of “spatial embeddedness” and movement (Sloterdijk 2012, 36) that seems overlooked by existential programs (of objects or humans). In other words, dirt and backdirt on a field site are a matter of places and inhabiting and relating to those places before they are a matter of time and objects.

As Van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022) emphasize, dirt is encountered instead of sought out intentionally. As an encountered obstacle of sorts, the authors also define it as transient and sticky: dirty environs, things, and people are often “othered” out of fear of also becoming dirty, materially and by association. Its stickiness means that it is not dirt in itself which is a problem, it is rather becoming dirty that is repulsive and unscientific. The authors reference Mary Douglas’s well-known definition of dirt as “matter out of place” (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 78). In this sense, “dirty” refers to those bodies or social-material phenomena which are out of place in a clean, modern, healthy, and innovative society. To provide a parallel example from a social anthropological perspective: neighborhoods in contemporary cities can be represented as unclean, reducing lives to dirty and wasted, and disenfranchising them as exceptional in governmental programs of social cleansing. Associations with dirt (poor) happen in the same political ecology as evictions and gentrification practices. Dirt has everything to do with the political ideologies of what is considered proper and improper and, by extension, of owned pristine properties and wild environments, and of classifiable properties in the sense of the clearly definable characteristics of an object or place. These notions raise similar questions when it comes to archaeological fieldwork: how are archaeological data collected, and what activities within that data collection are emphasized, or hidden, in the path to knowledge? What are the limits of how messy scientific and archaeological knowledge may be, before it is either accepted or rejected from the archaeological record?

The political economy of dirt and waste is not just a peripheral accident of globalized modernization practices. Instead waste “comes to designate the unenclosed common, the external frontier, and the ethical horizon of civil society” (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1626). It is the opposite of everything of value, as read through the writings of the liberalist and empiricist John Locke (Gidwani and Reddy 2011, 1626). In these authors’ analysis, waste constitutes some sort of molar modernity, by means of a divide of “value’” on the one side and “worthless” on the other side. It comes as no surprise then that dirt has been studied extensively in its multifaceted forms and by diverse fields. Thompson’s (2017) well-known rubbish theory investigates dirt and the act of discarding on a continuum of (economic and global) value creation and destruction. Humes’s (2012) garbology looks at the peculiar practices of our modern addiction to trash, whether in our houses or, more collectively, in the mounds of waste disposal facilities: “Trash is nothing less than the ultimate lens on our lives” (2012, 12), which sounds all too familiar to field archaeologists who interpret discarded things in their many forms and contexts. The importance of waste for archaeology is further established by Rathje’s Garbage Project, which re-frames trash in “contemporary societies from a problem into empirical evidence” (Reno 2013, 261). Recently, Liboiron’s (2021) Pollution is Colonialism delves into the many ways pollution (intimately connected to modern science) colonizes indigenous land, peoples, nature, and heritage. Liboiron reminds us, however, of the ethical and aesthetic relation of dwellers (indigenous, settler, or otherwise) to Land with a capital L, which allows us to rethink the relation of archaeology to the dirt and who and what dwells and dwelled there and the breakdown that comes with it.

Conceptually, rethinking dirt might aid in “rescue[ing] dirt from dwelling on the dark side, and it wants to rescue the dark side—literally: colonized environments—from dirt” (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, 78). The “dark side” refers here to the reductionist notions that dirt is just dirt and nothing else—nothing of note or interest remains in the dirt. Field archaeologists are exceptionally situated to know that dirt is of extreme interest. Taking the process of deciding on dirt/backdirt seriously involves a relation of poiesis to the dirt, which includes an aesthetic sense of making, crafting, and organizing. Crucially, I am talking here about aesthetics as a word for being exposed, like an excavation exposes the earth, or a work of art exposes something in and to those engaging with it, and yielding to it. Thinking with backdirt allows us to tell alternative narratives about “the archaeology” of the field site, in the socio-political production of knowledge of the past. These stories decenter the notion that archaeology should focus on lucid interpretation and therefore require an alternative ontological position and understanding of fieldwork in a (eco-aesthetic) sense.

Embodied Wit: Prehension and Touching Power

“DIRT IS A GOOD WORD. It goes straight back to the Anglo-Saxon and the Old Norse. Like ‘love,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘house,’ ‘hearth,’ ‘earth,’ ‘sky,’ ‘wrath,’ and ‘word,’ it is short, strong, and leaves a taste in the mouth. Therefore, even before you know what it means, you want to get ahold of it and chew it.” (Logan 1995, 42)

There are words that signify more or less of a sense of embodiment and sensory engagement. In the quote by Logan, the good of dirt seems to be that it has a longer history in language and is in this case rooted in a shared set of languages. It is, notably, more a good of aesthetic quality and less an ethical one. The reference to tasting and chewing communicates the visceral quality of dirt. Logan refers here to the primacy of embodied sensory experience when it comes to dirt as more significant—or at least prior in time—to understanding the meaning of dirt. There is an inherent critique here to discursive meaning-making: Logan seems to say that the strong, short, and carnal quality of dirt and the other words comes from being exposed to the dirt, and there might be an allusion here to how pre-modern societies like the Anglo-Saxon and Norse societies were exposed to the elements and environment. Archaeologists commonly say that field archaeology can certainly not be taught in the classroom and students need exposure to field sites in order to learn how to dig. First, they are required to get a “taste” of the dirt, and only then can it be understood.

Relatedly, in Germanic languages, there is a distinction between different forms of, and words for, knowing. One of them refers to understanding cerebrally and is encapsulated in an epistemological-scientific framework of formal repertoires of knowledge. An alternative is rendered in English as “wit:” while also referencing understanding and intelligence, it is perhaps better translated as astute, perceptive, or shrewd. A sense of embodiment and prehension is included with wit and wittiness, which formalized and objective knowledge often lacks. The verb “to wit” has an intrinsicality to it: it points to a reasoning power that is not brainy. It is tacit. Like Logan’s grasp of dirt, wit is even shorter, also strong and alluding to sensory affect. I think that expertise in fieldwork often requires more wit than rationalized knowledge. The skill of touch while troweling and cleaning, for instance, or the seeing of stratigraphic layers can surely be taught, but it requires a transformation of sensing to “just get it”² instead of a following or critiquing of textbook knowledge. This poetic transformation can occur, I stipulate, in relation to the process of distinguishing dirt and backdirt.

It is important to highlight the notion of taste as one of the senses used for witful prehension of the dirt. I am indebted to Manning’s (2009b, 217) discussion of Whitehead here in using prehension as an embodied alternative to “understanding,” as it incorporates exposure as a quality of relating in an excavation. I argue that the dirt/backdirt question can perhaps not be understood as cognitively important, but it can and is prehended with regularity, as excavators are exposed to the earth and expose the landscape in turn. “To prehend is to create an opening towards worlding” (Manning 2009b, 217). Prehensions are sense activations and world activation. While much work on embodied intentionality has been done by phenomenological approaches (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1994), this notion of prehension—and the part dirt/backdirt has in it—is distinctly different from how “we” right here might phenomenologically understand and make sense of “the world” out there (cf. Tilley 2019): exposure happens, and prehension is an invitation to think with the dirt/backdirt distinction from being on the same ontological footing with dirt—perception and its object are all already mixed up in the world.³ Drawing further on sensory studies, I find that the sensorium has been addressed in a variety of ways to highlight the interplays of distance and intimacy in, i.e., fieldwork. There is a rich history of scholarship addressing the sense of touch and the singularity of the prehensive sensorium: sensory experiences cannot be simply separated in five functional compartments, but sensory data intertwines in the body through the various sensory faculties (Serres 1985).

However, this fully sensory and embodied relationship is not how the senses are framed and organized in modern thought. Modern scientific practices often celebrate sight’s objectifying and distancing quality, in comparison to the other senses such as taste and touch, which are rooted in more intimate relations with their objects. The difference between seeing and touching is highlighted in particular for what it means to produce knowledge (Jay 1993; Marks 2002). Sight has the power to objectify and make distant, to know at a distance, sometimes without a need to excavate. Remote sensing technologies are an example of this prehension at a distance, which leaves the backdirt and the landscape undisturbed. Interestingly, though, this argument falls short, as remote mapping is also used to visualize disturbances of the landscape as a result of, e.g., looting practices, which are in themselves situated in socio-economic contexts (Parcak 2009). While furthermore useful to determine archaeological value and plan excavations before setting out into the field, technologies of sight potentially objectify the landscape through interventions of splitting the sensing subject and the sensed object from their immediate and shared ecology. At times tremendously helpful and valuable tools of discernment, my concern is, however, that those technologies of sight function in science as the “master sense of the modern era” (Jay 1993, 543) and include an aversion to being bodily implicated in the intimacy and messiness of the dirt/backdirt distinction in the landscape. Sight as a master sense makes perceptible how the modern use of it relates to a construction of a powerful kind of epistemic knowing, with the potency to cut away dirty ecologies.

The dirt/backdirt distinction however remains somewhat indifferent to the disembodying qualities of epistemic knowing through remote sensing technologies. It is often slow and changes according to its own pace. As I described previously (Pijpers 2021, 894–896), working the trowel means slowly making a relation with the ecology of the landscape. Troweling as relating with dirt is a practice of slow science. Along this fashion, one critical point to be made of Logan’s embellishment of dirt in the above quote is that actual troweling, and other methods of relating to dirt/backdirt, are often rather uninteresting intellectually. Troweling is a crucial practice during those times when nothing really happens: it is the quintessential practice of archaeologists who are exposing themselves to the dirt/backdirt, ready and waiting to become affected by something in it. Here also lies the risk of typecasting archaeological features, which involves making assumptions “before the ground has been broken” (Jones and Richardson 2012, 94). The authors explain that, while it is impossible not to make some assumptions during an excavation, they should at least be more considered than defaulting to relatively standard or seen-before interpretations, leading at times to the discarding of potential significant patterns. Therefore, even when nothing really happens during fieldwork, excavating comfortably, or producing knowledge that is all too comfortable with regards to its consequences, should be regarded with some suspicion. The uninterestingness of some excavation work is both of great interest and concern, as it is a sign of an infrastructure that has sunk into the earth and is invested in keeping the landscape stable (Star 1999). In order to further open up the at times comfortable knowledge production of archaeology, I draw on philosopher of animation Vasseleu (2009, 143) and suggest her use of “yielding” as a descriptive and active notion of “touching power,” e.g., this often uneventful embodied practice of engaging, making sensible the dirt/backdirt distinction in its infrastructural persistence.

Yielding to the Dirt

What does this focus on exposure and prehension in relation to the dirt and the ground add to discussions on knowledge-making through archaeological fieldwork? Of importance here are the day-to-day relations in the field and how dirt/backdirt changes and reorganizes these minor relations. In other words, the “component parts” of an excavation are already “coalescing, merging and intermeshing with each other” (Edgeworth 2016, 10). Yielding is a way of relating to such a coalescing of dirt. Instead of a non-invasive way of excavating, yielding suggests being susceptible to dirt/backdirt with bodily enthusiasm, excitement, boredom, disappointment, or other affects. Drawing on the surrealist artist Švankmajer, Vasseleu (2009, 144) proposes that we should understand such “tactile experience in terms of poetic metamorphosis rather than phenomenal dexterity.” Yielding to the dirt during fieldwork suggests that archaeology could be a discipline of poetic metamorphosis. Diggers yield to the dirt, while the dirt yields to archaeological intervention practices. As an attribute of touch, yielding is defined in terms of giving way to force or pressure and relinquishing possession of what is yielded to. Saliently, this metamorphosis suggests that excavation work might not depend on the phenomenological skills archaeologists have with their tools. Thinking backdirt together with yielding reconfigures the relational and sensory dimension of bodies, decentering and deflating cerebral knowing: translations to formal repertoires of knowing are still happening, and expertise matters, but supported by the relationships of wit, exposed to the dirt.

Moving further, Manning (2009a, 212) describes sensory perception as “sensitive to in-formation. It is to shapeshift, with-forming the world.” Touch in particular is, she proposes, inventive, without knowing in advance what it will mean to sense “body-events.” Her thought on touching bodies makes perceptible what in a body’s sensorium allows for movement in diverging directions. To elaborate on this, she draws on what Simondon calls a body’s margin of indetermination (Vasseleu 2009, 212). The margin of indetermination refers to the ability of a touching body to recombine towards a “somewhere else.” This power of recombination is not limited to the use of physical tools like trowels and shovels in excavation work but rather to bodily techniques, which include thought, as well as tools and, notably, dirt. A touching body is an indeterminate body: what it yields to and what it prehends rely on, i.e., archaeological techniques that expose, rather than conclude, relational reality in ways which are as yet dark, muddy, messy, and unknown. Prehensions pertain to simultaneously sensing, moving, as well as perceiving bodies, in the sense of the body’s activation and animation of a world.

Figure 1 shows a variety of techniques that can be understood as different ways that prehending bodies yield and recombine both their sensory apparatuses as well as the dirt/backdirt distinction. Here we see some mapping still going on while the backfilling is already underway and in various stages. Turf has been placed on the right side, while plastic sheets are in the process of being drawn in the upper left corner of the mound. This photograph shows body-events shapeshifting the more-than-human world they are working on. The backfilling does not so much conclude the archaeology of the landscape but rather exposes it through different relations with different actors. The mound, the most imposing piece of the excavation, is being kept safe and clean by the plastic sheets, the story goes. Simultaneously, walking across it with dirty boots is now allowed, where previously it was not: the pragmatics of keeping the mound separate from the turf transforms the body of the mound and how it is perceived and talked about. Everything on top of the plastic sheets is backdirt, everything below it still partially dark and unknown and able to feed into grant proposals for its continued excavation in the future. The ecopoetics of backdirt means that the stories that we tell about backdirt in this place have consequences for the arrangements of ecology we are involved in (Puig de la Bellacasa 2021, 199). The photograph in Figure 1 showcases that the messiness and dirtiness of fieldwork (e.g., the simultaneity of a variety of techniques) in both organizational and material terms is salient for the process of fieldwork. It also shows that the dirt/backdirt distinction is salient for how the field site (i.e., the mound) recombines through body-events of both humans and non-humans—as the mound is a body of a different kind.

Figure 1. Archaeologists from the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project in the summer of 2014 working on a trench in the process of being backfilled.

Different techniques, then, come with different ways of prehension and activate differentiating worlds. Sites of archaeological excavation such as the one in Figure 1 are not only archaeological sites: next to the non-human body of the mound, the site is inhabited by many animals and plants, while also used for different human practices like walking, living, camping, eating, and more. Animals like sheep, worms, and rats prehend these sites differently and contribute to the multiplicity of a singular place. Concepts such as yielding touch, relational displacement, and tactile animation and imagination describe what happens in the “dark side” of the dirt of archaeology. In relation to these central concepts, Manning (2009b, 221) furthermore voices a final dimension of touch: its hallucinatory dimension. She relates hallucinatory perception to affectual passages. Hallucinatory perceptions are small perceptions, and “relation[s] in the making” (Manning 2009a, 79). It is these hallucinatory small perceptions that emphasize the body’s perceptual ability to sense and actualize changing relations in processes of worlding. As such, bodies are able to enfold passages of affects, and while yielding to the dirt, they animate the potential and sense the becoming of objectivity.

In other words, bodies are very well able to actualize this sensorial potential of whatever the backdirt exposes. When objects are buried below the top layers of soil and overgrowth in excavations, for instance, archaeologists can imagine that differences in soil colors or textures are related to stratigraphical differences in the dirt, which are important for knowing what happened in that location and when. For Manning, this imagination is hallucinatory work, because imagination happens in bodily states of not knowing and in relation with the muddiness of the soil. Perceiving differences in soil colors or textures are hallucinatory, as they pertain to relations in the making, beyond scalable and representable objects of history. This new relation also opens up the possibility of deception. Archaeologists might be deceived by a change in soil colors or textures, which might turn out to mean something entirely different than what they hypothesized. What is important here is the invitation to imagine and animate the trench in unexpected ways and the continuity this imagining brings to fieldwork. Even the site of excavation can be in a state of hallucination: it moves and becomes something else, or rather an unpredictable “somewhere else,” with, i.e., each stroke of a trowel or emptied bucket of backdirt. The excavator body is then quite extraordinary, in the sense that its hallucinatory character can go together with a “dizzying effect of sensations, these sensual and sentimental fevers” (Nancy 2013, 13). Such a feverish struggle of touching-inventing new knowledge shows a “reciprocal motion: that as place is sensed, senses are placed” (Feld 2014, 179). Yielding to the dirt can then be envisioned as a monistic sensing and making of place, all the while materially extending some kind of hallucinatory imagination to the multiplicity of a site.

Conclusions: Speculating Backdirt Ecopoetics

“‘Why—’ Syenite can’t think. Her hands ache as she scrabbles backward along the boardwalk planks, trying to get to her feet and away all at once. Instinctively she reaches for the earth beneath her and that’s when she finally realizes what the Guardian has done, because there’s nothing in her that can reach. She cannot sess the earth past a few feet below her hands and backside; nothing but sand and salty dirt and earthworms. There is an unpleasant ringing ache in her sessapinae when she tries to reach farther. It’s like when she hits her elbow and shuts off all the sensation from there to the tips of her fingers; like that part of her mind has gone to sleep. It’s tingling, coming back. But for now, there’s nothing there.” (Jemisin 2015, 334)

This quote of Jemisin’s work of science fiction gives an impression of the importance of sensing (what she calls “sessing”) the earth and dirt and the affective and embodied work that not sensing can do. Through the “why,” cerebral reasoning stops “—,” and her body takes over, aching and moving and trying “all at once.” All that is to sense is the “sand and salty dirt and earthworms,” nothing deeper or more inherently essential than that. This quote describes an event of being cut off from the sensing system, with which its users can sense and engage with the earth in a stratigraphically deeper and more profound way. This sensing system, albeit of a metaphysical character (or perhaps, hallucinatory?), is built upon the historic breakdown of Earth’s ecosystems in the books. While it is an event of limitation—the main character loses access to this very system—it is also a renewed exposure to bodily affects and a body that tingles, scrambles, partially shuts off, and comes back to sense the dirt. There is an ecology here, inclusive of those non-humans who are categorized as “nothing but.” The main character lives in this ecology and world, which she prehends as salty and sandy, but as she instinctively reaches for its depth, nothing yields to her. Rather, she is the one yielding to the mushiness of the dirt as she attempts to control her lower arm, which has lost sense, and therefore, everything of importance in that moment.

For field archaeology, this example is salient of what it could mean to speculatively follow the lure of the dirt/backdirt distinction. I suggest that a cerebral approach to backdirt as something that is “in the way” of excavation work limits the potential knowledge building and witty world building of excavating together. As excavations often take place outside of traditional centers of learning and living, dirt/backdirt is both the transformative frame of the excavation and it encompasses the landscape as a place of dwelling and sensory richness. Dirt/backdirt therefore exposes the excavators to the ecology through embodied relations: touching and excavating the dirt means both being exposed to and implicated in a relation of ecopoetics to the Earth. In practice, as the dirt moves slowly, this exposure might feel boring, normal, or a necessary evil before unearthing important artifacts and assemblages. This slowness, however, signals that dirt/backdirt serves as “sunk” infrastructure, which supports and stabilizes the landscape and excavation work. This supporting infrastructural work of dirt/backdirt is embodied work. Staying with the trouble of the dirt/backdirt distinction means adopting an actively yielding disposition to the dirt as reservoir of potential affects. This yielding disposition might not predetermine the value of archaeological knowledge production on-site, but it does build increasing relationships through the additional sensing and thinking labor that goes together with imagining archaeological life with dirt/backdirt.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the archaeologists from the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project for their hospitality, as well as the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of this special issue for their engagement with this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Pijpers

Kevin Pijpers (Ph.D. 2018, University of Leicester) is a social anthropologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His broad research interests include archaeology, affective knowledge practices, community (in)justice, science and technology, and the everyday politics of ecological assemblages and their breakdown.

Notes

1 In Harman’s (2019, 278) words: “Stated differently, whereas archaeologists face the coldness of newborn worlds, ontologists and poets adopt the artifice of suppressing much that is known but irrelevant.” Here, Harman employs the affective term “coldness” to refer to situations of archaeological relevance as “relatively lacking in information” (Harman 2019, 277). This lack of historical detail is, however, as far as I have been able to discern during fieldwork, always a processual question in relation to the dirt/backdirt distinction on a particular site and never a negative ontological determinant of the entire discipline as such. In my view, his use of “coldness” and “newborn world” show Harman’s (2019) Object-Oriented Ontology’s disregard of place and environment and, by extension, landscapes that are never (metaphorically) cold and never newborn.

2 I do not suggest an uncritical acceptance of the rather vague allusion to “just getting it.” Instead, it is an opening for questioning.

3 I am indebted here also to Haraway's (1997) and Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2012) notion that nothing comes without its world.