Abstract
AbstractThis is a comment to Graham Harman’s 2019 response to an article by Þóra Pétursdóttir and Bjørnar Olsen (2018) in which they propose that a materially grounded, archaeological perspective might complement Harman’s historical approach inImmaterialism(2016). Harman responds that his book is indeed already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information. History, Harman holds, ends up in too much detail, while archaeology has the advantage of lending itself to the imagination. Hence, his reading of history had the aim of tempering the historical information overload, in effect making the book a work of archaeology. In this comment, I want to do three things: (1) critique the idea that archaeological and historical media are inherently different with regard to their densities of information, (2) discuss how archaeology and history approach their media, and (3) reflect on conceptualisations of “archaeology” outside the discipline itself.
Highlights
Philosophy and archaeology have been mutually engaged for decades
Harman responds that his book is already more archaeological than historical, stipulating that history is the study of media with a high density of information, whereas archaeology studies media with a low density of information
Associations between philosophy and archaeology have primarily transpired as intra-disciplinary monologues without much cross-fertilising dialogue: while archaeologists commonly engage with philosophical works and arguments, philosophers usually only refer to the idea of archaeology and rarely to archaeological literature itself
Summary
Philosophy and archaeology have been mutually engaged for decades. Archaeologists have been reading, inspired by and even framing their approaches to the archaeological with direct reference to the work of philosophers. This results from the current enthusiasm for digitisation of swelling quantities of data, and, above all, for methods and data from the natural sciences, making some archaeologists believe that knowledge gaps and epistemological uncertainties may be replaced by more detailed information, more facts, and better analytical data.[22] archaeology’s current predicament, one might argue, is the escalating confidence that its wealth of sources may be “heated” in ways that will do away with what I describe as the “dark matter” of the discipline: absence, fragmentation, vagueness, and tracelessness For this reason, I wonder whether it is perhaps too simplistic to portray archaeological and historical media as, respectively, “cold” and “hot,” since the degree of participation required to unpack their information depends on the familiarity with the particular medium and on its degree of detail and clarity. Things may be informative, as I shall discuss below, yet this is not all there is to them
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