The Anti-Anthropocentrism in the Recent Theoretical Archaeology

Abstract

It has been widely acknowledged that archaeology is the study of humans and their culture through the material remains of the past, and we have never doubted the validity of the proposition until now. However, in the theoretical suggestions of the recent archaeological studies, the arguments against the proposition are easily seen. For example, some argue that what we want to know are not the human beings and their culture, but the relationships in which humans and non-humans interact with each other or the things themselves that humans left behind. By the 21st century, archaeological theory had moved away from anti-anthropocentrism and turned into things and concentrated on the relational thinking that human and non-human, nature and culture, and materials and concepts were already associated with each other in an existential way. Thus the role and weight of human beings have been reduced, and archaeology has already had the trends of anti-anthropocentrism. In fact, it was from the early 1990’s when the theoretical archaeology became interested in the importance of things and began to show anti-anthropocentrism tendencies. However, it is Bruno Latour s Actor-Network-Theory(ANT) that played a crucial role in the transition to anti-anthropocentrism, which seems to have greatly changed the nature of theoretical archaeology. Some archaeologists, who have recently embraced the philosophy of ‘Speculative Realism’, even argue the need to speculate on the object itself left behind or left after humans. One can see that there is a degree of difference between the recent claims of theoretical archaeology, depending on how much they have tendency to the antianthropocentrism.