The Indian behind the Artefact or Things behind the Process?: Humanism, Post-humanism and the Transition to the Neolithic

Irene Garcia-Rovira

doi:10.37718/csa.2013.09

Abstract

In recent years, traditional models produced to ac- count for the transition to the Neolithic have been challenged with the creation of narratives that seek to portray the character of this change in specific socio- historical milieus. At the other end of the spectrum, approaches influenced by the material turn have read- dressed this context, defining the Neolithic as a spe- cific horizon within an ever-increasing entanglement. Whilst these interpretive frameworks have yet not been challenged, they might gradually give rise to a new polarization in the debate about the Mesolithic- Neolithic transition. These approaches differ not only in that they operate at different scales of analysis (lived experience, macro-scale). They ultimately echo the humanist/post-humanist debate currently held in theoretical archaeology. In this article, I argue that neither of these ap- proaches is successful in revealing the complex set of forces that triggered the transition to the Neolithic. Drawing from this discussion, I suggest that a more comprehensive review of this context of change re- quires the fusion of elements discussed by these mod- els. This situation hastens new challenges to archaeo- logical practice, and it raises a series of questions on the current state of archaeological theory.

Highlights

I am tired of the familiar story of how the subject, the social, the episteme, created the object; tired of the story that everything is language, action, mind and human bodies
Whatever the case might be, despite the differences that may exist between the aforementioned approaches, they are linked by a critique of social constructivist accounts of the past where human agents appear in a position of dominance, and by the lack of concern given to things in archaeology and the social sciences more generally
In a thought-provoking article, Sherratt (1996) foresaw interesting parallels in the history of archaeology with what he defined as a European cultural dialectic (Sherratt 1996:142) characterized by cycles of thought that oscillate between Romantic and Enlightened attitudes

Summary

Introduction

I am tired of the familiar story of how the subject, the social, the episteme, created the object; tired of the story that everything is language, action, mind and human bodies. I first want to further examine the suitability of Cummings and Harris’s interpretive framework Their interpretive model, like many others that stem from notions of habituated practice, is concerned with how human beings perceived and experienced the transition to the Neolithic, and to a certain extent they point at the role that non-human agencies had in this context of change, by noting how new practices (in different landscapes), “produced potential for ideas of wealth and status to be written” (Cummings & Harris 2011:367), their interpretive framework continues to place human beings at the core of this process. Whatever the case might be, despite the differences that may exist between the aforementioned approaches, they are linked by a critique of social constructivist accounts of the past where human agents appear in a position of dominance, and by the lack of concern given to things in archaeology and the social sciences more generally What matters in this particular situation is the ways in which Hodder’s material turn has triggered new interpretive frameworks for the transition to the Neolithic. Whilst still pondering on some of these ideas, I would like to return to the question that triggered this article

Discussion

Conclusion