Abstract
Abstract This paper seeks to do justice to the often complex, messy, and sometimes ambiguous meaning making practices of archaeological field work. Taking recent adoptions of assemblage theory and sensory studies in archaeology as an angle of arrival, I contribute here to discussions on self-reflective and interpretive archaeology. Drawing on empirical encounters with troweling and backfilling at the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project in western Scotland, I describe the production of archaeological knowledge in terms of storying: the coming into existence of an earthly archaeological world through sensory correspondences. I show how storying generates meaning and knowledge through correspondences of more proximate with more distant excavation practices and interplays between them. Furthermore, I propose that through storying, archaeological meaning making as well as knowledge production can be understood as worlding: the generation of sustained remembrances of earthly events with lively corresponding materials.
Highlights
This paper seeks to do justice to the often complex, messy, and sometimes ambiguous meaning making practices of archaeological field work
At the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project (ATP), in the Swordle Bay area of Scotland, archaeologists dig into differently emplaced trenches, each with distinctly different “gradients, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, elements, and life spans” (Stewart, 2010, p. 342)
I instead take the position that archaeological practices themselves are in ethnographic sense worth, including as a kind of process of recording or inscribing, and that record includes meaning making and worlding
Summary
At the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project (ATP), in the Swordle Bay area of Scotland, archaeologists dig into differently emplaced trenches, each with distinctly different “gradients, valences, moods, sensations, tempos, elements, and life spans” (Stewart, 2010, p. 342). This worlding process of sense-making is built by a sensorial and embodied flow of impressions and data: archaeologists switched between touching the soil from up close with their hands or with a trowel; to smelling the soil and sometimes even tasting it; to taking a step back and looking at a particular trench in a particular state; and to organizing and arranging these different sensorial experiences into a somewhat coherent stream of thought Even this latter part of organizing experiences and recording data was sensorial, as the assembling of a world with meaning and knowledge. Different from Hamilakis’s (2017) work, which renders configurations of sensorial and temporal practices, I take the sensorial and the assemblage here as an occasion and interpretative moment of crafting a similar connection for the labor of archaeologists themselves during their fieldwork at ATP
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