Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203133
N. Tiwari
The influence of colonial legacy on the scholarly work of the European Mesolithic has been represented in this paper by Elliot and Warren. Their take on this subject within the myriad of Decolonisation thought is wellresearched. They entangle the histories of colonial subjugation in the European Mesolithic by carefully examining the fundamentalswhy, how, and who (suggested by Graeme Warren in a discussion). This train of thought helps us understand why decolonisation is necessary, how it has and does affect the current scholarship on Mesolithic, and whom it affects. Elliot and Warren dive into the previously unknown deep waters of Mesolithic archaeology in the European scenario and weigh the consequences of the colonial thought process in Mesolithic archaeology globally. The present paper by the authors is an outcome of the long ongoing debates within the broader community of hunter-gatherer studies. This includes the scholars working with the indigenous communities and the archaeologists working in Mesolithic archaeology. As explained in the paper, specific dialogue on ‘Decolonising the Mesolithic’ began with the workshop on this topic that the authors organised in May of 2021. Before understanding the use of the term ‘Mesolithic culture’ worldwide, the necessity to explain and unhinge the European scenario is somehow the spine of this whole project. The deep-rooted use of this term has to be questioned, and Elliot and Warren, in this paper, rightly target such a sensitive issue with factual information. The term Mesolithic is frequently used loosely and globally and is attached to the tool typemicroliths, which were produced largely from Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene period. The occurrence and production of this tool type are spatiotemporally varied globally. However, the nomenclature denoted to this phasei.e. Mesolithicis used and applied in the countries under colonial rule. Elliot and Warren pointed out the origin of this term, its definition, and its apt use in Northern Europe, and they also state that this term is by far not inclusive for the whole of the European continent. Beginning with the basis of this research, the authors start by explaining decolonisation and whether it impacts our daily lives in academic research and for them as educators. Looking at decolonisation through a macro lens, they try to understand it in university-level teaching by following Pimblott’s (2020) and Bruchac’s (2014). They point out the universities’ Eurocentric approach towards assessing indigenous populations’ cultures and traditions. Such repertoire must be dismantled to listen to
{"title":"An Exposition on Colonialism and the European Mesolithic by Benjamin Elliott and Graeme Warren","authors":"N. Tiwari","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203133","url":null,"abstract":"The influence of colonial legacy on the scholarly work of the European Mesolithic has been represented in this paper by Elliot and Warren. Their take on this subject within the myriad of Decolonisation thought is wellresearched. They entangle the histories of colonial subjugation in the European Mesolithic by carefully examining the fundamentalswhy, how, and who (suggested by Graeme Warren in a discussion). This train of thought helps us understand why decolonisation is necessary, how it has and does affect the current scholarship on Mesolithic, and whom it affects. Elliot and Warren dive into the previously unknown deep waters of Mesolithic archaeology in the European scenario and weigh the consequences of the colonial thought process in Mesolithic archaeology globally. The present paper by the authors is an outcome of the long ongoing debates within the broader community of hunter-gatherer studies. This includes the scholars working with the indigenous communities and the archaeologists working in Mesolithic archaeology. As explained in the paper, specific dialogue on ‘Decolonising the Mesolithic’ began with the workshop on this topic that the authors organised in May of 2021. Before understanding the use of the term ‘Mesolithic culture’ worldwide, the necessity to explain and unhinge the European scenario is somehow the spine of this whole project. The deep-rooted use of this term has to be questioned, and Elliot and Warren, in this paper, rightly target such a sensitive issue with factual information. The term Mesolithic is frequently used loosely and globally and is attached to the tool typemicroliths, which were produced largely from Late Pleistocene to the Late Holocene period. The occurrence and production of this tool type are spatiotemporally varied globally. However, the nomenclature denoted to this phasei.e. Mesolithicis used and applied in the countries under colonial rule. Elliot and Warren pointed out the origin of this term, its definition, and its apt use in Northern Europe, and they also state that this term is by far not inclusive for the whole of the European continent. Beginning with the basis of this research, the authors start by explaining decolonisation and whether it impacts our daily lives in academic research and for them as educators. Looking at decolonisation through a macro lens, they try to understand it in university-level teaching by following Pimblott’s (2020) and Bruchac’s (2014). They point out the universities’ Eurocentric approach towards assessing indigenous populations’ cultures and traditions. Such repertoire must be dismantled to listen to","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42404697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203717
Ben Jervis
Whetstones imported from Norway into England are used to explore emergent processes of commercialisation in medieval England. The study is based on a sample of 2201 whetstones (both imported and locally provenanced) from excavated contexts, and the distribution and chronology of these objects is presented. Drawing on the nomadic thought of Rosi Braidotti and the associated concept of ecologies of interdependence, these innocuous objects are understood as constituents of affective processes of intensification. The paper explores the contrast between the acquisition of foraged and commodified stones for emergent urban and rural experiences of economic transformation between the 12th and 15th centuries.
{"title":"Confronting Commerce: Whetstones, Economy and Ecologies of Interdependence in Medieval England","authors":"Ben Jervis","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203717","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203717","url":null,"abstract":"Whetstones imported from Norway into England are used to explore emergent processes of commercialisation in medieval England. The study is based on a sample of 2201 whetstones (both imported and locally provenanced) from excavated contexts, and the distribution and chronology of these objects is presented. Drawing on the nomadic thought of Rosi Braidotti and the associated concept of ecologies of interdependence, these innocuous objects are understood as constituents of affective processes of intensification. The paper explores the contrast between the acquisition of foraged and commodified stones for emergent urban and rural experiences of economic transformation between the 12th and 15th centuries.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46445289","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203168
Stefan Burmeister
Kristian Kristiansen is certainly one of the leading scholars in European archaeology. Anyone who studies the third and second millennium BCE will already have read some of his publications. His publication list is breath-taking, and if you look at the immense number of total views on Academia, actually every archaeologist in the world must have already looked at least one article by him. Kristiansen is important, influential and opinionforming. His work can only be admired. But that is precisely why it is important to look closely here. Kristiansen’s textual mass production has churned out a book that bundles many of his central themes of the last few years and puts them into an overall outline. As he explains in his acknowledgements, the text was written ‘to meet the theoretical and methodological challenge raised by the third science revolution and its implications for how to study and interpret European prehistory’ (p. 89). So, the objective is maximally large. Since Kristiansen’s book consists of a series of outtakes from earlier works or works in print, nothing is really new – in the end, no one can constantly reinvent himor herself, certainly not with such a publishing output. But the book provides a good overview of Kristiansen’s worldview and his approach to the past. It is hard to deny that archaeogenetics is a powerful game changer in the study of prehistoric societies. Migration and kinship studies have been taken to a new level. For Kristiansen, genetics – and with it other molecular biological approaches – is triggering a scientific revolution in archaeology. Since he calls this the third, after the classification inspired by geology, botany and zoology and the access to absolute time made possible by the 14C method, archaeology has thus far been poor in revolutions. And revolutions seem to be triggered only from outside the discipline. The many shifts in perspective and paradigms that archaeology has undergone in the same period do not seem to have had an equal influence. One could also reflect on why the discipline cannot seem to renew itself on its own. Archaeogenetics has already experienced its breakthrough, but according to Kristiansen it is still far from the phase of steady implementation. The differences between genetics and archaeology pose great challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation. Kristiansen complains about the criticism of earlier publications as unjustified. The criticised striking statements about extensive population changes, the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their language, which are not covered by the actual results of the study, he appeases with the fact that in the Supplementary Information these statements were formulated in a much more deliberate, cautious way. He also rejects accusations of implicit racist tendencies in genetic research. But here Kristiansen makes it too simple: discourse in science is primarily conducted via scientific publications. It is the duty of researchers to argue cleanly
{"title":"Archaeology and the Genetic Revolution in European Prehistory","authors":"Stefan Burmeister","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203168","url":null,"abstract":"Kristian Kristiansen is certainly one of the leading scholars in European archaeology. Anyone who studies the third and second millennium BCE will already have read some of his publications. His publication list is breath-taking, and if you look at the immense number of total views on Academia, actually every archaeologist in the world must have already looked at least one article by him. Kristiansen is important, influential and opinionforming. His work can only be admired. But that is precisely why it is important to look closely here. Kristiansen’s textual mass production has churned out a book that bundles many of his central themes of the last few years and puts them into an overall outline. As he explains in his acknowledgements, the text was written ‘to meet the theoretical and methodological challenge raised by the third science revolution and its implications for how to study and interpret European prehistory’ (p. 89). So, the objective is maximally large. Since Kristiansen’s book consists of a series of outtakes from earlier works or works in print, nothing is really new – in the end, no one can constantly reinvent himor herself, certainly not with such a publishing output. But the book provides a good overview of Kristiansen’s worldview and his approach to the past. It is hard to deny that archaeogenetics is a powerful game changer in the study of prehistoric societies. Migration and kinship studies have been taken to a new level. For Kristiansen, genetics – and with it other molecular biological approaches – is triggering a scientific revolution in archaeology. Since he calls this the third, after the classification inspired by geology, botany and zoology and the access to absolute time made possible by the 14C method, archaeology has thus far been poor in revolutions. And revolutions seem to be triggered only from outside the discipline. The many shifts in perspective and paradigms that archaeology has undergone in the same period do not seem to have had an equal influence. One could also reflect on why the discipline cannot seem to renew itself on its own. Archaeogenetics has already experienced its breakthrough, but according to Kristiansen it is still far from the phase of steady implementation. The differences between genetics and archaeology pose great challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation. Kristiansen complains about the criticism of earlier publications as unjustified. The criticised striking statements about extensive population changes, the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their language, which are not covered by the actual results of the study, he appeases with the fact that in the Supplementary Information these statements were formulated in a much more deliberate, cautious way. He also rejects accusations of implicit racist tendencies in genetic research. But here Kristiansen makes it too simple: discourse in science is primarily conducted via scientific publications. It is the duty of researchers to argue cleanly ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45414889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203149
Ben Pitcher
I am not an archaeologist, but I do know a bit about cultural politics and the ways in which ideas circulate between researchers and the cultures they inhabit. To me, one of the key challenges of decolonization to any field of research is in understanding how this relationship plays out: to develop a better grasp of the two-way traffic of meaning between disciplinary specialists and the wider public as we contend with the ways in which both constituencies express, modify, and contest the ongoing legacies of colonialism. If decolonization is to involve the pursuit of social justice in the present, then it becomes necessary to move beyond the confines of a particular field to trace the ways it is implicated in a wider set of relations over which it will have little or no scholarly jurisdiction. It is little wonder that this is said to be a difficult and unsettling process. It is. It is to Elliott and Warren’s credit that they have sufficient confidence to open up their field and render it vulnerable to its broader cultural contexts. In their reflexive examination of the historical formation of Mesolithic research, the authors address their field’s embeddedness in the structures of colonial knowledge production without telling a reductive and onedirectional story about causality. Colonial-era Mesolithic scholarship is understood to have both reflected and given shape to teleological, progressivist, and universal stories about Western modernity where racialized others came to stand in for the temporal others of the distant human past. As they trace Mesolithic archaeology’s enduring entanglement with colonial ideas and conceptual frameworks, Elliott and Warren retain an understanding of their field as both constituted and constituting. Decolonization is not, therefore, a one-off moment of epistemological cleansing whereby scientific facts are neatly extricated from non-scientific values, but instead a continuous process of reflection and critique. Decolonizing is not about apportioning blame but about establishing ethical research practices that engage the colonial legacy in the cause of social justice. Of central significance to this ethics is a reconfigured relationship to Indigenous peoples. Given the central and problematic role that ethnographic analogy has long played in their field, Elliott and Warren reconceive of Mesolithic knowledge production as a collaborative process more closely engaged with the interests of contemporary Indigenous communities. While once Indigenous peoples served as the objects of research that consolidated racist typologies of human development, their involvement as subjects provides a way of speaking back to monodirectional knowledge extraction and to the colonial history of Mesolithic research. Conceptually, indigeneity continues to open up a space for knowledge claims generated outside of the categorizing logics of Western science, for fostering ontologies or cosmologies that were subjugated and
{"title":"Decolonization, Indigeneity, and the Cultural Politics of Race","authors":"Ben Pitcher","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203149","url":null,"abstract":"I am not an archaeologist, but I do know a bit about cultural politics and the ways in which ideas circulate between researchers and the cultures they inhabit. To me, one of the key challenges of decolonization to any field of research is in understanding how this relationship plays out: to develop a better grasp of the two-way traffic of meaning between disciplinary specialists and the wider public as we contend with the ways in which both constituencies express, modify, and contest the ongoing legacies of colonialism. If decolonization is to involve the pursuit of social justice in the present, then it becomes necessary to move beyond the confines of a particular field to trace the ways it is implicated in a wider set of relations over which it will have little or no scholarly jurisdiction. It is little wonder that this is said to be a difficult and unsettling process. It is. It is to Elliott and Warren’s credit that they have sufficient confidence to open up their field and render it vulnerable to its broader cultural contexts. In their reflexive examination of the historical formation of Mesolithic research, the authors address their field’s embeddedness in the structures of colonial knowledge production without telling a reductive and onedirectional story about causality. Colonial-era Mesolithic scholarship is understood to have both reflected and given shape to teleological, progressivist, and universal stories about Western modernity where racialized others came to stand in for the temporal others of the distant human past. As they trace Mesolithic archaeology’s enduring entanglement with colonial ideas and conceptual frameworks, Elliott and Warren retain an understanding of their field as both constituted and constituting. Decolonization is not, therefore, a one-off moment of epistemological cleansing whereby scientific facts are neatly extricated from non-scientific values, but instead a continuous process of reflection and critique. Decolonizing is not about apportioning blame but about establishing ethical research practices that engage the colonial legacy in the cause of social justice. Of central significance to this ethics is a reconfigured relationship to Indigenous peoples. Given the central and problematic role that ethnographic analogy has long played in their field, Elliott and Warren reconceive of Mesolithic knowledge production as a collaborative process more closely engaged with the interests of contemporary Indigenous communities. While once Indigenous peoples served as the objects of research that consolidated racist typologies of human development, their involvement as subjects provides a way of speaking back to monodirectional knowledge extraction and to the colonial history of Mesolithic research. Conceptually, indigeneity continues to open up a space for knowledge claims generated outside of the categorizing logics of Western science, for fostering ontologies or cosmologies that were subjugated and","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48133813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2173085
Per Ditlef Fredriksen
This book is a timely and important contribution to knowledge production in archaeology. Firmly grounded in the two authors’ own teaching experience and previous conversations about pedagogy, the book makes a convincing case for the value of assemblage approaches. The solution offered requires a rethinking of teaching, training, and practice in archaeology, turning the very discipline into the subject of investigation. Facing neoliberal political economy and its narrow-minded demands for humanistic disciplines to be ‘useful’, there is a need to resituate and re-weave the web of relations between archaeological teaching and research. At its core, the book addresses the undervaluing of teaching. As the authors point out, such undervaluing has seriously affected the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice and is anchored in a lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. Overall, the book is well written, well-structured, and well researched. Its greatest merit, however, is that it offers a sympathetic view that takes students – including their various viewpoints and points of entry into archaeology – seriously. From early on this reader is struck by two key qualities. The first is how useful the book is for teachers of archaeology. Not only in giving practical advice, but also in providing a much-needed comprehensive status for pedagogical research of particular relevance for the discipline. The second quality is how refreshingly clear the authors are in their criticism of neoliberalism. The core message is well summarized in the concluding chapter: ‘a fundamental way to challenge neoliberal agendas [...] is to recognize [...] that a place in which learning emerges is through research, and that research often emerges through teaching’ (p. 153, orig. emphases). Cobb and Croucher’s departure point for this book might humble even the most experienced teachers of theory in archaeology. Such readers will quickly recognize the philosophical heritage of the assemblage framework, drawing primarily on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) but referring to a wide array of ‘assemblage thinkers’ like DeLanda, Latour, Barad, and Bennett (cf. Hamilakis and Jones 2017, pp. 80–81). A key concept is rhizomatic learning, ‘something which develops along messy, non-linear, complicated, and unpredictable routes’. This fuels the authors’ rethinking of ‘both interpretations of the past and practice in the present in realist, new materialist, non-anthropocentric ways’ (pp. 46–47). While this wonderfully ‘messy’ approach levels with students’ experiences of uncertainty and unpredictability, it is not the easiest to convey in an accessible manner. In my opinion, Cobb and Croucher manages this quite well, first and foremost because they never lose sight of what they really want to achieve: a concrete archaeological pedagogy that takes students’ everyday challenges and life-worlds seriously. The book consists of 10 chapters and
这本书是对考古学知识生产的及时而重要的贡献。这本书以两位作者自己的教学经验和之前关于教育学的对话为基础，为集合方法的价值提供了令人信服的理由。所提供的解决方案需要重新思考考古学的教学、培训和实践，将这门学科变成调查的主题。面对新自由主义政治经济学及其对人文学科“有用”的狭隘要求，有必要重新梳理和编织考古教学与研究之间的关系网。这本书的核心是解决教学价值的低估问题。正如作者所指出的，这种低估严重影响了当代考古实践的基本面，并植根于学科人口结构缺乏多样性。总的来说，这本书写得很好，结构很好，研究也很好。然而，它最大的优点是，它提供了一种同情的观点，认真对待学生——包括他们进入考古学的各种观点和切入点。从早期开始，读者就被两个关键品质所打动。首先是这本书对考古学老师有多有用。不仅在提供实用建议方面，而且在为与该学科特别相关的教学研究提供急需的全面地位方面。第二个特点是作者对新自由主义的批评是多么清晰。最后一章很好地总结了核心信息：“挑战新自由主义议程的一个根本方法[…]是认识到[…]学习的产生是通过研究，而研究往往是通过教学产生的”（第153页，原始重点）。Cobb和Croucher对这本书的出发点可能会让考古学中最有经验的理论老师感到谦卑。这些读者会很快认识到集合框架的哲学遗产，主要借鉴德勒兹和瓜塔里的《一千个高原》（Deleuze and Guattari 1987），但也提到了一系列“集合思想家”，如德兰达、拉图尔、巴拉德和贝内特（参见Hamilakis和Jones 2017，第80-81页）。一个关键的概念是根茎式学习，“沿着混乱、非线性、复杂和不可预测的路线发展的东西”。这促使作者重新思考“以现实主义、新唯物主义、非人类中心主义的方式对过去和现在的实践进行解释”（第46–47页）。虽然这种奇妙的“混乱”方法与学生的不确定性和不可预测性体验持平，但它并不是最容易用通俗易懂的方式传达的。在我看来，Cobb和Croucher很好地做到了这一点，首先也是最重要的是，他们从未忽视自己真正想要实现的目标：一种具体的考古教学法，认真对待学生的日常挑战和生活世界。这本书由10章组成，具有累积结构。其中五章是相对传统的书籍章节：引言（第1章），然后是三个核心理论讨论章节（第4、6和8章）。第8章的标题“一千种学习组合：教学和规模”是对德勒兹和瓜塔里的致敬（德勒兹与瓜塔里，1987年）。最后的第10章提供了一系列总结性思考和建议。有趣的是，作者将学生的叙述编织成了这种更传统的教科书结构。承载这一叙述的五章通常较短
{"title":"Assembling Archaeology. Teaching, Practice, and Research","authors":"Per Ditlef Fredriksen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2173085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2173085","url":null,"abstract":"This book is a timely and important contribution to knowledge production in archaeology. Firmly grounded in the two authors’ own teaching experience and previous conversations about pedagogy, the book makes a convincing case for the value of assemblage approaches. The solution offered requires a rethinking of teaching, training, and practice in archaeology, turning the very discipline into the subject of investigation. Facing neoliberal political economy and its narrow-minded demands for humanistic disciplines to be ‘useful’, there is a need to resituate and re-weave the web of relations between archaeological teaching and research. At its core, the book addresses the undervaluing of teaching. As the authors point out, such undervaluing has seriously affected the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice and is anchored in a lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. Overall, the book is well written, well-structured, and well researched. Its greatest merit, however, is that it offers a sympathetic view that takes students – including their various viewpoints and points of entry into archaeology – seriously. From early on this reader is struck by two key qualities. The first is how useful the book is for teachers of archaeology. Not only in giving practical advice, but also in providing a much-needed comprehensive status for pedagogical research of particular relevance for the discipline. The second quality is how refreshingly clear the authors are in their criticism of neoliberalism. The core message is well summarized in the concluding chapter: ‘a fundamental way to challenge neoliberal agendas [...] is to recognize [...] that a place in which learning emerges is through research, and that research often emerges through teaching’ (p. 153, orig. emphases). Cobb and Croucher’s departure point for this book might humble even the most experienced teachers of theory in archaeology. Such readers will quickly recognize the philosophical heritage of the assemblage framework, drawing primarily on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) but referring to a wide array of ‘assemblage thinkers’ like DeLanda, Latour, Barad, and Bennett (cf. Hamilakis and Jones 2017, pp. 80–81). A key concept is rhizomatic learning, ‘something which develops along messy, non-linear, complicated, and unpredictable routes’. This fuels the authors’ rethinking of ‘both interpretations of the past and practice in the present in realist, new materialist, non-anthropocentric ways’ (pp. 46–47). While this wonderfully ‘messy’ approach levels with students’ experiences of uncertainty and unpredictability, it is not the easiest to convey in an accessible manner. In my opinion, Cobb and Croucher manages this quite well, first and foremost because they never lose sight of what they really want to achieve: a concrete archaeological pedagogy that takes students’ everyday challenges and life-worlds seriously. The book consists of 10 chapters and ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42870659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2022.2157745
Svein Vatsvåg Nielsen
It is not often I come across books that are concerned with two supposedly unrelated prehistoric phenomena, but which still succeeds in capturing my full scholarly attention. From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation by John C. Barrett and Michael J. Boyd is another one of these rare books. It is even a rather tiny piece, with a total of 169 pages of text and 45 illustrations, focused thematically on the knowledge production of European prehistory and the challenges of archaeological interpretation. More specifically, the book addresses ‘the archaeology of two regions that were once linked by the diffusionist narratives that Colin Renfrew recognized as no longer being viable’ and the two regions are, as indicated by the title, the area surrounding Stonehenge and Aegean during the second and third millenniums BCE. The main challenge of archaeological interpretation that From Stonehenge to Mycenae focuses on is the one emerging from the relation between two types of archaeological evidence. On the one hand, there is that evidence which pertains to mobility in the past, or what was previously referred to as ‘diffusion’ in archaeology, and on the other hand there is that which pertains to regional continuity in cultural traditions. This general theme is also probably what makes the book itself so alluring, no matter what background the reader has, and the authors do a good job in situating their work within the now well-known research history of processual and postprocessual archaeology. From their view, which it should be mentioned is firmly UK-based (Sheffield and Cambridge), the first important contribution to our knowledge of European prehistory during this period was made by V. G Childe in the late 1950s, when he connected the archaeology of different regions of Europe and Western Asia through diffusionist and rather schematic models. This was the state of the art in European prehistory before the advent of radiocarbon dating, which we know had a tremendous impact on chronologies. The second contribution, in these author’s view, was made by Colin Renfrew in the 1970s, when he used results from radiocarbon dating to form a new chronology of early metal production on the European continent, which according to the authors laid the very foundation for the formation of a processual archaeology in European archaeology. Their argument is, in short, that where Childe had explained the emergence of metallurgy in Europe by migrations from Mesopotamia, the Aegean etc., Renfrew on the other hand saw technological developments realized through ‘indigenous social and economic forces’ (p. 7). Thus, systems theory in processual archaeology, combined with radiometric dating methods, had a profound effect on European prehistory. However, even studies in processual archaeology, and particularly through the application of World Systems modelling, also came to recognize certain ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ geographical regions in Europe
我很少遇到涉及两种据称不相关的史前现象的书，但它仍然成功地吸引了我的全部学术注意力。从巨石阵到迈锡尼。约翰·巴雷特（John C.Barrett）和迈克尔·J·博伊德（Michael J.Boyd）的《考古解释的挑战》（The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation）是其中另一本罕见的书。这甚至是一篇相当小的文章，共有169页的文本和45幅插图，主题集中在欧洲史前史的知识生产和考古解释的挑战上。更具体地说，这本书讲述了“两个地区的考古，这两个地区曾经被科林·伦弗认为不再可行的传播主义叙事联系在一起”，正如标题所示，这两地区是公元前两千年和三千年巨石阵和爱琴海周围的地区。《从巨石阵到迈锡尼》所关注的考古解释的主要挑战是两类考古证据之间的关系。一方面，有证据与过去的流动性有关，或者以前在考古学中被称为“扩散”，另一方面，也有证据与文化传统的区域连续性有关。无论读者有什么背景，这个总的主题也可能是这本书本身如此吸引人的原因，作者们很好地将他们的工作置于现在众所周知的过程和后过程考古学的研究史中。从他们的观点来看，这一时期我们对欧洲史前史的第一个重要贡献是由V.G Childe在20世纪50年代末做出的，当时他通过扩散主义和相当示意性的模型将欧洲和西亚不同地区的考古学联系起来。这是欧洲史前史上放射性碳测年出现之前的最先进水平，我们知道这对年表产生了巨大影响。在这些作者看来，第二个贡献是科林·伦弗雷在20世纪70年代做出的，当时他利用放射性碳测年的结果形成了欧洲大陆早期金属生产的新年表，据作者称，这为欧洲考古学中形成过程考古学奠定了基础。简言之，他们的论点是，Childe通过从美索不达米亚、爱琴海等地迁移来解释欧洲冶金业的出现，而Renfrew则通过“本土社会和经济力量”实现了技术发展（第7页）。因此，过程考古学中的系统理论与辐射测年方法相结合，对欧洲史前史产生了深远的影响。然而，即使是过程考古学的研究，特别是通过应用世界系统建模，也开始认识到青铜时代欧洲的某些“核心”和“外围”地理区域，因为人工制品和技术的分布受到限制，这可以在经验记录中观察到。这些观察在一定程度上反映了文化历史研究范式的观察，因此，在Childe的作品之后很久，人们重新关注青铜时代的超区域物质交换系统，以及区域政治精英的形成（如Kristiansen和
{"title":"From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation","authors":"Svein Vatsvåg Nielsen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2022.2157745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2022.2157745","url":null,"abstract":"It is not often I come across books that are concerned with two supposedly unrelated prehistoric phenomena, but which still succeeds in capturing my full scholarly attention. From Stonehenge to Mycenae. The Challenges of Archaeological Interpretation by John C. Barrett and Michael J. Boyd is another one of these rare books. It is even a rather tiny piece, with a total of 169 pages of text and 45 illustrations, focused thematically on the knowledge production of European prehistory and the challenges of archaeological interpretation. More specifically, the book addresses ‘the archaeology of two regions that were once linked by the diffusionist narratives that Colin Renfrew recognized as no longer being viable’ and the two regions are, as indicated by the title, the area surrounding Stonehenge and Aegean during the second and third millenniums BCE. The main challenge of archaeological interpretation that From Stonehenge to Mycenae focuses on is the one emerging from the relation between two types of archaeological evidence. On the one hand, there is that evidence which pertains to mobility in the past, or what was previously referred to as ‘diffusion’ in archaeology, and on the other hand there is that which pertains to regional continuity in cultural traditions. This general theme is also probably what makes the book itself so alluring, no matter what background the reader has, and the authors do a good job in situating their work within the now well-known research history of processual and postprocessual archaeology. From their view, which it should be mentioned is firmly UK-based (Sheffield and Cambridge), the first important contribution to our knowledge of European prehistory during this period was made by V. G Childe in the late 1950s, when he connected the archaeology of different regions of Europe and Western Asia through diffusionist and rather schematic models. This was the state of the art in European prehistory before the advent of radiocarbon dating, which we know had a tremendous impact on chronologies. The second contribution, in these author’s view, was made by Colin Renfrew in the 1970s, when he used results from radiocarbon dating to form a new chronology of early metal production on the European continent, which according to the authors laid the very foundation for the formation of a processual archaeology in European archaeology. Their argument is, in short, that where Childe had explained the emergence of metallurgy in Europe by migrations from Mesopotamia, the Aegean etc., Renfrew on the other hand saw technological developments realized through ‘indigenous social and economic forces’ (p. 7). Thus, systems theory in processual archaeology, combined with radiometric dating methods, had a profound effect on European prehistory. However, even studies in processual archaeology, and particularly through the application of World Systems modelling, also came to recognize certain ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ geographical regions in Europe ","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45402970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203140
Liv Nilsson Stutz
The world is on fire, and European archaeologists are starting to feel the heat. With the war in the Ukraine, the rise of polarizing politics and global authoritarianism, and the climate emergency pushing us closer to the tipping point of planetary destruction, we cannot help but to feel deeply affected. In the face of these challenges, we want to act, but what we do as archaeologists can sometimes seem trivial and insignificant. Even worse, a critical examination of our disciplinary history can lead us to conclude that we are complicit in the injustices and even partially responsible for the current situation. The chasm between the social, cultural, and environmental crisis of our time, and the academy was masterfully depicted by Ryan Cecil Jobson in his essay ‘The case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019’ (Jobson 2020) written in the aftermath of the 2019 AAA meetings in San Jose, California, which saw hundreds of anthropologists fly in to socialize and discuss issues like inequality and climate change in a city covered by the smoke from raging wildfires. The irony was not lost on anybody. In the essay Jobson framed the situation as an epistemic crisis of the discipline and called for it to abandon its liberal suppositions (Jobson 2020, p. 261). The response is characteristic for a trend in academia today to respond with socially conscious scholarship and attempts at tearing down what Jobson calls ‘the fictive separation’ of ‘bourgeois academic work from the material histories of other fields that took shape alongside the formalization of the human sciences’ (Jobson 2020, p. 261). In this discourse we often encounter an amalgam of intellectual thought that combines anti-racism, feminism, anti-capitalism, and post-colonial criticism, with calls to decolonize institutions of power. It is in this context that I view the piece by Warren and Elliot calling for us to decolonize the Mesolithic, and I welcome it. At the same time, I am also wary of the critique framed by Olúfémi O. Táíwò as ‘elite capture,’ referring to the phenomenon of how movements to decolonize, including discourses, resources and processes intended to empower the marginalized, often become appropriated by the privileged (Táíwò 2022). I share the authors’ commitment to a socially conscious archaeology. I agree that archaeology is political and should be engaged in the contemporary world, and I am pleased to see this issue explicitly brought into focus for the Mesolithic, which often has remained on the margins of these debates. I am disappointed that several of our colleagues felt strongly enough to reach out to express their discontent and discourage continued work in this area. I wish we had come farther – but at least this seems to have struck a nerve that I think we should continue to put pressure on. That being said, and in the spirit of exploratory
世界正处于火海之中，欧洲的考古学家们也开始感受到了热度。乌克兰的战争、两极分化的政治和全球威权主义的兴起，以及气候紧急情况将我们推向了地球毁灭的临界点，我们不禁感到深受影响。面对这些挑战，我们想要采取行动，但作为考古学家，我们所做的事情有时似乎微不足道。更糟糕的是，对我们学科历史的批判性审视可能会让我们得出这样的结论:我们是不公正的同谋，甚至对当前的情况负有部分责任。瑞安·塞西尔·约翰逊(Ryan Cecil johnson)在他的文章《让人类学燃烧的案例:2019年的社会文化人类学》(Jobson 2020)中巧妙地描绘了我们这个时代的社会、文化和环境危机与学术界之间的鸿沟。这篇文章是在2019年加州圣何塞AAA会议之后写的。在圣何塞，数百名人类学家飞到一个被熊熊大火的烟雾笼罩的城市，参加社交活动，讨论不平等和气候变化等问题。每个人都明白其中的讽刺意味。在这篇文章中，约翰逊将这种情况描述为该学科的认知危机，并呼吁它放弃其自由主义的假设(Jobson 2020, p. 261)。这种回应是当今学术界一种趋势的特征，即以具有社会意识的学术作为回应，并试图摧毁约翰逊所说的“资产阶级学术工作与其他领域的物质历史的实际分离”，这些领域与人文科学的形式化同时形成”(Jobson 2020，第261页)。在这种论述中，我们经常遇到一种知识分子思想的混合体，它结合了反种族主义、女权主义、反资本主义和后殖民批评，并呼吁权力机构去殖民化。正是在这种背景下，我看待沃伦和艾略特呼吁我们去殖民中石器时代的文章，我对此表示欢迎。与此同时，我也对Olúfémi O. Táíwò所提出的“精英捕获”的批评持谨慎态度，该批评指的是非殖民化运动，包括旨在赋予边缘化群体权力的话语、资源和过程，如何经常被特权阶层占用的现象(Táíwò 2022)。我赞同两位作者对社会意识考古学的承诺。我同意考古学是政治性的，应该参与当代世界，我很高兴看到这个问题明确地成为中石器时代的焦点，它经常处于这些辩论的边缘。我感到失望的是，我们的一些同事强烈地表达了他们的不满，并劝阻在这一领域继续开展工作。我希望我们能走得更远——但至少这似乎触动了人们的神经，我认为我们应该继续施加压力。也就是说，本着探索的精神
{"title":"Fires and Seeds. Considerations for a decolonized Mesolithic archaeology","authors":"Liv Nilsson Stutz","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203140","url":null,"abstract":"The world is on fire, and European archaeologists are starting to feel the heat. With the war in the Ukraine, the rise of polarizing politics and global authoritarianism, and the climate emergency pushing us closer to the tipping point of planetary destruction, we cannot help but to feel deeply affected. In the face of these challenges, we want to act, but what we do as archaeologists can sometimes seem trivial and insignificant. Even worse, a critical examination of our disciplinary history can lead us to conclude that we are complicit in the injustices and even partially responsible for the current situation. The chasm between the social, cultural, and environmental crisis of our time, and the academy was masterfully depicted by Ryan Cecil Jobson in his essay ‘The case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019’ (Jobson 2020) written in the aftermath of the 2019 AAA meetings in San Jose, California, which saw hundreds of anthropologists fly in to socialize and discuss issues like inequality and climate change in a city covered by the smoke from raging wildfires. The irony was not lost on anybody. In the essay Jobson framed the situation as an epistemic crisis of the discipline and called for it to abandon its liberal suppositions (Jobson 2020, p. 261). The response is characteristic for a trend in academia today to respond with socially conscious scholarship and attempts at tearing down what Jobson calls ‘the fictive separation’ of ‘bourgeois academic work from the material histories of other fields that took shape alongside the formalization of the human sciences’ (Jobson 2020, p. 261). In this discourse we often encounter an amalgam of intellectual thought that combines anti-racism, feminism, anti-capitalism, and post-colonial criticism, with calls to decolonize institutions of power. It is in this context that I view the piece by Warren and Elliot calling for us to decolonize the Mesolithic, and I welcome it. At the same time, I am also wary of the critique framed by Olúfémi O. Táíwò as ‘elite capture,’ referring to the phenomenon of how movements to decolonize, including discourses, resources and processes intended to empower the marginalized, often become appropriated by the privileged (Táíwò 2022). I share the authors’ commitment to a socially conscious archaeology. I agree that archaeology is political and should be engaged in the contemporary world, and I am pleased to see this issue explicitly brought into focus for the Mesolithic, which often has remained on the margins of these debates. I am disappointed that several of our colleagues felt strongly enough to reach out to express their discontent and discourage continued work in this area. I wish we had come farther – but at least this seems to have struck a nerve that I think we should continue to put pressure on. That being said, and in the spirit of exploratory","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47167624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2182232
Ben Elliott, G. Warren
This paper heeds the broader societal calls for decolonisation in Britain and Ireland, and seeks to apply various strands of decolonial practice within the context of Mesolithic archaeology; a subfield which has seen little postcolonial reflection to date. We question the historic interactions between Mesolithic archaeology and colonial hegemony, and argue that Mesolithic research continues to reinforce these hegemonies today. This occurs simultaneously within Europe, and on the inter-continental scale. With this in mind, we explore areas of Mesolithic research practice that hold potential to shift this dynamic, and contribute to the deconstruction of colonially rooted power imbalances. In doing so, our focus falls upon the ethics of ethnographic analogy, and the ontological turn within Mesolithic Studies.
{"title":"Colonialism and the European Mesolithic","authors":"Ben Elliott, G. Warren","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2182232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2182232","url":null,"abstract":"This paper heeds the broader societal calls for decolonisation in Britain and Ireland, and seeks to apply various strands of decolonial practice within the context of Mesolithic archaeology; a subfield which has seen little postcolonial reflection to date. We question the historic interactions between Mesolithic archaeology and colonial hegemony, and argue that Mesolithic research continues to reinforce these hegemonies today. This occurs simultaneously within Europe, and on the inter-continental scale. With this in mind, we explore areas of Mesolithic research practice that hold potential to shift this dynamic, and contribute to the deconstruction of colonially rooted power imbalances. In doing so, our focus falls upon the ethics of ethnographic analogy, and the ontological turn within Mesolithic Studies.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43719296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2181212
Caroline Fredriksen
This paper explores the knowledge potential of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage through the conceptual framework of assemblage thinking. Drawing on the concepts of the actual/virtual, affect and coding, combined with the actor-network theory (ANT) notion of inscriptions, I discuss the metal-detected assemblage’s realm of potential for new archaeological knowledge. I identify and articulate the constituents of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage, identifying inscriptions and coding mechanisms affecting the phenomenon of metal detecting in the present, such as policies, management practices and cataloguing. Further, I discuss how these practices frame specific types of objectives, constituting and affecting the virtual diagram of the particular assemblage. In conclusion, Norwegian archaeological practices enable specific types of objectives, actualising specific types of knowledge.
{"title":"A Realm of Virtual Knowledge: Exploring the Capacities of Norwegian Metal-detected Assemblages","authors":"Caroline Fredriksen","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2181212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2181212","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the knowledge potential of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage through the conceptual framework of assemblage thinking. Drawing on the concepts of the actual/virtual, affect and coding, combined with the actor-network theory (ANT) notion of inscriptions, I discuss the metal-detected assemblage’s realm of potential for new archaeological knowledge. I identify and articulate the constituents of the Norwegian metal-detected assemblage, identifying inscriptions and coding mechanisms affecting the phenomenon of metal detecting in the present, such as policies, management practices and cataloguing. Further, I discuss how these practices frame specific types of objectives, constituting and affecting the virtual diagram of the particular assemblage. In conclusion, Norwegian archaeological practices enable specific types of objectives, actualising specific types of knowledge.","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49263336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00293652.2023.2203189
Håkon Glørstad
Benjamin Elliott and Graeme Warren have bravely taken on the project to write a debate article for Norwegian Archaeological Review about colonialism and the European Mesolithic. The dialog-oriented shape they have given the text makes it valuable and thought provoking and the authors certainly deserves credit for this, as most decolonising debates resembles the trench warfare of the First World War, not very attuned to dialog. Their arguments are many and complex and the format of the debate makes it difficult to address all the issues that they raise. I therefore limit my comments to just a few themes. These are the European or Western peccatum originale; the benefits of universality; the relation between structure and history; and finally, the significance of the archaeological record itself. I find it fascinating that the text de facto presents the core of the decolonisation debate as a theological problem of the peccatum originale or original sin in western culture. Few people in European societies and even fewer researchers in archaeology have taken a direct or active part in oppressing indigenous populations across the world. Still, their thinking, their language and their way of life are oppressing. This is, as far as I can see the classical dilemma of the original sin. I must admit that I am very sceptical to this doctrine, and I find it paradoxical that this very western and Christian problem, defines the debate about decolonisation – a debate aimed at criticising the very same phenomenon. This does not make the debate or problems per se (the very uneven distribution of capital, influence and power in the world today) irrelevant or silly, it raises however the question of how we are best served to investigate, discuss and debate injustice in the world today. In this respect, I doubt that colonialism and post-colonialism are the best tools for making intellectual or political progress. The reason for this is first that I think the problems are much more complicated than the fact that some nations and people in the modern era colonised other people’s land. Second, the terms themselves – colonialism, post-colonialism – come to act as a metaphor of everything wrong and thus preclude any attempt to make a precise analysis of the problems at stake. Just like the terms processual and post-processual mobilised generations of archaeologists in the 70s, 80s and 90s, (post)-colonialism also effectively mobilises current archaeological thinking – but does the term describe something of substance? To me it seems much more like a repetition of a classical Christian and western paradox, introduced to control through penance – not to liberate or enlighten. In this perspective, it is interesting that Elliot and Warren emphasise that the archaeologists that have been inspired by the ‘ontological turn’ in their interpretations of Mesolithic societies abstained from letting
Benjamin Elliott和Graeme Warren勇敢地承担了这个项目，为《挪威考古评论》撰写了一篇关于殖民主义和欧洲中石器时代的辩论文章。他们赋予文本以对话为导向的形式，使其具有价值和发人深省的思考，作者们当然值得称赞，因为大多数非殖民化辩论类似于第一次世界大战的堑壕战，不太适应对话。他们的论点很多，很复杂，辩论的形式使他们很难解决他们提出的所有问题。因此，我的评论仅限于几个主题。这些是欧洲或西方原产的山核桃；普遍性的好处；结构与历史的关系；最后，考古记录本身的意义。我觉得很有意思的是，文本事实上将非殖民化辩论的核心呈现为西方文化中的原罪或原罪的神学问题。欧洲社会中很少有人，甚至更少的考古研究人员直接或积极参与压迫世界各地的土著人口。尽管如此，他们的思想、语言和生活方式仍令人压抑。在我看来，这就是原罪的经典困境。我必须承认，我对这一学说持怀疑态度，我发现这一非常西方和基督教的问题定义了关于非殖民化的辩论——这场辩论旨在批评同样的现象，这是自相矛盾的。这并没有使辩论或问题本身（当今世界资本、影响力和权力的分配非常不均衡）变得无关紧要或愚蠢，而是提出了一个问题，即如何最好地为我们调查、讨论和辩论当今世界的不公正现象服务。在这方面，我怀疑殖民主义和后殖民主义是取得知识或政治进步的最佳工具。原因首先是，我认为问题比现代一些国家和人民殖民他人土地的事实要复杂得多。其次，术语本身——殖民主义、后殖民主义——开始成为一切错误的隐喻，从而排除了对所涉问题进行精确分析的任何尝试。就像70年代、80年代和90年代动员了一代又一代考古学家的过程和后过程一样，（后）殖民主义也有效地动员了当前的考古思维——但这个词描述的是实质性的东西吗？对我来说，这似乎更像是古典基督教和西方悖论的重复，通过忏悔来控制——而不是解放或启蒙。从这个角度来看，有趣的是，Elliot和Warren强调，考古学家在对中石器时代社会的解释中受到了“本体论转向”的启发，他们放弃了让
{"title":"Choosing the Right Weapons and Arenas - Comments to Elliott and Warren","authors":"Håkon Glørstad","doi":"10.1080/00293652.2023.2203189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2023.2203189","url":null,"abstract":"Benjamin Elliott and Graeme Warren have bravely taken on the project to write a debate article for Norwegian Archaeological Review about colonialism and the European Mesolithic. The dialog-oriented shape they have given the text makes it valuable and thought provoking and the authors certainly deserves credit for this, as most decolonising debates resembles the trench warfare of the First World War, not very attuned to dialog. Their arguments are many and complex and the format of the debate makes it difficult to address all the issues that they raise. I therefore limit my comments to just a few themes. These are the European or Western peccatum originale; the benefits of universality; the relation between structure and history; and finally, the significance of the archaeological record itself. I find it fascinating that the text de facto presents the core of the decolonisation debate as a theological problem of the peccatum originale or original sin in western culture. Few people in European societies and even fewer researchers in archaeology have taken a direct or active part in oppressing indigenous populations across the world. Still, their thinking, their language and their way of life are oppressing. This is, as far as I can see the classical dilemma of the original sin. I must admit that I am very sceptical to this doctrine, and I find it paradoxical that this very western and Christian problem, defines the debate about decolonisation – a debate aimed at criticising the very same phenomenon. This does not make the debate or problems per se (the very uneven distribution of capital, influence and power in the world today) irrelevant or silly, it raises however the question of how we are best served to investigate, discuss and debate injustice in the world today. In this respect, I doubt that colonialism and post-colonialism are the best tools for making intellectual or political progress. The reason for this is first that I think the problems are much more complicated than the fact that some nations and people in the modern era colonised other people’s land. Second, the terms themselves – colonialism, post-colonialism – come to act as a metaphor of everything wrong and thus preclude any attempt to make a precise analysis of the problems at stake. Just like the terms processual and post-processual mobilised generations of archaeologists in the 70s, 80s and 90s, (post)-colonialism also effectively mobilises current archaeological thinking – but does the term describe something of substance? To me it seems much more like a repetition of a classical Christian and western paradox, introduced to control through penance – not to liberate or enlighten. In this perspective, it is interesting that Elliot and Warren emphasise that the archaeologists that have been inspired by the ‘ontological turn’ in their interpretations of Mesolithic societies abstained from letting","PeriodicalId":45030,"journal":{"name":"Norwegian Archaeological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46479606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：