Post-humanistic Approaches in Archaeology

It is a pleasure to respond to Christina Fredengren’s thought-provoking keynote on post-humanistic approaches in archaeology. Her ambition is to give arguments for relational and entangled approaches and multispecies archaeology. It is a thoroughly warranted text. The political situation in the world, with increased segregation and inequality, requires action from the humanities and social sciences. Theories and methods used in archae ology are generational and time-specific, as the present is always the starting point for research. Conscious or unconscious demands in the present are incorporated, open or hidden, in our research questions. It is not remarkable that archaeological theories and methods have changed through the premodern, modern, and post-modern periods, due to ideological and political contexts, as Lori Braidotti (2013) outlines so well. I appreciate Fredengren’s call for critical feminist posthumanism and a new materialism in archaeology as it opens up for new questions about how archaeology can work. After a short presentation of posthuman theories and approaches and archaeological animal studies, Fredengren explores the concepts of taxonomy, hybridity, othering and killability. They are chosen to gain an understanding of how humanity and animality are produced and how to find animal agentiality. Fredengren’s argument goes far beyond the traditional field of archaeological research towards more overarching existential and philosophical questions.