Materiality and Agency

I’ve had to move forward my self-imposed deadline for the chapter on “Objects, Materiality, and Agency” for my slowly developing book in the Archaeology of Contemporary American Culture to give me some space to shift gears and return to the archaeology of Late Antique Cyprus. As a result, my current chapter will be very rough around the edges. 

At the same time, the topic of the chapter — thing theory, materiality, and agency — are not particularly prominent in the archaeology of the contemporary US. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s work in post-Katrina New Orleans perhaps being the most prominent exception, but even this drew more heavily on critiques ground in North American historical archaeology than the critiques of agency and ontology favored by European archaeologists.

There are a few exceptions, however, and the second half of this chapter will discuss the “ontological turn” in archaeology of the contemporary world and introduce two case studies: Timothy LeCain’s work at the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, and the work of photographer Micah Bloom in Minot, North Dakota after the 2011 Flood.

As with the other chapters, this is my morning work. Stay tuned for updates.  

Updated 1:45 pm 2/19/20

Dawdy’s work blends currents in American historical archaeology with attention to the role of capitalism and perspectives on the consumer culture rooted in the work of Daniel Miller and his students of modern material culture. Her interest in complicating and challenging Marx’s idea of the fetish, for example, echoes efforts among scholars of the things to demonstrate that things are more than simply vulgar distractions meant to obscure the social working of labor. At the same time, Dawdy’s insistence that material culture in New Orleans represents a critique of consumer culture, rather than simply a distinctive expression of how things serve to construct social relationships, suggests a continued hostility toward things as they exist within consumer culture mediated by contemporary capitalism.

Dawdy’s interest in the material signs of patina on old things in New Orleans, however, speaks to a growing interest among archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists into the materiality of things. In geographer Caitlin DeSilvey’s book, Curated Decay, she discussed her work to document the deteriorating remains of a century-old Montana farmstead which had been abandoned in 1995 (DeSilvey 2017; 2006). Looking through over a century of objects, she observed the multiple processes and agents that have shaped the assemblage of material associated with this farmstead and described evidence for the nesting habits of rodents, patterns produced by hungry insects, and the play of humidity, microbial action, rust and rot on the fabric of the farm and its contents. She speculatively proposes the potential for collaborative curation with animals, microbes, and chemical processes that continuously transform the materials that make up our contemporary world. Any one who has stepped foot in an abandoned building recognizes that the evidence for abandonment has less to do with the absence of human activity as it does the visible presence of a wide range of non-human agents and processes.

The DeSilvey’s work offers a compelling North American example of recent efforts to consider the materiality of our world in ways that challenges the long-standing dichotomies between humans and nature and humans and things that have defined the social sciences and humanities for the last two centuries. Many of these approaches center on critiques of the working ontologies that allow us to group objects into categories of ”things.“ These critiques have often emphasized flat ontologies which reject the hierarchical divisions that rank humans, animals, and things at different levels. Flat ontologies, often loosely described as “object oriented ontologies” offers a paradigm for understanding the interaction between things, between things and humans, and between humans as fundamentally similar. In this approach to objects, things have a kind of agency in their interaction with humans and other things. Archaeologists have introduced these and similar ideas in a diverse range of ways from calls for a “symmetrical archaeology” (Witmore) to the concept of “entanglement” (Hodder xxxx) and new or neomaterialism (for a survey of these approaches see LeCain 2017). Michael Shanks and Bjørnar Olsen, for example, stress that things are not a separate category (Shanks, et al. 2012, p. 8-9). Many of these ideas continue ways of thinking reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg, in which the blurry division between humans and things extends to recognizing the heterogeneous character of objects in our everyday life (Haraway 1991?; LeCain 2017, p. 80). Tim Edensor observes that ruins likewise blur the difference between human and non-human agency making it impossible to keep tidy ontological divisions when confronted with elusiveness of human efforts to create order in the world (LeCain 2014, 64; Edensor 2005). Breaking down the purity of categories like things and humans undercuts co-constructivist views in which things create society and, more importantly, provides a way to consider the commingled meshwork of existence that makes human life on earth possible (Latour xxxx; Ingold xxxx).

Timothy LeCain’s study of the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana demonstrates how some of these ideas can shape new understandings of the world (LeCain 2009; LeCain 2014). While LeCain is a historian, not an archaeologist, his attention to materiality and matter offer a compelling perspective for the discipline of archaeology and an opportunity to connect the discipline to environmental history. The Berkeley pit was a massive open pit mine created by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1955 after conventional mining methods using tunnels and shafts became less effective. The massive pit excavated by equally massive machines eventually extended for 1800 feet below the surface and was near 1.5 miles wide (LeCain 2014, 71). In 1982, mining ceased at the pit and when the pumps that served to keep pit dry stoped operating, it filled with acidic water laced with a toxic combination of heavy metals. The copper mined from this pit served to conduct electricity, make guns, produce components for TVs and Michael Schiffer’s portable radios. It also provided jobs to generations of residents of Butte, Montana. The pit changed the local landscape and introduced toxic chemicals to the water table. The toxic water interacted with residents and wildlife.

LeCain starts his 2014 article on the “ontology of absence” with the arresting story of a flock of migrating snow geese who landed in the pit in 1995 and were killed by its toxic waters. The interplay between the geese, the mining, the metals in the acidic waters, the rhythms of migration, and the weather conditions that night led to their demise. LeCain concludes with the observation that humans created the pit, but the absence presence of the pit remains a persistent and independent agent in the global landscape, technologies, and even migratory patterns that shape our world.