Shadow Archaeologies

Over the past week or so, I’ve been enjoying Assaf Nativ and Gavin Lucas’s edited volume Shadow Archaeologies: In the Shadow of Antiquity or For Other Modes of Archaeological Worldmaking(2025). The book reflects the work of a fairly well-known group of shadow archaeologists whose approaches to archaeological “worldmaking,” methods, and problems are fair familiar to anyone interested in the more theoretical side of the discipline. These shadow archaeologists focus their contributions in three areas: politics, practices, and objects, but these concepts are loosely and broadly defined.

I’m sure this volume will see a comprehensive review and a critique of the concept of “shadow archaeologies” as well as of the purpose of this assortment of papers. Whatever its limitations as a collection bound by a concept, there were several papers that seized my interest.

The most obvious of them was Chris Witmore’s “Shadows from Below: On an Increasingly Permeable Object of Permian Proportions.” Witmore, among other things, explores how Morton’s concept of “hyperobject” helps us understand the character of the Permian oilfield (cf. Ryan Rybka’s recent work). I found Witmore use of Morton’s concept of hyperobjects being viscous particularly compelling. Oil clings and spreads and transforms everything it touches. This alone makes the extent of the oilfield more than just its spatial boundaries, but its transformation of both the region and how we engage with the area. Witmore complements the concept of viscosity with four intriguing concepts of his own: proportionality, porosity, permeability, and potency. While in such a short paper, he doesn’t necessarily develop these concepts fully, he hints that they offer ways to integrate the viscosity (that is potency) of the hyperobject with archaeology’s interest in scale (that is its proportionality). Scale — proportionality — shapes how we interact with hyperobjects (especially by recognizing their porosity and permeability). In my work, I tend to see the photograph as a way to capture manifestations of the hyperobject and make it susceptible to scrutiny by arresting its viscosity and, by extensions, blunting oil’s almost mystical power (sensu Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia). Like Witmore, I see archaeology’s intervention with oil as a way to stress the permeability and porosity and perhaps in some sense undermining the almost overwhelming viscosity of oil’s influence over society. In contrast, I probably locate archaeology as “complicit,” to use Negarestani’s concept, in the potent viscosity of oil as a hyperobject. 

The other article that seized my attention was Artur Ribeiro’s “Archaeology and Technology: Living in the Shadow of the Machine-Gods.” This feels like a development of concepts of slow and punk archaeology that I developed in an earlier life. Ribeiro shares my interest in not only the technology at the core of archaeological practice, but also how technology has shaped the social organization of the discipline. As a result, Ribeiro argues that our increasingly dependence on technology has forced us to live in its shadow. Of course, this has always been the case to some extent. Even the trowel and the line level is a kind of technology necessary to expose and document disciplinary assemblages. That said, Ribeiro understands that contemporary technology has the capacity to accelerate, expand, and ultimately coopt our capacity to understand the world. This transforms archaeology from a discipline of human advancement, through the human thought and experience, to a discipline where humans have become prosthetics to the technologies that employ us. Ribeiro stops short of offering some kind of sweeping solution for this developing predicament and instead reminds us that despite computers being better than humans at chess, this has not stopped humans from playing chess. Ribeiro’s contribution also introduced me to the work of Byung-Chul Han which is influencing some of my writing this week.

Elsewhere in the book Benjamin Alberti’s piece titled “Wonder, Intuition, and Compulsive Creativity as Archaeological Method” and Dan Hicks and Rebekka Ladewig’s contribution, “Tacit Archaeology: Legacy Colonialism, Implicit Knowing, Cultural Techniques, and Slow Inheritance” offered keen insights into how our seemingly rigorous and transparent archaeological methods draw upon a deeper reservoir of wonder, intuition, and tacit knowledge. Here the shadow archaeology represents the assumptions that shape the kind of disciplinary knowledge that archaeology produces. Hick’s and Ladewig’s article introduce me to the work of Michael Polyani on “tacit knowledge” that formed the a framework for cultural, social, and scientific understanding. They argue that by making these tacit frameworks of archaeological knowledge visible, it prevents us for continuing ways of knowing grounded in deeply problematic colonialist and nationalist projects. Alberti’s piece, in contrast, describes intuitive and creative ways of working as difficult and not simply tacit. This allows for a deliberate escape from the mechanistic aspects of archaeological knowledge making. 

These pieces feel a bit like a counterpoint to some of my current thinking about pseudoarchaeology which often reveals some of the historical structures and assumptions that archaeologists have embraced in the formation of the discipline. By examining why certain pseudoarchaeological assumptions are compelling (e.g. ancient aliens or Atlantis) despite the absence of evidence, we can trace how different corpora of tacit knowledge fill in gaps for which disciplinary knowledge require (and acquire) evidence. This disjunction contributes to the incommensurability between certain forms of “alternative” and “pseudo-“ archaeology and disciplinary practices. It also suggests that these other forms of archaeological knowledge may not exist as failed version of a kind of “pure” or “true” archaeology, but as a kind of knowledge that exists within its own traditions, practices, and assumptions. The moments when pseudoarchaeology and alternative archaeology intersects with conventional archaeological practice and knowledge then should not be moments of conflict, but opportunities not only to make our tacit disciplinary knowledge visible, but also to open new ways of thinking about the past.