Three Article Thursday: Habitus, Unproof, and Cyprus

I am trying to catch up on some reading as I lurch into the winter break. I’m starting by burrowing down through a stack of articles that I’ve saved over the last semester. These are mostly unrelated, but interesting to me none the less.

Article the First

I very much enjoyed Jordi A. Rivera Prince, Kylie E. Quave, Di Hu & Katherine L. Chiou’s article “Methodological Habitus: Complicating Categories, Taxonomies, and Scientism in Archaeology” in the Journal of Field Archaeology. The article argues — among other things — that the close link between scientific methods (and scientism) and certain assumptions in archaeology constitute a kind of disciplinary habitus. This habitus makes the discipline prone to producing certain kinds of results and arguments. The example that the authors foreground is that various archaeological practices — from flotation to  bioarchaeological analyses of teeth and bones — are well adapted to identifying grains (including maize) in diets, but not as successful at identifying tubers and other foods that produce less distinct seeds or chemical signatures in the body (to oversimplify and vaguely misrepresent a complex and nuanced argument). This “zeacentrism” of our methods lets to the overrepresentation of grains in diets, and this, in turn, informs how archaeologists have come to understand the entanglement of agriculture, state formation, and territorial regimes in the Americas.

I’m not doing this article justice, but it serves as a salutary reminder of how the tools we use shape the arguments that we can make. 

Article the Second

I also read Catherine Frieman’s “Attending to unproof: an archaeology of possibilities” in Antiquity 98 (2024). This is a brilliant short article that applies as well to archaeology as to history. She argues that the gaps in the evidence creates a productive tension between what we know and what we want to know. This productive space encourages — indeed requires — speculative readings that embrace the possibilities and potential of any interpretation. 

This is particular significant because it creates the space for us to challenge received wisdom which too often bridges those gaps through appeals to common sense or appeals to the contemporary as universal. By “attending to unproof” — that is the gap between what we know and what we don’t know — we create meaningful space to challenge these assumptions, subvert their authority, and correct for biases that have no more grounding in evidence than other equally valid perspectives. This is obviously a powerful tool for feminist, anarchist, and queer perspectives on the past because it encourages us to embrace the potential of existing ambiguities as a way to challenge the status quo and imagine new futures.

Plus, she cites Ursula K. Le Guin.  

There are responses to Frieman’s article that are worth reading as well.

Article the Third

I was excited to read Yasmine Julie L. Cornelissen, Ralf Vandam, Frixos Markou, Meghna Desai, and Thilo Rehren’s recent article “Small-Scale Copper Production in Late Roman Pyrga, Cyprus: Ecclesiastical Influence on Technology” in Historical Metallurgy 55(3), 2025.

The article, as its title suggests, documents a Late Roman production site near Pyrga in eastern Cyprus. The site is about 25 km west of Pyla-Koutsopetria, and its closest coastal outlet would be on the western side of ancient Kition (modern Larnaka). The slag heap studied at the site of Pyrga had Late Roman pottery associated with it and this led to scholars from the Hala Sultan Tekke Hinterland Survey Project to assign it a Late Roman date. This team also studied the material in this slag heap with a scanning electron microscope and an energy dispersive spectrometer. I have no idea how these things help us understand slag in a technical sense, but I was impressed that the authors could discern that the consistency of the slag both at Pyrga and elsewhere suggested a uniformity in copper production in the Late Roman period.

This uniformity combined with evidence from the Codes of Justinian and Theodosius suggested centralized control of extractive industries. The authors speculate a bit that this might be influenced, or even controlled, but the church who not only may have owned the property associated with the copper adits but also helped to organize (or even train!) miners and smelters. I suspect there is some truth to this, but that reality on the ground is more complex.