In practice theory, it is assumed that both motivations and actions are contained in practice. Practices themselves create and recreate the emergent properties or structures of culture. That is, cultures are created through practice, and at the same time change it because of the inherent variability of practice. By recognizing that analytical categories are tools and not reality, one is free to discard them for more precise instruments. Just as earlier scholars recognized cultural subsystems and institutions in the historically contingent clusters of culture historians, practice theorists ask whether topics described as ideational cannot be more usefully addressed by looking for variation in what people do rather than in models that distinguish beliefs from actions, utilitarian from nonutilitarian, or religion and technology. For example, people’s interactions with the environment, so critical in processual archaeology are transformed into new analytical possibilities through consideration of practice. While still relevant to interpretations, they are modeled as local practices that will likely be far more variable than pragmatic commonsense anticipates. Such models like many others before them derive from a consideration of ethnographic materials.
Artifact Agency
Luckily, social science interest in practice-related theory has reinvigorated material culture studies across the academy. One of the hottest topics in contemporary social theory is the realization that people’s practice is conditioned by the agency or causal properties of objects. When people perceive and interact with objects as if they were alive, this creates social relationships between them that defy rationalist models of social action. Alfred Gell in his book Art and Agency makes a persuasive argument for inferring the agency of artifacts by analyzing how people’s actions track that animacy. An analogous model of inference is highlighted in Schiffer and Miller’s artifact-based approach to the study of human communication.
On a broader canvas, Bruno Latour and other scholars interested in the relationship between society and technology have also promoted a model of artifact animacy. They have argued that regardless of whether people perceive agency in material objects, the properties of artifacts and systems of people and artifacts have causal affects on the analogous to social agents. They, therefore, advocate reconceptualizing society as composed of both human and nonhuman social actors. In what has become known as actor network theory, they describe these social actors by the neutral term ‘actants’. Actor network theory calls for a symmetrical relationship between people and objects that erases the common sense notion of animate human actors and inanimate passive things.
Structured Deposits
Such diverse practice-based material-culture-oriented research has stimulated archaeologists to ask new questions about the relationship between artifact agency and the formation of archaeological deposits. Ethnographic evidence, since the early work of classical evolutionists, has demonstrated that people interact with a range of innate material objects that they consider in some sense to be alive or to possess vital powers. When interpretive models emphasize practice theory and object agency, archaeologists have a new tool for linking broad questions about politics, economics, social organization, and religion to the formation of archaeological deposits.
Since the late 1990s, archaeologists aware of such theories have looked for and found evidence of purposely ‘structured deposits’, sometimes called ‘ritual deposits’, in a range of societal scales from small-scale farming hamlets to complex urban cultures. Richard Bradley has succinctly summarized the significance of these deposits, noting that their patterning often highlights the significance of the materials comprising the artifacts, their histories of social interaction, and the significance of the particular places where they are recovered. Objects found in structured deposits are a mixture of mundane and extraordinary things, but because of their social nature enter the record in organized groups. Some are brought together by their agency, and others kept apart. Finally, these attributes of their organization (the structuring) may result from the enactment of narratives, such as might attend ritual practices recalling past sacred events.
Joshua Pollard and others argue today that the term structured deposit implies that some deposits are unstructured and that the true lesson for practice-oriented archaeologies is that all deposits reflect the social nature of human-object interactions. In common with Latour, they ask how would the agency of artifacts affect all forms of activity, ritual and otherwise, and what does that mean for interpretations of the past?
In conclusion, differing conceptions of what constitutes culture create specific questions that become the focus of interpretive models in archaeology. Archaeological history, therefore, has changed in relation to innovative understandings of culture including classical evolutionism, historical particularism, processualism, and practice theory. The key to understanding each of these models is understanding the linkages they make between artifacts, people, and culture.
See also: Agency; Artifacts, Overview; Behavioral Archaeology; Cognitive Archaeology; Culture, Concept and Definitions; Ethnoarchaeology; Evolutionary Archaeology; Historic Roots of Archaeology; Historical Materialist Approaches; Marxist Archaeology; Philosophy of Archaeology; Postprocessual Archaeology; Processual Archaeology; Social Theory.
World History
