This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide ...affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social networks. We cannot reduce things solely to the relational, to a semiotics of things. To do so undermines the power of things to entrap, and particularly to trap the more vulnerable. In the modern world, we have come to see that we need to use things sustainably and responsibly, to care for things. But this care and sustainability themselves too frequently involve further management and control of animals, plants, landscapes, resources, and humans. A long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements. It is in our nature as a species to try and fix our problems now by fiddling and fixing, but such responses may have their limits.
This volume discusses the main excavations at Neolithic Çatalhöyük East undertaken from 2009 to 2017. The site is well known because of its large size, elaborate symbolism and wall paintings, and ...long history of excavation. This volume covers the last period of excavation directed by Ian Hodder in the North and South Areas of the site. It also describes the work conducted in the GDN Area on the later phases of occupation.The main aim of these excavations was to understand the layout and social geography of the settlement (both houses and open areas) and to situate the elaborate art and symbolism within a secure architectural and depositional context. Excavation and conservation methods are described and the campaign of geophysical prospection is described. Considerable focus is placed on detailed dating using Bayesian modeling that alters significantly our understanding of the organization of the settlement. New light is thrown on the degree of contemporaneity of buildings and on the continuities and breaks in house occupation and in the site as a whole. A fuller understanding has also been reached of the variability of houses and burials and of how these variations relate to social differentiation. The descriptions of excavated units, features and buildings incorporates results from the analyses of animal bone, chipped stone, groundstone, shell, ceramics, phytoliths, micromorphology. The integration of different types of data and of different voices within the excavation team mimics the process of collaborative interpretation that took place during the excavation and post-excavation process.
This volume explores the role of religion and ritual in the origin of settled life in the Middle East, focusing on the repetitive construction of houses or cult buildings in the same place. Prominent ...archaeologists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion working at several of the region's most important sites-such as Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, Körtik Tepe, and Aşıklı Höyük-contend that religious factors significantly affected the timing and stability of settled economic structures.Contributors argue that the long-term social relationships characteristic of delayed-return agricultural systems must be based on historical ties to place and to ancestors. They define different forms of history-making, including nondiscursive routinized practices as well as commemorative memorialization. They consider the timing in the Neolithic of an emerging concern with history-making in place in relation to the adoption of farming and settled life in regional sequences. They explore whether such correlations indicate the causal processes in which history-making, ritual practices, agricultural intensification, population increase, and social competition all played a role.Religion, History, and Place in the Origin of Settled Lifetakes a major step forward in understanding the adoption of farming and a settled way of life in the Middle East by foregrounding the roles of history-making and religious ritual. This work is relevant to students and scholars of Near Eastern archaeology, as well as those interested in the origins of agriculture and social complexity or the social role of religion in the past.Contributors: Kurt W. Alt, Mark R. Anspach, Marion Benz, Lee Clare, Anna Belfer-Cohen, Morris Cohen, Oliver Dietrich, Güneş Duru, Yilmaz S. Erdal, Nigel Goring-Morris, Ian Hodder, Rosemary A. Joyce, Nicola Lercari, Wendy Matthews, Jens Notroff, Vecihi Özkaya, Feridun S. Şahin, F. Leron Shults, Devrim Sönmez, Christina Tsoraki, Wesley Wildman
In exploring human-thing entanglement I wish to make five points. (1) Humans depend on things. In much of the new work in the social and human sciences in which humans and things co-constitute each ...other, there is, oddly, little account of the things themselves. (2) Things depend on other things. All things depend on other things along chains of interdependence. (3) Things depend on humans. Things are not inert. They are always falling apart, transforming, growing, changing, dying, running out. (4) The defining aspect of human entanglement with made things is that humans get caught in a double-bind, depending on things that depend on humans. (5) Traits evolve and persist. When evolutionary archaeologists identify lineages of cultural affinity, they claim to be studying cultural transmission. Transmission may be involved in such lineages, but it is the overall entanglement of humans and things that allows success or failure of traits. Par l'exploration de l'intrication entre humains et choses, l'auteur souhaite soulever cinq points. (1) Les humains dépendent des choses. Pourtant, dans une grande partie des nouveaux travaux en sciences sociales et humaines dans lesquels les humains et les choses sont co-constitutifs, les choses sont, curieusement, peu considérées. (2) Les choses dépendent d'autres choses. Toutes les choses dépendent d'autres choses, au fil de chaînes d'interdépendance. (3) Les choses dépendent des humains. Elles ne sont pas inertes. Elles passent leur temps à tomber en morceaux, à se transformer, à pousser, à changer, à mourir, à s'épuiser. (4) L'aspect définissant l'intrication des humains avec les objets fabriqués est que les humains sont pris dans un double bind, dépendant des choses qui dépendent d'eux. (5) Certains traits apparaissent, évoluent et persistent. Quand les archéologues évolutionnistes identifient des lignées d'affinité culturelle, ils affirment étudier la transmission culturelle. Bien que la transmission puisse être à l'œuvre dans ces lignées, c'est l'intrication globale des hommes et des choses qui permet aux traits de prospérer ou de disparaître.
This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans ...and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.
This paper discusses the relationships between entanglement dependencies between humans and things. Power is oftendiscussed in terms of power over others, that is in termsof human-human, rather than ...human-thing, relations. Thispaper argues that human-thing entrapment can be used andmanipulated by elites but that non-elites find themselvescaught in a double bind, both entrapped in human-humanpower relations, and entrapped in the daily practices ofhuman-thing relations.
Over recent decades, many archaeologists have eschewed evolutionary theories, and in doing so they have turned away from the identification of long‐term trends that are of great relevance to ...present‐day matters of concern. In particular, there is clear evidence for an overall long‐term increase in the amount of human‐made material and associated human‐thing entanglements, an increase tied up with environmental impact and global inequalities. The directionality of these long‐term changes is clear and yet evolutionary theory largely shuns notions of overall directional change. This paradox and its implications are the subject of this article, with the suggestion made that, for human evolution at least, notions of directionality and path dependence need to be embraced, with concomitant changes in human evolutionary theory, and with implications for responses to environmental change. Adding to earlier accounts of entanglement, emphases are placed on the self‐amplifying processes that lead to change and on irreversibility in the place of teleology.
Abstrait
Le paradoxe du long terme : évolution humaine et imbrication
Résumé
Depuis quelques dizaines d'années, de nombreux archéologues ont tenté d’échapper aux théories de l’évolution et, ce faisant, se sont détournés de l'identification des tendances de longue durée, pourtant très importantes pour les questions qui nous préoccupent aujourd'hui. Les données pointent clairement, en particulier, vers une augmentation globale sur le long terme de la quantité de matière produite par les humains et de son corollaire, l'ensemble des imbrications avec les non‐humains. Cette augmentation est indissociable des impacts environnementaux et des inégalités planétaires. La direction de ces changements au long cours est claire, mais la théorie de l’évolution évite en général les notions de changement dirigé global. Ce paradoxe et ses implications sont le sujet de cet article qui suggère que, dans le cas tout au moins de l’évolution humaine, il importe d'adopter les notions de directionnalité et de « dépendance de sentier » (path dependence), en modifiant la théorie de l’évolution humaine et en identifiant les implications pour les réponses aux changements de l'environnement. Venant s'ajouter aux descriptions plus anciennes de cette imbrication, l'auteur met l'accent sur les processus auto‐amplificateurs qui entraînent le changement, et sur l'irréversibilité en lieu et place de la téléologie.
