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ASSEMBLAGE THOUGHT AND
ARCHAEOLOGY

From examinations of prehistoric burial to understanding post-industrial spaces


and heritage practices, the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is gaining
increasing importance within archaeological thought. Their concept of ‘assem-
blages’ allows us to explore the past in new ways, by placing an emphasis on
difference rather than similarity, on fluidity rather stasis and unpredictability rather
than reproduceable models.
Assemblage Thought and Archaeology applies the notion of assemblage to specific
archaeological case studies, ranging from early urbanism in Mesopotamia to 19th
century military fortifications. It introduces the concept of assemblage within the
context of the wider ‘material turn’ in the social sciences, examines its implications
for studying materials and urban settlements, and explores its consequences for the
practice of archaeological research and heritage management.
This innovative book will be of particular interest to postgraduate students of
archaeological theory and researchers looking to understand this latest trend in
archaeological thought, although the case studies will also have appeal to those
whose work focusses on material culture, settlement archaeology and archaeologi-
cal practice.

Ben Jervis is lecturer in medieval archaeology at Cardiff University, UK. He is


currently co-investigator (with Dr Chris Briggs) on the Leverhulme Trust project
Living Standards and Material Culture in English Rural Households: 1300–1600.
He is the author of Pottery and Social Life: Towards a Relational Approach, 2014,
and co-editor of several books including Objects, Environment, and Everyday Life
in Medieval Europe (2016), and Archaeologies of Rules and Regulation: Between Text
and Practice (2018). He has also published in journals including World Archaeology,
Medieval Archaeology, The Norwegian Archaeological Review and Archaeological Dialogues.
Themes in Archaeology

The Archaeology of Art: An Ontology of the Archaeological Image, Andrew


Cochrane and Andrew Jones

The Archaeology of Time, Gavin Lucas

The Archaeology of Personhood: An Anthropological Approach, Chris Fowler

Archaeology, Ritual, Religion, Timothy Insoll


ASSEMBLAGE THOUGHT
AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Ben Jervis
First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2019 Ben Jervis
The right of Ben Jervis to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jervis, Ben, author.
Title: Assemblage thought and archaeology / Ben Jervis.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018031337| ISBN 9781138067493 (hardback:
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138067509 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781351657020 (mobi/kindle) | ISBN 9781351657044 (web
pdf) | ISBN 9781315158594 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC CC72 .J47 2018 | DDC 930.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018031337

ISBN: 9781138067493 (hbk)


ISBN: 9781138067509 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781315158594 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS

List of figures vi
List of key concept boxes vii
Acknowledgements viii

1 Assemblage, ontology and archaeology 1


2 From archaeological assemblage to vibrant assemblage 35
3 Material and form 73
4 Assemblage urbanism 108
5 Doing assemblage archaeology 145

Bibliography 163
Index 181
FIGURES

1.1 Fragment of a Terra Sigillata (Samian) bowl 20


1.2 Chumash rock art – Polychrome transmorphic design known as
Blue Boy at Three Springs, California 27
1.3 Anglo-Saxon cremation urns from Spong Hill, Norfolk and
Cleatham, Lincolnshire 28
1.4 Modern replica of the antler frontlets from Star Carr, produced
by Ian Dennis, Cardiff University 29
2.1 Florentine maiolica jug from Upper Bugle Street, Southampton 42
2.2 Grave 20 from Great Chesterford 49
2.3 Diagrammatic representation of smooth and striated space 55
2.4 West Kennet long barrow, Wiltshire 63
3.1 Roman brooch of Hod Hill type, dating to 1st century CE.
Recovered by a metal detectorist in Boynton, East Yorkshire 75
3.2 A: Ramey Incised Jar. B: Diagrammatic representation of the
cosmos as depicted on a Ramey Incised Jar 85
3.3 A pile of unsorted pottery 87
3.4 Plan relief of the town of Satin-Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France 95
3.5 The western end of the Hilsea Lines, Portsmouth, showing the
site as a managed landscape 104
3.6 The eastern end of the Hilsea Lines, Portsmouth, showing a
ruinous and feral landscape 104
4.1 1838 map of Boston engraved for S.N. Dickinson’s Boston Almanac.
The future site of Back Bay is situated to the west of the public garden 113
4.2 Map of Mesopotamia showing the location of sites mentioned in the text 121
4.3 Map of Britain showing the location of sites mentioned in the text 132
5.1 Example of an archaeological context sheet 151
KEY CONCEPT BOXES

Key concept 1: Territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation 38


Key concept 2: Coding, de-coding and over-coding 38
Key concept 3: The Body without Organs 39
Key concept 4: Desire 40
Key concept 5: Stratification and de-stratification 41
Key concept 6: Smooth and striated space 41
Key concept 7: Capacities and affect 43
Key concept 8: Virtual and actual 57
Key concept 9: Tracing and mapping 67
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My interest in assemblage approaches in archaeology was first stimulated by


attendance at a conference session organised by Yannis Hamilakis and Andrew
M. Jones at the 2014 TAG Conference in Manchester and I am grateful to them
and the speakers in the session for introducing its potential to me. I would like to
thank Tim Pauketat, Gavin Lucas and Andrew M. Jones for their useful feedback
at the proposal stage and Rachel Crellin and Oliver Harris for their critical feed-
back on the draft text. Rachel, Oliver, Marta Diaz-Guardamino Uribe and Chris
Fowler have, at various times, been valuable sounding boards for ideas. I would
also like to thank Howard Williams, Ian Dennis, David Robinson and Duncan
Brown for their assistance with obtaining images.
The work presented in Chapter 3 derives in part from the Living Standards and
Material Culture in English Rural Households project, funded by the Leverhulme
Trust, The Economic History Society and The Newton Trust and undertaken in col-
laboration with Chris Briggs, Alice Forward, Matt Tompkins and Tomasz Gromelski.
This section has also benefitted from valuable insights from Sarah Semple.
Finally, I would like to thank Matthew Gibbons at Routledge for commis-
sioning the book and Molly Marler for her assistance in seeing it through to
production.
1
ASSEMBLAGE, ONTOLOGY AND
ARCHAEOLOGY

Introducing assemblage thought


It may, at first, seem odd to turn to a collaboration between a renegade philosopher
and former school teacher (Gilles Deleuze) who rejected the mainstream canon
of philosophical writing and a psychoanalyst and Marxist political activist (Felix
Guattari) to build a framework for understanding the past. In their collabora-
tive writing, however, we find tools and ideas which can be used to challenge
orthodoxy and structure, to enable us to engage with the past in alternative, and
potentially fruitful, ways. These tools, known collectively as assemblage thought,
are concerned with understanding the ways in which orders emerge, how they
hold together and how they fall apart and, crucially, their implications for shaping
the world as affective processes.
Importantly, we should not see assemblage thought as originating with Deleuze
and Guattari, as this would contradict their very approach to research, which is
less concerned with origins than middles, with ongoing processes; Deleuze and
Guattari’s writing emerged from a range of influences, philosophical, artistic, polit-
ical and historical, and has gone on to flow through a scholarship in a range of
disciplines; as a body of thought it is never complete, but always being worked on,
adapting and changing as it is applied. As a body of thought it acts as the very ideas
which underpin it; immanence, emergence and difference. ‘Assemblage theory’
was not a term used by Deleuze and Guattari, having been coined by the philoso-
pher Manuel DeLanda (2006; 2016) in his re-imagining of their writing. It is best
understood not as a unified theory, but as a set of ideas and tools which can be
used to build a radical view of an immanent world, in which core themes which
have dominated archaeological theory in recent decades; structure, individuality
and identity, representation and power, are critiqued and re-conceptualised. The
result is that they are not frames for understanding action, but emerge from, and are
2 Assemblage, ontology and archaeology

manipulated by, the ongoing productive processes which constitute a world which
is always emerging. This is a world which is always in a state of becoming, rather
than existing in a fixed state.
As we will discover, everything is an assemblage, from a pot to a city, from a
house to an economy. Objects are assemblages not only of materials, which are
constantly changing, for example as they corrode, but also of ideas and are, them-
selves, components of other assemblages; households or communities, being active
participants in the formation of the relationships which constitute those assem-
blages. Assemblages are not fixed entities, but fluid, ongoing and finite processes.
Thinking through assemblages therefore turns entities into processes and calls on
us to question temporal and physical boundaries. Assemblage thought shifts our
focus to the intensities which are productive of societies; we come to encounter a
material world which is not representative of the past, but is productive, unstable
and full of potential to destabilise received ideas, recover new stories and craft pasts
which reveal the complexities of power dynamics which transcend any division
between the human and non-human, past and present or near and far.
The ideas discussed in this book are derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s prin-
cipal collaborative works, known collectively as Capitalism and Schizophrenia, these
two volumes are Anti-Oedipus (first published 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus
(1987, first published 1980). A great deal has been written about the nature of
the collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari and the context of their writing
and it is not appropriate or necessary to offer a full analysis here. It is, however,
worth briefly reflecting upon the aims of the authors and the immediate context
in which they were writing. As a philosopher, Deleuze had, by 1972, carved out a
reputation as a character not afraid to challenge the dominant philosophical ideals
(see Bogue 1989, 1–3; Holland 2013, 2–3). He rejected mainstream philosophical
writing as being too egocentric and, whilst embracing structuralism’s move away
from this approach, was also opposed to the imposition of structure itself. Instead,
he focussed on the writings of less well known philosophers, with ideas derived
from Nietzsche, Bergson and Spinoza featuring strongly in elements of his col-
laborative writing with Guattari. His principal work before the collaboration with
Guattari was his thesis Difference and Repetition (1968), in which he argues that the
concepts of difference and becoming should have priority over identity and being;
that is an emphasis on experience and emergence rather than on a world defined
and conceived of in advance; as Tamsin Lorraine (2005, 159) summarises:

In Deleuze’s view, common sense notions of space and time as totalised wholes
within which everything can be either spatially or chronologically related with
respect to everything else are no more than retrospective constructs.

Guattari on the other hand was less established from an academic perspective.
He was a well known Marxist activist in France and worked as a psychoanalyst
at the La Borde clinic. He had similar concerns to Deleuze, in challenging the
orthodoxy of scholarship in his field, in particular seeking to rethink concepts of
Assemblage, ontology and archaeology 3

reality and group dynamics. This was achieved through a realisation that reality is
defined through relations and, from a political perspective, should be free-formed
and emergent rather than rigid and hierarchical, effectively seeing institutions as
repressive and subjective group processes as enabling. The political implications of
this were recognised in Guattari’s critique of the working of the Communist party
(1972; see Bogue 1989, 86–7; Holland 2013, 3–4).
The collaboration between Deleuze and Guattari coincided with the student
revolt of May 1968. The relationship between Anti-Oedipus and this event is con-
tested and, whilst the revolt was unlikely to be the catalyst for writing, it certainly
had an effect in framing the ideas developed within it (see Buchanan 2008, 7–12).
Deleuze and Guattari were clearly sympathetic to the anti-capitalist sentiment
of the uprising, but did not seek one political order to simply be replaced by
another; they had a bigger intention, to shake up power structures and change
them from within so as not to replicate repression, but to create potential for alter-
native systems of governance and society to emerge. When taking the tools offered
by assemblage thought it is easy to forget the radical political motivation of the
authors (see Russell et al 2011) but it is, perhaps, useful to find parallels with their
ideas within the discipline of archaeology; our aim in using assemblage approaches
should, perhaps, be to challenge structures and ideas which repress free thought
and imaginative interpretation, which reproduce subjective ideas as objective facts,
and, in doing so, embrace the diversity of the past.
For the archaeologist seeking to engage with assemblage thought for the first
time, the dense and abstract writing of Deleuze and Guattari is extremely chal-
lenging. A more accessible rendering of their key concepts can be found in the
writing of Manuel DeLanda (1997; 2002; 2006; 2016), who seeks to employ their
concepts in a more practical way to explore the emergence of western hegemony
in the modern world and, particularly, explores questions surrounding the city and
its implications (particularly DeLanda 1997; 2006) and scientific process (particu-
larly DeLanda 2002; 2016). As will become clear in the following sections, at times
DeLanda has taken the original ideas and developed them (most notably in his con-
sideration of the relationship between the meshwork and hierarchy), but he also
successfully simplifies concepts which are referred to in multiple ways in Deleuze
and Guattari’s writing, to create a more manageable set of theoretical apparatus.
It is not my aim here to reflect in detail on the genealogy of Deleuze and
Guattari’s ideas, but rather to explore in direct, practical, terms their potential for
archaeological research. In doing so, this introductory chapter situates the emer-
gence of assemblage approaches within archaeology, seeing them as a part of a wider
ontological turn across the humanities, exploring its parallels with other bodies of
sociological or philosophical literature (particularly Actor-Network Theory) and
introducing some archaeological articulations of these ideas. The following chapters
go on to introduce some of the key concepts which characterise assemblage thought
(Chapter 2) and apply these to the study of material culture (Chapter 3) and urban
archaeology (Chapter 4). The book concludes with a consideration of the implica-
tions of assemblage thought for archaeological practice (Chapter 5).
4 Assemblage, ontology and archaeology

Stimulating alternative archaeologies: the ontological turn


Archaeologists are turning to approaches such as assemblage thought because over
the last two decades there has been a mounting critique across the social sciences
of the implications of modern western thought, both for our practices of research
and our interpretations of how things are. This has been driven largely by the
application of post-colonial approaches within archaeology and anthropology and
the reading of anti-humanist thinkers such as Foucault and Heidegger (see Thomas
2004; Henare et al 2007, 7–12; Watts 2013; Harris and Cipolla 2017, 171–80 for
overviews). Fundamentally, we have called into question the justification for fram-
ing our research around the modernist dichotomies of society/nature or culture/
material (Henare et al 2007, 3; Olsen et al 2012, 29). A representational approach,
in which things are not seen as beings occupying a world with us, but as standing
for human ideas or behaviours, has been argued to have left things behind, making
them intermediaries, rather than mediators, in social action and underestimating
their implications for the world (Olsen et al 2012, 20–22; Jones 2012, 6–7). This
realisation, and the reaction against it, has been conceptualised in the literature
as a ‘turn to the material’ or as an ‘ontological turn’. This ‘turn’ has not been
without its criticisms, with some claiming that it has led to a de-humanisation of
archaeological study (Van Dyke 2015; Barrett 2016) and others suggesting that the
so-called turn is nothing more than a re-dressing of ideas and arguments (Ingold
2014). Whether a new development, or an intensification in the application of old
ideas, we have reached a point where the representational orthodoxy of archaeol-
ogy has come under sustained critique.
Benjamin Alberti (2016) has identified that there are two key strands to onto-
logical work within archaeology. The first, which he terms a “new metaphysics
for archaeology” (2016, 165), is concerned with the implications of how we think
about the past in general terms, as a process of unfolding relations. We must be
able to step away from a modernist position to be open to the potential of these
relations, which may exceed those which are deemed possible from the ontological
position of the ‘modern’. The second is an ontologically focussed archaeology, in
which indigenous theories form the basis of archaeological interpretation and in
which we make indigenous ontologies an object of study. There is also a need to
find common ground between these two approaches, in order to fully comprehend
the implications of the ontological turn for our understanding of the past. From
the outset, my position is largely one of using assemblage thought to exploit the
methodological and interpretive benefits of an ontologically enlightened archaeol-
ogy. With its rejection of structure, its emphasis on becoming and relations, as well
as its conscious effort to overcome modernist dichotomies, I argue that assemblage
thought is one toolkit which can be used to achieve this goal. However, as we
come to reflect on the implications of our own ontological position on our work,
the potential to examine the ontologies of past societies a research question in itself
will inevitably emerge (Alberti 2016).
Assemblage, ontology and archaeology 5

The first question has to be why is ontological awareness important? Ontology


can be conceptualised in two ways: “as a people’s ‘beliefs about’ reality or as a
people’s reality” (Alberti 2016, 164). My preference is for the latter definition, for
two key reasons. Firstly, the former implies a form of meta-ontology, the existence
of a single reality which is interpreted, and the second is that it is exciting to be
speculative in thinking about the richness that an awareness of other realities could
offer. To think about ontology is, therefore, to think about the multiple ways in
which the world might exist, to be aware of possibility and the potency of a world
beyond our own experience (Alberti et al 2011, 897–8; 901; Henare et al 2007, 1, 13).
Whilst it might be proposed that assemblage thought itself makes ontological
claims, for example that the world is in a state of becoming and that it is relational,
my position is that its core value is methodological in that its focus on relations and
their implications creates a space in which multiple realities can exist; rather than
being an ontology in itself, for me assemblage thought is a method from which
various ontologies might emerge. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the existence
of a modernist ontology, being more concerned with how it emerged, how it
persists and its societal or political implications. This is not possible if we adopt a
modernist ontological position, as this effectively translates the other worlds of the
past into a purified, anthropocentric and bounded history, one in which elements
not compatible with modern western story-telling, like the potency of materials
or objects, are lost (Anderson 2015, 287–9). Furthermore, as Timothy Pauketat
(2013, 5–6) states “beliefs about science rooted in modern rationality fail to appre-
ciate the alternate ontologies – the theories of being- of ancient worlds”, meaning
that our understanding of the motivations and behaviour of past people are left
lacking. Approaches such as assemblage thought help us to overcome this problem
by getting to know our evidence in new ways (Alberti et al 2011, 899). An aware-
ness of ontological difference forces us to reflect on the implications of how we
think and write about the past: even if we are alive to difference we may continue
to write in terms unrecognisable to the societies that we study, however we can
adopt a degree of sensitivity or contextual relevance by framing questions in ways
which problematise the evidence, rather than being focussed around our western
‘truths’ (Anderson 2015, 803).
It is these western ‘truths’ which have arguably served to colonialise the past,
to represent it in our own terms by homogenising experience and masking dif-
ference. Therefore, being alive to difference offers one route to de-colonialisation
(Haber 2013, 88). Yet, we cannot simply adopt another ontological position, to do
so would reify some other dichotomy; to reject a modern nature/culture divide is
to acknowledge and reify a difference between modern/non-modern, for example
(Bessire and Bond 2014, 442). Furthermore, by uncritically adopting the ontology
of the other we are arguably being equally colonial by abducting that reality, rather
than reflecting upon it from our own position (Bessire and Bond 2014, 443). Our
approach to ontology might be characterised in two divergent ways; what Bruno
6 Assemblage, ontology and archaeology

Latour (2009) terms ontology as a ‘type’ or as a ‘bomb’. This characterisation derives


from a consideration of the differences in the use of animism (the attribution of
the characteristic of a living being to things which may not be conventionally per-
ceived of as alive from a western perspective) by two of the anthropologists most
influential within the ontological turn. For Phillipe Descola (2013), animism is a
type of ontology. This approach should appeal to the archaeologist, as we can plug
an archaeological culture into an ontological typology and use this to create more
nuanced and culturally appropriate interpretation. However, I follow Lucas Bessire
and David Bond (2014, 447) in suggesting that the idea of ontological purity is a
fallacy. The non-human does not respect ontological difference, it moves between
ontological realms, both human and non-human action overflow their bounds and
have wider implications. Rather than adopting a particular ontological position it
is, perhaps, more fruitful to be aware of the potential for difference and the value
of speculating beyond our own ontological bounds, whilst holding on to a critical
awareness that our own perception is based upon our own experiences and rela-
tions with the world. In other words, to use an awareness of ontological difference
as a ‘bomb’ to destabilise our understanding of the world and the worlds of oth-
ers. This is effectively the way in which Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998; 2004)
utilises the idea of Amerindian perspectivism (in which the non-human such as
animals are objects which take on the characteristics of the human), not to suggest
that this is a type of ontology which can be widely transferred but, rather, to open
up productive spaces for enquiries into the potential for other modes of existence.
It is this role of animism as ‘bomb’ which I am most interested in, and is critical
to the way that the ontological turn has impacted upon archaeological practice. It
was only until recently that alternative ontologies were seen not as ontology (other
worlds) but as epistemology (ways of thinking about the world). This is a key con-
cern of Viveiros de Castro (1998; 2004; 2014), himself inspired by Deleuze and
Guattari, who argues that this is the result of a purification of ontological differ-
ence, undertaken to allow for this difference to exist from the modernist position as
a primitive set of ‘beliefs’ set in opposition to scientific reality, rather than being a
potential reality in itself. In other words the discussion of animism has been under-
taken in western terms (Alberti and Bray 2009, 337). Once we take these other
forms of knowledge seriously and realise that they might be a resource for our own
theory building (Alberti and Marshall 2009, 344) then we must accept that things
are not just thought about differently but are actually different for those communi-
ties of knowledge (Holbraad 2009, 434). Take, for example, the powder known
as Aché discussed by Martin Holbraad (2007), used in Ifà worship in Cuba. From a
western perspective it is an inert powder taken to be representative of power, but
within the Ifà ontology the powder is not analogous to power, but is power itself;
the thing does not represent the concept, the thing is the concept. As such, we can
take this ontological difference as a challenge to our own assumptions, to embrace
plurality and know things differently, rather than simply thinking of them differ-
ently in a way which continues to purify knowledge by converting ontology to
epistemology (Zedeño 2009, 408).
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