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Symmetrical archaeology
Michael Shanks
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To cite this article: Michael Shanks (2007): Symmetrical archaeology, World Archaeology, 39:4, 589-596

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 Symmetrical archaeology

Michael Shanks
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Abstract

Symmetry is an epistemological and ethical principle developed in the social study of scientific
practice. This essay connects a symmetrical archaeology to major trends in the discipline since the
1960s and to key components of archaeological practice – relational ontologies, mixtures of past and
present, people and things, biology and culture, individual and society. Symmetrical archaeology is a
culmination of effort in archaeology to undercut these modernist dualities and to recognize the
vitality of the present past. Symmetry adds new force to the claim that archaeologists have a unique
perspective on human engagements with things, on social agency and constructions of contemporary
identity.

Keywords

Sociology of knowledge; material culture theory; science studies in archaeology.

Introduction

The notion of a symmetrical archaeology is a loose one, somewhat metaphorical, even

evocative. It has links with philosopher and sociologist of science David Bloor’s ‘symmetry
principle’ (1976) – that philosophers’, historians’ and sociologists’ accounts of science
should be impartial with respect to the truth or falsity, rationality or irrationality, success
or failure of the scientific theories whose content is to be explained. This is to hold that the
truth or rationality of ‘nature’ (or any other object of interest such as ‘history’) cannot
speak for itself but needs representation and translation in the work of the scientist, in the
process of debate around experiment, evidence and argument. A symmetrical archaeology,
as we read in the accompanying papers in this journal, upholds such a methodological
impartiality. This requires us not to presume that the way the past was will win through
into our understanding because of the ‘force of evidence’. Instead, the past has to be
worked at. A successful account of the past is not so much a measure of accordance
between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal and social

World Archaeology Vol. 39(4): 589–596 Debates in World Archaeology

ª 2007 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240701679676
 590 Michael Shanks

achievement. This is one of the major propositions of a symmetrical archaeology – that we

need to look to the work of archaeologists in coming to understand the past.
A symmetrical archaeology also encompasses much more than this. The notion of
symmetry addresses the great divides and dualisms that have been so characteristic of
archaeology since its modern crystallization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as
Julian Thomas has recently shown so effectively in his perceptive book on modernity and
archaeology (2004; see also Schnapp et al. 2004). For example, the radical separation of
past (to be studied) and the contemporary location and viewpoint of archaeologists is one
that regularly involves according primacy to the past. For the past, uncontrovertibly it
would seem, can have happened only the way it did, and what did happen cannot be
changed by the will of some later archaeologist. The objective reality of the past, so
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immediately present in archaeological remains, faces off the contemporary archaeologist

possessed by a subjective will to know. Unbalanced and dualistic relationships, lacking
symmetry, are also, in this modernist orthodoxy, maintained between science and popular
superstition, between professional and popular archaeology, with, again, primacy usually
being accorded to the expertise and knowledge of the professional (Shanks and Tilley
1987: 24–6; Binford 1987). For otherwise there is the perceived danger of knowledge of the
past succumbing to myth and propaganda. Other familiar and now much discussed
dualisms in archaeology include those between people and artifacts, biological species and
cultural form, social structure and the individual agent. Many such relationships are
conspicuously gendered. (See discussion in Hodder et al. 1995.) All archaeologists,
whether they acknowledge it or not, negotiate these relationships in their daily practices.
Much post-processual archaeology since the 1980s has been dedicated to exposing the
relationships and correcting imbalances (see, for example, Hodder 2001).
This is why archaeologists became interested in cultural signification, as well as
ecological relationship, in the meaning of things as well as economic exigency, in gender
relationships, in agency, not as the search for the individual in (pre)history (as a counter to
larger historical and environmental forces), but as the recognition that social structure is
both the medium and outcome of (individual) motivated practices (see Barrett (1988) on
this duality of structure, after Giddens (1984); compare also Callon and Law (1997)).
People make history, but under inherited circumstances over which they have no
immediate control; this is a central principle of Marxian historical materialism. The past
has a material stake in contemporary life (Serres and Latour 1995: 57–62).
Beyond post-processual agendas, the politics of every archaeological practice, local
planning through to national agenda, touristic experience to trade in illicit antiquities, are
now thoroughly intertwined with matters methodological and theoretical, in a globalist
convergence of historicity, heritage, tourist industry and archaeological epistemology
(Shanks 2004; Webmoor 2007 for bibliography). And, it should be noted, attending to
such intimate association was quite simply taboo only twenty-five years ago.
In this new negotiation of dualistic relationships, symmetrical archaeology is not a new
kind of archaeology. It is not a new theory. It is not another borrowed methodology. Less
about critique of archaeology, symmetry simply summarizes what I see as fruitful angles
on these archaeological relationships between past and present, people and things, biology
and culture, individual and culture (see, for examples of contributions to these debates,
DeMarrais et al. 2004; Ingold 2000; Knappett 2005).
 Symmetrical archaeology 591

Symmetrical archaeology is an attitude. Symmetry draws attention to mutual

arrangement and relationship. Symmetry, in this mutuality, implies an attitude, that we
should apply the same measures and values to ourselves as to what we are interested in
(Latour 1989). A consonance of past and present, individual and structure, person and
artifact, biological form and cultural value, symmetry is about relationships.
There are four components to this attitude: process, creativity, mediation and
distribution. I suggest these four components are quite counter-intuitive, at least to our
conventional archaeological imagination.

Process
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As mentioned above, a successful account of the past is not so much a measure of

accordance between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal
and social achievement (Latour 1987). Archaeologists, under this attitude and under-
standing, do not discover the past. Archaeologists work on what is left of the past (Shanks
1992). And this process, of course, is something that takes us far beyond the academic
discipline and profession (Schnapp et al. 2004). An archaeological sensibility of attending
to traces and remains is one that unites the discipline and profession with memory and
many practices and cultures of collection (Schnapp 1993).
Archaeology is a process of mutual self-constitution, under this attitude. Working on
the past makes us who we are. This is a dynamic process because there is no resolution; it
just keeps on going. The process is iterative.
And there is thus a profound connection with design and making, with material culture
studies. In this dynamic and mutual self-constitution of past and present, human
and artifact, making things makes people (Shanks 2006, http://shl.stanford.edu:3455/
TenThings/Home for a full bibliography on design studies).
Symmetry here also holds that we are not essentially different from those people and
those remains we study. We are all bound up in different kinds of relationship with the
materiality of the world, whether working to make artifacts, ourselves, or to forge
narratives out of memory artifacts. There is a continuity between the processes of making
that archaeologists study and the archaeological process of working upon remains of the
past (Lucas 2001).

Creativity

This symmetrical archaeological process is profoundly creative. The past is not a datum,
but an achievement. The past is the outcome of processes of uncovering and articulation,
forging connections with and through the remains. The past is constantly being recreated
because the past is a process, a trajectory, a genealogical relationship with present and
future (Shanks 1998). This is simply to acknowledge that the past may be revealed only
with hindsight, and that the past is not wholly encompassed by date, but flows and
percolates through contemporary and future presence and effect (Serres with Latour 1995:
58). Such a creative process in no way compromises the ontology of the past – that it did
 592 Michael Shanks

happen (Shanks 1998). The creative and created past rather requires two connected
acknowledgements: that the past did not end at some point, and that the past is what it
was through connections that take the inquiring archaeologist beyond the confines of any
particular and local context, into an anthropological and historical field of comparative
examples and connections.
The past, in this attitude, is thus resource as much as source. Again, archaeologists do
not discover the past, but treat the remains as a resource in their own creative
(re)production or representation. And, as with any field of resources, this creative process
of making the past what it is has its own politics, the politics of access and agency, of who
is allowed to make what past and under what conditions (Shanks 2004 for issues and
bibliography).
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Mediation

The creative process of working upon what is left of the past is one of translation and
mediation, of metamorphosis, of turning the remains into something else. The
archaeological site and its finds become text or image, account or catalogue, recombined
into a museum exhibition, revised into the narrative of a synthetic textbook or TV
program, reworked into the rhetoric of a lecture course for an archaeological program.
It has long been recognized that publication is an essential component of the
archaeological project, simply because the future of archaeology, of the past, is impossible,
inconceivable, without the past being ‘recorded’. Here, in a symmetrical attitude, this
translation into medium is recognized as a dynamic process – with ‘the past’ existing in its
re-presentation; with text being the process of inscription; with medium being the process
of mediation (Shanks 2001). We can also call this a poetics (Shanks 1992).
And, again, this directs attention to the politics of such processes. Representation is
simultaneously inscription, witnessing and speaking for the past, in its absence, in
circumstances of evaluation and judgment, connecting past event with contemporary
understanding. Archaeology is a representative act, as much as the political representative
speaks for their constituency (ibid.; Joyce et al. 2002).
And, as processes of making, our attention is directed to the material practices of
reference, representation and mobilization – how the site and its artifacts are transported
into new and diverse environments, connections and ecologies that are not of the ‘original’
context of the site and artifacts, yet which nevertheless allow that site and artifacts to be
recognized, potentially, for what they were.

Distribution

The recontextualization, the remediation of archaeological remains, which is the basis of

their very recognition as the past, brings me to the fourth component of the symmetrical
attitude: the creative process of mediation is about connection and relations (Shanks 1999:
ch. 2 for a full treatment of this relationality in relation to the archaic Greek state).
 Symmetrical archaeology 593

The past becomes what it is through a trajectory of connections that take it far from
its temporal origin in the chronometric past of dated location. The past is not to be seen
as a datum under this symmetrical attitude, but as a network of relationships that
continually reconstitute the past itself. This is just like memory. Memory is best
conceived as memory work which gains significance only through recollection, the act of
connecting memory trace with something now that prompts the reinsertion of that
memory into our contemporary understanding, as we re-evaluate the significance of the
past in the light of what is happening to us now, through the past circulating around us,
and so we come to retell the past in a new way (Bowker 2005; and, as a contrast, Leroi-
Gourhan 1993).
It is not only contextual archaeology that has recognized that understanding is
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contingent upon relationship, putting things in context (Hodder 1987). Consider the
different contexts of connections involved in this symmetrical archaeology – trajectories
from past through present that constitute a megalithic monument as what it is, the work of
mediation that turns the site into another artifact of quite a different order even, yet
mobilizes that very monument in real debates about the way prehistory happened. This
symmetrical attitude implies a relational perspective that deals in networks and systems of
distributed phenomena, heterogeneous networks, in the term coined by sociologist of
technology John Law (1987), cultural ecologies that make a mockery of our accepted
disciplines.

Genealogy

Symmetrical archaeology is not a new discovery. It is not another ‘ism’ for archaeologists
to mimic. Its attitude, as I have briefly sketched it, has a distinctive and long genealogy. It
is important to connect the symmetrical with a tradition of thinking that has made much
of the four components of the symmetrical attitude. That this is an intellectual genealogy
implies that there is continuity and connection without implying necessary identity or
sameness.
So, behind the symmetrical, we can trace a Heideggerian line of interest in process rather
than ‘being’ that involves the likes of the pre-Socratic Herakleitos (‘you can never put your
hand into the same river twice’) (see, in this context, Thomas 1996). Hegel’s philosophy of
internal relations, particularly as received by the early Marx, is another vital constituting
moment (and see Randy McGuire’s (1992) fine archaeological reception of this tradition).
Nietzsche’s own genealogical thinking, of course, is familiar, not least through Foucault’s
history of discourse. The deep and fundamental questioning of essentialist meaning by
various western Marxists like Adorno and Benjamin is another familial connection.
Bataille’s anthropological interest in transgressive experience can be cited, as well as the
deconstructive, Derridean focus upon systems of difference. (See Shanks (1992) for an
archaeological treatment of these themes.)
I have already mentioned much recent work in science studies (after Kuhn) as
contributing to this attitude; Bruno Latour is to be mentioned here. Then there is a
prominent trend in the sociology and history of technology followed by the likes of
 594 Michael Shanks

Thomas Hughes, Donald Mackenzie, Pierre Lemonnier, Mike Schiffer and Michel Callon.
Contemporary fine art sometimes spectacularly and subtly deals in material processes of
human self-constitution and technical co-creation (Shanks 1992, 2001), as has been well
recognized by Colin Renfrew (2003). And, ironically perhaps in this company, the
fundamentals of systems thinking and information science acknowledge, of course, the
significance of relational connection and of emergent behavior. This brings me to
technoscience and post-humanist thought (in the humanities) – dismantling the essentialist
distinctions between humans and machines (Hayles 1999).
And I do hope also that a symmetrical attitude is recognized in much of post-processual
archaeology – from explorations of signification and the meaning of things through to
focus upon socio-technical networks. My own work on the Greek city state (1995, 1996,
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1999) can serve as a detailed introduction to the issues, concepts and forms of its socio-
cultural modeling.
So this is far from being another case of disciplinary borrowing. Symmetry is, rather, a
synthetic term that questions the character of disciplinary coherence and suggests some
new kinds of cross-disciplinary articulation, some of which we have been pursuing in our
Metamedia Lab at Stanford (metamedia.stanford.edu). Perhaps ultimately a symmetrical
attitude hinges upon conceptions of historicity – what it is to be an historical agent – for its
underlying premise is that historical process is best understood as the outcome of human
creativity: a dispersed creativity belonging to collective assemblages that denies the
conventional (Cartesian) distinctions between maker and artifact, design and realization,
individual and cultural context.

Stanford Archaeology Center

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Mexico. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.

Michael Shanks is the Omar and Althea Dwyer Hoskins Professor of Classical
Archaeology at Stanford University and senior founding faculty of Stanford Archaeology
Center. His lab, Metamedia, specializes in research that addresses issues of media and
materiality as they connect with the reception of the past. He is currently a Senior Fellow
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of Stanford Humanities Center working on a long-term history of design and innovation.

michaelshanks.org