Archaeology and The Second Empiricism

Witmore
:: page 1 of 31
Archaeology and the Second Empiricism
Forthcoming In F. Herschend, C. Hillerdal and J. Siapkas (eds.) Archaeology into the
2010s.
Christopher Witmore (Texas Tech University)
Introduction
The challenge posed by the editors of this volume, “Archaeologies into the 2010s”,
centers on whether the on‐going renegotiation of key features and concerns at the
heart of Archaeology, Classical Archaeology and Ancient History is connected with a
revitalization of empiricism, and whether it is possible to speculate as to which ‘turn’
these past‐oriented disciplines will take, more broadly. From here the editors push
matters further with the question: “. . . if we are resurrecting empiricism, what is the
difference between Empiricism 2.0 and the familiar Empiricism 1.0 that has shaped the
humanities during modernity?” This essay is a response to that question. Indeed, what
follows are several propositions as to the shape and character of what might be called
the “second empiricism” (Latour 2008 and 2010; after James 1912).
The old empiricism, generally speaking, was caught up with a common scenario
that archaeologists are seen to hold “the power of voicing an (objective) truth, a truth,”
as Isabelle Stengers puts it “that transcends the practices that produced it” (2010, 64).
This scenario plays out on post‐Kantian grounds marred by those fatigued rifts between
discovery and invention, objectivity and subjectivity, fact and manufacture. Rather than
beginning with two separate domains, with the second empiricism we may now ask:
why do we have to acquiesce to making a choice? Could the world not be
simultaneously concrete and constructed? Are there other ways to strike upon
experience, ways that do not presuppose a bifurcated nature?
It is with respect to these questions that I set out three propositions related to
the second empiricism. One: what is given in experience should not be oversimplified
Witmore :: page 2 of 31
(Latour 2008). Two: avoid the bifurcation of nature. Three: data are at once real and
artificial. With the first proposition we will work through an example of a site
documented by an archaeological survey in an attempt to understand what we might be
attentive to in experience. The point, following Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and
Alfred North Whitehead is not to move away from material experience, but to draw it
even closer (cf. Thomas 2004). With the second, we shall discuss why what Whitehead
called “the bifurcation of nature” posed such a problem for the first empiricism and how
it is avoided with the second. With the final proposition we take a closer look at
archaeological notions of data and the question of translation. This essay will then be
drawn to a close by underlining three points of difference between the ordinary and
second empiricism.
However, before setting out on this journey it is worth taking a brief pause to
address the question broached in the subtitle of this volume; namely, is it adequate to
think of this move as a ‘turn’ in the humanities? To witness how academic culture is
saturated with ‘new’ directions, ‘new’ turns one need but consider a brief litany of
familiar examples: the cognitive turn (Fuller et. al. 1989), the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967),
the interpretive turn (Hiley, Bohman and Shusterman 1992; in archaeology see Thomas
2004), the semiotic turn (Lenoir 1992), the ontological turn (Woolgar et. al. 2008), the
postmodern turn (Best and Kellner 1997), the speculative turn (Bryant, Srnicek and
Harman 2011), the turn after the social turn (Latour 1992; also see Webmoor 2007).
Grasping for the novel, probing for an unstated, unobserved angle on our matters of
concern has been a modus operandi for scholarly production for over two hundred
years; one need but contemplate the emergence of epistemes for Michel Foucault
(1973) or the shifts in paradigms for Thomas Kuhn (1970).
It is Peter Sloterdijk who stated it as a “trivial fact that kinetics is the ethics of
modernity” (2006, 37). At best, this peculiar kinetics of modernism results in genuine
gains; gains marked by advancing toward collective goals and a greater freedom of
movement within the specified state of affairs. At worst, a turn is quickly undermined by
the low‐hanging accusations of fashion and the self‐satisfaction of claiming the new. At
that point, cynical reason casts suspicion on that latest turn as the bovine tactics of an
academic herd clamoring for recognition among an avant‐garde. The conflation of
morals and kinetics often results in a false mobility and its associated amnesia. If the
movement signaled by the notion of a ‘turn’ falls into that logical scheme of
contradiction which consigns previous scholarship, ideas, theory to the waste bin of
outmoded labor then the body of work associated with it runs the risk of forgetting and,
therefore, repetition. With any turn, genuine gains should provide motivation, but to
put a spin on an old adage, those ignorant of previous arguments tend to repeat them.
Deep intellectual memory provides the countermeasures necessary for producing truly
novel work, but turns do not necessarily lack this—if they do, such turns sooner or later
are undermined by returns.
Proposition One: What is given in experience should not be oversimplified
In order to better understand how there are more ways to strike upon experience, let us
consider an example from archaeological landscape survey in Greece. August 8, 1980, a
humid Friday morning. Six members of a survey team (the “Red Team”) associated with
the Argolid Exploration Project (AEP) sweep along the northern edge of the Porto Kheli –
Kosta road adjacent to the Metokhi Coast (Figure 1). After three passes through a field
of “matted down grasses” and “low pistachio bushes” they come upon a site
“highlighted by a foundation partially hidden by these pistachio bushes”. They labor
briefly to map what amounts to 4 intersecting lines of 19 worked limestone blocks and
the associated scatter. The team collects 8 sample bags of ceramic sherds, tiles and
other material before they move on.1
August 15, 2003, a hot Friday afternoon. Video camera in hand, I walk east, uphill
across the area covered a week plus 23 years earlier by the “Red Team”. Following a
zigzagging pattern, I attempt to avoid patches of thistles, which now cover large

1
These details are extracted from the 1980 AEP Red Team field notebooks, which are
currently housed in the Metamedia Lab in the Stanford Archaeology Center.
portions of a once fallow cereal field—I note no pistachio bushes. My goal in this
undertaking is to relocate what the AEP has catalogued as “A51. Metokhi tower.” As I
proceed toward a long stonewall marking out the boundary of a new estate, I happen
upon a series of limestone blocks. Traces suggest that recent bulldozer activity has
covered the northern wall of the former structure and potentially dislodged a block
from the southeast corner. The unpaved road, which provides access to this fenced
estate cuts across the western portion of the tower. A small wash rill indicates that
water is beginning to slice through the western line of stones (Figure 2). This ‘site’ sits in
a plot that is now clearly marked “ΠΩΛΕΙΤΑΙ” – “for sale” (Figure 3).
Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994, page 431. One of 328 sites generated out
of the Argolid Exploration Project,2 “A51” is interpreted as a potential “farmstead”
dating to the Classical‐Hellenistic period. For the AEP, the term “farmstead” refers to:
“Dwellings assumed to be inhabited for some part of the year by some members of a
household. Consistently smaller than other categories of presumed settlements
(often less than 2.0 ha in size), sometimes with evidence of a rectangular structure
or a tower, roof tiles, a full range of “domestic” artifacts (including, in the Classical
period, lamps, oil press beds or weights, coins, other metal objects), and other
habitational features such as storage pits or cisterns” (Jameson, Runnels and van
Andel 1994, 249).
The designation of Classical‐Hellenistic rests on 37 fragments of diagnostic ceramics
including “a variety of black‐glazed fine wares, domestic coarse wares, pithoi, and many

2
The AEP defined the term ‘site’ in the following manner: “Sites, if we mean by that
term places of habitation and special‐purpose activities (e.g., animal folds, storage
buildings), are identifiable, at least in Greece, as specific places in the countryside… Our
working definition of a site was ‘any location with ancient features such as architectural
remains, or a concentration of cultural materials, e.g., artifacts, ecofacts, or manuports,
could be identified, having a recognizable boundary’ (see also Plog et. al., 1978)… The
term ‘site’ is thus nothing more than a convenient way to designate a locality where
cultural materials were found, apparently belonging together. Thus a grave only a few
square meters in area was called a site, just as was a walled settlement many hectares
in extent. Our definition of site included isolated features, such as a well or an
inscription, but was intended to exclude materials deposited or distributed solely by
natural processes” (Jameson, Runnels, and van Andel 1994, 221).
amphoras” (Ibid. 431). Ceramics also suggest subsequent activity in the Late Roman
period.
Choose any of these three topoi and one encounters a slightly different ‘site’.
August 8, 1980, a group of archaeologists work on this location just as they would have
with any other, except that day the narrator claimed to be more lethargic than normal,
following a number of redundant protocols in order to further clarify what for them was
a remnant foundation of limestone in the midst of stubble field, thinly covered in sherds
and pistachio bushes. Page 431 of Jameson, Runnels and van Andel stands out as the
end of the long series of transformations across which a few lines of intersecting
limestone and an associated scatter of ceramics (a relationship which is largely assumed
en lieu of excavation) in the Greek countryside gain competency as the former walls of a
tower associated with what is possibly a Classical‐Hellenistic farm. From here, August
15, 2003 represents an even more unlikely situation with a graduate student who
revisits “A51” as part of a project to retroactively verify work which took place more
than two decades earlier. Because of this ‘return’ we now know that at some point in
the intervening decades a fallow cereal field is sold, a new estate is built, the line of
unpaved access road covers some of the stones and a bulldozer enrolled in leveling the
encompassing plot of land leaves its marks upon the area.
Since the publication of the Argolid Exploration Project this remnant structure
has also gained in strength as part of a wider network of heterogeneous entities.
Though not protected by archaeological zoning as of 2010, a few lines of former walls
now have a greater potential to be connected with Greek notions of heritage,
construction permit regulations3, and personnel in the 4th Ephorate of Prehistoric and
Classical Antiquities in Nafplion. Indeed, it is this motley ensemble of relations that (has
the potential to) strengthen what were formerly a few lines of stone in a fallow field
against the work of a developer‐with‐bulldozer. Rather than regard this as the same site

3
These laws play a large part in the pervasive activity of ‘informal’ construction in
Greece (see Potsiou and Ioannidis 2006).
that acquires further definition, we witness an on‐going series of transformations. One
encounters something in perpetual formation rather than fully formed; one comes upon
something constantly in the making rather than ready‐made (James [1907] 1975). Still,
this doesn’t press matters far enough with the second empiricism.
How “A51” emerges is part of what it is. And this process is caught up within an
idiosyncratic web of archaeological relations. The second empiricism recognizes how
there are numerous separate spheres of relation and events running both
simultaneously and successively; each is equally real as far as they go. Residents and
visitors associated with the adjacent estate experience the worked limestone remains as
no more than a jolt of their vehicle as they move over a bump in the surface of a private
road. Here we encounter a very different outcome from that co‐produced by the AEP
whereby the western lines of stone are further polished by tires, and both tires and
suspension are further worn as a result. Equally, one cannot deny other nonhuman
relations—a rill of water interprets the site as much as a survey archaeologist does—a
matter of importance that we will pick up below. For now, it is to be underlined how it is
not the lot of the second empiricism to discriminate against relations that do not involve
human actors. Many more things come into play.
Equally, it may be a fact that the single‐course, remnants of a limestone
foundation, is a former feature of a Classical to Hellenistic farmstead, but it is also many
other things, many other locales, in addition. For archaeologists, this foundation, after a
long process of study, comes to be defined as the remains of a Classical‐Hellenistic
farmstead. For potential landowners, a pile of stones, strengthened within a system of
legislation for archaeological site in Greece, becomes an obstacle to the further
development of land for a potential estate and its sale. For car suspensions, the stones
become a bump in an unpaved road surface. A site adjacent to the Metochi Coast is
many because the reality of a series of limestone blocks is not indifferent to relations
with survey archaeologists, bags of collected ceramics, draft paper, a tome published in
1994, graduate students, personnel employed by the Greek Ministry of Culture, or
rainstorms.
For many archaeologists, such minutiae might appear to bear very little
relevance to questions of archaeological concern. Yet if what is given in experience
should not be oversimplified then we can no longer be indifferent to all these realities—
realities constituted at the nexus of different webs of relation—in how we document a
site such as “A51”. Beyond questions of empirical adequacy, being attentive to other
realities leaves room for unanticipated questions of the information worlds generated
through archaeological practice (Witmore 2009).
Moreover, could deploying what was formerly rendered as a single site in the
plural not generate a more realist perspective? To assert otherwise would led us right
back to a situation where one maintains a more privileged position in claiming what the
real world is really like. In order to understand the things archaeologists deem to be of
the past as uncertain, convoluted, and plural, the second empiricism avoids the
bifurcation of nature into social multiplicity, on the one hand, and natural unity, on the
other. This brings us to the second proposition.
Proposition Two: Avoid the bifurcation
Knowledge comes from experience and what grounds this ultimate doctrine of
empiricism is that one cannot know certain problems such as “what is red by merely
thinking of redness” ([1929] 1978, 256). As Whitehead puts in Process and Reality, one
“can only find red things by adventuring amid physical experiences in this actual world”
(Ibid.). Within the tradition of British Empiricism, and particularly the work of John Locke
(2008), sensation and reflection constitute the basic ingredients of our common
knowledge. Situated with respect to objects, these ingredients could be distinguished in
terms of primary and secondary qualities. So‐called primary qualities are those supplied
by nature, which an object possesses independent of human beings (or for that matter
other objects). Mass, shape, size, texture, motion: these qualities are those held to be
subject to geometrical proof—length, width, height, weight, density and so forth.
Alleged secondary qualities were those supplied by the human mind in the interaction
with an object. Primary and secondary qualities delimit “what is in the mind” from
“what is in nature” and these two domains form the obligatory bases for what William
James called the “ordinary empiricism” (1912).
Recognizing objects as discrete, the ordinary empiricism favored ‘separation’ at
the expense of ‘conjunction’ (1912, 42‐44). For Locke, initial experience involved ‘sense‐
data’ and the mind would subsequently enter to supply relations. Thus goes the old
empiricist motto: nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu—“there is nothing in the
mind that was not first in the senses”. Of course, this distinction between what is in the
senses and what is in the mind belongs now to an outmoded philosophical past.
Notwithstanding, the sensible, as Quentin Meillassoux has expressed so clearly, exists as
a relation between the observer and object observed (2008). These sensible relations
correspond to what are traditionally understood as secondary qualities, while those
qualities regarded as inseparable from the object denote primary. For Whitehead, this
separation of the subjective and objective was a presumption that bifurcated nature
into two, “the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of
awareness” (2006, 16).
Within archaeology it is quite common to conflate the bifurcation of nature with
fundamental attributes of experience, whether labeled in terms of interpretation and
data, mental judgment and sensory impressions, theory and practice, present and past,
or words and the world. Consider how Matthew Johnson defines empiricism in “its more
sophisticated form” as resting on “a conceptual division between ‘things’ or ‘the real
world’ on the one hand, ‘words’ or ‘concepts’ on the other, and the prioritization of the
former” (2010, 239, my emphasis). To avoid bifurcation, however, is not to simply write
off one side at the expense of the other; rather it is to give both sides back to a nature
undivided. One must refuse to regard perceptions as distinct from reality. Both the
brown of the soil and the chemical composition of the organic materials contained
therein are in the same boat – one cannot pick and choose (Whitehead 2006, 44; in
archaeology see, for example, Tilley 2004, 10‐12; Witmore 2006). James stated the point
thusly: “the parts of experience hold together from next to next by relations that are
themselves parts of experience” (James [1907] 1978, 173). To put it yet another way,
the observer is never separate from that which is observed, because, as Steven Shaviro
puts it, “they are both present in the world in the same manner” (2009, 27). There is
more to these considerations in the case of archaeology, which I will return to shortly.
For now let it suffice to say that to accept these bifurcations as starting points to be
transcended, is not to take leave of the problem.
To regard concepts and things as equipollent is a hyperbolic act of hubris, even
abuse. This is, on the one hand, because consciousness was far too diaphanous
(transparent and flimsy), as James puts it, to take a place among first principles set in
contrast to the totality of the material world (1912, 29) and, on the other, because this
drama grants central privilege to that relationship between humans and world—more of
the latter will be said below. With regard to the former, a purified notion of
consciousness bears no correlate in reality as an entity; for James, to speak of
consciousness was to add more than what is given in experience.4 As a matter of
contrast, we might consider how cognitive scientists, for example, now routinely situate
those powers of the mind, formerly held to operate internally and free of the material
world, as integral to a more ‘distributed consciousness’; one that operates in exchange
with flat projections, texts, instruments, groups of interlocutors and legions of other
entities (Hutchins 1995; in archaeology see Malafouris 2004 and 2008).
Meanwhile, the ordinary empiricism tends toward a reality made up of objects
that lacked any transformative imprint from relations. Relations, as alleged secondary
qualities, wasted over the deeper substance of entities (Witmore forthcoming).
Whitehead famously remarked that if we desire a record of experience devoid of
interpretation, then it is just as well to ask a stone to record its autobiography ([1929]
1978, 15). A corollary to an ordinary empiricism with its bifurcated nature is
‘conceptualism’ where ‘universals’ are mind‐made (Quine 1980, 14; also see Davidson

4
One should acknowledge that James’s solution never takes leave of the problem in the
way Whitehead does.
2001). This partitioning has left its mark on those now stale debates which turn over
distinctions between universals and particulars. But this transcendence of neutral
statements beyond nature occurs at the expense of the scaffolding of rooms, tables,
file‐folders, archives, computers, media, and the associated ‘ecology of practices’ that
give rise to and sustain so‐called ‘universals’ (Olsen, Shanks, Webmoor and Witmore
2012). Indeed, if we desire to transfer notions of what we deem methodologically
adequate from the Basin of Mexico to the Southern Argolid in Greece without any other
mediators, then we would never really get much farther than the valley edge at the base
of Cerro Tláloc (pace Blanton et al. 1996). For one to maintain a ‘view from nowhere’
(Nagel 1986) is to sort out the world in advance of putting in the requisite work to
better understand it.5 We will return to this issue below for it has bearing upon
numerous debates within the profession (e.g. Alcock and Cherry 2012; Blanton 2001). In
a few words, just as there can be no experience devoid of interpretation, there can be
no universals detached from localized practices of classification, metrology and
standardization (Bowker 2005; Callon 1998; Daston 2000). Indeed, those properties that
can be measured have as much to do with relations, whether they are with a theodolite
or perspective space, as they do with the definitive attributes of the thing.
Relations among archaeologists, planning frames, measuring tapes, and context
sheets along with computers, archives and institutions are part of the co‐emergence of
any material past (this term ‘co‐emergence’ will become clearer shortly). These
components are far too diverse to be boiled down to two domains alone—succinctly,
what are the definitive attributes of a thing and what is supposedly added to this reality
through sensation. And yet this old Kantian drama privileges the coddled twofold of
humans and the world (Harman 2009, 67‐68), thus leaving behind those dealings
between sheep, green grass and stone enclosures, car tires, suspensions and worn

5
We may for the sake of comparison consider Tim Ingold’s important discussion of the
hylomorphic model of creation where form (humans) is (are) assumed to be one kind of
entity that can be imposed upon matter (nature), another kind of entity which is taken
to be ostensibly separate from the former (2010).
limestone blocks, or a total station, grid paper and a reference marking out the location
of a denarius of Otho dating to 69 CE. Sitting out the game on the sidelines such
relations were not even of secondary importance for the British empiricist John Locke
who referred to them as tertiary properties—interactions between sun and wax were
third string (2008). One finds this hierarchy of value to be pervasive within archaeology
(Olsen 2006).
Let us consider this point further. With hermeneutic considerations in
archaeology, for example, interpretation is locked in a dialectical dance between the
interpreter (always human) and the ‘context’ of the object considered (cf. Hodder and
Hudson 2003, 195‐203). This sophisticated tradition, which has pushed such
considerations to the trowels edge (Hodder 1999), has nevertheless missed legions of
rapports between strings and baulks, theodolites and maps, sieves and sherds. With
phenomenological archaeologies, similarly, privilege is granted to human access to the
world (cf. Barrett and Ko 2009) while relations between nonhumans are consigned to
the natural sciences (cf. Tilley 2004). Phenomenology brackets the world as presented
to human consciousness. Phenomena, those things reduced to that which is brought to
light, the stuff that is apparent, rest upon the correlation between things‐in‐themselves
and categories of human understanding (see Harman 2009, 124‐134; and Meillassoux
2008). Relations, however, are a problem for all entities; trowels can be said to
‘interpret’ loose silt among cobbles as much as any hermeneut; the soil encasing a
menhir ‘feels’, ‘touches’ or ‘experiences’ the standing megalith as well as any
archaeologist. One could describe the differences of relations between various entities
in terms of degree, but not kind. Why deny these nonhuman relations subjectivity? This
democratic openness to the mediating potential of all entities, this flat ontology,
undermines any identification of primary and secondary qualities with a bifurcation of
nature into the material world and human beings. It is, indeed, Whitehead who gives
back to experience what is held to be exceptional about humans.
This realization strikes against the bow of correlationism, the doctrine that holds
that primal rapport between humans and the physical world as co‐originary (see
Meillassoux 2008; in archaeology, refer to Lucas 2012). In his discussion of
correlationism, Graham Harman underlines how “for the correlationist, not only are
there no independent states of affairs apart from the primal rapport, but a human
observer must also be one of the two ingredients of this rapport” (2009, 124). Thus we
encounter correlationist tendencies in the common denunciation of that old mantra
‘things speak for themselves’. To believe that things can speak, as Shannon Dawdy
maintains (2010, 778), is delusional. Artifacts, for Dawdy, “may have a type of agency,
but it is largely a situated and historical agency created by human habitus” (Ibid).
Beyond an implicit expectation that things should ‘speak’ in the way of humans,6 there
is a belief that humans need to be there to observe the rapports between levees and
water, cars and mud. But recall how a rill of water and lines of stone mutually articulate
each other in ways that should not be regarded as mere background interactions to
verbal statements. They do not require that monopoly of ‘human habitus’, in order to
mutually constitute each other. To be sure, “A51” is co‐produced by the heterogeneous
alliances that comprise the AEP, but this is not to say that lines of stones where not
being realized by numerous agencies prior to their purported ‘discovery’ by the Red
Team on that humid summer morning in 1980.
Succinctly, a revitalized empiricism does not take leave of the term ‘empiricism’.
We are, to be sure, justified in the maintained use of the term by its oldest of
etymological roots in the Greek term empeiria, which is concisely translated as
experience. A slogan, then, of the second empiricism is to “move closer to experience”.
Again, a main hinge between the ordinary empiricism and its successor is not to regard
the bifurcation of nature as a starting point—a move which any dialectical, transcendent
solution would champion (Webmoor and Witmore 2008). The dialectics where progress

6
Bjørnar Olsen cleverly plays upon this expectation of speech on the part of things: “If
things were invested with the ability to use ordinary language they would . . . talk to us
in ways very banal, but also very imperative and effective: walk here, turn, bow, lie
down, gather, depart, etc.”(2006, 97). Underlining the difference in how people get on
with things in ways irreducible to linguistic play, Olsen draws out the banality of such an
expectation.
occurs through contradiction, to be sure, has not put these issues definitively behind us,
because it accepts a given opposition, what it wishes to leave behind, as a starting point
and this occurs over and over and over again. The second empiricism, by contrast,
acknowledges the status of such rifts as one of many possible outcomes in our attempts
to strike upon “what we should be attentive to in experience” (Latour 2005, 111).
What then is missing from the discussion thus far is a consideration of how
archaeologists can nonetheless package the material world into two dimensions. In
other words how can ‘representation’ occur in the second empiricism? Indeed, one of
the primary faults of the empiricism discussed by archaeologists is to be found in how
poorly it represented the material world. While it was certainly not the case that this
empiricism, exemplified in the diverse work of Lewis Binford or David Clarke, failed to
recognize the practical constraints of making contemporary observations regarding
material things, it was, nonetheless, overly reductive in its rendering of experience and
this was due to a form of representation centered upon things of the material world as
matters of fact. Let us now turn to the third proposition.
Proposition Three: Data are simultaneously real and artificial
Establishing ground for this third proposition requires us to first ask: what are data?
Here, consider two definitions of data in archaeology. Data are, as Lewis Binford
maintains, “the representation of facts by some relatively permanent conviction of
documentation” (1987, 392; my emphasis). Facts, for Binford, refer “to aspects of the
actual occurrence of an event” (Ibid.). Quite astutely, Binford recognized that
archaeological facts are never historical facts (past events), but are always
contemporary observational events. Indeed, archaeological ‘facts’ are, in the words of
David Clarke, “observations in which the nature of the observer and his intentions play a
large part in which ‘facts’ are observed and recorded” (1978, 19).7 According to Binford,
the responsibility for a faithful portrayal rests with the archaeologist who must “seek
out experiences as widely as possible in order to provide reality checks on the accuracy
and utility of his ideas” (1987, 403). The archaeologist is accountable, and it should be
added, that these matters of fact are subject to modification through future experience
(cf. James 1912; also Wylie 2002). Facts could be built upon facts.
In a shift away from questions of fact, Ian Hodder defines data “as a set of
dynamic, dialectical, unstable relations between objects, contexts and interpretation”
(1999, 84). For Hodder, “interpretation is involved in the construction of data” and, as
such, excavation is justly regarded as a highly skilled activity (1999, 102‐03; also refer to
Berggren and Hodder 2003; Hodder 1984; Lucas 2001). Here, emphasis is placed upon
the steel edge in excavation and interpretations are debated among various
specialists—excavators, ceramic, faunal, lithic or micromorphological specialists, and so
forth—in the trenches. But that is not all. More groups have a stake. Because, as Hodder
puts it, interpretations impact data, attempts must be made to involve more
stakeholder groups on the ground (Hodder 2000).
While neither of these understandings of data can be boiled down to a
complacent acceptance of the kind of neutral, dispassionate statement that comes from
nowhere (Stengers 2008, 92), both can be said to rest upon the ‘bifurcation of nature’
discussed in the previous section where hard, objective, ‘primary’ qualities are separate
from those soft, sensuous, ‘secondary’ qualities that are supplied by a human subject.

7
To be sure, as Alison Wylie (2002) has so effectively demonstrated, we may well find
comparable, antecedent considerations within archaeology in the work of Clyde
Kluckholm (1939, 1940) or John W. Bennett (1943, 1946). Arguing against a kind of
“narrow empiricism” where sensory facts were given priority over theory both Bennett
and Kluckholm acknowledged the importance of theory in conditioning facts (Wylie
2002, 32). The very presence of the return to similar debates signals not only the
problem with regarding this bifurcation as a starting point (Webmoor and Witmore
2008) but also that we have not yet moved close enough to experience! Admittedly,
such careful genealogical considerations are outside the scope of this essay.
As specified with propositions one and two, we run afoul of our objects when we seek
to split them into such portions or, indeed, begin as if they once were.
Though it was savvy to the impact of the archaeologist, the brand of empiricism
articulated by Binford and Clarke ultimately reduced objects to archaeological facts—
facts they may be, but as we saw with the example of “A51” they are also a lot of other
things besides (Latour 2005b, 21). With the form of interpretivism expounded by
Hodder we are presented with a dialectical dance, which builds upon a radical
separation entirely of our own making (Webmoor and Witmore 2008). For Hodder, data
are both objective and subjective (1999). This scheme of ‘guarded objectivity’ would be
perfectly fine were it not for the precarious and disorienting position we must now
occupy between two non‐existing poles of a world torn asunder. Pulled in two
directions, one must now become socially constructivist with reference to the materials
and realist with reference to the ‘social’ at the same time (also consider Hodder and
Hudson 2003, 241‐242). For the second empiricism, both ways of representing data—an
ordinary empiricism where the real is conflated with actual facts and a dialectical
interpretivism that begins with/builds upon a bifurcated world—are untenable.
The past is not discovered; rather it is produced (a point that will be qualified
shortly) in the present by working with what is left behind—this was somewhat of a
credo for Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1992; echoed for example in Hingley
2005). For Shanks and Tilley, facts can be separated neither from value, nor from
concepts, nor from theory. Facts, returning to their etymological roots, must be
fabricated, and in this, theory can never be divorced from practice (Shanks and McGuire
1996). To put it another way, archaeologists are never wholly separate from the
material pasts they co‐produce; there is no neutral view from elsewhere; there is no
static record. Here the term ‘co‐production’ speaks to the wider ecology of participants
that take part in the manifestation of the material past (Witmore 2004; Olsen, Shanks,
Webmoor and Witmore 2012).
The chain of transformation between the trowel’s edge and the final document
is thick with moments whereby archaeologists, trowels, gridded paper and string swap
properties with things deemed to be of the material past. Even the basic question of
whether a dark soil‐encrusted lump is ceramic or stone leads to a gauntlet of tests at the
site of Roman Binchester in County Durham, UK. Through a series of steps—the texture
of the surface, the sound made by the tap of a trowel, the moist imprint left after a bite
of the teeth—an undetermined lump acquires further definition as either a sherd of
Roman grey ware or a bit of sandstone. If relations must be understood to take part in
the compositional reality of archaeological entities, then these entities cannot move as
pure forms from place to place. Every new relation has the potential to transform an
entity in some small way, but we should not jump to any conclusions that relations
exhaust what entities hold in reserve (Lucas 2012; Olsen 2010).
Likewise, what provides the grounds for any record—texts, maps, photographs,
archived artifacts—are also moving and continually transforming within new fields of
relation. Records do not take flight from the reality of the world and this was something
positivists failed to realize. Should you ever do so, you will never read the same report in
the precisely same way twice (see Olsen 2005 and 2010 for a discussion of this point in
relation to poststructuralism). It is worth taking a brief moment here to consider how
knowledge too is caught up in an ongoing process of formation and therefore requires
on‐going work to maintain. Any historical text, for example, is also comprised of
archives, institutions, administrative personnel, curators, ordered shelves, air
conditioning, organizational standards, databases, not to mention the long chains of
articulation, selection, filtering, acquisition, and so on that gave rise to that text (see
discussion in Austlander et.al. 2009). While most archaeologists recognize that the old
positivist mantra of adding another brick to the edifice of knowledge related to an
image of generating evermore accurate copies of the material world no longer holds
(consider the longstanding rationale of Classical Archaeology in terms of accumulation,
as it has been discussed by Morris 2000; also Siapkas 2001), few have grasped the full
implication of what remains.
Whenever we attempt to manifest a fragment of Roman grey ware in two
dimensions something of the manner of its reality is lost and something of the manner
of its reality is gained (Latour 1999). The reality of the sherd can neither be fully
encapsulated in a field notebook nor in an image in a database. Circulating relevant
qualities of this bit of ceramic requires the work of translation, which occurs across a
series of steps, a series of many small gaps (Latour 2005). In the course of this work, this
archaeological labor, the sherd is displaced and modified (Webmoor 2007; Witmore
2004). If, therefore, there can be no translation without transformation then the old
correspondence model of truth must be jettisoned.
With the correspondence model of truth, the philosophy of language postulated
that the gap between two distinct spheres—language and the world—was bridged by a
reference that resembles the thing verified (James [1907] 1975; Latour 1999).8 Accuracy
rested on a fidelity to the things shown as faithful copies (Harman 2009) and, in this,
progress in knowledge came about through refining this fidelity (consider Richard
Rorty’s [1979] felicitous polishing of the mirror of reality—a goal still held in the back
corridors of some archaeology centers, institutes and anthropology departments).
Rooted in an over‐simplified understanding of the relationship between the world and
words, facts and interpretation, data and theory, this image of accuracy has not
grappled with the complex, non‐linear, careful, exhaustive, protracted, messy, iterative
process by which archaeologists build an accurate portrayal of the material world
(Witmore 2004). Accuracy, of course, rests on how words, texts, maps, or photographs
correspond to an original situation, but it is also rooted in the iterative potential for
revisiting the series of steps between the material world and those words, that text,
that map, that photograph (Latour 1999; in archaeology see: Webmoor 2007; Witmore
2009).
In other words, the trials and tribulations that rest behind any final publication of
archaeological materials unfold across many steps; steps which bridge many small
gaps—there is no single chasm between words and the world. Gaps between entities
are legion, as Bruno Latour (1999) emphasizes, and translation, the negotiation of these

8
For more here see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth‐correspondence/
gaps, is omnipresent (Harman 2009, 73‐79). Any commitment to accuracy, any
obligation to a faithful portrayal, any measure of adequacy with respect to the things
manifest demands full disclosure of every step along the path of taken to generate a
statement, a notebook entry, a report, a final publication about the material entities
that co‐emerge through these very archaeological interventions. Equally, a duty to
accuracy on the part of subsequent researchers must both translate into a spirit of
caution (not quite the steadfast skepticism and distrust characteristic of the ordinary
empiricism) with respect to the adequacy of the claims made and, occasionally,
reiterative action through retracing the paths taken.9 Such loyalties situate archaeology
within a continual ‘tuning process’, to borrow from Andrew Pickering (1995). And the
burden of proof demands we open up every step of this process to the possibility of
public scrutiny (cf. Hodder 1999).
‘Co‐emergence’ is a key principle for the second‐empiricism. Contrary to the
notion that data exist as enduring nuggets of reality that persist in spite of all the
escapades around them; contrary to the presumption that data may be transmitted in
an absolutely pristine state from one site to the next, all actors are impacted and
perturbed by others. All actors swap properties and are modified in the course of their
transactions (such are basic tenants of process‐relational approaches, including Actor‐
Network‐Theory; see Law 2008). Stated differently, for a ‘series of stone‐lined pits’ to
come into being at the site of Binchester a whole host of entities—WHS trowels,
undergraduate students, bits of stone and rubble, sediments, unit supervisors and so
forth—must lend their action over the course of a few days of excavation in July of
2010. Anything and everything can be a mediator and all these mediators are
transformed in the course of this action: trowels are further worn; undergraduate
students become more adept at recognizing subtle differences in soil consistency,

9
Michael Shanks makes a distinction between scholasticism and criticism, which is
relevant here. The former, scholasticism, involves redundant citation and argument
within the elaboration of thoroughly accepted, and hence canonical, matters of
concern; the latter, criticism, is an “attitude of healthy skepticism and suspicion” set
within the moving project of knowledge (Shanks 1996, 118).
compaction and color; bits of stone and rubble are further freed of encasing soil and
thus defined as subsets of larger features; sediments are displaced to rubbish piles; unit
supervisors gain more confidence in their understanding a context, feature, a site.
Within this community of practice, all co‐emerge. Indeed, features similar to what are
now taken to be ‘stone‐lined pits’ had been recorded as rubble/slumping paving in the
course of earlier excavations on the site (Peter Carne, personal communication).10
So, to sum up, data are neither invented, because their reality plays a role in
their formation, nor discovered, because they are altered in significant ways by
archaeological scrutiny. Data are not only starting points, they are also achievements.
Data are artifacts (note may be taken of the spin on Clarke’s point that “artifacts are the
archaeologist’s main data” [1978, 13]; also see Stengers 2010). And accuracy rests upon
the traceability of those achievements to an original situation, a situation that always
begins in medias res.
From this vantage point, none of our forays as archaeologists have dug deep
enough to the bedrock of ‘fundamental entities’ (Clarke 1978; also Shennan 2004), as
they have all left in place a single natural unity across which dance rich multiplicities of
interpretation, meaning, significance and belief. ‘Differing views’ could be taken of the
‘same facts’ as Clarke put it (1978, 19). Succinctly, our pluralism is one‐sided in its
concerns for social or exclusively human‐oriented groups. With the turn away from
matters of fact in recent years, we have become adept at detecting and incorporating
the relevant parties. Of course, many archaeologists recognize the vast difference
between made and made up, constructed and ‘socially’ constructed (see Alison Wylie’s
discussion of a ‘mitigated objectivism,’ 2002, 161‐178). Facts must be both fabricated
and real at the same time (Latour 1999, 127). But in this we have emphasized a rich

10
For some readers, the specter of relativism will creep in, but this is only because many
quickly disassociate relativism from realism. The relativism of the second empiricism is
not some trite embrace of the tired and misguided belief in anything goes, there are still
better and worst translations of the material past. More will be said on this point
shortly.
multiplicity of ‘human subjectivity’ dancing on top of solid matter as discrete entities;
solid matter represented nonetheless, as data built upon indisputable matters of fact.
Full stop.
From an ordinary empiricism to empiricism 2.0
I must caution you that empiricism 2.0 looks very little like that of its ordinary
predecessor. The tendency of deciding in advance what part the materials deemed to be
of the past should play was one of the fallacies of the ordinary or first empiricism,
because the material world was reduced to facts. And while the first empiricism should
be familiar to any archaeologist, there are other legacies, which are recurrent: the
persistent delusion that we begin with the past that is separate from the present, the
dream of transferable methodological standards from nowhere, and a common
ontology of substance that results in enduring objects. I will now sum up the difference
between the first and second empiricism with a closer look at these three points of
discrepancy.
First, rather than assume the past to be demarcated and distinct, we may now
regard those things that hold something of the past as coextensive and involved. From
this angle, we move from time as successive to time as simultaneous. With the latter
any given ‘material past’ becomes an active participant, a mediator within current
and/or past states of affairs. Consider a brief example related to the Larissa above
Argos, Greece.
In the winter of 1822, a force of volunteers would defend the Larissa against ten
thousand troops under Dramali (Finlay 1877, 291). Until this ragtag bunch had franticly
rushed up the hill from the town below, the old castle of Argos was regarded as but a
ruin (Gell 1810; Leake 1830). However, in this course of the mêlée the former ruin took
on new characteristics, it acquired new properties and in the most desperate hours the
outcomes of Ancient Greek, Frankish, Venetian, and Turkish achievements as bastions,
towers and an inner and outer enceinte (along with a few hundred reinforcements from
Lerna under Ypsilantis himself, black powder rifles, and horses) would lend their aid.
Such polychronic exchanges between the castle and, for example, the Argives and the
Frankish overload Villehardouin, the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks, Bertoldo d’Este
and the Pasha of the Morea, the Ottoman Turks relieved by the Seraskier and the
Venetians under Morosini, or, once again, the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks (refer
to Andrews 2006) speaks to the coextensive nature of the past. And in these exchanges
1212, 1397, 1463, 1686 or 1715 are but coordinates for much more complex temporal
folding, for much more intense episodes of turbulence spawned by heterogeneous,
polychronic transactions.
Second, rather than argue for transferrable methodological bases that operate
irrespective of locality, we now recognize how local idiosyncrasies mediate
methodological outcomes. Consider the question of scale in regional survey. This
question has received a good deal of attention in recent years largely due to a persistent
cadre of Mesoamericanist Archaeologists, including Richard Blanton, Steve Kowalewski,
and Gary Feinman, who argue that myopic Mediterranean survey archaeologists should
be operating at larger scales with 100% sampling and contiguous coverage in order to
due justice to the regional scales at which past societies operated (for example, Blanton
2001; Blanton et al. 1996). These archaeologists, however, consider scale in terms of
size and zoom within perspective space: i.e. “putting things into a frame” (Latour 2005,
186) through the measurement of blocks of area—the bigger, the better. This is the
mapmaker’s space; a perspective space that unfolds at a distance of less than a meter
from a map on a computer screen.
Other spaces, other understandings of distance, however, arise at the nexus of
different relations on the ground (also see Ingold 2007): in the course of a farmer
moving between Halieis and his plot on the heights above Costa; a shepherd urging his
flocks along a drove road; or with a fisherman between the limani in Vivari and the
shoals off the south side of Platia Island. None of these movements operate free of the
circadian rhythms of light and dark, rain, gale force winds, or a Spartan invasion. Other
mediators, any entity, can potentially impact scale and, because of this, any frame
derived on the basis of best practice in one locale abstracts from realities on the ground
in another. Costa is immeasurably farther away when a division of troops is camped
outside the city walls of Halieis; a drove road sticks to the uncultivated heights and will
avoid a fresh field of grain at all costs, or at least this is the case in daylight hours; Platia
Island might as well be Crete in the heights of a stormy winter. For the second
empiricism, ‘a view from nowhere’ (Nigel 1986) cannot be imposed arbitrarily—what
constitutes a region has to be made, this cannot be settled in advance.
But note also, that if transferable, universal standards are out as to the proper
scale of survey, so too is it difficult to establish a detached notion of adequacy with
respect to good work. Judging better and worst translations was a simpler affair with
the former empiricism because it put so much labor into staffing the field of
archaeological knowledge production with common umpires. Whether you were in
Girikihaciyan, Turkey, Hatchery West, USA or Teotihuacan, Mexico didn’t matter
because adequacy was judged with respect to transferable standards of ‘data’
collection, explanation and publication. Such criteria, however, are neither self‐evident
nor indisputable; they too are local achievements, they too need to be explained, and
they too should be situated as tentative outcomes open to constant reevaluation with
respect to the questions being asked; questions which, as we have seen, result from a
long chain of scholarship. The second empiricism doesn’t appeal to arbitrary universal
officialdom. As Isabelle Stengers puts it: “a claim should be related to the demands it
has to fulfill” (2008, 92; also James [1907] 1975). Considerations regarding the adequacy
of our work can no longer be severed from the conditions under which that labor was
deployed; adequacy must be related to the questions that practitioners are trying to
answer. Good work is a localized, risky, and humble affair and can now only be
considered in light of the constraints under which it was mobilized.
Third, rather than endow those “things of the past” with a determinative
specificity that renders subsequent actor‐relations as purely derivative, things are now
deployed in the plural, as matters of concern, rather than matters of fact (after Latour
2003, 2004 and 2005). By matters of concern I am referring to those common
obligations, cares, and worries—those things that are lures for common feeling.
Consider another example, the small church of Agiannis (Saint John) in Lefkakia, near
Nafplion, Greece (Figure 4).
Set at the northern edge of a low hill is a small church built in the midst of a
square structure of carefully fitted polygonal masonry. The Orthodox Church, which
enjoys local renown for its window—a journey through this is held to be miraculous for
sick children (Sarantakis 2007)—is but a few hundred years in age; a mere drop in the
temporal bucket when compared with its stone superstructure, a former 4th‐century
tower, perhaps associated with the defenses of Asine. Both the exterior and interior
portions of polygonal masonry are whitewashed; the interior is thickly coated in wall
plaster. If these polygonal walls are static, stubborn, impassive objects across which
historical events have swept then their incorporation into the fabric of the church of
Agiannis, the iterative coats of whitewash or plaster, would be but derivative. What is a
former tower for some is a matter of contention for others. A portion of the church of
Agiannis, a plastered interior edifice, a tower associated with the defenses of ancient
Asine: these polygonal walls are all these things; which occasion we encounter is a
matter of orientation, gathering and on‐going figuration. In this way, the arbitrary
separation of statics and dynamics with respect to an archaeological record (Binford
1981; Binford [1983] 2002; Lucas 2001) proves to be just as unjust to experience as the
assumption of durable substance and transient relations. Everything is dynamic and in
this way the polygonal limestone superstructure of Agiannis is not so much a substance
as it is a performance (Harman 2009, 44), an ongoing series of events.
Conclusion
As archaeologists, it is not a requisite task of the second empiricism to tackle these
difficult metaphysical questions, as archaeologists we only have to be open to other
associations that things might be implicated in. And empirical adequacy demands that
we do not decide in advance what part the past should play in the world. As science
studies has shown, reality doesn’t take a holiday from the interactions of archaeologists,
institutions and ideas; what we have called discourse (Shanks 1995). Our work is part of
our experience and we practitioners are in the same boat as the entities we seek to
understand.
Ultimately, it is not so difficult to recognize the differences between the first and
second empiricism. Two domains in a bifurcated world are jettisoned in favor of legions
of mediators who are continually modified through their alliances and associations. No
longer faithful copies of the material world, data become translations that are
simultaneously real and artificial. Transferable notions of what we deem
methodologically adequate are placed to one side in favor of a situated understanding
of adequacy with respect to good work. Indisputability of the real as matters of fact
gives way to cautious negotiations around matters of concern—realities in the plural.
The outlines of a second empiricism are far from fully sketched. However, with the
second empiricism the world becomes a much more interesting place and archaeology
has everything to gain. The key point of the second empiricism is that in order to be
faithful to experience one must go forward into the world and not pretend to separate
what we know from how we know.
Acknowledgements
This essay has benefited from conversations with several colleagues and graduate
students who worked with me in Greece including John Cherry, Elissa Faro, Georgia
Ivou, Alex Knodell, Thomas Leppard, Bradley Sekedat, and Zoe Zgouleta. I am grateful to
Benjamin Alberti, Gavin Lucas, Timothy Webmoor, and Joseph Zehner for commenting
on various iterations of this essay. I thank Peter Carne for information pertaining to
Binchester as well as Zoe Zgouleta and Georgia Ivou for details concerning examples
from the Argolid, Greece. I am especially grateful to the conference participants for their
insights into an earlier version of this essay, which was presented at the workshop in
Uppsala.
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Archaeology and The Second Empiricism

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