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Symmetrical Archaeology: Excerpts of a Manifesto

Article in World Archaeology · December 2007

DOI: 10.1080/00438240701679411

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Symmetrical archaeology: excerpts
of a manifesto

Christopher L. Witmore

Abstract

This article sketches the project of a symmetrical archaeology in brief. At a point when archaeology
has arguably never been more relevant, it finds itself in a climate of necessary plurality where
incommensurability is routinely shrugged off as a symptom of diversity; it finds itself in a state where
seemingly incompatible differences proliferate on either side of the divide between the humanities
and the sciences; it finds itself perplexed by divides between ideas and things, past and present, and
so on. A symmetrical archaeology holds that these divides are of our own making. Without over-
simplifying the world with an impoverished vocabulary of contradictory bifurcations, a symmetrical
archaeology offers a profitable suite of perspectives and practices for recognizing the impact of things
and our fellow creatures, ordinarily denied a stake in modernist myths of the world.

Keywords

Genealogy; mediation; multiple fields; pragmatogony; symmetry; things.

Introduction

The ‘principle of symmetry’ begins with the proposition: human and non-humans should
not be regarded as ontologically distinct, as detached and separated entities, a priori (Bloor
1991; Callon and Latour 1992; Latour 1993, 1994, 2005a: 76; in archaeology: Olsen 2003;
Witmore 2006b). Indeed, modernism’s burdened ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are regarded as
the purified ‘products’ of our particular relations to the world (Latour 1993). Therefore,
neither our analyses nor our explanations nor our interpretations should ever begin with
such asymmetric dualisms. Thought and action, ideas and materials, past and present are
thoroughly mixed ontologically (for a further clarification of this mixture, see Webmoor
and Witmore (in press)). Any radical separation, opposition and contradiction between
people and the material world with which they live is regarded as the outcome of a
specifically modern way of distributing entities and segmenting the world.

World Archaeology Vol. 39(4): 546–562 Debates in World Archaeology

ª 2007 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438240701679411
 Symmetrical archaeology 547

Symmetry refers to an analytical levelling of these various entities. Levelling entails a

denial of assumed privilege within an oversimplified duality (this assumption of privilege
could take the form of a ‘materialist’ verses ‘mentalist’ explanation, for example). Here,
‘metaphysically speaking, all entities are on the same footing’ (Harman 2007: 33), but
symmetry does not imply some simplistic notion of equivalence between humans and non-
humans (Latour 2005a: 76). Moreover, it is not a claim to an undifferentiated world.
Symmetrical levelling is neither axiological nor ethical. As such, a symmetrical
archaeology attends, not to how ‘individuals’ get on in the world, but rather to how a
distributed collective, an entanglement of humans and things, negotiates a complex web of
interactions with a diversity of other entities (whether materials, things or our fellow
creatures).
With regard to definition, a symmetrical archaeology is a programme best described as a
new ‘ecology’ packed with things, mixed with humans and companion species (Haraway
2003), and which prioritizes the multi-temporal and multi-sensorial qualities, the
multiplicity, of the material world (Witmore 2006a, 2004b respectively; also González-
Ruibal 2006; Webmoor and Witmore 2005).
Symmetrical archaeology does not aim to reclaim a unified archaeology, rather it simply
conjures an image of occasions (turbulent and fluctuating though they are) around which
common grounds might be formed. It does not aim to establish itself as the latest
paradigm shift, although it could make such claims. ‘Symmetrical’ is not a new adjective
that should replace ‘processual’, ‘post-processual’, ‘cognitive’ or ‘social’ before archae-
ology; each approach being symptomatic of group formation and divisions of labour (on
issues of diversification in archaeological theory, see Hodder (2000); on incommensur-
ability, see Kristiansen (2004); also Shanks and McGuire (1996)). For those who dislike
the geometrical metaphor of the ‘principle of symmetry’, do not despair. The notion of
symmetry, though awkward, is simply a provisional name for a necessary remedy to a
number of pervasive, persistent and polarizing ailments which have befallen archaeology –
e.g. a scientific objectivism versus lived perception (see Tilley 2004: 1) or Darwinian
archaeology versus agent theory (Kristiansen 2004) or premodern versus scientific
thought. Once full recovery from these ailments is within reach, there will be no need for
‘symmetrical’ as a qualifying adjective.
In this abbreviated manifesto I am interested in sharing the blueprint of a programme
that has, I suggest, repercussions across the whole of the discipline of archaeology. In my
contribution here, I aim to move fast and sketch some of our preliminary work. At the
same time, I articulate common matters of concern around which archaeologists may
rally. In this manifesto, I am interested in neither critique nor refutation. Instead, I am
concerned with proposition and construction. In what follows I begin by briefly situating
symmetrical archaeology in the context of our current disciplinary archipelago and by
further clarifying why it is so necessary. I then go on to identify six key matters of concern
associated with a symmetrical archaeology. I describe them as matters of concern (after
Latour 2004, 2005b) as they are issues of common care, obligation and worry for all
archaeologists (though, do not make the mistake of equating common concerns with
common responses). Through a series of wide-ranging examples, I address some of the
most fundamental issues in archaeology relating to practice, agency, materiality, space
and time.
548 Christopher L. Witmore

Why symmetrical archaeology and why now?

Archaeology, I suggest, has never been more relevant than here in the twenty-first century.
This is because we find ourselves in a period pervaded by very short-term thought. Politics,
economics, engineering, none of these professions thinks in terms longer than four, ten,
maybe twenty years, at best fifty – the next election, the next fiscal year, the next
innovation – and yet they are determining our global futures. We hear of the provisional
reckonings by these professions through media sound bites which move on to the next big
story while quickly forgetting that which preceded it. ‘As for contemporary science, it’s
born in journal articles that almost never go back more than ten years; even if work on the
paleoclimate recapitulates tens of millennia, it goes back less than three decades itself’
(Serres 1995b: 29). Within these states of affairs the very long-term perspective on how
humans have lived with the world has never been more necessary. In remixing forgotten
pasts, in reanimating the collective experiences of past societies – societies which respected
and lived by long-term (in some cases even thousand-year-old) traditions – archaeologists
provide constant lessons and even potential alternatives (such respect, such livelihoods, I
hasten to add, did not necessarily rob these past societies of their dynamism). Yet,
archaeologists too are more than susceptible to the very short term.
The downside of pluralism has culminated over the last thirty-five years in the present
climate of (epistemological) divisions of labour with the potential outcome of
fragmentation. Here, we encounter a problematic state-of-affairs where we run the risk
of publicity replacing purpose and where bold work is threatened by the self-centred aims
of lobbying groups with short-term disciplinary memories. It is all too common to find
previous scholarship relegated to the outmoded and outdated, to find it cast by the
wayside (repeated gestures of Kant’s so-called Copernican revolution). Here, the issue of
how we translate this material past is critical.
The transformative nature of the archaeological process (with regard to excavation and
some forms of survey) means we get only one shot to document, to manifest the material
world sufficiently. Still, the nature of the archive is such that, while it remembers
compatible, standardized and ocular-centric sets of information, it actively engages in
silencing other sets. We strip the past of disorder, we silence its noise and in the end, while
we are left with pasts on which we can build knowledge, these are also pasts which are
evacuated of their specificity. With these ordered pasts we will build ordered futures –
futures where humans run the risk of becoming the measure of all things (Bowker 2005:
201–30). This may not be the direction that future generations wish to go and therefore we
have a responsibility to check human essentialism by giving something of our practices
over to complexities and multiplicities (human essentialism is to be underlined, because
anthropocentrism is not so much the problem as are asymmetrical definitions of what it is
to be human).
While symmetrical archaeology draws inspiration from the Leibnizian, Whiteheadian
and Pragmatist traditions in philosophy, it also recognizes the contributions and
complexities of other philosophies concerned with things (e.g. the work of Heidegger;
also, see Olsen (2006: 92) for the connection to Benjamin, Bergson, and the late work of
Merleau-Ponty) without muddling their very different frames of reference or sliding into
the eclecticism or trivialization (cf. Olsen 2007) associated with a philosophical
 Symmetrical archaeology 549

polytheism. Here, it takes direction from the work of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour
along with other key figures of science studies, including Michel Callon, Donna Haraway,
John Law and Isabel Stengers.
Symmetrical archaeology revisits ontology, a relational ontology (actor-network-
theory), and in the process suspends the epistemology of bifurcation, an epistemology
which distances ‘us’ from the world; it denies the logic of dialectics, a logic associated with
our disciplinary ‘revolutions’ (Webmoor and Witmore in press). Beyond all else, a
symmetrical archaeology builds upon the strengths of what we do as archaeologists.
Furthermore, it recognizes the contributions of the antiquarians, without relegating their
work to the obsolete. It respects other modes of engagement with the material past and
recognizes good practice in art, science and the humanities. Something of value is to be
found in all these works. In this regard, a symmetrical archaeology offers a productive
path around the divide between the sciences and humanities. Of its slogans and of its key
concepts we may list:

. Archaeology begins with mixtures, not bifurcations.

. There is always a variety of agencies whether human or otherwise.
. There is more to understanding than meaning.
. Change is spawned out of fluctuating relations between entities, not of event
revolutions in linear temporality.
. The past is not exclusively past.
. Humanity begins with things.

Each point is further unpacked in what follows.

First matter of concern: practice

How do archaeologists relate to the material world? Here, epistemology, sadly, has been,
and continues to be, one of our greatest stumbling blocks. This is because it is largely
based upon an absurdly over-simplified understanding of the relationship between the
world and words, facts and interpretation, data and theory. So long as we take for granted
definitions of what it is to be human, what an ‘object’ is, what constitutes an agent or even
how archaeologists constitute knowledge, we will continue to be drawn into spiralling
controversies, which merely repeat polar shifts every generation or so (Serres with Latour
1995: 144). Here we encounter the fog of a modernist amnesia that leads to repetitive
intellectual gestures (for a definition of ‘modernism’, see Witmore (2006b)). A symmetrical
archaeology recognizes conventional bifurcations such as data and interpretation, the field
and the contexts of knowledge production, past achievements and present archaeological
practices, words and the world as the outcomes of relations with particular entities of the
world and not the starting point. One path forward is briefly to suspend our interest in
epistemology and recast our taken-for-granted aspects locally (cf. Witmore 2004a). In
short, closely follow what we archaeologists actually do in relation to the material past;
carefully trace the many steps and the many transactions that occur in practice (on
ethnographies of archaeological practice, see Edgeworth (2005)).
550 Christopher L. Witmore

A notion of multiple fields, I suggest, might provide an adequate ground plan of this
constantly shifting terrain (Witmore 2004a). Drawing upon actor-network-theory (Latour
2005a), multiple fields cover the components, contexts and connections implicated in real-
time archaeological practice. The concept of ‘multiple fields’ carries a dual valence. First it
refers to the recursive linkages implicated in our practice on the ground, whether along a
survey transect in the Greek countryside or in a 161 metre trench somewhere in the
American south west. In other words, the fields correspond to all the necessary
components of the heterogeneous network, which situates practice throughout its various
stages of iteration.
Consider that at the Neolithic tell excavations of Çatalhöyük, Turkey, archaeologists
focus a great deal of energy into knowing as much as possible about what it is they are
digging when they are digging. Rightly so. But re-circulating knowledge about, for
example, the classification of a seed in order to understand better the context under
excavation involves many more interlocutors than an environmental specialist simply
interpreting a carbonized seed as einkorn. There are many more entities – whether trowels,
tapes, dumpy levels, labelled containers, notebooks or the human excavator, whether the
body sherd from area 1889 in which the seed is lodged, the clean and ordered spaces of the
on-site laboratory facility, the microscope, the texts with plant taxonomies, and so on –
that come into play (Last 1997). In this way, the success or failure of an ‘interpretation’
rests on mobilizing the vast heterogeneous network which lies behind it (Fig. 1).
Archaeological practice is both distributed and dislocated.
In its second sense, the notion of ‘multiple fields’ counters the over-simplified scheme of
correspondence between language and the material world (e.g. James 1978; Preucel 2006;
Preucel and Bauer 2001). As such, multiple fields refer to the series of steps present in the
translation of archaeological materials into a final publication (Fig. 2). Each step within
the process of assembling definitive documentation of the material past occurs at the lab

Figure 1 What is gathered behind an ‘interpretation’.

 Symmetrical archaeology 551

Figure 2 The transformation of the material world into media involves many small gaps (augmented
from Latour 1999: 70, fig. 2.21: also Witmore 2004a: fig. 12).

table, at the desk, in the archive, in the library, on the computer, within institutions. These
are all fields of co-production. In this respect, ‘the field’, which is often regarded as a locus
for the collection of ‘data’, is dispersed along the series of transformations present
between, for example, a scatter of ceramic materials in a Greek olive grove and a 1:5000
chart listing artefact densities per grid square in an accompanying map of a ‘site’. Here,
accuracy rests upon the traceability of our movements between the material world and
what we say about it, or show concerning it, and not upon some notion of correspondence
across a radical divide between words and the world (Latour 1999: 123).
By following what we archaeologists do on the ground, rather than what we may at
times say we do, we recognize that ‘the field’ is not simply ‘out there’ because the things
gathered from the surface move through other contexts of engagement, study and
articulation (Witmore 2004a). The things of archaeology circulate far and wide through
their constant substitutions (notebooks, catalogue numbers, illustrations, photographs,
etc.). Whether coarseware ceramic fragments, bits of millstone or obsidian cores, these
things eventually exist as material guarantors of an engagement on shelves in an archive.
Here symmetry undercuts a ‘subject-centred’ approach to the production of an
explanation or interpretation by taking into account many more entities and many more
steps in the co-creation of knowledge.

Second matter of concern: agency, or what it is to be human

Much of archaeology follows a very restricted definition of agency which is relegated to a

freestanding human subject (for a general discussion, see Dobres and Robb 2000). Of
course, others speak of a ‘material agency’ or ‘the action of artefacts’, but all too often
552 Christopher L. Witmore

things are treated as the products of ‘human intentionality’ and thereby as agents (more
appropriately ‘actants’) they are to be glossed with the adjective ‘secondary’ (Wobst 2000:
42; Robb 2004 respectively). Or, likewise, things are held as faceless minions deployed to
facilitate grand, insidious and mystical processes of power and change (one hour spent
reading tomes on state formation which focus on such macro-processes is all that is
necessary to realize this). In each case, we encounter both the maintenance of a modernist
myth where the initiative always comes from the free-standing human being and which
preserves a firm separation between human and thing. If we hope to understand how
things push back and have a stake, we can neither start with ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ at the
end of a long process of purification associated with the Enlightenment (Latour 1993) nor
deploy the logic of contradiction upon which this scheme is based (Webmoor and Witmore
in press). So, we must ask: how do humans fit into this convoluted puzzle with things? And
how do their relations play out on the ground?
On the ground the human being is but one of a multiplicity of entities. So in the course
of the excavation process the prime mover of an action is a ‘distributed and nested series of
practices whose sum may be possible to add up but only if we respect the mediating roles’
of all the participants in the series (Latour 1999: 181). Here, the notion of ‘mediation’
refers to the multiple ways humans and non-humans swap properties in the process of
moving towards a goal, a possibility, an outcome; in both this process of moving towards
and this image of an outcome, a variety of entities have a stake – again, this roll call would
include: trowels, notebooks, tape measures, the laws of superposition, Harris matrices
and, of course, other excavation personnel, institutions, career pressures and so on. If we
wish to know exactly how many actants there are then we must follow the path of action
and trace the associations involved very closely from start to finish. But the plot of this
story is not our focus. Rather let us focus on how action is distributed in the relations
between humans and things. The excavation of a heap of rubble piled along the inside
corner of a stone wall is a good place to start.
Amid a pile of rubble, tightly compacted by many, many rainy days and numerous
sheep (as this pile lies in a structure which was reused as a sheepfold after the collapsed
roof pulled down a portion of the wall) and well bonded by hardened mud plaster (washed
down from portions of the clay roof and the walls) and soil wash (largely what is left of
animal dung), an excavator is locked in a negotiation with these other entities. (Since I am
setting the scene, I have the luxury of specifying the ingredients of this excavation, a luxury
an excavator never has in this situation.) A combination of careful delineation of the
compacted slopes above the rubble pile, a few courses in soil science (here the enrolment of
phosphate analyses might clue us in to the reuse of the space as an animal enclosure) and
the location of this bunch of stones within an inner corner of a wall made of similar stone
all feed into the designation of a pile of rubble as wall collapse. In short, other things,
performances and lessons learned from similar situations contribute to her articulation:
the rubble pile is wall collapse. Still, despite all the other interlocutors, despite the walls
which delimit the pile, the cascades of other excavation reports which refer to similar
circumstances of wall fall, the blistering sun upon her back, in this example I wish to focus
on the most basic of associations: archaeologist and pick.
An archaeologist-with-a-pick is different from an archaeologist-without-a-pick, just as
the pick is different within the hands of an archaeologist. The outcome of the combined
 Symmetrical archaeology 553

action in the excavation of this wall collapse is different from the possible outcome of an
archaeologist who excavates without a pick. The number of hours involved, the amount of
effort exerted by our excavator, the intimacy with which every crack between the stones
comes to be cleared – a shift has occurred in what would have been the goals if the entities,
the pick and the archaeologist had remained independent of each other. An entirely
different outcome occurs through the combined action of archaeologist plus pick. The
centre of this ‘programme of action’ is neither with the pick nor indeed with the
archaeologist. The action rests with the archaeologist-with-a-pick. All interlocutors, actors
and actants are on the same footing. Action is an aspect of these associations (Latour
1999: 182). No privilege is arbitrarily accorded to a free-standing human who excavates,
instead a distributed collective, an archaeologist-with-a pick, excavates (to add the
designation ‘archaeologist’ here is again to situate the human within a very complex
heterogeneous network). Still, this extremely rough sketch is only partly the case.
Throughout the excavation process the socio-technical collective is in a constant state of
flux. Our excavator, now understood as a distributed collective called an archaeologist, is
constantly shifting her goals depending on the allies she mobilizes to attain a particular
end. To be sure, this end differs depending on the properties of that ally or, in this case,
tool. Wall collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-pick is very different from wall
collapse excavated by an archaeologist-with-a-trowel. Indeed, wall collapse (once
designated as such), along with the person, also mediates the enlistment of the pick over
the trowel. Follow this symmetry and we will not slip back into the duality of the human-
in-his-or-herself or the tool-in-itself. Whether one is discussing excavation practice or the
maintenance of a Greek polis there is always a variety of agencies whether human or
otherwise.

Third matter of concern: translation and mediation

Archaeology, unlike other sciences, actively transforms its fields of study. Unfortunately,
not all material pasts are as steady as the monumental walls of the Bronze Age citadel of
Mycenae, Greece. Once an excavation has taken place one cannot return directly to an ash
deposit from a small hearth; one cannot go back to that plaster floor surface removed a
few levels ago. These things are noted, drawn and photographed; these material contexts
are subsequently sampled, packed up and scraped away in the course of archaeological
practice. At the end of an excavation or even a surface survey, we are always left with
translations of these engagements. We can return only to the media that manifest these
contexts and features; we can retrace the process only through stand-ins for a material
world permanently transformed.
With the previous matter of concern dealing with agency, mediation transpired between
multiple entities – tool, context (materials and features: a pile of rubble) and archaeologist.
In the course of an excavation these entities can involve previous engagements,
theodolites, trowels, tapes, notebooks, cameras, digital video-recorders, a site director, a
pottery specialist – whoever, whatever – and the outcome of their long and complex
transactions is often some mode of documentation. In this process of manifesting the
material world, there is more to the complexity of that pile of rubble than can be translated
554 Christopher L. Witmore

into paper-based media (Olsen 2006; Witmore 2006a). Excavation always translates a
feature, a context, into a new thing, but a pile of stone is never completely reducible in this
process of translation. Something always falls through the sieve.
While we archaeologists have a responsibility to produce legible, compatible, optically
consistent and standardized media which circulate, we have also a responsibility to attend
to other qualities of the material world. We have a responsibility to the multiple, the
polysemous and more ineffable qualities of the past. Here, we encounter yet another sense
for the term ‘mediation’ and it has to do with this process of translation.
Mediation is on one level conceived as a broader process than simply making sense of the
material world. However, one even more focused sense of the complex term ‘mediation’
might be regarded as manifesting particular qualities of things (Witmore 2004b). As such, it
refers to articulating aspects of the material world – something of the locality, multiplicity
and materiality – that are often sieved away by paper-based modes of documentation – a
scenographic combination of text, map, plan and image. In this more focused sense
mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot adequately sum
up. It is a way of manifesting something of the ineffable (also Shanks 1997). Moreover,
mediation is a process that allows us to attain richer and fuller translations of bodily
experience and materiality that are located, multi-textured, reflexive, sensory and
polysemous. Indeed, as archaeologists we have a responsibility to the qualities of things,
the textures, the properties of materials – an emphasis which seems to be lacking in some
strains of material culture studies (Olsen 2003; more recently Ingold 2007). We have a
responsibility also to address the multiplicities, ambiguities and presences of the material
world within the archaeological process. There is more to understanding than meaning.
We may attend to these responsibilities by enrolling digital or analogue modes of
engagement. These modes include simple sound records of ambient background noise;
they include super-high quality photographs placed into zoom software much like Google
maps to allow magnification down to the most minute of details; they include rich
collations of mixed media such as simultaneously cast video feeds of an event (the
excavation of a pit burial) or context (a plaster floor level) taken from various directions;
all may be incorporated within a social software platform for collaborative authorship or
public feedback and exchange (e.g. the collaborative fora of the Metamedia Laboratory
(http://metamedia.stanford.edu) or the Joukowsky Institute Workplace (http://proteus.
brown.edu/joukowskyinstitute/home)). Through such modes we may translate something
of the sensory, physical presence of the material past. Here, symmetry involves a wider
concern for the various qualities of things and the multiplicity of the material world.

Fourth matter of concern: change

Another set of stumbling blocks is to be encountered around the strangely chronological,

but not wholly archaeological, notions of technological revolution, cultural transforma-
tion, epistemic change, paradigm shift, etc. Knowledge, understanding, being, these
qualities of life are never cleanly stratified. Indeed, as we all are aware, the notion of
‘stratified’ deploys a partial designation at best. At worst it wraps blocks of a linear
temporality up into periods placed into neatly stacked boxes; it separates these blocks with
 Symmetrical archaeology 555

laminar sequences and arbitrary divisions (see Lucas 2005). Transformation in these
schemes often comes about only through radical, event-oriented revolutions. How else
might we document change?
Ironically, one means of breaking up such stratification is through the notion of
genealogy. Let us consider the story of Franchthi cave, which is located in the southern
Argolid, Greece. Franchthi’s story is one that has come to be associated with transition –
from hunting and gathering to sedentism and agriculture. Its stratified deposits span
20,000 years across three critical periods – the Upper Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic and the
Early Neolithic. Franchthi, it is widely held, contains a story of the ‘origins’ of agriculture
(cf. Jacobsen 1981). Here beginnings lay buried.
Discussions of agricultural origins tend to focus on how human beings with radically
different ways of life can adopt a totally new one. Within one temporal box inhabiting the
Mesolithic are hunter/gatherers; in another, settling down in the Neolithic, are
agriculturalists and pastoralists – humans of ‘nature’ on one side and humans of ‘culture’
on the other. Following Catherine Perlès (2001: 38–51), four possible scenarios for the
transition into the Neolithic are posited for Greece: (1) autochthonous or the localized
development of agriculture; (2) cultural diffusion – ‘ideas’ shared by others; (3) demic
diffusion – outside populations settling in Greece; (4) a more mixed regime of interactions
between local foragers and incoming agriculturalists. While scholars debate the exact
nature of the transition, all agree that a radical shift occurred – there was an ‘origin’ to
agriculture (cf. Price 2000). Yet there are problems with this presupposition of a
revolutionary transition.
Images of the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition in Greece rest upon a misconceived and
modernist notion of historicity around what it is to be human and how humans in turn
relate to the world. Innovation, for Perlès and others, is about discovery. This implies
radical shifts in how humans transact with the world – transactions which were previously
unimagined.
However, when understood as distributed mixtures and collectives with our material
worlds, human beings are situated within a network of association and understanding
which absorbs and allows for changes which we ‘moderns’ in hindsight – always in
hindsight – regard as radical. While others also may well have thought in such terms of
radical revolution in the past, this is not to be assumed. Certainly, new implements, new
‘ideas’, new entities entering the scene, by virtue of association can cause shifts in another
entity or other entities’ paths of relation to the world. In other words, a new entity entering
the scene changes associations with other entities.
The transformations occurring around 7000 BCE, however, are not solely about how
new things, new understandings, new members are enrolled within a community, within a
collective, rather they are about how the roles of already present members or the relations
of the already present members change. In other words, instead of leaving some Lens
nigricans or Lens ervoı¨des behind to germinate, human beings now help Lens orientalis,
which appears in the Franchthi deposits around 7000 BCE, along the way to maturation. A
new member has entered the collective. And, though the roles of lithics may change,
people can still fish for tuna, forage for barleys and hunt for game just as others did before
them, all in the context of modified sets of relations with things, with their companion
species.
556 Christopher L. Witmore

Radical revolutions are not the only explanation for the emergence of new collectives,
new hybrids, as suggested by the remains which circulate from the cave floor deposits of
Franchthi. With symmetrical approaches to change, more subtle genealogical shifts, more
complex networks of relation are also to be traced behind such processes.

Fifth matter of concern: time

Archaeology has long treated the past as separate, demarcated and distinct (cf. Lucas
2005: 1–31; Shanks and Tilley 1992; Thomas 2004). In this regard practitioners today are
definitively divided from the past by scientific ruptures and epistemic shifts, which distance
and delineate ‘us’ now from ‘others’ then (Latour 1993: 67–9). Because we have broken
once and for all with the past, it is a locus to be protected and preserved (Lowenthal 1985).
The past is an ‘object’ to be closed off and guarded behind the glass of the cabinet. In this
regard time’s arrow is unambiguous and unidirectional. But time, it is suggested, is much
more complex than this form of modernist historicism.
Time should no longer be solely regarded by its measure. Time is not simply an external
parameter. It is not simply another dimension which affects the material world from the
outside. It is far more complicated.
Time both passes and does not pass. It is turbulent. Time is like the weather. It is full of
calms, whirlwinds and chaotic fluctuations. Time percolates (see Serres 1995a; Serres with
Latour 1995). In a symmetrical archaeology pasts are regarded as not exclusively past.
Something of the past exists in the material here and now. It is accorded action and as such
multiple pasts continue to mediate aspects of people’s lives in a multiplicity of ways today
(see also Olivier 2003).
We know landscape to be a complex aggregate mixture of disparate eras, events,
achievements which have a durable trace. In articulating this ensemble archaeologists can
treat time as the sorter and situate each component in relation to another within a series of
stacked boxes we call chronology. While the measurement of time is extremely important,
this is not time itself (Serres with Latour 1995: 60–1). In contrast, one can treat the sorting
as the maker of time and document the multiple material pasts of landscapes, sites,
features and things as the gathering of disparate times that they are. The latter is the reality
of the material presence encountered on the ground.
Here we encounter a problem with our old standby metaphor of the palimpsest. The
nature of the palimpsest is that of erasure and sedimentation. Layers written, erased,
rewritten, the processes of the palimpsest lend themselves to entropy, decay and
stratification. But this only partially takes us down the very long path towards
understanding the nature of time. What about points of connection, proximity and
action between various pasts? What of the pleats and folds in the fabric of time?
For example, throughout Western Europe segments of a network of Roman roadways
still direct the flow of people’s lives today (Plate 1). In each and every case the past has not
passed but still has action. Portions of the ancient Roman road network and segments of
the contemporary European transportation infrastructure are proximate. Communities
today are directly impacted upon by Roman achievements in their day-to-day lives. This
percolating time is profoundly archaeological (Witmore 2006a, 2007). Moreover, through
 Symmetrical archaeology 557

Plate 1 Oxford Street, one of London’s better-known shopping avenues, follows the path of a Roman
road connecting Hampshire with Colchester. Here, achievements of the Roman period orient
movement today, thereby impacting on thousands of twenty-first-century lives on a daily basis.

symmetrical levelling we recognize how material pasts push back in subtle, yet often
profound ways.

Sixth matter of concern: things (archaeology and pragmatogony)

The etymology of archaeology rests upon the term ‘ta archaia’. This may be literally
translated as ‘old things’. But now that we understand that the pasts are not wholly past it
opens up a whole world of ta archaia which have been denied their due recognition. Within
a modernist historicism folks often tend to treat the past as quaint and old fashioned
(another set of connotations which cluster around the root ‘arche’). But without the
material past we would be limited to interactions mediated by far fewer entities. Let it
suffice to say, that the world would be a very different place.
This point brings us to another connotation of the term ‘thing’ (whose etymology brings us
to the German ‘ding’) as a gathering, as an assembly. From mundane and archaic to complex
and futuristic all things gather achievements that transpired at a distance in space and time;
these polychronic transactions are, nevertheless, simultaneously present in the thing.
In the course of our daily lives whether directly or indirectly we regularly interact with
complex things – televisions and cell phones, automobiles and computers – which are
558 Christopher L. Witmore

proclaimed to be marvels of modern engineering, but which are really gatherings of achieve-
ments from various times and numerous places (here, I am focusing on these seemingly
modern and even futuristic things to emphasize the variety of ways in which the past is folded
into technologies ordinarily treated as exclusive to our era; we could undertake similar studies
of Cretan water-mills or the Parthenon). For examples of such gatherings, let us consider an
example from ‘media archaeology’ – an object-oriented field of media studies (as distin-
guished from conventional history) concerned not only with dead media, the forgotten
practices associated with them and their impact in the co-production of past knowledge but
also the more erratic developments and idiosyncratic genealogies of contemporary techno-
logies of communication (Druckrey 2006; examples include Kittler 1999; Zielinski 2006).
Eighteen-thirty-nine and 1833 are years which witnessed two critical innovations – the
daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre and the analytical engine of Charles Babbage respectively –
and, for Lev Manovich (2001: 21–6), these spawned the two trajectories necessary for digital
media. In stark contrast to the invention of photography, which had an immediate impact on
the world, the ramifications of the analytical engine, a memory device that ‘contained most of
the key features of the modern digital computer’ (ibid.: 21) would have to wait. The engine
was based on the use of punch cards for mechanical writing. This innovation was borrowed
from the Jacquard loom invented in 1800. The Jacquard loom was itself a refined version of
an even earlier weaving loom (Zielinski 2006: 236). Thanks to the hard work of these
‘media archaeologists’ we could continue following the genealogical metamorphosis of
digital media and the computer, but the point here is a simple one: in each and every case
achievements were made durable through their translation and in this way transactions
between various entities are folded into such things. As things these accomplishments may
circulate at a distance in space and time; they may be instantly successful, forgotten, or later
unforgotten; when recirculated, they may enter into new interplays and thereby contribute to
new achievements. As such, humanity begins with things (Serres with Latour 1995: 166).
In tracing the genealogies of these things we articulate ‘pragmatogonies’ (Latour 1994).
A compound of the Greek word for materials, pragmata, and the word for creation, gonos,
pragmatogonies result when we accentuate the paths which lead to a particular thing,
when we map a particular gathering. The point here is that as collective material beings we
are entangled with transactions between people and things at a spatiotemporal distance
which lend themselves to actions, performances and practices now. It is as if they too were
here and now. Through things they are – we find ta archaia entangled with some of the
most seemingly modern and futuristic of devices in our daily lives.
It should be underlined: by understanding things as polychronic gatherings of
achievements, people of past eras, despite claims to the contrary (Lucas 2007), are never
wholly absent. It would be more precise to describe them as quasi-absent. The notion of
past as absent fails to recognize humans as more than living beings solely (concerning the
notion of a non-absent past, see also Domanska 2006a).

Archaeological futures and symmetry

Archaeology has long struggled with divides: the material and the social, nature and
society, the present and the past, the sciences and humanities. Caught in what can be
 Symmetrical archaeology 559

broadly construed as a cyclical fluctuation between concerns with realism and

constructivism or objectivity and subjectivity our history of disciplinary ‘turns’ (from
culture history to processualism to post-processualism) in the negotiation of such divides is
familiar to many. The path of symmetry does not end with the recurring cycles of
‘dialectical war’ where, by faithfully and persistently repeating the gesture of the Kantian
(the so-called Copernican) revolution, we abandon previous archaeological approaches to
the obsolete past and thereby ignore them (Serres with Latour 1995: 52–6). This cycle
opens up archaeology to fragmentation and forgetting; this gesture exposes the discipline
to a modernist amnesia under which we risk repetition (cf. Wylie 2002: 25–41).
Without over-simplifying the world with an impoverished vocabulary of contradictory
bifurcations, symmetry implies a profitable suite of perspectives and practices for
recognizing the impact of things, ordinarily denied a stake in the modernist myths of the
world. A symmetrical archaeology understands how human beings live with (to be
distinguished from in) the world in terms of mixtures and entanglements. Such an
understanding opens up new realms of possibility and new potentials for invention, which
free us from the conceptual burdens associated with such a modernist predicament. This
new ecology is full of possibilities for understanding what it is to be human; how the pasts
are entangled in the present, how they have intimacy and relevance beyond being
understood as obsolete or outmoded heritage.
Attending to our common matters of concern is a way of digging down to a level of
mutual interest and obligation. In this brief manifesto I have addressed practice, agency,
translation, change, time and things – six matters of concern I believe to be shared by all
archaeologists. Beginning with the strengths of archaeology is the best path toward bold
archaeological syntheses.
The humanities and social sciences are awakening to an archaeological sensibility at large
(Witmore 2006b). We are witnessing a return to things (e.g. Latour 2005b; also Domanska
2006b). Here, there is a great urgency for archaeology to step up. In a world pervaded by
very short-term thought, archaeology, with our perspectives on the very long term, with our
focus on relations between pasts and present, with our understanding of the impact of
things and their heterogeneous (multi-sensorial) qualities, has never been more relevant.
But we cannot sufficiently answer this calling unless we come to agreement over how we
engage with the material world, unless we recognize the simultaneous action of material
pasts in our contemporary lives. Our world is made up of entanglements of achievements
from a great variety of times and places. A symmetrical archaeology attempts to articulate
this renewed sense of togetherness, while provisional, symmetry is, nonetheless, a necessary
step to an audacious and innovative archaeology which fights under its own colours.

Acknowledgements

This article was first aired as a paper in a session entitled ‘Symmetrical Archaeology’ at the
Theoretical Archaeology Group conference 2005 in Sheffield, UK. In observance of full
disclosure, portions of the ‘Fourth matter of concern: change’ were published in Witmore
(2007). This point has been slightly re-tailored for inclusion here. I am grateful to Ewa
Domanska, Bjørnar Olsen, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, Bradley Sekedat, Michael Shanks
560 Christopher L. Witmore

and Timothy Webmoor for conversation and feedback. I also thank the anonymous
referees of World Archaeology for some helpful points of clarification. None of the blame
for the inadequacies of this article should be attributed to them.

Brown University

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Christopher L. Witmore is a postdoctoral research associate with the Artemis A. W. and

Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown
University. His interests include landscape, things, time and emergent media in
archaeology. His research focus is the north central Mediterranean. Among other works,
he is currently co-authoring Archaeology: The Discipline of Things with Bjørnar Olsen,
Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor.

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