Symmetrical Archaeology

Michael Shanks

Stanford University

World Archaeology 39: 589-596 (2007)




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



This paper was part of a collection in World Archaeology involving Chris Witmore, Tim Webmoor
and Bjørnar Olsen discussing this principle of symmetry as part of a broader post humanist and
materialist agenda in what some have called a new ontological turn.



A detailed introduction to this prospect of a materialist archaeology can be found in the book
Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California 2012) by the four of us - https://
www.academia.edu/1234484/Archaeology_The_discipline_of_things


Introduction

The notion of a symmetrical archaeology is a loose one, somewhat metaphorical, even evocative. It
has links with philosopher and sociologist of science David Bloor's "symmetry principle" (1976) –
that philosophers', historians' and sociologists' accounts of science should be impartial with
respect to the truth or falsity, rationality or irrationality, success or failure of the scientific theories
whose content is to be explained. This is to hold that the truth or rationality of "nature" (or any
other object of interest such as "history") cannot speak for itself but needs representation and
translation in the work of the scientist, in the process of debate around experiment, evidence and
argument. A symmetrical archaeology, as we read in the accompanying papers in this journal,

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upholds such a methodological impartiality. This requires us not to presume that the way the past
was will win through into our understanding because of the "force of evidence". Instead, the past
has to be worked at. A successful account of the past is not so much a measure of accordance
between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal and social
achievement.

This is one of the major propositions of a symmetrical archaeology - that we need to look to the
work of archaeologists in coming to understand the past.

A symmetrical archaeology also encompasses much more than this.

The notion of symmetry addresses the great divides and dualisms that have been so characteristic
of archaeology since its modern crystallization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as
Julian Thomas has recently shown so effectively in his perceptive book on modernity and
archaeology (2004; see also Schnapp, Shanks and Tiews 2004). For example, the radical
separation of past (to be studied) and the contemporary location and viewpoint of archaeologists
is one that regularly involves according primacy to the past. For the past, uncontrovertibly it would
seem, can only have happened the way it did, and what did happen cannot be changed by the will
of some later archaeologist. The objective reality of the past, so immediately present in
archaeological remains, faces off the contemporary archaeologist possessed by a subjective will to
know. Unbalanced and dualistic relationships, lacking symmetry, are also, in this modernist
orthodoxy, maintained between science and popular superstition, between professional and
popular archaeology, with, again, primacy usually being accorded to the expertise and knowledge
of the professional (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 24-26; Binford 1987). For otherwise there is perceived
the danger of knowledge of the past succumbing to myth and propaganda. Other familiar and now
much discussed dualisms in archaeology include those between people and artifacts, biological
species and cultural form, social structure and the individual agent. Many such relationships are
conspicuously gendered. (See discussion in Hodder et al 1995.)

All archaeologists, whether they acknowledge it or not, negotiate these relationships in their daily
practices. Much post-processual archaeology since the 1980s has been dedicated to exposing the
relationships and correcting imbalances (see Hodder 2001, for example).

This is why archaeologists became interested in cultural signification, as well as ecological

relationship, in the meaning of things as well as economic exigency, in gender relationships, in
agency, not as the search for the individual in (pre)history (as a counter to larger historical and
environmental forces), but as the recognition that social structure is both the medium and outcome

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of (individual) motivated practices (see Barrett 1988 on this duality of structure, after Giddens 1984;
compare also Callon and Law 1997).

People make history, but under inherited circumstances over which they have no immediate
control; this is a central principle of Marxian historical materialism. The past has a material stake in
contemporary life (Serres and Latour 1995: 57-62).

Beyond post-processual agendas, the politics of every archaeological practice, local planning
through to national agenda, touristic experience to trade in illicit antiquities, are now thoroughly
intertwined with matters methodological and theoretical, in a globalist convergence of historicity,
heritage, tourist industry, and archaeological epistemology! (Shanks 2004, Webmoor 2007 for
bibliography). And, it should be noted, attending to such intimate association was quite simply
taboo only twenty five years ago.

In this new negotiation of dualistic relationships, symmetrical archaeology is not a new kind of
archaeology. It is not a new theory. It is not another borrowed methodology. Less about critique of
archaeology, symmetry simply summarizes what I see as fruitful angles on these archaeological
relationships between past and present, people and things, biology and culture, individual and
culture (see, for examples of contributions to these debates, DeMarrais, Gosden, Renfrew eds
2004; Ingold 2000; Knappett 2005).

Symmetrical archaeology is an attitude. Symmetry draws attention to mutual arrangement and

relationship. Symmetry, in this mutuality, implies an attitude, that we should apply the same
measures and values to ourselves as to what we are interested in (Latour 1989). A consonance of
past and present, individual and structure, person and artifact, biological form and cultural value,
symmetry is about relationships.

There are four components to this attitude: process, creativity, mediation, and distribution. I
suggest these four components are quite counter-intuitive, at least to our conventional
archaeological imagination.

Process

As mentioned above, a successful account of the past is not so much a measure of accordance
between the way things were and our archaeological account, as it is a personal and social
achievement (Latour 1987). Archaeologists, under this attitude and understanding, do not discover
the past. Archaeologists work on what is left of the past (Shanks 1992). And this process, of course,
is something that takes us far beyond the academic discipline and profession (Schnapp, Shanks

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and Tiews 2004). An archaeological sensibility of attending to traces and remains is one that unites
the discipline and profession with memory and many practices and cultures of collection (Schnapp
1993).

Archaeology is a process of mutual self-constitution, under this attitude. Working on the past
makes us who we are. This is a dynamic process because there is no resolution; it just keeps on
going. The process is iterative.

And there is thus a profound connection with design and making, with material culture studies. In
this dynamic and mutual self-constitution of past and present, human and artifact, making things
makes people (Shanks 2006: http://shl.stanford.edu:3455/TenThings/Home for a full bibliography
on design studies).

Symmetry here also holds that we are not essentially different to those people and those remains
we study. We are all bound up in different kinds of relationship with the materiality of the world,
whether working to make artifacts, ourselves, or to forge narratives out of memory artifacts. There
is a continuity between the processes of making that archaeologists study, and the archaeological
process of working upon remains of the past (Lucas 2001).

Creativity

This symmetrical archaeological process is profoundly creative. The past is not a datum, but an
achievement. The past is the outcome of processes of uncovering and articulation, forging
connections with and through the remains. The past is constantly being recreated because the past
is a process, a trajectory, a genealogical relationship with present and future (Hodder 1999; Shanks
1998). This is simply to acknowledge that the past may only be revealed with hindsight, and that
the past is not wholly encompassed by date, but flows and percolates through contemporary and
future presence and effect (Serres and Latour 1995: 58). Such a creative process in no way
compromises the ontology of the past - that it did happen (Shanks 1998). The creative and created
past rather requires two connected acknowledgements. That the past did not end at some point,
and that the past is what it was through connections that take the inquiring archaeologist beyond
the confines of any particular and local context, into an anthropological and historical field of
comparative examples and connections.

The past, in this attitude, is thus resource as much as source. Again, archaeologists do not discover
the past, but treat the remains as a resource in their own creative (re)production or representation.
And, as with any field of resources, this creative process of making the past what it is has its own

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politics. The politics of access and agency, of who is allowed to make what past and under what
conditions (Shanks 2004 for issues and bibliography).

Mediation

The creative process of working upon what is left of the past is one of translation and mediation, of
metamorphosis, of turning the remains into something else. The archaeological site and its finds
become text or image, account or catalogue, recombined into a museum exhibition, revised into
the narrative of a synthetic text book or TV program, reworked into the rhetoric of a lecture course
for an archaeological program.

It has long been recognized that publication is an essential component of the archaeological
project, simply because the future of archaeology, of the past, is impossible, inconceivable, without
the past being "recorded". Here, in a symmetrical attitude, this translation into medium is
recognized as dynamic process. With "the past" existing in its re-presentation. With text being the
process of inscription. With medium being the process of mediation (Shanks 2001). We can also
call this a poetics (Shanks 1992).

And again, this directs attention to the politics of such processes. Representation is simultaneously
inscription, witnessing and speaking for the past, in its absence, in circumstances of evaluation
and judgment, connecting past event with contemporary understanding. Archaeology is a
representative act, as much as the political representative speaks for their constituency (ibid; Joyce
et al 2002).

And, as processes of making, our attention is directed to the material practices of reference,
representation, and mobilization - how the site and its artifacts are transported into new and
diverse environments, connections and ecologies that are not of the "original" context of the site
and artifacts, yet which nevertheless allow that site and artifacts to be recognized, potentially, for
what they were.

Distribution

The recontextualization, the remediation of archaeological remains, which is the basis of their very
recognition as the past, brings me to the fourth component of the symmetrical attitude. That the
creative process of mediation is about connection and relations (Shanks 1999, Chapter 2 for a full
treatment of this relationality in relation to the archaic Greek state).

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The past becomes what it is through a trajectory of connections that take it far from its temporal
origin in the chronometric past of dated location. The past is not to be seen as a datum under this
symmetrical attitude, but as a network of relationships that continually reconstitute the past itself.
This is just like memory. Memory is best conceived as memory work which only gains significance
through recollection, the act of connecting memory trace with something now that prompts the
reinsertion of that memory into our contemporary understanding, as we reevaluate the significance
of the past in the light of what is happening to us now, through the past circulating around us, and
so how we come to retell the past in a new way (Bowker 2005; and, as a contrast, Leroi-Gourhan
1993).

It is not only contextual archaeology that has recognized that understanding is contingent upon
relationship, putting things in context (Hodder ed 1987). Consider the different contexts of
connections involved in this symmetrical archaeology - trajectories from past through present that
constitute a megalithic monument as what it is, the work of mediation that turns the site into
another artifact of quite a different order even, yet mobilizes that very monument in real debates
about the way prehistory happened. This symmetrical attitude implies a relational perspective that
deals in networks and systems of distributed phenomena, heterogeneous networks, in the term
coined by sociologist of technology John Law (1987), cultural ecologies that make a mockery of our
accepted disciplines.

Genealogy

Symmetrical archaeology is not new discovery. It is not another "ism" for archaeologists to mimic.
Its attitude, as I have briefly sketched it, has a distinctive and long genealogy. It is important to
connect the symmetrical with a tradition of thinking that has made much of the four components of
the symmetrical attitude. That this is an intellectual genealogy implies that there is continuity and
connection without implying necessary identity or sameness.

So, behind the symmetrical, we can trace a Heideggerian line of interest in process rather than
"being" that involves the likes of the pre-Socratic Herakleitos ("you can never put your hand into
the same river twice") (see, in this context, Thomas 1996). Hegel's philosophy of internal relations,
particularly as received by the early Marx, is another vital constituting moment (and see Randy
McGuire's fine archaeological reception (1992) of this tradition). Nietzsche's own genealogical
thinking, of course, is familiar, not least through Foucault's history of discourse. The deep and
fundamental questioning of essentialist meaning by various western Marxists like Adorno and
Benjamin is another familial connection. Bataille's anthropological interest in transgressive

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experience can be cited, as well as the deconstructive, Derridean focus upon systems of difference.
(See Shanks 1992 for an archaeological treatment of these themes.)

I have already mentioned much recent work in science studies (after Kuhn) as contributing to this
attitude; Bruno Latour is to be mentioned here. Then there is a prominent trend in the sociology
and history of technology followed by the likes of Thomas Hughes, Donald Mackenzie, Pierre
Lemonnier, Mike Schiffer and Michel Callon. Contemporary fine art sometimes spectacularly and
subtly deals in material processes of human self-constitution and technical co-creation (Shanks
1992, 2001), as has been well recognized by Colin Renfrew (2003). And, ironically perhaps in this
company, the fundamentals of systems thinking and information science acknowledge, of course,
the significance of relational connection and of emergent behavior. This brings me to
technoscience and posthumanist thought (in the humanities) - dismantling the essentialist
distinctions between humans and machines (Hayles 1999).

And I do hope also that a symmetrical attitude is recognized in much of post-processual

archaeology - from explorations of signification and the meaning of things through to focus upon
socio-technical networks; my own work on the Greek city state (1995; 1996; 1999) can serve as a
detailed introduction to the issues, concepts and the forms of its socio-cultural modeling.

So this is far from being another case of disciplinary borrowing. Symmetry is more a synthetic term
that questions the character of disciplinary coherence and suggests some new kinds of cross-
disciplinary articulation, some of which we have been pursuing in our Metamedia Lab at Stanford
(metamedia.stanford.edu). Perhaps ultimately a symmetrical attitude hinges upon conceptions of
historicity - what it is to be an historical agent. For its underlying premise is that historical process
is best understood as the outcome of human creativity - a dispersed creativity belonging to
collective assemblages that denies the conventional (Cartesian) distinctions between maker and
artifact, design and realization, individual and cultural context.

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