Simply not my type: building and using typologies in a new materialist world
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-09

Whilst the range of approaches and perspectives brought together beneath the banner of the new materialism comprise a broad church (Thomas 2015; Witmore 2014), where there is near universal agreement is with regard to the utility (or otherwise) of traditional typologies. Whether cast as classifications or inversions, typologies and the practice of typology are regarded as very bad things. And yet, there seems to be a clear tension - most directly confronted by Fowler (2013) - insofar as whilst new materialists (for want of a better term) are quick to damn typologies, they also seem unable to resist using them. If a trend can be teased out it is that whilst it is OK to use existing typologies (with caveats, naturally), it is a mortal sin to create a new one. Having encountered this situation in our own work on the destruction of megaliths at the site of Avebury - when one of us (MG) built a typology to the horror of the other(JP) - our aim in this paper is to step back and
think through some of the potential implications of this curious paradox.
Bibliography:
Fowler, C. 2013. The Emergent Past: a relational realist archaeology of Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices. Oxford: OUP.
Thomas, J. 2015. The future of archaeological theory. Antiquity 89 (348), 1287-1296.
Witmore, C. 2014. Archaeology and the New Materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1.2, 203-246

Mark Gillings, University of Leicester; and Josh Pollard, University of Southampton