OBJECT EPISTEMOLOGIES AND THE PRACTICES OF EDITING THINGS: AN INTRODUCTION
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 31/01/2021

Object epistemologies (after Markus Hilgert) address the question of how multiple and variable object identities arise when dealing with things, and how they in turn affect epistemic practices. This is not just an academic question, but also has social, economic, political and ethical dimensions. Corpora are a central epistemic instrument of knowledge generation for the archaeology of the Western World. But for a long time they were regarded as old-fashioned and part of an antiquarian tradition. This has, however, changed now that everyone is talking about digitisation and research data management; attention has turned once more to various strategies and the politics of representation, and in the course of the debate on (post-)factualism and cultures of knowledge and data we are striving to render the production of knowledge more visible and comprehensible. Following Bruno Latour, editions can be interpreted as translations and products of a praxeological connection between the world and representations. But who (should) own(s) the objects and their representations, who sets the agenda, and who is allowed to join the new democratic (?) projects for editing archaeological findings (citizen science versus knowledge by authority). How do we deal with colonial objects and negative heritage? How can we better do justice to things, beyond the usual classifications and description logics; must things in editions always become frozen as objects? These and other questions will be raised in our

introduction.


Author(s): Hofmann, Kerstin - Wigg-Wolf, David (RGK - Romano-Germanic Commission DAI)