A Path Toward Reconciliation? Biographies, between scales, assemble history
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-02-03

Interest in biographical approaches in archaeology has waxed and waned repeatedly for several decades, with an uptick in interest over the past three years (e.g. Joyce & Gillespie 2015). The difference this time around is the well-developed understanding of relationality in theory today, which refigures what a biography is. Rather than treating objects, structures, or bodies as self-evident entities, today we are able to ask more clearly what, exactly, we are tracing diachronically through the thick mesh of past worlds, and how we are best to do that. Drawing on research into depositional sequences in Catalhoyuk houses, I argue that refiguring the concept of biography in an inter-scalar, relational perspective provides an opportunity to bring together particularising approaches to history with approaches centred on the past’s meshwork of relationships. In particular I ask how types of biographies come to be (cf. Fowler 2016). By seeing lives (broadly defined) as virtually open-ended, but actually channelled along certain paths by participatory relationships between parts and emergent wholes (DeLanda 2006), we can understand biographies as centres of reconciliation among converging and conflicting social phenomena, with structured yet eventful histories as the outcome. Working biographically in this way, and empowered by high-resolution archaeological information, we become better equipped to follow the meaningful regularities and disruptions that constituted the times of past lives. 

Kevin Kay (University of Cambridge)