Messy materiality take 2
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 11/05/2016

Two TAGs ago I presented a paper on messy materiality in the context of the South-East Scottish Iron Age. In a nutshell it was argued that Iron Age worlds were composed not of material categories, but of messy conglomerations of ‘stuff’, and that world-views were based on cosmologies of transformation. Since then, and with recent events in our own contemporary worlds, I have felt compelled to re-visit these ideas; but more specifically
focusing on the question of how can we envision social organisation in such contexts? I will also use this paper slot as an opportunity to try and reflect on the previous papers in this session.
Recent political events such as ‘Occupy Wall Street’ and ‘the Arab Spring’ have brought to the fore tensions between formalised economic structures and new emergent liberal global identities and relationships. National and regional identities are being re-negotiated as a result of events in Europe questioning traditional centralised political structure, for example in the context of the recent Scottish Referendum. Therefore, we live in an era in which familiar structures of society and social relations are increasingly being questioned and re-defined. This is in part due to the ever expanding world of the internet creating new types of
disembodied social relationships and encouraging multiple identities, with smart technological developments allowing the immediate sharing of ideas, information and products. As a result, our traditionally more rigid structures of social and economic networks are being unravelled and re-woven. In the European Iron Age (c. 800 BC to 800 AD), well established, rigid networks of social, political and economic relationships came under similar strain and were subjected to radical change, leaving distinctive material traces. Specifically, the Late Iron Age in Northern Britain
was a period of huge social upheaval subjected to successive campaigns by the Roman army and its final withdrawal from the northernmost part of the region in the first few centuries AD.
Is heterarchy a useful concept for making sense of messy materialities?

Mhairi MAXWELL (Glasgow School of Art)