This book is an outcome of a collaboration that has lasted nearly ten years. The births of children, conferral of PhDs, first jobs, international moves, promotions, a wedding: all are bound up in the completion of this project. It has been the proverbial journey, fostering intellectual challenges, development and unexpected partnerships, and is the manifestation of our collective destination. It began with Bjørnar visiting Stanford University in 2003 where all four of us were united in our unease with ‘the state of things’ in archaeology. Archaeology deals in the material remains of society, in things, their associations, assemblages, environments and contexts. While materiality and material culture have grown as objects of concern, things nevertheless are too often treated as secondary expressions of society, of social structures and cultural values. Different platforms and agendas have proliferated in seeking a social, cultural, or biological significance to the shape of things; what unites the diversity, even the incommensurability of most is an embarrassment that archaeology might primarily be about things, rather than other typical concerns of the social sciences and humanities such as norms and values, social structures and change, behavior and social psychology, historical agency, cultural geography. A question motivated us: where was the care for things in a discipline that is surely ‘the discipline of things’? We wanted to write a book that would offer guidance to archaeologists in a return to things.
A very early iteration of this project was a presentation by three of us at Stanford Archaeology Center’s workshop series in 2003. There quickly followed other iterations in the founding of a Symmetrical Archaeology Collaboratory, symposia at Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) Sheffield in 2005, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) meetings in Puerto Rico in 2006, and TAG Stanford in 2009. There were resulting publications and additional presentations where we developed our ideas. Brainstorming for the structure and arguments began in earnest in 2007 and 2008 when Bjørnar was again visiting Stanford University. These many sessions around the whiteboard in the center’s Metamedia Lab were fervent and memorable.
While circumstances dispersed the four of us, the spirit, ethos and aspirations of the Metamedia Lab—inclusivity, shared commitment, collegiality, creativity, openness, courage, and humility—were taken up in writing the draft chapters in a wiki. In step with a theme of the book, the work to manifest it has been collective and heterogeneous. Viewpoints, experience, and writing styles do differ, with a circulation of voices coming to the fore then receding to support in the background. Nonetheless, thoroughly collective, the book would not have been possible without all four of the authors.
Of course, there are many other essential ingredients that contribute to this collective work. We are indebted to many friends and colleagues: Susan Alcock, John F. Cherry, Douglass Bailey, Hein Bjerck, Ewa Domanska, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Ian Hodder, and Gavin Lucas. We thank Alfredo, Wendy Ashmore, and Michael Schiffer for their most pertinent comments to complete drafts of the manuscript. We are extremely grateful to Blake Edgar and Kate Marshall for their editorial guidance and support, to Peter Dreyer for his attentive work in copyediting the manuscript, and to Rose Vekony for her diligence in the proof stages.
Over the years, this project received generous support from Stanford University, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, the Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Offices of the Provost and the Vice President for Research at Texas Tech University, the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, Oxford University, the Institute of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, Tromsø University, and the Norwegian Research Council. We are grateful to Timothy Lenoir, the Jenkins Collaboratory, and the Information Sciences and Information Studies Group at Duke University for hosting Chris as a visiting scholar during the summer of 2011 and for providing a warm and inviting space for two of four when some final edits were being completed. We also thank Ian Hodder and the Stanford Archaeology Center for supporting Bjørnar with work space and access to the research facilities during his two sabbatical years in Palo Alto. We also thank the Ruin Memories Project and the Norwegian Research Council for providing one of us critical support during the writing and allowing two of us to meet in Norway during drafting. Finally, Tim’s gratitude goes to Amy Webmoor and Chris’s to Liz Witmore.