Creating Material Worlds: The Uses of Identity in Archaeology

Despite a growing literature on identity theory in the last two decades, much of its current use in archaeology is still driven toward locating and dating static categories such as ‘Phoenician’, ‘Christian’ or ‘native’. Previous studies have highlighted the various problems and challenges presented by identity, with the overall effect of deconstructing it to insignificance. As the humanities and social sciences turn to material culture, archaeology provides a unique perspective on the interaction between people and things over the long term. This volume argues that identity is worth studying not despite its slippery nature, but because of it. Identity can be seen as an emergent property of living in a material world, an ongoing process of becoming which archaeologists are particularly well suited to study. The geographic and temporal scale of the papers included is purposefully broad to demonstrate the variety of ways in which archaeology is redefining identity. Research areas span from the Great Lakes to the Mediterranean, with case studies from the Mesolithic to the contemporary world by emerging voices in the field. The volume contains a critical review of theories of identity by the editors, as well as a response and afterward by A. Bernard Knapp.

Table of Contents

Contents

Contributors
Preface
Introduction: creating material worlds, Adrián Maldonado and Anthony Russell

1. Becoming post-human: identity and the ontological turn
Oliver J.T. Harris

2. Materialising the afterlife: the long cist in early medieval Scotland
Adrián Maldonado

3. Move along: migrant identities in Scandinavian Scotland
Erin Halstad McGuire

4. Smoke and mirrors: conjuring the transcendental subject
John L. Creese

5. Drinking Identities and Changing Ideologies in Iron Age Sardinia
Jeremy Hayne

6. Impressions at the edge: belonging and otherness in the post-Viking North Atlantic
Elizabeth Pierce

7. We are not you: being different in Bronze Age Sicily
Anthony Russell

8. There is no identity: discerning the indiscernible
Dene Wright

9. Food, Identity and Power Entanglements in South Iberia between the 9th-6th Centuries BC
Beatriz Marín-Aguilera

10. Proportionalising practices in the past: Roman fragments beyond the frontier
Louisa Campbell

11. Afterword, by A. Bernard Knapp

Louisa Campbell received her PhD from the University of Glasgow in 2011. Her main research interests are in Roman material culture, the Roman and Provincial interface and theoretical approaches to culture contact.

Adrián Maldonado is lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Chester. He is most interested in the ontological transformations that came with the conversion to Christianity and the adoption of literacy beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire.

Elizabeth Pierce has worked in commercial archaeology in Britain and the U.S., and taught courses on the archaeology of the Vikings and early medieval Scotland at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include the Middle Ages in the North Atlantic, exotic materials such as walrus ivory and jet, and recumbent monuments in medieval Scotland.