Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity: A Global Archaeological Perspective

Objects of adornment have been a subject of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic study for well over a century. Within archaeology, personal ornaments have traditionally been viewed as decorative embellishments associated with status and wealth, materializations of power relations and social strategies, or markers of underlying social categories such as those related to gender, class, and ethnic affiliation. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity seeks to understand these artefacts not as signals of steady, pre-existing cultural units and relations, but as important components in the active and contingent constitution of identities. Drawing on contemporary scholarship on materiality and relationality in archaeological and social theory, this book uses one genre of material culture - items of bodily adornment - to illustrate how humans and objects construct one another.

Providing case studies spanning 10 countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history, the authors demonstrate the myriad and dynamic ways personal ornaments were intertwined with embodied practice and identity performativity, the creation and remaking of social memories, and relational collections of persons, materials, and practices in the past. The authors’ careful analyses of production methods and composition, curation/heirlooming and reworking, decorative attributes and iconography, position within assemblages, and depositional context illuminate the varied material and relational axes along which objects of adornment contained social value and meaning. When paired with the broad temporal and geographic scope collectively represented by these studies, we gain a deeper appreciation for the subtle but vital roles these items played in human lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781789255966

Book preview

Chapter 1

Personal adornment and identity construction in archaeology: an introduction

Hannah V. Mattson

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience, 1844

This book is about how people in the past used objects of adornment—particularly personal ornaments—to create, contest, and transform their identities. Jewellery has always fascinated students of history, both professional and casual. One only has to observe museum visitors poring over display cases of ancient ornaments to notice how these items capture the modern imagination. The traditional and widespread view that these artefacts are purely decorative and somehow supplementary to the basic functioning of human society has shaped our interpretations of their roles in the past. Most often, personal ornaments are relegated to markers of wealth and social status when found in archaeological contexts; after all, who but those with extra resources would possess such luxuries? However, these understandings are shifting as archaeologists increasingly consider how things and people are inextricably bound together. The recognition that the social and the material constitute one another, and that this can vary infinitely depending on context, influences how we think about identity construction. Individual and collective identities are not just reflected in objects such as ornaments—they are also actively shaped by them.

We view our work as contributing to two main areas of contemporary study, the archaeology and anthropology of dress and bodily adornment and the broader dialogue surrounding embodied identity and material practice in social and archaeological theory. Dress has been a growing subject of interdisciplinary inquiry in the last decade (Cifarelli 2019; Lee 2018; Loren 2011; Martin and Weech 2017). These studies—conducted from the perspectives of archaeology, ethnology, history, and art history—consider how the wearing and production of clothing and related items intersect with perceptions of the body, ethnicity, gender, and status (for earlier works on the topic see also Eicher 1999; Entwistle, Wilson and Eicher 2001; Gleba, Munkholt and Nosch 2008; Roach-Higgins 1995; Sciama and Eicher 1998). A recent synthesis, entitled Not Just for Show: An Archaeology of Beads, Beadwork, and Personal Ornaments, focuses on body ornaments specifically (Bar-Yosef Mayer, Bonsall and Choyke 2017). This is a broad treatment of archaeological research involving jewellery items, including topics ranging from methodological and experimental approaches to exchange and site function. Added to this are recent archaeological reviews of the bodily adornment of specific regions and time periods (Baysal 2019; Kershaw 2013; Lullo and Wallace 2019). This volume builds on this previous research but is distinguished by its focus on archaeological personal ornamentation in the context of the formation and negotiation of identity. It is also differentiated from many other works by its broad spatial and temporal scope, including studies of material culture from archaeological sites spanning ten countries, three continents, and more than 9,000 years of human history (Fig. 1.1).

Here we use the term ‘personal ornament’ to refer to objects made to be worn and displayed on the human body. This includes jewellery and accessory items, such as beads, pendants, necklaces, bracelets, armlets, anklets, and rings; ear, nose, lip, and hair ornaments; fasteners such as belts, buckles, buttons, brooches, and pins; and objects sewn or otherwise attached to clothing. The term also refers to these objects when they are fragmentary, reworked or repurposed, or removed from the context of bodily display, such as when they occur in caches, ritual deposits, production areas, or are used as currency. Although these items were made from a variety of materials in the past, they are often fashioned from durable substances, particularly lithic material such as minerals and stone, freshwater or marine shell, various metals, and bone or teeth. We use the phrase ‘bodily adornment’ (not to be confused with body modification such as tattooing, scarification, and piercing) interchangeably with personal ornamentation, though the term is somewhat more expansive and can also refer to other diverse enhancements such as body/face paint and headgear. Anthropologists have debated the definition of identity for decades, but here we understand it to encompass a diversity of collective memberships or associations and self-designations. This includes elements of group affiliation (e.g. ethnic, tribal, clan, society, and lineage membership), gender, age, marital status, relative social standing, and role or office, among other innumerable emic social categories. Importantly, identity is seen as relational and dynamic. Because it exists only relative to other beings (both humans and non-humans) and social contexts, identity is in a constant state of flux and negotiation (Amundsen-Meyer, Engel and Pickering 2011; Díaz-Andreu et al. 2005; Fowler 2004; Insoll 2007; Jones 1997).

Figure 1.1. Location of study areas and archaeological sites discussed in this volume.

Rather than ornament scholars per se, we are archaeologists (with a notable exception) whose geographical and temporal areas of expertise include a material record containing items of adornment. We have recognized the potential of these artefacts to study aspects of past social relations that might otherwise be imperceptible and have endeavored to examine the complex interfingering of material practice, identity, and agency. To do this, we draw on a wide range of evidence, including depositional patterns, methods of manufacture, usewear and modification, historical texts, ethnographic literature, and artistic depictions on other media. In our interpretations, we look to contemporary theoretical frameworks encompassing concepts such as embodied personhood (Butler 1993; Joyce 2003; 2005; 2008; Meskell 1999), social memory (Borić 2010; Mills and Walker 2008b; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003), materiality (Ireland and Lydon 2016; Knappett 2014; Meskell 2005c; Miller 2005a) and relationality (Bennett 2010; DeLanda 2006a; 2016; Latour 2005; Lucas 2012). We first came together in 2017 for a Society for American Archaeology symposium entitled Adornment, Personal Ornamentation, and the Construction of Identity: A Global Archaeological Perspective. Since that time, two researchers joined our ensemble, contributing papers that pushed back our temporal scope and added important perspectives from ethnolinguistics.

In the remainder of this chapter, I provide overview discussions of several broad areas of social and archaeological theory that are particularly relevant to the interpretation of personal adornment with regard to identity—embodied performance, memory-making, and materiality and relationality. I then discuss the individual papers in relation to some common themes, and, finally, conclude with some thoughts about the contribution of archaeological research on personal ornamentation to our understanding of identity construction in the past.

Bodily performance

Archaeologists have long used objects of adornment and dress, as well as depictions of these items in other media such as statuary and paintings, to make interpretations about the identity of past peoples. Until the 1990s, these identities were largely considered to fall into distinct categories along lines of age, sex, social status, and ethnicity. In addition, these different aspects of identity were thought to be communicated through stylistic differences in material culture to other members of a community (Braun and Plog 1982; Conkey 1978; 1980; Wiessner 1983; 1984; Wobst 1977). Scholars disagreed about the degree to which these material messages were conditioned by passive enculturation, such as learned behaviours and cultural norms, or social strategizing linked to competition, reciprocity, and the justification of existing power relations (DeMarrais, Castillo and Earle, 1996; Earle 1987; Hodder 1982; Peregrine 1991; Sackett 1986). Visibility was interpreted as a particularly important aspect of material style, with more noticeable elements serving to transmit information to wider audiences (Carr 1995; Friedrich 1970; Wobst 1977). Dress and body adornment were thus generally viewed as a means of imprinting and signaling social information via the otherwise passive and neutral canvas of the human body.

For the next decade, archaeologists continued to debate the extent to which human practice is conditioned by larger social structures and individual agency. Particularly influential to this discourse was the work of sociologists Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1990) and Anthony Giddens (1979; 1986), who considered the degree to which individual action is enabled and constrained by structural boundaries such as social prescriptions and the distribution of available resources (Dornan 2002; Fisher and Loren 2003; Varien and Potter 2008). Both acknowledged that social structures are themselves comprised of, and reproduced by, individual practices and actions. Bourdieu (1977) believed this process to be largely unintentional and subconscious, with the intersection of agency and structure residing in the collection of deeply ingrained individual dispositions and tendencies he referred to as ‘habitus’. In his view, individual practice is not directly determined by the larger social order, but it generally reinforces it because it is based on socialized intentions and strategies. Giddens (1979) saw individuals as having more conscious intention, with the ability to reflexively alter their actions, thereby transforming their larger structures. Based in part on this important dialogue, identity is now generally viewed as an active and agentic process, whereby individuals don’t simply broadcast their social classifications through material culture such as dress and personal ornaments but actively construct and negotiate them. The notion of identity as some kind of collective mental concept residing only in the social realm has also been challenged. We now recognize that identity is constituted by the aggregate individual behaviours and practices that articulate and reproduce it, and these actions are inherently material; identity is not a role humans adopt in their minds, it’s something they do in the physical world with their bodies.

A focus on the individual body as the seat of agency and identity lies at the heart of ‘embodiment’ or corporeal approaches in archaeology. This follows developments in social and feminist theory in the 1990s and early 2000s in which the pivotal role of the body in the enactment and reproduction of social relations became a key topic of interest. Entrenched intellectual dichotomies between mind and body, interior and exterior, and private and public were disassembled, with the body surface no longer seen as the barrier between self and society. That people experience and interpret their worlds—cultural and physical—through their bodies was explicitly recognized (Bulger and Joyce 2012; Butler 1993; Csordas 1994; 1999; Meskell 1996; 2000; Moore 1994; Rautman 2000). Similar to previous debates over the role and meaning of material style in archaeology, scholars argued over the degree to which the body can be understood as a medium for symbolic display, social discourse, and projection of norms or as a tool for individual meaning-making, empowerment, and resistance. The former stance is often associated with the views of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw power relations and the social enforcement of dominant values as the primary forces shaping the actions and meanings of an individual’s body (Meskell 1999; 2000). The latter view—that of the body as ‘an instrument by which all information and knowledge is received and meaning is generated’ (Grosz 1994, 87)—grew out of a phenomenological approach, informed by the work of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this view, the body is an agent, the self experiencing, perceiving, and acting in the world (Bulger and Joyce 2012, 70; Fisher and Loren 2003, 227; Reischer and Koo 2004, 307). It is important to note that the ‘individual’ or ‘self’ is a social construct that varies widely across cultures (Fowler 2004). Western culture understands an individual person to be a singular, autonomous entity defined by thoughts and feelings and bounded by the limits of the physical body. In other cultural contexts, an individual may be conceived of as interdependent, permeable, and aggregate, containing multiple parts of other people (Busby 1997; Fowler 2004; Ingold 2011b; Thomas 2002). Personhood can thus assume many different forms and is defined contextually. Corporeal approaches refer to this relational aspect of the individual as embodied subjectivity, in which the self is a subject constructed relative to other actors and the material world through sensorial experiences and bodily practices (Bulger and Joyce 2012, 74).

Feminist theorist Judith Butler (1988; 1990; 1993) connected these ideas about the embodied self with the realm of material practice through her work on identity performativity. Arguing that gender categories appear stable and natural only because they are continually referenced and reinforced through physical performances like gestures, modes of behaviour, and dress, Butler (1990) highlighted the role of repetitive, everyday bodily activities in identity construction. Importantly, these performances are built on ‘citational precedents’, including norms and idealized ways of being presented through vehicles such as artwork and the enactments of adults modeled to children (in a contemporary context, this would also include traditional and social media) (Butler 1993). These bodily identification practices are thus like Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus or Gidden’s (1979) idea of structuration in that they are shaped, but not wholly determined, by existing social formations and are patterned due to their citation of previously established strategies and goals.

However, when these performances deviate from established citational precedents—such as when material objects associated with socially sanctioned roles are reworked, reused, or implemented in completely different contexts—they may serve as a form of identity contestation and transformation through ‘radical resignification’ (Butler 2001, 335). The body is, therefore, an amalgamation of societal customs and expectations reiterated through habitual material practice, as well as a tool for the active reinterpretation or even potential undermining of those norms. Archaeological studies influenced by Butler’s work and that of other gender theorists often compare material evidence of body practices in the past, such as from mortuary contexts, with representations of selves/bodies on figurines and effigies, murals, statues, rock art, and other iconographic media (Fisher and Loren 2003; German 2000; Joyce 1993; 2000; 2001; 2005; 2008; Meskell 2000; Meskell and Joyce 2003). This approach highlights the ways socially recognized and idealized roles were carried out (or contested) in everyday lived experience.

Memory practice

There has been an increasing interest in memory studies in sociology and anthropology during the last two decades, particularly the relationship between group memory, cultural transmission and materiality. With an inherent focus on continuity and change in practice and material culture through time, archaeologists are especially well-suited to contribute to this dialogue. Investigations of memory in archaeological studies go beyond simply seeing ‘the past in the past’ and examine the ways in which memory is continuously shaped and reworked as part of the creation of identity, the reification or countering of existing power structures, and everyday lived experience (Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Yoffee 2007). The idea of collective memory was popularized by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]). In his formulation, it was something that resides external to individuals and is reproduced through commemorative rituals and monuments, primarily to assert political control and maintain social inequality. As noted by Van Dyke (2019, 210) in her review of changing conceptions of group memory, ‘collective memory’ is now generally associated with intentional and official messaging, particularly that sponsored by states, used to achieve certain political goals. This contrasts with idea of ‘public memory’, which refers to alternate and local historical narratives that often counter this messaging (see also Mixter 2017). Many scholars now use the term ‘social memory’ to denote the manner in which people negotiate group identities through interaction with one another, material objects, and both constructed and natural places on the landscape (Van Dyke 2019, 210–211). Building on Halbwach’s (1992) important recognition that memory is created through human performances and material things, the work of sociologist Paul Connerton (1989) has been influential in its emphasis on the less conspicuous and informal aspects of memory construction. He defines two major types of memory practice—inscribed and incorporated. While inscribed memory is intentional and associated with monuments, texts, and artistic representations, incorporated memory is conveyed through bodily performance of commemorative rituals, which are conditioned by tradition and habitual practice. In this way, Connerton’s (1989) notion of incorporated memory can be viewed as a type of embodied practice related to identity performativity (Bourdieu 1977; Butler 1990; 1993; Giddens 1986). Other scholars have made similar distinctions, for example between discursive and practical memory (Van Dyke 2019, 14), official/intentional and informal/quotidian memory (Mixter 2017), and public and hidden aspects of memory (Scott 1990). As recognized by these scholars, these elements of memory practice are not mutually exclusive—they each form in relation to one another.

Like other elements of identity, social memory is not a fixed set of features passed on to individuals by larger societal structures; it is actively developed in relation to those structures through material and bodily practice. To acknowledge this practice-based perspective, scholars often now refer to memory-(re)making as ‘remembering’ and ‘forgetting’, both equally important components of ‘memory work’ (Mills and Walker 2008b; see also Bartlett 1995 [1932]; Mixter 2017; Van Dyke 2019). Acts of remembering are practices that summon or reference the past, while acts of forgetting seek to expunge, mask, or conclude aspects of the past. As underlined by Mills (2008), practices of forgetting, such as the formal destruction of a ritual building, can also serve as acts of memorialization, and thus remembering (see also Küchler 1988; 2002). Archaeologists interested in remembering and forgetting have focused on two major areas of material evidence—landscapes and depositional patterns. Social memory, like all human experience, is grounded in space. Particular places associated with past events and histories may be marked physically through architectural elements, such as monuments and shrines, or indirectly referenced in the case of important natural features such as mountains and other landforms, celestial occurrences such as solstices, or significant directions (e.g. Van Dyke 2017). Pieces of the past, real or fictive, may thus co-inhabit the same space as the present, guiding subsequent movement, action, and meaning-making (Gillespie 2008; Mills and Walker 2008b; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003). Acts of remembering and forgetting may also be examined through depositional practices, including the treatment of certain kinds of architectural spaces, human remains, and material objects. These practices are particularly archaeologically observable when they are patterned due to repetitive activity sustained across generations. Commemorative rituals and routines surrounding the handling of human remains, the inclusion of grave offerings or the breakage/destruction of property, and the construction of funerary facilities tend to be persistent within specific cultural contexts. Deposits associated with mortuary performances and ‘technologies of remembrance’ represent the intersection of body performativity, social memory, materiality, and place, and are thus ideal contexts for the construction and reshaping of both the histories of the deceased and the identity of the living (Jones 2007; Lillios 2003; Van Dyke 2019; Williams 2003).

Past memory practices have also been examined through the movement and treatment of certain objects, allowing us to trace the different meanings they held through time. The value placed on material things is based on diverse properties that may or may not be innate. For example, an artefact may derive significance from its physical qualities, such as its colour or reflectivity, its association with the place the raw material was procured or the location the item was crafted, or its past owners or caretakers (Bradley 2000; Helms 1993; Jones and MacGregor 2002; Mills and Walker 2008b; Saunders 1999; 2001). Object biography and life history approaches seek to track how these values are linked to an artefact’s position along trajectories of production, use and circulation, and discard. Within a behavioural archaeology framework, Schiffer (1976) first called attention to the physical pathways artefacts follow during their use lives, which are shaped by various natural and cultural formation processes (Rathje and Schiffer 1982; Reid, Rathje and Schiffer 1974). Subsequent work in exchange theory and material culture studies focused explicitly on the relationship between object biography and meaning, particularly how social value affects the way objects move through cultural systems (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Weiner and Schneider 1989). Kopytoff (1986) distinguished separate routes of exchange for objects serving as ‘commodities’ and value-laden ‘singularities’. While commodities are exchanged with few restrictions, the transfer of singularities is carefully controlled and occurs only in specific contexts. The regulated movement of singular objects directly influences how they enter the archaeological record. An often-cited example is that of carved malangan objects from Papua New Guinea, wooden sculptures created for commemorative ceremonies for the deceased (Küchler 1988). These powerful objects are bound up in the personhood and ancestry of the dead and were traditionally destroyed at the conclusion of the mortuary feast. Another classic example is kula objects, shell necklaces and armbands that continually circulate between Trobriand island communities in a formalized, prescribed manner, deriving their value from the identities of their past owners (Malinowski 2014 [1922]). Like human biographies, object life histories can be shaped by the ways in which individuals enacted and reworked their identities in different settings (Lillios 1999). As things move through different domains of use over time, they are assigned new significance and recontextualized through material practices.

Two interrelated classes of ‘singular’ objects that derive their values from their life histories are heirlooms and inalienable possessions. As outlined by Katina Lillios (1999; 2003), heirlooming is a memory practice in which items are passed down through generations due to their association with individual or collective history and identity. They serve as ‘mnemonics to remind the living of their link to a distant, ancestral past’ (Lillios 1999, 236), which may comprise an important aspect of personhood. In many cultures, upon death one’s inherited property is treated differently than the possessions acquired over one’s lifetime. Lillios (1999) notes that this is particularly true of ranked and chiefly societies, where demonstration of a tangible connection to the past is key to the maintenance of social position. Unlike property in the form of land or access to resources, heirlooms are portable and made of durable or semi-durable materials, especially those that have cosmological, mythological, or other significant associations. Objects of bodily adornment often meet these criteria, and both archaeological and ethnographic evidence indicate they commonly served as heirloom items. Some heirlooms can be considered ‘inalienable wealth’, as defined by Annette Weiner’s (1985; 1992; 1994) theory of exchange and value. Similar to Kopytoff’s (1986) commodities, alienable possessions can be transferred to others relatively freely, such as in economic transactions. Inalienable wealth, on the other hand, is so closely tied to the identity of its owner(s) that it cannot be relinquished, or only under very specific circumstances. These objects may act as a kind of receptacle or archive of past events and descent, ‘bringing the past time into the present, so that the histories of ancestors, titles, or mythological events become an intimate part of a person’s present identity’ (Weiner 1985, 210). Like heirlooms, inalienable possessions can play an important role in both legitimizing and undermining hierarchies due to their power to substantiate identities (Lesure 1999; Lillios 1999; Mills 2004). Inalienable items tend to be made of rare raw materials, are more distinctive in appearance and less divisible or partible than alienable objects, and their production may require special skills or ritual expertise (Inomata 2001; Weiner 1992). Although heirlooms and inalienable objects tend to have some general shared physical characteristics, they can occur in a diversity of culturally specific forms. What is most consistent about these objects of memory is the control applied to their circulation and discard. Therefore, identifying their presence in the archaeological record requires attention to details associated with their life history and depositional context.

The practices guiding how objects and materials with high social value, acquired through their histories and connections, enter the archaeological record are the focus of studies of ‘structured’ deposition (Bradley 2000; Mills 2004; Pollard 1995; Richards and Thomas 1984; Thomas 1991; Walker 1995; Walker, LaMotta and Adams 2000). Cross-cultural and ethnographic research indicates that ritual objects and those associated with corporate identity and history (inalienable objects) tend to be deposited in deliberate, formalized ways and within specific contexts. Examples include items buried within architectural spaces as part of dedication and termination ceremonies, goods placed in mortuary contexts, secondary interments of human and animal skeletal elements, caches of ritual paraphernalia, buried hoards of special objects, offerings deposited in association with shrines or in significant locations on the landscape, and spiritually dangerous materials discarded or disassembled in certain ways. Importantly, the significance of the objects in these deposits is not defined by their inherent physical properties, but by their association with ‘the identity or substance of people, places, and supernatural entities’ (Pollard 2008, 49). Structured deposition has been criticized for distinguishing between ritual and secular behaviours, creating a false dichotomy between activities that are induced by symbolic purpose and those that are not. Ritual behaviour, like all other facets of human action, lies along a continuum and is rooted in everyday bodily practice (Bell 1992; Brück 1999; Insoll 2004). Some scholars propose the term ‘ritualization’ to acknowledge ‘a shift from a study of ritual as an analytical object to a focus on ritualization as a strategic practice’ (Stahl 2008, 160 [citing Bell 1992]). Accepting this important distinction, certain archaeological deposits are still clearly more purposeful and patterned than others, and structured deposition remains a useful concept for those seeking to understand past materiality. Mills and Walker (2008, 13) caution that in implementing artefact life history approaches in memory studies, the focus should ultimately be on tracing ‘genealogies of practice’ and the ‘embedding of object biographies within a broader field of material practices’ rather than simply chronicling the histories of material things. Depositional patterns, particularly when carefully examined across time, provide this essential link between object value, biography, and memory practice.

Archaeological studies of object enchainment and citation illustrate this point. In his examination of Neolithic and Copper Age structured deposits in Britain, Chapman (2000) argues that the distribution of pieces of intentionally broken objects in structured assemblages represent ‘enchained’ relationships between people and between people and non-humans. These fragments (or parts of wholes) form bridges between entities, not unlike the modern example of two individuals each possessing one half of a friendship necklace. Pieces of things can also be reconfigured and combined to forge new relationships and identities. This process is not limited to structured deposits or fragmentary inalienable objects, however. Any object may reference those produced, circulated, or deposited in other contexts (i.e. contemporaneous or past, local or foreign, manufactured or natural) (Jones 2007; Pollard 2008). As discussed in the last section, citational material practice is an essential component of identity formation within embodiment approaches. It is also a key concept in the investigation of memory work through practices of remembering that reference the past (Borić 2003; 2010; Mills and Walker 2008a; Van Dyke 2009) and in contemporary understandings of recurrent objects in relational assemblages (e.g. Conneller 2017; Fowler 2017).

Materiality and relational assemblages

Many contemporary archaeological approaches share a critical reevaluation of the dualisms entrenched in modern thought and anthropological theory of the last 150 years. This entails a radical questioning of a human-centered ontology in which the material and social, matter and mind, are understood as distinct domains. A strict dualistic philosophical stance, originating in the work of Descartes and other thinkers of the Enlightenment, construes humans as the only true actors on an otherwise inert material stage. For modern archaeology, a discipline rooted in these traditions, material remains are often seen as residual evidence of past human action, traces of social activity inscribed on a passive world of things (e.g. Jones 2015; Miller 2005b; Thomas 2004). Humanity is defined primarily through social relations, which act upon or are represented by materials but are somehow separate and