Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis; and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations, but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC – third century AD): the fluid, the categorical, and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories, and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives, and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9244-

Crafting History: How the World Is Made. The Case of Islamic Archaeology

In this paper an archaeological and theoretical perspective that builds a relationship between the concepts of craft and of identity is presented. Both of them are concepts very widely used in archaeological and anthropological theory nowadays, and they have often been linked in field studies. However, these concepts are usually contemplated from very different points of view and with many diverse implications in each case. One of the aims of this paper is to show that craft and identity can be inserted in a common theoretical framework which in turn can be used to understand cultural change or, in other words, history within culture. The paper will start with a necessary theoretical introduction to different concepts related to craft and identity, and then a discussion on how to link these different concepts will follow. In the last part of the paper, this theoretical perspective will be applied to a field which is familiar to the author, that of Islamic archaeology. A case example of the author’s research in the Vega of Granada (southeast Spain) will be brought to the fore. This part of the paper will show how the theoretical discussion developed above can contribute to solve one of the core questions of this field, that of the definition of an Islamic culture and its application to understand the daily life of people living within it