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The ultimate aim is to reassert an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasize the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artifacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology’s seeming-seamless epistemological objects.
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Emily Miller Bonney is an historian and Associate Professor of Liberal Studies at California State University, Fullerton. With a PhD in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology she specializes in the material culture of Bronze Age Crete and in particular Prepalatial mortuary practices. She is especially interested in how prehistoric material culture reveals the entanglement of things and people and places and how these processes shape social structures.
Kathryn Franklin is an anthropological archaeologist working on the intersections between local and world as mediated by travel, trade and political projects in the 12th-15th centuries, and with a focus on the territory of the modern Republic of Armenia. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014; her doctoral work develops the concept of cosmopolitanism in a late medieval context, as a practice of situated world-making. She is currently a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and working as a specialist on archaeological heritage analysis consultant to the Oriental Institute of Chicago.
James A. Johnson is a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His work centers on the lifecourse of urbanism in the Eurasian steppe and Central Europe in the Bronze and Iron Ages. His particular focus is on how urban centers breakdown and how such events are mediated through reuse of the landscape and continued use of material traditions. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2014, where his doctoral research centered on how pastoral communities disintegrated but during population dispersal began to use historical capital (pottery traditions) as a tool for social and political legitimation.
