Originally published as Olsen, B. and C.

Witmore, 2015: Archaeology, symmetry, and

the ontology of things: A response to critics, Archaeological Dialogues 22(2), 187-97.

Archaeology, symmetry, and the ontology of things: A

response to critics
Bjrnar Olsen and Christopher Witmore

Recent critiques have highlighted numerous misgivings about the notion of symmetry
and the definition of things within archaeology. In this short article, we address three
common claims. First, that symmetrical archaeology denies the differences between
living and non-living things, what is often called the animate and inanimate. Second, that
in placing emphasis on things, symmetrical archaeology turns its back on humans, other
living things and, indeed, the past at large. Third, that symmetrical archaeology eschews
ethical grounds for things, and naively depoliticizes the archaeological project. Our aim
here is to redress these common misunderstandings and further clarify our takes on
symmetry and things.

Claim one: dedifferentiation between things

A cursory glance at any excavation manual will reveal a host of agencies: earthworms
and clay, microbes and rain, podzols and stonewalls, sun and soil, roots, lemmings and
mold. These things sort or seal a deposit, leach surfaces, arbitrate order in phasing,
contribute to compaction or solifluction, dry out a surface; these things root, burrow
and/or decompose. All these things perform. They all intervene and play different roles
in shaping the matter that we claim to know best. For Paul Graves-Brown, however,
lumping animals together with inanimate objects misses the point that some non-
humans can originate action and some cannot (Graves-Brown 2013, 184). A key, as he
puts it, cannot change its mind as to whom it admits to an apartment, but a bear can
change its mind as to whether it is going to eat you (ibid.).1 A symmetrical approach to
things is dismissed by Graves-Brown because its ontology misses the problem of free
will and to conflate their [things] passive agency with that of sentient beings merely
confuses things (ibid.).

But where do we draw this line, and for what purpose? To what end does this search
for a last resort for dualistic thinking work and how could it work without continuing
to embrace a dogma of fundamental divides?2 One of our initial points was to oppose
the assumption that things are epiphenomenal and residual outcomes of some social or
cognitive priors rather than real beings with a genuine existence and impact in a shared
and flattened world. Graves- Browns sudden emphasis on free will hardly promises
more than to lead us right back down that old track of idealism and methodological
individualism. Just to raise one issue, to what extent is free will a requirement for
having agency among both humans and other animals? In what way, and for which
reasons, should originating action inevitably be conflated with free will or human-like
intentionality? Moreover, bringing in the notion of symmetry was never about confusing
farmers with shovels or sailors with navigational aids; it was never about turning
differences into similarities or uniformities. The world, of course, is full of differences
and to reduce them a priori to the outcome of any great divide (culturenature, free
will and necessity, animate inanimate) is actually to gloss over and violate these
differences. Thus to forefront symmetry is not to deny that beings are different; in fact,
it is to acknowledge that these differences are constitutive for the world, including for
human existence.

Symmetry is a notion that emerges from the premise that these differences are
grounded in the qualities that objects or entities have, and which thus should be
acknowledged and, at the outset, treated symmetrically without a priori subsuming them
to an asymmetrical regime of radical divides. As an empirical discipline we need to hold
assumptions of an entitys character and shape until the requisite work has been
accomplished; thus symmetry is simply a guideline that helps to get at those differences
without decreeing what they are in advance.

For Graves-Brown (2013), action is initiated by a privileged agent and is merely

transferred down the causal chain among objects that lack any ability themselves to
inflict independent blows on each other. This species of reductionism fails to account
for bastions that outlive their makers; for terrace walls that are free of the intentions
that farmers had for them; for watermills that are released to their own trajectories,
that form new alliances and offer up unpredicted qualities. Whatever differences these
things make cannot be explained by reducing everything to a supposedly primary
rapport with a favored interlocutor, thus sidelining bastions, terrace walls or watermills
as merely derivative. Indeed, the reasoning championed by Graves-Brown posits a more
genuine, more definitive and cleansed reality, but this would provide us with insufficient
traction in understanding the differences made to former timber buildings by wood and
nitrogen-fixing bacteria, climate and moisture saturation in soil, plant roots and badgers.
In archaeology the plot cannot be laid out in advance. Furthermore, these quips over
definitions of agency completely miss the larger point. We need a different metaphysics
to provide some purchase on the challenges-turned-catastrophes that we now face.
Relations between permafrost and methane, between CO2 and seawater, between
atmosphere and sun require a very different sort of agency than that found in the
reductionist scheme of Graves-Brown.

John Barrett, in a recent provocation, takes another line on the question of agency. By
regarding things as agents, and championing a symmetrical commitment, our work is in
danger of missing a crucial distinction, that between living and non-living matter (Barrett
2014, 72). He states, Organisms and machines certainly both do work, but the work of
the organism, unlike that of the machine, is directed towards its self-affirmation and
renewal. It is difficult to understand why this distinction appears to be so easily missed
(cf. Olsen et al. 2012).3 Barretts aim is to create a taxonomy on the basis of an
ontological discrepancy found in specific kinds of entity.4 While the differences between
organic and non-organic things may lay claim to one way of ordering and dividing the
world, it does not easily follow that self-renewal and self-affirmation are exclusive
attributes of living things. Do rivers not renew themselves? Does the steel structure of
the Chrysler Building not self-affirm? Of course, rivers and structural steel do so in a
very different way to walruses or molds, pine trees or Greek hetairai. And these things
have vast differences between themselves, but like any other empirical discipline, we
should be concerned with what is specific to such entities and not reduce their diverse
beings to an outcome of the non-organic classificatory label attached to them.

To divide along the lines of living and non-living things is to give too much weight to only
one kind of difference at the expense of others. Why elevate these distinctions or free
will to the point of fundamental ontological rifts? Real differences and qualitative
distinctions between things are beyond numerous. Barretts (and Graves-Browns)
cautionary tale is actually a textbook case of purification, where the world is dissected
and sorted into two utterly opposed realms, only this time it is not human thinking that
is viewed as a transcendent realm removed from the world, rather it is life which exists
in a way that base matter does not. Anthropocentrism is thus replaced by a quality
seemingly possessed by all living entities, and the surplus bits and pieces, inanimate
objects, continue as secondary being, deriving their vitality from elsewhere; never is this
to be regarded as a quality of the thing itself. Thus we are thrown back into that choice
of two realms, that of necessity and that of freedom.

Carving reality into organic and inorganic realms prejudices every interaction from the
start, and denies innumerable differences between various life forms, some subjective,
but others not. This bifurcation belongs to a classical definition of biotic autopoiesis and
is doomed to repeat many of its pitfalls. Here, Barrett pulls back the veil on something
that involves trudging old grounds. The theorists of symbiogenesis, and indeed Gaia, to
whom Barrett alludes, see the opposition between life and everything else as inherited;
they regard matter as part of the consortium of life. Autopoiesis is not solely biotic, it is
also geological, and therefore metabiotic (see Clarke 2012). For us, autopoiesis is the
self-realization of things.

More pertinent grounds for critiquing the early forays into symmetrical archaeology (i.e.
Olsen 2003; Witmore 2004) are related to how they placed more emphasis on action at
the expense of other qualities; how they placed more emphasis on the assemblages and
entanglements than on the autonomy and integrity of things; that is, how tombs and
terrace walls, sledges and skin boats, withhold something in their contact with other
things (Harman 2009; Olsen 2010). However, to claim that in symmetrical archaeology
there are no autonomies: all objects and subjects are entangled and dependent
(Srensen 2013, 14), speaks against the evidence to the contrary (see Olsen 2010, 154
55; 2012b, 21214; 2013; 17981; Olsen et al. 2012, 12022; Webmoor 2012, 113;
Witmore 2011, 1214; 2014, 78, 1317).

Here, we encounter a more pressing differentiation, between objects and relations,

which symmetrical archaeology handles by opting for a balance between the autonomy
of objects and their rapports. As argued by Harman (2014, 100), things are not always
affected by each other; sometimes they just exist, non-relationally, and simply do not act
at all, at least in the conventional sense of the word. And even if they mostly were, not
all parts of their being are affected. Things do hold something in reserve, something that
cannot be explained by such relational involvement or by the rationale of the in-order-
to. Other distinctions also exist. The disjunctures between continuous and discrete, or
between unity and multiplicity, are among the greatest challenges to mathematics and
philosophy, and clearly also to archaeology.

Claim two: the exclusivity of things

There is, as Julian Thomas (2015, 24) has recently argued, a growing tension between
the view that archaeology should be a discipline of things to which humans, history
and interpretation are incidental (Olsen 2012a, 25) and a concern that without
adopting human exceptionalism, archaeologists should not apologize for being
interested in people (Fowles 2010, 23). Examples of this growing tension include Tim
Ingolds recent (2012, 427) charge that symmetrical archaeology operates with a
conception of the material world and the nonhuman that leaves no space for living
organisms. Symmetrical archaeology appears, as Barrett suggests (2014, 72), to be
incapable of investigating those distinctive features of hominin biology that have
contributed to the emergence of different kinds of humanity under different material
and historical conditions. These charges are based on a patent misconception where
readers conflate the rejection of the rift between humans and the world as a move where
humans, life and interpretation become merely incidental.5 Here, we may add another
rejoinder, recently voiced by Yiannis Hamilakis (2013, 115), that there is a danger that
such emphasis on things will lead to an artificial separation between things and bodies,
things and environments, and amongst things, the landscape, the atmosphere, and the
weather. Let us take up these points in turn.

Because some works under the rubric of symmetrical archaeology do not always
mention reindeer, brown bears, minke whales, lynx or lemmings by name at every turn,
it seems to be assumed that symmetrical archaeology makes no room for them. Indeed,
for this to be the case, readers must either ignore numerous contributions where these
things are engaged, or, more disconcertingly, embrace a rather circumscribed definition
of what things are (see Pluciennik 2013; also Hamilakis 2013, 115). If we eliminate the
opposed realms of culture and nature or subject and object, then why appeal to that
familiar valorization of one side above the other? This would directly violate the
principle of symmetry. Within a symmetrical approach, every being in the world can equally
be seen as a differentiated thing; that is, farmers, centaurs, ruined temples, the goddess
Athena, plowed furrows, earthworms and cisterns are equally individual and
differentiated entities or units that cannot be broken into their parts (Witmore 2014, 4;
cf. Harman 2013, 6 7). Things do not gain their reality from elsewhere,6 or by being
situated dialectically. Things are irreducible to anything else.

To treat the difference between humans and things as fundamental and oppositional
misses what is significant about the turn to things. For us, things have no opposites, thus
they are non-oppositional (Bryant 2011, 75; Webmoor and Witmore 2008). Rapports
between things are generative, but the relationship between farmer and furrow is not
a priori more or less important than that between earthworms and soil, microbes and
leather. Humans are thingly beings among others, but that, of course, does not imply
that we deny the differences that distinguish us from other beings.

Barrett suggests (2014, 66) that the logical conclusion is for symmetrical archaeology to
avail itself of the historical role of all material conditions. Quite the contrary, it is about
better caring for the past not to be confused with history by recognizing the roles of
things, which are irreducible to anything else agency, substances, etc. The past lingers
on and gathers as material durations now coextensive in the present, constituting at all
times an effective archaeology (rather than an effective history, following Gadamer).
This present past is far from solely an outcome of human management or intentions but
sediments and transforms according to its own diverse material trajectories. If agencies,
as Barrett defines them (ibid., 67), are mechanisms that have a material effect, then the
expectation that a human- derived mechanism lies behind what has become of the past
is one of archaeologys greatest fallacies. What has become of the past exists not as
assumed categories of humanness, but as actual entities, as specific things and
assemblages, and their rapports. They form dynamic and genuine ecologies that preserve
and transform this gathering past; and in our engagement with it, the interactions
between ruins and weather, bones and acidic soil, are not by necessity less important
than those who supposedly abandoned these things. If everything comes to be defined
by its encounter with humans, this closes off huge areas of interest to archaeology.
Everything stands partially outside any zone of humanness so to emphasize it above all
else is to maintain an estrangement from our empirical grounds. A symmetrical
approach thus conceives of archaeology as being about more than humans and more
than the connection between people and other beings.

Claim three: ethics for things

Symmetrical archaeology, as with object-oriented approaches more generally, has also

been attacked for lacking sincere ethical concerns and even, by allegedly dehumanizing
people, for turning humans into things in an effort to legitimize dubious political
doctrines. For example, in a discussion of Ian Hodders entanglement theory (2012), it
was recently claimed that the blurring of the boundaries between people and things
opens the philosophical door . . . to the legitimization of slavery, the annihilation of
whole groups of people, and the glorification of war (Pollock et al. 2014, 15657).
Against such absurd measures it seems a minor accusation that this claimed blurring also
threatens to turn us into the fetishists that symmetrical archaeology wants us to be
(ibid., 157). We have responded to the accusation about erasing differences above
(never mind the fact that two world schemes of existence managed to underwrite all of
these horrors). Here, we would just like to add that assessing the world by ethical
principles that restrict us to human fraternity, however well-meaning, is disquieting.
Thus, rather than grounding differences in an ethical and ontological exceptionalism, we
propose a difference that is grounded in both the autonomy of, and the connectivity
among, people, objects, environments and animals, all of which share membership in a
dwelt-in world, but which two-world philosophies have obfuscated in favour of a fenced
divide (Olsen et al. 2012, 207).

Interestingly, symmetrical archaeology is at the same time accused of eschewing ethical

grounds for non-humans, and naively depoliticizing the ar- chaeological project. This
confusion underlies the compulsion for an altruistic ethics for things including the
Parthenon, bronze arm rings from Jutland or undiagnostic potsherds exemplified in a
recent piece by Tim Flohr Srensen. In his attempt at a deep reading of symmetrical
archaeology, Srensen claims to have come across a logical flaw in the writings of one of
us. Referring to two statements by Witmore one holding that symmetrical levelling is
neither axiological nor ethical (2007, 547), the other that a symmetrical archaeology
builds on the strengths of what we do as archaeologists (ibid., 549, Witmores emphasis)
Srensen claims to have revealed a problematic separation of practice from ethics,
where ethics curiously is abandoned; in other words, that our approach reflects a
naivety that consider[s] practice and politics disconnected from the ethical field
(Srensen 2013, 4).

First of all, we would like to state that naivety should not be underrated as a scholarly
attitude (cf. Ptursdttir 2014); being open-minded and curiously naive in our
engagement with things and the world may indeed be more helpful than theoretical
regimes where everything important is decided in advance. Unfortunately, Srensens
claim is based on a conflation of two very different issues. One refers to the principle of
symmetry, which is an empirical guideline that helps place prejudice to one side; the
other is about what we and indeed naively can learn from our down-to-earth
archaeological practices. Why should one jump from the proposition that the principle
of symmetry is analytical to one where all of symmetrical archaeology is without ethical
grounds?

While Srensen subsequently admits that a number of writings under the moniker of
symmetrical archaeology have indeed explicitly been concerned with the ethics of
archaeological things, he finds our position to be unclear, not elaborated, and he
moves on by claiming that we disregard how all things, including non-humans, do not
exist on a level ethical footing or have value without prejudice (Srensen 2013, 58).
The latter, of course, is far from true (cf. Olsen 2012b, 22021; Olsen et al. 2012, 206).
Thus Srensens discovery that things, including archaeological things and heritage, are
treated differently is not exactly shocking news (While some non-humans find a place in
the limelight, others are stowed away in storage facilities where the sun never shines
(Srensen 2013, 7)). What is remarkable, however, is his proposition that those in the
limelight have been granted thing rights (ibid., 5), or that heritage management happily
elevates (some) non-humans to the state of proper beings (ibid., 12). The rights
granted to these selected things are, of course, closely tied to human self-interest, and
to their status as things-for-us (cf. Olsen 2012a; Ptursdttir 2012; 2014). Without such
human attachment and utility, even Stonehenge is claimed to basically be a collection of
rocks in the field (Smith 2006, 3).

In all of this, Srensen elides the difference between what is and what was by confusing
relations between human bone and a bronze ring with the ethics of human perspectives
on a bronze ring as a power-laden object. However, for a symmetrical archaeology, this
difference is paramount. It is also amazing how freely Srensen substitutes the principle
of symmetry with symmetrical archaeology. These concepts are not interchangeable!
Indeed, ethics are always tied to human relations with non-humans and not, as
symmetry invites, relations also between non-humans. Moreover, things are not
reducible to ethics, politics or anything else, for that matter, which seems to be what
Srensen is aiming for. Here, there is a disquieting confusion of ethics and ontology.

With Srensen we encounter an ethics that results from a direct moral- evolutionary
trend, where observers gain humility sufficient to recognize things as subaltern others
a seemingly enlightened trend that requires things to be admitted to the privileged
house of humanity, rather than be redefined altogether, along with what it is to be
human. This is a textbook example of normative thought extending existing norms
through the inclusion of excluded others. It assumes that the rights that humans have
should be transferred to disenfranchised non-humans, anonymous artefacts, which,
according to Srensen (2013, 6), are excavated simply to do the hard work of
manufacturing raw data for the sake of the celebrity non-humans on the canonized
heritage lists, contextualizing, illuminating and framing the celebrity non-humans.
Potsherds care nothing for fame. Potsherds do not complain when they are ignored in
the shadows of more famous objects of archaeological interest, such as the Parthenon
evoked by Srensen. Moral qualities may be the province of archaeologists and farmers,
but to impose them upon, or use them to characterize, relations between potsherds
and other archaeological objects is to lose what is different about these specific things.
This is precisely what is confused in Srensens reading of ethics and symmetrical
archaeology and it misses a more fundamental point with respect to the roles played by
things within our ethical considerations.

Suggestions as to a course of action, softer versions of the directives discussed by

Alphonso Lingis (1998; see also Morton 2013, 14044), occur with respect to the host
of agencies found in any excavation manual mentioned earlier. A course of action is not
solely dictated by codes, precepts or procedures, but nudged along by small things
within the zone of archaeological labor.7 A zone places one in a space disposed to
suggestions. The line of stones within a newly delimited excavation trench compels one
in a very different way than the previous five seasons as an obstacle along a path. A
patch of discolored soil provokes an excavator to hesitate, to question, to draw others
in. Pits serve as inducements. Coins or sherds lure in students with feeling. Things within
the zone of excavation suggest various courses of action and these suggestions can easily
be surrendered to synthetic judgements. Care and uncertainty, naivety and humility,
keep one in check better than assurance, confidence and certitude with respect to
recognizing suggestions.

Archaeology without symmetry?

Symmetry is a principle, a component, a guideline, and symmetrical archaeology began

with a problem-oriented set of emphases, which have been lost in critical
misrepresentation. It was never a full-blown platform, but simply a tonic to be
consumed in service of archaeology (Witmore 2007, 527). For the record, symmetrical
archaeology embraced, from the beginning, the irreducibility of things no thing can be
exhausted by any other thing and this was closely connected to the notion of
manifestation, of translation, as a counter to reductive understandings of representation.
It has always emphasized how all entities in the world are equally thingly, but this is not
a denial of difference. Quite the opposite, in fact. Both relationality and non-relationality
are to be held in symmetry. Thomas, Srensen and others have targeted an emphasis on
mixtures and entanglements indeed, Srensen situates this emphasis as an exclusive
one. In this, they miss the crucial point that we have stressed both rapports and
autonomies. Here, there is a difference between saying that things are made of diverse
elements and saying that they are reducible to them. The dissolution of the arbitrary gap
between humans and the world need not result in the cessation of autonomous things
altogether.

The symmetrical was always provisional. Once its liberating effects were expended as
an adjectival qualifier, it was ready to be shed (Olsen 2007, 586; 2012b, 210, 223;
Witmore 2007, 527). When? Well, that is not up to us. It remains a challenge for
archaeology when it fully recognizes that we begin not with a detached past, not with
bits of pots that act as intermediaries to artisans, but with what becomes of what was,
with things. As mediators, these things work to presence the past and hold memories
not only of their human entanglement, not only of their contact with other non-human
peers, but also of themselves and their own irreducible, individual being.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Karen Carroll of the National Humanities Center in Research

Triangle Park, NC, USA, for her work in copy-editing this article.

Notes
1
It may be questioned whether the bear actually changes its mind and equally whether Graves-
Browns dogs enact their free will when deciding as ever before to mark their territory on
their daily scheduled walks. They may indeed have a strong will to do so (or to run after rabbits),
but is it free or based on some imperative habit memory?
2
As Latour (2014, 7) recently put it, One of the main puzzles of Western history is not that
there are people who still believe in animism, but the rather naive belief that many still have in
a deanimated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the
agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day.

3
Elsewhere in the article, Barrett argues (2014, 66) that we must recognize that the emergent
properties of hybrid biological and material systems operate as living ecologies and not as
machines. We could not agree more. And yet, the statement is set up as if it runs counter to
our argument, which it does not. While our emphasis in that paper may have been on a species
of what we labelled mixtures, this had nothing to do with providing an opposition to life or,
indeed, suggesting a machinic platform for archaeology. Machines make no appearance in the
article (Webmoor and Witmore 2008), which he uses as a dishonest foil to reassure readers he
doesnt repeat this stale opposition.

4
Here, we build on what Graham Harman has identified as the taxonomic fallacy (see Harman
2012a, 250; 2012b, 189).

5
Barrett (2014) does not quite make the same mistake as Ingold (2012; an emphasis noted by
Mark Pluciennik 2013), namely that our emphasis on material things does not allow for the
organic. Thus, rather than a question of emphasis being transformed into one of definition,
Barrett argues that our definition of things risks effacing a very important distinction, one so
important that it can bear the weight of what archaeology should be about. If anything, this
interjection comes a few years too late; symmetrical archaeology has moved on in its emphases
and has already dealt with the questions Barrett brings to bear (Olsen 2012a, 2223; Witmore
2015; see Witmore 2014 for further discussion).

6
This is precisely the point things derive their reality from elsewhere made by Fowler and
Harris (2015) in a recent article. While Neolithic communities created the chambered long
barrow at West Kennet, it does not follow that the former tomb will always be tethered to
relations with the agrarian communities that constructed it. Once produced, the long barrow
stands free of any and all communities; it exists in itself. Indeed, the relational character Fowler
and Harris argue to endure has become present retroactively, through the work of antiquarians
and archaeologists who co-produce a Neolithic chambered tomb, rather than a quarry for flint
or chalk or an obstacle to a wagon road. Fowler and Harris assimilate a long barrow in
Wiltshire over to a historical understanding in the present and their enduring relations
presuppose an essential identity, a permanent identity, which they are in fact arguing against.

7
Here echoing Mortons (2013, 14044) use of zone.

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