I have attended the 17th EAA annual meeting in Oslo last September. The conference has provided once again an opportunity to learn about current research in many fields (within archaeology), and revealed at least some of the current "hot topics". I identified two main recurring themes: research focusing on the human body and research focusing on symbolisms, religion and the formation of cosmologies (broadly relevant to semiotic archaeology). In fact, the two themes are complementary: they can be described as body & soul, or materiality & the mind. Of course, pottery, the traditional main staple of archaeology, is still represented quite significantly.
Figure: Viking ship at the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo.
I found many presentations focusing on the body either treating it as a starting point or just providing a focal point to on-going research that may not be showing just yet any particular direction. The body became often an excuse for presenting extended material evidence from contexts, including human remains, or was a way to provide something perishable that may not be part of the archaeological record in some contexts, but nonetheless it must have been present. Of greater interest to me where the attempts to recognise symbolisms made through the body or pointing to the body. This is a dangerous area of research because it is very difficult to exclude entirely the body from any archaeological context, and yet I do not think it is correct to place the main interpretative focus on it. This is an area where anthropological and more specifically behavioural sciences may always produce some results, which may not pertain to the added layers of complexity provided by material culture and that should not take out the focus. There is a need for some coherent framework in this area of research, one that provides some reliable and balanced indication of where the focus should be. Cosmologies (intended as world views decipherable from the material record) were not forgotten even in papers concentrating on bodies, and the appearance of complex cosmologies are perhaps seen as one step in the cultural and intellectual formation of contemporary human beings. Timed approximately at the Copper Age, it is one of the latest developments dividing "us" from the rest, including archaic human beings (not just hominids and hominins, but also early representatives of our own species).
Unsurprisingly given the location, much attention was paid on archaeological contexts from northern Europe, where studies of early cosmologies have produced significant results for some time. My general problem here, and I hope that I do not sound too negative by providing this critical commentary, is that natural and biological stimuli may be overemphasised. Archaeological research should focus on aspects related to human culture that integrate research and findings from other disciplines. The environment was however excessively prominent in many presentations, and it mixed with the focal point on bodies since the cosmologies were often defined as "embodiments of landscapes". I do not argue that the neurological brain, the body or the external environment are unimportant, but I am frankly uninterested about argumentations rigidly rooted on naturalistic, evolutionary approaches that end up forgetting those characteristics that set humans apart and define human beings. I am sure that biological and natural processes and occurrences determined most of the life of human beings, even today, but in such a broad focus, human beings are lost in the background. In particular, I have attended presentations that were outright contradictory in the balance between natural and human/artificial, while others crossed the line between human and animal too lightly. This is not entirely wrong methodologically, but at times I felt that the uniqueness of the human mind, and the particular human condition and perspective became peripheral. Moreover, at times some ideas clashed with my understanding that humans have free will and can determine themselves and their lives more evidently than other animals and living beings just because of the complexity of their minds. In other words, I heard more deterministic approaches than I wanted to. Cosmologies are the most complex constructs of the mind, which in my opinion bring consciousness and self-awareness to a higher level of perception and understanding. Many current approaches seem to identify and explain cosmologies as mirror images of the reality, in some way as reality seen through the distorting lenses of the mind. In fact, cosmologies build upon memory, identity, knowledge, beliefs, experiences to explain the natural world. While the natural world provides the question and the starting matter to be explained, true cosmologies merge both the inner and natural worlds perceived by human consciousness and define as well as identify individuals and communities. In my opinion, apparent cosmologies derived from and mirroring the natural world are perceptions, glimpses of individual minds and natural responses to the environment, which are vastly different from true cosmologies. I firmly believe that all beings capable of any basic thought will have some understanding of the world they live in and they will react in personal ways and this has already be proven for some species (e.g. monkeys, fish, squid, insects and most recently sea anemones). I think that many archaeological approaches as presented at the conference may not even be able to reach an understanding of cosmologies, and while the focus is appreciated, the results were still missing.
We live in a period of great uncertainty, and somehow the conference mirrored that: more presentations than usual lacked direction or contained unacceptable uncertainties (of the type that makes me think, "why bother?") The surprising (to me) advance of determinism also seems to suggest stress from the current inability for people to self-determine themselves, and the general pessimistic lack of confidence. Economic studies, which may have been relevant to the contemporary (social and) economic crisis bringing to the light past experiences that may be useful in our contemporary world were sorely missing. Clearly archaeologists need some further pressure to bring forward their research to the public as useful rather than leveraging to the exotic appeal of some discoveries or the CSI-style of science that leads decisively to one and only one solution as if human beings could be explained (it may be, but at least we cannot yet). After so much talking of bodies and naturalistic cosmologies, at times I felt that I was at a New Age convention (I never attended one).
Rather than presenting a report of the many papers, I have summarised many papers (from different, unconnected sessions) focusing on two main themes (the conference itself is open, and does not suggest as yet any main theme) that clearly have generated much interest. Formally separated, the two themes appear intertwined, and there were frequent citations of the other theme in papers of each camp, which I consider genuine and may not have been picked up by everybody. The two themes, in my view, can be merged into one and represent themselves (how ironic) the current philosophical world view (cosmology) of archaeologists. Whilst I could not understand much about the past (or their relevance to the study of the past) in several papers, after some thought, I could understand much about the present. Finally, the absence (or better the subdued presence) of papers focusing on economic topics, was also telling: economics has become some sort of modern taboo, a topic in which no one felt confident enough to present suggestions or make forecasts. It was a lost occasion, but I can understand why people shied away from the topic. No one was really in the mood for a cautionary tale, or worse a tale with catastrophic ending.