Overview
Human beings are sensate, skilled, intentioned and desiring. The material world is recalcitrant, enabling, plastic, and rich in forms. Phrased in this way one can characterize human beings and then compare and contrast them with the world around. Having divided the world into two – the human and the material – the problem becomes one of relationship. How do you take the sets of socially-related humans and add materials, so that material things become material culture, acting as raw materials for social relations? Two sets of characterization are required of the human and the material, plus a set of relating principles.
There is, of course, quite a different strategy available to us and that is to refuse to separate people from the world around, so human desire and sensitivity are part of a broader set of forces within the world as a whole. People then become an especially sensitive element of the mass of relations, with a particular set of energies and desire to shape the world. But they start off as part of that world and the embodied nature of human being partakes of the biochemical processes, neural connections or mechanical forces found in all living things and some non-living ones.
Prehistoric archaeologists have also been much concerned with form. The development of typological methods for distinguishing and dating prehistoric periods arose first in the nineteenth century and continued through to today. Typology can provide an exceedingly thick description of objects, but it has been very deficient in linking things to people. Linkage has mainly come through a particular idea of technology, whereby the movement from stone to bronze to iron in Europe was seen to presage a greater ability to extract energy from the environment and to manipulate it, which in turn fuelled the move from tribe to chiefdom to state. Today typology is somewhat out of fashion amongst archaeologists, because of the limited purposes to which it has been put. But given the new interest in materiality we can now put typology and other forms of thick description to good use in describing the small, but salient differences, between artefacts which might well then make a real difference to people.
New materials help produce people through extending the capabilities of human bodies, demanding new skills of discrimination and novel sensory experiences. New human bodies can explore the potentials of artefacts in novel ways, leading to extra possibilities being found within materials.
Issues and Interests
I am currently writing a book on Celtic art, with Duncan Garrow, looking at the impact that fine and decorated metalwork had on human relations in the later Iron Age and Romano-British periods. In this book we shall explore, to some degree, the making and decoration of metalwork and of its forms of deposition, setting this within longer term trends within the creation and deposition of metal objects from the later Bronze Age to the Romano-British period.
In writing on Celtic art I am also exploring issues of creativity and intelligence, so that I hope to start a book on these issues later this year. This will explore concepts of bodily intelligence, drawing on contemporary debates in philosophy, neuroscience ( a huge field) and social psychology, as well as focusing on the senses and the emotions. This is a huge area of thought and work and I still considering how to structure the book and what to concentrate on.
Further reading
Gosden, C. 2004. Archaeology and Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gosden, C., F. Larson with A. Petch. 2007. Knowing Things: exploring the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gosden, C. (ed.) 2001. Archaeology and Aesthetics. World Archaeology 33(2).
Gosden, C. 2005a. Material Culture and Long-term Change, in C. Tilley, W. Keane, S. Kuechler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds) The Sage Handbook of Material Culture: 425-442. London: Sage Publications.
Gosden, C. 2005b. What do objects want? Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 12: 193-211.
Edwards, E., C. Gosden and R. Phillips (eds). 2006. Sensible Objects: material culture, colonialism, museums. Oxford: Berg.
Garrow, D., C. Gosden and J. D. Hill (eds) 2008. Rethinking Celtic Art. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
DeMarrais, E. C. Gosden and C. Renfrew. 2004. Rethinking Materiality: the engagement of mind with the material world. Cambridge: McDonald Monograph Series.
Renfrew, C., C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais. 2004. Substance, Memory and Display : Archaeology and Art. Cambridge: McDonald Monograph Series.
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