Robert Preucel | Brown University (original) (raw)
Papers by Robert Preucel
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2022
a discussion essay in reply to Lucas and Witmore's "Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory... more a discussion essay in reply to Lucas and Witmore's "Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology?"
Figures xi 5.5 Axis of reflection and point of bifold rotation for the core area of Chaco Canyon ... more Figures xi 5.5 Axis of reflection and point of bifold rotation for the core area of Chaco Canyon (Fritz 1978:Figure 3.7). 5.6 The William Paca garden (courtesy of the Historic Annapolis Foundation). 6.1 Structure, habitus, and practice (after Bourdieu 1984:Figure 8). 6.2 Modalities of structuration (after Giddens 1984:Figure 2). 6.3 The mutuality of ritual and social maps of the Saami kahte (after Yates 1989:Figure 20.4). 6.4 Pot decorated with snake motif from Igbo Jonah (Ray 1987:Figure 7.3). 6.5 The canoe as a big man (Tilley 1999:Figure 4.3). 7.1 Steven Mithen's cathedral model of the evolution of intelligence (Mithen 1996:67).
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2022
Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, 2015
Against the backdrop of increasing social change, an urgency courses through contemporary life fo... more Against the backdrop of increasing social change, an urgency courses through contemporary life for weaving the past into the present. The process of folding past conditions into present ones is selective; it has to be, given the richly textured inheritance bestowed on each passing generation (Trouillot 1995). The result over the past century plus has been a gradual refining of practices and ways of talking about what came before, encompassed by the concept of 'cultural heritage.' Cultural heritage is variously invoked as something (some object, site, building, landscape, traditional practice) with historic connections that must be properly tended to, as well as the field of expertise that has developed around this care. Over time, or at critical moments provoked by shifting events, these practices and languages of heritage became incorporated into political and legal institutions with jurisdiction over local, regional (e.g., state), national, or international bodies of governance. National standards have traditionally been the most influential in institutionalizing how heritage is dealt with, but increasingly so too are international norms codified within an expanding oeuvre of global conventions, recommendations, lists, safeguards, management guidelines, and reports picked up as 'best practices.
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2001
To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The ... more To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The answer to this question, of course, depends upon the kinds of semiotics that one is talking about. In our article we argue that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches favored by some Postprocessualists are incomplete and advocate an alternative approach inspired by the 'other father' of semiotics, namely Charles Sanders Peirce.
Current Anthropology, 1987
Archaeology is becoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new arc... more Archaeology is becoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new archaeology is being questioned, and alternative radical approaches are being championed. In an at-tempt to assess the validity of these new directions, this paper ...
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014
Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its bas... more Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its basic insight is to conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things rather than in terms of the things themselves. Alongside functionalism and adaptationalism, it played a seminal role in the early days of processual archaeology, particularly in the context of systems theory. Structuralism and its poststructural critiques were also central to the rise of postprocessual approaches and their engagement with issues of reading, writing, discourse and performance. While structuralism is no longer advocated in its original forms, its legacies are evident in many current research directions. Among these directions are cognitive archaeology, Peircian semiotics, and network analysis.
Archaeology is a semiotic enterprise engaged in the study of meaning-making practices by past act... more Archaeology is a semiotic enterprise engaged in the study of meaning-making practices by past actors and of archaeologists themselves. Archaeology embraced its semiotic character in the context of the processual and postprocessual debates, and in terms of various postprocessual developments. Recently some archaeologists have drawn inspiration from the material semiotics of Bruno Latour to advocate for a symmetrical archaeology. This perspective offers a novel approach to object agency and focuses on how objects and humans together form assemblages. However, it neglects a satisfying account of how objects and things transform each other. One productive way forward is a consideration of semiotic mediation offered by a pragmatic archaeology linked to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Keywords: Peirce, semiotic mediation, transformation, assemblages, object agency, archaeology
The ‘ontological turn’ is currently being touted in anthropology and other social sciences as a w... more The ‘ontological turn’ is currently being touted in anthropology and other social sciences as a way of providing new insights into the global ecological crisis. This move encompasses a variety of posthumanist and New Materialist approaches including assemblage theory, vibrant matter, perspectivism and object-oriented ontology. Although distinctive, these approaches share an interest in animating things. Not surprisingly, archaeologists have taken notice of this new-found fascination with things and are participating in the ontological debates on our own terms. One can distinguish three main approaches: symmetrical archaeology, assemblage thinking and relational archaeologies. This paper will examine the nature of the ontological turn and offer a critical review of its use in archaeology.
In The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming, edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel. University of Arizona Press, Tucson., 2019
Antiquity
Over 30 years ago, Paul Minnis (1985) proposed the distinction between ‘pristine domestication’ a... more Over 30 years ago, Paul Minnis (1985) proposed the distinction between ‘pristine domestication’ and ‘primary crop acquisition’. The former refers to the initial domestication of wild plant resources and is characterised by only a dozen or so places in the world, most notably China, the Near East and Mesoamerica. The latter refers to the local integration of crops that were domesticated elsewhere and is the more common process. The American Southwest, here defined as the U.S. states of Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, is a classic case of primary crop acquisition. Cultigens, first maize and then squash and beans, originally domesticated in Mesoamerica, were brought north by immigrant groups who joined with local hunter-gatherer communities. The introduction of these cultigens did not initiate major immediate changes in ecological or social relationships, instead the shift to agriculture as the central subsistence practice took mill...
Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets
Post-processual archaeology refers to an intellectual movement in Anglo-American archaeology that... more Post-processual archaeology refers to an intellectual movement in Anglo-American archaeology that emerged in the 1980s. As its name implies, it grew out of critiques of processual archaeology and advocated alternative interpretive perspectives, especially those encompassing questions of meaning, history, politics, and practice. At the broadest level, post-processual archaeology can be seen as a response to the widespread influences of post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism on the humanities and social sciences. Significantly, post-processual archaeology expanded the reach of the field by opening up spaces for the investigation of gender, practice, materiality, and identity. It also encouraged archaeologists to acknowledge the relationships of humans and their object worlds and the different possible trajectories they travel. A key insight is that studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects; they must engage in the dialecti...
Expedition the Magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, 2005
Expedition the Magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, 2003
New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, 2017
With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) ... more With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) puzzled its role in anticipating the inevitable events that would surround the 500th anniversary of European-Native American interactions. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the SAA at the time, and the president asked me spearhead the society's efforts for observing the Columbian Quincentenary. Thanks to the support and encouragement of key SAA officers Don Fowler, Prudence Rice, Bruce Smith, and Jerry Sabloff, we were able to develop a plan. After exploring a number of options with the board, we settled upon a series of topical seminars that we dubbed Columbian Consequences. These nine public seminars, to be held over a three-year span, were designed to generate an accurate and factual assessment of what did-and what did not-transpire as a result of the Columbian encounter. We specifically tasked ourselves to probe the social, demographic, ecological, ideological, and human repercussions of European-Native American encounters across the Spanish Borderlands, spreading the word among both the scholarly community and the greater public at large. Although sponsored by the SAA, the Columbian Consequences enterprise rapidly transcended the traditional scope of archaeological inquiry, drawing together a diverse assortment of personalities and perspectives. We invited leading scholars of the day to synthesize current thinking about specific geographical settings across the Spanish Borderlands, which extend from St. Augustine (Florida) to San Francisco (California). Each overview was designed to provide a Native American context, a history of European involvement, and a summary of scholarly research. The structure was fairly simple. Each of three consecutive SAA annual meetings (in 1988, 1989, and 1990) hosted three Columbian Consequences seminars. The resulting three volumes were published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which remarkably published each volume less than a year after the seminar papers were presented. The initial book, entitled Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Thomas 1989), tackled the European-Native American interface from the Pacific Slope across the southwestern heartland to East Texas, from Russian Fort Ross to southern Baja California. The archaeologists involved addressed material culture evidence regarding contact period sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment. Other authors attempted to provide a critical balance from the perspectives of American history, Native American studies, art history, ethnohistory, and geography. In the intermediate volume-Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Thomas 1990)-nearly three dozen scholars pursued a similar agenda across La Florida, the greater Southeast, and the Caribbean.
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2022
a discussion essay in reply to Lucas and Witmore's "Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory... more a discussion essay in reply to Lucas and Witmore's "Paradigm Lost: What Is a Commitment to Theory in Contemporary Archaeology?"
Figures xi 5.5 Axis of reflection and point of bifold rotation for the core area of Chaco Canyon ... more Figures xi 5.5 Axis of reflection and point of bifold rotation for the core area of Chaco Canyon (Fritz 1978:Figure 3.7). 5.6 The William Paca garden (courtesy of the Historic Annapolis Foundation). 6.1 Structure, habitus, and practice (after Bourdieu 1984:Figure 8). 6.2 Modalities of structuration (after Giddens 1984:Figure 2). 6.3 The mutuality of ritual and social maps of the Saami kahte (after Yates 1989:Figure 20.4). 6.4 Pot decorated with snake motif from Igbo Jonah (Ray 1987:Figure 7.3). 6.5 The canoe as a big man (Tilley 1999:Figure 4.3). 7.1 Steven Mithen's cathedral model of the evolution of intelligence (Mithen 1996:67).
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2022
Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage, 2015
Against the backdrop of increasing social change, an urgency courses through contemporary life fo... more Against the backdrop of increasing social change, an urgency courses through contemporary life for weaving the past into the present. The process of folding past conditions into present ones is selective; it has to be, given the richly textured inheritance bestowed on each passing generation (Trouillot 1995). The result over the past century plus has been a gradual refining of practices and ways of talking about what came before, encompassed by the concept of 'cultural heritage.' Cultural heritage is variously invoked as something (some object, site, building, landscape, traditional practice) with historic connections that must be properly tended to, as well as the field of expertise that has developed around this care. Over time, or at critical moments provoked by shifting events, these practices and languages of heritage became incorporated into political and legal institutions with jurisdiction over local, regional (e.g., state), national, or international bodies of governance. National standards have traditionally been the most influential in institutionalizing how heritage is dealt with, but increasingly so too are international norms codified within an expanding oeuvre of global conventions, recommendations, lists, safeguards, management guidelines, and reports picked up as 'best practices.
Norwegian Archaeological Review, 2001
To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The ... more To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The answer to this question, of course, depends upon the kinds of semiotics that one is talking about. In our article we argue that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches favored by some Postprocessualists are incomplete and advocate an alternative approach inspired by the 'other father' of semiotics, namely Charles Sanders Peirce.
Current Anthropology, 1987
Archaeology is becoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new arc... more Archaeology is becoming a broader, more catholic discipline. The positivist foundation of new archaeology is being questioned, and alternative radical approaches are being championed. In an at-tempt to assess the validity of these new directions, this paper ...
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014
Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its bas... more Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its basic insight is to conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things rather than in terms of the things themselves. Alongside functionalism and adaptationalism, it played a seminal role in the early days of processual archaeology, particularly in the context of systems theory. Structuralism and its poststructural critiques were also central to the rise of postprocessual approaches and their engagement with issues of reading, writing, discourse and performance. While structuralism is no longer advocated in its original forms, its legacies are evident in many current research directions. Among these directions are cognitive archaeology, Peircian semiotics, and network analysis.
Archaeology is a semiotic enterprise engaged in the study of meaning-making practices by past act... more Archaeology is a semiotic enterprise engaged in the study of meaning-making practices by past actors and of archaeologists themselves. Archaeology embraced its semiotic character in the context of the processual and postprocessual debates, and in terms of various postprocessual developments. Recently some archaeologists have drawn inspiration from the material semiotics of Bruno Latour to advocate for a symmetrical archaeology. This perspective offers a novel approach to object agency and focuses on how objects and humans together form assemblages. However, it neglects a satisfying account of how objects and things transform each other. One productive way forward is a consideration of semiotic mediation offered by a pragmatic archaeology linked to the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. Keywords: Peirce, semiotic mediation, transformation, assemblages, object agency, archaeology
The ‘ontological turn’ is currently being touted in anthropology and other social sciences as a w... more The ‘ontological turn’ is currently being touted in anthropology and other social sciences as a way of providing new insights into the global ecological crisis. This move encompasses a variety of posthumanist and New Materialist approaches including assemblage theory, vibrant matter, perspectivism and object-oriented ontology. Although distinctive, these approaches share an interest in animating things. Not surprisingly, archaeologists have taken notice of this new-found fascination with things and are participating in the ontological debates on our own terms. One can distinguish three main approaches: symmetrical archaeology, assemblage thinking and relational archaeologies. This paper will examine the nature of the ontological turn and offer a critical review of its use in archaeology.
In The Continuous Path: Pueblo Movement and the Archaeology of Becoming, edited by Samuel Duwe and Robert W. Preucel. University of Arizona Press, Tucson., 2019
Antiquity
Over 30 years ago, Paul Minnis (1985) proposed the distinction between ‘pristine domestication’ a... more Over 30 years ago, Paul Minnis (1985) proposed the distinction between ‘pristine domestication’ and ‘primary crop acquisition’. The former refers to the initial domestication of wild plant resources and is characterised by only a dozen or so places in the world, most notably China, the Near East and Mesoamerica. The latter refers to the local integration of crops that were domesticated elsewhere and is the more common process. The American Southwest, here defined as the U.S. states of Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, is a classic case of primary crop acquisition. Cultigens, first maize and then squash and beans, originally domesticated in Mesoamerica, were brought north by immigrant groups who joined with local hunter-gatherer communities. The introduction of these cultigens did not initiate major immediate changes in ecological or social relationships, instead the shift to agriculture as the central subsistence practice took mill...
Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets
Post-processual archaeology refers to an intellectual movement in Anglo-American archaeology that... more Post-processual archaeology refers to an intellectual movement in Anglo-American archaeology that emerged in the 1980s. As its name implies, it grew out of critiques of processual archaeology and advocated alternative interpretive perspectives, especially those encompassing questions of meaning, history, politics, and practice. At the broadest level, post-processual archaeology can be seen as a response to the widespread influences of post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism on the humanities and social sciences. Significantly, post-processual archaeology expanded the reach of the field by opening up spaces for the investigation of gender, practice, materiality, and identity. It also encouraged archaeologists to acknowledge the relationships of humans and their object worlds and the different possible trajectories they travel. A key insight is that studies of materiality cannot simply focus upon the characteristics of objects; they must engage in the dialecti...
Expedition the Magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, 2005
Expedition the Magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, 2003
New Mexico and the Pimería Alta: The Colonial Period in the American Southwest, 2017
With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) ... more With the Columbian Quincentenary just a few years off, the Society of American Archaeology (SAA) puzzled its role in anticipating the inevitable events that would surround the 500th anniversary of European-Native American interactions. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the SAA at the time, and the president asked me spearhead the society's efforts for observing the Columbian Quincentenary. Thanks to the support and encouragement of key SAA officers Don Fowler, Prudence Rice, Bruce Smith, and Jerry Sabloff, we were able to develop a plan. After exploring a number of options with the board, we settled upon a series of topical seminars that we dubbed Columbian Consequences. These nine public seminars, to be held over a three-year span, were designed to generate an accurate and factual assessment of what did-and what did not-transpire as a result of the Columbian encounter. We specifically tasked ourselves to probe the social, demographic, ecological, ideological, and human repercussions of European-Native American encounters across the Spanish Borderlands, spreading the word among both the scholarly community and the greater public at large. Although sponsored by the SAA, the Columbian Consequences enterprise rapidly transcended the traditional scope of archaeological inquiry, drawing together a diverse assortment of personalities and perspectives. We invited leading scholars of the day to synthesize current thinking about specific geographical settings across the Spanish Borderlands, which extend from St. Augustine (Florida) to San Francisco (California). Each overview was designed to provide a Native American context, a history of European involvement, and a summary of scholarly research. The structure was fairly simple. Each of three consecutive SAA annual meetings (in 1988, 1989, and 1990) hosted three Columbian Consequences seminars. The resulting three volumes were published by the Smithsonian Institution Press, which remarkably published each volume less than a year after the seminar papers were presented. The initial book, entitled Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West (Thomas 1989), tackled the European-Native American interface from the Pacific Slope across the southwestern heartland to East Texas, from Russian Fort Ross to southern Baja California. The archaeologists involved addressed material culture evidence regarding contact period sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment. Other authors attempted to provide a critical balance from the perspectives of American history, Native American studies, art history, ethnohistory, and geography. In the intermediate volume-Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East (Thomas 1990)-nearly three dozen scholars pursued a similar agenda across La Florida, the greater Southeast, and the Caribbean.
Louis Shotridge is a rema¡kable figure in the history of American ethnology. He was the first Nor... more Louis Shotridge is a rema¡kable figure in the history of American ethnology. He was the first Northwest Coast lndian to receive professional anthropological training and the first to gain employment by a museum (Milburn 1992,124). While working forthe UniversityMuseum ofthe University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphi4 he led four expeditions to Alaska and British Columbia and collected over 475 ethnographic objects (see Williams, this volume). In addition, he took more than five hundred photographs and published eleven articles on aspects of Northwest Coast cul-tu¡e.r Shotridge has been prominently featured in books Cole r98S; Ikplan and Ba¡sness r98ó; Price rgSg; Williams zoo3; Wine-Srad rggg), scholarly essays (Berman zoo4; Brown zoo5; Dauenhauer and
Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its bas... more Structuralism is an important influence in the development of Anglo-American archaeology. Its basic insight is to conceptualize the world in terms of relationships between things rather than in terms of the things themselves. Alongside functionalism and adaptationalism, it played a seminal role in the early days of processual archaeology, particularly in the context of systems theory. Structuralism and its poststructural critiques were also central to the rise of postprocessual approaches and their engagement with issues of reading, writing, discourse and performance. While structuralism is no longer advocated in its original forms, its legacies are evident in many current research directions. Among these directions are cognitive archaeology, Peircian semiotics, and network analysis.
Our aim in this essay is to describe a basis for a rational recognition of multiple interests in ... more Our aim in this essay is to describe a basis for a rational recognition of multiple interests in the past. We also do this in order to provide some guidance to actions that can be takm the social context of archaeology has an impact on itself. We explore these relationships within the co issue.
Archaeology is a common theoretical hat-rack for all our parochial hats.
The second edition of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism, has been thoroughly... more The second edition of Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism, has been thoroughly updated and revised, and features top scholars who redefine the theoretical and political agendas of the field, and challenge the usual distinctions between time, space, processes, and people. Defines the relevance of archaeology and the social sciences more generally to the modern world Challenges the traditional boundaries between prehistoric and historical archaeologies Discusses how archaeology articulates such contemporary topics and issues as landscape and natures; agency, meaning and practice; sexuality, embodiment and personhood; race, class, and ethnicity; materiality, memory, and historical silence; colonialism, nationalism, and empire; heritage, patrimony, and social justice; media, museums, and publics. Examines the influence of American pragmatism on archaeology. Offers 32 new chapters by leading archaeologists and cultural anthropologists
This interdisciplinary book examines archaeology's engagement with semiotics, from its early stru... more This interdisciplinary book examines archaeology's engagement with semiotics, from its early structuralist beginnings to its more recent Peircian encounters. It represents the first sustained engagement with Peircian semiotics in archaeology, as well as the first discussion of how pragmatic anthropology articulates with anthropological archaeology. Its central thesis is that archaeology is a distinctive kind of semiotic enterprise; one devoted to giving meaning to the past in the present through the study of materiality. It compliments standard studies of linguistics and reformulates contemporary theories of material culture.
The dynamic discourse stimulated by 78 magnificent objects created by Native Americans over the y... more The dynamic discourse stimulated by 78 magnificent objects created by Native Americans over the years, now housed in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the responses of contemporary Native Americans to those objects forms the core of this book. As seen in these vibrant pages, the Museum is not a place of dead objects from the past. It is, rather, a place of people and ideas about human societies and cultures, a place of living, active objects, a place where the present can connect to the past
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is a popular topic in Borderlands history and southwestern anthropology... more The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is a popular topic in Borderlands history and southwestern anthropology. Historians have generally regarded it as an extraordinary and pivotal event and have sought to understand its causes and consequences, using an overarching frontier model tied to the expansion of the Spanish empire. Anthropologists have tended to see it as a temporary response to the inexorable march of acculturation with Western beliefs and practices gradually replacing traditional Pueblo ones. This volume challenges both these perspectives through its emphasis on the agency of Pueblo people, the significance of material culture in mediating acts of resistance and structures of domination, and the character of the various discourses that constitute the oral historical, documentary, and archaeological records of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
The Companion to Social Archaeology is the first scholarly work to explore the encounter of socia... more The Companion to Social Archaeology is the first scholarly work to explore the encounter of social theory and archaeology over the past two decades. * Grouped into four sections - Knowledges, Identities, Places, and Politics - each of which is prefaced with a review essay that contextualizes the history and developments in social archaeology and related fields. Draws together newer trends that are challenging established ways of understanding the past. Includes contributions by leading scholars who instigated major theoretical trends.
This reader presents an easily accessible collection of seminal articles in contemporary Anglo-Am... more This reader presents an easily accessible collection of seminal articles in contemporary Anglo-American archaeological theory for use in introductory undergraduate classes as well as graduate level seminars. If focuses upon the period from 1980 to the present emphasizing the far-reaching effects of recent internal and external critiques of processual archaeology. The central purpose of the reader is to assist students in thinking about the interrelationships between theory and practice for different theoretical approaches.
Contexts reports on the annual activities - research, education, exhibits, and collaborations - o... more Contexts reports on the annual activities - research, education, exhibits, and collaborations - of Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Now in its 40th year, Contexts' 2015 reports on archaeological research around the world, innovative uses and expansions of the HMA's collections, new collaborations with the RISD Museum and across the world, and outreach to diverse publics, including public schools and our university community.