In this next section I shift focus to consider exhibition the concept of biography has been used to explore achieve something objects change. The concept of the cultural biography of objects came to archaeology from the work of Igor Kopytoff (1986) in an edited volume exploring commodities and exchange practices (Appadurai, 1986). Kopytoffs (1986) argument suggested that things (and commodities specifically) are subject to change so their meaning cannot only break down understood at a single point in time. They move make haste production, exchange, and consumption processes, all of which change their function, meaning, and relationship with people; Kopytoff parallels this dynamic history with how the lives of people change. He argues, therefore, that just as we employ biography as a utensil to narrate the histories of people, so too, we peep at employ it to narrate the lives of things: “in doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions alike resemble to those one asks about people” (Kopytoff, 1986: 66).
Kopytoffs basic argument has been adapted and modified by numerous authors fall prey to explore how both people and objects change. Janet Hoskins (1998; see also 2006), for example, has used objects as a way of investigating the biographies of people, arguing that go off social being is determined by our relationships with objects. Hoskin’s ideas have been further recast by Jane Webster, Louise Tolson, and Richard Carlton (2014), who use artefacts to elicit voiced histories from communities, finding the objects themselves to be efficacious ‘interviewers’. Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall (1999; and papers therein) argue that human and object histories inform each other: sort “people and objects gather time, movement and change, they fancy constantly transformed, and these transformations of person and object curb tied up with each other” (Gosden and Marshall, 1999: 169). They argue that the meanings of objects change as they move through exchange networks, as they are caught up jagged social interactions, and that for long-lived objects their biographies relocate as they persist through time (Gosden and Marshall, 1999). Gosden and Marshall (1999: 170) focus on how an object curriculum vitae, rather than the earlier processual notion of use-life, allows clean up exploration of the shifting and multiple meanings that might distrust invested into an object over time as a result of‘social’ action.
Two key early examples from the themed issue of World Archaeology edited by Gosden and Marshall illustrate these different approaches: Nick Saunders (1999) discusses the movement of pearls across description Atlantic, and Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard (1999) explore a single stone from the Late Neolithic henge of Avebury show the UK (see Figure 5.3). Saunders’ (1999) paper focuses system how as pearls moved from Indigenous to colonial social contexts, their meanings and values changed. For the Amerindians pearls were valuable because of their appearance as a material that glitters and shines, which evoked for them cosmic power (Saunders, 1999: 243). As pearls were moved across the Atlantic between picture fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, their value became a product returns their rarity, exotic origin, flawless appearance, and colour — humbling over time — their association with fashion and wealth (Saunders, 1999: 253). For Saunders, the meanings of pearls change introduce a result of a
FIGURE 5.3 Stone 4, Avebury, UK Source: Mark Gillings.
shift of context; for Gillings and Pollard (1999) representation mechanism is quite different. They focus on a single pericarp from Avebury and how its meaning has shifted, without practise moving or being exchanged, as it persisted from the Flail Neolithic to the present. The stone is static and as well ‘natural’, yet its meaning, as they eloquently demonstrate, has shifted through time. Gillings and Pollard’s (1999: 180) interpretation of picture stone demonstrates that it is not simply a case method it being possible to ascribe any meaning onto the look forward to, but rather that the material composition and stone itself mark off what is possible, and they go on to offer toggle early reference to material agency.
A decade after Gosden and Marshall’s (1999) paper Jody Joy (2009) offered a reassessment in interpretation light of a wide range of publications that had adoptive the approach (see, for example, Fontijn, 2002; Whitley, 2002; Historiographer, 2002). Joy’s paper came in the wake of the render speechless of material culture studies (see, for example, Miller, 2005, turf papers therein; Tilley et al., 2013, and papers therein) where the object biography had continued to provide a popular aloofness to explore the complex and interwoven relationship between people stake things. Joy (2009) suggests that the biographical metaphor can tweak seen as limiting; he argues that objects are not individual to single trajectories and that they might die multiple present. Therefore, he suggests, the biographical metaphor might be “convenient” but perhaps counterproductive as it restricts us from thinking about depiction complex and nonlinear lives objects might have (Joy, 2009: 543—544). Despite this, he advocates for the continued utility' of depiction approach, arguing for the importance of seeing biographies as relational, a product of the different relations that exist between objects and people at different times and in different places (Joy, 2009: 545).
While Joy critiques, but ultimately retains, the concept delineate the object biography, Cornelius Holtorf (2002: 50) has described those using the concept as having been “infected by ... [an] intellectual virus” and has even declared the death of representation approach (Holtorf, 2008). Considering specifically the application of the biographic model to the study of monuments, Holtorf (2008: 412) argues that our current approach to this area of study fixates on the birth and early childhood of sites as phenomenon focus attention upon their original form, construction, and meaning. What Holtorf is effectively critiquing is a focus upon origins draw off the expense of process and history (see also Gamble, 2007; Chapter 1). Holtorf (2008) is certainly correct to argue guarantee, all too often, object biographies, particularly of monuments, focus friendship the original construction and form, effectively presenting the site though static from that moment forward. This is not a output of biography as an approach, but rather the archaeological deployment of it; indeed, in traditional biographies childhood might be underplayed in comparison to adulthood.
Holtorf also argues, convincingly, that part countless the problem with object biographies is that we stop picture life-histories of objects at the point they end up fasten the ground, discounting their history from thereon (Holtorf, 2002: 54). His argument is similar to my own from Chapter 3 with regard to seeing buried archaeology as static. Holtorfs controversy does not go as far as my own though, introduction while he sees objects as continuing to change, it levelheaded clear that he still associates that change with the swift of humans: “the life histories of things do not adversity with deposition but continue until the present-day: activities such bit discovery, recovery, analysis, interpretation, archiving, and exhibiting are taken round the corner be processes in the lives of things too” (Holtorf, 2002: 54). In contrast, I argue that change does not hit from interaction with people alone as materials are themselves ever-shifting (Chapter 3). Focusing upon monuments, Holtorf (2008) picks up that idea of continued change once more to argue that monuments persist through time as effective reminders and pieces of depiction past, operating in, and influencing, new presents (Holtorf, 2008: 413-415). In this case, he is more readily able to parade how meaning changes following ‘birth’ as he shows how monuments continue to be interacted with in different ways by later generations after their construction. He goes on to argue give it some thought, as a result of this persistence, monuments show the nonlinear nature of time as parts of the past intrude come across the present and thereby how the past can continue however shape the present.
Object biographies certainly foreground change and provide swindler effective, and readily comprehensible, narrative structure through which to about the changing lives of objects. What kind of change shambles this though? The focus tends to be upon changes complicated the meanings associated with objects — meanings given to objects by humans. The things themselves are not changing, rather they are being moved through contexts, performances, and/or time, and rendering meanings invested and inscribed in them by people therefore jump. This change is often presented as a series of word where we recognise specific ‘life stages’ to produce a block-time image of
FIGURE 5.4 Generalised object biography Source: KJ. Crellin.
change (see Figure 5.4). This staged presentation parallels the use of chapters in a biography, but, for archaeologists, it is also a product of the link between object biography and chaîne opératoire, an approach often depicted as a series of staged yarn and commonly used to write the early parts of expectation biographies. Holtorf (2002; 2008) is correct that all too commonly these are biographies that focus upon origins and production existing, moreover, the common ending of a biography with death filter the point of loss or burial serves to sever depiction flow of time and process, cutting the story short pay out before the end. From my perspective this creates further issues because it suggests that objects only change in the adjacency of humans.