Agency Uncovered: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Agency, Power and Being Human (UCL)

This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology. On the one hand it has been argued that previous generations of archaeologists, in explaining social change in terms of structural or environmental conditions, have lost sight of the 'real people' and reduced them to passive cultural pawns, on the other, introducing the concept of agency to counteract this can be said to perpetuate a modern, Western view of the autonomous individual who is free from social constraints. This book discusses the balance between these two opposites, using a range of archaeological and historical case studies, including European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures. While focusing on the relevance of 'agency' theory to archaeological interpretation and using it to create more diverse and open-ended accounts of ancient cultures, the authors also address the contemporary political and ethical implications of what is essentially a debate about the definition of human nature. Cover 1 Agency Uncovered 2 Title Page 3 Copyright Page 4 Acknowledgments 5 Table of Contents 6 About the contributors 8 List of figures 10 1 Introduction: social agency, power, and being human 12 PART 1: SOCIAL AGENCY 27 2 An evolutionary perspective on agency in archaeology 28 3 Agency and community in 4th century Britain: developing the structurationist project 41 4 ‘Agency’ theory applied: a study of later prehistoric lithic assemblages from northwest Pakistan 58 5 Agency, technology, and the ‘muddle in the middle’: the case of the Middle Palaeolithic 71 PART 2: AGENCY AND POWER 85 6 Dirt, cleanliness, and social structure in Ancient Greece 86 7 Examining the role of agency in hunter-gatherer cultural transmission 111 8 Identifying and defining agency in a political context 139 PART 3: BEING HUMAN 155 9 Acts of god and active material culture: agency and commitment in the Andes 156 10 Being in a simulacrum: electronic agency 193 11 Agency and views beyond meta-narratives that privatise ethics and globalise indifference 212 COMMENTARY 240 12 Agency, structure and archaeological practice 241 Index 248 Using a range of archaeological and historical case studies from around the world, the authors in this volume discuss the various arguments surrounding the concept of 'agency', or individual free will. Papers originally presented at a conference held at the Institute of Archaeology, University Collge of London, on Nov. 8, 2001.