IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v34y2010i1p103-114.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Archaeologies of technology

Author

Listed:
  • Marcia-Anne Dobres

Abstract

Archaeologists make use of several different ontologies to research and develop theories about ancient technology. After briefly sketching out central features of mainstream (materialist) technovisions, this essay concentrates on recent ontological trends emphasizing the 'mutual becoming' of people and products. Symbolic and structuralist orientations enable archaeologists to 'see' something of the social values and cognitive structures shaping technological traditions in the deep past. As the question of gender has become an explicit topic of interest, archaeologists are able, at long last, to theorise about ancient technicians as thinking and feeling women and men. To appreciate ancient technology 'as if people mattered', I outline my own preferred ontology--grounded in phenomenology and agency theory. It argues that the ancient technician's body was a mindful, sensual, socially constituted and gendered being making sense of the world--and themself--by working through it. Chaîne opératoire data on technical gestures and related strategic choices of artifact manufacture, use, and repair provide the necessary empirical and interpretive link between the making of personhood and the making and use of products within the (ancient) body politic. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcia-Anne Dobres, 2010. "Archaeologies of technology," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 34(1), pages 103-114, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:34:y:2010:i:1:p:103-114
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/bep014
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Philip Faulkner & Clive Lawson & Jochen Runde, 2010. "Theorising technology," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 34(1), pages 1-16, January.
    2. Lena Dubinsky & Marcelo David & Leore Grosman, 2023. "Recognizing technique variation in rock engravings: ArchCUT3-D for micromorphological analysis," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(1), pages 1-20, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:34:y:2010:i:1:p:103-114. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.