Posthumanocentric Archaeology

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http://haecceities.wordpress.com

This is a website created by the archaeologist Johan Normark. The website is dedicated to an archaeological perspective that downplays the importance of the human. It is posthumanocentric, or prehuman in a sense since it focuses on processes that forms materialities, humans and other entities. Like posthumanist theorists, I have questioned what a human is. I claim that there is nothing essential in the human from where we can define the human. According to this reasoning, the human needs to be decentralized from the archaeological record in the initial phase of research. She cannot be used as an a-priori starting point. I take the consequence of this argument one step further away from what I call an essentialist humanocentrism in archaeology. Humanocentrism works from a static and generalized view of human and culture. I am preparing several articles and four books on what I call posthumanocentric or polyagentive archaeology.

I am currently working on four projects (each aimed to be published as a book): (1) Continuing the development of the posthumanocentric archaeology through readings of the philosophers Deleuze, DeLanda, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza. (2) Climate changes in southern Mexico and how they relate to settlement changes around caves. (3) Study the face in Maya iconography and ceramics in order to point out the non-human components of an emerging subjectivity. (4) Investigating the meshing of temporalities in various material media. These four projects intersect with each others since the emerging subjectivity and settlement changes will be analyzed from a posthumanocentric perspective where different temporalities mesh with materialities.