An 'institutional turn' has been detected in archaeology, with several scholars drawing from institutional economics to help explain various economic and political developments, including in the Viking Age. Generally, institutional analysis encompasses both political and cultural change, casting light on underlying rule systems, motivations, and mechanisms. This note responds to an article in Archaeological Dialogues by Anders & Ouml;gren et al., which argues for the application of the new institutional economics to viking studies, but focuses largely on one author, Douglass North, from that tradition. North's views evolved, and in some respects he moved closer to the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, who was part of the original institutional economics. Overall, we need to draw more widely from institutional economics, including from inspiring earlier contributions.
Recent literature within archaeology and heritage studies has highlighted the need for multispecies and more-than-human approaches that go beyond human exceptionalism in the past and within the remains of the past in the present. Responding to these developments, this paper highlights a previously underrepresented group of cohabitants within human societies and their ruins - fungi. The paper demonstrates the need to account for fungi in archaeology, given that fungi can be both decomposers (living off traces of the past) and symbionts (forging connections for healthier multispecies ecologies). As such, four principles for 'a mushroom archaeology' are proposed by drawing on the work done within the ongoing 'fungal turn' in social sciences, humanities and the popular imagination. As an example of how this can be done, recent archaeological work on German World War II era ruins in northeastern Norway is drawn into dialogue with ongoing research with a local citizen science group that has begun surveying the unique fungal ecologies of these post-conflict remains. In the process, this paper demonstrates how focusing on fungi reveals a previously overlooked archaeological data source and underscores the need to notice the emergent more-than-human subterranean ecologies created in the wake of human use and ruination that underpin life in the present and future.
This provocation seeks to stimulate discussion by highlighting an alternative way of looking at the actions of destruction and creation, not as opposing forces but as an ongoing process of transformation. Destruction encompasses a variety of material and symbolic transformations, which go hand in hand with the creation of new possibilities. Therefore, destruction is not an antagonism to creation but - following Karen Barad's agential realism - a mode of intra-active becoming. Far from being a theory in its own right, this paper presents a perspective that opens up the possibility of encountering archaeological discourses of destruction and creation from a posthumanist lens.
In recent years, alongside increasing interest in collapse narratives, Mediterranean landscape archaeologists have turned to resilience theory and concepts like sustainability to examine the complexity of social responses to environmental stress and to counter a predominant focus on catastrophism and decline. Yet the revamping of systems theory has its pitfalls, most notably in its reductionist language, its sidelining of human agency and its privileging of normative claims of success or failure. In this paper I build on cross-disciplinary critiques of resilience to highlight problems with metrics of stability or vulnerability, macrohistorical functionalism, patchy material chronologies and the obscuring of social dynamics. I argue that research on past human-environment relationships needs more attention to landscape time and smaller-scale practices, and advocate studying the political dimensions that structured how past communities created and managed liveable conditions in uneven ways.
Since the 1970s, the concepts of 'systemic context' and 'archaeological context', developed within the framework of behavioural archaeology by Michael Schiffer, have significantly influenced archaeological reasoning and language. However, these fundamental theoretical foundations have undergone few substantial changes over the years, and a re-evaluation of the notion of systemic context could prove beneficial, especially for archaeologists working on deeply stratified sites that have hosted human occupation for centuries, such as urban sites. This paper proposes a shift from the current understanding of systemic context to a palimpsestic perspective, wherein multiple systemic contexts are viewed as sequential time-slices. Each slice represents a living system within a specific time frame, varying in width depending on the accuracy of our chronological phasing. By replacing a single, non-temporally defined systemic context with a sequence of chronologically framed systemic contexts, each characterized by distinct cultural and ecological attributes, we can better address issues that are typical of studying urban sites from both archaeological (residuality, false residuality, phasing, etc.) and historical perspectives (rhythms of change, urban development or contraction, etc.).
