Archaeology and Archaeological Information in the Digital Society ed. by Isto Huvila (review)

ERIC KANSA, Open Context; kansaeric@gmail.com because the two participate actively in practices of well-being. The last case study (Ch. 10) revolves around fossils in British Early Bronze Age burials. The authors, Joanna Brück and Andrew Meirion Jones, seek to go beyond the Euro-American notions of individuality that consider grave goods as representations of status and prestige of the deceased. Instead, they argue that natural and modified fossils might be linked to a remote ancestral period and, thus, were cosmologically charged. Another example of this are the clay vessels that resemble echinoid fossils through the addition of applied balls with a grape-like appearance. These objects and their location make clear that persons were ontologically entangled with them, an association that challenges the Western dichotomy between culture/nature or animate/inanimate. The book ends with a complex chapter by HarrisonBuck that examines critically some ideas about personhood and agency. A first point to highlight is that agents and persons are not synonymous. There are agentive nonpersons or agent-objects. Thus, agents are not inherently persons (humans or otherwise). Another relevant point that arises from the chapters is the understanding of agency as generative action that brings things to life. In this sense, the author uses the label of “crafting persons” to stress the important role of the process of making rather than the finished product in giving life and potency to certain objects. Based in neuroscience studies, the author also criticizes the idea that relational personhood is a socially learned concept and advocates that it ontologically exists prior to social learning; so, humans and nonhumans are relationally constituted at birth. In the same vein, she defends the idea of embodied cognition or mind, explaining that the mind is connected to the body, but bodily experiences also influence the mind in a mutually constitutive manner. In all, the contributions to this volume reinforce this approach because “thinking and doing are co-creative conditions in the formation of agency, materiality, and personhood” (p. 276). This book provides stimulating discussions about topics currently trending in archaeological debates, such as the so-called ontological turn, or post-humanist perspectives. The case studies presented here concentrate on specific questions like who is considered a person or how personhood is acquired or what values rule relations among persons. However, the inclusion of difficult jargon and references to theoretical concepts and methodological perspectives of other scholars across the chapters make it difficult to follow some of the arguments. In addition, the book is not balanced with regard to the case studies, given the dominance of American examples from recent periods. The bias certainly is explainable since the extant sources for the study of Native American societies are particularly rich and varied. In this situation, the inclusion of a prehistoric context such as Bronze Age Britain is very stimulating, as it opens new avenues of research and methodologies for the European past. Overall, the book offers highly recommendable lessons and is truly thought-provoking, not only for archaeologists concerned with issues of agency and personhood, but also for those interested in archaeological theory.