VAN DYKE (2019) Archeology and Social Memory

AN48CH13_Van_Dyke ARjats.
cls July 10, 2019 12:51
Annual Review of Anthropology

Archaeology and
Social Memory
Ruth M. Van Dyke
Department of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York,
Binghamton, New York 13902-6000, USA; email: rvandyke@binghamton.edu
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019. 48:207–25 Keywords

The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at
social memory, monuments, time, ruins, forgetting, counter-memory
anthro.annualreviews.org
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218- Abstract
011051
This review provides a road map through current trends and issues in archae-
Copyright © 2019 by Annual Reviews.
ological studies of memory. Many scholars continue to draw on Halbwachs
All rights reserved
for collective memory studies, emphasizing how the past can legitimate po-
litical authority. Others are inspired by Bergson, focusing on the persistent
material intrusion of the past into the present. “Past in the past” studies are
particularly widespread in the Near East/Classical world, Europe, the Maya
region, and Native North America. Archaeologists have viewed materialized
memory in various ways: as passively continuous, discursively referenced,
intentionally invented, obliterated. Key domains of inquiry include monu-
ments, places, and lieux de mémoire; treatment and disposal of the dead; ha-
bitual practices and senses; the recent and contemporary past; and forgetting
and erasure. Important contemporary work deploys archaeology as a tool of
counter-memory in the aftermath of recent violence and trauma.
207
AN48CH13_Van_Dyke ARjats.cls July 10, 2019 12:51
Visitors to the Iglesia de Santiago in the Galician town of Padrón approach an elaborate baroque
altar underlain by a white stone carved with an ancient Latin inscription: NO ORI ESES D S
P, which translates as “To Neptune with the contribution of the Irienses.” The presence of this
seemingly misplaced yet clearly venerated item is explained by a nearby plaque—also in Latin—
which describes how pious Catholics believe that this was the dock stone to which was tied the
ship that delivered the body of St. James to northwest Spain, before he was ultimately entombed in
Santiago de Compostela (Figure 1). Archaeological investigations in the area reveal the stone to be
one vestige of a pagan Roman past, integrated into a medieval and, eventually, a modern Catholic
present (Suárez Otero 2004). Meanwhile, in the nearby village of Cereixa, Xurxo Ayán Vila has
excavated the remains of a house where Guardia Civil soldiers killed anti-Francoist guerilla fight-
ers following the Spanish Civil War (Figure 2). Ayán Vila’s team recovered material evidence
that both confirms and refutes aspects of local versions of this 1949 event, and the excavation has
become a talking point for community members and descendants (Ayán Vila 2008).
Figure 1
A Roman dedication to Neptune on the stone under the altar of Iglesia de Santiago at Padrón, Galicia, Spain.
Photo by author.
208 Van Dyke

Figure 2
Xurxo Ayán Vila ( far left) shows colleagues his excavation site, the house where Guardia Civil soldiers killed anti-Francoist guerilla
fighters in 1949 near Cereixa, Galicia, Spain. Photo by author.
These cases, separated in space by less than 100 km, illustrate two kinds of archaeological en-
gagements with memory: in Padrón, a past given legitimacy by a more distant past, and in Cereixa,
archaeology as a tool with which to confront twentieth-century trauma. Early archaeological in-
terest in the topic of memory focused on studies of “the past in the past,” but the topic has since
expanded to encompass mortuary treatments, habitual practices, the recent and contemporary
past, and archaeology’s utility for social justice. Archaeologists draw inspiration from Halbwachs
for collective memory studies focused on the use of the past to legitimate political authority and
from Bergson for visions of persistent material intrusions of the past into the present. In a sense,
archaeology is memory all the way down because our discipline is the construction of social mem-
ory as deployed and created through engagement with material things and places.
Although archaeologists often use “collective memory,” “social memory,” “cultural memory,”
and “public memory” interchangeably, scholars with specific interests developed these terms.
“Collective memory” and “cultural memory” reference the creation and maintenance of nation-
alist (or other monolithic political) identities (e.g., J. Assman 2011), whereas “public memory”
denotes counterhistories that sit in opposition to official, state-sponsored (often textual) records
www.annualreviews.org • Archaeology and Social Memory 209

(e.g., Shackel 2001). Historians use “social memory,” the broadest term, to describe the relational,
contested ways that groups construct identities. I generally use “social memory” to encompass
multiple kinds of memory practices and perspectives, reserving “collective memory” for the in-
tentional construction of shared ideas about the past to serve specific (usually political) ends in the
present.
In this space- and reference-limited review, I chart a road map through current archaeological
trends and issues, avoiding detours into history and sociology (Climo & Cattell 2002, Olick &
Robbins 1998) as well as too much overlap into closely related topics such as heritage (Harrison
2012), death (Williams 2013), and archaeologies of the contemporary (Harrison & Breithoff 2017).
First, I briefly sketch the background to memory studies in archaeology. Then I describe key do-
mains of inquiry: memory in place and lieux de mémoire; the ancient dead; practice, intentionality,
and senses; time and persistent materials; forgetting; and counter-memory/political action. I con-
clude with thoughts on future directions.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Borić (2009) and Olivier (2011) provide excellent overviews of the ancient and modern philo-
sophical roots of the study of memory. The Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs [1992
(1925)] moved the discussion of memory beyond the bounds of the Freudian individual, arguing
that memory is a collective, group phenomenon. Following Halbwachs, historians and anthro-
pologists investigated collective memory as a mechanism for the legitimation and maintenance of
political regimes (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). Ancient history scholars Jan Assman [2011 (1992)]
and Aleida Assman (2011) built on Halbwachs to define “cultural memory”: the creation of offi-
cial, mythic pasts through monuments and texts that allow ancient states such as Egypt to persist
over time. For the Assmans, materials passively store cultural memory for subsequent generations
(see Bernbeck et al. 2017 for a critique).
Interest in the relationship of writing to memory led structural-functionalist anthropologists
(e.g., Goody 1987) to separate literate and oral social memory. In response, Connerton (1989)
distinguished between inscribed memory, involving monuments, texts, and representations, and
incorporated memory, encompassing bodily rituals and behavior (see also Rowlands 1993). Con-
nerton’s work reminded anthropologists that social memory involves both intentional acts (such as
the construction of monuments) and habitual practices (such as the chanting of a liturgy). How-
ever, archaeologists quickly realized that it is impossible to categorize memory practices in this
way because all inscribed behaviors also involve habitual practices, and many habitual practices
happen in the context of durable, monumental places (e.g., Hamilakis 2013, p. 89). Nonetheless,
the recognition that past peoples memorialized and razed their own more distant pasts just as
we do set off a boom in archaeological memory studies around the turn of the millennium (e.g.,
Alcock 2002, Bradley 2002, Bradley & Williams 1998, Holtorf 1996, Van Dyke & Alcock 2003,
Yoffee 2007; see Gillespie 2010 for a good review). This fervent interest in memory owes some of
its weight to the forces of capitalism (Connerton 2009), the rise of heritage studies (Smith 2006),
and the traumas of the twentieth century (see discussion in Van Dyke 2011).
MEMORY IN PLACE AND LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE

Social memory is always spatially situated, evoked by and associated with particular places (e.g.,
Basso 1996; Connerton 2009, pp. 7–39). As illustrated by the Roman altar stone in Padrón, a com-
pelling connection to the past is established when materials from different times exist in the same
space (Zerubavel 2012). Because all human experience is spatial, social memory may require access
210 Van Dyke

to particular places. In the Native American Southwest, for example, landforms and bodies of water
figure prominently in ancestral histories and group identities; Native communities struggle with
mining corporations and developers to retain control of these sacred locations (Van Dyke 2017c).
For Arab Alawites, shrines called zyaras commemorate the locations of events and are central to
religious practice; an inability to visit zyaras (which cannot be moved) impacts the sense of identity
of expatriated Arab Alawites (Can 2015). Contemporary nation-states such as Israel and Greece
deploy archaeology as a tool to validate constructed memory and legitimize claims to territory
(e.g., El-Haj 2001, Hamilakis 2009).
People visibly mark places with monumental architecture, shrines, stelae, and burial tumuli.
Many early “past in the past” studies (e.g., authors in Bradley & Williams 1998) focused on mon-
umental architecture, with Stonehenge (Bender 1998) as a quintessential example. Using Con-
nerton’s terminology, monumental architecture is both inscriptive (meant to communicate ideas
or evoke associations) and incorporated (experienced and sensed through the body). As the word
“monumental” implies, the builders of highly visible features attempted to project ideas and ma-
terials into the future (Bradley 2002, pp. 82–111); Holtorf (1996, 1997) called this “prospective”
memory. Although such projections usually take the form of intentional durability (such as stone
stelae or megalithic tombs), they may, by contrast, involve intentional decay and disappearance,
as in the case of wooden henges in the British Neolithic (Parker Pearson et al. 2006). Monu-
ments that persist into future times become focal points for new interpretations, new references,
new monuments, as beautifully demonstrated by a host of British landscape archaeologists (e.g.,
Barrett 1999, Jones 2007, Whittle 2009). When new monuments spatially reference previous eras,
archaeologists often interpret them as instances of elite legitimation (e.g., Alcock 2002, Sinopoli
2003, Van Dyke 2004).
On the heels of these early studies, using monumental mounds and architecture to investigate
the past in the past has become something of a cottage industry in archaeology, particularly in
the Near East/Classical world, Neolithic Europe, the Maya region, and Native North America
(e.g., Borić 2009, Fowler et al. 2010, Mixter & Henry 2017, Stanton & Magnoni 2008, Yoffee
2007). For example, Cosmopoulos (2014) uses stratigraphic, architectural, and ceramic evidence to
argue that eighth-century BCE Cretans legitimated the cult of Demeter through preservation and
reference to an earlier, Mycenaean temple. In the Naco Valley in Honduras, Schortman & Urban
(2011a,b) tie monumental architectural shifts to changing Classic Maya regimes. Iverson (2017)
uses architecture and ethnohistory to argue that Aztecs legitimated their power by referencing
both the real city of Tula and an imagined Tollan past. In Native America, much of the focus
has been on earthen mounds or “persistent places,” where multiple remodels and stratigraphy laid
down over time provide ample evidence of repetitive engagement with past activities (e.g., Gamble
2017, Henry 2017, Pauketat 2008, Thompson & Pluckhahn 2012, Wilson 2010).
However, manipulations of ancient buildings and burial mounds are not always best interpreted
as intentional attempts to reference the past to legitimate authority. Sometimes reuse of a building
is just expedient reuse of a building (Blake 2003), and change of a building’s function (from a
residence to a trash receptacle, for example) may have little to do with social memory. Authors in
Stanton & Magnoni (2008) explicitly interrogate these possibilities in the Maya area, where older
buildings may be referenced or reused to commemorate or erase the past, but intentionality is
difficult to discern because buildings last a long time.
Galaty (2018), moves the study of collective memory beyond a simplistic association between
monuments and legitimacy, following Jonker (1995) and J. Assman (2011) to develop a model
that explains how would-be leaders transformed individual memory (particularly from funerary
contexts) into collective memory, defined as “a symbolic, social-structural system that situates
cultural behaviors in space and time by linking them to a constructed past” (Galaty 2018, p. 2).

Using three case studies (ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and Albania), Galaty posits that diverse
collective “memory systems” enabled and constrained the rise and maintenance of different kinds
of sociopolitical configurations across millennia.
When archaeologists deploy “collective memory,” they should be mindful that scholars de-
veloped the concept in the context of modern nation-states; it may be inappropriate to equate
ancient states and empires with contemporary nationalisms (see discussion in Bernbeck 2017).
Nora’s (1989) term lieux de mémoire is frequently (and uncritically) used by archaeologists to refer-
ence places that have become monuments or focal points for collective memory. Nora developed
lieux de mémoire for places that gather history for purposes of French nationalism, contrasting
them with milieux de mémoire (the general circumstances of daily life that are lost to historians).
A French monument to the mythical nationalist hero Vercingetorix (Dietler 1998) is an excellent
example of a lieu de mémoire, but a repeatedly reused Bronze Age burial mound might not be.
Authors in Hofmann et al. (2017) identified problems with lieux de mémoire, including that not
all places that involve social memory involve national (or even collective) memory, that lieux lend
themselves very well to commodification, and that lieux can become places of abjection rather
than commemoration. Perhaps most problematically, establishing a lieu de mémoire creates a par-
tial vision of the past under the guise of a whole. Monumentalizing a particular site or event can
foreground one version of the event—often a mythic and problematic version—while simultane-
ously silencing other aspects of the story. Although materialized memory can be an attempt to
transform the discursive into the nondiscursive (Buchli & Lucas 2001, p. 13), this is not always
successful; Dolff-Bonekämper (2002) coined the term lieux de discorde for places that gather diverse
or contested versions of the past.
At Kalkriese, Germany, archaeologists confronted these complex problems head-on (Derks
2017). According to Classical sources, in 9 ce, Roman expansion in Central Europe across the
Rhine was checked when Germanic warriors, led by a tribal leader named Arminius, ambushed
and defeated the Roman leader Quinctilius Varus. Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries,
successive regimes revisited and recast this history as a nationalist story of a unified Germany, vic-
torious against an imperial Roman oppressor. At the battle site—Kalkriese—archaeologists care-
fully avoided creating a nationalist lieu de mémoire; rather, they used the site to challenge facile and
inaccurate equations of Arminius with a racist German past.
Alfredo González-Ruibal (2017) provides another example from excavations associated with
the Spanish Civil War. All war dead from Catalan are deposited in the Memorial de Campesines;
González-Ruibal points out that this lieu de mémoire does not create memory but obliterates it by
refusing to engage with the ideological nature of the conflict. “Both sides are depicted in equal
terms…[and] very little information on the causes and political contexts of the war is provided….
A heavily ideological war ends up being described as a dynastic or territorial conflict of the eigh-
teenth century, by focusing on military details, territorial gains and losses, weaponry, uniforms and
daily life” (González-Ruibal 2017, pp. 294–95).
THE ANCIENT DEAD

Mortuary practices are another good entry point for archaeological studies of memory (e.g., au-
thors in Chesson 2001; Hallam & Hockey 2001; Hill & Hageman 2016; Porter & Boutin 2014;
Williams 2003, 2006; see review in Williams 2013). Mortuary memory studies have dealt with the
treatment of human remains, grave goods, funerary monuments, power dynamics, personhood,
and community identity. Human bone is a durable, emotionally powerful medium; remains can
reference deceased individuals or can be disarticulated and recombined into ancestral collectives
(Overholtzer & Bolnick 2017, pp. 79–80; Verdery 1999, p. 27).
212 Van Dyke

Increasing sedentism brings changes in social relationships and mortuary practices, and it is
perhaps for this reason that the Eurasian Neolithic has been particularly fertile ground for studies
of memory and the dead. Neolithic bodies were frequently subject to secondary treatments, re-
distributions, and manipulations. Well-known investigations into barrows, megalithic tombs, and
mortuary practices in prehistoric Europe span the Neolithic through the Bronze Age (e.g., Barrett
1999; Bradley 2002; Holtorf 1997; Jones 2007; Parker Pearson et al. 2006; Thomas 2013, pp. 315–
53). Many examine the reuse or secondary manipulation of graves and human remains; the advent
of Bayesian chronological modeling has sharpened archaeologists’ ability to distinguish among
these processes (e.g., Whittle et al. 2007). At the Late Mesolithic/Neolithic site of Vlasac in the
Danube Gorges, Borić & Griffiths (2015) employed Bayesian modeling to identify a 240-year gap
between two sequences of burial activities in the same location. Borić argues that traces of the ear-
lier practices must have survived, and Neolithic peoples felt it important to reference them. Kuijt
(2001, 2008) provides a compelling description of Neolithic mortuary processes in the Near East,
where people initially interred the dead beneath house floors but marked and remembered loca-
tions of crania. Later, people re-excavated skulls, refleshed them with plaster, and reburied them
in large extramural caches. Kuijt contends that individuals were being transformed into collective,
perhaps fictive ancestors for the entire community in an emotionally charged, cyclical process,
creating social memory that contributed to stability across generations.
In Mesoamerican archaeology, many studies of mortuary memory involve the establishment
and maintenance of the lineage or house, anchored to place, across time (e.g., Joyce 2001; Lucero
2008; McAnany 1995, 2010). Working at Xaltocan in the Mesoamerican Postclassic, Overholtzer
& Bolnick (2017) examined household burials tied to claims to land and power. Using DNA analy-
sis in combination with stratigraphy and Bayesian statistics, they demonstrated that four groups of
people were buried beneath a house cluster, moving counterclockwise in time. Two of the clusters
were matrilineally related, but the others were not. Overholtzer & Bolnick concluded that this
was an instance of fictive kinship constructing spatial continuity.
Grave goods are another focus of mortuary memory studies. Lillios (2008) demonstrated that
engraved textile designs on Iberian Copper Age slate mortuary plaques signal group affiliation.
Jones (2007) and authors in Williams (2003) developed the idea of “technologies of remembrance”:
how interactions between funerary materials, places, and performances forge and remake memo-
ries of the dead. Working in Iron Age Scandinavia, Williams (2013) developed the idea of catalytic
commemoration, with grave goods (e.g., combs, iron rings, clay paws) meant to transform the
deceased.
Hamilakis’s (2013) work on mortuary commensality links the material aspects of funerary rites
(food remains, grave goods, culinary vessels, the space of the tomb) to the emotional and sensory
acts of mourning, eating, and drinking. In Bronze Age Crete, as people repeatedly installed the
newly dead in monumental tholos tombs, mourners had sensory interactions with the decaying
corpses, the monumental space of the tombs, and the things inside.
PRACTICE, INTENTIONALITY, SENSES

Influenced by Halbwachs, many archaeological memory studies view the past in the past as dis-
cursive, intentional, and instrumentalist. For Van Dyke & Alcock (2003), past peoples engaged
in “collective memory” practices, constructing memory to naturalize or legitimate authority, to
create a sense of community identity, or to disguise or ameliorate rupture. Holtorf’s (1996, 1997)
“prospective” monuments similarly illustrate intentional, discursive mnemonics. But memory is
never simply “banked” in monuments, texts, or objects—it is always interactively elicited and per-
formed (VanValkenburgh 2017, p. 121). And what of Connerton’s (1989) incorporated, habitual

actions “sedimented in the body through repetition” ( Jones 2007, p. 61)? As Bourdieu (1977)
knew very well, habitual, repetitive, nondiscursive practices are an important part of social stabil-
ity across time (see also Connerton 2009, pp. 18–27).
Archaeologists interested in decentering human agency and intentionality have turned their
memory work toward repetitive, habitual activities that characterize group identities and that en-
dure across generations, as reflected in depositional practices such as caches, shrines, burials, and
the creation of complex stratigraphy (Mills & Walker 2008). Hodder & Cessford’s (2004) microar-
tifact and architectural analyses at Çatalhöyük revealed how people repetitively swept, cooked,
and moved within cramped living spaces, passing the rules of social life across millennia. At Xu-
nantunich in the Maya Lowlands, LeCount (2010) demonstrates how pottery for domestic food
consumption helped construct community across generations. Hendon’s (2010) Houses in a Land-
scape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica illustrates how communities learn, make meaning,
and live together.
Archaeologists should be careful here, however—equating social identities and habitual prac-
tices with “social memory” risks conflating memory with culture, weakening memory’s heuristic
value (Berliner 2005, pp. 202–3). This trend can be seen, for example, in Fowler and colleagues’
(2010, p. 311) definition of social memory as “a set of processes that unify Maya traditions and
experiences into a unified whole.” In counterpoint, I have argued (Van Dyke 2009) that we should
(following Giddens) distinguish between discursive and practical memory. Discursive memory
refers to the intentional construction of pasts and counter-pasts—a process well-illustrated by,
but not limited to, the erection or dismantling of monuments. Practical memory involves the
unthinking activities, the habitual practices that constitute much of social life. Bergson similarly
distinguished between habit-memory, which requires no effort and is nondiscursive, and event-
memory, which is discursive and recalled with effort [Bergson 1991 (1896)]. Of course, as with
Connerton’s inscribed/incorporated dichotomy, discursive memory always involves nondiscursive
practices, and the habitual can be infused with intention. Sutton (2001), for example, describes
how the incorporated, nondiscursive, habitual practice of eating can become discursive “prospec-
tive memory” when it is undertaken to explicitly evoke the experience at some future time.
Although rarely cited by memory scholars, Ingold’s (1993) concept of “taskscape” is perhaps
the most creative and useful conception of the interplay between repetitive, daily, materialized
practices and memory. The taskscape is a landscape seen through time, with an array of human
and material beings attending to one another. In Oliver’s (2007) evocative example from northwest
North America, as groups of Salish revisit stands of trees to gather bark for baskets, they see scars
of previous journeys (theirs or their ancestors’), evoking memory, stories, emotion, and a shared
sense of Salish identity.
Sensory perception and memory are closely linked [Bergson 1991 (1896), p. 133; Jones 2007,
pp. 157–58; Van Dyke 2004]. In Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect,
Hamilakis follows Bergson and Deleuze to argue for archaeology as the study of multitemporal
sensorial assemblages that territorialize or gather together materials, people, emotions, practices,
perceptions, and memories (Hamilakis 2013, pp. 124–28). Hamilakis focuses particularly on eating
and drinking, sensory practices that happen repetitively and periodically. He argues that
(s)ocial memory thus can be experienced as a collective meta-sense which is activated by embodied
acts, such as food and drink consumption. While it would be simplistic to see memory as a process of
recording, storing, and retrieving, the sensory stimulations and effects activated by practices such as
eating are sedimented into the body, generating bodily memory. (Hamilakis 2013, p. 90)
Hamilakis illustrates his perspective with examples from ancient Greece. For example, Middle and
Late Bronze Age palaces on Crete celebrated sensory and mnemonic histories, evoking ancestors
and previous commensal events (Hamilakis 2013, pp. 161–90).
214 Van Dyke
TIME AND PERSISTENT MATERIALS

In one important sense, the study of memory is about how humans perceive and grapple with
time. Bergson [1991 (1896); see also Deleuze 1991 (1966)] wrote about memory from a very dif-
ferent vantage point than did Halbwachs. Bergson observed that the material world exists at a
temporal scale that transcends that of human life. The material past may be celebrated, ignored,
stabilized, or dismantled, but most of all, the material past persists. Our world is a multitemporal
palimpsest of durable objects. Things pile up, overlap, and intrude into the present. Like the stone
from Padrón, objects travel through multiple eras, acquiring new valences and meanings along the
way. As archaeologists well understand, cities and settlements are conglomerations of features and
buildings from bygone times (Harmanşah 2013, Huyssen 2003).
Many archaeologists interested in time and memory have found inspiration in Bergson’s work
(e.g., Borić 2009; Gosden 1994; Hamilakis 2013, pp. 122–12; Jones 2007; Lucas 2005, 2014;
Olivier 2004, 2011; Olsen 2010; Olsen & Pétursdóttir 2014). Archaeology’s materiality means
our discipline does not lend itself easily to historical narration of linear time, but rather describes
material intrusions of the past into the present. Olivier (2011) provides an interesting, accessible
treatment of the relationship between archaeology and memory in The Dark Abyss of Time. Time
may be viewed as linear and sequential, or cumulative and durational; from the latter perspec-
tive, every era is heterogeneous, filled with fragments of many pasts. Pasts are hidden from us
because they take the form of the present. Time thus becomes a “dark abyss” that has swallowed
entire worlds, and archaeologists are engaged in an Enlightenment project to shine light into this
darkness.
Durable objects such as the altar stone from Padrón provide frequent archaeological examples
of objects from earlier times that intrude into, and are reappropriated by, later ages. Similarly,
Hamilakis (2013, pp. 119–24; Hamilakis & Labanyi 2008) describes a fifth-century BCE fragment
from the Erechtheion that contains an 1805 Arabic inscription, juxtaposing Classical Greek and
Ottoman pasts. Some objects out of time are celebrated precisely because of their past associations.
The classical use of spolia—visible fragments of earlier buildings—is a good example (Gutteridge
2009, Papalexandrou 2003). Owing to their persistent and atemporal nature, stones from the past
can end up as foci for contestation, as was the case for a nineteenth-century fireplace in a twenty-
first-century Texas house museum (Van Dyke 2017b).
Phenomenologists Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty built on Bergson’s observations
about the nature of time and human experience, and these observations have, in turn, influenced
archaeologists, primarily through Gell’s (1992, 1998, pp. 221–58) work on art (e.g., Borić 2003,
2009; Jones 2007). An artist’s oeuvre or body of work is distributed in time, containing both pro-
tentions, or earlier harbingers, and retentions, or later versions of a given idea. Gell’s example
of these ideas neatly illustrates materiality in memory: As the shape and layout of Maori meet-
ing houses change through time, any given house is both recognizable to those built before and
presages those built later. Jones (2007, pp. 141–60) used protention and retention to describe
connections between motifs on ceramic vessels and metalwork in Bronze Age Scotland.
Peircean semiotics moves us beyond the idea of materials as boxes containing memory or signs
representing memory. The Peircean ideas of abduction (nondeductive inferences) and indexical-
ity (causal relationships) influenced Gell’s (1998) abduction of the index, in which objects or signs
(for Gell, indexes) exert secondary agency in abductive or inferential relationships with other ob-
jects, people, and ideas. Peirce and Gell inspired Jones (2007) to explore change and continu-
ity in structures, mortuary practices, and objects in prehistoric Europe. Materials invoke refer-
ences and relationships not only through formal similarities but also through practices, shared
experience, and emotional and sensory associations. For Chapman (2000), enchainment describes
how the physical breakage and sharing of objects in Neolithic and Copper Age Britain created

relationships across space and time. Several archaeologists have adopted citation, derived from
Derrida’s notion of iterability via Butler (1993), to denote references to the past (Borić 2003,
2009; Jones 2007; Van Dyke 2009). The classic example of iterability is a signature; it can be repli-
cated because it has a recognizable form, but these same, recognizable characteristics create the
possibility for a signature to be counterfeited.
As memory recedes beyond the scope of those still living, the past becomes ever more tenu-
ous and flexible, more open to multiple and contested interpretations, and more likely to become
lieux de discorde (Dolff-Bonekämper 2002). Ayán Vila (2008) sees this process in action as Cereixa
residents offer conflicting tales about the 1949 killings at his excavated house. Within recent and
living memory, people create knowledgeable links to the immediate past or to ancestors within the
scope of genealogical knowledge. Looking to the more distant past, people invent relationships
with mythical antiquity out of whole cloth. Between the genealogical and the mythical pasts lies a
fertile terrain where references may be replicated, emended, skewed, or transformed (Gosden &
Lock 1998, Meskell 2003). To tease out these differences, I contrasted citation—a direct, immedi-
ate copy—with translation—a more general reference to a mythic past (Van Dyke 2009). But my
dichotomy does not account for nondiscursive references to the past, such as the reuse of settle-
ments or the continuation of material styles over time (Mills & Walker 2008, Stanton & Magnoni
2008). Borić (2003, 2009; Borić & Griffiths 2015, p. 360) developed a tripartite schema—trace,
citation, and repetition/recapitulation—that includes discursive and nondiscursive material mem-
ory. Trace, following Derrida (e.g., 1973) and Ricoeur (1988), is simply the presence or awareness
of something from the past that is intruding into the present. Borić expanded citation beyond the
desire to create a perfect replica (as per Van Dyke 2009) to encompass all intentional or active
attempts to point to, or reference, something in the past. Repetition-recapitulation integrates or
synthesizes what is inherited from the past into practices in the present. Borić illustrates these
ideas with a discussion of Late Mesolithic–Early Neolithic burials in the Danube Gorges.
Materials not only persist; they also decay and accumulate. Influenced heavily by Bergson, ar-
chaeologies of memory bleed seamlessly into archaeologies of the contemporary (Buchli & Lucas
2001, Graves-Brown et al. 2013, Harrison & Breithoff 2017). Self-styled “symmetrical archaeolo-
gists” have followed Latour and others to elide differences between people and things, examining
how things persist in the world without human knowledge or intervention (e.g., Olsen 2010, 2013;
Olsen & Pétursdóttir 2014).
Olsen and Péttursdóttir find a romanticized beauty in persistent, decaying, quasi-abandoned
places such as the Soviet town of Pyramiden (abandoned in 1998), or Eyri, an Icelandic herring
cannery (abandoned in 1952). They use photography and archaeological methods to lay bare the
artificial divide between archaeologically acceptable, temporally distant pasts and the detritus of
industrialization and capitalism.
In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin [1999 (1927–1940)] developed the idea of ruination
as a critique of modernity, illustrating how a capitalist focus on things contains its own seeds
of destruction. Following Benjamin (1999) and Huyssen (2003), Dawdy’s (2010, 2016) work in
historic and contemporary New Orleans demonstrates that in late capitalism, ruins are always
intruding, always in the making. For González-Ruibal (2005), abandoned Galician houses stand
as testament to the ravages of capitalism, evoking the pain of economic hardship that led to mass
nineteenth- and twentieth-century emigration from the region.
For historical archaeology, standing ruins are talking points for eliciting local, community, oral
histories, as discussed in Orser (2010) and by authors in Jones & Russell’s (2012) edited journal
issue. Moshenska’s (2007) excavation of a World II Blitz attack area of East London provides an-
other good example. In Acadian Louisiana (Rees 2008) and Alsatian Texas (Van Dyke 2017b),
community members see archaeological materials as affirming and reproducing immigrant
216 Van Dyke

identities. Similar studies have begun to gain ground in the Classical world (authors in Dakouri-
Hild 2017). This area of work has synergy with heritage studies (e.g., Smith 2006, Harrison 2012).
FORGETTING
Forgetting is memory’s complement and counterpart. The relationships between remembering
and forgetting are “not a linear process but a struggle, a tension—in every material, something
has been left out or forgotten, in every removal, something is left behind, remembered” (Buchli
& Lucas 2001, p. 80). As some materials and events continue to be part of social consciousness,
others fall away into oblivion (Forty & Küchler 1999, Ricoeur 2004). Connerton (2009) considers
forgetting to be a condition of modernity, hastened by capitalism. Our material world is character-
ized by built-in obsolescence and constant remodeling. We are disconnected from our labor, living
in megacities that discourage walking, unable to make meaningful connections with the commod-
ified landscape around us—all aspects of late-stage capitalism that interfere with the construction
and continuation of memory.
Deliberate erasure of the past can be an effective strategy for gaining power over others
(Starzmann & Roby 2016, Trouillot 1995). Bell Beaker people blocked older megalithic tombs
in Europe, perhaps for protection from dangerous ancestors (Sommer 2017). In damnatio memo-
riae, the Roman Senate officially condemned an emperor’s memory; Pool & Loughlin (2017) sug-
gest that something similar happened to an Olmec ruler depicted on a stela from Tres Zapotes,
Mexico. The face was pecked off and thousands of obsidian blades were packed around the mon-
ument in what appears to be an act of political erasure. Galaty (2018, pp. 151–55) explains how
Islamic extremists have prioritized the destruction of monuments such as Palmyra because the
destruction of the material sites of collective memory is a move toward cultural amnesia. By re-
moving citations to earlier times that might be employed in resistance, despots create an empty
slate for domination—a strategy that worked well for many ancient states.
González-Ruibal (2016a) describes the outcome of such a strategy on the island of Corisco in
Equatorial Guinea. When he attempted to engage local Benga people in archaeological endeavors
spanning from the Iron Age to recent history, the people were uninterested. For the Benga, cen-
turies of colonial domination followed by dictatorship had entirely obliterated Benga language,
history, architecture, and crafts, replacing them with European history and ideas; suffering from
cultural amnesia, the Benga considered their local heritage to be irrelevant.
Sometimes materials are concealed or destroyed to create or enhance memory of people or
events rather than to obliterate them. The elaborate wooden malanggan mortuary carvings of
Papua New Guinea are one well-known example (Küchler 2002); European Bronze Age hoards
are another (e.g., Bradley 2002). In the ancient Southwest United States, collectively owned items
of powerful ritual paraphernalia were broken or sealed inside building walls when ritual practices
changed or ended (Mills 2008). These are cases of “remembering while forgetting,” when render-
ing materials inaccessible contributes to the continuity of social memory rather than its rupture.
Sometimes destruction of monuments is intended to erase the past, but the process backfires,
amplifying what is supposed to be eliminated and creating counter-memory (Bernbeck et al. 2017).
For example, in racially charged Baltimore, monuments to Confederate generals Robert E. Lee
and Stonewall Jackson recently became foci for protests and deliberate interventions in a display
that Osborne (2017) describes as counter-monumentality.
CHALLENGING OBLIVION: COUNTER-MEMORY

AND POLITICAL ACTION
Perhaps the most important work happening in our discipline is the use of archaeology as a tool
to remedy the oblivion caused by trauma and pernicious regimes. When some archaeologists use
the term memory, they are talking about using archaeology to recover evidence and traces of
obliterated events, for purposes of social justice in the present—in short, archaeology as politi-
cal action (McGuire 2008). This concept is sometimes glossed as “counter-memory” because the
archaeological narratives produced are usually in opposition to the dominant history. Historical
archaeology, contemporary archaeology, and Indigenous archaeology are leading the way, with ex-
emplary work by authors in Starzmann & Roby (2016), Hofmann et al. (2017), Shackel & Roller
(2013), Bruchac et al. (2016), González-Ruibal & Moshenska (2015), Rubertone (2008), Silliman
(2009), and others.
Starzmann & Roby’s (2016) edited volume, Excavating Memory, brings together anthropolo-
gists across the subdisciplines. Most of the archaeological cases are focused on contested places,
unremembered silences, violence, and conflict. Authors see memory as a contested field embed-
ded in political relations; following Trouillot (1995), remembering and forgetting are strategies of
power. The goal of the volume is to “decenter dominant memory discourses by exploring the in-
terstitial spaces that are located between remembering and forgetting” (Starzmann & Roby 2016,
p. 10). Gonzáles-Tennant (2016), for example, conducts archaeology in Rosewood, Florida, where
an entire African American town was destroyed in a pogrom carried out by white neighbors in
1923. Archaeology cannot right that wrong, but it can document what happened and can inspire
survivors’ descendants to tell their stories.
During the Argentine military dictatorships of the 1970s and early 1980s, between 9,000 and
30,000 people (desaparecidos) were abducted, tortured, and killed at sites such as La Perla—a former
school turned concentration camp (Figure 3). In 1983, the newly elected democratic government
set up a commission to find out what happened to the desaparecidos and to bring the perpetrators
to justice (CONADEP 1984). At La Perla, archaeologists deployed their skills to amass evidence
against the perpetrators. Today, La Perla is a memory museum—one of many throughout the
country that help keep the horrors of the dictatorships in public consciousness so that they cannot
happen again (Salerno & Zarankin 2015). The museums are emotional places where survivors can
come to remember their lost family members and grieve.
Ayán Vila’s excavation at Cereixa is but one example of similar work in Spain, where archae-
ologists and forensic anthropologists identify and exhume mass graves and battlefield sites from
the Civil War (1936–1939). Often these projects generate considerable local and governmental
controversy, as their work revives traumatic events that some would prefer to leave to oblivion
(González-Ruibal 2012, 2016b, 2017). In other areas of Europe, archaeologists have turned their
attention to battlefield sites from World War II (Filipucci 2009, González-Ruibal & Moshenska
2015, Moshenska 2007) and to illuminating Nazi persecutions (Bernbeck 2018).
In North America, some of the best-known work on counter-memory is focused on class and
race, including archaeology of historic Annapolis (Leone 2005), the Ludlow coal miners’ massacre
in Colorado (Larkin & McGuire 2010), Civil War battlefields and monuments (Shackel 2001), and
the African Burial Ground in New York City (Perry et al. 2006) (see also authors in Shackel &
Roller 2013).
Indigenous archaeology foregrounds Native American and First Nations histories, oral tradi-
tions, and perspectives. Colwell-Chanthaphonh & Ferguson (2006) explain how Hopi and other
US Southwest tribes see archaeological sites as materialized memory. Chaco Canyon is a “mem-
ory anchor” with conflicting, contested claims from Navajo and Pueblo peoples (Van Dyke 2017a).
Charles Cobb’s Distinguished Lecture at the 2018 meetings of the American Anthropological As-
sociation described how colonialism contributed to the systematic erasure of Indigenous collective
memory and highlighted ways that archaeology can help reclaim it. Silliman (2009) and Cipolla
(2008) document how traditional material uses and practices helped maintain Indigenous identity
in the face of conquest and colonization. Rodning (2009) shows how continuity in the placement
218 Van Dyke

Figure 3
Andres Laguens (right) discusses how archaeologists used their skills to amass evidence that helped convict those responsible for torture
and murder at La Perla, which is now a memory museum. Photo by author.
and alignment of Cherokee townhouses contributed to stability in the wake of European con-
tact. Euro-American archaeologists working in Latin America and South America are similarly
awakening to the importance of deploying their craft to assist Indigenous communities with the
recovery of social memory. Borgstede (2010) worked with Jakaltek Maya on the interpretation of
sacred sites associated with mountains, caves, and rivers in Jacaltenango, Guatemala. McAnany
(2016) relates how new collaborative archaeology programs are encouraging dialogue, rebuilding
connections, and helping to heal the separation of ethnolinguistic Maya from their own pasts by
the forces of colonialism.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Amid a contemporary cultural fascination with memory, archaeology occupies a unique position.
Materials may be employed in memorials or intentionally obliterated; they may endure for mil-
lennia or fade away. Archaeologists analytically engage with the role of things in memory across
time and space, we think philosophically about the interplay between materials and time, and we

deploy materialized memory as a political tool in the present. My opening examples from Padrón
and Cereixa in northwest Spain illustrate but two facets of a memory literature that is both wide
and deep.
Such diversity is healthy for the discipline, but I am concerned about the strange disconnect
between symmetrical archaeologists (e.g., Olsen 2010, Olsen & Pétursdóttir 2014) and those en-
gaged in practices of counter-memory (e.g., González-Ruibal & Moshenska 2015, Starzmann &
Roby 2016). Both groups trace philosophical roots to Bergson and Benjamin, and both groups
work in the contemporary, but symmetrical archaeologists generally stop short of mobilizing their
materials for critique, preferring to “let things speak for themselves.” In a world where all archae-
ology is surely political, this approach strikes me as an abnegation of responsibility.
Our discipline is the construction of social memory. Archaeology is on the front lines of ongo-
ing debates over which pasts to preserve and which to consign to oblivion. We are all too aware
of these conflicts in the US Southwest, where energy development rolls roughshod over ancient
landscapes important to both archaeologists and Indigenous descendant communities (Van Dyke
& Heitman 2020). Materials carrying mnemonic valences from the past are the sites and the stakes
of these struggles. Particularly in these troubling times, archaeologists should not be reticent to
wield our trowels in the interest of more equitable and just futures.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The author is not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might
be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to Charlie Cobb, Zoë Crossland, Siobhan Hart, Rui Gomes Coelho, and Randy
McGuire for comments and feedback, which helped me improve this review. All errors and short-
comings remain my responsibility.
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cls July 10, 2019 12:51

Annual Review of Anthropology

Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019. 48:207–25 Keywords

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MEMORY IN PLACE AND LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE

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THE ANCIENT DEAD

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PRACTICE, INTENTIONALITY, SENSES

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TIME AND PERSISTENT MATERIALS

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CHALLENGING OBLIVION: COUNTER-MEMORY

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