Assembling Archaeology. Teaching, Practice, and Research

Abstract

This book is a timely and important contribution to knowledge production in archaeology. Firmly grounded in the two authors’ own teaching experience and previous conversations about pedagogy, the book makes a convincing case for the value of assemblage approaches. The solution offered requires a rethinking of teaching, training, and practice in archaeology, turning the very discipline into the subject of investigation. Facing neoliberal political economy and its narrow-minded demands for humanistic disciplines to be ‘useful’, there is a need to resituate and re-weave the web of relations between archaeological teaching and research. At its core, the book addresses the undervaluing of teaching. As the authors point out, such undervaluing has seriously affected the fundamentals of contemporary archaeological practice and is anchored in a lack of diversity in disciplinary demographics. Overall, the book is well written, well-structured, and well researched. Its greatest merit, however, is that it offers a sympathetic view that takes students – including their various viewpoints and points of entry into archaeology – seriously. From early on this reader is struck by two key qualities. The first is how useful the book is for teachers of archaeology. Not only in giving practical advice, but also in providing a much-needed comprehensive status for pedagogical research of particular relevance for the discipline. The second quality is how refreshingly clear the authors are in their criticism of neoliberalism. The core message is well summarized in the concluding chapter: ‘a fundamental way to challenge neoliberal agendas [...] is to recognize [...] that a place in which learning emerges is through research, and that research often emerges through teaching’ (p. 153, orig. emphases). Cobb and Croucher’s departure point for this book might humble even the most experienced teachers of theory in archaeology. Such readers will quickly recognize the philosophical heritage of the assemblage framework, drawing primarily on Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) but referring to a wide array of ‘assemblage thinkers’ like DeLanda, Latour, Barad, and Bennett (cf. Hamilakis and Jones 2017, pp. 80–81). A key concept is rhizomatic learning, ‘something which develops along messy, non-linear, complicated, and unpredictable routes’. This fuels the authors’ rethinking of ‘both interpretations of the past and practice in the present in realist, new materialist, non-anthropocentric ways’ (pp. 46–47). While this wonderfully ‘messy’ approach levels with students’ experiences of uncertainty and unpredictability, it is not the easiest to convey in an accessible manner. In my opinion, Cobb and Croucher manages this quite well, first and foremost because they never lose sight of what they really want to achieve: a concrete archaeological pedagogy that takes students’ everyday challenges and life-worlds seriously. The book consists of 10 chapters and has a cumulative structure. Five of the chapters are relatively conventional book chapters: an Introduction (Chapter 1) followed by three central theoretical discussion chapters (Chapters 4, 6 and 8). The title of Chapter 8, ‘A Thousand Learning Assemblages: Teaching Learning and Scale’, is a nod to Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The final Chapter 10 offers a set of concluding reflections and recommendations. Interestingly, the authors’ weave a student narrative into this more traditional textbook structure. The five chapters carrying this narrative are generally shorter and are all