Practice beyond processual archaeology

Christophersen's essay is structured around a critique of processual approaches to towns in Scandinavian archaeology. He argues that processual archaeology offers a ‘steadfast reconstruction of the medieval town as a structure lacking individuals and held together by political, economic and productive structures’ (pp. 109–10). Elsewhere (p. 119), he argues that ‘processual urban archaeology has traditionally been mainly concerned with the instrumental functions of urban landscapes’. The critique here is that processual approaches lose sight of the actions and performances of people which were crucial to the way towns formed, as he describes (p. 129): ‘the formation and development of practice would thus have been able to permeate and bind together the urban space through its own creative dynamics, which initiated the social, cultural and material development of medieval urban communities’. Although this critique is generally well placed, I take issue with how Christophersen argues that his new approach to urban practice replaces processual concerns (‘an alternative to the processual research tradition’ (p. 110)), when in fact it might be better to see a practice approach as building out from, and at times complementing, processual concerns. Although I agree wholeheartedly on the importance and centrality of practice in the constitution and transformation of urban societies, the structures and functions that places and relationships acquire through practice cannot be simply ignored but are rather part of ongoing social practices and performances. Robin (Reference Robin2013, 19), in her theoretical introduction to the study of everyday life in Belize, describes this more critical approach well: ‘critical perspectives on everyday life demonstrate how people construct their social world through daily practices and expose the structural constraints and power relations that exist for and among individuals in society and how these practices affect and are affected by day-to-day interactions’. Her description (ibid., 33) of de Certeau's (Reference De Certeau1984) distinction between ‘voyeurs’ and ‘walkers’ in The practice of everyday life offers a useful example: a voyeur looks down upon the city from on high, seeing the whole of it as ‘a city planner, institution, government, or leader might see’, but this perspective misses the actual activity on the ground, that of the walkers, those who ‘form the chorus of footsteps that give life and meaning to the concept of the city’. She argues further that ‘while the spatial order constructed by planners, leaders, or institutions organizes what is possible, the walker actualizes some of these and also invents others’.

In this example we can see the implicit distinction that Christophersen draws between the top-down approaches of processualists and the bottom-up approaches of practice theory. In doing so, and in focusing exclusively on the bottom-up practices, his approach may be less attuned to the mechanics of power in towns. Christophersen's approach does offer the possibility of understanding how power works in Scandinavian towns – how it is created, constituted and practised through interactions of everyday life (Robin Reference Robin2013, 28) – yet we hear little about this in his examples. This may be because of his efforts to exorcise processual concerns and its attendant “political, economic, and productive structures.” For example, in discussion of ports, he draws a distinction between a processual and a social-practice approach:

There is, however, no need to make these discourses mutually exclusive; the ‘working partnerships’ recovered through the study of social practice might be transformative of the way a town functions. The relationship between these approaches thus should not be seen as one replacing another, but rather as the relationship between practice and structure.

A number of archaeological approaches to urban places have explored this dynamic. One recent example is a set of studies in Creekmore and Fisher (2013, 1), where they argue that ‘there is a mutually constituting relationship between urban form and the actions and interactions of a plurality of individuals, groups and institutions’. These studies explore the multiple levels that ‘operated simultaneously’: ‘top-down actions by political authorities . . . mid-level actions of particular socioeconomic groups or neighborhoods and districts, and grassroots actions seen in the daily practice of households and individuals’. Rather than enforcing a strict distinction between processual and practice approaches, such studies work productively between them, exploring relationships between different levels within urban settings (see also Smith Reference Smith2007; Rapoport Reference Rapoport and Poyatos1988; Reference Rapoport1990). Similarly, a rich literature on cities and everyday life not referenced in Christophersen's essay may provide a more critical approach to a social-practice approach to urban communities. As already mentioned, the work of Michel de Certeau (Reference De Certeau1984) could provide important theoretical inputs, bringing to the study of urban contexts a practice orientation of everyday life as well as a clear notion of space and place. Although more focused on contemporary cities and periods, Gardiner (Reference Gardiner2000) and Highmore (Reference Highmore2002; Reference Highmore2011) offer up further theoretical interventions that would help bolster the theoretical framing of everyday life alongside the more robust work that is offered for social-practice theory. Finally, I return to Robin's (Reference Robin2013) indispensable study of Mayan communities in Belize, in which she articulates an extremely clear vision of an archaeology of everyday life. She argues (ibid., 5) that the study of daily life is not only a counter to more structural approaches, but in fact a nexus: ‘It is at the daily level of people's lived experiences that the micro (self, interaction, experience) and the macro (institutions, power relations, societies) levels of social life intersect.’

Practice, contingency and unintended consequences

It is clear that one of Christophersen's concerns about processual approaches to Scandinavian towns is their tendency to offer functionalist or mechanistic interpretations. The approach that he sketches offers the possibility for interpretations to capture some of the sense of contingency that occurred as people lived and acted in towns. I want to follow one thread that hints at contingency culminating in one of the final examples of the essay. In this example, he offers a brief discussion of contact zones which include open spaces such as streets, squares, and port areas. In these locations, he argues, people ‘met informally and in socially non-committal relationships’ (p. 131). Such locations, he believes, would be conducive to the creation of

Here we see the way in which a ‘practice complex’ can emerge in quite unintended ways. And it is through the attention to social practice that archaeologists can begin to see how unintentional and unanticipated activities, materials, and performances can serve to shape the histories of towns themselves. As this argument is positioned at the very end of the essay it is hard not to see it as a culminating one. This can be read as one of the crucial contributions of the model presented: the ability to describe and understand unintended consequences as they emerge in the ‘phases’ of practice (proto-practices, stabilized practices and ex-practices), or in particular bundles or complexes of practices.

More than a decade ago, Joyce (Reference Joyce2004) offered a similar argument for monumental constructions in Mesoamerica. In her example (ibid., 6), the early monumental constructions were platforms built in well-known styles and materials ‘that probably did not reflect a radically altered use of space or the invention of a new category of building’. In time, however, ‘these more durable buildings permanently changed the spatial arena within which agents lived and worked, and these arguably unintended consequences of the first building projects furnished new sites for innovative practices that, through repetition, became standardized parts of Mesoamerican practices’. This argument provides a useful comparison to Christophersen's study: we can see how Joyce's study begins with the contingency of social practices and the possibility of unintended consequences, even while acknowledging that ‘actors are always knowledgeable . . . [and] act with intention’ (ibid., 5). And yet, as Joyce (and Christophersen) make clear, ‘their knowledge is not always (or ever) perfect’. The result, then, is often unintended consequences: ‘what we see is as likely to be a result of unforeseen effects of decisions made with other goals in mind’. Although Christophersen gets to this point at the end of his essay, I believe that there is much in his model to develop this idea more robustly, beyond ‘leakage zones’ and his less developed sense of ‘creativity’.

Applying the theory

Christophersen's paper offers some intriguing examples in which his theoretical approach might be applied, focusing on quarters, ports and public spaces. And while it is important to see what types of questions might emerge when this practice theory is applied to these contexts, I was unsure as to how archaeological data would ultimately be deployed to address the theoretical model presented. It is one thing to offer a description of the phases of practice patterns (proto-, stabilized and ex-practices) but it is another to connect that framework to archaeological data that can offer the level of granularity needed to distinguish one from the other. Many of the examples lead to questions that would seem to be very difficult to address archaeologically (‘Who were the workers who loaded and unloaded vessels in medieval Trondheim?’ Were they “casual labourers”? How did the development of [port] practices affect the organization of the workers who loaded and unloaded goods?’ (p. 128)). Christophersen acknowledges that some of these questions are not answerable, but suggests that we need to ask them ‘inspired and supported by the physical remains’. The physical remains that can address such questions are, of course, produced by traditional archaeological approaches but must also expand significantly to include advances in archaeological techniques such as geophysical survey, geochemical testing, soil micromorphology and attention to micro-remains such as micro-artefacts and phytoliths.

To provide a very brief sense of how certain techniques might be useful to Christophersen's practice approach, I discuss my collaborative research project with Stephanie Wynne-Jones at Songo Mnara, a medieval Swahili town on the southern Tanzanian coast. This project has applied a suite of techniques to explore the use of space in houses and public zones (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones Reference Fleisher and Wynne-Jones2010; Reference Fleisher and Wynne-Jones2012; Reference Fleisher and Wynne-Jones2013); through these efforts, research at Songo Mnara has begun to reveal the interplay between planning and practice. We take seriously the power of elite members of society to plan town spaces and build elaborate houses, while at the same time investigating and revealing the myriad ways that peoples’ lived experiences shaped how towns developed and changed. This work approximates Christophersen's concept of the towns as “performative social practice” while explicitly examining the way social practice is related to relations of power within the town (Fleisher and Wynne-Jones Reference Fleisher and Wynne-Jones2012, 202).

Since 2009, we have applied a set of methods to public spaces and houses that have offered evidence at the level of daily practice. In the public spaces at Songo Mnara (akin to what Christophersen calls ‘leakage zones’), we have conducted extensive geochemical and geophysical sampling as well as more traditional test excavations and shovel test pits. By correlating these multiple techniques we have been able to populate outdoor, public spaces with recursive human activities: the ongoing protection of public areas through waste-avoidance practices, long-term commemorative deposition practices, the small-scale production of materials like shell beads, the possible use of public space for drying nets or fish, and the creation of sightlines and differential visibility across town spaces (Fleisher Reference Fleisher2013; Reference Fleisher2014; Fleisher and Sulas Reference Fleisher and Sulas2015; Fleisher and Wynne-Jones Reference Fleisher and Wynne-Jones2012). Within houses, research has included soil micromorphology, geochemistry and phytolith analysis: this suite of techniques has helped reveal locations where plants were processed and burned, what types of plant were used in the houses, and how floors were plastered and replastered (Sulas and Madella Reference Sulas and Madella2012; Wynne-Jones Reference Wynne-Jones2013). The addition of these techniques to the traditional excavation of houses has transformed our understanding of them: where once excavations would have allowed for an assessment of the size, shape and features of the rooms, we can now begin reconstructing the ephemeral and recursive practices of the people who inhabited them. There are many projects which now deploy these techniques, and they are increasingly applied to the study of houses and urban settings (Shahack-Gross et al. Reference Shahack-Gross, Gilboa, Nagar-Hilman, Sharon and Weiner2005; Shillito and Ryan Reference Shillito and Ryan2013; Milek and Roberts Reference Milek and Roberts2013). The point in describing this work is to suggest that the work of reconstructing the recursive and often ephemeral practices of past people requires a shift in the analytic units with which archaeologists work – the reconstruction of ‘practice complexes’ will not be accomplished only through traditional archaeological excavations and stratigraphic analyses. The fine-grained perspective that such techniques offer is the scale at which the routinization of practices can be investigated, but it requires an expanded approach to archaeological fieldwork.