Paper short abstract:

Imagine an archaeology-cum-anthropology of the future, which has put aside the ideas of an ancient past and of the human as a duplicitous state of being in nature while knowing out of it. Together, these disciplines have the potential to lay the foundations for a new, post-human science.

Paper long abstract:

Imagine a future in which the divisions between anthropology and archaeology, which so exercised our predecessors, have disappeared. Even the disciplinary prefixes, archaeo- and anthropo-, have lost their appeal, as we have come to realise that although the world’s inhabitants follow in the ways of their predecessors, none are more ancient than any other, nor others more modern, and that the distinction between knowing and being that underwrites the concept of the human is unsustainable. Looking back, the intellectual historians of this future will wonder how the scientists of today have been so beguiled by a theory that can only comprehend the evolution of being in nature as an evolution of knowing out of it, and will puzzle over the consequent construction of original humans as curiously constituted hybrids of genes and culture. They will chart the messy implosion of these ways of thinking and the humbling of big science in the wake of the collapse of the institutions of finance on which it depended. And they will tell of how, like small mammals in the last age of the dinosaurs, today’s disciplines of anthropology and archaeology survived the maelstrom, quietly ushering in a genuine revolution in the way we see ourselves. Together they went on to lay the foundations of a new, post-human science, at last realising the dream of Giambattista Vico three centuries previously, that starts from the recognition that knowing is itself a practice of habitation, of dwelling in a world that is continually growing over.