Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter 29 — The Archaeologists

A Relational Anthropologist’s Guide to the Disciplinary Darlings (and the Bones They Built Their Thrones On)

Archaeology is the subfield where the institution’s crushes are the most obvious.
No other branch of anthropology has such a dramatic love affair with its own “great men,” its own heroic narratives, its own myth of the lone genius brushing dust off the past.

This chapter reads the major archaeological theorists through the Four F’s — Friend, Foe, Food, Fornicate — and through the relational lens that reveals what the institution rewards, what it hides, and what it refuses to see.

This is the chapter where we name the truth:
archaeology has always been more in love with its heroes than with the humans whose lives they excavated.

THE FOUNDING MYTHMAKERS

Johann Winckelmann

Friend: No — aesthetic hierarchy, classical fetishism
Foe: Yes — Eurocentric beauty standards
Food: He fed art history, not anthropology
Fornicate: The institution swoons over him

Relational verdict:
The institution’s first crush. Aesthetic, elitist, non-relational.

Jacques Boucher de Perthes

Friend: Yes — recognized ancient stone tools
Foe: No
Food: He nourished the field with deep-time awareness
Fornicate: The institution loves him for being “right early”

Relational verdict:
A necessary ancestor, but not relational.

Gabriel de Mortillet

Friend: Sometimes — typology
Foe: Yes — rigid evolutionary schemes
Food: He brought order
Fornicate: The institution loves his neat categories

Relational verdict:
A classifier, not a companion.

THE IMPERIAL EXCAVATORS

Flinders Petrie

Friend: No — racial typology, eugenics
Foe: Yes — deeply harmful
Food: He brought seriation
Fornicate: The institution worships him

Relational verdict:
A brilliant methodologist with a violent worldview.

Kathleen Kenyon

Friend: Yes — stratigraphy, rigor
Foe: Rarely
Food: She nourished the field with precision
Fornicate: The institution respects her, but less than her male peers

Relational verdict:
A relational ancestor in method, not theory.

Mortimer Wheeler

Friend: Sometimes — public archaeology
Foe: Often — militaristic, colonial
Food: He brought the grid
Fornicate: The institution adores him

Relational verdict:
A charismatic obstacle.

THE THEORISTS WHO SHAPED THE FIELD

V. Gordon Childe

Friend: Yes — social evolution with nuance
Foe: Sometimes — still evolutionary
Food: He fed the field with synthesis
Fornicate: The institution loves his grand narratives

Relational verdict:
A visionary who tried to humanize prehistory.

Julian Steward

Friend: Sometimes — cultural ecology
Foe: Yes — determinism
Food: He nourished the field with systems thinking
Fornicate: The institution loves his neat models

Relational verdict:
A bridge figure with a controlling streak.

Lewis Binford

Friend: No — processualism is anti-relational
Foe: Yes — scientism, hostility to meaning
Food: He brought rigor
Fornicate: The institution worships him

Relational verdict:
The high priest of transactionality.

THE POST-PROCESSUAL REVOLUTIONARIES

Ian Hodder

Friend: Yes — reflexivity, meaning, agency
Foe: Rarely
Food: He nourished the field with relational interpretation
Fornicate: The institution tolerates him

Relational verdict:
A relational ancestor. He brought humanity back into the ruins.

Michael Shanks

Friend: Yes — critical archaeology
Foe: No
Food: He feeds the field with theory
Fornicate: Yes — his writing incites

Relational verdict:
A provocateur who insists archaeology is cultural, not mechanical.

Colin Renfrew

Friend: Sometimes — cognitive archaeology
Foe: Sometimes — still structural
Food: He nourished the field with interdisciplinary reach
Fornicate: The institution loves him

Relational verdict:
A respected synthesizer, not fully relational.

THE MATERIALITY & OBJECT-ORIENTED TURN

Bjørnar Olsen

Friend: Yes — things as relational actors
Foe: No
Food: He nourishes the field with materiality
Fornicate: Yes — his ideas spark desire

Relational verdict:
A major ally for relational ontology.

Laurent Olivier

Friend: Yes — memory, time, materiality
Foe: No
Food: He feeds the field with temporal depth
Fornicate: Yes — his writing is evocative

Relational verdict:
A relational thinker in a field that rarely allows them.

David Graeber (anthropology-adjacent but essential)

Friend: Absolutely — relational economics, value, care
Foe: Never
Food: He nourished the field with imagination
Fornicate: Yes — endlessly inspiring

Relational verdict:
A relational revolutionary. The institution loves him posthumously.

THE AMERICANISTS & SYSTEMS THINKERS

James Scott

Friend: Yes — resistance, state avoidance
Foe: No
Food: He nourishes with political insight
Fornicate: Yes — his ideas incite rebellion

Relational verdict:
A relational thinker disguised as a political scientist.

Kent Flannery

Friend: Sometimes — systems ecology
Foe: Sometimes — deterministic
Food: He fed the field with models
Fornicate: The institution respects him

Relational verdict:
A systems thinker who occasionally glimpsed relationality.

What This Lineage Reveals

Archaeology is the subfield where the institution’s preferences are loudest:

It loves order
It loves systems
It loves heroes
It loves grand narratives
It loves control
It loves certainty
It loves the grid
It loves the man with the trowel

But relationality?
Meaning?
Care?
Ethics?
Survivor literacy?
The humanity of the people whose lives are being reconstructed?

Those were always afterthoughts.

This chapter shows why Relational Anthropology is not a critique from the outside — it is the missing organ that reveals what archaeology has been blind to:

The past is not a puzzle to be solved.
It is a relationship to be tended.