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Kjel Knutsson
sources for and stand as representations of past events in that narrative. The
past as material culture is thus actively engaged in the present and made in
telligible in relation to our view of the world.
The skill necessary to be able to replicate and read stones is a matter of
bodily and cognitive experience, something we have several examples of at
the workshop. This is the technically skilled practioner “who knows”.
The archaeologist or lithic analyst then, in my argument, is but one, the
latest one, in a long sequence of “archaeologists”. The lithic craft person
thousands of years ago, “returning” to old campsites of their past, may ac
tively have used the relics found to recreate a craft using the same objecti
fying strategy. Not only as “discursive objects or phenomena of the subjects
(craftsmans) cognitive experience”, but based on the “real” qualities they
possess, qualities that “shape both our perception of them and our cohabitation with
them” (Olsen 2003:88
tions,
it is human agents and their webs of social relations and values that are central
cultural context, the craft being reproduced from within so to speak could
salizing frame. Here the “intertwined social and material constitutions of
material practice” has temporarily been made separate (the Present in Mau
knowledge as seen by Jacques Pelegrin (1990), or
re-collective remembering
2003:97)), making “the mechanical and chemical properties” (Dobres 2000 and
thus regularities of fractures in brittle solids (Knutsson 1998) more open
sised in the process, mimicking the distanced analytical work of the natural
scientist in the true Baconian tradition. This distant view is thought of as
being typical of the modern mind. But this is only the surface; underneath
this technical relationship to past materialities there is another relation, the
relation to history that forces people to “return to the sources” (Bourdieu
to its history, this return cannot stand apart from it.
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