Understanding communities through things: Archaeology as a social science
We need things – if only to manage our everyday lives. A world without vehicles, lamps or crockery, for example, is unimaginable. In our society, the number of things and, above all, their functional specialisation has increased massively in recent decades. A customised device is produced for every situation in life, with the result that more and more initiatives for ethical consumption, such as local swap meets, are springing up to reduce waste and the amount of things. This shift in mentality shows that consumption depends on social perceptions. The way people deal with things is deeply embedded in their lifestyles and cultural concepts. Therefore, the mutual interactions between people and their non-human environment are crucial to understand social orders.
The unremarkable thing in the picture on the left is a case in point. The small, solid rod made of fired clay is clearly abraded on all sides and was therefore probably used as a tool. It has been reused, as its size, shape and material suggest that it was originally the handle of an amphora made in Greece as a transport container (image on the right). When the amphora broke, the shards were not all disposed of but recycled. The context of the find adds another dimension: the rod was found together with similarly abraded amphora fragments in a small, seasonally inhabited settlement on the Sea of Azov. The inhabitants of this settlement apparently had a regular need for grinding tools and recycled amphorae for this purpose. One reason for this is the steppe landscape, where suitable resources were scarce or more difficult to access than the amphorae imported from distant Greece.
The different perspectives on the small rod show its literal and metaphorical transformability from a Greek amphora handle to a Eurasian grinding tool. Through external circumstances, habits and needs, consumers developed their own conceptions and meanings of it. As a science of material heritage, archaeology has the key methodological competence to explore the diversity of human-thing relations – and thus a central aspect of access to the world – in different societies and times.