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This project aims at developing a philosophical and methodological reflection on key concepts underlying the research of the CRC. It thereby provides a platform for critically assessing and evaluating crucial terminologies and notions in the relevant fields as well as in their interdisciplinary contextualisation. The two key concepts addressed are “materiality” and “agency”. Whereas archaeology always depends on material remains of past societies, on the basis of which patterns of agency of those societies can be reconstructed, anthropology investigates the observable agency of individuals and groups in their cultural embedding. One important aspect of such anthropological inquiry is the interconnection of human activity with the environment and material objects. Insofar as human agency responds to ecological demands and utilises materiality to form cultural artefacts, both concepts – agency and materiality – can be regarded as correlates on a theoretical level.

Questions of cultural innovation and transmission are considered in this project as being bound up in the circularity of agency and materiality, thereby shaping local, regional, and transregional industries, productive economies, and mobility patterns of humans. The general interest of the CRC concerning which changes in cultural production lead to which expansions or retreats of our species, which technologies enable which kinds of mobility, and which artefacts can be taken as evidence for migration (e.g. by multi-local findings of the same kinds of artefacts) provoke the question what exactly is signified by terms such as “technology”, “artefacts”, or “mobility” as a special form of human agency. While it is generally agreed that the interplay of climate, environment, and human agency (cultural factors) is essential for the dispersion and mobility of human populations, it is still debatable as to how we can conceptualise cultural change and its material correlates in a way that is accessible to a variety of disciplines involved in the CRC.

This gap in conceptual clarification can be closed by the philosophical and interdisciplinary efforts of this project by locating the key meanings in the relevant fields and interpreting them against the background of recent debates in the humanities and social sciences. For the discussion of archaeological findings and theorising, the chaîne opératoire approach, originating in the French tradition of techno-anthropology, will be the main reference point. This tradition is currently being taken up in discussions on the materiality of human-environment interactions and the mediality of artefacts. For the discussion of ethnographic approaches and social-anthropological modelling, the focus will be on agency-based accounts and phenomenological descriptions of embodiment under the rubric of 4E Cognition. Both strands of research can be studied with reference to the so-called “ontological turn”.  

A crucial concept linking archaeology and anthropology is that of the “life-world” (Schütz/Luckmann 1973), which designates the pre-theoretical, everyday world of socio-cultural meaning that is re- produced and re-enacted by agents through material practices and social codification. When archaeologists engage with the meaning that an object (e.g. a tool or ritual artefact) might have had for prehistoric humans, then the task consists of embedding this object within the larger context of the prehistoric life-world. The object belongs to a past that was constituted by a network of things and practices in a specific sociocultural and environmental milieu. But often, many of the elements co-constituting this life-world are unknown or have to be inferred indirectly. “Contextual areas” as epistemic constructs guiding fieldwork and data retrieval are one of the bases for such inferences, as demonstrated in some of the empirical projects of the CRC. In anthropological investigations of current populations, their life-world, including human-animal and human-environment interfaces, can be studied directly. Nonetheless, as the paradigm of participant observation implies, the differences between indigenous and scientific conceptualisations, of emic and etic perspectives, also require resources for valid inferences to bridge the conceptual gaps and integrate both perspectives into overarching models. 

On a meta-level, the project therefore also intends to trace the mechanisms in which scientific knowledge about life-worldly occurrences and factors that shape human industries, economies, and self-interpretations is created and stabilised. The question for the chosen interdisciplinary combination then is how excavated material remnants of the past as well as observed and modelled agency patterns of recent populations can be transformed into “epistemic objects” (Rheinberger 2001) in archaeology and anthropology.