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Book Reviews
Yannis Hamilakis. Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, xiii + 255pp., 26 b/w figs., hbk, ISBN
978-0-521-83728-6)
Yannis Hamilakis provides a very different
framework for incorporating the senses
into the construction of the past using
archaeological research—a framework that
might be a challenge for those who under-
stand the senses as a tool to enrichen and
elaborate their interpretations and expla-
nations of archaeological data. In this
book Hamilakis turns on its head the tra-
ditional understanding of the senses as
epiphenomena of more powerful forces
that drive history by forefronting them as
the driving forces in a history that is con-
structed as the affective, event-based, and
practice-oriented construction about real
people.
To those who have read other works by
Hamilakis, the clear explication of his
anti-modernist, anti-colonialist standpoint
that is expressed from the outset will be
familiar. But there are a number of aspects
of his writing in this book that were new
to me, including some very intimate and
poetic narratives. However, the general
thesis that he puts forward was not
entirely unexpected, since I had heard and
seen its prelude in his Afterword to
Making Senses of the Past edited by Jo Day
(Hamilakis, 2013). The book under review
is called Archaeology and the Senses in order
to draw away from the idea that it is an
Archaeology of the Senses or a Sensorial
Archaeology, which Hamilakis is at pains
to repeat throughout the volume it defi-
nitely is not. He is quite explicit that this
volume is not a proposal to create a new
sub-discipline in archaeology. It is a pro-
posal to look at what we do as
archaeologists in a quite different way by
enlisting sensorial experience.
This would not be such a novel prop-
osition, given the recent interest in
phenomenology and sensorial experience in
the broader fields of archaeology, anthropol-
ogy, history, and geography. But Hamilakis
puts forward what seems to me a quite
novel way of incorporating sensoriality into
our interpretations of the past as well as
what we do as archaeologists, and how we
do it. What he writes here is relevant not
just for archaeologists working in the field,
but also cultural heritage and museum pro-
fessionals.Ashepointsout,whetherweare
speakingoftheworldofthepastor
present, ‘There has always been a tension
between the anarchic and messy world of
the senses […], and the often politically
motivated attempts by various people and
groups to regulate and channel sensorial
experience, often using material culture and
physical and built space’(p. 15).
In Chapter 1, Hamilakis introduces this
different approach to the senses. Many of
the arguments of going beyond the strict
boundaries of empirical observations of
archaeological materials in order to build
sensorial awareness of the past have been
covered by contributions to Making Senses
of the Past (Day, 2013). Hamilakis’aim is
not to re-present the past but to evoke its
presence (see p. 6).
After the fiery introductory chapter,
Hamilakis starts his Chapter 2 with a gen-
ealogy of sensoriality in the context of
western Modernism. ‘I show that the con-
struction of the Western sensorium in
European Journal of Archaeology 18 (4) 2015, 705–748
© European Association of Archaeologists 2015 DOI 10.1179/1461957115Z.000000000144
modernity is embedded within the colonial
and national nexus of power’(p. 13). His
aim is to provide the background to how
western modernist archaeologists incorpor-
ated the five bodily senses into their
research. This latter topic forms the
second half of this chapter in which he
traces how ‘the official archaeological
apparatus’separated the visual from the
multi-sensorial experience and gave it a
privileged focus, all as part of a project to
regulate and control the uncontrollable
senses, especially the ‘less remote’ones
such as smell, taste, touch, and movement
that create affectivity. Hamilakis makes
the important point in this chapter that ‘in
archaeology […] there is a severe sensorial
tension […] that pitches the heritage of
the autonomous, de-sensorized vision
against the fundamentally multi-sensorial
nature of both the object of archaeological
inquiry (i.e. material things) and the
archaeological process itself ’(p. 53).
Chapter 3 brings the genealogical exer-
cises of Chapter 2 up to date with the
current understanding of sensoriality and
archaeology during the late twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Most of the changes
have come from outside archaeology. Fem-
inism and the labour movement in the late
twentieth century challenged the ‘regimen-
tation and regulation of bodily sensorial
norms’(p. 108). Cinema with its introduc-
tion of movement and sound to the visual
image created a sensorial revolution. The
privilege of vision was challenged by a
return to a multi-sensorial approach.
Hamilakis gives a fresh look on the sen-
sorial overload and commodification of the
multi-sensorial experience in the twenty-
first century, along with an astute and
rather pessimistic set of critical obser-
vations on the recent attempts at an
archaeology of the senses (p. 109), ‘which
[…] seems to be trapped, more often than
not, in a framework set out by the
Western sensorium and its five senses,
devoid of affective power’(p. 14).
Although Hamilakis does not specify
examples of such ‘attempts’, as someone
who has published articles on a sensorial
archaeology, I recognize myself among
this group. As a result of reading his book
I was quite happy to acknowledge this cri-
ticism and am inspired to revisit what I
have previously written in terms of Hami-
lakis’standpoint. That surely shows the
power of his arguments in this book!
The logical stream of his argument leads
him to propose a new ontology that would
enable archaeologists to use their privileged
access to the wealth of the materiality of
the world throughout history to its full
potential, including revealing undiscovered
sensorial modalities. In Chapter 4 he devel-
opssuchanontologywhichdrawsaway
from individual senses towards defining a
field of sensoriality ‘and […] the affective
and mnemonic flows it engenders’(p. 14).
The key guiding principles of the new
ontology or framework are ‘presented
mostly as a series of aphorisms’(p. 112)
which I can re-present here most clearly as
a list: (a) the senses are about the nature
and status of being; (b) the senses are
innumerable and infinite; (c) archaeology
can explore that sensorial infinity as long
as they can escape the modernist five
senses limitations; (d) from the body and
the thing, to the field and the flow of
experience. ‘The sensorial field and the
sensorial flows encompass material sub-
stances, airwaves, rays of light, gestures
and movements as well as discourses,
affects, memories and ideas’(p. 116); (e)
sensorial flows are risky and unpredictable;
(f) the senses are political; (g) the senses
are historical, meaning that they are his-
torically, culturally and socially constituted;
(h) every sensorial perception is ‘full of
and shaped by memories [….] it is never
[…] pristine experience’(p. 118); it is
worth noting here that Hamilakis values
the power of communal memory over that
706 European Journal of Archaeology 18 (4) 2015
of the individual; (i) sensorial reflexivity
should be the starting point of any sensor-
ial analysis, ‘by excavating our own sensory
stratigraphy’(p. 119); he does this himself
in Chapter 1 (p. 11) and in the personal
narratives at the beginning of Chapters 3,
4, and 7; (j) the senses are multi-temporal.
Taking off from the idea that every sen-
sorial experience involves memory, and
‘every sensorial perception is at the same
time past and present’(p. 122), Hamilakis
concludes that archaeology could be recast
‘as a multi-temporal, corporeal and sensor-
ial practice’(p. 124), since the materials
are sensed at multiple times from their
first manipulation in perhaps a distant past
to their current incorporation into cultural
heritage and other social practices in a
complex entanglement of memories, lives,
and events; (k) archaeologies of the senses
are also archaeologies of affect. Quite poe-
tically Hamilakis writes that ‘through
affectivity sensorial flows and interactions
animate the flesh of the world’(p. 125).
Bringing together these guiding prin-
ciples, Hamilakis identifies ‘sensorial flows’
that hold together diverse entities that com-
prise a ‘sensorial assemblage’.Asensorial
assemblage is ‘the contingent co-presence of
heterogenous (sic) elements such as bodies,
things, substances, affects, memories, infor-
mation and ideas’(p. 126) that may be
convened explicitly as a performance or
ritual or less planned as an event or more
discretely as a ‘sense of place’.Ididmissa
sense of multiscalarity in these discussions,
though I assumed it was implied.
Chapters 5 and 6 provide the case study
to demonstrate how such a sensorial
archaeology analysis might take place.
Chapter 5 focuses on the domain of
family burial places in Early Bronze Age
Crete. Chapter 6 follows on, focusing on
the ‘palatial phenomenon’of Middle and
Late Bronze Age Crete. Interestingly, I
found these chapters the least engaging
parts of this book. In spite of this, I did
look differently at the Early Bronze Age
and especially the Middle/Late Bronze
Age of Crete after reading Chapters 5 and
6, but not very much. Perhaps I was
already familiar with resisting the moder-
nist interpretations of these archaeological
entities. In Chapter 5 the sensorial analysis
led Hamilakis away from the modernist
interpretation of the Early Bronze Age
tombs as expressions of individuality to
their interpretation as ‘attempts at
prolonging and maintaining mnemonic
connections and associations’(p. 154) of a
small community in a trans-corporeal
landscape where there were no permanent
individual burial places. In Chapter 6, his
analysis led Hamilakis to reject entirely the
cultural evolutionary interpretation of
western modernism that the ‘palaces’of
Middle/Late Bronze Age Crete were
centres of political and economic power;
he builds rather on the research of the last
fifteen years showing that the ‘palaces’
were centres for communal events, rich in
multi-sensorial experience that can be
‘conceived more fruitfully as the materiali-
sation, glorification and celebration of
ancestral time, of long-term, sensorial and
mnemonic history’(p. 167).
These chapters are designed to be the
climax of Hamilakis’argument, the high
point in which the validity of the new
ontology is demonstrated. But for me, the
excitement built up over the preceding
four chapters fell a little flat, and I think
the cause of that lies in the way in which
the story was told. Many readers,
especially those specializing in Aegean
archaeology, will probably appreciate the
academic style and detailed presentation of
evidence to support his arguments in these
chapters. However, I have to confess that
I was not grasped by the affect that was
promised, even though I was quite pre-
pared to be ‘affected’.
In Chapter 5 Hamilakis first faces the
challenge of how do you write a sensorial
Book Reviews 707
archaeology using the long-form narrative
demanded of academic writing. This is a
quandary many of us have faced at the end
of the twentieth and during the twenty-
first century (Gero & Conkey, 1991; Day,
2013; Van Dyke & Bernbeck, 2015).
The storytelling vignettes that introduce
Chapters 3, 4, and 7 are beautifully
written and are powerful narratives in their
own right. For me, the most powerful
demonstration of the possibilities of the
sensorial paradigm is Hamilakis’narrative
about the Vietnam War memorial in
Washington that introduces the conclud-
ing Chapter 7. In contrast, his narratives
that demonstrate the sensorial paradigm
using the archaeology of Bronze Age
Crete are pedestrian and do not have the
brilliant affect of his personal stories of
sensorial experience. He ‘attempts to
combine academic essay and storytelling.
[…] it is an experiment in narrating a
series of vignettes, fragments of material
and sensuous lifeworlds, hopefully retain-
ing and conveying the texture and
carnality of intersubjective and trans-
corporeal experience’(p. 130). While
reading the tour of a tholos tomb narrated
by someone following the burial team
(pp. 131–8) I have constant questions
such as: Who am I, the narrator? The
teller of the tale in Chapter 5 diverges fre-
quently from his narrative path with
academic discussions and very academic
language, so we assume that it is that
40-year-old white male described on page
11; To whom am I telling this story?
Whatever is the social and historical
context of that episode of voyeurism?
Who are the others (non-playing charac-
ters) in the story? To me these questions
are legitimate topics for discussion in a
demonstration of archaeological sensorial-
ity. Just as Hamilakis is most successful in
creating affect in his personal vignettes,
these archaeological narratives could have
been as successful when told at an equally
intimate scale. I personally believe that
long-form narrative is not the ideal format
to tell such stories; Stewart (2007) (whom
Hamilakis clearly admires, as do I) chose a
format of fragments to write her Ordinary
Affects. I think that if Hamilakis had actu-
ally kept to his aim for fragmentary
archaeological narratives, they might have
been more successful.
My conclusion is that what Hamilakis
proposes in his first four chapters will
need a great (but not impossible) effort to
put it into practice. The book ends on
such a buoyant note, which I fully
support: ‘Sensoriality and affectivity […]
enable and invite a radically different
approach to the presentation of the
archaeological work’(p. 201). By the time
he is finished with the book, Hamilakis is
even ready to throw the ‘archaeo’out of
‘archaeology’! With or without ‘archaeo’
the book will make a huge contribution to
re-thinking this discipline.
REFERENCES
Day, J., ed. 2013. Making Senses of the Past:
Toward a Sensory Archaeology. Carbondale,
IL: Center for Archaeological
Investigation, SIU.
Gero, J. & Conkey, M., eds. 1991.
Engendering Archaeology: Women and
Prehistory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hamilakis, Y. 2013. Afterword: Eleven Theses
on the Archaeology of the Senses. In: J.
Day, ed. Making Senses of the Past: Toward
a Sensory Archaeology. Carbondale, IL:
Center for Archaeological Investigation,
SIU, pp. 409–20.
Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Van Dyke, R.M. & Bernbeck, R., eds. 2015.
Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology.
Denver: University Press of Colorado.
RUTH TRINGHAM
University of California, Berkeley, USA
708 European Journal of Archaeology 18 (4) 2015
